I’ve finished Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I’ve mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn’t like his ideas, I thought he’d expressed them poorly before, but I’d give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.
My opinion: it’s dreck.
No, it can’t possibly be true! Jim Theis’s masterwork, The Eye of Argon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has actually been published? As a book? With pages and a cover and all of that? I’ve known of this legendary monstrosity for years, and have read it online and as a tattered and stapled faded photocopy, but to actually have a publisher commit resources and money to it … truly, we are in the End Times.
You too can read it, but don’t buy it: get it for free, and even then you are paying too much for it. This is what you get when you give a teenager a thesaurus, insist that every noun must have an adjective, and the only forbidden word is “said”.
Take a taste.
Eyeing a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishing to wholesomely occupy his time. The flickering torches cast weird shafts of luminescence dancing over the half naked harlot of his choice, her stringy orchid twines of hair swaying gracefully over the lithe opaque nose, as she raised a half drained mug to her pale red lips.
We all know how unattractive transparent noses are.
Glancing upward, the alluring complexion noted the stalwart giant as he rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from the pair of deep blue ovals of the amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticing him to join her. The barbarian seated himself upon a stool at the wenches side, exposing his body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishing a long steel broad sword, an iron spiraled battle helmet, and a thick leather sandals, to her unobstructed view.
I’ve got to get me one of those battling loin cloths. I can copy no further, though, because the next bit seems to be a young virgin’s idea of making love, as learned from the pages of Robert E. Howard’s pulp stories, and decorum and taste forbid it.
It goes on like that, interminably. You will say more than once, “I do not think that word means what you think it means, Jim” as you read it. Its sole virtue might be that it is a book you can hand to aspiring fantasy writers and tell that this is exactly how not to write.
(via Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog)
Over at Street Anatomy, you can find some utterly stunning anatomical images from a series of books called Pernkopf Anatomy; really, it’s beautiful stuff, with artfully posed models and exquisite detail. If you get on Amazon and look up the books, you’ll see that you might be able to find used copies for $500 and up — far out of my price range, but for the quality, they might well be worth that.
Except, unfortunately, for this little detail…
Like Pernkopf, the artists for his atlas were also active Nazi party members. Erich Lepier even signed his paintings with a Swastika, which up until 15 years ago remained in editions of the atlas, but have been airbrushed out since then.
In 1995, an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, summarized the history of the University of Vienna in 1938. They found that the Anatomy Institute of the University of Vienna, where Pernkopf worked, received the cadavers of prisoners executed during the Holocaust. The University of Vienna conducted their own investigation and found that in fact 1377 bodies of murdered victims, including children, were taken into the Anatomy Institute. It is also known that Pernkopf willingly accepted the bodies of murdered adults and children to the Institute. Therefore, it is almost without a doubt that Pernkopf used these bodies for the dissections from which the anatomical illustrations were drawn.
I’ve often said that I’m not a spiritual person, and that I don’t believe in any kind of spirituality at all. I do believe, however, that objects can be imbued with meaning beyond their simple physical parameters; they can carry a burden of history and intent that, when you know it, can trigger deeper feelings than mere matter would warrant. If I were to own such an item, I know that I could not touch it without feeling revulsion for its authors, and reverence for its victims, and that I would set it aside from my ordinary library as something more than just a book.
Don’t mistake that for a belief in the supernatural, or that there is some greater metaphysic that surrounds our material existence. Ghosts and gods do not sanctify portions of our world. The resonance of a book like Pernkopf Anatomy comes from the fact that it is anchored in purely human evil, and purely human sacrifice—it is a morbid reminder of what we can do.
Well, Skatje’s going to Minicon next weekend—sending her off to hang out with intelligent nerds and geeks and people like Charles deLint and Lois McMaster Bujold and the Nielsen Haydens and Jane Yolen is probably the most responsible thing a parent can do. If any of my readers are also going, make sure she doesn’t just go hide in her room and knit or chat on the computer. She needs to get out and socialize! Make friends! Watch Dr Who! Something!
Unfortunately, although I’ll be providing the shuttle service to get her to and from the con, I’m going to be swamped with work for the next few weeks and just can’t afford to take the weekend off. I’ll probably get a day pass and hang out on Friday evening for a while, though, before Skatje shoos me away. Next year, though, I’m going to plan my calendar a little better and see the whole thing.
So my daughter gets to go to Minicon and she probably won’t even get me a lousy t-shirt.
The Biology in Science Fiction blog has a short article on color-changing chromatophores in cephalopod skin, and asks for examples of biological adaptive camouflage used in SF stories — I want more. I want to know what SF novels have used cephalopods or cephalopod-like aliens as major characters or antagonists. There’s usually a tendency to make anything with tentacles the representative of evil in these stories, unfortunately.
Tikistitch has put up a list of the “Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years” (hey, as old as I am!). Put the ones you’ve read in bold — I’ve put my list below the fold.
A new movie about Darwin is in the works—
Jeremy Thomas is set to produce Annie’s Box about Charles Darwin, and hiring John Collee to write and directed by Jon Amiel.
The film will be based on a biography of Darwin by Randall Keynes, the great-great grandson of the Victorian scientist. Variety notes it focuses on the period when Darwin was writing The Origin of the Species, his ground-breaking treatise on evolution, while living a family life at Down House in Kent, near London.
The ‘Annie’ of the title is Darwin’s first daughter, whose death aged 10 left him grief-stricken. With his scientific discoveries leading him toward agnosticism, he was unable to find consolation in belief in an afterlife, but coped with his loss by plunging into his work.
Thomas plans to start production on Annie’s Box next year in Down House; he’s hoping for a release in 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth.
The book it is based on is Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Randal Keynes, and it’s an excellent choice. There’s a great deal of potential for family-centered drama in the story—it’s all about his family life, and in particular the effect of the death of a daughter at the age of 10—but there’s also some difficult material on Darwin’s tussle with religion that’s going to be hard to capture. (It’s also not easily summarized; Darwin left Christianity behind, but his ideas about a deity were conflicted).
The NYT has a nice article on Carl Sagan’s new posthumous book—it was put together by his widow, Ann Druyan, and she makes a few good points:
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. “A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.
I’ll say. It was a stupid truce, anyway, entirely to the benefit of the old guardians of mythology.
I have mixed feelings about EO Wilson’s book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s wonderfully well written, it’s on a subject I care about and that Wilson is clearly passionate about, and it’s trying to straighten out religious people on an important matter, but it’s also written directly to an audience of which I am not a part. I found myself alienated by the style, and despite my appreciation of his effort, simply wasn’t able to finish the book. I’m going to have to try and wade through those last few chapters sometime, though, when I’m feeling charitable enough to be able to cope with being addressed as a Baptist minister.
Still, though, I agree that Wilson deserves to be awarded a Green Book Award for The Creation—we can’t afford to wait for all the Baptists to commit apostasy before we draft them to support biodiversity. Let’s hope he wins many more, and especially let’s hope more religious organizations start acknowledging his ideas!
Oh, but I am dragging this morning. Have you ever done that thing where you start reading a book and you don’t want to put it down, and eventually you realize it’s late and you need to get some sleep, so you go to bed but you can’t sleep anyway so you get up and finish the whole book? And then you get a couple hours of sleep before you have to get up again? And your whole day is like trudging through molasses afterwards? That’s me.
The book is Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Edward Humes, and from the title I think you can guess why I’d find it engrossing. But it’s more than just a copacetic subject, though: this book reads like a novel. Even though I knew how it would turn out, I had to keep going.
It begins with a few science teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania trying to get the school board to approve the purchase of new textbooks and ends with the community trying to resolve the aftermath of Judge Jones’ decision—it’s a retelling of the key events in the Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al. court case, with a few brief digressions to visit places like Kansas. Seriously, it reads like a courtroom thriller, with a ‘crime’ at the beginning, the gradual build-up as events spiral out of everyone’s control, culminating in a courtroom drama complete with revelatory rhetoric, Perry Mason-like traps set in the cross-examination, and last-minute discoveries of crucial pieces of information…and then, finally, a resoundingly unambiguous resolution, a complete victory for the good guys. This could be a movie.
The story has ‘villains’, too, but they aren’t quite as black and evil as you’d expect in a work of fiction—writing an accurate account of a historical event, as Humes has done, usually doesn’t give you much choice in your bad guys. They’re all human and trying to do what they think is honestly right. Unfortunately for them, the overriding message is that the trouble-makers here, the various bad actors in this drama, may be piously sincere, but they’re also astoundingly ignorant. Buckingham, Bonsell, Geesey, Dembski, and most of all, Behe emerge as grossly uninformed clowns who stroll out onto the stage of the courtroom to do the most entertaining pratfalls. The book ought to be mandatory reading for schoolboards across the nation, as a cautionary tale: the bottom line is that the Dover school board members who launched their district on this expensive, damaging journey were completely unqualified to have any say at all in science education, and worse, were completely incurious about trying to find out anything about this theory of evolution they were critizing, or most damaging of all, even about this Intelligent Design idea they were trying to peddle. Like the stories in most crime dramas, what eventually trips up the bad guys is their stupid mistakes, and the clever sleuthing of the heroes.
Oh, yes, there are heroes: the most obvious are Barbara Forrest, who gave meticulous testimony that demolished the creationist case; Nick Matzke, the eager young rascal who dug up the most damning pieces of evidence; and Eric Rothschild, who eviscerated the witnesses for the creationists, exposing their dishonesty and foolishness on the stand. There is a huge amount of sympathy for the people of Dover, in particular the teachers and parents who were watching this farce consume their hometown in a feast of mockery and laughter and waste.
We also meet lots of other characters. The prologue opens with the Reverend Jim Grove, Burt Humburg and Kent Hovind pop up near the end, Irigonegaray and Calvert square off, and Bill O’Reilly and George W. Bush speak up. The blogs even make an appearance; Red State Rabble does a cameo, as does the Panda’s Thumb, and I even appear as a fierce and furious “one-man wrecking crew” offstage. (That was a bit discombobulating. Imagine reading fixedly through a John Grisham novel at 1am and unexpectedly encountering your name in an aside. Really, it broke my attention for a moment and gave me a weirdly meta sensation. You probably won’t have that problem.)
I knew there was a first-rate dramatic story in the Dover trial, and Edward Humes has written it. Now I’m just waiting for the movie.
