KiM KARDASHIAN REVEALED !!!! (8)

... [T]he greatest provocations for lust are from our apparel; God makes, they say, man shapes, and there is no motive like unto it ... A filthy knave, a deformed quean, a crooked carcass, a maukin, a witch, a rotten post, an hedge-stake may be set out and tricked up that is shall make as fair a show, as much enamour, as the rest; many a silly fellow is so taken...Not that comeliness of clothes is therefore to be condemned, and those usual ornaments: there is a decency and decorum in this as there are in other things...Why do they crown themselves with gold and silver, use coronets and tires of several fashions, deck themselves with pendants, bracelets, earrings, chains, girdles, rings, pins, spangles, embroideries, shadows, rabatoes, versicolour ribands? Why do they make such glorious shows with their scarves, feathers, fans, masks, furs, laces, tiffanies, ruffs, falls, cauls, cuffs, damasks, velvets, tinsels, cloths of gold, silver, tissue? stones, odours, flowers, birds, beasts, fishes, and whatsoever Africa, Asia, America, sea, land, art and industry of man can afford" Why do they use and covet such novelties of invention, such new-fangled tires, and spend such inestimable sums on them?...Why are they like so many Sybarites, or Nero's Poppea, Ahasuerus' concubines, so costly, so long a-dressing as Caesar was marshaling his army, or a hawk in pruning...they had more need some of them to be tied in Bedlam with iron chains, have a whip for a fan, and hair-cloths next to their skins, and instead of wrought smocks, have their cheeks stigmatized with a hot iron, I say, some of our Jezebels, instead of painting if they were well served. But why all this labour, all this cost, preparation, riding, running, far-fetched and dear-bought stuff? "Because, forsooth, they would be fair and fine, and where nature is defective, supply it by art."

Robert  Burton , The Anatomy of Melancholy

MONDAY MORNING

BOOK REVIEW: RED MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The last long science fiction I read was Dune the year it came out. Then a long period of no science fiction, and in the past year a return to the genre. And one thing I have liked about the mid-century sf I have been reading is its low page count. Most of these guys, and so far I have read only guys, get the story done in under 300 pages. And I really go for the ones that clock in at around 180. There's a good idea, the story moves fast, outrageous things can happen but the story can also be quite moving.


Red Mars is 572 pages long, and it is only part one of a trilogy. (SF writers used to crank out short stories because they only got around a penny a word. Nowadays it seems that long novels in series is the way to go.) But by all reports, Red Mars, and the subsequent Green Mars and Blue Mars are good solid entertainment and a relatively realistic look at how human colonization of Mars might play out. On the cover of the copy I had, Arthur C. Clarke hailed it as "The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has every been written." I don't know how big or how seriously competitive that field is, but I can say that is the best novel on the colonization of Mars that I have ever read.


With 600 pages of narrative you expect some character development, a sense of history, and a good plot. Robinson creates good characters. When we fist meet them they seem destined to fill stereotyped slots in an sf novel of this kind: The ex-Astronaut who was the first man to land on Mars; the gregarious Russian who spouts revolution; the female scientist who believes Mars should remain essentially untouched played against the male scientist fixated on terraforming the planet; the diplomat; and, the difficult, Russian beauty who will allow for a certain amount of erotic tension, but not too much. But the story, told in long sections that focus on individual characters, is never formulaic. The novel follows competent people working hard in an alien environment where where everything around them is deadly.


One hundred of them set off for Mars, and the book covers about thirty years. And yes, at times I felt like I was plodding through a James Michener novel about Hawaii or Texas or The Holy Land. (That feeling could return if I read the next two in the series.) Critics praise Robinson for writing hard sf, science fiction where the writer uses a serious scientific background to develop the plot. Most of that is lost on me -- I never did understand the whole space elevator thing -- but I did enjoy the way the colonization developed from 100 dedicated scientists to tens of thousands of new immigrants, sent either by the homelands to secure a spot on the new planet, or the equivalent of wildcatters out to exploit the treasure trove of metals the planet holds.


There is a mystery, actually several mysteries, involved, and the political maneuvering that becomes part of the expanding society rings true to what one would expect in a world that is part research station, part boomtown, and part escape valve for an earth that is going out of control. I have to say, though, that one description of a Martian sunset is very much like another, and that we have better get busy with advancing robotic technology to get these guys settled on Mars by 2026.


James Cameron has Robinson's trilogy under option, which seems as inevitable as the fact that nothing will probably ever come it. It could be the next Battlestar Galactica, and I don't mean this as a spoiler, but,if they do the trilogy, a lot of actors are going to have only one year contracts.


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KIM KARDASHIAN REVEALED !!!! (7)

(In a craven effort to move up on Google searches for Kim Kardashian, I have abandoned The Kim Kardashian Reading Series for this slightly more lurid title. I considered KIM KARDASHIAN EXPOSED !!!, but that seemed a bit much, and also mean-spirited in a way to don't intend. Of course if numbers don't go up, I may be reduced to even more lascivious headings. Meanwhile, Kim continues to share her readings with followers of Potato Weather.)

Idleness overthrows all, love tyrannizeth in an idle person. If thou hast nothing to do, thou shalt be haled in pieces with envy, lust, some passion or another. Through doing nothing men learn to do ill. 'Tis Aristotle's simile, "As match or touchwood takes fire, so does an idle person love." ...Love, as Theophrastus defines it, is an affection of the idle mind, or as Seneca describes it, "youth begets it, riot maintains it, idleness nourisheth it, etc."

Robert  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

THE PHILIP K. DICKATHON (7)

Vulcan's Hammer by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Even Lawrence Sutin, PKD's biographer, refers to this one as dreck. As per usual for Dick's novels of this period, there has been a devastating war in the 1970's, and this time around humanity's bad idea for how to handle post-war society it to turn everything over to computers. These machines' decisions will be based purely on logic, war will come to an end, but of course an elaborate police system must be put into place to maintain this logical utopia. Underground movements are breaking out across the globe.


The computer has had three incarnations, Vulcan I, Vulcan II, and the current Vulcan III that only one man can access in its impregnable stronghold deep underground in Switzerland. The current director maintains a fondness for dusty old Vulcan II. He enjoys making the punch cards that feed it information and then reading the printouts it releases, although those messages now take up to a day or so to appear. There's something a little creepy and Vulcan III with its digital screens and its suspicion that its humans are not telling it the whole story. Of course, Vulcan III decides to matters into its own hands.


Dick's novel has all the pieces in place but then has nowhere to go with them. The conclusion is as predictable as it is anti-climactic. Vulcan's Hammer was the "B side" of an Ace Double, so it has if nothing else the virtue of brevity.


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MONDAY MORNING

BOOK REVIEW: SISTERS BY A RIVER, by Barbara Comyns

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Barbara Comyns' Sisters by a River has this in common with J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Both Comyns and Tolkien wrote their stories to read to their children, neither initially had an eye toward publication. I can image the Tolkien children delighting to the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the lot, but I wonder what the Comyns' young ones made of this passage from a chapter titled God in the Billiard Room.

There was a funny light in the billiard room, and I wasn't really surprised when one hot Sunday morning I walked in there to get cool and there was God, he was over by the fishy window and just glided up to me, I knew it was God although he looked like and enormous parchment coloured bag drawn up round the neck with a cord, I had been expecting to see him for a long time but I couldn't help being rather overcome and fainted. When the grown-ups found me they wouldn't believe I had seen God and I fainted rather a lot after that so they said I mustn't eat crab, and  I still don't and I have never seen Him any more.

Comyns was writing up her childhood memories that she would later use in the novel Who Was Saved and Who Was Dead. I think I believe just about every word of them. She relates events through a child's perspective -- she was the middle of five sisters -- and everything she remembers ring true. The family lived in large country house on the river Avon. Their mother went deaf after the birth of her last chlld, and the grandmother, whose home it was, was something of a terror. Their alcoholic father lost most of the family money. The girls pretty much ran wild. They were erratically educated by governesses who frequently fled the household or at boarding schools that frequently sent them home. And through this all the girls seem to having a pretty good time of it. They may be briefly unhappy when their pets die, either through their own neglect or because the groundskeeper, who is very particular, shoots them, but there are constant distractions. Servant girls become pregnant and disappear; Chloe, the youngest, spends a year convalescing from rheumatic fever; when Granny dies, the girls secretly sell off all her smelly Edwardian furniture and create a nice, white room; and, the river is scene of perpetual adventure,


Sisters by a River seems to be out of print, and the old Virago Classic editions get listed for anywhere from a penny to around forty dollars. It's worth searching out, along with the Comyn's novels that are coming back into print through The Dorothy Project and NYRB. And there is the public library.




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