Less Than Energetic Book Reviews

That's fairly uninspiring title, but I just can't get myself motivated for this post for some reason. During my last sojourn out of town, my father directed me towards a used book store that had popped up in town recently, and as a bibliophile, he encouraged me to go by there while Alex was working, since I'd have some time to kill*. It's a nice store, and the owner's certainly trying to get as many books in there as she can, evidenced by me frequently taking a step away from one shelf, and bumping into another. I'm not sure about naming your store "Get lost!", though. I understand she means "Get lost in a book", or something to that effect, but it's still a little amusing to me every time I look at the bookmarks she included with my purchase of several cheap paperbacks.

There was one book that was a series of essays on "bogus science" that was published in the early '80s, which started out interestingly enough, but got old pretty quickly. You can only read so many times about how what Uri Geller's trying to pass off as telekinesis is really just misdirection any halfway skilled magician can pull off, and that stuff gets brought up a lot. I guess because all the believers in psi powers loved Uri so much. Even when he got caught cheating to produce results, well that didn't dissuade them. he just cheated because he was under pressure to produce results, and it isn't that easy. It certainly doesn't mean all those times he was successful at bending the key were cheats as well**. I do enjoy how, if tests for clairvoyance or ESP fail, the testers can blame it on there being too much pressure on the subjects, or even that there were skeptics present, and their skepticism somehow interfered with the subject's powers. Geez, I wish I could have used that kind of excuse at my thesis defense, when the statistical analysis didn't back up my expectations***. I can see myself shouting at the assembled professors, "Well the reason it didn't work the way I predicted is because someone in this room didn't believe in it!", and they would nod and accept that. If they were some of the more extreme advocates of parapsychology, anyway

After that, there was a collection of nine Issac Asimov short stories, which I may or may not have read before. The story of the Multivac computer claiming that a particular man was going to attempt to destroy it, and the actual motive behind that seemed familiar. It was still entertaining, just for how clever the machine was, and the sinking realization by its keepers that it would only get more clever.

I suppose the book I'm going to focus on primarily tonight is Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. An anthropologist, Marghe, is sent to a world which was colonized by humans some time in the past. The Company (that's what the company that's been investigating is called) has already sent technicians, soldiers, and other anthropologists down there, only to learn there's a virus. The virus is apparently 100% lethal on men, but only 20% lethal on women****. Thus, the settlement population, and the remaining people the Company sent, are entirely female. One of Marghe's jobs is to try and find out how a planetful of women reproduce, in addition to your basic attempts to learn more about the various cultures, and any information that will help the Company's employees to have an easier go of it. Marghe descends to the surface as one of the two remaining anthropologist is leaving, and learns the other one died or vanished on a trek north. Marghe resolves to go north, since that's were evidence suggested human habitation started from, and runs into trouble shortly after she parts company with the soldiers escorting her. From there it's your basic story about a person confronting their weaknesses, learning about themselves, finding their true self, then putting this newfound sense of self to the test by confronting something which terrifies her.

If your care, the secret to reproduction is a somewhat more mystical form of what the New Mexico whiptail lizard (genus Cnemidophorus) goes through. There's a distinct strain of mysticism that runs through the book, a sense of everything being connected, and that it can take place even if people aren't aware of it (as was the sense I got from some of the soldiers and technicians, who have no idea what's going on with this planet). How exactly something like that could come about biologically, I can't quite figure.The culture on the planet's a bit of a microcosm of that situation. The population is fairly sparse, scattered. Predominantly agrarian, there is some use of boats for shipping and fishing. People speak all sorts of dialects derived from Earth languages (Greek words, Gaelic, English, Spanish, on and on). And yet, people seem very aware of what's happening in a different region of the continent. They can be weeks apart by ship or overland travel, but people will have heard about the odd people that settled in one location, don't understand anything about the virus, or where you shouldn't try prescribed burning, and spend all their time walled up in their settlement (that'd be the Company employees). The mythology is fairly common, but that may result from the viajaeras, who are wandering storytellers/mediators/healers/Swiss Army Knives.

It does seem like an interesting world. There is unusual indigenous life, there are strange customs where there's really no such thing as a one-time trade, since it ultimately establishes a kinship/or extended trade agreement between the "families" of the two parties, and there are believers in Death Spirits, which never ends well. I'm still not entirely sure why it had to be a world devoid of men to set all that up, but I suppose it provides the odd biological situation to drive forward the desire for discovery. The book surprises me a little in that there's an extended sequence where Marghe is part of a family, but also a prisoner in a sense, (if this had been a long-running, Y: The Last Man style comic, it would have made a nice story arc in the midpoint) that seemed superfluous at the time, but it wound up being relevant to the character, and their attempt to evolve. Also, the book didn't go how I expected when it cam to Marghe finding the original landing point for the first settlers. It happens unexpectedly, and isn't the revelation for the character I've seen in other books where the protagonist strives mightily to find an origin point (Foundation and Earth being an example). Whether that would be good or bad, I leave to your judgment. As for me, I got the book for a buck, so it's hard to complain.

* After the two days I spent helping Alex and his boss prepare food for two separate weddings they were catering, I've decided not to venture back in there again, lest I get sucked into helping.

** Which could be true, but it certainly doesn't help his case.

*** Actually, I don't wish that, because it didn't really matter. They still approved the thesis, since in real science, even if the results falsify your hypothesis, they can still be useful, since they help rule out certain possibilities, assuming you set the experiment up properly. Gotta love that about science.

**** I know women have stronger immune systems than men, but that much stronger? Every single guy that showed up had a weaker immune system than 80% of the women? Can it be that much of a disparity?