This Week at the Library (12/11)

Books this Update:

• Robot Dreams, Isaac Asimov
• World Made by Hand, James Kunstler

I began this week with World Made By Hand, written by James Kunstler. Kunstler is a social critic who spoke at my university a few weeks back, and his lecture was on "Life After Peak Oil". Kunstler predicted all manner of dire things occurring to us after we ran out of oil, and his ideas are fairly reasonable in the event that we do run out of oil before we're able to find a new way of maintaining normalcy within a range. He's very big on the idea that we're not going to maintain normalcy, that our present society is doomed to collaspe and that this will happen in the next twenty to thirty years.

World Made By Hand is written in the kind of world where our society has vanished. War over what little oil is left destablizes the geopolitical scene. While Kunstler is not very specific about what exactly happens, we know that war comes to the so-called "Holy Land". Since humanity can no longer ship food, manufactured goods, or the supplies from which those goods are made across vast distances -- our transfer trucks and modern ships depending so much on oil -- globalization ends. Economies -- and life itself -- become more local. More of the population works on farms, people begin to become aristans again, and we find ourselves in a world that is somewhere between the high middle ages and the old American west. Disease has ravaged the population, ostensibly because innoculations are no longer available.

Kunstler's story is set in the small town of Union Grove, which is near Albany in what used to be known as New York. His main character is Robert Earle, a former executive who is now the town carpenter. Union Grove has three major population centers: the town itself with democratically-elected officials, a trailer park town surrounding the dump ruled by a criminal warlord who is a New York redneck, and Bullock's plantation. The beginning of the book sees a religious sect led by the charismatic and folksy Brother Jobe. The sect -- the "New Faithers" -- provide Union Grove's townsfolk with a lot of extra manpower something that's more important -- the willingness to do stuff. The New Faithers have seen the shape the rest of the country is in, and they plan to make Union Grove a "New Jerusalem". World Made By Hand is the story of these people during one long and particularly hot summer in their new world they are 'making by hand'.

Kunstler's world is...somewhat romantic, in that the people face a lot of adversity but make it through with hard work and stubborn effort. Does that really happen? Human beings are far from ideal creatures. I'd like to believe we could make it through such a new dark age, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it's an interesting read -- even if you think Kunstler is just using it to scare people into better urban planning.

Next I read a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov, all featuring robots or computers. There were a number of repeats, but considering the author, I didn't really mind. Asimov begins the book with an introduction, saying that these stories were written in the 40s and 50s and thus may seem dated by contemporary standards -- although some of his predictions have come to past. In "The Martian Way", for instance, he writes about a spacewalk even though no one had ever walked -- or floated, rather -- in space before. A few favorites:

• "The Feeling of Power" is one of my favorites. People have completely forgotten how to do ordinary math, so dependent on computers are they. Earth is at war with the planet Deneb, which is similarly addicted to computers and is probably settled by humans. Then a lowly technician realizes he can do math in his head, which has implications for the war effort.

• "Little Lost Robot" deals with robots at a hyperstation. It features Susan Calvin, Asimov's first female and one of his most memorable characters. One robot with a superiority complex is told to "get lost" and promptly does so -- compromising the security of Earth's hyperspace program and possibly the future of robotics.
• "Franchise" is one of the more interesting stories, because it predicts the importance of voting machines. Asimov wrote this in 1955, remember. In Asimov's future -- in our reality, November 2008 -- Multivac has come to control the elections by analyzing data and coming to a rational prediction about who the elecorate would vote for -- if they were in fact to vote. So complex has Multivac become by 2008 that it only needs to ask a few questions of one voter to come to its decision. This voter is apparantly chosen by Multivac to be the most represenative of all his citizens. He is informed thusly: "Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American elecorate on Tuesday, November 4, 2008". Considering the week I happened to read this in, you can imagine what I found so interesting about it.

Robot Dreams was of course interesting. I enjoyed almost every story in it, with an exception or two. Even if you've read some of these before, I recommend the reading.

Having a pick of the week this week would be fairly pointless, as I only read two books. I still have papers to work on, so once again my weekly reading will be a bit...suppressed.

Next Week:

• Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel : Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies
• Writings on an Ethical Life, Peter Singer
• The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov (Possibly: it still hasn't shipped yet, even though I requested it on Friday.

Robot Dreams

Robot Dreams
Isaac Asimov © 1986
Berkely Publishing, NY
349 pages

When I first started reading Asimov's fiction, I started with short story collections -- and this week I returned to that type of literature. Robot Dreams is a collection of short stories that deal with robots or computers. Some of these stories have appeared in collections I've read in weeks past, and so I re-read them -- and enjoyed them again, as much as I did the first time I read them. Asimov begins the book with an introduction, and it is his introductions and commentaries that first made me such a fan of him.

Although the collection is titled "Robot Dreams", the stories in the collection don't all have robots. Many of them are about the role of computers -- which for Asimov, writing in the forties and fifties, was real science fiction. A few of his stories feature Multivac, which is a character by itself. Multivac is always depicted as a massive computer that coordinates all of the other computers on the planet -- Asimov never predicted personal computers (although he did predict hand-held computers and personal consoles that could access the "real" computers). In Asimov's stories, computers are industrial and government tools, each section having a part of the globe to handle its problems. Asimov also depicts computers building better computers, to the extent that humanity forgets how to and becomes as dependent on the computers as -- well, there's no real anagram, I don't think.

A few stories from the collection, with comments:

• "The Feeling of Power" is one of my favorites. People have completely forgotten how to do ordinary math, so dependent on computers are they. Earth is at war with the planet Deneb, which is similarly addicted to computers and is probably settled by humans. Then a lowly technician realizes he can do math in his head, which has implications for the war effort.
• "Little Lost Robot" deals with robots at a hyperstation. It features Susan Calvin, Asimov's first female and one of his most memorable characters. One robot with a superiority complex is told to "get lost" and promptly does so -- compromising the security of Earth's hyperspace program and possibly the future of robotics.
  
• In "Robot Dreams", an experimental robot brain leads to a robot that have subconscious thoughts and dream about them -- but its subconscious thoughts of those of it freeing robots from human servitude.
• "Lest We Remember" is the story of a man whose life is changed when he takes part of a medical trial designed to increase the ability to recall stored memories -- and who learns that an infallible memory doesn't necessarily make one wise.
• "The Ugly Little Boy" is always mentioned by Asimov as one of his personal favorites. I find it enjoyable, but it's not a favorite of mine. Still, I mention it because he likes it so much. The story is about a Neanderthal boy who is ripped from time and brought to Earth to be studied.
• "Franchise" is one of the more interesting stories, because it predicts the importance of voting machines. Asimov wrote this in 1955, remember. In Asimov's future -- in our reality, November 2008 -- Multivac has come to control the elections by analyzing data and coming to a rational prediction about who the elecorate would vote for -- if they were in fact to vote. So complex has Multivac become by 2008 that it only needs to ask a few questions of one voter to come to its decision. This voter is apparantly chosen by Multivac to be the most represenative of all his citizens. He is informed thusly: "Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American elecorate on Tuesday, November 4, 2008". Considering the week I happened to read this in, you can imagine what I found so interesting about it.
  

I enjoyed almost every story, even those I have read before. There are a couple of shorter stories that I didn't quite "get", but they were vastly outnumbered by the interesting ones. I enjoyed the collection immensely and reccommend it.

World Made By Hand

World Made By Hand
© 2008, James Kunstler
Atlantic Monthly Press, NY
317 pages

I think this is the first book I've ever seen with its own trailer -- with the narration taken directly from the plot summary on the book's dust cover. A few weeks ago, James Howard Kunstler spoke at my university and I went to go see him. He spoke on "Life After Peak Oil". Our way of living in the west, as you know, is completely dependent on oil. We receive manufactured goods from overseas courtesy of oil-using transport ships: we receive our food from great farms in the midwest through oil-using transfer trucks, and that food is grown by a mere few through the use of oil-using mechanized tractors. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of people go to their jobs and schools and everything else using automobiles -- we live in vast fields of subdivisions far from urban centers. Kunstler is very critical of surbanization and has written a book about it -- one that I intend to find. World Made By Hand is a book written in America's post-oil future. He never gets a specific year, but I would estimate that this takes place in the 2020s.

Rather than repeating Kunstlers' various predictions, I'll simply write about the book -- because Kunstler makes his predictions come true in it. One of the blurbs on the back of the book says that "...since this brooding powerful, novel takes place in the future, you could call it science fiction. Except the end of the fossil fuel economy has preetty much done away with science -- and the advent of peako oil means it may not be entirely fictional much longer." World Made By Hand is the story of one small community in upstate New York, "Union Grove". It is near Albany, as the characters make their way there in return in a matter of a day or two. If you want a complete synopsis, you can just go to the trailer link above: it gives you the essence of the plot without spoiling the story.

In Union Grove, civilization after oil is decaying. Most of the people here still retain memories of the old days. Some, like the viewpoint character Robert Earle, don't particularly miss the old days. Earle was an executive of a software company in the old days, making regular flights across the United States and the world. Now he works as a carpenter and will as the plot goes on become the town's mayor. The people of Union Grove have been adjusting slowly to the loss of the old order. While we are never given specifics, we know war came to Earth as the oil wells ran dry. One particular war in the so-called "Holy Land" is referred to numerous times, but it is the only conflcit mentioned specifically. Nuclear bombs from terrorists destroy D.C. and Los Angeles. Without automobiles and electricity, the globe collapses -- people become aware of only local concerns. There is no more United States: there is only Union Grove and the surrounding county.

The people of Union Grove are lucky in that they escape the complete loss of law and order that takes over other areas. As the summer begins, the town of Union Grove sees its population increase substantially when a religious sect arrives. They call themselves the "New Faith". They wear simple, sober clothing and are described as a cult by the fearful Union Grover citizens. Their leader, "Brother Jobe", is amiable if a bit devoted. The New Faithers left their homes in Virginia and have traveled north. They describe the complete chaos that pervades most of those areas, and announce that they intend to build a "New Jerusalem". The Union Grovers react with skepticism, but acknowledge that even in Union Grove, things are falling apart. The town's electricity is nonexistant, and its water pressure is falling. Their system relied only on gravity, but now even it seems to be failing them.

At the book's beginning, Robert Earle, Shawn (a young farmboy), and his friend Reverend Loren head off to the town dump to forage for supplies. The dump is under the care of a New York redneck by the name of Wayne Karp. Karp controls the dump and rules over "Karptown" -- a community of trailers -- with an iron fist. The dump's supplies are sorted by the Karptown lot, though, so they have their uses. When one of Karp's men shoots the farmboy in cold blood, Earle begins to realize that things have fallen too much apart. Encouraged by Brother Jobe, he sets out to a psuedo-plantation run by a man named Bullock. Bullock is the town's judge, and Earle and Jobe aim to convince him that he should start doing his duty.

At Bullock's plantation, Jobe and Earle find a nicely-working community that has been rebuilt from nothing in the past twenty years. The townsfolk have most of the amenities of the old life, including electricity and hot dogs. Bullock relies on riverboat transporation to trade goods, and when one of his boats goes missing, he asks Earle and Jobe to help him recover it and his crew. They wil eventually do so, and Bullock agrees to help Union Grove bring order. Earle is elected the new town mayor, and the three of them work together to turn rebuild the Union Grove community. While the Union Grovers join a levee at Bullock's plantation/manor, thugs from Karpstown drift down to pilfer supplies from the town.

This presents the book's ending conflict: the forces of law must prove they can deal with the community's criminal element in a lawful and orderly way without resorting to violence. Earle is a student of history, and sees the need for his community to maintain some kind of civil decorum. The book ends on a hopeful note, as the community moves on and continues rebuilding. Its last lines: "And that is the end of the story of that particular summer when we had so much trouble and so much good fortune in the world we were making by hand."

Kunstler has been called "cantankerous", accused of both Luddism and nostalgic bullshit by varying people I've spoken to. I don't think the world presented in World Made By Hand is nostalgic, although it may be a bit romanticized and hopeful. I didn't mention the full range of activities that the petty criminal lord Wayne Karp indulged in, but Earle and the townspeople are remarkably civil in their treatment of him even though he probably deserved a round with a bullwhip. The world Kunstler creates is a gritty world -- one I would not want to live in. I do want to live in a "human-scale" community, and I already do -- Montevallo, where I can walk everywhere I really need to go, and where I could bike to places further than my walking range. I love living here, and would be content to remain here for all of my days -- although that probably will not happen, as I will have to move wherever there are jobs.

While the book's setting is harsh and unforgiving, there is a bit of romanticism about it, I suppose. Union Grove's citizens, by and large, are there for one another and work together for the common good. They learn to embrace the strangers to their town, and everyone works to rebuild the community into a world made by hand. At the same time, we see plenty of examples of people who have given up, or people who have started to prey on their fellow beings -- how much romanticism is there really?

The story was captivating: I was never bored. Kunstler constantly releases details about what happen to put them into this predicament throughout the book. Had I not attended his lecture, I might have been confused. Thought was put into the printing of the book itself. Its pages are not perfectly cut and lined: there's some technique some printers do to give the edge of the page an uneven, but natural-looking, line. The result is that the book's pages have actual texture and they feel substantial.

All in all, I enjoyed the read and reccommend it as an interesting story -- even though I'm a bit skeptical that this will happen. It seems to me to be a secular doomsday scenario, with society's "sin" of oil corrupting it and leading to its destruction -- giving people the opportunity to rebuild a new world, a "better" world.

This Week at the Library (5/11)

Books this Update:

• Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallons, Kurt Vonnegut
• Communism, Richard Pipes
• Nemesis, Isaac Asimov
• Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies
• Puzzles of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
  

I started this week with Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallons, by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is a collection of miscellaneous works produced by Vonnegut, ranging from essays to speeches to short stories. While the material is quite diverse, Vonnegut's wit and commentary prevail.

Next I finished Communism by Richard Pipes, which is a history of 'Communist' governments in Russia, China, and the third world. Pipes is a Russian historian, and so the chapters on Russia were rather strong and informative. Communism in Russia is presented as nothing more than a tool for Lenin to gain power to overthrow those he felt had wronged him.

I moved on to Nemesis, by Isaac Asimov -- a science fiction story set two hundred years in Earth's future, at the beginning of a hyperspace age. An Earth settlement is established on a planet orbiting a large gas giant which is itself orbiting a red dwarf star called "Nemesis" for its potential to end life on Earth permanently.

Next I read more nonfiction, namely Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. The book begins by exploring the contributions that the Roman family, the German family, and the Christian religion made to the development of the medieval family from 600 to 1500 CE. After establishing this, they then move chronologically through the middle ages, taking time to explore the effects of the Black Plague and the economic revival along the way.

Lastly, I finished Asimov's Puzzles of the Black Widowers, another of his Black Widower mystery collections. I've been reading it off and on for a couple of months. Entertaining and well written as always.

Pick of the Week: It would be between Gies and Asimov. Let's just go with Nemesis for old times' sake, shall we?

Next Week:

• A World Made By Hand, James Kunstler
• Robot Dreams, Isaac Asimov

I am entering into an extraordinarily busy academic period that will not end until Thanksgiving, so my reading will be limited.

Puzzles of the Black Widowers

I've been reading Puzzles of the Black Widowers on and off for a couple of months now. Rather than reading it straight through, I'd read a puzzle or two whenever I ran out of my weekly reading. This morning, I finished another Black Widowers book. Asimov follows the same formula: in every story, the Black Widowers -- a small club of six or seven gentlemen who meet once a month for dinner together -- go to their restaurant. The host brings a guest, and in the course of the guests' interview, a mystery arises. The Widowers then try to work out the solution to the mystery through rational thinking. After they have exhausted all possibilities and are stymied, the last Widower -- Henry the waiter -- points out the obvious and unforeseen solution.

As usual, there are twelve "collections" in this series. A few of the mysteries:

• In "Unique is Where You Find It", the Widowers try to puzzle out what element of the periodic table is most unique to a particular college professor who has challenged their guest.
• In "The Envelope", the Widowers are asked to speculate on the significance of an envelop tucked into the jacket of a spy.
• "The Recipe" is a locked-room mystery that the Widowers attempt to solve.

They were all enjoyable, excellently written. I enjoy these Widower tales very much, as the characters are interesting and the stories always quite interesting. "The Recipe" had a fairly obvious solution, though. Usually I have to think about them to solve the mystery, but in "The Recipe", I simply read and wondered, "When are they going to bring up...".

All in all, though, superb as usual. Asimov is the master.

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
Joseph and Frances Gies, © 1987
Harper & Row, New York
369 pages.

This week I continued reading Gies, this time one of their books concerning changes in the family during the middle ages -- from late Roman times until roughly 1500 and the Renaissance. The authors begin by looking at the way three institutions shaped the medieval family: the Roman family, the Germanic family, and the Christian church. After this, the book moves chronologically -- Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages. The Gies deal with peasants and aristocrats seperately, using specific towns to explore differences.

The book is well-written, which is what I have come to expect from the Gies. In certain sections, the Gies focused on particular families and I found some of the more extended passages to be uninteresting, but for the most part the book is captivating. What I enjoyed most about the book is that it broke the simplistic idea that medieval culture was monlithic. The impression that I had was that the lords and churchmen held absolute sway over the peasants and that the church have this massively strong cult of anti-sexuality going on, so much to the point that even sex outside of marriage was frowned upon.

The authors show that reality varied tremendously in all aspects. I'll mention a few points from the book as an example:

• While marriage is regarded as a religious institution, it did not become customary for people to take their vows inside a church until the late 1400s.
• Some medieval personalities maintained that such vows were unnecessary -- that so long as two people committed themselves to one another, consumated their union, and showed 'marital affection' toward one another that they were married.
• In the realm of disicpline toward children, not all attitudes were 'medieval'. Two men were mentioned as having rather 24th century attitudes toward raising children -- treating them with respect, sympathy, and responsibily rather than with fear.
  
• Gies again wrote on the life of peasants and their limited self-government.
  

The Gies don't only just write about family structure and relations: they also describe the physical makeup of homes that medieval families lived in. There's a lot of information here, and it's presented quite well. Were I ever in the position of reccommending a book on this subject, this particular book would be a recommendation.

Nemesis

Nemesis
© Isaac Asimov 1989
Doubleday, New York
364 pages

Having completed Asimov's Foundation series, I decided to return to a volume of short stories, Robot Dreams. I had some difficulty in finding a copy, and so in the meantime I read Nemesis. Nemesis takes place on Earth, during the twenty-third century. According the Fount of All Knowledge, Nemesis's place in the Foundation metaseries (the Robot, Empire, Foundation, and assorted short stories all put together) is as a "legend". Earth is apparantly united: the characters make reference to a Global Congress and a global president. Meanwhile, humanity is spreading throughout the solar system in "Settlements". They are limited to the solar system because hyperdrives are not yet available -- but they become so as the book wears on.

The first half of the book contains two seperate stories. One is about a settlement called "Rotor" that finds a way to move a bit more quickly through space, if not achieving faster-than-light speed. The commissar of Rotor opts to take the settlement to Nemesis, a nearby star. "Nemesis" is named by Eugenia Insignia, a scientist onboard. During the heyday of the space rage, back when cosmologists began realizing that most stars were binary stars, some theorized that our sun, Sol, had its own counterpart, one they termed "Nemesis". They named it so because they thought such a system might explain why the solar system is periodically subjected to increases in comet activity.

The first story is about Rotor -- its journey to Nemesis, its discovery of a massive gas giant with an Earth-sized moon, a moon that is semihabitable. Asimov does not spend much time detailing their journey, the discovery, or the building of a dome around the planet (which they term Erythro). He quickly moves this first story to a point in time twenty years after their "leaving". The second story begins twenty years before their leaving, and he goes back and forth between the two. This did not cause any disconnect at all: despite the twenty-year gap, I read the stories perfectly well. The second story, set in the "past", deals with Earth's response to Rotor's leaving. They realize there may have been a purpose behind the Leaving when they discover Nemesis, and predict that its course through space will take it through the Solar System in five thousand years or so.

Without spoiling the book's plot, the Earthers begin to work on the problem of hyperspace, and use superluminal ability to reach Nemesis for themselves. Consequently, the second story -- set in the "past" -- catches up to the first story at page number 268. The rest of the book is the covergence of the two stories. The Earthers and the Rotors must work together to reach a compromise concerning Erthyro. There is more going on in this story than political intrigue, however. Most of the first story concerns the mysterious planet Erthyro -- a world lit by red sunlight, covered by nude dirt and seas that are filled with a form of prokaryotes. There are a number of strong characters in the book. Eugenia Insignia has already been mentioned, but she has a daughter named Marlene, who has the unusual ability to read people's body language thoroughly. (She would make an excellent cold reader, no doubt.) Marlene's father is the subject of the second story on Earth, as he works to find a way to reconnecting with his daughter.

The story was quite good and the characters strong. I enjoyed the book, although not as much as I did the Foundation books. That's to be expected, I suppose -- with the Foundation series, my enjoyment was magnified because of the grand story each book's seperate story worked into. It was as ever enjoyable.