The Theory of Everything by Stephen W. Hawking

I understood maybe 50% of that. Maybe.

In this series of lectures, first published in 1996, Stephen Hawking tries to ‘splain It All to us. From the early history of universe theories (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, etc.) all the way up to String Theory.

I was fine with stuff up until he started talking about finite space-time with no boundaries, “like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions”. I understand the words, but I can’t get a mental picture of what that actually means practically speaking. Throw in “imaginary time”, and I’m pretty much down for the third time.

I note he says that by the “end of the century”, we should know whether String Theory is worth anything. That is, by 2000.

If Wikipedia is any gauge, String Theory does not (or should not) really enjoy the status of a full blown Scientific Theory, as it is not falsifiable in the foreseeable future until we can do some testing using equipment on a scale of the solar system. Many scientists say it more accurately qualifies as a “mathematic framework”. Whatever that means.

All in all an O.K., albeit challenging, read.

Gods of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer

Okay, so that was the final Riverworld novel, book #5, unless you count the collections of short stories, which I don’t. They are dead to me.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, the Riverworld series describes the adventures of everyone who ever lived. Sort of.

It imagines that (almost) everyone who ever lived on Earth has been resurrected on a planet entirely composed of a winding, 10 million mile river. Everyone is young, healthy, and essentially immortal. All needs are provided for by this kiosk things that give food and clothing and, for some reason, cigarettes. Also some sort of mind altering drug in gum form. Nobody knows why.

The series is ostensibly telling the story of the people trying to figure out why they are there. More or less. Two of the books are primarily concerned with Samuel Clemens and King John building two gigantic riverboats and fighting each other on the way to find out why they are there. Yawn. I’ve commented in the book logs for those that my overall impression of that story was “Just let it go, Mr. Twain.”

By the fourth book, we’ve pretty much got a picture of what’s going on. In fact, Philip Jose Farmer had intended to stop the series there. But, like Douglas Adams, he decided he had a fifth one in him. Essentially, this book is a story of what the people decide to do with the knowledge of what is actually going on on Riverworld. Essentially, this is pretty much ado about nothing, aside from a not very interesting dissertation on human nature.

I kept reading because there were mysteries, and I thought maybe we’d learn something new about the world Farmer had built, but not so much. I think the series could have been kept to two books just fine.

A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

It took a few starts to get me going into this book. It attempts to thimbalize the general progression of beliefs from pre-history until now, in a mere ~150 5×8 pages. With wide spacing.

I had to keep stepping back and taking a breath when she is claiming a general belief for people in the world over periods of thousands of years, when it’s hard to nail down what people in, say, Georgia believe this week, as a group. But it’s a necessary simplification for what she’s trying to do.

Perhaps I had more trouble than usual because I’m continuing to simulatenously read Guns, Germs and Steel and The Ancestor’s Tale during this same period, both humongous works with tons of detail covering the same time period or greater than Myth.

There are a few points she makes that I remain skeptical about.

One is that it is only recently that people have taken their myths to be literally true, a quirk of modern fundamentalism. She claims the bible was not written as a historical document, but rather as metaphor… Genesis, for instance, is not a literal description of the beginning of the world, but rather a story to give one context to live in, to help in developing our personal philosophies. Or something like that. I couldn’t find a quote that sums it up neatly.

My question is, how does she know? Though there are many footnotes, I didn’t see one attached to that assertion anywhere. Really, Genesis was not meant to be taken literally? Ever? Huh.

The second point that I take issue with is her assertion that we’re kind of flailing these days without our mythology. She makes the claim that novels can suffice, and some art.

This reminds me of an episode of Northern Exposure that I thought particularly brilliant. There is a shaman who is trying to break into the business of healing White People through his means, and he goes about collecting White People mythology. So he asks everyone for their stories that get handed down, and all he gets are these campfire stories about murderers with hooks for hands and the like.

So, he gets frustrated, but then he meets with Ed, shaman in training, in the movie house. He is watching some classic, I think Citizen Kane. He then realizes that movies are our modern mythology, our stories that give us the context, the philosophy.

But Karen Armstrong never mentions tv or film. Perhaps they are too recent in a historical context to include in a book with such huge time-scope.

Or maybe she’s just never seen Citizen Kane.

Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany

I didn’t really understand the point of this book. Aside from being a speculative fiction concerned with creating a possible future (published in 1976), there’s some kind of point he’s making about gender roles, but I’ve really got no idea what that point is.

The blurb on the back says “…Bron Helstrom– an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman.” It doesn’t make any more sense when you read it. Something about how he is a certain rare kind of man (as far as I can understand, a “jerk”), and that type of person is even more rare in women, and in order to save the human race he needs to change genders and find a man like himself in order to be happy. Or something like that. I dunno. Also, there’s some sort of war going on between Earth and the outer planets. And men and women are the same height because we stop discriminating in the 21st Century.

It’s not as big a deal to switch genders in this future because it takes about 3 and a half hours, including physical changes, changing your Y chromosome to X and reversing your sexual orientation (if desired).

I was tempted multiple times to abandon the book, but just about then I’d come into an interesting passage about genetics or something similar, and that’d give me some more momentum.

Like all Science Fiction of past decades, it’s amusing to see where the authors get it (likely) wrong and where they get it right. In the wrong case, he assumes that data is still stored on “tape” in 2112, on the other hand he predicts that the human genome will be sequenced in the early 21st century.

Of course, maybe they will store data on some sort of super-Tape in the future. What do I know?

Electricity: A Novel by Victoria Glendinning

Fooled, I was, by the title and cover of this book. I envisioned it as a Difference Engine/Baroque Cycle Trilogy bit of historical fiction with a female protagonist. Really, it’s a Romance novel that half-heartedly uses electricity as metaphor.

To be sure, there’s some presumably well-researched realism in the early days of electricity as the husband of our lovely protagonist is an electrical engineer hired to electrify the manor of a handsome, rich gentleman. You can guess where that’s going.

I read the first two-thirds in fits and spurts, then set it aside for months and months when more attractive fare appeared on my bookshelf. The last third has almost nothing to do with electricity, and instead delves into the mystic/medium scene for a while.

Ho hum.

It is small and portable (fits in my obligatory factory lab coat), so I threw it in the bag for my trip to Juarez to knock it out in my many, many spare moments I have here. And thus I have.