I may be a loyalist royalist but I don’t usually much care about the comings and goings of the Royal Family and I am no art critic either. However, I cannot refrain from commenting on the official portrait of Kate Middleton. It’s like all the goodness has been sucked out of her. Like a charmectomy operation. All the warmth that makes her photographs such a pleasure to look at… none if it is present in the painting. What was the artist thinking?
I am so not into “franchise” novels, novels that are written-to-order, set in the universe of an established franchise like Star Trek. Like franchise computer games, franchise novels tend to be hollow, weak, transparent attempts to capitalize from the success of the original work.
I like Star Trek. Over the years, I did read the occasional Star Trek “franchise” story, but they did not leave much of an impression. So I was not particualrly motivated to read another.
That said, when I recently read about Provenance of Shadows by David R. George III, a franchise novel written to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the series, for reasons I can no longer recall I became sufficiently intrigued to read the sample chapters on Google Books. They were enough to get me to buy the book. I do not regret doing so.
Spoiler alert
This book tells the story of an alternate timeline. Namely, the alternate timeline created by the events in the famous Star Trek episode “The City at the Edge of Forever”, in which Dr. McCoy finds himself in 1930 and, as we later learn, by preventing the death of a social worker, gravely alters history. The social worker, Edith Keeler, is a devoted pacifist; in the alternate timeline, she launches a pacifist movement that becomes powerful enough to delay the entry of the United States into World War II. This gives Hitler a chance to achieve victory on the Eastern Front, Japan a chance to conquer much of the South Pacific including New Zealand and parts of Australia, and most alarmingly, gives the Nazi atomic bomb project a head start.
I find this “alternate history” timeline compellingly believable. We tend to think that the defeat of the Nazis was a historical inevitability but it was by no means preordained. Suppose the United States adopts a different posture in the Pacific in the late 1930s and early 1940s, so that Japan has easier access to raw materials and oil, and feels less threatened by the US Navy. Suppose this convinces Japan that defeating the US is not a priority. No Pearl Harbor in 1941 means no opportunity for Stalin to move a huge, well-equipped and experienced winter fighting force from Siberia to Moscow, and the first successful Soviet counteroffensive never happens. There is a good chance, then, that Hitler would have captured Moscow in early 1942 and after that, Stalin’s government may have collapsed. With the resources of the Soviet Union secured, Hitler would have finished “pacifying” Western Europe, including Great Britain. Had this happened, the world in which we live would be a very different place today.
McCoy’s struggles to avoid altering history and later, to understand how he altered history, and his struggles to come to term with his own demons both in this alternate history and also, back in the 23rd century in the original timeline, make this book a compelling read. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
There were many short science fiction stories I read in my misguided youth, like Van Vogt’s Dormant, that left a lasting impression.
Promise Them Anything, by Dean McLaughlin, is a delightful “first contact” story. Impeccably polite aliens arrive and tell the United Nations that they’d like us to vacate their property, for it was them who created the Earth and they are now here to mine it. The protagonists, who are diplomats, successfully explain to the aliens that humanity does not have the ability to remove itself from its planet of birth, as it lacks the know-how and the technology. The aliens, ever polite, respond by installing a supercomputer that contains all their collective knowledge, then they leave. Subsequently, not all the protagonists live long enough to meet the aliens again (some were too old already) but several of them are still alive a thousand years later when the aliens show up again… but they never come closer to the center of humanity’s growing interstellar empire than tau Ceti.
Another great story was Evensong by Lester Del Ray. It is about an individual being chased by a relentless opponent that wishes to imprison him. The chase takes them to a planet that the fugitive recognizes as the place where it all began. Ultimately, the Usurper corners him; there is no escape. “But why?” asks the fugitive, “I am God!” – “I know,” replies his pursuer. “But I am Man. Come!”
Finally, Hungary once had a world-class science fiction anthology, Galaktika. Volume 24 of this anthology was dedicated to Spanish science-fiction. In it, I read a story attributed to a “J. M. Lois”, titled Anticuerpos (Antibodies). (I can’t find anything about a writer by this name online.) It is about a time-traveling lifeboat of sorts on an otherwise barren planet that we soon recognize as future Earth. The protagonists were sent forward billions of years to find out why humanity was set to die out just after its greatest triumph: defeat of a cosmic danger that threatened the existence of the entire universe. Slowly we learn the answer: humanity was the universe’s response much as a biological organism produces antibodies to fight off disease. When the antibodies are no longer needed, they wither away. And indeed, the technological marvel of that temporal lifeboat lives on as a bright point of artificial light for a little longer… but the planet on which it is positioned is now truly lifeless.
I don’t read science fiction stories that much anymore. I’d like to think that it’s not because I am older, but because the Golden Age of Science Fiction is no more, and great stories like these just don’t get written that much anymore.
I spent a lot of my misguided youth reading science fiction. I particularly liked short stories.
Dormant, written by A. E. Van Vogt, is set in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War and the first atomic explosions. The hero (if it can be called that) of the story is a giant slab of rock, which turns out to be a sentient machine that has lain dormant at the bottom of the sea for untold millions of years until it was woken by trace amounts of radioactive energy as a result of nuclear fallout in the ocean. When this 400-foot slab of rock climbs out of the sea and up a hill, it attracts the attention of the US military, which ultimately decides to destroy it with an atomic weapon. The sudden flood of energy was all Iilah (for the rock had a name) needed to wake up fully and remember its mission; after which, it destroys itself in a gigantic explosion, dislodging the Earth from its orbit and causing it to plunge into the Sun. For Iilah’s purpose was to destroy a solar system. And even if it had known that the war it was designed to fight ended eons ago, robot bombs are not designed to make up their own minds.
This story was written by Van Vogt in the 1940s but much to my delight, I just came across a sequel published on the Web in 2012. Written by a Bruce Munro and titled After Dormancy, it gives humanity, in the author’s own words, “a slightly happier ending…”
I came across this picture on Facebook the other day, a photo of the cheapest car radio made in Hungary back in the 1970s. It was a very basic radio manufactured by Hungary’s dominant electronics manufacturer Videoton. We had the exact same type of radio in the exact same model car (a Lada 1200 if I am not mistaken) when I was in grade school.
Funny thing about this receiver is that it wasn’t an AM-FM radio. It was an AM + shortwave radio, with a single shortwave band tuned to 49 meters.
The same 49-meter shortwave band that was the preferred band used by Cold War era propaganda stations broadcasting in Hungarian, including Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, even The Vatican.
We lived in the town of Visegrad at the time, only 40 km north of Budapest but separated from the capital by some hills. Because of the terrain, reception of Budapest stations was often spotty. Which may explain why this little car radio had trouble tuning to the 2 MW transmitter of Radio Kossuth, located in central Hungary, but had no trouble at all with the reception of the aforementioned propaganda stations; those were always crystal clear.
As to why a communist-era state-owned electronics factory was manufacturing a car radio with such excellent short wave sensitivity, I have no idea. Perhaps, in an early experiment with capitalism, they were trying to respond to market demand?
I like the CBC. CBC Radio 2 is pretty much the only radio station I listen to these days (though I admit I liked them a great deal more before they changed the station’s format and eliminated some unique programs, most notably Jurgen Gothe’s Disc Drive). In the evenings, I like to watch local news on CBC Ottawa. CBC Newsworld still has some excellent documentaries. And so on.
The CBC is about to have its licenses renewed. It is asking the CRTC for “more flexibility”, including permission to run commercials on Radio 2. And this makes me pause. Do we really need the CBC?
Yes, I think Canada needs a public broadcaster. One that is dedicated to provide Canadians with unbiased information; one that takes on a role of cultural leadership.
But no, we absolutely do not need an ill-managed private broadcaster that loses a billion dollars a year in public funds.
I have heard of the conspiracy theory that Stephen Harper’s government is purposefully allowing the CBC to be steered in this direction, as a means to devalue and, ultimately, destroy the CBC for ideological reasons. I don’t like conspiracy theories but I admit I sometimes wonder…
One of the best known Russian science-fiction authors from the Soviet era, Boris Strugatsky, died today at the age of 79. Together with his brother Arkady (who died in 1991), they wrote some astonishing, unique novels, including some of my favorites: Monday Begins on Saturday and It’s Hard to be a God. But they are perhaps best known for the short story Roadside Picnic, immortalized in film by Andrei Tarkovsky under the title Stalker.
The other day, creators of The Big Bang Theory (the television sitcom, not the cosmological theory) accomplished something astonishing.
They managed to replace in my mind the iconic number 42 (the answer to the Ultimate Question about Life, Universe and Everything, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) with the number 43.
I am still reeling from the shock.
Obama won. He is not going to have an easy four years with an obstructionist Congress. And the route Republicans will chose in the wake of Romney’s defeat remains an open question. I hope they don’t turn further right; that would either marginalize them or lead a far-right candidate to the White House, and neither of those outcomes are pleasant to think about.
But the real winner of the night I think was Nate Silver of the The New York Times, who predicted the outcome with uncanny accuracy, state-by-state. The one state that has not been called yet by the networks? Florida, with Obama slightly in the lead. Nate Silver’s prediction? A 50.3% chance of Obama taking the state.
And the real losers were Fox News, I believe. Rather than facing the facts, they decided to question the wisdom of their own “decision desk”, live on the air. What a sad (not to mention ridiculous) moment.
There is a beautiful love poem by the 19th century Hungarian revolutionary poet Sandor Petofi about the end of September. Unfortunately it is, well, in Hungarian. I am sure there are English translations out there, but I am also certain that they aren’t quite the same as the original.
But there is an equally beautiful song by the immortal Kurt Weill. It is his September Song, best sung by his wife Lotte Lenya:
In a mere few months, I’ll be older than Kurt Weill was on the day of his death. A sobering thought on a cloudy, gloomy September 30.
There is, apparently, a call for a world-wide ban on anti-Islam “hate speech”: essentially, any speech that criticizes Islam or its prophet.
My immediate reaction was a flat out Cold War Soviet-style “Nyet”. Or simply to tell them to bugger off. Seriously bugger off.
But it was a friend of mine whose views on Islam are generally far less restrained who offered the most eloquent way to respond to these calls. It was a quotation supposedly from Voltaire:
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
So an American (or not; the identity, ethnicity and nationality of the filmmaker(s) are not entirely clear) filmmaker creates a rather amateurish production bearing the title, The Innocence of Muslims, screened originally to an audience of less than 10 when it was first shown in a theater earlier this summer. To say that the movie is obscure is an understatement… It doesn’t even appear to have an entry in the Internet Movie Database (though chances are this will change soon.)
So what’s the best way to defend the honor of your Prophet? Why, how about launching a world-wide publicity campaign for this film, attacking embassies and consulates, burning American flags, and generally making sure that every news media talks about the film and its availability on YouTube. The trailer has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.
So, dear protesters, if your goal was to promote this hack job on your religion, give the filmmaker worldwide fame (and no doubt help him earn a few dollars in the process) and, incidentally, by murdering America’s ambassador to Libya, produce evidence that perhaps the movie’s point is not entirely to be dismissed, you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. Mohammed must be proud.
At this moment, there are protesters ripping down US flags at the American embassy in Cairo, upset over some film (no idea which one, just repeating what I heard on CNN) that in their mind insults the prophet Mohammed (many Muslims like to add the phrase, “peace be upon him” to his name, but there is nothing peaceful about the name of a prophet in whose name suicide bombers kill innocents, even if most followers of Islam do not subscribe to such violence. No, I don’t think Christ represents peace either.)
I think it’s about high time we tell something to violent Islamists who believe it is alright to intimidate others who, in their view, offend their religion. You, Islamists, offend us. You offend one of our most sacred beliefs, our belief in the right to free speech and freedom of expression. And yes, if necessary, we are willing to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to protect these rights. And don’t think for one moment that our beliefs are less important to us than your beliefs are to you. So what shall it be? Shall we go on and murder each other in the name of our mutually incompatible beliefs? (Don’t forget, there is a good chance that we might win. Westerners have become rather good at this war business after two world wars and countless smaller ones, and we are armed to the teeth. We also invented industrialized murder, you know, Auschwitz and all that.) Or shall we just let each other be?
I suggest the latter. And if you believe that there is a veiled threat behind this suggestion, you might not be wrong.
So next time you hear about a film that you don’t like, here is an easy solution: don’t watch it. Then we can just happily leave each other alone.
Here is a scary story: after a university professor referred jokingly to two absentee students as “spooks”, he became the subject of allegations of racism despite being well-known for his previous work on civil rights and racial equality. It so happened that the two missing students were African American, a fact of which the professor was unaware.
This Kafkaesque nightmare was the inspiration of a novel, “The Human Stain”, by author Philip Roth. Yet the novel itself became part of a Kafkaesque story on Wikipedia recently. That is because the Wikipedia entry falsely stated that the novel’s inspiration was a New York writer. When Roth asked for the article to be corrected, he was told by a Wikipedia administrator that “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”
Wikipedia’s goals to have facts backed by sources and to not contain original research are laudable. But sometimes, they go a tad too far (to say the least), a situation I ran into myself when contributing minor edits to entries about certain television series. Original research is one thing, but when prima facie evidence that is available for all to check contradicts a “secondary source”, shouldn’t it be obvious that the secondary source is simply wrong?
The story does have a happy ending, though. Now that Roth published an open letter in The New Yorker, the letter itself qualifies as a “secondary source”, and the Wikipedia entry is now updated. But if anything, this resolution just adds to the Kafkaesque surrealism of the story.
Speaking of books… A couple of weeks ago, I received my copy of The Hunger Games on Blu-Ray. I knew more or less what to expect but I was still amazed. I am trying to imagine that conversation somewhere in a movie company boardroom where the producer made the pitch: “I am planning a movie in which two dozen children brutally murder each other…” It’s a near miracle I think that this movie was made, and a genuine miracle that the result was not sweetened up by Hollywood.
The brutality of The Hunger Games is not self-serving. Its dystopia teaches a young audience a lot more than what a first kiss is like or how to survive a life-and-death game with a bow and arrows. It teaches them about choosing and betraying (or be betrayed by) friends. It teaches them about choosing when all your choices are evil and immoral. It teaches them how not to trust any authority. How life can be lethally unfair. How the protected world in which children live is merely an illusion. And the sequels, if possible, are even better. Yes, I now read them all, and I cannot wait to see them come to life on screen.
I just finished reading a chilling Swedish dystopia: The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist. Its title caught my eye when Google Play on my new tablet offered it at a discount, for only $1.99. I read the first few chapters for free and I was hooked.
The Unit paints a frightening picture of a society in near-future Sweden, in which childless people past childbearing age are sent to state-of-the-art facilities, Reserve Bank Units, to live out the rest of their lives in perfect comfort… as dispensable subjects of medical experiments and organ donors, submissively awaiting the day of their “final donation”.
I just hope that the mentality depicted in this book is not in any way representative of the way people think in present-day Sweden.
To those friends of mine who think I am nuts when I express my concerns about the inevitable coming of Skynet (from the Terminator movies)… say hello to TaserDrone.
Yes I know, it’s just a proof-of-concept prototype and not a very efficient one at that, but still…
Ray Bradbury would have turned 92 yesterday. Were he still alive, perhaps he would have appreciated this birthday gift: the landing site of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars was just named in his honor.
And Curiosity is now leaving tracks in the Martian dirt at Bradbury Landing.
It has been two decades since the collapse of the Soviet empire but Russia still has political prisoners.
The names of the latest three are Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevitch, members of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot. Their crime? Singing a punk rock anti-Putin song in an orthodox church. This earned them a two-year sentence for “crudely undermining the social order”.
Needless to say, I am thoroughly disgusted by this deplorable show trial. But I am also left wondering: is Mr. Putin’s regime really so insecure that they feel threatened by these young women? (The irony, of course, is the the decision to jail them and put them on trial probably harmed Mr. Putin’s regime a great deal more than their songs ever could. But then again, according to statistics quoted by Wikipedia, most Russians seem to think that the trial was fair and impartial. So perhaps Putin’s thugs know what they are doing.)
Today, I was waiting for Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN in vain. I had no idea at first why the program was preempted, but then on Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz explained: Zakaria was was suspended by both Time and CNN for plagiarism.
Zakaria was caught by the conservative news watchdog site Newsbusters, for writing the following:
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
This was supposedly plagiarized from a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, who wrote this:
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
Zakaria admitted making a “terrible mistake” and apologized. But wait a cotton-picking minute. What exactly happened here?
Lepore found some relevant data in a book by Adam Winkler. Most of the paragraph in question is just a summary of facts obtained from Winkler’s book, and a direct quote. Zakaria presumably found out about this book from Lepore’s article, and reprinted the same facts. But plagiarism? It’s not like the Lepore paragraph was full of original thoughts. Indeed, if I take the list of states and dates and the direct quotes out, very little original text remains:
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight […]. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893 […]
Zakaria’s version:
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight” […], firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, […]
Perhaps it might have been wise for Zakaria to mention that this paragraph was based on Lepore’s article. But then, unlike papers written for scientific journals, newspaper articles are rarely sourced.
In any case, I just don’t see how this warrants a suspension and a public humiliation of a journalist who is respected around the world. Not to mention giving an undeserved opportunity for right-wing nuts who find even Zakaria’s centrist views much too liberal for their taste to rant again about the “liberal bias” of the “mainstream media”. A prime example comes from the blog site American Thinker: “wouldn’t it be prudent to cut him and let him paste away elsewhere? I mean, I know you have a Muslim quota to fill, but I’m sure there’s an acceptable replacement you could poach from Al Jazeera.” Huh? Yes, I know Zakaria was born a Muslim, but he is no more a practicing Muslim than I am a practicing Catholic. I guess these are the same “American thinkers” who cannot tell the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh when going on a murderous rampage. But then, who cares about such nuances when you can spew hate?