Tag: books

Review: The Prînce of Nöthing

About twenty years ago, I was at a used bookstore and I picked up what looked like an interesting medieval spin on James Bond.  It was set during the period of the Crusades, but appeared to be conceived as an action-thriller series rather like The Executioner, Mack Bolan.  I started reading it, but around page 30, when the slave girl sent by Saladin to spy on the Crusaders was in full throat enjoying her third rape at the hands of her captors, I suddenly realized that the book was not a historical novel but rather one of those strange 70’s porn novels with a thin veneer of historical fiction.  A little research indicates that the book was probably the fifth book in the Crusader series, Saladin’s Spy (1986), written by an author very familiar to Black Gate readers, although he published it under the pen name “John Cleve” rather than Andrew J. Offutt.  I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was casting about for a way to explain the epic fantasy of R. Scott Bakker’s series entitled The Prince of Nothing.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

A Dance with Dragons review – no spoilers

It was interesting to read George R.R. Martin’s latest so soon after seeing HBO’s A Game of Thrones and reading two fantasy series that some have attempted to compare to Martin’s epic, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie and The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. My first thought upon simply viewing the size of the tome was that Martin is clearly suffering from the same disease that inflicted Stephen King and JK Rowling before him. It would appear that some time in between A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, Martin came down with a bad case of morbus nemendatorus. This is the illness which strikes an author after he has become so prodigiously successful that he no longer sees any need to pay heed to an editor. It can be diagnosed on sight by the simple measurement of the thickness of the first book in the series and comparing it with that of the last book in the series. After reading A Dance with Dragons, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Martin has not yet recovered from it.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

UPDATE – Matthew David Surridge, who is one of the best critics in the SF/F genre, offers a substantially different take on the novel.

A failure of atheist cheerleading

Apparently Miss Myers didn’t get the message that all books written by New Atheists are to be blindly defended, tooth and claw, rather than criticized for the flaws that are apparent to any intelligent reader. I was both impressed and vastly amused by her scathingly dismissive review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, as it was even harsher and more contemptuous than my own review of it.

So, to summarise:

1. Utilitarianism is right, but not any more justifiable than anything else. But who cares what other people think, anyway?

2. Because utilitarianism is right, we don’t have to be loopy post-modernists.

3. Science can tell us what makes us happy. Here’s a smattering of scientific studies about the brain.

Why in the hell do they give out book deals so easily? This book isn’t about convincing others, or providing novel ideas. It’s about pandering to atheists with very little knowledge of philosophy and ethics and an abundance of arrogance, telling them science is with them, and then reiterating how immoral people who like FGM and throwing acid in girls’ faces are and how we don’t have to listen to them because We Are Right. This is nothing but a convoluted rehashing of utilitarianism that still falls to the same old criticisms, and an immense waste of time unless you really like a good ignorant circlejerk.

It would certainly be interesting to see Miss Myers review Sam Harris’s two previous books, to say nothing of the other books I addressed in The Irrational Atheist, with the same skeptical eye. Regardless, it appears she will make a more challenging champion of atheism than her father ever has because she is willing to pay attention to the words as written and to think for herself rather than to simply parrot centuries-old talking points and froth at the mouth like some sort of performing bearded clown monkey.

It appears that I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity in our conclusions concerning Harris’s book. Unbelievable, PZ’s daughter is the female version of Vox Day. What’s next? anti-feminism, repeal of women’s right to vote, border control and Austrian economics?

We can always hope that sweet reason will triumph, even if we harbor few expectations of it. And certainly, the intrinsic problem of utilitarian consequence pointed out by Miss Myers is not dissimilar to the famous Austrian explication of the impossibility of socialist price calculation. I must say, however, that she was perhaps a little unfair to Sam Harris in failing to give him credit for at least attempting to make a necessary case that so many other atheists have avoided, and in some cases, even claimed to be irrelevant. Ironically, given my past suspicions about him, Sam Harris may in some ways have turned out to be the most intellectually honest of the evangelical atheists. His blithely candid arguments are at least relevant, even if they reliably reveal his carelessness and inability to construct a valid argument on solid foundations.

Checking the metric

After publishing RGD in 2009, I was asked to list some of the metrics that would indicate that I was wrong about the USA having entered the Great Depression 2.0. One of the more important ones was an increase in state and local tax revenues. So, it was interesting to read this report from the U.S. Census, which tracks annual state government tax collections.

State government tax collections totaled $704.6 billion in fiscal year 2010, down 2.0 percent from the $718.9 billion collected in fiscal year 2009. Although 2010 total state revenue figures have yet to be released, in 2009 total state tax collection accounted for 64.0 percent of the total state government revenue.

In 2010, 11 states reported a positive increase over the previous year’s total tax collections, up from five states in 2009. The reasons for each state’s year-to-year increases vary. For example, in the case of North Dakota, increased tax revenue was largely due to strength in severance tax revenues, which are taxes imposed for the extraction of natural resources. However, North Carolina’s revenue increase was largely driven by sales and gross receipts tax.

Four states experienced a decrease of 10.0 percent or greater in year-to-year tax collections. Prior to 2009, no state had year-to-year tax revenue declines of this magnitude since 2002.

That this is somewhat of a positive spin on the situation is readily apparent when one looks at the actual data. Although overall state tax revenue is only down 2 percent in 2010, it’s now down 10.21 percent from its 2008 peak and is lower than it was in 2007 or 2006. The comparison of the eleven states with positive growth in tax revenues to the four states with revenue contractions of more than 10 percent is simply bizarre; a more relevant one would be to point out that 39 states had declining revenues in 2010.

Also, five of those eleven states with tax revenue growth had growth of less than one percent. In the case of Maine, it was only 0.03%. One cannot reasonably say that the state economies were improving in 2010, only that they declined at a slower rate than in 2009.

Keep in mind that this slower rate of contraction took place despite the benefit of the enormous stimulus package, much of which, as we know from Paul Krugman’s past recommendationscurrent complaints, went to the state governments. Now that the spending orgy has, at least temporarily, come to an end, we would anticipate that state tax revenues will again decline at an increasing rate in 2011. I can’t confirm that, though, because the monthly Iowa tax report that I use as a rough proxy is inconclusive; in April it looked like 2011 tax receipts would be down, while in May they look very positive.

Regardless, by the state tax metric, the central thesis of RGD still appears to be sound.

The Crüel World of R. Scött Bâkkër

After some back-and-forth discussions pursuant to my opining on the New Nihilism of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and others in a post entitled The Decline and Fall of the Fantasy Novel, I found myself interested in the works of my interlocutor, who happened to be the author of The Prince of Nothing series as well as a second series entitled The Aspect Emperor. It’s too soon to write a review, as I have only finished the first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before. However, there are already five things that are readily apparent about Mr. Bakker’s fiction:

Read the rest at The Blâck Gátë

Umberto Eco on Stephen Hawking

I was thinking about addressing Stephen Hawking’s absurd new book, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to bother even picking it up, let alone reading it. Fortunately, Umberto Eco was willing to do the dirty work for us:

Philosophy is not Star Trek

In “The Republic” of last April 6th, there appeared a preview of the book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, introduced with a subtitle that more or less reprised a passage from the text: “Philosophy is dead, only physics can explain the cosmos”. The death of philosophy has been announced on various occasions and therefore the announcement made little impression, but it seemed to me it must be balderdash to have claimed that a genius like Hawking would say such a thing. To be sure that “The Republic” had not erroneously summarized the book, I went and bought it, and the reading confirmed my suspicions.

The book appears to have been written by two hands, although in the case of Hawking the expression is sadly metaphorical because, as we know, his limbs do not respond to the commands of his exceptional brain. However, the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”. In the book, one can see the beautiful illustrations that appear to be conceived for a children’s encyclopedia from a bygone time; they are colorful and engaging, but do not actually explain anything about the complex physical, mathematical, and cosmological theorems they are supposed to illustrate. Perhaps it is not prudent to trust one’s destiny to the philosophy of individuals with rabbit ears.(1)

The work begins with the fixed affirmation that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only physics can explain:

1)How we can comprehend the world in which we find ourselves.
2)The nature of reality.
3)If the universe had need of a creator.
4)Why there is something instead of nothing.
5)Why we exist.
6)Why this particular set of laws exists instead of some other.

As you see these are typical philosophical questions, but it must be admitted that the book demonstrates how physics can, in some ways, serve to answer the last four, which appear to be the most philosophical of all.

The problem is that in order to attempt to answer the last four questions, it is necessary to have answered the first two. It is those questions which, in a large way, are what one requires in order to say that something is real and if we know the real world as it is. Perhaps you will recall from your philosophical studies at school that we understand by attribute what the intellect perceives of a substance,(2) it is something outside of ourselves. (Woody Allen adds: and if so, why are they making all that noise?) Either we are Berkeleyans(3) or, as Putnam said, brains in a vat.

Well then, the fundamental answers that this book puts forward are exquisitely philosophic and without these philosophical answers not even the physicist could say “because he knows” and “what he knows”. In fact, the authors speak of “a realism dependent on the models”, that is, they assume that “other concepts of reality independent of description and theory do not exist”. Therefore “other theories can satisfactorily describe the same phenomenon by means of different conceptual structures” and all that we can perceive, we know, and we say of reality depends on the interaction between our models and that thing which is outside but that we know only due to our perceptive organs and our brain.

The more suspicious among the readers will have already recognized a Kantian phantasm, but it is clear the two authors are proposing that which in philosophy is called “Holisticism” and by others “internal realism”. As you see, it is not a treatise of physical discoveries, but of philosophical assumptions, that stand to sustain and legitimize the research of the physicist – those which, when he is a good physicist, can only address the problem of the philosophical foundations of his own methods. We already knew, we were already familiar with these extraordinary revelations, (evidently due to Mlodinow and to the company of Star Trek), for “in antiquity there was an instinct to attribute the violent actions of nature to an Olympus of displeased or malevolent gods”. By gosh, and then, by golly.(4)

(1) “Orecchie da leprotto”. Literally, “the ears of the hare”. I’m not familiar with this phrase, which could mean anything from implying that the two men are asses (think Pinocchio) to a leafy green vegetable found in salads. Or it may simply be referring to Mlodinow’s background in television. Seeing as it’s Eco, one hesitates to guess. But one thing is certain; it’s not a compliment.
(2) I think this refers to Spinoza’s philosophy of mind. Some school. But do they know how to put condoms on bananas?
(3) Philosopher George Berkeley, who argued against rational materialism and considered the idea of “matter” to be unjustified and self-contradictory.
(4) “Perdinci e poi perbacco”. It’s an Italian expression that doesn’t necessarily translate well, but indicates a lack of surprise. The sense of dismissive sarcasm should be readily apparent.

As my Italian is better described as “conversational” rather than “fluent”, don’t put too much confidence in my translation. The four italicized notes are mine and therefore may be incorrect. Regardless, it should be clear that Eco is describing a material example of how, once more, science has climbed to the summit of another intellectual mountain, only to find the philosophers already there.

The Warrior Lives: Remembering Rosenberg

I was a fan of Joel Rosenberg’s work long before I ever met him, but I eventually came to admire him more as a man than as an author. I wasn’t a close friend of his, more the friend of a friend, but I did have the good fortune to get to know him over the last 15 years. It was a privilege for an SF/F fan, but more than that, it was a genuine pleasure. Growing up in Minnesota, which at the time felt rather like the cold side of the back of beyond, I had no idea that there were Real Live Writers living there, never being much inclined to read the author bios at the back. Like many a teenage boy in the Eighties, I had dabbled in role-playing games such as AD&D, Gamma World, and Traveller in the Time Before Girls, and so The Guardians of the Flame were a real revelation to me. Rosenberg’s novels were gritty long before grit became fashionable; he made a distinct impression on a young reader by killing off a major character practically at the beginning of the first novel, then went himself one better by killing off the lead character in only the fourth book in the series. I can’t recall being more shocked while reading fiction any time before or since. Karl Cullinane is dead? But… but what about the series?

Continued at The Black Gate

R.I.P. Joel Rosenberg

Some bad news this morning. Joel Rosenberg, the SF/F author, Second Amendment advocate, and a friend of mine, died of a heart attack last night. He was 57. The OC has more information at the Friday Challenge.

If you haven’t read his books before, I highly recommend beginning with Not for Glory. It contains one of my favorite short stories, about the dangerous relationship between the treacherous general Shimon Bar-El and his nephew Tetsuo.