First update in a while, mostly about books

I actually have been doing things other than playing Oblivion. No really. I've been reading books. Not just for school and not even just at work during my break, even (but mostly). Traditionally, I've talked about the books I've read in my old journal even when I wasn't updating with anything else (usually). I'm going to finish another book soon and it's the best one I've read in quite a while, but more on that some other day. I'm still not done with it yet.

Tonight was the first time I had training partners for judo since right about the time the high school judo season started. Pretty cool. I competed in a tournament earlier, by the way. Like two weeks ago or something. I sucked and I didn't feel like writing about it here. But now you know.

Geology class is kind of cool, but also annoying because it seems so dumbed down. It's definitely got me wanting to learn more about geology, especially the chemical aspects of it. Not saying that I want to necessarily pursue a career in geochemistry or anything, but it is very interesting stuff.

In a month or so I should be reapplying to the University of Washington, I guess. We'll see how that goes. Eventually. Probably.

So the first of the two books I read was The Future at War Volume I: Thor's Hammer. I bought it at that library book sale a while back. Like Cyberdreams, it is an anthology. It's the first in a three-part series of anthologies compiled by Reginald Bretnor. I would read the other two, but there's no way I'm going to hunt for obscure 1970's science fiction paperbacks. Out of the question. I can glean, from the introduction, how the trilogy was supposed to flow. This volume deals with war on Earth and in near-Earth space. The second volume moves outward to war in the solar system and the third volume moves all the way to intergalactic war.

Not to bash the previous anthology I read, but this one definitely takes editing to another level. As far as that goes, I could say that Reginald Bretnor gets an "A" for effort. Instead of just, "Hey here are some stories from our magazine that all have something to do with one of three or four completely different things" he actually has a real theme. The book includes both science fiction short stories and articles written by science fiction authors. Between pieces, Bretnor chimes in briefly and thoughtfully to give background. He doesn't try to bash the reader with some sort of message or digress into his own opinions on the material. He lets the stories and articles do the work themselves.

Unfortunately, Thor's Hammer leads with its trump card. And it's rather blatant about doing so. I picked this up because it had Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson's names on it. I mean, not solely for that. It was also because it looked like an interesting concept for an anthology and I was getting books for very little money. Anyway, right after the introduction, the very first thing this book gives us is Robert Heinlein's The Long Watch. It is excellent. It would be impossible to keep up that level of quality the whole time, but this definitely made the rest of the book look worse than it probably was.

Charles Sheffield's Fixed-Price War was pretty good. Tom Purdon's Moon Rocks was also good. Poul Anderson's Marius was decent. Rick Rubin's Final Muster was interesting. Most of the rest was disappointing, although it might have seemed better had they saved the best for last rather than throwing it out right away.

One thing that I learned from most of these stories and almost all of the articles is that the 1970's was a completely different world from the one I live in now. I mean, it wasn't, of course. That's silly. But I learned it. So I guess I learned a lie? A pretty convincing one, though. I went into this with Man Plus, but only a little. Mainly, I guess the way the Cold War dominated science fiction fascinates me. Technically, I do remember the Cold War. But I was so young that even if I had been able to understand what was going on, no one bothered to keep me informed. The only times I can recall adults referring to it, they simply called it "the war" and didn't bother to go into detail. I learned more in history classes in school, but not much. Most of what I know about the Cold War I learned from reading on my own.

When I say that the Cold War dominated science fiction, I don't mean that futuristic science fiction invariably dealt with a world in which it was still going on. That did happen a lot. But even in futuristic scenarios that have nothing to do with the Cold War as we know it, the idea of the Cold War still applied. I almost feel as though from reading enough of this that I have a sense for a particular brand of nothing much actually happening but almost everyone being convinced that major shit is about to go down that I don't think I've ever directly observed in real people in my whole life. But in science fiction, either some flavor of that expectation or some component of it or it in combination with a few other things is virtually nonexistent before and after the Cold War.

Also, I could write a whole post on Jerry Pournelle's article, Lasers, Grasers, and Marxists. Not because it's particularly bad or particularly good. It's because there's something about his article that is entirely terrifying and which he is aware of and is part of his point, all while there's something about his article that is entirely terrifying in a way that he could never have intended. I'd say more, but this is already probably so long that I lost everyone. Maybe later.

Anyway, the other book I just finished is Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. And it's also from the 1970's and yes, it also got me thinking about the difference between then and now, although for entirely different reasons. Carl Sagan was a knowledgeable and proficient science writer. While this has probably never been held up as one of his great works, it's not a bad book and I have no reason to believe that he slacked off on this one. However, the most prominent thing about The Dragons of Eden is quite possibly how useless it is.

The subtitle is, "Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence." Sagan gets into the nature of intelligence, how to define it, artificial intelligence, intelligence in other animals, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, how the human brain works, and some weird symbology that I found a bit annoying, but not nearly enough to ruin the whole show. However, three topics that get relatively huge sections in this 250-page book are computers, neuroscience, and phylogenetics. They aren't the only three fields of science touched on, but the intersection of these three is the focus of The Dragons of Eden. And if you were to randomly draw names from a hat of scientific and technological fields, you would spend quite some time before you hit on a combination that has seen more progress since 1977 than those three. I guess that's a very longwinded way of saying that almost the entire book is outdated. But I think it explains why so much of the book is outdated. Science changes. Science is expected to change. It's a good thing. Science writing becomes outdated. It happens. But when it comes to science writing becoming outdated, you aren't usually going to write a book tying three disparate research fields together with a single theme and have those turn out to be three of the most rapidly changing fields after your book comes out. Yeah, it's been over thirty years. Long enough that much of the science writing at the time would be outdated anyway, but not, I think to such an incredible extent.

This post is over.