"What took you so long to pick it up?" I did not believe the hype.
Before The Windup Girl, my exposure to Bacigalupi's work was through two short stori"What took you so long to pick it up?" I did not believe the hype.
Before The Windup Girl, my exposure to Bacigalupi's work was through two short stories:
(1) "The People of Sand and Slag"—which seemed to pop-upeverywhere for a while; and then (2) "Yellow Card Man"—which was in the same milieu as this novel and which I liked but which I didn't really "get" because I was expecting something more along the lines of "The People of Sand and Slag".
This is not to say that I did not enjoy Bacigalupi's work at least on some level—they were both good stories but neither of them was enough to send me out on a mission looking to read more of his work. Nevertheless, I recognized the name and had this strong flicker of recognition every time yet another review appeared in my RSS reader. The Windup Girl is amazing and a shoe-in for at least one of 2009's big awards and so forth. But I kept thinking about "The People of Sand and Slag".
Turns out that Bacigalupi has the same problem that I ("...would like to think I...") have.
His ideas are big. Too big for some crummy 5000 word short story or some 8500 word novelette. Those ideas are big and they are important and they need room to breathe. Those ideas need a 350+ page apparatus to fully get themselves across. But these big ideas all seem so small and slow at first, and for the first 50-100 pages you find yourself thinking So what? So this is an interesting and immersive milieu but where's the action? Why is everyone ready to have this book's babies? But then it hits you hard and drags you through 250 more stunning pages. But now I'm just gushing?
I loved this book the way that I loved Ian McDonald's River of Gods. There is something very special about the rich tapestry that these guys have created by putting these futuristic settings against the lush and visceral backdrops of these oriental locales with all their poverty and banalia. But whereas McDonald did it with AIs in India, Bacigalupi is doing it with genetically modified human not-quite-clones in Thailand.
But what makes this one so special is that everyone is under indictment and nothing is sacrosanct. None of the stories end the way you would want them to, but you cannot think of any other way that they could end. This is one that will haunt you, and makes a great companion read for Oryx and Crake....more
Every other review of this book that you read will sum this up pretty well: that this book is a briskly-paced, well-executed tale of running, of a "seEvery other review of this book that you read will sum this up pretty well: that this book is a briskly-paced, well-executed tale of running, of a "secret tribe" in Mexico that has basically made an art of ultra-running, of the people world-wide that are truly passionate about putting their bodies into motion and not stopping for hundreds of miles. Also, that your fancy shoes are the reason you're getting plantar fasciitis.
So if you want the details on all that, and if you want to get pumped up about barefoot running (you pervert) then have right at it.
Instead, I want to put out there a serious question about what seems like a pretty big inconsistency in the text that I'm having trouble reconciling:
First -- there is quite a bit in the text where it seems that McDougall is suggesting that a vegetarian diet is the way to go for the elite ultrarunner. Put down your lean meat and go after the beans and pinole. Runner after runner in chapter after chapter, all of them seem to say that they've gone and eschewed meat, that they "eat like a poor person", and they've never felt better, and never run better (nor run longer). And yet...
Second -- there is this section where McDougall starts talking about the evolution of Homo sapiens, and this conjecture that we "defeated" our Neanderthal cousins in the evolutionary arms race because we "ran our prey to death". In other words, our species learned to run so that it could more easily obtain meat, and the improved access to meat was a huge driver behind the survival of our species, behind the further development of our brain.
But this contradiction isn't really explored. Evolution has strong feedback effects built in. So if we're running to get meat, why eschew the meat hundreds of thousands (millions?) of years later? Does the access to the meat simply open the door and once through it we're better off without it? Or is there more to this story?
REAL REVIEW PENDING but super-short version: after having finally read this, I can see why it has been held up as influential and widely regarded as aREAL REVIEW PENDING but super-short version: after having finally read this, I can see why it has been held up as influential and widely regarded as a masterpiece. Dawkins cuts into some deep science here with very accessible language, painting a vivid picture of what genes are, what their function is, as well as what our function is as vehicles for those genes.
SIDE NOTE: Any aspiring science fiction author must read this. If you want to a lush inter-galactic tapestry with bizarre but believable alien species, start close to home. You don't know bizarre until you read about ant queens that invade the colonies of other ant species and secrete mind-control hormones to turn that colonies workers into zombies that murder their own mother....more
First and foremost: an uncritical read of this book will leave you feeling cynical and a bit cheated. It ranks up there with E.O. Wilson's SociobiologFirst and foremost: an uncritical read of this book will leave you feeling cynical and a bit cheated. It ranks up there with E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (though I'll admit that I know those two primarily by reputation, having read excerpts and not their entireties). It would be very easy to find yourself getting defensive about the material presented in here; especially if you believe humans to be some special exception among animals.
Meanwhile, with a more critical approach, you'll find that you cannot get Robert Wright's text out of your head: it is insightful, intellectually rigorous, even-handed, and at times palpably funny. Plus, you will find that it informs a great many (all?) of the human discourse (verbal or otherwise) that you encounter daily -- how certain traits and behaviors came to be and the functions they serve.
Don't ask about their intentions though; we need to remember that evolution is goal-less, after all. Put most succinctly:
What Robert Wright sets out to do with The Moral Animal is to take Darwin's life and oeuvre (primarily The Origin of Species), frame them with two other important contemporary writings (John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and Samuel Smiles' Self-Help), and use that lens to execute a thorough analysis and discussion of Darwinism and evolution, how human civilizations evolved as a consequence of "reciprocal altruism", and capsulize all of this as the basis for what Wright calls evolutionary psychology. Wright's choice of style is an interesting one and reminds me vaguely of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: meticulous and technical scientific discussions of biology, genetics, and evolution are interspersed with nearly whimsical narratives that detail the life and times of Charles Darwin. For every page that cites Robert Trivers or Richard Dawkins, there is another that quotes Darwin's personal correspondence or illustrates the backdrop of Victorian society. Wright's is an interesting and compelling approach that makes that text very engaging and approachable. Which is not to suggest that the material is easy to follow; Wright does not shy away from getting denser and heavier as the work progresses -- there were many instances were I found that I needed to double-back over certain passages to "get it".
Again, for as dense and technical as much of Wright's writing is, he throws himself whole-heartedly into the text and makes the material come to life. There is something strangely erotic about his in-depth scientific analysis of mate competition, cuckoldry, and evolutionary strategizing. There is something perversely amusing about his apples-to-oranges comparisons of Darwin and Freud. There is something appropriately voyeuristic about reading letters from Darwin to friends and seeing how they reflect elements of his own theories.
In many ways, Wright's eloquent prose is currency for getting us through some very challenging material. As I've already discussed, there is the implicit challenge of reading technical literature (especially as a layperson). More so however, is the explicit challenge that Wright lays out early in the text: that we all carry a great deal of cultural baggage that sets us up to reject the logical conclusions posited by Darwinism and evolutionary psychology. Wright spends the first half of the text building up to the discussions that give the book its title. By the time we get to Part Three: Social Strife, it is no small wonder why Wright keeps circling back on the example of bluegill sunfish and the equilibrium between "nest builders" and "mate poachers". The animal kingdom seems to contain not a more succinct microcosm of industry versus opportunism, of cost/benefit economies and stability through constant adjustments in strategy.
The cornerstone of the second half of The Moral Animal is reciprocal altruism, a theory introduced in the early 1970s by Robert Trivers. Wright gives reciprocal altruism the thorough treatment: he describes how it may (must?) have evolved, the benefits it bestows on an organism (or, more accurately, its genes), how reciprocal altruism gave rise to human societies and civilizations, and the feedback loop between society and biology (i.e., meme and gene) as mediated through the extremely complex manifestation of reciprocal altruism in human beings. At first glance, Wright's exposition may appear cynical and determinist: even "on our best behavior", we are just a product of our genes -- even agape presumes a pay-off in the form of a more "loving" and stable society for our offspring. Swing such a cynical evaluation around to the other end and you are using these postulates for justification of extramarital affairs, for rape and for genocide, or for whatever other Twinkie Defense you might conjecture. Wright is very conscious of this and tries to be very delicate and deliberate in his treatment of all this; he even goes so far as to label it "postmodern morality" and he summarily eviscerates these conclusions as damaging and naïve. (Perhaps he is so explicit about this because he wishes to avoid being damned in the same way as E.O. Wilson when he published Sociobiology.) Wright suggests that if anything "separates" humans from animals, it is self-reflection, the capacity that we have to evaluate our actions (and the actions of others) and consequently judge those actions. Wright asserts that even if the content of our judgments (and our abilities to make those judgments) are evolved tendencies, that we can on some level make choices about the "rightness" of a given action; that our memes (though he eschews that word) and genes interact and we express agency in our evolution.
Of course, he also appears to caution us that there is a great deal of cultural transmission going on in human evolution right now and that meme transmission is fragile and tenuous even under the best conditions. Hyperbolic though it may sound, Wright appears to suggest that we are one catastrophic event away from being free agents in the game of evolution.
Underlying all of this is the assertion that reciprocal altruism is a non-zero-sum game where each player (i.e., the genes that are making efforts through the organism to reproduce) functions as a kind of accountant of favors. Each organism is playing life and evolution as a game where sometimes the best move is to take a short-term loss, where sometimes the best move is to take a little more than what you're owed but not as much as you could exploit. In a way, this is a hopelessly romantic view of evolution -- that even despite the ubiquitously short half-life of any pleasure, that an organism might still "choose" a small short-term sacrifice for a greater long-term gain. In reading the entirety of Wright's argument however, it is certainly reasonable to assume that this is a pragmatic trait, that it's a complexly evolved response system for economies of scarcity -- that there is in fact nothing romantic about charity or sacrifice or romance or the outlaw exploiter. Mechanistically, we are all cogs in the perpetual motion machine of evolution's equilibrium. And as such, our morals (or lack thereof) are the motions of that machine balancing itself.
I could see how some, perhaps many might find this thought is unsettling. With his re-telling of Darwin's tale, Wright illustrates a Copernicanian re-centering of humankind, its origins, and even its humanity. As mentioned above, it can be easy to carve out portions of this hypothesis and serve them in cynical isolation. Taken as a whole, it is a strong composite view of humankind's genetic and cultural make-up, the forces that drove us to where we are, and the agency we may express over our destiny....more
A gorgeous book in every possible way. From the lush illustration and clever diagrams clear through to Sagan's lyrical and at times whimsical narrativA gorgeous book in every possible way. From the lush illustration and clever diagrams clear through to Sagan's lyrical and at times whimsical narrative, this is the science book for non-scientists. (And if you are a scientist, may this be a lesson in how to tell your story.) Sagan makes the astronomy and the math and the mind-boggling complexity of the universe not only comprehensible but palatable. He wraps up our history as a species into the history of the universe (such that we can even know it).
As a kid, I adored this book for the color plates. I would flip the pages in my Dad's copy over and over and over again. Down on the floor, on the couch -- anywhere. Probably every day from ages four through seventeen. I didn't go on to be an astronomer. Hell, I never took a physics class and I nearly failed more than one math class (as I recall) but this book...
Reading it cover-to-cover for the first time as an adult, I was struck by many things. The book is dense but Sagan paces it well, makes you hungry for every anecdote about Kepler or Pythagoras, thirsty for the decimal-laden scientific notation.
And then there was the moment that blew my mind; tucked away in a footnote about telescopic "snapshots" of galaxies:
...The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.
I struggled with what rating to give this. Five stars on the basis of the science? Four stars on the basis of how Bear illustrated the geo-politics anI struggled with what rating to give this. Five stars on the basis of the science? Four stars on the basis of how Bear illustrated the geo-politics and socio-economics? Three stars for characters? And for plot? And do I really spend the time to meditate on why I was tempted to give it two stars?
Mixed feelings all over the place.
I think ultimately what it came down to for me was that Bear was focused on making this a rigorous Hard 카지노싸이트 Fiction novel and, though he succeeded in doing that, it felt thin in other ways. That said, that rigorous Hard 카지노싸이트 Fiction kept me going to the end, even if I felt like the characters were stereotyped, and the plot was largely telegraphed and easy to predict. There were certainly a lot of nuts and bolts here, but they were all technical.
I wanted to like it more, but I felt like--much like spectating a pregnancy--once the wheels are in motion you just wait and watch, and you know what's going to happen....more
Deep geekery. Let's build logic from its component parts. And then after by-hand fabricating that nomenclature, we'll use it to talk about intelligencDeep geekery. Let's build logic from its component parts. And then after by-hand fabricating that nomenclature, we'll use it to talk about intelligence, problem-solving, heuristics, etc. building up to general intelligence (generally) and artificial intelligence (specifically). Deep, heavy, at times extremely fun. Took me five years to read it.
And so somewhat in the spirit of the text:
GEB is like this incredibly attractive, incredibly smart, incredibly funny/witty woman that you meet through a friend. The early part of the relationship is a little tentative—what with both of you trying to get a feel for each other, and both of you not quite knowing what to make of each other—but the time you spend together is lots and lots of fun. And after a little while, you're both very comfortable with each other and the time passes quickly. Perhaps too quickly. You just can't get over how lovely she is, how funny, how brilliant... But then out of the blue she gets heavy. Even your light-hearted conversations end with your head spinning. What happened to the woman you thought you were falling in love with? So you walk away. But she doesn't seem heart-broken in the least. You walk away, and you stay away for a while. Until one night you realize that even if she was getting into deep and heavy subjects that it was YOU who was afraid; she'd asked nothing of you but to listen. And like a coward you walked away. But when you return to her, she takes you back—like nothing ever happened. And before you know it, you really have come to the end of your journey together. But you feel so enriched for it.
And yes that's a terrible and cloying analogy that takes it way too far. But I couldn't help myself....more
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