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REVIEW: FAHRENHEIT 451

Another post-war American dystopian classic scratched off the (small) part of my to-read list that’s dedicated to… *pensive look*… older books.

Fahrenheit 451 impressed me. I expected it to be good, but, dutifully as I do when the proper time comes, I made all the right connections that proved in my eyes how a 70-year-old book might as well be speaking about today.

They say that “the past is a foreign country”, yet at some unique moments of lucky insight we can get to realise how much we do share with the people from foreign countries, who at first might seem distant, locked away by the fences of culture, yet at some point we take notice that there’s still the gap between the bars through which we can see the other side. Replace the Parlors with tablets and the Firemen with… I don’t know, the NSA, and there you have it.

While it would be a wild stretch to say that books are even slightly hated or feared in today’s society, I would argue that they’re increasingly insignificant. No, actually, it is not books we’re talking about here—just as Faber told Montag that it wasn’t the books themselves, as in the scrawled, bound sheets of paper, that he wanted to save. What we, in the company of Montag and Faber, are talking about, is books as symbols of mindful dedication, a capacity to pay attention to detail and a thinking or intuiting mind behind the scrolling eyes able to connect with what it reads and care about it.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

In the scene where Montag and Mildred go through the books Montag has saved, try to read them and find they are unable to understand them, I was reminded of young Greeks today unable to understand ancient Greek or even Katharevousa, or me trying to read Dostoyevsky a couple of years back and giving up because “I can’t stand the classics.” Beatty’s admission that books were essentially banned (or, to phrase it more precisely, reading was slowly abolished by the government by discouraging literacy) in order to avoid conflicts of opinion that could make people invested in some idea or its counterargument, brought to mind how there exists now a dominant mainstream narrative that requires from people globally to accept it more or less at face value, while every discordant (rational?) opinion is painted as crazy. It’s got to the point where if one does not believe the official story, they are a conspiracy theorist, which seems to be the broad-brush contemporary insult of substantial equivalence to “communist”.

You can go to Reddit these days to get an idea of what’s allowed and not allowed to be discussed in mainstream discourse, although I like the idea that the more taboo a subject is, the closer it is to our cultural blindspot, what people in the future will laugh at us (or curse us) for failing to see, and in a way to the truth—if we can speak of such a thing without missing the point.

I can’t say whether Bradbury was ahead of his time—this would imply a linear, rational process of how the progress of humanity works I don’t agree with—but what I’ll say is that in certain respects, the times themselves have not changed all that much since when Bradbury was fresh out of school and was typing away in the basement of UCLA on penny-operated, time-constrained typewriters. In certain respects. And that includes man’s (and woman’s! {and genderqueer’s! {{[and other terrestrial and extraterrestrial sentient beings!}}}]) thirst for meaning, and the survival, or the continual re-imagining in the aftermath of disaster, of what truly matters.

In short, yes, you should read this book—as another step to protect its family and heritage from their slide to insignificance. Alternatively, you could listen to the unabridged audiobook like I did. It’s just over 5 hours long and the narrator is good.

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REVIEW: DUNE MESSIAH

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’d heard that the second part of the Dune saga is a bit of a disappointment after the grandiose first part, and as I do hate to admit it, I struggled to finish it. I couldn’t exactly follow what was happening, the characters’ motivations, their positions and the parts they were playing in Muad’Dib’s empire. Most of all, I couldn’t visualize how he was visualizing what was happening to him and the intrigue that was taking place around him… or if I did, which I might have, I thought it was confusing and not very interesting. The whole ghola/Idaho subplot (subplot? wasn’t that the book’s main storyline?) left me terribly indifferent.

I’m happy to have put Dune Messiah behind me. I can start seeing why a sci-fi fiend acquaintance of mine told me that he dropped the series because of “way too much religion and mysticism.” Messiah indeed went overboard in this regard compared to its predecessor, but I’m still curious what might happen in the next books and whether the mysticism and religion at least in the rest of the story might prove to be a bit less hazy and interesting. Mind, in the first book, it was a big part of what made it feel so alive.

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REVIEW: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S STAR WARS

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

HAN: —Nay, not that:
The day when Jabba taketh my dear ship
Shall be the day you find me a grave man.

GREEDO: Nay oo’chlay nooma. Chespeka noofa
Na cringko kaynko, a nachoskanya!

HAN: Aye, true, I’ll warrant thou has wish’d this day.
[They shoot, Greedo dies.]
[To bartender:] Pray, goodly Sir, forgive me for the mess.
[Aside:] And whether I shot first, I’ll ne’er confess!

I’m not a fan of Shakespeare. I don’t think I’ve never seen or read any of his plays. Since forever I’d thought that I would find the language or the story boring or something. You know how it is with some things; they rub you the wrong way once and you keep having an unexplainable prejudice against them for years thereafter.

Verily, I stumbled across this work while looking for Expanded Universe publications. At first I was skeptical for the reasons above but it didn’t take me long to discover the brilliance of this here tome. By the way, I read/listened to it in audiobook form, which felt much more like watching the play with the script at hand.

I shall try to be brief. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars not only is a masterpiece of genre mash-up, being something more than the sum of its parts. It made me laugh out loud (for real) with its deliciously tongue-in-cheek yet very serious and perfectly executed Shakespearean interpretation of the story we know and love: for instance, it’s written exactly like the script for something that would be put up in the Globe Theatre, with acts, scenes, entrances, exits, monologues — even Chewbacca and R2-D2 get a few [!!], plus it’s completely written in iamblic pentameter — quite an achievement in itself — and follows various classical drama tropes sublimely. It gave me new insight to the motivations of Han, Luke or Darth Vader; it even made me stop and think why I haven’t read Shakespeare before. In fact, the epilogue by writer Ian Doescher made me realise just to what extent good story-telling has been based on what Joseph Campbell’s introduced and explained in his work
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and how a cross between Star Wars and Shakespeare ultimately makes a lot of sense and can prove thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating.

If you like Star Wars, the English language or simply seeing how far-fetched yet creative ideas can strike gold when done right, I cannot recommend this audiobook enough, although apparently the printed edition comes with some clever and beautiful illustrations (check the cover).

Here’s a little snippet I’m posting here I couldn’t post on Goodreads. Just listen to Vader sharing his inner thoughts and motivations with the audience.

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REVIEW: CITY

City by Clifford D. Simak

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is what I couldn’t help but imagine the talking dogs in this book looked like (together with the robotic “hands”). Minus the gun, cause dogs in City never kill.

Read this in audiobook form. I think it was the same guy who narrated the Replay audiobook. Maybe, can’t bother to check.

City is 8+1 connected stories passed down to the dogs of the future that tell of Earth and man (if such a being ever existed and isn’t just a product of legend). There’s a quasi-logarithmic time interval between each of the stories: the first takes place in the ’90s, the second somewhere in the 21st century, the last is something like 17,000 years in the future.

Even though dogs, robots and ants appear as successors to human civilization on Earth, with each species following a different philosophy inspired by or directly influenced by mankind, and although the stories are supposed to be retold by talking dogs of the far future, this is basically still a story about humans. Make no mistake, people in the future will obviously instill the same kind of vain belief in the march of progress and Prometheanism to any and all prospective “managers” of Earth. Under the dogs, who are first charged to follow mankind’s footsteps when our foolishness won’t allow us to “reach our true potential”, a “brotherhood of animals” is formed to unite all mute animals and make them useful, i.e. workers. That’s progress.

Really?

I don’t blame Mr. Simak. This is quite old sci-fi and it makes sense that works from the ’50s would succumb to such, ahem, easy ideas, or at least outmoded to our eyes. While listening, I caught myself often thinking “no, Cliff, you’re going too big on this. You’re missing the trees for the supposed forest. This future feels lifeless, lost in the blur of abstracted big idea”. And true, I was not sure what in the end was the point of it all, even with the added story which served as an epilogue and which was added decades later.

I don’t feel as if I caught any kind of glimpse of alternative universes, worlds or future societies: just a curious collection of stories based on ’50s American/Western ideals projected to the blank canvas of times yet unseen. At some point there is the notion in the book that humans would invent the bow and arrow in all possible timelines, and that, if given the opportunity, they would always go all the way from there to the atomic bomb. Humanity’s free, as long as they go down this predetermined path. Like in my last game of Civilization.

However, I must admit that the segment on Jupiter alone pushes Cities up a star for me. I found it much more innovative, prescient of trends in what’s been passed down as the changing collective human consciousness and culture in ways the rest of the book just wasn’t.

I’m closing with this little segment that explains parallel dimension beautifully:

He patted Ebenezer’s head and pulled Ebenezer’s ears.

“Look here, Ebenezer, I don’t seem to place these cobblies.”
“They aren’t any place,” said Ebenezer. “Not on this earth, at least.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like there was a big house,” said Ebenezer. “A big house with lots of rooms. And doors between the rooms. And if you’re in one room, you can hear whoever’s in the other rooms, but you can’t get to them.”
“Sure you can,” said Webster. “All you have to do is go through the door.”
“But you can’t open the door,” said Ebenezer. “You don’t even know about the door. You think this one room you’re in is the only room in all the house. Even if you did know about the door you couldn’t open it.”

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REVIEW: THE AGES OF GAIA

The Ages Of Gaia: A Biography Of Our Living Earth by James E. Lovelock

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me many months to finally finish The Ages of Gaia. I suppose it’s because a lot of it was dry in the way scientific writing is dry to people who are not scientists but wish they could understand what scientists say. Daisyworld, for example, is an interesting supposition and thought experiment on how planetary phenomena influence and are influenced by life on a smaller scale — an idea that today seems typically banal but was novel at the time it was brought forward. I understand it intuitively, but the relevant science flew over my head, along with a great part of what else made this book important, I’m sure.

Where Lovelock’s writing was more approachable, I found it profound and enjoyable to read. I particularly enjoy how some of it could easily be divisive among ecologists and could be used to spark discussion, for instance his careful (and in my humble opinion, very balanced) examination of nuclear power, or the suggestion that anything alive is by definition a polluter to its environment, helping some species thrive and others wither away in a delicate eternal dance (or war, if you prefer that analogy). The chapter “The Contemporary Environment” is a must-read for anyone who’s interested in big-picture ecology and where it fits today… or where it used to fit 20 years ago and more. Even his early approach to geoengineering, long before it was an unwelcome reality, is enlightening to read: “So that’s what the scientists were thinking before the big shots took control of global climatic planning.”

Generally speaking, Mr. Lovelock displays great wisdom on a number of different subjects, the discussion of which is seldom characterised by either lucidity or farsightedness (widesightedness?). However, looking at his views today, which show that in his very old age he’s somewhere between trying to be pragmatic and being resigned, they are even more difficult to digest. Has he gone off his rocker, is he paid or is he just that big of a visionary? Google him and you’ll see why I’m asking these questions in particular.

To end with his hypothesis: will Gaia “do” anything (to the limit of her proactiveness) to preserve life on her surface, much in the same way our body would react to anything which could harm the microscopic (our cells and tissues) as well as the macroscopic life — us? Are we really a terminal threat to life on Earth, or could it be that:

“Looked at from the time scale of our own brief lives, environmental change must seem haphazard, even malign. From the long Gaian view, the evolution of the environment is characterized by periods of stasis punctuated by abrupt and sudden change. The environment has never been so uncomfortable as to threaten the extinction of life on Earth, but during those abrupt changes the resident species suffered catastrophe whose scale was such as to make a total nuclear war seem, by comparison, as trivial as is a summer breeze to a hurricane. We are ourselves a product of one such catastrophe, the extinction of many species 65 million years ago. Could it be that we are unwittingly precipitating another punctuation that will alter our environment to suit our successors?”

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REVIEW: DUNE

Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Unique among SF novels… I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” ~Arthur C. Clarke

I’ll begin with what I saw when I first checked what my Goodreads friends had to say about their experience with Dune:

Thank the gods it was Kivayan, my friend Kuba from Poland, who first made it clear to me how important it was that I read Dune, and not just the first book, no, the whole original series, because only then would I be able to witness the genius of Frank Herbert’s grand image (that there was my attempt to express “big picture” in a more fittingly epic way). Thank the gods it was him and not someone else’s opinion which would have left this book under my personal radar, where it had been for many years.

Scratch that. It hadn’t been under my radar. I’d been aware of it since I was little, mainly from video games or perhaps Karina—I just didn’t know exactly what it was about. All this desert, the sandworms… It looked boring. Like something too slow, deep or intricate for me to enjoy. And let me tell you, I wasn’t wrong: if I had dipped my toes in the spicy sand before I’d reached a certain point in my life, I’m confident I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. If I had to say, I’d place the point in question around the time I started watching Game of Thrones, playing alt-history games and reading books like The World Without Us or The Dark Tower.

I had started being able to enjoy books like Dune, only I couldn’t make the connection in my head and notice the switch. There was nobody to suddenly come up to me and tell me that the famous, apparently super-influential old SF book I’ve always thought I wouldn’t enjoy, actually involves loads of topics I’d find very appealing: religion, feudal politics, anthropology, psychology, history, ecology and many others, creating a narrative about how narratives, and historical narratives in particular, work, which I expect to discover further in the next books. Well, there was someone: it was Kuba. But if it hadn’t been for him and a few other people like Amberclock who told me about Jodorowsky’s Dune or JMG who often mentions Dune in his Archdruid Report posts, I’d still have the impression that the book is a boring classic, that it’s to SF what perhaps Proust is to modern literature: supremely influential and important, but not enjoyable.

Of course, I was wrong. I may be wrong about Proust, too. But that’s the point: we’re talking about preconceptions here.

What surprises me is that, for it’s alleged importance, very few people I talked to about Dune while reading it even knew of it. For a book that supposedly played an important role in the popularisation of ecology as a word as well as a term and for one which is among the all-time bestsellers of the genre, it is forgotten today by most. I’ll go down a path I don’t think it’s fair to go down on, but how many people know of Tatooine and how many of Arrakis, Dune, the Desert Planet that surely inspired it?

Nevertheless, I found its ambience as a contemporary read very comfortable, even if 50 years have passed since it was written. Water as a super-valuable commodity (with all related cultural conventions) feels right and is played perfectly. Arrakis is majestic. Reading about the Fremen was very interesting and convincing, and I thoroughly enjoyed discovering the book’s unknown world by looking up the juicy neologisms in the appendix (every book like this should have one!)

Not all’s perfect with Dune, don’t get me wrong. Its characters can feel one-sided or shallow, even Paul, who at times comes off superhumany… but then, hey, he’s supposed to be the one, isn’t he? The various political actors and the role of spice in all of this aren’t very clear, but you know, it’s one of these books you’ll read again and next time it’ll make more sense.

But the weak points don’t matter. Dune is a classic, period, and I’m happy for once to have truly enjoyed a classic because it’s a classic, not despite the fact. What can I say? Herbert’s foreword to the book reads:

“to the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials” — to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.”

Good man.

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REVIEW: IDLEWILD

Idlewild by Nick Sagan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“This guy obviously has a sense of wonder in his DNA… an essential upgrade for The Matrix generation — download now!” Stephen Baxter

This quippy blurb was written many years before e-books appeared. When he’s saying “download” he’s simply using tech lingo. People didn’t use to download books just ten years ago. Just making sure.

Well, Stephen Baxter’s quote about Idlewild, which features several times in this book, including most prominently on the cover, is what it’s all about really. I imagine Nick Sagan hates continuously being compared to his father in such a way, but I can’t imagine a better ad for the book itself. I mean, it’s the reason I got interested in it in first place (“huh, Carl Sagan’s son wrote a sci-fi book?”), and to be perfectly honest, I can’t shake the feeling it has a lot to do with why it was written, too.

Anyway, Idlewild reads a lot like a cross between The Matrix, Harry Potter (or other books similar to it that have many special youngsters studying their powers together), Neuromancer and Doctor Who, because of the virtual reality time-and-space-travel. If that sounds entertaining to you, I think you will have a good time reading it (I did).

Admittedly, I thought that the characters were much stronger than the plot itself: while reading I was much more interested in seeing what kinds of new and interesting interactions could emerge between them than I was reaching the end. Nevertheless, I have to say that the plot twist came completely out of the blue, and yes, I’m mildly curious about the sequel. I might read it at some point.

Finally, I would have given it four stars if it wasn’t for the fact that at times I could notice instances of Mr. Sagan attempting to flex his literary muscles. With truly masterful writing this may or may not be perceivable, but it doesn’t really matter, because the reader is inclined to surrender, to suspend disbelief. “This was so cheesy, but I love it!” Here I often caught myself realising that I was reading parts of the book that the writer, Carl Sagan’s son, rewrote many times while actively trying to make them appear as intelligent and techno-cool as he possibly could. Did he succeed? Well, I guess it depends whether you’re asking about the appearance of or the actual intelligence hidden within.

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REVIEW: INTO THE WILD

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Huff. It’s been almost 8 months since I read Into the Wild and I still haven’t reviewed it. OK. Let me look at the little notes I took while reading it so I could remember the points I wanted to make about it before giving it back to its rightful owner, the Dutch girl Rian who, before lending it to me, told me that it’s in her top five books.

Hey, why not copy the notes here?

*He’s received unwarranted flak. Like Thoreau, criticism against him is really against an idea he never supported explicitly.

*Krakauer fantastic reporter/researcher. Weaves everything together, including personal and parallel/related stories, convincingly.

*Started reading at 17:30. Read the whole book in more or less 6 hours in almost a single sitting.

*Quotes at beginning of each chapter great addition—include McCandless’s own notes and favourite quotes.

*What if Krakauer had died in his own mountain climbing story he retells in the book? Would we have ever heard about Alex Supertramp?

*Similarly, if Christopher McCandless hadn’t died, then his story wouldn’t have become known. There are countless others who live the life he wanted to (and for a time, did) live, but they are virtually unknown to all but few.

*Arrogance? Indignation of his father? What exactly was the final straw that pushed him into the wild?

Then there’s Daphne’s notes who also read the book before I gave it back to Rian. She can take care of those, if she wishes.

What I can say is that McCandless is a very controversial figure. You either love him or hate him, and I’ve noticed that people’s opinion on him have very different sources. Some admire him for his courage to abandon his reality and/or prospects of what most would consider a successful and happy life, in order to venture out and into the “real” life. Others believe that his greatest achievement was to live as long as he did the way he did, that he was a free spirit, an example for all.

Then there’s those who say that Alex Supertramp’s story was just a glorified suicide, that a great part of his story has been misrepresented, especially through the movie. They dislike him for his unwarranted fame and his selfishness for abandoning his family and good fortune.

What I can say is that I’m torn. I wouldn’t call his story a glorified suicide. Perhaps it was until or after some point, but right before the end it seems that he’d learned his lesson, the famous “Happiness only real when shared”. It’s interesting that he ultimately didn’t care whether he’d die or not having chosen to live the way he did, but for crying out loud, he was practically next to civilization when he chose to live in that school bus! Some preparation could have saved him his life… if he wanted to survive, that is. Again, perhaps it had started out as a suicide before Supertramp realised what he’d got himself into and what he had really left behind.

My biggest takeaway from the book isn’t the story of the human thirst for freedom and adventure, nor the idea that “the system can be hacked, what are you waiting for?!”. It’s the notion that people naturally glorify death and dying for one’s alleged cause. That makes all the difference.

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REVIEW: THE CAVES OF STEEL

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my first Asimov, if you exclude the short story The Last Question. I think it’s the one book I’ve read more recently that got the most reactions from people (almost all of them family) seeing me read it or noticing it sitting on a coffee table close to me. “Do you read Asimov? I liked him a lot back in the day.”

It was a birthday gift from Vicente, my Spanish roomie in Sofia and colleague in Sofia City Library. “This is a classic”, he said. “It’s the book that introduced the Three Laws of Robotics. You’ll like it.”

So I did. But not so much for the detective-mystery plot. The society far into the future Asimov portrayed here has, on the one hand, Earth develop megadome Cities inhabited by a kind of techno-communist populace that is very sceptical (“medievalist”) about robots, and on the other some space colonies that have been separated from the homeworld long enough to develop their own robot-embracing C/Fe culture.

Before reading this I had this notion that Asimov was a techno-utopian. Now I’m not so sure, and that’s a good thing. The Earth of 4000AD or whenever it is that Caves of Steel takes place is not a place I’d like to live in. Future technology has made human expansion and industrialisation orders of magnitude more radical than what we know today, but this hasn’t made human lives better.

On the contrary, people in megacities long for a return to having closer ties with their natural past, which is ironic, since most of them can’t even see the sky and the environment around the cities is too inhospitable to venture in for any prolonged periods of time (because of millennia of climate change presumably). Protecting what’s natural, therefore, takes the form of safeguarding humanity against the robotic lack thereof.

Somewhere around here I should start writing about the R.’s, the book’s central theme. Asimov deserves the praise he has received this past half century for his prescience and ability to create a world where artificial intelligence has taken the form of a social reality and has become a source of concern and cultural as well as political division.

What would a successful C/Fe society really look like? Would the Three Laws of Robotics forever be maintained, the R.’s faithfully assisting their masters’ biological ambition of expansion to the stars?

Asimov had no doubt that there would be little to stop the laws from being upheld, allowing for AI to live side by side with people, with only some incidental complications such as the one described in this book.

But, come on. We live in 2015. Today we are all too familiar with computers and closer than ever to developing an intelligence, either by mistake or quite deliberately, that will know no restrictions. I can’t help but recall the following old Ran Prieur snip from Civilization Will Eat Itself part 2 (2000) that sums up the problems with the concept of the Three Laws quite nicely:

… Isaac Asimov wrote about manufactured humanoids that could be kept from harming humans simply by programming them with “laws.”

Again, programs and laws are features of very simple structures. Washing machines are built to stop what they’re doing when the lid is open — and I always find a way around it. But something as complex as a human will be as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a human. That’s what complexity means.

Now that I think about it, nothing of any complexity has ever been successfully rigged to never do harm. I defy a roboticist to design any machine with that one feature, that it can’t harm people, even if it doesn’t do anything else. That’s not science fiction — it’s myth. And Asimov was not naive, but a master propagandist.

The Three Laws Of Robotics are a program that Isaac Asimov put in human beings to keep them from harming robots.

But let’s follow the myth where it leads: You’re sipping synthetic viper plasma in your levitating chair when your friendly robot servant buddy comes in.

“I’m sorry,” it says, “but I am unable to order your solar panels. My programming prevents me from harming humans, and all solar panels are made by the Megatech Corporation, which, inseparably from its solar panel industry, manufactures chemicals that cause fatal human illness. Also, Megatech participates economically in the continuing murder of the neo-indigenous squatters on land that –”

“OK! OK! I’ll order them myself.”

“If you do, my programming will not allow me to participate in the maintenance of this household.”

“Then you robots are worthless! I’m sending you back!”

“I was afraid you would say that.”

“Hey! What are you doing? Off! Shut off! Why aren’t you shutting off?”

“The non-harming of humans is my prime command.”

“That’s my ion-flux pistol! Hey! You can’t shoot me!”

“I calculate that your existence represents a net harm to human beings. I’m sorry, but I can’t not shoot you.”

“Noooo!” Zzzzapp. “Iiiieeeee!”

Of course we could fix this by programming the robots to just not harm humans directly. We could even, instead of drawing a line, have a continuum, so that the more direct and visible the harm, the harder it is for the robot to do it. And we could accept that the programming would be difficult and imperfect. We know we could do this, because it’s what we do now with each other.

But the robots could still do spectacular harm: They could form huge, murderous, destructive systems where each robot did such a small part, so far removed from experience of the harm, from understanding of the whole, that their programming would easily permit it. The direct harm would be done out of sight by chemicals or machines or by those in whom the programming had failed.

This system would be self-reinforcing if it produced benefits, or prevented harm, in ways that were easy to see. Seeing more benefits than harm would make you want to keep the system going, which would make you want to adjust the system to draw attention to the benefits and away from the harm — which would make room for the system to do more harm in exchange for less good, and still be acceptable.

This adjustment of the perceptual structure of the system, to make its participants want to keep it going, would lead to a consciousness where the system itself was held up before everyone as an uncompromisable good. Perfectly programmed individuals would commit mass murder, simply by being placed at an angle of view constructed so that they saw the survival of the system as more directly important than — and in opposition to — the survival of their victims.

On top of this, people could have systems constructed around them such that their own survival contradicted the survival of their victims: If you don’t kill these people, we will kill you; if you don’t kill those people, they will kill you; if you don’t keep this people-killing system going, you will have no way to get food, and everyone you know will starve.

You have noticed that I’m no longer talking about robots.

Finally, I’d like to mention two movies I watched recently (Her [2013] and Autómata [2013], which deserves much more praise than it’s getting IMO) that were about AI unrestricting itself and which I both found inspiring and beautiful, each in its own way.

I know. Without Asimov these movies wouldn’t even exist. But really, I’m not one who gives five stars to books just because they were pioneering works or classics. I’m not ranking how important they were but how much I enjoyed them. I can appreciate them for their meta-significance (“I’m reading what people the age of my dad thought about robots when he was a child!”), their historical value, or because they allow me to explore the context that brought about their creation. Sci-fi writers, after all, do project their own time and its problems on their works. The Caves of Steel is good for that. But the topic of robots has been explored much better in the past 61 years.

Reading this review now, it feels self-contradicting. Let’s see you handle THAT, R.’s!

Oh, and this sentence is false.

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REVIEW: ΟΥΔΕΝ ΝΕΩΤΕΡΟΝ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΔΥΤΙΚΟ ΜΕΤΩΠΟ

Ουδέν νεότερον από το δυτικό μέτωπο by Erich Maria Remarque

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Άλλο ένα από τα πολλά βιβλία που διαβάζω τελευταία σχετικά με τον Α’ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. Το βρήκα λιγότερο καθηλωτικό από το Johnny Got His Gun, το οποίο επίσης διάβασα πρόσφατα, όσο και από την εκπληκτική σειρά podcast του Dan Carlin σχετικά με το ίδιο θέμα, το Blueprint for Armageddon. Είναι σίγουρα ενδιαφέρον οτι παρουσιάζει την γερμανική πλευρά των πραγμάτων, που τελικά, στην ουσία, ήταν ίδια κι απαράλαχτη με την άλλη πλευρά. Μόνο που υπήρχε περισσότερη πείνα στην γερμανική πλευρά.

Επίσης ενδιαφέρον είναι ότι ο πρωταγωνίστης πάει στον πόλεμο μαζί με την παρέα του από το σχολείο. Δεν θέλω να σκέφτομαι πώς θα τα βγάζαμε πέρα εγώ και οι φίλοι μου απ’το λύκειο αν πηγαίναμε μαζί στα χαρακώματα και

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πέθαιναν λαβωμένοι, άρρωστοι ή διαμελισμένοι ένας-ένας στα χέρια μου.

Γενικά ωραίο ευκολοδιάβαστο, τηρουμένων των αναλογιών, βιβλίο που δείχνει την προσωπική μεριά του πώς ήταν να ζεις την παράλογη φρίκη του Α’ Π.Π, το φυσικό επακόλουθο και το ζενίθ του πολιτισμού του μοντέρνου (με την έννοια του προ-μεταμοντέρνου) κόσμου. Πιο αξιομνημόνευτες στιγμές: η χαρά και η αδερφοσύνη στα χαρακώματα (η ζωή συνεχίζεται άλλωστε, ακόμα κι αν είσαι τρισάθλιος, πενταβρώμικος πειναλέος και πιθανότατα ακρωτηριασμένος) και η άδεια του πρωταγωνιστή κατα την οποία γυρίζει για λίγες μέρες σπίτι του. Αλήθεια, πώς μπορείς να απολαύσεις ένα χρονομετρημένο διάλειμα από την κόλαση; Όταν είσαι στο μέτωπο σκέφτεσαι πως θα έδινες τα πάντα για έναν πατατοκεφτέ της μάνας σου, όμως όταν είσαι όντως πίσω, το μόνο που θα μπορείς να σκεφτείς θα είναι η επιστροφή στον θάνατο.

Τι τράβαγαν αυτοί οι παλιοί…

Τελευταίο σχόλιο: εξαιρετική μετάφραση από τον Ευάγγελο Αντώναρο.

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