Category Archives: Book Review – Fiction

Atlas Shrugged vs. Red Plenty

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I finally got around to reading Atlas Shrugged (confession: I read an abridged version because life is short). It’s a childish book in many ways. It depicts a naive vision of perfect competition and innovation between large corporations, then suggests that any government interference is a mistake. Government is as incompetent and corrupt as private industry is virtuous and innovative. The government interference in question is not the environmental regulation and anti-trust regulation of today, but rather an extreme form of anti-competitive central planning that sounds very much like the vision that would have prevailed in the Soviet Union at the time. In fact, I think Atlas Shrugged makes the most sense through a Cold War lense. At the time the book was written, the early 1950s, the Soviet model did seem to be producing fast growth, and if it had been able to stay on that trajectory for decades it could have theoretically overtaken the west. Some people probably admired it for this, and some people were terrified of the implications. Ayn Rand was somewhat prescient in foreseeing how such an extreme form of central planning would eventually destroy incentives for productivity and innovation, and she even foresaw the risk of the military industrial complex managing to hijack such a system. Of course, what she gets wrong is the idea that large corporations engage only in perfect competition and innovation. They do their best to avoid competition whenever they can because it is cheaper to buy political influence. This means that capitalism is creating exactly the kind of government corruption that Ayn Rand railed against! It shouldn’t be surprising though, if we look at ecological analogs to how competition actually works. Plants and animals occasionally compete head to head for the exact same resources at the exact same place and time (thing Coke and Pepsi), but more often they try to find and exploit niches where they are complementing or at least not interfering with each other (think Coke itself versus bottlers, trucking companies, restaurants, etc.) Parasitism and gangsterism also are strategies that work pretty well in the natural world. So in summary I think Ayn Rand was prescient for her time on certain things, but overall the book is just childishly dumb and not even all that entertaining.

I’ve just started Red Plenty, which is a historical novel about Soviet central planning in the 1950s. The book tries to capture a moment in history when people were really excited about this model, thought it was working, and didn’t see that it would lead to ruin and military-industrial domination. You know how the story ends, and yet you are sympathetic to the characters (some actual historical leaders, like Nikita Krushchev), and actually pity them because they are so full of hope and have no way of knowing their story will end in tragedy. And unlike Atlas Shrugged, this book is well written and entertaining.

Hugo Awards

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The Hugo Award winner for best novel is:

From Amazon:

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.
Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

air pollution and diabetes

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Here is a long article citing evidence that air pollution is at least correlated, and quite possibly a contributing factor, to diabetes. The website is called diabetesandenvironment.org, so I don’t know if it is an unbiased source of scientific information. The scientific studies it cites are certainly real.

These authors suggest that oxidative stress, which involves an excess of free radicals, might be one mechanism whereby air pollutants could influence the development of type 1 diabetes. Ozone and sulfate can have oxidative effects. Particulate matter carries contaminants that can trigger the production of free radicals as well as immune system cells called cytokines (involved in inflammation), and may affect organs that are sensitive to oxidative stress (MohanKumar et al. 2008). Beta cells are highly sensitive to oxidative stress, and free radicals are likely to be involved in beta cell destruction in type 1 diabetes (Lenzen 2008)…

The children of mothers exposed to higher levels of air pollution while pregnant have a higher risk of later developing type 1 diabetes. This finding comes from the relatively unpolluted area of southern Sweden, and was found for both ozone and nitrogen oxides (NOx) (Malmqvist et al. 2015)…

A number of long-term studies have found that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in adults. For example, a study of African-American women from Los Angeles found that those who had higher exposure to traffic-related air pollutants (PM2.5 and nitrogen oxides) were more likely to develop diabetes (as well as high blood pressure) (Coogan et al. 2012). Adults in Denmark had an increased risk of diabetes when exposed to higher levels of the traffic-related air pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2)– especially those who had a healthy lifestyle, were physically active, and did not smoke– factors that should be protective against type 2 diabetes (Andersen et al. 2012). A study of adult women in West Germany found that women exposed to higher levels of traffic-related air pollution (NO2 and PM) developed type 2 diabetes at a higher rate. This study followed the participants over a 16 year period (at the beginning, none had diabetes) (Krämer et al. 2010). A long-term study from Ontario, Canada, found that exposure to PM2.5 was associated with the development of diabetes in adults (Chen et al. 2013). From Switzerland, a 10 year long study found that levels of PM10 and NO 2were associated with diabetes development in adults, at levels of pollution below air quality standards (Eze et al. 2014).

So does it make sense that we are obsessing over chemicals like trace agricultural pesticide residues in food and “microconstituents” in drinking water, rather than air pollution, which is 100% proven to be extremely harmful? I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t be concerned about all of the above, but in a world of finite resources and time we should calibrate our amount of concern and action to the biggest, most proven risks, while continuing to learn more about the others. The internal combustion engine is killing us and our children, slowly through the air not to mention through sudden, violent death on the ground.

A few more interesting air pollution notes:

  • China may have reached peak coal, with its consumption actually falling last year. World energy consumption has been known to fall during recessions, but this is supposedly the first time it has fallen during an economic expansion. The economics of renewables seem to be playing a significant role.
  • Air pollution kills more people worldwide than tobacco.
  • A Chinese documentary about air pollution called “Under the Dome” was seen by 300 million people in less than a week before it was censored in China. The film maker was partly inspired by a rare tumor her daughter developed in the womb that she links back to air pollution.
  • Confusingly, Under the Dome was also the title of a recent Stephen King novel and TV series. In Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, children are dying right and left of emphysema and cancer caused by air pollution. The government is covering it up and keeping people distracted and entertained with reality TV shows.

ocean on Jupiter’s moon

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Here is an article called Vast underground ocean discovered on Jupiter’s largest moon. Somehow they can tell by the way the planet bulges out that there is water underneath the surface.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.

This reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. About half that book is verbal description of an ocean on an alien planet. It doesn’t sound exciting, but I found it fascinating. This is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words, because he describes these fantastical geometric shapes that you can picture in your mind’s eye, and yet they could never actually be drawn. It’s even more amazing that the book was written in Polish, and the version available in English is supposedly an English translation of a French translation of the original. Or maybe that has something to do with why the language is so fascinating. I wish I had a copy to pull out a good quote but I don’t have one at the moment.

what’s new with drugs

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Drugs are not immune from the current wave of seemingly accelerating innovation (from Pacific Standard Magazine):

New psychoactive substances are coming out so quickly that it’s not possible to ban them fast enough to keep up, let alone police or scientifically understand them. When one substance is outlawed, another is born, just chemically distinct enough from the last one to evade its ban…

Not since the 19th century—when an earlier wave of globalization rapidly accelerated the spread of opium, cocaine, marijuana, and hazily defined “patent medicines”—has there been such a burgeoning and unregulated pharmacopeia. And by all indications, the future promises only more acceleration. Last year, a research lab at Stanford demonstrated that it’s possible to produce opioid drugs like morphine using a genetically modified form of baker’s yeast. Soon, even the production of traditional illegal drugs or illicit versions of pharmaceuticals could become a highly decentralized cottage industry, posing the same kind of regulatory challenge that the specter of 3-D printed firearms poses to the project of gun control.

In 2013, the U.N.’s World Drug Report summed up the global situation this way: “The international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon known as new psychoactive substances.” Testifying before Congress that same year, the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi said that his agency could not keep up with “the clandestine chemists and traffickers who quickly and easily replace newly controlled substances with new, non-controlled substances.”

New Zealand is starting to regulate recreational drugs more like food: with labeling, consumer notices, and so on. Sometimes I wonder how long this will stay a mom and pop business – once it’s legal, won’t big drug and chemical companies try to get in on the game? It’s a brave new world.

my vacation reading list

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Here’s my vacation reading list, just in case anyone is interested:

The Fear Index (about a hedge fund running an automated trading algorithm – way more fun to read than it sounds)

Count Zero (the sequel to William Gibson’s Neuromancer – great dystopian technology and artificial intelligence fiction although similar to Neuromancer, he uses a lot of made-up slang, weird sentence structure, and multiple points of view that keep me from getting really absorbed in the book)

Monster Hunter International (what it sounds like – pure escape fiction, basically an updated Ghostbusters with a Walking Dead-like gun fetish, violent but lighthearted)

MaddAdam (the third and final book in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake series)

The original I Am Legend (because why not, I seem to be on a monster kick – if I don’t get to this one, I may save it for around Halloween)

can/should machines run the world?

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From “futureoflife.org“, here is a short excerpt on future directions of artificial intelligence research.

What policies could help increasingly automated societies flourish? For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [12] explore various policies for incentivizing development of labor-intensive sectors and for using AI-generated wealth to support underemployed
populations. What are the pros and cons of interventions such as educational reform, apprenticeship programs, labor-demanding infrastructure projects, and changes to minimum wage law, tax structure, and the social safety net [26]? History provides many examples of subpopulations not needing to work for economic security, ranging from aristocrats in antiquity to many present-day citizens of Qatar. What societal structures and other factors determine whether such populations flourish? Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [34, 19]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could signifi cantly improve the median quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on topics such as the basic income proposal could clarify our options [83, 89].

Please follow the link if you would like to see the references.

Also see The Evitable Conflict, the last story in Asimov’s I, Robot. No, not the Will Smith movie! Just put that out of your head and read the book, it’s short. Anyway, in that story humans have handed control of the global economy over to “Machines”, artificial intelligences which are supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the humans are trying to figure out why not, and whether or not they should try to do anything about it. This story was written in 1950, so it should be in the public domain soon. Another great old story that is in the public domain is Forster’s The Machine Stops. In that story (from 1909!), a machine runs the entire world, and is supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way. Or, it does for awhile, but then the machine… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s free and it’s short, so give it a read!

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

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This post is a must read. I did not expect anything in it. It’s hard to pick a quote because the whole thing is quotable. Anyway:

There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting bacteria that you basically grow on natural gas. And then we can either eat that directly or process it or say, feed it to rats and then eat the rats. Then there’s the bacteria that we can grow directly on wood. Or on leftover mushroom waste. And so this would be taking down a tree, pulverizing it, turning it into a slurry, and then letting the bacteria go at it.

So for instance, there are bacteria that secrete sugars they then use to feed themselves. You can pull out the sugars, and eat those ourselves and leave the bacteria and the partially decaying wood pulp. And we can feed that stuff to other things. So for instance, rats digest wood to some degree, particularly after it is partially broken down that way. This makes a fairly good solution. We could feed something similar to chickens. And chicken is something maybe people would maybe be happier to eat than bacteria milkshakes.

So – we’re going to cut down all the trees, which is going to be hard because they will be frozen. Then we pulp them, feed the pulp to bacteria, then to rats, then eat the rats. Please people, let’s not let it get to this point.

It also reminded me of the yeast vats in The Caves of Steel. Also how certain yeast strains can make wheat beer taste like bananas, even though there are no bananas in there. It has occurred to me before that fungi could be a key to feeding people in a world that was photosynthetically limited for one reason or another.

Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.

The Year of the Flood

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I finally got around to reading The Year of the Flood, the second book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy. And I liked it. I remember not loving the first book, Oryx and Crake. Sometimes whether or not you love a book depends on where you are and what you are doing when you read it. Often, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read a book I loved. And I don’t remember where I was when I read Oryx and Crake, which is a telling sign. However, I remember exactly when I read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl – 2009. And I remember thinking that Margaret Atwood lifted themes directly out of that book, only didn’t use them quite as well, so I guess I read Oryx and Crake after that. And I remember being annoyed that Atwood would not admit that the book was a work of science fiction, and that serious people were reading and positively reviewing the book who thought they were too serious for science fiction. Well, I have news – it was science fiction all along, and not only that, it’s cyberpunk. Well, I’ve decided to forgive all this. I can give her the benefit of the doubt, or else I can decide that she was paying homage to an earlier science fiction master and give her credit for that. As I’ve gotten more into science fiction, I’ve seen that done several times, obviously on purpose, and it seems to be acceptable where it might not be acceptable in another genre. So, I’ve decided since then that both books are pretty good after all, and I plan to read the third book.

In The Year of the Flood, there are themes that seem like they are taken right out of The Hunger Games. I found this interview online where Atwood says she has never heard of The Hunger Games, and forgives the author of The Hunger Games for taking her idea.

Have you had a chance to read or see The Hunger Games? The games are designed for the districts to pay back the Capitol for a past rebellion, via the lives of their children, like the heroine Katniss Everdeen. It seems to be inspired in part by elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and Year of the Flood, especially in terms of the structure of postapocalyptic society, how the disenfranchised are “chosen” for an honor that is anything but …
In kind of a game show? So, basically it’s Painball from Year of the Flood in which people are pitted against other people so other people can watch it on TV? And the origin of that of course is paintball, which is a real thing! It’s always nice to have people see the beauty of one’s ideas. I’m flattered. [Chuckles.] It sounds interesting. Some of these things go way back, mythologically. How did she end up in this position?

Because there’s a lottery, and her sister was chosen, and so she volunteers to take her place.
Shirley Jackson! How old are they?

Between the ages of 11 and 18.
Theseus and the Minotaur! Love it. And so they put these people in a very large area? It’s Painball. Same idea. If you survive, will they let you out?

I don’t want to spoil it too much for you.
That’s okay — I can guess. I haven’t written my third one yet, so whatever’s in it can’t be used in The Hunger Games.

The original Hunger Games novel was released in 2008, and The Year of the Flood in 2009. So it’s plausible that it was a coincidence and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt again. Anyway, maybe she’s right and there are only a certain number of themes and plots out there, and good fiction is all about how you apply them to your characters and your time.

The MaddAdam books present a near-future dystopian society in a very entertaining way, and I was entertained by that. I don’t think I would be giving away too much if I told you there is a collapse of industrialized, urbanized civilization in this story. You find that out in the first few pages of the first book. Then the rest of the story is really about who, how, and why that happened. The first book focuses more on consumer society and dangerous technology in the hands of amoral – in fact immoral – private corporations, while the second mixes that with a bit of climate change, habitat and species loss.

You find out pretty early what actually caused the collapse, but the more interesting part to me, which Margaret hints at but ultimately leaves to our imaginations, is how the society got to the point it was at before the crash. Any sort of representative government seems to be completely absent, but you don’t get the sense that the corporations muscled it aside through any sort of armed means. Maybe they simply starved it of resources to the point where it gave up. The entire society is designed to accumulate wealth and power at the top, but it is a bit of a puzzle how that works. The corporations themselves create new value through their research into the new technologies, but then they have to make the whole society want to buy those things from them. They have to let just enough wealth trickle down to enough people so they can spend the wealth and let it be gathered back up. So there must be a very, very large number of relatively poor people working hard to support the elite few, without realizing they are doing that. I say relatively poor because they can’t be so poor they decide to drop out of the consumer system entirely (as a few people do, which is the focus of the second book.) They can’t realize how poor they are, and they have to have a little bit of income that they can spend on all the things the corporations provide, which is everything – food, shelter, clothing, drugs, even access to reproduction. They have to believe in money, and want to accumulate money, but they have to want the products and services of the corporations so much that they never actually accumulate much money but spend it all. Of course, the corporations are exploiting not just all these people but the natural environment, so at some point that is either going to catch up to them, unless there is an accident or deliberate act to help the process along first…