Erik Boisen's

Walter Tevis’ first novel. Tevis wrote this after working in a pool hall while working towards his degree in English literature at the University of Kentucky. The story is fairly interesting, but what really sticks out to me is the way Tevis creates characters. You quickly get a clear picture in your head of every character he brings to the pages. He keeps the number of characters to a digestible number as well. I count only five in the entire book, with the exception of a bartender, a very minor character, he hustles in the first chapter.

The main character is “Fast” Eddie Felson, a traveling pool hustler circa 1947. The book starts with Eddie and his partner, Charlie, who puts up the money that Eddie gambles with, traveling by car to their eventual destination in Chicago. They pretend to be salesmen who are just passing through town. They start off playing one another for money and eventually try to lure in a local with a chance to win some easy money from an inebriated Eddie. Drunk or not, Eddie is always holding back until the real money becomes available, at which point, the hapless victim appears to lose on a luck shot on Eddie’s part. They part ways and Eddie and Charlie move to the next town to play their hustle.

The story takes a sharp turn when Eddie arrives in Chicago and tries to engage with a known player by the name of Minnesota Fats. What Eddie is attempting now is not really a hustle. Eddie and Mr. Fats are well-aware of each other’s skill level. This is to be a series of big money games until someone gives up. They shoot pool for 40 hours straight. Initially, Eddie wins most of the games, but Fats does not give in. Eventually, Eddie wilts under the grueling pressure of playing for high stakes for many hours on end. Eventually, Eddie has to tap out, being $6000 down. This is a huge sum of money for 1947.

Despondent, and feeling guilty for losing most of Charlie’s money. Eddie leaves Charlie sleeping in the hotel with their car keys and half the remaining cash. He wanders off on foot to a nearby bus station where he encounters a quirky young woman named Sarah. Sarah is a literature student at a nearby college. Sarah is an insomniac who lives alone, likes to drink to excess, and is a little bit older than a typical college student, due to having had polio as a child. Eddie enjoys some time at the bus station’s diner with Sarah, but they part ways early in the morning and Eddie heads to the local Y for a room. While staying at the room he is able to hustle up some money playing games at local pool halls. With some money in his pocket, he heads back to the bus station diner to look for Sarah. As luck would have it, he finds her and he eventually gets invited to her apartment. They begin a relationship and Eddie continues hustling for money at local pool halls. One night, he raises the stakes and manages to collect a pretty big windfall. The person he beat pays up, but has both his thumbs badly broken by local who decide to teach a “pool shark” a lesson.

Eddie, with his thumbs badly mangled, goes back to Sarah’s place and she cares for him while he tries to heal. After an extended period and a number of doctor’s visits, Eddie’s thumbs begin to mend. He resumes playing pool again, but has to modify the way he plays because his thumbs still hurt really badly. He is eventually able to hustle again for a little bit of money, but is clearly not going to be able to make money he was accustomed to.

 

…to be continued

Joseph Murphy was a pharmacist who became a minister later in life. He incorporates bible verses into much of his rationale for his techniques to optimize your life. The gist of this book is that whatever thoughts and beliefs you put in your conscious thought, your subconscious mind  will work to make into reality.

The simplest aspect of this is to keep a positive mindset. This is often something easier said than done, but if you are consciously positive, your subconscious will go to work to create positive outcomes. It always seemed to work for SpongeBob, right? Counter to this, negativity, will harvest negative outcomes.

The best example of the subconscious at work I can think of is the placebo effect. The mind has cured incurable diseases in patients who were given what they thought was a cure, but was, in reality, nothing more than a sugar pill. This is scientific fact. Drug studies must include a placebo group because the placebo effect is so well-documented and accepted. This book suggests that it is the subconscious mind that is working to create a cure in patients that believe they have been given one and that they will be healed. It is hard to argue against there being truth in this.

Even though the author frequently quotes the bible in his explanations of how to use your subconscious, he also frequently gives examples such as the placebo effect so that non-believers can also benefit from the techniques. He likens your subconscious as a communicative pathway to God. Give your problems to your subconscious, and it, your subconscious or God, will provide you with solutions.

This was a very easy read. Even if you are not religious, there are many persuasive and interesting arguments to ponder and perhaps create more positive outcomes in your life.

This is a novella, so it did not take long to read. I saw the movie that this was based on and thought it was interesting. A little bleak, but interesting. Usually, novels provide for more material than is needed for a full-length movie, so some parts usually have to be left out. This, being a novella, I expected, should have been just like the movie. Nope. Large portions were left out or changed completely.

The main character, who goes by his last name, Grainier, starts life out with a different name that he no longer remembers. His parents died very early in his life, when he about six years old, and he was sent by train to live with another family who always gave him somewhat conflicting stories about his original family. He wasn’t even sure where he came from. It may have been Canada, but it could have been Utah. The story is set in the early 1900’s

As a young adult, in 1917 Grainier,  works in the timber and railroad industry. He usually worked one end of a two-man saw, felling trees all day and sleeping in a tent. The trees were either shipped off by rail to somewhere else for sale, or used to build bridges for the railway that was being extended nearby. The work is pretty brutal, but it is seasonal. At the end of every season, Grainier, comes back to Idaho, the place he calls home as an adult. He returns at the end of every season with several hundred dollars. Likely a fair amount of money for the time. He lives in a tent and eats the food provided by the logging company, so he has almost no expenses when he is working.

There is really no mention of Grainier’s adoptive family when he is an adult. He appears to have lost all connection with them. He spends his seasons off from timber work doing odd jobs around the small town of Bonner’s Ferry and spends his winters there lodging wherever is available.

Grainier does not seem especially religious, but his does tend to go to the local church when he is in town for the winter. He is also not particularly social, but he does strike up with a young woman named Gladys after church one Sunday. At this point Grainier is about 30 years old. At the time, this was likely a little old to start a family, but this is what he does. He marries Gladys and uses the money he saved from his seasons working the timber to buy an acre of land outside of town. He and Gladys build a small cabin on it and Gladys lives there full-time, but Grainier still goes off to work during the timber season. A short time late they have a baby girl named Kate. They have a wonderful life for a couple of years, but Gladys definitely does not enjoy having to care for a baby in an isolated cabin by herself for months on end while Grainier works far away from home. Times are tough so they make it work, but Grainier makes plans to save money and find a way to work closer to home.

At the end of one logging season, as Grainier makes his way home by train, he sees immense smoke and flames coming from the outskirts of Bonner’s Ferry. A fire has consumed most of the land around town, including the land his cabin was on. Grainier looks everywhere and asks everyone he can on the whereabouts of his family, but finds out nothing. He finds his old homestead, where just the woodburning stove remains. Heartbroken, Grainier spends his days and nights at the site of his cabin in the hopes that someone will return. Eventually, Grainier rebuilds the cabin on the same site as the old one.

One night, an old mongrel dog appears and serves as his off and on companion. The dog mostly remains, but does leave on occasion for days on end. Other than a Kootenai Indian named Bob, Grainier has almost no social interaction when he is not working the timber season. Bob appears in both the novella and the film version of the story, but in the film he takes care of Grainier while he is mourning at his burnt-out cabin site. In the novella, he plays a smaller part as just a casual companion who is one day run over by several trains after he passes out drunk on the tracks. Bob doesn’t ever drink, but on this one occasion, he was tricked into drinking by some ranch hands.

This leaves Grainier with just his red mongrel dog. The movie introduces a women with a love for the outdoors to the story, but she is absent from the book. Grainier work several more timber seasons and spends his winters alone in his cabin, sometimes dreaming or having hallucinating of his wife or daughter. One vision is that his wife sees the oncoming fire and begins gathering baby Kate and some belongings and begins to flee the cabin. In the scurry, Gladys falls and tumbles down an embankment, breaking her back. She sees the flames consuming everything, and shortly before she dies she sends the baby Kate towards the edge of the river in the hopes that at least she will survive.

Later, we are not sure if this is a hallucination or a dream, Kate returns as an injured feral girl that has presumably been raised by wolves. Grainier tends to her wounds and she leaves shortly afterwards, never to return.

Eventually, Grainier acknowledges that his aging body can no longer take the rigors of working timber. He starts to find that his body takes the entire off-season to begin to recover. He manages to strike up a deal for a couple of horses and a wagon. This finally gives the ability to find work near his cabin transporting people and/or goods. In the winter he lives in his cabin and boards the horses in town. He does this until he is an old man, until one day he decides to venture off to Spokane, Washington. There he sees television for the first time and goes to a fair and rides in an airplane for the first time. In the movie, the story ends shortly after this. In the book, Grainier, is somewhat overtaken by lust from seeing all the women in the city. He spends a week there and then heads back to his cabin desiring to go back into the fray, but ultimately decides against. Eventually, one winter, he passes away quietly and alone in  his cabin and is not discovered until the following spring. He came into the world not knowing who he was, or where he came from, and he exited it with those questions still unanswered.

The final book in the The Three Body Problem trilogy….

It remains to be seen how closely the Netflix series follows this final book in the Three Body Problem trilogy as the series has not gotten to any of the storyline in this book as of the time of this writing.  This book starts where The Dark Forest leaves off, with humanity and the Trisolarians in a truce mitigated by the threat of mutually assured destruction. With Luo Ji (in the book), Saul Durand, in the series, as the former Wallfacer and current swordholder maintaining the balance of power as he approaches nearly a century of life. Earth has determined, that due to Luo Ji’s age, he needs to be replaced. Humanity has softened mightily since he has taken over. Life has been, perhaps, too good. Humanity chooses a kinder, gentler swordholder in Cheng Xin.

Yun Tianming and Cheng Xin or Will Downing, portrayed by Actor Alex Sharp and Jin Cheng,  portrayed by actor Jess Hong in the Netflix series

 

The very instant she assumes her duties, the Trisolarians begin their attack. They anticipate that there will be a moment of hesitation on her part and move quickly to disable any transmissions of the coordinates of Earth or Trisolaris beyond the solar system. They then begin their plan to overtake Earth. They force all the people of Earth to either Australia or a small colony on Mars. The majority of Earth’s population moves to Australia. Conditions are brutal, but survivable. The Trisolarians then mandate that there shall be no electricity. Providing the resources for billions of people on just one continent is only possible with electricity. Obviously, in the scramble for resources, chaos ensues. Fortunately, one of the starships that fled during the Trisolarian attack many years earlier, makes a transmission of Earth’s and the Trisolarian’s coordinates, thus making Earth undesirable for inhabiting as it will eventually be targeted for destruction by some receiver of the coordinates. All plans for Trisolarians to inhabit Earth are abandoned. The only trace of the Trisolarians to remain is a robotic humanoid named Sophon. She allows humans to maintain contact with Trisolarians through her.

This is how Cheng Xin learns that the brain that belonged to the cancer-ridden Yun Tianming that was launched  via coordinated nuclear explosions (aka The Staircase Project) actually made it to the Trisolarian fleet where they were able to re-animate him back to human form from just his brain. After his brain was launched Cheng Xin had learned that Yun Tianming spent a $20 million fortune he had inherited on buying a star for her. They had been classmates in college and remained friendly afterwards, but Cheng Xin had no idea Yun Tianming was in love with her. An arrangement is made through Sophon for Cheng Xin to communicate with Yun Tianming, although with great restrictions. If any information is passed between the two that the Trisolarians deem undesirable, Cheng Xin will be instantly killed. Yun Tianming transmits information in the form of fairy tales he has fabricated. They had become popular with Trisolarian society, but Yun Tianming had written some of them with secret messages that divulge Trisolarian technology such as light speed ships. They also make an agreement that they will meet in the solar system that Yun Tianming bought Cheng Xin if they are ever able.

Cheng Xin then goes into hibernation for over 50 years shortly after the conversation, just as Earth is on the verge of being destroyed by an unknown civilization.  The weapon used resembles a sheet of paper that is capable of traveling at nearly light speed and collapsing three dimensions into two. The collapse of dimensions presumably kills everything within. It is later learned that this weapon will likely turn the entire universe into two dimensions. The civilization that wielded this weapon is presumed to have figured out a way to sustain their own existence in two dimensions.

Eventually, most of humanity is wiped out, with the exception of Cheng Xin, her friend AA (No explanation is given for this weird name in the book), and a small group of others from the two ships that fled from the original Trisolarian attack. Chen Xin and AA just happened to be traveling in one of the few space curvature-drive ships that humans had created and are able to escape the paper-like weapon. They end up in the solar system that Yun Tianming bought for Cheng Xin. AA winds up on a planet with Yun Tianming and Chen Xing on a ship with an astronomer named Guan Yifan, who was part of the crew of the ship that transmitted the Earth’s coordinates and stopped the Trisolarian takeover. Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan end up in a mini 1 km³ universe that Yun Tianming has created for Cheng Xin to ride out the end of their original universe.  She is there with Guan Yifan and Sophon. There is no time in this universe as millions of years pass outside.

It is believed that the universe will eventually reset itself and start over, but will require all of its original matter to do so. They end up emptying the contents of their mini-universe back into the regular universe and take their chances with fate. In the end, Romeo and Juliet (Yun Tianming and Cheng Xin) are never reunited and it looks as if life is headed back to the Garden of Eden.

This is a very long and detailed book. It describes all sorts of worlds, theories, and technologies that will probably make for a great tv series. This book, however seemed to go a little to deep into the weeds with this stuff for the second half of the book. I found myself losing interest in the technological and descriptive details and wondering what is going to happen to the characters? I am an engineer saying this, this book went deep enough into the scientific and theoretical weeds to almost lose me. This is probably more than most readers want from their science fiction. In the end, we are never really certain of much, except that Cheng Xin is likely one of the last humans to exist and that the inhabitants of the universe are most likely doomed to destroy it.

Thinking about this series of three books, it strikes me really odd that the author was able to write nearly 1400 pages about an alien invasion and never physically describe an alien. He addresses their intelligence, culture, and technology, but never once is there any sort of physical description, other than that they can be dehydrated into hibernation and rehydrated back to life. I am not sure how he pulled this off. Perhaps the author never revealed an alien so that God could, perhaps, be the mystical force cleansing the universe and bringing it back to Eden?

 

The sequel to The Three Body Problem.

This book is significantly longer than The Three Body Problem. It also answers some questions about the Netflix show’s plotlines. The first book, The Three Body Problem, does not send anyone’s brain into space at 10% the speed of light using a series of nuclear explosions and an enormous lightweight sail to propel it, as the tv series does. This occurs in the latter book. The show does a pretty faithful job of telling the story, but does so somewhat out of sequence with the books. I do not fault the show writers on this, because the books tell the story out of sequence at some points to follow the perspective of one character and then goes to another character’s perspective at the beginning of the first character’s story timeline. This, coupled with the Chinese names of many of the characters, produces a little bit of confusion for readers of the English version of this book. When I mention names like, Ye Wenjie, Shi Qiang, Ding Yi, Zhuang Yan, and Luo Ji do you get a sense of whether these character names represent a male or a female? I don’t. I find myself looking for a his or her somewhere on the pages to give me perspective. Sometimes it takes a few pages to create a mental image of what the author is conveying with a character because of this gender confusion.

The TV series makes several of the Asian characters non-Asian, and changes most of the character names completely.  Watching the show did help my brain associate the characters in the book with each character’s role in the story better. The book itself comes with a legend of characters in the beginning to help the reader keep track. There are quite a few characters, too, which compounds things a little more. Most great stories only have a handful of main characters. This book has at least twice that many. The story, however, is so good, that you find yourself powering through confusing sections with the assumption that things will come together at some point. This book is comprised entirely of 80-100 page chapters. It is kind of odd to see such a change in writing style from the same author from one book in a series to the next. This book does have a different translator than the first, so maybe this accounts for it?

One of the most significant events in The Dark Forest is the arrival of a Trisolarian probe ahead of the rest of the Trisolarian fleet. The probe is rather small, somewhere around compact car-sized, and resembles a shiny metallic teardrop. It travels at a significant percentage of the speed of light and maneuvers like a hummingbird. Initially, the Earth’s fleet of starships intercepts the probe and brings it aboard one of their ships to analyze it. Even under an electron tunneling microscope, the probe’s surface looks smooth and reflective. Typically, nothing looks smooth at that magnification. The first people to examine the probe assume that it is a beautiful gift, that is, until it suddenly accelerates through the hull of the ship it is aboard. It then systematically drives through nearly the entirety of Earth’s fleet, destroying all but a handful of the fleeing starships before stationing itself between the Earth and its sun.

At this point, it is clear that the Trisolarians are a threat to humanity and that they have a technological advantage that appears insurmountable. A wallfacer named Luo Ji, Saul Durand in the show, devises a way to basically destroy the entirety of Earth’s solar system with strategically placed nuclear warheads in space.

Luo Ji is Saul Durand, played by actor Jovan Adepo in the Netflix Series.

 

Luo Ji’s vital signs are linked to devices that will set off these warheads if his life ends. He threatens to kill himself if the Trisolarians do not form a truce with the people of Earth. This planned threat of mutually assured destruction largely works, as the Trisolarians agree to share some of their technology and release the sophon’s restrictions on life on Earth. At this point, it appears like the book series could end, but an even longer sequel, Death’s End, follows.

One thing this book does is answer the question of the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox basically says that if the universe is infinitely large and there are an infinite number of universes, then the likelihood of aliens existing should be a certainty, so why have we not seen any? The answer presented in this book is that, once one planet’s higher life forms signals its existence to that of another planet, the life form with the lower level of technology will eventually be exploited and or driven out of existence. Basically, the same thing that happened many times on Earth when one advanced civilization found a less advanced one during the 1200’s to the 1800’s via sailing ships, rather than space ships.

Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel.

Titan is one of the many moons of Saturn (there are at least 274 of them). Titan is the largest. It is planet-sized, bigger than Mercury, in fact. Some of the characters of this story inhabit this moon for a while when they are banished from Earth. The sirens are three rather attractive women used in an advertising campaign for Moon Mist cigarettes. Statues of them sit at the bottom of a swimming pool on Titan. So, if you get nothing else out of this piece, at least you have some idea where the odd title comes from, and that Saturn has a ridiculous number of moons.

The story starts out with Noel Constant, an unsuccessful door-to-door salesman, finding incredible luck by using the passages of the Bible’s book of Genesis to make stock picks. He simply went through each word of each sentence and used the pairs of letters that comprised it, to generate the stock symbols he should purchase.  As an example- “IN.TH.EB.EG.GI.NN.IN.G”. Using this method he generated incredible wealth which he passed on to his son, Malachi, whom he only met once. During this meeting, he passed on his wealth-building method to Malachi. Malachi continued using this method after his father passed to build even more wealth, until, after five years of using this method, his luck runs out.

This sudden lack of fortune occurs just as Winston Miles Rumfoord, another extremely wealthy man, invites him to his house, through his wife, Beatrice. His wife has to make the invitation because Winston is popping in and out of existence at regular intervals throughout the universe. This is due to him crossing into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, A chrono-synclastic infundibulum distorts space and time for the beings in it. Past, present, and future are all visible and available at the same moment. In this case Winston and his Mastiff, Kazak, are the beings trapped in this particular chrono-synclastic infundibulum.

Rumfoord manipulates Malachi, in his fragile state, as well as countless others to secretly populate Mars. This in itself does not sound too nefarious, but Rumfoord wipes the memories of his Martian populace to turn them into remote-controlled soldiers. These soldiers, with the exception of Malachi, will later be sent to attack Earth. When Malachi gets his memory wiped clean on Mars, he assumes the name of ‘Unk’ and uses this moniker for most of the rest of the story.

Unk returns to Earth after his lengthy stays on Mars and Mercury. His return occurs after the failed ‘Martian’ invasion of Earth. Rumfoord had his Martian soldiers attack Earth, despite it being a foreknown effort in futility. The attack, however, has the intended effect of uniting the people of Earth and creating a religion based on equity where Rumfoord and Malachi are a primary focus. Rumfoord is revered and powerful, while Malachi is an outcast to be shunned off to Saturn’s moon, Titan with his wife Bea (formerly Rumfoord’s wife), his son Chrono, and a robotic alien named Salo, who is waiting on a spare part for his space ship. Unk spends his remaining life, with the exception of his final day, on Titan. He dies peacefully, shortly after being dropped off by Salo, who finally received his spare part, on a park bench during a snowy night in Indiana.

This book is obviously the seed through which other books, such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series were born. This is the first absurdist science fiction space travel novel I am aware of. It also shows some of the skill Vonnegut had in transporting a reader forward and backward in time and place without confusing him. This is something that is prevalent in his later masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. I know of no other author who did it better. Vonnegut is also excellent at creating believable dialogue between characters, even when the dialogue may be ridiculous. This is not my favorite Vonnegut book, I preferred the story in his preceding novel, Player Piano, better, but this book shows the emerging creativity and absurdist humor that will come in his later novels.

It has been several years now, but, long ago, I asked my former co-worker, Danny Smyth, if he had any book recommendations. This was it. I wish I had picked it up sooner.

While I started reading it on a recent flight to Harrisburg, PA, the gentleman next to me asked whether this was the book that the tv series was based? I told him that I was not aware of it being a series. We gave each other some context of the plot and I learned that this is currently a Netflix series. After I finished the book, I watched the first episode.

The tv series omits a very brutal and graphic execution of a female student protester that opens the book. The story does not seem to suffer from the omission as the opening of the series is still fairly brutal without it, as it portrays a physics professor beaten to death on a stage, in front of a large student crowd for teaching Western theories, namely Einstein’s theory of relativity. On the stage with the professor is his wife, who appears to go along with the crowd for the sake of her own preservation.  The professor’s daughter is also an unwilling witness in the crowd. The opening chapters start in 1966 during a cultural revolution that reviles all Western teaching and thought, regardless of whether or not it is correct.

The professor’s daughter, Ye, is the closest thing to a main character in this book. She is initially imprisoned for her association with her father, but is then given the opportunity to work for a secret military complex using her scientific background. The catch is that she must agree to spend her life there. She accepts without hesitation, to the surprise of everyone involved. After initially being told that the military complex is working on technology to disrupt and destroy enemy satellites, she later finds that the real purpose is to contact and communicate with whatever intelligent life might be out in space on distant worlds.

Many years go by without any such communication, and then one day a message appears from a civilization on a planet called Trisolaris. This message is followed by another one instructing whoever read the message not to respond, because it will result in earth being invaded and taken over by the civilization on Trisolaris. Ye, despondent with the state of mankind and civilization in general, does respond, aiming her signal directly at the sun to amplify it. She sends a short message stating she would assist the aliens as mankind is unable to solve its own problems. The response to the message will give the aliens a location, based on the delay in receiving it. The distance is 4.2 light-years. Even in a very fast ship, it will take the aliens 450 years to arrive.

The aliens know that their technology is far superior to that of humans, but determine that by the time they reach earth to overthrow it, earth will likely have surpassed them because Trisolaris developed, due to their having three suns, with alternating stable and chaotic eras. During chaotic eras, they could not progress. The chaotic eras existed when multiple suns appeared simultaneously and created extreme heat and/or gravitational pull, or when none appeared for a long time and created extensive freezes. The Trisolarians would dehydrate before a chaotic era, to be rolled up and stored, and then rehydrated when the era again becomes stable. Someone would always have to be holed up in a protective structure for the chaotic eras to rehydrate the rest when the era ended. We discover this through the characters in the book playing a simulated reality game that appears to interface with the nervous system of the player and takes over all of the player’s five senses to immerse them in the game that simulate life on Trisolaris. In the book, the interface is a full suit. In the tv series it is a shiny, metal, partial helmet. Because earth is mostly stable, it progresses largely unabated, technologically, by natural disturbances.

To maintain their technological superiority for the 450 years they must travel, they create a plan to disrupt scientific evolution on earth. They take two entangled pairs of protons, enlarge them to planetary proportions by dimensionally unfolding them, create sophisticated circuits within them, and then fold them back to proton size. Having little mass, this allows two of them to be propelled at close to the speed of light toward earth. Keeping the entangled twin of each allows instantaneous communication and control at any distance. They use these sophisticated proton-housed devices to disrupt particle accelerators on earth. They also use them to control, communicate, and monitor almost everything on earth when the protons arrive. They communicate and utilize the group of humans that are now part of a militant religious group that sees the aliens as their Gods. The group assists in disrupting technological progress on Earth.

Counter to this militant religious group is a covert organization that is linked to many of the world’s governments. It is a small, but powerful group whose grunt work is largely carried out by a gruff, former police officer.

The book ends with scientists dying en masse, science itself in chaos, and aliens enroute to take over. When I bought this book, I had no idea there were two large sequels already written. I started reading the Sirens of Titan in the interim, but I now have the sequels. I must find out the fate of humanity.

Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author. Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, and Hocus Pocus are all great novels that expertly blend science fiction, drama, and humor. This book is a little bit of a departure from his typical book. It is the last book he wrote. He passed away in 2007 at age 84 and this book was released in 2005.  This book does not really tell a story, but serves more of guide to what he was thinking when he wrote some of his famous novels as well as his current view of the world and humanity.

He mentions the politicians and political events of the time the book was written. George Bush was president and Dick Cheney was vice-president as the US attacked Iraq searching for “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” This definitely was a low point in US history. Vonnegut seems somewhat despondent at the state of events at the time. He appeared to believe that the attack was merely to gain access to Iraqi oil. This may or may not have been true. He spoke of the unsustainability of our reliance on oil, which is true. Much of what we do now, twenty years later, is even more unsustainable. Think about this, nearly six billion people own cell phones right now. How many people use the same cell phone for more than five years? Not many. We are discarding billions of cell phones every year. Where are they going? This is not sustainable and no one seems to care. We, as a society, devour vast amounts of resources for almost no reason. Nothing is meant to last. Almost nothing electronic is intended to be repaired. We just toss it. All the resources used to manufacture and transport the product are gone and all that is left is waste that does not degrade.

Vonnegut seems as he had nearly reached full curmudgeon stage as he wrote this book. He always like to poke fun at humanity’s flaws, but it seems like things had finally gone past the point of joking for him. It was more like venting. He was definitely right to be worried. This book was written 20 years ago and things have only gotten worse. The world is more disposable than ever before.

Vonnegut also seemed concerned, as he did in Player Piano, of the role computers were taking in the workforce. He was concerned of people being displaced by machines in the workforce. As AI begins to become more commonplace, this will likely become a very real issue for the generation that is currently reaching adulthood. Vonnegut predicted a universal basic income to pay a large part of humanity that served no useful purpose in Player Piano in 1952. He predicted a world largely manned by a machine workforce, with just a small number of engineers and technicians keeping it running. The rest of the world spends its days drunk in bars and wallowing in lethargy, desperately seeking meaning. Is this where we are headed?

Another Charles Bukowski novel starring Bukowski’s alter-ego, Henry Chinaski. It follows Chinaski during the 1940’s as he wanders from meaningless job to meaningless job in a drunken stupor, sometimes moving, via Greyhound bus, from his base in Los Angeles to New York and Miami. His girlfriend and sometimes prostitute, Jan, enters and leaves his life a couple of times along the way. Hank, as he often refers to himself, never maintains employment for more than a few months. He is riddled with vices – alcoholism, infidelity, gambling, and sloth. He acknowledges that he is not the greatest person. He often pokes fun at himself. Most of the humor in this book is derived from this. He sees himself exactly as society likely does – as a degenerate lacking all self-control. He is clearly able to identify right and wrong and he is also very accepting of the consequences of his wrong choices. He never seems to hold ill-will over the person firing him. Most people do not have an accurate perception of themselves. They believe they are better, smarter, or nicer than they really are. Hank sees himself precisely as an outsider would. I think it is a big part of what makes Bukowski’s writing so unique, that and the fact that he brings you vividly into his myriad of debaucherous circumstances. He makes no apologies for anything. He just expertly narrates his life at the bottom.
Here is an example of how Hank approaches a new job:

I wasn’t very good. My idea was to wander about doing nothing, always avoiding the boss, and avoiding the stoolies who might report to the boss. I wasn’t all that clever. It was more instinct than anything else. I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.

Hank frequently works with other degenerates and bums. One thing that likely distinguishes him from the other rabble is that Hank did study journalism at city college for two years. This is a fact he often omits in his dealings with others in his circle as he believes it may disqualify him from some of the menial jobs he applies for or alienate him from the those he has to work with. Hank continuously writes and submits stories to various publications during his debauchery. This is his most redeeming quality. He is looking to improve his position through this means, despite avoiding every other aspect of being a responsible and respectable adult. He eventually gets some work published in a magazine and takes great pride in it. Bukowski himself, had his first succesful book published when he was over 50. It is somewhat endearing that he maintained a love for writing and a confidence in himself despite decades of obscurity and rejection. This is remarkable as he is considered as quite a successful author.

The book ends with Hank broke, just fired, drunk, and in a strip joint. He finds himself much the way the story starts, but now he is without his girlfriend Jan, who has found a cash cow to live with.

 

C.S. Lewis’ attempt to disprove the existence of God that brings him to the opposite conclusion.

Lewis begins his book with an explanation of a thing that appears to be in all, but the outliers of humanity. He contends that we all, regardless of the culture we come from, have an innate understanding of certain things that are right and wrong. Perhaps we can call it a conscience. We know that certain things are just right and others are just wrong. Sure, we are brought up and taught certain things by our parents, but Lewis contends that these things would be in us and have been in us, regardless. He uses for example, an empty seat in a public place. We are all pretty accepting that if a seat is occupied by someone before we arrive at it, we do not have a right to it. The person that got there first does. We may be upset that we missed out on the seat, but we hold no ill will to the current seat holder. He got there first. Everyone seems to recognize some basic universal laws of morality. This built-in morality is God. Anyone can choose to ignore this morality, but that does not negate it. The wrongdoer knows he has deviated from it.

Lewis contends that we can deviate from this morality if we choose, because he has given us free-will. Without this free-will, we would all be perfect. We would also not be individuals. We are all dealt a different hand when we are born. We can be tall, or short, a particular race, or a mixture of races, we can be rich or poor or somewhere in between. We can be born with a physical malady or deformity. We can be born physically beautiful. Lewis contends that someone who is born with many gifts has to work harder to earn his place. For example, it is likely easier for someone who is born rich and beautiful to have a good temperament. This person can live a life where basic necessities are not an issue and people you interact with tend to treat you better. Someone with below-average looks and born into poverty has to work much harder to keep a good temperament. God weighs this sort of thing in his judgement.

Lewis contends that God made the world, but he is no more a part of it than a painter is part of his painting. He had to take human form to become part of it. This human form was Jesus. He existed and endured crucifixion in order that we too could become sons of God as we were in the Garden of Eden before temptation derailed us.

In order to be accepted, we must fully give ourselves to God. There can be no half-effort. One must fully surrender. One outcome of this will be that you discover your true self. Most people walk around with a portrayal of some personality that is not really a representation of one’s true self. Fully surrendering yourself to God will reveal this true self and allow you to fulfil the purpose of your life.

This was a wonderfully well-written book. It is a very easy read and you will definitely find yourself evaluating the concepts presented in your own way. It is very thought-provoking, as any good book, film, or any other good work of art should be.