Book Review

David Brin, Existence (Tor, 2012)

Its been too long since I immersed myself in a big science fiction novel where world-building and ideas hold sway, prompting me to think big thoughts and muse about the fundamental purposes of human life.  David Brin’s novels and short stories have often provoked those emotions in me, an example of the sense of wonder that is so key to good science fiction.  I have read most of his novels and two of his non-fiction books and enjoyed reading his most recent novel, Existence (Tor, 2012) (ebook).

This is a long novel (I estimate 300,000 words), a sprawling epic, scientifically-grounded and optimistic, similar in scope and intent to his 1990 novel Earth (ebook)  A large cast of characters and events occur over the course of the next hundred years or so, though the exact time frame is only vaguely described.  The plot centers around the discovery of large crystals which contain the virtual remains of extinct aliens.  Brin imagines a world with virtual overlays, instant information, a rapid rate of change, and human civilization striving to make the right decisions and avoid possible civilization-ending traps.  As is common with his writing, he focuses on themes of how alien civilizations might evolve, humans adding other intelligent species to our planet by genetically modifying dolphins and chimpanzees, and issues about privacy, transparency, and how political power works.

His characterization is good, particularly in showing how people can get excited about science.  His portrayal of autistic people, as a type of new human with different capabilities, is intriguing and heartfelt.  One character is obviously based on the late Michael Chrichton, well-known for his thrillers based on science gone wrong.  For Brin, the greatest human traits are curiosity, problem-solving, and diversity.

Brin ends the Afterword of the book with an ode to humans, decrying the idea that humans are a pox on the environment.

We aren’t a curse upon the world.  We are her new eyes.  Her brain, testes, ovaries . . . her ambition and her heart.  Her voice.  So sing. (556)

While it is not a popular idea among some circles, I personally believe that humans are the culmination of life on Earth and give the Earth meaning.  In the best science fiction, we see these ideas discussed and dissected, a useful activity for all of us, because these issues will someday become burning issues of the present day.

Posted: 16 November 2013

Review of H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, 2000)

I have always been fascinated by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).  This was probably initially prompted by seeing the Disney short film, Ben and Me, as a child, where it is revealed that a mouse really developed all the inventions of the great man.  I even used Franklin as a minor character in my ‘secret history’ science fiction novel, Anasazi Exile.  Recently, I read that Franklin had written an essay on the future American population of colonial Pennsylvania, in which he described how the availability of land and early marriage was leading to a faster increase in white population for the colony than in Europe.  This essay was read by Thomas Malthus, who later wrote his famous “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798.  Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who both discovered the theory of natural selection, were directly inspired by Malthus’ essay.  In terms of intellectual history, we can trace a direct line from Franklin to Malthus to Darwin to the modern theory of biological evolution.  Once again, I found Franklin to be a fascinating man, so I read H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, 2000).

Franklin was truly a polymath.  He was a self-made man as a printer, an accomplished writer and humorist, founder of numerous public services like a fire department and library, postmaster for both the colonies and the new nation, an effective politician, the ambassador who encouraged France to support the American Revolution, and a scientist with many varied interests.  His education came from voracious and wide reading.  These accomplishments were built upon a physically strong and robust body, which he nurtured with regular swimming as a youth.  He followed a strict diet, though that did not prevent him from suffering from gout in his old age.  Franklin was rarely limited by sickness and his long life of eighty-four years allowed him to even greater impact.  Oddly enough, for a man of so many skills, he was not a powerful public speaker.  He often wrote his speeches and then had someone else deliver them.  He also confessed in his autobiography that he had a weakness for consorting with “low women.”  His first child was illegitimate, raised by his wife, who he married at about the time that the child was born.  The real mother is unknown.  That child later became the Royal Governor of New Jersey and remained loyal to the king during the American Revolution.  He tried to reconcile with his father after the war, but the older man could not find it in his heart to forgive his son and they never saw each other ever again.

Franklin’s research on electricity is most commonly known through his kite experiment with lightning.  Some scholars have doubted that this was anything more than a thought experiment, because the effort itself will usually lead to either death or severe injury.  His research in electricity made him a celebrity in Europe among the educated who were fascinated by science.  He used that social status as a tool to promote the cause of the colonies.  He also did research on many other scientific topics, such as the Gulf Stream.  His numerous inventions included the lightning rod, a more efficient stove, and a musical instrument, the glass harmonica.  He was a true scientist who studied what was already known on a topic, conducted his own experiments or observations, speculated on what he had found, and strove to divine the deeper rules of nature.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin is an excellent book, very readable, well researched, and it is not surprising that it was a  2001 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography or Autobiography.   Aptly named, because through the narrative we see Franklin gradually move from being an Englishman loyal to his king and country, to becoming an ardent believer that the English Parliament itself was corrupt and had betrayed the ideals of what it meant to be English, and that the American colonies needed to break away from crown and country in order to truly fulfill what it meant to be an enlightened nation of liberty.  Franklin had become the ‘First American.’

Posted: 27 August 2013

Review of John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

A colleague recommended this book, which he uses as his first text in a course on American military history.  The book was fascinating and disturbing, always a good thought-provoking combination.  The American War of War is a phrase coined by the late historian Russell F. Weigley to describe how the United States Army developed a tradition in which they fought wars of total victory and sought to decisively defeat enemy forces rather than fight wars of attrition.  While Weigley’s thesis has merit, explaining American thinking about regular wars, he ignored irregular wars, or what was called petite guerre or little wars.  In his book, Grenier argues that a tradition of irregular warfare characterized the first two centuries of American history and the Weigley completely ignored this earlier form of war.  This lack of consideration is not surprising, since professional soldiers have often abhorred irregular warfare, which is messy by nature, morally ambiguous, and often more savage than regular warfare.

Grenier’s description of early American warmaking was everything that “professional soldiers supposably abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlement for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.” (5)  These earlier wars were not fought by professional soldiers, but by citizen soldiers, the militia.  This first way of war was an effective way to either eliminate or subjugate the Indians who originally controlled the land that settlers desired.  Early Americans also developed the practice of turning backwoodsmen into rangers in order to fight irregular wars, so that they could compete on equal terms with the Indians.  The early Americans also adopted the practice of scalping.

I was shocked to learn that colonial legislatures would offer cash bounties for scalps during times of war.  While the practice of scalping may have been learned from the Indians, the Americans put the practice to different uses.  For the Indians, a scalp was a trophy showing the counting of coup, a mark of honor showing a warrior’s skills.  While Indians sometimes fought wars of elimination, they usually fought such extreme wars with a goal of absorbing their enemies into their own tribe or nation.  The colonists, driven by fear that the Indians may attack at any time, wanted the greater sense of security that came from totally eliminating the Indians as a threat.  The legislatures paid enough money for scalps that it made sense for non-militia men to freelance and kill Indians for their scalps.  This was a form of privateering on land, instead of at sea.  Even more shocking was that sometimes the scalping bounties were paid out for any scalp, whether man, woman, or child; at least once, the scalp bounties were even paid out based on age and gender, with men’s scalps worth more than a woman’s or child’s.  My skeptical frame of mind wondered how you would tell the difference between the scalps of a man or woman, other than by hair decorations.  During times of war with the French, bounties were also offered for French scalps, and the French offered the same type of bounties to their Indian allies for British or American scalps.

Grenier does not use the word genocide, which would have been appropriate at times, but that word has been so overused for so many different ideological agendas, that its use is problematic.  He uses the older term, extirpation, which was used at the time by the colonists.  The word implies the goal of eliminating the ability of the Indians to live near the colonists by not only killing them, but also by burning their homes and destroying their crops.  If the Indians fled for safety by moving further west, that was just as satisfactory as having killed them.  When Indian-settler wars broke out, Indian warriors bands and groups of white rangers roamed the frontier, attacking individuals, homesteads, or small groups.  This type of warfare induced terror among civilians and the frontier rapidly became a no-man’s land as white settlers and Indians both fled to find safety.

While Grenier’s book only covers up to 1814, after which the regular army came to dominate the military narrative of the United States, he briefly speculates that the first war of war occasionally returned during the later wars against Indians in the American west, the Civil War, the strategic bombing campaigns during World War II, and during the Vietnam War.  In each of these wars, noncombatants became legitimate targets, which we now call “collateral damage.”

Posted: 25 August 2013