I just finished Vernor Vinge’s book A Deepness in the Sky. It is a loose prequel to his former novel A Fire Upon The Deep. Both of these are great science fiction books with characters that you will love. These people are surrounded by far future technologies, and they are living in the middle of galaxy changing events.
A Deepness in the Sky won the Prometheus Award for best novel. This award is given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society on a yearly basis. A major theme of the story involves a main character who struggles against his desire to make a “great society” while at the same time realizing the necessity of freedom for everyone. This and the many other ideas throughout the book will keep you reading to the end as quicky as possible.
Ron Paul’s new book The Revolution: A Manifesto was officially released this week. I received my copy from Amazon about a week ago and highly recommend it. With chapters on foreign policy, the constitution, economic freedom, personal freedom, and money this book covers many of the problems in our country today.
The book is a quick summary of the main areas that gave national prominence to the Ron Paul campaign. I am excited that Ron Paul has also includes a four page reading list at the back of the book telling other sources to read on the important issues of the day. The price for the book on Amazon is currently 45% off the regular price. Buy this book and gain a more clear understanding of the many issues that need addressed in our country.
Update: It’s #1 on Amazon Wednesday afternoon.
I finished reading The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance this week. It is a very interesting story about a planet whose entire culture is changed by a change in the language. This change in language and culture was meant to make the planet more aggressive and able to stand up to its enemies instead of always immediately submitting. This concept interests me because I have thought for some time that their is a stronger relationship between language, culture, and overall attitude of the individual than we normally realize. I don’t know how to prove this but it seems to me that the language of a culture will cause the individuals of a culture to look at the world in a certain way.
Continue reading ‘The Languages of Pao’
I am in the middle of reading 1984 by George Orwell. A friend of mine pointed out the article “Orwell for Christians” from First Things. 1984 is a very interesting book but a little difficult to see where Orwell is coming from. The author of the article explains that Orwell wasn’t really pushing for any specific political ideal. He was coming from his own moral understanding to expose the moral injustices that he saw. Considering that Orwell was not a Christian it is interesting to see how his arguments against the societies he was part of are based on his concept that there is a right and wrong that should be obvious.
Over the last year I have become interested in the science fiction of Gene Wolfe. Because of various posts on the Urth List concerning the reliability of Severian as the narrator of The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1 and Volume 2 I have become intrigued by this idea of the dishonest narrator.
The entire concept at first took me by suprise when I saw it mentioned. If the narrator of a book is not telling the truth then what exactly is the purpose of the book? I am the type that gets annoyed when Star Trek contradicts itself or when books and movies don’t match. I want to believe the story they are telling (as fiction, of course) but the point of what really happened isn’t the same when the story is different. Compare the books and the movies of The Lord of The Rings for instance.
I don’t think that the way I deal with fiction is too out of the ordinary. People tend to want fiction that is consistent and believable. I know lots of people with the whole sci-fi genre for instance that don’t like it because it’s “not real” (as opposed to other regular fiction which is real). The question pops into my mind – Why do we tend to trust fiction? Why do we instinctively believe that the narrrator is all knowing on the topic at hand. If the style or facts is such that we can’t believe the story we chalk it up to poor writing – not dishonest narration.
Unbelievers won’t allow positive assumptions to be made about the writers of the Bible. They assume that many of the writers (or redactors) were dishonest narrators who were inventing a religion. We conservative Christians can’t believe whole-heartedly the daily news or reporters like Dan Rather. We know that we have often been lied to. It seems to me from last year’s election that John Kerry has throughout his life pushed a falsehood which is his concept of the Vietnam War. We believe what we want to when it comes to the news and the happenings around us. I remember reading and article in the Chalcedon Report a couple of years ago in which the author mentioned series with episodes that never happened. He specifically named The Last Battle from the Chronicles of Narnia and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. In that author’s view these stories were part of a larger series and these specific stories could not have happened. They didn’t fit.
Because of falsehoods in the news, history books, public schools, congressional testimony, campaign promises, and our pulpits we need to be able to discern the turth. We can look at the Chronicles of Narnia and debate whether The Last Battle should have been written the way it was or whether it really happened in its context. We can watch the news every day and wonder what is really true. We can read scientific studies that contradict the Bible. We need to know where our foundation is. The Bible is either true with faithful narrative or it is a false book that happens to include some true stuff. We can’t throw out Genesis 1-2 because it doesn’t fit with our science. We can’t twist the meanings of words and phrases because they don’t agree with our eschatology as we “see” it. The Bible means something and it is faithful. We may not always understand it instantly but we can know it is true. People can continually present “facts” that seem to disprove the Bible but prove their idiocy. They basically claim that they are omniscient and know all of the facts. They fail to take into account that the God who wrote the Bible may have access to more facts than they do.
I have digressed slightly from my main idea which was being intrigued by the unfaithful narrator. Sometimes it would probably be helpful to have a more real view of literature and realize that the fictional narrator who saw the events may just be writing his viewpoint and not what “really happened.” Looking at it this way may help total contradictions to make more sense if that is possible.
I am currently reading Peter Schweizer’s book Reagan’s War: The Epic Store of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. It is a very interesting survey of Reagan’s thoughts toward and interactions with communism beginning with his time as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. The media tend to present Reagan as a dufus who happened to be in the right place at the right time. More fair views of Reagan paint him as an intelligent man who happened to be able to defeat communism. Schweizer has done a lot of research including KGB files on Reagan and presents him as a man with basically one purpose for 40 years. Reagan had one goal throughout his time at the SAG, to his speaking engagements for General Electric, to being governor of California, and finally as the President of the United States. He understood the evil of the communist system and knew that it could not be contained – it had to be defeated. I have always liked Reagan as a president and knew that he did many good things. Reading this book shows me that his interactions with the communist system for 40 years was central to the defeat of communism. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Reagan or the fall of communism.
A while back I received an e-mail from the Conservative Book Club advertising the book A Concise History of the Crusades. Based on their description the book sounded really interesting and I added it to my Amazon.com wishlist hoping to get it for Christmas. I got it for my birthday instead which was good because I already have it. The book is concise as the title says with only 214 pages. I plan to start reading it soon. After having reading Angels in the Architecture a few years ago I wanted to gain a more true understanding of the 1500 years of Christian history before the Reformation.
While I am thinking about it, another book that is helpful in pointing out misconceptions concerning pre-enlightenment people is Inventing the Flat Earth : Columbus and Modern Historians. While I am not entirely sure where I got the notion I do believe that my upbringing including Christian school taught me that pre-enlightened people all thought the world was flat. It wasn’t until I read an article by Gary Demar that I realized this wasn’t true. Inventing the Flat Earth does a very good job of proving that it is not true. The majority of people in the middle ages did not believe the earth was flat. The idea was invented to ridicule Christians.
I heard a little bit of the Rush Limbaugh show today. Roger Hedgecock, who today substituted for Rush, was interviewing Richard Miniter, the autohor of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror. I only heard 10 minutes or so of the interview but that little bit of time made me want to read the book. Miniter said that he had traveled throughout the world to do research on how the war on terror is going. His outlook on the whole thing is totally different than what you tend to here on the radio. One statistic was that “Since 9/11 we’ve killed or captured 3,000 Al-Qaeda terrorists in 102 countries.” This is entirely different than anything we hear in the media. The media along with the rest of the left continually focus only on apparent negatives and totally ignore the positives that are occurring throughout the world. While our intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong, why don’t we hear more of Libya’s move to cease it’s nuclear weapons programs? Why don’t we hear from anybody but the President concerning the elections that are going to happen in Afghanistan? The reason is that the left and specifically John Kerry do not care what Bush has done, they will call it wrong and they will call it lies. They only want to win an election, no matter what the cost.
I haven’t posted for a while and decided I wanted to write a little more about Gene Wolfe’s books. I have finished Shadow & Claw, Sword & Citadel, and Urth of the New Sun. I really liked the series but have to admit that there was a lot of times in the story where I didn’t really understand what was going on. Because the books are written in the first person I actually think this whole feeling contributed to the story. There was a lot of times when Severian (the author) didn’t know what was going on and therefore I the reader didn’t either. By the end of Urth of the New Sun there were many ideas brought up that I only had a vague understanding of what was going on. I don’t really want to talk to much about those things here though because it would give away a lot to people who haven’t gotten a chance to either finish the books or read tham at all.
I would highly recommend these books and I plan on reading anything else by Wolfe that I can get my hands on. Currently though I want to get Lexicon Urthus. I bid for a copy of it on eBay the other day but it went for $131 dollars in the end. I can’t afford to spend that much at the moment. I get the impression from what others have said that the info that is compiled in it would be very helpful for the more obscure items in the New Sun cycle.
To find out more info on Gene Wolfe books and to read ideas from other fans you can subscribe to the Urth List. I subscribed when John Barach commented about it earlier. The list has been helpful in seeing that many other readers are trying to work out what is going on. It is good to read posts by others who have read the series a lot more and really do seem to understand what is going on.
I just finished reading Shadow & Claw which contains the first two volumes of The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I really like the book and would recommend it to anyone. I became interested in Gene Wolfe after seeing the Gene Wolfe Interview conducted by James Jordan. I like most of what I’ve read by James Jordan and have also liked the Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith which Jordan recommends.
In the first chapter of Shadow & Claw a statement is made that grabbed my interest and has caused me to want to understand more of what the author intended. The narrator says the following after the main character Severian is given a coin:
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life–they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
This statement is very interesting to me because each day I am seeing more and more how a true understanding of symbols is lacking in the religious circles I grew up in. Most of those people think that symbols mean nothing unless I do something to give them meaning. The fact is that symbols have meaning whether I understand or not. This includes Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Both of these symbols affect the individual and are not effected by the individual.
I am looking forward to reading Sword & Citadel which contains the third and forth parts of The Book of the New Sun. I am enjoying Gene Wolfe so far and expect that to continue. I eventually want to get into some Jack Vance who is supposed to write in a similar style.
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