Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 7

Project X the movie vs. The Artificial Man

The Artificial Man by Leslie Purnell Davies

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was the basis of a favorite science fiction film of mine called Project X. That was what made me interested in reading the book. Project X tells an interesting story with a very limited budget.

While the character names and some of the premise is similar, the book is quite different from the movie.

In the movie Hagen Arnold is a secret agent sent to Sino Asia to learn about their advances in genetics. He escapes from that country after sending the message "The West will be destroyed in fouteen days, repeat fourteen days!" When he returns to the U.S. he has no memory, the result of a drug that destroys memory in secret agents who are tortured, in order to prevent the enemy from learning their secrets. The scientist Doctor Crowther must find a way to recover those memories so they can figure out the meaning of Arnold's last message while there is still time. Crowther tries to do this by convincing Arnold he is a bank robber in the 1960's.

The book is, again, very different. The story takes place in England, and the hero thinks he is a science fiction author living in the 1960's in a small village. We soon discover that the year is in fact 2016 and Britain is a dictatorship with food rationing and government mandated birth control, etc. Hagen Arnold is a secret agent who has lost his memory, and the village is a way to try and learn what those memories are, just like in Project X, but the difference is that nobody is in any particular hurry to find out what those memories are, and the whole false identity being given to Arnold may have a motive besides getting those memories.

So with the movie the premise is used for suspense, whereas the book goes more for mystery. Unfortunately, the solution to the mystery is disappointing.

I regret to say that the movie is much more interesting than the book.



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Finally Reading The Tenth Canto

Srimad Bhagavatam, Tenth Canto Part One: The Summum Bonum by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Back in the late 1970's I discovered Srila Prabhupada's books in the Western Illinois University college library. I started reading Krishna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead (known by all ISKCON devotees as Krishna Book) and continued until I had read every one of them.

I can say that I understand these books better now than I did when I was a practicing devotee. This is not because of any spiritual advancement, but only because I am more mature than I was back then. (Or as Robert A. Heinlein would have it, too tired).

Back when I was a devotee I was required to think of these books as describing actual historical events. I had a very hard time doing that. Every scripture there is contains a part that is stories that just couldn't have happened that way, another part a collection of prejudices in force at the time it was written, and a third part something else. In my opinion, the "something else" gives the scripture its real value, and the rest you need to come to terms with as best you can.

When I first read Krishna Book I identified with Krishna, as He was clearly the hero of the story. Krishna Book is a summary of the Tenth Canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, the part of that scripture that tells of Krishna's life. Srila Prabhupada did not live to finish his translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam. He died shortly after beginning the Tenth Canto, so the rest of the translation was done by his disciples. There are apparently devotees who refuse to read these later translations. To accommodate these devotees, the BBT sells a version of the Bhagavatam that only contains the first nine cantos and includes Krishna Book as a substitute for the Tenth Canto. It is a reasonable substitute, in my opinion. In fact, in their commentary on the verses of the actual Tenth Canto the disciples frequently quote passages from Krishna Book.

I note also that if Srila Prabhupada translated a verse of the Tenth Canto (as he often did when translating the Chaitanya Charitamrita) the disciples will use that translation, giving Srila Prabhupada credit for it, rather than doing their own.

The translation of the Tenth Canto had not gotten far while I was still a devotee, but now, so many years later, I found myself still interested in reading it. I bought the Kindle edition, and this is a review of that edition.

Srila Prabhupada's translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam is unique. I am not aware of any other complete and literal translation of the Bhagavatam. Each verse is explained with references to other books like the Harivamsa and the writings of the Goswamis. It is a translation by a believer, and that is a big part of its value.

Reading the book now, I identify more with the devotees of Krishna than I did before. Again, this is the result of a certain amount of maturity, nothing more. I no longer try to reconcile the events in the book with things that could have actually happened. For example, we are encouraged to think of Krishna living a simple life among the cowherds, but his father Nanda possesses millions of cows and is in the habit of giving them away by the thousands to the brahmanas (the priestly caste) to get their blessings. Not only does he give them the cows, he has the cows decorated with gold and jewels first. The point seems to be that back when the world was more righteous there was a lot more wealth around, and if everyone would be more generous with the brahmanas that wealth could return. More than one religion believes this, (think of the story of King Solomon, for example) so I can't be too critical.

Srila Prabhupada believes that you cannot understand the Tenth Canto without going through the first nine first. I would agree with that. In the first nine you will learn about the other avatars of Vishnu, about the creation of the universe, about how the universe is laid out, about gods and demons and their efforts to produce the nectar of immortality by churning the ocean that fills the bottom of the universe using an enormous mountain as a pestle and an enormous snake wrapped around that mountain to produce the churning action. You will learn about how the Ganges river flows from a hole in the top of the universe that was caused by Vishnu incarnating as a dwarf and making that hole by poking it with His toe. You will learn about oceans of milk, sugarcane juice, and ghee. You will learn about heavenly planets and hellish planets. You will learn that women have their monthly courses because they collectively agreed to take on a portion of a curse given to Indra by a brahmana, in return for the ability to feel sexual desire even while pregnant. You will learn, in short, that the story of Krishna takes place in a universe not much like the one we live in.

You will also learn about the path of Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti is devotion to God. In the earlier Cantos this concept is developed gradually, but in the Tenth it reaches its highest form, where devotees of Krishna love Him without understanding that He is God. This makes a kind of sense. Being in the company of God, knowing He is God, could get to be oppressive very quickly. Read the classic short story "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby if you don't see why.

In the earlier cantos Vishnu makes an appearance, but He doesn't stay long. In the Tenth Canto His devotees see Him all the time, and those who do not wish they could. Krishna is their friend, their child, their husband, or their lover. Occasionally He demonstrates awesome power, but even then His devotees don't think of Him as God.

Srila Prabhupada's commentary on Krishna's childhood pastimes answers questions you probably never thought to ask. For example, in one passage Krishna is described as herding unlimited cows. You might think this is just hyperbole, but Srila Prabhupada and the Gaudiya Math will tell you that it is not. He had an infinite number of cows, because He is God and God can fit unlimited cows in a finite space.

Frequently, Krishna and the cowherd boys would be attacked by a powerful demon, which Krishna would defeat. To attack Krishna, the demon had to interrupt the transcendental activities of Krishna and His friends. Since those activities are eternal, a devotee might wonder how a mere demon could interrupt them. Srila Prabhupada points out that the demon did not in fact interrupt them. The boys would be playing all morning, then they would take tiffin (lunch). In the moments between playing and tiffin there were no transcendental activities to interrupt, so during those moments the demons could attack.

Another thing you probably never thought about was that the people of Vrindavana thought Krishna's footprints were such a fine decoration for the Earth that they did everything they could to preserve them and never stepped on them, ever. Everything in the story that seems like an inconsistency is explained by referring to the writings of previous acharyas.

The most famous childhood pastime of Krishna is being the lover of the cowherd girls, or gopis, who are all married to others but sneak out at night to be with Him. There are more pictures of Krishna with the gopis than there are of Krishna doing anything else with anyone else. The pictures tend to show Krishna being older than He actually was. He was only eight years old when these pastimes took place.

Srila Prabhupada passed on before he could translate those most difficult chapters, so the work was left to his disciples to finish. Many devotees believe that you need to be a pure devotee to even read these chapters, and ISKCON has not yet produced a devotee other than Srila Prabhupada who is on the level needed to translate them.

The spiritual point of these stories seems to be similar to Jesus saying "the last shall be first." The gopis sneak away from their husbands and families to be with Krishna. Materially they are low status, because they are ordinary women, and their status would be considered even worse because they are unfaithful to their husbands. As Krishna's lovers they have everything to lose and nothing to gain, as Krishna will soon go to Mathura to claim his birthright as a prince and will not see them again. Spiritually speaking, they are the most exalted for that reason. If you ask what they do with Krishna, you're asking the wrong question. They are more interested in His pleasure than their own. Often they feel abandoned by Him, which gives them a kind of intense ecstasy. Only a very spiritually advanced person can understand that. Again, I am not that person.

If you expect to read more about Krishna and the gopis than you did in Krishna book, you will, but only a little and that little may be troubling. For example, the verses about Krishna stealing the clothing of the unmarried gopis says that Krishna went with his friends to the forbidden spot where the girls were bathing. The friends somehow don't seem to be present during the stealing of the clothes, but it is clearly mentioned that they went with him. A well known acharya explains this by saying that these were NOT the friends Krishna normally hung out with, but were instead some toddlers that tagged along when Krishna went. I don't think this explanation improves the story at all.

Krishna is described as being a seven year old boy when He lifts Govardhan Hill, and He steals the clothes of the gopis that same year. The gopis are older than He is, but according to Srtila Prabhupada in Krishna Book they could have been as young as twelve.

Krishna spends the morning doing the clothes stealing pastime, then later that day He and His friends of the same age (we know this because many of them are named) try to get some food from some brahmanas. They have no luck, so Krishna advises them to approach the wives of the brahmanas and mention His name. All of the brahmana wives are in love with Krishna, so the cowherd boys get plenty of food from these wives. None of these wives have names, but to be fair the brahmanas aren't named either. They don't do much in this part of the story. Mostly they suggest to Krishna's foster father Nanda that he donate more cows to the brahmanas so they can pray that Krishna stops getting attacked by demons. Nanda always does, even though it doesn't seem to be helping.

Much harder to explain is why none of the gopis is ever named. Not even the most important gopi, Srimati Radharani, is given a name. The gopis are of course the greatest of all Krishna's devotees according to what we were taught, but you'd never know that from reading the Bhagavatam. Actually, the names of gopis that we know about all came from poems by Jayadeva, Vidyapati, and others that were written much later. It's like these poets wrote Krishna fan fiction, and this fiction became so popular it was accepted as canon.

This has happened in other religions. Most Christian ideas about Hell come from The Divine Comedy by Dante, not the Bible, and many Christians have ideas about the book of Revelation that do not appear in that book at all, but were invented for a series of very bad novels.

The Srimad Bhagavatam is not the oldest scripture about Krishna. According to tradition, the Mahabharata was written first, then the sage Narada criticized Veda Vyasa for not putting more in that book about Krishna. In response, Vyasa wrote the Bhagavatam. However, this account is not likely to be true. The Bhagavatam mentions the Buddha as a ninth avatar of Vishnu (who appears to deceive the atheists). Devotees in ISKCON consider this an example of prophecy, but I do not. This suggests that the Bhagavatam was written after the Buddha's appearance.

However, the stories about Krishna's life also appear in the Harivamsa, an addendum to the Mahabharata, so while the Bhagavatam was written much later the stories of Krishna's childhood, etc. are as old as the Mahabharata.

In both the Harivamsa and the Bhagavatam the gopis are not named. This would make them minor characters in any other book. We know the names of Krishna's father and mother, His foster father and mother, many of his male friends, the most important of the sixteen thousand one hundred and eight princesses that He would later marry, a hunchbacked woman He cures, the heroes and villains of The Mahabharata (in which He plays a vital role), and the names of all the demons He slew.

But not the name of even one gopi.

Imagine the New Testament if it told us the names of every character except those of the twelve apostles. Or imagine the New Testament as it is, but learning that Jesus's greatest follower was the unnamed woman caught in the act of adultery, or the unnamed woman at the well.

Now the commentators will object that Srimati Radharani is named, indirectly. Sukadeva Goswami, the narrator of the Bhagavatam, tries to keep her name a secret but uses a word that sounds a bit like "Radharani" to describe her. I can just imagine myself asking Tamal Krishna Goswami why Sukadeva Goswami would feel the need to keep her name secret, or if he did why the rest of us did not. TKG probably would have killed me for that.

The actual rasa dance is described pretty much as it was in Krishna book. It is meant to describe romantic love in the spiritual world, and show how mundane romantic love is only a perverted reflection of that perfect love. Krishna is eight years old but already inspiring romantic feelings in the young women of Vrindavana, even those that are already married to others and have children. (If you're the kind of person who thinks that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to be a virgin her whole life even though the Bible says that Jesus had brothers and sisters, you will be reassured by the arguments here explaining how the married gopis were still fit to be Krishna's lovers). The sound of Krishna's flute calls the gopis to meet Him in the forest, and they are powerless to resist. When He sees them He tries to convince them to return to their homes, but they give Him various philosophical arguments why they must remain. He allows them to stay, but because they are proud to be His lovers He disappears. They go looking all over the forest for Him and their love for Him becomes a kind of madness, where they start acting out His childhood activities of killing demons, etc. Eventually they track Him like a Boy Scout would, by following His footprints and other spoor, and determine that He has taken one gopi that He favors above all others to a private spot. She, too, is abandoned by Krishna when she becomes too proud of being His lover.

Then Krishna returns and the actual rasa dance begins. This is remarkable because Krishna expands Himself into multiple bodies, one for each gopi, so that each gopi thinks He is dancing with her alone. There are a lot of gopis. The number I read when I was in ISKCON was 16,108, the same number as Krishna would later have as wives. The commentary for these verses gives a different number: three billion. Somehow the child Krishna herding infinite cows does not bother me as much as the idea of three billion gopis. Hindu mythology seems to like large numbers. For example, the number of soldiers who fought in the Mahabharata war was almost four million, and nearly all of them died in a war that lasted only a couple of weeks.

In addition to a very large number of gopis, plus one plenary expansion of Krishna for each gopi, we are told that there are hundreds of Vedic airplanes (called vimanas) flying overhead, each one containing a demigod and his wife. They have all come to witness the rasa dance and occasionally throw flower petals on the dancing couples.

If that wasn't enough. we are told that this dance lasted one night of Brahma, although at the end of it only one terrestrial night had passed. A night of Brahma is billions of years. I would not have a problem with Krishna creating a time bubble for Himself and the gopis to make this possible, but I do wonder about all those demigods flying overhead, and just how they experienced that passage of time.

In addition to the actual verses from the Tenth Canto, there are writings by various acharyas describing conversations the gopis have with Krishna or with each other. I wish we had some context for these. Are they the product of realization, and thus considered canon, or are they Krishna fan fiction? There's no indication.

Back in the nineteen eighties, when this Tenth Canto translation was done, the best devotees in the movement were supposed to be the zonal acharyas, the initiating gurus that Srila Prabhupada had created to carry on his work. If any men were qualified to carry on the translation, these men should have been. However, nearly all of them got involved in some scandal that proved that they were not as spiritually advanced as we had hoped they were. Some of them were forbidden to take more disciples, or kicked out of the movement entirely. One was murdered.

Even if these devotee translators were sufficiently advanced, the Tenth Canto would be a tough place to begin. For someone new to translating Sanskrit, which they were, it would be like taking your driver's license exam while competing in the Indy 500. It isn't that the Sanskrit itself would be any more difficult, but that the expectations would be much higher. Again, some devotees believe you should be a pure devotee before even reading the Tenth Canto; it would be spiritually dangerous to do otherwise. However, anyone can read Krishna Book. Knowing that, anyone who has read Krishna Book and comes to the Tenth Canto expecting to read something much more profound or detailed or potentially dangerous to his Bhakti creeper than Krishna Book was will be disappointed. Maybe not as disappointed as the Scientologists must have been when they learned about Xenu and the volcano, but still pretty disapointed.

There is some demarcation in the book that tells you when Srila Prabhupada's work ends and his disciples take over. Towards the end of the story of Brahma hiding the cowherd boys and calves the style of the commentary seems to change. In the Prayers By Lord Brahma immediately afterwards the purports start saying "Srila Prabhupada said", and the end of the chapter acknowledges that the disciples wrote it. I got an impression that the changeover happened a bit earlier, based on a slight difference in the style of the commentary.

The advantage this book has over other translations is that the original Sanskrit text appears (in the printed books I had actual Sanskrit characters followed by a romanization, in the ebook just the romanization) with a word by word breakdown of the translation. You might argue with the meaning, but you can't say that anything has been added or removed. (Sometimes the commentary adds something, but there is nothing hidden about that).

The toughest audience for this particular Canto will be Srila Prabhupada's disciples. I joined the movement too late to be one of them, but I had read all of Srila Prabhupada's books and when I met some of the new zonal acharyas back then I would always be looking for some sign that they could teach me something that Srila Prabhupada's books could not. I never saw it. Perhaps that isn't a fair thing to want; I wouldn't know. On the other hand, they were asking a lot of me, and it is understandable that I would want some reassurance that they were worthy of it.

It is a shame that Srila Prabhupada did not live to finish his translation, but I suspect it would not have been much different in content than what we are getting here. Srila Prabhupada's distinctive voice is missed, but the translation and commentary in this Canto are as good as we have and far superior to any others I know of.



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Reverse Engineering A.E. van Vogt

Slan by A.E. van Vogt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I just finished listening to an audio book of A.E. van Vogt's first novel, Slan. This was a talking book for the blind that someone had uploaded to You Tube. A.E. van Vogt had updated the book since it was originally published in 1940, so I found myself comparing what I had just heard with the text of the original (using a collection of his novels called "Triad" which is in my personal library).

In my opinion this is van Vogt's best novel. He was a very talented author of short stories, but this is the only novel of his I could honestly recommend to anyone. I understand that the book started out as a series of short stories that was turned into a novel. Ray Bradbury did something similar when he wrote The Martian Chronicles, but with better results.

In my opinion the later rewrites didn't help the book all that much. I wouldn't go so far as to say they made the book worse, but they didn't improve it either.

Slan is about a young boy who is a member of a mutant super race of humans called Slans.

Every science book for children has the same drawing of the evolution of Man, progressing through Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, and modern Homo Sapiens. Every boy who sees that picture thinks two things:

1. What comes after Homo Sapiens?

2. What is the difference between Cro Magnon and Homo Sapiens? They don't look all that much different.

Evolution is a gradual, continuous process, so you don't have a Neanderthal woman giving birth to a Cro Magnon. I didn't know that as a kid, so when I read this book in high school I accepted the idea that the next stage in human evolution might have two hearts, super strength and endurance, super high IQ, the ability to read minds, and be born of a human woman.

Jommy Cross, the hero, has all of these attributes. As a result of these advantages he and his race are persecuted by normal humans, who believe that Slans were created by a mutation machine invented by one Samuel Lann (hence their name) and that hundreds of years later Slans are using this machine on human babies to create more Slans, but most of the time they just create deformed monstrosities. Jommy Cross doesn't believe that, but he really doesn't know what to believe. The only Slans he knew were his parents, both dead shortly after the novel begins.

Jommy is on the run from the humans after his mother is killed. He escapes by hanging on to the bumper of a passing car. (Hundreds of years in the future, cars have bumpers children can hang on to). He hides out with an old woman who protects him while he uses his super powers to steal things for her. His ultimate goal is to find the super weapon invented by his father and use it to defeat Kier Gray, the leader of the humans.

While Jommy is doing this, a Slan girl is growing up in a palace which was built by Slans but has been taken over by humans. Their leader, Kier Gray, is keeping this Slan girl for observation. His political enemies want her killed on her eleventh birthday. He prevents this, and thus becomes a sympathetic character.

Then the story goes back to Jommy, who has discovered that there is a race of tendrilless Slans who can pass for human and who are secretly controlling all air travel and building spaceships which can go to Mars. To his surprise, these tendrilless Slans hate true Slans just as much as humans do, and for similar reasons. They want to kill Jommy because he knows of their existence and of their space ships. They need to keep this information from both the humans and the true Slans.

After that, lots of stuff happens, secrets are revealed, etc.

I thought the concept of a mutant being a hero with human beings as villains was pretty neat when I first read it. That idea has been used many times since, but it was new when Slan came out. The book has a lot of super science, breathless adventure, and romance. It was everything I wanted it to be when I read it in high school. Mostly, it holds up.

I have been reading and listening to audio books of classic science fiction, trying to learn what makes them work so I can hopefully give similar virtues to my own writing. So what can I learn from van Vogt?

I like how his two best novels are about characters who need to learn the truth about themselves. This works better in Slan than it does in The World Of Null A because the answers are more satisfying, but Null A introduces the wrinkle of a man who thinks he knows the truth about himself, only to find in the first chapter that he has been given false memories and that nothing he believes about himself is true.

I like how the villains in the stories are not really villains, but just men pursuing their own interests. This is very effective in Slan. In the first chapter we learn about Kier Gray, the enemy of the Slans, and are ready to hate him. In the second chapter he is introduced and becomes an appealing character. We know that Jommy Cross and Kier Gray must meet, but we cannot predict what will happen when they do.

I like how van Vogt piles mystery on top of mystery, although at times he overdoes it.

I like that the Slans have secret hideouts and that the Slan-built palace has secret passageways the humans who live there don't know about. I like that Jommy Cross can build gadgets with the most amazing technology in a workshop in his ranch, all by himself, just because he's super-smart.

As a young man I probably liked how the Slan boy and Slan girl meet and instantly fall in love, but the Slan girls gets murdered before things get too mushy. I may still like that. I don't know what that says about me.

The events in this book inspired certain events in my own novel Shree Krishna and the Singularity, but I handle them very differently. That may make van Vogt a counter influence. I wanted to go in a different direction than Slan did, but to do that I first needed to read Slan.

Having said that, I don't think I'd ever deliberately imitate van Vogt. There are several authors who have been praised for being like Heinlein (John Scalzi, Alexi Panshin, etc.) but nobody I know of has been called "the next van Vogt". There may be a good reason for that.

But A.E. van Vogt may live on indirectly in Hollywood's adaptions of Philip K. Dick stories. Dick was an admirer of van Vogt, but was a much better writer. Dick had cool ideas like van Vogt, but he knew what to do with them. When Hollywood adapts a Dick story they tend to take the cool idea, remove everything Dick does to develop it, and insert a long chase. A cool idea with a long chase is a good description of an A.E. van Vogt novel.





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A. E. van Vogt, The Hare Krishna Movement, And Me

I am working on writing my second novel and when I'm not doing that I'm re-reading or listening to audio books of classic Science Fiction, trying to reverse engineer what makes them great or at least good, with the goal of adding these good qualities to my own writing. The latest author to be studied is A.E. van Vogt, specifically the novels Slan and The World Of Null A. On rereading these novels after so many years I find parallels between the worlds in them and my experiences with the Hare Krishna movement.

Slan

I read Slan in high school. It is the story of a young boy, Jommy Cross, who is a member of a race of mutants called Slans. These mutants, the next stage in human evolution, have superior intelligence, superior endurance (because they have two hearts), and the ability to communicate telepathically. This last ability is accomplished with tendrils coming out of their heads, making them easy to tell apart from normal humans. The Slans have been hunted to near extinction by ordinary humans, and after Jommy's mother is killed Jommy vows to destroy Kier Gray, the leader of the humans.

One reviewer described Slan as follows:

"The first, perhaps the most widely read, and perhaps the best of his novels, Slan is set in a far-future post-catastrophe world in which a mutant human species (of supermen) is attempting to survive the 'final solution' that has been decreed for them by normal humans. Since an analogy with the position of the Jews in the Third Reich is obviously intended, the ironic thing is that in this story there actually is a secret world-wide conspiracy, and the Slans actually do control the world in much the same way as is imagined about the Jews by students of The Protocols of Zion. Thus van Vogt's use of what Blish has called the 'extensively recomplicated plot,' or of what others have called the 'pyrotechnic' story or the 'kitchen-sink technique,' tends to lead to confusion even in the more simply constructed of his novels".

I did feel confused reading that novel. van Vogt introduces a new idea every few pages. One of them is the idea of Slans that don't have tendrils and can pass as human. I'm not sure what role they play in the story.

Anyone who feels he is being persecuted by those who aren't as good as he is will identify with Jommy Cross. Of course, that is always a large number of people. If the phrase White Genocide has a special meaning for you, you'll enjoy reading Slan.

The World of Null-A

The novel The World Of Null-A also has people with special abilities, but they are ordinary humans who have been given training to integrate the cortical and thalmic regions of their brains. This training is based on the science of General Semantics. If you don't know what that is, the novel won't teach you much. In college I attempted to read Science and Sanity (the book by Count Korzybsky that introduces the subject) and couldn't make much of that either.

Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

Suffice it to say, your brain has a thalmus, or more animalistic part, and a cortex, or more human part. Null-A training teaches you to make them work together effectively. In the future it will also teach you to do things like fight with superhuman strength by cutting off signals to the fatigue centers in your brain.

What is that training like? I couldn't tell you. In the novel there is a Games Machine in a City of the Machine. Each year there is a competition judged by this machine to find out who has the best trained minds. The very best get to live on Venus, a Null-A utopia. Those not quite qualified to do that get important jobs on Earth, including ruler of the planet. You need to travel to the City of the Machine to take this test. A.E. van Vogt never imagined the Internet, so the idea of taking the test in your own home never occurred to him. Although the novel takes place hundreds of years in the future, people still smoke, there are still printed newspapers, and all electronic devices still have vacuum tubes. At one point in the story the hero rents a voice recorder for a week. It costs him four dollars. The idea that anyone would buy such a device never occurred to van Vogt. On the other hand, there are robot planes and something called an atomic cutter seems to be an ordinary household item.

The hero must fight an emperor of a galactic empire that spans hundreds of thousands of worlds. Everyone on those worlds is human. They have starships and a device called the Disruptor (which also uses vacuum tubes) but never developed Null A. The empire isn't described much, and what description there is isn't that interesting.

The novel doesn't tell you much about the Games, either. On the first day the applicant must define Null-A, Null-N, and Null-E, by writing the definitions down on a piece of paper and feeding that paper into a slot where it will be read and interpreted. (No computer terminals, no Internet). This gives the author a chance to do some exposition without really explaining anything. The hero never gets to take any more tests than that, so we can only imagine what they must be like.

As for the definitions: Null-A is non-Aristotelian logic. Null-N is non-Newtonian science. Null-E is non-Euclidean geometry.

The second and third have no place in the story. Null-A consists of multi-valued logic and knowing the difference between the map and the territory. Apparently, Aristotle's logic has been holding back humanity for hundreds of years. Considering the high opinion Ayn Rand had of Aristotle (she uses some of his laws as book titles in Atlas Shrugged) there may be something to this. How a multi-valued logic works is never explained.

So the hero of the story, Gilbert Gosseyn, goes to the City of the Machine to compete in the Games with the idea of emigrating to Venus. His wife Patricia has died recently and he's been doing intensive training in Null A. He gets to the City and finds out that during the Games there will be no police protection for anyone. Contestants form groups to protect each other. When he attempts to join such a group he finds out that he is not who he thinks he is, and that in fact all of his memories are false. His dead wife turns out to be the daughter of President Hardie, still very much alive, and never married to him.

The way this is revealed is amusing. A device that everyone seems to own (unlike voice recorders) is a lie detector. This is not today's polygraph machine. Instead it is an electronic gadget, with vacuum tubes, that is intelligent, self aware, and capable of having conversations (although it cannot volunteer information not specifically asked for). It can look inside a person's brain and determine not only if a person believes something, but if that belief is true. The lie detector determines that Gosseyn really believes that he is Gilbert Gosseyn and is married to Patricia Hardie, but it isn't so. Who he really is, the machine cannot say.

Philip K. Dick would use the idea of false implanted memories in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? but van Vogt got there first.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Fortunately, Gosseyn has Null-A training so he is much better equipped to deal with this revelation than you or I would be. (Of course, it is quite possible his memory of that training is also false, so he only thinks he has it. Philip K. Dick would have gone there; van Vogt does not).

Since he cannot account for who he is he is evicted from his hotel. He'll have to spend the thirty days of the Games sleeping in the park.

At this point the novel reads more like a hard boiled detective story than Science Fiction. Gosseyn meets a dizzy dame who turns out to be Patricia Hardie. He meets some tough guys who seem to be advance men for a galactic empire that will invade Venus. He gets killed by the bad guys and finds himself in a new body, on Venus this time. He finds out he has something extra in his brain. He finds out that the bad guys have been extorting the Games machine so they can replace the Null-A trained leaders of Earth with their own, untrained people. Conquering the Null A utopia that is Venus is the first step in their conquest. Because of the Venusians' trained minds, their millions are a bigger threat to the invading forces than Earth's billions. And of course Gilbert Gosseyn, with his extra brain matter, is the biggest threat of all. Or he will be, if he ever figures out what is going on.

Lots of breathless adventures follow.

I was fascinated with this novel when I read it in college. I couldn't make sense of the plot, but as a college student I was comfortable with the idea of people smarter than myself and I gave credit to van Vogt (and Count Korzybsky) for being such. I also read the sequel The Players Of Null-A, but I didn't think much of that one.

The Players of Null-A

Back to the present. For the past week I've been listening to The World Of Null A as an audio book. (Somebody uploaded it to You Tube. There are many audio books on You Tube, all violating someone's copyright, and nobody does anything). Hearing the story without having to read it, I was finally able to follow it all the way through.

Which brings me to the Hare Krishna movement.

I am in no way blaming A.E. van Vogt for my involvement with the Hare Krishna movement. I did that on my own. What I am saying is that the appeal of cults and the appeal of van Vogt's early novels are similar.

The obvious example of this is the Church of Scientology. I can easily imagine someone encountering Dianetics for the first time and thinking the E-meters are much like the Null-A training that Gosseyn alledgedly had. I never found Scientology appealing, though. I knew who John Campbell was, and also that L. Ron Hubbard had started out as a Science Fiction writer. In the edition of Dianetics in the college library Hubbard describes Campbell as an atomic scientist. He was no such thing. He was perhaps the greatest and most influential Science Fiction editor ever, and a pretty fair author of same (he even has a Lunar crater named after him) but he was no scientist. I don't think he even had a college education.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

So basically I was inoculated against Dianetics and never took it seriously. A.E. van Vogt was not so fortunate. He ran his own Dianetics center for awhile, but had quit Dianetics by the time I was in college (the late 1970's). The problem with Dianetics is that it presented itself as Science, but it didn't really hold up as Science. It read like the paranoid ideas of a lunatic. The author believed that every child born survived an attempted abortion done by its mother. The phrase "attempted abortion" is used so often in the book that it is given the abbreviation "AA". So the idea of being clear of engrams didn't appeal to me.

I had no such defense against Krishna Consciousness, although at the time I thought I had. I was an atheist, and had no interest in religion.

The story of how I got interested in Krishna Consciousness is in my book, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim. The short version is that I met a guy who had a sister living in the Detroit temple. We both became friends with the same woman, and somehow that led me to read about Krishna. As it turned out, the Western Illinois University library had a complete set of books published by the Hare Krishna movement, so I had plenty to read.

The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim

According to Srila Prabhupada, Krishna Consciousness is Science, and History. In Krishna Book (technically not the actual title, but that's what Krishna devotees call it) he states:

"We therefore request everyone to take advantage of this great transcendental literature. One will find that by reading one page after another, an immense treasure of knowledge in art, science, literature, philosophy and religion will be revealed, and ultimately, by reading this one book, Krishna, love of Godhead will fructify".

Krsna: The Supreme Personality of Godhead: v. 1

It would be more accurate to describe Krishna Book as a very elaborate mythology which has no more basis in historical fact than the Lord of the Rings. However, the story of Krishna is compelling reading and I ate it up. Afterwards I read everything about Krishna I could get my hands on, not just the movement books but others as well. Then one day I visited the Evanston temple, met a most remarkable woman among the devotees, and began an involvement with the movement that would go on for over two years. The whole sad story is in my book.

There were many Hare Krishna beliefs I did not accept at the time. The astronomy described in the Hindu scriptures was just wrong. The accounts of events in the scriptures did not seem like things that really happened. On the other hand, their core beliefs about the soul were intriguing. I didn't judge their scriptures using the same standard I used to judge Dianetics, and I don't think it is fair to any religion to judge it by those standards.

So how is the Hare Krishna movement like a van Vogt novel?

The first similarity will be found in the immense self esteem of the author. If you're going to start any kind of movement you need to have a good opinion of yourself, especially if that good opinion is not widely shared. Read van Vogt's introduction to the revised edition of The World Of Null A. He clearly has a high opinion of himself and his work. He also feels unfairly persecuted, mostly by critics like Damon Knight.

Srila Prabhupada thought that distributing his books was the greatest welfare work for mankind. Back in the seventies they were mostly sold in airports. The devotee would hand someone a book and ask for a donation. Many of the books wound up in trash bins. The devotees would buy the discarded books from the janitors and try to sell them again. Anyone looking at this activity would think it was a dumb way to win hearts and minds or raise funds, but Srila Prabhupada thought that anyone who came in contact with these books even for a moment might have his life changed. Even though the books were translations of existing Hindu scriptures where he only provided commentary, he thought of them as his own books.

The second similarity is the practice of training to control one's own mind. In Null A the practitioner seeks to integrate his cortex and thalmus by training. Psychology is an exact science. You can go to a psychiatrist and have him take a picture of your brain, and based on what that picture shows he can treat you. By Null A training you can arrive at a superior kind of sanity.

In the Hare Krishna movement there is also training. The devotee seeks to rise above the three modes or gunas (goodness, passion, and ignorance). Like in the world of Null A there are castes based on what guna predominates in your mind. The mode of ignorance is dominant in animals and in those that are not much better than animals. These would be the laboring class. The mode of passion is suitable for the ruling class. The mode of goodness is for the priestly class. Those who have trancended these modes are the enlightened ones, like van Vogt's Venusians.

The practice for transcending these gunas involves following four regulative principles (no meat eating, no gambling, no unregulated sex, and no intoxication) and training the mind by listening to the sound of chanting Krishna's names two or more hours per day. This wasn't something Srila Prabhupada invented. It is normal Hindu practice, though not one performed by most Hindus.

The third similarity is the promise of Utopia. In Null A, Venus is a Utopia. It is a world without crime and without want where everyone does what is needed, even resisting an alien invasion. Living there is to be prized even above being a ruler of Earth.

The Hare Krishna movement believed that being a devotee living in a Krishna Conscious society was as good as living with Krishna in the spiritual world. Their scriptures speak of kings so righteous that in their realms no parents ever experienced the death of their children. Devotees take this seriously.

Persecution is a big theme in van Vogt novels, and back in the seventies the Hare Krishna movement had various insulting names for those not in the movement. The ones that gave us the most grief we called demons. The ones that were easy to get donations from were called slows. The ones that came to the temple ever Sunday night but weren't serious about following the rules we called fringees. The ones we felt neutral about we called karmis (which means those who work for the fruits of action, or karma).

I left the Hare Krishna movement in 1979 after being deprogrammed. It took three days for people who had once belonged to cults like Hare Krishna was in the 1970's to convince me that I was trapped in thought patterns that prevented me from thinking for myself. I wonder what van Vogt would have thought of deprogramming. I know he wrote a book The Violent Man whose plot involved brainwashing. I was impressed enough with that book that I mailed it to a friend that I had helped deprogram. (Remember how I had met a remarkable woman on my first visit to the Evanston temple? She was the one). The book might have started her to think that I was too nerdy to be good husband material. but she would have figured that out in any case.

The Violent Man

A.E. van Vogt's works don't age well for me; I am too aware of their flaws. I believe that they influenced many people who went on to become better writers than he was. Cordwainer Smith and Philip K. Dick might be two examples. Philip K. Dick wrote an excellent story called The Golden Man which is like the mirror image of Slan. In this story, a mutant becomes the next stage in human evolution, not by having superior intelligence, superior endurance, or telepathy, but simply by being attractive to women. This creature has no intelligence to speak of, or any qualities humans admire in themselves, but it can see a few minutes into the future and thus take action to avoid being captured, and its golden skin has the power to arouse desire in human women and make them willing mothers to its offspring. As the story ends, it is likely that creatures like it will replace the human race.

The Golden Man

The story was definitely a reaction to Slan. Dick wrote:

"Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't".

There was a movie made from The Golden Man titled Next, about a man who can see a short distance into the future. I didn't see it, but it sounds like Hollywood took a neat idea from a Dick story and did its own thing with it, ignoring the original point to the story. Hollywood tends to do that, and not just to Dick. Read Farewell To The Master by Harry Bates, which had a very different ending from The Day The Earth Stood Still, the film based on it.

Farewell to the Master

This brings me to my own novels, which were influenced by all the Science Fiction authors I've read, including van Vogt, as well as my experiences in the Hare Krishnas. My first novel is Shree Krishna And The Singularity, a story of the first conscious machine and its search for self realization, a search that will involve a future version of the Hare Krishna movement. There are van Vogtian elements in that story, but done with a more straightforward plot and a sense of humor which is entirely absent in van Vogt's works.

There are novelists, van Vogt being one example, who make a big sensation with their very first novel. My own novel has shown no signs of doing that, at least not so far.

Shree Krishna And The Singularity

Having said that, I'm not too unhappy with how it turned out.

You ain't nothin' but a Space Hound

Spacehounds of IPC by E.E. "Doc" Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Badly, badly dated.

If you enjoy Star Trek you should know that Roddenbery owes a great debt to E.E. Smith, and Star Wars owes more to him than it ever did to Joseph Campbell.

Having said that . . .

In this story every planet and moon in the solar system is inhabited. A "computer" is a job for a human being. Space ships run on broadcast power. Relations between men and women have not advanced even to where they were when the story was written. Space ships have VERY thick armor to protect themselves from meteors.

Yet there are tractor beams, presser beams, force fields, and other inventions that are the stuff of classic space opera.

A modern reader would be disappointed in this book, especially the love story. Someone who believes in abstinence-only sex education might even have second thoughts after reading it.

Smith's Lensmen novels hold up better than this.



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A Badly Dated, But Fun, Heinlein novel

The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a very enjoyable, though badly dated, book. It was written the year I was born, so that isn't too surprising. It takes place in the year 1970 and the year 2000, neither of which are much like we remember them.

Heinlein was trained as an engineer, and the hero of the story is an engineer, but Heinlein could not predict the personal computer or all of the things that it made possible. He also had never taken an electric typewriter apart, or he would have known that an electric typewriter and a computer keyboard are two very different things. (I know this myself because in high school I found an electric typewriter in someone's garbage and took it apart).

One of his inventions is similar in purpose to CAD/CAM software, but it isn't done with software. Another is much like a Roomba. His general purpose robot is built with "Thorson tubes" but anyone building something like that today would use computer programs.

The story itself is entertaining, with an appealing hero and a good sense of humor. His ideas about what 1970 and 2000 AD would be like are amusing.




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Citizen of the Galaxy

Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Lately I've been listening to classic science fiction stories as audio books, both to make my commute more interesting and to help me improve my own writing. I had originally read this book in high school and remembered liking it well enough that I bought a copy for a friend's son. The book was already old when I read it, and I wondered if it would hold up for a modern reader.

In my opinion, it does.

One of the great things about Heinlein as a writer is that he can take an idea and really think it through. In the middle portion of the story the hero spends time among the Free Traders, a society of space travelers that rarely spend more than a few hours outside their ships. Heinlein tells us how this society works, what the rules are, why the rules need to exist, what the penalties for breaking the rules are, how family relationships work, how people get married, how trading is done on different planets, etc. He makes this society seem real. The characters might be a little thin (I thought they were OK) but in science fiction the setting is important, and Heinlein nails it.

The science fiction that my friend's son has grown up with (Star Wars, etc.) is entirely lacking in this kind of imagination.

It's a rousing story with the hero Thorby having breathless adventures and visiting strange worlds, bit there is a lot of thought behind both. Listening to Heinlein stories makes me want to be a better writer and gives me a pretty good idea what I'd need to do to become one.



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The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first read this book in High School (not as an assignment) and really enjoyed it. Heinlein does a wonderful job of creating a plausible Lunar society that began as a penal colony and is gradually evolving into something else. There a fewer women than men, which leads to them becoming more powerful in Lunar society and changes the way marriages and families work. Most women have more than one husband, and there are more complicated arrangements.

There is politics in the story. Some call it a Libertarian novel, and while I would agree with that the dire situation that the Loonies find themselves in is a plausible outcome of their world starting out as a penal colony. It isn't silly like the dystopia in Atlas Shrugged, for example. The Loonies have every right to revolt, and the explanation of how things got that way is satisfying.

While there are parallels between this story and the American Revolution, there are many differences. The heroes aren't all wealthy white slave holders, for example. The main protagonist speaks with a Russian accent, and his partners in revolution are a sentient computer, a blonde woman who has been a surrogate mother to eight children, and a South American dissident professor. You can't imagine any of them watching Fox News.

As you would expect in a story set in the future there are technologies we don't have yet: Lunar catapults, a sentient computer, nuclear fusion. What is interesting reading the book now is how many present day technologies they don't have. There are no personal computers, no cell phones, no Skype, no World Wide Web, no bloggers, no email. A kind of computer animation is described in the book, but it is described in a way that makes it sound incredibly difficult to do with even the most advanced technology available. There is no digital photography. There are still newspapers, including one called the Daily Lunatic.

At one point the heroes type a letter on four different typewriters to make it difficult to trace where it came from. There are still phone booths and switching systems. The heroes spend much effort devising ways to keep their communications secret that seems silly today. All of this would make the story very difficult to film. You'd have to rethink a lot of it.

Of course he gets things wrong the other way, too. This Lunar penal colony was set up in the nineteen nineties.

In spite of these few shortcomings, this may be Heinlein's best novel.



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Wildsmith by Ron Goulart

Wildsmith by Ron Goulart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is one of the sillier premises for a science fiction novel. Wildsmith is the best selling author of a book described as one of the filthiest historical novels ever written, as well as one of the best researched. Unfortunately, he's a robot, a fact that must be kept from his readers at all costs. Even more unfortunately, he has been programmed with every eccentricity of every great author. This means that he sometimes feels compelled to mail his hands to his female admirers, or rant about growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, or about being on safari in Africa.

The protagonist has to take Wildsmith on a public relations tour, in a future world that is even more dysfunctional than the one we live in. Along the way he meets and is attracted to the PR flack and lover of another eccentric author, this one human. Hilarity ensues.

The premise is of course, ridiculous, but if you're willing to go along with it you'll enjoy a very funny story.



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Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I actually bought the issue of Wired magazine containing the longest chapter in this book: Mother Earth, Mother Board. I got rid of a big pile of Wired magazines because they were taking up space but I later regretted not trying to find and save that issue. This book contains that article and several others. The article is about laying undersea cable. To give you some idea of what it's like, if you watched and enjoyed the James Burke TV series Connections, imagine that cranked up to 11. Maybe 12.

Connections

Stephenson in his novels constantly puts in big chunks of exposition and somehow manages to do that without making you lose interest in the story. This book is like the exposition without the novel parts.

If you've never read any of his books, this is not a good one to start with.

Some reviewers have pointed out that much of this material can be read for free online. That is true. The book even reprints an interview he did for Slashdot! Having said that, Slashdot has interviewed more than a few authors, and this interview is worth putting in a bound book.



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