Illuminatus! trilogy

This is a kill or cure for paranoiacs, with an embarrassment of riches of conspiracies - complete with detailed evidence which is easily referenced. The mout outrageous and silly conspiracies are true (the Principia Discordia quotes are real), and some of the more believeable stuff is false. Wilson and Shea call it “guerilla ontology”. Some people may find the viewpoint character changing so often to be distracting, but I enjoyed it as part of the trip. Its very seventies hippy culture, and very funny and perceptive. Its mindblowing to realize it was written before Watergate and the Nixon insanities were publically known.

Principia Discordia

This is the book that started the Discordian movement. Its the Discordian “bible” God is a crazy woman, called Eris by the ancient Greeks, and called Discordia by the ancient Romans. This is a very subversive anti-dogmatic satiriacal look at religion and mysticism and a lot of fun. My original copy came from Loompanics and was borrowed by Tristan Gutsche, along with my Ren and Stimpy video tapes, and my escapologist’s thumbcuffs . I never saw him again. . I eventually bought my new copy from Amazon.

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

Using a modified version of Timorthy Leary’s Six circuit model of the brain, this book illustrates how each circuit is imprinted and work, and has exercises at the end of every chapter for you to play with how your own brain is wired, and to show you how to rewire it for more fun and flexibility. AS life changing as “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I used to lend this book out on a regulat basis in my undergraduate years to friends I deemed intelligent enough to benefit from the experience. Eventually I loaned this one with “Real Magic” to David Eggleton in 1994, and I never heard from jim again, so I no longer own a copy of what was one of my all time favourite books.

The brain is a wonderfully flexible toy, and Wilson shows you how to discover how yours has been programmed by your life experiences, and how to take over for a more satifying life.

Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz

Every science fiction and fanstasy writer should read this book. Bonewitz has the first “Bachelor in Thaumaturgy” from a Californian University. He takes the assumption that psychic powers exist, and then runs with that through a very logical and rational process to how they must work in a universe where such things are true, drawing on anthropology and psychology and the occult. A facsinating read for believers and skeptics alike. Invaluable for writers. If psychic powers are real, this is how they would work.

The Art Of Deception by Nicolas Capaldi

An Introduction to Critical Thinking: How to: Win an Argument, Defend a Case, Recognize a Fallacy, See Through a Deception

A witty and entertaining tutorial on the art of informal logic. The reader is taught to recognize when logic is being abused by being shown how to win arguments by abuising the rules of informal logic.
You are introduced to all of the logical fallacies you may have intuited but previously never had a name for, and how they can unfiarly be used to win arguments. In so doing you learn how to conduct fair arguments and to avoid the fallacies yourself. Every high school studentb and undergrad should be given a copy to study, certainly everyone who has ever been in an argument.

coalescent

I’m a Sydney-sider in Canada in winter for the first time, and I developed bronchitis five days ago. So take that into account. On the one hand I have the time to read while I rest, and I want to escape into an interesting story. On the other hand my body and my environment feel miserable.

“Coalescent” by Stephen Baxter is my current science fiction read. I’m on page 360 of 470, but its sat unread for a whole week. It was a reluctant read the week before that.

The chapters alternate with Regina, a girl in ancient Roman Britain from the fall of the Roman Empire about sixteen hundred years ago, and with her descendant, George, in the modern day.

Baxter has lovingly filled in the details of ancient Roman Britain, and he gives an impressive vision of how modern and civilized the Roman Empire was, and how quickly the foundations of a civilised system can just go away. Regina goes from incident to incident as she grows up, including time with a historiaclly plausible King Arthur, all throw away history to justify the Society she secretly sets up to make sure her family survives the fall of civilisation.

The chapters with the modern world were much less interesting, and in fact I was constantly annoyed by the formulaic manner in which the central character shows no interest at all in the alien artefact discovered in the outer regions of the solar system, unless forced to by outside events. I don’t like George at all, he’s a boring character. This is the first book in a series called “Destiny’s Children”, and I’m not sure I’ll care enough to find out what his inevitable connection to the alien artefact will be.

Its page 360 of 470, the Coalescents are a nice idea, but you have to DO something with them! Or else George and the others have to be interesting enough to draw me in so that I’m patient enough to plough through the next books and find out what on Earth the point of all this is.

Sometimes, writers will conclude a story so brilliantly, that you change the way you see all the characters and events that you’ve experienced, and you feel the difficult journey was justified. Perhaps I’m being unfair to post something this early, but with the doom-laden words “Destiny’s Children Book One” as the sub-title on the cover, I have little faith.

OK, I finally read the last 110 pages, and Baxter does finally do something with the Coalescents. He takes you into the far future and shows you what the Coalescents are really about and where they’re going. Its an interesting vignette, and then he zooms back to the present, which is boring again. He leaves the alien artefact as pointless, and I think he misses part of his own point of the self-pepetuation of large complex memetic systems with the way he ends the book with Peter and the Slan(t)ers.

So he does redeem his central itheme of the Coalescents and use them, but it wasn’t enough for me to want to go on and read the rest of the series. I found better escape while I was ill in the graphics novels “The Books of Magic” by Neil Gainman, which chronicle Timothy Hunter’s initiation as a wizard, written more than a decade before Harry Potterism.

Midnight Lamp

“Midnight Lamp” by Gwyneth Jones, was a fun, engaging view of a future not very far from now when the instability of Britain predicted by Ken Macleod and other authors has come to pass. Rockstars have taken control. The world has quietly been complicated by the discovery of “effective magic” and “Zen Self” technology, accessing the “information space” that underlies reality and the rockstars are at the heart of it.

This is the third in the series starting with “Bold As Love” and “Castles Made Of Sand”, which I haven’t read yet. Jones is such a good writer that I had no trouble with starting the story AFTER the major magical battle between the heroes and the monster. She gets the best of both markets by having very English rockstars wandering around a very American Hollywood landscape.

The three-way romance between the rockstar heroes is believable and touching. Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda are all walking wounded, but all are a lot more than they appear to be and always looking out for each other. Ax Preston, with his digitally animated skull mask, is the super-powerful rockstar Ozzie Osbourne fantasized about being, and like Osbourne, he’s now older and trying to cope with responsibility and having survived his youth. Sage is a bodhisattva, brought to Zen enlightenment by information space technology, and returned to the Earth with wisdom, but badly injured and recuperating from his magical battle. Fiorinda is a fragile, beautiful redheaded diva who has effective magic without any technology, but who dare not use it because of the schizophrenia the magical battle has brought upon her.

The heroes are in retreat on a beach in Mexico when they get drawn into an American plot to “weaponize” effective magic by the Pentagon. Somebody wants to use black magic to pump a talented candidate up to “Fat Boy” status - a human weapon of mass destruction. The rockstars have to stay free of other people’s plans and save the world.

Midnight Lamp will be published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in February 2004, don’t miss it.

Bold As Love website

Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

I loved Richard Morgan’s first novel “Altered Carbon”, and this is the sequel. In the first book, Kovacs has been trained to be an Envoy, an elite government soldier who discovers that the only retirement job is crime. He lives in a future where your mind and personality are routinel;y accurately recorded on an Altered Carbon chip embedded at the base of your brain. The chip can be extracted at death, and then implanted in a forced-grown clone adult body so that you can live again.

Kovacs has been caught, his data extracted, and squirted as information faster than light from his colony homeworld to Earth. Convicts are no longer kept imprisoned in the expensive flesh, instead their chips are removed and kept in a Stack. Kovacs is taken off the stack to become a bonded private detective and solve a murder in “Altered Carbon”.

“Broken Angels” takes up Kovacs’ career afterwards, and he’s returned to the military as a mercenary. His edge over everyone else is his Envoy conditioning and training. This is another story where Zen enlightenment has been adavnced by science into a useuable technology. Not so far-fetched when New Scientist is running stories about how the brain scans of Zen masters are different than average and where they can see in the neurology how Zen practices can make a person feel more inner peace and control. Kovacs can control his emotions and his perceptions utterly, he’s always cool. He has skills and reflexes that can transfer over to an unfamiliar body in unfamiliar environments.

Kovacs has been “sleeved”, re-embodied, in a war zone to recover an alien artefact before the other side do so. Human life is cheap among mercenaries, but in Kovacs’ case, he goes to a market to buy soldiers mind chips, recovered from their battlefield corpses. He’s cheerfully served by a man who scoops chips out of a huge pile and charges by the kilogram. Soldier’s minds are booted up in a virtual environment, where the recruitment officer asks them if they want to sign up. Since the alternative is death, its an offer that can’t be refused.

This is a very different book to the previous one, it was a big jump for me from private detective muder mystery to military campaign, and so I don’t know if the feeling I had that we took too long to get to the artefact was because of the change of pace in the switch in sub-genres, or was just my impatience. I love the character and the writing, but the second book wasn’t quite the pure joy of “Altered Carbon”.

Richard Morgan has a wonderful writing style, and he keeps coming up with further and further implications of his basic world set-up and technology. Kovacs is a punk who doesn’t deserve the Zen enlightenment his Envoy conditioning has gifted him, and is enlightened enough to know so. His character grows throughout the two books, and I’ll be very interested to see where Morgan has him going next.

evolution by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter’s “evolution” is a really ambitious piece of writing, he’s attempted no less than to novellize ALL human history from our early rat-like primate ancestors scurrying around the feet of giant dinosaurs, all the way through pre-human and more human ancestors, the stone age, the invention of agriculture, all the way up to the modern day, the near future, and then the far future. He’s mostly succeeded.

By the very scope of the subject, the book is really a linked series of short stories, where a female ancestor is the central character. Baxter’s description of the morivations and perceptions and most importantly, the relationships of his characters is amazing. Starting the book, I wasn’t certain I could stay interested in animal stories while waiting for the humans to emerge, but Baxter rewards the reader for persisting.

It was fascinating to read about how our basic body plan evolved way before our brains, and that our bodies are optimized for running. Two legs are faster than four, and we were once the fastest and most persistant of predators, before we could even speak. Just when you start to get impressed with these people, you discover that there are giant sabre toothed tigers that have evolved to out-smart the clever pre-humans. Baxter gets into the minds of our ancestors and convincingly describes how they feel, and to what extent they think. He shows how consciousness evolved in response to social relationship needs, and how originally our ancestors only had “selves” when they interacted with others. The invention of grandmothers has as huge effects as the invention of stone tools.

Baxter charts the time when there were several different human species all living in competition and cooperation, the stagnant millenia when human culture was stuck in a stone-age balance with the environment, the effects of schizophrenia and creativity, deception and political manipulation. Our brains evolved to deal with other people, and the people are realized very sharply and believably.

Baxter has done such a remarkable job that I was almost disappointed when the people have developed into modern humans with an agricultural feudal society with an aristocrat called “Potus” at the head of the empire. POTUS stands for “President of The United States” to fans of the West Wing TV series. However Baxter comes through with continuity from the ancestor characters, and keeps you facsinated.

I was a little disappointed with his far future projections for humanity and life on Earth, but its a very hard thing to do convincingly.

“evolution” takes a little patience and persistance at times, but you’ll come away looking at the world with new eyes.

Light by M. John Harrison

My first impression of LIGHT was that it was entertaining, but mean. You’re reading along enjoying the thread, when people are suddenly, coldly and irrationally killed. And thats before the Lovecraftian horror elements are introduced. Then the thread switches from the near to the far future, and the reader is sucked in the same way again. Its a schizophrenic, but fun ride.

Every chapter is a different thread, and we switch between physicist Michael Kearney of modern day, researching quantum computers and running away from a un-human entity. K-captain Seria Mau Genliche is a brain-in-a-ship of the year 2400, using Kearney’s discoveries to navigate her space battles faster than light. Finally virtual-reality addict Ed Chianese of 2400, also running away.

Michael Kearney lives in Britain and has met and objectively verified the reality of the horror that pursues him. Harrison uses the classic element of horror stories, where the reader knows Kearney’s work is related to what haunts him, but Kearney is too terrified to deal with it rationally. Everything that happens to him spurs him in a new direction as he constantly reacts to the fear that destiny will eat him up. Is he right, or is he massively over-reacting?

K-Captain Seria Mau Genlicher lives near the Kefahuchi Tract, a huge conglomaration of astronomical bodies centered around a naked singularity that beeds impossibility into the fabric of reality. Humanity has come in sixty-five million years after other intelligent species have tried to find the secrets of the Tract. Humans and aliens alike now mine the ancient artefacts of the peoples who have explored before them; millions of years worth of working technology and ideas. The nightmare and wonder is that everything works. Even when the underlying theories contradict each other, the technology works. Seria wants to believe her inner life and her relationships bring her far past humanity, but she knows she’d do anything to live as a person again.

Ed Chianese is a twink, someone who spends their time and money escaping into virtual reality fantasies. His everyday life in 2400 on the Beach of the KafaHuchi Tract gives a great sense of how bizarre 21st Century life really is. He surfs life without any plan, and is happier that way. He enters the Circus of Doctor Lao, and like the famous legend, he grows from the experience and finds Destiny there.

M. John Harrison has achieved amazing things in LIGHT. The style is fun, and playful, while still filling the reader with wonder and horror by turns. He describes a rich, vibrant, bizarre, but believable and engaging world. I highly recommend you read this book.

A Space Child's Mother Goose

“The Space Child’s Mother Goose”, verses by Frederick Windsor and illustrated by Marian Parry is published by Purple House Press www.purplehousepress.com

This almost describes my own career…

There was a man in our town,

A Cyberneticist.

For those uncertain, the author includes a definition of hyperspace:

Regular space is high and wide;

HYPERSPACE is just outside.

A Space Child’s Mother Goose Frederick Windsor with quirky illustrations by Marion Parry

reviewed by Ian Woolf

As a science geek in High School my favourite poetry all came from “The Space Child’s Mother Goose”, light witty verses by Frederick Windsor with quirky illustrations by Marion Parry. There was one copy at the local library, and nothing anywhere else, it has long been out of print.

The “Annals of Improbable Research” is a journal of wit, silliness and sarcasm for those with a love of science. I was pleased last year to find them publishing a poem per issue from “The Space Child’s Mother Goose”, and that they were trying to find a new publisher.

Purple House Press have put this wonderful book back in print, and I ordered a copy as soon as it became available. The book has forty-five illustrated poems, along with a glossary of difficult words at the back labelled “The answers”.

I have a selection of the poems for you here, but I urge you to seek out purplehousepress.com on the internet, or ask your library to buy a copy so you can enjoy the illustrations as well.

Probable-Possible, my black hen,

Because she’s unable to Postulate How.

Scattered amongst the other poems, the author has translations of this poem in French, German, Greek, an African language, and Mandarin Chinese, all of which rhym in the same places, followed by the literal translation back again into English.

Then there are the variations on old favourites:

Little Miss Muffet

Is not in the picture today.

Little Jack Horner

And produce a more peaceful vicinity,

Solomon Grundy

Solomon Grundy?

And finally:

This is the Theory Jack built.

And Demolished the Theory that Jack built.