Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier: Max Kaehn’s LiveJournal

23:14 ※ Buddha’s Nature: Evolution as a Practical Guide to Enlightenment, by Wes Nisker ★★★★

Wes Nisker examines Buddhist meditation practices in the light of modern scientific understanding of biology and evolution. This is not a breathless “OMG people knew all this stuff 2500 years ago” screed— it’s more a matter of noting modern scientific results that match up with the insights that meditators came up with over many years of self-examination, and suggesting ways that understanding the science can enrich your own meditative practice. The book has a friendly, colloquial tone, and Nisker gives the pleasant sense that meditation includes a lot of chances to stop and smell the flowers on the way toward enlightenment, rather than a determined trudge toward nirvana. The science was all review for me, but written very accessibly—

wyvernwell, would you like to borrow it sometime?

November 6th, 2009

In the early fourth millennium, humanity largely lives within the light-hour surrounding our own Sun, and a few wealthy tycoons take up galactic tourism: they clone themselves a thousand times (often with genetic variations, including gender), decanting their personality into each clone, and set out in a thousand ships to travel the galaxy at near-lightspeed, with plans to meet up later. As civilizations rise and fall across the galaxy, these “shatterlings” (with the assistance of technologies for suspended animation, life extension, and time dilation) see six million years pass, trading information and expertise to the worlds they visit.

The book has two parallel stories: a shorter one following the youth of Abigail Gentian, who grows up to spawn the thousand shatterlings called Gentian Line (or the House of Flowers, since all of them are named after flowers), and a larger one following the intertwined lives of two of her shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, who have broken the rules of their Line, fallen in love, and taken up traveling together. They arrive late at a scheduled reunion of the Line, fearing censure by their fellows, and discover that someone has attempted to wipe out the entire clan. Their challenge is to figure out who did it, and why— and to survive.

Reynolds does a good job of keeping the suspense high even as the action stretches over the decades and centuries of interstellar travel. The tale includes some reflections on recent events, including the fear of the Other and the erosion of morality in times of stress. The feel is very much in the New Space Opera style of his other works, but is not as dark as the tales in his Revelation Space universe.

November 3rd, 2009

View Answers

Yes, I have performed my duty as a citizen
11 (44.0%)

Not yet, but I intend to
1 (4.0%)

Irrelevant— there’s no election in my district today
12 (48.0%)

Irrelevant— I’m not a citizen of the United States
0 (0.0%)

No! You can lead a citizen to democracy but you can’t make them vote!
1 (4.0%)

November 2nd, 2009

23:28 ※ Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way; Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★½

In the introduction, Le Guin explains that the Tao Te Ching has been an influential book throughout her life, and that over the years she has made efforts at producing her own rendition of the classic. (She won’t call it a translation, since she doesn’t actually speak Chinese, but she has done extensive research— she provides copious notes on how she chose particular renderings in the back of the book— and produced this in collaboration with a scholar of the language.) Her goal has been to distill the clarity of the classic for a modern reader who is more likely one citizen among millions rather than a leader seeking sagacious insights for rulership. The result is quite good, with a penetrating brevity I haven’t seen in the other translations I’ve read. I actually wound up reading it with another translation to hand when I wanted to get another perspective on the occasional verse, but I think the simplicity of her rendering is a good place to start before going out looking for more nuance.

October 31st, 2009

I picked up this book based on a Big Idea post before I discovered that the author is Sarah Zettel (whom I already like) with a new nom de plume. She gives us a fine far-future intrigue, with several viewpoint characters caught up in schemes where no one really knows what’s going on. I was particularly impressed by the depiction of a society that has managed to both keep a lid on humanity’s natural warring tendencies and cope with the societal effects of radical life extension. There is a subtle metafictional element as the author hints at tropes from softer space opera genres to put more possibilities in the reader’s mind when trying to unravel the conspiracy, then eventually resolves it in a different way; I found it disconcerting at first when she rang a few “cheesy paranormal romance” alarm bells, but by the time she pulled it with a second genre I found the effect amusing.

October 30th, 2009

October 25th, 2009

20:28 ※ Crazy Wisdom: A provocative romp through the philosophies of East and West, by Wes Nisker ★★★★★

I decided to reread this one since I was about to lend it to

yanfali, and found it held up well since the last time I read it.

baronlaw,

meorime,

sistercoyote, I think you’d enjoy it.

Journalist-turned-Buddhist-meditation-teacher Wes Nisker takes us on a tour of the world of “crazy wisdom”: the province of trickster gods, sacred clowns, holy fools, Taoist sages, Hassidic rabbis, Zen masters, Sufi mystics, existentialists, Dadaists, and the scientists who delve into the scales of space and time where we see the counterintuitive effects of evolution and quantum physics and general relativity. Crazy wisdom is the insight that comes from dropping away the filters of ego and preconceived notions and taking a good hard look at the world in all its banality and splendor... as well as taking the time to laugh at our own silly human pretensions.

The book is both a survey of crazy wisdom traditions from ancient times through modern and a look into its practice. It’s more of a signpost than a how-to manual, with lots of leads one can follow up on if they prove intriguing, liberally salted with quotations from sources ranging from ancient holy books to modern humorists and poets. I find the metaphysical perspective resonates well with my own aversion to dogma and hierarchy.

October 24th, 2009

In 2095, the world has been through some rough pandemics and wound up run by a gerontocracy facilitated by advanced medical technology. Mia Ziemann has been careful enough to make it to age 94 before finally deciding to try a full rejuvenation treatment, and decides to try the new cutting-edge technology— which, in addition to restoring physical youth, also adds a lot of fresh new brain cells to replace the ones lost over the decades. And with a head full of fresh neurons and a body coursing with youthful hormones, the rejuvenated Mia finds that she has an all-new set of priorities that don’t match the life she led before. This carries her off on an escapade into Europe and a world of disaffected young artists who aren’t so thrilled to be in a society run by and for the aged.

The future society is very believable, and Sterling put a lot of good thought into an artistic world a century from the time the book was written. The story itself has world-sized problems without world-sized solutions; it’s a good cautionary tale that warns of what can go wrong, but only provides a basis for speculation about how to do things right.

October 20th, 2009

October 16th, 2009

19:30 ※ Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, by Olivia Judson ★★★★★

A great look at the evolutionary biology of sex, presented as a collection of newspaper advice columns where “Dr. Tatiana” answers questions sent in by everything from slime-molds to vertebrates. Judson keeps the pace lively and the writing humorous, mixing the exposition of the gobsmackingly weird mating behaviors found throughout the animal world with our current understanding of the evolutionary principles that give rise to them. If you’re designing aliens for your science fiction setting, this book is full of inspirational material (in the vein of the Alien Sex panels given at local science fiction conventions by SF author and physical anthropologist Patricia MacEwen). This book could also be a good way to liven up the study of biology for a high school student with a dry textbook; if you have more academic pursuits in mind, there’s an excellent set of references in the back.

October 15th, 2009

In the sequel to The Mirrored Heavens, Williams delivers plenty more action and a bit more of the big picture. Connections between many of the characters in the first book are revealed, including some interesting weird-science ideas, as well as some hints of a posthuman theme. Like the first book, there is so much action we don’t get to find out much about the world: there’s a fight over whether the world should change without much to tell the reader whether or not it needs it. The ending is on a complete cliffhanger; I’m still curious as to what we’ll see in the third volume, but unless you really like high-tech future action, it’s probably best to hold off on buying this trilogy until we find out if Williams can deliver a satisfying conclusion.

October 14th, 2009

23:57 ※ Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, by Charles P. Pierce ★★★½

Charles Pierce is a great admirer of the American tradition of cranks: people with wild and wacky theories that challenge the status quo, whose notions are tested against reality and are either break current understanding or are broken by it. (For example, my mother grew up in an era when tectonic drift was a crank theory; it is now accepted geology.) He sees this as one of the beauties of a society with the First Amendment in its bedrock.

In recent years, however, crank theories are getting spread throughout the media without benefit of testing them against reality, and without the benefit of testing they amount to so much idiocy. Instead, they are swept up by what he identifies as three Great Premises of Idiot America:

He documents much idiocy of recent years and compares it to historical crankery (Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World being a prominent example). Pierce doesn’t have a structural solution to the problem; he calls for a return to the days when cranks were a beloved fringe element of our society rather than mass-marketed lunatics on television, propped up by anyone whose political agenda they serve, but doesn’t chart a course to get there.

October 9th, 2009

I was intrigued by a Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s weblog and picked up the book. It’s 2110, there’s a new Cold War on between the United States and Eurasia (with South America and Africa as client states providing access to equatorial launch sites), and the elite operatives fall into two categories: mechanics, for their skill with weapons and powered armor, and razors, who handle information warfare. And just as the new skyhook constructed as a symbol of international détente is nearing completion, a terrorist group calling themselves Autumn Rain bring it down and set off conflicts that could start a whole new world war.

The book has lots of cyberpunk action, to the exclusion of getting much of a view of the world itself. (Various appendices wound up on the series’ web site.) The action follows four viewpoint characters through their heavily-constrained views of events; they are, very plausibly, kept in the dark about the large-scale issues by their superiors, and have to speculate amongst themselves to figure it out. The reader eventually gets a good idea about the large-scale conflict in which the main characters are instrumental, but the action never slows down long enough to get a sense of what it’s like to live in the world of 2110.

September 24th, 2009

For seat 1, it’s the incumbent Tony Spitaleri (currently mayor, elected by the city council) and challenger Pat Meyering. Spitaleri has never impressed me— in past council meetings I’ve attended, he’s always upheld the status quo and been resistant to change— and in this one he demonstrated a mastery of political doublespeak that I found very offputting. Meyering showed more interest in policy detail than Spitaleri, and spent a lot of time attacking his opponent as corrupt, claiming that Spitaleri was in the pocket of developers who donated to his campaign (and that there was a general problem with this on the City Council); he did it often enough that I found it offputting as well. (Meyering’s skills probably work well when he’s working as a prosecuting attorney, but they clashed with the atmosphere of the event. He was also the only candidate not to show up with campaign literature touting a web site, which struck me as a lack of preparation for the obvious.) I’m leaning toward Meyering but not thrilled with either candidate.

For seat 2, it’s the incumbent Chris Moylan (currently vice mayor, elected by the city council) and challenger Michael Anthony Flores. Chris Moylan demonstrated an impressive command of policy detail, had good green credentials to cite (including endorsements by the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club), and has usually been on my side on issues in the past four years. Flores showed good intentions, but didn’t have the detailed knowledge to back it up; most of his answers were rather vague. (Flores also suggested people visit Special Interest Watch, which is owned by the wife of former Sunnyvale mayor Tim Risch, so he’s already enmeshed in Sunnyvale politics and is not an outsider.) I think Moylan is a much stronger candidate.

In seat 3, John Howe is being termed out, so the newcomers are Penny Kelly (chairperson of my local neighborhood association) and Jim Griffith. Griffith is clearly a policy wonk and knows a lot about local issues and details; Kelly was refreshingly honest in saying she doesn’t have Griffith’s level of knowledge, but has plenty of experience in learning on the job. Much as I like Kelly personally, I think Griffith is better qualified for the position.

If we were using the single transferable vote to get the top three candidates instead of dividing them up with these arbitrary seats, I would currently be inclined to vote Moylan, Griffith, Kelly, Meyering, Flores, Spitaleri.

September 22nd, 2009

The premise of The World Without Us is a hypothetical future: what would happen to the Earth if all of humanity suddenly disappeared? To explore that, Weisman looks over our present and our past, touring the planet from deep wilderness to urban cores, history from the Paleozoic Era through the Paleolithic up to the modern day, and places where humans have already vanished, including Chernobyl and the Mayan civilization. It’s an interesting survey of our planet and the true fragility of infrastructure that seems very solid in our daily lives. The book is a tour, not a reference, and has no handy timelines for quickly generating descriptions for abandoned cities if you’re writing.

September 21st, 2009

The first city-sponsored forum for the candidates for the City Council in this November’s election will be held on Thursday, September 24 at 7:00pm at the Council Chambers at 456 W. Olive Avenue. It will also be broadcast on KSUN-15 and webcast.

View Answers

Yes, I will sit in solidarity with you as you expose yourself to toxic political bloviating
2 (18.2%)

No, I will be following along live on KSUN-15 so I can play drinking games
0 (0.0%)

No, I will record it on TiVo and delete it unwatched unless I hear something of immense hilarity occurred
0 (0.0%)

No, I will crib from your research notes in late October and thank you for throwing yourself on the political grenade
1 (9.1%)

No, I am not a citizen of Sunnyvale and have an entirely different slate of politicians to horrify me
8 (72.7%)

View Answers

The Eighth Amendment guarantees that I don’t need to put up with political speech in real time
1 (11.1%)

I will be walking up and down the aisles of the Council Chamber selling rotten fruit to the audience
0 (0.0%)

I have a note from my doctor: politics is bad for my blood pressure
5 (55.6%)

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” — John Godfrey Saxe, 1869
2 (22.2%)

At least one of the candidates has a restraining order against me after their last public appearance
0 (0.0%)

Global warming has exposed my secret lair and I’m busy with damage control
5 (55.6%)

September 16th, 2009

Zindell uses the storytelling style of epic fantasy to spin a far-future hard SF tale. Three millennia into the future, Mallory Ringess is a newly trained Pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame that has the monopoly on faster-than-light travel, based in the city of Neverness on the world Icefall. He winds up in an odyssey that takes him into realms of posthuman gods and genetically revived cavemen in pursuit of a solution to the long-term survival of humankind and the mysterious series of supernovae devastating settled worlds.

The depiction of three thousand years of cultural development works manages to convey a sense of strangeness without making me reach for a dictionary like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The hero gets put through the wringer (sometimes due to his own impetuosity), so I recommend this story for when you’re up for an odyssey, not just thrilling your sense of wonder.

Some parts of the future history are already dated— the book was written at the tail end of the Cold War, back when we all lived with the spectre of Mutual Assured Destruction, and the tale of Old Earth being devastated in a nuclear holocaust already seems quaint.

September 11th, 2009

Book One: The Promethean Challenge ★★★½: A cyberpunk classic following the adventures of the soldier Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner Briareos, who are recruited from surviving in a postapocalyptic wasteland to come to the apparently-utopian city Olympus, which is leading the reconstruction of the planet. Olympus has a significant population of artificial humans— clones, hybrids made from multiple genetic sources, and bioroids with significant after-evolution options— and the variations on the theme of humanity set the stage for many interesting possible conflicts. This volume is setting up a larger story, with our heroes clearly being embroiled in a larger scheme.

Some of the combat scenes full of powered armor can be hard to follow, but overall the tale has me wanting to see what happens next.

Book Two: Prometheus Unbound ★★★½: As the cyborg Briareos recovers in the hospital from the assault in Book 1, Deunan goes to work in law enforcement in the utopian city of Olympus. The artificial-human bioroids created to run Olympus are developing the notion that the fundamental problem with the world is human nature itself— and this sets off a conflict where the city’s central computer, Gaia, goes out of control. And it will take Deunan and Briareos and their bioroid friend Hitomi to fix the problem...

This volume has plenty of violent power-suit action and explosions, and more of the undercurrent speculating on the problems of human nature. This still feels like setup; I’m looking forward to the resolution.

Book Three: The Scales of Prometheus ★★★: Deunan and Briareos are trying to fit into Olympus’ ESWAT team, involved in the pursuit of a rogue combat bioroid and a raid on a criminal operation in France, and Deunan isn’t so good at teamwork with anyone other than her partner. Plenty of cyberpunk action, lots of exposition via fanservice, not so much connection to the larger-scale plot laid out in the first two volumes.

Book Four: The Promethean Balance ★★½: Deunan and Briareos are on a mission for Olympus ESWAT to deal with a plot to disrupt the alliance between Imperial Americana and the Holy Islamic Republic of Munma. Naturally, this leads to large amounts of gunfire and explosions and a battle with an oversized powersuit. I found that the emphasis on the action got in the way of figuring out the actual plot, and the more philosophical side of the Appleseed story faded almost entirely into the background.

Overall, the series was a disappointment; the first couple of books raised my hopes that there would be some interesting perspectives on the human condition, but that thread of story got dropped in the latter volumes.

September 9th, 2009

Since some web sites have declared this to be a Day Without Cats on the Internet, you may be missing your RDA of fluffy adorability. Yeti is here to save you.

Miles Flint finally worked his way up to detective in the police force for Armstrong dome on the Moon, and this week is presenting him with an unpleasant set of cases. Interstellar diplomacy requires that wrong committed against a member of an alien species be punished according to that species’ laws, and some of those laws are harsher than anything Hammurabi ever wrote down; naturally, this creates a market for illegal Disappearance services to help people evade alien justice that is, by human standards, unreasonable. He winds up having to juggle three related cases involving three different species tracking down people who used Disappearance services, and facing some very nasty moral decisions.

The story keeps up a fairly good pace and the characters well fleshed-out, but the worldbuilding seems a bit of an afterthought. There are some details about life on the moon, but even I never noticed even a nod toward the differing gravity there, or the other details of coping with an environment containing vacuum, meteorites, and radiation. I’m not expecting a rigorous work of hard science fiction here, but it would have been nice to at least see some sort of handwavium nod toward the issue.

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November 9th, 2009

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