Thoughts on "Tau Zero"

The story involves a ship traveling via a bussard ramjet engine. Physicist Robert W. Bussard proposed this method for space travel in 1960. The ship has a huge electro-magnetic-net that collects hydrogen from space and compresses it so hard that thermonuclear fusion occurs. This energy is forced out of the rocket’s exhaust and acts as the propellant. And because the hydrogen is everywhere in space they don’t have to carry the weight of fuel.

Unfortunately Bussard’s theory was later disproved because it turns out there isn’t as many high concentrations of hydrogen in space as was thought. However when Poul Anderson wrote the book in the late 60's we didn’t have that information, so I can’t fault him for that.

"Tau Zero" has kind of a weird prose structure. There’ll be a couple of pages of story and then a couple of pages of technical information about the ship or about the bussard ramjet engine. This can be kind of jarring because sometimes I’m more interested in what’s going to happen next in the story, so I’ll want to skip the technical stuff and other times the story dragged and the science was more interesting.

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The book featured 25 men and 25 women on the ship Leonora Christine. I wish the book had a cast of characters list like the Niven/Pournelle novels always have. I made my own list because I wanted to see if all fifty were at least mentioned. I got about 20 men and only 7 women

In order of appearance or mention

Men
1) Charles Reymont; 2) Lars Telander; 3) Boris Fedoroff; 4) Norbert Williams; 5) Elof Nilsson; 6) Johana Freiwald; 7) Auguste Boudreau; 8) Luis Pereira

(Seen once or twice and/or only mentioned)
9) Dr. Urho Latvala ; 10) Chef Carducci; 11) Iwamoto Tetsuo; 12) Kato M’Bato; 13) Malcolm Foxe-Jameson; 14) Mohandas Chidambaran; 15) Lenkei; 16) Pedro Barrios; 17) Michael O’Donnell; 18) Phra Takh; 19) Hussein Sadek; 20) Iwasaki; 21) Yeshu ben-Zvi

Women
1) Ingrid Lindgren; 2) Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling; 3) Jane Sadler; 4) Emma Glassgold; 5) Margarita Jimenes

(Seen once or twice and/or only mentioned)
6) Olga Sobieski; 7) Marie Toomajian

I thought this was kind of unbalanced. Why were so many more men mentioned? The numbers look a little less unbalanced when you consider that there is approximately the same number of men and women characters that are significantly explored. Boudreau and Pereira are seen doing their jobs on the ship but never really seen off-duty. But it was straight up sexism that so many less women are ever mentioned, Anderson couldn’t imagine what jobs a woman would be doing in space, so he said they were there, but never said what they were doing.
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Reymont became too powerful a character compared to the captain who in theory should be the most capable. I understand the captain was supposed to be of an earlier time period because of time dilations, so he feels like he can’t relate to his crew, but at that point shouldn’t he just be a technical advisor instead of a captain. Movie sets sometimes hire experts from scientific fields in order to get details right, but no one puts them in charge of the whole film.

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Towards the end of the book I started to wonder how much time had past for the ship and despite all the depression the crew went through in the book, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of years. I find it hard to believe they traveled through billions of years real time even with time dilation, but as I learned when I questioned some of the science in “Ringworld” sometimes you just can’t understand the math. As they increased speed, maybe the increase in time dilation increased exponentially and exponents get real big, real fast. Can anyone here explain to me mathematically whether this story could be true or not?

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The character of Lindgren bothered me more and more as the book went on. At the start of the novel she is a young girl fresh out of school. She has trained for many years to be an astronaut and we are told she had an extensive education. She is given a very high position for a rookie: first officer. You see, in this novel the first officer’s main job is to be like a human relations officer. You see the captain is a veteran from a different time period so he needs someone to almost translate for him, tell him what modern people are like and smooth over awkward social situations.

In the first chapter Lindgren shows she is a good planner when she bags a boyfriend for the flight before the flight takes off. She sets up a meeting with Reymont before the mission and tells him she’s going to be very busy at the beginning of the mission, but it’s a long mission and she know she’ll want some sexual release and some human contact from time to time, so she wants to seal a deal pronto before someone else bags Reymont. I thought this was pretty smart and showed her to be a savvy judge of how shipboard politics would work.

However, from that good start she starts to get weird. When the engineer is having trouble performing his duties she goes to his quarters and has a drink with him, finds out it’s lady trouble that’s got him down. She compliments him, tells him he’s a great guy and then proceeds to have an affair with him. The affair ends up destroying her relationship with Reymont, who is by her own accord, the love of her life.

So why did she have the affair, for adventure? No. Reymont wasn’t fulfilling some kind of emotion need? No. She had the affair because the ship needed the engineer and the engineer needed sex and his confidence rebuilt. How do I know this for sure, because she does the same exact thing later in the book when Elof Nilsson is feeling suicidal and it is decided that the ship won’t survive without him at the top of his game.

Now it’s one thing to take your job seriously, but it’s quite another to take it upon yourself to become the ship’s courtesan. I’m all for a liberated women that uses her sexuality, but it’s a fine line between being a modern liberated woman and being the ship’s prostitute.

Thoughts on "Sixth Column"...

The “Sixth Column” is one of Robert Heinlein’s first published novels. It was written in 1941 and supposed that the Asians got the atomic bomb and the “vortex beam” and won the war. I think Japan had taken over India and China before invading America so they are referred to PanAsians in the book. We see very little of them in the novel, so they never become anything more than a caricature of Japanese culture. All we learn about them is that they speak in a formal and flowery language and at the slightest dishonor, they commit suicide rather than disgrace their families. They are cruel rulers; thousands of Americans are put to death in retaliation for some rebels capturing one of the PanAsian governors.

People have said that this caricature is racist and it is! However, it is no worse then when aliens are presented as one-dimensionally evil invaders in any number of science fiction novels. But all of us know Japanese culture and Japanese people so we know what a one-sided portrayal this is. Where as when it’s invaders from Mars we just think, “Oh, those Martians are just so evil.”

And it is no different than what governments did historically to demonize the enemy in times of war. The US government demonized the Germans during WWI by portraying them as dark, evil Huns and also demonized the German people and the Japanese during WWII. That’s just what all countries did. It’s only modern technology that has made this kind of thing more difficult today. I mean the average American wants all the terrorists dead today, but at least they don’t want the Afghan people dead. That’s progress!

This book only acknowledges two races Asians and Caucasians; I don’t know what happened to all the other races. African Americans, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans just aren’t mentioned at all. As I’ll go in to more detail later the American forces come up with super weapons that can be programmed to only affect PanAsians.

Another unspeakably horrible happening in “Sixth Column” is the PanAsians committing genocide on all the Asian Americans. You see, the PanAsians want to be the master race and want all Americans to be a slave race. It was just too complicated to them that Asian Americans would look like the masters but still be slaves so they just started getting rid of them. It’s not the same, but Americans did round up Japanese Americas during WWII and put them into civilian internment camps (a nice way to say prison camps) because, “they couldn’t be trusted.” A lot better than mass murder, but still awful.

The first chapter of the novel is really excellent, it is really rich story and idea wise: The PanAsians invade Washington and New York City and other major cities and completely take over America in one day. Deep within one of the Rocky Mountains, there is a secret American military base devoted to scientific research called “The Citadel.” On the same day as the invasion, the bases’ most brilliant scientist Ledbetter had an unexpected major scientific breakthrough. Unfortunately the breakthrough resulted in not only his own death, but also the death of all but 6 members of the Citadel.

Also that same day, Major Whitey Ardmore, an intelligence officer from Washington arrives at the Citadel to see how operations there are progressing. He was sent before the invasion. When he left Washington, their hope was that some weapons would be developed soon, before the PanAsians decided to attack. Unfortunately, minutes after his arrival at the Citadel they listen to radio reports of the destruction of American cities. Ardmore has no choice, but to assume that the Citadel might be the last hope for America defeating the PanAsains and that they are on their own.

Ardmore first has the 6 men introduce themselves, there are 3 scientists, a mathematician, a biologist/bio-chemist, and a radiologist/physicist, a craftsman, a cook, and a cook’s assistant.

The first job in the Citadel after Ardmore gives the group a pep talk is to clean up the hundreds of dead bodies in the base from the experiment gone wrong.

Ardmore who immediately assumes command of this group is himself not a military man, he was an advertising man and became a sort of PR man in Washington. It is interesting to see a man that has never fought a war learning how to lead and how to win against impossible odds.

The breakthrough that Ledbetter had concerned the discovery of additional spectra; I’ll let Dr. Lowell Calhoun explain it, “You see, most of the progress in physics in the last century and a half has been in dealing with the electromagnetic spectrum of light, radio, X-Ray…General field theory predicts the possibility of at least three more entire spectra. You see, there are three types of energy fields known to exist in space: electric, magnetic, and gravitic or gravitational. Light, X-rays, all such radiations, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Theory indicates the possibility of analogous spectra between magnetic and gravitic, between electric and gravitic, and, finally , a three-phase type between electric-magnetic-gravitic fields. Each type would constitute a complete new spectrum, a total of three new fields of learning. If there are such, they would presumably have properties quite as remarkable as the electromagnetic spectrum and quite different.” (p.20-21 in Hardcover Edition)

Ledbetter it seems had found a way to tap into these other spectrums, unfortunately for him and most of the other people in the Citadel the wave he tapped into is one that is deadly to humans. Calhoun and the others figure out a way to adapt the beam. They can make anyone the beam hits unconscious or dead. They even figured out a way to make it only do so for PanAsians and not Caucasians.

They also tapped into a number of different spectra, they found a communications channel so they had radio and video that could not be traced. They had a spectrum that could be adapted into a personal shield that could deflect most conventional weapons including guns. They found a gravitational spectrum that could be used to lift heavy objects. They found a spectrum of transmutation so they could make endless supplies of gold or turn solid rock into a harmless gas. They also found a spectrum that healed people of all diseases.

Yes, it is extremely unbelievable that 7 people managed to come up with so many technological advances so quickly, but it makes sense that if you tapped into what is basically a new science you might make a bunch of different advances fairly quickly.

So now Ardmore has some superior technology, but it is still just seven men against an empire and he has already seen that as active guerilla warfare on his part would be paid for a thousand times over by innocent Americans. So he has to resort to the strange tactic of starting a new religion. You see the PanAsians still allow freedom of religion oddly enough, because they say “all a slave needs is food, rest and religion and if you give them religion you can deny them the other two sometimes.”

The Citadel quickly spreads their religion around the country and by the time the PanAsians catch on, the Americans are ready to strike.

I enjoyed the book despite its flaws, but I can see why people are offended by the one- dimensional demonizing of Asians and/or think the scientific advances are too convenient.

Thoughts on "Ringworld"

The first thought that sticks with me as I make my first foray into Niven’s “Known Space” universe is that Niven was an idea man, but he wasn’t a storyteller. I mean look at all the ideas and concepts in this novel: Slaver stasis fields, Pierson’s Puppeteers, Kzin, starseeds, General Products hauls, boosterspice, tasps, transfer booths and of course the Ringworld itself. But the story itself is nothing remarkable: Four people crash land on Ringworld and wander around for the whole book. You can really see what Pournelle must have added to their mix as a writing partner. He kept him on task as far as writing interesting stories as well as interesting ideas.

Transfer Booths

Wanted to mention transfer booths, because I thought they were such an original idea when I saw identical devices in Dan Simmon’s “Ilium” series. The concept is obviously borrowed, but I give Simmons a pardon because even though Niven originated the idea, he never really explored the idea. Simmons took it, expanded the idea and kind of made it his own.


Teela Brown

The luck of Teela Brown is a very interesting concept, but luck is a very difficult thing to write about because the question becomes, “who or what is governing the luck?” You see, luck is really only good or bad when you consider future variables. Leaving for work late might be considered bad luck. But when the train the commuter would have been on crashes, suddenly it’s good luck that he was running late.

I just don’t understand how Teela’s luck could have been genetic as the novel suggests. She has had good luck all of her life to the point where she has never experienced fear or rejection, or stubbed her toe. To me luck of that magnitude would have to suggest a “man behind the curtain,” some sort of God like being that has foreknowledge of all future events and the power to manipulate events.

The other thing about her luck that bothered me is that when something bad happened to the party, like when their ship crashed on the Ringworld, Louis, Nessus, and Speaker immediately said, “well, she must not be lucky, that’s why we found her.” But, then when “good” things happen like when she meets Seeker her Conan the Barbarian boyfriend, they say that everything happened because of her luck. It’s like no matter what happens to them it’s because of her luck. Speaker even says the Kzin shouldn’t have another war with the humans because of the other lottery winning families. Do they realize they are assigning God like powers to all of these people when a few days before this they had decided it was all bunk because they’d had some bad luck while she was around.

Ringworld

The detail about Ringworld that I’ve been fixated on is about how because it’s an artificial structure there are no deposits of heavy metals on it. The engineers saw no need for them because they had the technology of transmutation, they could make any elements into any other element, but when their technology began to break down they were left with just what they had. I think it sticks with me because this is what I’ve always thought will kill humanity. We’ll have high levels of technology and forget how we made it and not be able to repair it like in the “Foundation Series” or we’ll deplete our natural resources and not be able to survive without them. Or, we’ll kill animal and plant species, one after another, until we realize we needed tigers for this antibody, but they’ll already be extinct. Or, we’ll realize all the hormones we put into cows have made the milk we drink bad for us, but it will be too late to go back, there won’t be enough cows without the hormones already in them to start over.

The other thing I thought about was the scale of the thing. They had 10 worlds that were getting too crowded. They used all their resources and spent hundreds and hundreds of years on this project. The Ringworld project is a success; the Engineer civilization now has plenty of space. But it isn’t sustainable, it’s too big, instead of helping their civilization to grow, it causes its collapse. What was supposed to solve their over-crowding problem, the project that united people for centuries, turned out to be their downfall. Their civilizations on the original 10 worlds would probably have stood a greater chance of springing back quicker, even when and if their over-crowding caused a collapse.

Gender

As far as gender issues this book is a disaster!

First, we have the Kzin whose females are non-sapient. The men are intelligent and the women are animals. I mean, gender issue wise, it does even out slightly because the Kzin men are exactly what human women imagine men would be like without them: ultra aggressive and violent (4 wars with humans); don’t learn from mistakes or stop for directions (4 wars with humans).

The Pierson’s Puppeteers are another case. The main Puppeteer we see is Nessus, I’m not sure we ever learn for sure if he is a he. Louis just thinks of him as a he. However, his high-pitched voice originally makes Louis think of a woman. When Louis asks him if he is the male or female of the species, Nessus says he doesn’t think it’s proper to talk about reproduction with an alien, but he does reveal when he talks about his deal with the Hindmost that there is a third and again non-sapient gender that is essential to their reproduction.

Much later in the book we meet a Ringworld Engineer. A woman, but she wasn’t a scientist, or an engineer, she was a ship’s whore. You see, the Engineers didn’t have FTL travel, so trips were long. The men needed women to please them… Starting to see the trend?

Then Teela disappears and when they find her she’s with Conan the Barbarian (Seeker). A big muscular guy in a loincloth, who swings a big sword around. Teela is the first to admit he isn’t very bright, so what is it she sees in him? His sense of duty and honor, along with a heavy helping of the fact that he looks like the guy on the cover of every romance novel. But is this really the “perfect man for Teela” as Louis suggests? Louis believes her luck drew the two of them together. Think about it for a minute, this guy Seeker considers women to be property. He thinks he bought Teela for some boosterspice and some bodyguard duty. What happens the first time Teela wants to walk in one direction and he wants to walk in another? What happens the next time he is in the mood for sex and she isn’t? Suddenly I don’t think he’s gonna seem like the perfect man after that.

Size of Ringworld

I didn’t understand the size of Ringworld and because of that the “Eye of the Storm” they came across bothered me. Here is a place where a meteor hit the Ringworld and caused a puncture in the Ringworld floor. Air is leaking out of this hole and causing a violent storm system to occur around it. I wondered, how long before all the air in the Ringworld leaks out from this hole?

The Ringworld is 600,000,000 miles long X 1,000,000 miles wide X 1,000 miles tall =

That’s 600 Trillion X 1,000 Miles tall =

600 quadrillion cubic feet of air.

Assuming the air is leaking one cubic foot per second

600 quadrillion seconds/60 seconds =
10 quadrillion minutes/60 minutes =
166 trillion hours/24 hours
69 trillion days/365 days
19 billion years of air/1000 years
19 million centuries of air

Yep, I guess that’s a while.

Thoughts on "Perelandra"...

This the second book in Lewis’ Space trilogy, it is basically a retelling of early “Genesis” and “Paradise Lost” with the science fiction twist that the events happen on Perelandra (Venus) in the present instead of in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of time.

C.S. Lewis, who says that Ransom told him about his experiences on Venus narrates the novel. I think Lewis switched to this form of narrator because he knew he could not explain what it felt like for Ransom to experience the trip across space or how wonderful Venus fruits tasted so it was easier to say, “Ransom said he couldn’t explain it to me,” than to have to say, “I can’t explain it to you,” which seems like more of a cop out.

The first part of the story is a sort of travelogue about the surface of Venus how the land is not fixed, there are these floating islands that are pushed here and there by Venus’ oceans. The islands are filled with all sorts of strange planet life and also friendly animals. And everything Ransom eats tastes fantastic. But I started to wonder if there was any intelligent life on the planet.

Finally Ransom meets “the Green Lady” a beautiful naked green woman, yet Ransom feels no sexual attraction to her due to the innocence of the planet or how innocent she instantly seemed or…basically just because that’s what the book said, I guess?

The Green Lady sits around with her friendly animals and waits for her King to come back, you see her man lives on some other island, but when they met again, they will start civilization on the planet.

The Green Lady and Ransom take a trip over the “the Fixed Land” a huge mountain that is the only Earth like land on the planet. The Green Lady who says she hears the voice of “Maleldil” says that see is permitted to visit the fixed land but never to sleep upon it. This is the one directive she has been given (This replaces eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom in this story).

Then a spaceship crash lands on the planet and it is none other than Weston’s ship. Weston is not actually Weston though, he has been possessed by some sort of demon, some servant of the “Bent One.” It is of course this creature’s mission to convince the Green Lady to sleep on the fixed land.

When the Green Lady is around, the demon is completely eloquent like a professor of history who never tires. However, when she sleeps or goes away, the demons turns into an almost mindless thing that speaks only in grunts and catches Venus’ frog like creatures so that he can slice them open and watch them die.

The fascinating thing about “Weston’s” attempts to convince the Green Lady to sin is that both him and Ransom are not allowed to lie. Ransom tries at some point and finds he can’t. So Weston tells the Green Lady story after story about strong willed women that went against the laws of the land and/or disobeyed their fathers for what they thought was right. He spoke about how sometimes these woman suffered severe consequences but it paved the way for a better life for their children and countrymen.

I found this aspect of the novel to be absolutely fascinating because we think of the devil as the “God of Lies” he tells you half-truths and tricks you into sinning. Here the devil is forced to use logic and truth to make his point and he continuously gives Ransom a run for his money in this battle of wits.

So I expected from Ransom to pull some sort of intellectual rabbit out of his hat at the end of the book. I mean, a warrior of God bears the armor of God, the belt of truth, etc. Ephesians 6:10-17. But instead Ransom is forced to resort to violence in order to defeat his foe. First Ransom beats the tar out of Weston’s body. Weston runs away and hops a ride on a fish. Ransom grabs another fish and follows him for hours and hours. When night falls they are in the middle of the ocean and neither of them know where they are.

The real Weston takes control of his body again and says that he has been to hell and that God has no authority there. He says the “Bent One” is the true God because the “Old One” only has authority over the living and life is only 70 years at the most while death is eternal and inescapable.

Then the demon gains control again and lunges at Ransom. They are both plunged into the ocean in the middle of the night. After flailing around in the darkness for some time Ransom finds that he has washed up on shore. It is still pitch black. The demon has washed up near him. In the darkness Ransom find the demon and repeatedly bashes his head against the rocks until he is positive he is dead. Ransom waits a very long time and the sun never comes up, eventually Ransom reasons that he is in some sort of subterranean (or is it subvenetean) cave. So Ransom spends the rest of the novel trying to find his way out of the cave. Along the way the Weston demon shows up once more. This time the body travels even though it is dead, so it’s like some kind of zombie. Ransom attacks it again and when it is subdued he pushes in into a fire pit and watches it burn.

In the last few pages of the novel Ransom find the Edils of Mars and Venus in the cave as well as the Green Lady and the King. They tell him that the fixed land had been forbidden because it needed generations to form, but that now it is ready for the Green Lady and the King to live on and it is on this land and in the caves that they will begin to form their civilization.

Basically from the moment when Ransom and Weston started chasing each other into the middle of the ocean on fishes’ backs, the novel started going downhill and never really recovered. I couldn’t understand why the novel didn’t just end. The endless journey of Ransom in the caves was a flashback to the boring travelogue around the surface of Venus at the start of the novel.

An interesting question raised in the novel is that Ransom continually says that God doesn’t repeat himself so he wonders how it is that the devil in the form of Weston seems to be inching closer and closer to victory as everyday he tells the “Green Lady” more and more stories. Whether or not God repeats himself isn’t the most interesting thing though, you see over the course of the two novels Ransom sees things on Mars and Venus that he believes inspired Earth mythology such as the Sorns are the inspiration for Cyclops. Late in this novel the Edil of Mars and Venus take human form and Ransom says that surely they inspired the mythical Venus and Mars themselves. This seems to be similar to the idea expressed at the end of "Childhood’s End" (Massive Spoilers ahead…) that the death of humanity was such a strong event it took a trip backwards in time down the human collective unconscious and made the image of the Overlords into the mythical image of the Devil. So all of that caused me to wonder whether Lewis was trying to say that the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis never really happened and that the story on Perelandra took a trip back through time too. My evidence for this is that if God doesn’t repeat himself, why is the story in Genesis and this story on Venus so similar?

One plot thread that never got developed was that the Green Lady and the King weren’t the only intelligent animals on Venus there seemed to be a race of Mermen in the planet’s ocean. Ransom wonders about them but never gets to know them because he can’t breath underwater. To me, this changes the whole book, I mean surely those are God’s creatures too, why does god make such a big deal about the Green Lady and the King, when there is already some sort of civilization on Venus? Also, you never find out if the Green Lady’s ancestors and the Mermen will one day have to fight for supremacy. That might be an interesting book.

Thoughts on "Out of the Silent Planet"...

First posted July 9, 2010, edited on July 12, 2010 after further examination of the book due to comments and discussion of the review.

As I was reading “Out of the Silent Planet” by C.S. Lewis, I thought of “The Wizard of Oz.” (The movie, I’ve never actually read any of the books). As you no doubt recall, the movie starts in black and white and then when Dorothy gets to Oz, it turns into a Technicolor film. I thought this book was science fiction during the trip to Malacandra (Mars), but after getting there the story becomes fantasy.

Okay, the stuff on the spaceship was far from being "hard science fiction," but for 1938 when it was written, this was remarkable. I liked how the ship was a sort of sphere and the gravity was towards the ship’s core so all the rooms were curved. It reminded me of the rotating ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Again, I’m thinking of the movie version). I also liked how Weston, the creator of the spaceship (and the book’s villain) was always so concerned with conserving power and air during the trip. There are too many science fiction stories were space travel is just routine like driving your car down the road to the next neighborhood. It’s just a more interesting story when space travel is still something difficult.

Like I said, when Ransom arrives on Malacandra, it switches to a fantasy story instantly. They get off the ship and Mars has an atmosphere, breathable air, and forests. You just have to say to yourself, “Okay, it’s going to be one of those stories.” In order to enjoy the story, you have to check the science portion of your brain at the door.

The main plot of the story is that Ransom a Philologist, a sort of linguist, was kidnapped by two men about to make their second trip to Malacandra (Mars). They think that the “natives,” Sorns, a large thin almost birdlike race several feet taller than man, demand a human sacrifice. You see, because Weston and his toady sidekick Devine don’t understand the alien language well, they think the aliens are primitive savages. In reality, they are intelligent and peaceful creatures. Anyway, Ransom believes he is going to be sacrificed too, so the first chance he gets he runs away into the strange world he’s just arrived at.

To understand this book, you have to understand that C.S. Lewis was a devote Christian. So he writes “Christian stories.” In this story the Christian elements are somewhat masked, God is called the “Old One” Jesus is “Maleldil,” and angels are Edil. All of them are interdimensional beings that live outside of linear time as we know it. The Devil, called “the Bent One” is a rogue Edil that betrayed the “Old One” and caused him to cut off direct communication with Earth through Edil. Earth is known as “Thulcandra” which translates to “the Silent Planet”

Weston, who as I mentioned is the story’s villain, is a human who believes that humanity’s destiny is to populate other planets in the solar system and then conquer other star systems and then rinse and repeat forever. Having grown up on Star Trek and having always been taught the American idea of “Manifest Destiny” in school, I must confess that a part of me agrees with Weston. I mean, didn’t Stephen Hawkins recently warn us that humanity must spread to other worlds if it is to survive?

On the other hand, sometimes I think of humans as a sort of locust. Like them, we are one of the only animals that destroys its own habitat. How can we spread humanity to other planets before we figure out how to live in harmony with this one?

According to Malacandran philosophy, each peoples and each planet have a certain amount of time and that’s it. Mars is a planet that is slowly becoming inhospitable to life, but the population just shrugs and says that’s the way of things.

In Lewis’ mind Malacandra is a planet in perfect harmony. The three intelligent alien species lived in peace. Each species felt valuable, no one group ruled over another. Ransom does not understand how three so different intelligent species could all live as equals, but he comes to realize that humanity really missed out on not having true brother species and later decides that humans so often keep pets because, without even realizing it, they are searching for the brotherhood of an equal.

My favorite of the three species are the Pfifltrigg, who unfortunately only really make a cameo in the novel. Ransom never goes to their territory, so the only one we really meet is in the capital city. The Pfifltrigg are tinkers and builders. But, they make things just because they enjoy it. They just build, build, build and then they give it away, kind of like the Doozers in Fraggle Rock. (Why do I keep going back to movies and tv today?)

Malacandra is ruled by Oyarsa, who is an Edil. Lewis wants the reader to believe Oyarsa is a fair ruler, but the truth is he’s just as dark and evil a creature as Weston or the “Bent One.” Oyarsa tells a story that thousands of years ago he feared his people might decide to make skyships and flee Mars, because even then it was known Mars was a dying planet. So Oyarsa nipped the rebellion in the bud before it got started by killing almost everyone, “Some I cured, other I unbodied” he said. Oyarsa says his actions were justified because though the civilization on Malacandra is not sustainable they do not know “fear, murder and rebellion.” Oyarsa is an Edil, he is not all-knowing. He has obviously made a mistake and refuses to admit it. I think he has broken the Social Contract he has with his people in Malacandra and should be removed. Maybe there is some other nice young Edil that can take over. As I already mentioned I don’t think I could accept a ruler that said, “Yes, the planet is dying but you should just accept it.” I’d want to preserve my people, and my people’s collective knowledge.

Overall, I felt like the religious aspects of “Out of the Silent Planet” were somewhat in the background. The story meshes science with religion (God is an interdimensional super being that lives out of linear time as we understand it) so completely that the story stands on it’s own as a piece of speculative fiction without only becoming a pseudo religious text.

The second novel of the series “Perelandra” unfortunately never develops into anything more than a pseudo religious text, but that’s a story for another review.

Thoughts about "On the Waterfront"

I feel really bad for "throwing it under the bus," because I think a lot of people love this movie, but I watched "On the Waterfront" over the weekend and I just didn't get why this movie is such a classic.

The first thing that really bothered me is the Leonard Bernstein soundtrack. During the film whenever anyone starts showing the slightest emotion the orchestral music swells and distracts from the acting. Basically, I wish I could have erased the music.

Yes, Marlone Brando gives a great performance, but I didn't think the script gave his character Terry Malone much growth. He starts off as kind of a dimwitted ex-boxer that only thinks about himself and by the end of the movie I guess we are supposed to think he’s learned to think about other people, but he testifies because the villain had his brother murdered, so has Terry learned altruism or simply revenge? In fact, I thought all of the characters where kind of one-note characters, the only other character with any growth was Eva Marie Saint’s Edie, who at the start of the film is a sheltered, but book-smart girl who doesn’t seem to have any experience with men and at the end of the film she’s fallen in love with Terry, but the movie doesn’t show how/if the relationship has made her grow/change.

My favorite scene without a doubt is the one where Terry and Edie are talking and she drops her glove. Terry picks it up and starts playing with it. I've always heard that this part wasn't scripted, but improvised. It really makes the scene because it's not just Brando that's improvising Saint is right there with him because at the end of the scene she pulls the glove off his hand and it all seems so natural, so real. Unfortunately it’s one diamond among a pile of coal.

Possibly the film’s biggest problem is that it can’t decide what kind of a villain Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) is. In his first scene, Friendly talks about how he started as a nobody and carved out a crime empire. This led me to believe he was an effective and smart villain. However, in the same first scene Friendly does two incongruous things: first he repeatedly refuses to count stacks of money saying it makes his head hurt. I let this go at first thinking he must be the hands-off type. Then someone else counts a stack and says a guy was short $50 bucks and Friendly goes nuts on the guy and tells him he doesn’t work in this town anymore. For someone who can’t be bothered to count his own money, the money sure means a lot to him. I guess we are supposed to think that the money doesn’t mean as much to him as trust does?

The next questionable scene takes place when it seems like Terry is going to testify. Friendly talks to Terry’s brother Charley. Charley is one of Friendly’s Lieutenants. Charley is the reason why Terry has always gotten a free ride, Friendly has kept Terry happy because it makes Charley happy and by that logic, Friendly is willing to do so much for Charley because he is a really great Lieutenant. But the fact that Terry might testify is just too much, Friendly gives Charley an ultimatum, he tells him he has to kill his brother or else. Now here comes the curious part, he lets him go take care of it on his own! If I was a really smart crime boss who had built a crime empire from nothing, I’d probably be pretty careful. If I’d given a man an ultimatum that backed him into a corner I’d probably be concerned he might decide to betray me. So you take a bunch of guys you can trust and you go with Charley and you make sure he kills his brother and if he can’t, you kill both of them. The one thing you don’t do is let him go off alone so he can formulate some sort of plan. Luckily, Charley did something even more boneheaded. He’s in the back of a car with his brother; up front some unnamed hoodlum is driving the car. Charley openly discusses betraying Friendly. You can see how horrified the driver is and so it is absolutely no surprise when Charley is dead a few scenes later. Did Charley think the hoodlum was loyal to him before Friendly? Maybe they were really good friends, and he trusted the unnamed hoodlum completely. But the unnamed guy had secret ambitions and his betrayal was not unlike Iago’s betrayal of Othello, a saga of unbelievable evil. But unfortunately the movie doesn’t give us the slightest hint.

Okay, the next scene of interest is the court scene. Terry gives about a two sentence confession on the stand. They ask him if he knows who killed Joe Doyle, he says Friendly ordered some guys to do it. That’s all he says and it seems that’s all the evidence the Crime Commission has: one man’s testimony. If Friendly was smart he’d understand that they still have nothing and all he has to do is play it cool. Instead Terry gets off the stand and Friendly goes into a blind rage and starts screaming at Terry and punching him. This outburst made him look guilty whereas the testimony hadn’t really been all that damning.

Okay, so Friendly and his boys are the Union leaders for the dockworkers. They make their money from…I never quite figured that out. Okay, so Friendly and his boys control whether a dockworker works on any given day. They also control what jobs any given guy has. We know this because Terry Malone was given a job where he doesn’t actually have to work. But the catch is that Friendly doesn’t own the boats or the cargo. That’s all owned by an overweight bald guy who we see only twice in the movie: First he is watching the court proceedings when Terry testifies. He just sort of grumbles when Friendly goes “ape-shit” on Terry afterwards. Then we see him at the end of the movie. He stands at the doorway to the docks and waits for the bloody and beat up Terry to report for work, because none of the workers will work unless he is working too. If the fat man didn’t somehow benefit from whatever deal he had with Friendly, why did he let him run the workers for so many years?

This movie’s director, Elia Kazan is legendary. I’m a big fan of his film “A Streetcar Named Desire,” but this movie was clearly an attempt by him to justify his testimony to the House Un-American activities Committee (HUAC). You see, Kazan was a Communist for a year and a half from 1934 and 1936. Then twenty years later, the HUAC was questioning “known communists” and trying to get them to name names. It was a witch-hunt and Kazan eventually caved and named 8 people. Then the following year he made this movie where the theme of the movie turns out to be how much of a hero you can be if you have the courage to testify. Knowing this background made what seems on the surface to be a movie about silly and evil mobsters seem to be about much more and it made it seem almost insidious, like if we thought Brando’s Terry Malone was right for testifying then we had to think Kazan must have been right for testifying too, right? Only they were two completely different situations. When I listened to Father Barry’s (Karl Madden) impassioned speeches about standing up to the union and having the courage to speak out, I thought they were kind of over-the-top, but when I think about them in the context of the HUAC, they absolutely disgust me.

Thoughts on "Contact"

Carl Sagan's "Contact" is a great concept and is very well written in some parts, I especially enjoyed the beginning where the reader follows Ellie Arroway through her childhood.

However, the novel suffers from being kind of flat. It's a 432 page novel (all page numbers are according to the hardcover edition I got from the library) and I got the feeling someone told Sagan that's how long a "real" novel had to be. There seems to be some filler in the form of tangents where Sagan introduces all sorts of extra science fiction elements into his near future world.

But I'll focus on those tangents later, but first I want to explain why I thought the story was flat. On about p 106 Arroway and the other scientists discover the 10,000 page encrypted message from the Vegans (Did anyone else read the first mention of Vegans as talking about those vegetarians that don't eat dairy?) but they can't decipher the message. So, they wait for the message to repeat, hoping that at the beginning of the message is a "primer," a key to the encryption. Then around p 234 they figure out that there is no primer, but they end up figuring the message out without one. It's only about 100 pages, but it felt like a lot more while I was reading the book. This section was kind of bland, nothing was happening, it just felt like the story had no momentum.

I didn't like the religious aspects of the book until the end of the novel. When the evangelist characters Joss and Rankin were introduced I felt like they were just "strawman" characters, whose only purpose was to be beaten by Arroway and science. When Arroway debated them, I thought that the two of them were made to look like jokes. I'm no preacher, but I felt like I could have put up a better argument against Arroway.

I think that religion comes down to faith. God, in the Christian sense, doesn't show himself in an absolute fashion because he wants us to choose to follow him. He wants us to choose to be "good people" not out of fear, but because of a belief that it's just the right way to live. Because philosophies like "love your neighbor as yourself" and "turn the other cheek" are worthy philosophies to aspire to.

I was happy to see that the ending dovetailed: Arroway who questioned religion because of a lack of absolute proof, received first hand proof of aliens and many other wonders in her journey across the galaxy, but she only had her words to share with others. She had become exactly what she criticized. She expected the rest of the world to believe her story and her philosophy without any physical evidence.

The very end of the novel puts a further spin on the ending when a computer finds a message buried deep inside the exponents of Pi, a binary code that translates to a circle. The novel purports that this is the proof Arroway needed for people to believe her story. I'm more skeptical of human nature and figure that the average person would either figure it was a coincidence, or not be able to wrap their head around how deep the number was buried in Pi and just figure it's not true.

I just thought I should note that in 2009 Pi was calculated to 2.5 trillion digits and no sequence of ones and zeroes or binary circles were found, but it was a fun idea, wasn't it?

Okay, I promised I'd get back to those tangents. The first one, around page 223 is all about a theme park called "Babylon" that is somewhere 30 minutes from Manhattan by train, but still subject to NYC laws, so it must be in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.

By day Babylon had neat architecture, fun rides, games and tasty food, but by night Babylon was an adult theme part where men and woman could play out sexual fantasies with prostitutes.

I know there is a real market for prostitution, but I find it impossible to believe that it could ever be coupled with a family friendly tourism industry. Sure Las Vegas is a tourist trap, but I've never seen it advertised as a family-get-away destination.

The other tangent is when Arroway goes up to a space station and there are a small number of elite super rich men who believe that living in the weightlessness of space is going to prolong their lives. Everything I've read about the effects of weightlessness suggest that it's long term effects are harmful. Here is what Wiki said:

The most significant adverse effects of long-term weightlessness are muscle atrophy and deterioration of the skeleton, or spaceflight osteopenia. These effects can be minimized through a regimen of exercise. Astronauts subject to long periods of weightlessness wear pants with elastic bands attached between waistband and cuffs to compress the leg bones and reduce osteopenia. Other significant effects include fluid redistribution (causing the "moon-face" appearance typical of pictures of astronauts in weightlessness), a slowing of the cardiovascular system, decreased production of red blood cells, balance disorders, and a weakening of the immune system. Lesser symptoms include loss of body mass, nasal congestion, sleep disturbance, excess flatulence, and puffiness of the face. These effects begin to reverse quickly upon return to the Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness#cite_note-13

I especially enjoyed the part about increased flatulence. I just picture the men and woman on the International Space Station in a sort of reenactment of the famous beans scene in Blazing Saddles.

Finally, I wanted to mention my confusion about one passage in the novel. On page 277, Arroway is agonizing over Drumlin's death. She feels guilty because her first thoughts when he died were about herself. She thinks about men who for one reason or another she had admired "Drumlin. Valerian. Derr Heer. Hadden...Joss. Jesse... Staughton?...Her father."

Was the purpose of this passage just to foreshadow the revelation at the end of the book that Staughton was her biological father. When I read the passage the first time I was sure it had some sort of deeper significance. Like she was admitting to herself in some sort of Freudian way that she was sexually attracted to men she admired.

The other strange thing about the passage is that she doesn't mention Vaygay. Of the men in her life, he was my favorite. Clearly he was interested in her sexually, but he never pressured her. He just sort of left that option open to her. And in turn she developed a sort of relationship with him that went somewhere beyond friendship but only unconsciously on her part. Look at the way Arroway gets all "hot and bothered" when she thinks of the other women in his life.

I haven't yet seen the 1997 film. (It's next in my netflix cue). But I am looking forward to seeing how it differs from the novel. I see that Matthew McConaughey plays Joss and so I suspect Arroway and him will become romantically involved in the movie version. Off hand this doesn't make sense to me, though the end of the novel seems to imply that the two characters could get together after the events of the novel, because Arroway's experiences have given them new-found common ground.