The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

This book is an ambitious look at what happens to the world in the near-future (no more than 200 years hence), when nano-technology has been developed to the point that people get their clothes, furniture, and even food from matter-compilers in their houses or on the street. I must say that after reading this, the David Marusek book I reviewed earlier (Counting Heads) seems very derivative, because he borrowed a lot of concepts from Stephenson. He also seems to have picked up a lot of the same flaws. For example, I said:

It's more like a subset of completely different stories are told as part of an intertwining narrative, but instead of everything coming together at the end in a way you might understand, it just falls apart again after people and events swirl briefly around each other near the very end.

This is pretty much true of The Diamond Age as well. You get characters introduced who disappear completely halfway through, (or in the case of Bud, starts at the beginning and ends at the beginning), or who come in later for no apparent reason and then do not play a major role. One of the two principle characters of this book is John Hackworth, who comes in early, disappears for a long time, and then reappears later only to go away again without having made any contribution that necessitated writing his story at all. He was important; don't get me wrong on that. It's just he was important in the way that the President is important to you or me. We don't need to write exactly what he's doing at this moment to write a story about what his laws are doing to school districts in Texas.

Still, The Diamond Age does have a coherent story that was quite intriguing. The main problem with it was that it didn't conclude. I don't know about you, but I hate that. The book ends, so the story should end. It's like drawing a picture of an elephant, but only putting half an elephant on the page. You didn't finish! That's just annoying to me. It was well written though; Stephenson proved that he's a solid writer to my satisfaction. He had a few Gene Wolfe moments though, so have your dictionary on hand.

The story is basically about what happens to a little girl from a broken home when she runs away with her Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (a book which is actually a very complex nano-machine). The Primer teaches her all kinds of lessons, not just how to survive, but how to succeed and win. That was good, but I was expecting her then to succeed in some major way. By the end, she's still hardly important at all, and when the climax comes, it's like all that was just a sort of prequel to the real story of Nell, but then the book ends. So disappointing.

A lot of the story was a showcase for the various techno ideas that Stephenson could come up with, and I think for the most part they were pretty brilliant. A lot of people think nano-tech and then think of a few things you could do with them, but fail to explore the deep implications such a novel and important technology have on society and individuals. I mean, look at what air travel and computers did for the world. Nanotech will do the same, and Stephenson is trying to scry the future and predict some of what it will look like. Of course I have no way of knowing if he's right, but it's still pretty cool.

His writing is more what you call serviceable than poetic. I mean, he can handle the language, it's just not the main reason to read this book. Look Homeward, Angel, it is not. I usually am of the opinion that sci-fi is a fine read for anybody and the only reason people don't read it is because they are biased and think it is for geeks. However in this case, I might agree that this is more for the geek than the lover of good literature. Again, there's a good story hidden in this book, it's just that for a lot of people, the sci-fi is going to be a lot of stuff they don't understand wrapped in ok but sometimes overly dense writing in which is hidden a great story with some characters you can really care for. I'm just not sure this one will work for the masses. But hey, if you like sci-fi or if you're always willing to give a book a chance, I say read it.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

This is one of the more interesting non-fiction books I've read in a while. It sounds simple enough, but has very complex ramifications. The purpose of this book is to examine man's relationship with plants, specifically plants that humans have domesticated for our own reasons. The four plants he examines are apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatos. However, Pollan looks at this relationship in a new light. He looks at it from the point of view of what the plant gets out of it and why they would allow themselves to be domesticated. Most people tend to think that we settle on a plant and decide to make it into something we find useful. What they don't realize is that plants will only follow the course of more reproductive success. This is why humans have never successfully domesticated acorns, even though they have tried for thousands of years. The plants have to get something out of it too.

Pollan explains the true nature of apples in the first section of the book, and tells the true story of Johnny Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed. One thing that Pollan explains is that apple trees do not "come true" from their parents. Only a vanishingly small percentage of wild apples are edible, and all the edible apples that we know and love come from clones of a very small number of trees. Johnny Appleseed wasn't planting trees for eating; he was planting trees ahead of settlers so that they could make cider when they caught up to him. If you wonder what it is that apples have gotten out of their relationship with humans, consider this: all apples are descended from a few trees that grew in what is now Kazakhstan. And yet this is the world's number one fruit! Amazing.

I won't provide a synopsis of each section, save that each one gives similar eye-opening revelations about each plant that we thought we knew. Cannabis is an especially interesting case. Since I don't really keep up on the subject of drugs, it surprised me to hear that the brain already has receptors for THC (or a THC-like compound), the active ingredient in marijuana. The question is: why? Evidently it controls the responses of other brain chemicals which are necessary for our health. This is not any argument for marijuana, by the way. It mucks up the natural workings of the brain. The point is that this highlights the functioning of the brain in ways we were not aware of before, including the fact that our ability to remember is directly related to our ability to be in the now (and our degree of perception).

The last chapter, on Monsanto's New Leaf potatos is especially enlightening, and somewhat frightening. If you've taken my earlier suggestions and read Fast Food Nation and Don't Eat This Book, you know that this potato has a pesticide built into it (and is classified as a pesticide by the FDA). The ramifications of direct genetic modification of plants goes far beyond what you might suspect.

I find it hard to describe much about this book, but the premise alone should sell you on it. It's well-written and well-researched, and the topic is just plain interesting anyway. I suggest that if you're looking for some light non-fiction, you pick up this book.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

This is quite simply one of the most well written sci-fi books ever. Ray Bradbury brings poetry to prosidy and one can't help but be carried along on the beautiful language of his novel. Although he's a master of the language, like Wolfe and Benford, with Bradbury he never uses obscure or archaic language to set the reader apart from the story. This book is written using words practically any reader can understand, which is a reason it's popular with English teachers. It gives it an accessibility that other books just don't have, which, while the snobbish denigrate, the rest of us appreciate. It's a device, of course, the same as in The Hobbit. In that book, Tolkien told the story from the point of view of a character any of us could sympathize with and using language all of us could understand. It's the same here, and because of the very real-world setting (an America which is quite familiar to us), we can feel the danger even more.

The story should be well-known to most readers, since probably all of us had it in school at one point or another, and if you didn't I just don't see how you could have avoided reading it anyway. To refresh you though, Guy Montag is one of the firemen, whose job is finding illegal books (mostly anything besides censored news and technical manuals, or rather, anything that makes you think) and burning them, along with their owners' houses. The purpose of this is that in this future, people have pursued their right to happiness to the extreme. They know of nothing to disturb them, and want nothing to disturb them in their media-induced stupor. Sounds familiar, eh? It's not even a case of people hearing what they want to hear; these people want to hear, see, and know nothing. Even though they know that a war is imminent, it has no reality to them. People are convinced it will be over in a matter of days and that all will be normal afterward. People run around with shells (earbud headphones) blaring noise at them all day and night, and if they don't, there's noise over the public broadcast system anyway. Guy is just another member of this society until his crew runs into an old lady who'd rather be burned herself than live without her books. When this event happens, Guy's world is turned upside down as he asks the question of what's so great about books. A lot more happens than that of course, but the basic shape is he leaves this society and ends up an outcast. The war happens at the very end of the book, and you get the feeling that the old world is gone and that perhaps a new world will begin in which books have a place again.

One of the notable things about this book is how prescient Bradbury was with some of these technologies. He envisioned a mechanical hound in an age when there was only one computer in all of the US and it had less processing power than the pc I'm typing on. He also envisioned wall-sized tvs that were incredibly intrusive in people's lives. He also envisioned "spin", in which the media affects people's views on politics and political figures. Before tv and radio, people actually got to see their candidates as they rode around the country on trains making stops to actually deliver speeches in person.

Above all, though, Bradbury's book is warning us of the dangers of stifling critical thinking, and especially thinking for ourselves. When you abdicate your authority to think for yourself, no one will guard you against the depredations of those who would use you. This is an important point. Montag is a criminal because as he says, "I don't want anyone to tell me what to think anymore." Bradbury's book was protesting tyranny of all sorts, including Nazism, Fascism, Socialism, and Mcarthyism. All of these movements were anti-intellectual, and where they were let loose they were highly destructive.

I'm not sure what the afterword contains in the book, but on the audiobook version there's a q&a with Bradbury about his work. A couple of interesting tidbits came out of that (regarding the book, that is, because most of the afterword dealt with other topics). One is that Beatty (the fire chief) turned against books because he was disappointed by them. He believed that books had all the answers, and when he was proven wrong, he began to take out his wrath on them. The second revelation is that Beatty himself kept hundreds of books. Never to read; just to own and let them molder unused on his shelves. Bradbury said that he regretted leaving that information out and that he was considering doing a rewrite and working those in (although he may not since he's not sure he should interfere with his previous work).

This book is really an American classic that's both valuable and understandable (which latter reason is why a lot of poetry goes unnoticed). Read it!