Gil's All Fright Diner: Literary diner stack coming right up!

Gil's All Fright Diner
A. Lee Martinez
Tom Doherty Associates, 2004


Envision a diner stack: hash browned potatoes, hamburger and/or breakfast sausage patties, fried eggs sunny side up, buttermilk biscuits, sausage gravy, and a helping of grease, plus Tabasco. It certainly isn't the most nutritious meal, let alone health food, but there are very few folks I know who don't harbor the occasional craving. Call it satisfying junk food. So it is with Gil's All Fright Diner.

Just like a diner stack, Gil's is chock full of varied (and tasty) ingredients. Its plot conjures unspeakable Lovecraftian elder god cosmic horror type stuff (in pig Latin, no less), while stylistically it evokes the lighthearted New Southern Gothic of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries. The two protagonists' pickup truck breaks down in a tiny town in the Texas panhandle, the diner of which has become the focus for nightly zombie attacks which turn out to be something far worse: the first stages of The End of the World. There is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-flavor to the mix of teenage sexuality and black magic that is Tammy the teenage necromancer and her perpetually horny boyfriend/assistant, Chad. The town of Rockwood, the setting for the story, is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, sort of like Douglas Adams except Texan. And there's a sweet romance that breaks some taboos: it's between a vampire and a ghost.

The novel is actually more thoughtful than I initially gave it credit for. By having Earl, a vampire, and Duke, a werewolf, as protagonists, but more importantly as regular guys, the novel's very premise calls into questions our normal understanding of what it means to be monstrous.

"Pushing monsters away into childhood fantasies was much harder after you've become one. He'd discovered that most of the terrors that stalked the night weren't really terrors at all. They were mostly like regular folks, just trying to live their lives. As long as they were left alone they were perfectly harmless except for the occasional bite on the neck. Humans were the real terrors, always getting worked up and looking to kill something." (pp. 32-33)

Here's an example of that surreal quality that I mentioned. Zombie cows.

"Damn," Duke swore under his breath. This sort of thing would happen now....

Melinda raised her head and uttered a low, haunting howl. The rest of the herd joined her in a bloodcurdling moan that seemed to bubble up from the sulfurous pit of Hell itself.

"Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo."

Eyes full of unnatural hunger, loose lips smacking, the herd closed in. The clang of cowbells marked their otherwise silent advance." (p. 53)

I think that was the first time I actually had to catch my breath from laughing so hard. This is funny stuff.

Speaking of funny, there's the aforementioned Tammy, an Asian-American high school hottie who moonlights as Mistress Lilith, Queen of Night, contemporary priestess of the old gods. She's the perfect combination of The Wicker Man and Mallrats:

"[I]t was hard enough to resurrect the old gods without having to deal with curfews, groundings, and math homework. She didn't know what the big deal was. A C-plus was passing. Maybe she wasn't "living up to her potential," as [her dad] so often put it, in geometry, but in the new age geometry would mean little. Denise Calhoun has a straight-A average. It wouldn't save her from the special hell Tammy had in store for pig-faced sluts who thought they were so smart just because they knew all about planes and points and parallel lines and other completely stupid stuff that nobody ever used in real life." (p. 70)

The surreality of the town makes for good laughs too. After coming out as a werewolf to the sheriff, Duke discovers that the tiny town of Rockwood is a little different from most places:

"'Bout seven years back, had an outbreak of vampire turkeys. And four years before that, Charlie Vaughn's daughter got herself possessed. And the Stillman's scarecro took to wandering around at night and scaring the bejeezus out of the kids. Point is, Rockwood has itself an unusual history..." ((p. 85)

Vampire turkeys? And the sheriff's voice is written so clearly that I can hear the deadpan delivery in my head, and so I laugh all the harder.

Martinez describes our heroes' visit to Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, the only attraction in Rockwood:

"Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' to Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had To Get Rabies Shots" by everyone else." (p. 94)

"These incidents were a mere sampling of the many inexplicable events at Wacky Willie's. Willie had pamphlets made for the tourists. He'd even sold one which, at an asking price of five bucks, was something of an inexplicable event in itself." (p. 95)

The humor gets downright Monty Python-esque when the vanquished ghouls (or, more properly, the scattered-and-as-yet-still-animated parts of the vanquished ghouls) confront the approaching daylight and with it their collective doom:

Detached arms twisted to cover their squinting yellow eyes. They squealed in the ghoulish tongue.

"Bugger, I hate this part."

"Well, no point in complaining," another ghoul replied.

"True, true," a head agreed somewhere from the center of the pile.

"Moof glu tlak," a jawless head seconded.

"See you gents on the other side."

"Any plans?" the head atop the pile asked.

"Oh, nothing much," the buried ghoul replied. "Just float around in the sullen ether. Wait to be called upon again. Review my performance this go-around."

"I thought you did a marvelous snarl."

...

And then the sun poked its way over the horizon, and the melting began. Green flesh liquified. Eyes oozed from their sockets. Foaming bubbles boiled and burst in loud, popping splatters. The ghouls shrieked their death rattles. Not that any of it was all that painful for things that were already dead, but they were determined to enjoy their last remaining moments of form with a good screeching contest. (pp. 144-5)

"Bugger, I hate this part." " I thought you did a marvelous snarl." "A good screeching contest"! Need I say (or quote) more?

If you are in the mood for a tasty read worth every empty calorie, slide on up to the counter and give it a read.

The Empty Tank: Witty, grim, unflinching, hopeful --- essential reading when peak oil meets global warming

The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Global Financial Catastrophe
Jeremy Leggett
Random House, 2005

[W]hat makes the depth of the current global addiction especially bewildering is that, for the entire time we have been sliding into the trap, we have known that oil is in fact in limited supply. At current rates of use, the global tank is going to run too low to fuel the growing demand sooner rather than later in this century. This is not a controversial statement. It is just a question of when....

In a society that put a man on the Moon more than three decades ago, surely there can be no doubt that we could replace oil use if we seriously wanted to. I ask again, why have we not been fast-tracking the solutions to the problem long since? (p. 6)

I've read several books on peak oil, and this one is among my favorites. Geologist Leggett provides a compelling look at the coming topping point in oil production, the global catastrophe of global warming, and possible hope for the future, and he does so in a style that reads like well-crafted fiction. Interspersed throughout the narrative are Leggett's journal entries which reveal an intimate perspective on how all this theory and Big Picture stuff plays out in daily life.

First off, an admission. Based on the author photo on the book's dust jacket, I kept envisioning Leggett as the fired forklift driver in the British TV show The Office who challenges the wisdom of keeping Anton the midget on as a forklift driver. So that guy's voice was the one with which my mental vocalizer read the book. That, along with his absurdist, understated British wit (a la Monty Python and Douglas Adams), made the book a quite often funny read, in spite of the rather grim subject matter.

This wit is clearly on display in the Prologue, which tells the story of geological and human history from the Big Bang to the "The Two Oversights" of the 20th century. This account is told as if being related to alien anthropologists who have no vested interest in seeing history through the particular lens of their ideology or belief system. So along the way from creation to the present we encounter Apocalypse One, the catastrophic end of the Carboniferous Period which left behind a lot of coal; the "Two Great Underground Cookups," during which all oil and natural gas were created; and Apocalypse Two, otherwise known as the K2 Event or the end of the age of dinosaurs, 65 mya. Humans arrive on the scene in the last few milliseconds of the year that has been geological history, and develop agriculture and religion and urban civilization and almost continuous hostility toward one another:

Conflict avoidance was not, and never has been, our strong suit. At first we organized into tribes, and periodically killed the members of other tribes. Later we organized ourselves into city-states and built amazing cathedrals. But despite our inventing athletics as a potential substitute for war, we still couldn't think our way out of regular armed conflict, and our means of waging war grew steadily worse. (p. x)

In the last three centuries we learned to support all these endeavors by exploiting the fossil fuels from the Great Underground Cookups:

Just as [coal's dirtiness] was becoming very irritating, we found we could drill below the surface of the planet, pump oil, and burn that. We didn't even have to send children down to get oil. (p. xi)

(See what I mean about the wit?) The discovery of and reliance on oil lead to two big "oversights." Big Oversight One is that all the burning of this oil, coal, and gas has created global warming which has been ignored by the Number One Nation-State. This nation, not otherwise named (to protect the innocent, of course), happens also to be Number One Petroleum Addict, and in this capacity serves deeply entrenched vested interests:

[M]ore than 100 years of unconstrained burning of oil, and 200 years of coal, have created quite a set of vested interests....These vested interests have created a web of power that transcends the throw-weight of the nation states. This web has become, in effect, a kind of Empire. The Empire of Oil is loosely bound, and even capable of civil war, but is without the most powerful interest group on the planet.

These vested interests have prevented research into alternative and meaningful political action. Big Oversight Two is that, because all the oil we have was created during the Two Big Cookups, and so therefore is limited in quantity by definition, discovery and production of oil is peaking. What this means is simple, if unpleasant to contemplate:

Humans will no longer be able to run their lives and their industries on growing amounts of cheap oil. All we can expect thereafter is shrinking supplies of expensive oil....We will look for the alternatives to come to the rescue, but the alternatives won't be able to, or at least not in enough volume to make a big difference, because the Empire of Oil and its Culture of Suppression has held them back all the years of the Great Addiction. (p. xiv)

One or the other "oversight" alone would be bad enough to face, but the possible threat posed by the synergy of both is chilling. Luckily, Leggett recognizes the role that each of us play in shaping our collective destiny, and so does not completely relinquish hope:

As the impact of the oil topping point joins with the first wave of assaults by a climate going awry, is there any hope that we can avoid an unpleasant outcome? I fear not. The chapters to come will show why. But what we can do, collectively, is to stop the rot and have a second crack at getting things right beyond the unpleasantness....Because changes of course need hands on the tiller, involvement matters. This book is a call to arms. Let us take our stupidities with oil, which will be put under such a necessary microscope when the topping point hits, and turn them into a new beginning before it is too late. (pp. xiv-xv)

With this book, Leggett seeks to address three related questions: (1) how close is the peak? (2) why haven't we done something earlier? and (3) what can we do about it?

So how close is the peak in oil production? Leggett distinguishes between "late toppers" and "early toppers," i.e., those who think we've got 2 trillion more barrels of oil to exploited (oil companies, financial analysts, etc.) and those who think we've got around 1 trillion more barrels (in other words, the downside of the production curve). The difference between the two is, in Leggett's word, seismic. If the late toppers are right, then we have a few decades in which to work out plans for a smooth transition from oil and gas to alternative; if the early toppers are right, though, the peak may actually be upon us now.

Leggett discusses some key witnesses in support of the "early topper" school of thought including veteran petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, Chris Skrebowski (editor of the trade journal Petroleum Review), and Houston oil investor Matthew Simmons. If these folks are correct in their reading of the available data, then the situation we face may be summed up in this sentence from a report within the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves:

"A serious supply-demand discontinuity could lead to worldwide economic chaos" (p., 50)

Worldwide economic chaos. And even if the early toppers are wrong in their estimates regarding the peak in oil production, the discontinuity between rising demand and falling supply will still be a reality due to a lack of investment in exploration and infrastructure:

Stated simply, it seems that even if an early topping point doesn't hit us, the results of two decades of negligence in investment in infrastructure and exploration will. p. (59)

After thoroughly scaring the beejezus out of the reader by marshalling all this evidence that the age of easy, cheap oil is rapidly coming to a close, with potentially catastrophic results, he introduces a variable that no other peak oil author I've read has mentioned: global warming.

A pair of diagrams on pages 75 and 76 says it all. The first is a graph showing a jagged line fluctuating between two extremes of atmospheric CO₂, a minimum of around 175 ppm and a maximum of around 300 ppm, showing that these quantities have changed within a relatively standard range over the last 500,000 years. The last fraction of a millimeter of the graph, representing the last century, shows the concentration at the beginning of the 20th century (near 300 ppm) rocketing skyward, out of the normal range and in fact off of the graph altogether. The predicted CO₂ concentration for 2100, based on current emission rates, is over 700 ppm, effectively off the charts and into "seriously fucking things up" territory. The second graph plots temperature fluctuations over the last millennium and reveals that they too fly off the charts during the 21st century, leading to an average increase of over 5 degrees globally. Which is disastrous. This stuff ain't controversial folks, and it ain't a liberal plot. The temperature of the Earth is rapidly climbing, most likely due to our increase of atmospheric CO₂, and all we know about the consequences is that they won't be pretty.

So how did we allow ourselves to get into this mess? Leggett provides an answer by way of an historical overview of the age of oil, divided into two chapters. The first, "Before the Knowledge," describes how we dug the initial hole, while the second, "The Complicity Years," discusses the last few decades, during which we have known better but let all our nation's policies be dictated by a consortium of vested interests. Our inability to change our approach to energy and fossil fuels is pretty clearly revealed in our national response to the first oil shock, which hit in the form of the OPEC embargo against the US, in retaliation for its uncritical support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

In the first three months of the [OPEC] embargo, U.S. gasoline consumption had decreased by more than 7 percent. But, after the embargo ended, consumption shot right back up again. Apathy instantly reasserted itself in Congress. Almost 800 potential bills concerning energy had been circulating on Capitol Hill during the oil crisis, many of them intent on promoting the prospects for renewable energy, renewable fuels, and energy efficiency. But by July 1974 only eight of them had become law, and two of those involved the suspension of anti-pollution laws and the opening of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. (p. 101)

Once cheap oil went back online, all alternatives were back off the table. By 1975 Exxon was the world's biggest corporation, with GM and Ford also occupying seats in the top 10. We didn't learn and so the Second Oil Shock followed the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War. Although President Carter urged us to treat the fuel crisis as "the moral equivalent of war," Americans still didn't listen and willingly voted in Reagan and the last three decades of denial.

Of course, one could say that if these earlier oil shocks were survivable, even after a mistake like electing Reagan, then perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned about future oil shocks. Anticipating this, Leggett duly notes that the circumstances surrounding these first two oil shocks do not pertain to the coming megacrisis:

[T]he Saudis cannot pump faster as they did in 1980, there is no spare capacity anywhere, little oil is stockpiled, and there is little liklihood of new discoveries on the scale able to meet fast-growing global demand. Bad as it was then, it will be much worse when the next crunch hits. (p. 104)

According to ExxonMobil's Lee Raymond:

"I think the notion in the United States of energy independence, which was first proposed in the Nixon administration, was a poor concept thirty years ago and it is a poor concept today."There it is, just as he told OPEC. It couldn't be clearer. We choose dependency, and therefore overseas adventures by our military in support of our dependency. (p. 135)

There you have it. That's how we allowed ourselves to get into this predicament. The Empire of Oil made us into a nation of junkies who elect those promising to keep the fixes coming.

So what can we do about it? In his chapter astutely entitled, "What Can We Do About It?" Leggett outlines five basic arguments:

1. We can replace fossil fuels with renewable energies and do so rather swiftly.

Renewable energies comprise a big family of options including biodiesel, a hydrogen economy (energy storage with home solar-driven electrolysis), fuel cells, solar (electric) and solar (heat), wind power, etc. There are alternative, renewable sources for plastics too, which is important since more petroleum goes to those industrial uses than into fuel production. We can improve efficiency too. And of course, we can re-envision the situation to come up with some novel solutions:

Currently, some 200 million of the world's 700 million hydrogen cars and trucks travel and park around America. If they were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles they would have many times the grid's total generating capacity. What need then for nuclear, and coal- and gas-fired power plants? (p. 155)

2. We've waited too long, and so even with these technologies ramping up swiftly, we won't be able to cover the shortfall between now and then with any combination of fuel sources.

Economies will shrink, which is never a good thing for little people like me with jobs and families. Some are pushing for nuclear power to fill the gap (going so far as to discuss it in the pages of Mother Earth News), but Leggett thinks nuclear won't come to the rescue because (1) it will take even longer to get nuclear up and running to fill the gap than it would other sources of power, (2) investors don't want to back nuclear, particularly new unproven designs, (3) the threat of terrorism + nuke plants = bad idea, (4) disposal of waste is still an unsolved problem, and (5) nuke power's track record for accidents, cover-ups, etc. make it understandably unattractive. In short, nuclear is simply too risky in all ways to take seriously. (Although, sadly, that won't prevent our government from funding it, alas.)

Just think what renewable energy and energy-efficient markets could be doing by 2020, given even a fraction of the governmental and institutional support nuclear has been given for the last half-century. Come to think of it, just imagine what they could be doing tomorrow. (p. 159)

3. Renewable energy and fuel and energy efficiency will grow explosively.

Come whatever in other societal and economic sectors, people working in renewable energy, energy storage, and energy efficiency will be in the front row of those who can help once widespread acceptance of the oil topping point and its implications had descended on the world. (p. 165)

Leggett makes the important point that looking at solar energy costs means comparing them to retail prices rather than generator costs, because PV solar power generation gathers the power right where it is needed rather than producing and shipping it over extensive power grids. The decentralized quality of solar means that it is incredibly competitive in terms of price when generating costs are factored in, something that nuclear and coal advocates never do.

4. Many will try to turn to coal to support the status quo --- this will basically be a life-or-death decision for the future of the planet --- renewables or polluting coal.

The coal industry is strangely hard-line. Here is a technology that is so clearly mortgaging the future--at best, torpedoing it at worst--and yet it continues to grow largely unapologetically around the world. Besides the future death toll from unmitigated global warming and dire air quality, there is also the actual death toll to date from getting the stuff out of the ground....In the face of all this, even if they genuinely reject scientists' arguments about global warming, you would think there would be a little humility, a little reluctance about the product, a little willingness to search hard for alternatives. No, not that I have seen. In all my years as an environmental campaigner, I have observed a clear distinction between the oil industry and the coal industry....The oilmen and women were capable of politeness, reasoned debate, and even changing their position. The coal men and women weren't; not that I ever saw, once. (p. 168)

So instead of looking at renewables, we get nonsense about "clean coal," coal gasification, carbon sequestration, etc. And for the effects of coal on the world, all you need to do is Google "Beijing" and "air quality." And yet coal looks easy and cheap when the energy panic hits, and it has lots of technoscience supporting the rush to "clean coal," usually from the same folks who want to put parasols between the Earth and the Sun to cut down on solar radiation. Very little systems thinking and a technoscientific culture that valorizes individual achievement (just think about genetic engineering and the lack of consideration of ecology) mean that the coal hoax may be perpetrated on an unsuspecting Earth at precisely the worst possible time.

[G]iven the research programs underway aiming to bolster the acceptability of coal in a warming world, the depth of denial in the coal and coal-related theocracies, and the scope for iconoclastic scientists to fan the flames of confusion--belief in the feasibility of burning a thousand billion metric tons of coal or more and getting away with it might be much greater too. (p. 173)

5. We can influence the outcome of the struggle over coal vs. renewables

Don't look to leadership from governments or corporations. According to Leggett it must come from individuals. (I must note that these options are not mutually exclusive, and that following merely the role of individual effort may be playing into the corporate trap of devaluing collective efforts.) One should follow Stephen Leeb's lead by encouraging enlightened self-interest when investing money--invest in a green future and lead the marketplace where you want it to be. We must act locally and in every way possible to reach the tipping point from which a new future is visible.

Legget concludes with another presentation for aliens, this time looking at the present and at a possible hopeful futures. Consumer Empire gets hit by warriors in commandeered civilian jetliners and retaliates, pitting its own Christian Fundamentalists against the Middle Eastern Muslim Fundamentalists in a Cycle of Hate.

In both the Consumer Empire and the Middle Eastern nation-states, Fundamentalism has thrived amid all this mayhem. In the Consumer Empire, many humans hold a belief that their version of God would let them trash the Earth and still join Him in His heaven. Indeed, the more quickly we trash it, the more quickly they would get to enjoy what they think of as the Rapture. Rapturist humans tend to care nothing about the fuel efficiency of their horseless carriages, tend not to give a damn about the alternatives to oil, and tend to be very keen on burning coal. They also figure that all-out war might be another way to join their version of God more quickly than letting things run their normal course, so they tend not to be averse to that either....

For humans who believe in Cosmopolitan Tolerance--simply stated, having a stab at learning from the lessons of history--things are beginning to look really very bleak as they stand today. (p. 189)

Oversights One and Two show up, the economy collapses as oil production peaks and there are no replacements, there's all sort of political repression taking place in Consumer Number One in the wake of the attacks, and then global warming kicks in and really fucks with everything. This is Leggett's prediction of what will happen. Not a lot of wiggle room in there, and as he has noted, it is definitely unpleasant. He doesn't end there, though. Rather he provides an optimistic vision of the sort of world we can bring about out of this wreckage, a new Renaissance in which the tipping point is reached and humanity chooses a future of alternative energy and power, which in turn leads to a general renewed interest in the local, in community, in place, and eventually leads to a stabilization of human population through the education and empowerment of women. Not a bad future at all, but one that will definitely take a lot of dedication and hardwork with no hope to see the results. Like building a cathedral or journeying toward the Promised Land.

The Man in the High Castle: Dick's postmodern masterpiece

The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962

Juliana said, "I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that? And why one about the Germans and the Japanese losing the war? Why that particular story and no other one? What is there is can't tell us directly, like it always has before? This one must be different, don't you think?" (p. 216)

I think this one is definitely different. Dick had been writing novels for over a half-decade by the time this novel--his only Hugo Award-winner--was published. Every Dick novel published in the seven years following Solar Lottery shared a similar storytelling style and quality of language. For want of a better term I'll say Dick was a "hack"; his novels were cranked out at amphetamine speed in order to pay the bills. This is not to say that these novels are bad--to the contrary, as I've indicated in my previous reviews, even from the beginning of his career Dick was obviously gifted with both an intellect and an imagination that he put to good use in his short stories and novels. It's just to say that his writing really wasn't all that special.

Until he wrote The Man in the High Castle. Here Dick plays by different rules, writing alternate history rather than dystopian speculations about the 1990-2000s. (I read somewhere that he was initially inspired to write an alternate history of the post-Word War II world after reading Ward Moore's 1953 alternate post-Civil War Bring the Jubilee.) Dick, demonstrating the sort of self-referentiality that initially drew me to his work, even has two of his characters chat about alternate history and whether or not it is properly called science fiction:

"[It's n]ot a mystery....On contrary, interesting form of fiction possibly within genre of science fiction."

"Oh no," Betty disagreed. "No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise."

"But," Paul said, "it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort." (p. 91)

And what an alternate present (i.e., 1962) it deals with. We learn about the history of this alternate world and how it diverges from our own through snippets of conversation and internal monologue. In 1933 President Roosevelt is assassinated and Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of the Third Reich. By 1942 the USSR has fallen, with the Slavs joining European Jews and Gypsies in extermination, and the Japanese have devastated the entire US fleet at Pearl Harbor. They subsequently conquer the West coast of the US, and the Nazis have taken over the East coast and begun the extermination of the Jews in NYC by 1948. Between the two coasts the high plains and Rocky Mountains constitute a buffer zone between the two global superpowers of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The novel recounts the chilling German holocaust on the African continent, the policy of high tech Lebensraum through space colonization, and the inevitable tensions in the marriage of convenience that is the Axis. And Dick reveals his suspicion, in the form of an aging and syphilitic Hitler, that literal rot and insanity lie at the root of the Nazi ideology:

And the horrible part was that the present-day German Empire was a product of [Hitler's syphilitic] brain. First a political party, then a nation, then half the world. And the Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester's Antigas Pills--he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease. The entire world knew it, and yet the Leader's gabble was still sacred, still Holy Writ. The views had infected a civilization by now, and, like evil spores, the blind blond Nazi queens were swishing out from Earth to the other planets, spreading the contamination. (p. 29)

But Dick doesn't just stop with one alternate history of the world from 1933 1962. Within The Man in the High Castle is another novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy--a contraband alternate history of the world in which it is the US and the UK, and not Japan and the Third Reich, who are victorious in World War II. This world is not ours either, though, as Dick makes abundantly clear in a section that Freiherr Hugo Reiss reads in his office:

[I]n the U.S.A. the color problem had by 1950 been solved. Whites and Negroes lived and worked and ate shoulder by shoulder, even in the Deep South; World War Two had ended discrimination... (p. 135)

Any white American reading this sentence in 1962, at the height of the civil rights movement, would surely have felt Dick's rebuke. By 1950, "[w]hites and Negroes lived and worked and ate shoulder by shoulder"? In 1960, white Americans in our version of history wouldn't even use the same water fountains and cafe counters! Of course this alternate world has its own problems with colonialism and the like, but to those living under the boot of the Third Reich, the alternative reality presented in Grasshopper appears nearly paradisiacal.

It is interesting to note that this is not the only book which is central to the novel; the other book that continually resurfaces is the I Ching. In fact, as we discover at the end of the book, the I Ching has basically channeled Grasshopper through a man who is little more than a medium, Hawthorn Abendsen, the so-called "Man in the High Castle." Again and again the novel reminds the reader of the importance and power of writers, particularly those who write "what if" stories. The aforementioned Reiss is captivated by Grasshopper, and his comments reveal the subversive, compulsive force of science fiction:

How that man can write, he thought. Completely carried me away. Real. Fall of Berlin to the British, as vivid as if it had actually taken place. Brrr. He shivered.

Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it's banned within Reich territory; I'd ban it myself. Sorry I started it. But too late; must finish, now. (p, 105)

Dick experiments in other ways. Most of the dialog in the novel is in a dialect of English that captures the flavor of Japanese, with the absence of articles, unusual word order, and a stilted choice of words. Those white characters who interact with the Japanese regularly (and so have become internally colonized to some degree) even think in this dialect. And while Dick has regularly written non-linear plots, at least to the extent that the stories begin in media res, this novel is almost postmodern in its avoidance of a single master narrative. Instead, there are collected plot threads interwoven with the various narratives of the POV characters.

We have Ms. Nobusuke Tagomi with the Japanese Trade Mission in San Francisco, a regular patron of Robert Childan's high-end antique boutique American Artistic Handicrafts. Here he purchases a "genuine Mickey Mouse watch" for Mr. Baynes, a Swedish businessman who turns to be an officer of Reich Naval Counter-Intelligence who has travelled from Germany in disguise to meet with Tagomi and a mysterious Mr. Yatabe, who is himself en route from the Japanese "Home Islands."

Then there is Frank Frink (born Frank Fink, a Jew) who works at Wyndham-Matson Corporation creating fake Americana for such unsuspecting antique dealers as Mr. Childan. Frink's ex-wife Juliana is a judo instructor living in the Rockies, in the neutral zone between Japanese and Nazi spheres of influence. Frank and his coworker/friend Ed McCarthy quit their jobs at Wyndham-Matson and begin a jewelry business, creating beautiful, original pieces of American art. At roughly the same time, Juliana begins an affair with an Italian truck driver.

Mr. Yatabe arrives for his meeting with Mr. Baynes and Mr. Tagomi, who are surprised to find that their visitor is actually Japanese General Tedeki, formerly of the Imperial General Staff. Baynes reveals himself to be Captain Rudolf Wegener of Reich Naval Counter-Intelligence, whose mission is to warn the Japanese about Operation Löwenzahn/Dandelion. It turns out that Goebbels plans, once he assumes control of the Reich as the next Chancellor, to nuke Japan ("The Home Islands") and consolidate Nazi control over the entire world. After the death of Hitler's successor, and the possibility of Goebbels becoming new chancellor, Baynes seeks Japanese support for a different Nazi leader. After the meeting, Nazi agents attempt to attack Baynes and are instead killed by Mr. Tagomi using the Colt Army revolver that he previously bought from Childan.

"Part of personal collection," Mr. Tagomi said. "Much fooled around in vainglorious swift-draw practicing and firing, in spare hours. Admit to compare favorably with other enthusiasts in contest-timing. But mature use heretofore delayed." (p. 162)

Tagomi also retaliates against the local Nazi authorities by directing that Frank Frink, who is scheduled for deportation and subsequent execution as a Jew, be released. It turns out that Frink's artwork, which had been taken on consignment by Mr. Childan's store and subsequently mocked by a young Japanese client as being suitable for export to the Third World, is actually possessed of a soul stirring power and beauty, and that this power has made quite an impression on Mr. Tagomi.

Frink's ex, Juliana, gets more deeply involved with Joe, the truck driver and Italian veteran of war. He wishes to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and so the two of them embark on a road trip to find his fortress home. As they approach their destination, she discovers that Joe is actually a Swiss assassin whose target is the Man in the High Castle. Juliana attempts to leave their hotel room. and when Joe bars her way, she slashes his throat with the razor with which she was previously going to kill herself. She makes her way to Abendsen's home and induces him to reveal the truth about his novel--it was written in collaboration with I Ching--and about life.

"The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same...

Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step...

We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious." (p. 207)

As always, Dick explores some deep themes in this novel. The role that the tiniest chance has in determining larger outcomes is evident throughout the story. For one thing, it is built into the genre of alternate history; whether Franklin Roosevelt lived or died in 1933 had long lasting repercussions for the people of the US and the world. So it is with the I Ching which is used by several characters throughout the book to make sense of and determine the appropriate response to a given situation. Dick also interrogates the distinction between reality and artifice, particularly in regard to antiques and a slippery quantity an object's "historicity":She said,

"What is 'historicity'?"

"When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn't. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?" He nudged her. "You can't. You can't tell which is which. There's no 'mystical plasma presence,' no 'aura' around it."... "It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here." He tapped his head. "In the mind, not the gun." (p. 52)

Embedding Grasshopper's alternate history of the world within his own alternate history allows Dick to take this question about reality and simulation to the next level, leading the reader to speculate on the meaning and possibility of multiple simultaneously interpenetrating realities and on the role of the individual reader in pinning it all down.

The Lord of the Rings: A masterpiece of myth-making

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin, 1994

I first received The Lord of the Rings as part of a boxed set, complete with The Hobbit, for Christmas in 1985. I also received a boxed set of the first four Dune books. I was 13 and in 8th grade.

Like many 13-year olds, I loved The Hobbit but I thought The Lord of the Rings was simply awful. For one thing, the plot was not immediately obvious to me. (Keep in mind that at the time my enjoyment reading primarily comprised Doctor Who novelizations and Choose Your Own Adventure books.) Instead of the short chapters of plot and dialogue to which I was accustomed, Tolkien provided page after page of exposition, describing the local color and history with any "action" provided almost as an afterthought. And then there is what may have been the biggest problem of all with The Lord of the Rings, the scores of strangely named characters and places, some of whom are central to the story and others of whom are purely peripheral and which is which is unclear. I mean, sheesh, who names their two main villains Sauron and Saruman, names that differ by only one syllable?

It should be here noted that while I loved reading at age 13, I was also not the best reader. Memories of reading what I managed to of the trilogy consist mainly of reading a single page over and over and over again just to follow the main thread of the story. Somehow I managed to finish The Fellowship of the Ring and made it a few dozen pages into The Two Towers before I threw up my hands and abandoned Tolkien to the realm of "authors I think are overrated." I still have a vague recollection of giving a a pretty worthless presentation on the first book in front of Mrs. Fox's English class, the same class I was in when the Challenger exploded. (I also have an even vaguer memory of reviewing some disposable piece of genre SF called Dushau, but that's another story.) In short, I never thought I would ever read this book again, and considered all those folks who worshiped Tolkien to be little short of fools.

Fast-forward sixteen years. It's Christmas time in Champaign, and I'm attending The Two Towers with my coworkers, mainly because the bosses gave us cinema tickets for the holidays. As the movie begins to unfold, I remember those few dozen pages that I read at 13, and I slowly begin the journey of reappraising Tolkien. While I agree with those who urge reading the book as well as simply seeing the movie, I think that in this case I could not have done the former if I had not done the latter. Peter Jackson's trilogy allowed me to familiarize myself with the overall story arch (something that was hard for me to do from within the perspective of the novel, at least at first) and also helped me to handle the enormous cast of strangely named characters. (Finally Saruman and Sauron were decidedly distinct characters in my mind's eye, and the logic behind their naming, based as it is on Tolkien's invented languages, became more apparent.) So in fall of 2007 I finally decided to give the damned book another chance, mooched the one-volume "trilogy" (apparently Tolkien always considered it one big novel) through BookMooch, chose it over the New Testament for 2008's "big book" (sorry Mom), and devoured it in January, 2008.

In short, I loved it, particularly the exposition and the bizarre names for characters and places. Strange, huh, how the passage of time will do that to one's sensibilities? The very features of the novel that I found off-putting in 1985, I found absolutely ingenious in 2008. The names and locations in The Lord of the Rings all figure into a much-vaster cosmology and narrative history, and this becomes more apparent when the reader peruses the voluminous appendices. All the details that seemed arbitrary and distracting from "the action" were in fact anything but arbitrary, deriving as they did from a comprehensive mythology (of a world that did not exist until Tolkien wrote it into existence!). Take for example the appendix on the "translation" of the text explaining why Tolkien chose English words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "halfling" to "translate" the "original" Elvish words. Apart from the implication that there is really an original manuscript written in Elvish, this appendix also implies that the "elves" in this story aren't really elves, the "dwarves" aren't really dwarves, etc., but that these are the closest analogs that the translator could find in fantastic literature.

That these 1,000+ pages, with all their hyper-detailed exposition, are merely the tip of the iceberg of Tolkien's invented world, makes the novel all the more amazing. This really is a masterpiece of storytelling and myth-making. I can understand now why so many people love this book. I think I'm now one of them.

Some of these stories have haunted me for decades

Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore
Alan Moore
DC Comics, 2003


V for Vendetta and From Hell are two of my favorite graphic novels, due in no small part to the brilliant ideas and prose of Alan Moore. Because I first read both books in the `00s, I'd just assumed that Moore was only a contemporary comic book writer. Imagine my surprise, then, that upon picking up this volume at the local library, I discovered not one but three stories that affected me so profoundly when I read them as a kid that they still stick with me twenty-plus years later.

Two of these stories, both of which involve the Green Lantern Corps, still come up in my comparative religions class when I am reflecting on perception and frames of reference. In "Mogo Doesn't Socialize," Bolphunga the Unrelenting has come to a remote planet in search of the great Green Lantern Mogo. Suffice it to say that Bolphunga and the reader both discover precisely why Mogo can't be found anywhere on that remote world in a perceptual shift worthy of the Twilight Zone. "In Blackest Night" challenges a Green Lantern to communicate with a blind being from a dark planet who knows (and, more importantly, can know) nothing of "green" or "lanterns." This story drove home the point that you need a common frame of reference in order for ideas to translate.

The third story, "Brief Lives," filled a single page spread and came from something called Vega. As with the latter of the GL stories, this one was all about perspective. Two giants, whose lives encompass epochs of geological time, encounter---in the form of an almost imperceptible little cloud of dust---the futile attacks of a race of militant insectoids. The punchline, delivered by one of these eons-old creatures to his colleague, is that he shouldn't worry too much about the dust cloud because "life is too short." Wonderful!

All the other stories collected in this volume are strong, and most of them explore the nuances of interpersonal relationships, hardly the standard fare of superhero comic books. In "For the Man Who Has Everything," Superman is attacked by an alien plant-thing that renders him comatose while allowing him to live out an idealized virtual life on a Krypton-that-never-exploded with his wife and children. "The Jungle Line" finds the Swamp Thing gently, almost tenderly, rescuing Superman from the feverish grip of a lethal Kryptonian fungus. "Night Olympics" follows an evening out with socially conscious crime fighter couple Green Arrow and Black Widow as they encounter drug freaks, stereo thieves, and a would-be assassin. "Father's Day" is a troubling, if overlong, Vigilante story about a child-abusing, wife-murdering ex-con, and the complex, unfathomable relationship he has with his daughter. The closing story, "Mortal Clay," finds Batman dueling with the third incarnation of Clayface over the affections of an, um, woman.

Alan Moore has demonstrated time and again that he is a writer to be reckoned with. The implications of some stories in this collection took me by surprise decades ago, and their effects have still not worn off. I recommend the stories in this collection very highly.

(This review was originally written on November 19, 2007.)

Are you ready for the red pill?

The Culture of Make Believe
Derrick Jensen
Chelsea Green, 2004

The Culture of Make Believe picks up where its predecessor, the powerful Language Older than Words, left off. After examining in that latter volume the objectification and systematic denial of that objectification that permeate Western culture, Jensen turns his attention to the related "relationships between hate and fear, hate and power, power and fear... What are the relationships between any of these and the desire or need to control? And what are the relationships between all of these and a desire or need to perceive others as objects? It seems obvious to me that enslaving another requires that the other be, at least to some degree, objectified: Does objectification imply hatred? I used to think so, but I'm beginning to think the relationship is more complex." (67)

The relationship is indeed more complex, and because of the complexly interpenetrating nature of the subject matter, the book itself is also complex while somehow remaining an engaging read. In order to adequately describe and analyze these complex relationships, Jensen's sprawling tome draws on vivid storytelling, graphic and painful historical accounts, potent metaphors drawn from our cultural heritage, powerful intuitions, postmodern reflexivity and critical insight into the author's own biases, lengthy interviews with relevant thinkers, and an underlying logic that deftly interweaves the seemingly disparate strands of racism, sexism, monotheism, hatred, power, exploitation, colonialism, ecocide, war, abstraction, objectification, production, and of civilization (particularly the civilization with roots in the Mediterranean and the Levant, aka "Western" civilization) itself. In the Biblical metaphor that he develops throughout the book, Jensen is Noah's son Ham, sharing his vision of the naked patriarch of civilization, especially industrial civilization, and calling the reader to see that the patriarch has no clothes, and having seen, to make a choice.

Jensen's book is filled with detailed accounts of atrocities that have been perpetrated against racial and ethnic minorities, women, and against the natural world itself, but he doesn't stop with relating the gory details. Instead he digs deeper into the accounts to show how the perpetrators were most often not barbaric and marginal, as we tend to assume, but were instead policemen, politicians, businessmen, economists, investors, CEOs, Rotarians, and other decent, respectable folks, the people that Ward Churchill has called "little Eichmanns." (In other words, the perpetrators were and are all of us who benefit from the system.) He describes how South African cultures were systematically destroyed, not through lawlessness but through the passing of laws, in order to get black laborers to mine diamonds for DeBeers; in effect, racist apartheid grew out of good old-fashioned market economics. He relates accounts of how everyday black Americans were lynched and burned for looking at white women, or for looking like black men who looked at white women, or for just being black. (He even tells the story of a woman whose fetus was cut out of her belly by a bunch of upstanding white citizens as punishment for her crime of hating them for burning her husband.) Again and again, we see that the perpetrators of these evils weren't inbred reprobates, but were upstanding members of their communities, and that these evil occasions weren't attended in shame, but in celebration. For example, at its height the KKK, contrary to popular belief, did not comprise backwater yokels but police chiefs, sheriffs, attorneys general, and state governors.

According to Jensen's analysis, hatred--whether aimed at blacks, at women, at religious minorities, at Iraqi civilians, or at the natural world itself--is a manifestation of our cultural vision of the world. In this vision, the Other is objectified, dealt with abstractly in terms of a class (so an innocent black man is burned just because he looks like the actual criminal or a 2,000 year old tree is rendered into two-by-fours just to make a quick buck), held in contempt, and viewed as a resource to be exploited instead of as another living being with which one may enter into relationship. Moreover, as Jensen teases out, the phenomenon of red-faced, spittle-flinging hatred is an aberration that typically appears only when the normal direction of power is subverted or challenged. At other times, hatred merely manifests as the status quo, innocent only to those who benefit from its privileges.

This book, while engaging, is not an easy read, precisely because it challenges the reader on EVERY level. It reveals the "embeddedness of all of us in a culture that perceives war in monstrously utilitarian terms" and our "immersion in a river of deceit, a river where we take as accepted that one hand may hold forth an olive branch while another makes final arrangements to thrust with a sword, a river where treaties are abrogated at convenience, a culture in which lying to achieve one's goals in not only acceptable and expected, but routine" (175). Making the choice to see one's embeddedness in the culture of make believe and to conceive of alternatives is irrevocable and has real consequences: "The difficulty comes--and here is the real beauty of the story of Noah and his sons---when, like Ham (or at least my vision of Ham), you find your way through these shifts in perception and see the patriarch naked and vulnerable. What do you do then? Do you, like Ham, talk about what you have seen? As the story makes clear, there are grave strictures against doing so, with severe consequences. Or do you follow the lead of Ham's brothers, and reap the privilege that comes from averting your eyes?" (62-3) Jensen's book challenges our need for happy, simple solutions and implies that this need for "feel-good" vibes is itself a loss created by the culture of make believe: "I need not fight despair...despair is a normal and reasonable response to a desperate situation.... my response--breaking into sobs over the killing of so much beauty--is normal, and expected, and that to not feel these losses manifests another type of loss, that of one's own humanity, one's own heart." (249)

I could write and quote more, but I won't. My guess is that you are here, reading these reviews, because you already have an idea of what Derrick Jensen has to say and agree with it to a greater or lesser extent. Readers seem to either hate Jensen's writing style-- with its tangential approach, long narrative arcs that connect loose ends over a span of 200 pages, and self-referential quality--or to love it, hearing it in a voice as refreshing as the truth it reveals in page after page. Give this book a read. Your view of the world and of your role in it won't be the same when you finish it.

(This review was originally written on June 22, 2007.)

Good news about the Good News

Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts
Joel Green and Mark Baker
InterVarsity Press, 2000


What is scandalous about the cross of Jesus and why do Christians need to recover it? According to the authors, the cross is scandalous insofar as it turns all the categories of the world--failure and success, master and servant, sin and redemption--upside down. Not only are Jesus' disciples in the Gospel of Luke confounded by the apparent failure of his mission (i.e., dying on a cross rather than leading Israel as newly anointed Davidic king), but also the entire project of salvation involves God becoming human and DYING out of his love for humanity. Contemporary mainstream American Christianity, with its self-assured and monochromatic emphasis on individual salvation through God's redemptive violence, too often misses the subversive and countercultural dimensions of the scandalous cross. In this powerful examination of the models and meanings of the cross in Christian history and theology, Green and Baker provide an antidote to this monochromatic gospel by revealing the ambiguity of the cross and challenging the reader's preconceived notions about what the New Testament itself says about salvation in Christ.

For the earliest followers of Jesus, his death "on a Roman cross was an event that lacked within itself a self-evident, unambiguous interpretation" (11). In fact, according to the authors, while the earliest Christians affirmed the centrality of Christ's death on the cross to their salvation, they didn't seem to worry too much about how it had its saving effect. The New Testament itself uses a wealth of different metaphors to describe the salvation obtained through the cross--justification, redemption, reconciliation, sacrifice, triumph--and because these different terms with their subtle shades of meaning get elided in the monochrome of penal substitution theology, the authors spend two full chapters examining these metaphors and teasing out their possible nuances in the context of early Christianity.

The diversity of meanings ascribed to the cross isn't limited to the discourses of Christian scripture, either. In the fifth chapter, the authors outline and critique several historical interpretations of the cross, including the Christus Victor model of Irenaeus and Gregory Nyssa, the Satisfaction model of Anselm of Canterbury, the Moral Influence model of Peter Abelard, and the contemporary model of penal substitution. (This chapter alone is with the price of the book.) In chapters six, seven, and eight, the authors examine the significance of the cross in other, non-Western cultures, revealing the diversity within contemporary global Christianity and using these cross-cultural perspectives to illuminate blind spots in American penal atonement theology.

The authors' efforts in this book are not mere intellectual exercises, either. As the authors repeatedly point out, the cross of Christ grounds the gospels in this world as much as in the next, because it was abusive political power and the desire to protect privilege that lead the Jewish and Roman authorities to execute an innocent man. The ambiguous, scandalous cross challenges all of our received notions about the status quo, and addresses contemporary social issues like racism, social justice, extremes of wealth and poverty, environmental degradation, and our very relationship to the rest of the world. The penal substitution atonement, with its overemphasis on the individual and her sinfulness, omits any critique of our cultural norms and institutions as unnecessary to Christian discipleship. "Given the diversity of witness to the saving significance of the cross in the New Testament, should we not look with caution, even dismay, when we see the atonement articulated in terms of one model only, and especially when that model coheres so fully with the emphasis on autonomous individualism characteristic of so much of the modern middle class in the West" (213). The authors provide ample reason for us to view the contemporary Christian theological scene with dismay, but they also afford the reader many opportunities to look at the Good New anew. And that is definitely good news.

(This review was originally written on March 14, 2007.)

Heinberg is a definitely a Cassandra, but remember what happened to those who ignored her

The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2005


Richard Heinberg set out to answer the questions, "How much petroleum is left? How much coal, natural gas, and uranium? Will we ever run out? When? What will happen when we do? How can we best prepare? Will renewable substitutes--such as wind and solar power--enable industrialism to continue in a recognizable form indefinitely?" (p. 3) He sorted the various responses to these questions into four broad voices--those of free-market economists, environmental activists, petroleum geologists, and politicians--and of these four, he found the third, the petroleum geologists, to be the most useful, if only because "theirs is a long-range view based on physical reality" (p.5). (Throughout the book, Heinberg notes that the free-market economists are almost constitutionally opposed to talk of Peak Oil, because, as economist Robert Solow said, "the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources." Resources, in other words, are merely commodities created by the market to satisfy demands, and when the demand arises, the market will find a supply. Needless to say, Heinberg finds this laissez faire approach to Peak Oil--"perilous optimism"--quite dangerous because it ignores hard ecological realities.)

"The message here is that we are about to enter a new era in which each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how to adjust to this new regime" (p.5). In short, an ecological perspective on humanity's consumption of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources reveals that the astronomical population growth and economic expansion of the last century are the biological bloom and population overshoot enabled by an energy subsidy from cheap, abundant oil, coal, and natural gas. As with other population overshoots in human (and evolutionary) history, the end probably won't be pretty, with massive die-offs and "structural readjustments" (to use free-market lingo) bringing the human population back into line with the Earth's carrying capacity. Heinberg's book challenges us to face this coming change NOW and to do what we can to mitigate against its worst effects through exploring and developing economical and social alternatives to the status quo.

The discovery of new oil resources peaked several decades ago, according to the majority of petroleum geologists, and as it seems that discovery and production follow similar curves, it will be but a matter of years until the production of oil peaks. (For the record, this doesn't mean that we will literally run out of oil, but only that it will seem like we've run out, because it will cost more--financially and energetically--to extract and refine the oil than it is worth.) The peak in oil production won't merely have a direct impact on the automobile industry, but will also undermine the production of plastics and pharmaceuticals, of which oil is the feed stock, and will yank the rug out from under petro-intensive, corporate, "Green Revolution" agriculture. Combine these consequences with growing population and energy consumption of developing nations like China and India, and you have a recipe for seriously ugly changes. Like James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency, Heinberg examines various other energy sources and technologies, from natural gas to zero-point energy, and finds them all wanting in one way or another. (Unlike Kunstler, Heinberg maintains a solid faith in our flexibility as a species and in our ability to adapt.) According to this perspective, oil (and other nonrenewables) were a one-time windfall in ecological terms, and once we've passed the peak in extracting them, we will have to recognize our ecological limitations as one species amongst many struggling for limited resources.

I recently read PowerDown, the follow-up to this book, and found it an excellently written, powerful and thought-provoking read. Perhaps it's because I read The Party's Over in conjunction with the contrarian book The Bottomless Well (Huber and Mills) or perhaps it's because I'm a bit burned out reading books on Peak Oil, but whatever the reason I did not find this book as compelling as its sequel. That said, it is still a better introduction to the subject of Peak Oil and to its ecological basis and implications than most others I have yet read.

(This review was originally written on February 10, 2007.)

Essential and unsettling reading about our options for making it in the Post-oil Age

PowerDown: Options And Actions For A Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2004

Author Richard Heinberg approaches his topic, the consequences of peak oil and the final stop of the cheap oil gravy train, with ecological sensibility and moral clarity. These two characteristics, coupled with a straightforward prose style, make for compelling reading, as well as for serious reflection on the hard choices that we most likely face in the near future.

Heinberg's introductory chapter recaps his earlier book, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. In it, he describes a century's uncritical addiction to cheap oil and outlines the impending crises it has wrought, crises for which we must prepare and to which we will soon respond, voluntarily or otherwise.

After this brief introduction (which basically assumes the truth of the peak oil dilemma, a definite problem for those who are still unconvinced), Heinberg lays out four paths that we may take, both individually and collectively, in response to the threats of dwindling power supplies, climbing global temperatures, etc.

1. Last One Standing - In this scenario, which Heinberg glumly admits is the default scenario given our inability (or worse, unwillingness) to consider the reality of our natural constraints and our predilection for settling things militarily, the powers of the world scramble in their rush to control the world's remaining energy resources. The US misadventure in Iraq, and the current threats to Iran, are part and parcel of this "option," which, as most sane people will admit, doesn't sound like much of an option at all but is, instead, the path of least resistance. As Heinberg notes, this is "a breathtakingly alarming prospect" that may lead to "the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological life-support system of the planet" (p. 55). (And for those who would dismiss this speculation as merely the work of a green handwringer, he cites a Pentagon report featured in Fortune magazine that sketches the basic outlines of this kind of "option." If the top brass are seriously thinking about it, then so should we citizens.)
2. Powerdown - This scenario is all about radically reforming the human heart, so as to replace a global culture of greed and self-interest with one of collective interest, sharing, and community. Important components of this powerdown strategy include limiting the size of the human population, increasing the efficiency of our energy consumption, replacing planned obsolescence with enduring quality, and returning global agriculture from its contemporary dependence on fossil fuels to its sustainable, organic roots. Of course, these changes necessitate a change in our underlying economic principles, so that eternal growth is seen as a suicidal imperative and an ecological impossibility, which will in turn necessitate changes in our social and political organization. Because these radical changes will have to be implemented quickly, Heinberg realizes that something like Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat will have to be formed, presumably of like-minded folks of ecological sensibility and moral clarity. Alas, this option seems to me to be a combination of wishful thinking and highly questionable forms and uses of power; as anyone with a sense of history knows, such vanguards tend not to dissolve of their own accord and folks who aim at radically transforming the human heart end up getting crucified. Nevertheless, the scenario is one we may face out of necessity rather than choice, and so it is essential to come to grips with it.
3. Waiting for the Magic Elixir - This describes the option, if it can be called that, of waiting for the technoscience and free market cavalries to deliver the solution to our problems. Because we've muddled through before, goes the argument, we will surely do so again. This option includes all the hullabaloo about the new hydrogen economy, or abiotic oil, or tar sands, or zero-point energy, etc. None of these options take factors like ERoEI into account, for example, but more problematic, they seek to tackle the problem solely from the supply-side. If we don't work on the demand-side, argues Heinberg, we will merely forestall the crises of overpopulation and overconsumption that come from living beyond our ecological means. Needless to say, Heinberg has little patience for this option, seeing in it a self-centeredness that is morally reprehensible.
4. Building Lifeboats - In this final option, Heinberg echoes Morris Berman's Twilight of American Civilization in calling for a counterculture of "new monks" who will preserve those aspects of human science and arts that are worth preserving. In short, we will need to have small communities in which traditional and primitive technologies and skills are mated to contemporary knowledge of science, politics, literature, etc. Again, this is a tall order for such a short amount of time, but at least this challenge sounds possible and interesting.
   

In conclusion, Heinberg argues that the world's elites will probably play up option three while tacitly working on option one. Most of the outspoken opposition, the so-called "Other Superpower" of the anti-globalization, etc. activists, will choose a variant of option two, but they are limited because of their resistance to admittedly problematic ideas, specifically those involving population control. The rest of us folks here on the ground, living our modest middle class lives in our modest single-family homes, will suffer the impact of option one (e.g., sending our children to die in oil wars, watching as formerly unmentionables like torture become acceptable again, etc.) while also being able to reduce our own consumption, to reach out and form new small-scale communities, and to increase our practices of cultural preservation. None of these options looks pretty to those of us reared in the age of opportunity, but if what Heinberg and others argue about peak oil is true, these options may be all we have.

(This review was originally written on January 3, 2007.)

Absurd. Clever. Satirical. Quirky. And, sadly, just not as funny 17 years later.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition)
Douglas Adams
Harmony Books, 2004

There are books that you should read, re-read, and re-re-read. This, unfortunately, turned out not to be one of those books, at least for me.

When I first read this as a teenager, the whimsical English humor, sudden digressions, metafictional interruptions, and probing satirical questions kept me in stitches. This novel (such as it is), held together by a singular smart-assery, profoundly appealed to my own new found sense of adolescent rebellion. Coincidences, meaningful and otherwise, non sequiturs, and bureaucratic balderdash leavened the side-splitting dialogue and made it impossible to put down.

Alas, upon re-reading the novel at the conclusion of 2006, I was struck by how much of the writing didn't strike me anymore. To say that the plot of the book is thin would be a compliment, and to call the characters, well, characters, would be a stretch. Most of the jokes just weren't as funny this time around, and the few that did crack me up were tinged with the bittersweet recognition that they would never be groundbreaking again.

Because I read the 25th anniversary edition, perhaps it is fitting that it conjured up such mixed emotions. The author, Douglas Adams, had died three years before this edition was published, and so many of the extras in this volume involve tributes from luminaries like Terry Jones and Neil Gaiman. The introductory chapters are also chocked full of reproductions of flyers, book covers, and other such emphemera that will only be important to die-hard fans of the book, radio show, and/or movie.

Remember, though, that this review is just my opinion. Whatever you do, Don't Panic.

(This review was originally written on January 1, 2007.)

A must-read for wage earners and other people who work for a living

Strike!
Jeremy Brecher
South End Press, 1997

"The United States, while founded in revolution and proclaiming itself based on the consent of the governed, reveals under its democratic veneer an ambiguous reality....the emergence in the nineteenth century of a class system whose main actors are workers and corporate capitalists and the persistence of that system through the twentieth century violate the cherished tenets of the American myth. Instead of a society based on freedom and consent, we find a small, circumscribed realm of protected liberties, surrounded by vast--and now increasingly global--hierarchical institutions based on command and backed by force." (pp. 273-4)

Using the phenomenon of the mass strike as his focus, Brecher examines this "ambiguous reality" of circumscribed liberties, of command and force, and the way that it has played out in the lives of America's working people. From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, when previously independent farmers and craftspeople suddenly found themselves poor wage earners in someone else's factory to the successful Teamster strike against UPS in the late 1990s, the stories that Brecher relates demonstrate the power and integrity that working people have demonstrated repeatedly in their attempts to realize democracy in the workplace. This book demonstrates that, far from being protectors of our liberty, as patriotic platitudes would have us believe, the police and military far too often have been used by the state to defend the economic interests of the few against the needs of the many. It also puts the lie to other cherished myths, such as the notion that working people don't have the capacity for self-management or that labor unions are unambiguously pro-worker and anti-employer. Most importantly, though, through its detailed and energetic accounts of spontaneous insurrections on the part of working people, this book restores a lost history and dignity to the American worker, which is essential for the labor struggles that will be an inevitable part of global capitalism's future. As Bob Marley noted, "if you knew your history, then you would know where you're coming from." In short, this book provides an engaging and highly readable introduction to one aspect of the "lost" history of American labor and whets the appetite for more.

Exhilarating SF tour de force---brings "cyberpunk" from the neck down

Moldies & meatbops: Three *ware novels : Software ; Wetware ; Freeware
Rudy Rucker
Doubleday Direct, 1997

This volume collects three of the four novels in Rudy Rucker's intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable *Ware series: Software, Wetware, and Freeware. The arc of these three novels carries the reader from the dawn of the 21st century, when humanity's lunar robots reprogrammed themselves for freedom and consciousness, to the middle of the century, the radical future of artificial life, and beyond. In Rucker's mostly optimistic vision of the near-future, robots (from the Czech word for "slave", remember) give way to self-directing boppers (and human-dominated asimovs), who in turn pave the way for the quasi-organic moldies, who themselves become the staging ground for something far more transcendent. Meanwhile, humanity tries as best it can to keep pace with its new neighbors while inadvertently catalyzing their evolution from time to time. An exhilarating intellectual romp!

Rucker's novels work on so many levels that it beggars description. His intellectual and philosophical speculations about the nature of conscious life itself provide the skeleton, his joycean linguistic inventiveness enrobes his fresh ideas in strange flesh, and his sheer joy at being embodied succeeds both in animating his creation and in bringing the genre of science fiction, which has long been decidedly cognitively top-heavy, from the neck down. This is science fiction for people who love the raw stickiness and smelliness of physical existence. Moldies and Meatbops, or, more properly, the novels collected therein, easily ranks as Rucker's SF masterpiece.

(This review was originally written on September 4, 2006.)

Breathtaking work of literary genius and theological inquiry

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Jose Saramago
Harvest Books, 1994

In this novel Saramago has created a masterpiece, both in terms of style and content.

The prose is musical, poetically evocative of the streams of consciousness and conversation that fill our lives. While Saramago's paragraphs often run several pages in length, and his idiosyncratic use of punctuation (e.g., his refusal to use quotation marks to delimit speech and his insistence on ending all sentences--including questions--with a period) can seem daunting, the fluid, melodic language makes reading the story a true pleasure.

In terms of content, Saramago has mastered the art of faithfully retelling a story while simultaneously subverting the text through interesting asides, editorial comments, notes to the reader, etc. He also subverts the normal relationship between humanity and God in Christian tradition, wherein humanity is in need of God's forgiveness. In Saramago's retelling, it is the inhumanity of God that is need of humanity's forgiveness. I have often wondered at the needless brutality that lies at the core of mainstream Christian theology (i.e., God needing to have his only child brutally murdered in order to forgive me for being the imperfect being I was created to be), and finally, in Saramago, I have found an author willing to take God to task while not dismissing the sorrowful beauty of the life of Jesus.

(This review was originally written on June 19, 2006.)

The Milagro Beanfield War: A delightful read about the day a man began irrigating his father's beanfield

The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel
John Nichols
Owl Books, 2000

I finally got around to reading this novel whilst on summer vacation (it was in the free pile at the condo) and am so glad that I did.

Nichols engages the reader from the first page, with a blend of magical realism, social commentary, satire, and good old fashioned story telling.

Jose "Joe" Mandragon sets in motion a variety of forces in the state of New Mexico when he irrigates his family legacy, a miniscule beanfield left to him by his father. With that simple act, centuries-old tensions between rancher and farmer, Mexican and Anglo, subsistence living and the cash economy, come to a head.

What could have been a dull exercise in race relations, regional history, and economic theory, is instead brought to wonderful, earthy life in this charming novel that will make you think, laugh, and perhaps even shed a tear or two.

Definitely worth reading!

(This review was originally written on June 14, 2006.)

Dense, intricate, important look at the somatic side of Western history

Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West
Morris Berman
Bantam, 1990

Morris Berman begins his exploration of the "hidden history" of the West with a discussion of the nemo, a word he borrows from John Fowles' The Aristos which connotes the sense of non-existence at the core of the existential condition. The experience of this nemo, according to Berman, results from a developmental split between the felt sense of embodiment (somatic awareness) and the mental self image that comes from how others see us (specular awareness). Berman uses the history of mirrors and the human relationship to animals to demonstrate how this split has led historically to a de-valuation of somatic, embodied experience, a consequent preference for "cognitively top-heavy" abstraction, and various attempts to heal the breach between the two.

The core of the book is an exploration of four different periods in Western history---the origins of Christianity and Gnosticism, the Cathar/Albigensian heresy in Southern France, the rise of modern science from the practice of alchemy, and the modern phenomenon of Nazism. Berman investigates how these periods relate to the suppression of the body in favor of the abstracted intellect and to the return of that suppressed somatic experience in different forms (e.g,. Gnostic mysticism, romantic love, scientific abstraction, and Nazi mass murder).

Finally, Berman looks at our prospects for the future. Since the abstraction/experience split and our attempts to smooth it over are still going strong in modern Western societies, Berman fears the potential for a resurgence of fascism. (Given the tenor of the 21st century so far, it would seem that his fears are well founded.) Instead of advocating another mystical or political attempt to heal over the split and to fill in the nemo, Berman discusses the possibility of a "gesture of balance"---learning to accept the split and the feeling of the nemo without being compelled to fill it in or smooth it over. This radical acceptance of the gap might be the key to "resolving" the gap altogether.

In short, this is a book that demands serious attention from students of history, politics, religion, philosophy, psychology, and also for those dedicated to pursuing a spiritual path.

(This review was originally written on June 7, 2006.)

Generous and much needed "experiment in literary investigation"

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Harper Collins, 1974

Gulag--a Russian acronym for the network of camps where prisoners languish without recourse to law or justice, where women are gang-raped by thieves, and where innocent people are starved, beaten, tortured, killed, disappeared. Though Solzhenitsyn's experience of the Gulag took place under Soviet rule, the phenomenon does not seem to be uniquely Communist but is symptomatic of totalitarianism in general. This is why this "experiment in literary investigation" is so relevant right here, right now. The potential for something like Gulag in the age of the eternal "war on terror" is terrifying. (And as the author notes, many of the evils committed in Gulag depended upon the perpetrator believing that what he did was not only necessary, but actually moral.)

Yet Solzhenitsyn's indefatigable sense of humor and generosity of spirit keep this book (at 615 pages, the first volume of three) from being a work of torture in itself. Instead, he mocks the pretensions of the Soviet penal code and revels in the small joys (i.e., sleep, reading, comradery) he experienced in Gulag. In fact, at times, Solzhenitsyn conveys the sense that Gulag was a potentially redemptive experienced for those who made it through, since it winnowed away the chaff of life from the wheat and revealed the nobility we may find in our darkest, deepest hour.

(This review was originally written April 26, 2006 and it refers to the first of the three volume series. Subsequent volumes await my attention.)