Doctor Who "The Doctor's Wife"

Spoilers....

The latest episode of Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife" was written by Neil Gaiman. It is the first episode he's written and I hope it will be the first of many.

The episode examines the relationship between the Doctor and his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space). This is a relationship that has gone largely unexplored in this long running series.

The TARDIS was first said to be a living ship way back in the 1964 serial "The Edge of Destruction"

I primary watch the new series, so it was in "The Rise of the Cybermen" that I first started to appreciate that the TARDIS was alive. In that episode the TARDIS ends up traveling into another dimension and dies, but the Doctor saves it by giving it some of his Time Lord energy, "I've given it one year of my life."

Throughout the course of the new series the Doctor has commented on several occasions that he only sometimes/somewhat controls where the TARDIS goes. He implies that he has it set to travel to pivotal points in time, sort of space time tipping points. Though it had never been specifically mentioned my theory was that the Doctor only goes to points in time where the TARDIS senses evidence of other time travelers or alien technology where it should not be.

I think it's funny that the Doctor will often assure his companions that they are going to go somewhere nice a relaxing, such as when the Doctor takes Amy and Rory to Venice. But the TARDIS only travels to tipping points, so in Venice they encounter Aquatic alien vampires. The Doctor has also said things like he doesn't like to go to boring times so he never lands on Sundays.

This episode is a first for two reasons. 1) the TARDIS is truly personified for the first time when it's essence is put into the body of a women named Idris and 2) The TARDIS tells the doctor that she/it is just as much of a thrill seeker as he is and that's why he's always finding himself on adventures.

I found this to be truly refreshing and long overdue, because though "The Heart of the TARDIS" was said to be a living entity and though the Doctor has been known to sometimes sweet talk it or "rub bits of it" as Sarah Jane mentioned in "School Reunion," the TARDIS has never been shown to have a personality of its own.

Up until this point it's been more of a vehicle. I thought the Doctor was fond of it because it took him from place to place. He loved it the way some guys love their sports car. This episode puts a whole other spin on their relationship. In essence it is a symbiotic relationship the TARDIS wanted to see the universe and so did the Doctor and as Idris put it, "you were the only one (Time Lord) crazy enough to give me what I wanted."

This episode is a bit tragic because for the first time the Doctor gets to actually have a conversation with his fellow adventurer of some 900 or so years and he learns that the ship choose him as much as he choose it, but it is only for one brief adventure and when he returns the energy into the shell of the TARDIS he knows that they won't be able to speak again. (Don't ask me why the Doctor can't make the TARDIS capable of speech, he just can't).

I think the episode is called "The Doctor's Wife" because the relationship between the Doctor and his TARDIS is the defining relationship of his life. He constantly fills his ship up with people he calls companions, but his real life-long companion is the TARDIS itself. It is his best friend, his most trusted ally, his greatest defender, and a constant believer that the work he is accomplishing is for the greater good. If that doesn't describe a wife's role than I don't know what does.

Uh-oh! Somebody’s Actually Reading This.

First Problem

I have two problems, the first problem is that I just discovered Blogger.com has all sorts of statistical data about how many people view my blog, how they found the blog, what browser they were using, where they were from, etc.

I know everyone else that has a blog through this site probably realized this long ago, but I somehow missed it until now. This is a problem because I can be a bit obsessive sometimes so it’s not a good thing that I can go in at anytime and see if anyone is reading my blog and then press the little button that says refresh and see if anyone started reading it in those last two seconds.

I now know that I’ve had over 100 page views from such foreign countries as Germany, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and Netherlands and Spain. And in the last week I’ve had visitors from New Zealand, Denmark and the United Arab Emirates.

I can’t even get my best friends to look at my blog, but I have readers in Indonesia?!

It was also interesting to see the different web browsers and operating systems people are using to view my site because I’d never heard of many of the more obscure ones.

For instance people have viewed my site with the web browsers Ubuntu (a Linux browser), SeaMonkey, Novarra-Vision, and PBSTB (which is so obscure the only thing I found by searching Google for it, was a link to another blog where she asks “What is this browser?” and even though there are many replies no one seems quite sure).

My blog has been viewed by such devices as I-pads, I-phones, I-pods, Blackberry, DoCoMo another mobile phone operator, (but it didn’t say whether it was the Indian or Japanese DoCoMo) and Playstation Portable.

It just amuses me to no end that someone manages to get their Playstation Portable to browse the Internet and they end up at my blog of all places. Plus, it’s just a portable video game console, Game Boy sure as heck couldn’t surf the web.

My question is how come no one using an Android or Nook Color has been to my blog?

Second Problem

My second problem is that people are actually looking at my blog. This blog wasn’t created so that people could read it, it was started so that I had a place to put the various articles I’d post on message boards. I’d post them and then I’d want to find them months or week’s later and I’d have to struggle with that particular site’s search engine to find it. Also, as I got more layout savvy I got frustrated with message board limitations; I wanted it to look just so.

And so,"One Geek’s Mind" was born, a storehouse for all of my brain-droppings in one convenient location.

Up until now I was working in a vacuum. I only have five followers of my blog so I figure no ones looking except for my wife that faithfully reads it, but does admit to skipping over the boring parts (love you Babe!). But, according to the stats I’ve had over 8,000 page views.

My most read book review is “Childhood’s End” it's had 534 views since I posted it on Oct. 29, 2009. I just looked st the review tonight for the first time in who knows how long and I feel like I have to apologize to all 534 readers for never bothering to fix up the text. It was double-spaced and the heading weren’t bolded. Now I know why girls get so embarrassed when someone comes over to their house and it’s “all a mess.” I also have no idea why this particular review is so popular. It’s blowing everything else out of the water; the next most viewed book reviews are “Contact” (93 views) and “Fahrenheit 451” (89 views). Is it just that good a review? Is it a popular book?

At Jim Harris’ suggestion I sent one of my articles “How Many Hugo Nominees and Winners can you get for free?” to a popular Science Fiction blog, SF Signal. They linked to my blog and it was a successful experiment, I got 67 hits because of SF Signal’s link. The article is my fifth most popular overall receiving a total of 223 views so far. The rest of the hits are probably a result of people searching Google with phrases like “Hugo winners, free.”

My third most viewed article with 253 views is, “Some Details in Back to the Future.” It’s just a quick article I threw together after watching the movie again. Most of the things I mentioned are found in other various articles around the blog-o-sphere. It’s just the things I happened to pay attention to that viewing and decided to look further into.

The other five top-ten articles are all comicbook reviews. Comics were one of the original focuses of the blog, but they’ve kind of been eclipsed by some of my other interests lately. The last time I wrote one was last April.

The number one most viewed article is, “What if Spiderman had rescued Gwen Stacy?” (604 views). It’s a well written review for what it is, but my theory on it’s popularity is that since I used the title of the comic for the title of the article, my blog comes up first itf you search the title in Google. And since I used a big scan of the cover with a high resolution, it also comes up first in image searches for both the title and “What If 24” (that’s what I named the image file).

The other popular comic articles are "Daredevil Part 3, The Romita Era" (175 views) and "Not so Mellow Yellow- Daredevil the Early Years Part 1" (132 views), I have no clue why people are skipping Part 2. Daredevil is kind of the "red-headed step-child" of the comicbook world, it's weird to me that his articles would get more then my other Spiderman reviews or Thor or Ironman.

Then there are, "Musings on the Incredible Hulk Part 2" (131 views) and Part 3 (122 views). These figures really confused me because you’d think people would start with Part 1, which is my personal favorite of all the comicbook reviews I’ve ever done. In it I purport that the Hulk is a modern day Buddha attempting to reach a form of nirvana by finding an end to his suffering. I guess it was too out there for most people.

The Chinese Space Program

China has a space program. Sometimes it seems like it's all just a bunch of talk, but while America has basically scraped its space program and Russia is content to use the Soyuz for "taxi flights" to the International Space Station, China is putting real money into their program because they want to prove themselves as a 21st century superpower. They are playing a very long-term game and as you will see, they are making the first of their goals on time.

According to Wikipedia, so far there have been 3 manned space flights by China. It might not seem like much, but it seems like China's theory isn't repetition, it's getting it right the first time.




# Shenzhou 5 – 15 October 2003 – 14 Earth orbits carrying Yang Liwei
# Shenzhou 6 – 12 October 2005 – 5 day mission with Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng (In the space suit in the above picture)
# Shenzhou 7 – 25 September 2008 – three-man crew with Zhai Zhigang (who conducted China's first spacewalk), Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng

Here are their plans for the near future. Only time will tell if they stay on schedule or get delayed.

# Tiangong 1- October 2011 unmanned mission (Target Vehicle)
# Shenzhou 8 – 2011(?) – unmanned mission, will rendezvous and dock with Tiangong 1.
# Shenzhou 9 – 2011(?) – manned mission, will dock with Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 8.
# Shenzhou 10 – 2012(?) – manned, will dock with Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 8 and Shenzhou 9 to form a space laboratory.
# Tiangong 2- Launched 2013-2015 (Space Laboratory)
# Tiangong 3- Launched 2014-1016 (Space Station)

Let's check if China is meeting their schedule. This is according to an 2004 China National Space Administration (CNSA) schedule

Goal 1- Orbit a satellite around the Moon before 2007. (Lunar orbiter Chang'e 1 was launched on October 24, 2007 from Xichang Satellite Launch Center and entered lunar orbit on November 5. The spacecraft operated until March 1, 2009, when it was taken out of orbit and it impacted the surface of the Moon. Data gathered by Chang'e 1 was used to create the most accurate and highest resolution 3-D map ever created of the entire lunar surface.)

Goal 2- Phase two involves sending a lander before 2010. (Chang'e 2 was launched on October 1, 2010 to conduct research at a 100km high Moon orbit as the preparation for a soft landing by Chang'e 3. Chang'e 2 is similar to Chang'e 1 with some improvements, including a better camera with a resolution of one meter.)

Goal 3-Phase three involves collecting lunar soil samples before 2020. (In 2009, the 2013 launch date was confirmed for a landing craft and rover named Chang'e 3. It will use variable thrusters to make a vertical landing on the surface. After landing, the rover will leave the Chang'e 3 lander and work on the surface for three months. If this happens it would be 7 years ahead of their 2004 schedule.)

Goal 4-In September 2010, it was announced that the country is planning to carry out explorations in deep space by sending a man to the Moon by 2025. China also hopes to bring a moon rock sample back to earth in 2017,

Goal 5- The first unmanned Mars exploration program should take place between the 2014-2033 period, followed by a manned phase in 2040-2060. (Yinghuo 1 is a joint Russian-Chinese Mars-exploration space probe scheduled for launch in 2013)

You can argue that they haven't done much yet, but you can also argue that so far they have done everything they said they were. We live in interesting times!

I can't wait to see if China continues to meet all it's goals. Maybe there will be some space excitement in the world after all. After watching NASA's decline for year's I'd started to lose hope. Maybe I won't even care that it's not my country that's generating the buzz.

Meeting the Angry Video Game Nerd

This past weekend I got to meet the Angry Video Game Nerd. For the uninitiated the Nerd is a foul-mouthed, beer drinking nerd who tortures himself by reviewing the crappiest video games in history. His reviews are so entertaining because James Rolfe who created and stars as the Nerd is a really talented guy. He directs, writes, acts, and owns his own production company Cinemassacre. (I guess that's a quadruple threat?). The humor in his videos is mainly of the scatological variety, but that's part of it's draw; he says what some of us might think, but most of us would never say.

There's definitely a nostalgic element to the videos. I and much of my generation grew up playing, Atari, Nintendo and other early video game systems. But those days are far behind us. I don't even think Atari is compatible with digital televisions.

Rolfe, who has basically been a director since he could carry a video camera, is the ultimate movie buff and so he fills his videos with endless tributes to popular culture. One of my favorite episodes is his review of Star Trek video games which features an homage to the original series' absurd fight scenes.



And Rolfe is no one trick pony, in addition to the Nerd he does other series such as Board James, You Know What's Bullshit, and Over Analyzers. He's done short film work like The Deader the Better and Legend of the Blue Hole. He does movie reviews, examines the history of movies and video technologies and has documentaries about visiting the locations featured in movies.

The one common thread is that you feel like you get to know the real James Rolfe. I know it's the Johnny Carson syndrome and I don't really know him, but I feel like I do.



Rolfe attended the Too Many Games Convention in Oaks, PA (about a 5 minutes drive from my apartment) and my wife and I went to the convention just to see the Nerd in person.

First there was a screening of some of the Nerd videos. Then there was a Q and A session during which it struck me is how good Rolfe is to his fans, no matter what kind of a loaded questions people asked or no matter how socially awkward the questioner was, he just rolled with it and was always polite.

I had all these things I wanted to talk to him about. I wanted to tell him about my experiences writing screenplays and filming short films from way back when I was still in High School. I also wanted to ask his advice because I'm thinking about doing some filming in the ghost town of Centralia, PA, but there was such a tremendous crowd to see Rolfe, even at this tiny suburban convention that I didn't really get the chance. Basically all Rolfe had time for was to sign my stuff and let me snap a picture with him.


Don't get me wrong, It was neat to meet him and shake his hand and tell him I was a fan, and I appreciate him signing my SNES and the ET Atari Cartridge (that might be worth something in the future because ET will be the featured game in the upcoming Angry Video Game Nerd feature film) and I love having the picture (though I wish I'd put down my bag). It's just like I said before, I've watched so many of the videos I sometimes feel like we're already old friends and it's disappointing when that false image is shattered. He doesn't actually know me and probably never will.

Thoughts on "Rite of Passage"

I got through “Rite of Passage” by Alexi Panshin (1968) and even enjoyed some parts of it, but rarely have I disagreed so thoroughly with every idea found within a novel.

I didn’t think that Mia Havero was worthy of being the narrator of the novel. First-person perspective novels such as this one are effective when the reader quickly feels a connection to the narrator. You begin to think of them as sort of a friend and then you are truly riveted by whatever sort of crazy adventure they end up going through. I disliked Mia from the start of the novel; she was a hotheaded and small-minded girl that clearly had a lot of growing up to do.

I know that Mia’s journey of maturation is the whole point of the book. It even says as much in the second paragraph of the novel, “Some of the incidents are wholly made up. It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on.” However, that doesn’t change the fact that the reader is stuck with an unlikable guide for the entirety of this journey.

I disagree with the notion that it was the only way to tell this kind of story. Robert Heinlein’s juveniles whom Panshin, (a Heinlein biographer and fan) was clearly trying to emulate, always featured protagonists who were immediately likable. I loved “Starman Jones’” Max Jones from the very first chapter. Part of it was that Heinlein knew what emotional buttons to push and part of it was that Heinlein didn’t write kids like they were children instead he wrote them as less emotionally developed adults.

I would have been happier with third-person narration, perhaps that would have allowed Panshin to cleverly bring Mia’s flaws into stark reality. Or, I might have been happier had the book been from Jimmy Dentremont’s perspective. He learned life lessons throughout the novel too, but he seemed to be an overall better person than Mia.

In addition to failing to write characters the way Heinlein would have, Panshin was guilty of an even greater crime: talking down to his readers. Heinlein never wrote a juvenile like he was writing a lesson for children. He just wrote an adult novel with a teenage main character and trusted the young reader to grow into the novel if it was above their level the first time they read it. Panshin on the other hand, writes explanations about the human circulatory system and the basic rules of soccer. Who does he imagine is reading this?

Another premise of the novel is that since there is a limited amount of space and resources on this vessel where Mia and everyone lives. Therefore to cull the herd, 15-year-olds are dumped on a planet for a month and if they survive, they are adults and if not well then there was something wrong with them anyway. It’s not a completely foreign idea; some Native Americans had a similar “Rite of Passage.” But, in Native American culture where a man’s primary job was hunting and warring this sort of thing made more sense.

On the other hand, this ship’s society was completely intellectual. They didn’t fight wars or hunt therefore this Trial made absolutely no sense. It is stated over and over again that the ship’s primary mission is to protect the scientific and cultural knowledge of Earth (which has been destroyed). All that knowledge would be lost if they people on the ship had to deal with the difficulties of life on a colony world, which are all largely agrarian. The ships keep knowledge that would allow the colony worlds to experience an industrial revolution to protect their own existence and so perpetuate the stunted growth of the entire remainder of humanity. Panshin understood these points and they became the basis for his dramatic conclusion. But, what he fails to understand or point out is that you don’t need to be a tough outdoorsmen to be a great protector of intellectual knowledge. What if Albert Einstein had been born on this ship? He had the greatest knowledge of theoretical physics the world has ever known, but what kind of a camper was he? Could he have survived on his own at 15-years-old for a month in a strange forest? The question is completely absurd to me! What an unthinkable crime to possibly rob the universe of his intellect because of such an irrelevant test. An even more absurd example: Could Stephen Hawkings survive such a trial?

I reject the notion that 15-years-old is old enough to give this test to. I think back to how immature I was at 15 and I can’t help but think my chances of survival would have improved exponentially for every additional year of experience I was able to receive. In the novel, children lead a sort of mundane and normal childhood: going to school, playing sports, just hanging out. If anything is emphasized it is certainly traditional education, before they are 15 they have to decide what area of study they’ll start to focus on if they get back from the Trial. At 13-years-old children start to take survival classes and start to learn how they’ll survive on a planet for a month. Why would they only start to learn at 13? I would have trained my children from the time they were little to be campers and then as they get older teach them how to hunt things and how to identify plants etc. This sort of practical knowledge is the only way to insure my kids survive the Trial. Why would I wait till they were 13? As far as I can tell a student could have a straight C average in school, but if they survive the Trial they are adults. This doesn’t encourage a ship of scientific and mathematical thinkers. It creates a ship of Darwinians run wild where the meanest and toughest survive while some percentage of the abstract thinkers and a larger percentage of truly theoretic and revolutionary thinkers (who unfortunately are often slightly out of touch with reality) who would not survive the Trial.

The whole idea of the Trial is flawed. It’s just random chance if someone survives not skill. One person makes camp next to a hungry bear’s cave and another person doesn’t. All the survival skills in the world aren’t necessarily stopping the bear. Also, there are no rules against working collectively so there is always the chance of one strong survivalist carrying one or more other less resourceful kids during the month.

On p 39 (of my paperback) Panshin attempts to explain what an ordinologist and a synthesist are. The best I can understand it they are two kinds of futuristic librarians, though the novel claims they are much more than librarians. We are told that both professions are highly regarded on this ship and that there are only a handful of each every generation. However, we never see any first hand evidence of the professions at work on the ship. Instead we see that politics are king on the ship. Mia’s dad is the Chairman of the Council. The Council members are the ones who publicly debate the two major policy issues that are ultimately brought before an Assembly of all adults on the ship for voting. The first discussion is about the woman that has an unauthorized pregnancy and the second issue is whether or not a planet should be destroyed and whether or not the ship should change its policy of limiting the knowledge it allows colony planets to have. Ordinologists and/or synthesists never influence either of these decisions.

So why is it that at the end of the book we are left with two vague premises? One, that the younger generation on the ship are more liberal in their thinking about colony worlds. Two, that Mia and Jimmy as an ordinologist and a synthesist are going to be influential in somehow stoking that liberalism. Other than the fact that at the end of the novel both Mia and Jimmy disagreed with the current status quo, there was no evidence presented that any significant group of young people felt the same way they did. And also nowhere in the book did it explain how two intellectuals, no matter how much their professions were respected, would be able to influence a generation. To reuse an example, Stephen Hawkings is an influential theoretical physicist; it is not stretch to say he is highly regarded. He said a couple of years ago in a speech he gave in China that the world needed to focus its energy on getting us into space. He spoke about colonies within our solar system and beyond. He was basically saying that Earth is too small and fragile a basket to keep the eggs of humanity in. My ultimate point is no one listened to Hawkings. Instead our media mostly laughed at and ridiculed him. Maybe Mia and Jimmy will really influence a generation or maybe they will be thought of as over-idealistic or simply out of touch. It is an unfortunate reality that most of the time the most influential men and woman are not the smartest we have to offer, but rather those that have had greatness thrust upon them. Sometimes they measure up like George Washington or Harry Truman and sometimes they fail miserably at every turn.

For the record, I found the way people thought about children and life on the ship to be sort of repugnant. They believed in love and marriage, but you conceived children based on what the ship’s geneticists said. So, I guess the idea was that maybe you didn’t necessarily have a child with your spouse. Anyway families weren’t a valued idea. Mia’s mother rejects her and moves out, we later find out that she had a son whom she loved who died. But that doesn’t seem to justify her actions. And the fact that Mia didn’t think her mother’s rejection was strange signals that lots of people on the ship do the same thing. They think to themselves that, “the geneticist told me I gotta have this baby, but let someone else raise them. I can’t be bothered.” What kind of a soulless culture is that?

Did everyone else’s p. 35-36 have an odd jump? Mia is in her apartment, she catches Jimmy snooping around her apartment and they start to argue and then at the end of the argument they are in a classroom. Also Mia says it’s the first time she met Jimmy, but they’d been together in a classroom a few pages earlier. I guess a couple of paragraphs about Mia in her apartment got mixed up with Mia at school, but I couldn’t figure out where the errors began or ended.

What did I like?

I liked the side plot with Zena Andrus, how she and Mia started off on the wrong foot, but became friends after going through the adventure of finding the sixth level together. Unfortunately this plotline just dies after that.

I also liked how when Mia goes back to her old hangout in Alpha quad she quickly realizes it’s no longer her home. Even her old best friend doesn’t want to talk to her. I’ve had that experience before of not being able to go home again as I’m sure everyone else has too.

I liked how Mia began hanging out with a “gang.” That rang true for me. I fell into clicks in High School and College too. It seems to be a universal thing.

I enjoyed Mia’s first trip planet-side where she meets colony children and finds out they have just as many uninformed notions about ship people as she has about colony people.

I enjoyed how the “gang” manages to steal some spacesuits and go for a walk outside the ship, but they are ultimately caught for a dumb and highly avoidable reason.

I liked it when Mia finally went on the Trial. I just wished I didn’t have to get through 175 pages to get to it. It might have been a better novel if it had started with the Trial and then explored Mia’s early adulthood.

Calibre Saved the E-Reader

When I first got my B+W Nook last August, I took pride in my choice and convinced myself that the Nook was better then the Kindle.

But, sometimes when I’d see a Kindle novel price cheaper then a Barnes and Noble price, my pride would waiver.

I’ve finally accepted that the differences between the Nook and the Kindle, or any other e-reader for that matter, are pretty slim. Especially with the game-changing free software like Calibre, which is further blurring the line.

I just downloaded Calibre this past week and have only begun to explore its many uses, but I wanted to share my experiences so far.

Calibre is a free and open-source E-book management tool that has basically solved all my e-reader problems. It is customizable, so no matter what e-reader you have; it will be able to help you.

My first e-reader problem was that I’d put a file on my Nook and I wouldn’t be able to find it. It wouldn’t be under the author’s name or the title of the story. It would be under the file name or just the first couple of word from the file. I’ve had files whose title was completely blank. I started to make my own E-pub files use this website, I’d take a Microsoft word document, convert it to an e-pub file and on my Nook the files would be under my name as the author!

The second problem was that when I’d get multiple stories by the same author they wouldn’t always be filed with each other because one file would have the authored first, middle, and last name and the other would only have the first and last name.

Calibre solved these problems for me because it allows you to edit the metadata of the file. In other words you can change the title and author associated with the file to anything you want.

My third e-reader problem is that since I read mostly free short fiction from Project Guttenberg, I get frustrated with the pages and pages of disclaimers they attach to their files. On an 18-page file the disclaimers represent half the pages. Calibre solves this problem too because I can use it to edit any e-pub file. (Once again, I have it customized for my Nook, I’m guessing if I set it to Kindle, I could edit Kindle files somehow).

Calibre has many other features, it will convert any text file type to any other. This will no doubt result in various degrees of success depending on the files. Calibre also has a build in universal e-reader. Also, you can use Calibre to download news articles for anywhere on the web, covert them to e-reader files and transfer them to your e-reader. (I haven’t had any use for this but it’s kind of neat).

Over the last 7 months since I bought my B+W Nook, there have been some new kids on the block such as the iPad 2 and Nook Color. And I’m sure in another 7 months there will be other new and different e-readers and tablets coming out.

Today, everyone is talking about the advantages of getting an all-in-one device, why get just an e-reader when you can have a tablet? But I’m still happy with my purchase, even if it doesn’t run apps or let me check my Facebook; it does exactly what I wanted it to do, it lets me read books and short fiction. And its specificity means that it uses E-ink so there is less eyestrain and longer battery life.

Thoughts on "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater"

“God Bless You Mr. Rosewater” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1965) is a novel about the relationship between the rich and the poor in modern society.

Eliot Rosewater controls a foundation, which is worth 87 billion dollars and makes $10,000 of profit a day. Eliot has poor personal habits, he constantly drinks, he wears the same dirty cloths all the time and he rarely showers and he is estranged from his wife. However, Eliot is a humanitarian who cares deeply about the poor. Over the years he has gotten to know and given vast sums of money to many of the poorest people in the small county of Rosewater, Indiana. This is where his family has their estate and legal residence (though the family hasn’t actually lived there in several generations). Eliot has a foundation telephone line that he basically mans in his office/apartment 24/7. He is always available if someone needs any sort of help. One woman, Diana Moon Glampers constantly calls him just to chat. Because Eliot gives so much of his money to the poor, he is seen by many of them as an almost religious figure. One woman insists that he baptize her children.

In stark contrast to Eliot is his father Lister Rosewater a career Senator. Senator Rosewater hates the poor. He believes they are worthless and lazy layabouts. He also thinks that his son Eliot must be insane because why else would someone want to help the poor?

For all the poor that love Eliot, it seems there are an equal number that side with the Senator because they feel it is wrong to accept handouts.

Vonnegut lets the reader decide who is right giving equal time to both sides and making each extreme seem ridiculous.

There is also a sort of tangential story about a Rosewater family in Rhode Island who are cousins to the other Rosewaters, but don’t know it. They are middle class, but are very unhappy because they desire to be wealthy.

Like all of Vonnegut’s novels it is wickedly funny and totally subversive. There is a 13-year-old girl in the novel, Lila Buntline, who makes money by buying all the dirty books (like “Tropic of Cancer”) in town and reselling them to other kids at a huge profit, all under the nose of a organization of mothers continually declaring the town free of smut.

Also like other Vonnegut novels “Rosewater” seems to be just a part of a much larger tapestry. A character visits the Rumfoord Mansion (Sirens of Titan). Eliot gives a speech at the Midland City Science fiction convention (Breakfast of Champions). And, Kilgore Trout’s science fiction stories appear occasionally throughout the novel and he makes a special guest appearance at the end of the novel.

I consider Vonnegut to be a science fiction author even though many of his novels including this one aren’t science fiction novels. But he is one of those authors that is hard to categorize. So, I thought it was kind of funny that “Rosewater” was shelved in the science fiction section of the little used-bookshop where I recently bought it. I don’t know how Vonnegut would feel about being labeled a science fiction writer, but there are worse things to be categorized as, right?

Additional: Here is proof that Vonnegut didn't appreciate being know as a science fiction writer. This column appeared in the New York Times in 1965 the same year "Rosewater" was published. I think Vonnegut ends up sounding like kind of a jerk, but that's because I'm a happy member of the "lodge." Thanks for the link Bill!