The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace

Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 by nosleepingdog

Another post-apocalypse novel published (like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) as mainstream fiction rather than science fiction. The Pesthouse (2007) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and got good reviews, but I’m afraid it left me cold.

It’s a journey, the writing is “sensitive” and competent, the two protagonists suffer and change, the typical after-the-fall elements are present (religious nuts, violent raiders, superstitious greedy villagers)… Maybe if you don’t read sf this would all seem original and riveting, but I got bored and started skimming less than half-way through just to see if anything better came along and to find out how it would end. I think some sf writers have done much better on this theme, though as genre writers they never get much attention. Topics for another day: the genre label, and better stories on this theme.

Searching for a forgotten book?

Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 by nosleepingdog

Lately I have been re-reading science fiction novels and stories I remember from my youth. But in some cases I remembered something about the plot or setting, and nothing of title or author. For example, a story where the alien said to the protagonist, “I trade with you my mind.” Atypically for me, I had a dim recollection that it was by Clifford Simak, but no idea of the title or if maybe it had been in a novel instead.

Where to turn? BookSleuth® to the rescue. This is a branch of the discussion forums run by used-bookseller abebooks.com. They have separate US and UK sites; each has its own forums and Booksleuth® section.

Here is the abebooks description of BookSleuthe®:

Is there a special book that you read, or perhaps had read to you, at some point in your life but you can’t remember the author and title? Perhaps you know the plot, or a character, or maybe even what the front cover looks like. BookSleuth® is here to help you find that book! Simply post a short description of what you can remember here on our board. Visitors from all over the world will read your post, and one of them is bound to know exactly what you’re talking about and post a response. Not missing anything? Why not see if you can help anyone else find their long-lost books?

Each of the two forums has some genre divisions: General, Children’s, Romance, Mystery, Non-fiction, Science Fiction. The members who answer questions are real enthusiasts with incredible memories (even for 40-year old short stories!), and their answers sometimes include valuable index-type websites where other such questions can be researched.

I have spent some time cruising questions and answers, even had a try at answering a few. I found that one frequent poster is a bookfinder for a library system, and I am sure she is not the only Booksleuther with such specialized skills.

When I wanted to find a British book, I posted my question in the UK forum. I had few details: it had to do with hand-production of daily objects in a small English village, lots about woodworking, I thought the author’s first name was George, and I read it in the early 70’s. (If you can’t give an approximate date of publication, at least you can narrow the field by saying when you encountered the book). I’d thought about this book for thirty years, longing to re-read it, and had done some searching on the web myself but never even came close. The folks on the UK BookSleuth® forum had an answer for me very soon: The Wheelwright’s Shop, by George Sturt–a book of some renown. Soon I had my very own copy courtesy of Amazon; I shared it with a friend who’s a sign painter immersed in fine hand-craftsmanship, he bought a copy and talked it up to friends, so we’ve got a mini-revival of Sturt’s masterpiece going on this side of the pond.

One tip: if you decide to post a query: use a descriptive title for your post, not “Help, looking for book title” or “Looking for old cookbook”.

Here a a few recent queries:
Kids lost in outback
American Civil War & female cat burglar
A Particular Jewish Cookbook
Children playing casting shadows 1950’s
Type 23 Frigate in an West African coup
Middle East Trucking
Suffragette Story for teen/child reader
Novel with storyline based around chess

Look out, though, cruising these forums is likely to have you adding more books to your future reading list!

http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom

http://forums.abebooks.co.uk/abesleuthuk

And, the same day I posted my inquiry about the “I trade with you my mind” story, I had an answer: it is in the early pages of Simak’s novel Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), which I found in my local library system and am about to start reading.

Will it be as memorable as it was 40 years ago? I’ll get back to you on that. But I looked up some vintage covers of this title, from which I can predict absolutely nothing about the book. Typical of sf cover art!

These are from the Clifford Simak Fan Site, specifically Foreign covers; last two.

Little Blue Books

Posted on Friday, August 8, 2008 by nosleepingdog

Before Project Gutenberg, there were Little Blue Books. Before paperback books (not pamphlets, but books) came along in the 30’s, there were Little Blue Books. My remaining library of them is shown above, and below are a few with a paperback of the same period.

“Little Blue Books” was the popular name for a series of tiny publications printed on pulp paper, with slightly heavier paper covers, by E. Haldeman-Julius between 1919 and 1951. Emanuel Julius was the son of Russian immigrant Jews; he said his life was changed when, as a boy, he got hold of a 10 cent publication of Oscar Wilde’s grim poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and read it straight through oblivious to the freezing weather in which he sat. At that moment, he thought “how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could be made available.”

All of us who were bookworms in childhood can identify with that experience. I don’t remember much of my youth but I can still recall exactly where I was when I read the end of To Kill A Mockingbird: sitting on a log in some neighbor’s front yard, having put the paperback in my pocket before setting out ostensibly to take the dog for a walk. And on a difficult bus trip to San Francisco, I buried myself in the Little Blue Book of Macbeth and came across the encouraging lines “Time and the hour/run through the roughest day.” I was on the bus with my parents, but seated separately; they were barely speaking to one another, having had another of the fights over my father’s extreme stay-at-home habits–this one followed by “Well, maybe you’d like to go to San Francisco (about 40 miles)?” “Driving and parking there is too awful.” and so on, until we ended up a silent trio on Greyhound.

I still have that 15-cent copy of Macbeth, and most of the other LBB’s that I acquired. The titles in this line included a lot of classics, not just because they were copyright-free, but because Haldemann-Julius had an agenda: a mixture of the classical, the progressive, and the useful.

Here’s a sampling of titles [my apologies for such a long list, but, I confess, when I started looking at the lists on the Penn State Axe Library site, I found it hard to stop selecting examples!] :

1a. The Ballad of Reading Jail, by Oscar Wilde. First Edition. [Cover title.] People’s Pocket Series. [1919] [

1b. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Second Edition. [Cover title.] People’s Pocket Series. [1919]

3a. Walt Whitman’s Poems. [1920.]

17c. On Walking, by Henry David Thoreau. [1921.]

60a. Emerson’s Essays. [1920.]

90c. The Mikado, by W. S. Gilbert.

94a. Trial and Death of Socrates. [1920.]

95a. Confessions of an Opium Eater, by Thomas De Quincey. [1920.]

60a. Emerson’s Essays. [1920.]

140a. America’s Prison Hell, by Kate O’Hare. [1920.

1001. Tales of Italian Bandits [by] Washington Irving. [1927.]

1002. A Dictionary of Sea Terms [by] Frank Wells. [1926.]

1003. How to Think Logically [by] Leo Markun. [1926.]

1004. How to Save Money [by] J. George Frederick. [1926.]

1005. How to Enjoy the Orchestra [by] Isaac Goldberg. [1926.]

1006. A Book of Children’s Games [by] Grace Perkins. [1926.]

1008. The Origin of Religion [by] Joseph McCabe. [1926.]

1009. Typewriting Self Taught [by] Miriam Allen DeFord. [1926.]

1010. A Handbook for Amateur Magicians [by] George Milburn. [1926.]

1011. Pocket Dictionary, English-French, French-English [by] Vance Randolph. [1927.]

1014. The Best American Jokes, edited by Clement Wood. [1926.]

1017. Without Benefit of Clergy [by] Rudyard Kipling. [1926.]

1019. Bluebeard and His Eight Wives [by] Clement Wood. [1926.]

1020. Why I Am an Infidel [by] Luther Burbank. [1926.]

1021. Italian Self Taught [by] Isaac Goldberg. [1926.]

1022. An Odyssey of the North [by] Jack London. [1926.]

1162. Mystery Tales of Ghosts and Villains [by] Montague Rhodes James, Katherine Rickford [and] Charles Dickens.

1163. The Policewoman’s Love-Hungry Daughter and Other Stories of Chicago Life [by] Ben Hecht.

1177. Woman and the New Race [by] Havelock Ellis.

1178. The Chorus Girl and Her Lover’s Wife and Other Stories [by] Anton Chekhov.

1179. How to Make Desserts, Pies and Pastries [by] Mrs. Temple.

1182. How to Make Your Own Cosmetics [by] Gloria Goddard.

1183. How to Play Checkers [by] W. Patterson.

1185. The Weather: What Makes It and Why [by] Clifton L. Ray.

1186. A Handbook of the Rules of Golf, compiled by Harold Dix.

1188. Sex and the Garden of Eden Myth, a Collection of Essays on Christianity [by] Maynard.

1189. Pin Money: One Hundred Ways to Make Money at Home [by] Gloria Goddard.

1190. What Price Love? [by] Anton Chekhov.

1286. Do Human Beings Have Free Will? A Debate: Affirmative: Professor George Burman Foster, Negative: Clarence Darrow.

There are some patterns here: how-to and self-improvement, progressive politics and “free-thinking” about religion and society, and, of course, plenty of titles containing the words “love,” “sweetheart,” and “sex.” But there are also the large and small lights of Western Literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, O. Henry, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Balzac, Ibsen, Mark Twain, Rabelais…there seems no end to Haldeman’s inclusiveness, until one thinks that a complete set of Little Blue Books would make the ideal accompaniment to a desert island existence. And cheap, too; in the beginning they retailed for a nickel; by the early 1960’s the price was all the way up to fifteen cents. So the 39 titles above would have run you a total of $1.95 at a nickel apiece, $5.85 at 15 cents.

Haldeman published some works he’d written himself, including

1287. Brann, Who Cracked Dull Heads [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.

1288. America’s Fakirs and Guides, Surveying the Leaders and Misleaders of Our Day [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.

The Brann of LBB 1287 was William Cowper Brann (1855-1898), an opinionated American journalist and newspaper owner who attacked aspects of religion, social pretense, and anything else that roused his ire. He died in Waco, Texas, after being shot in the back by a man who objected to his vituperative editorials about Baylor College; Brann turned and shot his attacker dead before walking to the jail, from which he was soon released. He died the next day.

I encountered Haldeman’s magnum-opus-in-small-pieces early in my teens. I was questioning religion and social conventions, fascinated with adventure tales, and lived with my nose in a book. Mostly I went to the library, but Little Blue Books were portable, full of surprises and oddities, and felt in some way personal. I must have bought them by mail, because I never remember seeing one in a bookstore or on a drugstore book rack. I now know that J. Edgar Hoover had mounted a campaign against Haldeman and his publications in the 1950’s and forced most bookstores to stop carrying them. The Little Blue Book series was, in its day, “edgy”: marked by progressive politics, including socialism, and consideration of forbidden topics like free love, homosexuality, evolution, birth control, and women’s rights. You can see that a cranky repressive guy like Hoover couldn’t allow such pollution of the American intellectual landscape.

Despite J. Edgar, 300 million Little Blue Books were published between 1919 and 1978, so I suppose those who blame our moral decline on things like Pokémon and gay marriage can just add Haldeman’s smart-alecky elitist smut to their list.

Nanotech intro for the rest of us

Posted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by nosleepingdog

Book cover image from Amazon.

Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology. Ed Regis.

I picked this book up at our Friends of the Library bookstore for a quarter, though when I saw the publication date of 1995 I had second thoughts. How could so old a book, on such a fast-moving aspect of technology, be worth reading?

But when I started it I was immediately drawn in, and after finishing it conclude that for us non-scientists, as well as for those interested in the background and implications of the whole “nano” idea, the book is well worthwhile. The focus is on Eric Drexler, who as an MIT engineering undergrad in 1976 formulated the basic idea of assembling substances or structures one molecule or atom at a time, and became what Apple used to call an evangelist for the idea for the succeeding decades.

Drexler was not the first to discuss the possibility of such constructions––that honor goes to the ingenious mind of Richard Feynman who broached the topic in a 1959 lecture––but he expanded upon it, foresaw not only multiple uses but also some of the social/economic consequences of a technology which could lead to all of us having tabletop “matter assemblers” which could produce anything, from a ribeye steak to car parts, using just about any old “stuff” as raw material. And Drexler organized others into a bi-coastal league of nano-fans to brainstorm, research, and support the vision. At least, he did that after the first few years when anxiety about the social impact, or the possibility of runaway assemblers covering the earth with “grey goo,” led him to keep the idea more or less under wraps.

Ed Regis is an experienced science writer of the sort that used to be dismissed as “popularizers,” because they write for the general reader, one who’s interested, educated, but not schooled in the particular branch of science under discussion. He writes for publications like the NY Times, Wired, and Scientific American, as well as writing books. He’s good at what he does.

This book, for example, explains Brownian motion (the jumping about that individual particles, from atoms to pollen grains, do when suspended in liquid) and the workings of scanning tunnelling microscopes (which proved able to manipulate individual atoms), and other such things, well enough that I was able to explain them to someone else. That doesn’t mean I have any real inkling of the physics or mathematics of it all but I have a degree of layman’s understanding which enables me to follow the discussion, and I can build on it if I wish to read more.

Brownian motion was early raised as a theoretical objection to the concept of moving atoms around to construct molecules: how could you do it if your atoms wouldn’t stay put? An early response was, “If our own cells can make molecules, then it can be done.” A later response was the demonstration that it had been done; researchers pushed atoms around to make letters and pictures. Since then, other researchers have used enzymes or gene-altered microorganisms to tailor-make specific molecules.

Regis includes a lot of what could be disparaged as unscientific human interest detail–personalities, anecdotes–but to me this added more than just readability, it added another dimension. The original concerns about the human future which motivated Drexler to think about fundamental technological change, the ability of a high school student to make his own scanning tunneling electron microscope, the accounts of scientific rivalries and misunderstandings, these have a place in a popular account of a technology that is so mind-boggling and promises or threatens such far-reaching upheavals in society.

As I finished, the question in my mind was “Why haven’t I heard more about huge strides in this technology in the years since the book’s publication in 1995?” I’m looking into that question now, with much more comprehension than I had before reading Regis’s book.