Being Alive

Tim Ingold's Being Alive was a thought-provoking yet frustrating read. Ingold is an anthropologist, and the book is an attack on the way anthropologists approach their subject, and in a larger sense, on how westerners think, and interact with the world. It's extremely low-level, challenging the reader on how they think about objects and motion and walking. Most of a chapter is spent discussing the action of sawing a piece of wood, and what that means.

Fundamentally, he argues that we think about the world around us as being comprised of objects. We mentally model the world as being a collection of "things" that have "properties", and have relationships. It's a world that can be represented as a set of connected points. He then argues in many ways and from many points of view, that we should be thinking of ourselves as lines (or bundles of lines) rather than as points, and that the lines interact with each other in many ways. He refers to a number of cultures that think about the world like this, and explains how our western way of thinking about the world blinds us to a real understanding of how these cultures work. Animism, the beliefs of many hunter-gatherer societies around the world, is in this picture not a world view where everything is imbued with a spirit, but is rather a world view where animals, people, rocks, and everything in the world are parts of stories, and there is no rigid separation between "living things" and "non-living things". That distinction isn't needed because they don't see the world as being comprised of objects, and so they don't need to imbue certain objects with the property of "living" in order to explain their ability to act in the world.

I don't think I've read anything that is quite such a fundamental attack on the way the western world  thinks, and it left me intellectually reeling in a number of places. I hadn't even considered the possibility of not thinking of the world in this way.

On the other hand, there is a lot about the book that frustrated me. There were an awful lot of straw men used to support his arguments - stating that people generally think of things in a certain way, which was clearly (to me) a blatant simplification of how actual people think. Plenty of unsupported arguments. And the most fundamental problem was that he never really explained what his alternative world-view was. He explained some of the properties of this world view, but never what the "lines" really actually represented - what they meant. So while I often agreed with his position that there are other ways of thinking about the world, I couldn't bring myself to embrace his position, because it wasn't ever stated. And lastly, as a mathematician by training, I found his statements about things "not being points, but rather, being lines" seemed rather trivial - there are plenty of things that can be represented as lines or points depending on how you want to view them - it's a simple transformation, not a fundamentally different thing.

I think Being Alive will give different things to different people. I can understand how it would appeal to humanities folks much more than it did to me. In many ways, the most important thing it contains is the questions it asks - many of which I've never heard asked before - rather than the answers it attempts to give.

Tarnsman of Gor

I've wanted to read a Gor book for ages, based on their weird reputation and the fact we had a bunch of them in the Sutekh library way back when. It's famed for it's misogyny, taking the usual Fantasy/Sci-fi gender roles to extremes. Tarnsman of Gor is the first in the series, so it seemed like a good place to start.

At first glance, it's actually very John Carter of Mars-esque - young academic Tarl Cabot is mysteriously transported to another world. It's like our world in some ways, but it's trapped in some equivalent of out ancient world - battles are fought with swords, spears, and archers. But it's also different in various fantastical ways - the world is rules by mysterious priest-kings; warriors fly about on giant pterodactyl-ey creatures called Tarns (hence the title of the book, Tarnsman of Gor), there are giant talking spiders in the forests, etc. It's not too bad (or at least, not much worse than other similar portal-into-a-world-with-a-bunch-of-random-sci-fi-and-fantasy-devices-thrown-in novels). The misogyny and extreme gender roles are relatively mild in this one - dodgy in a few places, such as the submissive slave girl business, and the long-winded justification the author felt Tarl Cabot needed to go through in order to hug his father and be happy about seeing him); but not as ridiculously horrifying as the later novels in the series get (it's now up to 30 novels).

I'd recommend this only if you're super-keen on both Conan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and have run out of anything like that to read.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a dark and sombre look at drug culture in the near future (at least, the near future of the near past). It's unlike most of Dick's other stories (at least those I've read) in that it really is a study of character under pressure, rather than a series of shotgun blasts of ideas. It's a eulogy to friends the author lost to drugs in the sixties - not praising, not condemning, but looking sadly at the effects of drugs on the psyche.

The protagonist, Bob Arctor, is an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the drugs scene. To fully immerse himself, he has become addicted to Substance D, a powerful drug, and the drug starts to take its toll on him as the story progresses. We witness this from his perspective, which is often abrupt and difficult to follow, particularly so once his perspective becomes more and more warped by the drugs. It's very well done, and well worth a read.

The Lathe of Heavan

"Dreams come true, changing the real world" is a relatively common theme which has been explored quite a few times - I know I've read at least three stories based around the idea. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven does a good job of it.

The novel starts with George Orr, an otherwise perfectly normal person, whose dreams occasionally change the world. He is terrified of this, and takes drugs to suppress his dreams. The plot kicks off when he is caught abusing pharmaceuticals and sent compulsory rehab, and Dr Haber (who I only just noticed when writing this, is an anagram of "rehab") realises that his patient is not delusion, and that this power of dreaming can be used to change things.

The novel explores a range of worlds, each a different dystopia. An underlying theme is that we can't really change things for the better, as there are always unexpected consequences to our choices, and the more significant the choice, the more significant the consequence. There is quite a bit of philosophy packed in here, and the key tension in the book is between Haber's very scientific, positivist approach, and Orr's calm acceptance of the world as it is.

Lathe of Heaven is quite an interesting read, and deserves its place in the SF Masterworks series that I found it in.

Emphyrio

I've like Jack Vance's weird blend of fantasy and science fiction since I was a teenager. He presents cultures and worlds with this air of stagnation and byzantine flamboyance that is unlike any othe writer. Emphyrio is a perfect example of this - it's a science fiction, but set in a strictly controlled medieval world where every person is required to follow their parents' career path, and respect the strict control of the Welfare Agency. As such, it feels more like fantasy than science fiction, probably deliberately so.

The protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, is a carver who dreams of great things - mainly, freedom and financial independence, and he stands up to the Lords and Ladies of his world to fight for it, with a range of unexpected consequences. As the story unfolds, it turns into a space opera, with Ghyl uncovering the mysteries of his home world. It's an interesting take on a possible future, emphasizing the diversity of governments and societies that are likely to evolve is we ever manage to get off Earth and spread ourselves across the galaxy.

Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons is hauntingly beautiful and heart-rending to read. Set in a South American town in the 18th century, it tells the story of the life and death of Sierva Maria, the daughter of a noble whose life has fallen apart around him. She is bitten by a rabid dog, and the emotional disturbances caused by her neglected upbringing are diagnosed as rabies, and then as demonic possession. The tale leads inexorably to a tragic ending for all involved.

I love reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez - they are incredibly powerful - haunting and sad and tragic and subtly surreal, and at the end you're left with echoes of melancholy rather than ideas and plot. They need to be taken in small doses, as too much can overwhelm, so I only delve into his corpus every few years. They colour my whole mental picture of South America - I haven't read much other literature from south of the US/Mexican border, so when I think of South America, I think of sadness and lost love, of careful, gentle priests and dreaming girls, of magic and melancholy. It's a beautiful world, one I can ever visit because it only exists in García Márquez's pages.

Neptune's Brood

I've been a big fan of Charles Stross since I first read Accelerando years ago. I got my hands on this one the day it was released (ebooks ship quickly) - it's a followup to Saturn's Children, set some number of thousands of years into the future, in a posthuman universe that is being gradually colonized by the successors of Humanity.

More than any Sci-Fi author I've read, Stross is fascinated by economics. This thread in his fiction seems to be becoming stronger over the years, though it has always been there, and played an important part in Accelerando. In Neptune's Brood, the protagonist is a banker - specifically, a historian of accounting practices. The gradual colonization of space is drive by economics, not by any sense of manifest destiny or adventurous spirit or greater good of humanity. The novel is, in the end, a accountancy detective thriller set in the far future, rather than a classic space opera. Stross throws in a lot of ideas about how interstellar colonization will work in a universe governed strictly be the speed of light and laws of physics as we know them, and a few of them are quite fascinating. A few of them seem to be of more interest to Stross than to this reader, though.

I wasn't left as impressed with Neptune's Brood as I was by Saturn's Children or Accelerando, but it was still a worthwhile read.