The Singularity Happened... and I Missed It!

Why should we accept that transformative change can only be caused by artificial intelligence or genetic modification of the brain or encounters with aliens? What if it's something so profound that we're not able to predict it or even realize, at the time, that it's happened? What if it's something not even dreamed of by Ray Kurzweil or Charles Stross?

Old-timey sci-fi writers John Wyndham, Charles Harness and Theodore Sturgeon saw the future as human evolution. In More than Human, Sturgeon saw evolution as not just the development of psychic abilities but also the creation of multi-person organisms, leading to the next stage of man, homo gestalt.

In one of my [many] favorite sci-fi novels, Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, there's a sort-of singularity (arguably it's not fast or profound enough, but it's the same idea) that's a confluence of three events: breakthroughs in human genetic engineering, the invention of cold fusion, and a popular new religion that preaches libertarianism.

Female authors Margaret Atwood and P.D. James envision a future where a failed ability to reproduce is the cause of massive change. I don't see futurism as a feminist issue, but they do suggest a different direction - and the paranoia that we won't wake up to the change until it's too late. I suppose you could translate that paranoia to the singularity idea by suspecting that aliens are already among us, changing things quietly under the covers. Or maybe we simply can't comprehend the change that's happening to us personally, as I can't differentiate my personal development from the societal changes happening during my childhood in the 60s and 70s.

In Stross's worlds a singularity is akin to an apocalypse: overnight society crumbles and most people die. That's not an event that people would fail to notice. (Unless it didn't happen in the northern hemisphere, or wasn't good at selling papers?)

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The White Hotel (Review)

I first read DM Thomas’s novel The White Hotel when it was published in the early 80s. I loved it but found it extremely disturbing. It ranked in my mind with Deliverance, 1984 and Jude the Obscure as books that had upset me so much I could never read them a second time.

This week, after 27 years, I read it again. My second reading was profoundly different from the first. It was still rewarding and disturbing. I cried pretty steadily for the last hour of reading and a while after. But the world has changed so much in 27 years that it’s a different book.

The White Hotel (don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens) is about several things, but is based in Freud’s article Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he posits that humans are motivated by the life instinct (creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation) and the death instinct (destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction) – by sex and death.

In the novel, the historical Freud is helping a young woman who has debilitating pain that doctors think is psychosomatic. As part of her treatment she writes Freud a poem, followed by a narrative explaining the events in the poem, in which she describes a passionate tryst she has in a hotel in the Alps (which she calls the White Hotel) with a man she identifies as Freud’s son. She has never met Freud’s son. In this fantasy, while the lovers have sex other guests are killed in all sorts of horrific ways. Bodies fall outside their window.

The poem is meant to be shocking: it’s obscene, erotic, sometimes gross, and jarringly personal in the way she keeps referring to her lover as “your son”. When I read the book in 1981, the sex section at the beginning of the story balanced the shocking death scene at the end. However, in the intervening 27 years our measure of what is sexually shocking has changed markedly. Now the sex can’t provide that ballast, and the brutal violence at the end of the book doesn’t fit as well – it might almost, to a first-time reader, feel a little tacked-on.

The story could be read as a novelization (and hence sort of proof) of Freud’s theory of sex and death as the two great motivating forces. It's also a repudiation of Freud, as in the story Freud has let the young woman read his papers, and then she creates a fantasy (or a free association) that perfectly proves his theory. But also, in the novel the character Freud believes in clairvoyance, by which he means the ability to read minds and see into the future. (I don’t know if the real Freud believed this, but he probably did, given Thomas's scholarship.) Given that Freud believes that, all his explanations for his patients’ problems are turned on their heads, because he was treating mainly young Jewish women 30 years before the Holocaust, which would profoundly affect all of them: if they had any clairvoyance at all, it surely would explain their hysteria.

At the end of the story our heroine is killed, along with thousands of others, by German troops at Babi Yar. Thomas was criticized for lifting some of the description of the massacre directly from the text of a survivor (although he credits him on the copyright page), but I thought it was appropriate. Certain things are so horrific that they shouldn’t be fictionalized. Thomas’ handling of this portion of the book is extraordinarily sensitive.

The book has a coda in which all the characters (Jewish or not) are in heaven, which takes the form of Palestine. I don’t see how the book could exist without this coda. It’s like Thomas is taking the reader by the hand and leading us to the end of the experience, helping us cope, reminding us that although many died, life continued.

In one sense, things feel a little over-explained in the book: explanations are a bit too pat. I think Thomas was trying to write for a wide audience that wouldn’t necessarily be able to fill in gaps. But I also feel after my second reading that I need to read it many more times. I don’t understand the purpose of the various perspectives (different narrators and the disturbing second case in “your son”) or the reason the plot unfolds as it does, or why our heroine spends so much time on trains.

Not that you need to understand any of the mechanics of the novel to feel the emotional impact. In an ironic twist, the book leaves me thinking about Freud’s rival Jung. The novel has added to our collective unconscious this image of a large, stately hotel in the mountains, a place we might unexpectedly find ourselves while on a journey somewhere else. If it hadn’t been for the coda I might have thought of the White Hotel as heaven, but instead I see it as our inner life (maybe the id). The lulling sound and motion of a train might hypnotize us into a visit to the White Hotel, deep in our psyche, where every character is an aspect of ourselves and events show us – well, that’s the mystery.

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Smartypants Writes a Book

A while back I heard two journalists on CBC radio talking about book reviews. They said a book review should inform the reader whether the book is worth its purchase price. From the perspective of the reader, this is totally the wrong approach. When I crack the Saturday paper and open the sections full of non-news articles, I am interested in information second, writing first. I'm not reading Consumer Reports looking for appliance suggestions. I'm sprawled on the couch in a pool of sunshine goofing off.

I read the New York Review of Books to learn things. A typical NYR article will take three books on the same topic and talk about the topic with reference to the perspectives of the three authors. They may mention strengths and weaknesses of the books in passing. They may not.

One of the best Saturday book reviews I ever read was a few months ago in the Globe & Mail books section. Some hapless NYU psychology prof had written a book about the evolution of the human brain, and the Globe reviewer didn't like it. I mean, he really didn't like it. And apparently the headline writer agreed. The review was called "Smartypants writes a book." It ripped the book to shreds, but it wasn't that I enjoyed so much as the fact that the review was outrageous, free, original - and really good writing. (Even had the review been favorable, chances are slim that I would ever have read the book.)

That was the glory of the old Joanne Kates restaurant reviews. She evoked the esthetic experience, and whether the food was good or bad, reading her was always delicious.

Writing is delightful when it's honest. That's the secret of David Sedaris, I think. He once wrote that his favorite place to eat in his adopted home town of Paris, France is a tourist food court - which is wonderful not because it's an outrageous statement, but because it's honest and courageous and suggests something meaningful... about living in a foreign culture, and feeling alone and in need of comfort, and about having secret preferences.

Back in her heyday, before she became nasty and bitter, Maureen Dowd could turn a phrase like nobody else. Her most famous line is, of course, "the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years." But my favorite, from 2002, is "I've downed enough Pringles to shingle Versailles." That's journalism as poetry.

Too much investigative journalism is full of meaningless detail. You know the style - every page has a couple of digressions like, "The meeting was to be held in Williamsboro. Williamsboro, a picturesque town of 40,000, was established in 1788 by Methodist refugees from the west coast of Scotland. Its main industry is rhutabaga waxing." And then Williamsboro is never mentioned again. Every inconsequential character is introduced with a paragraph or two describing their parents, their spouse, their education and their job. This endless irrelevant detail seems designed to prove that the writer investigated everything thoroughly, as well as to pad out the piece. It ends up boring the reader.

I write opera reviews on this blog with a lot of trepidation. I don't have any musical training so I'm not equipped to write a real review. But I'm interested in how the experience of an opera affects the audience and what the opera means, so I write about that. I like to think that as I soldier away at my opera reviews, I'm getting better, but the process has given me a lot of respect for the art and skill of literary journalism.

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50 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy - er, 42

A while back I published a list of 50 sci-fi and fantasy books that's been going around, and I criticized the choices quite severely.

After a great deal of deep thought I came up with my own list of the 50 most important sci-fi and fantasy books, only I only came up with 42 (quite by accident!), and I am much humbled now that I've actually tried to create a list myself. For one thing, it's hard to remember them all. (For example, I vaguely recall reading a series of at least a dozen books about ten years ago and being completely engrossed, but have forgotten everything about them.)

The biggest problem with my list is that I am so hopelessly out of date... there is very little that was published within the last ten, or even twenty, years. (That may say something about the state of the genre too.)

So, for what it's worth, here's my 42. Some guidelines: I did not include children's literature (defined as books that have children as characters and that children might like), horror, or Arthurian or other legend. I only include one book per author, and they're in alphabetical order by author. I don't include books I don't like, with the exception of the Fionovar Tapestry, which I think is important enough to make the list. No short stories.

I would appreciate hearing what you think I've missed.

(Thanks to my mother, Helen Ellis, who taught the first sci-fi course at the University of Waterloo, and my brother, Larry Haworth, who's had the second-biggest influence on my reading. They both helped me compile this list.)

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
4. The Last Coin, James P. Blaylock
5. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
6. The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner
7. To Reign in Hell, Steven Brust
8. War for the Oaks, Emma Bull
9. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
10. Little, Big, John Crowley
11. Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany
12. Time Out of Joint, Philip K. Dick
13. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
14. Red Shift, Alan Garner
15. The Rose, Charles Harness
16. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
17. Dune, Frank Herbert
18. Brave New World, Aldus Huxley
19. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
20. Conjure Wife, Fritz Leiber
21. The Fionovar Tapestry, Guy Gavriel Kay
22. Star Fraction, Ken MacLeod
23. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
24. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller
25. The Condition of Muzak, Michael Moorcock
26. Ringworld, Larry Niven
27. Witchworld, Andre Norton
28. 1984, George Orwell
29. The Coming of the Quantum Cats, Frederick Pohl
30. The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
31. Mort, Terry Pratchett
32. Pavane, Keith Roberts
33. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
34. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
35. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
36. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
37. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
38. The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells
39. Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang, Kate Wilhelm
40. Passages, Connie Willis
41. The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
42. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

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Book Launch: No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice

Concerned about the effects of big-box stores? About urban sprawl? About the influence of the world's largest companies? Too bad. As consumers we seem to have voted for all these things with our feet.

But what if it's not that simple?

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Wine & cheese; meet the author Tom Slee
Words Worth Books, 100 King St S, Waterloo
Thursday, May 25, 7 PM

For more info about the launch, call 884-2665

For more info about the book, see:
Whimsley
No One Makes You Shop At Walmart

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This is a really interesting book that argues we should revise the way we look at public decision-making. It discusses politics, ethics and economics, covers issues of immediate interest, and is well-written and engaging. And no, I'm not the author!

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Top 10 Non-Fiction Books

As with my list of Top 10 Fiction Books, these are sentimental favorites... books that are important to me more than books I think are of universal importance. That's not to say that they aren't all really, really good.

1. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso
2. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert Caro
3. Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas
4. The Book of J, Harold Bloom
5. The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
7. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Harriet Jacobs
8. From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman
9. Land of Lost Content, Ian Smillie
10. A Theory of Econometrics, Anna Koutsoyiannis

10 Best Books

Of course, a "ten best books" list is really the ten favorite books of the list creator. I wouldn't even attempt, much less bother, to try to work out objective criteria for judging quality in a book. Also, I made no attempt to exclude sentimental favorites from my list, especially books I read at a pivotal time in my life and which I remember with great fondness.

Having said all that, after a great deal of hand-wringing over the books that didn't make the list and what order to place my top 10, this is what I came up with several years ago. Surprisingly, I have never felt a desire to change any of my picks.

1. Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
1. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
3. The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault
4. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
5. The Last Coin, James P. Blaylock
6. Joshua Then and Now, Mordecai Richler
7. Passage, Connie Willis
8. The Solid Mandala, Patrick White
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
10. Dust, Yael Dayan

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