Dr Dan?

Well, there it goes, off into the ether, winging its way across copper and fibre, onto a pile of disks in a darkened shelf somewhere in Ultimo. I've just sent off my CV to see if they're interested in letting me do a PhD. It took me over a week to respond to their email asking for it. Had they thought I'd forgotten or changed my mind?

This whole thing is rather intimidating. My Honours years (now seemingly an aeon ago) weren't exactly the masterpieces they could've been (though I tend to cite various extraneous factors as excuses). With a full-time job and a wife and three small kids, is taking on a PhD a smart idea? Have I got what it takes to do this? It'll take smarts (which I can usually successfully fool people into thinking I have), and hard work (most people aren't aware, but I have been known to do it on rare occasions), and a whole lot of energy (rarely my strong point, despite the medically inadvisable amount of energy drinks I consume).

It's still not final, and I'm still a fair way off being actually enrolled in anything, but each step closer fills my gut with a roiling brew of dread, excitement and worry.

738 Books

738 Books. That's how many I've got left. To read, ever.

Part of the reason I've been noting the books I've read here in this blog is to get an idea of how quickly I actually read them, and thus how many I've got left to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I've read 18 books in the last year, and given average life expectancies and my current age, it means I'll get to read another 738 books (if I knew a bit more stats, I'd produce a nice graph that would show the likelihoods of me reading each particular number of books between 1 and 1500).

The good thing is, this is more than I was expecting. I didn't know of the number would be 200 or 2000; I was expecting something closer to the 400 mark. But it does show I need to think a little more about the quality of book that I read. Each book I read can now be considered 0.14% of all the books I'll ever get to read in my life, and each crappy book is a good one I don't get to read. If I should decide to read the entire oeuvre of a writer who has produced 8 novels, that's 1% of my life's reading.

This doesn't mean only reading the highest literature and non-fiction to be found; it means the books that will affect me the most, and bring me the most enjoyment. A lot of the books I've read over the last year have been of that sort, and I find a Singularity Sky to be as relevant, or even more so than a Vernon God Little. I will, however, avoid wasting 0.27% of my remaining lifetime literary intake on the sequels to Byzantium's Crown.

Of course, I still have the option to expand my intake by spending more time reading. And getting serious about it once I retire. Danny seems to get through about four times as many books as I do, so it's certainly possible.

I intend to keep writing here about the books I read. I've enjoyed it so far, so I'll keep doing it until someone tells me to shut up :)

God is not Great

The other book I've been reading over the last month was God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. I picked this up after seeing the Intelligence Squared debate regarding "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world", with Hitchens and Stephen Fry on one side, and Archbishop Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe on the other. It was a good watch, and hugely improved my opinion of Hitchens.

I'm generally aware of the state of the "Culture Wars" going on, particularly in the USA, between the secular world and the resurgent religious fundamentalism. I've been supportive in general of the "New Atheism" - Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, whats-his-face Dawkins, etc., basically because without them it's a one sided argument. I'm an atheist, but like most atheists I feel there is a kind of pointlessness to arguing for my position. There are lots of things I don't believe in that I don't ever get questioned about - my lack of belief in Dragons and Unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, and so on. But when you wander around being an atheist, you do get called on your lack of belief in the various Gods that people have invented over the years. It's good to see there are people on our side willing to take on the fight, and risk all the death threats and personal attacks that inevitable arrive when you criticize religions. It's those proselytizers who wander around hassling non-believers (and believers in slightly different versions of their own god) that tend to give all believers a bad name, and result in my general lack of tolerance for religion in general. On an intellectual level, I'm perfectly supportive of people's right to believe in gods, and I'm quite supportive of the broad deism that typifies many people who were raised with organised religion but have drifted away from their church; but I do think a world without religions and other superstitions would be a better place.

The book itself was a great read - very well written, clear, and intelligent. I found myself really enjoying reading it; Hitchens says better than I ever could why religion as a bad thing, from a rational, ethical, historically knowledgeable point of view. He mentions some of the arguments for the existence of god, and points out the glaring holes in them; but in the main this book takes it for granted that religions are, in general, incorrect, and is mainly arguing why religion in general, and churches in particular, are a bad thing.

He makes a key point when he recalls a radio host once asking him whether if he was walking down the street after sunset, and a group of men were walking towards him, wouldn't he feel safer if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens responds that no, at most times and in most places, he wouldn't. Certainly not in Baghdad, or Beirut, or Belfast, or several other cities beginning with B.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone to read. It expounds in great depth and with great vigour why we'd be better off without religions; that the rational person has no need for religion, and that it in fact tends to make people less rational and gives them excuses to absolve themselves of great evils. It also acknowledges that we are imperfectly rational mammals, and that we probably have a need for religion to fill in the gaps left by our lack of rationality. If you're religious, it'll show you that your churches haven't been the forces for goodness that they like to protray themselves as; if you're atheist or agnostic it'll show you that there are people who think like you, and that there are very good reasons for living the way you do.

Transition

Things have been a bit quiet here on the Stuff By Dan front; it's been an absurdly busy month (with another absurd month or two ahead), and the latest book I have read has those badly-sized chapters that mean I have a choice of about 5-10 minutes of reading, or 40 minute of reading. For me, 20 minutes is about the ideal chapter length, since it means I get a fair bit read each evening before bed, but not so much that I'm awake all night reading, or falling asleep before the chapter ends.

Also, I was reading two books simultaneously. But more on that in the next post.

I've just finished Transition, by Iain Banks (oddly, not Iain M Banks). It's that very difficult breed of novel, a Multiverse novel.

A big problem with science fiction is making all the worlds your characters visit feel like real, and distinct worlds. It's why I avoid running space opera roleplaying games; I never feel it's really possibly to evoke the sense of a real world when it's a different planet you're visiting every session. Multiverses are even harder, as it's a different world in a different universe that is being visited. Banks, on the other hand, is a masterful world builder, so he can get away with these sorts of shenanigans.

Transition gets around this by having the transitions between universes being only possible between similar universes; in fact, the characters can only transition into bodies and minds similar to their own; and it's only their mind that transitions. It's often hard to tell which universe any particular part of the story is taking place in; our Earth is frequently visited, as is Calbefraques, the version of Earth where the ability to transition was discovered. Each different version of Earth has branched from ours at some time in the past, and there are infinities of possible earths between each of these universes, corresponding, presumably, to every branching possible outcome of every event in the Earth's history.

Once you get past the very Science Fictional setting, the story is more a spy thriller than a Sci Fi novel. The main protagonist, Temudjin Oh, is a Transitionary, one of the rare breed who can transition between Universes. He is an agent for l'Expedience, aka. The Concern, and organisation based on Calbefraques, which has the duty of sending its Transitionaries to different realities, and making butterfly-effect changes to a single person's life that end up changing that world in a big way. Things naturally get more complicated as conspiracies are unveiled and motives revealed, and it marches to an exciting, if somewhat small-scale, conclusion.

I'm yet to find a Banks novel that I'm disappointed by when I get to the end. Admittedly, I wasn't able to really start reading Feersum Endjinn, but the others are great. Transition never feels quite on the scale of Banks' other Science Fiction; novels like The Algebraist and his Culture novels overwhelm the imagination with the sheer scale of things. No-one can write an interstellar war like Banks. Transition is smaller, more personal, and deals with the intrigues between a small group of people who know each other quite well.

So, it's worth a read, but if you haven't read Banks, I'd start somewhere else in his corpus.

Should be watched...

Gotta love logic

This evening Atty decided he was scared of his skeleton pajamas, since they might attract skeleton ghosts. I informed him that his dogs (he has a small army of plush dogs) would protect him. It reminded me of a similar incident with Dante a while back.

"Daddy, I can't sleep - I'm scared of ghosts"
"D, you know that there's no such thing as ghosts - they're not real"
"But I'm scared of them"
"Don't worry, Brown Bear and your other bears will protect you" (Where Atty has dogs, Dante has bears)
"But they're just toys, Daddy, they're not real"
"That's OK, ghosts aren't real either, which means that your bears can protect you against them"

Dante thinks for a moment, and nods, satisfied, and lies down to go to sleep. Gotta love a kids that's willing to accept logical arguments.

The New Space Opera

The New Space Opera is a collection of short stories by a range of authors, showing the breadth and depth of writing that falls into the "New Space Opera" sub-genre.

It's something I realise I've been reading a lot of in recent years. It's Space Opera, but written in the wake of the Information Revolution; which has transformed how Sci Fi writers envision the future. Notably missing from this collection are two of my favourite authors, Stross and Banks.

There are some great stories in this collection; some will stick with me for ages, and some are the kind where I'll forget the story, but the ideas will be integrated into my brain, and I'll probably read them in the future and wonder why the technologies all seem so familiar.

Some of the high points: Dan Simmons' Muse of Fire melted my brain; Walter Jon Williams' Send them Flowers felt like a Beat Generation road trip in a parallel universe; Alastair Reynolds' Minya's Flowers was food for thought. Note for further investigation: do all good modern Sci Fi authors have names ending in 's'?

So the future is going to be dark and mysterious and complex and textured. We may be the only civilization we ever meet, but otherwise we'll be a minor player in the vast and incomprehensible game of galactic politics. Physics is Einsteinian, but wormholes or a Many Worlds universe may let us get around that to travel the greater universe freely.

I got a lot out of The New Space Opera, even though I don't think it's necessarily the best that the genre has to offer. A lot of the tales in this compilation were really bursting at the seams of the short story format, and were clearly aching to be filled out to novel length, so that the strong characters and huge ideas has space to stretch their legs.