A great ending, and a terrible one

Recently I finished the final book of the Expanse series.  Having seen many long series end up either in limbo or finished badly I was a little concerned that it would finish up a giant mess - I needn't have been concerned.  The Expanse finished wonderfully, tying up the loose ends well, giving the readers insights into the story that we have long been waiting for, and wrapping up character arcs in appropriate ways.

It was quite the contrast to the other space adventure series I finished recently - Battlestar Galactica - which shambled to a disastrous end that tainted the entire series.

I won't spoil the the final book of the Expanse here, though I will assume you have read most of the books already.  Galactica though, I will spoil ruthlessly.

One of the key things that has to happen for a finale to work is that the authors have to reveal solutions to some mysteries that have continued throughout the story.  To do this you have to have a plan.  The Expanse writers clearly had a plan.  There were many unknowns about the two alien races in the series, including how exactly the war between them played out, and a lot of those gaps were filled in.  More importantly, they were filled in with information that fit everything that came before.  All of the things that happened during the series fit with the information in the final installment, and you can see the consistency of the rules of the world.

Galactica though, wow.  They got to the end and it was clear that they had *no* idea how to wrap up their ongoing storylines.  They had a shared vision among multiple people about an opera house where a child had two people chasing after her to save her, and two others who were taking her away for some unknown purpose.  This vision was a big part of the plot for multiple seasons.  It needed a grand ending, something to justify all the setup.  Then, at the end, the kid in the vision was walking through a ship with those two people trying to find her.  The other two people picked her up, walked ten paces, and put her down.  And that was the entire payoff to two seasons of drama and tension.  

The kid could have walked those ten paces herself.  If no one had been there, nothing would have happened.  If the other two people had found the kid first, nothing would be different.  What a waste, and it made it entirely clear that the writers came up with a cool thing to do in season 2, but never bothered to consider what it would actually mean in the end.

Another key ingredient to a good ending is keeping character motivations and traits consistent.  Again the Expanse did this well.  Holden and Alex in particular got endings that fit their arcs, and had appropriate and emotional callbacks to how they thought and behaved in the early books.  They continued to act like themselves and although they had changed throughout the series the change felt real, believable, and good.  Being able to combine a variety of threads from the first book through to the end to help finish off a character's tale is difficult, and the Expanse nailed it.

Again, Galactica failed spectacularly.  At the end all of the characters decide to throw all of their technology into the sun and become nomadic hunter gatherers.  This wasn't set up ahead of time, even though they had plenty of opportunities to establish religious groups that could have potentially justified this nonsense.  They had a bunch of people totally reliant on modern technology all decide simultaneously "Well, I guess I don't want to have a heater, or medicine, or sanitation, or anything ever again.  It is time for us all to die of exposure and disease... because reasons."

It was embarassing to watch, honestly.  Truly, it is hard to imagine that a space adventure series ends with a "Because God's divine plan, that's why." and that wasn't even the main thing I wanted to rant about.  If the story beats had been paid off, and the characters got appropriate and consistent endings, I could have forgiven Because God as the end of the show, but put it all together and you have something truly pathetic.

If you just want some views, you can make up random crap as you go along.  That works.  If you want an enduring legacy though, you have to actually make a plan.

The Expanse had a plan.  Galactica did not.  It shows.

Moving on up

I recently finished the book Exodus - How Migration is Changing Our World.  It is about the movement of people from poor countries to rich ones, and examines what effects this movement has on all of the parties involved.  I didn't agree with it all the way, but I think it does a great job of asking hard questions and looking at the issue from the perspective of everyone affected.  Being as I live in Canada it is no surprise that most of my exposure to immigration discussion has been centered on whether or not it is good for current Canadians if new people move here.  Exodus examines the subject from that perspective, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the effects on the immigrants themselves and the people left behind in the poorer countries from which they come.

In political debate the subject of immigration often comes down to left vs. right shouting matches.  The left wants all the immigration and any opposition to that is racist, and the right wants no immigration and any opposition to that is destroying our culture.  Naturally both extremes are nonsense, and both have some kind of point if you tone the rhetoric down some.  A lot of opposition to immigration within rich countries is based on racism, but there are real concerns about how immigration levels change the culture of the countries people are moving to.

One key topic that is pivotal and controversial is the examination of why exactly poor countries are poor.  Is it just historical, based on past behaviour?  Luck?  Or is it culture, and poorer, worse functioning countries are that way because of the behaviour of their citizens?  Again, this discussion is a political minefield, but the explanation is a bit of all of each of these simple answers.  Colonialism left all kinds of troubles and issues in poorer countries, but some countries have pushed beyond a troubled past, marred by invasion and occupation.  Some countries are lucky to have valuable resources, but those resources do not explain much of the difference in standard of living.

Exodus explains that much of the difference between countries can be explained by mutual regard between citizens.  If you think of everyone else in your country as someone close to you, someone you should respect, and insist on the same behaviour from them, your country will prosper.  When nurses steal all the drugs from hospitals to sell on the black market, the country suffers.  When crime is so rampant that everyone must spend tons of money on security guards, the country suffers.  When bureaucrats demand bribes and squander money via corruption the country suffers.  Countries that are rich tend to have high trust among citizens and people do not overlook transgressions by others, even if those others are close to them.  Of course every country has some degree of corruption, but less corruption is hugely beneficial.

If a rich country wants to maintain its standard of living, then any new arrivals must take on its current culture.  They don't have to have all the same holidays, modes of dress, etc. but they need to buy into the basic ideals and customs with regards to law and corruption.  If they do not, the standard of living in the country will suffer.  It is reasonable to demand certain cultural standards, but it is easy to tip over and demand far too much, and of the wrong types.

I definitely think Canadians need to be concerned about racism, particularly against immigrants.  I also think that we have to carefully manage how many people we bring in to make sure we have the infrastructure to support them, and also make sure that we maintain the parts of our culture that give us the wealth and privilege that the immigrants are seeking.  We can't expect to have open borders and welcome anyone who wants in while maintaining our standard of living, so we need restrictions, and those restrictions are going to be complicated and difficult to decide on.

The simple fact is that immigration cannot be boiled down to Good or Bad.  It is a complicated thing that is governed by extremely complex systems, and how we approach it hugely affects our outcomes.

One thing in Exodus that I was especially interested in is the discussion of nationalism.  I have been wont to say that nationalism is poison, but Exodus does point out that nationalism does have some benefits.  It tends to reduce corruption and increase mutual regard, convincing citizens to do things for one another.  The basic argument is that nationalism is good for the economy.  The author carefully states that nationalism was, in the past, a huge source of wars and conflict, and this is an obvious downside.  He thinks though that this is a thing of the past, and we shouldn't worry much about that anymore.

I think he is delusional on this point.  Nationalism may well improve the economy, but wars are still happening and they aren't gone forever.  Nationalism is a danger to humanity at large, particularly since one of our greatest existential threats, nuclear war, is vastly more likely to occur between two states in the throes of nationalist ideas. I am totally willing to take a hit to my standard of living to push the possibility of war further to the wayside, and it isn't even close.

Anyone who thinks that nationalism isn't setting us on the warpath anymore should look carefully at the US and the wars it has been continuously involved in for the past several decades.  Would Russia have been involved in the military actions it has over the past few years if it weren't so tightly in the grasp of militant nationalism?  I think not.

While I disagree with some of Exodus, I do think it raises a great many useful points.  If you haven't thought a lot about immigration from a variety of viewpoints you will probably learn a few things, and the book is easy to read and clear.  One final caveat though - the author likes to use formulas and graphs to make points, and sometimes they are misleading.  You can't take an enormously complicated topic, boil it down to 2 numbers, and then pretend that putting those numbers in a formula gives you good data out the other side.  Economists are fond of simple math representing labyrinthine issues, and such behaviour should be given a generous helping of side eye.

Humans are kind

Next up in my reading series is HumanKind.  This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.

By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.

Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live.  When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own.  You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense.  You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible.  Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful.  This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to.  The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.

Once you have agriculture the rules all change.  Land ownership becomes crucial.  Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible.  Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies.  All of this leads to war and violence.  However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control.  We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.

This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people.  In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety.  There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example.  However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.

The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness.  For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited.  The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack.  They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died.  The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person.  Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died.  It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.

Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad.  The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.

Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another.  These are the things that set us apart from all other species.  The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all.  However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are.  We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not.  The last century shows us that we can get better.  We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.  

We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.

HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities.  Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.

Defeated by detail

The next book on my 'stuff people recommended' list is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.  It is a book about archaeology / anthropology that looks at ancient peoples, particularly a group that lived in the steppes of Asia called Indo-Europeans.  

It is the first book that I failed to finish.

I didn't fail because the book was bad, or wrong, but rather because it is so chock fill of minute details that I just don't care about.  It sounds like it would be right up my alley - I am interested in historic trends and the idea of following the invention of the wheel or horseback riding and seeing how they influenced language migration sounds neat.

Unfortunately the book is just so dry and so full of proof for minor points that I couldn't get through it all.  I read halfway, and then stopped reading at all for weeks because I had no desire at all to finish.  Finally I concluded that I need to give up on my goal of reading all the books all the way through and simply write up what I have and ship it back to the library.

It turns out that I like broad strokes of learning when I am looking at something quite unfamiliar.  I suspect I am like most people in this regard.  If I am well versed in a topic I enjoy intricate detail, but for something I know little about I can't get that interested in a scholarly treatise that gets bogged down in minute tidbits.  I just don't care about the origin of a particular consonant in the Proto Indo European language.  

The book seems well researched.  I don't fault its academic credentials, though honestly I don't know that I would be able to tell if it was absolutely full of it.  That might be the issue, really.  If every single word in the book was a lie I don't think I would be able to definitely argue against it, and that means I am reading way above my pay grade.

If you enjoy detailed linguistic explanations and exhaustive examination of archeological evidence, this book may be for you.  

For me though, it was just a bit too much.  I don't have the knowledge required to get a lot out of it... and I suspect that 99.9% of humanity is in the same situation.

My next couple of books are much more approachable, written for mass audiences, and I am sure I will be able to finish them.  For now though I will consider myself defeated by detail.

The true war

I finished Pursuit of Power:  Europe 1815-1914.  This book was the first that I started reading in my Stuff People Recommended project, but it took me a long time to finish both because of length and density.  If you intend on reading it I suggest investing in steel toe boots - if you drop the book you will need them.

This book is the story of Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to WW1.  It covers a vast range of topics from political intrigue to wars and lines of control through to labour disputes, technology, and economics.  Pursuit of Power is incredibly well researched and the author clearly knows his stuff.  You will come out the other side with a dizzying array of facts, should you make it through.

The trick is making it through.  The book is not light reading.  Every mention of a person includes their birth and death date.  There are endless lists of things and odd tangents with highly specific details that don't fit well into a narrative.

Speaking of which, the book doesn't have a narrative.  That isn't necessarily a criticism or a form of praise, just a fact.  You do see trends of course as you go through all the data, but the author isn't trying to push a particular viewpoint or tell a story.  He is presenting well researched facts, that is all.  If you want an arc, or characters about which you know something, you will not find it here.  If what you want is a wild flurry of interesting tidbits of knowledge though, you will find exactly what you are looking for.

I did come away from reading this book with a few insights that I think are worth sharing.  First off it is clear from reading it that our current way of discussing and viewing history as a story of nation states battling one another is deeply flawed.  For example, many of the rebellions in Europe in this period ended when the rebels ousted their monarch and then another country invaded, destroyed the rebels, put a new monarch in place, and left.  The key battle wasn't country vs. country, but aristocrats vs. peasants.  The aristocrats in Germany wouldn't abide a rebellion in a nearby country because those uppity peasants can't be allowed to get ideas!  It was common to see other countries simply install a random noble as king in a newly minted country and then walk away, all to keep the lower classes under control.

The peasants were often tricked into thinking that the real war was them vs. some other country, when in fact they should have been seeing it as a war of all peasant vs. all the upper classes.  The writings of Marx make a lot more sense to me now that I see this more clearly.

I also acquired a new appreciation for the effects of economics and business on societies with much more primitive science.  Reading about how railways affected the price of wheat and thus dramatically changed farmers lives in nations far away was fascinating.  A railway in France that allows a French farmer to sell crops at a much lower cost because of lower shipping prices can destroy the life of a Russian peasant when their crops now aren't worth selling.

Additionally I have come around to a new way of thinking about why democracies with substantial freedom and rights for individuals have become so successful. The liberties of a modern democracy improve the efficiency of a country dramatically over a oppressive dictatorship.  I think the reason we see so many countries moving in that direction over time is simply because a country run like that gets rich.  We aren't living in a more democratic, free world because that is righteous... we are living that way because societies like that *win* on the battlefield of money.

Reading Pursuit of Power will teach you many things.  It will take a lot of time and it will sometimes feel like a slog, but you will come out the other end with a great deal of insight, and more than a few interesting facts you can spit out at parties.  

Feathered scaly critters

The next book in my 'stuff people recommended' series is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.  Unlike many other books in this series it did not cause me to rethink my opinions on humanity or consider becoming a full on communist.  The book was a fun, straightforward description of what we know about dinosaurs at this point, starting when the dinosaurs first emerged and moving through time until their extinction.  

The author mixed in some anecdotes about fossil hunting and archaeologists throughout, providing some amusing moments.  Certainly when I think about scientists studying dinosaurs now I imagine careful dig sites with lots of regulations and structure, but back in the day competing scientists hired mercenaries and troublemakers to fight and rob each other trying to collect bones - quite the contrast.

Much of what I learned about dinosaurs as a kid was wrong.  It is neat to take a body of knowledge that I hadn't questioned and find out how many things have changed.  Movies like Jurassic Park are now quite dated because they don't show many of the dinosaurs having feathers - though these aren't feathers like modern birds have, but rather something halfway between a feather and a thick hair.  Also our understanding of how fast dinosaurs can move, what they eat, and how they behave has changed over time.

Mixed in with dinosaur facts are descriptions of environmental changes during the dinosaur period, covering things like climate change, plate tectonics, and other factors.

This is a good book for any age.  I imagine kids would get a kick out of the random stories, but they would also get a solid education about dinosaurs in particular and general scientific topics of many kinds.  I think most adults would enjoy learning about dinosaurs anew to update their knowledge, and the book is extremely accessible to anyone without any background required.

If you want a quick to read, well written book that gives a broad overview of many scientific topics with a focus on dinosaurs, this is a great book to pick up.  

Somehow we lived

Are you looking for a book to make you feel much worse about the nature of humanity?  Desperately in need of depressing news?  Are you hunting for a sense of doom and despair?  

I have just the book for you!

The Doomsday Machine is the latest in my 'stuff people recommended' series of readings.  It is a book written by a nuclear war planner turned anti nuclear activist detailing the history of nuclear weapons in the US.  It goes into detail about just how out of dangerous the cold war was, how out of control the nuclear weapons were, and how constantly we were exposed to civilization ending nuclear war.

It is depressing to hear just how aggressive and reckless people were.  The US military was so worried about not being able to annihilate their enemies that they gave permission to fire nuclear weapons to a huge range of people and refused to create systems to prevent individual pilots and soliders from using nuclear weapons on their own initiative.  When systems were put in place to prevent armageddon individuals carefully circumvented them.

For example, there was a system where there were 2 safes with codes to fire nukes.  There were always supposed to be 2 people on duty, each of which knew the combination to one safe.  Both safes were required to fire, so in theory this meant that a single rogue person couldn't end humanity.  In practice the soldiers all just shared their combinations with one another so if one of them was away for some reason the other could easily fire the nukes and end us all.

This isn't stupidity.  There are stupid people in the military, just like anywhere, but that isn't what happened here.

If I were to prioritize four situations in nuclear standoffs, I would list them as 

Everyone lives

Enemies die

We die

Everyone dies.

The soldiers clearly prioritized them as

Enemies die

Everyone lives

Everyone dies

We die.

Their overriding concern was not the continuation of humanity, but rather the destruction of their enemies.  They were desperately concerned not for life, but for saving face.  Better that America being a pile of ash and all humans die than anyone else feel like they had pulled one over on America.

They knew what they were doing, they just thought that macho posturing and patriotic bullshit was more important than all human life.

This, more than anything, is the story of nuclear weapons.  It is a bunch of assholes who wanted to push people around who were willing to kill us all to maintain their deathgrip on power.  It is despicable, and yet not at all surprising.

Normally I agree with the statement that it is foolish to ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but that isn't the case here.  It is all malice, all the way.

By the end of the book I was stunned at the colossal evil at the heart of the US military.  This, coming from someone who was already convinced that the US military is one of the most evil things around.  I spend days wondering how it is that I am still alive, and thinking constantly that I am surely not going to live to see my 50th birthday, much less die at a ripe old age.

The Doomsday Machine is good.  Well written, informative, and important.  We all need to understand why this insane situation occurred, and advocate for changing it.  Reading it, however, will not be a fun thing to do, and you will despair at what we have wrought.  In addition, you will never wonder about the Fermi Paradox again.  There aren't any aliens visiting us because they all eventually nuked themselves into oblivion.

A call to communism

If you want to read a book that will turn you communist, then How To Be A Victorian is a good place to start.  I am continuing my 'stuff people recommended' book readings, and while this book does not intend to suggest any political affiliation I couldn't help but be filled with despair at the portrayal of life in Victorian England.

The starvation of children is what got to me.  Reading about the 10 course meals the aristocrats were eating while the poor starved to death filled me with rage.  I can hardly imagine the distress I would feel if I were to look at my child, skinny with hunger and misery, and then have to tell her that there is no food today, and maybe not tomorrow.  The rich are throwing away food from every meal, but she just has to suffer, and maybe die.

Even if she got enough to eat in calories, she would probably be eating nothing but bread and would end up with rickets and scurvy because we couldn't even afford vegetables.

The idea of making a careful economic decision to send my 6 year old kid to work for 16 hours a day in the pitch dark of the mines because that way maybe I can afford enough food for her is just beyond my experience.  How could I look at her and then look at an aristocrat of the same age and realize that the aristocrat is 10 cm taller because they get enough to eat without grabbing a pitchfork and joining a revolution?

I am not normally a violent person, or one inclined to armed revolt.  But in that situation, I am pretty sure the rich people had better make sure they have tight security, because I am coming for them.  Communism strikes me, from the perspective of a 21st century Canadian, as impractical.  As a Victorian though, I can see myself getting pretty excited about sharing the wealth.

The book itself is set up in a neat way - it starts out with getting up, washing, dressing, breakfast, and then proceeds through working life and entertainment, while finishing up with sex.  The sections varied a lot in interest for me, as I found the endless lists of specific garments boring but the descriptions of sexual mores and medicine were compelling.  There isn't a plot so you can easily jump around to whatever stuff grabs your attention though, which is good.

The author clearly did a tremendous amount of research and the book is authoritatively written.  Sometimes it is a little dry, so you want to go in with an interest in history because there aren't any thrills otherwise.

People do, from time to time, wax poetic about the good old days and how things are terrible now.  Those people need to read some more history books, because the more I read the more certain I become that there has never been as good a time to be alive as right here, right now.  

We have problems, yes.   But the olden times *sucked*.

Periodic Tales

In my continuing series about all the books people recommended to me I finished reading Periodic Tales.  This book is far less controversial than the last one I wrote about, and is a meandering tale winding its way through history.  It has the periodic table of the elements as its theme, so the author devotes each chapter to an element or group of elements and talks about their discovery, uses, and notable events.

The book is a good read for anyone whether or not you have any scientific training.  All the science in the book is pitched at a broad audience and is easily accessible.  The great majority of it is just a series of short history lessons which are generally interesting and amusing.  The author does a great job of blending humour and learning to make the stories fun as well as educational.  It isn't a long read so you can't expect to get a complete education on any one topic but if you want a series of history highlights with a focus on discovery then you will be happy with the book.

You will find pieces about gold rushes, aluminum (or aluminium, depending on where you live) utensils that were the height of fancy living for Napoleon III, and chlorine's use as a weapon in WWI.  The variety is huge.

One thing that stood out to me though was the way the author talked about gold, silver, and iron.  He spoke about them as though gold and iron were obviously male associated and silver obviously female.  Those associations exist in several cultures, but the idea that this is inevitable or inherent to the elements is quite absurd.  From a western historical perspective his point is supported, but he talks about it as if this is an inherent property of the elements themselves instead of a historical accident and that is wrong.

The reason this stood out to me is that gender essentialism is a real issue in society and it irritates me to see it.  It wasn't a huge part of the book, but I do like to point out these things when I see them.  It was a negative mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

I recommend this book.  A few 'Silver is obviously a female element' comments aside, it was quick, informative, and fun.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

So you want to talk about race

I read the book So You Want to Talk About Race recently.  I picked it up in part because I have been having some difficult discussions about race with people I know and I wanted to look for suggestions that might help me get my point across.  I try to start off arguing carefully, knowing that "Wow, you are super racist" usually doesn't put people in a receptive mood.  However, after awhile, I end up saying "Yeah, actually, the things you are saying are racist, and your beliefs are extremely destructive" and then no more useful conversation happens.

You see, being called a racist is pretty much the worst thing that can happen, which means that since white people get called racist, racism is mostly a thing that happens to white people.  Or so it has been argued at me, at any rate.

ARRRGGGGHHHH.

This book is a useful tool when having these sorts of discussions.  It covers a bunch of practical topics like microaggressions, the model minority myth, police violence, and many others.  I already knew the great majority of the facts the book covers, but I did find the model minority chapter quite informative.  It isn't a deep dive into any one topic, and it isn't a scholarly work.  It is a simple book for the average person who wants to learn about the subject, and it fills that niche cleanly.

This is one of the few books that I will give an absolutely unqualified Read This Book rating.  I agree with all of it, and I want everyone to have this information.  It is quick, well written, effectively organized, and informative.  If you want to have a conversation about race, this is a great place to start, particularly because the author aims parts of the discussion at white people, and parts at people of colour, with the goal of helping either of those groups improve understanding and communicate effectively.

Sometimes people are convinced by research.  Sometimes they are convinced by personal stories with high emotional content.  The book has both things, covering all the angles.

Next time I have someone ask me for a recommendation because they want to understand the subject better I will definitely tell them to read So You Want To Talk about Race.  Better that then trying to learn by listening to an angry white guy, methinks.  I have all the vitriol, but not the qualifications.

Making it up as we go along

I like my science fiction hard.  I want stories where a strange thing is proposed, and then the writer takes a long look at what that would do to society.  I don't like stories that are set in the future but in which everything is resolved with techno babble and space wizardry.

When I watched the first season of Altered Carbon I quite liked it.  It had some issues, notably the excessive sexual violence against women, the star actor having only a single expression, and the departures from the books in ways that weren't useful, but I still had a positive watching experience.  It did the thing I want science fiction to do where it built a consistent, believable universe and explored the consequences of a particular scientific discovery - the ability to move human consciousness from body to body and preserve it after the death of the meatsack.

I read all three books in the series and enjoyed them too.  The followup books weren't as good as the first, but there was still something there that I appreciated.  When I heard of season 2 I eagerly awaited the adaptation of book 2.  The reviews were positive and particularly highlighted how it was better than season 1, so I had high expectations.

Those expectations were dashed.  There were good things - I liked the queer and POC representation in the show better.  The lead actor was a considerable improvement.

But the story.... ack.  Instead of writing an installment that built on the first season, they decided to just randomly change physics and technology whenever they had a cool scene to write.  The AIs in particular were a neverending sack of nonsense technobabble in the service of unnecessary details.  Want to have a certain spot look a certain way?  Mumble about nano swarms and then have it just happen.  Want to threaten an AI?  Mumble about code and have it just happen.

It makes me sad when writers clearly give up.  Instead of building a compelling story in the world they have created, they just decide to change the world any time the facts get in the way of whatever thing they want to do.  I can't be excited about threats to characters when the threats are nonsensical, nor thrilled by solutions when they are pulled straight out of somebody's ass.  It is especially egregious when they use a solution for one thing and then refuse to use it for another because they want to make up some new stupid random thing to solve that.

Character abilities also shift without warning.  Sometimes people are unbeatable fighting machines, and then in the next scene they get bested by some random chumps because they needed to get arrested because plot.  Equipment randomly acquires or loses abilities for convenience, so it is hard to have any idea what anyone can do.  At one point the characters are standing at the scene of a battle, completely surrounded by well equipped dead fighters.  However, the next scene needs them to be at a particular gun store, so they announce that they need guns and head off to the gun store, leaving reams of excellent armament just sitting on the ground.

I can't get into a story that silly.  Nothing feels serious or real, and the emotional moments end up being contrived instead of poignant.  It is sad, because the source material gave them a ton to work with, and instead they created an entirely new story, one that is held together by the flimsiest of plots.

Trouble in paradise

My brother gave me the book Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman.  He asked me not to return it, but instead to pass it on.  It is the sort of book that will divide readers by political affiliation, and as I am a hardcore lefty I liked it.

Bergman talks about three main things in the book - the 15 hour workweek, open borders, and universal basic income.  He posits that all of these things are easy to do, would have huge benefits for society across the economic spectrum, and would improve quality of life around the world.

I am inclined to agree with him, in large part.  UBI is a thing I have been yelling about for years now, and I am sure that it would make the world better.  Bergman talks about it as a big part of the solution to increased automation, and while I think that might hold true, automation itself doesn't worry me.  Economic inequality does though, and although there is some correlation there, I do think that resistance to automation is not just futile but also destructive.  We want mindless jobs to be automated... we just need a structure in place to make sure the resulting wealth is more evenly distributed.

Open borders is something I have thought less about but I ended up agreeing with the book after considering it.  People often talk about 'buy local' as a thing to do, and while buying locally can have benefits in reducing transportation costs and emissions, it is usually pitched as a way to help the local economy.  In rich nations I don't see how that is a benefit - shouldn't we be happy to help people in other places just as much?  Why is it a moral imperative to help people near me be richer?  If we all do this around the world that protectionism ends up making things worse for everyone.  Opening borders is a more extreme version of this, letting people cross borders as easily as goods do.  It involves sharing, and trust, and it ends up with the entire world improving tremendously.

The workweek section of the book is something I agree with less.  Bergman is right when he says that a huge percentage of jobs are bullshit.  There is pure evil like telemarketing scams and protection rackets, but there are so many jobs that are just pure waste.  If all the marketing people in the world quit their jobs and instead taught in school or worked in hospitals or built things we would be so much better off!  Marketing just competes with other marketing but we actually don't need any marketing at all for our society to work just fine.  Those customers will buy from *somebody* if you ad campaign doesn't go through!

If we got rid of all the evil or bullshit jobs from hedge fund managers to social media consultants and put all that brainpower and time to use doing something useful for society we could easily maintain our standard of living and have a 15 hour workweek.  There is no practical thing to stop us, aside from our desperation to compete.  And that competition is a HUGE problem.  People who work more and earn more will have more stuff, even in a world with UBI.  Other people will want that stuff.  Keep in mind, stuff isn't just huge TVs or fancy cars, it is things like a home located closer to city centres, or enough land to have a garden.  Even if we made working more unnecessary, people would put in that work just to get ahead of other people.

As an example, take CEOs who make a bajillion dollars a year.  They don't need the money.  They could just retire.  But they continue working hideous hours, hardly getting to use their many houses and toys.  This is how people mostly are, defining themselves by their peers, not by any outside standard.  Unless we decouple work from money entirely I don't see our workweeks shrinking down to 15 hours.

The general idea of reducing bullshit jobs and flattening the distribution of wealth I really like, but I am pessimistic about how effective it will be at reducing workweeks.  Governments can step in to help with this in a heavy handed way - forcing companies to pay overtime for all time worked over 30 hours, for example, would help.  Improving social safety nets so that companies are more incentivized to hire multiple part time employees instead of working single employees to death in order to save on benefits payments would also be a thing we could try.

In any case if you want to read a quick book that outlines a lot of good research and information about economics and work in these areas I recommend Utopia for Realists.  It isn't perfect, but it is the sort of book that would improve society greatly if everyone read and implemented its suggestions.

A Trojan Horse

Dan Simmons is an author I have a history with.  He wrote the Hyperion novels, which are a crazy far future set of books that are chock full of wild and fascinating ideas.  I have read the four book series several times, despite each book being a doorstopper.

Wendy has had another duology by him, Ilium / Olympos, on our bookshelf for years, and I figured I should try this series out.

It is a mess.

Much like the Hyperion series it has all kinds of cool ideas.  It also has a bizarre fascination with old english poets and playwrights, for some reason.  Unfortunately Ilium lacks one of the things that I most liked about Hyperion - the tech.  In the Hyperion series the tech is far beyond anything we have, indeed often far beyond what we imagine is possible.  However, it all fits together.  In Ilium though Simmons just has any random tech he wants for the story and justifies it by using the words quantum or nano.  Quantum teleporting.  Quantum energy.  Quantum field.  I quantum the quantum quantums!  And if that isn't enough, just call it nano quantum, and you are good to go.  If you thought Ant Man and The Wasp had stupid amounts of quantum nonsense, prepare to see it dialled up to 11.

I don't mind wild tech, even tech that violates the laws of physics as we know them.  What I can't stand is mindless, foolish explanations that toss around buzzwords and pretend like that makes it all work.

I am cool with establishing new rules in a fictional world.  What I can't stand is the author obviously wanting a character to go to a place for a scene, so they have somebody yell about quantuming the quantum nano field to make it happen instead of actually, you know, writing well.

The Ilium duology really made me remember some of my Dungeons and Dragons experiences from my teenage years.  Inexperienced Game Masters would come up with a plot and wouldn't know how to get the characters into the story they had written, so they would have a massively powerful character show up and order the characters to do the thing.  No good explanation or reason would be given, it would just be 'All of you have to do this thing.  No, I won't tell you why or how.  Just follow me, or I will punch you out and carry you.'

This often resulted in the entire party being beaten up, tied to horses, and dragged along while the powerful character (who clearly didn't need any of *us* to win the day) lectured us on our flaws.

Ilium has a ton of this, and for the same reasons.  Simmons obviously had scenes in his mind he wanted to do and couldn't come up with good reasons for those scenes to occur, so he would just have some nearly omnipotent, omniscient character show up and order the regular people to do some damn fool thing.  The demigod would refuse to provide any reasons or context, and if the regular person resisted, they were unceremoniously smacked down.  Even after they finally gave in and did what the demigod wanted, it was usually unclear why doing that even mattered in the first place!

It might sound like I think Simmons is a hack and has nothing to say.  That isn't true - Ilium has no end of cool scenes and original ideas.  The problem is that the plot makes no sense, the characters are inconsistent and unpredictable, and he doesn't tell the reader what the hell is going on because he is so busy getting to the next cool thing.  It reminds me a bit of Too Like The Lightning, which I read awhile ago and did not like.  Other people lauded it for its ideas, which is fair, but failed to add that the plot and characterization were a hot mess.

Simmons really needed to sit down with his ideas, cross out about two thirds of them, and then write these books.  Either that, or maybe add another 4 books to the series so he could actually have the room to make it all make sense.  In any case it desperately needs an editor to tear it down and make better use of the gems that are there.  For example:  There are posthumans who have been given tech to make them into immortal 'gods' who live on Mars and are presiding over an alternate universe siege of Troy on an Earth from another dimension.  They have resurrected a human from the 21st century to record the event, and then he is tasked by one god to murder another.  Wow, what a wild premise!  You could write so much with that!  This is about 5% of the premise for the actual story.  It is just too much, and Simmons tries to juggle all the things he has created and the reader gets to watch the balls all fall down.

I am sure lots of people liked these books.  Unfortunately they hit my personal pet peeves of having weak villains, terrible tech, weak and nonsensical plot, and flat characters.  I find that many science fiction books that get all kinds of awards totally fail on these fronts, so clearly some people are good with that.

Me?  Not so much.

Banking is dangerous

I just finished book five of the Dagger and the Coin series by Daniel Abraham.  It is a high fantasy story with magic swords, dragons, and epic battles.  It is fantastic, but not because of the magic swords, dragons, or battles, but rather because of the amazing people that inhabit the world Abraham has created.

In particular, the villain is *amazing*.  Geder Palliako is a jerk.  Not a Sauron-like "I will cover the land in darkness!" kind of evildoer, just a person who is an asshole.  He is bigoted, entitled, selfish, and cruel.  But he is entirely human.  He has crushes on people, loves his father, attempts to do the right thing, and genuinely thinks he is really a good person... but he is also willing to burn down a nation to avenge a slight against him, will commit atrocities to save himself admitting he is wrong, and is more than happy to treat other people as tools for his whims.

Palliako doesn't even have any powers, abilities, or really anything at all to recommend him. He just ends up in the right place at the right time to do all kinds of heinous things, and he seizes every opportunity that comes his way.  It feels very much like the real world, where evil people like Trump are in power not because of being particularly good at anything, but simply because opportunity presented them with a chance, they seized it, and things went their way.

All this makes Palliako believable, frightening, and worthy of all the hatred I can muster.  Unlike "I am the prince of darkness" type villains which mostly make me laugh, Palliako feels absolutely real.  I can't just dismiss the story as silly, because I know people like him.  The things he does truly could happen.

It isn't just the villain that sells it though.  The circumstances that grant Palliako his power are a fantastic condemnation of religion, though I suspect that religious folks might not see it that way.  They might see it as a debunking of false religion, but I think the author is really pointing an accusatory finger at the way religions tend to make people think, and how they treat dissenting thought.  It is possible to reasonably argue that the villain isn't in fact Palliako, but rather a way of thinking, and that makes the whole thing have a lot more weight and interest.

But I am not done with the praise.

The heroes also make me swoon.  Seriously, you know that a fantasy novel is working its magic when I desperately want to play a particular character or set of characters out in a roleplaying game.  Yardem and Marcus' interactions are a gem.  Abraham sets it up at the very beginning when the two have the following simple interaction:

Marcus:  So, Yardem, is today the day that you toss me in a ditch and take over the company?

Yardem:  No sir, not today.

This interaction sets the tone for their friendship and working relationship for five books, and the payoff is just perfect.

The story also features a hero who wields the power of economics.  She doesn't swing a sword, or cast spells, or command armies.  She just thinks about money and banking and how power really works, and her thoughts *matter*.  It is a rare thing for an author to manage to make a banker a compelling character, and her insights on banking into an important plot point, but Abraham does it.

I loved these books, and I recommend them to anybody who wants a fantasy story that has great villains and lovable heroes, both of whom manage to be flawed, messy, and believable.

Seven Fallen Feathers

On my trip last week I read the book Seven Fallen Feathers.  It uses the stories of seven young Indigenous people who died in Thunder Bay over only a handful of years to explain something much bigger - the way that Indigenous people in Canada have been terribly mistreated over many generations.

The book does not paint a good picture of Thunder Bay, my hometown.  Thunder Bay is the hate crime and murder capital of Canada.  Those hate crimes are overwhelmingly targeted at Indigenous people, and racism, when you are in Thunder Bay, generally means anti-Indigenous hatred and bigotry.

I knew that was true, to an extent, when I was younger.  I just didn't realize quite how bad it was.  Reading about how the kids who had to travel from far away reserves to Thunder Bay for high school were pelted with garbage from passing cars on a regular basis just sickened me.  Worse than that, a Indigenous woman died when people threw a trailer hitch out of a car at her just a few years ago.  It isn't just cruelty - this bigotry spills over into murder.

The way the police and other officials treated these cases was tragic.  When they found a Indigenous kid dead in the river, the police instantly declared it an accident and moved on.  Maybe it was an accident.  Hard to say, sometimes, and information was sketchy.  But they police made it clear that they weren't declaring it an accident because they did everything possible to determine the cause and that was the logical conclusion.  They declared it an accident because investigating the death of a Indigenous kid just wasn't worth their time or attention.  Those deaths didn't count.

When people call for Indigenous people to just work harder, get better, fix their own circumstances, they completely ignore things like this.  How do you get a job when people refuse to hire you?  How do you build a network of professional contacts in a big city when you have never seen things like a streetlight?  How do you trust in the police and other authorities when you know that if you were murdered they would just shrug, call it an accident, and forget about it?

All of that is compounded by the long term destruction wrought by residential schools.  Whole generations of kids were taken, literally at gunpoint, to schools where they were regularly starved, beaten, raped, denied their names, culture, and family support, and then dumped back in reservations at the end.  Even if they escaped the medical starvation experiments (conducted on Indigenous kids without knowledge or consent of them or their parents, naturally) and didn't die at school (many thousands did), how do you then build a life after that?

How the HELL do you excuse thousands of children dying at school?  I can't comprehend it.

Seven Fallen Feathers gives both an understanding of the history that led to the challenges Indigenous people face now, and current examples of how that situation plays out.  It is a hard book to read, but an important one, especially for white people in Canada.  Atrocities are not something that only happens in other countries.  They have happened here, and they continue.  We need to do more to repair the mistakes of the past, and prevent more tragedy in the future, and understanding the problem, both past and present, is key to that.

Falseness

The messages our culture sends about female sexuality are a mess.  In large part they are completely wrong, and they almost universally assume that our cultural norms are universal instead of arbitrary.  For example, the idea that straight women just want a man who is a good provider, steady, and reliable while straight men want a woman who is young and attractive is wildly off base.  Women aren't really in it for the sex, we often hear, they just put up with the sex in order to get the other benefits of relationships like security and support.

I bought into these stereotypes when I was young.  They came cloaked in 'science' and a Darwinian understanding of nature.

But then I had sex with a bunch of women, and talked with a bunch of women, and noted that these stereotypes did not well explain the women who were desperately horny, the women who had male partners who weren't interested in sex, and the women who wanted all kinds of wild, kinky sexy stuff that had nothing to do with safety or sustenance.

Plenty of women want sex, (though obviously some do not, which is true of any and all genders) and the myth that women are mostly asexual is just another consequence of patriarchy.

I read Untrue recently and it ably covered the reasons to think that women's sexuality is wildly misunderstood, and happily smashed most of the standard stereotypes to bits.

Wednesday Martin attacks the issue from multiple angles.  She includes lots of science and interviews with experts to bolster her credentials but also talks about her personal experiences with infidelity and desire.  She goes to polyamory conferences to discuss open relationships, attends sex parties for mostly straight women who want to try out sex with women, and otherwise pushes her own boundaries surrounding her monogamous commitment to her husband.

One of the core theories in the book is the idea that the plough and how its development and use affected women's sexual liberation and general autonomy.  It turns out that societies that used ploughs relegated women to a much lower status that societies that did not, probably because of the high upper body strength requirements and issues with child rearing that came along with use of the plough.  The issue is probably more complicated than Martin makes it out to be, but I completely buy into the general thesis that specific styles of agriculture changed society in ways that were bad for women and the problems that those styles of agriculture created remain tenacious to this day.

If you are interested in understanding the history of women's sexuality and examining what science tells us about it, I highly recommend this book.  It is accessible and easy to read while be well researched and informative.  I like the line it walks between trying to be fun and provocative while being strict about the truth.

There is one thing that bothered me though, and it isn't specific to Untrue.  So often in conversations about relationships and sexuality people seem desperate to bring primate behaviour into the mix.  We seem to need to talk about bonobos and their orgies, bisexuality, and promiscuity to justify such behaviours in humans.  A large part of Untrue is dedicated to studies of primate behaviour that strongly support the idea that female sexuality in other species is NOT passive, straight, monogamous, or secondary to male sexuality.  However, this whole thing about primates is just a diversion from the key facts:

1.  Humans having relationship structures that aren't straight, monogamous, or vanilla isn't a problem for other people.

2.  People doing stuff that isn't a problem for other people should be left to do their stuff without interference or harassment.

We don't need to justify our relationships or sexuality by proving it is 'natural' because other primates do it.  We don't need to prove that we aren't the only species that wants to do all these things, because even if we were the only species that had orgies or queer sexualities it would still be fine for us to do it.

If some fool tries to tell people that women shouldn't be promiscuous because females don't do that in nature you can be all scientific and tell them 'LOL wrong!' or you can just circumvent that argument entirely and say 'so the fuck what?'  It is false, but even if it were true it wouldn't be relevant.

It is all well and good to study primates, but let us not think that we need primate behaviour to tell us how we ought to treat one another, or what the range of acceptable human behaviour should be.

The future of the red pill

Orson Scott Card is not a good person.  I don't like him, not one little bit.  However, he did write one of my favourite books, Ender's Game.  I find it hard to reconcile these facts; generally I decide to just make sure that I never do anything that gives Card money but still read the books I love.

This weekend I started reading Ender in Exile, a book following Ender after the events of Ender's Game.  I figured I would enjoy the book and it would be a guilty pleasure.  Instead the book pissed me off and I don't even plan on finishing it.

Ender In Exile in many ways a predictable followup to Ender's Game, but it goes off the rails with Card pushing his crappy sexist bullshit.  Much like many other highly successful authors before him, Card pushes out sequels to make cash but inserts bigoted views because he is big enough that he can get away with it.

This time it is all about relationships.  Card makes it clear that the only way that human society can function is monogamy, and that it has to be enforced monogamy.  This is silly and flies in the face of all of the evidence, but initially I was merely irritated.  I am all about non monogamy, but fine, the characters in the book are ignorant, I can cope.  The thing that really got me was a scene where on a planet where monogamy has been arranged and is seriously policed.  In the scene, a top male scientist had a subordinate female scientist desperately try to convince him to have sex with her to give her smart babies.  She desperately wanted to lie to her husband explicitly because she wanted better genes for her children.

I am disappointed that Card has added 'red pill' sexist bullshit to his repertoire of evil.  He wants to portray women as requiring enforced monogamy, because otherwise they will just cuckold their husbands for higher status / better genetics / prettier men.  Card's sexism was evident in previous books but this particular one really slapped me in the face with it, and because it also pushed my buttons I couldn't just ignore it.

I just don't know how to cope with straight men who so obviously hate women.  It is such a mess to have that combination of desire and bitterness, attraction and repulsion.  It is wretched and awful, and I am glad I have no part of it.

Don't read Ender in Exile.  Further, if you must read anything Card wrote, try not to give him money for it.  That message is an important one to send.

A man called Ove

I just finished reading the book A Man Called Ove.  It was a random find, purely located by happenstance.  Most of my reading comes from Wendy shoving books at me, but this one was sitting in the little library in my condo building and I picked it up for no good reason.

I cried so many damn times reading this book.  It caused more shed tears than any other piece of media I have ever consumed, I think, and that takes some doing.  The book wasn't my usual fare of fantasy romp or science fiction heavy with ideas.  It was just a simple story of a curmudgeonly old man who wished to die because his only reason for living was gone and his discovery of new reasons to live.

There are bits of myself in Ove, but this story wasn't so moving because I saw myself in the protagonist.  It piqued my emotions because I could see in Ove a man who struggled mightily with the injustices of the world and who wanted to live his own way even though the people around him could not understand why he would want that.  In his own way he tried to do the best things for the world, the right things, and his struggle to do right caught him up in all kinds of difficulty.

The story is well written, tight, and easy to read.  It has all the things it needs and no waste.  All of the little bits that you might want to dismiss as mere details are there for a reason and they contribute to the story in just the right way.  The characters feel absolutely real and believable and the silly and random events that occur are just the sorts of things that happen in real life.

Normally I recommend books because they will make you think or expand your horizons.  I recommend this book enthusiastically not because it will do either of those things, but simply because it is a joy to read.  Despite the tears created by the sad parts the book as a whole is uplifting and may raise your faith in humanity's ability to be good in spite of all the troubles we must endure.