The Inevitable

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
© 2016 Kevin Kelly
336 pages

No one can say where exactly a ball thrown in the air will land,  but at least on Earth it’s a certainty that a thrown ball will land.   Kevin Kelly,  formerly of Wired magazine, can’t  say exactly what the future will look like, but he is confident enough to predict what trends will continue based on present technology.   Our global civilizations have been radically transformed from the 1970s til now, but computers weren’t the catalyst for all the change we see around us. Networked computers were. By themselves,  the first computers were house-sized calculators and overpriced filing cabinets;  when they began exchanging information freely, magic happened.   What world-changing wonders can we expect from the current trends in technology?

First, says Kelly, is “becoming”:    In the late eighties, Zygmunt Bauman introduced the term liquid modernity to our sociological lexicon.  In previous generations, changes happened slowly enough that our societies were able to digest them and establish a new normal.   As the 19th gave way to the 20th century, however, the rate of change has quickened to the point that a new normal is impossible: societiy is revolutionized multiple times within a single generation, with the effect that there is no stable ground to be had, no new normal to be reached. Now our products are no longer discrete products, but services that are continually being changed -- think of Office 365, or even Windows 10. Windows 10 is rumored to be the last Windows, not because Microsoft is retiring from the OS business, but because Windows 10's frequent updates constantly add  new features that would have otherwise been developed and delivered in a new Windows.  Our phones, too, are not merely the device that came out of the original box: as we add apps and accessories, we change their nature.

The second big-ticket item in here is "cognifying", by which Kelly means using machine intelligence for everything. There won't be a master AI that controls every aspect of our lives, he says;  instead,  we''ll develop multiple machine intelligences for different suites of needs, and they''ll be utterly mundane -- and already are. When we execute a google search for recipes or ask it for directions, we are in fact helping train and  benefit Google's machine-learning algorithisms: we are teaching them what we're most likely to be looking for.  Those "Related Products" that Amazon helpfully shows you are also an early example of machine intelligence, as Amazon's database learns your shopping preferences and attempts to predict what you would like next.

Two more concepts from the book worth sharing quickly here are Accessing and Tracking. Tracking sounds obvious, but Kelley isn't just talking about website cookies or Google & Apple recording your movements through your phone's  GPS. By tracking, Kelly means that the door is open to quantifying every aspect of our lives.   People can already use their phone's apps to track how much they walk per day, how well they asleep, and record their diets;  they can already use phones to monitor their heartbeat;   phones in the near future will be able to monitor blood pressure and blood sugar, as well.  Cheap cameras and cloud storage mean that we can record more moments of our lives,  and later poke through them at our leisure as if they were files in a drawer.  The cloud is a key aspect of much of what Kelly covers, but it is especially prominent in the "Accessing" chapter, in which he writes that we're moving away from an ownership society. We no longer need to own a car;  we just need access to one. Apps and tech allow us to share resources,  and in some cases the resources are becoming so cheap that they can be offered for free: no one needs to  struggle with an ersatz Office clone when they can use the freely available OfficeOnline.

There are ten real concepts in total (there are two more chapters, "questioning" and "becoming", but they're less about content than thinking about our relationship with content), and the author purposely avoids mentioning any downsides. He takes it for granted that everything can be used to malicious purposes, but that would be another book entirely. (A book like Future Crimes II, perhaps...) I also liked the chapters on Interacting and Screening; one addressed the future mundane role of virtual reality and augmented reality,  in that games and movies will become more "real", and our travels in the real world will have a digital overlay adding more information -- the ubiquity of screens dovetails with that rather nicely. One disturbing possibility Kelly mentions is having glasses or ocular implants with different apps installed; one can read people's faces and match them to a driver's license database.   The other concepts in the book are extensions of minor things happening now, like remixing and filtering.

As someone who can be both entranced and repelled by the promises of technological -- completely fascinated on a abstract level,  distantly horrified at a human level --  I found The Inevitable enthralling reading.  The author is sloppy with language, however, using "socialism" and "collective" when 'cooperative' would have been more accurate. For some reason he thinks libertarian individualism is contradicted by Wikipedia , when it's merely individuals voluntarily working together toward a common goal.  Socialism makes me think more of involuntary mass actions, like taxes and slavery.

Short rounds: of cybercities and medicinal ectasy

Recently I've read a couple of books that I wasn't particularly impressed with, but  they weren't stinkers enough to merit one of those rare-but-fun-to-write negative reviews.  They're in that "I can manage a paragraph of mixed interest and disappointment" grey zone.

 

 This had some interesting topics, from growing kidneys to developing Geordi's VISOR from Star Trek, but I was not impressed at all with the author's grounding as a science journalist. Trust and regard sailed out the window when he hailed the average increase of height and bodymass following industrialism as proof that humans can evolve much more quickly than previously expected. Um...no, that's proof that our present geneset can do more when it has better materials to work with, i.e more access to different kinds of food, and less work to do fighting off vicious diseases. Have the South Koreans evolved past their primitive ancestors in the north, or are their shorter northern cousins just malnourished? Kotler also referred to a cure for cancer as a vaccine. Cancer isn't a microbe you fight off with antibodies! Sure, maybe he was dumbing things down to increase potential leadership, but forgive me if I don't take the chapter on medicinal ecstasy too seriously after that.. (In the last part of the book, he explores ecstasy and LSD's potential in helping people deal with end-life terror, as well as PSTD. Steroids are also billed as an anti-aging  superweapon, but by that point I wasn't really taking the author too seriously.

This is not on the level of Michio Kaku. It's more like Newsweek fluff pieces.

Next up, Smart Cities! Ooh, cities meets the digital world, two of my favorite topics. This should be outstanding! ...well....not quite.  The cover is lively, sure,  but the book is more conceptual than practical  in that the author spends most of his time talking about the city as a living machine in abstract, or weighing top-down city government approaches against apps created by ordinary people.    I wanted to read about different ways smart cities were happening, but they're only mentioned from time to time as examples of the more elevated debate.  I think I learned more about a smart transit system from Straphangers, in its chapters on Paris' metro card, then I did here.  Sure. there are mentions of apps for citizens to report problems, and mentions of how other apps can bring the city more to life by leading users to bars and places they've never heard of, but these are only teases.  I bought this book last year, started reading it, quickly lost interested, and mounted another assault this week only to find it wasn't really a hill worth that much worry.  

Ah, well.   They can't all be life-changing books. 

Springing forward

At the library I've put out the gardening books, which means it's officially springtime! ...at least, in central Alabama.  I'm still not certain we're past the threat of a sudden frost, but I am looking forward to my annual spring planting, of vegetables that do OK and of flowers that fail completely. (Every year I plant flowers and get green sprouts, but no actual flowers.  Sure, I could buy flowers and plant them, but the joy is watching them grow and..er, flower, not just admiring them after they've done it already.)

Recently I requested a science book on NetGalleys and was promptly sent...a third of it.  The third comes from Soonish:  Ten Emerging Technologies that'll Improve or Ruin Everything,  a bit of futurism/science fusion. The authors are the creators of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and their artwork is part of the text.   The part accessible via NetGalley only covered the falling costs of space travel, the feasibility of space elevators, and the potential if any in mining asteroids. Although the text itself was a nice mix of information and amusing commentary,  I wasn't particularly interested in this section of the book. I wanted to read about 3D printing and advances in medicine, and I got cannons that shot things into space.  It was perfectly entertaining, to the degree that I was interested in such things.  Perhaps one day the full book will be cheap enough for my miserly self to buy it.  Until then I have The Inevitable and Tomorrowland,   one of which should address those subjects.

The Silent Intelligence

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things
© 2013 Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski
166 pages

A couple of years ago I created a Digital World label in recognition of the fact that the Internet was no longer a discrete service that one could engage in or detach from - -that it had become instead part of the infrastructure of everyday life.  The Silent Intelligence is a technological/business briefing that expands on that,  documenting  “Machine to Machine” networking  that will allow the tools and infrastructure we use to coordinate with one another automatically – so that the lights in our house, for instance, can be informed by an app tracking our phone that we pulling in the driveway.    This is rapidly aging news now, of course,  given that there are now competing systems for managing home electronics.   After explaining the technological breakthroughs that are making this trend possible, the authors then examine challenges facing the field, and discuss possible areas where it might find the most immediate use, like hospitals and homes.  Imagine if a nurse in a large hospital,  in search of a piece of needed equipment could consult an app on her phone, which would direct her to the closest available piece.   In this  this case each instance of the equipment would be tagged,  almost like Zipcars are now.  Some of the predictions have already come to pass, like Redbox movie rental kiosks that can monitor their inventory and report when they need to be serviced,  and there’s no shortage for opportunities here.   The Patient Will See You Now expanded on this kind of technology in the medical field.    Last year I acquired another book (Smart Cities) whose premise was also introduced here - -the idea that cities would become more “alive” than ever, as  apps and infrastructure talked to each other and allowed for real-time monitoring of pollution, traffic, etc.    Technologically, the 21st century will be a very exciting place to live

The Silent Intelligence is not leisure reading unless someone likes to read about the nuts and bolts of an emerging industry’s technical problems, but it’s one of the first books about the “internet of things” I was able to find. I’m sure more will follow as the built environment is reprogrammed along these lines.

Resistance is futile. Your home will be adapted to serve the Internet of Things. 

Future Crimes

Future Crimes; Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
Paperback subtitle: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World 
© 2015 Marc Goodman
608 pages

"It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."  (Q, ST TNG)

 The future is arriving more quickly than we think,  the world being re-formed beneath our feet. Ten years ago, the fact that a presidential candidate was glued to his ‘BlackBerry’ was an oddity;  now, smartphones are the very way we interface with our environment.   The transformation of the world from material to digital is total, providing new avenues for the darker instincts of  mankind to exercise themselves alongside entertainment, commerce, and education. Future Crimes is an astonishing review of the myriad of ways that this brave new world is making us not only more productive, but more vulnerable to malicious attack – and offers insight into the dangers we will face tomorrow.  This is a book without  rival.

 Goodman writes as a law enforcement official who specialized in cyber security as computers left warehouses to become basic infrastructure. Now, after decades of experience, he shares extensive research and personal encounters with the reader. He begins by treading familiar ground at first, by reviewing  the state of overwhelming exposure people now live in. As learned in Data and Goliath, virtually everything we do generates data that is collected and evaluated by someone, whether it’s our phone company keeping a history of where our phone travels, apps within the phone transferring our information to marketing agencies, or our interactions with the online world being monitored and recorded, as Google sifts through our email – and our websearches, and our YouTube viewing history, and our web activity on Android and Chrome – ostensibly to sell ‘better ads’.   It's not just Google, of course: facebook is another major data distributor, but practically every website that depends on adspace is complicit.

 Adding to this, however, is the threat of outside attack: criminal elements corrupting apps or creating their own to collect data for more malicious purposes, like emptying our bank accounts – or entities across the globe, looking for secrets.  The fact that a person is an American or German national won’t stop Chinese companies from having an interest in their personal business if they are involved in technical enterprises of interest.   Blueprints of the US president’s personal aircraft, for instance, were obtained by the Chinese after a defense worker’s laptop was infected with targeted malware.  It’s not just smartphones, either: as computers undergird our very homes, surveillance no longer requires a group of fictional plumbers poking around installing cameras into  ceiling fans.  These days, even the power outlets can have ears.

 Data collection isn’t just a problem for privacy issues: the concentration of so much information invites crime.  When heist extraordinaire Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied simply – that’s where the money is. Why penetrate Target’s databanks? That’s where the information is  --  high-value credit card information.   The exposure isn’t all about profit, either, though the information superhighway has already helped far-distant predators steal and skedaddle. The early hackers practiced their craft for laughs, and so they still do – but the odds at stake are higher than simply wiping out computer drives.   Future Crimes documents one case of a young teenager whose laptop was infected with software that allowed an outside party – a teenager at her school who was not even reasonably clever, but purchased a kit – to  turn on her webcam,  collect photographs of her in states of undress, and then attempt to blackmail and humiliate her. Even after she switched schools,  the photos became the arsenal of bullies there,  their hounding continued after a failed suicide attempt, and eventually ended only when she succeeded in killing herself.  Secure in anonymity, able to meddle in the lives of others from safety, humans are willing and capable to do all matter of wretched things.

The fun will continue as the 21st century develops. Our digital world is in its infancy, a mere golf ball of connectivity compared to the solar-sized scale of tomorrow.  In the years to come,  it is possible that most every object in our home will be connected to an internet of things, and even if paranoiacs and luddites like myself object, regulation and market availability may force some level of IoT integration.  The systems that control our lives – traffic management, electrical grids, financial markets – are managed online, and each of them has already been tampered and manipulated by tech-savvy hoods.  As the world continues to become more automated,  services performed by machines running on software that can be manipulated,  our danger grows.  Military drones have already been touched by malefactors – insurgents can watch a drone’s feed as it approaches, or skew its navigation so that it blows up the wrong neighborhood. (Assuming it had the right neighborhood to begin with...)   Manufacturing robots have already proven themselves lethal,  sometimes mistaking human laborers for parts to be manipulated, and if their software is tampered with, accidents could be effected on purpose.

Future Crimes is a daunting, eye-opening book.   Even after reading other books on cyber-security,  Goodman provides case after case I hadn’t heard of. This is five hundred pages of disturbing reporting and evaluation,   dense and powerful.   Like any security auditor, Goodman doesn’t leave readers shocked but helpless: the last fifth of the book offers some ideas into protecting ourselves.   Part of the problem is that culture has not caught up to technological change yet: as smartphones ease  un-informed adults into the digital world, people unprepared for vigilant defense of their information expose themselves to a burgeoning number of thieves and opportunists.   Not even those who should know better are ready; many of the instances document here come from military or security officials not being fastidious enough, with the result that a virus intended for an Iranian offline network traveled to the International Space Station.   In addition to arguing for regulations that force private enterprises to take more fiscal responsibility for safeguarding the information they collect,  Goodman shares more interesting ideas, like crowdsourcing better digital security systems.

Two things are certain: we’re in for a ride in the next decade, and I won’t find a more eye-opening book this year.  This book delivers reams of eye-opening information. It would make for an interesting exposure of crime merely by itself,  but goes beyond that to brief readers on the multitude of security challenges we face now, and will face tomorrow, threats to our personal, corporate, and national security.  Future Crimes is well worth your time: it, and the world it opens one's eyes to, are incredible.

Related:

• Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier
• The Internet Police, Nate Anderson
• Spam Nation, Brian Krebs
• 10 Don'ts On Your Digital Devices,  Eric Rzesut, Daniel Bachrach
• @ War, Shane Harris

I have a few more titles in this vein that will appear later this year, like Richard Clark's Cyberwar and Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide.  They may succeed, but they won't surpass....

Player Piano

Player Piano
© 1952 Kurt Vonnegut
352 pages

"I'd be in exile now, but everywhere's the same..."

     Not since the roaring twenties was American society so giddily obsessed with newfangled stuff than in the 1950s.  Americans were awash in material prosperity, filling their homes with labor-saving devices -- the future had arrived, buddy-boy, in gleaming chrome and with automatic controls. While some starry-eyed futurists looked forward to a world in which machines took care of all of the dirty work and left humans free to paint, compose, and ponder the mysteries of the cosmos, others saw a darker vision.  Player Piano casts a critical eye against the future machines might create, where mankind lingers in despair not from want of food, but want of purpose.

In this world, the entire economy is automated by massive plants of machinery, one per city, and so extensive is machining that most of the  population is functionally idle. Aside from an infinitesimally small group of people with jobs machines cannot usurp (among them, bartenders and barbers offering a friendly ear), the only truly employed people are the managerial elite, who run the machines and think up new ones.

Vonnegut escapes being predictable in that the misery of his novel is not a luddite view of poor, starving wretches denied wages because machines do their jobs more effectively. Indeed, the standard of living for Americans, from an economic point of view, has never been better. Taxes on capital support most of the population, who can have a world of consumer good before them for pennies. Their homes are filled with miraculous wonders that make our laundry machines and ovens look like Franklin stoves and washboards. Yet for all their material prosperity, the characters throughout the book are deeply miserable. The masses huddle in bars, drinking and talking about the good ol' days, when a man's work was worth something, while management tends to its machines and seeks relief from tedium in petty office politics.  

Main character Dr. Paul Proteus is a late-blooming reactionary; having been accepted by the managerial class, indeed being one of its most promising up-and-comers, he finds no satisfaction in his work and often steals over into the other part of town to sit in a bar, drink, and listen to chatter. Eventually he becomes a key figure in a revolution against the machines, as disgruntled people attempt to seize control of their lives again, to restore dignity and purpose to their work.

Player Piano is one of Vonnegut's earliest works, but for me the most poignant.  There are obvious marks of a writer beginning his craft;  the seams as Vonnegut switches from character to character are rough, and the revolution lacks a lot of dramatic punch.  Vonnegut's essential vision, however, has never been more potent;  there are many elements of the story that seem prophetic, but Vonnegut's predictions are more chilling than those of 1984's or Brave New World's because his world is so ordinary, not nearly as removed from our own as are those two dystopian classics. Player Piano's modernity is Plato's republic, realized in full, with the Machine set as the ultimate ideal form. People are judged by this ideal their entire lives long;  nothing matters except for the economy, and the computer analyzes them and determines their place within the economy, and by extension within society.  They are constiuent parts serving it.  In our own world,  even those applying for a job in fast food must submit to lengthy psychological assesstments of dubious merit, which are graded by no one but a machine, and whost will not even managers can contest.  We are beholden to systems that not even the operators understand fully, and no aspect of life escapes being reduced to the machine's standardized level.

In the end, the revolution of Player Piano is one against anomie and emasculation, an attempt to restore the striving to life. It provokes questions. How close are we to Player Piano's despair? How engaged in our lives are we?  Do we Live, or do we merely exist, producing and consuming -- does the work of our hands makes a difference? It is difficult these days not to be overwhelmed by the machine. We rely on them for entertainment, for sustenance, for validation. But people don't simply want to be administereds, clients of some system;  this race that conquered the world is filled with restless energy that must find some creative outlet, and  our souls contain greatness that cannot be contained by chronic subservience. Man yearns to be free, to act independently, to be the agent of his own prosperity.  It is a yearning ignored in Player Piano, and increasingly overlooked in our own world  of automated cars, canned music, factory food,  and a state that wants to take care of everything.

Ultimately, Player Piano is less a triumph than a tragedy, an ominous suggestion of the world to come.

Related:
The Sea Wolf, Jack London, with a similar theme of man's actualization in striving against the world on his own merits
Technopoly, Neil Postman, whose work was mentioned prior
Average is Over and The Glass Cage, two recent works on automation and social stratification by Tyler Cowan and Nicholas Carr
Compendium of the Social Doctrine, which calls for meaningful work.

Physics of the Future

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
© 2011 Michio Kaku
389 pages

We live in a remarkable time of human history. Since the industrial revolution, society has been radically altered by new innovations on a regular basis, and the rate of those world-changing transformations is ever-increasing, like a snowball growing in size and strength as it barrels down a hill. In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku attempts to identify what changes may come in the 21st century, after interviewing hundreds of scientists from various fields. The result is extraordinarily interesting, covering projected developments in computers, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, and space travel as well as the future of wealth and humanity itself.

Although Kaku's field of theoretical physics doesn't lend itself well to lay understanding, here he writes expressly for a popular audience, inundating the text with references to pop culture. While he does engage in some scientific discussion from time to time to explain the basis of new technologies, the book emphasizes their effect on everyday lives, and his ultimate goal seems to be to wake the public up to the potential of science and the importance of appreciating it. When writing on technology,  that's easy to do -- there's no shortage of new toys that Kaku can tantalize readers with.  Imagine being able to take care of your entire morning routine -- cooking, errands, etc -- with a few orders given to your home computer via a headset while you sit in bed, for instance.

Considering the range of chapters, there seems to be something for everyone here. Being keen on human space flight, for instance, I looked forward to reading about the various ways in which we might further explore the deep black. While I try to stay well-read on that subject, Kaku touched on approaches I'd never heard of --like launching swarms of "nanoships".  Our medical prospects seem exciting and wondrous.  His predictions on the future of computers frankly horrified me, as he envisions increasing immersion inside virtual environments, or rather a day in which there's no real distinction between virtual and 'real' environments. We're already seeing this today, with applications for our gadgets that read the environment and give restaurant reviews for the dining establishments on a given street, but in the future this interaction will rely on contact lenses that project the Internet onto our eyeballs.

Kaku's work is triumphantly optimistic about the way technology will continue to dominate human lives,  which I appreciated given the cynical spirit of our times. However, more thoughtful consideration to the possible consequences of these technologies on our lives might have been in order. His projections point toward a world in which humans are increasingly spectators in their own lives, the subjects of Matrix-like domination by technology.  Considering the health problems our current use on automation has given us, do we really want a future in which that is increased?  There are seven billion people alive today, most of us doing jobs that Kaku sees machines doing in a hundred years. The kind of social disruption  that widespread job losses would cause is unimaginable.  He also takes a curiously light attitude toward energy. It would seem to me that in a world as technologically dominated as his in 2100, the section on energy would be fundamentally important -- the foundation on which every other section is based. Instead, it is treated as lightly as a commercial advertising toys mentions the need for batteries.

Even with these limitations, Physics of the Future recommends itself. It's open to anyone remotely literate and should have surprises in store even for those who consider themselves tolerably well-read in matters of science and technology. I imagine the sharpest criticism would come from those interested in social sciences like myself.

The KunstlerCast

The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler

...the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.

© 2011 Duncan Crary, James Howard Kunstler

300 pages

James Howard Kunstler is a journalist turned social critic and the author of numerous books, most prominently The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. These two books address the seemingly disparate topics of urban planning and the global oil economy, but to Kunstler and like-minded readers, they are troublesomely knit together, intensifying the problems that each causes. For the past three years, Kunstler has talked each week with on these and connected topics with his co-host, Duncan Crary, who has now produced a partial record of their discussions -- a collection which will no doubt please Kunstler's fans, while offering those unfamiliar with his work their first taste of it.

Although his modern work ties to his predictions for the post-oil future, most of Kunstler's nonfiction works fall within the realm of urban criticism. Americans who have never encountered his ire may be staggered by how much of their world he holds in scorn. Just what is it about the modern city and suburban sprawl that he finds so appalling?  In a word, everything. The opening sentence of The Geography of Nowhere, in which Kunstler attempts to summarize why he wrote the book, is a paragraph long.  The growth of American cities and later,  the 'edge' cities that grew out of suburbian sprawl, has centered on the automobile, and the result is the decline of public transit like rail lines in favor of highways -- infrastructure built on the promise of cheap gasoline, and frightfully ugly to behold. Its decentralization destroys the integrity of human communities and is in part responsible for the rising obesity problem in the U.S:  our automobile-fixated culture gives people few opportunities to incorporate activity like walking into their everyday life, for now every trip anywhere demands the car. The results are hideous: compare an eight-line commercial strip lined with box stores,  oceans of pavement, and offensive, neon-colored signs the size of trucks to the charm of what once was, to the tree-lined American Main Street with its cozy stores and pedestrian focus.  The good news, for Kunstler and those who sympathize, is that this horror cannot long remain: it is doomed by its dependency on oil.

The second half of Kunstler's legacy, originating in The Long Emergency and a source of constant chatter among the author and his co-host, is the idea of peak oil and its ramifications. The cancerous growth of urban sprawl has been enabled by the abundance of cheap oil, but that era is drawing to a close. The United States' oil reserves have already dwindled, and soon enough the oil wells of the middle east and Russia will dry, too. The consequences for a global economy built on oil -- oil to run the ships and trucks that connect manufacturing and distribution, oil to process food -- for food is an industrial, not an agricultural product these days -- are dire. Kunstler sees the fabric of globalization partially disintegrating, and local economies reviving. Everything, including the cities, will shrink to a smaller scale -- a human-sized scale. The unviable sprawl will die, and authentic human communities will prosper once more, while bemoaning the amount of resources that were wasted  in the "cheap oil fiesta".

KunstlerCast's conversations tend to focus more on Kunstlers' urban critiques than the peak oil scenario, though the two are connected to the point that the whole of the book flows together well, aside from some small deviations wherein Kunstler takes time to grouch about tattoos. I found these breaks more amusing than anything, and the book as a whole a positive delight, one which prompted me to begin re-reading The Geography of Nowhere.  While Kunstlers' arguments as a whole are more thoroughly presented in the two books previously mentioned, the format of KunstlerCast allows the author and his host to discuss contemporary, related, and specific issues not mentioned in the 1993 book, or only mentioned in passing, like the health consequences of an automobile-centered society or the work of other critics like Jane Jacobs. They also cover ground visited in its lesser-known books, like Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind. I especially enjoyed these sections, as I've not been able to get my hands on these books despite my interest in them. Thus, while covering familiar ground the conversations also introduce new material, making them of interest to Kunstler fans. Newcomers may appreciate a less formal introduction to these issues, especially given how easy it is to "listen" to the banter-filled conversation between these two intelligent and thoughtful men.

Given the present economics of the world, Kunstler's work has never been more relevant, and is now all the more accessible. This is a hit for old fans and the newly interested alike. The KunstlerCast may be found at KunstlerCast.com,  with archives as far back as 2008.

Related:
The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
American Mania: When More Isn't Enough, Peter Whybrow

The Currents of Space

The Currents of Space
© 1952 Isaac Asimov
From Triangle (pp. 1-172). © 1952.

"Frightened people can be very dangerous, my Lady. They can't be counted on to act sensibly."
"Then why do you keep them frightened?"

An entire planet is doomed, and only one man knows enough to care. Pity he's been kidnapped, subjected to a mental probe that cost him his mind, and left in the middle of nowhere to be looked after only by peasants suspicious of the unknown. The farms of Florina aren't quite the middle of nowhere, however: they're the only place in all the galaxy which can produce the miracle fabric 'kyrt',  known for its beauty and versatility, and worn by the elite of the cosmos. Florina's fields have made their conquerors -- the planet of Sark -- immensely rich, and powerful enough to keep Sark free from being annexed by the Trantorian Empire.  But the planet in peril is in fact Florina, and if it goes so does Sark's power -- and the Galaxy belongs to Trantor.  Who attacked this man, and why? What kind of danger could threaten an entire planet? Thus begins a fantastic political mystery and the last novel in the Empire 'trilogy'.

Like The Stars like Dust, Currents of Space is a political-mystery thriller with a futuristic setting. The science fiction elements take a backseat to the puzzle of Rik and Florina's alleged doom and the depiction of Florina and Sark's society.  Their relationship is baldly exploitative: the Florinians generate all of the wealth, but it is stolen by Sark -- and Sark keeps the Florinians impoverished and uneducated, staving off rebellion through means of superior force. If the Florinians could gain outside assistance -- say, from Trantor -- they might be able to break the yoke of their masters.  Given how keenly Trantor would be interested in breaking Sark,  it's a safe assumption they have a part to play in the sinister plots which are afoot. Once the action erupts, the plot advances at breakneck speed over the bodies of anyone who gets in the main characters' way, and it doesn't stop until a revelation in the final pages which surprised me.   I started reading this to take a break from the oddness of Robert Heinlin's The Cat Who Walked through Walls, and it may just be my favorite Empire novel.


I have no idea who this woman is supposed to be, but it convinces me that book covers are an essential part of vintage SF's charm.

The Coming

The Coming
© 2000 Joe Haldeman
217 pages

2054. Earth. The future isn't what it used to be. The seas are rising -- Florida cities are frantically trying to build seawalls for protection -- and the outlook is deteriorating.  The United States is led by a perky but depressingly imbecilic woman named Carlie (who may or may not be able to see Russia from her house),  the eastern hemisphere is increasingly dominated by large, hostile alliances like "The Eastern Bloc", and Germany and France are on the brink of war. And then down in Gainsville Florida,  astronomer Aurora Bell picks up a signal. Confirming its existence with Japan's station on the Moon, she realizes to her shock that it's in English.

"We're coming".  Repeated sixty times.  Something from outside the solar system, using an unbelievable amount of energy, is coming -- and Earth has three months to be prepared. What is it? Aliens? Jesus? The revolt of the urban proletariat?  While the potential for contact with alien lifeforms would seem to take precedence,  it recedes into the background after an initial surge of interest. While the clock ticks down, people live out their lives.  In Gainsville,  a man is being blackmailed by the Mafia, who threaten to make public his homosexuality --  now a crime in the United States. His wife, meanwhile, tries to keep the president from leading the entire world into oblivion. No, Madame President, it may not be the best time to launch supernukes into orbit at a time when France and Germany are blowing up each other's parliaments and playing chicken with their tanks on the border.  As the date of the coming approaches, tension reaches crisis level, and then --

Have you ever witnessed a small child trying to blow bubbles? Clutching a slippery bottle filled with the soapy fluid in one hand, and grasping the plastic bubble-blower in another, she carefully fills a pocket of the solution with air. It grows bigger and bigger, and you know it's going to be a beautiful, big bubble when it escapes, and then -- it pops.

If you haven't, then read this novel and maybe you'll experience that feeling. While the premise fascinated me, my enthusiasm never caught. There was nothing for it to catch on. Haldeman employs an interesting style of writing here: the novel is presented in a relatively seamless succession of viewpoint characters. They're a diverse lot, with varying roles to play in the story. Some don't even play a role in the story, they just exist because, hey -- wouldn't you want to know how pornography is filmed in 2054?  This viewpoint succession threw me off at first, until I realized that the new character was someone already in-scene, and all I had to do was make a slight jump -- switch trains of thought, as it were. The problem, though, is that the trains of thought speed up and slow down at random, and often arrive at the station in rapid succession. At one point there were three jumps in two pages, and one character only had a paragraph, leaving me feeling very disoriented.

It doesn't help that all this jumping has little bearing on the plot, if there is one. While this is advertised as a science fiction novel and bookended by the announcement and arrival of The Coming,  what science there is in here is limited to technology -- three-dimensional television, interactive pornography, and semen-based  drugs. The plot consists of the announcement, people living their lives for three months, and the ending. It's not coherent. It left me wondering, "This is it?"   There are five-star reviews for this book on Amazon, and most of them focus on the characterization and presentation of how the world might look in fifty years. I found the people and predictions to be bleak, though there were a couple of characters who I hoped would make it out all right. While the off-beat ending was unexpected (and a little disappointing), and the writing took some getting used to, the book's central weakness for me is that so much of it is utterly relevant to the presumed plot. This is not about The Coming. This is about people living in 2054.  That may be of interest to you -- it was in part to me -- but don't pick this book up expecting Contact.

The Complete Robot

The Complete Robot
© 1982 Isaac Asimov
688 pages

A boom in electronic engineering followed World War 2, one that led to consumer televisions, the first computers, and a wide variety of other electricity-using gadgets. As people looked more toward the future, they conceived of mechanical men: these robots often ran amok in the style of Frankenstein's monster. Isaac Asimov thought this silly: robots were tools explicitly designed by intelligent people. It made no sense for them to run amok. He subsequently developed in full the Three Laws of Robotics, and later wrote a host of stories and novels based on them.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov used his stories to explore how humans might use robots to better the human condition, but he also explored questions of intelligence, creativity, sentience, and prejudice. He coined the phrase robotics and his body of work subsequently left various marks on our culture: the android Lieutenant Commander Data of Star Trek possesses one of Asimov's "positronic brains", for instance. The Complete Robot collects just over thirty of his short stories in this theme, written throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Because other robot stories and essays followed it, its name has not remained accurate: still, the book constitutes the sizable bulk of his robot short fiction, including the Susan Calvin stories and classics like "Robbie".

The stories vary slightly in setting, but cover the latter half of the 20th century and human history throughout the 21st, until the dawn of hyperdrives that allow for interstellar travel. Most of the stories share a same canon: at some point in the late 20th or early 21st century,  the many political entities on Earth unite under a weak confederation. Essential parts of the economic (agriculture, for instance) are planned, and crucial to the planning are large computers. These globe-monitoring computing machines in the style of UNIVAC may be subsidiaries to Multivac -- a massive supercomputer at least the size of a building. Several stories here concern Multivac, the machine that bears all the cares of humanity upon its transistor- and vacuum-tube employing shoulders.

Robots in the style of Commander Data come later: while designed to emulate human beings in essential form and size, they exist chiefly for industrial work or for the amusement of wealthy individuals. The people of Earth later react against the employment of robots in this way, relegating them to maintaining space posts in a dozen or so of the stories here. Three stories follow Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell, two quality-assurance technicians in the employ of US Robots and Mechanical Men, as they observe the latest robot models at work, "manning" the stations that beam intense sunlight to Earth, powering its electric grid. Later on, robots nearly vanish from Earth history altogether: in the Empire age, only humans who have left Earth to colonize other worlds use robots. Little of the Empire age is seen here, though -- only its prelude in a short story about detectives Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the latter being what we call today an android.

Asimov's stories are as ever simple and charming. They bear the mark of the fifties and sixties, not only in their portrayal of marriage (husband goes to work, wife keeps house), but in the way they grapple with the future. Some predictions seem banal by modern standards, others still far off and bordering on fantastic -- but the optimism and hope are undeniable. Asimov is refreshing and endearing, and the retro-feel has its own appeal to me. The Complete Robot is a solid hit, taking me back to that summer in which I first delighted in Asimov's short stories. I definitely recommend it.

Highlights:

• "Sally", a favorite of mine about automated cars with personalities.
• "True Love", in which a computer designed to find its maker the perfect match finds his own.
• "The Tercentenary Incident", set on 4 July 2076, follows the aftermath of an attempted assassination of the US President. The assassins seemed to have only vaporized the president's android decoy -- but who can know that that puff of atoms following the disintegration blast belonged to an android, and not to an unpopular president?
• "Reason", in which quality-assurance technicians struggle with the first sentient robot after it establishes a religion based on the worshiping the station which it was designed to serve. 
• "Mirror Image", an unexpected treat featuring the Robots trilogy team of Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw as they attempt to settle a matter of academic fraud.
• "The Bicentennial Man" follows a robot's quest for humanity. Watching the Robin Williams movie of this prompted me to read The Positronic Man back in high school, my first involvement with Asimov. The link leads to the trailer.

"To those of you who have read some (or, possibly, all) of my robot stories before, I welcome your loyalty and patience. To those of you who have not, I hope this book has given you pleasure -- and I'm pleased to have met you -- and I hope we meet again soon." - p. 683, 'the last word'.

Indeed, Dr. A.

Contact

Contact
© 1985 Carl Sagan
432 pages

"We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation -- and we wouldn't even know." - Michio Kaku, "Our Place in the Universe".

Dr. Eleanor Arroway, known as "Ellie" to her few intimates, is long accustomed to being marginalized. She's a woman in a field dominated by men, and her interest in using radio telescopes to search for intelligence life in space further isolates her. Even those who take note of her brilliance do so only to suggest that perhaps she's wasting her time looking for "little green men".

And then....the signal. Steadily pulsing, it cannot be tracked to a satellite in Earth orbit, nor is the region of space it appears to emanate from a source of pulsars. This signal comes from outside -- and it comes with purpose. The initial signal contains prime numbers, but as Ellie and her coworkers begin to dissect the data, they find a recording of the first signal from Earth to find its way into space -- and then, The Message, a massive transmission of data that unites the world's scientific, political, and economic authorities as they search for the Message's meaning.

While Contact is in part a science fiction tale that depicts humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial life, Sagan also offers a story about the human search for meaning. He does this by bouncing the nonreligious Ellie, who finds meaning in science, off of Christian guru and television personality Palmer Joss,  who sees a transcendental deity and revealed truths as the source of ultimate meaning. Later, Sagan puts Ellie into the position of defending what might be called a religious experience.

To my knowledge, Contact is Carl Sagan's only fictional work.  I first read it in 2005 or 2006, and Sagan's depiction of radio astronomy changed the way I thought about extraterrestrial life. In the years since, my readings in astronomy and physics have convinced me that Sagan's Contact scenario is more likely than say First Contact. Contact is among the more interesting novels I've read, and it's one I can recommend. While the opening premise is interesting by itself, the role of scientific wonder and the advocation of the human spirit make it all the better.

"She had studied the universe all her life, but missed the clearest message: for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." - 429


Related:

• Contact, a film adaption of the book that stars Jodie Foster. Although it takes a few liberties with the plot , the visuals are solid and the acting makes even the more despicable characters fun to watch. The intro, in which the camera soars through space, following the advance of Earth's oldest television transmissions, is particularly memorable. 
• The Symphony of Science videos, all starring Sagan in part. "Our Place in the Cosmos" has a line that neatly refers to the pretext of Contact. 

Are we all alone, or are there others standing by.

Waiting to see what we will do, how hard we'll try?

It costs a lot to live, even more to fly.

Kindly send a prayer my way while I shoot up in the sky.

We'll send the best from Earth, to find out what it's worth.

We'll send the best from Earth, to find out what it's worth.

- "Others Standing By", Prometheus Music

The Roving Mind

The Roving Mind
© Isaac Asimov 1983
350 pages

In the first place, I type quickly -- 90 words a minute, when I am happy, carefree, and in a good mood. And that's my typing rate when I am composing, too, because I don't believe in fancy stuff. In my writing, there is no poetry, no complexity, no literary frills. Therefore, I need only barrel along, saying whatever comes to mind, and waving cheerfully at people who happen to pass my typewriter." (337)

The Roving Mind collects sixty-two essays by Isaac Asimov, the majority scientifically-themed, along with several tributes to the late Asimov by friends and comrades who knew him well. The essays by men like Paul Kurtz and Carl Sagan update a volume originally printed in the early eighties, and the essays reflect the preceding period, particularly the seventies.  Asimov's thoughts on the future are particularly interesting, as he seems to predict consumer-specific advertising and entertainment (as in TiVo and Google) and a computer-oriented marketplace that allows customers to buy goods and reserve hotel rooms through their private consoles. Other essays take on religious dogma and political  matters of interest (censorship), warn of the dangers of increasing population,  reflect on the human condition, and share Asimov's thoughts on the increasing role of technology in everyday lives, particularly in his own: he devotes three essays to his new-fangled Word Processor. Interesting topics abound, as is par for the course given Asimov's many varied interests, and his explanations are both lucid and witty with plenty of eccentric charm. Especially notable for me:

• "The Reagan Doctrine", a satirical essay tackling the idea that believing in God is necessary for morality. "In every country, you'll find large numbers who claim that the United States fought a cruel and unjust war in Vietnam and that it is the most violent and crime-ridden nation in the world. They don't seem to be impressed by the fact that we're God-fearing. Next they'll be saving that Ronald Reagan (our very own president) doesn't know what he's talking about."
• "Technophobia", in which Asimov addresses the various reasons people fear society's increasing dependency upon technology, although most of the essay is given over to overcoming people's dislike of having to learn new things. He recounts his experiences with the word-processor, how it was foisted upon him and how he studiously avoided so much as even looking at it.
• "Pure and Impure" takes on the prejudice intellectuals, particularly theorists and liberal-arts snobs like myself, may have  against applied or "dirty" knowledge. 
• "Art and Science" sees Asimov write on one of my favorite subjects,  the connections between every field of human knowledge. "If you look at an electron micrograph of a sponge spicule or of a diatom (you can find both in the 1977 Yearbook), you don't know whether to admire them as products of science or as works of artistic beauty -- And it doesn't matter; the two are the same."
• "The Sky of the Satellites" is a favorite: Asimov imagines what the skies of Jupiter and Saturn's moons look like
• "The Surprises of Pluto", in which Asimov states: "Pluto is scarcely a respectable planet; it is more like a large asteroid."
• "The Ultimate in Communication", which Asimov sees as YouTube with VHS cassettes. 
• "Touring the Moon" is a faux-news essay detailing what visitors to Earth's colony on the moon may expect from their trip. "Nothing, apparently, can prevent [the Moon's gravity] from being a surprise to first-timers. After the initial shock, the reaction is inevitable amusement, and a tendency to try walking, hopping, or jumping, despite the large signs that ring every possible change on the message, "Please do not run or jump, but wait quietly for processing."
• "The Word-Processor and I" is the first of Asimov's essays detailing his partial conversion from typewriters to word processor. "With the help of my dear wife, Janet, [the Radio Shack guide] set up a 'computer corner' in our living room. Within it, the word-processor was unboxed, hooked together, and plugged in. I did my bit, to be sure. I kept saying, 'I don't think we have any space for a word-processor anywhere,' but no one listened to me."

This is a fun collection particularly of interest to skeptics and humanists, but enjoyable to all who delight in reading Asimov in general.

Brave New World

Brave New World

© 1932 Aldous Huxley

270 pages

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman introduced the book with his suspicion that Brave New World's predictions were coming to fruition -- namely, that human happiness will be pursued by destroying human culture, or to put it in more ironic terms, all that makes us human. It's a book you've probably heard of: I was introduced to it through a Star Trek novel. The story is set in the future, where Earth is controlled by the World State, which dominates the lives of its wards. Every human institution you know and love -- or despise-- is gone. Even the most basic, the parent-child relationship, has been removed: the opening chapter has a group of teenagers being taken on a tour of a hatchery. As the guide gleefully tells the story of how human beings come to be in this world, she also explains how the World State arose in the after math of a nine-years war.

Humans are now biologically engineered and socially conditioned to fall into caste systems, ranking from administrators (Alpha++) to brute labor (Epsilon--). Pavlov-like conditioning is implemented throughout a person's lifetime to keep them loyal to their caste, to their job, and to the ideals of the world state. When emotional distress occurs, it is dealt with through soma, a drug of some sort. The World State doesn't control everyone: there are "savage reservations" where people still live off the land, and WS people sometimes tour these areas for their own amusement.

The book's story shows that despite all of this conditioning, the human animal has still not created a society in line with its nature: several of the main characters are frustrated by it, and some by their inability to fit in as well as they would like. One of them -- Bernard Marx -- takes a female acquaintance of his to a Savage Reservation, where he meets a World State citizen named Linda who was lost on her outing here -- and who has in the meantime become a mother, an act which is obscene in the extreme for World-Staters. Her grown son John ("John the Savage, typically referred to as The Savage") has grown up trying to behave like a man of two worlds: he tries to please his mother, who has been conditioned to live in the world state, and he tries to live like those on the reservation. He can do neither well, so he asks Bernard if he might join him on a trip back to the World State.

From the Savage's reaction to what he finds in the world state -- not the utopia his mother described but a shallow, sterile, and shockingly indecent place where no one cares about anyone else -- where the joys and miseries of human existence are absent, replaced by self-indulgent human-sized infants. He eventually confronts a world controller (a top bureaucrat), and the two talk for a few pages as the controller explains why science, art, religion, and the family had to be destroyed -- and the Savage defends them.

I don't know a lot about the book's historical context. I'm more familiar with HG Wells' idealistic notions. It's certainly thought-provoking. One question it raises is the source of human happiness: does it come from avoiding unpleasant things and enjoying as many pleasurable sensations as possible? Or do we as sentient creatures really need things like wonder, art, and family to feel fulfilled? Again, I don't know the context Huxley was writing, and I'd like to know more about the social developments that led him to write this to see what their long-term implications might mean. I think it, like Ibsen's A Doll House, could be a "discussion" work, rather than one you just read for the story.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Where Do We Go From Here?
ed. Isaac Asimov, © 1971

Where Do We Go From Here, a short-story collection assembled by Isaac Asimov, is more than the usual collection of short stories. Asimov introduces it in this way: "I have long maintained that science fiction has potential as an inspiring and useful teaching device. For this anthology, therefore, I have selected seventeen stories which, I think, can inspire curiosity and can lead the students into lines of questioning of his own that may interest and excite him, and may even help determine the future direction of his career. [...] [T]he seventeen stories included are all good ones, clever and exciting in their own right. Anyone who wishes can read them for themselves alone, need make no conscious effort to learn from them, and may totally ignore my own comments after each story. For those who would probe a little deeper, I have placed after each story a few hundred words of commentary in which I talk about the scientific points made in the story, pointing out their validity, or, sometimes, explaining their errors. Finally, after each comment, I have appended a series of suggestions and questions designed to direct the reader's curiosity in fruitful directions."

As said, this is a collection of seventeen science fiction short stories, chosen for both their worth as stories and as science fiction. Asimov believed that good science fiction must have within it good science. The stories come from a variety of authors. A few are well-known names -- Lester del Rey, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke -- but most were new to me. Two stories are by a Hal Clement, and at least one story was written by John Campbell, the editor of Astounding Stories under a pseudonym. After each story, Asimov reveals the year in which the story was published and comments on the author's predictions, assumptions, and so on, ending his commentary with three or four questions that are intended to jog the reader's mind. For instance, at the end of "The Cave of Night", he writes "Gunn has the rescue vessels designed, built, and launched in the space of thirty days. Do you think this is practical? Look up data on the space program and find out how such things take." Another example follows "Dust Rag" : "It is likely that Venus has an iron core, yet it has no magnetic field to speak of. How do we know it has none? Why should it not have one despite the iron core? What about other planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn? How do we know?"

Only one story ("Proof") escaped me completely. I was able to enjoy all of the others to varying degrees. The stories seem deliberately chosen to cover the full range of scientific knowledge: in "Omnilingual", the readers join a team of scientists on the surface of Mars as they attempt to learn about a long-dead Martian civilization. This particular chapter concerns language. In "Dust Rag", two men on the surface of the Moon encounter problems with electromagnetism in that their visors become charged and attract lunar dust that is being charged by the Sun. The result is that the visors and the outside of their suits (including air filters) become covered in lunar dust and the astronauts -- in bulky space suits -- have to figure out how to return to their camp or shuttle before they run out of air. In "The Day is Done", we see speculations on human-Neanderthal interaction. Here Asimov posits in his commentary that the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals may have interbred to produce humans, but this is quite dated. (Asimov died nearly twenty years ago, so he can be forgiven for not considering the last two decades of evidence in regards to Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.) One of my favorite stories was "Surface Tension", which shows the results of humans modifying the human genome for life on other planets. The particular planet that the story is set on is covered in water and the largest animals are crayfish, so the humans are designed to be microscopic and interact with amoebas and so forth in a story that is completely implausible but very interesting.

I found the book to be tremendously enjoyable: the stories as well as the questions Asimov probed. I wonder if he did any other projects like this.

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories
Isaac Asimov, © 1979
207 pages

Today while in the library taking notes for my two term papers, I read through Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. I did not intend to finish it, but I realized I was finished with my notes ahead of time, and rather than starting my first paper an hour before lunch, I decided to return to and finish Buy Jupiter. It is a collection of some 20+ short stories by Isaac Asimov, each with generous afterwords and forewords. It turns out that I am not the only fan who adores these little asides by Asimov -- apparently he was written to by fans who thanked him for them.

Many of the stories are quite brief. There were about four that I didn't quite "get", but there were also some stories that really struck me and have become favorites. I'll mention a few of the stories: all are not necessarily favorites.

1. "Buy Jupiter" concerns the reaction of Earth when aliens approach requesting to buy the planet of Jupiter. The conclusion is rather comedic.
2. "The Founding Father" is about the crew of five Earthmen who crash on an Earth-like planet with an atmosphere of ammonia. They labor to make it livable. Excellent conclusion -- one of my favorites.
3. "Button, Button" features an inventor who uses German sentence structure whenever he grows emotional. As a student of the German language, I found that particularly interesting.

Many of the stories feature a first-person narrative voice, which is unusual for Asimov's short stories -- at least the ones I've seen. The book is an exceptionally quick read.

This Week at the Library (3/7)

I've had a lot of good reading the last few weeks, which is not suprising given how heavily steeped my library selections were in science. I began with Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. The cover of the book is of a mature acacia tree, silhouetted by a beautiful African sunset. Before the Dawn is a work of anthropology, and it focuses on humanity as we became human and began to populate the globe. All aspects of human society at that time are brought into focus -- race, religion, and so forth. It reminded me a bit of Guns, Germs, and Steel. If you're interested in anthropology, I think this book is worth checking into. While reading it, I couldn't get a certain Johnny Clegg tune out of my head.

We are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I...
We're on the road to Phelamanga, beneath a coppy sky
And we are scatterlings of Africa, on a journey to the stars..
Far below we leave forever dreams of what we were....

I then read two related books about neurology. The first was Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which dealt with the biological origins of belief. I found it interesting, but I enjoyed Phantoms in the Brain far more. It was a genuine pageturner. I enjoyed every moment I spent reading it. Phantoms deals with mysteries of the human mind -- phantom limbs, stroke oddities, delusions, hallucinations, and so on. Technical knowledge about the field may help in better understanding some of the biology mentioned, but you need nothing to appreciate the weirdness that the brain is capable of generating.

The next book I read was Jacques-Yves Cousteau's The Whale, and it was interesting enough. It isn't exactly an informative book about whales; it chronicles some of Cousteau's trips and a lot of the material is his logs. There are many pictures, but I was looking more for information. I changed genres for my next book when I read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. It is a work of poetry, and rather than read it straight through like a novel, I read the chapters one at a time and savored them. I've posted some of my favorite quotations here.

After this, I read Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestial Civilizations, whereupon Mr. Asmiov explains the requirements for life to arise in the universe, and speculates on what kind of organisms might form in varying atmospheres. He also writes about human colonization efforts. I read this mainly because of the author. On a similar note, I read Space Station: Base Camps to the Stars, which was a history of human efforts to establish a space station in orbit. I found it to be highly interesting.

My next book was a history book titled Hitler's Shadow War, and it put forth the idea that the second world war was really just a farce -- something Hitler did to draw attention away from his genocidal policies. While it failed to prove this to me, it did offer a lot of information on the Holocaust. The last book I read was a work of fiction by Jean M. Auel, called The Clan of the Cave Bear. I ran across this while reading about Neanderthals. The book is about a young Cro-Magnon girl who is adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals. The "Clan", as they call themselves, are very different humans than we are, and the girl -- Ayla -- must struggle to fit in. As she does, we learn about how these humans might have lived. I loved this book and decided to read more of the series.

So that concludes my last two weeks of reading. As I said, highly enjoyable. Next week:

1. The Valley of Horses, the sequel to The Clan of the Cave Bear.
2. Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov.
3. Dolphin Days by Kenneth S. Norris.
4. The Tribe of Tiger by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
5. Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

That should make for a lovely week of reading.