I’m pretty sure that if there isn’t already a sport that involves mocking what people of the past predicted our society would be like, then we need to invent it. Right now. Tomorrow: Science Fiction and the Future has some gems. It opens with a piece by Isaac Asimov, who begins:

Predicting the future is a hopeless, thankless task, with ridicule to begin with and, all too often, scorn to end with. Still, since I have been writing science fiction for over a quarter of a century, such prediction is expected of me and it would be cowardly to try to evade it.

Brave words from a brave and prolific author who gave us laws of robotics, the term robotics itself, and the Foundation series. Asimov immediately acknowledges the futility of the task he has set himself, as well as the ridicule he will receive for such statements as:

Sports also will be stressed in the world of 1990 as a good and harmless time consumer. I suspect that the great sports novelty will be flying. Small motors, mounted on the back, will lift a man clear of the ground.

Now, this book was published in 1973, but the original form of this essay, “The World in 1990”, was published in 1965. So it is further removed from 1990 than the book’s age would indicate—but only slightly more so than 1990 is removed from us here in 2011! And I still don’t have a jetpack for playing aerial golf.

I could go on, but it wouldn’t really be sporting of me. Asimov is right: predicting the future is a hopeless and silly task, and I suspect the academic tone he takes in this piece is there for effect (if you are going to be silly, be silly all the way). Yet even amid this facetious undertaking, there are currents of the tensions of the 1960s: “What will the situation be a generation from now, say in 1990, assuming that we avoid a thermonuclear war?” For those of us born into a world that does not, generally, fear the looming thermonuclear apocalypse, this question elicits snickers—I know it did from me. It makes me wonder what the next generations will think about my generation’s obsession with global warming and other environmental issues. I hope that this obsession, like our obsession with avoiding nuclear war, ultimately makes such concerns obsolete for our children and grandchildren.

The remainder of Tomorrow is an eclectic compilation of various works of science fiction, both prose and poetry. These works span several decades, with excerpts from an E.M. Forester story from 1928, to an adaptation of Rod Serling’s “Class of ’99” into a playscript. There is a breadth of material here, all organized around the common theme of stories that show us what the world of tomorrow could be. They are glimpses of our possible futures.

As an avid science-fiction reader, this book tickles my brain cells but does little more than that. Just as I’m starting to think, it shifts gears slightly and moves on to the next piece. Nevertheless, there are still some gems in here. I liked reading Asimov’s essay, and there is a neat Arthur C. Clarke short story, “The Awakening”, which I swear I have read in a different form somewhere.

I looked at this book in a group of two other people for my English curriculum instruction course. We had to evaluate the book’s value as a possible textbook: would we buy a class set? Our professor provided a detailed list of criteria. My group concluded that, while the book has an amazing amount of nostalgia value, it would not make a suitable textbook in today’s classroom. Tomorrow’s time, alas, has come and gone. But I still borrowed the book to read it in its entirety anyway.

Space is a difficult word to pin down. Colloquially, it probably conjures images of stars and supernovae, Jupiter and Saturn and Mars, and the shuttle hanging against the backdrop of clouds and the horn of Africa. It is—or was—the Space Age, when we were supposed to go forth and colonize the stars. It didn’t work out that way, but our association of the word with “not of Earth” continues. Space can also refer to a place in which certain interactions happen—or to the places between objects. Space is both physical and psychological, and as Margaret Wertheim demonstrates, conceptions of space play and interesting role in our history.

Last year I took a course called Philosophy & the Internet, and we discussed the idea of the Internet as a space. We drew on the work of Manuel Castells and Michel Foucault, who respectively talked about spaces of flows and heterotopias, and we discussed how these terms could apply to the Internet. Although many of us are comfortable using cyberspace as a synonym, I’m not sure how many of us naturally perceive the Internet in a spatial sense. I tend not to (I’m not a very “spatially-adept” person in general). I suspect that will change now that our interfaces are becoming more natural. We haven’t quite reached the submerged, virtual reality level portrayed in Neuromancer or The Matrix, but in many ways the online world has become more inextricably linked to our offline world than most people would imagine. There is a tension between the urge to combine these spaces and the urge to keep them separate.

For Wertheim, cyberspace represents the latest in a long progression of the conception of space throughout the Western world. She sees it as a recapitulation of the fundamental Christian concepts of heaven, or “soul-space”. Cyberspace, like soul-space, is a disembodied world outside our own universe, and thus independent of anything like those pesky laws of physics. The development of those laws is itself linked to our changing ideas of space, and Wertheim traces how the transition from a metaphorical consideration of space to a geometrical one resulted in the increasing secularization of science and spaces. Hence, cyberspace represents both an opportunity for and a response to what Wertheim claims is a growing need for some kind of spiritual space.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace was written in 1998, and it shows. Whether this has bearing on the soundness of Wertheim’s arguments is debatable—but it certainly means that I am tempted not to take it as seriously as I should. On one hand, though the Web has exploded in the past thirteen years, the Internet itself has remained largely the same. Most of Wertheim’s points are still valid, if not exactly in the way she intended. On the other hand, seeing references to CompuServe and AOL where I would expect to see discussions of MySpace and Facebook and Twitter is a surreal experience. I think cyberspace has changed enough that some of Wertheim’s predictions have been revealed to be too conservative or slightly off the mark. And many philosophers have since integrated the rise of Facebook and social networking into theories of cyberspace.

This book is both philosophy and history—the best kind! Wertheim makes a lot of good points that individually have merit. For example, she points to the popularity of the Internet as a sign that it fills a need:

People will only adopt a technology if it resonates with perceived [sic] a need. For a technology to be successful, a latent desire must be there to be satisfied. The sheer scale of interest in cyberspace suggests there is not only an intense desire at work here, but also a profound psychosocial vacuum that many people are hoping the Internet might fill. The essence of this desire and the nature of this vacuum needs to be explained; we need to understand the factors that give rise to such intense interest in this particular technology. Specifically we might ask: What are the psychosocial conditions enabling cyberspace to become the focus of essentially religious dreams? What is it about our lives, and about cyberspace itself, that encourages such an outpouring of techno-religious dreaming.

This “techno-religious dreaming” at the crudest level would be the cult of the Singularity, the Nerd Rapture, which believes that we are rapidly approaching a posthuman future where we will be in communion with an Internet-enabled AI. Beyond that, however, Wertheim is speaking more broadly of the optimistic dreams that the Internet inspires. I’m sure I don’t have to expound much further here: just stop and consider, as I do at least once a day, that if I want to know something, I can look it up instantaneously—and thanks to my smartphone, I can do it practically anywhere. This was not possible twenty, even ten years ago, and it is a major paradigm shift that blows my mind. What isn’t possible now? (Of course, the flip side to this optimism is the accurate critique that points out the Internet is still a phenomenon largely embraced by Western, wealthy nations. Wertheim recognizes this caveat, citing scholars who have opined that the Internet isn’t so much a vehicle for freedom and equality so much as the latest front for Western imperalism. And they have a point!)

Wertheim also analyzes the Internet’s potential for fracturing our identities. At its most basic we can say that the Internet allows us to be two people: one person in our offline, “real” life and one person online. We could even be multiple people, one for each online group we frequent. This is that tension I mentioned earlier in the review. We see it when services like Facebook and Google+ pressure us not only to use “real names” but to connect our profiles across various services—they do this, of course, because they want to mine our data and sell advertising. Anonymity is a useful and often desirable aspect of cyberspace, but there is also a great deal to be said for keeping one’s online and offline personae in sync. I started using the Web in a very public way when I was only 14, so a certain level of anonymity was only appropriate. Gradually I decided to peel back that cloak until now I operate very publicly online—and that works for me. But the malleability of identity (if not, as Wertheim says, of self) is one of cyberspace’s most attractive features, and it is intensely spiritual.

For most of the book, however, Wertheim doesn’t talk about cyberspace itself. Instead, she provides a history of space. She begins with the way Dante catalogues Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in his Divine Comedy. She discusses the transition from medieval imagery to the perspective, realistic style of Renaissance artwork. And as our ideas of how to represent space change, so too did the ways in which we thought of the universe as a whole and the Earth’s place in it. Ptolemy’s epicycles and Kepler’s spheres gave way to heliocentric, Hubble-esque ideas of circles and ellipses and inflation and the Big Bang. Absolute space and time proved too inflexible and became relative, even as we realized that the universe is expanding, and that time and space might indeed be one.

Parts of this survey are interesting, but the majority of it is hard to swallow. Wertheim writes with an authority backed up by research, made obvious by the number of sources she quotes directly in each chapter. But this makes for a dry, academic style that works well in journal articles and not so well in hundred-page histories that span six centuries. I suppose this is the common complaint about the survey-style work: so much here could be its own book; alternatively, so much here has been its own book. I waded through my nth telling of Einstein’s development of the theories of relativity. Wertheim talks about so much here, but at times it feels very disparate and disjointed. While there is a clear theme running through the chapters, it is hard at times to step back and see that big picture.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything (or even most) of Wertheim’s theses here. She advances an interesting relationship between various conceptions of space and spirituality, and she might be on to something—but she might not. In particular, her point that cyberspace is beyond the universe, that like our ideas of a spiritual soul-space it has escaped the relentless physicalism that accompanied the secularization of science, is seductive. Yet—and maybe this is just the reductionist in me—it also seems false on some level. Cyberspace, those bits and bytes travelling through fibre optics and silicon, is ultimately the product of atoms and electrons and solid-state physics. It is enabled by the laws of physics and limited by those laws (though what those limitations might be we don’t necessarily know); the independence of such space is thus a convenient illusion.

I can’t recommend this book so much as say that there’s probably something valuable here, if you can devote the time and effort. It’s a little dated and a little long, and I suspect that most of what it says has since been said more succinctly. Still, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is a well-written, well-researched book, and so it deserves three stars. I cannot deny that it is a seriously thought-provoking and insightful tract.

Jay Lake has been hovering around the edge of my observable SF/fantasy universe for a while now, finally entering that universe when I read his Clockwork Earth series. Unfortunately, Mainspring disappointed me, and while the other two books in the trilogy were a big improvement on it, I was not much impressed. Sometime between acquiring Mainspring and reading it, however, I decided to buy this anthology from Subterranean Press.

I like novels more than I like short stories. Odd, I know: a bad short story takes much less time to read than a bad novel, so it should be less of a waste of time. But a great novel is a proportionally greater reward—what can I say? I’m a gambler! Single-author anthologies excel, however, in exposing the reader to a wide range of that author’s work. The Sky That Wraps is an excellent survey of Jay Lake, from the familiar surrounds of his fantasy milieux—including a story from his Clockwork Earth universe, and I confess I skimmed that one—to the exotic locales of a far-future, posthuman universe.

Even though I still can’t quite bring myself to love his voice the way I do some of his contemporary luminaries, I don’t begrudge Lake his standing in the field: his is a singular, creative mind. That’s obvious in all of the stories in this collection. Lake seems to thrive in an ambiguity that suits the short story form well: he doesn’t establish more of the world than he needs to. And he frustratingly sets up boxes we never get to open. So in the eponymous “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black”, we learn that the narrator destroyed a piece of alien technology that could have revealed the purpose of alien artifacts he now paints to sell as trinkets. It’s a lugubrious tale. And as much as I’d like to know what the artifact was, what those trinkets do, Lake never tells us. He chortles explicitly about this in his preface to “Journal of an Inmate”, telling us how the writer’s circle to whom he first showed the story demanded to know what was in the letter that the narrator destroys, unopened, at the conclusion of the tale. Lake is comfortable not taking the reader into his confidence in a way that few authors seem to be—I suspect this is one of the reasons Mainspring grated on me, because it always seemed like elements of the story were coming out of nowhere. For his short stories, however, this sleight of authorial hand is quite effective.

The two stories I mentioned above are both told from the perspective of a narrator who is a prisoner—or, in so many words, an exile. In fact, many of the characters in The Sky That Wraps are exiles in one form or another: in “Coming for Green” Samma is an exile in all but name as she traces Green’s footsteps; the Befores in Lake’s two Sunspin stories are very old, very special types of psychological exiles. Most of the protagonists in these stories are unique and usually lonely individuals walking through a world that doesn’t quite fit them. These stories of exile were, for the most part, really interesting. I really liked “To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves”, and I would love to see Lake’s planned space opera novels come to fruition. It tapped into some of my favourite posthuman tropes, like shipminds, in a stylized, high-stakes setting. I’m very interested in seeing that universe developed as a novel.

Then there are the weird stories, ones that verge on what I might call experimental. This includes “Achilles Sulking in His Buick”, the sort of one-off joke that begins as a title and doesn’t get much better than that. There’s also “Skinhorse Goes to Mars”, which has an excellent but confusing plot. I’d also include “Little Pig, Berry Brown and the Hard Moon” as well, even though that one isn’t so bad if you follow it carefully. I guess I’m just lazy; I prefer my stories to be more linear and easy to parse, and Lake doesn’t always let me off with such fare. These are the stories that will please the connoisseur of short SF and fantasy fiction.

Finally, like Stephen King or some of Orson Scott Card’s work, Lake also enjoys writing about weird stuff happening in small American towns. So “Dogs in the Moonlight” and “Fat Man” will please those of you who do. And while Portland isn’t quite a small town, I’d probably throw the Portland wizard series in here—intriguing urban fantasy though it is. These stories were no less creative than others in the collection, just less to my liking.

And that’s the key to this anthology: it has breadth. It was good for me, as someone who wanted to read something by Lake that I could enjoy. I suspect that fans of Lake will probably have seen most of these stories already (although there are two brand new ones), but this is still a lovely collection to own. There were no stories that really blew my mind, alas, but neither were there any that made me groan. It’s a solid anthology where your enjoyment will vary with your tastes.

Rocks. They’re old.

Thank you for reading my review.

OK, I guess I’ll go into slightly more detail. In his phenomenal A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson devotes slightly less than a page to William Smith and the first geological map of Britain. This is likely a result of Bryson (or his editors) striving in vain to meet that promise of being “short”. Bryson promises us a more “comprehensive” account in The Map That Changed the World. I didn’t actually find this book through A Short History of Nearly Everything; I only saw the reference when I went back to look up what Bryson has to say about Smith. One day I casually stumbled upon the story of William Smith, fossils, and rocks, and this seemed like the sensible book to buy in order to learn more. This guess largely turned out to be correct, with some minor quibbles and caveats.

Much like Longitude, another non-fiction book that I read recently, The Map That Changed the World is a semi-biographical look at the contributions of one man to a field of scientific study—in this case, geology. By definition it attributes to William Smith an importance that might be overstated, in the sense that English geology seemed to be doing fine without him and probably would have continued doing fine if he hadn’t come on the scene. Yet it’s true that Smith’s contributions are both important and, considering his background and his often penurious circumstances, all the more outstanding. If one wants to examine how one individual affected a scientific discipline, few choices would be more appropriate than William Smith.

Simon Winchester begins by describing Smith’s release from debtor’s prison before jumping back to his origins and start as a surveyor in rural England. As with most endeavours, Smith’s come to fruition through a careful combination of skill, hard work, and luck. Sometimes he’s in the right place at the right time to get a job that lets him travel around England, looking at layers of rock—such is the case with his position surveying for the new Somerset Canal. As Winchester unfolds Smith’s life before us, we get to see how the economics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries played a role in shaping scientific inquiry. The vast, industrial scope of coal mining gave Smith both the access and the reason to delve deep beneath the Earth and look at layers of strata. More importantly, the rich upper class’ interest in being able to find coal before digging up their property provided an economic interest in Smith’s studies. Although it certainly seems like Smith was both clever and dedicated, I can’t help but form the impression that he also happened to be born at the right time, and in the right country. England, Winchester explains, was ripe for a revolution in scientific thinking. And Smith’s discovery that fossils are the key indicators of a rock’s type and age would begin that revolution.

If Smith is correct, then the Earth is not six thousand years old. It’s far, far older. This was not the popular view in Smith’s time and would not be for some time after his death—as Winchester is careful to point out, Smith himself did not care to go so far as to posit how or why stratification occurs the way it does. He just reported what he had observed, and used it to make useful predictions. But it was a start, a beginning in a chain of reasoning that would lead geologists to speculate that the Earth’s past extends into the millions and billions of years, and culminate in Charles Darwin publishing a controversial treatise about the origins of humankind.

The way that Smith and so many scientists clung to the Biblical interpretation of the origins and age of the Earth stayed on my mind as I read this book. Although I’m an atheist, I do not view science and religion as irreconcilable. However, people who subscribe to fundamentalism but also claim to be adherents of science do puzzle me. There are, to put it lightly, contradictions between these two schools of thought. And with science, as with fundamentalism, it seems to me that it is hypocritical to pick and choose. What makes science so enduring, so potent—dare I say, so sexy—is that everything is interconnected in incredibly complex and interesting ways. So Smith’s ideas lead inexorably to this idea that the Earth is much older than six thousand years. Our ability to calculate, now, things like the speed and direction of motion of planets and satellites and even stars lets us “turn the clock back”, so to speak, and look at the solar system thousands or even millions of years ago. Fundamentalists reject all these claims and come up with very creative ways of doing so. But many watch television. Many use cars. Many wear glasses and take medicine. These are all a result of the same science that tells us the Earth is ancient and the stars themselves gave us life. How can one accept all the more mundane marvels but reject the other ones and still claim to be consistent? (Obviously it’s very easy if one does not claim consistency, but for some reason people get offended when you go up to them, call them a hypocrite, and begin itemizing contradictions in their personal belief system….)

But I digress. The Map That Changed the World got me thinking about science, the nature of science and how we do science, as any good science history book should do. It also chronicles the difficulties Smith faced as he began working on his geological map. Some of these were difficulties of his own making—he lived as if he were well off and had a stable income, and he married a wife who was an emotional and financial burden. Some were a product of the still-rigid class system, wherein Smith was an uneducated country bumpkin, and upstart whose contributions should be overlooked whenever possible and stolen if not. The story of how George Greenough blocked Smith from membership in the fledgling Geological Society—which was, after all, just supposed to be a dinner club for gentlemen—and then plagiarized from Smith’s map to produce one of lesser utility on behalf of the Society is exactly the type of dirty scientific feud I love to read about. And Winchester delivers on all of these accounts.

I also loved reading about Smith’s dedication to this singular task. He travelled all across England and Wales to compile observations and evidence for this map! Granted, England isn’t quite as large as, say, Canada—but he did this on foot or by coach. And he had to go into the field, dig into the mud, get dirty, day after day for decades in order to get the data he required. For that alone he deserves a medal! A note about the map at the beginning of this book remarks that its similarity to modern maps is all the more impressive because it is the work of one man, whereas modern maps are the work of large, coordinated teams. This is a keen observation. Despite being terrible with money, unlucky in love, and reluctant to publish until it was almost too late, William Smith was a profoundly hard worker. I’m not quite certain I’m as eager to buy into Winchester’s attempts to turn this into a discussion over the gulf between fieldworkers and theorists, but at the very least, it made me, as an armchair mathematician extraordinaire, feel very lazy!

There are a few aspects of Winchester’s writing style that marred my otherwise unqualified enjoyment of this book. He is overly-enamoured of the passive voice. It kept reappearing, feeling very out of place by dint of Winchester’s attempt to give his account a sweeping, narrative arc. Also, while Winchester is very diligent about noting when we have evidence available to us and when something is mere speculation, he does like to indulge in considerable parenthetical digressions about what might have motivated Smith to do one thing or another. That is to say, he injects too many of his own conjectures and opinions about Smith for my own liking. I’m not sure how to say this without saying I would have preferred a drier account. I kept comparing Winchester unfavourably to Bryson, who always seems to manage to make the subject of his writing the focus of any sentence rather than his own thoughts on the matter.

This is a nicely designed book, with some cool illustrations, and my edition has a colour plate in the middle depicting a map. (Alas, it’s so small that the detail is almost indecipherable.) Yet it probably could have been shorter. Winchester includes an entire chapter that is nothing but an interlude describing his childhood fascination with fossils along the cliffs of Dover. It’s informative in its own way, and I suppose for some readers it might be the highlight of the book; for me, however, it was a distraction from the main story of William Smith. Coupled with Winchester’s tendency to hop through the chronology—occasionally in vexing ways—in order to highlight certain themes, thereby repeating or relating some facts more than once, and The Map That Changed the World is slightly long-winded.

Neither of these criticisms are enough to stop me from recommending this book to others, mind you. I’m not as certain I will read other things by Winchester, but I’ll take a look at his catalogue and see if anything else piques my interest. This is far from a perfect book, and there were times when I found my mind wandering to other topics or found myself cursing the overabundance of passive constructions. Overall, though, The Map That Changed the World is a detailed and passionate account of the life of William Smith and his contributions to English geology. It has its rough patches. But it promises to tell the story of how one map changed everything, and in this respect, the book definitely succeeds.

Pirates of Nirado River takes place in an alternative universe where kids have been forced to form ad-hoc pirate gangs that cruise down the rivers around Dog Lake in tricked out canoes. These gangs fight wars with crap apples, commit arson on abandoned cabins, and poach rabbits off Crown land. When one or more gangs have a dispute, they settle it through complex negotiation, kidnapping, and bondage.

All of the above is true, except for the “alternative universe” thing. Actually, the pirate gangs are just “clubs” (the precise amount of formal organization is never made clear) that children belong to based on age group. The Nirado River Pirates are one such club, with children aged 11 and 12 in it. There are a few other bands: the Dog Lake Pirates, the Spruce River Pirates, and the Silver Mountain Pirates. But the (potential) arson, rabbit poaching, and rampant crab apple warfare are all true; I swear.

This book is perhaps the furthest from my usual fare that I’ve read all year. I’m making a conscious effort to read more young adult fiction in an attempt to stay connected to what the students I’ll be teaching are reading. This, of course, is not young adult fiction; it’s a chapter book billed for ages 7–12. I am doubtful I would ever have picked this up on my own.

The school where I’m doing my student teaching practicum is reading this. Every class has to read it together and do some kind of activity based on the book, culminating in an assembly next week with a visit from the author. Michael Setala is local and the book is set nominally in an area outside our city, though it doesn’t really matter. Our class is reading the book this week, so I read it in preparation. At 78 pages of large print, it was not a massive infringement upon my time. Indeed, my tea hardly got cold.

Children’s literature is, in some ways, a whole different ballgame from adult literature. I don’t know how to review it (or really how to read it, for that matter), so take this review with a grain of salt. From what I know of children’s literature, though, writing it must be hard compared to writing adult fiction. An author writing adult fiction has the benefit of being on relatively even ground with the audience, who will have about the same vocabulary and comprehension skills (though authors are probably more practised in these categories for occupational reasons). With children’s literature, the author is writing to an audience whose skills are neither developed nor nuanced. Moreover, the variation across and within age groups is staggering. Some 6-year-olds are reading chapter books for 10-year-olds while their older siblings struggle with the 6-year-old material. So not only do authors have to get in the right mindset to write stories that will captivate kids, but they need to write in a language that is meaningful.

What I’m trying to say is that I have the utmost respect for children’s authors and their labours.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll let just anything slide. If anything, I’m going to be more critical, because what children read is almost as important as what they eat—food fuels the body; books fuel the mind.

Pirates of Nirado River is set to the northwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Thunder Bay is my hometown and the only place I want to live (though I may move away for a few years until I find work here). I love this place, even though I am not the most outdoorsy type of person, and I’m always thrilled to learn of fiction set here. While this book is set here, it’s not really set here. All the author does is drop the names of some local rivers and landforms. I feel like the story could be transposed to any other location with rivers and a mountain and work just as well. Perhaps this universality is a virtue for the book and its potential audience, but I think it undermines any argument in favour of this book simply because “it’s set in Thunder Bay”.

For all its sweeping universality, though, Pirates of Nirado River contains a lamentably uncomplicated story. The Dog Lake Pirates are trying to burn down the Nirado River Pirates’ cabin in retaliation for something they think the Nirado River crew has done. So the venerable Captain Corey decides to negotiate, and after several misunderstandings, all gets resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and they sit down for some rabbit stew. I suppose Setala is trying for the message that compromise and conversation are better ways to resolve conflict than all-out fighting; he wraps the message in several scenes of crab apple warfare for some action goodness. But the conflict and its resolution seem wildly unbalanced.

At its core, the conflict is basically a territorial squabble between gangs. It’s not very interesting, so I can understand why it only takes a few chapters to resolve. There is no real meat to the story, just scene after scene of the Nirado River Pirates paddling up and down the river to meet with various gangs and fling crab apples. It’s supposed to be invigorating and suspenseful, but it’s unremarkable more than anything else.

The only part of the plot that really got my attention was the two attempts to burn down the cabin used by the Nirado River Pirates. I don’t know who owns the cabin or the land it’s on, but I doubt they would take kindly to arson. What kind of “club” structure is this that encourages children to retaliate by burning down cabins? And this cabin is off a lake, presumably in a wooded area, where an uncontrolled conflagration can easily lead to a forest fire. Where is the forest ranger? Who’s supervising these hooligans?

On some level I’m sure I’m taking this too seriously when I should just sit back and enjoy where the story takes me. I disagree, but the plot isn’t the only problem with Pirates of Nirado River. Its characters are similarly dull and lifeless. Now, just as Setala does an excellent job describing the action, he also does a good job describing the characters themselves. I don’t take issue with how he describes them. But the characters he creates through these descriptions are just as uncomplicated as the conflict they solve. There are never any moments of doubt, nor are there moments of heroism, of treachery and betrayal, or of regret. Children experience emotions every bit as complex as adults; they may not be able to understand the emotions using the same language we do, but those emotions are there and should be portrayed in the characters they read about.

Also, Pirates of Nirado River is a boys-only book. The single female character is someone’s mother, and I think she has about one line. There are no older or younger sisters hanging about, let alone any girls in the gangs proper. From cover to cover, this is a book about boys doing stereotypical boy activities. Granted, they resolve their problems through level-headed discussion, which is commendable. Ultimately, though, if we ask girls to be a part of a reading experience—such as when an entire school reads a book—we should try to find books that will appeal to them as well. I’m not saying Pirates of Nirado River appeals only to boys, but it doesn’t go out of its way to make it easy for girls to identify with the characters or their problems. Despite its positive theme and upbeat conclusion, as far as genders go in this book, girls are invisible—and I find that deeply problematic.

I feel a little bad adding this book to Goodreads and then eviscerating it. To be fair, it’s not so much poorly written as it is poorly conceived. The book itself is probably—I don’t have much experience to go on—fairly typical for the kind of fare I expect we’re feeding children. But it’s not amazing, and if anything it’s too simple, especially for an older audience like my Grade 8 class. In the afterword, we learn that the author wrote the first draft of this story when he himself was around 12 years old … and frankly, that explains a lot. There’s a reason most authors have consign the first novel they ever write to the deepest, darkest corner of a locked drawer in the bottom of their filing cabinet: no matter what the skill level or the intent, the product just isn’t that good. Pirates of Nirado River is an earnest effort and definitely something I would love reading if it came from someone in Grade 7 or Grade 8. From an adult trying to write to children … it’s lacking.

There is a conciliatory tactic in the trenches of the science versus religion debate that tries to separate the responsibilities of the former from the latter. Despite its attempts to stay out of religion, though, science can’t. It has a job to do: it has to explain religion. Religion is a human behaviour, and humans are part of the physical universe. Therefore, science should have room for an explanation of religion as an emergent phenomenon. Historically, religion has tended to be the domain of sociologists and cultural anthropologists, part of a pushback against the forebears of evolutionary psychology that were also responsible, in part, for social Darwinism and the spectre of eugenics that haunted the early twentieth century. In The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade examines religion using evolutionary theory, and particularly evolutionary biology, to see if religion could be an evolutionary adaptation.

The possibility for explaining religion through evolutionary theory comes as a result of religion’s universality. It is not something that just a few groups do here and there: religion has been with us for our entire recorded history, and religious activity exists in some shape or form in every culture we study. In more recent centuries there have been some attempts, such as those in Russia and China, to create societies without religion. These have not succeeded. What keeps bringing us back to belief? More importantly, when examined from an evolutionary perspective, religion is costly. All that time and energy spent worshipping a deity or a pantheon, building temples, finding sacrifices of some kind … that’s an expensive endeavour, so for it to exist, let alone thrive, suggests it provides a significant advantage for survival.

Historically we associate organized religion with the advent of agriculture. The ability to settle and farm land created the potential for a class of people who did not provide food—a class that could include people responsible for religious duties. Agriculture gave us priests and divine monarchs, but Wade argues that religion would still have been prominent, albeit more egalitarian, in hunter-gatherer cultures. He cites anthropological studies of extant hunter-gatherer cultures; in particular, he explores the connections between music, dance, and trance and how they bring a society closer together. Wade’s thesis overall is that religion could be an adaptative way of promoting social cohesion.

So far, so good. Wade makes a good case for looking at religion using evolutionary theory, and his idea that it promotes social cohesion sounds plausible. However, his evidence to support this idea is less impressive. I enjoyed his previous book, Before the Dawn, because its analysis of our migrations is founded in genetics. As such, Wade can point to specific genes that are common to a population and make inferences about that population’s journey out of Africa. Although Wade assembles explanations from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and neuroscience, this composite corpus of evidence is rather underwhelming. For instance, Wade discusses how, much as with the capacity for language, there may be a neurological basis for religious belief. He notes that excessive activity in the temporal lobe often results in increased religiosity. However, he has to concede that we just don’t know yet.

This proves to be the recurring theme: we don’t know. We don’t have enough archaeological evidence to draw conclusions about ancient religions. We don’t know enough about how the brain or consciousness works to understand its role in religion. (I do find it interesting that Wade does not mention, at all, Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Though controversial and similarly lacking in evidence, it seems pertinent to the discussion.) Despite our best efforts, we can’t link religion to any particular genes. Wade’s theories are fascinating and his reasoning is laid out in an organized way … but without that evidence to back it up, The Faith Instinct is more thought experiment than anything else.

I suppose this is to be expected from a book that describes itself on the back cover as nonpolemical. Wade isn’t contending much beyond the fact that religion might provide an evolutionary benefit. He acknowledges perspectives that differ from his own, offering useful insight into some of the changes to the climate of anthropology and evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. Similarly, he devotes time both to the positive aspects of religions (their sense of community, their emphasis on moral behaviour) and to the negative aspects (their creation of the Other, wars and crusades and persecution). Set against the backdrop of more charged and controversial tirades for or against religion, The Faith Instinct stands out sheerly because of its level-headed and somewhat non-committal approach to the entire affair.

Wade tacitly recognizes he doesn’t have enough biological evidence for his thesis and devotes the second half of the book to an archaeological examination of various religions, mostly of the Abrahamic line of descent. This is fascinating, but all it did was make me want to re-read The Evolution of God, which does the same thing in more depth (and with more detailed endnotes!). I quite enjoy reading about sacred texts from an archaeological standpoint, but it’s a little out of place in a book about the evolutionary origins of religion…. On one hand, Wade uses these chapters to demonstrate how people have shaped their religions over time to respond to the needs of society in terms of morality, fertility, and cultural identity. On the other hand, his treatment is too general to do the subject justice.

In what is perhaps the most contentious part of the book, Wade examines religion’s link to morality. Although careful to point out that athiests can be moral individuals, Wade wonders if this is a consequence of their existing in a community whose moral standards are largely derived from one religion or another. Would a society composed entirely of atheists who are ignorant of religion still have moral standards and be able to maintain order? Wade cannot draw a conclusion one way or the other, for no such society has existed, and he argues that the innate tendency towards religious behaviour means no such society will exist in the near future.

It’s this last part, that idea that religious belief seems to be innate, that might rankle some atheists. Yet the very nature of the word atheist is a philosophical declaration against belief in a deity. It speaks of a need to differentiate oneself in the negative, something we don’t often see. As Neil de Grasse Tyson points out in a video where he explains why he identifies as agnostic, non-skiers don’t get together and talk about not skiing. Atheism is an active rather than a passive form of disbelief—and it is that way because religion is so pervasive a human behaviour.

I understand why Wade did not digress further into his discussion of the morality of a society of atheists, for that delves into philosophy rather than evolutionary biology. If such a society were to develop today, it would still possess the historical and philosophical traditions of morality, including those handed down by religion. In that case, it seems reasonable to conclude that such a society could develop secular moral tenets, albeit tenets that might descend from those proposed by religion. So Wade might have a point after all, when he claims that religion could have a necessary purpose in the development of our species. This doesn’t mean that atheism or secularism are wrong. After all, perhaps religion was necessary before but will gradually disappear, just as we evolved tails and then eventually discarded them. I don’t see that being the case, but you never know.

Part scientific speculation, part philosophical rumination, The Faith Instinct is an intriguing look at religion from a rational, science-based perspective. It seeks to prescribe neither an attitude toward religion nor a prognosis for its future role in society. Instead, Wade taps evolutionary theory to explain the universality of such a complex and diverse human behaviour. At times his explanations, while interesting, lack the necessary evidence to be persuasive. I can’t help but feel like The Faith Instinct is somewhat premature—in a few more decades, who knows what secrets of the brain we might uncover? For what it is, however, this book is good but not great. It shines the light in that one spot where we can’t, no matter how we try, separate science and religion. If you are already very interested in this subject, there are some books, like The Evolution of God, that might leave you more fulfilled. Neophytes, however, will probably find The Faith Instinct a welcoming way to begin looking at religion in this light.

And in other news, local authorities reported today that “feminism” has been stolen. Anyone who has any tips on the whereabouts of feminism or its thieves, please contact the hotline.

Seriously, how does one “steal” feminism? I know it’s just a title, and it’s probably the publisher’s idea of a grab for readership, but Who Stole Feminism? is not a title that bodes well for a measured, logical analysis of the state of feminism. The subtitle, How Women Have Betrayed Women, is even worse. Christina Hoff Sommers clearly has a bone to pick with feminism, or at least the feminism of 1994. This book is a little dated, which is not to say it’s necessarily obsolete. However, as I noted in my review of The Beauty Myth (which Sommers targets explicitly in this book), my knowledge of the state of the world, much less feminism, in 1994 is somewhat vague at best. So I’m coming to this book with a perspective different from someone who was, say, a university student at the time Sommers wrote this.

A previous reader of this book (I borrowed it from the library) took the time to scratch some pencil notes in the margins. I love notes from the past (almost as much as I love notes from the future)! I don’t mark up library books or books I think I’ll donate to the library, but I enjoy encountering them when I do. The first of several somewhat cryptic notes appears on page 37, next to a paragraph in which Sommers recounts Professor Faye Crosby’s experiences with trying to be inclusive in her classes. The sentence from the book reads, “Like Raphael [Atlas], she was clearly exhilarated by how terrible she felt.” The note says, “In ‘love’ with how good she is—that’s vanity.” Various admonishments such as “look in the mirror!” and “that’s vanity” appear sporadically throughout. Whoever this person was displays an almost religiously vehemently agreement with Sommers’ thesis.

I guess I should mention what the book is about. Sommers essentially advances the argument that a subset of feminists, whom she calls gender feminists, have come to have an undue amount of influence when it comes to public policy, particularly education. Gender feminists see the world through a “sex/gender lens” and generally promulgate radical, even misandrist views. In contrast, Sommers labels herself an equity feminist of the old school, one who believes women merely need to be accorded equal rights and privileges of men. (I suspect this is second wave versus first wave stuff but am not clear enough on the distinctions to say for sure.)

Sommers is reacting against the gender-feminist claim that “mainstream” (whatever that means) society and media are oppressive (towards women) and inherently patriarchal. She asserts there is no evidence for such claims and goes on to show, in painstaking detail, how some groups within this school have used misleading statistics and surveys to advance their agendas. Finally, Sommers turns it around and accuses the gender feminists themselves of being oppressive, of curtailing debate and censoring dissent at any opportunity. Thus the title, the implication that the feminist movement has been hijacked by a select subset of those who claim the label.

Sommers speaks of “transforming the academy” (Chapter 3) and the movement to revise both the humanities and the sciences to be more inclusive of women voices. She laments the vandalism of the Western Canon: “Why can’t we move on to the future and stop wasting energy on resenting (and ‘rewriting’) the past?” This subject is near and dear to my heart because, as a teacher, I’m on the front lines of education. What should I be teaching in an English class? Who should I use to help teach concepts and ideas? These are a big questions, and while I think Sommers raises some good points about the overzealousness of policy-makers in attempting to include more diverse voices, her tone detracts from the effectiveness of her argument. She’s whining: why can’t we move on, why can’t we just let the past be the past?

Such a sentiment is absurd. As much as Sommers is eager to demonstrate that gender feminists and their allies are blinded by their own transformationist agendas, she seems remarkably quick to discount the possibility of extant bias in culture. Her attitude appears to be that it’s either/or, that if we bring more women voices into the conversation we’re obligated to sacrifice the traditional classics on the altar of feminism. I’m sure there are some “radical” feminists out there who would love to do that, and I’m sure this attitude lends itself well to a polemic—but it seems just as radical and wishful as the thinking being done by the people Sommers criticizes. The reality is much more complicated than she portrays here.

This oversimplification pervades Who Stole Feminism? and makes it difficult for me to praise Sommers even when I’m inclined to agree with her. Such is the case when she calls out Sandra Harding for advocating for “feminist science” without really describing what that would look like. I encountered Harding in Feminism: Issues and Arguments and a chapter on “Feminism, Science, and Bias.” Harding’s contention that scientific knowledge is a social construction, as well as similar introductions to the anti-realist position in the following year’s Philosophy of Science & Technology course, triggered a mini-crisis in my personal philosophy of science. It’s something I’m still working through (though I still think I’m a reductionist—or maybe just a physicalist—don’t know!). So when Sommers dredged it up again, I felt that familiar stab of disagreement—but Jennifer Saul provides a far superior analysis in Feminism: Issues and Arguments, in which she points out that even if Harding is off the mark, science has historically had a lot of bias in it. Much of that bias happens to be white and male.

Sommers is eager to reject the idea that our society is patrarichal. She is dismissive of the “sex/gender lens” perspective of gender feminism. I find this tactic peculiar considering her background in philosophy—rather than analyze the philosophical claims of the gender feminists, Sommers chooses to cricitize particular people and organizations within this movement. To be sure, some of the concerns she raises are valid. For example, misuse of statistics or surveys to influence public policy is bad news no matter who is doing it. Furthermore, the problems she notes in academia are real and troubling. But none of these invalidates the sex/gender approach at all, nor does Sommers demonstrate to my satisfaction a causal link between the sex/gender perspective and divisive politics. Conflating radical and misandrist feminism with “gender feminism” is, to borrow a term Sommers hates the gender feminists using, “shortchanging women.”

Speaking as a mathematician, I know the siren call of statistics—and I know they can be misleading. Empirical data is an important, essential part of doing science and of decision-making. But in focusing solely on the statistical side of feminism, Sommers is ignoring the larger philosophical debate. Consider her chapter on “Rape Research”, in which she discounts the notion of rape culture as a byproduct of inflating the percentage of women who are victims of rape. Sure, maybe the numbers are wrong—Sommers’ point that definitions of rape vary greatly is valid—but this does not change the fact that, in our society, victim-blaming remains pervasive. Rape continues to be viewed as a problem women have—as in, “boys will be boys—and rape you—so don’t do anything to attract a rapist’s attention.” This toxic idea is harmful to men as well as women. Even if the prevalence of rape remains statistically ambiguous, the cultural representation of rape as something women must prevent remains a problem. And that is rape culture right there.

When I look at society through a sex/gender lens, I see a lot I consider wrong, a lot I want to change. If some feminists are abusing this perspective, that is deplorable and needs to stop—but that doesn’t invalidate the basic ideas that we can work together to make culture less white, male, and heteronormative. Why is it so wrong to point out the ways in which women are marginalized and objectified? Why is it so wrong to want to have a conversation about it? It might be the case that some gender feminists want to shut down the conversation, if Sommers’ anecdotes about being censored are true. Yet, again, that’s the misconduct of certain voices within the feminist discourse and not a flaw with the sex/gender perspective itself.

The problem with Sommers’ cheerleading of equity feminism is that it’s insufficient in our twenty-first century society. I won’t blame Sommers for not anticipating how the adoption of the Web has created new opportunities for feminist discourse. However, I’m willing to argue that it was insufficient even in the 1990s when she wrote this. Feminism may have begun as a movement for women to have rights equal to those of men, but today it is inextricably linked to larger issues of social justice, including anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-colonialism, etc. The struggle for equity requires us to struggle for equity for all; otherwise, it is hollow. Sommers’ perspective is a very limited, very academic and American one, in which there are men and there are women and she wants the two to be equal. It’s a nice sentiment and a good start, but it’s not nearly enough.

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women is everything it promises to be: a polemical, confrontational invective against so-called gender feminism. It’s also just as divisive and exclusionary as the feminists Sommers is criticizing. As far as books go, it is by no means a train wreck: it’s well-written, with thoughtful and organized arguments backed by an almost overwhelming amount of citations and statistics. Sommers identifies issues, predominantly in academic departments, that are probably still relevant now in 2012 (though I’d opine they are part of a larger crisis in higher education that Sommers fails to discuss). As with any mosaic movement, feminism has its own internal struggles of dogma and doctrine it must overcome.

So in that respect, this book offers some interesting perspectives on the nuanced and often conflicting voices within feminist discourse. Yet as much as I can appreciate some of her criticisms, I can’t agree with most of Sommers’ proposed solutions. Her future of feminism seems like it’s moving backwards, folding inwards upon itself, in an attempt to return to roots that are always receding into romanticized histories (“it was better in the good old days, when feminism was … and feminists were …”). Perhaps this is just my bias in favour of the idea that society is still oppressive, but I think feminism, in order to make progress, has to be an agonistic process. Anything less is palliative at best.

My first fantasy novel was The Lord of the Rings, but it was an isolated incident. The book that motivated me to continue reading fantasy was The Belgariad (more of a series, really), by David Eddings. These books vary in terms of quality, but both adhere to what one might call the standard fantasy plot involving an unassuming, young protagonist prophesied to overthrow the Dark Lord. It might be what hooked me (and a lot of other readers) but it’s been done to death.

There are a lot of ways to subvert this trope. Brandon Sanderson chooses a clever one in Mistborn: The Final Empire. He starts the story a millennium after the coming of the Chosen One … because the Chosen One failed. (Well, it’s more complicated than that, but spoilers!) Vin is a street urchin and smalltime thief who gets discovered by Kelsier, the Survivor of the Pits of Hathsin and a powerful Mistborn. Vin’s a Mistborn too, able to use all of the allomantic metals instead of just one, and Kelsier recruits her for a caper. They and a small crew will steal the Lord Ruler’s cache of atium, a super-rare allomantic metal. Oh, and while they do this, an army will attack the city so they can overthrow the empire. No pressure.

Sanderson doesn’t really date his empire with much. It’s feudal in scope and feel, but one must remember that it has been this way for a thousand years through artificially-imposed stagnation. The Lord Ruler has no interest in developing new technologies, particularly ones like the steam engine that would make skaa labour redundant. So parts of the setting feel generic, but others, such as the mists and vegetation (or dearth thereof), are very well described. Though I really think they should be “dominions” and not “dominances”…. But the setting is far from Mistborn’s main attraction; no, that would be its characters and the plan they have concocted to save the world (again).

I can see why so many of my friends here on Goodreads have enjoyed this book. It’s really, really good. Almost every facet of it, when examined, is well-planned and put together. Sanderson evidently knows what he’s doing when plotting—not to mention when designing magic systems. I started Mistborn while reading outside one morning, and I just kept reading. At some point I had planned to go inside and play some more Assassin’s Creed: Revelations or maybe, you know, do something productive … but all I wanted to do was read. It was nice out, and I was enjoying this book.

Sanderson kept me hooked. He knows when it’s time for an action scene and when to throw in some higher drama. He can do subterfuge and spy games or all-out havoc. What I found most interesting about his choices was probably how he portrayed so much off the page. Whether it’s through a voice writing in the distant past or Kelsier simply recounting something to the rest of the crew, a significant number of things happen outside the direct attention of the narrative. With ample foreshadowing and exposition crafted to look like casual, almost throwaway dialogue, Sanderson dangles a lot in front of the reader to be filed away or ignored at will.

Mistborn made me want to keep reading, made me excited to read it, because I wanted to know what happened next. More importantly, I wanted to guess what would happen next. This is huge, because although I tend to do this a lot, I’m really bad at it. You have to be pretty blatant about foreshadowing to catch my attention. In this case, Sanderson’s decision to embrace but also subvert various fantasy tropes means that Mistborn walks an interesting line that makes guessing fun. I was right about quite a few things that I thought were predictable, including the identity of the author of the chapter epigraphs and the nature of faux-Renoux. I was wrong about a lot of things too—for example, I thought a certain member of Kelsier’s crew would end up betraying him, but it didn’t happen. Still, I was right enough of the time that I didn’t mind when I was wrong—and I was wrong enough of the time, or didn’t see enough coming, that I didn’t find the book too predictable.

I love Vin, and in particular I love how she develops throughout the book. When we first meet her she’s beaten (literally) and prone to making herself as unobtrusive as possible. She’s so categorically mistrustful of Kelsier’s crew and their motives for helping her; it’s fascinating watching the internal monologue happen as she decides how far to trust them and plans contingencies for her escape. And at first, there’s no question in her mind that she will one day break from them—as her brother beat into her, betrayal is inevitable. Yet Kelsier and the others wear her down, and as the story continues, Vin begins to change. I know this because Sanderson has her observe it quite a lot—unlike some of his foreshadowing, his character development is sometimes loud and obnoxious.

I’m willing to forgive it, though, because Vin is a good protagonist. She suffers a bit from the superpowered birthright syndrome common to fantasy protagonists—not exactly the Chosen One per se, she still has access to powers that other Mistborn don’t. However, this power is not the primary reason she triumphs. She’s intelligent and observant and puts these attributes to fantastic use. Always asking questions (because knowledge gives her power), Vin—and by extension, the reader—deduces quite a few interesting quirks of allomancy, some of them in the heat of battle. Sometimes she’s wrong—fallible protagonists are great—and pays for it dearly, much to my amusement. (I’m a terrible person.) But when she’s right, and she wins a fight as a consequence, it comes with that feeling she won because she was smarter, not just because she hit harder or had superior magic powers. I appreciate that type of nuance in my fantasy.

And then there’s allomancy. (Also feruchemy and, though not named directly in this book, hemalurgy—but I think talking about one magic system is enough for this review.) As far as magic goes, I’m not a huge fan of allomancy. I guess I just prefer my magic when it has a little more metaphysical oomph to it. This is not a technical term. Allomancy, at least as it is commonly practised, is more of a physical magic. That being said, there is no question that it is a well-constructed system of magic. Sanderson explains it succinctly and gradually, introducing us to each of the metals at an appropriate time. And it does make for some good fight scenes, if that’s your cup of tea. If you are one of those curmudgeonly readers sitting out there saying, “Damn fantasy these days doesn’t have any good, consistent systems of magic! And get off my lawn!” then Mistborn will stand you in good stead.

If you haven’t yet joined the ranks of the curmudgeons, Mistborn will probably work for you anyway. It’s a little bit heist, a little bit epic fantasy with kind of an urban feel to it. I loved the ending, particularly the part where the Lord Ruler delivers an ominous line of foreshadowing that his role in this little dystopia might not be as clearcut as it would seem. It makes me want to go read the next book right now. And that’s always a good sign.

My reviews of the Mistborn trilogy:
The Well of Ascension → (forthcoming)

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett are kickass, A-list, all-star authors in their own right. Both have an enormous command over their craft: they write with purpose. Gaiman creates so many fantastic worlds filled with a diverse range of characters, from the all-too-human to the incredibly bizarre. Pratchett, most famous for Discworld, is great at playing with (and playing off of) the most beloved tropes of fantasy. Both of them have a grasp of that circuitous, somewhat too-clever style of British wit reminiscient of Douglas Adams. Put them together, and you get Good Omens, quite possibly one of my favourite books of all time.

The premise of Good Omens is simple: the Antichrist is an eleven-year-old boy who doesn’t particularly want Armageddon to happen. An angel and a demon, each softened from millennia of living among humans, are of similar minds and also working to avert the End. Caught in the vortex of these supernatural beings are human characters are all types, including a descendent of seventeenth century witch Agnes Nutter, whose nice and accurate prophecies are coming in handy.

If you like Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, if you like Douglas Adams or absurd British humour, you will like this book. You’ll think it’s offbeat and clever and even laugh-out-loud funny at points, and you’ll see the rich humanistic subtext exposed for what it is and appreciate that this book is more than just entertainment. If you don’t like these things, then you won’t like this book. You’ll think it’s too corny or too quirky or tries too hard, and you won’t appreciate its sense of humour at all. (And that’s fine.) But it’s that simple.

Still not convinced? Here’s some examples taken, I have it on good authority, from Good Omens:

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours—he was incredibly good at it.

All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: ‘Learn, guys...’

I try not to lob a large chunk of quotations into my reviews too often. In this case, however, I feel that it’s the most appropriate way to give you a sense of the novel’s warm, almost cozy voice and tone. Good Omens doesn’t so much present the apocalypse as mull over the apocalypse and its attendant phenomena (including Atlantis, UFOs bearing messages of peace and cosmic harmony, and confused Tibetan monks tunneling into Lower Tadfield).

If I were to stop my praise at “it’s funny”, though, I would be doing this book a disservice. Many books are funny—it’s not particularly difficult. What makes Good Omens so great, what earns it a place among my favourites, is what Gaiman and Pratchett do with regards to Armageddon. Re-envisioning Armageddon is certainly not an original concept in literature. Rather than treating Armageddon as Judgement Day, as the punctuation-full-stop at the end of humanity’s worldly existence, Gaiman and Pratchett take a moment to pause and consider what Armageddon really is, in the context of this whole Heaven-and-Hell thing. And where humans fit into the mix.

The whole plot of Good Omens is possible because Crowley screws up. He doesn’t supervise the switching of the baby Antichrist with another, innocent baby. As a result, the Antichrist grows up in the wrong household, completely free of angelic or demonic influence and intervention. Adam Young grows up, as Crowley later notes, human. So when the clouds gather and the storm comes, Adam has to make a decision about the fate of the world, and he does so as a human boy with human experiences rather than some kind of supernatural entity.

The theme here is that humans aren’t good, and we aren’t evil either. We’re a mixed bag—good and evil, often in surprising and bewildering combinations. We are the ineffable part of God’s ineffable plan, because of that whole free will thing. Angels will act as Heaven’s agents, demons as Hell’s. Neither considers whether Armageddon is actually a good idea; they just act. But as Adam points out, the entire notion of some kind of apocalyptic battle in which millions (if not billions) die is wasteful and stupid. Armageddon as written definitely makes for a dramatic climax to the Bible, but it’s far from a good end-of-life plan for humanity.

The battle between fate and free will is a potent motif in Good Omens. Crowley constantly says he doesn’t have free will, yet he manages to subvert the will of his hellish superiors quite effortlessly. (He later jokes that this is because he learned free will, which I think is so cool.) Humans, on the other hand, supposedly have free will—but Anathema and Newton are trapped in the mousewheel of referring to Agnes’ prophecies, which are as nice and accurate as she promises. And, to be fair, they actually come in handy. Without spoiling the ending, however, I think Gaiman and Pratchett come down in favour of free will, at least in the case of those two.

And Adam Young? He is, to paraphrase a psychologist in a book far, far away, just this boy, you know? A boy and his dog. Because it always comes back to that, doesn’t it: a boy and his dog, standing against injustice. And it doesn’t have to be a boy and his dog; these are merely symbols. It’s that unity of childhood innocence and empathy for life. By innocence, I don’t mean that children are ignorant of ills—Adam and his friends know all about nuclear disasters and whale hunting, even if they aren’t clear on the Spanish Inquisition. Rather, I mean that they haven’t yet grown into that practised cynicism of adulthood, that apathetic, “that’s the way there is” about the world. They haven’t learned to say, “it can’t be done” yet. That innocence, and that empathy, make great things possible.

Good Omens is one of the most optimistic, upbeat books I’ve ever read. It’s hilarious, in my opinion, and it’s also about the end of the world. I don’t know how else to commend or recommend it.

The Rwandan genocide is one of those events that looms in my mind as something that happened when I was alive but too young to really understand that there was a world outside of my country, or even my community, really. Politics was something that came via the television, an artifact of the history we were studying in school, not a daily fact of life. War and genocide was something that had happened in the past, long ago and far away. I was lucky, because I grew up in Canada, where hardship is visited upon fewer people than most places (though still far too many). I’ve always had a roof over my head, clean water and plenty of food, not to mention electricity. Oh, and I’ve never had a mob try to burn my house or kill me simply because I happened to be the unpopular ethnicity de jour. (September 11 was kind of my personal geopolitical moment of awakening. I was in Grade 7. I remember coming home for lunch and my mom telling me someone had attacked the towers in New York.

God Sleeps in Rwanda is about the genocide, and about the efforts to move past it in the late 1990s. It’s also an intensely personal tale by someone who was born and raised in Rwanda. Joseph Sebarenzi understands the terror of having one’s home and life threatened by a genocidal mob. Although he was not present for the events of 1994, he later returned to Rwanda and became Speaker of the Parliament, where he played an integral role in trying to wrest power back from the hands of the executive branch and restore rule of law. Though his attempts were largely unsuccessful, the struggle itself is moving, even haunting. Sebarenzi and his co-author, Laura Ann Mullane, create a tenuous balance between the heartbreaking recounting of each successive blow to freedom and peace in Rwanda and Sebarenzi’s relentless optimism.

I read, and loved, Shake Hands with the Devil. Yet Roméo Dallaire’s perspective is that of an outsider. He entered Rwanda with certain pre-conceptions and ideas acquired as a result of his upbringing. This isn’t a criticism of him or his book, which is an amazing chronicle of the international community’s failure to react to the Rwandan genocide. But it’s a limitation that makes books like God Sleeps in Rwanda a welcome counterpart to Shake Hands with the Devil. Sebarenzi exposes us to a viewpoint that isn’t Western or Eurocentric. He can cut through the “centuries of tribal genocide” myth or any other colonial misconceptions about life in Rwanda and tell us how it is (if we are willing to listen).

I enjoyed reading Sebarenzi’s account of the political machinations afoot following Rwanda’s supposed transition to democracy under Bizimungu and Kagame. Sebarenzi was right in the thick of it, actively working to promote rule of law. He also doesn’t conceal his own blindness, at the time, towards Kagame’s deviousness. He honestly believed Kagame was interested in instituting democratic reforms up until the point where it became clear Kagame was only interested in holding on to power. This kind of insider’s account of trying to stabilize a fledgling democracy is fascinating and valuable.

That relentless optimism of Sebarenzi’s is what makes the book worth reading. As I said in my review of Shake Hands with the Devil, genocide is depressing. Sebarenzi doesn’t go into as much detail about the genocide—in many ways, the bulk of the book focuses on the recovery efforts afterwards—but what he lacks in detail he makes up for in the personal connection to some of the victims. Moreover, the Rwandan genocide marked a kind of death of Rwanda as a unified nation … Sebarenzi has now lost his homeland twice, and it isn’t even being occupied by a foreign power.

So for him to write that he’s still hopeful, he still wants reconciliation and forgiveness and reparation … that’s kind of amazing. It reminds me of the Dalai Lama’s attitude towards China. Sebarenzi by no means sees what the perpetrators of the genocide did as justified or acceptable—but he doesn’t demonize them either. He understands their motivations. And he categorically rejects the idea that revenge is the best thing on offer right now. This kind of fairness and compassion is everything we need in a world increasingly polarized by rhetoric and radicalism … and now I sound like a movie trailer narrator.