Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

Valente (yuki_onna) continues the intricate weave of story begun in In the Night Garden, introducing many new threads as well as continuing some from the earlier book. Like the first volume, the threads draw together at the end; this time, they illuminate mysteries introduced at the beginning of the story, making the two books together a complex ring of knotwork. Overall, The Orphan’s Tales are great fun for anyone who loves to dig into mythology and folklore from around the world.

Wes Nisker examines Buddhist meditation practices in the light of modern scientific understanding of biology and evolution. This is not a breathless “OMG people knew all this stuff 2500 years ago” screed— it’s more a matter of noting modern scientific results that match up with the insights that meditators came up with over many years of self-examination, and suggesting ways that understanding the science can enrich your own meditative practice. The book has a friendly, colloquial tone, and Nisker gives the pleasant sense that meditation includes a lot of chances to stop and smell the flowers on the way toward enlightenment, rather than a determined trudge toward nirvana. The science was all review for me, but written very accessibly— wyvernwell, would you like to borrow it sometime?

In the introduction, Le Guin explains that the Tao Te Ching has been an influential book throughout her life, and that over the years she has made efforts at producing her own rendition of the classic. (She won’t call it a translation, since she doesn’t actually speak Chinese, but she has done extensive research— she provides copious notes on how she chose particular renderings in the back of the book— and produced this in collaboration with a scholar of the language.) Her goal has been to distill the clarity of the classic for a modern reader who is more likely one citizen among millions rather than a leader seeking sagacious insights for rulership. The result is quite good, with a penetrating brevity I haven’t seen in the other translations I’ve read. I actually wound up reading it with another translation to hand when I wanted to get another perspective on the occasional verse, but I think the simplicity of her rendering is a good place to start before going out looking for more nuance.

I decided to reread this one since I was about to lend it to yanfali, and found it held up well since the last time I read it. baronlaw, meorime, sistercoyote, I think you’d enjoy it.

Journalist-turned-Buddhist-meditation-teacher Wes Nisker takes us on a tour of the world of “crazy wisdom”: the province of trickster gods, sacred clowns, holy fools, Taoist sages, Hassidic rabbis, Zen masters, Sufi mystics, existentialists, Dadaists, and the scientists who delve into the scales of space and time where we see the counterintuitive effects of evolution and quantum physics and general relativity. Crazy wisdom is the insight that comes from dropping away the filters of ego and preconceived notions and taking a good hard look at the world in all its banality and splendor... as well as taking the time to laugh at our own silly human pretensions.

The book is both a survey of crazy wisdom traditions from ancient times through modern and a look into its practice. It’s more of a signpost than a how-to manual, with lots of leads one can follow up on if they prove intriguing, liberally salted with quotations from sources ranging from ancient holy books to modern humorists and poets. I find the metaphysical perspective resonates well with my own aversion to dogma and hierarchy.

A great look at the evolutionary biology of sex, presented as a collection of newspaper advice columns where “Dr. Tatiana” answers questions sent in by everything from slime-molds to vertebrates. Judson keeps the pace lively and the writing humorous, mixing the exposition of the gobsmackingly weird mating behaviors found throughout the animal world with our current understanding of the evolutionary principles that give rise to them. If you’re designing aliens for your science fiction setting, this book is full of inspirational material (in the vein of the Alien Sex panels given at local science fiction conventions by SF author and physical anthropologist Patricia MacEwen). This book could also be a good way to liven up the study of biology for a high school student with a dry textbook; if you have more academic pursuits in mind, there’s an excellent set of references in the back.

Charles Pierce is a great admirer of the American tradition of cranks: people with wild and wacky theories that challenge the status quo, whose notions are tested against reality and are either break current understanding or are broken by it. (For example, my mother grew up in an era when tectonic drift was a crank theory; it is now accepted geology.) He sees this as one of the beauties of a society with the First Amendment in its bedrock.

In recent years, however, crank theories are getting spread throughout the media without benefit of testing them against reality, and without the benefit of testing they amount to so much idiocy. Instead, they are swept up by what he identifies as three Great Premises of Idiot America:

1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
3. Fact is that which people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

He documents much idiocy of recent years and compares it to historical crankery (Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World being a prominent example). Pierce doesn’t have a structural solution to the problem; he calls for a return to the days when cranks were a beloved fringe element of our society rather than mass-marketed lunatics on television, propped up by anyone whose political agenda they serve, but doesn’t chart a course to get there.

The premise of The World Without Us is a hypothetical future: what would happen to the Earth if all of humanity suddenly disappeared? To explore that, Weisman looks over our present and our past, touring the planet from deep wilderness to urban cores, history from the Paleozoic Era through the Paleolithic up to the modern day, and places where humans have already vanished, including Chernobyl and the Mayan civilization. It’s an interesting survey of our planet and the true fragility of infrastructure that seems very solid in our daily lives. The book is a tour, not a reference, and has no handy timelines for quickly generating descriptions for abandoned cities if you’re writing.

Book One: The Promethean Challenge ★★★½: A cyberpunk classic following the adventures of the soldier Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner Briareos, who are recruited from surviving in a postapocalyptic wasteland to come to the apparently-utopian city Olympus, which is leading the reconstruction of the planet. Olympus has a significant population of artificial humans— clones, hybrids made from multiple genetic sources, and bioroids with significant after-evolution options— and the variations on the theme of humanity set the stage for many interesting possible conflicts. This volume is setting up a larger story, with our heroes clearly being embroiled in a larger scheme.

Some of the combat scenes full of powered armor can be hard to follow, but overall the tale has me wanting to see what happens next.

Book Two: Prometheus Unbound ★★★½: As the cyborg Briareos recovers in the hospital from the assault in Book 1, Deunan goes to work in law enforcement in the utopian city of Olympus. The artificial-human bioroids created to run Olympus are developing the notion that the fundamental problem with the world is human nature itself— and this sets off a conflict where the city’s central computer, Gaia, goes out of control. And it will take Deunan and Briareos and their bioroid friend Hitomi to fix the problem...

This volume has plenty of violent power-suit action and explosions, and more of the undercurrent speculating on the problems of human nature. This still feels like setup; I’m looking forward to the resolution.

Book Three: The Scales of Prometheus ★★★: Deunan and Briareos are trying to fit into Olympus’ ESWAT team, involved in the pursuit of a rogue combat bioroid and a raid on a criminal operation in France, and Deunan isn’t so good at teamwork with anyone other than her partner. Plenty of cyberpunk action, lots of exposition via fanservice, not so much connection to the larger-scale plot laid out in the first two volumes.

Book Four: The Promethean Balance ★★½: Deunan and Briareos are on a mission for Olympus ESWAT to deal with a plot to disrupt the alliance between Imperial Americana and the Holy Islamic Republic of Munma. Naturally, this leads to large amounts of gunfire and explosions and a battle with an oversized powersuit. I found that the emphasis on the action got in the way of figuring out the actual plot, and the more philosophical side of the Appleseed story faded almost entirely into the background.

Overall, the series was a disappointment; the first couple of books raised my hopes that there would be some interesting perspectives on the human condition, but that thread of story got dropped in the latter volumes.

Diaspora is an instantiation of the third edition Fate system (currently best known for the pulp RPG Spirit of the Century) inspired by the classic game Traveller and updated for thirty years’ progress in hard sf storytelling. The writers for Diaspora have done a good job of fleshing out the differing scales of the system, with rules for personal combat (including more details on armor and weapons than in SotC), starship battles, social struggle, platoon-scale warfare, and developing clusters of star systems. Like SotC, there are no significant rules for advancement: character details can be shuffled around as they change, but any gain in skill has to be offset with a loss in some other skill. The writeup is a useful framework, but not as colorful as SotC (in either the setting or the stunts); if you loved Traveller but want a more storytelling-oriented system to use where you already have inspiration, this is likely to be great for you. I find it worthwhile as a playtested instantiation of Fate to compare to when developing my own game, but no story ideas are jumping off the page waving at me.

In the sequel to The Color of Distance, Juna Saari returns to Earth with two of the alien Tendu: froglike beings with an innate talent for biotechnology who have never had occasion to develop hard technology like our own. The humans living on and near Earth, however, aren’t ready to cope with a new sentient species, and there’s plenty of trouble brewing.

Thomson sets out to deal with a lot of issues, including xenophobia, ecological catastrophe, mandatory birth control on a planet stretched to its limits, the potential of the Tendu biotech ability, the reaction of the aliens to the human world, and Juna’s own family. She has plenty of interesting ideas (though the traditional dirt farm with working animals on a space station was difficult for my suspension of disbelief), but she doesn’t manage to weave all the threads together very well. There’s a lot of telling instead of showing, and some threads just get lost without any resolution. Handling them well would probably have required another book, but if the story had kept up the quality of the first book, it would have been worthwhile.