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.

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.

The Scotts Ferry / Dead Lakes People

In my earlier post about James Richards, I thought about including the fact that Scotts Ferry, which is only about twenty miles from the Richards blockhouse, was founded by an American Indian named Jacob Scott and for many years was largely an Indian settlement.  However, it seems that only a few families had moved to that spot by 1849, which is when James Richards died, so this provides little evidence of him peacefully coexisting with Indians after the massacres.  It might seem a little surprising to have Indians move into the area so soon after a war fought over the Removal Act, but the difference seems to be that the newcomers did not try to maintain their own laws and political independence.

Honestly, this whole dimension of the story of Scotts Ferry came as a complete surprise to me.  My parents were married in the Methodist church at Scotts Ferry, and the churchyard is full of my relatives, including my grandfather and grandmother on my mom's side, but I never heard a whisper about the town being founded by an Indian.  Nor was there anything about this in any of the Florida history classes I took as a schoolboy -- classes that, in retrospect, were remarkably lacking in the sort of local information that might have made them "come alive".

The reason appears to be that none of my elders knew that Scotts Ferry was founded by an Indian.  The Jim Crow laws had tended to isolate the different racial communities from each other, and about the time those laws disappeared, the Indians largely dispersed to other parts of the country.  There was a real risk of this chapter of history being lost.

Fortunately, Christopher Scott Sewell and Steven Pony Hill have collected a good portion of this history into The Indians of North Florida: From Carolina to Florida, the Story of the Survival of a Distinct American Indian Community.  My only complaint is that the book suffers from some of the same problems as certain of the historical books of the Bible; lists of unfamiliar and difficult-to-pronounce names can interrupt the flow and distract the reader from the main point of the story.  It is definitely important to preserve the names, but I wonder if some reorganization of the material might have kept a tighter focus that would leave readers wanting to know all the details.  Perhaps some information should have been moved to an appendix or end notes.  Fortunately, the authors have also put up a web page dealing specifically with the history of Scotts Ferry, and gives a much more succinct picture.

As is so often the case with history, it is not a pretty picture, showing the inexcusable discrimination that was entrenched in laws and attitudes and that had much more serious consequences than determining where one sat on a bus or what water fountain one used.  I've known for a long time that there never really was a golden age and that the New Jerusalem will only descend from Heaven at the end of time, but I can't help still being disappointed to discover again and again that we humans have always been a pretty sorry lot.

Book Review: The Lost Island (Audio)

The full name is The Lost Island:  A Gideon Crew Novel, by Douglas Preston, and unlike the The Amber Room, which I reviewed some time back, it is a nearly perfect fiction audio book for listening to on a trip.  Normally I prefer non-fiction historical books, like The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II or The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, but it is getting harder for me to find the kind I am looking for in stores.  I took a chance with The Lost Island in part because it was on sale.

The Lost Island is not great literature, but it is nearly perfect for listening to on a drive.  When I say it is not great literature, I mean both that it has actual flaws and also that it is not the sort of thing that would appeal to a certain kind of literary snob.  Its actual flaws are basically three in number:

1. The characters are a bit too superlative.  The main character, for example, is a former physics researcher at Los Alamos.  It's nice to see that the physicist is not treated as a clueless dweeb, as so often happens in fiction, but on the other hand there is nothing about his character which betrays him as a physicist.  Gideon Crew is actually more of a con man than a physicist; he spends a lot of time figuring out how to make people do things for him, but he really never spends any time wondering how something works.  So he's a former physicist, an accomplished thief and con-man, a gourmet chef, etc.  All the characters are like this, which can only partially be compensated for by the fact that they have been intentionally recruited for their skills.
2. Even taking into account the superlative characters, there are still at least 5 moments in the book when the odds of survival were less than 50%.  An amazing run of good luck is something of a distraction.
3. There are too many wildly improbable, basically unrelated science-fiction elements for this to be a great book for reading, though it still works fine for listening while driving.  I'll try to avoid saying too much more, in case someone wants to read the book.

As for the "great literature" angle, well, I take "great literature" with a grain of salt.  I think a lot of the claims are meant to create the impression that the person making the claim is so well-educated and sophisticated, when in fact that person has merely found out what is popular in the group with which he identifies.  Also, I think we tend to exaggerate the literary quality of books which reflect our own worldview.  Certainly Catholics these days seem to vastly overstate the profundity of Tolkien, who was a Catholic and who is currently popular but who was neither one the world's greatest writers nor a Doctor of the Church.

But a great work of literature may not be a great audio book.  The Bible is great literature, as well as the inspired Word of God, but it is terrible as an audio book.  I know, because I have tried several times to listen to it as an audio book.  The pace is too fast and too linear when played on CD; to treat the Bible seriously, some time for reflection and for skipping around for comparison with other passages is necessary.  A good audio book for a long drive cannot require one's entire attention.

So what about The Lost Island?  Without giving too much away, its title is an homage to The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, and it has a few similarities to that novel.  I would say it is closer in style and content to some of the books by H. Rider Haggard, such as King Solomon's Mines and She: A History of Adventure.  Since it starts with Gideon being asked to steal a page from the Book of Kells, I was afraid it would be a shoddy rip-off of the already shoddy Da Vinci Code, but rest assured it is not.

In summary, this was a fun, extravagant yarn that can help keep you from getting bored on a long trip but that does not demand close concentration.  I strongly recommend it for any long drive.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention another stunning problem.  At the climax of the book, a catastrophe occurs as the result of the actions of the characters.  However, for this catastrophe to have been possible at all, it would have been possible for natural causes to have triggered it, and it is a virtual certainty that they would have long before Gideon and the others ever saw the island.  This flaw is hard to overlook precisely because of its importance to the overall plot.

String Theory: Did God Have Any Choice?

I am reminded of this question by the opening chapter of a book I have just started reading: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin.  Smolin, who is skeptical of string theory, has justified criticisms about the extent to which string theory has monopolized particle physics and the over-exuberance of some of the proponents of the theory's proponents.  He does not quote them asking, "Did God have any choice?" but it actually has been suggested by some enthusiasts that no, God did not have any choice; no other laws for the universe were possible.

You don't have to be either a physicist or a theologian to see that this is poppycock.  We can imagine all kinds of laws that might govern the universe.  We do this not only in scientific conjecture, but also whenever we write books of fantasy or science fiction.

Not only does such a suggestion both border on blasphemy and also contradict the everyday experience of telling, hearing, and reading stories, it perpetuates the idea that modern physics advances very much like it did in ancient Greece:  scientists sit around and tell stories, and whoever tells the best story "wins".  This completely obscures the fact that physics is an intrinsically experimental science.  The literature is full of elegant theories that nevertheless are contradicted by experiment, and Mother Nature always gets the last word.  Of course, the most damage was done by Albert Einstein, who really did think his theory was so beautiful that it must be true; so far, Mother Nature seems to agree.

In reality, the situation is not that bad.  The best book I have finished on string theory and why it is appealing is Out of This World: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics by Stephen Webb.  Webb's book makes it clear that the "inevitability" of string theory is a conjecture (not proved) that is constrained by the known symmetries of the gravitational, strong nuclear, and electroweak forces, together with a dash of aesthetic beauty. 

To illustrate what this means, imagine I am trying to understand how many finger are on my right hand.

1. I perform one experiment and find that there are fewer than 6 fingers on that hand.  
2. I perform another experiment and find  that my right hand has more than 4 fingers.  
3. Finally, I declare that the laws of nature are beautiful, and a beautiful law would be that the number of fingers on a hand is an integer.  

There is only one solution left:  I have 5 fingers on my right hand.  I might make a brash statement that "God had no choice" but to give me 5 finger on that hand, given conditions 1, 2, and 3.  But of course, the experiment does not really constrain God's choice; God's choice constrained the experiment.  I could easily have been born with more or fewer than 5 fingers on my hand, as was the case with some of my acquaintances.  As for the requirement of an integer number of fingers, some people lose part of a finger, and in any case one might argue that the thumb does not count as a whole finger.

Why then is such a ridiculous claim made about string theory?  Either because the speaker does not really understand what he's talking about, or because he wants to make a shocking statement that makes him seem more important than he really is.

Book Review: The Amber Room (Audio)

On my drive down to visit my dad over spring break, I stopped at a Books-A-Million just south of Atlanta and picked up an audio book to pass the time during the drive.  In the end I chose The Amber Room by Steve Berry, read by Scott Brick, hoping to find at least a good historical fiction.  I was disappointed.  I will not try to avoid revealing anything from the book because I cannot recommend it to anyone.

1. None of the characters had any real depth.  The character that most nearly has depth is the White Russian introduced at the book's opening.  Unfortunately, he is murdered only about 1/4 of the way through the book.  As for the remaining characters, once the character is established, they never do anything remotely surprising.  The closest thing to a surprise is when the most prominent female villain does not indulge in unnecessarily murdering a teenage boy.  (Unnecessary murders are sprinkled generously throughout the book.)
2. Related to the first point, few characters are more than stereotypes.  This is particularly true of Germans, who are in every instance cold and obsessive, and in every case but the heroes' police contact (a mostly absent character) are ruthless.  The first stereotypical image that comes to your mind when you think "Russian bureaucrat" completely defines the Russian bureaucrat the male villain meets in St. Petersburg; the southern lawyer who runs afoul of the heroine is neither more nor less than the stereotype suggests.  How about the hero and heroine?  They may not be exactly a stereotype, but they are a well-established cliche:  they love each other deeply but their quarrels led to divorce.  From the moment the (ex)-husband is introduced, you know they will get back together again; this is even suggested by the heroine's father in his will.  Sure enough, their remarriage is the epilogue to the story.
3. Speaking of stereotypes, readers should stop trying to distinguish speakers by faking accents, as Scott Brick does here.  Fake accents are incredibly distracting.  On top of that, Brick uses a bad German accent to indicate nationality and a "feminine" voice when a woman is talking, but he can't do both, so German women voiced by him sound exactly like the German men.
4. The level of violence is not really justified.  OK, I get how the billionaires at the top of the club of art thieves might feel themselves to be above the law, but hiring hyperviolent sociopaths as henchmen really does not make sense.  The string of murders (which includes both the heroine's father and both the hero's parents, together with everyone on their plane) was bound to lead someone back to their bosses.  This is especially true when they were murdering people who were very, very far removed from being threats; for example, people asking questions that might lead them to a mine from which the Amber Room had been removed 50 years ago.
5. That whole mine episode made no sense whatsoever.  They left in the mine three large German trucks that had been used to bring in the Amber Room.  How did they get it out?  With their own trucks?  Why not just drive the German trucks out?  It's not like war surplus German trucks would have looked that out of place in 1951 Germany.  But no, they had to leave them in the mine and then murder anyone who got close to it, because apparently the trucks were some sort of give-away.  Yet they didn't even do that right.  They shot and killed some foreign help, but they didn't bother to remove all their identification, and they let one of the dying men spell out the name LORING (the billionaire who had him murdered) in the sand.
6. The dating of the book is ambiguous at best.  Several references within the book make it seem to be set in the late 1990's, probably around 1998.  Additionally, the descriptions of air travel sound distinctly pre-9-11.  However, the book is set only in "the present day"; it really couldn't be set in even "the recent past" because it ends with the Amber Room being publicly restored to Russia, an event which is conspicuous for not having been in the news.  The book's publication date is late 2007.
7. The worst thing about the book was the graphic and deviant sex.  The (German) male villain, in particular, seemed to be a cross between Will Riker, James Bond, and Ted Bundy.  He pursued rough sex with every woman he met, frequently by means of rape followed by murder.  The long pornographic descriptions seemed to be more an indulgence of a very ugly side of the author than anything required to develop characters or move the plot forward.

Cycles of Time

I've been reading Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose off and on since about Thanksgiving.  It's a very spotty book.  The main idea is interesting, but not convincing.  The organization is atrocious, with the refrain I'll explain this more fully in Chapter 3 repeated about 10 times too often, but the biggest problem with the book is that the level of detail, though greater in some chapters and lesser in others, generally falls into an awkward middle ground that will intimidate and confuse the general reader while simultaneously frustrating physicists and mathematicians that it is not specific enough to really evaluate. 

The basic problems which Penrose wants to address are

• Why does the Second Law of Thermodynamics give time a direction -- and the same direction for everywhere in the universe, out to the most distant galaxies?
• Did the Big Bang have a cause, and if so, what?
• What is the ultimate fate of the universe?
• What is dark matter?

Penrose addresses all of these issues by suggesting what he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC).  The gist of the idea is that in the extremely distant future, the so-called "Heat Death of the Universe" will take place, with nothing left but increasingly low-frequency photons, gravity waves (mostly from the supermassive black holes in the centers of colliding galaxies), and, ever-so-rarely, a remaining electron or positron (the antimatter counterpart of the electron).  In an almost empty world, there are fewer and fewer events; yet time is only meaningful as a measure between events.  Due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, an infinite amount of time corresponds to only a finite number of events.  After those events have happened, what then?  Does this question even have meaning?

The only way to really deal with such questions is with advanced mathematics, but a physical analogy (one that Plato would have liked) can help with the basic idea.  Imagine a kind of projector consisting of a bright lamp surrounded by a spherical shade.  Holes in the shade allow light to fall onto a nearby wall, making (perhaps) a star field, like in a planetarium.  If the holes in the shade are evenly spaced, though, they will not evenly cover the wall with "stars"; the "stars" will be denser towards the center, near the lamp, and sparser towards far from the lamp.  No matter how large the wall, though, only holes on one side of the spherical shade will cast light on it.  If all we could see were the "stars" on the wall, we still might realize that they corresponded to evenly spaced holes on the spherical lamp shade, and we might wonder if holes continued to be evenly spaced on the other side of the lamp shade. 

To translate this back to Penrose's topic, the "stars" would represent events -- the interaction of matter and energy -- and distances on the wall, measured from the point closest to the lamp, would represent time.  Distances on the lamp shade itself would correspond to "conformal time", and the two halves of the shade would be different "aeons".  

Penrose argues that the transition from one aeon to another produces what looks like, from one side, a Big Bang, and from the other side, a Heat Death.  He further claims that to make this mathematically tidy, 

• it is necessary to introduce something that would behave like the mysterious Dark Matter;
• it would solve the problem of the initial thermodynamic state of the universe after the Big Bang (with a high temperature but an overall low entropy that can subsequently increase, as necessary for the Second Law of Thermodynamics); and 
• it would remove the need for Inflation in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.  

So far, so good; this seems to be wrapping up some loose ends.  He even claims that correlations in the Cosmic Microwave Background are suggestively similar to what might be expected from Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC).  CCC also seems to require that electrons and other particles eventually become massless; on the one hand, there is absolutely no evidence for this, but on the other, it could take place over an inconceivably long time span, making the change of mass imperceptibly small over the last 13 billion years.  

Since it seems impossible to devise any experiment or observation that will add substantial support to CCC -- and without such, this is not really physics -- it's just mathematically sophisticated science fiction.  Good historical fiction stands in the same relationship to real historical research:  the research may inform the fiction; the fiction may contradict nothing which is known from the research; the fiction may be plausible and even give insight into the research; but the fiction is fiction and not research.

It is also worth mentioning that the real motivation for this book is obviously philosophical, not physical.  Penrose admits to finding the now-traditional narrative of the Heat Death of the Universe disappointingly dreary and hopeless; this is not the kind of story he or any of us want to believe.  At the same time, Penrose is very much a modern man, and modern man does not like how a creation at the Big Bang seems to imply a Creator.  This was Fred Hoyle's objection to the Big Bang (he coined the term in mockery) and his motivation for devising the Steady State Theory.  CCC differs dramatically from Steady State Theory in all the details, but the essence of it remains the same; as they said so often in Battlestar Galactica, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."  Both the Steady State Theory and CCC provide a model of physical reality without real beginning or real end, and certainly with no real purpose.

It is noteworthy that in a situation like this, it is the atheist who is painted into a corner by his dogma, not the Christian.  The Christian must believe that the universe has a Creator and a purpose, but he need not insist that these facts will be manifest in the structure of nature or its laws -- other than that nature should have structure and laws, which is one of the reasons modern science originated in a monotheistic culture.  The Christian would not be troubled if In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum were scrawled in great letters across the Cosmic Microwave Background, but neither is he troubled that it is not.  He is free to consider both possibilities.  The atheist has no such freedom.  He must eradicate every hint of a Creator, even if that means resorting to speculations about "times" before the Big Bang and "times" after a literally infinite count of centuries.