The Times We Live In

This decade in our nation's history has not exactly been one to inspire my confidence in its future.  The COVID-19 pandemic was one of those crises that hit us from time to time, testing the resolve of our people to confront it. Sad to say, in much of the country it was a failed effort, with folks flipping out over the notion of simply wearing a mask around others and refusing to accept freely given, safe and potentially life-saving vaccines.  Then there was the 2020 presidential election, when a sitting president, for the first time in United States history, adamantly refused to acknowledge the results of his defeat and encouraged a violent insurrection against Congress to prevent the electoral votes from being officially counted.  Worse, two thirds of his party in the House of Representatives...including its current Speaker...supported overturning a free and fair election, and a majority of Americans polled in the same party agreed that the losing incumbent president, who recently said he wants to institute firing squads, guillotines and mass executions, should have stayed in office.  Rabble-pandering politicians like my own state's governor are tripping over each other in a race to see who can seem the most reactionary and intolerant with their edicts and laws.  Mass shootings claiming innocent lives have become commonplace in America...but don't offend the gun-worshippers by suggesting any meaningful firearms regulation laws. And now, for nearly a year in running, another fascist leader...this one in Russia...is threatening nuclear war as his military seems hopelessly bogged down in neighboring Ukraine, a country that, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, gave up its own nuclear weapons in exchange for an assurance that Russia would never invade it.  So, these are the times we live in...can't wait to see what happens next...

Weekly Short Stories: 1986 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look at 1986 short science fiction as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1987 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his picks from the previous year.  1986 was the year of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown disaster in northern Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.  Now it's 2022 and the invading Russian forces seem to have learned nothing about the environmental consequences of damaging these kinds of facilities...doesn't look good for our planet's future when madmen can gain control over entire, heavily nuclear-armed nations and sacrifice untold lives and threaten the world order just to alter borderlines on maps. It's almost as if I'm living out a surreal apocalyptic story, sad to say.  But back to the book's final four tales...before we all run out of time... 

INTO GOLD by Tanith Lee

A historical fiction tale set in the frontiers of post-Roman Empire rule in Central Europe, the remnants of an outpost town, beset earlier by a devastating fire, are treated to a trade caravan from the East that includes a young woman who can transmute anything to gold.  The narrator is suspicious of her motives as she seduces and marries his old friend, the town's military leader.  A story that brings up notions of alchemy and the possibility that some of us just might be more than human...

THE LIONS ARE ASLEEP THIS NIGHT by Howard Waldrop

Imagine an alternative world where the African slave trade is reversed, colonization is overthrown much earlier, and this continent rises to become a modern society.  A little boy in a western African nation likes to read and has aspirations as a writer. His books inspire him to write a play based on an earlier, more traditional society...but will the local publisher accept it? 

AGAINST BABYLON by Robert Silverberg

Here "Babylon" is really Los Angeles in the present time (1986) as a firefighter pilot works with others to contain massive fires started by the landing of three large alien ships around the city.  What are their intentions, and were the fires, which seem out of control, deliberate or accidental?  The pilot's own wife, a freethinker, appears to have been abducted by the strange visitors, complicating matters further.  I think this could make a good movie...

STRANGERS IN PARADISE by Damon Knight

A space traveler finally gains permission to visit perhaps the only human paradise in the universe, a planet settled and terraformed a few hundred years before, with what seems to be a perfectly workable social system without violence.  He wants to visit where their great poet lived and learn why she suddenly ceased writing anymore.  A rather stark, sad reflection on what it means to be human, even a "good" human...

Next week I'll continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1986, but from a different source: Gardner Dozois' excellent anthology series...

Just Finished Reading Never by Ken Follett

Last year Ken Follett published his latest novel, Never, which quickly rose to the top of the best-seller list.  Stephen King, whom I follow on Twitter, highly recommended it and stated that it reminded him of what's going on in the world today, especially regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The characters...including the world leaders such as the American and Chinese presidents and others...are fictional but the countries and situations are painfully real, much of it taken straight from news of recent years.  The story's focus is triangular: (1) in Chad in northern Sub-Saharan Africa, the CIA has agents there to find the ringleader of a notorious international group of extremist Islamist terrorists, (2) a young top Chinese intelligence official in Beijing must maneuver between the hard-liners in his government and the wayward North Korean dictator to further his country's interests, and (3) the U.S. president, Pauline Green, must react in a measured but careful way to the escalating events falling like dominoes after a North Korean rebel military group seizes control of the country's eastern part, including its nuclear missile facilities.  The story is chilling: you can have rational people running different countries, folks who more than anything want to avoid nuclear war and the untold carnage and suffering which it would release onto the world.  Yet within each country, both democratic and autocratic, there are people and forces pressuring those leaders into conflict.  I know, at this time in early April of 2022, that no atomic bombs have been used in war since 1945.  Much of this I believe is due to the deterrence factor with the two main sides, the USSR/Russia and the United States, very much aware that either of them can destroy the other many times over.  But now with nuclear proliferation and regimes like North Korea and Pakistan in possession of nuclear warfare capability, the danger of one of them triggering a nuclear conflict has escalated.  And once something begins on a limited scale, can the escalation process be turned off...and who will take the first step in that direction without surrendering to their enemy?  A tough book to read with an even tougher ending...

Fascist Putin, Praised by Trump, Invades Ukraine

Fascist Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, as expected for weeks, today launched his country's invasion of neighboring Ukraine as tanks are rolling in and bombs dropping across this besieged nation.  Putin's biggest American buddy, fellow fascist Donald Trump...who tried to overthrow our dearly cherished free and fair presidential election a year ago...has been full of nothing but praise for Putin, calling his Ukraine strategy of aggression "genius".  And other right-wingers, most notable among them FoxNews' Tucker Carlson, have made no secret of their unbridled support for Putin...what has my country come to?  It's true that under Vladimir Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia shed its previous aggressive communist ideology in favor of social conservatism...lining themselves up nicely with the political right on several ongoing issues in America.  But don't these people see what carnage, damage and disruption this military takeover of another sovereign nation is going to cause?  This isn't like some football game with folks choosing, say, the Rams or the Bengals...this is life and death, and some of my compatriots need to get their heads screwed on right and their hearts drastically changed.  As for my own heart, it goes out to the Ukrainian people in this time of crisis and suffering...

Just Finished Reading Mental Immunity by Andy Norman

About three weeks ago I was with Melissa in Books-a-Million browsing around when my eyes fell on Andy Norman's book Mental Immunity in the "self-help" section.  I briefly surveyed the contents and discovered that the author, one of those rare professional philosophers among us, wrote it largely in response to some of the things I was noticing about how people were adopting really, REALLY bad ideas that they were picking up from friends, the Internet, TV and radio.  But how does one reverse the tide of "alternative facts" and confront those who believe in them?  After all, aren't we all entitled to our own opinions?  Norman hones in on this assumption and challenges it, concluding that no, that while legally we may be so entitled our own flawed views...even when the "facts" supporting our positions are false...we are in no way morally entitled to them...even with matters of religious faith.  And, in fact, the idea of NOT challenging those pushing false beliefs is in itself immoral.  Norman doesn't just come up with his notions spontaneously, but bases them on the historical development of philosophy, going back to that of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and progressing up to the century-old dispute about faith between William James and William Kingdon Clifford, the latter of whom promoted a more scientific approach to philosophy...and in particular epistemology, that is the study of knowledge, its truth value and use...and with whose perspective the author essentially agrees.  James, on the the other hand, made one's faith and core belief system a kind of unassailable fortress, basically giving rise to the notion that what people thought was somewhat a sacred right and to confront them was out of line...it was James' approach that won the day, and according to Norman this is causing a great deal of trouble in our time with conspiracy theories and slanted narratives running rampant and people bubbling themselves off with others who share their peculiar beliefs.  It is necessary to dissipate the aura of sacredness regarding one's own beliefs and open them up to the open, public scrutiny that they merit.  As for me, I often find myself standing back from disputing what I hold to be unwarranted assumptions from others around me, falling back on that old James-inspired "everyone's entitled to their own opinion" mantra as a kind of cop-out excuse for avoiding possibly unpleasant and awkward engagement.  Mental Immunity is a very rigorous introduction to philosophy, particularly the branch of epistemology, and there are sections in which I experienced difficulty keeping up with Andy Norman's narrative.  Norman is a philosophy professor, and his evolving teaching approach to the subject reveals part of his strategy for stemming the tide of bad ideas infecting our culture.  After seeing that his lectures weren't getting anywhere with his students, he changed his teaching tactics to include their in-class input...while politely questioning their various assertions as to where they got them from.  The book is an attempted balance between the author trying to justify his views on the state of affairs in our misinformation society of today and explaining in as much detail as he can, with his academic background and knowledge that he uses to back up those views.  It's a tough balancing act, and I respect his efforts.  I'm sure a rereading will help me better understand Norman's approach.  He seems to have rejected the parade of philosophies over the ages, finally setting on a modified version of Socrates' in which the search for truth is marked, not necessarily by rationalization and proof, but rather by inquiry with the notion of commonly-held presumptions playing a major role.  For example, when confronting someone with "bad ideas", politely-leveled questions leading to clarification and giving the source of those ideas helps to keep that party off the defensive, with the dialogue more likely to lead to mutual enlightenment.  At the book's end, Norman has an elaborate strategy laid out for this...I'm gonna have to go back to it...