Books of the Month - three pieces of speculative fiction

I have been bitten by the reading bug lately and this is the second book of the month post in a row featuring three novels. This time all three are speculative fiction (as discussed previously). 

I'm going to review them in the order I read them. The first book was another pick up from TK Maxx. 

The Power - Naomi Alderman

This book was published in 2016 and imagines what would happen if women suddenly developed the power to conduct electricity (the Power), establishing them as the dominant gender. It's framed through being written as a fictionalised history written by a man in a future civilisation, 5,000 years hence. Throughout the books are drawings of archaeological discoveries dating from the time period being written about.

The framing includes advice from an editor that it seems far-fetched that men were ever the dominant sex. There's also a rather patronising suggestion that the fictional author considers publishing it under a female name to avoid it being categorised as women's literature. I wondered if the real author had been on the receiving end of similar sentiments.

The book follows several female characters who either develop the Power of have it awakened in them. All the characters are in some way oppressed, abused or overshadowed by men, and the Power enables them to break free. There is also one male character who is chronicling the impact the Power has on various societies and it's really through his eyes that the shift becomes noticeable, as he finds it increasingly unsafe to be in the presence of women.

I was interested in the development of a women-centred and led religion, evolving rapidly out of Catholicism, which echoed the growth of populist movements in organised religions that sometimes outflank the established ecclesiastical structures. It felt believable to me, because new religious movements can take root and spread very quickly - and would be much more robust if they were linked to a sudden societal change like the emergence of the Power. There is, however, a natural explanation for the sudden emergence of the Power, although details are kept to a minimum. 

There's a bit of gore and violent vignettes, including some sexual violence. There are some loose threads that are left frayed at the end of the book. But overall, there are plenty of points that made me think about gender politics, and the reversal of power dynamics was sometimes amusing, sometimes frightening. The unwillingness of the female editor in 5,000 years time to accept the idea that women aren't just naturally aggressive, for example, made me smile. 

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

I bought this book in a deal at HMV because I had never read it and it appears on most lists of classic books one should read. I knew it was about the wartime firebombing of Dresden. I assumed it would be a straight up war book. I was wrong. 

This is the second Kurt Vonnegut book that I've read. A few years back I read Breakfast of Champions. I didn't like that much, and, truthfully, although I can see why this is considered a classic novel, I didn't like this book much either. I think it's just that I don't get on with Vonnegut's style. 

Having said that there are moments and throwaway lines in this book that are almost instantly memorable. There is a very early comment that foreshadows the destruction to come when the narrator says that Dresden post-war must have "tons of human bone meal in the ground". 

There is another cynically comical comment about a woman who "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." With lines like that, I feel I really should have liked the book more!

The main character in the book is called Billy Pilgrim. The plot device is that he has been abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He now experiences all of time all at once, which is a side-effect of travelling on a flying saucer. So his recollections of the war, being captured, being incarcerated in a converted abattoir (Slaughterhouse Five) that ironically protects him from the firebombing, and being involved in the grim clean up operation in Dresden afterwards, are mixed up with his life after the war, his family, his capture by aliens and subsequent captivity in a zoo amusing Tralfamadorians, and so on. 

I think it was that fantastical aspect that I found difficult. On reflection, it did distract from the absolute horror of what happened in Dresden. The vivid description of pulling bodies from the rubble afterwards ('opening up a corpse mine') and there being too many dead people to deal with other than incinerate them perhaps needed leavening with the alien abduction and Billy's happier post-war experiences. 

It might all be meant to indicate that Billy has gone mad as a result of his wartime experiences. But it's played with a straight bat - although, I guess, madness seems real to the person experiencing it. It may just be that it's Vonnegut's way of processing what he witnessed in Dresden and he needs to make this fantastical to deal with the fact that the worst bits of the story actually happened. 

There was some interesting commentary on the American poor, which I will save for another post. And the idea of experiencing time in a concurrent way rather than as causal consecutive moments felt very up to date - covering similar ground to some of the chapters in Existential Physics, which was my Book of the Month back in June. Not bad, considering Vonnegut published this in 1969.

The Boys from Brazil - Ira Levin

The other book in the HMV deal, and the second book by Ira Levin I have read this year. I reviewed The Stepford Wives last month. As with Stepford, I knew the basic premise of this story - Nazis in South America have perfected cloning and are seeking to restore the Third Reich.

What I didn't expect - the same as with Stepford - was to get quite so gripped by the story. The slow reveal of what is going on happens for both the main character, ageing Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann, and for the reader. The scene where Liebermann encounters his second teenaged clone was incredibly well done, and I really got a sense of the world slipping sideways for the character as he tried to process what he was seeing. 

Because the book was published in 1976, the science behind cloning has to be explained - even the word 'clone' has to be explained. I suspect this was cutting edge knowledge at the time of publication - but I was intrigued by how even then there was speculation that some governments had already been cloning larger mammals and maybe even humans. I remember the fuss in the late 1990s about Dolly the Sheep who was announced as the first sheep to be successfully cloned. So it was interesting to read characters speculating about it twenty years earlier. 

It's a short book that concludes with a discussion about the morality of killing children that might grow up to be evil. Liebermann and his anti-Nazi allies have to hope that the boys from Brazil defy their genetic heritage. The ultimate ending of the experiment is left ambiguous as to what might happen, which I quite liked for the ending. 

Book of the Month: Existential Physics

The tagline 'A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions' grabbed my attention and made me buy this book by Sabine Hossenfelder, whose day job is studying quantum gravity at Frankfurt University.

The questions covered in Existential Physics are a mix of hard science (How did the universe begin? Are humans just bags of atoms or something more?) and speculation (Is the universe conscious? Do copies of us exist in a multiverse?) with some extra stuff that is a bit of both - hard speculation, if you will. 

Along the way, there are some very interesting summaries of what we can say for certain, and some ideas that scientists advocate for that are, at best, ascientific, meaning there is just no way, now, to know. 

The chapter on death and dying and how, on a human level, it illustrates entropy provided a me with a new take on the subject. Although there is no evidence for an "afterlife", and no workable scientific theory for one, the impression individuals make on the universe as "information" is never truly lost - unless it ends up in a black hole. Versions of us sort of might continue to exist, which is weirdly comforting.

I got a bit lost in the discussion about free will and determinism, which cropped up in a couple of places. I can accept that our universe is almost entirely predictable, if an observer had access to enough data and in that sense 'free will' as understood by most people doesn't actually exist. It's not a very intuitive way to approach things though - and Sabine acknowledges this and addresses the issue of holding people to account for their actions, whether those actions are pre-determined or not. There are a few similar diversions from physics into ethics throughout the book.

There is a small section of one of the later chapters that is probably the best precis I have ever read about artificial intelligence at this stage in the development of AI (pp207-210). Sabine outlines what is currently known about trying to create thinking machines and presents a convincing case that the first true AIs will be fragile and will struggle to survive.

"...artificial intelligences at first will be few and one of a kind, and that's how it will remain for a long time. It will take large groups of people and many years to build and train artificial general intelligences. Copying them will not be any easier than copying a human brain. They'll be difficult to fix when broken, because, as with the human brain, we won't beable to separate the hardware from the software. The early ones will die quickly for reasons we will not even comprehend."

That actually made me feel sad for the creations we might bring into being. Sabine also points out that these AIs will most likely be owned by people who are already rich and powerful and will reflect the ethics and interests of their masters. It's a very good point that I've not seen mentioned in other discussions of AI.

Another superb section is the interview with Zeeya Merali, which discusses whether it would be possible to bring another universe into existence. It's certainly doable in theory if beyond human current engineering ability in practice. But if a universe was created then it would separate off almost immediately, and develop detached from our universe. It could expand infinitely and sentient beings could evolve there and we would almost certainly never know, unless we discovered a way to observe other universes (which we can't do now, making the concept of a multiverse ascientific even though lots of scientists talk about it as established fact). 

This leads to a discussion of ethics and morality - what responsibility would the creator(s) of that universe have towards any beings that lived in it? That's an ethical conundrum in its own right. It also opens up the possibility that if it's theoretically possible that we could create universes, then this universe may also have been created in a similar fashion. Not that there is any need for a creator based on what we observe about our universe, but a universe created in a lab would probably look the same as ours from inside. 

Consciousness is a topic that crops up throughout the book. Trying to explain why humans have consciousness is really difficult - it's something that seems to be more than the sum of our parts (our constituent atoms) and if I understood what Sabine was saying, the observations of consciousness in complex combinations of atoms isn't something that could be predicted by just looking at those individual atoms. So, something currently unexplainable is going on. 

The final section of the book is about whether there is any purpose to everything. Sabine concludes that the desire to understand the universe is a meaningful purpose in itself, and I found that a satisfying way to end the book. 

I have read several 'popular science' books over the last few years. I found this harder than any I've read previously. The scientific terms come at the reader quickly and there were several occasions when I needed to re-read paragraphs. Some of the early chapters were particularly hardgoing, but I'm glad I powered through - either I got smarter as the book went on (unlikely) or the concepts were less bound up in mathematical theory so were easier to convey in words that a reader like me could grasp. 

As a plus point, though, Sabine includes a 'Brief Answer' at the end of every chapter which summarises all that has been said before into three or four sentences. I found that very helpful clarifying what I had just read.