2018: Closing out the Year

For me, this has been a year of doing a lot of reading to help me think--which, in a sense, is a return to an earlier practice, one I pretty much gave up when I started Aqueduct Press. I suppose I thought of this loss of mental discipline as unavoidable, at least for the first few years of Aqueduct's existence. Dropping a habit of discipline, though, has the downside of making it tough to do casually what was previously habitual. I wonder now whether that might not be the reason I began to feel out-of-synch with the world, despite my spending hours in online activity, plugged into social media, the blogosphere, and the 24/7 news cycle. I assumed it was the effect of aging. 

And then, in late 2016, like many people I knew, I felt massively confused; the political events of 2016 clobbered me into a momentary mental/psychic standstill. Appalled by this standstill, I vowed to return to the kind of interior life I felt I'd lost, an interior life that I knew requiring sustained slow-reading and slow-thinking. To reclaim that interior space, I withdrew from most of my online activity and struggled to establish a new set of habits. It took a protracted effort and the determination to reallocate my attention. My spending three months a year writing in seclusion in Port Townsend has been enormously helpful in doing that.

2018, perhaps as a result of this personal reorientation, perhaps for other reasons, has been a year of clarification. I'm currently drafting an essay about some of the reading that has helped clarify my thinking, so I don't really want to say much more about that here. Instead, to close out the year, I'd like to quote from a Walter Benjamin essay that I've recently reread, "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Benjamin drafted this essay in the spring of 1940, shortly before his death. It's a piece full of glittering gems of thought as quotable, I think, as many of Nietzsche's aphorisms. I'll quote only the eighth thesis (translated by Harry Zohn). Although our moment is not that of Europe in 1940, the challenge Benjamin issues in this thesis has mostly yet to be met. (And what a different world we would be living in, I think, if it had been met.)

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

I don't think that thinking of our current situation as an instance of "Fascism" is helpful. But examples abound of people wondering at how what we are experiencing now (and fearing to experience in the near future) is "still" possible--and, perhaps more to the point, that all these new "populist" regimes are derailing the "progress" and "competence" assumed to drive history. Sad to say, this attitude informs the most popular strains of feminism, and it unfortunately dominates the loudest voices in the Democratic party. Resistance doesn't lie in rolling back time and getting the Progress Train back on track. It means going someplace new, somewhere we've never before been. Given all we've learned about the climate-change juggernaut this year, it's our only hope.

Hey, that cup is half full!

I was interested to read a summary of a new Harris Poll, asking people about their reading habits, particularly with reference to their use of e-readers: Harris Interactive: Harris Polls One in Six Americans Now Use E-Reader with One in Six Likely to Purchase in Next Six Months.
Its sub-header is "e-Reader users likely to both read and purchase more books than non-users." What interests me most isn't the numbers about e-readers per se, but what they tell us about reading and purchasing habits generally, with breakdowns not only by gender, but also by region, generations (identified as Matures (66+), Baby Boomers (47-65), Gen X (35-65-- which must be a typo), and Echo Boomers (18-34), and genre of books read).

See, there's always so much attention on the high percentage of people who don't read, that it surprised me to see how many people do still read books fairly regularly. Answering the question of how many books you purchased in the last year, 12% in 2010 and 9% in 2011 said more than 21 books (which was apparently the pollster's ceiling), and 11% in 2010 and 10% in 2011 said 11-20. (The figures are a bit better for books read, as opposed to purchased.) Note, though, that these are not averages (or even means) of numbers of books read per person, since the poll doesn't count books per person past 21. (Which is to say, the many extreme bookaholics among us aren't skewing the figures.)

Considering all the competition for people's time and attention, these figures cheer me up. 

Reading, consciousness, and technology: intimate relations

I've been reading David L. Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. His essay traverses the path of a familiar anxiety: he recently noticed that the life of his own mind had been dramatically changed by his immersion in the internet and the social media associated with it, and that he feels an urgent need to do (or figure out) something about that-- without necessarily giving up all access to the internet (which would be highly impractical for any professional person).

I'd thought, at first, from the way the book opened, that it was going to be more about reading than about living in a "distracted time." But it departs from talking about experiencing particular books when Ulin finds himself having trouble finishing a reread of The Great Gatsby that he decided to undertake in order to encourage his son, who was reading it (and annotating its pages for a class)-- this though Gatsby is a book he has always loved. His then worries that his concentration span doesn't easily accommodate the reading of books the way it used to, a change he attributes to his constant immersion in (or should I say preoccupation with?) the internet and the swiftly shifting, fleeting habits of attention he believes its uses are susceptible to. The Lost Art of Reading draws heavily on other's studies or insights, which Ulin uses to try to make sense of what his happening to his own habits of mind (and, he implies, others', too). Much of this is resonant and (therefore?) interesting. For instance, this passage, likening reading one's iPod in the middle of the night (which I sometime do, since it doesn't disturb Tom's sleep)-- though unlike Ulin, I mainly read books new to me on my iPod:

Of course, the books I've downloaded to my iPod are not new to me, but rather works I know from other formats, from the physical, as well as the virtual, world. In that sense, e-reading remains an ancillary activity, less about discovery than reassurance of a kind. This, [Nicholson] Baker notes, is one appeal of the iPod, which offers ease of access "when you wake up at 3
AM and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind." The sensation he describes is familiar: "Hold it a few inches from your face with the words enlarged and the screen's brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes....After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead." That is what it's like to read a book under the covers, while holding a flashlight up to the pages. It reflects one of my most common memories of childhood, another kind of neural pathway, an experience etched deeply into my brain. Something similar occurs with the iPad, or with software such as Sophie, both of which evoke an essential booklike sensibility within the digital realm. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest that what we have here is an example of art influencing technology, a back-and-forth that has its roots in our relationship to written language and then extrapolates outward, to the screen. (135)

He then notes that relationship has to work in the opposite direction as well-- that the digital world is so much a part of our reality that "investigating the relationship between technology an intimacy" needs to be integrated "into the fiber of [a novel's] narrative." He then suggests that reading material like the PowerPoint chapter of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, when read in a print book devoid of electronic components is "interesting if a bit abstracted," compared with reading it onlne, on Egan's website. He quotes Egan herself, who reveals that she had never used PowerPoint and "normally write fiction by hand." "What I needed to do was find the internal structure of each fictional moment and reveal it visually."

His conclusion about where writers are taking us is not surprising (though one I don't often see): "We've gone from a situation in which technology allows us to enhance a book after it's been written to one in which authors such as Moody or Egan adapt it in the framing of their texts. Technology, in other words, is now a matter of aesthetics, of intention. But if this suggests a new approach to writing, what's important is that we have the agency, that as readers, we get to decide."(141)

This conclusion leads in turn to an interesting speculation:

What if the e-book is a catalyst for reconnection, by engaging our fascination with technology to stir long-form reading, by integrating deep concentration with the lure of the machine? What in the e-book is the means by which we start to get beneath the fragmentation, the scattering of attention, the drift that marks so much of our digital life? I say this as someone who doesn't do a lot of electronic reading....I say this knowing the e-reader changes the nature of the conversation, and yet, I can't help but feel hopeful about the buzz these devices generate, all those people reading e-books on-screen. The process is familiar, as familiar a Baker turning to his iPod in the middle of a sleepless night....What all this shares is a certain primacy of the text, a sense that, enhanced or oterwise, reading can exist in a variety of different forms.(141-42)

Ultimately, Ulin suggests, we live in the world of Borges's "The Library of Babel," "the place where possibility tips into overload." "What we need is silence--not to disconnect but as a respite, to uncover a little piece of stillness in the din."(147) It is sort of an eat one's cake and have it too solution, of course. Certainly it was a "solution" for his problem that was obvious to me from the start, though for a while I wondered if he would end up somewhere else. The interest of the read is not in the solution, of course, but in some of the material he draws on along the way. I especially enjoyed his including a quotation from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains that describes what happens when a medieval bishop learned to read silently (as opposed to aloud):

Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself, "as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent to me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart." Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was-and is--the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this "strange anomaly" in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.

Talking about Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

The Seattle Feminist Science Fiction Book Club met in my dining room last night, to discuss this year's Tiptree Award winner, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic. We numbered seven, and variously consumed rich, gooey chocolate cake, wine, and tea with our conversation. Though we talked for three hours, I came away from the discussion still turning over the questions that arose over the course of the discussion and confirmed in the belief that this is one of those books that, like certain movies, really needs to be read more than once to be experienced fully.

You will have noticed, I suppose, that I said "books," rather than "novels." One thing we did not discuss was whether this book is a novel. In the broadest sense, I think it is. In a narrower sense, not. It's not really an important distinction in my mind (and was apparently not in the minds of the others, as well).

However much we talked about the characters, we continually returned to metalevel discussion. The book fairly demands it, given the self-consciousness permeating all three of its sections. More to the point, though, I don't reallythink it's possible to talk about the book without grappling with its formal organization. The first section is a first-person narrative about a writer's relationship with her mother (who suffers from dementia and is dying), a trip the writer makes on her mother's behalf to the city her mother came from, and her relationship with a young fan named Aba, who has somehow come to know the narrator's mother. This section is written in the prose style of conventional realism. The second section is a fantastic picaresque tale involving three old women of three different generations (the youngest is 60) who take a trip to a spa in a foreign country so that the oldest of them (who is paying all the expenses with her pension) can die (which she's come to understand that she can only do away from home). Some of the characters are tangentially related to the mother in the first section. The prose is exuberant and over the top, delivered by a chorus straight out of a Shakespearean pastoral comedy making regular appearances (speaking at intervals in couplets, IIRC), and loaded with obvious symbolism and wild coincidences and improbabilites. The third section is a hodgepodge of "folklore" from around the world and purports to offer literary criticsm of the first two narratives and is written, supposedly, by Aba.


Somewhere in the first two sections of the book the narrative announces "In the absence of all ideologies, the only refuge that remains for the human imagination is the body." In fact, of course, there is "no absence of ideologies," particularly where women are concerned (and even more particularly where old women are concerned). The third section is a bloated recital-- and even celebration of-- ideologies, reciting as it does innumerable ways that old women have been hated from culture to culture. The first two sections delight in the body, in all its idiosyncratic particularities-- most pointedly in the bodies of the many old women that inhabit it (which is, of course, what makes the book so unusual).

Throughout our discussion, one person placed great emphasis on the anger revealed in the endnotes of the third section (which were chiefly asides and rants, rather than documentation), while another was troubled by the thought that someone who compiles such folklore (i.e., Aba), in some way became complicit with its attitudes through preserving it. Others mentioned that when powerless people are virtually invisible in their societies-- unrepresented in the public sphere, the arts, etc-- any representation at all is desperately welcomed, even when it is derogatory. Which then reminded me of how in the early modern period of European history very now and then an old woman would claim to be a witch simply to get some respect (and perhaps food) along with the hatred of their family and neighbors. We all recognized that the book's taking aim at the overebearing arrogance and absurdity of academic textual criticism as represented by the author in the third section of the book was also taking aim at any attempt by its readers at explication of the text. A couple of people felt this was part of the power struggle being waged within the book between Aba, the critic and fan, and the narrator of the first section.

At first the metalevel discussion focused on the irony of the third section of the book. But we continually came back to the relations of the three sections to one another. Were the three sections all talking to one another? We seemed to agree that they were. But the big question, which we never fully nailed, was what the book's (i.e., author's) attitude toward Aba and the third section was. Ironic, yes. Derisory? Probably-- but maybe not entirely. The playfulness that continually leavens the events and rants in the narrative makes the author's derision gentler than the inordinate length of the third section would otherwise have rendered it. I suspect I might have a clearer answer were I to read the book a second time.

Believe it or not, this is the first book club meeting I've ever attended in my life. I found it wonderfully engaging and stimulating. The group will be discussing Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood trilogy next month, and probably a book by Joanna Russ the month after that. If you live in Seattle and this sounds like your sort of thing, you can find the group on Facebook.

Oh, and in case you didn't pick up on this: I recommend this book as an interesting, enjoyable read.

Bad Books

The Focus section of the new issue of the American Book Review, on "Bad Books," features short contributions from forty writers and critics. It's well worth checking out.

R.M. Berry 's reflections particularly struck me as apt. I especially liked is zeroing in on how an encounter with and discussion of a bad book makes one feel:

What makes a book bad? It gives me small joy to hear the judgment pronounced, even by me, since the effect is always stifling, regardless [of] intent.

Just so. And I'm with him, too, when he expands on this to remark:

[A]fter piling on, I always need a bath. E.M. Forster pronounced Gertrude Stein bad, and it would be pleasing to retort that the joke's on him, but who is reckless enough to explain why? In truth, no book has ever made a difference to me that someone whose judgment I respected didn't find execrable.

There are surprisingly few comments on genre fiction in the forty pieces. But here's Berry's comment on that:

Genre books aren't bad. They are the paradigm of good books. If any writing can be justified, romances and Westerns and mysteries and pornography can, being like the stain on a napkin, exactly the size of themselves.

The focus offers some pedagogical reflections. Here's Gerald Graff:

It has always seemed strange to me that bad books aren't a prominent part of our school and college literature curriculum. How do we expect students to learn to tell the difference between good and bad books unless we assign some bad ones for comparison? Don't you need badness in order to know goodness?

I can only conclude that those who have determined the literature curriculum have been more interested in protecting the good or great books from contamination-- that is, in feeling virtuous about their own tastes-- than they are in helping students understand what they read. There is also the view, though, that reading good books is itself sufficient-- no reason to read bad ones for comparison, especially since some students might think some of the bad ones are good and vice-versa, or might catch on to the fact that which books are good or bad is often alarmingly debatable.

As if in response, Sophia A. McLennen describes what sounds suspiciously like a bonding experience with her students over bad books:

In almost every class, I teach a bad book, an awful, poorly written, sometimes sexist, racist, reactionary book.

I do this for a few reasons....[T]hey assume that I like it or I wouldn't put it on the syllabus. When they f[i]nd out I hate it too, we ha[ve] a great time in class trashing it critically and learning a lot in the process.

So now you know that other reason I like to teach bad books. I like to trash them. I like to teach my students that they can trash bad books. Too much reverence for the literary can float around graduate programs in literature.

One of my favorite pieces in the section is Carol Guess's. She begins by talking about the brilliance of Heather Lewis's second novel, Notice:

Underrated, rarely discussed, the book belongs with contemporary classics. It is perhaps the most disturbing book I've ever read, and amongthe most compelling. It illuminates the state of female, specifically lesbian, subjectivity under contemporary American regimes by deconstructing genres that have failed to capture women's experiences: pulp, noir, mystery, romance. It subverts these genres, yet never falls prey to the directives of political correctness.

Notice was published posthumously. Its narrative voice was so unique that no press would touch it until Lewis committed suicide at forty. Her suicide allowed the book's publication: now that she was dead, and sufficiently chastened for examining experiences that mainstream culture attempts to suppress.

The bad book Guess singles out was also written by Lewis-- and published.

The Second Suspect is a terrible book. But it's not just a bad book; it's so much more. It's a bad book riffing off the author's masterpiece. The Second Suspect is a rewriting of Notice, but minus everything that makes Notice literary. The Second Suspect takes plot, characters, and themes from Notice and reduces them to formulaic drivel.

The Second Suspect is the work of an author who understood that her masterpiece had been censored, tossed aside, misunderstood. So she sat down and rewrote it. She made it bad, deliberately bad. And the public loved it.

Among the many books singled out as bad are Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Malleus Maleficarum. Actually, it's reassuring for me to see that consensus is lacking not only on the naming of "good" books, but also on the naming of "bad" ones. It goes without saying, I suppose, that my own list of "bad" books is likely not shared by many others. But I'm not going to go there myself. As Berry says, "After piling on, I always need a bath."

Reading the Forty Signs of Rain Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain triology last week, and so I had the odd experience when reading George Monbiot's One Shot Left: The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation in Tuesday's Guardian of feeling the lines blur between one kind of reading experience and another, between reading fiction and reading nonfiction. This has rarely happened to me before, and so it prompted me to think about why it happened. For those unfamiliar with it, the trilogy consists of three sequential novels: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, totaling roughly 1600 pages of near-future science fiction.

The novels' primary setting is Washington D.C., deep in the bowels of the federal government; its primary characters are scientists and politicians. Unlike most scientists depicted in science fiction (the physicists in Carter Scholz's Radiance offer a finely depicted exception), many of the scientists in these novels are also administrators. The crux of the overarching narrative is the administrator-scientists collectively formulating and acting upon what they call "The Frank Principle" (named after one of the books' central characters, Frank Vanderwal): saving the world so that science can proceed. The inception of collective action coincides with the stalling of the Gulf Stream and concomitant onslaught of extreme weather, thus bringing a convincing level of plausibility to Frank's argument that a Kuhnian paradigm shift is necessary. Given the federal government's general disregard for science and scientists, there is very little infrastructure for coordinating such an effort. He therefore proposes that the NSF become the political and organizational means for directing confronting the problem of global warming.

The narrative includes many documents that reminded me of Monbiot's article; the documents are, of course, a part of the fictional narrative. But the sorts of events and statistics they describe are not far off from the flood of such reports to be found in science journals, magazine, and newspapers today. As such, Robinson's documents serve the novels' sense of verisimilitude admirably. But the similarity between the fictional and the real cannot alone account for my sense, reading Monbiot's piece, that because of these books, the lines between fiction and reality have become blurred in my mind. I've been reading narratives that include life-like documents for decades and have never had that experience before now. Something else is at work here, something that speaks to the quality of Robinson's achievement with these books. To see what it is, it helps, I think, to look at the narrative choices Robinson makes.

First and most important, he chose not to write a thriller in which disaster strikes and politicians are made fools of and a lone scientist almost single-handedly saves the day. He could easily have inserted the basic facts and characters of his story into the sf thriller formula. Of course if he had done that, he would have rendered the issues themselves trivial-- since all it takes in such a story is the brilliance and powerful will of one individual to solve a discrete and pressing problem. (The presumption of such a storyline would be that after the scientist had saved the world from the stalling of the Gulf Stream, the book would have ended with everyone realizing that This Can't Go On... and the world would have set about with a will to stop or even reverse global warming. Book over. Warm and fuzzy feeling for readers assured.) Such a narrative would have raced by, speeding from one dramatic moment to the next. The narrative's documents would have provided key information at crucial points and have been used to great dramatic effect. And as if with most thrillers, once finished, the reader would have forgotten most of it within hours of closing the book.

Instead, there are no dramatic moments in these books, though there are numerous events that could have been presented with great dramatic flair. This was a risky strategy for Robinson to take, a strategy few sf writers would even consider (and even fewer editors would be likely to endorse). But it works (mostly). And where it works, it works powerfully. What Robinson does, instead, is weave for the reader the fabric of particular characters' lives-- chiefly, in the first book, that of Senate staffer Charlie Quibler (and, to a lesser extent, his scientist wife, Anna Quibler), and, in the second book, Frank Vanderval. (Robinson drops the pattern in the third book, Sixty Seconds and Counting, which I logically expected to take up the lives of either Diane Chang or Drepung, a displaced Tibetan Buddhist, and I think this accounts for the weakness of that novel and the trilogy's conclusion as a whole.) The events are subsumed to the fabric and take their meaning from the effects it has on the fabric.

Charlie Quibler, while a part-time policy wonk working for liberal Senator Phil Chase (a job he does mostly over the phone and via email), is first and foremost the caretaker of his toddler son, Joe. A significant portion of Forty Signs of Rain is devoted to depicting in unusual and utterly believable detail what being directly responsible for the welfare of an infant is like and, more particularly, a plausible male version of that role. I hasten to add that this is the kind of narrative that is usually open to criticism when produced by a woman-- as it has indeed been done. I'm not signaling this book out for its innovation tout court. But it is rare to see this kind of narrative in a book of hard science fiction. It isn't only that the narrative pays such close attention to the life of caring for a child that matters here: rather, it's the narrative's insistence on viewing all the players in these books as living interconnected lives, where the realms of science, policy, and daily life are inextricable and impossible to view meaningfully in isolation from one another.

In the second book, Fifty Degrees Below, the character whose life is under close examination, Frank Vaderwal, decides that he lives a "parcellated" existence-- one in which he comprises numerous selves living compartmentalized lives. He may think that; he may feel his consciousness is split any number of ways; but the reader can plainly see the interconnections and never forgets them. Frank is the most inconsistent and fluid character in the series, but for me he is the most true-to-life. He is more like the scientists I have known than just about any scientist I've encountered in science fiction. That when he finds himself homeless he builds a tree house in a park and creates a social routine that substitutes for the habits of "home" strikes me as just the sort of thing I could imagine certain scientists I've known doing.

The upshot of the slow, nondramatic pacing and drawn out attention to detail is that the reader ends up knowing the characters to a degree they never get to know the crisply depicted characters in thrillers (or, indeed, in most hard sf novels)-- and by knowing them so well, also cares about what happens to them. Okay, so I'm saying these are good novels. But what do the virtues of Robinson's narrative have to do with my blurring of the documents in the novel with Monbiot's report?

It's this: over the span of 1600 pages, the characters repeatedly read or generate reports about different aspects of global warming. And in showing the characters doing this, the narrative subtly teaches us to read the documents in a particular way. And so, while reading Monbiot's piece, certain key themes popped out at me. For instance, after writing--

But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.

--Monbiot then asks:

Is it too late [to stop runaway climate change]? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun.

This question, in the trilogy, is revealed as double-edged and part of the mechanism of denial that prevents governments from doing anything about global warming. As the books' cientists note, merely asking the question plays into the hands of the fatalists who say there's no point in trying to salvage the world-- global destruction is inevitable. But the flip side of that is that as long as scientists say there's still time to do something, then politicians (in the US, anyway) will insist that that means there's no need to do anything.

Monbiot is probably grimmer than the trilogy, though:

The Tyndall paper* points out that annual emission reductions greater than one per cent have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval." When the Soviet Union collapsed, they fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

* Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. "Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138

http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf

Anderson and Bows state that "The framing of climate change policy is typically informed by the 2 degrees C threshold; however, even stabilizing at 450 ppmv CO2e [parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent] offers only a 46 per cent chance of not exceeding 2 degrees C." This estimate is given in the following paper:
Malte Meinshausen, 2006. "What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates." In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.


Oh, and one last thing: the second novel, Fifty Degrees Below, opens in a Washington D.C. that has been devastated by flooding and has Congress refusing to allocate the funds needed to clean it up and restore the public facilities and private housing that was damaged or destroyed in the storm. The release date for the book was November 2005, just two months after Katrina, which means it was probably at the printers when Katrina struck. Have to say, Robinson sure did nail that one.

ETA: Perhaps I ought to add one more thing: the narrative style of the trilogy reinforces at every level that the disaster story that is global warming is a collective problem (however much it visibly affects individuals differentially) that can have only a collective solution. But even as it approaches the problem collectively, Robinson's narrative focuses our attention through the prism of individuals' life stories. This is something the news media fails at accomplishing, miserably.

"A Reviewer's Hardest Task"

Joanna Russ writes, in her F&SF column of January 1975 (reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen):

A reviewer's hardest task is to define standards. "Good" can mean almost anything: what the British call "a good read," "for those who like it, this is what they'll like," "it won't poison you," "good enough for minor entertainment," "mildly pleasant," "intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting," "charming!" and just plain "good"--excluding the range of better, from fine to splendid to superb to great. Reviewers also tend to adopt a paradoxical sliding scale in measuring a book's quality, i.e., the more ambitious a book, the more it's likely to fail; yet the competent, low-level "success" can be less valuable and interesting than the flawed, fascinating, incomplete "failure." For example, in July 1973 I reviewed James Gunn's The Listeners (which belongs emphatically in category two, above) and managed to make it sound worse than Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a considerably lower-level (although fun and interesting) category one. Novels don't only provide different kinds of pleasures; they involve a reader more or less profoundly. Listeners was "bad" because parts of it were so wonderfully good. Dream was "good" partly because it demanded so little of the reader-- some of this by the author's deliberate choice, which only adds to the complexity of the whole business.

None of this months' hardcover novels* lives up to its author's own best work and in that sense they are not good books. They're certainly not in the "good-by-any-standards" class. Yet none of them is in the droopy-eyeball or loathsome class, either, and all have some excellences. The reviewer's business (as so many reviewers have said) is distinguishing between various levels of failure, keeping in mind that by "good" here I mean very high standards indeed.

I'm variously a reader of reviews, a writer of reviews, a writer's whose work receives reviews, and an editor/publisher who hopes to see the work she publishes reviewed. I have long read reviews for pleasure-- and not as a guide to what I ought or ought not to be reading. I think I first began reading reviews as a graduate student, most often in the form of review essays (which I also, of course, was required to write). Review essays encompass more than a simple review does, exploring the subject matter of several books in a thoughtful, critical way. This probably has something to do with my interest--as a reader--in reviews these days. When I read a review for pleasure (as I still often do), it's in the hope of being given something interesting to think about, or even the occasional gem of insight. This is certainly why I'm reading Russ's old reviews. Reviewers who offer intellectually or emotionally threadbare descriptions or assessments of the books they're reviewing don't interest me; if after several encounters I see that their reviews consistently fail to give me anything worth thinking about, I stop reading their reviews. I also stop reading their reviews for pleasure if I see that a reviewer is intractably ignorant or stupid-- that they have a penchant for misreading or under-reading or for continually praising the banal. I'm a bit like Mr. Darcy, I'm afraid, in that my good opinion of a reviewer once lost, is unlikely to be regained. I'm a busy woman, you know?

As an editor/publisher, I'm largely unconcerned with whether or not a review is pleasurably insightful or even intelligent. It's still a mystery to me what actually sells books. A reviewer's writing intelligently about a book will likely make its author happy, but it probably won't make that much difference to sales. Because I read every review of Aqueduct's books (that I know of), I'm constantly made aware of how few reviewers are careful readers. More to the point, though, is that many of those reviewers who have passed beyond the naive-reader stage are so caught up in their own particular set of dogmas that their readings tend to be inflexibly rigid and skewed to conform to their dogmas such as they are. This doesn't concern me as a publisher, but I can't help reflecting on it as a reader and writer of reviews myself.

Not surprisingly, I try to write the kind of reviews I enjoy reading. It can be hard to do it, though, when a book is so poorly written that I can barely bring myself to keep reading it. (I've twice forced myself to finish really bad books and reviewed them, but the experiences were so painful that I have a deep aversion to doing it ever again.) Russ has no hesitation in characterizing books as "bad." But aware as I am of what inadequate readers so many reviewers are, I've been reluctant to deliver such bald judgments myself. [Though so as not to mislead anyone, I will cop to once having delivered an unequivocally scathing judgment of a book that really should not have been published.] And so I have to wonder just how useful terms like "good" and "bad" can be in reviews today. Russ, unlike most reviewers, offers insight into the books she reviews; so I'm tempted to think she knows what she's talking about. Even so, for me at least it is more her discussion of the books rather than her verdict on a given book's quality that "defines" her "standards." The "whole business" is indeed complex.

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*The books under review were by Robert Silverberg, James Gunn, John Brunner, Philp K. Dick, and Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders.

Gender Delusions and Gaps

About a week ago, Nancy Jane Moore posted on what, following Gwyneth Jones, she calls “The Great Divide.” Today, Mark Liberman has posted The "Fiction Gap": Empathy, Prestige, or What? on the Language Log, showing just how far the obsession with gender differences can go. (With thanks to The Mumpsiumus for the link.) Liberman begins by noting recent reports that the women purchase 80% of books of fiction and men 20%. His post surveys various explanations for this apparent gender gap.

Theories attempting to explain the “fiction gap” abound. Cognitive psychologists have found that women are more empathetic than men, and possess a greater emotional range of traits that make fiction more appealing to them.

Apparently the theories for explaining the “fiction gap” even wander into the territory of “mirror neurons.”

The research is still in its early stages, but some studies have found that women have more sensitive mirror neurons than men. That might explain why women are drawn to works of fiction, which by definition require the reader to empathize with characters.

Liberman summarizes a study of gender differences in mirror neurons based on magnetoencephalography and discusses whether or not its results (based on a sample of ten young Taiwanese men and ten young Taiwanese women) are statistically significant and then moves on to the 2004 NEA report on reading and decides that since the differences between racial and ethnic groups were as large or larger than the differences between males and female that the argument that gendered differences in empathy explains the gap is dubious.

What strikes me as really weird about the various “theories” Liberman cites is their apparent failure to notice that if this gap actually does now exist in present-day US, Britain, and Canada (and Liberman notes that he’s by no means certain that it does), it is a reflection of a particular cultural juncture and not a hard-wired biological imperative controlling the behavior of men and women. I seriously doubt that the 80/20 split (if it’s real) has always existed for as long as fiction has existed and I would be surprised if the same results were reproduced in other cultural milieus. That any cognitive psychologists or neuroscientists could entertain for a moment the idea that women are hardwired to read fiction and men aren’t stinks of nineteenth century pseudo-science—the kinds of “science” that used calipers to “prove” that Caucasians are intellectually superior to non-Caucasians and that men are intellectually superior to women. I find myself wondering why these people are so obsessed with “the Great Divide” that they are apparently unable to ask reasonable questions. It shouldn’t be possible for someone still cherishing such discredited assumptions to get an advanced degree in any science. The amount of time and money spent trying to demonstrate hardwired sex differences for shoring up the credibility of the Great Divide is scandalous.

If I were certain there was a “fiction” gap between men and women (and of course I’m not), what I’d write about what it might mean in light of the domination by male critics and reviewers, male tastes, and male values of all literary discussion. The critic gap certainly exists: we all know that. But that’s not the kind of gap anyone but women are interested in thinking about, explaining, and discussing, is it. And certainly not the relation between the critic gap and the “fiction gap.”