Stranger in a Strange Land (a book review post)

I feel like I'm a little late to the Heinlein game.
Which is silly.
But, for someone who grew up reading all the sci-fi/fantasy he could get his hands on, it makes me feel like I'm late.
What makes it silly, though, is that even if I'd read this when I was a teenager, I would have been reading it decades after it was originally published. Can you really be late to the game with fiction? Unless you're trying to be in on the cultural zeitgeist game, but that's a totally different thing.

At any rate, I'm not sure reading this when I was younger would have necessarily been a good idea. I was a pretty hard-line Fosterite all the way through my 20s. Oh, wait, I mean Southern Baptist. Not that Fosterite equals Southern Baptist specifically, but it certainly equates to any of the Evangelical denominations. Probably all the Protestant denominations. There's every chance I would have dismissed the book as blasphemous and been done with it.

Or, maybe, it would have helped to yank the stick out of my ass.
I guess we'll never know.
"Waiting is...," as Mike would say it, and I think I've read it at a fairly appropriate time in my life.

What I want to say about Stranger in a Strange Land is that it's barely science fiction, but that's not really true. To paraphrase Mary Doria Russell's response when her book, The Sparrow, was referred to as not really being sci-fi, "It has spaceships and aliens!" And so Stranger does have spaceships and aliens. But the sci-fi wrapper is to cover the philosophy underneath. Which is, actually, totally okay. Asimov said something about sci-fi being the perfect genre in which to write about anything.

Or, in this case, everything. Almost everything. It's a philosophy of... the world. A view of how things could be if we could just... get along? Love each other? His name is Valentine, after all. I don't want to be spoilery and say what kind of figure Michael Valentine Smith is, so I'll say, instead, that the first thing I thought of, the other first thing I thought of, was Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy Budd and Smith are very similar figures, at least in my vague memory of Billy Budd, which I haven't read in decades. Since most of you probably haven't even heard of Billy Budd, I'm not really spoiling anything, right?

But did I like it? I'm sure that's the question you're all dying to know the answer to, probably in some very human rushed sort of way, wanting me to get on with it. But that's not very Martian, you grok?

Yes, it's a very interesting and engrossing book.You can tell by how quickly this review is following after my last review. [And shut up to you people who are pointing out that it's been a full month since my last review! For me, especially recently, I flew through this book!] It's good. In fact, it's very good. I especially enjoyed the character of Jubal Harshaw; I suspect he's a personification of Heinlein himself, though I don't really know anything about Heinlein so that supposition could be completely baseless.

That said, the book does have a few issues, the first one being the way the lead female character is referred to by the male characters early in the book. They pretty regularly call her "little girl" or "baby girl," something which made me extremely uncomfortable. And, like I said, I'm completely unfamiliar with Heinlein, this being the first book I've read by him, so I don't know if this is a Heinlein issue or not. Or it could have been purposeful and for effect since the main male characters quit that behavior as they... well, as they become more evolved due to their experience with Smith. So is it an issue? I don't know, but I bet he wouldn't write it that way if he were writing it today.
Or would he..."

The real issue I have with the book, though minor, is a story issue. And this is what you could call mildly spoilery, so you've been warned.

Mike grew up on Mars. On Mars, dead Martians hang around after they're dead and, really, control everything. They're the Old Ones and are considered all-wise. But, when your soul gets to hang around for... forever... I guess it gives you a different view on things. If you got to hang around after you died, wouldn't you want tell people what to do?

At some point early in the book, we get a snippet from the perspective of the Old Ones. Which was fine. That's part of the sci-fi. Martians aren't the same as humans. The issue is that Mike spends a good portion of the book wondering about the human "Old Ones" and how to get to talk to them, which is also fine... right up until we hit a point where Heinlein gives us some point-of-view from a dead human. That part just didn't work for me.

Heinlein spends a fair amount of time discussing, through Jubal, how it is that we can't actually know the truth about religion, especially in a world where everyone insists that they know the one and only truth. That he later breaks that wall by giving us a view of what happens after death, at least from his perspective, undermines his point about that sort of truth being relative. Fortunately, there's not a lot of that in the book, because that would have had the potential of ruining the story.

All of that to say, if you're a sci-fi fan and pretty flexible minded, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're not a sci-fi fan but, still, pretty flexible minded, i.e., you enjoy hypothesizing about the state of the world, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're ultra-religious or think you have everything figured out, unless you have happened to figure everything out in the same manner as Jubal, you're going to want to throw the book against the wall and burn it. Or, maybe, it will help you get the stick out of your ass.

A Sad Thing

Let's talk philosophy.

But only a little and only bouncing a bit on the surface.

Throughout most of human history, we have operated under this idea of "might makes right." We can talk about the concept from a number of angles, but they all come down to the ability of a person or group to silence his/their opponent(s). Often by death: combat, war, whatever. The stronger person/group then gets to set the rules, the "right."

Frequently, we (as a race) have used "God" as our justification. "I won because God was with me; therefore, I must be right." "God" wouldn't side with a loser, right?

Only, through the lens of history, something previous eras have not had to the extent we have today, we can see that that is, in fact, not true. Or, actually, we can see that "God" certainly wasn't on the side of the winners since they were clearly in the wrong (unless "God" is an immoral capricious bastard). These things we can see even today as the bully beats up the kid in the bathroom and stuffs his face in a toilet. He doesn't have any god on his side; he's just stronger and can, therefore, enforce his injustices on those weaker than himself. Or a group (the Republicans) can make it inordinately difficult for another group (African Americans/minorities) to vote thereby throwing an election in their favor.

And since this is a blog post, I'm not going to run through all of the historical examples of this faulty logic. Might doesn't make you right, but it might just make you an asshole.

As an aside, "might" is the root of racism.
But I digress...

Of course, in our "modern American society," we tend to frown on violence being used as a way to assert might (which is not necessarily so in other parts of the world). Instead, in the US, we tend to use wealth and, well, shouting. Shouting the loudest is our current iteration of beating someone up or challenging someone to a duel. It's this "yelling the loudest" thing I want to focus on.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this "off the cuff" from personal observations and what I already know about psychology (which is a lot considering I have a degree in it). I'm not citing sources, so, if you don't trust what I'm saying, do your own research. (Which is probably a good thing, all things considered.)

One thing that is known about people is that they tend to follow a show of force, which is why bullies tend to gather followers and why gangs attract people. There are too many reasons why to get into that, right now, but you can probably accept that as true. Another thing that is known is that what is true/factual is not of great importance to most people. People want more to follow someone who can "prove" they are right rather than working out what is right on their own. People, unfortunately, don't want to do that much thinking for themselves and most people are perfectly fine with being told what and how to think. Not that they even realize that that is what they are doing.
[The proliferation of fake news, right now, is a good example of people being willing to believe whatever is put in front of them and also an example of the type of people susceptible to it (those on the Right have been shown to be MUCH more susceptible to believing fabricated stories than those on the Left).]

What this comes down to is the person who can yell the loudest being declared the victor even if, maybe especially if, what the person is yelling is false. From experience, people with facts tend to be quieter people. They tend to be the thinkers. And they tend to erroneously believe "the facts will speak for themselves." The facts almost always speak too late or, rather, are listened to too late. Your opinion is only as strong as my fact until your opinion actually runs up against my fact and is crushed by it.

In fact, I think wrong people tend to yell all the more loudly because they know they know they have no facts or truth but want to assert themselves anyway. Having grown up in a household with a father exactly like this (to the point of yelling at me about text books being wrong because he was right because he said so godamnit!), I'm pretty good at recognizing this behavior, and Trump is exactly the same kind of personality.

So, yeah, thanks climate deniers. In four years when the climate is destroyed by Trump and his cronies, you'll know just exactly how strong your opinion was.

The one thing this election proved is that Trump is a blowhard. He relied upon bellowing loudly that he was right without ever having any facts to prove it and, the sad thing is, people swarmed to him. Yes, he proved that he has "might," that he can yell loudly. That he could yell more loudly than Clinton who mostly relied upon statistics and facts and experience, all concrete things that she believed would speak for her.

At this point, you might be saying, "But Clinton won the popular vote," which is true, she did, but she didn't win the EC because Trump cowed so many people into not voting by yelling so loudly about what a horrible person Clinton is. When half of the country doesn't bother to even make a showing, something is horribly wrong.

You know, we like to think we are all enlightened these days. That we are smarter than people of the past. But that is demonstrably not the case. Our technology and progress are not due to "people" but to select individuals who have been building on facts and truths over a long period of time. Quiet people. Thinkers. People who were, in their own times, frequently drowned out by people shouting over them.

"People" are a sad thing. Lemmings. Because Trump is certainly going to lead everyone off the edge of a cliff and, well, most people are not just going to follow willingly but delightfully. The problem is that the people who don't want to follow, people who see Trump for what he is, a bloated sack of flatulence, are going to get dragged off of the edge of the cliff, too. And, well, because it's America, we could actually drag the whole world with us.

[Yes, I know a lot of you are rolling your eyes, right now, and think I'm being "a bit extreme," but I will have another post soon on why this is not extreme but, actually, a clear and present danger.]

Clone Wars -- "Plan of Dissent" (Ep. 4.9)

-- The wise man leads; the strong man follows.

[Remember, you can sign up to join the Clone Wars Project at any time by clicking this link.]

Can the clones continue to unquestioningly follow orders from General Krell? Okay, well, it was never unquestioningly, but can they continue to follow orders when they know those orders will almost certainly lead to their deaths. Lead to their deaths without accomplishing anything. As of this episode, the answer appears to be "no," at least for some of them.

The conflict around General Krell and whether to obey his orders immediately and without thought or not continues to drive a wedge into Anakin's regiment. Which may not matter considering Krell seems to be doing his best to maker sure that Anakin has no regiment to return to.

There are the soldiers like Dogma (great symbolic name) who just want to do as they're told no matter what the consequences. Don't question, just obey.

There are soldiers like Fives who want to know the reasons and want to believe they can trust their commanders to do what's right by them. Fives, where Krell is concerned, is on the side of disobedience.

Which leaves the ones stuck in the middle. Those like Hardcase (and maybe only Hardcase) who don't believe in Krell but also don't mind following his orders if it means more fighting.
And those like Rex...

Rex believes in his mind that Fives is correct and that Krell is throwing them away carelessly, but he, in his heart, believes in the system and can't bring himself to go against it. He has decided that if Krell is doing what he's doing then there must be a reason, some reason ha can't understand, so he will follow the orders even if it's the death of him.

This is a great arc so far. Lots of great philosophical issues evenly meshed with a lot of great action. It's even an arc you can watch without needing a lot of backstory, so it's a good place to step into the series.

"Hardcase! What are you doing?"

"If I knew, I wouldn't be doing it."

Clone Wars -- "Heroes on Both Sides" (Ep. 3.10)

-- Fear is a great motivator.

[Remember, you can sign up to join the Clone Wars Project at any time by clicking this link.]

Everyone remembers the financial crisis, right? And everyone remembers that the thing that enabled the financial crisis to happen was the deregulation of the banks, right? Well, this episode deals with deregulating the banks of the Republic in an effort to drive the war machine even farther. Basically, the Republic needs more money for more clones, but it's the corporations who are making money off of the war who are pushing for the deregulation. After all, it's all about the profits.

With that as the backdrop, we get our first real look at the people fighting on the side of the Separatists. Not the droids, the people, a point the episode highlights as Ahsoka meets the son of a man who was killed during a Republic attack. Before the war, the  boy had believed the Jedi were good; now, he's not so sure. After all, they were the leaders of the attack that lead to his father's death and, of course, the Separatist rhetoric is that the Jedi serve at the will of the corporations and are therefore as evil as the corporations.

What we really get to see, though, is how it's the same bad guys driving both sides of the conflict. The Trade Federation and the banking clans might be a part of the Republic Senate, but they take their orders from Count Dooku. And, of course, then there's Palpatine, the man pulling all of the strings.

In the end, the people fighting on both sides of the conflict, the normal people and the Jedi, are all good guys. They are all people who could have sat down and worked things out in a rational manner. They could have if, you know, there weren't other people who were making money off of the fighting.

The episode isn't quite all philosophy and politics, though that is what it mostly is. For a look behind the curtains, so to speak, this is definitely an episode worth watching.


"In this case, our business is violence."

Assholes (A Theory) (a book review post)

Assholes, by Aaron James, is a difficult book to walk past and not pick up. With a title like that, it's hard to resist. And I'm sure that it's the title that has made the book a New York Times bestseller. Probably bought as gifts, because, when you see a book called Assholes, you're bound to immediately think of someone who ought to have that book no matter what the book is ultimately about. For me, that person was myself. I mean, here was a book that promised to tell me where assholes come from and what to do about them. I didn't even try to resist.

Perhaps, I should have, though. But, ultimately, it's a different experience standing in the book store with the book in your hand than it is looking up the book online and being able to see what other people are saying about it. I probably would have bought the book anyway just to see for myself, but I would have gone into it expecting more of what it was rather than what I hoped it would be.

See, James is a philosophy professor and, as such, the book is presented more as a research paper than as a book. Or, maybe, like a sermon. It very much follows the practice of (1) I am going to tell you what I'm going to talk about. (2) I am going to talk about what I am going to talk about. (3) I am going to tell you what I just talked about. It makes the book annoyingly repetitive at times.

But that's not to say the book isn't without its charms. It does, for instance, give us a workable definition of what an asshole is:

In interpersonal or cooperative relations, the asshole:

1. allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;
2. does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and
3. is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.

I think that's a pretty good definition.

From there, he goes into examples of different types of assholes. The only problem is that he's a bit choosy about the examples and fails to actually provide a general description of the sub-types, leaving it to become "an asshole politician is an asshole who is a politician" or "an asshole driver is an asshole who drives a car." Except he gets even more vague about it by saying things like "sometimes, a person is an asshole only when they are driving [or at work or at home or wherever]," or "sometimes an asshole politician isn't really an asshole himself, he is just taking asshole advice from some other asshole politician [as in the case of Bush from Cheney]." He gets so involved in the philosophy behind assholism that he fails to provide any practical "advice" for identifying assholes definitively.

Also, one of the main purposes of the book is stated to be "asshole management" or how to deal with the assholes in your life. Asshole management boils down to a cost-benefit analysis, because dealing with an asshole is never easy. You therefore have to always weigh the cost of taking a stand against an asshole against the benefit you will get from it. And, then, there is no particular strategy or set of strategies, anyway. He leaves it very "every situation is different," which is true, but, then, don't state that you're going to provide keys to asshole management if you're not actually going to do that.

There are some very interesting portions of the book, like the chapter about asshole capitalism, but I'm not sure I can say that the book is worth reading just for those sections. I also don't think there's any good way to know which sections any given individual ought to read. Personally, the thing I found most interesting about the book was how it came to be in the first place, which had to do with dealing with asshole surfers. Unfortunately, then, the asshole surfer thing serves as no more than a brief illustration about the larger asshole picture.

I suppose, in the end, I would say that the book is worth the read as a curiosity piece. Don't expect to get any actual, practical information out of it beyond the asshole definition, which is something you probably already knew, anyway, but had failed to ever put into words. Mostly, the book serves as a political soapbox from which James can call "asshole" at selected politicians and discuss how assholes caused the financial crisis (and cause most of them). I don't really have a problem with that in a general sense; those guys need more people to point the "asshole finger" at them. However, don't try to disguise that as a guide to identifying and dealing with assholes in regular life if what you really want to do is make a political statement. But, then, James is a philosopher so, maybe, that's all the same to him.

[Also, in posting this review to Amazon, I find it both supremely annoying and amusing that I will have to edit out every usage of the word "asshole" despite the fact that the book is named Assholes.]

An Acceptable Time (a book review post)

Imagine for just a moment that you're the parent of a teenage girl, a very smart teenage girl who is not getting the kind of education she needs at her high school. You decide to send your daughter off to spend some time studying with your parents who happen to be genius scientists. Now... Imagine a boy, a boy you don't know from Adam, shows up at your house wanting to see your daughter. A boy, a college boy, mind you, who says he has just driven from one coast to the other for the sole purpose of seeing your daughter. Your teenage daughter who is in high school. How do you respond?

Let me tell you how you don't respond. You don't tell the boy where your daughter is and give him directions to get there without consulting your parents or your daughter. You do not NOT check to see if your daughter even knows this boy. You do not assume the boy is telling the truth that he met her when she was on a school trip to Greece as she was passing through Athens on the way to her actual destination. And, actually, we don't even know if the boy, Zachary Gray, told Polly's parents any of that. All we know is that he showed up at her grandparents' house without any kind of verification or warning that he was coming after being sent ahead by Polly's parents.

Now, imagine for just a moment that you have a teenage granddaughter who is staying with you. A boy shows up at your house who says he was sent there by your daughter and that he knows your granddaughter and would like to see her. Do you tell him where in the woods she is likely to end up from the walk she is on and send him out to wait for her? Do you not call your daughter to verify this boy's story? Of course, if you were to call your daughter (although you would find that, yes, she did send him there) you would find she has no idea from Adam who he is.

I have an almost teenage daughter and this whole scenario in An Acceptable Time deeply disturbed me. That no one bothered to verify with Polly that she knew this boy was completely insane. I don't know; maybe there are people out there who are that naive (other than L'Engle, I mean), but I've never known any of them. It was not a circumstance I could accept as even being remotely realistic, so the book plunged off the Cliff of Belief and Acceptance almost before the first chapter even got going. Then, it got bashed around on the rocks down below as I made my way through the book, before finally drowning and sinking to bottom of the Sea of Disbelief.

So Polly has this time slippage event where she's out on a walk and ends up a few thousand years in the past. She's only there for a few pages in the book before she ends up back in her own time. She tells her grandparents about it which results in more than half of the book dealing with conversations over food about how they don't believe that it happened. This might be okay except that her grandfather has been to other planets and experienced time travel. There is no rational, acceptable reason for her grandparents to spend so long clinging to the belief that she imagined it and that if they just pretend nothing happened then nothing else will happen. And they spend 200 pages doing that. The same conversation over and over about how they don't believe it.

Still, that's not even the most annoying thing about the book. Evidently, for all of L'Engle's "science" in this series, she was one of those people who believe that the Earth is only 5000 years old. Polly (supposedly) has gone 3000 years into the past, and she keeps noticing how young the mountains look. How tall and jagged and un-eroded, because in her own time those mountains have been worn down (by just the wind and rain, mind you) into hills. Maybe L'Engle missed that part of geology where you learn that that kind of erosion takes hundreds of millions of years... well, to actually get down to the point where a mountain has been eroded from a mountain to something that is just a hill would probably take billions of years at least. And L'Engle mentions the ice age and talks a lot about glacial rocks, but it's really unclear when this age she talks about is supposed to have happened.

Basically, L'Engle mixes in just enough science talk to fool kids into believe her books know something about science but, at best, her mumbo jumbo is pseudoscience and, at worst, it's all a part of her "all you need is love" philosophy, which, again, is what saves the day at the end of this book. Not anything the protagonist does because, mostly, what she does is hangs out waiting to be sacrificed and hoping someone will save her. In fact, the only action Polly takes to get herself out of the mess she is in, she undoes. On purpose! And, then, goes back to waiting to be rescued.

And I haven't even talked about the part when the young man she's infatuated with says right in front of her that he intends to sacrifice her so that the Mother will send rain and, instead of being freaked out and trying to get away from him, she starts trying to convince herself that he would really never do that. I'm sorry, but that's messed up and a horrible message to send to young girls.

My final analysis is that this series is, well, horrible. I would never recommend them to anyone and am sorry that I ever did. I'm glad that I re-read Wrinkle and went on to read the rest just so that I will no longer recommend anything by L'Engle to any of my students. And, while I can understand a liking for Wrinkle, I honestly don't understand how anyone can like Many Waters or An Acceptable Time. I can barely make allowances for A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet and that's only because she uses the same characters as from Wrinkle and there's a flying horse.