They Fight Crime!

A common TV series pitch--or parody of one--is taking an "odd couple" and placing in them in situations where they solve mysteries and defeat criminals. This trope is called They Fight Crime, and examples include Numb3rs ("He's an FBI agent; he's a math professor. They Fight Crime!") and Blood Ties ("She's a Canadian police detective who is slowly losing her sight. He's a vampire. They fight crime!").

From Jaka, there's this neat meme:

1.) Go to TheyFightCrime! and find a crimefighting pair that makes you swoon.
2.) Go to the Hero Machine and illustrate your duo!
3.) Repeat as necessary or until your mom tells you it's time for bed.

I'll illustrate one I did, but first, guess this famous media property. You'll be surprised who it is--I certainly was! Answer after the images below:

"He's a battle-scarred veteran of the war in Afghanistan! He's a substance-abusing dilettante grad student! They Fight Crime!"

"He's a leather-clad guitar-strumming photographer who believes he can never love again. She's a virginal insomniac bounty hunter who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!"

And the odd couple mentioned above?

Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Finally stopped Browning around

So, Random House has finally announced that Dan Brown's next novel, The Lost Symbol (formerly known under the working title The Solomon Key), will be released in the US and Canada on September 15th, with a precedent-setting first run of five million copies.

Based on the plots of Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, let me try to divine the plot of this one:

• We will have a tweedy hero, a man of letters but who can also run fast and jump down from heights if necessary. Since we already know this is the third Robert Langdon novel, this is an affirmation, not a prediction.


• The story shall begin with a mysterious murder that sets off the plot.


• The mystery of the murder will involve "symbology", which will drag Langdon into the plot.


• The plot will involve a conflict between two conspiracies. One will be an established publicly-known organization that features in several real-life conspiracy theories. The other will be a historical or pseudo-historical group that also features in real-life conspiracy theories, but in reality is either long-defunct or harmless.


• Langdon will quickly be paired with a young, attractive woman who is versed in some academic or practical discipline relevant to the plot, and physically capable enough to join him in mad dashes and rolling falls from great heights, but not capable enough to fight off the assassin. There will be no other female characters of significance.


• Oh yes, there will be an assassin, likely directly responsible for the initial murder, and possibly others throughout the novel. He will attempt to add Langdon and his companion to his hitlist. The assassin will be typified by either "exotic" ethnicity (ie, swarthiness) or a physical handicap of some kind, as well as sadism and dogged persistence. SPOILER ALERT: The assassin will die.


• The assassin will be working for a high-ranking member of one of the conspiracies, the mastermind of the main plot, but this puppetmaster's identity will be concealed until the climax, even from the assassin. SPOILER ALERT: The mastermind will die.


• As Dan Brown is a strong adherent to the Law of Economy of Characters, the mastermind will be a significant character introduced in the first third of the book, who will be portrayed as one of Langdon's greatest allies during the bulk of the book. Statistically he is likely to be a white male, most likely late middle ages or older.


• Meanwhile, the "obvious" villain will turn out to be a red herring and likely assist Langdon at or after the climax.


• Langdon will be pursued by the authorities for most of the book, complicating his efforts to solve the central conspiracy and avoid being killed by the assassin. At the conclusion, the authorities will recognize their error and clear Langdon of all suspicion.


• There will be intricate puzzles or riddles Langdon and his allies must work out to solve the central conspiracy. This will involve running around various landmarks of a city with a lot of established real-world history. These puzzles will either be so simple as to be laughable, or counterfactual to the real-world evidence.


• Through Langdon and other characters, Brown will pontificate on historical theories or analysis of culture that are sure to rankle any professional or scholar (or relatively well-read layperson) of the field in question: some refer to this as being "Dan Browned".

If I'm found to be correct, I'm going to find someone to write an online app that just churns out Dan Brown plots and make me rich.

The Gernsback Continuum

Mindful of the fact I don't seem to read enough these days, I've set myself a challenge: to read all of the 2009 nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The Hugo is one of the top prizes a science fiction author can receive, and they awarded annually at Worldcon, the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society. As an added bonus, this year's Worldcon, Anticipation, will be in Montreal, and I'm thinking about going.

This year's nominees for Best Novel are:

• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, a juvenile fantasy in the vein of The Jungle Book that has already won the John Newbery Medal.



• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, a young adult novel about a group of teenagers fighting the attempts of their government to curtail personal freedoms in the wake of a terrorist attack. Think of the movie "Hackers" only a) the methods and technologies described are heavily grounded in realism and b) the enemy is a government security apparatus overstepping its bounds and shifting blame for its criminal activities onto libertarian-minded tech-saavy adolescents, instead of an evil corporation.



• Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, a space-opera tale of sentient robots, continuing to live, work and play in a solar system-spanning society, long after their human Creators (i.e., us) have died out.



• Anathem by Neal Stephenson, about monastic societies that preserve knowledge and learning in the face of societal collapse, and conflict with the secular authorities about what knowledge should be revealed. (The basic premise sounds similar to the venerable science fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.)



• Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, whose plot is contemporaneous with the third novel in his acclaimed "Old Man's War" universe, The Last Colony, with events related from the perspective of the titular 16-year-old protagonist.

Thus far I've read The Graveyard Book and Little Brother, and am almost halfway through Saturn's Children. Initial impressions:

• Graveyard Book is textbook Gaiman, with an original premise, interesting, well-detailed characters, a moving plot, and a somewhat lacklustre ending. It's definitely recommended--even on his worst days Gaiman writes circles around the rest--but I didn't find it as compelling as say, American Gods or Neverwhere.



• Little Brother is extremely fascinating, but also extremely didactic, and reads more of a combination of libertarian political manifesto and how-to manual for subverting government surveillance than novel. In other words, it's the novelization of Doctorow's personal ideology as regularly expressed on his site and the BoingBoing shared blog. Some might see that as interfering with the narrative, but science fiction is about exploring ideas. Using novels as soapboxes didn't stop Robert A. Heinlein from winning five Hugos either.



• Saturn's Children is an engaging read so far, but not exactly compelling or innovative. To his credit, Stross considers SC to be the weakest of his last six novels (all nominated for the Hugo) and hopes to improve his record for most consecutive nominations without a win



• Typical for him, Stephenson's book comes close to a thousand pages of dense prose and fabricated terminology, so I'm thinking I'll have to listen to Anathem on audiobook.



• I don't feel right reading Zoe's Tale, the fourth book to be set in the "Old Man's War" setting, without some background so I'm going to attempt to read the other three first. I will certainly work on the first one, Old Man's War, as it is considered a modern sf classic.

Incidentally, Stross's blog post on his nomination seems to set the same tenor that all the authors have expressed: All of them are falling over with praise for each other (well, except maybe Stephenson, who doesn't seem to blog). Part of me wants to be at Worldcon when the award is announced, on the chance they'll all be there, and will go into a big group hug as the winner is announced, and cry tears of joy collectively (because there's nothing sexier than half a dozen geeks tearfully embracing--and I speak from experience).

More updates to follow!

The funny things authors say

Shorter G.P. Taylor, English vicar and author of the Shadowmancer Quartet of fantasy novels:

"It worries me that children are becoming interested in Wiccan and neo-pagan ridiculousness. I hope that my books bring them back to proper Christian ridiculousness. My Muslim and Jewish readers agree with me."

Rating the Villains



I stumbled across this blog post that asks how well Voldemort of the Harry Potter books stacks up against the Evil Overlord List. Some highlights:

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

Lord Voldemort has, since the end of "Goblet of Fire" insisted that only HE may kill Harry Potter, and that he needs to be captured alive. This is, of course, an idiotic and self destructive notion which I'll come back to later. I comment on it here, because Voldemort has made it clear that killing Harry Potter is a treat reserved for Voldemort himself, thus making Harry Potter too good for death at the hand of a mere underling.

6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

Voldemort not only gloated over Harry at the end of "Goblet of Fire" he waited until his followers had been gathered to kill him as part of a spectacle. The SMART thing to do would have been to Kill the unarmed and still bound Harry the moment he had a new body, and showed off the corpse to his Death Eaters when they showed up.

I might try and do this for other famous villains in the future.

Father knows best

In his Father's Day entry, Neil Gaiman passes along Heinlein's Five Rules (with Sawyer's sixth addendum) to an aspiring writer:

Dear Neil, I am sure you have probably answered this question before and are probably, therefore, very sick of it. But, I still must ask. I am an aspiring writer and am wondering how you stayed motivated during times of great failure. I understand what many writers mean when they say the love of the art drives them. What I am concerned with is how to deal with the inevitable denial of a piece of literature that you have invested everything in?

Write the next thing.

Maybe the world will catch up with your brilliance eventually, or maybe you'll look back in ten years and decide it wasn't that great really after all. Doesn't really matter. Times of great failure or times of great success, the problem is the same (how do you keep going?) and the solution is the same: You write the next thing.

Heartless War

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II:

The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945, 12 weeks before the surrender of the German Wehrmacht, remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. The raids saw 1,300 heavy bombers drop over 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices in under 15 hours, destroying 13 square miles (34 km²) of the city, the baroque capital of the German state of Saxony, and causing a firestorm that consumed the city centre. Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000.

The Allies described the operation as the justified bombing of a military and industrial target, which was a major rail transportation and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Against this, several researchers have argued that Dresden was a cultural landmark of little or no military significance, a "Florence on the Elbe," as it was known, and the attacks were not proportional for the commensurate military gains.

In the first few decades after the war, some estimates of the number killed were as high as 300,000, in part because of misinformation spread just after the bombing by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda. As a result, many charged that it was a callous slaughter of civilians comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with some historians arguing that it was a war crime. Later assessments lowered the casualty figures by a factor of ten or more, yet the raids continue to be included among the worst examples of civilian suffering caused by strategic bombing, and have become one of the moral causes célèbres of the Second World War.

I've discussed the aerial bombardment of civilian population centres before, and Dresden is a particularly noteworthy part of the controversy. It has been immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which drew upon his experiences as a POW in Dresden during the attack, and how he and his fellow prisoners were drafted by the Germans to assist in the mass burials. Infamously, the chief authority of the devastation of the attack (even quoted by Vonnegut in his novel), was David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden. Irving's casualty figures cleaved closely to Goebbel's and for decades were considered authoritative. With Irving now largely seen as a Nazi sympathizer, much of his work is considered discredited by most historians.

This has spurred me to finish reading Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945, which presents evidence that counters much of the conventional understanding about the bombing, notably:

• The casualty figures were probably between 25,000 and 40,000, not 130,000 and 500,000


• Contrary to the conventional understanding, Dresden was home to several industries vital to the German war effort


• Far from being an "innocent" city, Dresden enthusiastically supported National Socialism and anti-Semitism before Hitler even came to power. The handful of Jews left in Dresden were scheduled for a likely death march a few days after the bombing


• Dresden was an important rail hub and supply trains to the Eastern Front went through it almost exclusively.


• There is no doubt spreading terror among the civilian populace was among the goals of RAF Bomber Command. However, as my earlier post noted, this was hardly a discredited tactic among bombing strategists--London and Paris were still targets of German V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks, so even among the many pilots who took issue with the bombing of a civilian population centre, most would have found a good reason to get past it

Taylor doesn't deny that the question of whether it was worth stooping to such tactics remains a painful one. His quarrel is with the notion that Dresden was exceptional, or at least intentionally so. He points out that previous and subsequent raids on other cities aimed to be just as destructive, but didn't succeed because weather or human error or some other unforeseen factor interfered. Hamburg, a larger city than Dresden, took more casualties when it was bombed in 1943, and the towns of Pforzheim and Darmstadt lost a greater percentage of their population when their turn came. Conditions in Dresden combined to create the firebombing equivalent of a perfect storm. That the same thing did not happen elsewhere wasn't because the Allies didn't try.

I will post my own review of Taylor once I finish. Until then, let's all hope we are never the victims of such mass destruction like the citizens of Dresden, nor will we have to make a choice concerning a city full of the enemy's civilians.

Say You Want an Evolution...

Happy Darwin Day! That's right, old Chuck turns 199 this year!

Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around February 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born on in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin -- the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.

PZ Myers, one of my favourite bloggers (and biology professor) outlines his activities today at Pharyngula:

Charles Darwin's Origin is 149 years old this year, and although it is a very good book and well worth reading for the historical context and as an outline of the beginnings of a science, it is, well, 149 years old. There's much more to evolutionary biology than Darwin. My talk is titled "Evo-Devo: the future of biology?", and I'm going to be discussing new perspectives on evolution, why I think development is an essential component of our understanding of how organisms evolve, and giving several specific examples.

There and Back Again...

Squeal with delight, fanboys and fangirls! Peter Jackson has signed up to direct the film version of The Hobbit:

December 18, 2007

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC

NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS

PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”

Looks like Jackson and New Line sorted out their legal differences.

Sorry about that, old chums...

The British government has gone and done something absolutely dreadful:

British PM Brown 'profoundly' regrets data security breach

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 | 11:44 AM ET
CBC News

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Wednesday for the "inconvenience and worries" caused by the British government's accidental loss of computer discs containing detailed personal information of 25 million citizens.

During a heated question period in the House of Commons, Brown tried to reassure the country that people's personal details gathered by Britain's tax and customs service were safe following one of the biggest security breaches in the country's history.

Two computer discs that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and — in some cases — banking details for nearly half the country's population.

"I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits," Brown said. "We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public."

Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the discs contained details of the 7.25 million families in Britain claiming the child benefit — a tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children.

He said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.

The discs were password protected but the information on them was not encrypted, officials said.

I always find it interesting that our governments collect ever-increasing amounts of personal information on their citizens--on us. It's all for our own good, for our safety and protection, they tell us. When they demonstrate they aren't even capable of keeping this supposedly critical information safe, what sort of confidence are we supposed to have in their ability to protect us from more concrete and salient threats?

Which brings us to my next book review, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better by Matt Hern. Hern runs an independent school in East Vancouver and is a scholar of Urban Studies. With Watch Yourself, he discusses our society's increasing obsession with safety and protection before openly wondering if we're actually safer as a result. Not to mention, as the subtitle indicates, if safety is always the preferred option.

Hern notes the obsession with safety in all aspects, often accompanied by the mantra "for the sake of the children". He shares an anecdote about two girls who died during a high school skiing trip. They slipped under a safety fence that had been clearly plastered with warning signs, and fell to their deaths. Despite these precautions, their families still felt that "more could have been done" to prevent the deaths of their daughters.

Fear is among the most potent of marketing tools, and this does not escape Hern's notice. His discussion on SUVs, summarized in this interview states that SUVs were originally a ploy by automobile manufacturers to sell cars as trucks, skirting around certain emission and safety requirements. Owners became convinced that the size of an SUV compared to other passenger vehicles made them safer, when in fact the opposite is true: top-heavy SUVs are more likely to roll over during a quick manouevre, say when trying to avoid a crash.

Hern does not speak from some cloistered, upper-middle class bubble or ivory tower of academe. He runs an alternative school, the Purple Thistle Centre, in Vancouver's infamous East Side. He and his family have been the victims of property crime, and he knows that drug dealers operate in his neighbourhood. This gives his narrative an authenticity other books of this type often lack. For example, he notes that a park in his neighbourhood known for the presence of drug dealers and their clients, was granted a beefed-up police presence. All this did was move the drug dealers to another park several blocks away, whereupon the residents of that neighbourhood began to demand more police. Hern notes that calls to deal with crime and safety typically mean spending more money on policing, and not on the root causes of crime. This is treating the symptoms while letting the disease fester.

Heresy is Hern's agenda: to spread the idea that safety is not always the most desirable goal. And he has a point: how much progress has been achieved in our society because some people were willing to take risks? I would say damn near all of it.

Suddenly Seeking Search Engine

Cross-posted at Map of the Informatique.

At work, I've been asked to train one of the library board members on "advanced Google searching". I'm not entirely sure what he means by that (the training session has yet to materialize), but I suspect he wants to go somewhat beyond typing one or two words into Google's search field.

In the hopes of providing a full exploration of the topic, and to show exactly why I'm worth the (not so) big bucks they're paying, I've been doing a bit of research on the Google phenomenon. Two books on the search engine king were released in 2005, probably to capitalize on Google's initial public offering and some of the fallout in the year following that seemed to tarnish the seemingly-untouchable lustre of the Internet's fasting-rising company and its likeable founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (as of October 2007, both men are tied for 26th richest person in the world, worth about $16.6 billion US each). I read one at the time, that being The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle. Like many non-fiction authors these days, Battelle maintained a website detailing some of his research and writing, and continues to use the site to promote his book as well as blog on internet search more generally.

The other book, which I just finished, was The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time, by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, whose authors also maintain a website.

Both books are valuable for anyone who wants to learn more about the current master of internet search, and complement each other very well. Both books focus on Google and how it used internet search, a feature the rest of the internet industry had dismissed as useless and unprofitable, to rise above the bursting of the dot-com bubble and become the fastest-rising technology company in history. But I would call The Google Story more of a business biography, while Battelle's book is more of technological history.

Vise and Malseed focus on Brin and Page and the business they built, from their fated meeting in the computer science graduate program at Stanford, to the humble beginnings of Google on campus, tracing the company's development to its IPO and some of its legal and public image troubles following that, ending with some of Brin and Page's hopes for the future of search. While the account is thorough, there is a mood of triumphalism that permeates the text, a narrative of two smart kids with a new idea done good. The focus is more on how Google transformed business culture with its very different approach. Brin and Page, academics and the children of academics, run Google more like a college campus than a business (the PageRank system at the core of Google's search technology is based on the citing practices and impact factors of academic journal articles). One of their more revolutionary practices is the 20% rule. In the academic world, professors are given 20% of their time (generally, one day a week) away from lecturing and administrative work to work on their own research and projects. Employees at Google are also given 20% of their time to work on their own projects. Sometimes these go nowhere, but other times they result in new applications like Froogle and Google News. Vise and Malseed even devote a chapter to Google's former head chef, Employee #53, Charlie Ayers, as part of their description of Google's corporate culture. Google is also known for its humour, evidenced by its regular April Fools Day jokes and the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT, a spoof of the battery of standard tests used by other firms.

Meanwhile, Battelle begins with the history of internet search, tracing the development of some of Google's more noteworthy forefathers, from Archie at McGill University, to the web's "first truly good search engine", AltaVista, to those other two Stanford PhDs at Yahoo!, Jerry Yang and David Filo. While the spotlight of his text then shifts to Google, his overall focus is on internet search and search engines. In the mid and late-90s, other dot-coms were trying to build "portals", which were actually destinations. The idea was to draw in users and keep them on the site, which was awash in visual and pop-up ads. Anyone who remembers Yahoo!, Excite and Altavista back then remembers the slew of ads, internal links and flashy banner ads splashed over every square inch of the site. Search was seen as just another service provided by the portal, along with email, personal ads, weather reports, and so on.

Along comes Google with its bare bones white screen and a single search field, but that simple field offered the keys to the World Wide Web. While others were adding to the clutter of the internet's closet, Google provided the sense of organization to all that clutter, while making billions from advertising that was so unobtrusive, few people recognized the ads when they saw them. In just a few short years, the search engine named for the impossibly large number garnered the greatest brand recognition in the online world, even becoming a verb related to internet searching in the process (e.g., "I Googled him last night").

Both books offer a very comprehensive coverage of Google's rise and dominance of the market, while focusing on different aspects of the company. The Google Story, true to its title, is a biographical narrative of the company's "life", largely holding to a tone of triumphalism throughout. Only in a handful of later chapters, when discussing threats to Google's public image and through the courts, is the clarion call muted. The Search is more illustrative of the search technologies involved, without getting overly technical, and is probably more interesting to my fellow library and information science professionals.

Google continues to maintain a high profile in the public eye, as even the company's former masseuse is ready to tell her story:

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.

Book Review: Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

October 4, 2007 marked an important historical anniversary. The 50th anniversary of humanity's exploration of outer space. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial object launched by human beings to escape the Earth's gravity (for six months, but a milestone).

In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski covers the intense rivalries that served as the catalyst to the great space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which would eventually culminate in landing men on the moon, and laid the foundations for today's space program, including the International Space Station.

Although the obvious rivalry between the Americans and the Soviets plays out over the course of Brzezinski's account, many other more personal conflicts come to the front of the stage. For the USSR's head of missile development, Sergei Korolev, his childhood obsession to touch space drove him relentlessly. Even years spent in Stalin's gulag did not dash the dream from him. His drive to put a satellite in orbit allowed him to navigate the treacherous waters of the Soviet military community.

Rivalries were, if anything, were more pronounced on the American side of the missile race. The army, navy, and nascent air force all had ballistic missile programs in the works, though it was the Army's that would place the first American satellite in orbit, thanks largely to the stubbornness of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's commander, Major General John B. Medaris, and ABMA's chief engineer, Wernher von Braun, the man behind the German V-2 rockets.

Brzezinski's book is a fast-paced, enjoyable read giving a lot of insight into the scientific and political environments of the USA and USSR of the late 1950s. The personalities involved leap off the page and come alive, shaping the course of the historical narrative. Highly recommended.

In his house at R'lyeh Cthulhu pwns n00bs



For more fun, read The Tales of Plush Cthulhu.

The areas of book-writing expertise

I've been listening to the audiobook version of The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman. Hodgman is best known as the "Resident Expert" on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or as the PC in the Apple "Mac vs. PC" commercials.

Resident Expert of The Daily Show

PC vs. Mac

He is also a professional writer, and a former literary agent for the likes of actor Bruce Campbell, and in honour of National Novel Writing Month, I thought I'd share some of Hodgman's advice from The Areas of My Expertise:

What is the best kind of book to write?

I was asked this many times when I a professional literary agent, and the answer at the time was obvious: the most marketable kind of book to write, was one in which vampires fight serial killers, but the best kind of book to write, was one in which the vampires fight large weather systems and perfect storms. Of course, that answer is not correct in today's publishing environment, as neither of those old examples includes a worldwide conspiracy, overseen by a centuries-old religious secret society. While my initial response dates me hopelessly, I realize literature, blessed, ever grows and matures.

And one more:

Throughout history, all effective stories are based in some sort of conflict, and most critics agree, that in literature, there are five primal conflicts:

These are:

Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Himself
and Man vs. Cyborgs

If you think of a story, any story, I trust you will find it fits neatly into one of these rubrics.

New Golden Compass Trailer!

Right here.

I can't wait!

When he has a fire sale, he means it

This used bookseller has found a way to sell his merchandise and make a social statement too:

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books

Via LIS News.

Book Review: The Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson

A few months ago, I reviewed Blowback, Chalmers Johnson's take on American military and economic imperialism. The economist and East Asia expert explained how both trigger consequences that the American people are often required to bear, but because military and covert actions are kept secret or hidden, most citizens haven't the slightest clue why these "terrorists" or "rogue states" are targeting them.

Some might say Johnson's book was uncannily prophetic, since it was written in 2000 and one year later the ultimate form of "blowback", the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, occurred. Others--like myself--might have been surprised at the scope and effectiveness of the attack, but few active observers of international politics were surprised that 9/11 happened in the first place.

In Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, Johnson takes on American imperialism directly. Tracing its history from the Spanish-American War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Johnson details the string of bases the US military has erected in something like 3/4 of the nations of the world. He also details the personal arrangements American military officers cultivate with the military elite of other nations. These relationships bypass and undermine the usual channels of civilian diplomacy, as these military relationships are not subject to oversight or control by the elected civilian authorities.

Truth be told, the earlier chapters are not as strong as Blowback's thesis. Johnson's expertise in economics and East Asia were evident in the earlier book, but here he delves into somewhat unfamiliar territory, and thus it comes across more as a popular history than a scholarly analysis. Still, the facts he compiles are shocking.

Much like Gwynne Dyer, Johnson failed to predict just how disastrous the occupation of Iraq would become. In fact, few of the major commentators heard before the war and during the initial invasion, whether supporters of the action or its opponents, were able to predict just how badly the Bush administration would bungle the occupation. In this Johnson is not unique. It seems many commentators and analysts believed the Bush administration could be idealistic, or corrupt, or evil, but no one predicted they could be incompetent. Sadly, the last three years have made that abundantly evident.

Johnson saves the best for last, as it is the book's penultimate chapter that features his strongest argument. "Globalization", that capitalist buzzword of the 1990s, is nothing but Western (ie, American) economic imperialism. This rebirth of eighteenth-century liberalism, often dubbed "neoliberalism", brings with it the racism and exploitation that accompanied classical liberalism in the heydays of the British Empire. Johnson feels that Bill Clinton was a far more successful imperialist than George W. Bush:

In accordance with the logic of Sun Tzu, Bill Clinton was actually a much more effective imperialist than George W. Bush. During the Clinton administration, the United States employed an indirect approach in imposing its will on other nations. The government of George W. Bush, by contrast, dropped all legitimating principles and adopted the view that might makes right. History tells us that an expansive nation must at least attempt to disguise what it is doing if it wants to consolidate its gains. It must pretend that its exploitation of the weak is in their own best interest, or their own fault, or the result of ineluctable processes beyond human control, or a consequence of the spread of civilization, or in accordance with scientific laws--anything but deliberate aggression by a hyperpower.

Clinton camouflagued his policies by carrying them out under the banner of "globalization". This proved quite effective in maneuvering rich but gullible nations to do America's bidding--for example, Argentina--or in destabilizing potential rivals--for example, South Korea and Indonesia in the 1997 economic crisis--or in protecting domestic economic interests--for example, in maintaining the exorbitant prices of American pharmaceutical companies under cover of defending "intellectual property rights". During the 1990s, the rationales of free trade and capitalist economics were used to disguise America's hegemonic power and make it seem benign or, at least, natural and unavoidable. The main agents of this imperialism were Clinton's secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy (today, president of Harvard University). Lawrence Summers. The United States ruled the world but did so in a carefully masked way that produced high degrees of acquiescence among the dominated nations.

George W. Bush, by contrast, turned to a frontal assault based on the use of America's unequaled military power.

Ironically, "in its spurious scientificity, globalism has proved similar to Marxism, whose roots lie in the same intellectual soil," in that the modern globalists are convinced their path is inevitable and irresistible. Clearly this notion of historical determinism mirrors the dialectical process of Marxist thought.

The notion of the American military-industrial complex as a socialist entity is not a new one: see for example William Greider's Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. Greider, Johnson and others have noted that American defence spending shows little regard for market forces or other considerations of a capitalist economy--indeed, periods of economic downturn seem to be accompanied by increases in American defence spending. Generally speaking, the same arms manufacturers are granted defence contracts over and over again, which brings into question how competitive the awarding of contracts is. The US military has many of the earmarks of a planned economy.

Johnson takes this idea to the next level, quoting Peru's ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Oswaldo de Rivero:

The ideological war between capitalism and communism during the second half of the twentieth century was not a conflict between totally different ideologies. It was, rather, a civil war between two extreme viewpoints of the same Western ideology: the search for happiness through the material progress disseminated by the Industrial Revolution...the cost of the Soviet version of development was shortages and lack of freedom; today, that of the neoliberal, capitalist variant is unemployment and social exclusion.

The book's conclusion summarizes four likely negative results to the American Republic from increasing American imperialism, the last (and most dangerous in his eyes) being bankruptcy. Imperialism is an expensive business and American defense spending is more out of control than ever before. Although Johnson suggests that the American people could still use their civil institutions to reclaim their nation from the imperialists, he isn't very hopeful.

I conclude this review with a recent example of blowback from American interventionism: the Fort Dix Six, Kosovars so pleased with American involvement in their war against Serbia, they decided to show their gratitude by attempting to break into a US military base on American soil and kill as many US soldiers as they could.

And this is why those who favour American imperialism, even for beneficial reasons (there is something positive to be said about the type of society American imperialists give lip service to, even if they don't practice it). The globalization project of the imperialists has empowered the dissident and disgruntled around the world. The Romans, British, Russians, Turks--they didn't have to worry about oppressed subject peoples in the colonies causing major damage in the homeland. At least not until their empires were well on their way to complete collapse. Whereas today, the openness of frontiers and borders and the free flow of information, technology and finance (a direct consequence of globalization) has placed immense destructive power into the hands of dissidents--and we've seen they're quite prepared to use it--and given them the ability to project that force directly into the political, military and economic capitals of the American empire. The American people should fear their rising empire as much as those worldwide. For much like the British empire that preceded it, the American empire benefits the wealthy and powerful, but it is the rest of society that suffers the consequences.

Read two books and call me in the morning

Last night, Dr. Vincent Lam, winner of the 2006 Giller Prize, did a special author visit at work. This was part of our Asian Heritage Month celebrations (which I mentioned briefly last month).

Dr. Vincent Lam, Toronto emergency room physician and Giller Prize-winning author.	The Giller Prize-winning Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.

Although running a bit late (thanks to the notorious traffic situation of the Greater Toronto Area), no one seemed to notice or make a fuss about it. Dr. Lam began with a brief introduction about himself, then read sections from "Winston", one of the stories in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. To be honest this is one of my least favourite stories from the book, but it is one with several conflicting emotions (concern, paranoia, suspense, humour) and probably best illustrates the various aspects of the working lives of medical professionals that Lam endeavours to communicate throughout the book.

Afterwards, I read some audience-submitted questions to Dr. Lam, which he answered with candor and good humour, after which he signed books, including a couple for me. Deranged Squirrel (who brought her sister K along), MadJenny and The Blogless One also came out on their night off to see Dr. Lam.

Dr. Vincent Lam signs my copies of his book.	The signed title page.

I found Dr. Lam to be an incredibly nice and approachable person, and wish him every success with his next book.

Star gazing

This evening, the Deranged Squirrel, Mad Jenny, and The Blogless One (AKA JL), went to an author visit (at our library) from the Dean of Canadian science fiction, Robert J. Sawyer.

Alas, poor Hominid--I knew him!

Sawyer read from his latest release, Rollback (which is highly recommended), and fielded questions from the audience. He is a talented public speaker and storyteller, and very well-informed and practiced, nimbly parrying and riposting a question of mine concerning the first novel of his I read, Calculating God, and the Anthropic Principle. Afterward, he autographed two books for me:

The Hugo Award-winning Hominids.	Its immediate sequel, Humans.

Click on the photos to enlarge them. As you can see, Robert J. Sawyer is a keen observer of humanity.

Six of one; a 101 of another

Or, the False Prophet in Hell

To celebrate my 101st post here at False Prophecy, why not see just where in Hell I'll end up?

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Test