spocksbro

Egypt fascinates me, especially ancient Egypt, really ancient Egypt – the Old and Middle Kingdoms. And Egypt is old. The so-called New Kingdom period ended c. 1069 BC. Several decades before David created Israel and three centuries before Romulus and Remus founded Rome. The time span from Khufu to Cleopatra is greater than that from Cleopatra to us.

Lives of the Ancient Egyptians is a collection of 100 two-to-three-page essays about the men and women of ancient Egypt from those murky beginnings c. 3100 BC to its conquest by Augustus in 31 BC. There are entries for the usual suspects: Khufu, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Ptolemy. But the relatively more interesting essays are the ones about the more obscure pharaohs and the less-exalted members of Egyptian society.

The following aren’t the “top 10” but they are a sampling of ones I found of particular interest:

Merneith: Before there was Hatshepsut, there was Merneith, the mother of Egypt’s fifth pharaoh, Den. She ruled as regent while her son was a child and was rewarded by him with a full mortuary complex.

Imhotep: The real Imhotep is a far more fascinating character than the villain of The Mummy movies. There are only two contemporary references to his existence that have survived. The first is an inscription on the base of a statue of Pharaoh Djoser located at the entrance to that ruler’s tomb complex, the Step Pyramid, the one that inspired all the succeeding pyramids. The inscription’s prominence and the fact that it honored someone other than the pharaoh indicate how important Imhotep was at the royal court. The second reference is a graffito on a monument from Djoser’s successor’s tomb complex. Later generations would embellish Imhotep’s life until he became a god of writing, architecture, wisdom and medicine.

Hemira: Hemira was a priestess of Hathor who lived in the Delta (Lower Egypt) during the First Intermediate Period. She staffed a minor temple in a provincial town but I liked the inscription on her tomb. People would come to these tombs and offer sacrifices and such for good fortune, etc., similar to Catholic saint cults. Hemira advertised: “As for all people who will say ‘bread for Hemi in this her tomb,’ I am an effective spirit and will not allow it to go ill with them.”

Intef II: Intef was ruler of the 11th Dynasty who loved his dogs. One of the stelae he erected shows him playing with his dogs Behkai (Gazelle), Abaqer (Hound), Pehtes (Blackie) and Teqru (Kettle).

Hekanakht: Hekanakht was a farmer whose letters to his sons and other family members reveal an anxiety over the proper management of his properties (“Take great care! Watch over my seed corn! Look after all my property! Look, I count you responsible for it. Take great care with all my property!”) and a tangled family life. His first wife died and the relationships between the children of that first marriage and the wife – Iutenhab – and children of the second were tense (“Shall you not respect my new wife?!”).

Twenty-five hundred years or so later, Agatha Christie would use Hekanakht’s troubled domesticity as the basis for her mystery Death Comes As The End.

Merenptah: Merenptah’s reign is noteworthy in some circles because it’s the only time in hieroglyphic texts that Israel is ever mentioned – as one of several cities and tribes defeated by Merenptah.

Paneb: Paneb was no court official or military officer. He was a crook and serial adulterer. A corrupt workman who stole, bribed and blasphemed and, perhaps, committed murder. Unfortunately, though we have a record of the trial where his enemies brought him up on the most serious charges, we have no idea how it turned out. Did he escape justice? Or was maat preserved and he got what he deserved?

Naunakht: Naunakht is another Egyptian woman. Women in Egypt enjoyed a relatively high status in society. They could own property in their own right and controlled their dowries. Naunakht’s children were not suitably grateful for her care and protection when they were young. When she had grown old and needed support, several of them were less than generous: “I brought up these eight servants of yours…But see, I am grown old, and see, they are not looking after me in my turn. Whoever of them has aided me, to him I will give of my property; he who has not given to me, to him I will not give of my property. They shall not participate in the division of my one-third.”

Piye: Most of the time, it was Egypt who sent the troops to chastise, sometimes conquer, Nubia but in the 8th century BC it was the other way around. Piye, the ruler of Kush, took his legions and conquered Thebes, going on to conquer Lower Egypt as well and restoring unity to the country. Far from being a foreign conqueror, however, it seems Piye was “more Egyptian than the Egyptians.” He restored the Amun cult and temples and consciously modeled the regime’s art and propaganda from models of the best remembered and most prestigious former dynasties.

Manetho: Manetho flourished under the first two Ptolemies (late 4th – early 3rd century BC). It is to him that all modern Egyptologists owe the scheme of 31 dynasties and a great deal of knowledge about that ancient land’s history (though all of his works survived second hand, being quoted in other author’s histories).

Wilkinson assumes a general knowledge of ancient Egypt on the reader’s part. If you didn’t recognize any of the “usual suspects” I mentioned above, this is probably not a book that will interest you. However, if you’re like me and do have an interest in the period, then I would recommend this book. I’d also recommend Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, which is also geared toward the lay reader and offers a well-written account of the Nile valley’s history over the same period as this book covers.

Reading The Country of Ice Cream Star(TCICS) I was reminded of two novels. The first is Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (review). It too depicts a post-apocalyptic world where a young, driven hero journeys from a parochial life into a much larger world and finds himself playing a much larger role than he had dreamed possible. In both books, the heroes retain an essential decency and innate moral resilience despite becoming wiser to how the world works. And both books are written in an invented dialect. In TCICS – as well as in Riddley Walker – the narrator’s English serves to bring her circumstances alive in a way that writing the novel in Standard English wouldn’t have. Everything Ice Cream sees, feels and does is brought into sharper focus because the reader has to experience it from a slightly skewed perspective. I can only describe the writing as “exuberant.” There’s an energy in it that makes reading it a pleasure.

The second book I’m reminded of is William Nolan’s Logan's Run. Here again we have a dystopian future. A true nightmare: a world run by teen-agers, where life ends at 21. In Logan’s Run, the death sentence is enforced by the Sandmen of Deep Sleep. In the world of Ice Cream Star, it’s plague that has carried off everyone over 21, and it continues to do so. Every child gets the “posies” around 18 or 19, and every child dies before their 21st year.

Ice Cream Sixteen Star is the oldest girl of a group of nomads – the Sengles – who are currently living near the ruins of Lowell, Mass., alongside more sedentary groups like the Lowells, the Christings and the Nat Mass Armies.

My mother and my grands and my great-grands been Sengle pure. Our people be a tarry night sort, and we skinny and long. My brother Driver climb a tree with only hands, because our bones so light, our muscles fortey strong. We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like ten guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love.

 

We Sengles be a wandering sort. We never grown nothing from anything, never had no tato patch nor cornfield. Be thieves, and brave to hunt. A Sengle hungry even when he eat, even when he rich, he still want to grab and rob, he hungry for something he ain’t never seen nor thought of. We was proud, we was ridiculous as wild animals, but we was bell and strong. (p. 3)

 

The delicate balance among the various groups is soon disrupted when the Sengles capture a “roo,” short for – as we learn – “Russian.” Pasha, apparently a deserter, tells Ice Cream that there’s a cure for the “posies” but it’s on the ships of an invading army down near Washington. Ice Cream determines to get that cure – both for the sake of her brother, who is showing signs of the disease, and for the sake of all her Sengles, in fact, for the sake of every child. And so begins her journey into a wider and more dangerous world than anything she’s seen. From New York – now known as Ciudad de las Marias, a catholic theocracy run by a gaggle of adolescent cardinals who would give the Renaissance Papacy a run for its money – to Quantico, where a band of “marines” holds on to the sacred grounds of the Mall, to confronting the invaders and wresting the cure from them (sort of).

Not to spoil it too much, but the ending is not a “happy” one. Not in the sense that Ice Cream and her allies save the day and bring a new, better way of life to the Nighted States. It’s messy, like life, and that’s what makes it so much more satisfying than otherwise. As Ice Cream writes at the conclusion:

And I know inside this final loss, I going to save this place. I be small in all this blackness world, this ship of drunken vampires, but through my hearten wounds, I living yet, and all my love the same. Nor death been ever arguments to me, I know my truth. I know ain’t evils in no life nor cruelties in no red hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star. (p. 580)

 

TCICS compares favorably with Riddley Walker. I thoroughly enjoyed it and – after a long drought – can recommend something without reservation. This is a remarkable book, certainly the best new fiction I’ve read so far this year, and Ice Cream has joined my list of “favorite characters.”

The problem with books of this nature is that either the "death of an idea" is such a no-brainer that it doesn't deserve an essay or it's the bete noire of the author. For example, in this volume one can find essays that call for the final interment of String Theory alongside others that as vigorously defend it. Or materialists who deny that consciousness persists after death alongside others who argue for the opposite.

The best essay in the collection - and what makes it worth reading - is Ian McEwan's, "Beware of Arrogance! Retire Nothing!"

A great and rich scientific tradition would hang onto everything it has. Truth is not the only measure. There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right. Some are wrong, but brilliantly so. Some are wrong but contribute to method. Some are wrong but help found a discipline....

 

We need to remember how we got to where we are, and we'd like the future not to retire us. Science should look to literature and maintain a vibrant living history as a monument to ingenuity and persistence. We won't retire Shakespeare. Nor should we Bacon. (pp. 256-7)

I could have done without the too-cute asides and double entendres but there is a serious point to this celebration of genitalia and that is:

[S]tudying the evolution of genitalia has provided us with deep insights and spectacular panoramas on the history of life....

 

Somewhere in the deep folds of time, sex arose as a means to outrun fast-evolving viruses or help fix errors in the genetic code. Then a bacterium crawled into a primordial cell. To counter combat among cohabiting bacteria, separate male and female sexes, producing different sex cells...appeared. Rather than scattering these sex cells randomly...some organisms began packaging them...setting the stage for sexual selection...and giving us the bewildering array of form and function that we see today....

 

[G]enital evolution may also be the driving force for the origin of new species. If it is true that male genitalia are constantly evolving t adapt to female genitalia, and vice versa, then this dual adaptation could cause...speciation events....

 

And while I would not imply that the evolution of genitalia is the wedge driven between us and our primate brethren, it certainly has played it part in paving the evolutionary paths that these species have traveled.... (pp. 187-88)

It's too short for the topic it addresses (esp. the role of homosexuality in sexual selection) but it's interesting and the author gives a decent bibliography and annotations for those who want to get into more specialized literature.

Julie Czerneda is not an author whom I follow regularly. But she has been on my radar ever since reading A Thousand Words for Stranger several many years ago. I read Survival, the first book in the Species Imperative series, when it came out and enjoyed it well enough. By the time Migration, book two, came along, I was reading other things and never found the time or inclination to continue. Recently, DAW issued the entire series in this omnibus volume, offered by the Science Fiction Book Club, and – the stars being favorable – I decided to complete my reading.

A brief summary: Sometime in the future, Earth has become a member of the Interspecies Union, a galaxy-wide association of aliens held together by the Sinzi, who control the transect technology that makes FTL travel possible. While interspecies relations are never easy, the situation appears stable and there are no threats on the horizon. In the Solar system, heavy industries and much of the population have moved off Earth, allowing the planet to begin recovering from the ravages of the Industrial Age.

Things are never so simple, of course; otherwise we wouldn’t have a novel. Along one of the transects that pass through the Solar system, there is a region of space called the Chasm, where every potentially life-bearing world has been scoured of all organic life. No current space-faring species knows who, why or how this occurred but recently similar scourings have been happening on worlds along the transect.

Caveat: I have not picked up a Game of Thrones novel since #4 back in 2006, right before the notorious hiatus between that and volume five. Even before then, however, I was growing bored with the series. There wasn’t anyone I really cared about in the cast except for Arya and Jon, and they hardly ever got any “screen time.” And Martin wasn’t exploiting any of the nonmundane elements of his world, like the erratic weather or the wildlings beyond the Wall.

I also haven’t watched a single episode of the TV series, and don’t plan to.

So why – even before I’ve finished this book – am I giving The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones four stars?

Simply because I live for reference books like this and I am very much enjoying reading it.

Of late, and for too long, the Muse has left me and I have found little inspiration to write extensive reviews of the books I've been reading. But as I've given this one four stars, I'd be remiss if I entirely neglected to explain why.

I first became aware of Margaret Fuller's existence from a review in the New York Review of Books of one of the recent biographies that have come out and was intrigued (whether this one or Megan Marshall's, I forget). And when I came across this quote (which graces my e-mail address), I knew I had to know more: "I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own."

It turns out that my gut reaction was correct: Fuller is a person worth knowing. I've provided some examples of her thoughts and beliefs in my status updates on GoodReads so I will only quote here a sketch culled from Matteson's biography:

A reference book that devotes a chapter each to some of the more interesting (large) animals around the world. Much of the focus is on African fauna - gorillas, lions, zebras, crocodiles, etc. - but Benyus also samples Asia, the oceans, North America and the poles. The selection is governed in large part by the animals' presence in zoos, and the author devotes the opening and closing chapters to critiques of zoos and how they can better accommodate their charges, and zoos' importance in a world where humans are short-sightedly destroying natural habitats at a frightening pace.

Five interesting things I learned:

1. 1. Because black rhinos are so unsocial, mating rituals can be dangerous as "in response to early solicitations, the female is likely to attack." (p. 195)

2. The unfortunate myth that rhino horns promote sexual virility comes from the fact that copulation can last up to 1-1/2 hours.

3. Among male giraffes, dominance contests often cause erections and end in the winner mounting the loser.

4. Bottlenose dolphins exude a mucous from their eyes that helps them move through the water more easily.

5. Komodo monitors are not picky eaters. Smaller, younger monitors run the risk of becoming meals themselves if they get in the way of their larger cousins.

And one example of the need for editors:

There's a point in the book where Benyus uses the idiom "it doesn't faze the animal" but it's spelled "phase."

This is a very dense biography of the Roman emperor Vespasian (69-79), and a more general history of the establishment of the Flavian dynasty (69-96); Levick assumes a very solid knowledge of Roman history in the reader.

Which - if you have one - makes this a highly recommended book. Levick presents a balanced account of Vespasian's life and his (and his family's) impact on the development of the Principate.

Ever since I read Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis I have been recommending it every chance I get. At a little over 700 pages (in my edition), this book has not been high on my list of rereads, but as I’m waiting for R. Scott Bakker’s Unholy Consult to come out in July (2014) and I’m not in the mood to start anything new at the moment, I decided to pull it out of storage and see if it holds up.

The book is a quasi-sequel to Asimov’s classic Foundation series. Kingsbury (as I understand it) had difficulties securing the rights to use Asimov’s work so he approached things indirectly. For example, “Terminus” becomes “Faraway” and “Trantor” is now “Splendid Wisdom.” The Mule, the psychic mutant from Foundation and Empire, is “Cloun-the-Stubborn,” his mutation morphing into a technological device (the ancestor of the quantronic familiar, about which more below), and the world from which he defeats the Foundation is “Lakgan” (sted “Kalgan”). Hari Seldon is never mentioned; instead, the man who invented psychohistory is always referred to simply as “The Founder.”

The story is set about a thousand years after the Pscholars of the Second Foundation have united the galaxy under the second Galactic Empire. Using the mathematics of psychohistory, these men (and I’ll elaborate upon that deliberate use of the gendered word below) have maintained peace and prosperity throughout the galaxy, and seem poised to continue to do so indefinitely. However, a young, brilliant Pscholar – Eron Osa – believes he has discovered evidence that, despite appearances, the empire is in the midst of a Seldon Crisis. Jars Hanis, the Rector of the Lyceum and the highest ranked Pscholar, panics and has Eron’s fam destroyed, effectively executing him. Fams – quantronic familiars – are the descendants of Cloun-the-Stubborn’s mind-control device. They are symbiotic machines that greatly expand the human mind’s (the wetware) capacity to think and process information. Every citizen of the empire – nearly every citizen – gets one when he or she is three. Human brain and fam develop and mature together. To destroy one, is to effectively destroy the other.

Those parts of the book set in the present deal with the suddenly merely human Eron’s efforts to survive without a fam and to try and discover what he had done to be punished so severely. The majority of the book, however, deals with the years leading up to Eron’s fall, when he was subtly manipulated by a cabal of renegade psychohistorians (the Oversee) into wanting to be a Pscholar; his entrée into the Lyceum; and being taken under the wing of the second-ranked Pscholar, Hahukum Konn, Hanis’ bête noire.

The novel’s finale pits the established psychohistorical model of the empire against Eron’s predictions.

Having digested Psychohistorical Crisis again, I can still recommend it, though not as enthusiastically as before. If you have any interest or liking for Asimov’s original novels (the first three, at least), seeing what Kingsbury does with the universe is fun, and he does his best to make the “science” of psychohistory plausible. Of course, the romance has faded and I can see flaws in the story telling. The author’s primary sin? Too much of the book is taken up with back story. The ending feels rushed and incomplete.

The second flaw is that there are no serious female characters. At all. This may be a nod to the era in which the original books were written, when fully realized females were few and far between in most SF novels. If so – it’s not readily apparent. For example, apparently there are no female psychohistorians. All of the ones we meet are men; and even in references to past Pscholars none appear to have been women. It’s as if Barbie’s famous comment, “Math is hard,” has been taken seriously. And of the women who do appear, they’re either housemaids (e.g., Magda) or mostly interested in sex with our hero or some other male character (e.g., the nameless captain of a starship).

There is one woman, Nemia, an agent of the Oversee, who exhibits talents outside of the bedroom. She’s a master technician, and a genius at fiddling with fams. But even in the Oversee, “math is still hard,” as it’s her grandfather who’s the psychohistorian.

The third flaw is also gender related. Most of the women in this book are underage girls, and there’s a strong flavor of paedophilia throughout the novel. This I can’t forgive as a sideways homage to ‘50s SF, and is my strongest reservation about recommending this to anyone. It reflects a trend I’ve noticed in a lot of the hard SF I’ve read, esp. from older authors – a fixation on certain things, including extended lifespans and having sex with young women (e.g., Peter Hamilton in Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, though he doesn’t go quite so far as to descend to paedophilia. Larry Niven in Lucifer’s Hammer and Glen Cook in The Silver Spike and most recently in A Path to Coldness of Heart, both of whom have paedophile characters who are not “bad guys.” Perhaps I don’t read widely enough in this particular part of the field. And thereare authors in this genre I really like – Alastair Reynolds or Michael Flynn, to name two, but these others are big-name authors, not minor talents or self-published.

Having written the above, should I continue to recommend this book? With some trepidation, I would say, “yes,” but I would now add the caveat that there are some distressing flaws in the novel that may ruin the reader’s enjoyment of what is good.

A decidedly "bleh" homage to Sherlock Holmes, which reaches a nadir of unreadability with "The Startling Events in the Electrified City." I couldn't finish the story and thought of giving up on the collection entirely.

I persevered, however, and the remaining stories weren't too bad. Just not "too good."

Except for one story, "The Last of Sheila Locke-Holmes," which has nothing to do with Holmes but is about a young girl dealing with her parents' marital problems, and quite good.

And I will mention one more story - "The Adventure of the Concert Pianist" - to say that it shamelessly steals the murder plot from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, except there's no insane monk.

Ever since I read Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis I have been recommending it every chance I get. At a little over 700 pages (in my edition), this book has not been high on my list of rereads, but as I’m waiting for R. Scott Bakker’s Unholy Consult to come out in July (2014) and I’m not in the mood to start anything new at the moment, I decided to pull it out of storage and see if it holds up.

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Ted Hughes’ Crow was a mixed bag for me. Some poems went right over my head no matter how many times I would read them. Others read like pretentious claptrap. But then there were a handful that I enjoyed reading, like “Crow Goes Hunting”:

Crow

Decided to try words.

He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack –

Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained,

With strong teeth.

You could not find a better bred lot.

He pointed out the hare and away went the words

Resounding.

Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare?

It converted itself to a concrete bunker.

The words circled protesting, resounding.

Crow turned the words into bombs – they blasted the bunker.

The bits of bunker flew up – a flock of starlings.

Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings.

The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst.

Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water.

The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir.

The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hill

Having eaten Crow’s words.

Crow gazed after the bounding hare

Speechless with admiration.

My other favorites were “Crow’s Playmates,” “Apple Tragedy,” “Fragment of an Ancient Tablet” and “Snake Hymn.”

If you’re a Hughes fan then you’ll probably like this collection well enough but I can’t competently say “yea” or “nay” for anyone else.

“This is the original Game of Thrones,” or so says the man who would know, George R.R. Martin, and The Iron King certainly has more than its share of murder, adultery, conspiracy, star-crossed lovers and bloody-minded cruelty. The only thing it doesn’t have is dragons (unless you count the ones on heraldic devices). It’s an account of the last days of the Capetian dynasty of France, when the feudal society of the Middle Ages was giving way to the modern state, and England and France became locked in the deadly embrace of the Hundred Years’ War.

The Iron King opens a generation before the war, in 1314, when Philip the Fair successfully concludes his persecution and destruction of the Knights Templar, one of the most powerful organizations in Europe. On his pyre, its last Grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, curses the Capetians unto the 13^th generation. (And, within a year, all three architects of the Templars’ fall would be dead. Coincidence? Well…yes. The curse is the stuff of urban legend; and does it really make sense that a man brutally tortured for seven years and being burned alive would have the presence of mind to enunciate a curse against his tormentors? But it does make for a good story.) Between the death of de Molay and Philip, the royal family is torn apart by adultery. The wives of the king’s three sons are implicated in affairs. Two are condemned to convents, and the third is put under house arrest (she hadn’t had a lover but she helped the others conceal the trysts), and the hapless lovers are tortured and brutally executed. Meanwhile, the king’s daughter, wife of Edward II of England, is taking advantage of the situation to put herself and her young son (future Edward III and instigator of the Hundred Years’ War) in a position to claim the crown of France.

R.K. Narayan’s abridged, prose version of India’s national epic,The Mahabharata, is concise, fast paced, well written, and – unfortunately – passionless. Narayan has excised nearly everything not directly related to the Pandavas (Yudhistira, Bhima, Arjuna, and Nakula and Sahadeva) and their wife, Draupadi. In the process, he’s also stripped the story of any emotional power. For the most part, it’s like reading a book summary rather than a proper story. For example, there’s the chapter that has come down to us as The Bhagavad Gita, one of the more profound scriptures by anyone’s reckoning. In Narayan’s telling, it’s reduced to:

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Fall of Arthur. I’ve never been a fan of Tolkien as poet and, as a rule, skim through the examples that crop up in his prose or that are reproduced in the History of Middle-earth volumes. But I was intrigued by the subject and by what Tolkien may have made of the Matter of Britain (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight doesn’t count since it’s a translation of an existing poem).

Unfortunately, The Fall of Arthur is incomplete. Tolkien only completed four cantos (in several versions which Christopher Tolkien exhaustively presents) but what’s there suggests an original retelling of the war between Arthur and his son Mordred. The first cantos opens with Arthur fighting in the unmapped east when he learns of Mordred’s treachery; the second introduces Arthur’s son, his motivations for rebellion, and the queen and her motivations; the third cantos takes us to Lancelot, who languishes in Benwick mourning his fate; the fourth cantos describes Arthur’s initial landing at Romney in Kent and the ensuing battle with the rebels.