“Little Brother” is the first complete novel by Cory Doctorow that I have read. Before this I have read the short story “When Sysadmins Ruled The World” and I follow him on Twitter and RSS as he has some very  interesting things to say on his blogs and in his column in the Guardian.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

From the author’s site:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Review

Little Brother

This book doesn’t have the scope and depth of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which the idea of Big Brother, a totalitarian surveillance state, is introduced. Little Brother is set in contemporary society, it is fast-paced and a more enjoyable read; it’s much more of a page-turner than “1984“.
How to describe this book? I will list just list some keywords and phrases: surveillance state, war on terror, Department of Homeland Security, hacking, freedom of speech, David against Goliath (in this case M1k3y against the DHS), coming of age, love story, totalitarianism, social media, teen techno-geek rebellion, and if you are a teen you might find some valuable career advice in there too. No kidding, read the afterwords by Bruce Schneier and Andrew Huang.

Cory Doctorow’s novels have been on my to read list for some time now, but after reading “Little Brother” they have been moved to the top of the list. I also put “Little Brother” on my to buy list because it is a book that I will certainly read again.
“Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow was published in 2008 and is freely available for download with the author’s and publisher’s permission. I mentioned at the start of this article that Cory Doctorow has interesting things to say, he does, especially about Digital Rights Management.

Rating:

• Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com
• Feedbooks | Food for the mind

“I Shall Wear Midnight” is the fourth book in the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett, which, in turn, is part of the larger discworld series. The first three books in the Tiffany Aching series are: “The Wee Free Men“, “A Hat Full Of Sky“, and “Wintersmith“. I recommend to read them in that order before starting on “I Shall Wear Midnight“.

I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany Aching is 16 and finished her training to become a witch, not just a witch but the witch of the Chalk, or hag o’ the hills as the Nac Mac Feegle would say. She does what witches do: doing her rounds, delivering babies, salving wounds, being there when people die, bandaging legs, taking pain away, and cutting old ladies’ toenails.

Then things start to go bad, an evil has awakened and with it come all the old stories, the stories about evil old witches. It starts with whispers, murmurs, and looks. Then someone picks up a stone. Before you know it they start looking for fire-wood. The evil has set its eyes on Tiffany. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I will just mention that Tiffany Aching ends up in Ankh-Morpork with a bunch of Nac Mac Feegles, meets a city witch and a legend, … before returning to the Chalk to face the evil on her own turf and on her own terms, and finds some unexpected allies.

These last couple of years some new elements have entered Terry Pratchett’s novels: sentiment, romance, drama, tragedy, and some novels have become darker, like this one. This came at the expense of what made the discworld series of comic fantasy novels so unique; a mix of great storytelling, wit, humor, satire, parody, and littered with puns, allusions and culture references. Those elements are not gone, but they are not as abundant as before.

It is a very good story, but it is not a very good traditional discworld story; the tumbling-down-the-rabbit-hole kind of fun has gone. I miss the shear joy, sarcasm, and wittiness of “Going Postal“, “The Wee Free Men“, “The Last Continent“, “Eric“, “Pyramids“, “Thief of Time“, …

Rating:

Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Fanny Hill

I do not live in the USA, but freedom of speech and expression is equally important in the EU. Banned Books Week was brought to my attention via Twitter by some of my fellow tweeps.

My goal was to read books that are or once were banned. The books I read during the Banned Books Week of 2010 (September 25 – October 2) are:

1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
2. Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol

Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been (temporarily) banned in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, and India for violation of obscenity laws. The book starts good with the observations by Lady Chatterley of the discussions between her crippled husband and his guests on mind and body, relationships, intellect, classes, … Amusing at first, it becomes rather boring even during the first half of the book. Her longing for a child, her love affair, and her trip to Venice didn’t make me change my opinion. You don’t really get to know the characters and the book provides little context for the period just after the first world war in the UK, a period of which I know very little.

Fanny Hil or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was banned in the U.S.A in 1821 for obscenity, then again in 1963. First published in 1748 in England, it is considered the first pornography novel. It is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history, and a synonym for obscenity. I am not familiar with the genre, but I think a better 21st century description would be an erotic novel. I think John Cleland deserves an award for writing a pornographic novel without ever using an obscene or vulgar word.
The story can be summarized as follows: once upon a time a young women went to the big city, to support herself she had to work as a woman of pleasure, she was very good at it and got rich, she found back her first love, and they lived long and happily ever after. It has all the ingredients of a fairy tale, but not one you will see on the Disney channel.
The characters, context and story are better than in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, making John Cleland a better writer than D.H. Lawrence in my opinion.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was the most entertaining read of the three. The genre is called literary nonsense and the first chapters of the book were really promising. Alas, contrary to writers like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett who are able to maintain a high level of fun, entertainment, sarcasm, humor and wit throughout their books, Lewis Carrol can’t keep it up. The quality of the story varies between funny and boring, amusing and dull.
The book is/was (?) banned in the province of Hunan, China, beginning in 1931 for its portrayal of anthropomorphized animals acting on the same level of complexity as human beings. Duh?

Ratings:

for Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

for Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland

for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol

All three books are freely available for download. I am looking forward to next year’s banned books week. On my shortlist are Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Resources

• Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read (ALA)
• Banned Books Week (Wikipedia)
• List of books banned by governments (Wikipedia)
• Feedbooks: A place to discover and publish e-books
• Project Gutenberg – Free eBooks

Why the interest in Ervin Laszlo? It started after reading a column in the Dutch magazine Bliss titled “Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Why the controversy?” In my previous post, “Design? No. Evolution? Yes. Controversy? Damn Right!” I commented on the article. My comment was over 1500 words, which is a lot for a blog post, so I needed a separate post to discuss the author Ervin Laszlo.

Who is Ervin Laszlo?

Ervin Laszlo

In the magazine Bliss he is introduced as a doctor, scientist, philosopher, musician and author. Some research online revealed no medical or scientific degrees; he is a Doctor of Philosophy and has an honorary doctorate in economic sciences. He is a philosopher of science, but that doesn’t make him a scientist. Ervin Laszlo, or László correctly, has been busy, very busy. Some facts:

• co-founder of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG),
• founder and president of the Club of Budapest
• member of the Darwin Project
• founder and editor of World Futures – Journal of General Evolution
• member of the International Academy of Science
• member of the World Academy of Arts and Science
• adviser of the UNESCO Director General
• co-founder of the WorldShift Network
• author of over 70 books and 400 papers
• promoter of the theory that 2012 will either be the collapse of human civilization or the beginning of a new, quantum consciousness
• former President of the International Society for Systems Sciences
• former program director for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)
• nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice
• chancellor-designate of the GlobalShift University

The list is incomplete. I will now discuss some of the organizations and projects. All links can be found in the resource section below.

General Evolution Research Group (GERG, 1984)

The General Evolution Research Group (GERG) began with a secret meeting in Budapest in 1984 of scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain during a critical juncture in the Cold War. Spurred by the mounting threat to our species of rapid nuclear proliferation and overkill, the purpose was to see if it might be possible to use the chaos theory then coming into vogue to develop a new general theory of evolution that might serve as a road map for our species out of the mounting chaos of our times to the reassuring order of a better world.

The GERG now serves as the research arm to the Club of Budapest, a prestigious group for advancing humanity and is founded by Ervin Laszlo. So, it all started with chaos theory, but by now Ervin Laszlo has moved on to the psi-field, quantum, and Akashic field. Depending on what’s in vogue?

The Club of Budapest (1993)

Founded in 1993 by Ervin Laszlo who is still the president, the mission of the Club of Budapest is to be a catalyst for the transformation to a sustainable world through promoting the emergence of planetary consciousness, interconnecting generations and cultures, integrating spirituality, science, and the arts, and fostering learning communities worldwide.

Like Greenpeace fights for ecological issues, UNICEF for children, and Amnesty International for human rights, the Club of Budapest stands for global consciousness. Its mission is to be a catalyst for the transformation to a sustainable world.

Contrary to Greenpeace, UNICEF, and Amnesty International the goals of the Club of Budapest are rather vague. Distinguished Honorary Members of the Club of Budapest include the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Peter Gabriel, Desmond Tutu, Peter Ustinov, Jane Goodall, Deepak Chopra, Arthur C. Clarke, Paulo Coelho, … Do they even grasp the gist of Ervin Laszlo‘s ideas?

The Darwin Project (2003?)

The mission of The Darwin Project is to speed the shift in our homes, schools, and the media from only teaching destructive “first-half” Darwinism to the inspiring liberation of Darwin’s long lost completing half — along with all the fields of modern science that support and expand Darwin’s original full vision to reveal caring, love, moral evolution, and education as the prime drivers for human evolution.

Darwin’s long lost book? Apparently they are referring to the “Descent of Man“, but this was in part a response to those who wanted to introduce a design in human evolution, not to support it.

Ervin Laszlo and David Loye, author of the new evolution story “The Great Adventure“, must have found Charles Darwin long lost book “The Theology of Species” (see the PS below). Apparently we have misunderstood Darwin, because what Darwin really meant was:

What primarily drives human evolution, Darwin wrote in page after page of the long ignored writings that complete his theory, are “the moral qualities.” These, he said, are “advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion, etc., than through natural selection.”

Some further reading revealed that “On the Origin of Species” is to be blamed for the Robber Barons, corporate greed, environmental devastation, hate crimes, and Nazism. Not Charles Darwin personally is to be blamed, but the scientists who don’t understand Darwin’s complete work. You have to read the second part of Darwin’s work, “Descent of Man“, to see the whole picture. You can download the new story, “The Great Adventure” by David Loye, from the website of The Darwin Project.

In the beginning there was
the Domination System and the Organism.
Then the Love System entered life and
meaningful Evolution began . . .

Honestly, I am not making this up.

Conclusion

How did someone with such bizarre ideas get to be adviser of the UNESCO Director General or a member of the International Academy of Science? Or did he landed those jobs before he saw the light (quantum or Akashic)?

How did people like Peter Gabriel (musician), Jane Goodall (known for her long-term field study on wild chimpanzees), Mikhail Gorbachev (former President of the USSR), Vaclav Havel (former President of the Czechoslovakia and later on of the Czech Republic), Richard von Weizsäcker (former President of the Federal Republic of Germany), Óscar Arias (former President of Costa Rica), Paulo Coelho (bestselling author), and the list goes on, get involved with Ervin Laszlo? Do they even know the extend of this man’s ideas?

His theory on 2012, that it will either be the collapse of human civilization or the beginning of a new, quantum consciousness, is a safe bet. No matter what happens in 2012 he will come out as a visionary: increased or decreased solar activity, abundant harvests or famine, natural disasters or not, border disputes or peace treaty between North and South Korea, civil war or peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israel, …

The difficulty in understanding his work is hampered by the many hats he wears and the many organizations, but it is all linked. Starting from the Club of Budapest with it’s many famous honorary members, there is a link with his personal website and forum on quantum consciousness, Akashic field, and other fuzzy new age thinking via some of the honorary members like Deepak Chopra and Barbara Max Hubbard. The General Evolution Research Group is the research arm of the Club of Budapest and from there you get to the pseudoscience of the Darwin Project. The main link is Ervin Laszlo, in the center like a spider in its web. It’s not difficult to be the president of several organizations when you founded them. When you stick solely on the information available on the site of the Club of Budapest it is quite respectable, but you will not see the complete picture.

How can you be against a man who wants love, peace, and understanding for all? But at what cost? Must we give up the freedom from Enlightenment and return to the dark ages of superstition, replacing God, the Bible and the Catholic Church for the quantum consciousness and the Akashic field, whatever those may be. Ervin Laszlo compares the Club of Budapest to Greenpeace, UNICEF, and Amnesty International. I think a better comparison for the many organizations of Ervin Laszlo is Scientology!

While most of the honorary members of the Club of Budapest might not grasp the full extent of his vision, his partners in folly are Deepak Chopra, Michael Beckwith, Barbara Max Hubbard, … On his forum you will find articles like “Finding the Holy of Holies: Sticky Particles and the Ground of All Being”, “Geoesthetics: The Spiritualization of Art and Science in the Noosphere”, “Retrieving the Hidden Rays of Light: A Global Partnership is Emerging”, … You get the picture.

How is it possible he has been flying under the skeptic radar for so long? Do you want to give someone like Ervin Laszlo a global platform as Nobel Peace Price winner? Do you want someone as Ervin Laszlo as an adviser on a science committee? Do you want Ervin Laszlo or people affiliated with him as advisers to the EU or UN? I know I don’t.

PS: The reference to Charles Darwin‘s book “Theology of Species” comes from “The Science of the Discworld III – Darwin’s Watch” by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. In the series our universe is the result of a failed magical experiment by the wizards of the Unseen University on the discworld. Being who they are, the wizards can’t help but messing with our roundworld. The series discusses evolution, the role of William Shakespeare and the role of Charles Darwin. Each chapter by Terry Pratchett is followed by a chapter by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen giving the scientific point of view on the event or period. In the third book something goes wrong again and we go extinct in the near future. What happened? It appeared that Darwin wrote the wrong book, the “Theology of Species“. Don’t fear, the wizards of the Unseen University come to our rescue and travel back in time to make sure Darwin gets aboard the Beagle and writes “On the Origin of Species“.

Resources

• Ervin Laszlo
• Wikipedia on Ervin László
• Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Then Why the Controversy? by Ervin Laszlo
• Design? No. Evolution? Yes. Controversy? Damn Right! by Johan Mares
• WorldShift 2012 – From Global Emergency To Global Emergence
• LEARN USA – Who Is Ervin Laszlo?
• The Darwin Project
• GERG – General Evolution Research Group
• Club of Budapest
• Stock Photo: Radar by KimPouss via stock.xchng

It was my intention to write a short comment on a column “Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Why the controversy?” in Bliss, a Dutch magazine, but the more I read on the author of the article, Ervin Laszlo, the longer my article became. Then the second part of the column got published and I discovered that Ervin Laszlo’s theory transcends ordinary Creation Theory and Intelligent Design. What a mess. I had to split the article in two; the first part is a comment on the column by Ervin Laszlo and the second part (to be published later this week) is on the man himself.

Why did I set out to write a comment on my blog? Well, I can’t comment in the magazine nor on the accompanying website. You will find all links in the resources section at the end of the article.

Intelligent Design in Belgium

Intelligent design and creation theory are almost a non-issues in Belgium. Mieke Vanhecke, the CEO of the Flemish Catholic Schools (VSOK – Vlaams Secretariaat van het Katholiek Onderwijs) is on record saying that catholic scientists have accepted evolution theory a long time ago. So, no creation theory or intelligent design in Belgian schools, not even in the Catholic ones.
Once or twice during the past years it made the news when an organization send books on creation theory or intelligent design to schools, but such initiatives are mostly ridiculed or criticized and the books end up in the waste paper bin.
An initiative in 2005 by the Minister of Education Maria van der Hoeven in The Netherlands, a more protestant country, was so heavily criticized that she immediately withdrew her proposal.
So, it’s basically a non-issue here and I hope it stays that way.

Bliss

Bliss is a free, Dutch magazine for people who dare to make choices in The Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. It is available at health food stores, wellness centers, golf clubs, cultural centers, …
The contents: ads, ads masked as articles, ads masked as recipes, the occasional feel-good article that I couldn’t link to an ad, and columns. The ads are for books, courses, supplements, lotions, tees, quantum pendants, fairs, psychic readings, … Let’s be clear on this, some of the articles are good reads and provide some info on food and supplements, but the majority is hot air and snake oil.
What compelled me to write about Bliss, was a column by Ervin Laszlo.

Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Why the controversy?

Is the title of a 2-part column written by Dr. Ervin Laszlo in Bliss (May en September 2010). This is about the column, the next article is reserved for Ervin Laszlo. In the magazine he is introduced as a doctor, scientist, philosopher, musician and author. Some research online revealed no medical or scientific degrees; he is a Doctor of Philosophy, a philosopher of science, but that doesn’t make him a scientist.
The original article is in Dutch, but I found the English version on Ervin Laszlo’s site.

The debate among conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews (the “creationists”) and natural scientists and the science-minded public (the “evolutionists”) centers on biological evolution. But on a deeper look, it concerns the universe in which life has evolved—or in which it was created. And, as I will argue, on this level there is no contradiction between design and evolution: both are equally needed to explain the facts.

An example is the relationship between a cheetah and antelope. According to Laszlo it is impossible that cheetahs and antelopes have evolved to what they are today without a design to start with. He makes the classical mistake to limit the choice to design versus accidental. As it is impossible that the evolution of the cheetah and antelope is accidental, or the result of accidental mutations it must have been designed like this from the start. This theory is debunked in Evolution for Dummies, need I to say more? It is called co-evolution and predation.

Ervin Laszlo feels very confident:

That view marks the classical Darwinist position, still championed by a few (though always fewer) mainline biologists. Richard Dawkins, for example, insists that the living world is the result of processes of piecemeal trial and error, without deeper meaning and significance.

So it is up to Richard Dawkins and his band of merry men to hold the fort, to stop the barbarians at the gate?

It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error.

3.8 billion years is not enough for evolution to take place! Could it be that as a creationist he works with a different time scale, a couple of thousands years up to ten thousand years maybe?
I guess you could call it trial and error from a certain point of view. Some random mutations (trial) occur within a species and over a period of time some mutations prove to be more successful than others, they survive and the others die out (error). A better description would be survival of the fittest, natural selection or just evolution. The biggest mistake is to consider evolution a complete random process; it’s random mutations followed by non-random selection. You can even see for yourself how it works; just give the “Blind Watchmaker” applet a try (program runs quite nicely, but you have to close the browser window to close it).

Blind Watchmaker

Then Laszlo introduces Fred Hoyle‘s theory who compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” It is also known as Hoyle’s fallacy and is quite similar to the infinite monkey theorem and has been debunked over and over again. Fred Hoyle was a great scientist, but he was an astronomer and way out of his league on biology and evolution.

The most part of my article is based on the first part of the column as it appeared in Bliss; I only got the second part 2 days ago and it gets even fuzzier.

The creationist position would be the logical choice if—but only if—scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is.

Who are these cutting edge scientists, these post-Darwinian biologists? Are they real scientists and biologists, as in exact or hard sciences? Or are they scientists in the way Ervin Laszlo is portraying himself as a scientist, but who are in reality philosophers of science, or theologians of science?

Leading-edge scientists realize that the evolution of organic species is an orderly, highly coordinated process, even if it’s not mechanistic and deterministic. The evolution of the living world is part of the great wave that created particles from the underlying virtual-energy and information field misleadingly called ”vacuum” (and is better called unified field, nuether, or Akashic field).

Now he lost me completely. How many theories can you mix in one article? Why didn’t he add quantum into the mix? These particles, are they also known as midichlorians?

For someone who refers so much to Richard Dawkins, Ervin Laszlo should really pay more attention to his books and documentaries. I am new to the skeptical writing thing, but am I correct to assume that creationists and the like don’t do a lot of reading outside their comfort zone?
I am getting a lot more respect for Richard Dawkins and other prominent skeptics every day. You can make up a crazy theory in 5 minutes, but thoroughly debunking it takes days or even weeks.

Resources

• Blind Watchmaker Applet
• Bliss magazine (Dutch)
• Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Then Why the Controversy? by Ervin Laszlo
• Evolution for Dummies by Greg Krukonis and Tracy Barr
• Wikipedia on Akashic records
• Wikipedia on Ervin László
• Wikipedia on Hoyle’s Fallacy
• Wikipedia on Infinite Monkey Theorem
• Wikipedia on Intelligent Design
• Wikipedia on Intelligent Ontwerp (Dutch)
• Wikipedia on Maria van der Hoeven (Dutch)
• Wikipedia on Timeline of evolution

I participated in my first readathon last weekend. A readathon is an event during which people read books for a certain period of time. This can be to raise money for charity or just for fun. My first readathon was a read-your-own-books readathon, starting Friday morning and ending Monday morning. I managed to read 5 books between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening, but I cheated a little.

The readathon was organized by the Bibliophilic Book Blog and the word was spread via Goodreads.

The books I read were mostly pockets, with each having somewhere between 100 and 150 pages — this is the cheating I mentioned.
My books in reading order:

1. The Last Castle by Jack Vance
2. Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
4. The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph by Jack Vance
5. Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching by Ralph Alan Dale

Before I started I thought that Ursula K. Le Guin‘s translation/interpretation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching would be better than Ralph Alan Dale‘s, but this was not the case. Ralph Alan Dale‘s book is a more modern interpretation of the 2500 year old verses, more accessible, easier to read and beautifully illustrated with black and white photographs to really get you into the mood. Doing a comparison on Tao Te Ching books could be an idea for yet another article as I already have read 4 of them.

I always wanted to read both The Last Castle by Jack Vance and Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin in a short period of time. The stories are very similar and so I thought, more than half a lifetime ago when I was a huge fan of Jack Vance, that Ursula K. Le Guin must have copied his work.
It was only more recently that I discovered that both books were published in 1966. So who copied who? Or is it possible that 2 very similar stories were published almost simultaneously. I now say that Ursula Le Guin is by far the better writer. Her writing and storytelling is better, her characters are more real and you get to know them, even her fighting and battle scenes are better written. But the comparison between both books will be the topic of a complete article.

The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph by Jack Vance is a combination of old school SciFi and detective story. A fun read.

Conclusion

This one weekend I read 5 books, which gave me inspiration for 3 articles, including this one. All in all a productive weekend. But the fifth book proved a bit too much, it felt more like something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do.
Still, it was fun, devoting a weekend to reading. I am looking forward to doing it again, but not too often – a couple of times a year maybe.

I was in doubt whether to read this book or not. I don’t like religious fundamentalists, so would I like a book by an atheist fundamentalist any better?

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

This is Richard Dawkins’ impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

The Good

His arguments against religion, his appeal for a secular society and atheism, … are just brilliant. The way he picks the arguments in favor of a religion and the stories in holy books apart are eye openers and even hilarious on occasion. It will provide a lot of ammo next time you find yourself in a discussion on religion.
He also does a very good job pointing out how expressions by or quotes from famous scientists, writers, politicians, and even the founding fathers of the USA are used out of context to support the idea that they believed in a God. While his explanation is a lot better than those by theists, by putting those quotes into context, it is also a weak point because most of those people are dead, so you can’t ask them what they really meant by it. It’s his interpretation against those made by theists.
Another good point for this book is making connections; sometimes you read something in a book, and something else in another book, without making a connection. This book made me connect some dots. Some of the things the author wrote reminded me of funny quotes or witty remarks by Terry Pratchett. I am not saying that Richard Dawkins read Terry Pratchett‘s work or vice-versa. Both are well-read men and it’s likely they have read the same books. When I read the part on pedomorphism, it reminded me of the SF-novel Protector by Larry Niven. These are just 2 of the more enjoyable insights. I had many Aha-Erlebnis moments while reading this book.

The Bad

Richard Dawkins is a bit too fanatical to my liking in his atheism. This is probably why he got his nickname Darwin’s Rotweiller instead of just being called a Darwinist. The content is very good, but the tone was too aggressive. I recently listened to an interview with Dr Pamela Gay — a scientist, astronomer, writer and Christian — on Token Skeptic on the separation between scientific truth and belief. In it she said that when you want take action against religious fundamentalism, Creation theory, or Intelligent Design, you shouldn’t attack Christianity in general. Challenge the arguments by the fundamentalists, the creationist, … and you might even find Christian allies. Richard Dawkin‘s arguments are good, but he wont be finding allies among moderate believers for keeping creation theory or intelligent design (ID) out of the science lessons. He might end up only preaching to the choir. There is humor in the book which made me laugh, but why doesn’t he use it more.

This book proved to be a slow read. I didn’t expect a page-turner, but I also didn’t expect to have to work my way through it. It’s not like the topic is difficult. Was the problem mine — a lack of concentration? Is it the author’s writing style? Is it the Dutch translation?
It wouldn’t be the first time that I preferred to read the original English version of a book instead of the Dutch, my native tongue, translation. I would never have become the fan of Terry Pratchett I am today reading his books in Dutch. After reading the series “De Duivelsprinsen” I almost immediately sold my copies and bought the original English books, The Demon Princes by Jack Vance.

So, to those of you who have read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, either in Dutch or in English, was it a slow read, did you have to work your way through it, or was it a page-turner?

Conclusion

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is definitely a book that I am going to read again, but next time in English. The content is great, but I didn’t like his style that much. I did put his other books on my to read list.
Be prepared; the many references in this book made my to read list a whole lot longer.
Rating:

Resources

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The Jennifer Morgue is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series by Charles Stross. This review contains some minor spoilers.

Did you ever experience the feeling of being turned into a zombie while watching a PowerPoint presentation? Well, here it is for real, a PowerPoint presentation is used to turn people into zombies. After barely surviving this ordeal, Bob Howard, computer übergeek and demonology hacker extraordinaire in his Majesty’s occult secret service, must stop software billionaire Ellis Billington. Billington has managed to get his hand on a Soviet Cold War device that permits communication with the dead. He plans to use it to raise an eldritch horror, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, from the Stygian depths, in order to rule the world.

The Jennifer Morgue

The entire operation has been put under a specific geas by Ellis Billington, meaning that if the good guys want to win they have to play it by the rules of the archetypal British spy novel. So you have a huge yacht in the Caribbean, a very rich evil mastermind with a white cat, casinos, martinis (shaken, not stirred), and you also need a British secret agent. Don’t tell Bob, he’s not supposed to know.
And you’ve got to have girls — Bond girls. There is the gorgeous looking (at least glamor level 3) Ramona Random from the Black Chamber, who planted a demon on her in order to control her — not just any demon but a succubus. Every man she has ever slept with died horribly less than 24 hours later. Can she be trusted?  Is she even human? What will Bob’s girlfriend Dominique “Mo” O’Brien do? Lie back and think of England? Yeah right, when hell freezes over.
What is the role of the Laundry, Britain’s occult secret service? The Laundry wouldn’t be the Laundry if they played by the rules, at least to other people’s rules.

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Charles Stross did it again. This is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series, where hard science fiction is mixed with the British spy novel and Lovecraftian horror, and spiced with humor, sarcasm and satire. Not as geeky, fast-paced and witty as the first novel in the series, The Atrocity Archives, but still very good.
Click here for my review of the first novel.

What do you get when you mix hard science fiction, a spy thriller, a loathing for bureaucracy, a computer hacker as main protagonist, Lovecraftian horror, a wicked sense of humor and set it all in an alternate history? Answer: The Bob Howard or Laundry series by Charles Stross.

This is a review of the first novel of the series: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.

The grinning sallow face of Fred from Accounting looms out of the darkness in front of me and I recoil before I realise that it’s all right — Fred’s been dead for more than a year, which is why he’s on the night shift.

The premise for the series is that certain mathematical computations, the Turing-Lovecraft Theorem, can be used to open gates to other dimensions and universes or summon demons and even worse things that, as Terry Pratchett puts it, even the dark is afraid of. Or you could use some candles, a human sacrifice, and some other stuff, but that’s old school.

The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics — computerised or otherwise — draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

The main protagonist is Bob Howard, a computer geek now working as a low-level techie for the Laundry, Britain’s super-secret, occult, government agency. As a student they caught him messing with stuff he shouldn’t have and offered him the choice to either work for the Laundry or … Well, it wasn’t much of choice anyway.

I thought I was just generating weird new fractals; they knew I was dangerously close to landscaping Wolverhampton with alien nightmares.

The Atrocity Archives

After a while he gets bored and volunteers for active duty on Her Majesty’s Secret Occult Service, which is something he will regret several times during the novel when fighting zombies, Nazis, nameless horrors, and his line-manager.

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This is a special kind of fast-paced geeky science fiction that I had never encountered before. Take William Gibson’s cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett’s sarcasm and humor, Lovecraft’s horror, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond and this will give you most of the ingredients. I am not really a fan of Lovecraft, but in the mix served up by Charles Stross it is simply irresistible.
This is not going to be everyones cup of tea. You will either like it very much or not at all. Be prepared to read sentences like “Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule. ” If this doesn’t put you off, you could be in for a treat.

I wasn’t a big fan of the superhero comics (Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Hulk, …), but I had a friend who was so I read quite a lot of those comics during my teens. They provided a nice pastime, but nothing more. I was much more a fan of Guust Flater, Durango, Rode Ridder, Soda, Jeremiah, Blake & Mortimer, … which non-Belgians probably never heard off. Your loss.

The very first page of the Watchmen immediately sets the tone with an excerpt from Rorschach’s journal, October 12th, 1985:

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!” …
… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.”

How’s that for change? Can you even imagine Superman, Batman, Spider-man, Wolverine, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Storm, Wonder Woman, … utter a phrase like that? Saying no to a person in need. The Watchmen grabbed my attention from the very first page.

When the story takes place the glory days of the costumed heroes or masked vigilantes are over and they are outlawed. Costumed heroes because apart from Dr. Manhattan they do not have superpowers. The only ones still active are Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian, but these last two work for the government.

The story starts with the murder of one of the costumed heroes. Is it a standalone event or is there a plot to kill and discredit these masked vigilantes? Or is there something much more sinister going on? Will the remaining heroes find themselves out of there depth on this one? Follow Rorschach on his, initial lonely, quest for answers.

The author makes no effort whatsoever to make the costumed heroes look sympathetic: paranoid, cynical, estrangement, aggression, violence, rape, murder,  … You sometimes wonder what the difference is between the heroes and the villains. The characters transcend the simplistic good versus evil so often found in comics. How do you judge someone like Rorschach or the Comedian? How do you judge a god-like being as Doctor Manhattan? How do you judge Ozymandias?

I can see the world through Rorschach’s eyes, understand Doc Manhattan’s estrangement from humanity, kinda get the Comedian’s joke, follow Ozymandias’ logic, and sympathize with the Night Owl 2.0. If you have read the novel, you realize this is kinda scary. It only shows Alan Moore’s genius.

You can call this story impressive, awesome, a master-piece, or a classic, but it’s not a nice or enjoyable story, it grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. The scope, the setting at the height of the cold war in an alternative history where the USA won the Vietnam war, the flashbacks to the early years of the Watchmen and even into the origins of their predecessors the Minutemen, and the mix of comic and text makes this book a master-piece. For a comic this book contains an unusual amount of text; excerpts from (auto)biographies, interviews, news paper clippings and psychiatric reports.

Usually a story written for a certain format doesn’t do well in another format. Who doesn’t know the expression “the book is better than the movie?” However, this comic would hold it’s ground if published as a novel. The story, the setting, the scope, and the depth would make sure of that. Which is probably why it made Time Magazine’s list of 100 best novels.

The first time I read this, I just grabbed it on impulse in the adult comic section in the public library where it was on display between the Star Wars comics and the comic adaptations of Agatha Christie’s and Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels. They should have put a warning label on the cover, “This is no ordinary comic.” If I would have to compare it with a well-known novel than it would be George Orwell’s 1984.

I am not the first one who finds it hard to write a review of the Watchmen. How good is this book? What do you have to compare it with? I have less than a dozen Marvel comics, but even if I would have 5 times as many, I would give them all up for a copy of the Watchmen. I wouldn’t give up my Guust Flater collection though. I would also find it hard to part with my Blake & Mortimer collection or with the beautiful, 3-part, hardcover, comic adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War by Marvano.

Some of the references to other comics might seem obscure, but Belgium has more to offer than fries, chocolate, beer, and waffles. Belgium is also known for its comics, but unfortunately you will have to learn either Dutch or French to read most of them. Point of reference: Tintin wouldn’t make it to my top 10 list of best Belgian comic series.

I hope you found this review helpful.

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