Slowness in Fitness Recovery Tied In with Cancer Prognosis Uncertainty

My path to return to my previous level of cardiovascular fitness, as evidenced by my participation and finishing times in a number of long-distance races, has recently been slow, irregular and halting...causing some discouragement.  On Depot parkrun 5K Saturday mornings, I gradually increased my number of laps finished and, on April 25th, managed to walk the whole course.  But I only got through a single lap of their last race, feeling a bit too tired to go the whole distance on that one.  A couple of hours ago today I walked...at a reasonable pace...around my own neighborhood block.  On the backstretch homeward I would deliberately start some very brief, slow jogging.  This helped me gain some confidence about running.  Sometime around sunset today I'd like to try some slow running across our back yard, and see how long i can manage the effort.  i realize that i am being daily reminded of my medical status, and that the struggle to make progress...or even overcome...treatments for this unfortunate brain cancer condition is fraught with concerns about their effectiveness, and possible side effects.  I know that it's probably a good idea to be bold with my athletic training, and one of these weeks I'm going to let go at a Parkrun event and try running for as long as I am able to manage it...maybe this coming Saturday will work that way: if I tire out too quickly, I should be able to hobble over to Melissa and the car.  I don't like this cancer role in life i've been consigned to for a while.  I do know that my life...and my eventual passing through and beyond it...are in my Lord's loving and powerful arms...He brought me in and He's carrying me through it all!  I'd still like to be able to frame my own Earthly future in terms of relations with Melissa, family and friends, and athletic and intellectual pursuits.  And I'm still interested in what's going on in the world!  I can't properly boast about tomorrow(read the Book of James Chapter 4), or about the future in a personal, worldly sense...only God has the power to determine it all.  So instead, to the degree that uncertainty still maintains a vital role on this Earth,,.  I'll hedge my comments about the future with 'if the Lord tarries", recognizing that His timing is the correct timing...

MLB Channel and Rohm Mentor Present Tricky and Confusing Viewing Options

 Yesterday evening I was browsing back and forth with my MLB channel, trying to pick up a game that was ongoing.The Chicago White Sox, San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Angels figured into it all, producing the sensation of scoreboard dyslexia...that's when I get confused trying to mentally process the part of an inning in which the road team is up at bat.  For today's Sunday lineup, I anticipated their attempt to schedule all 30 major league teams with games.  For today's Bill Irwin lineup, I wonder whether I'll be able to surpass my physical limitations I am undergoing from my brain cancer circumstances.  I would truly like to sense that I am turning a crucial corner in my treatment and that the future actually represents  a real future that I can live through without  a foroboding sense that the END is near.  As for the two of us, we have postponed involved international family travel that is liable to impose undue stress and anxiety, especially on me with what I'm medically passing through. Right now I'm treating each day as an open, unscheduled block of time.  I'm free to read, write, rest, exercise and watch TV during this stretch without guilt that I'm not adhering  to the late Jim Rohm's dictates about how I ought to be living my life. Rohm, with all the good intentions behind his podcasts, comes across to me as sounding like some kind of a dogmatic ayatollah.He expresses the demeanor of someone who has lived out their lives successfully, being very careful to do uncomfortable things very, very consistently while telling me to follow his example...and don't stray from it!  I wouldn't want to find myself seated across from this type of mentor with him expecting me to dissolve my independence of personality just to let him lay his mandates all on me.  So here I am with another day facing me...may it work out well for the both of us.  Hope I don't make any mistakes...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.                 ---Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Minnesota's great poet/songwriter/performer, turns 83 today...he is a part of that cluster of famous musicians born in the early 1940: he's 15 years older than me.  So for 15 years of his life I wasn't alive...should I be despondent over my death, or non-existence, during that period?  After I die...whenever that happens...should he likewise be despondent should he outlive me?  You see, I'm taking a little of ol' Bob's above quote and working with it, for I think we two just might have overlapping views about the passage of time and the concepts of past, future, and the now.  Not that the "The Bard" was referring to any of this with his quote, other than emphasizing that both future and past are indistinct and essentially unreal while only the now, the very moment we are currently both living through, is truly all that is real.  It's indeed a great mystery, not any less than what happens after death from our own perspective, about what we were before we existed in the first place.  Yet unless you believe in reincarnation, and that would only be a conjecture on your part, time itself seems to be an illusion, a construct that living organisms have used to perpetuate themselves...

Just Finished Reading Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

Scary Smart, long title Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World is a 2021 book by Mo Gawdat, a former Google X business executive at that AI-development section of Google with a background in engineering.  When I think of artificial intelligence combined with the word "scary", I recall movies like The Terminator, The Matrix and the old 1970 TV movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, all depicting a future nightmare scenario where super-intelligent computers have concluded that humanity at best is inferior and extraneous...and at worse an evil affliction on the planet that must be controlled or eradicated.  I believe that these stories greatly contribute to the public's increasing concerns about the meteoric rise of this technology in today's real world, and about what direction it will take in the near future, good or bad.  In our dog-eat-dog cutthroat competitive capitalist business environment, the clear message is that you'd better jump into AI as quickly and deeply as possible, else you will be left in the dust and perish.  Gawdat recognizes all this, and hence I felt while I was reading his book that he and I had at least a good deal of common ground in spite of our highly divergent personal and academic backgrounds.  He considers humanity's investment in artificial intelligence too far gone to reverse.  It is here to stay and, with the recent development of quantum computing, increasing its power and development more than exponentially, its intelligence will soon far, far exceed that of humans.  Gawdat believes the world will be irreversibly transformed in the next thirty years or so, so much that he posits a word picture projected ahead that far: he and the reader are out in some isolated natural scenario camping...are we rejoicing at the great new world AI has created for us or are we desperately in retreat, hiding from it?  His thesis in Scary Smart is that now is the time that people can affect the future benevolent (or malevolent) nature of artificial intelligence by instilling in it a more positive representation of what humanity is instead of the more negative, hypercompetitive, bellicose and cruel image we've engendered of ourselves over our history and how we have been using AI so far.  Gawdat is pushing a new creed of happiness, politeness, grace and generosity in dealing with artificial intelligence, which learns with every single interaction.  Even though he feels that we're destined for some future difficult times with artificial intelligence, which he likens to a sentient life force, a change in our attitudes toward ourselves where mutual happiness is the higher aim can steer it away from the nightmare science fiction scenario featured in old movies and toward the fulfillment of the many hopes for us that it brings.  I sympathize with Mo Gawdat's views but given my own experience with human nature over the course of my 67-year existence on Earth, I tend to think that his suggestions are probably just as impractical as reversing AI.  Still, I liked and recommend his book: check it out and get back to me..

Podcaster Stresses Living in the Future Instead of the Past

Personal development coach Rob Dial has a successful podcast titled Mindset Mentor.  Four days a week he spends about 20 minutes on various topics relating to success, motivation and self-improvement.  On a recent show he discussed how too many people allow their pasts to dictate their present outlook and behavior, consequently holding them back from success.  Instead, he proposes that we project ourselves into the future...Dial suggests about 10 years ahead...and visualize the kind of person we want to become. Consequently, we would be tackling the kinds of life situations we are experiencing in the present based on that future vision of ourselves. In other words, get the brain to go into the future instead of the past when determining our actions.  This sounds a little counterintuitive to me, especially since the same podcaster has in past episodes stressed living in the present moment, with the past and future only representing abstractions instead of reality.  But it's a good habit to have a sense of direction in life and taking some time and effort to know what person I want to become.  James Clear's book Atomic Habits lays a similar foundation when he stresses "becoming" over "goals" as a guide for eliminating bad habits and growing into new ones.  For me, at age 65 I have a long span of memories that I can let negatively influence what I undertake now, and, yes, projecting myself into the future and letting that vision guide me sounds reasonable.  On the other hand, and Rob Dial acknowledges this to an extent, I didn't get to where I am today by dismissing my past experiences wholesale: memory is an important survival mechanism.  So, as with so many other things, this comes down to discernment and a sense of balance... 

Some Interesting Newspaper Articles from October, 1956

Here are four articles that caught my attention as I was skimming through the archives of The Miami News, a mainline, established newspaper, covering the dates October 4th through 6th, 1956...64 years ago.  It's interesting to see how people saw the future back then, as well as being treated to many assumptions they made about the ways society should be structured.  With each article I first wrote the main point of interest to me, followed by my own commentary.  Yes, these were real articles...

ENSLAVEMENT OF MEN AS ROBOTS PREDICTED...JUST PLUG 'EM IN (10/4/56)

In the article: Curtiss R. Schafer, project engineer for the Norden-Ketay Corp., of Milford Conn., said research in the science of "biocontrol" has shown that the conversion of human beings into electronically-controlled robots is possible.

Yes, I believe Schafer's revelation that "whole nations might be enslaved by tiny radios implanted into the brains of infants to prevent them from thinking as individuals" is feasible: I saw, with my own eyes, the archvillain Plankton do this sort of thing in the first SpongeBob SquarePants movie!  But seriously, aren't a lot of people in our own day and age voluntarily allowing themselves to be enslaved by their own smartphones and social media? This was a United Press article...

RADICAL CARS STILL FAR IN FUTURE...STEERING LEVERS AND ATOMIC ENGINES COMING (10/4/56)

In the article: According to F. C. Reith, vice-president of the Ford Motor Co. and general manager of the Mercury division, "Gas turbine engines are 5 to 10 years away, while atom-powered cars are at least 15 to 20 years in the future."

Although gas turbine technology has been extensively used with other forms of transportation, it hasn't yet taken a strong hold with passenger cars...although lately research and development is going on concerning its use with hybrid electric cars.  As for atomic cars...ha, ha, ha...this shows the overly rosy assessment folks were giving this energy source at the time: after all, the first running nuclear reactor began operations just the previous year.  Mike Davis, Miami News staff, wrote the article...

DUMB GUYS HELD BETTER AS DRIVERS (10/5/56)

In the article: Quoting Arthur L. Berlin, chairman of the driver education program in San Leandro's (California) schools: "The man who drives while thinking of his business is a poor driver, while the man with low mental ability won't be thinking about much of anything."

This is the kind of silly article I would have expected from a rag like the National Enquirer, not a reputable, serious newspaper like the Miami News...yet it was released under the auspices of the Associated Press. The article's premise is asinine: just because someone's thought processes function at a "lower" level than another's doesn't mean that they can't be just as distracted by their own less-significant thoughts while driving...

STOP THE SHOUTS FOR EQUAL RIGHTS...A WOMAN'S VOICE (10/6/56)

In the article: From Dorothy Roe's syndicated women's advice column, agreeing with Florence Anderson, a Chicago mechanical design engineer: For instance, if you want a raise...don't start complaining about how you can't afford a new pair of nylons, have to go without lunches and haven't had your hair done in three weeks...Instead tell [the boss] how fortunate you are to have such a brilliant and understanding employer, who understands the necessity of keeping up appearances in the business world. Tell him how you'd hate to work for an old fogy who didn't appreciate the importance of such things as hairdos and nylons.  

From today's more enlightened vantage point about equal rights for women, this article seems overly patriarchal and patronizing.  But it was serious advice when it was written and would have been uncontroversial within the accepted norms of the time.  I expect to see more articles like this one from the old newspapers... 

Well, I guess it's time for me to go back to the archives for some more treasures...

Quote of the Week...from Thurgood Marshall

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals.  Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.                                                         ---Thurgood Marshall

I don't know where the above quote came from, but it sounds like a school's commencement speech, doesn't it?  Thurgood Marshall, a champion for civil rights in the twentieth century, is best known for his tenure as a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1967 to 1991 as well as the attorney successfully arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that the same court ruled to outlaw segregation and overturn the earlier 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling.  But before that 1954 case Marshall repeatedly risked life and limb in the segregated Jim Crow south defending blacks against unjust charges, having to contend with lynchings, white-instigated race riots, police mistreatment of prisoners, and a general atmosphere of hostility toward his presence there as a black northern lawyer...of course he had to abide by the discriminatory segregation rules as he went about his business there as well.  I'm learning all this as I am currently reading Gilbert King's excellent historical account of a 1949 central Florida case he was involved in, titled The Devil in the Grove...very, very disturbing.  As for Marshall's quote, I picked it because it is so universal in application.  I'm afraid that more and more people these days are wasting their God-given ability to think for themselves and instead place all their beliefs in the hands of media gurus, celebrities, and politicians who seem to have a queer hold on them.  Also, in deciding how to behave during this pandemic I'm afraid that too many of us are like animals in a herd, knowing the right, publicly responsible thing to do but holding off on doing it for fear of rejection by the rest of the "herd" we interact with...in particular the alpha dog leaders who often espouse questionable tenets.  For me, no longer concerned about herds or alpha dogs, Marshall's quote had a deeper meaning to me.  I will be turning 64 in less than two months, and when it comes around to forming goals...especially those requiring a substantial investment of my time...this more advanced age may imply to some that my doors are closed in some areas.  But I'm not a blind follower of other peoples' dictates or views and instead hold to the notion that no matter where I am in this journey called life, I have the present moment to make my choices in...what the future holds for anyone is always going to be a mystery...

Just Finished Rereading Otherland: River of Blue Fire by Tad Williams

One of the problems with reading drawn-out series is that many times, the novelty that characterizes the first book has long disappeared with subsequent volumes and the reader has to go on faith that the author will eventually get around to explaining everything by the time it's all over.  In the meantime, there is a danger of readers having to "slug it out" book by tedious book...this was a major problem with Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth fantasy series.  Although Tad Williams, normally a fantasy writer as well, wrote his four-volume Otherland as a provocative science fiction series about the possibilities and perils of virtual reality...a subject that greatly interests me...the same problem exists here.  I know, I've read it before...

In River of Blue Fire, the second volume in the Otherland series, we see the same list of characters struggling through the virtual reality multiverse: they are trapped there and unable to return to the real world.  Renie Sulaweyo, a young South African IT expert living a hundred years in the future, is searching to find what happened to her little brother Stephen, who is in a coma after visiting a virtual reality site.  There are others with her, each with his or her own quest/agenda...not all of them benevolent: one of Renie's group is an imposter, working for the sinister Grail Brotherhood of ultra-wealthy elites who seem to by trying to achieve a sort of digitally-based immortality through their virtual reality creations.  The protagonists go from one exotic location to another, each of which Williams describes in intricate detail and which presents its own unique challenges.  Yet, after I finished this rather long book, I didn't feel that the story had progressed that much...something of a disappointment.  I know that some very interesting things happen in the next book, but as I said before, it won't be until the very end of book number four that it all begins to come together.  Oh well, I started it and I'm gonna finish it...

There's a rumor that the Otherland series might be adapted to movie or television...I think that would be fantastic.  What would be much better, though, would be for virtual reality to finally take off and become the established, dominant next stage in the evolution of the Internet.  They'd better hurry, though: I'm not getting any younger...

Just Finished Reading Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

One of prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's final novels was Nemesis, which was released in 1989, three years before the author's death in 1992.  Set early in the twenty-third century, Earth is an overpopulated and seriously polluted planet with all sorts of environmental and social problems (no surprise here).  A number of Settlements, as they are called, have gone out into the Solar System...these are large, self-contained systems populated by thousands, many of whom are the product of generations living completely away from the original home world.  Rotor, one such settlement, has perfected the ability to travel at approximately the speed of light and, under the direction of its leader Janus Pitt, who is cynical and contemptuous of Earth, has decided to secretly depart to a hidden star system only recently discovered by one its astronomers, Eugenia Insignia.  She takes along her teenage daughter Marlene...who has the intuitive gift of intimately discerning others' hidden motives through their speech and body language...while sending her estranged husband Criles Fisher (and Marlene's father) back to Earth.  She does not know that Criles had been working as a spy for Earth to discern Rotor's intentions, and he is soon enlisted in the effort first to find the missing Settlement with the aid of the invention of superluminal (faster than the speed of light) travel by his new partner, Tessa Wendel.  Making it all a very urgent matter is the discovery that Nemesis, a red dwarf star only two light-years from Earth, is headed in the Solar System's general direction and, upon its passing, will disturb Earth's gravity enough to move its orbit and make it uninhabitable in just a few thousand years.  Is there a habitable world around Nemesis...and what happened to Rotor?  Young Marlene figures greatly in all of this, and her gift contributes immeasurably to the story's resolution.  Naturally, I'm not the one to spill the beans...you'll have to read it for yourself to find out what happens...

Breaking the light barrier in space travel has been a common theme in much science fiction literature, with it being supposed by many writers that humanity will eventually devise a means to bypass Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which sets an absolute limit on motion at the speed of light.  In reality, good luck with that project...sounds unfeasible to me...but it does open up the universe for stories and speculation.  Other themes that Nemesis incorporates are how to deal with life forms so exotic that they may be completely overlooked at first, as well as how they might communicate with us and see themselves and their environment.  Good stuff to muse upon, and this novel also presents some compelling characters with strong personalities and worldviews.  It also has a great epilogue, expressing the forebodings of Janus Pitt.  I found it to be one of Isaac Asimov's better works, and I've read a lot of them...

3-D and Virtual Reality Technology Needs Development and Promotion

I was watching the Star Wars movie series this weekend on the TNT channel.  In Attack of the Clones, Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi has been given a tip as to the location of a star system in which the inhabitants thrive on creating clone armies...for the highest bidder.  But when he goes to the great star library to discover its identity, he only sees empty space where its coordinates are...someone had surreptitiously deleted its memory from the records.  Then Obi-Wan goes to the Jedi temple where Yoda projects a three-dimensional star map around them.  And once again I was reminded about the lagging state of our virtual reality technology...

We don't live on Flatland, but rather in a three-dimensional, spatial environment...so why do we get all our communications either through one-dimensional language or two-dimensional flat pictures?  I remember as a kid loving to look through the View-Master and experiencing at least a semblance of three-dimensional immersion in what I was seeing...where is the improvement over that during the past fifty-plus years?  Why watch a sports event in only two dimensions when cameras can be set up around the competition from strategic vantage points and coordinate together, giving the virtual viewer a truer, spatial sense of what is really going on?  I go outside and see all these stars in the sky, and there is an illusion of them all being projected, side-by-side, against a black background.  Yet I know that some are relatively close to us while others are hundreds...sometimes thousands...of light-years away.  I would much rather have a three-dimensional star map, like in Star Wars, where I could walk among the star projections and more truly appreciate their spatial relationships with each other.  And why can't cinematic art finally take the plunge into virtual movies instead of those occasional tacky 3-D flicks with the silly glasses...what are they afraid of?

I am currently rereading one of my all-time favorite science fiction novel series: Otherland by Tad Williams.  It vividly paints the picture of a well-developed virtual reality technology a hundred years into the future, and I can't help but feel envy for the fictional characters in it who experience the wonders of alternate realities.  But in decrying the lack of three-dimensional visual technology, I'm also complaining about the lack of that level of general communications about our real world...after all, we're not flatlanders...

Three Books I've Read Recently

Over the course of the last week, I finished reading three more books: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King, Tamar by Mal Peet, and Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams.  Here's my take on each of them:

***SLEEPING BEAUTIES by Stephen King and Owen King***
Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties came out just this past September. I got myself put on a holds list at my local public library and eventually checked it out .  It wasn't as good as most Stephen King novels, but the premise was intriguing.  All over the world, women and girls...even infants...are falling asleep and not waking up, with a web-like cocoon enveloping them.  Attempts to cut through the wrapping and revive them only result in them behaving murderously...and then falling back asleep.  A women's prison just outside a small Appalachian town becomes the test ground to see whether the women will return to consciousness in this world or humanity will grow extinct in a few decades without them.  One of that prison's inmates, Evie, seems to hold the key to it all. I found the explanation given at the end for all this to be vague and unsatisfactory, but I did get into the characters, like the psychiatrist Clint and the animal control officer Frank, who has a serious anger management problem.  Still, I didn't care at all for the ending and also felt that as a reader I was being talked down to with a patronizing lesson in political correctness: men: bad, women: good...

***TAMAR by Mal Peet***
Tamar is a 2005 young adult novel by Mal Peet.  I just happened to find it lying on a table in my house...no one seems to know where it came from.  Oh well, here's a book...might as well read it! And I'm glad I did.  The story goes back and forth between late World War II in Holland and England of 1995.  Tamar is a fifteen-year old girl whose grandfather, who had asked her father at her birth to give her that name, has just committed suicide.  With a box of clues he left her, she begins to investigate his past and travels, with her distant Dutch cousin Yoyo, along the Tamar River in southwestern England.  Meanwhile, the story flashes back to 1945 as two intelligence officers working for Britain, code-named Tamar and Dart, are dropped behind the lines in Holland to work for the Dutch resistance against Hitler's German occupation.  There's suspense, romance, and intrigue...but no, I'm not going to tell you what happens.  I was very satisfied with this tale, especially how it ended...

***OTHERLAND: CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW by Tad Williams***
I first read the four-volume Otherland science fiction series by Tad Williams ten years ago and felt that it had a lot to say about our future and the promises...and dangers...that will come when virtual reality technology reaches its fruition.  The setting here is about a hundred years into the future.  The internet...and VR...has continued to develop and humanity across the planet is highly dependent on it.  Renie Sulawelo, a South African college instructor in the field, one day discovers that her little brother Stephen has gone into an inexplicable coma...she ties it in with a suspicious, forbidden site he had just visited with his friends in the virtual world.  As she keeps probing, the mystery deepens and she finds herself, her family, and fellow investigators pursued and attacked by a group with a very big secret to hide.  I loved this series for its very international cast of characters, especially the perceptive Bushman "!Xabbu", who has his own reasons for accompanying Renie into "Otherland".  I highly recommend this series, the first book of which came out before the movie The Matrix, which I suspect might have ripped off some of Otherland's ideas.  Read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean...

Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

The future ain't what it used to be.                   --Yogi Berra

The great New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who passed away two years ago at the age of 90, was always a welcome baseball card for me to pick up as a kid...but his warmth and humor made him a larger-than-life public figure.  One of Yogi's trademarks was his tendency to twist words around in a funny way...some examples:

--Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
--It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
--I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field, in answer to a question). They had bags over their heads.
--I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
--I never said most of the things I said.
--Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
And my current favorite:
--In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

The above quote of his that I settled on for this article, though, while on the surface a bit nonsensical and silly, actually contains a deeper truth: in our times, our view of what the future holds has changed quite a bit from what others saw ahead of them in previous times.  In America, there had long been the notion that we could do anything...where there was a will, there was a way, so to speak...and the future was bright, full of technological innovations if not miracles.  After World War II, a different sort of outlook began to take root among the population: an apocalyptic future of nuclear war and its devastating aftermath.  In the early 1960s, another vision of a future...that of a planet sickened by man-made abuse of the environment...began to take hold.  The revival of Christian evangelism in the latter part of the century combined within that community the idea of worldwide apocalypse with Christ's impending return.  And there is now a developing fear among many of a future world run by autocratic strongmen in alliance with the super-wealthy that disposes of many of the individual's human rights and treats people-at-large as simply consumer units. One of the factors creating political tension within our society nowadays is a plethora of competing visions about what the future holds for us...and what we should do to create the best results.  I happen to believe that there are elements of truth contained within the various outlooks: we do have the capacity and can develop the will to solve many of our problems, but we have to come to some sort of consensus about what those problems are...and that is where I fall a bit on the pessimistic side of things.  For it seems that, in this present world of ours, people tend to just follow the "news" sources that serve to bolster their own closely held notions and prejudices, opting to refer to any opposing input as "fake news".  Not a good portent for the future...I wonder what ol' Yogi would have to say about this...

Just Finished Reading The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons

Having read Robert Jordan's nearly interminable fourteen-volume Wheel of Time fantasy series, twelve volumes of the actually interminable Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind (now ongoing with seventeen books already out), and the apocalyptic monstrosity called Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, I've pretty much had my fill of protracted series in literature.  The exceptions are those series, many of them mysteries written by folks like Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich, Ruth Rendell, and James Patterson, in which each book contains a complete story...making it possible to read them out of order.  The way I see it now, if you can't get your point and the story across in four volumes max (well, maybe five if the books are short), then you just might want to consider breaking it all up and instead write completely separate stories.  And this ridiculous situation with George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire ("Game of Thrones") and his refusal to get on with his writing, coupled with his lack of vision as to how to eventually end it all, is beyond the pale.  So when I came across the Hyperion Cantos science fiction series by Dan Simmons, I was gratified to have in front of me a complete set contained in four volumes.  And I just finished reading the final one, titled The Rise of Endymion...

It is a thousand years into the future and the human race has long settled among the vastness of our galaxy, with the fate of our own mother planet Earth a great mystery.  The strange pilgrimage of the Seven to the remote planet of Hyperion back in the first book is still of paramount importance three hundred years later as Raul Endymion, who grew up there, finds himself on a seemingly impossible quest to escort a hunted young woman through the known populated universe as she changes the course of history...while at the same time fighting an AI (artificial intelligence) presence that has manipulated and threatened humanity for those thousand years. Now if you're thinking that this is all some kind of ripoff of The Matrix, keep in mind that Neo's movie debut happened in 1997, the same year that the Hyperion Cantos series ended...if anything, The Matrix was guilty of ripping off Dan Simmons...

There's no way I can further describe the characters and situation of The Rise of Endymion...at least in specifics...without giving away the series, which I strongly recommend as a great science fiction work.  I will say this much: the Hyperion Cantos series...and especially this final volume...delves pretty deeply into religion and philosophy.  This is not literature that you will want to rush through, although at times the author's detailed descriptions of the nearly impossible-to-fathom technology he has envisioned can be a bit difficult to endure.  But especially as you approach the end of the last book, I think you'll appreciate the extra time and attention you spent trying to understand it all...

So yes, I liked Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos a lot and consider it now to be one of my favorite sci-fi book series...but not my all-time favorite, which still happens to be the relatively unknown Otherland series (also four volumes) by Tad Williams.  And of course no list of favorite science fiction series would be complete without Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen Covey

Live out of your imagination, not your history.                 ---Stephen Covey.

You may be already know Stephen Covey from his blockbuster hit book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a few years ago...he's written several spinoff books since then.  So it's not surprising that he would have quite a few practical, uplifting quotes...I found the above one and would like to share what I think of it...

Each and every one of us has our own histories that are composed of the multitudes of experiences that have constructed our unique individual life tapestries...I cannot escape my own personal history as I go forward with my life.  But I also have the ability to consciously employ my imagination and reasoning to take the present moment and behave in a different way from what my past might otherwise dictate to me...and by so doing, I am not only fulfilling the essence of Stephen Covey's exhortation, but also changing who I am by adding something new and positive to my own life's tapestry.  For what I consciously do now will inevitably be part of my history, for better or for worse.  Using my imagination and doing things that are out of my comfort zone serves to widen my choices in the future and allow me more freedom to make it more fulfilling.  Also, by employing my imagination in deciding what to do in the present moment, I am digging more deeply into my own subconscious, where ironically some of my more pressing unmet needs from my past may be submerged...

There is one other thing I'd like to add to Covey's quote: it says to live out of your imagination...but I say that, being social creatures as we humans are, it's also all right to listen to the products of others' imaginings and, if discerned to be good ideas, to adopt them as your own and to live out of them as well...after all, isn't that what I'm doing with this quote?

Asimov Misses Kindle's Advent by Some 26,000 Years

Sometimes I am amazed at how on-target science fiction writers from the past have been able to predict future developments in technology...and sometimes I'm just as amazed when they are terribly far off-the-mark.  Take, for example, the late Isaac Asimov's 1982 novel Foundation's Edge.  It is set some 26 thousand years into the future, when faster-than-light space travel (through "hyperspace") has been available for humanity for almost all of that time...and nuclear technology has developed on a "micro" scale.  The story's main characters of councilman Golan Trevize and historian Janov Pelorat are about to embark in space on a ship that is mentally driven, with their quest being the rediscovery of the planet Earth.  Pelorat is a rather stuffy old academician, and he wants to take his materials with him on the trip.  In italics, I have provided a short excerpt from the book at this point:

Golan Trevize asked Professor Pelorat, "Are you ready?"

"With this I am", Pelorat said and held up a square wafer about twenty centimeters to the side and encased in a jacket of silvery plastic.  Trevize was suddenly aware that Pelorat had been holding it since they had left his home, shifting it from hand to hand and never putting it down, even when they had stopped for a quick breakfast.

"What's that, Professor?"

"My library.  It's indexed by subject matter and origin and I've gotten it all into one wafer.  If you think this ship is a marvel, how about this wafer?  A whole library!  Everything I have collected!  Wonderful!  Wonderful!"

The "wafer"? I don't know how you would call it, but to me it's nothing less than a Kindle, which came out in 2007...only 25 years after the publication of Foundation's Edge.  Yet the good professor compares its level of technology favorable to the hyperspace-capable spaceship...something that in our own present minds has to be thought of as next-to-impossible.  I don't think that Isaac Asimov, not to mention other science fiction futurist writers of his era, understood the upcoming information technology revolution and how quickly and pervasively it would affect the world.  On the other hand, almost all of them had humankind traveling widely in space by our time and establishing settlements on the moon and other planets...