Blackout by Connie Willis

A Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel

It’s hard for me to even calm down enough to gather my thoughts and write about Blackout. It’s just that good. At least, as a pretty longtime fan of Connie Willis’s work, I knew that something this awesome was coming before I opened the book.

Blackout is a return to Willis’s creatively imagined future in which academics time travel from Oxford University to observe history as it happens. Of course, the story doesn’t stay at Oxford for long, but instead follows a few of these historians as they duck and weave their way through England during World War II. Things don’t go so well for them, of course, and all of their foreknowledge and confidence in the laws of time travel might not be enough to get them out of their sticky situations.

This book is tense with furious action, but not all of it is avoiding bombs during the Blitz or trying to avoid changing history at Dunkirk. Willis manages to make events as simple as someone looking for someone else exciting. There’s a lot of running around and trying to figure out what’s going on, and what has gone wrong. Of course there’s not a little bomb-dodging as well.

I really loved this book, which I found not only entertaining and fun to read, but also downright informative (the historical research is fabulous). It was very hard to get anything else done before I had turned the last page. There’s only one thing disappointing about Blackout: the story doesn’t end on that last page! I’ve been left hanging! All Clear is the continuing volume, but I don’t currently have my hands on a copy! I can’t stand it!


A Year Of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Here is a great line I read from Johannes Kepler in A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel:

Regard the Holy Spirit as a divine messenger, and refrain from wantonly dragging Him into physics class.

I also liked this quote from Georg Joachim Rheticus:

It is characteristic of the honorable mind to love nothing more ardently than truth, and, inspired by this desire, to seek a genuine science of universal nature, of religious, of the movements and effects of the heavens, of the causes of change, not only of animated bodies, but also of cities and realms, of the origins of noble duties and of other such things.

It's really too bad that Rheticus couldn't know about modern uses of mathematical modeling, because he mostly just used his number-crunching skills to tell fortunes and try to predict the future. 

A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel

How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

I was not surprised to read in A More Perfect Heaven about how Nicolaus Copernicus (or Niklas Koppernigk before he Latinized) “revolutionized the cosmos.” I already knew about that. He was the guy who first published something suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe, but that it went around the sun instead. What was new and impressive to me was that Copernicus was a church canon, a medical doctor, served as a bishop’s secretary and personal physician, and made his famous astronomical observations and worked out the rigorous mathematics that explained them in his spare time.

Throughout Sobel’s account of his career, Copernicus never fails to come across as a source of reasonable, tactful and intelligent calm in a storm of chaos. He managed to make himself an all-around smart guy, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation and counter-reformation, invasions of his homeland by the Teutonic knights, and all kinds of other unreasonableness, violence and bad behavior. And he seemed to recognize that he was an island of intelligence, because he didn’t have much desire to publish his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. He may have known that it would just have been declared heretical, and banned, and get him into all kinds of trouble.

Somehow, and that somehow has been lost to history, a mathematician and astrologer named Georg Joachim Rheticus convinced Copernicus to take him on as a student and eventually convinced him to publish his revolutionary new theories. About a third of A More Perfect Heaven is a play that Sobel wrote as an imagining of how Rheticus may have talked Copernicus into publishing, which is a pretty fascinating turning point in history. Copernicus suffered a stroke while On the Revolutions was being printed and didn’t live to witness the reactions, positive or negative, to his revolutionary work.

Of course now we take for granted that the earth goes around the sun and that others from Kepler and Galileo to Einstein and Heisenberg have built upon what Copernicus started to get us even closer to understanding the universe and how it works. It seems strange from this vantage point that Copernicus wasn’t inclined to shout about his brilliant work from the rooftops (remember, he didn’t just have a good idea, he did all the math to back it up), that he stayed pretty quiet about it and didn’t try to forcibly jar the world out of its ignorance. I’m pretty convinced that I’ll never exhibit the level of brilliance that Copernicus did (although I did make some pretty delicious cookies recently), but I hope to someday have the grace that he seemed to have when making his practical comments on matters domestic and universal.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

In my post on Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, I discussed the miniature physics lesson the reader gets whether she likes it or not.  Here's a great line from that lesson:

Davidson [an astronomer] could not tolerate this sloppy talk. "No such thing as centrifugal force. It's and engineer's phantom. There's only inertia."

This is likely an expression of the frustrations of physics enthusiasts everywhere. (But what about the angular momentum?)

And, having recently moved my own collection of hard copy to a new home, I could really appreciate this line, spoken by Commander Norton.

"You know Jerry Kirchoff, my exec, who's got such a library of real books that he can't afford to emigrate from earth?"

This is not only a sobering reminder of the laws of physics, but also a cautionary soundbite to biblio-gluttons like myself who hope to have a place in the spacefaring far future.  Eh, I get carsick enough that I probably wouldn't be able to travel by rocket anyway.

Coming next: My thoughts on A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

A Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel

Just as there are classics in world literature there are classics in science fiction as well. Where the writers of literary classics are lauded because they beautifully explore the human condition, pressing or even extending the limits of language to do so, great science fiction writers apply the known laws of the universe to unique situations that are as yet beyond the human experience. I think sometimes quality science fiction doesn’t get as much recognition because not enough people understand the science, which is a shame.

Rendezvous with Rama is a terrific example of this application of science to something we have never seen in the real universe. Rama is an object visiting our solar system from some unknown place and the lucky crew of the spacecraft Endeavour gets to explore it. It is the distant future and much of the solar system has been colonized and space travel is relatively commonplace. The setting itself is exciting enough, but Clarke doesn’t skimp on the real science, or the realistic people.

The descriptions of the interior of Rama, which is a spinning cylinder, have been created in such detail that I have to be careful to remember that this thing isn’t real. Embedded in this story of adventure and exploration is a miniature physics lesson in which Clarke has spelled out in concise language how things would work or wouldn’t work in Rama, and how reasonable and reasonably well-equipped people might adjust to it.

There are, however, more than just adventures in artificial gravity and cylindrical seas in Rendezvous with Rama. There’s also the excitement of exploration and discovery, of observing something no one on earth has seen before. Even though William Norton, the commander of Endeavour, is a veteran space traveler, he recognizes the significance of this unique situation. “There was also a sense of danger that was wholly novel to his experience. In every earlier landing, he had known what to expect; there was always the possibility of accident, but never of surprise. With Rama, surprise was the only certainty.” (Having recently read Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram, I was particularly tickled that Norton recognized his similarity to Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen’s tomb.)

Rendezvous with Rama is speculative fiction at its finest, although there’s no death and/or destruction if that’s what you’re looking for. Even if you’re afraid of the details of the science, you can just take in the novel as you might an amusement park in a place that is just being explored as you ride along. I, however, particularly enjoyed the scientific details, which allow me fully suspend my disbelief and be entertained.

Of course I was left wanting more, but the reader is allowed hope of a sequel or two in the final line of the book: “The Ramans do everything in threes.” (Spoiler: there are sequels.)

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Words I Wish I Wrote by Robert Fulghum

A Collection of Writing that Inspired my Ideas

This isn’t so much a Book I Should Have Read By Now. It’s more of an Idea I Wish I Had. I picked it up from the library when I was looking for my own inspiration in writing about other people’s writing. It is so chock-full of great quotations and personal commentary by Fulghum that I thought I’d post my thoughts about it on what would normally be Favorite Lines Friday.

In this volume, Fulghum has collected the words of others who have inspired him and helped to create his ever-evolving philosophy and world view. I’m glad that Fughum has not been afraid to allow his personal philosophy to change over time. It gives me some hope for the future of my own sanity. I suppose one could say that I’m finishing up a sort of philosophical boot-camp phase in my life. That is, I’ve torn down most of the dumb and wrong-headed ideas I’ve had, or was told to have, and am ready to rebuild. Since I’m fully aware that I’m unlikely to have an idea that someone else hasn’t already had, and that someone has undoubtedly expressed it much more eloquently than I ever could, I like the idea of scribbling down the words of others that strike a meaningful chord as Fulghum has for much of his life.

Here are some lines quoted by Fulghum from John W. Gardner:

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

I couldn’t agree more…unless you replace the word philosophy with politics and theories with policies.


I also jotted down a few good words from Fulghum’s own reflections. Here’s what he wrote about reading Joseph Heller:

The books are not about death and horror, but about what the system does to the better inclinations of human nature. I laugh when I read Heller, fully understanding that what I’m reading isn’t funny.


And on a similar note:

Nothing connects me with a person quicker than knowing what he laughs at. Nothing is more valuable in a relationship than loose and easy laughter.

Ha!

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Wednesday Word

stele (stē' lē, also stēl) 1. an upright stone slab or pillar engraved with an inscription or design and used as a monument, grave marker, etc. 2. Archit. a prepared surface, as on a facade, having an inscription, carved design, etc. 3. Bot. a central cylinder of vascular tissues in the stems and roots of plants

Having recently read Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram, I'm mostly interested in the first two definitions (although I listed #3 for completeness).

Imagine you are thrashing your way through the thickest jungle and you come across a great big rock carved with ornamentation and figures that are unlike anything anyone has seen or recorded in known history.  This is just what happend in the late 1830's to John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood as they were searching for the Mayan city of Copán in what is now Honduras:

Stephens and Catherwood themselves now took machetes and set about getting a clearer view.  They found themselves before a stele, a high and richly carved slab of stone.  In artistry of execution there was nothing in Europe or Asia to compete with it.  Such sculpture had never been even remotely suspected on the American continent.
     The ornamentation on the stone likeness was magnificent beyond description.

Stephens and Catherwood eventually found thirteen more of these magnificent stones.  Since they could not haul them out of the jungle (and I, for one, am glad of that) it was left to Catherwood, an experienced draftsman to make a drawing of one of the darn things. The images before him were so beyond his experience that he nearly drove himself crazy trying to create an accurate depiction.

I suppose the next time something like this could happen it would have to be on another planet...or in a far, far future when super-evolved humans try to figure out why us ancients carved out so many sets of golden arches. And in either case the discoverers will probably have digital cameras.

Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram

The Story of Archeology

Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram is a popularization of archeology, an engagingly written account of that science for the uninitiated, for the rest of us. Cream tells us by way of introduction in the book’s Foreword, “My book was written without scholarly pretentions. My aim was to portray the dramatic qualities, the human side.” It is, in short, a work of non-fictional adventure.

I must stand up and be counted among those who fell in love with archeology after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 1980s. If I had been able to follow up the pulp-style fictional adventures of Indiana Jones with Gods, Graves and Scholars I may have been hopelessly smitten for life. Instead, I had to wait until my freshman year of college when I took my one and only archeology class. All I really remember was learning how some bits of broken dishes proved that a certain group of Scandinavian immigrants lived in a certain area of Upper Michigan. Not exactly swashbuckling.

But Gods, Graves and Scholars is, and it’s not even fiction. It’s an exciting account of the way some of the most important discoveries came about:

Archeology, I found, comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth.

These stories are filled with compulsive scholars, obsessive dreamers, tireless adventurers, code-breakers, murderers, sadistic one-eyed villains, and an entire town full of tomb-robbers. Ceram takes the reader by the hand through accounts of J.J. Winkleman’s creation of a systematic approach to the new science of archeology in the mid-18th century before he was murdered; Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the city of Troy (and its treasure) by following his favorite fairy tale; Jean-Francois Champollion’s obsession with the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics; the breathless climax of Howard Carter’s entrance into Tutankhamen’s tomb; and John Lloyd Stephens’s securing for study the ruins of the Mayan city of Copan by purchasing the whole thing for fifty dollars.

At the risk of sounding like an infomercial host, I’ll just say, “and there’s much, much more.” The reader rides along to discover statues and steles, pyramids and tombs, crumbled towers and buried treasures, to so many places where, “that piquant combination of research and adventure, of scientific success and treasure-hunting, of that romantic éclat which comes when the excavator’s spade suddenly strikes a find of great material and intellectual value.” We watch over the shoulders of archeologists and other scholars as they struggle “to make dried-up wellsprings bubble forth again, to make the forgotten known again, and cause to flow once more that historic stream in which we are all encompassed.”

This book is, in a word, fascinating! I’m still a little out of breath from taking this armchair stay-cation with Ceram, who wrote, “In truth no science is more adventurous than archeology, if adventure is thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed.” After having read his book, and when I consider that it was originally published in 1949 (in German), several years before Sputnik gave us new frontiers rather than the remains of forgotten ones, I have no choice but to agree.

Coming soon: My thoughts on Words I Wish I Wrote by Robert Fulghum

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Here's a quote from The Phantom of the Opera that made me smile...

"None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learnt to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy."


Coming next: my thoughts on Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram

Wednesday Word

I came across the word pierrot while reading The Phantom of the Opera:

"With his face in a mask trimmed with long, thick lace, looking a very pierrot in his white wrap, the viscount thought himself most ridiculous."

First off, I have to agree that the viscount (Raoul de Chagny, Our Hero) probably looked pretty ridiculous in this get-up. At the risk of baring my ignorance for all of cyberspace to see, I have to admit, however, that I didn't know the word pierrot.

Pierrot (pē' ə rō', Fr. pye rō') a stock comic character in old French pantomime, having a whitened face and wearing loose pantaloons and a jacket with large buttons


While the trusty Second College Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary that I got for Christmas from our dog, Flash, in the late 1980s gives Monsieur Pierrot a captitalized first initial, Leroux (or at least his translator) did not.  I can only assume this means that pierrot no longer refers to a name, but rather a type and has lost its status as a proper name.

(This wikipedia entry has images of Pierrot. This and a Google image search might just lead to something that looks pretty familiar.)