For The Win

Do you know how big a fan I am of Cory Doctorow's YA novel Little Brother? For the last couple of years I've kept an extra copy around in case we need a last-minute birthday party present. Because what teenager doesn't need to read that book?

Well, Doctorow has a new novel out, and it's entitled For The Win. It's about gaming, so I wasn't going to buy it, but when I saw it at the library I brought it home and Walker read it. He thought it was good enough that I should read it, so I started it and read a little, but didn't get all that interested. "Do I really need to read more of this?" I asked him and he said "yes, you really do; it gets more interesting." So I kept at it, and of course, he was right. It's about more than gaming; the title has a nice ironic resonance. It's not the kind of book I'm going to get extra copies of--or even buy, for that matter, but it was worth reading.

One of the thing that makes it worth giving to your kid to read is the clarity and brevity of the explanations. In a few places, the narrative demands that an idea like "inflation" be explained, and Doctorow manages to have one of the characters deliver enough of the idea, along with some context, to allow young readers to seriously consider the worth of an idea that the gamers are about to implement, like here:

"There's a saying from physics, 'It's turtles all the way down.' Do you know it? It comes from a story about a British physicist, Bertrand Russell, who gave a lecture about the universe, how the Earth goes around the Sun and so on. And a little old granny in the audience says, 'It's all rubbish! The world is flat and rests on the back of a turtle!' And Russell says 'If that's so, what does the turtle stand on?' And the granny says 'On another turtle!' Russell thinks he has her here, and asks, 'What does that turtle stand on?' She replies, 'You can't fool me, sonny; it's turtles all the way down!' In other words, what lives under the illusion is yet another illusion, and under that one is another illusion again. Supposedly good currency is backed by gold, but the gold itself doesn't exist. Bad currency isn't backed by gold, it's backed by other currencies, and they don't exist. At the end of the day, all that any of this is based on is, what, can you tell me?"
"Belief," Yasmin said. "Or fear, yes? Fear that if you stop believing in the money, you won't be able to buy anything. It is just like game gold!"

Another thing I like is the way the kids communicate; they're inventive, like the kids in Little Brother. Here's how some of the characters in China send messages to each other and to people outside their country:
"We just pick a random blog out there on the net, usually one that no one has posted to in a year or two, and we take over the comment board on one of its posts. Once they block it--or the server crashes--we switch to another one. It's easy--and fun!"

There are some interesting insights into online security issues and collective bargaining along the way. One of my favorite parts is a variation on civil disobedience, when some kids decide that the way to show their solidarity with a worker protest is to buy ice cream and walk around in front of a business eating it. And if the police arrest them for that, one character says, they're going to try smiling, to see if the police can arrest them all for smiling.

There's a personal appeal, for me, in reading about people who are faced with an impossible task but don't give up. And on that note, I would like to announce that I'm less underemployed now--I got a job as music director of the spring musical at Eleanor and Walker's high school, which means, among other things, that there will be a musical this spring! Win all around!

Empire of Lies

Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan, is a novel given to me by a friend who thought I should read it for my "read a book you disagree with" challenge. And I'm going to assume that he didn't read it before he gave it to me, because that's the most charitable assumption I can make about a person who would actually purchase a novel promoting lies, hate, misogyny, racism, lip-service-only Christianity, and sexual perversion. I haven't read anything I hated so much in years, and I'd like to destroy my copy so that no one else will ever have his--or her--mind stained by reading something so ugly and harmful.

Let me give you some evidence for my claims about how awful this novel is. The protagonist (I will not call him a hero!) is a self-proclaimed conservative Republican who introduces himself by describing his long-ago journalistic expose of corrupt government in his town for which, as he says "I was roundly despised by some of the best-educated and wealthiest people in town. Something about my uncaring, insensitive editorial policy. Elites hate to be proved wrong by the common man." Don't you love the name-calling? That's only the beginning. Oh, it gets better. Later he thinks "hm, I guess those dark-skinned angry-looking killers named Muhammed all over the world aren't radical Muslims after all....Hey, News-clowns! Tell the truth for once in your useless lives! Say the word! Say some word, Islamo-fascists! Jihadis! Something." Inevitably he progresses to calling all Muslims terrorists and seeking out people who also enjoy name-calling: "camel-jockey--rag-headed--dune-coon." The groups this guy belongs to just inform the ways he's despicable, rather than tempering any of his lunatic tendencies. Despite the fact that he fights against going crazy in the same way his mother did, by the end of the story this protagonist does not see the world the way most other people see it--which is one of the very definitions of insanity.

The Big Lie of the novel is that "anti-American, relativistic, multiculturalists...have...created a breeding ground on campus for hate-filled, violent, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitic Islamic radicals." This protagonist wants all issues to be simple; he wants to boil them down to "good and evil," and he doesn't think about ideas, but merely feels. His reaction to attending a lecture is not to consider the ideas he's heard and weigh the evidence for them, but to have "an emotional response" and then--get this--to have a revelation: "as I sat there breathless and sweaty--then the thought came to me--as clear as if it were spoken aloud--spoken with absolute certainty, absolute conviction: Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is."

The protagonist is so convinced by his own revelation that he later breaks the professor's kneecaps with a hammer in an attempt to get him to confess to terrorism. Of course, since this is a novel, the professor actually IS a terrorist and breaking his kneecaps makes it possible for the protagonist to save his own daughter from being blown up. I guess Klavan couldn't resist novelizing the traditional excuse-for-torture scenario. And the protagonist enjoys the torture: "but the thrill of it...Yes, that. The coursing rush of excitement, the old dark, mesmerizing sadistic joy--that belonged to me. Even at that moment, I could feel it flowing into my brain, into my belly and my groin. I could feel the old smoky sickness of lust and pleasure spreading all through me." Mr. protagonist thought he had given up sadism in favor of Christianity, but evidently not. Descriptions of the various kinds of sexual sadism he enjoyed in his younger days are detailed, and available for the reader's prurient interest.

The protagonist's misogyny manifests itself at first as a promise-keeper's twisted version of how to be a good husband and father. He wooes his wife by telling her that he's "the because-I-said-so guy, the head-of-the-household guy, that's me. Marry me and I call the shots. I'll break my butt to make you happy, and I'll try to give you the life you said you wanted. I don't cheat, I don't leave, and I am what I say I am." He soon shows his true colors, however, admitting that "frankly, I find the only way to avoid hitting women is to avoid women who need to be hit. Right then, Lauren needed a smack in the face, maybe a couple of them. I was itching to give them to her...."

If there is anything in this novel for me to disagree with, rather than simply be repulsed by, it's the exaggerated comic-book characterization of all college professors as uniformly leftist liberals who espouse political correctness and want to write articles like "Chador--A Source of Pride for Muslim Women." In fact, earlier this week--before I began to have my mind stained with oily residue from reading Empire of Lies--I sent an email note to an OSU professor of philosophy, Andrew Oldenquist, telling him how much I liked his recent article about why the U.S. should ban burqa wearing within our borders, and I got a gracious response.

I don't usually read a lot of non-fiction, although you better believe that the next few books I try reading to see if I disagree will be non-fiction. It seems to me that the promotion of hatred and fear in a novel like Empire of Lies is even more insidious than making the same arguments would be in non-fiction, because the author doesn't even have to attempt to give any evidence for his absurd claims.

Since I don't believe in book burning, I'm fantasizing about dumping this book in the toilet. Maybe I could take pleasure in breaking its spine with a hammer. Sigh. Or maybe I could just reread something better, like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, to get the bad taste out of my mind.
Update: reading a book you disagree with is one thing, but reading seven over the next year is worth considering! I hereby subsume my little challenge into the better one at Shelf Monkey.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

Christmas Secrets

I turned in my grades today. Then I did a quick cleaning sweep, and went to Amazon to order some Christmas gifts. Not to give away all my secrets, but mostly I'm giving people books for Christmas, and several people on my list are getting a copy of my book of the year, Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. Several young people on my list are getting a copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I hope they've read George Orwell's 1984, but if they haven't, there's nothing wrong with working backwards. Personally, I've almost always read the parody first.


This button comes from My Friend Amy, and you can see suggestions for book gifts here.
Update: notice that I was responsible for spreading this idea to Whatever and getting attention for The Gone-Away World over there!

Don't Trust Anyone

In Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother, the kids who are fighting the modern-day version of Big Brother say "Don't trust anyone over 25," having modified the former hippie (yippie) creed. But one of the messages of the novel is simply don't trust anyone. Encrypt your files and your e-mail, not because you have anything to hide, but because some things should be private. Go to http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/rss.xml?show=instructable for specific instructions on how to maximize your electronic privacy. This is a website that grew out of the novel--people wanted to know how to do some of the technical things that the protagonist, Marcus, does in order to stand up for his rights.

Little Brother is not just a wonderful novel; it's an important novel, and it's addressed to the right age group ("young adult"). Doctorow's exaggeration of the role of the Department of Homeland Security in our everyday lives in the wake of another terrorist attack on American soil shows young adults exactly why the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights are worth preserving. The inclusion of history lessons (woven in seamlessly, since the protagonists of the novel are still in high school) doesn't slow the pace. From the beginning, this novel is relentless in the way it shows readers what can happen when Americans get to a point where safety is considered more important than freedom.

The dangers that Marcus, a San Francisco native, faces are explicitly laid out for him, and he's smart enough to be able to articulate what the problems are in the kind of thinking demanded of him. When the DHS agent wants the password for his phone, Marcus "submitted to her will," but he thinks about why, even though he has nothing to hide, it's a bad idea to be forced to give up such information:

"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body--and how manhy of us can say that?--you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you."

That's a pretty good paean to human dignity, especially coming from a 17-year-old. I don't know about your town, but in my town and many nearby, anyone still in high school has fewer Constitutional rights than the rest of us. They're subject to random backpack and locker searches. Earlier this year, my daughter came home from school and told me a story about the bravery of one of her classmates. The math teacher claimed he heard a cell phone in the classroom and demanded that the student hand it to him, as cell phones are completely banned from the high school. According to my daughter, he must have heard something in the hall. At any rate, one student finally got up and gave him her cell phone, which she was carrying, as almost every student carries one--turned off and put away in her backpack. She was a hero to the rest of the class, because she'd saved them from having their backpacks searched.

Marcus' history teacher, Mrs. Galvez, who eventually loses her job for teaching too much history and too little pro-DHS propaganda, reminds me of the history teacher in Francine Prose's novel After, who loses her job (and probably her life, in that novel) for similar reasons. Here's Mrs. Galvez' explanation of the purpose of some of the sixties protest movements:

"Yippies were like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt guns and shot each other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV--one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night--and they mobilized a lot of people.
Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day....The police and the demonstrators fought in the streets--they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.'
The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over thirty.' They meant that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit thirty, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking to the streets, dropping out, freaking out.
San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things--for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC."
I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now."

Cory Doctorow's genius consists of the way he makes history matter in his fictional world, and the way he makes abstract issues feel very specific and pressing. The teacher who replaces Mrs. Galvez sketches a scary picture of a society in which the federal government can suspend the Bill of Rights. Room 101 has nothing on the room Marcus eventually ends up in on a waterboard. The image of Big Brother has nothing on the idea of the government recording everything you have to say, both public and private. (See that little camera on your computer? Look deeply into its eye.)

Read this book. Don't trust me to tell you enough about it. Give it to your friends and your children, and your childrens' friends. It's available online at
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Old Man's War

I'm late to the Scalzi party--it's a good one, and I've been missing it! My friend who reads more SF than I do had what I consider a minor quibble about John Scalzi's wonderful first book, Old Man's War, and so didn't recommend it to me. He has a weird philosophy about not wanting to read books other people recommend anyway, so I guess that's why he didn't bring me the book, press it into my hands, and demand that I start reading it right then. This is what I would do to all of you if I could. I press the book virtually into your hands right now.

What did I like most about Old Man's War? Well, it has stuff. You know, science fiction stuff that's described in just enough detail to make it interesting, like the "beanstalk" elevator that gets the main character, John Perry, to outer space. It also has aliens. And it doesn't just have one or two, and it doesn't just describe them physically. They have mysterious motivations and philosophies, and there's an entire universe of them! Most of all, it has this great idea that old people would make good soldiers, if they only had physical prowess to match their decades of experience.

I found the description of Perry's transformation into a physical being capable of soldiering to be accurate, if a bit speedy. The process has just taken place (note that I'm carefully not telling you exactly what the process is; it would be rude to steal the author's thunder in that way), and the old man steps out:

"I placed my right foot forward and staggered a little bit. Dr. Russell came up beside me and steadied me. 'Careful,' he said. 'You've been an older man for a while. It's going to take you a little bit of time to remember how to be in a young body.'
'What do you mean?' I said.
'Well,' he said. 'For one thing, you can straighten up.'
He was right. I was stooped slightly (kids, drink your milk). I straightened up, and took another step forward. And another. Good news, I remembered how to walk. I cracked a grin like a schoolboy as I paced in the room.

What took me about a month to learn--how to walk again after walking like an old person for some years--takes Perry about a minute, but hey, this is fiction. It's good enough fiction that it brought me back to the coaching I got on how to hit with the heel first and then roll the foot and bend the knee at the end, and the days when I had to think about stepping like that in order to be able to do it.

The stuff in this book includes Scalzi's version of the feed. He calls it a BrainPal. When Perry gets his, he names it Asshole:

Apparently, there was very little Asshole couldn't do. He could send messages to other recruits. He could download reports. He could play music or video. He could play games. He could call up any document on a system. He could store incredible amounts of data. He could perform complex calculations. He could diagnose physical ailments and provide suggestions for cures. He could create a local network among a chosen group of other BrainPal users. He could provide instantaneous translations of hundreds of human and alien languages. He could even provide field of vision information on any other BrainPal user.

The uses of the BrainPal get even more interesting in the sequel to Old Man's War, entitled The Ghost Brigades (I'm halfway through it). The kinds of philosophical questions raised by human use of technology get more interesting, too--and they start out pretty interesting in Old Man's War:

The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth....you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts.

When I finish The Ghost Brigades, I'm going on to read The Last Colony and then all the other Scalzi books I can find, probably starting with the one about Jane Sagan, even if it is only available in hardback, and the one about Jane and Perry's daughter Zoe, which is coming out this August. Not only that, but I'm joining the considerable party of readers who follow Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's like what Holden Caulfield imagined all those years ago--you finish a book, and you can virtually call up the author and talk to him about it. Everyone's invited, but you'll have more fun if you've read his books, and maybe the books of his friends... For mother's day, I got a trip to the bookstore to find some of the books on the list I keep. We have a credit card that gives us a book dollar for every thousand dollars we spend, or something like that, so I got a bunch of books I've been wanting to read, including The Ghost Brigades and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's a great week to be underemployed.

By the way, at the bookstore I went to, Borders, I found The Ghost Brigades in SF, Little Brother in YA, and Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic in the children's section.