Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Far­ava­har, a sym­bol of Zoroas­tri­an­ism, at Persepolis.

I’ve been read­ing some things, such as this book, about Per­sian reli­gion before Islam. What fol­lows is based as much on Paul Kriwaczek’s In Search of Zarathus­tra [item 15183] as on this book, as well as on ear­lier read­ing [Mary Boyce Zoroas­tri­ans: Their Reli­gious Beliefs and Prac­tices; M. J. Ver­maseren Mithras, the Secret God, the Zoroas­trian scrip­tures, and many books on ancient Per­sia and on the dual­ist Chris­t­ian here­sies of the mid­dle ages. The more I look at it, the more I’m con­vinced that an under­stand­ing of ancient Per­sian his­tory is essen­tial to putting togeth­er an intel­li­gi­ble pic­ture of the ancient world. The more I read about the Zoroas­trian tra­di­tion, the more I come to see it as smack dab in the cen­ter of a con­tin­uum of cul­ture between India and Mediter­ranean. I was look­ing for evi­dence of con­sular insti­tu­tions, either in reli­gious or sec­u­lar bod­ies, but the evi­dence is too frag­men­tary and ambigu­ous to per­mit any secure state­ments. This dri­ves me crazy, because just one or two clear-cut exam­ples would but­tress my instinc­tive belief that urban and trib­al con­sular insti­tu­tions oper­ated in pret­ty much the same way across the con­tin­uum. In oth­er words, thou­sands of name­less and for­got­ten “republics”, con­fed­era­cies, oli­garchies and monar­chies strug­gling with the same issues as the Indi­an and Greek ones, scat­tered every­where. But how to prove it, when only two regions pro­vide us with any kind of doc­u­men­ta­tion? You can’t infer it from the archae­ol­o­gy. Read more »

15137. (David Dem­chuk) Touch: A Play for Two [play]
15138. (H. Joseph Hebert) Tens of Thou­sands of U.S. Bridges Rat­ed Defi­cient; Repair Costs
. . . . . Esti­mat­ed in the Bil­lions [arti­cle]
15139. (Nor­man F. Can­tor) The Last Knight: The Twi­light of the Mid­dle Ages and the Birth
. . . . . of the Mod­ern Era
15140. (Jonathan Steele) Good News from Bagh­dad at Last: the Oil Law has Stalled [arti­cle]
15141. (John Foot) The Ren­di­tion of Abu Omar [arti­cle]
15142. (Andy Grif­fith) The Day My Butt Went Psycho!
15143. (Robert A. Hein­lein & Spi­der Robin­son) Vari­able Star
Read more »

This short and enter­tain­ing account of life in four­teenth cen­tury Eng­land and France uses the life of John of Gaunt to illus­trate its themes. Can­tor is opin­ion­ated. He likes to make analo­gies with today’s social insti­tu­tions, pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture, and movies. This makes the book feel “unschol­arly”, but it comes clos­er to the actu­al con­ver­sa­tions that his­to­ri­ans are like­ly to hold while dis­cussing John of Gaunt in a pub. It”s the sort of book that should be read by a few friends one evening, then dis­cussed over beer the next.

There are two atti­tudes that one can hold about a dis­tant time. One is that “the past is a for­eign coun­try” — that we can’t real­ly put our­selves in the shoes of four­teenth cen­tury peo­ple, because their expe­ri­ence was fun­da­men­tally alien to our own. The oth­er is that the past is com­pre­hen­si­ble to us psy­cho­log­i­cally, if our inter­pre­ta­tions are based on com­mon sense, because human nature and char­ac­ter remain con­stants. Things in our own expe­ri­ence will present them­selves as clar­i­fy­ing par­al­lels. Can­tor is inclined to this last atti­tude, and so am I. I was not very sur­prised to learn that Can­tor is not the usu­al Oxford don, but the son of a Man­i­toba ranch­er. An ear­lier book of his, which I great­ly enjoyed, exam­ined the per­sonal expe­ri­ences and atti­tudes of sev­eral twen­ti­eth cen­tury his­to­ri­ans who inter­preted the Mid­dle Ages (Invent­ing the Mid­dle Ages, 1992).

At the 2003 World Sci­ence Fic­tion Con­ven­tion in Toron­to, it was revealed that an out­line exist­ed for a nov­el that Robert Hein­lein had cho­sen not to write. The out­line, pre­pared in 1955, was detailed. It cried out to be com­pleted, and vet­eran sci­ence fic­tion writer Spi­der Robin­son was assigned the task. Vari­able Star, is the result.

I think that sci­ence fic­tion is in the mid­dle of a process of self-destruc­tion. While the glob­al read­ing pop­u­la­tion has been expand­ing, the sci­ence fic­tion shelves in the book­stores have been shrink­ing. It is now almost impos­si­ble for a new writer to break into the field, and edi­to­r­ial poli­cies are increas­ingly con­ser­v­a­tive and for­mu­laic. At the same time, there’s a per­va­sive recy­cling of old mate­r­ial. One of the most annoy­ing activ­i­ties is the pub­li­ca­tion of end­less sequels to old works, some­times writ­ten by oth­ers after the death of the author, or works “set in the uni­verse of” an estab­lished clas­sic. Baroque styl­is­tic con­vo­lu­tions are pre­ferred. We have entered a kind of Hel­lenis­tic Alexan­dria, where the dead out­rank the liv­ing and clev­er­ness con­sists of say­ing what has been said before, only in a more con­fus­ing and duller way. Read more »

15105. (Joseph-Charles Taché) Des provinces de l’Amérique du Nord et d’une union fédérale 
(Stephen Lea­cock) Non­sense Novels:
. . . . 15106. (Ross Behar­riell) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15107. (Stephen Lea­cock) Author’s Pref­ace [pref­ace]
. . . . 15108. [2] (Stephen Lea­cock) Mad­dened by Mystery:or the Defec­tive Detec­tive [sto­ry] Read more »

As the num­bers in brack­ets indi­cates, I’ve read all the sto­ries in this book sev­eral times. I read Cord­wainer Smith when­ever I want to be remind­ed of what Sci­ence Fic­tion once was: a field in which intel­lect, imag­i­na­tion, and artis­tic integri­ty com­bined to tran­scend the lim­i­ta­tions of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. Nobody was bet­ter equipped to think uncon­ven­tion­ally than was “Cord­wainer Smith”, who was real­ly Paul Myron Antho­ny Linebarg­er. Amer­i­can born, but raised in Chi­na (where he was known as 林白楽 [Lin Bai-lo] ), France and Ger­many, Linebarg­er was at var­i­ous times a spy, expert in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare, aca­d­e­mic, and advis­er to the White House on Asian affairs (though refus­ing to be involved in the Viet­nam War). He was, odd as it seems, Sun Yat-sen’s god­son, and nego­ti­ated inter­na­tional treaties when he was teenag­er. Yet his iden­tity remained a secret to the sci­ence fic­tion com­mu­nity when his sto­ries appeared in the magazines.

The sto­ries he wrote were far in advance of their time. In 1945, these words appeared at the begin­ning of “Scan­ners Live In Vain”: Mar­tel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. Read more »

This fas­ci­nat­ing book dates from 1989, when the Gay Rights move­ment was in con­fu­sion and trans­for­ma­tion. The authors, who came from a back­ground of neu­ropsy­chol­ogy and math­e­mat­ics (Kirk), pub­lic rela­tions and adver­tis­ing (Mad­sen), where among the minor­ity of gay intel­lec­tu­als who felt that the stag­na­tion that their cause had suf­fered dur­ing the resur­gence of reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism in the U.S. owed more to flaws and fail­ures in the gay com­mu­nity than to the strength of its ene­mies. They felt that there was a clear­ly trod­den path by which despised minori­ties had his­tor­i­cally won a place in Amer­i­can soci­ety, and that their gen­er­a­tion of gay activists had failed to fol­low that path, and become their own worst ene­mies. In ret­ro­spect, much of their argu­ment now seems com­mon sense. Con­sid­er­able progress has been made in this area (though much more in Cana­da than in the Unit­ed States), and it has been made large­ly by the growth of a new mind­set among gays. Kirk and Mad­sen pre­saged this new mind­set. Read more »

This is a minor work by Jules Verne, but it enter­tained me great­ly because it’s set in Tran­syl­va­nia, where I have just been hik­ing and tour­ing. In fact, the main action takes place pre­cisely in the place I was explor­ing on foot with my friend Isaac White ― the moun­tains of Hune­doara. Here he places a mys­te­ri­ous cas­tle, and a mad sci­en­tist who has invent­ed tele­vi­sion. The book was writ­ten in 1893, and counts as one of the first fic­tional spec­u­la­tions on this idea that did not involve the super­nat­ural. How­ever, the sto­ry is pedes­trian by Verne’s stan­dards, and con­sists most­ly of dis­ser­ta­tions on the flo­ra, fau­na, geol­ogy, and his­tory of the region, in the style that Verne fell back on when he wrote on autopilot.

illus­tra­tions by
Léon Benett

James Gunn was writ­ing “hard sci­ence fic­tion” in the 1950’s, and was in some ways the pre­cur­sor of peo­ple like Ben Bova and Lar­ry Niv­en. The con­nected sto­ries in this book are Gunn’s attempt to envi­sion the con­struc­tion of an orbit­ing space sta­tion, at a time when “seri­ous” sci­en­tists still dis­missed talk of space explo­ration as mere fan­tasy. Unlike many who had writ­ten sto­ries in which eccen­tric sci­en­tists built space ships in their back yards, Gunn under­stood that such a project would require engi­neer­ing and financ­ing on a mam­moth scale, and would involve polit­i­cal com­plex­i­ties. The sto­ries are quaint, now, but will inter­est any­one who reads fic­tion with a his­tor­i­cal perspective.

con­tents:

15119. (James E. Gunn) The Cave of Night [sto­ry]
15120. (James E. Gunn) Hoax [sto­ry]
15121. (James E. Gunn) The Big Wheel [sto­ry]
15122. (James E. Gunn) Pow­der Keg [sto­ry]
15123. (James E. Gunn) Space Is a Lone­ly Place [sto­ry]