There are weird things about Ohio, believe it or not

Weird Ohio
James A. Willis, Andrew Henderson, and Loren Coleman
Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2005

Despite having hack writer and former Decaturian Troy Taylor at the helm, Weird Illinois--a companion to this volume--makes for great bathroom reading. The production values and colorful images more than compensate for Taylor's leaden prose and inane editorializing. I love this book so much that every time I visit my best friend's Chicago apartment, I make time to secrete myself away in the john and hunch over it. I got to wondering what I would think of the book if the writing were as good as the production, and so I decided to check out another book in the series to see.

Luckily, I picked an absolute winner with Haunted Ohio. The writing is great, and not just because I'm comparing it with Taylor's ham-fisted oeuvre. The three co-authors balance a love of a good scare story with a desire to know the available facts about any site they describe; it constantly amazed me how they could debunk a particular legend with one or two salient, documented facts without ever abandoning the joy of repeating the original legend."Who cares if it isn't exactly true?" they seem to suggest, "If you're reading a book of weird stories, you're probably into it more for the chill it send down your spine than for any empirically verifiable facts it may reveal." As mentioned before in the context of Haunted Illinois, the production values are superb, and the addition of stories supplied by readers and locals really capture something uniquely Midwestern about these weird people and places.

The sections of the book deal with various weird topics like local legends, ancient mysteries (e.g., the Serpent Mound), fabled people and places, unexplained phenomena (e.g., UFO sightings, Hangar 18, and the ever-popular pancakes from space!), bizarre beasts (including the Mothman), local heroes and villains, personalized properties, roadside distractions (like the Longaberger Basket HQ featured on the cover---it's the building shaped like the giant basket, complete with handles), haunted places, cemeteries, and abandoned buildings and roller coasters.

A very fun, entertaining, and even (gasp) informative book.

"Certainly the prospect for 'normal' humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories." Amen to that assessment.

Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
Gardner Dozois, editor
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002
0312275692

“Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings like the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a terrifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term has been understood for thousand upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at the very least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for “normal” humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition… with the humans left ever father behind, unable to cope.” (Preface, pp. xii-xiii)

As with almost every book I read, this one fits into a larger context. A few years ago, one web search or another introduced me to this idea called "the Singularity." It seems that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge came up with this term to describe that point in the near-future where developments in germline genetic engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and associated disciplines will accelerate and converge in such a way as to create a scientific analog to the fundamentalist Christian "Rapture." Those of us who came into existence before this singular convergence will be radically different from those whose lives are defined by the terms of a post-Singularity world. The latter, deemed "posthumans" (or "transhumans") by various commentators on this vision, will be in control of the the fundamental constituents of the human universe---matter, life, and mind---to such a degree that they will effectively be as gods to the mere humans who preceded them.

I was fascinated by this idea, in part because these developments do seem to presage a variety of unprecedented social, cultural, and other realities. After all, just consider the impact that computer and mobile phone technologies have had on all aspects of global society in the last twenty years, and envision those changes compounded and sped up. I read a few novels that I've previously reviewed here (i.e., Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Rudy Rucker's Moldies and Meatbops and Realware, and The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod) and sort of burned through the most intense phase of the interest before I moved on to more pessimistic appraisals of our collective future (mainly dealing with the issue of Peak Oil, a prospect thatjust might put the kibosh on the whole transhumanist project).

This series of pessimistic appraisals then led me back to the topic of transhumanism in the form of Bill McKibben's book Enough. In this well-written but not entirely convincing book (more about which when I actually finish it), he argues against the posthuman/transhuman future implicit in these technologies on the grounds that it will be devoid of meaning, since meaning is grounded in our limitations, defects, and finitude. His book got too preachy too quickly, and so I put it down and picked up a variety of other relevant books, including Jeremy Rifkin’s The Biotech Century, Rapture, The Future and Its Enemies, and a bunch of SF, including this volume. So that's all by way of an explanation as to why I picked this book up.

Regarding this collection of short SF itself, editor Gardner Dozois provides a rough sketch of a "superhuman" posthumanity in his outline of the criteria used in selecting these stories. Science fiction, once dominated by stories of space conquest and interstellar adventure, had by the early 1970s begun to yield to the fundamentally unsettling discoveries of modern cosmologists and space researchers. Solar system changed into galaxy, which in turn had gave way to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and ultimately to a universe of such analogy-defying proportions that the space conquest fantasies of the 1950s came to be regarded as impossible. So SF writers and some scientists began to develop new scenarios and strategies for space colonization; after all, if the crux of the problem is a dearth of nearby earthlike planets, then two possible solutions are to make planets earthlike (i.e., terraforming) or to change the nature of human beings and adapt them to a wide variety of habitats. It is this latter notion, changing the very nature of what it has meant thus far to be a human being, that is the subject of this collection.

But it is not just any change of what it means to be human. Dozois invokes various filters in his anthology: the stories contained don't deal with "accidental" posthumanity brought about through mutation or post-apocalyptic scenarios, nor do they deal with posthumans who are angels, machines, or gods in disguise (it is SF after all and not fantasy), nor do they deal with virtual realities and downloaded posthuman consciousness. In this collection, all the posthuman situations are the direct result of deliberate change, often for the purposes of space colonization and conquest, and occur primarily in the "meat" world, as opposed to that of disembodied cyberspace.

Alas the stories in this collection did not, for the most part, live up to the promise of Dozois' introduction. While many of the tales were quite good in terms of craft, not many very meaningful or memorable. Too often I found myself shaking my head at the glibness of the authors and at how far they hadn't come from the Wild West, Manifest Destiny, cowboys in space mentality that characterized much of so-called Golden Age SF. A few stories do stand out, though, and so merit special mention.

• In “The Chapter Ends,” by Poul Anderson, the Earth has become a rustic backwater that has been traded to an alien civilization in a cosmic territorial exchange. The posthuman descendents of Earth, who have absolutely no connection to this obscure planet in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, move the few thousand remaining human beings off of the homeworld. They leave behind one Wendell Berry-esque holdout who realizes what it like to be the last person on earth--after the last flight out has gone.
  

• “Aye, and Gomorrah,” by Samuel R. Delany, is the sort of sexy science fiction I'd expect from Phillip Jose Farmer. The story centers on spacers, "modified" posthumans whose exotic asexuality makes them the target of fetishists called frelks.
  

• "Understand,” by Ted Chiang, features a patient who is resuscitated from a vegetative state through the use of an experimental new synthetic hormone. Of course, the vegetable becomes an uber-genius, escapes from the hospital as a fugitive from CIA, begins meddling in the affairs of humanity in pursuit of his posthuman aesthetic agenda, and finally discovers another pharmaceutically engendered uber-genius out to save the world.
  

• “None So Blind” finds Joe Haldeman (one of my favorite authors) telling a love story of sorts about an odd couple whose love begets an experimental surgery that turns regular folks into geniuses. And all they need to do is give up their eyes.
  

• “Border Guards,” by Greg Egan (another author I've always liked), poses a good challenge to the McKibbenses of the world with their argument that death gives our lives meaning and dignity. Egan asks the simple question, "is that true?" If we could find a way to get rid of death once and for all, would it be fair to our children not to do so?
  

• “A History of the Human and Post-Human Species,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, was my favorite story, I think. It is found in the epilogue, and constitutes a "scientific" abstract covering all the speciation and evolution, engineered and naturally selected, that facing the human race in the next few million years. Intelligent species arise after humans, but none achieve spaceflight, and in a final twist reminiscent of Dougal Dixon's Man After Man, posthuman descendants of Terrestrial colonists on Mars return to Earth in the far future, with no memory of their original connection.
  

Makes for fascinating reading on multiple levels

DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences
Rick Strassman, MD
Park Street Press, 2000


What feature do mystical experience, near-death experience, and alien abduction share? According to this fascinating book, all of these disparate experiences may be accompanied by a release of dimethyltryptamine (DMT, a potent psychedelic compound related to serotonin, melatonin, and psilocybin) from the pineal gland. Interestingly, this substance is also found in scores of different New World plants and has been used in many indigenous South American cultures as a pharmaceutical adjunct to shamanic practices. Intrepid psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Rick Strassman navigated the byzantine bureaucracies of the FDA and the DEA in order to conduct the first psychedelic research on human beings in two decades and lived to tell the tale, much to the satisfaction of psychonauts like yours truly.

This book serves multiple functions: it provides an introduction to the chemical DMT and to the anatomy and physiology of the pineal gland, an overview of the literature on human psychedelic research and an outline for future instances of the same, a template for the process of human psychedelic research design, a database of first-person experiences of large doses of intravenous DMT, speculations on the nature of consciousness and reality, and caveats about future research with psychedelic substances. As noted in the title for this review, the book provides fascinating reading on all these levels. It is rare that I've read a nonfiction book that held my attention so easily; the fact that I devoured a book that covered so much intellectual ground in such a brief time speaks volumes as to the quality of Strassman's writing. He follows the tried and true method of writers past---summarize what you plan to say, say it, and summarize what you've said. For some reviewers his prose was too pedantic or workmanlike, but for me it was perfect. He managed to convey a sense of scientific detachment while at the same time exhibiting a profound sensitivity both to the needs of his subjects and also to the needs of his readers, even as he described the saline flush used to clean out the IV lines. Strassman does not approach the subject matter glibly and avoids coming to any easy conclusions; in fact, his own sense of discomfort with the direction the research takes (i.e., the repeat encounters of test subjects with "other beings" that don't seem hallucinatory in the least) cemented my respect for him as a researcher and an author.

Anyone interested in altered states of consciousness, whether natural or substance-induced, would do well to read this book. Dr. Strassman should be thanked for returning a sense of respectability to an area of scientific research that was effectively "lost" for a generation.

(This review was originally posted on December 6, 2007.)

Well la dee da, it's Adi Da!

Adi Da and Adidam: The Divine Self-Revelation of the Avataric Way of the "Bright" and the "Thumbs"
Carolyn Lee
The Dawn Horse Press, 2004


In my sojourns through the religion, philosophy, and New Age sections of various bookshops, I've repeatedly come across the name and face of Adi Da (previously known as Bubba Free John, among other monikers). It was only when I found this pocket-sized introductory book, though, that I decided to read a bit more about this enigmatic and controversial guru and his teachings. Having devoured the entire thing last night, I'm still trying to figure out whether or not Adi Da means for us to take everything written here seriously. My assumption is that this booklet is an accurate, if brief, look at Adidam, because it is published by the Dawn Horse Press (the publisher of all of Adi Da's other works) and was written under the direction of the Ruchira Sannyasin Order of Adidam Ruchiradam (a impressive-sounding group about which the reader is told nothing). If this is the case, then Adi Da is either: (1) God incarnate, (2) a legitimate spiritual teacher with delusions of grandeur, (3) seriously mentally ill, (4) a charlatan of epic proportions, or (5) some combination thereof. For the record, my money is not on option #1.

Adi Da is, according to this book, "Real God, or Truth, or Reality, Manifesting in human form" (p.6). He claims that at his birth as Franklin Jones (in Jamaica, NY, no less), the Divine Reality became a human being for the first time, and that the millennia-long struggle for human beings to attain enlightenment under their own steam, as it were, came to an end. This claim must come as a surprise to the billion-plus Christians worldwide who assert that God became a human being in 1st century Palestine, and to the hundreds of millions of Hindus who believe that the divine Vishnu has taken human form on at least nine occasions.

As for Adidam, "the Path of the Heart," it boils down to guru-devotion or bhakti-yoga. What this means is that the devotee, by surrendering the heart and giving complete attention and devotion to Adi Da, allows the divine essence that is incarnate in Adi Da to break through the knot of self-concern and ego-contraction which is the source of all suffering. Again, this is not unique, at least from the perspective of comparative religion. Bhakti yoga is probably the most practiced form of Hindu spirituality, and many other religious traditions, Christianity and Shin Buddhism among them, see divine grace as the only "means" to salvation. For the devotees of Adidam, however, the salvific response to this devotion isn't simply taken on faith; rather, it takes the form of palpable energetic responses, called the "Bright" and the "Thumbs" by Adi Da, that transform the mind, soul, and body of the devotee. At least, that's what the book says.

Apart from the actual content, the book's style posed many problems. Hagiography isn't a genre popular with too many moderns, yours truly included, and the praise-filled prose becomes cloying just a few pages into the book. Adi Da's own commentary, quoted at length throughout the slender volume, is rife with arbitrary capitalization, underlining, and other annoying stylistic and typographic idiosyncrasies. Those features, combined with fairly impenetrable philosophy and a sense of inflated ego (which is to be expected, I guess, from the "promised God-man"), made for a less-than-thrilling read.

(This review was originally written on November 27, 2007.)

These authors need a crash course in discerning speculation from fact

The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
Touchstone, 1998


Claiming on the front cover to be an expose about the "true identity of Christ," the book comes to this conclusion on page 352-3: "Jesus was not the Son of God, and neither was he of the Jewish religion--although he may have been ethnically a Jew...John did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. He may well have baptized him, because Jesus was one of *his* disciples, perhaps even rising through the ranks to become his second-in-command. Something went wrong, however: John changed his mind and nominated Simon Magus as his successor. Shortly afterwards John was killed. Mary Magdalene was a priestess who was Jesus' partner in a sacred marriage..."

After reaching this point in the book, I put it down in disgust, something I am not wont to do (particularly after I've spent hour after hour plowing through a text), and decided to write this review.

This book is offensive, not necessarily because of its radical and unsubstantiated claims about Jesus, but because it, like so many others of its ilk, confuses a constellation of conjecture, speculation, supposition, and allegation with EVIDENCE as it seeks to support a very unconventional hypothesis.

From its first chapter, in which authors Picknett and Prince discuss the secret symbolism of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings (symbolism that most professional art historians consider spurious, by the way), the following pattern is established:

• Explain away the fact that reputable and knowledgeable parties don't agree with your observations by linking these parties with the "conspiracy" you're attempting to expose.
• Ask a question like, "what other possible explanation could there be?" and then refuse to seek explanations different from your own pet theory.
• Use qualifiers like "perhaps," "could," "suppose," or "might" when establishing a speculative data point, and then forget about that qualifier when you bring up that same data point, as an established fact, in the next chapter to bolster the next data point.
• Connect all your dots and claim that the picture you've just drawn is the REAL DEAL, all the while ignoring the fact that the dots you connected were all of your own design.
  

I can't honestly say that the book was worthless; it was occasionally a fun read and the authors' ruminations contain lots of interesting, if unsupported, speculations about varied topics. The first half of the book does a fair job of showing possible connections between various esoteric and occult groups in Western history, such as the Knights Templar, the Hermeticists, and the Freemasons. As well, the second half of the book, which focuses on the "true identity of Christ," is also interesting, if only because it offers a challenge to those whose knowledge of Christian origins and history is sorely wanting. (Didn't know that the New Testament was put together by a committee of bishops and their representatives? Well now you do.) And the chapter on the Mandaeans of Iraq was also very interesting and made me want to read more about this vanishing remnant of Gnostic religion. Having said that, the authors' tendency to conflate speculation with fact and their lack of hesitancy in passing the former off as the latter ruined this book for me as anything other than a work of fiction.

Read it if you must, enjoy it if you can, but please remember that speculation and fact are two different animals. Just because Picknett and Prince have written it, doesn't make it so.

(This review was originally written on November 20, 2007.)

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.)

Great introduction to Jodo Shinshu Buddhism

Buddha of Infinite Light
Daisetz T. Suzuki
Shambhala Publications, 1998

Ever since the first Englishman translated the final words of the Buddha as "work out your own salvations with diligence," the English-speaking West has associated Buddhism almost exclusively with the cool, detached path of self-power and the attainment of enlightenment through the individual cultivation of wisdom, ethics, and meditation. Perhaps it is due to this limited understanding of the Buddhadharma, perhaps it is because so many Westerners have come to Buddhism in order to escape from a theistically oriented religion; whatever the reason, out of the millions of Westerners who now find themselves attracted to the Buddhadharma, few are familiar with the Buddhist path of Other-power, a path which finds its clearest expression in the Jodo Shinshu Buddhism of Japan.

Thankfully the folks at Shambhala Publications have decided to fill this gap in knowledge by updating and republishing a classic work by D.T. Suzuki, perhaps most well known in the West for his work on the Zen traditions of Japanese Buddhism. The result is this short, clearly written work which attempts to explain the essential teachings of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism (aka Shin Buddhism) in a way that situates them squarely within a more familiar Buddhist worldview.

Suzuki admits up front that his presentation of Shin Buddhism, stripped of what he calls "accretions," will go directly against more traditional interpretations, and so obviously this book is not an exhaustive treatment of its subject. Instead the book sketches the basic premise of Shin Buddhism (i.e., Amida Buddha has vowed that anyone who calls out to him with sincere faith will be reborn in the Pure Land, a stainless realm whence anyone can attain enlightenment) and discusses its essential practice of reciting the nembutsu ("Namu-Amida-Butsu") in the context of standard Buddhist philosophical concepts (e.g., selflessness, emptiness, compassion, etc.).

So for Suzuki, the practice of reciting the nembutsu is not about calling out to a god for salvation, although that is certainly how it first appears. Instead "Namu" symbolizes self-power, "Amida Butsu" Other-power, and the conjunction of the two in the nembutsu is emblematic of the essential nonduality of oneself and the enlightened mind of the Buddha. Likewise, Suzuki explains that we cannot practice the sincerity necessary to call out to Amida because sincerity is the "perfect forgetting of oneself." In other words, what initially seems "too easy" is seen on closer analysis to be nigh impossible. This is why Shinran's modification of existing Pure Land Buddhist doctrines was, and is, so radical; for him, the nembutsu isn't a prayer or mantra to be put into practice (after all, what good would such practice be given our hopeless self-centeredness?) but an expression of gratitude for having already been swept up into the Pure Land through the absolute grace of Amida's compassion. For Shinran, the Pure Land itself is not merely understood as a post-mortem destination but is a radical re-envisioning and sanctification of the present moment. The strict separation between what is self and what is not-self, between what is samsara and what is nirvana, blurs; "When sincerity and insincerity are transcended, then Amida comes into our inner self and identifies himself with this inner self. Or, we can say, this self find itself in Amida. And when we find this self in Amida, we are in the Pure Land" (p. 41).

This is a great introduction to an often-overlooked school of Buddhist thought and practice.

(This review was originally written on October 26, 2007.)

Not as funny as *The Daily Show* nor as clever as *The Onion*

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book)
Jon Stewart


This book was a gift from one of my die-hard Democrat, old school liberal friends. Like many other coffee table books, it sat unread, gathering dust on my shelf. Something finally possessed me to read it, I read it cover to cover, and now here I am, filing my obligatory report. Suffice it to say that while I found the book mildly amusing, it isn't a keeper.

Sadly, the book is not nearly as funny as The Daily Show itself. Maybe I would have liked this book more if I weren't so spoiled on the really clever, witty, and occasionally brilliant writing of the folks at The Onion. Then there was the realization that, other than being progressive and left-leaning, I don't think I fall into the book's target demographic of young hipsters. Regular jokes about "bling," "mochachina," and "mother f*ckers who love their mother f*ckin' tea" just left me cold. As well, the use of profanity seemed gratuitous and, because it wasn't bleeped out and therefore somehow even more scandalous, just not that funny.

That said, there was one truly exceptional piece of writing in the book--on the introductory page to the chapter on the media, the authors tear the Fourth Estate a new one for their constitutional inability to investigate and report on substantive issues whose open discussion is essential to the health of our democratic republic. Of course, in Monty Python-esque fasion, the next page featured a new, more "acceptable" introduction to the chapter on the media. I got a big kick out of that, in an "oh my god what is happening to my country" sort of way.

As well, the layout of the book, mimicking as it does a public school social studies textbook (down to the stamp inside the front cover for student names), is really well conceived and executed. The sometimes tedious and unfunny text is supplemented by scores of ridiculous timelines, diagrams, textboxes, and quizzes, and it was in these detailed elements that the book redeemed itself. (After all, who doesn't want their own copy of naked Supreme Court justice paper dolls?)

So there you have it: America (The Book Review). There will be a pop quiz on this review next period. Any questions?

(This review was originally written on October 26, 2007.)

Explores some heavy-duty ideas, but gets pretty confusing along the way

Deathhunter
Ian Watson
St. Martins, 1987

Deathhunter is the third Ian Watson that I've read, the first two being The Embedding and Miracle Visitors, and it shares some features with his other works. On the one hand, Watson is a brilliant thinker whose novels are filled to the brim with profound questions about the nature of the self and the nature of reality. On the other, because Watson's novels are about profound topics which don't lend themselves to easy envisioning, they tend to become confusing and murky. In this, Watson seems very much like Philip K. Dick.

This book features a society in which the fear of death has been all but completely uprooted. Violent deaths, murder, warfare, etc. have all disappeared and been replaced with a peaceful system of "good deaths" in which the sick and elderly are brought into Houses of Death and guided to their ultimate fate. Religion, with its insistence on survival of death, has been suppressed, as have those art forms that are rooted in death anxiety (i.e., all quality poetry, film, art, etc.).

At the novel's opening, protagonist and death guide Jim Todhunter arrives by monorail at Egremont, one of the cities in this society. Almost immediately he witnesses the unthinkable assassination of the community's resident saint, Norman Harper, by one of the residents of the local House of Death. Though he is tasked with guiding the assassin to a good death, he instead becomes caught up in the assassin's belief that so-called "good deaths" allow strange, red, bat-like creatures from another dimension to steal the souls.

The novel explores this premise, that different forms of death lead to different sorts of afterlives, as the two main characters explore near-death experiences, astral travel, and attempts to cage death itself. While these explorations themselves are quite fascinating, they lead the novel into ever-widening circles of weirdness where the characters, and reality itself, are not quite what they seem.

(This review was originally written on October 16, 2007.)

Imaginative and creatively written vision of a world without "the West"

The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinson
Spectra, 2003


What would the last 700 or so years have looked like if the Black Death virtually wiped out Europe, instead of "merely" annihilating 30-60% of her population? What if Christianity were suddenly and almost completely removed from the world stage? What if Columbus had not sailed the ocean blue in 1492---would the New World have still been "discovered" and if so, by whom? These are among the questions that Kim Stanley Robinson addresses in this masterfully written work of alternate history.

Robinson uses a couple of interesting writing devices to add a singularly human depth and breadth to his speculative vision. Instead of employing a single linear narrative history spanning three-quarters of a millennium, he uses ten individual yet interconnected books of exploration, conquest, and discovery as the brush strokes with which to paint an overall picture of a world without "the West." The connections between the ten books come in the form of recurring characters whose many names throughout the centuries share the same initial consonants, e.g. "B" and "K." Between the varied stories that comprise the novel these characters find themselves in the bardo--the "space in between"--deliberating on their choices and on the progress of humanity as a whole. The use of these cycles and of recurring personalities in the place of linear history and character development reinforces the absence of the West; the characteristically Asian cyclical nature of time, of history, and of progress provides an appropriate foundation for Robinson's overarching vision.

This is the first Robinson I've read, apart from an anthology that he edited (Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias), and based on how much I enjoyed this I think I'll definitely read more.

(This review was originally written on October 15, 2007.)

Intriguing premise, inoffensive story

Eternity Road
JackMcDevitt
Eos, 1998


Engaging and competently if not masterfully written, Eternity Road envisions a post-collapse North America dotted with the crumbling ruins of a bygone Golden Age, that of the "Roadmakers." McDevitt recounts the exploration of this land by a party of Illyrians (the neo-dark age successors to those who lived in what was once Memphis) in the context of an earlier, failed expedition.

He does a fine job of creating a landscape that is unsettlingly familiar. For example, the citizens of Illyria marvel at the ruins they call the Iron Pyramid, made not of iron but of some strangely permanent material and whose original purpose can't be fathomed. En route to the fabled outpost of Roadmaker civilization, a mythical (?) place called Haven, the travelers encounter other wonders: the Devil's Eye (perhaps the remnants of Fermilab's particle accelerator); an automated maglev train and the sole surviving artificial intelligence in Chicago's Union Station; a submerged Detroit-Windsor tunnel; the natural wonder that is "Nyagra;" reverse engineered technologies like steam engines; and, of course, the ubiquitous roadways which have given their name to the Roadmakers who built them.

While we learn that a plague killed almost everyone in North America (and presumably the world) in 2079 AD, the novel refuses to spell out explicitly just how long before our protagonists' time that plague occurred. Their knowledge of history only goes back 300 or so years, if that, and so we wonder at the age of ruined bridges and skyscrapers along with our heroes. Buried in the chapter on "Nyagra," the author gives us a substantial clue as to how far in the future the story takes place; if, through erosion, the Niagara has traveled approximately three feet upstream every year and the falls have traveled almost a mile in this fashion, then we are looking at roughly the year 3839 AD. That's approximately the same as our distance in time from the fall of Rome.

And so I guess my favorite feature of the story is that our contemporary, 21st century world becomes legend and pre-history to our barely civilized descendants and our commonplace technologies (those which survive anyway) are seen as the magical wonders of gods.

The story was strong until the last few chapters, which seemed hurried and disappointing. I was also unhappy with the conclusion, although perhaps McDevitt wanted his characters to learn to live in their own time and to experience progress on their own terms, instead of rescuing them from their "savagery" with a deus ex 21st century machina.

Definitely worth a read for people who like post-apocalyptic SF, especially since you can get it for a single cent.

(This review was originally posted on October 15, 2007.)

Interesting artwork and factoids, but overall a big "who cares?"

The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill : A Closer Look at the Hidden Magic and Meaning of the Money You Use Every Day
David Ovason
Perennial Currents, 2004


"Fascinating." "Extraordinary." "Dazzling." Breathless adjectives like this, taken directly from the blurb on the back cover, echo the tone of the book itself. While purporting to reveal "the fascinating secret meanings behind the design of the money we use every day," this book instead merely presents a series of more-or-less unconnected factoids about the various images found on the US $1 bill. Having previously read Ovason's The Zelator on the recommendation of a friend, I recognize this rambling and disconnected manner of presentation as something characteristic of the author's ouvre and not merely something particular to this specific book. Sadly, Ovason's writing style wrings all the power and magic out of a fascinating premise and replaces it with a sullen "so what?" I also found annoying Ovason's habit of passing off unsubstantiated assertions as fact, something that he does on a regular basis.

A page-by-page analysis of the book is inappropriate for a book review, but one choice example should suffice to support my criticisms. On page 5 (in his irrelevant factoid on how the word "dollar" originally came from Germany, irrelevant because he fails to connect it with any subsequent factoid) Ovason makes the claim that only those who knew that the dollar sign had been derived from a crucifix (one of the many points he assumes rather than proves) would get the "half-joke" from Sinclair Lewis' Main Street that the dollar sign "chased the crucifix clean off the map." Really? I would have thought that was a pretty transparent reference to the fact that the "almighty dollar" had supplanted the Christian God in the hearts of America's faithful, a rather mundane theme which is in keeping with the rest of Sinclair Lewis' writing. Far too often, a section heading that includes wiggle words like "may," "possible," "might" is followed by a paragraph from which these qualifiers are absent. One need read only a few pages into the book to see that Ovason's tendency to confuse assertion with fact is clearly evident.

A good book on the symbolism of the dollar bill would definitely be an interesting read for those interested in American history, Freemasonry, and symbolism in general. Sadly this isn't that book.

(This review was originally posted on October 3, 2007.)

A fitting (and welcome) conclusion to a long story

In at the Death (Settling Accounts, book 4)
Harry Turtledove
Del Rey, 2007


I've said it before and I'll say it again--if you've read the rest of the series, then what I have to say probably won't influence you one way or another. As well, it is likely that anything I reveal here won't be a real spoiler. It should come as little surprise that Turtledove's wrap-up involves the deployment of this world's first atomic weapons (a total of nine times worldwide!), the trials and hangings of those responsible for Confederate atrocities, the assassination of CSA President Jake Featherston, the utter collapse of the Confederate States of America, and the permanent occupation/reconquest of these territories by the USA.

What did surprise me is that Turtledove's warring nations unveil their atomic weapons less than halfway into the book. I was expecting that something so paradigm shifting as the birth of the nuclear age would come later in the novel and be used for greater dramatic effect. As it is Turtledove's treatment is much more subtle; after the absolute obliteration of Petrograd ("One bomb. Off the map. G-O-N-E. Gone. No more Petrograd. Gone."), the use of uranium and plutonium/jovium bombs by the different warring nations begin to influence how the POV characters see the world and their places in it. The atomic age begins with a bang and a whimper, as it were. Similarly the assassination of Featherston takes place with little fanfare, as if to suggest that his fall from power was as total as his rise. The novel itself spends much of its second half dealing with the aftermath of the war and the consequences for those in both nations occupying the heart of North America. Although its conclusion leaves the door open for further sequels, I hope that Turtledove is through with this series---frankly, I don't think I can handle further installments. Instead, I hope that the ambiguities and uncertainties the reader faces at the end of this novel are simply indicative of how history is itself constantly in the making, never thoroughly resolved.

Turtledove (or the writing team by that name, if you subscribe to certain authorial conspiracy theories) also seems to have taken fan criticisms to heart with this concluding installment. He avoids overindulging in threadbare comments on the quality of US tobacco and how readily Sam Carsten's skin burns in even the slightest sunshine, for example. This, like its predecessor The Grapple, had better pacing and was far more engaging than many which came before it, making for a fitting conclusion to an interesting, if overlong, vision of an alternate North America.

(This review was originally written on September 21, 2007.)