A couple of weeks ago I saw this book from 1687 in Beinecke library (sorry for the blurry picture). The text in the title page reminds me of the “for dummies” books, except that it is more verbose and polite:
HODDER’s ARITHMETICK:
Or, that Necessary Art
Made most eaſie
Being explained in a way familiar to the Capacity of any that deſire to learn in a little time.
Very interesting novel about the end of humankind due to mad genetic engineers trying to improve life. Told by Snowman, who appears to be the only survivor, as he remembers his life and the events that lead to the disaster. Although there are no explicit dates, it is in the near future (perhaps Snowman was born on the 2010s…).
The scenario before the catastrophe is a fairly typical dystopia for our times. The world has already suffered from global warming and an unexpectedly early and high rise on sea level. New York is no more, but we have New New York instead. Giant corporations have all the power and are like represive city-states where the well-to-do people live. The rest live in the “pleeblands", which are dirty and anarchic.
Something odd is that, despite the incredible advances in biology, they still use CDs, which in my opinion are not likely to be common after 2010. But this is not a very “technical” type of science fiction, so I didn’t care that much. Along those lines, I’ve seen people criticize the author for her made-up words for the new genetic creations, such as pigoons, wolvogs, rakunks, and chickienoobs. Although I also found those words unlikeable, I think they are realistic when one thinks about the kind of names that marketing comes up with in the real world.
Is such a future plausible? I doubt it, but it’s good to remember that humans may now an be an endangered species, of our own device.
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
This is perhaps the most memorable dialogue in 3001: The Final Odyssey
[…]Indra complained:
“People are always asking me why I’ve devoted my life to such a horrible period of history, and it’s not much of an answer to say that there were even worse ones.”
“Then why are you interested in my century?” [said Poole, referring to the 20th century]
“Because it marks the transition between barbarism and civilization.”
I think that the transition will take a long time, but if I had to choose a specific century to mark it, I’m hoping for the 23rd century…
This is not a book, but a blog with the intention of turning into a book: Survival Guide to Homelessness, by Mobile Homemaker. A very interesting look at the life of a homeless man in the US, full of practical advice about where to sleep, what to eat, where to take a shower, how to stay warm, etc. Very educational, and, as some have called it, “stereotype-shattering".
The most striking advice: get a car, whether it works or not, to use as a shelter and for storage.
This book, as well as the one from my previous review, came from random browsing in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore. I had never heard of it, and I was certainly not looking for something like it. It was the title which grabbed my attention (note to prospective book authors: choose a good title!) The back cover said that it was a novel about an autistic man, written in the first person. That grabbed my attention even more, since one of my friends once told me that I must be autistic. ;-) I started reading, and after a few dozen pages I decided to buy the book.
The basic story is: Lou is a roughly 40-year-old autistic man in the near future (I estimate the 2040s). Thanks to modern treatments, he can (barely) function in society and works in a special bioinformatics division in a pharmaceutical company “looking for patterns". Autistics who were born a few years after him were cured before or shortly after birth thanks to a newer genetic treatment, so he belongs to the last generation of autistics. When a new experimental treatment promises to cure autism in adults, Lou must decide whether to take it or not, while his company is trying to pressure him into taking it.
The story is relatively simple, many of the characters (other than Lou) may seem shallow, and the ending is a matter of debate, but I liked the book overall and I think it is worth reading just because of the way it portrays the autistic viewpoint of the main character. The lack of detail about most of the other characters may be excused because Lou (being the main narrator) doesn’t understand them in detail or doesn’t talk much about them; he just talks about what he thinks, in a very logical and detached way.
Lou’s handicap is that he has to think actively about what people mean with certain expressions, gestures, and intonations–things that most people tend to understand intuitively. And sometimes he just can’t understand people; he takes everything literally and has trouble with sarcasm and humor (he has feelings, but he doesn’t know what to do with them). He prefers to be alone in his routine, and can’t avoid computing probabilities or calculating the volume of the room, or looking at the patterns on the floor tiles.
It was easy to identify with Lou, as I have had many of those problems, although to a lesser degree. Who hasn’t? There was certain irony when other characters in the novel had relationship problems and Lou couldn’t believe it, thinking along the lines of “they are ‘normal’; unlike me, they have the power of reading other people’s minds. Why do they fight?". The book is good for thinking about “what is normal?” and for putting one’s life into perspective.
Elizabeth Moon - The Speed of Dark
Now I’ve decided that I’ll bore my imaginary readers by discussing every book that I read that I find worth mentioning.
A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. It is a collection of essays, mostly about evolution. Before I forget, I’ll mention three ideas from the book that I found interesting.
First, let me say that I like analogies that compare unfamiliar things like atoms to the size of the Earth (for example, what would be the size of a mole (6.02E23 particles) if each particle were the size of a marble? It would be of the order of 1000 km wide…). Dawkins applied this kind of trick to evolution: if you stand next to your father, and he next to your grandfather, etc. (imagining that all your ancestors were alive, of course), you would be standing 300 miles from the ancestor that we share with chimpanzees. Not as far as one would imagine! Millions of years are not a tangible thing, but 300 miles are.
Second, I found interesting that the author declared that while he believes that evolution is the way nature works, that doesn’t mean that we humans have to work that way: he is Darwinian when it comes to science, but anti-Darwinian when it comes to society. For example, whenever we use contraception appropriately we are “fighting evolution", and that is the Right Thing To Do.
Third, I liked a “paradox” that was discussed in the book. Has evolution itself changed over time? Some people argue that in the Old Times (Cambric period, I think it was) new kingdoms and phyla were created. Nowadays, we only get new species! Dawkins suggested that the confusion comes from applying the classification of modern species to ancient ones. In those times, when the phyla split, they were “only species” as well. He likened the situation with that of a gardener discussing a tree, saying “when the tree was young, new branches were formed. Now we only get twigs!".
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