Tea With the Black Dragon

by on February 21, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

In the nearly 35 years since it was published, Tea With the Black Dragon has nearly become a period piece. The book opens in San Francisco, which doesn’t feel too different, but moves down to Silicon Valley, which has changed a lot. The street names are the same, but much else isn’t. Computers have also changed a lot in those years, with the novel showing the pre-IBM PC era of little shops, odd systems, and experimental hobby builders. It also features a person who would fit in easily with the dot-com era, constantly starting small companies with outside investment, which sometimes work, and sometimes don’t.

In many books of this type, the title would be something of a giveaway of a central mystery: Is Mayland Long just a somewhat odd person, or is he something more? But while that is a slight undercurrent for some of the characters, just what he can do is treated in a more offhand way. And though there’s a fuller explanation towards the very end, there’s plenty of points where you’re not given a lot of data.

Overall, the romance between the two main characters as the save the damsel third wheel is the main thread of the book. The crime/mystery that powers the main parts of the plot take over for the middle of the book, and things get too busy for the main two, but that just allows them time to be sure of how much they’ve grown fond of the other.

Sadly, the Open Road Kindle edition has completely lost all the scene breaks, leading to some very abrupt transitions. Other than that, the text is in great shape, but they really need to fix that.

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The Ornament of the World

by on February 14, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Medieval Spain is one of those subjects I would like to know more about, so a used copy of Menocal’s book on al-Andalus was an attractive purchase for me. It’s a little more limited than I would like, being more about literary culture than anything else (though there is plenty of architecture, and other high cultural objects as well).

But the ‘how’ (as seen in the subtitle) is generally left out. There is some discussion of how tolerance was built into a lot of early Muslim culture, but nothing on the day-to-day functioning of that tolerance, and nothing really about how it broke down. Most notably, the book largely ends with the fall of Granada, and the promise of religious toleration which is broken mere months later. There’s no real look at the pressures that lead to this final violent end of tolerance.

In the meantime, we are treated to shapshots of what happened in Iberia over ~700 years, taking particular scenes and persons, and exploring them and what they did, and who they knew, what they wrote, and how it was written. Some very interesting things come to light this way. Menocal promotes the idea that languages only have (by custom) certain uses. A language may be so identified with religious uses, that it stops being a language of poetry or storytelling. She identifies Arabic as a language that was used for religion, and yet never lost its non-religious (and religiously prohibited) uses. Jews and Christians living in al-Andalus learned Arabic, and then transmitted this freedom into the post-Latin vernaculars and Hebrew, creating a flowering of literature in those languages. According to Ornament of the World, this is the start of the various Romance vernaculars being taken seriously, and the start of the popular songs that started the ‘courtly love’ tradition in Aquitaine, and I’d like to see a book that traces this in more detail.

It’s a decent book, and if you’re interested, I do recommend it, though I would like to see a more rigorous look at most of the subjects Menocal brings up.

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Dune

by on February 6, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve been meaning to read Dune for decades now, but the thick paperback on my dad’s shelf always intimidated me a little. I’ve had some knowledge of the book, being aware of the Avalon Hill game and having started Westwood’s Dune II once. And none of the expectations that were generated by those were wrong.

Overall, it’s a very good book, though there were some concerns. I didn’t have too many problems figuring out the general outline of the story from near the beginning. Some of that is just because I have some idea what I’m getting into, but considering all that’s going on, I have to wonder if a certain amount of ‘telegraphing’ was intentional on Herbert’s part as a mirror to Paul’s own abilities to sense the future. However, the final climax has an extremely sudden raising of the stakes that feels out of place. There is an explanation, but it comes down to a single line much later, and the entire end just feels extremely disjointed from the rest of the book, since it is a situation that several points in the rest of the book say won’t happen.

The worldbuilding is very good, with the exception of being another SF setting with a time scale that is unlikely, with institutions existing for thousands upon thousands of years. But that’s a somewhat common feature of SF of the time. And it’s easy to ignore for all the things that are well done. Arrakis is that staple of SF, the one-terrain planet. But there’s a lot of nuance put into that terrain and ecology, and some very good inventions mixed in with parts that are more familiarly terrestrial. As the focus of the book, no other world gets any sort of real detail, but what is needed is given, and we’re shown just enough to see that it exists.

I can’t unreservedly praise Dune, but it is very well written, and certainly one everyone needs to read at some point.

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A World Lit Only By Fire

by on January 25, 2018 at 12:00 pm
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William Manchester’s book is really an ode to his hero, Magellan. He’s not a bad hero to have, but I think Manchester gives him far too much credit. The real value however, is that Manchester is far more interested in establishing the world he lived in than examining the man. Considering how often it is difficult to get anyone willing to have the feel of a time period as their main subject, it raises the book a bit in my estimation.

However, ‘The Medieval Mind’ in the subtitle is an overstatement. There’s a brief establishment of his look at the medieval world at the start of the book, but most of it is really on the transition into the Renaissance. It’s well written, and tackles the subject fairly well, but there are problems. Most of the contemporary authors he quotes were probably doing so for moralizing purposes in the first place, and a lot of what is cited has a very distinct tone of ‘kids these days!’. So, the book paints a picture of a static society that was breaking down into license and abuse of power that is unlikely to be very accurate in either direction.

Its worth noting that he covers the earliest parts of the Reformation, and within limits, covers it better than Diarmaid MacCulloch’s large volume on the subject. He doesn’t go into the threads of intellectual thought that is the primary focus of the latter, but he covers the more temporal aspects of the early power struggle in a more readable, and I think, more complete, format.

The final section is on Magellan’s voyage, including a good grounding in what the original plan was, and where it went wrong: At the time, the Rio de Plata was known, and from its size, was assumed to be a passage to the Pacific, as it had been too large to explore thoroughly. It’s a very good summary of one of the great sea voyages of history.

In general, A World Lit Only by Fire is a good readable starting point for the history of the Renaissance, but a lot of nuance is decidedly not there. The general learned opinion is that his scholarship is too out date (I’ll note that Durant’s Story of Civilization looks to be the primary starting point of his opinions, which while great, is well over half a century old), though I don’t know of a more current ‘alternative’.

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The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by on January 17, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Alexandria is one of the great success stories of the ancient world, being founded by Alexander the Great, and then spending the next several centuries as one of the great trading ports of the Mediterranean, as well as a center of learning. So a history of the city has a lot of appeal.

Sadly, this isn’t really a history of the city. It does start with Alexander’s initial choosing of the site, and laying out the basics, and talks a little bit about the initial building. But past that, the book becomes almost entirely dedicated to the great minds that were at (or may have spent time at) the great library of Alexandria. So the bulk of the book is more of a who’s who of ancient philosophy. That still makes for good reading, but the authors are too enthusiastic, and make a number of statements that are problematic or error-prone.

The most startling mistake is a statement that the Julian calendar (correctly identified as being borrowed from Eratosthenes) is accurate to one day in 1,461 years. If that were true, there’d hardly be any need for the Gregorian calendar, as they’d only differ by a day or so, instead of 13 days. They also imply (in the Eratosthenes chapter again) that Columbus would have trouble convincing the King of Spain that the world was round, when the real trouble was convincing the court that he could make it, as the distance was too great for any amount of carried supplies (a conclusion that Columbus would have come to if he’d used Eratosthenes’ figure for the size of the Earth, instead of a much smaller estimate).

On the other hand, there’s an interesting note that an early draft of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus references Aristarchus’ heliocentric theory. Presumably they’re referring to the Commentariolus, and it’s an interesting connection that I hadn’t heard about before. (Though looking it up on Wikipedia shows that the authors perpetuate a translation-induced misconception of Aristarchus’ theory being considered impious at the time.)

This is a lighter, less technical, book than I was expecting, and for the lighter side of non-fiction, fairly well written… as long as you remember some of the wider-ranging pronouncements are problematic.

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