Set Phasers on Stun

I borrowed Steven Casey's Set Phasers on Stun from Lucky Bob because it sounded interesting and Lucky wrote a good review. I did the borrowing back in... oh, December. Really. It's been on the sidebar a long time, huh?

Well, I made the mistake of setting the book by the bed as a little before-bed reading. Unfortunately, though it's interesting, it gave me kafka dreams if I read it right before bed. I mean, the whole book is about situations where there was a small error in engineering--generally, where a product was designed without the end-user in mind--and sadly most of these ended in tragedy, one life or many. Not the best bedside reading.

So I read almost all of it in the last couple weeks not at bedtime, and it was much better. It's a very interesting book, and I can see why it was a textbook for an engineering design class. Now I just have to figure out how to get it back to its rightful owner.

Resurrection, Inc.

Smittygirl's best friend recommended this book to me, and although it's not normally my genre I always like reading other peoples' favorite books (and I'll lend anybody copies of my favorite books if they want). The book is out of print now but if you click on the cover you'll be taken to BN.com's used book area. At least that's what supposed to happen. Anyway, on to the review!
Having just read Fierce Invalids, I caught something interesting in this book that I might not have picked up on otherwise.

Switters, our fearless hero from Fierce Invalids, has this idea that government and industry combine to keep the great mass of people entertained by meaningless garbage--Jessica Simpson, movie box office totals, the latest tawdry Hollywood affair, sports stars using steroids, even politics presented purely as a horse race--because it keeps them from getting curious about anything else, keeps them too happily occupied to ask questions about what the government or corporations are doing. Thus they can do what they want without much inquiry from thinking people.

The antihero of Resurrection, Inc., Francois Nathans, believes he is setting humanity free by creating undead Servants to fill menial tasks--and finds out that the majority of people set free in such a manner are bored, incurious about government or industry or, indeed, anything at all. Nathans had hoped they would take up the arts, sciences, anything--give in to natural human curiousity. Instead, they didn't--and Nathans sets out to eliminate them once and for all.

What an interesting perspective. Is Switters right, that without constant entertainment people would actually ask questions about the world around them? I like to think he is--curiosity and a desire to learn are hallmarks of humanity. But what if Kevin Anderson, the author of Resurrection, Inc., is right? What if, deprived not only of constant entertainment but of menial work, many people would just sit bored, turn to crime or riots not out of a need to support themselves but simply because they can't think of anything else to do?

One of the books on my reading list is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, one of many futurist books set in a post-scarcity world, where the only things that are hard to come by are good seats in restaurants and short lines at theme parks. Post-scarcity worlds have been treated before by science fiction writers (see the Culture cycle by Iain Banks, the Queendom of Sol by Wil McCarthy, and E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, though I haven't read any of these; even The Matrix is a sort of post-scarcity society, at least for the machines that control the place), and occasionally there are looks at the world as it struggles to get to that post-scarcity plain. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson shows a society approaching post-scarcity. And Resurrection, Inc. shows one man's attempt to push society in that direction.

Writers are divided on whether post-scarcity is good or not (in Riders of the Purple Wage, Philip Jose Farmer notes that artists, though they are the toast of society, often run out of inspiration for their art because the society is free of conflict). Francois Nathans seems to have believed it would be great. Though his Servant revolution (Servants are recently deceased people who's bodies are preserved and implanted with microprocessors and synthetic fluids to allow to function as androids would--except androids are prohibitively expensive and there's an endless supply of the dead) would not have ushered in true post-scarcity economics, he did create the means for vast improvements in efficiency in most industries and commerce, meaning many people lost their jobs but were supported by bouyant governments and welfare (presumably in turn supported by immensely more profitable industry). Nathans and his company (Resurrection, Inc., of course) might have started the machinery of the post-scarcity age to come.

But what happens when nothing is scarce and thus no one needs to work? In Resurrection, Inc., we see that a lot of people don't even bother to get up in the morning. A version of online gaming (the book was written in 1988 so MUDs existed at the time, but Anderson still made a good guess at where multiplayer online games were headed) occupies many people, and others simply sit around, bored, start riots, or turn to petty crime. In the world of Resurrection, Inc., scarcity matters--without it, people's live become meaningless.

I suppose this is the danger of defining yourself through your work--when you have no work, you have no self-definition, either. Though I doubt that was Anderson's goal in telling this story.

Indeed, this is a pretty ripping yarn all the way through, and I haven't even mentioned any of the main plot points. Bear in mind I referred to Francois Nathans as the antihero--because he's certainly no hero. After all, as wonderful as Servants may be, even if the people they freed from work found constructive things to do, everything wouldn't be quite hunky-dory, now would it? What if, through a quirk of the resurrection process, some Servants retained the memories of their previous life... and death?

Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Good book. You'll probably find it a well-stocked local library.

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Verbose, aimless, disorganized, overstuffed, and incredibly delightful. There's just so much going on in Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates it's impossible not to like it. My review follows the jump.

If I wanted to, of course, I could find plenty of things wrong with it. Robbins just loves his big words, almost abuses vocabulary. And with a lot of other authors (myself included, probably), that just gets annoying. Here it's generally a pleasure, only occasionally a bother. The book seems barely contained, asides and tangents spring up amid the fertile soil of Robbins' pen and wither on the ground, leaving the reader lost in the garden and desperately trying to catch up. Again, this sort of thing could be annoying, but here... here, it's not.

I've never read Tom Robbins before. I think his best-known work would be Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, which was made into a movie a few years ago. But that book is from another era; Fierce Invalids was written in the late 90's and the world of its main character is clearly recognizable. I had a great time and I'm going to go out looking for his most recent novel, Villa Incognito, but that doesn't mean I'd recommend this book to everyone.

Robbins breaks the fourth wall. He does so in the fourth chapter quite blatantly, and occasionally throughout, though most noticeably (and, I'm afraid, distractingly), right towards the end, and the beginning of Part 4. The book veers dangerously close, at times, to polemic, as Robbins (through his character and mouthpiece, Switters) decries the state of everything, from American society (controlled by a government and corporations that want everyone kept dimwitted and incurious) and foreign policy to organized religion and the nature of life itself.

This could get tedious if readers aren't receptive to this sort of thing. If, for example, you would be offended by Switters' assertion late in the book that "terrorism is the only rational response to American foreign policy," there will be plenty of other things in here you will be so annoyed by that you won't enjoy the book. If, on the other hand, you could care less what Switters thinks about foreign policy (being a fictional character, after all), or you agree with him, then you'll enjoy it.

There's no question but that Robbins' phrases are wonderful. In this one book you'll come across so many fascinating new metaphors you'll wonder why anyone ever resorts to cliche (well, not everyone is blessed with so fecund a mind as Mr. Robbins). Read it for the words, for the joy of reading, as much as anything.

But it's actually about something, too. And that's where it gets fun. Our hero, Switters, is a man of contrast, of inner contradictions--as, says Robbins, are we all. But unlike most of us, Switters is not concerned about taking one side in his inner life. He takes both. He loves his 16-year-old virgin stepsister, and a 46-year-old nun at the same time. And even to the last page he's trying to figure out how to have them both. Switters' message to is to embrace our inner contradictions, for to do otherwise is a betrayal of both our beliefs and ourselves. At one point he points out that being willing to lie to protect a belief is just one step away from being willing to kill for the same purpose. And much, if not all, of the world's suffering has stemmed from that very evil. Better to embrace our own inner contradictions first, thus be ready to accept the contradictions thrust upon us and our beliefs by the outside world.

All this is somewhat lost in the mysterious coda, however. The last several paragraphs take Switters to Thailand, and while I don't suppose they detract from Switters' character or our understanding, I don't see how they add anything to the story. Oh well. Nothing, and no one, is perfect.