Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 4

Timequake review

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


At the beginning of this book the author tells us he tried and failed to write a novel called Timequake and rather than chuck the whole thing out he is going to salvage the best bits and combine them with other material (mostly autobiographical). After that, he refers to the failed novel as Timequake 1.

This is entertaining reading, but nowhere near as good as his best real novels are. I would compare it to Mark Twain's recently published Autobiography, in that both authors seem to write about what they want to write about on that particular day. Both are good enough at this to be entertaining, but Mark Twain is better.

You can't really call this a novel.

It is often said that a novelist's early work is his best, and this book tends to support that notion.




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Doorways in the Sand review

Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Of all of Zelazny's works, this is the most fun, and the funniest.

The hero has an uncle whose will specifies that he will be supported until he graduates from college, as long as he carries a full course load. This inspires the hero to keep changing majors so he never has to graduate. If that wasn't enough, the hero enjoys climbing on the rooftops of the campus buildings. If that still wasn't enough, there is an alien artifact that has gone missing that the hero is accused of having, and you'll just have to read the book for the rest.

This is a story that starts off crazy and builds to a climax. Highly recommended!




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Mother Night review

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kurt Vonnegut often uses science fiction concepts in his novels. This is not one of those novels. The story is realistic and entirely too plausible, and Kilgore Trout does not make an appearance. Having said that, if I was going to recommend a Vonnegut novel to a science fiction reader, I'd recommend this one. Science fiction readers like big ideas, and this novel has one as big as I've ever seen.

The basic idea is simple. The hero, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. (am I the only one that notices the resemblance to the name of a famous science fiction editor and wonders at its significance?) is living in Germany before the second world war and is recruited by the allies to be a spy. To do this, he needs to gain the trust of the Nazis, which he does by doing propaganda broadcasts for them. In these broadcasts are hidden messages to allied agents, and Campbell never finds out what they are. His broadcasts provide inspiration to many Nazis, both during and after the war. To serve the allies, he must do an exemplary job of serving the Nazis. He does.

He is warned before accepting the assignment that nobody will ever acknowledge his true role in the war. The most anyone will do for him is protect him from being punished for his apparent role in the war.

The moral, according to the author, is that you need to be careful what you pretend to be or you may become the thing you are pretending to be.

There are several characters in the story pretending to be something.

There is humor in this novel, but no laughs.

There are no surprises in the novel. Like in Slaughterhouse Five, the author tells you what's going to happen well before it happens. This is something that Vonnegut thought all authors should do.

This could be Vonnegut's best novel.



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Fantastic Voyage, the Novelization

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Fantastic Voyage is one of the best science fiction movies of the 1960's, even though the science is questionable and there are plot holes you could drive a bus through. The idea of shrinking a submarine small enough to be injected into a man's bloodstream so the team of scientists inside can remove a blood clot with a laser beam had me at hello when I was a kid. I still like the movie, but had never read this book.

This is a novelization, but not the usual kind of novelization. Dr. Asimov was well aware of the scientific and other flaws in the story and he did his damnedest to fix them in the novel. I give him a lot of credit for trying. For example, he says that the shrinking process actually sends the submarine into another dimension, which is why it is both tinier and lighter weight than it was to start with, even though it contains the same number of molecules. He talks about the effect of their reduced size on light waves and a lot of other stuff the movie ignored.

If you're only going to read one Isaac Asimov novel in your life it should not be this one. Having said that, it is worth reading if you've seen the movie.



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Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind

Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes by Marcel Kuijsten

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have not read The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I had read the novel Snow Crash (which uses the theory in its plot). I had hoped that this book would be an easier introduction to the theory than the original book. It may have been. I have no way of knowing.

I am writing a series of novels dealing with consciousness, specifically about machine consciousness, so I was very interested in the subject matter.

The theory basically says that until a few thousands of years ago humans did not have consciousness as we understand it. They did no introspection, were incapable of deceit, and under stress they heard voices that came from a currently unused speech center of the brain that they interpreted to be the voices of departed ancestors or even gods. These voices gave orders that must be obeyed.

At some point in history humans developed metaphorical language and the ability to do introspection and the gods stopped giving orders.

The theory is supported by the study of schizophrenic patients, children with imaginary friends, and ancient literature. In particular, the Illiad and the Odyssey are considered examples of bicameral thinking and modern consciousness respectively. They were apparently not written by one person named Homer, but by different authors hundreds of years apart in time.

This book considers all of these things, and parts of the book are more interesting than other parts. That's really about all I can say about it.

The theory is (apparently) not widely accepted, but it is interesting. I don't think there is any question that the authors of the Old Testament had a different way of thinking than we do today, for example.



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Review of Heinlein's The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read this a long time ago, as an adult, and recently rediscovered it in audio book form. I really enjoyed it.

The story is about a family traveling in space in their own rocket. Everyone in the family is a genius, and if this was ever made into a movie it would be terrific family entertainment, and very educational as well. If nothing else the audience would learn about ballistics. Heinlein takes pains to get the details right, and for the most part he succeeds.

Humor, breathless adventure, and memorable characters make this one a winner. Some of it is dated, as you would expect, but the story holds up in spite of that.



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Planet of the Singing Apes Review

Planet of the Singing Apes by Madelon Mottet

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I received a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. I do not know the author personally. She approached me via email because I had reviewed a novel on Amazon that she thought had things in common with her own. I review a lot of books and get many such requests, so I’ll generally read the free preview on Amazon before I’ll commit to reviewing a book.

This book is really different. It reminds me a bit of the old Connections TV show in that it talks about many different things that end up being connected together in unexpected ways. Reading it, you’ll learn about the biology of shellfish, about how early man’s learning to swim and to sing led to the evolution of human intelligence, and about the economics of running a seafood processing business in Sitka, Alaska. There are also stories told by various animals, including a whale singing a song about blubber.

The main thread of the story is about a woman’s relationship with a man who is just too free spirited and colorful to believe, but who seems to be based on a real person. The story is autobiographical, with some embellishments. (There are photos taken by the author throughout the book that suggest that the author and the protagonist are more or less the same person).

Speaking of photos, there are a lot of them in the book, as well as a lot of links to YouTube videos showing the things that are discussed. To get the full effect the author was going for you should probably read the book on a tablet or a smart phone rather than a Kindle (a Kindle Fire should work). One of these would let you pause in your reading and check out the videos. I read the book on a standard Kindle, which let me follow the links but not play the videos, and prevented me from viewing the many photos in full color. I will probably revisit this book using my phone at some point.

The embellishments to the autobiographical parts of the story concern abduction by aliens for breeding purposes. In a typical science fiction story this abduction and attempts to escape from it would be the plot, but not this one. In this one the abductors turn out to be angels who teach astral projection and take the human characters back in time to meet humanity’s earliest ancestors. Their breeding program, such as it is, creates a new kind of human which is not that much different from the current model. If you expect a story like Van Vogt’s Slan you won’t get it.

The author suggests that her book is a bit like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a valid comparison in some ways. The similarities are in the way the authors handle exposition. In a typical S.F. story exposition is a necessary evil, needed to get the story moving but bringing the story to a halt while it is going on. In this book, as in Hitchhiker, the story is an excuse for the exposition, and the exposition is the whole point of the thing. You have to be a good writer to get away with this, and Madelon Mottet is pretty good.

Where the differences are between these books is in the contents of the exposition. In Hitchhiker the contents are based on the author’s imagination, and in this book the exposition is mostly about real science. Instead of learning about Babel Fish, beach towels, and Telephone Sanitizers from Golgafritchen you’ll learn about geoducks, testicle sizes in primates, and the challenges facing herring fishermen. And of course you’ll learn about singing apes.

If you agree with Mark Twain that God created man because he was disappointed in the monkey you’ll find much to like in this book.




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Lord Of Light and Hindu Mythology

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read this one when I was a junior in college. I was amused by the descriptions of Krishna in this book as an oversexed drunkard who plays the flute really well. As a sophomore I had met a fellow who had a sister in the Hare Krishna movement, and I found this guy annoying. I actually wrote to him and quoted a long passage from this book.

A few months later I would be somewhat active in the Hare Krishna movement myself, which would continue for almost three years. I forgot about this novel.

Over thirty years later I'm giving it another look.

This book is not about Hindu gods, but about human beings who have chosen to play the roles of Hindu gods. I'd be interested in knowing what books Zelazny read to research these gods. In some ways this research seems to be very detailed, and in others he totally misses the boat. This may be his intention, as he is writing about humans pretending to be gods, and not the actual gods of Hindu mythology. I guess we'll never know. However, it bugs me that some important details are wrong for no apparent reason.

The best example is Brahma. He is described as covering the whole Universe with three steps and having a lotus flower growing out of his navel. Wrong! It is Vishnu that covers the whole universe in three steps and has the lotus flower growing out of his navel. Also, in the story Brahma is considered the most important god, but in fact that should be either Vishnu or Shiva (some Hindus believe Vishnu, some Shiva). Brahma is not their equal.

Krishna is the most different in the book. Granted, He did have thousands of girlfriends and wives, but He was also the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita, the most important holy book from India. It is His brother Balarama who was fond of drink.

I can understand why someone playing the role of Krishna might prefer to do it as Zelazny's character does. It is less clear why the person playing Brahma would do it the way described in the novel.

In mythology Brahma has four heads, and Ganesha has the head of an elephant. Not true in this novel.

It's an interesting read, but if you want to learn about Hindu mythology use a different book!



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Doc Smith and the Singularity

You've probably heard that everything old becomes new again. I've been looking at the Skylark books by Edward Elmer Smith. If you are unfamiliar with these, I'll refer you to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark...

John W. Campbell wrote a similar series of stories, involving characters named Arcott, Wade, and Morley.

Conventional wisdom would say that this style of super-science space opera had fallen out of favor by the 1940's and would never be heard from again. I'm beginning to think that isn't quite true.

If you've never read either Smith or Campbell's books I can describe their plots as follows:

A small group of scientists makes a discovery that makes interstellar space flight a possibility, and incidentally gives them a source of wealth that they can use to make a starship. Neither series concerns itself much with our solar system, or even any of the nearby stars. The story finds them going to stars so distant that anything the author might make up about them will seem plausible.

In the case of the Skylark books, the hero's girlfriend is abducted by the villain. He intends to take her no farther than Mars, but she puts up resistance which ends up throwing the ship off course and eventually they are so far out in space that only the hero could hope to rescue her.

Eventually they come across an alien civilization, more advanced than Earth in some ways and less in others. One of the gadgets the aliens have is a device that can transfer knowledge directly from brain to brain, so the hero and the aliens quickly learn each other's languages and everything else. Of course these aliens have their own enemies, and the hero must help them too. He ends up building a new spacecraft combining Earth technology and alien technology, and the aliens do too.

In the books that follow, the same things happen again. The aliens have new enemies, and the hero has made a new discovery that he doesn't know how to make practical use of, so off everyone goes to the alien's planet. Then even more powerful enemies arrive on the scene, with more advanced technology, and the only way to fight them will be to find a planet with an old enough intelligent race that they have already solved the technical problems that the hero needs to solve to fight the new enemies.

I don't remember the Arcott, Wade and Morley stories that well, but I remember that they follow a similar pattern. The heroes discover alien races and learn all their secrets. At the end of the story they have learned things these other races took thousands or millions of years to learn. That's basically the point of these stories. The heroes start off their adventures in the near future and by the end of them they have god like powers.

These godlike powers don't get evenly distributed back on Earth. The people of Earth have to settle for cheap electricity and some alien jewelry. Only the heroes get to leapfrog over millions of years of scientific progress.

In my novel Shree Krishna and the Singularity I named one of the protagonists Doctor Charles Seaton, inspired by the name Dick Seaton from the Skylark books. I didn't give a great deal of thought to this, but E.E. Smith's hero and mine have something in common, in that they will make a discovery that will greatly accelerate human progress. The biggest difference is that in my novel the accelerated progress will affect everyone on Earth, many of whom will not be well equipped to deal with it.

Imagine Dick Seaton returning to Earth with his mechanical educators and other scientific miracles and making Earth absorb a thousand years of progress overnight. That might be a good story.

Unfortunately, in the world we live in half the people have rejected current scientific progress, or at least such progress as affects their view of the world and how God wants it to be. The alien races Smith writes about are more receptive to new ideas than we are.

One example of super science that Smith didn't see coming is an artificial brain more powerful than any living brain could be. Some of his aliens had powerful brains, but they got that way through evolution. (Girls go for guys with the big brains, and vice versa). It never occurred to Smith that his heroes could have super science without leaving home.

Review swaps and conflicts of interest

Soon the United States will have a president with business dealings all over the world. Half the country is convinced that he can avoid conflicts of interest by having his children run these businesses. This president will continue to be an executive producer on a TV show that he used to star in, for a network that has to report news about him. Half the country sees no problem with that either.

At the same time, a bunch of self published authors are struggling to get customer reviews for their books.

Every time I buy something on Amazon, I review it. Somehow I got the idea that this would help Amazon's customers find my own offerings, but so far it has not. What it has done is attract authors in need of reviews. They generally offer me a free copy of the e-book in exchange for this review.

The problem with this is, there are an awful lot of free e-books out there. I used to subscribe to Book Gorilla, a newsletter that tells you about free and discounted books. I gave up on it because I found it depressing to see so many free e-books offered day after day.

Even if there weren't so many struggling authors offering free e-books in exchange for reviews, there are thousands of public domain e-books at sites like Project Gutenberg. Why should I care about a free e-book from an unknown author when I can read a great novel by a famous author for the same price?

I might review your book if I check out the preview and it looks like something I'd enjoy reading, but I have a reading pile and it isn't likely that your book will go to the top of that pile any time soon.

The one thing that could change that would be your willingness to give an honest review to one of my books.

Amazon is trying to enforce some new rules about reviews. You can't get a free or discounted product in exchange for a review. (I used to get an offer like that every week, but they've stopped). The one exception is books, since free books for review purposes is a standard practice in publishing.

What is less clear is their policy on authors reviewing each other's books. They may or may not have one.

Established authors do review each other's books. Raymond Chandler wrote a review of an Ian Fleming novel with this famous quote:

“Bond is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.”

Some more recent examples:

Tom Clancy: "A new Clive Cussler novel is like a visit from your best friend."

Stephen Coonts: "Nobody does it better than Clive Cussler, nobody."

The objection to a review swap would be that if I give your book four stars you'll feel uncomfortable giving my book any less than that. Maybe you would. In practice, I think authors would generally give honest reviews. Enlightened self interest would make them do the right thing more often than not.

Now when a stockbroker or a politician talks about enlightened self interest it's time to count the silverware, but for authors there really is an incentive to be honest. Authors need their opinions on things to matter. I can't give a glowing review to a lousy book without hurting my own reputation.

Would I give an author who reviewed my book a break that I wouldn't give another author? Yes, in one very specific way: if I think the book is two stars or worse I won't review it. I'll send my comments on the book to the author in an email but I won't post a review.

If the review is three stars or better, I'll send it to the author before posting it and give him the option to not post it. He can try to change my mind about some point in my review, but ultimately I have to stand behind what I write. If I don't post a review he's no worse off than he was to begin with, and he might benefit from my feedback.

I generally don't give one star reviews to anything unless I think the author is morally reprehensible in some way. A good example of this are people that take books in the public domain that are already transcribed by Project Gutenberg volunteers and available for free and do some quick and dirty repackaging on them so they can be sold on Amazon. I've done some one star reviews on these reprobates.

I don't give two star reviews because I don't read two star books. I can spot a two star book in the free preview. Anyone can.

What do you think about review swaps? Leave comments below.