Book Review: The Pharaoh Key (SPOILERS)

I cannot really discuss this properly without spoilers, so be warned.

As I have pointed out in my reviews of The Lost Island and Beyond the Ice Limit, Gideon Crew novels may not be great literature, but they are about right to have in the background during a long drive.  The Pharaoh Key somewhat conforms to this pattern, but it is a big step down from Beyond the Ice Limit, which is itself a step down from The Lost Island.  I am left with the distinct impression that Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are just milking the franchise for the last few bucks with no respect for the story itself.

One notable feature of The Pharaoh Key is that familiar characters are shown to have personalities that are distinctly uglier than in the earlier novels.  That is not to say that they were saints in the previous novels, but they seemed to be basically people who tried to achieve the right ends, even if their means were often outside the law and frequently ethically objectionable.  Characters that straddle the line between hero and antihero can make for interesting stories, but changes in their characters need to be adequately motivated.

Take, for example, the character Eli Glinn.  He had been shown to be brilliant, but pompous and dangerously overconfident: to have mastered a technique for the predictive study of individual people, but to have trouble with personal relationships, whether with his would-be love interest, Sally Britton, or with his employees and subordinates.  Glinn was self-centered, but (1) he was still haunted by the way he had failed Sally, directly resulting in her death and endangering the whole planet, and (2) he was clearly prepared to take whatever steps were required to undo, to the extent possible, the damage he had caused.  It might be plausible that such a man would want to avoid unpleasant memories, but it is bad writing to have him forget all the lessons he had appeared to have learned about humility, responsibility, and valuing the people around him.  Eli Glinn leaves the story -- both the novel and, apparently, the franchise -- in a way that is simultaneously anticlimactic and an insufficiently motivated reduction of his character to only his most petty attributes.

The problem of behavior without plausible motivation is found with the other recurring characters, too.

For example, Manuel Garza, Glinn's lieutenant, is motivated by a combination of a desire for revenge against Glinn's callous dismissal of the whole staff of Effective Engineering Solutions (Garza included) and by greed, feeling that he has not been properly compensated for the risks he took and the sacrifices he made in pursuit of Glinn's "white whale."  He is also surly, inflexible, and condescending.  And then, at key moments in the story and especially at the story's conclusion, he is almost exactly the opposite:  putting the interests of total strangers above his own and completely immersing himself, with great success, in a culture that was completely alien to him.  Presumably the authors intended this to be a revelation that Garza has both a good side and a bad side, with the good side gradually becoming more prominent as the story progresses and becoming dominant at the end.  Because the changes in behavior are always abrupt and in contradiction to what he has just been doing, though, the actual effect is to make Garza seem to have Multiple Personality Disorder.

As for Gideon Crew himself, his behavior has remained essentially unchanged from the beginning of The Lost Island to the end of The Pharaoh Key -- and that is a major problem.  It might be understandable if Gideon, whose medical condition means that he faces an inevitable, sudden death within a short, predictable time, is less affected than most would be by numerous close calls with death, but he has also lost, to death or otherwise, women he loved in his last few adventuresome years.  Gideon has also seen many strange things that should have shaken his mundane worldview, yet they have not.  Above all, his looming demise might be expected to make him become desperately religious, or explosively antireligious, or depressed, or hedonistic, or Stoic, or in complete denial, or whatever, but at any rate to affect his personality more than the looming deadline for filing taxes.  The absence of noteworthy growth or development of Gideon's character is striking, not only because he is the protagonist of the series but also because he has so much reason to grow and develop.

Gideon's indifference to religion is all the more bizarre given the nature of their discovery.  Briefly, they encounter a tribe of Egyptians that has remained completely unchanged since the reign of Akhenaten.  It is stressed that they are unchanged -- but now they are illiterate, they have never seen the Nile nor express any interest in it, they have no pharaoh and perceive no need for one,  they have no memory of the ancient Egyptian gods, and the religion of Akhenaten has been reduced to an off-the-shelf worship of the sun.  They know of the Arab invasion of Egypt, but show no evidence of having heard of the Ptolemaic rule of Greeks over Egypt, of the Roman conquest, or of the centuries Egypt spent as a Christian nation.  In other words, they are given the name of Egyptians, but they are written as stock characters -- they could just as easily be American Indians or Eskimos or Australian Aborigines for all they retain of Egyptian culture or worldview, the construction of a tomb for the local chieftain and his mummification (which took much longer in the real world than it does in the book) notwithstanding.

The religious legacy of Akhenaten may be mostly lost to them, along with essentially every other aspect of Egyptian culture, but they have remained in the middle of nowhere and carefully guarded their secret valley from outsiders to protect its sealed shrine.  Once again, this part makes very little sense.  They seem to know that the shrine they protect is full of gold and treasure -- or perhaps only that many of the people who find their valley are looking for gold -- but they make no connection between this and the gold and jewels that shower over Garza when his saddle bags rupture, nor does the broken seal and broken-in door to the shrine clue them in.  It is not clear that they even noticed it -- so what kind of guards are they? As for the origin of the gold and jewels, Imogen speculates them to be religious tribute not just from Egypt, but from other nations as well, and our heroes only found the place by decoding a sort of map found in Crete, meaning the secrecy was originally intended to be only relative, not absolute -- yet it seems to have become absolute as soon as the shrine was stuffed full of riches.

But the real treasure of the shrine is interpreted by the rather more politically correct, hyper-competent Bond girl (Imogen Blackburn) who inevitably shows up in a Gideon Crew novel.  The real treasure is, of course, the religious artifact the shrine was built to house:  a sort of early draft of the Ten Commandments.  Only this time, there is an Eleventh Commandment, which, like the Shema Yisrael, might not exactly be a commandment, but more of a revelation of the nature of God or a prophecy, a horrible "truth" that the "world is not yet ready for," but that Imogen reluctantly believes.  She is also convinced that many people, including Eli Glinn (who turns out to be her uncle or something), would also believe it.

Gideon Crew has discovered the Decalogicon, yet it does not much excite his curiosity; he knows he is, if not to be hanged, at least to die in a fortnight, but it does not concentrate his mind at all.  Seriously:  he shows less emotional reaction to and intellectual curiosity in the Decalogicon than many people show towards the crossword puzzle in their newspapers.  Oh well.  At least he gets it right that, however much fluster and buzz it might stir up among "thoughtful commentators", no one would really believe the Decalogicon; they are given no reason to believe it.  We have seen this same sort of thing play out in real life, for example with the "Gospel of Judas": even those who relished the doubt and confusion they imagined it would create doubt in the minds of Christians did not actually believe everything written in this so-called gospel.

Contrary to what the authors seem to believe, real religions give reasons why they should be believed.  These reasons may be

1. historical, such as Belloc's observation regarding the Catholic Church that "no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight", yet the Church has survived, preserving and cautiously developing the doctrines received from the Apostles; 
2. philosophical, however unpopular philosophy is today and however nonspecific a "God of the philosophers" might be;
3. or even miracles. Christianity in particular is based on the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and miracles played an important part in its early spread.  Other religions, particularly Islam and at least some forms of Buddhism, likewise claim to have been spread by miracle-workers.  This has to be taken into account in order to comprehend the self-understanding of a religion, though of course everyone acknowledges that at least some so-called miracles are false.

For most people, however, the reason is simple:  the people (usually their parents) they most admire, and whom they therefore have the most reason to trust, are taken to be "experts" on the moral and metaphysical questions near the heart of religion.  "Expert testimony" is no rigorous proof, but neither is it irrational.

The Lovecraftian version of Atenism discovered by Gideon and crew, however, receives support from none of these directions.  It scarcely did survive a fortnight, as opposed to Judaism or even the sun worship of the natives-straight-out-of-central-casting.  It never produced a Maimonides or Aquinas to clothe it with philosophy.  No miracles are mentioned in its favor; no parents pass it down to their children.  Consequently, it would be rejected for the very rational reason that it failed to meet the burden of proof, not because of an irrational fear of an unpleasant truth.  "Search your feelings; you know it to be true!" may work for Luke Skywalker and Imogen Blackburn, but the vast majority of people would want something more concrete.

Back to Gideon Crew.  The authors try to use the prospect of his death within a matter of weeks to provide urgency, particularly when it comes to the critical decision to loot the shrine and flee back to civilization.  By this point in the story, Garza has begun to go native, and Imogen is appalled at the damage that will inevitably be done to an important archaeological site.  Yes, Gideon has a reason to say, "If we are going to do this at all, we need to do this now," but he has no reason to want to do it at all -- and both Garza and Imogen have reasons not to do it.  Even Gideon's rush to return to modern civilization does not work, because he has no goal of sufficient importance.

• Loved ones? Gideon is an orphan who has tried to avoid actual attachments, since he knows he is dying.  He has no one to return to.
• Comfort?  He left that behind to embark on an adventure in a forbidden, hostile, foreign desert.  
• Wealth?  Garza wants wealth, but Gideon already has enough to last the few weeks still remaining to him, even if he were to live extravagantly.  Gideon has no dependents to provide for.
• Revenge?  Garza also wants revenge against Glinn, but honestly that was achieved simply by conning him.  Gideon is more irked than truly angry.  
• Fame?  Many of Gideon's actions have been illegal, and the only really interesting things he has seen would not be believed.  Nor has Gideon ever shown any interest in fame.
• Curiosity?  Gideon is a physicist, so the desire for knowledge should be one of his key motivations -- yet it is not.  His questions to Imogen regarding the shrine may be accurately characterized as polite indulgences of the Bond girl's interests.

The authors clearly have no idea what to make the Eleventh Commandment, so they cop out and use Lovecraft's excuse for being vague: it is so horrible that merely knowing it would drive a person insane.  In fact, the few hints dropped by the authors are suggestively consistent with Akhenaten = Nyarlathotep (a Lovecraftian character who sometimes takes the appearance of a pharaoh) and Aten = Azathoth (the "blind, idiot god" served by Nyarlathotep).   The main problems with this interpretation are

1. it is hard to see how this would have actually attracted a large body of worshipers, and 
2. more importantly, it is completely inconsistent in tone with the other ten commandments.

The first objection is rather weak, since weird cults are a major feature of the Cthulhu mythos, but the second objection is harder to overcome.

Other possibilities come to mind.  It could, for example, be a prophecy of the Last Judgment, which many people would find frightening; the problem is that this is already a feature of the Abrahamic religions, and most religions, including that of ancient Egypt, have a judgment of the dead.  It could be the revelation that we are all parts of a giant computer simulation, and we are being contacted by our programmer; the problem is that, in terms that would be comprehensible 2300 years ago, that would probably be identical to the "dream of Vishnu."  It could be that the Eleventh Commandment would seem to confirm the truth of an existing religion, and so would be readily accepted by millions while being horrifying to millions more.  None of these possibilities seem so horrible that Imogen would refuse to reveal them to Gideon, though.

Ultimately, it is a problem that the authors do not understand religion at all; they seem to have merely researched it on Wikipedia and concluded that there was nothing more to learn.  Only savages and bit characters have any religion in this series.  The main characters treat religion the way a typical resident of Opelika, Alabama might treat hockey:  "It's not our thing, and it's entirely an arbitrary human creation, but it's an important part of some people's culture, and that's cool."  There are many people who would agree with such a sentiment, but the only way to explain religious indifference being the casually unexamined position of all the scientists and engineers is that (1) the authors do not really know many scientists or engineers and (2) they find it difficult to imagine people with beliefs different than their own.

Let me conclude by considering the impact on world religions that the main characters assume would result from the discovery of a near parallel antecedent to the Ten Commandments (even without an enigmatic Eleventh).  The truth is that the discovery would create a great deal of buzz for a few years, but ultimately it would end up as trivia of only academic interest.  The similarities of some parts of the Code of Hammurabi to the Law of Moses have long been known, as has been the Sumerian Flood Myth.  The similarity in layout of the Tabernacle and the Temple to Canaanite structures is also clear, as is the similarity of the Ark of the Covenant to Egyptian portable shrines.  Metaphorically, it is not necessary for Abrahamic monotheism to invent a new language in order to tell a new story.

Indeed, it is the teaching of Christianity (based on Romans 2:15) that the fundamentals of the moral law are "written on the hearts" of everyone.  C. S. Lewis called this the "Tao" in The Abolition of Man, and J. Budziszewski identified this with a generalized form of the Ten Commandments in What We Can't Not Know.  And of course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all traditionally teach that all humans descend from Adam and Eve, who knew God, and from Noah, who also knew God; which would mean that monotheism was not, as Imogen says, "invented" by Akhenaten, nor even a late revelation, like the Trinitarian aspect of God's nature, but a revelation that dates back to the beginning of our species.  As Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man, 

Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz, of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, "Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!' ... The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into small talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood the priest whispers the final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.

Egypt and Rome

Nobody is fit to be "a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation"; Israel was Nobody; and so it was fitting that God chose Israel for that role.  On the other hand, Everybody has sinned, and sinned grievously, yet Everybody still has some remaining good, and God earnestly desires the salvation of Everybody.  Is there a nationality that can stand in symbolically for Everybody?

The first such nation was surely Egypt. Maybe when the first humans left Africa for Arabia or the Levant, they simply followed the coast, but it seems just as likely that they followed the Nile.  After the Sahara Desert started spreading at the end of the Ice Age, the Nile became all the more important as the best "road" connecting central Africa with the Mediterranean world.  The amount of trade and travel surely waxed and waned, but from a very early date, the Nile Valley was a place where people from different cultures met.  Both Abraham and Jacob left the Levant for Egypt to escape famine; and from the earliest records we have of Egypt, they were trading with neighbors, conquering and being conquered, teaching and learning, always mixing in one way or another with very disparate neighbors.

That's not all.  The Canaanites, among others, practiced human sacrifice, but the Egyptians did not.  Oh, very early on, maybe Pharaohs were buried with some of their slaves, but they quickly moved on to just using pottery figurines instead.  And if you look at what the Egyptians hoped for in the afterlife, it was hunting, fishing, and beer.  I'm not at all kidding -- this is what even the likes of King Tut had on the walls of their tombs.  Compare this with the gravestones of your redneck relatives.  They were a lot more like us than most people realize.  The Egyptians were "good ol' boys."

Bear in mind that Egypt was the refuge for Abraham and Jacob in time of famine; it was the refuge of Jewish refugees from Nebuchadnezzar; it was the refuge of Holy Family when they fled from Herod; and it was the only place outside Jerusalem where a Jewish Temple was constructed.  Egypt represented generic, Gentile humanity at its best.

Even the events of the Exodus have to be read in that light.  Egypt may have been generic humanity at its best, but the fact remains that our best is not good enough.

What about Rome?  Rome became what Egypt had been.  Just read chapter 7 of The Everlasting Man, "The War of the Gods and Demons;" perhaps read 1 Maccabees 8 as well, though "Now Judas heard of the fame of the Romans" does not mean that all the propaganda Judas heard was entirely true.  This also explains Rome's role in the Crucifixion:  those directly responsible for it were (arguably, and by worldly standards) the best of the Jews and the best of the Gentiles, lest we claim that we would have behaved better under similar circumstances.

At the same time, there is a tradition, apparently a rather old one, related to 2 Thessalonians 2:7 --

For the mystery of iniquity already worketh; only that he who now holdeth, do hold, until he be taken out of the way.

The tradition is that "he that now holdeth," restraining the emergence of the Antichrist, is in some sense the Roman Empire.  If this seems strange or even impossible, consider that it has already happened:  in 168 BC Antiochus IV Epiphanes was very literally halted and humiliated in his ambition to invade Egypt by a single Roman senator, Gaius Popillius Laenas.  If, in typology, Antiochus Epiphanes prefigures the Antichrist -- and no knowledgeable Christian denies that point -- then it seems likely that the Roman senator holding him in check also has some deeper meaning.

"Coincidentally", in his letter to the Romans (2:14,15), St. Paul says, 

For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: Who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between themselves accusing, or also defending one another....

Many other writers -- including Chesterton in The Everlasting Man and The Barbarism of Berlin, Lewis in the appendix to The Abolition of Man, and Budziszewski in What We Can't Not Know -- have likewise argued that, in broad terms, there really is only one morality; that we all have consciences aware, however dimly, of one law binding on all humans by virtue of our nature, which is what Natural Law means; and that although no society adheres to this law with absolute fidelity, since we are all sinners, they generally aspire to keep rather close to it, particularly the societies that are able to survive for many generations.

If pagan Rome indeed represents Everybody in the way an Olympic athlete represents his nation -- not as being typical, but as being a champion -- the only meaningful standard by which they could have excelled must be adherence to the standard for Everybody, the Natural Law.  If Rome is also that which restrains the Antichrist, and if it is Rome in this sense, a few things begin to fall into place.  Maybe the "times of the Gentiles" has something to do with the influence of this universal standard, despite the spotty adherence given to it.  Maybe the falling away that precedes the Man of Sin is not a falling away of Christians from specifically Christian doctrine, but a startlingly universal and complete falling away of all humanity from the Natural Law.  Just as the Antichrist will surpass even the likes of Hitler in evil, this falling away from the Natural Law would have to surpass all those before it -- Nazism, the slave trade, human sacrifice in the Americas, all of them.  However, a more profound error does not necessarily (or immediately) require a greater recourse to violence and cruelty.  The fact is that these things are very nearly impossible to imagine, and they will presumably remain so until they take place.  That is a good thing; I do not want to imagine evils worse than those we have already seen.

Trump the Businessman?

I have never been a fan of Donald Trump -- which is not to say that I took no pleasure in the shocked looks on the faces of Hillary Clinton's overconfident supporters on election night.  Trump has spent his whole life in the spotlight, and no one with that kind of record can be called a "conservative", at least as that term was understood in the 1980's; he has more in common with Hugh Hefner than with Ronald Reagan.  I did however accept the claim that Trump was an experienced businessman.  Two observations now make me doubt that very much.

The first observation is of Trump's appointees, or at least the ones with whom he regularly works on important decisions.  A large business will require many specialized skills, and its CEO cannot be expected to master them all.  That is not his job.  He should, however, be able to assemble a team of capable subordinates who work together to achieve the corporation's goals and implement his vision.

For a good example, consider Walt Disney and the creation of Disneyland, or even any of its more important early rides, such as the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean.  The dream and the final say both belonged to Mr. Disney, but he managed to get a number of inspired imagineers to buy into that dream.  The difference between getting talented subordinates to buy in vs merely hiring yes-men cannot be overstated.  A yes-man will not creatively challenge his boss:

• because he was selected for personal loyalty rather than ability, he may lack the necessary expertise to flesh out alternative possibilities;
• it is not necessary even to understand the boss's vision to be a yes-man (though a boss who prefers yes-men may well lack anything coherent enough to be called a vision); and
• the yes-man is motivated by his boss's praise (and by fear of his boss's criticism), not by the success of the project.

Walt Disney did this the right way, and the results speak for themselves.  Can anyone actually claim Donald Trump has chosen his subordinates wisely?  The resignations, the infighting, and the harsh language Trump has unleashed on people he personally selected indeed speak for themselves.  If Trump were a real captain of industry, how could he assemble such a poor staff, and why would he go to such lengths to undermine that staff?

The second observation crystallized a few days ago in the context of recent comments Trump has made about NAFTA negotiations:  he sees trade deals, and apparently most international affairs in general, as zero-sum games, in which one side wins only what the other loses.

Zero sum games can occur in business, of course, as well as in sports and electoral politics, but the particular characteristic of business is that it should produce wealth, making it possible for both sides to win.  In fact, it is not unusual for the success of one's "competition" to be extremely important for one's own success.  For example ...

• It may be that the competition helps increase demand for one's product.  Take Busch Gardens for example.  They would be horrified if they were to hear that the Magic Kingdom were going out of business, even though Walt Disney World is a "competitor".  That's because many people come to central Florida just for Walt Disney World, but while in the area swing by Busch Gardens for a day or two.  Fewer people visiting the Magic Kingdom would mean fewer people visiting Busch Gardens.
• Without competition, a business's suppliers might not be able to continue operations.  Let's say I'm a farmer.  Other farmers might be "competition", but John Deere would not be able to keep making tractors if I were their only customer.

Again, these things should be obvious to any businessman. 

"But," you might object, "international diplomacy is not business per se, and the examples you gave don't exactly apply to the United States."  Fair enough, then, so here are cases at the international level:

• a prosperous Mexico would be better able to afford American goods, and 
• there would be no need (nor desire) to "build a wall" to keep prosperous Mexicans out of the United States.

The case is even more dramatic with regards to Cuba.  The USA has spent decades trying to crush Cuba, even after the fall of Communism in Europe, but the only threat Cuba poses to America is another Mariel Boatlift should Cuba actually collapse politically or economically.  We would have a much better chance of transforming Cuba -- a small, nearby nation with much the same cultural background as ours -- through constructive engagement than we have with China, yet we treat Cuba as though it were the existential threat, not the nuclear-armed, incipient superpower.

It is worth repeating that not every interaction can be made into a win-win situation; it would be naive and dangerous to assume it could.  Yet it is even more naive and dangerous to assume that if our adversaries are losing, we must be winning.  Saddam Hussein definitely lost the "second Gulf war"; but did the United States really win?  A vacuum was created that allowed ISIS to form, and the whole area is still a mess with a very uncertain future.  Has this made America safer, or more respected, or more prosperous?  There is nothing particularly unusual about this example, either; punitive actions based on zero-sum reasoning seem to be counterproductive more often than not.

Sadly, Trump seems to base his whole foreign policy -- to the extent it has any consistent basis -- on the idea that for every loser there is a winner, and vice versa, so other countries must lose so that America can win.  This is not how a real businessman should think.

If Trump was not really the businessman he is portrayed as having been, what was he, exactly?  My guess is that he was like an NFL owner.  The players make the plays that fans come to see; the coaches call the plays; the general manager hires the coaches; the owner ... hires the GM, gives the team some of its general direction, but mostly just sits in his luxury booth and enjoys a feeling of power.  It is helpful if an owner knows the rules of the game, and even more helpful if he knows how to manage subordinates, but neither of these is really essential as long as he allows the GM to make the important decisions while he remains a kind of figurehead.  This leaves the owner with lots of free time to pursue other interests, like hosting a reality TV show or running for office.

Book Review: Beyond the Ice Limit (Audio)

This is the second "Gideon Crew" book I have read, but I happened to start with The Lost Island, which falls in the middle of that series.  It is also the third book by Douglas Preston; he and Lincoln Child coauthored the Gideon Crew series.  Most of the general comments from The Lost Island thus apply to this book as well.  Fortunately, my review of Lost City of the Monkey God is not very relevant -- perhaps because this book is fiction, or perhaps because it does not treat a subject of serious academic interest, or perhaps because it is coauthored, the political posturing is not really present here.  Warning:  Spoilers ahead.

Genuinely original science fiction is hard to come by these days, and you won't really find it here.  Here are some echoes that I heard in this book.

• Human choices can be modeled with great accuracy, from Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series.
• Luckiness is a real attribute of some people, from Larry Niven's Ringworld.
• A plant/animal/?? from outer space eats people and threatens to take over the world, from a lot of places, but Little Shop of Horrors comes to mind.
• An alien tries to communicate with whales, from Star Trek IV.
• Snake-like aliens enter people's heads and control them, again from many possible sources, but most notably from Stargate SG-1.

The originality of the components is not so important as the way they are combined, though.  On that score, this is a decent story.

A few other flaws are worthy of note.

• Everyone agrees that the ship Rolvaag (which occurred in an earlier book, The Ice Limit) was blown apart when the seed came in contact with salt water, resulting in the death of most of the crew.  Everyone also agrees that this is the fault of Eli Glinn, for refusing to drop the seed into the salt water in order to lighten the ship.  Despite the number of geniuses involved, no one notices the obvious conclusion that the explosion would have happened anyway, this time with no one having made it to the lifeboats.
• Since everyone was convinced that the alien was very dangerous, there is no way the initial exploration would have been by manned submersibles a few dozen feet from it.  They come with 5 manned submersibles but only 1 remotely operated vehicle, which they intend to use only to deploy a bomb!  Reversing the numbers would make more sense.  The characters are supposed to be too smart to make this kind of mistake.
• The alien is supposed to harvest brains on planets when it arrives; it enslaves them for "computing power". It is a safe assumption that brains evolved on different planets would have very different structures.  How is an organism that needs other brains intelligent enough to understand, preserve alive, and incorporate brains completely unrelated to it?
• The alien seems to be rather flexible in the size of brains it uses.  Why did it not make use of whale and dolphin brains?
• One of the characters was in the process of deciphering Blue Whale language by comparing whale vocalizations to their circumstances.  The alien is supposed to have done this without being able to sense their circumstances.  That should not be possible, no matter how intelligent the alien might be.
• Conservation of energy seems not to be in play in this universe.
  • The shell of the seed is supposed to be made of a superheavy element (number 177) from the hypothetical "island of stability". Even if this element is truly stable (which is unlikely -- "stability" is a relative term for high-atomic-mass elements), it would be nowhere abundant. The creature would have to expend a huge amount of energy to make enough for millions or billions of seeds, each with a mass of thousands of tons. Where would this energy come from?
  • Contrary to what Eli Glinn suggests, throwing the bulk of a planet's crust into space is not more efficient than throwing only the seeds into space.  Nor is there enough energy available on a planet to disrupt it that way.
  • The "goa'uld" do not eat, but they move energetically.  Where do they get their energy?
• Early in the book, a sex scene is described in more detail than some (myself included) may find comfortable.  The encounter does help drive the plot, but it need not be so explicitly described.

So again, this is not great literature to read.  It has just enough crazy ideas, though, and enough redundancy in exposition to make it a good book to listen to on a long drive.

Book Review: The Lost City of the Monkey God

A few months ago, I finished The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston -- at least, I have reached the point where the main plot line has concluded, and I have no interest in finishing the last few chapters, for reasons I will get into shortly.  It is a mediocre book, which, given the material it had to work with, makes it immensely disappointing.

The book's main flaw is its lack of focus.  It starts off well, being the story of a mysterious, legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras and of the adventurers who contributed to it finally being found.  This part could just as easily have been an Indiana Jones adventure, and when I first bought the CD's to keep my mind occupied during a long drive, I thought it was a fictional work in exactly that genre.

As the book progressed, though, it became all to clear that Preston was more interested in proving himself to be a liberal in good standing than to tell a good story.

Perhaps the least problematic part of Preston flaunting his liberal credential is when he is apologetic for the whole mission as not being sufficiently academic. It's not that academic credentials are unimportant; it's that they are more important in some parts of science than in others.  For example, skilled amateurs have made, and continue to make, many important contributions to astronomy, frequently being the first to spot a comet or nova and often recording the only record of a transient lunar phenomenon.  Amateurs are frequently the ones who find fossils, and indeed objects of archaeological interest; as long as they do not do irreparable harm to the finds, this is a help, not a hindrance, to science.  In all these cases, careful, knowledgeable amateurs give the professionals more "eyes" than they would otherwise have, and they allow the professionals to concentrate their efforts in places where their expertise is truly essential.  Really good scientists understand and acknowledge this.

Stepping up from that is Preston's "sensitivity" to cultural imperialism.  Yes, that is a real thing, but it doesn't really apply here.  In parts of the book, Preston is very "sensitive" to the claims that no, of course what they found was not the legendary "White City" (Ciudad Blanca); that is a myth told by the ignorant, and to claim to have found it is mere exploitative sensationalism, like claiming to have found Atlantis or Camelot.  At other points, Preston is "sensitive" to charges that the expedition really discovered nothing; the natives knew it was there all along, and the legend of Ciudad Blanca proves that.  

But these two extremes obviously contradict each other, and neither of them are exactly true.  Ciudad Blanca is real in the same way Troy is real (discovered by Heinrich Schliemann), the kraken is real (in the form of giant squids), the unicorn is real (it is a distorted description of a rhinoceros), and Santa Clause is real (St. Nicholas of Myra was a real man who lived from AD 270 to AD 343 in what is today Turkey); confusion and fiction do not remove the fact that each of these is "based on a true story."  The locals knew there was something out in the jungle, the works of a great native civilization, and some of them knew where at least parts of it could be found.  However, their story of the curse was at best a dim memory of the disease that arrived in the New World with Europeans (and traveled through it much faster than they did), and the animal behavior at the main archaeological site indicated that no human being of any kind had visited the spot for generations -- possibly since the location was abandoned centuries ago.  So there was a kernel of truth in the folktale, but only a kernel, and archaeology was necessary to learn the full truth.  That is not cultural imperialism; it is not an attempt to shoehorn another people's culture or history into a narrative to serve our own purposes, it is instead simply a matter of trying to learn as much as possible about their culture and history.  That a few self-serving individuals say otherwise is to be expected, but their claims need to be evaluated in the light of reason, not merely affirmed for ideological reasons.

Worse than even this, though, is Preston's shameful display of "white guilt".  

Now let me be quite clear on this.  Yes, the Europeans who came to the Americas did many cruel things to those who were already living here.  But don't be stupid about this:  choose any time and place at random, and you are almost certain to find that at that time and place those with the power to be cruel were in fact being cruel.  We are a species of stinkers.  If the conquistadors were more cruel to the natives of Central America than the other way around, it was only because circumstances gave them certain remarkable advantages, not that the New World was some hippy paradise of pacifists, like FernGully.  Now anyone is right to feel shame for his own misdeeds, and in diminishing proportions for the misdeeds of those with whom he identifies -- those of his family, those of his religion, those of his nation, those of his race.  Race really does come near the very end of any such list; our connections to those with very superficial resemblances to us is very tenuous indeed.  If Preston is Christian (his religion, if any, is unclear), he has better grounds to be ashamed of cruelty by Christians, both because he identifies with them, and because he could claim that Christians, with the benefits of the Gospel and the Sacraments, really should know better.  Naturally, there is no hint whatsoever of that argument.

But that only applies to deliberate cruelty, not to the diseases that were unwittingly spread from one location to another.  When the conquistadors came to the Americas, no one had a decent understanding of disease, as is clear from the fact that European populations would continue to suffer greatly from very preventable diseases.  In particular, the conquistadors had absolutely no reason to believe -- at least until it was too late -- that the natives of the New World would be much, much more vulnerable to diseases common among Europeans.  Nor did they have any reason to want to devastate the Americas; even the most selfish and worldly of them wanted to govern a prosperous territory, not a destitute one in a state of collapse.  Believe the stories about blankets intentionally exposed to smallpox centuries later if you like, but those stories had nothing to do with this first contact.

"No," you may say, "That's not good enough.  What matters is that a civilization was destroyed, not the intentions of those who carried the disease."  I disagree; blaming people, regardless of color, merely for being sick really is reprehensible. If that is still your position, though, you will have to blame Native Americans for the destruction of Ciudad Blanca's civilization.  No white man would penetrate that part of Honduras until long after the pandemic had done its worst; it was instead carried by Native American refugees.

In conclusion, this book is a wasted opportunity.  It could have been about adventure; it could have been about colorful personalities in an exotic location; it could have been about science and history.  It dabbles in each of these, but refuses to concentrate on any one of them; and it ruins even that weak mix with a heavy dose of off-putting virtue signaling.

Presidential Pardons and the Rape of Lucretia

Yesterday, President Trump tweeted, "I have the absolute right to PARDON myself...."  This conclusion seems to be based on the absence of explicit constraints in the first paragraph of Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:  

The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Let's assume Trump is right.  What consequences could this have?

For one thing, it would put is squarely in the bearded-Spock mirror universe.

• Vice President Mike Pence could have Trump assassinated, then (as President) pardon himself and the assassins.
• Speaker of the House Paul Ryan could have Trump and Pence both assassinated, then (as President) pardon himself and the assassins.
• Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch could have all of the above assassinated, then (as President) pardon himself and the assassins.
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could have all of the above assassinated, then (as President) pardon himself and the assassins.
• You get the idea.  It keeps on like this down the order of succession.

On the other hand, the Constitution does not allow a President to pardon impeachments.  This isn't much of a problem really, though, if a President can have the Congress murdered and then pardon himself and the other murderers.

Like most Republicans, Trump claims to respect the original intent of the authors of the Constitution.  Does anyone really think this is what they had in mind?  Bear in mind, these were men who had rebelled against the British king for far less, and who had signed off on the words of the Declaration of Independence:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. 

As importantly, the Founding Fathers knew the story of the Rape of Lucretia, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the king of Rome.  More specifically, and not at all coincidentally, the last king of Rome:  the rape so scandalized the Roman people that they overthrew the monarchy.  The Founding Fathers understood that some outrages cannot be swept under the carpet by clever wordplay by lawyers, because the Romans are not the only people who could cast off a whole system. 

If nothing was explicitly written about this in the Constitution, it is because Rule of Law is a prerequisite for any democracy and for any republic, and any President who lacks the wisdom to know this already would not feel constrained by any mere "scrap of paper".

My grandparents and me at the Gregory House

Here's a picture of my grandparents holding me at Torreya State Park during our family reunion in 1969.  The Gregory House, seen in the background, is the last remaining building from Ocheese Landing, where my ancestor Thomas Cupples Richards moved in 1821.