It's been almost two years since I re-read The Magic of Recluce. I consider the Recluce saga among the "formative fantasy series" of my youth. I associate the word "Recluce" with memories of being curled up in a massive armchair in the living room, rain streaming down the windows outside, cradling a massive 600- or 800-page hardcover book in my hands. That was the life.

With The Towers of Sunset, Modesitt returns to the Recluce saga in prequel form: this is the founding of Recluce by Creslin and his somewhat-reluctant partner, Megaera. Creslin is the son of the Marshall of Westwind; Megaera is the sister of the Tyrant of Sarronnyn. Both Westwind and Sarronnyn are western countries of Candar that subscribe to the Legend, which is essentially a garbled creation myth that provides the basis for their matriarchical societies. The Marshall bucked tradition by allowing Creslin to train with the female guards of Westwind, who are among the best in the world. Meanwhile, Megaera is a White witch, a chaos mage, and her sister has had her bound in iron chains since she came of age. Oh, and she's "life-linked" to Creslin, so she feels what he feels and dies if he dies. You can guess how much she loves that.

The plot of The Towers of Sunset has many similarities to that of The Magic of Recluce, which will come as no surprise if you are familiar with Modesitt's writing. Just as Lerris is dispatched to Candar for ulterior reasons, Creslin too is manipulated by the Marshall, the Tyrant, and even the White Wizards of Fairhaven to fulfil his "destiny", which is the founding of an order-based haven on Recluce. Instead of the Grey mage Justen for the role model/wise mentor figure, we have Klerris, a Black mage. Notably, Creslin does not have a trade; he is a soldier and a musician seems to try his hand at pretty much everything.

Creslin's self-enforced versatility is one of the reasons I didn't like this book. I should probably mention that, unlike The Magic of Recluce, I don't think I've read this one before. I would remember being this annoyed. Self-righteous male protagonists bother in fantasy books. You know the type I mean: they bludgeon their way through the plot like a bulldozer, swiping aside any resistance with the fateful words, "I don't have any choice." It's one of the reasons I skewered Richard and the Sword of Truth series. Creslin is not nearly so extreme, fortunately; yet the last half of the book seems to consist of him whining that his choices come down to "let everyone starve" or "mount an increasingly destructive series of order-based gambits to turn Recluce into a nation at the expense of other countries". Indeed, much like my reservations about the end of The Ringworld Engineers, I don't think I can condone the way Modesitt glosses over the morality of Creslin's actions. In altering the weather patterns to bring more rain to Recluce, he causes floods and droughts elsewhere. We see these results, but we never really see Creslin called to account for them, except for the toll his use of order in the service of destruction takes on his body (blindness), which I would argue is not sufficient here. Creslin is a war criminal!

Ironically, my feelings were the opposite for the first half of the book: I was annoyed with Megaera and thought Creslin's feelings were justified. She was contradictory and vague toward him no matter how he treated her. Eventually, however, I came to see his actions from her point of view. They're both stupid and probably deserve each other, but on balance I'll have to give the epic award for stupidity to Creslin, for essentially forcing himself upon Megaera by imposing another life-link on them. She is already linked to him, so he feels that he should make the link reciprocal; he'll feel what she feels. But he does this without even asking her permission, which is … rape. It doesn't matter that "it was going to happen eventually" as a result of her life-link and their mutual order/chaos abilities. The squee factor is definitely there.

When Creslin is not forcing his way into the thoughts of his wife or destroying weather patterns for his own gain, he's usually doing something boring, like guarding a trader caravan or singing in a tavern. I am exaggerating, of course, but I want to emphasize how very workaday the Recluce saga seems to be when it comes to adventures. Creslin is just as obsessed with counting coppers and recounting to us the exact meals he orders at inns as Lerris was; once again, Modesitt focuses a lot on the logistics of life. Alone, this might be enough to dissuade some people from reading the book but doesn't particularly bother me. Unfortunately, The Towers of Sunset also seems to miss a lot of dramatic notes. Creslin undergoes a few very important trials, including his escape from the Westwind escort, his confrontation in Fairhaven, and his subsequent recovery of his memory and escape from the road crew. Maybe it's my fault for reading at a baseball game, but the tone and urgency of the writing doesn't always adjust to match the intensity of these moments. Altogether the result is a somewhat flat, albeit very evenly-paced, story.

There is nothing truly unique or exciting about The Towers of Sunset to make it stand out. As usual, Modesitt's chaos-order magic system is fun and interesting and stifled by the heavy-handed exposition. The bad guys (in this case, the White Wizards) get their own short chapters of dialogue in which they cackle about their latest gambit to unseat Creslin from Recluce. Modesitt does get two things very right: the epic scale, with Creslin's manipulation of the winds and the destruction of multiple fleets of ships and enemy soldiers; and the toll this takes on Creslin's body. That was a cool price to extract for his unmitigated use of order at the service of destruction. Unfortunately, these two positives do not sufficiently compensate for the dull or even unsavoury parts of this book. It's not a bad book, and to his credit Modesitt attempts to explore issues of gender politics, from his creation of the Legend to the relative roles that Megaera and Creslin play in ruling Recluce. Nevertheless, unless you are on a mission to read the complete saga of Recluce like I am, you might want to skip this one.

My reviews of the Recluce saga:
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I will be brief, since I don't read much horror and am generally ignorant of Lovecraft's work, so I won't try to make a general statement based on this one story.

At the Mountains of Madness itself was OK, not great. Lovecraft is far more concerned with describing the extinct society of the Old Ones and their struggles with surviving Earth than injecting genuine dread into the story. It left little impression on me.

I liked the introduction by China Miéville better than the actual story. Likewise, Lovecraft's survey of horror in Western literature is interesting although somewhat dry--keep in mind, however, that I'm not all that interested in this subject. Those who do enjoy horror, especially fans of Lovecraft, will no doubt find the essay and the book itself fascinating. And I won't stand in their way.

Sometimes I wanted to throw this book out the window. Or at someone. It's a hefty little paperback, and my copy is old enough that it the pages no longer lie quite next to each other on the spine, so it looks even bigger than it is. I have no doubt that if it were to hit someone in the head, it could seriously annoy that person and even cause a headache. That's often the feeling I experienced while reading The Clan of the Cave Bear. But I wouldn't turn this book into a projectile out of mere spite or desire to cause headaches. No, the temptation was purely an urge to remove the book from my vicinity as quickly as possible.

I apologize for the somewhat lengthy and uncharacteristic paragraph of plot summary that follows. I promise it has a point.

In a world of long, harsh winters and short summers, the Clan of the Cave Bear is a humanoid civilization that worships Ursus for bringing them culture and traditions. There are many clans within the Clan, each of which live in their own caves, have their own leaders and medicine women and mog-urs (shamans). One such clan, led by the fair-minded Brun, is searching for a new cave after theirs was destroyed in an earthquake. They stumble across an injured five-year-old child—but she is not Clan. She is a member of the Others, a strange species that looks humanoid but is not Clan. Brun reluctantly allows his medicine woman to care for the child, whose name is Ayla. For the most part this brings his clan great luck, but Ayla has a lot of trouble fitting in. She fails to conform to the Clan standards for women, preferring instead to hunt and assert herself in ways permitted only to men. And she earns the ire of the future leader of the clan, the impetuous Broud. Through the eyes of Ayla and members of Brun's clan, Jean Auel tells a story about family, acceptance, loyalty, honour, tradition, and yes, race.

There is just one problem.

This book is actually set 30,000 years ago in prehistoric Europe. The Clan are the Neanderthals, while the Others are Cro-Magnons, anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens. While this might not sound problematic—and I admit that I'm probably weird seeing it as a problem—it is the one element of this book that I cannot overlook.

I know this book is insanely popular (especially given its subject matter). I might even have read it at some point in the distant past (14? 16? I don't recall). To be honest, I probably wouldn't have ever picked up this book again were it not for the fact that I inherited it from a friend who moved away. I like historical fiction, but prehistorical fiction is another matter.

Historical fiction is based, in addition to archaeological evidence, primary source material like written records, artwork, and if it's more recent, photography and audio or video recordings. The farther back in time one goes, the sparser the record and the more difficult it is to portray a society "realistically". Often this isn't a problem; it's fiction, after all, and we expect some licence.

Prehistory is different. By definition there are not written records; there are pressure few remnants of artwork, and much to our chagrin, the Neanderthals recorded everything on Betamax or, much later, in whatever format the Zune uses. (And who has one of those these days?) So their voices are probably lost to us forever. We can speculate, but it is very difficult to determine what Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon culture was like from the archaeological record. This gives archaeologists and anthropologists plenty to do when they are not actually in ur fields, diggin' up ur ancestors. It lets them form (perhaps untestable) hypotheses about homonin societies based on what evidence we do have. That's really cool, and I love reading non-fiction books about such theories. The dearth of solid information, however, makes the job of a writer of prehistorical fiction that much more difficult. I'm not going to rule out all prehistorical fiction from this one experience, but Auel has not convinced me The Clan of the Cave Bear is a shining example of the genre.

I actually reached a point where I had to break out the sticky notes and mark a few pages for later reference. This happens on occasion with a book, usually if it's really bad or really good. In this case, the quotations highlight my issue with the way Auel portrays the evolutionary competition between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Neanderthals possess a genetic memory that is nearing its maximum storage capacity:

But as more memories built up, crowding and enlarging the storage capacity of their brain, changes came harder. There was no more room for new ideas that would be added to their memory bank, their heads were already too large. Women had difficulty giving birth; they couldn't afford new knowledge that would enlarge their heads even more.

Suffice it to say, there is no record of Neanderthals, or any hominins, possessing a genetic memory. It's true that The Clan of the Cave Bear is steeped in scientific accuracy; Auel did her research. This is not one of those accuracies. This appears to be something of her own invention (or an idea she borrowed from another theorist), and quite frankly, it breaks the book for me. Despite trite allusions to evolution and nature, Auel's proposed reason for the demise of the Neanderthals runs contrary to very idea of Darwinian evolution:

Her brain followed different paths, her full, high forehead that housed forward-thinking frontal lobes gave her an understanding from a different view. She could accept the new, shape it to her will, forge it into ideas undreamed of by the Clan, and, in nature's way, her kind was destined to supplant the ancient, dying race.

At a deep, unconscious level, Broud sensed the opposing destinies of the two. Ayla was more than a threat to his masculinity, she was a threat to his existence. His hatred of her was the hatred of the old for the new, of the traditional for the innovative, of the dying for the living. Broud's race was too static, too unchanging. They had reached the peak of their development; there was no more room to grow. Ayla was part of nature's new experiment, and though she tried to model herself after the women of the clan, it was only an overlay, a façade only culture-deep, assumed for the sake of survival.

Evolution does not work that way. Species do not reach "peaks" of development and find "no more room to grow". The extinction of the Neanderthals was not destiny.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that Auel is saying that Cro-Magnons were "destined" to supplant Neanderthals or that the Neanderthals were necessarily doomed as a result of their genetic memory. She could be saying that. If so, I find it very problematic. I cannot countenance calling this book "historical fiction" and lauding its scientific accuracy if Auel rejects something so fundamental as the theory of evolution.

It's also possible to interpret all of this as an attempt to be poetic—hence, the references to "destiny" and such are the twentieth-century narrator's hindsight being applied to the story at hand. This does not absolve Auel entirely, for it is still an example of sloppy writing, but at least it is, in my mind, a lesser crime. And this is consistent with the narration in The Clan of the Cave Bear in general, which is itself rather inconsistent. The book switches between following one particular character's thoughts from a limited third-person perspective to an omniscient twentieth-century perspective. This is accompanied by a corresponding change in vocabulary. Consequently, all complaints about the science aside, I had a hard time even reading this book. I felt almost like I was reading some kind of children's story. Here's an example:

The women breathed easier. They knew Ayla was inexperienced, and though they had little choice but to allow the girl to treat Brac, they were concerned. A hunter needed two good strong arms. If Brac lost the use of one, he would never become a leader as he was destined. If he was unable to hunt, he would not even become a man, but would live out his life in the ambiguous limbo in which older boys, who had reached physical maturity but had not made their first kill, existed.

I picked that by opening the book at random. The entire book is littered with phrases like, "They knew", "Ayla knew", "Creb knew", etc., which preface exposition by Auel that shows off her extensive research into various prehistorical methods of life. I love that she did all that research, and in some ways it does improve the book. Unfortunately, Auel often chooses to divulge her knowledge in the least engaging way possible.

No, this book works much better when viewed as a fantasy or science-fiction novel about a world far, far away. As I set it up in my plot summary at the beginning of this review, one can easily ignore the references to our Earth of the past and treat the Clan and the Others as two alien species, one with genetic memory that is proving a liability. In this way, the problematic parts of the story's narration become more forgivable, and The Clan of the Cave Bear becomes a fascinating thought experiment. Now, I might be a literary snob, but I'm no literary tyrant, and you are free to regard this book as historical fiction if you like. I wish I could have enjoyed this book more, because it had a lot of potential, and there are some genuinely great things about it—alas, certain aspects of Auel's style and writing were enough to sour the experience for me.

As I write this review, there is a single, lonely rating on this book and no other reviews. I apologize, but I can't resist …

FIRST!

All right, I have recovered from my temporary insanity and am now ready to get down to business. I have never before read anything by Ian R. MacLeod. I have a terrible and impoverishing addiction to purchasing titles from specialty publisher Subterranean Press, and during an all-too-common binge (this time it was Charles Stross titles), I saw this on offer, shrugged, said, "What the hell?" and added it to my cart.

I don't recall hearing much about Ian R. MacLeod either. His name is almost criminally similar to Ian McDonald, however, whose The Dervish House is my pick for this year's Hugo Award for Best Novel. Indeed, their names are so similar that I am afraid I will confuse these two authors. I assume that with a name like MacLeod, Ian R. must be immortal, and therefore I shall refer to him as "the Highlander" for the rest of this review. Wikipedia tells me that he was actually born in Birmingham and not the Scottish highlands, but I am too smart to fall for that small bit of trickery, Highlander.

Journeys is an anthology but not a slapdash one. At nine stories it feels short, but the stories themselves are quite long for short stories. And, for the most part, the stories are good. As someone who much prefers novel-length stories, I took a risk in introducing myself to the Highlander through an anthology. I would do it again though, because Journeys was an enjoyable, even magical experience.

Wikipedia also mentions that another of the Highlander's series is an alternate universe affair where the use of aether has preserved the trade guild structure in England and "has retarded technological progress". In hindsight, then, the common theme running through Journeys makes a lot of sense. Several of these stories are set in a similar (if not the same) universe, an alternate England where magic is much more in evidence. The first story, "The Master Miller's Tale", seems to take place near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Nathan watches steam-driven mills slowly supersede his traditional mill, which is held together by song spells. He gets mixed up in a group of Luddite-like terrorists who go around sabotaging steam-driven installations. For Nathan, there is also a personal component: the woman he had an adolescent crush on is now a champion of steam technology. Another story, "Elementals", is set a bit later, toward the Victorian end of the century. Its narrator is acquainted with an amateur scientist who is convinced he can harness elemental beings as an alternative energy source. The truth turns out to be much more complicated—and much more metaphysical.

Most of the stories in Journeys also involve the narrators losing themselves, physically or psychologically, and the above two stories are good examples. Nathan is so attached to his mill that it becomes difficult for him to realize his business is dying. Eventually he becomes obsessed with finding the windseller, a merchant who used to come by and sell bagged winds for him to release and use at his mill. Nathan's own obsessions offer a kind of opening for magic to enter him and consume him, and it's a similar story in "Elementals". The narrator learns that elementals are not tied to one element, that they are not the Other; rather, everything and everyone are elementals in a sense. Everything is powered by belief, his example being that it is more difficult to notice people who are down on their luck when you are at the same parties as them—they sort of fade into the background.

Not all of the stories in this collection fit comfortably into my framework. Two in particular—"The Camping Wainwrights" and "On the Sighting of Other Islands"—are quite different, and another, "Taking Care of Myself", is science fiction rather than fantasy but also deals with questions of identities. That being said, those first two stories certainly fit in with the title: the former is, surprisingly enough, about camping and family tribulations; the latter is told in a collective voice by the inhabitants of one island on a sea of moving islands. All of the stories in Journeys are weird in the sense that they are not quite grokkable the first time around—there are certain twists in the Highlander's narrative style that make the stories feel very original—but those two stories in particular among the weirdest.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that two of the intertwined motifs that seem most prevalent in Journeys—alternative worlds where magic has replaced or remains a rival to technological progress, as well as stories where the use of magic leads to a personal crisis of identity—appeal very much to me. So if the rest of the Highlander's work is like this, I look forward to reading more of it. Looks like this edition is sold out on the Subterranean Press website, so unless they print more or you can pick up a copy used, you'll have to be content with finding these stories elsewhere as you can. Alone, none of them really stand out, but together they form a very unified corpus of works. For a new reader like me, Journeys was a good introduction. Although I obviously can't say for sure, I suspect fans of the Highlander will find it familiar and comfortable.

Second review: August 2020

First review: August 2011

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

"But why should you be right and all those fellows like St. Anselm and St. Augustine be wrong?"

"You mean that they were very clever and learned men, while you have grave doubts whether I am either?" asked Weeks.

"Yes," answered Philip uncertainly, for put in that way his question seemed impertinent.

"St. Augustine believed that the earth was flat and that the sun turned round it."

"I don't know what that proves."

"Why, it proves that you believe with your generation. Your saints lived in an age of faith, when it was practically impossible to disbelieve what to us is positively incredible."

"Then how d'you know that we have the truth now?"

"I don't."

Philip thought this over for a moment, then he said:

"I don't see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn't be just as wrong as what they believed in the past."

"Neither do I."

"Then how can you believe anything at all?"

"I don't know."

He cried a good deal. At first he was very angry with himself for this and ashamed, but he found it relieved him, and somehow made him feel less hungry. In the very early morning he suffered a good deal from cold. One night he went into his room to change his linen; he slipped in about three, when he was quite sure everyone would be asleep, and out again at five; he lay on the bed and its softness was enchanting; all his bones ached, and as he lay he revelled in the pleasure of it; it was so delicious that he did not want to go to sleep. He was growing used to want of food and did not feel very hungry, but only weak. Constantly now at the back of his mind was the thought of doing away with himself, but he used all the strength he had not to dwell on it, because he was afraid the temptation would get hold of him so that he would not be able to help himself. He kept on saying to himself that it would be absurd to commit suicide, since something must happen soon; he could not get over the impression that his situation was too preposterous to be taken quite seriously; it was like an illness which must be endured but from which he was bound to recover. Every night he swore that nothing would induce him to put up with such another and determined next morning to write to his uncle, or to Mr. Nixon, the solicitor, or to Lawson; but when the time came he could not bring himself to make the humiliating confession of his utter failure.

"Betty," he said, when she came in. "Mr Carey's coming to live with us."

"Oh, that is nice," she said. "I'll go and get the bed ready."

She spoke in such a hearty, friendly tone, taking everything for granted, that Philip was deeply touched. He never expected people to be kind to him, and when they were it surprised and moved him. Now he could not prevent two large tears from rolling down his cheeks. The Athelnys discussed the arrangements and pretended not to notice to what a state his weakness had brought him. When Mrs. Athelny left them Philip leaned back in his chair, and looking out of the window laughed a little.

"It's not a very nice night to be out, is it?"

Never a word of love passed between them. She seemed not to desire anything more than the companionship of those walks. Yet Philip was positive that she was glad to be with him. She puzzled him as much as she had done at the beginning. He did not begin to understand her conduct; but the more he knew her the fonder he grew of her; she was competent and self controlled, and there was a charming honesty in her: you felt that you could rely upon her in every circumstance.

"I wonder if you'll marry me, Sally."

She did not move and there was no flicker of emotion on her face, but she did not look at him when she answered.

"If you like."

"Don't you want to?"

"Oh, of course I'd like to have a house of my own, and it's about time I was settling down."

He smiled a little. He knew her pretty well by now, and her manner did not surprise him.

"But don't you want to marry me?"

"There's no one else I would marry."

"Then that settles it."

"Mother and Dad will be surprised, won't they?"

"I'm so happy."

"I want my lunch," she said.

Drumroll of irony, please: I bought this book because it was the required textbook for one of my education courses, Educational Psychology, and this is the first time I’ve opened it. Those of you who know me as a student will understand that this is uncharacteristic behaviour and might even suspect I’ve been replaced by a school-hating doppelgänger. In fact, Educational Psychology was one of very few courses that I disliked during my time at university, and it was entirely due to the professor’s teaching style. The material itself interested me, as this review will show, and I completely understand that the subject matter is useful for me as a new teacher. Unfortunately, the professor insisted on using PowerPoint for her lessons despite clearly not knowing it they worked (to the point where we would shout out how to navigate among slides). I managed to get out of reading this book because she didn’t actually test us on the book itself; she merely “followed” certain chapters with her own notes, and there was only one midterm test; the rest of our marks came from assignments. I’m not proud of my performance in that course, nor am I proud to talk about my inattentiveness—but it happened, and I suppose it’s ironic it happened when the book is called Why Don’t Students Like School?

I loved school as a child and still love school. (This is probably a good thing, since if my career aspirations come true, I will be spending the rest of my working life in school, albeit on a salary.) School—and by this I mean “learning”—was, for me, the point of my childhood. Oh, I had plenty of fun with friends and got into my fair share of shenanigans. But I loved learning, lessons, and homework. So I’m at somewhat of a disadvantage, as a teacher, when it comes to diagnosing problems of disinterest, since I have so seldom experienced it myself. Fortunately, Daniel T. Willingham has come to my rescue with a book that concisely explores this issue and has recommendations and advice for how to help students learn.

I love the length of this book, which is rather short for a non-fiction science book (don’t let the thickness fool you, however, because the print is small). Why Don’t Students Like School is just the right length for Willingham to cover each of his nine “cognitive principles” and explain them without going into too much depth with the science behind the principles. A longer, more detailled book would doubtless have been more daunting, and I think Willingham has found the right balance among length, depth, and barrier to entry. You don’t need to have studied cognitive psychology by any means to read this book; however, despite its length, this is not a popular science book. Willingham’s style is a blend of the academic and the science writer, mixing facts, figures, and tables with intriguing analogies. Finally, every chapter ends with two bibliographies: “less technical” and “more technical”. Attention to details like that are what differentiate books that are merely interesting from books that are interesting and useful. Why Don’t Students Like School? goes on to emphasis this distinction in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about reading this book is that it taught me how many pre-conceptions and biases I have already developed regarding pedagogy. Willingham challenges many tenets of teaching that I have absorbed, either through society at large or explicitly through my education coursework. For example, his seventh cognitive principle is “Children are more alike than they are different”, which leads into a discussion of the very common notion that different children “learn differently”, i.e., some people are “visual learners” and some people are “tactile learners”. Who hasn't heard this? I bet that most people, even those who aren’t teachers, have been exposed to this idea, whether or not they subscribe to it on any significant philosophical level.

Willingham tackles this theory in depth, describing the hell out of it so that we have a firm idea of what it is, then going on to say:

I’ve gone into a lot of detail about the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory because it is so widely believed, even though psychologists know that the theory is not right. What I have said about this theory goes for all of the other cognitive styles theories as well. The best you can say about any of them is that the evidence is mixed.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a moment, Willingham—are you telling me that received wisdom from “society” is wrong? That it doesn’t accurately reflect how students actually learn, and instead perpetuates outdated psychological fads? That seems rather far-fetched, but I suppose if you have evidence….

In addition to its twin bibliographies, every chapter concludes with an “Implications for the Classroom” section where Willingham lists explicit ideas and tips that teachers can apply to their own lessons. In the conclusion to this chapter, he advises teachers to “think in terms of content, not in terms of students”. So some content is better seen than heard and vice versa—students differ, but not as much as content differs. It would be silly to teach a music class by only reading sheet music. Willingham also opines that, “There is value in every child, even if he or she is not ‘smart in some way’”, referring critically to the idea that “Every student is intelligent in some way”. I’m not sure I agree with Willingham on this point, but I won’t get into it because intelligence is such a vast and difficult concept.

I recall, dimly, that we discussed the multiple intelligences/learning styles theory in my Educational Psychology class, but you can see how much information I retain when a professor’s teaching style doesn’t work for me. This is an important point that Willingham emphasizes throughout Why Don’t Students Like School?: students’ learning styles and attitudes and abilities are important, but they are not as important as they teacher’s style. I was more than unusually fortunate in my draw of teachers as a child, but even the poor teachers provided me with something that I, as an avid and eager student, could nurture into knowledge. Other students are not so lucky. If I had to choose a favourite part of this book, it would be the very end. Willingham includes in an endnote to the conclusion a quotation from Reynolds Price:

If your method reaches only the attentive student, then you must either invent new methods or call yourself a failure.

What an excellent sentiment. It refocuses the responsibility where it should rest: not with students who are inattentive, disadvantaged, or otherwise not achieving their “potential” (whatever that means), but with the teachers. Because, you know, this is kind of our job; this is what we do. If we resign ourselves only to reaching those students who embrace school, then we are doing a very poor job indeed.

With his sixth cognitive principle, Willingham makes a point that I think I’ve previously realized but have never really expressed as a single statement: “Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.” In other words, students in a field don’t just know less than experts in that field—they actually think differently about that knowledge, owing to the way their brains structure and organize information. As one becomes more familiar with a subject—more practised—one’s brain becomes more adept at organizing information about that subject and applying different techniques to study a situation. Experts have a larger “mental toolbox”, as Willingham puts it. The lesson for teachers here is not to expect one’s students to think about problems as an expert would, and thus they won’t necessarily learn by doing the same sort of activities that experts do.

“Practice makes perfect” might sound trite these days, but Willingham makes a strong case for it. I haven’t read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, which has popularized the idea that, on average, one needs to put in about 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an expert at something. Willingham echoes this idea, particularly when discussing the difference between novices and experts, and backs it up with some nice cognitive studies. He even takes it further and specifically refers to teachers. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to how teachers can improve, and this is a good quotation from the chapter on expertise:

This generalization—that experts have abstract knowledge of problem types but novices do not—seems to be true of teachers too. When confronted with a classroom management problem, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problems.

I didn’t realize how much I needed this reassurance, but that’s what it is for me. This is the year I will engage in “student teaching”, the period in which I shadow a teacher in a high school and even teach the class directly—and I’m terrified. What if I screw up? What if I step across the threshold of the classroom and they sense that I’m somehow not really teacher material? And I know, deep down in the most rational cockles of my heart, that this is not going to happen, and that I will be a good teacher—but that does nothing to calm my nerves! Still, Willingham’s reassurance goes a long way to reinforcing the idea that we have “permission to suck”. Although most often applied to students of the creative process, it’s applicable to life in general: I am going to suck, at times, as a novice teacher. I am going to make mistakes, and I will certainly improve—when I look back at myself ten years from now, I will laugh at those first few feeble lesson plans. Because practising almost automatically results in improvement, assuming you make the effort. I can see this in my own reviews here on Goodreads, which have improved gradually but noticeably since I began writing them. My process, in general, has not changed—I’ve just had more practice.

I’ll finish by touching on Willingham’s second cognitive principle: “factual knowledge must precede skill”. He opens the chapter by mentioning stereotypes of teaches who are obsessed with drilling facts into their students’ heads, including Mr. Gradgrind of Hard Times, a book that I read in first-year English and quite enjoyed. This was the chapter I approached with the most scepticism and perhaps even hostility, for although I have yet to read The Shallows, I disagree with Nicholas Carr’s proposition that Google is making us stupid. He makes an important point, but my objections have always been based on this nebulous, perhaps not well-defined premise that “critical thinking” is more important than knowing when William the Conqueror invaded England (1066). Well, Willingham attacks this defence and gets in a critical hit: in order to solve problems, first we have to know what we’re talking about. I don’t think he’s taking as hard a line as Carr, because he exhorts teachers to consider carefully what background knowledge is necessary for students to succeed at a particular task. And, come to think of it, I was already expressing a similar idea when I told my math professors why I want to teach high school: in my experience as a tutor, many university math students aren’t struggling with the higher-level concepts themselves but with the more basic operations (fractions, oh the fractions) that they should have mastered in high school. One needs a certain level of background knowledge and skill to succeed.

Of course, that is why I read so voraciously, and why I read books like this. Why Don’t Students Like School? reaffirmed a lot of what I think, challenged a great deal too, and in general has probably helped get my mind back in gear for the start of school next week. Unlike many books to which I award five stars, I am not going to gush and recommend this to everyone. If you have an interest in pedagogy or cognitive psychology, check it out. For new and aspiring teachers like myself, I will say this is required reading. With Why Don’t Students Like School?, Willingham neither patronizes nor panders to teachers but instead provides an excellent, helpful volume based on studies in cognitive psychology. It’s not anecdotal hokum; it’s not prescriptive pedagogical bullshit. It’s science, bitches. It works.

I read Vonnegut now. Vonnegut is cool.

I have vague memories of reading Vonnegut before—I have some very old, very pulp editions of some of his other novels that I … er … “liberated” from my father. I swear I’ve read Breakfast of Champions before, and I’m pretty sure I read either Cat’s Cradle or Player Piano at my sister’s wedding. I remember this because I was only 15, but the server still offered me wine (I declined). Suffice it to say, although Vonnegut is associated with some interesting memories, this is really the first of his novels that I have read as an adult, and the first one I remember well enough to review.

Bluebeard is easy to read and, therefore, easy to dismiss. Thanks to the conversational first person narration and the consistent switching between Rabo’s reminiscences and the present day at his home in the Hamptons, Bluebeard feels like a light novel. Yet this is also a story about genocide survivors, abusive relationships, the horror of war, and the horror of mediocrity. This book is an excellent example of how levity can be just as good at delivering a polemic against war as more gritty, realistic depictions like you might find in The Kindly Ones or in Hollywood movies.

Vonnegut has some choice words for the way movies, in general, portray war. His narrator, Rabo Karabekian, points out that most of the veterans in those movies are the age he was when he returned home, and not the young striplings whose lives are shattered on the front. In general, as one familiar with Vonnegut might expect, utter disdain for war and for the glorification of war pervades Bluebeard, almost dripping off the pages. What makes the book so impressive—and so successful—is how Vonnegut manages to do this in such a pithy way:

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.”

Can you imagine that?

Coming from a country whose armed forces are routinely ridiculed for their perceived lack of personnel or equipment, I totally can, Rabo. I love this passage so much, because it demonstrates the irony of contemporary ideas of American patriotism—failing to support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan somehow makes one “un-American”, or at the very least constitutes a “suspicious” action, a black mark on one’s patriotism. Vonnegut, the Vietnam War no doubt weighing heavily in his mind as he wrote this, wanted to remind us that the militaristic mindset that accompanied the United States’ rise as a twentieth-century superpower was not always the status quo.

Rabo Karabekian is an awesome narrator in general, because he does not bullshit. He strikes me as a man who knows exactly who he is, who is comfortable with his place in the world, who accepts his flaws and failures and position of mediocrity. In the end, he is as divested of illusions as it is possible for a human to be. This is an incredibly refreshing type of narrator to have. Rabo doesn’t ask for forgiveness and doesn’t offer up excuses (beyond joining us in shaking our heads at his youthful naïvety). He is self-deprecating, but he does not wallow in self-pity. He has been through war. He married, divorced, married again, and survived his second wife. He is American in citizenship and, mostly, in sentiment, yet he has taken up the flag of his father to carry on their cultural heritage as Armenians—he leaves all his property and wealth to his estranged sons, on the condition that they legally change their names and those of his grandchildren back to “Karabekian”.

So Rabo is complex yet comfortable, and he is definitely the heart of this story. That might seem obvious given that Bluebeard is a fictional autobiography, but I would argue that there’s a difference between being the main character in one’s story and being its heart. In the end, despite invoking a number of famous people (both real and fictional), the story and its lessons are about and for Rabo Karabekian. A different Rabo, one less sympathetic or more clever, would still be the main character of his own life, but would he make the book enjoyable? Would he be able to pull off the levity that allows Vonnegut to juxtapose war with abstract art? I’m not sure, but I’m glad I don´t have to find out!

Rabo owes this state of grace in part to his artistic struggles and the conflict between his technical mastery and his stillborn passion. He also owes it, however, to the effects of Circe Berman, a widow who shows up on his private beach, invites herself to stay at his place, and slowly transforms his home and his life. Overbearing and irksome, Circe is nevertheless a positive influence on Rabo. I say this knowing full well that if some woman redirected my foyer without my permission, I, being the incorrigible 21-year-old that I am, would probably not handle it as well as Rabo does, all things considered! :D The interaction between Rabo and Circe is by far one of the best aspects of Bluebeard, because it is rife both with real tension and with real respect between the two parties. This is evident in how Rabo decides to reveal the contents of his potato barn to Circe.

At one point, Rabo has a very frank conversation with his cook and her daughter, Celeste, in which we learn that despite employing her for years, Rabo has never remembered his cook’s name (it’s Allison, Allison White). Indeed, when Rabo kicks out Circe, Allison gives notice, stating that she can’t stand working for him any more without Circe around to improve the atmosphere of the house. It’s not that Rabo is a bad person, but he has fallen out of practice interacting with people as human beings, and Allison accuses him of being “scared to death of women”. Rabo’s relationships with women throughout Bluebeard are certainly interesting and rocky. As an adolescent, he forms an attachment to Marilee Kemp, who is eleven years his senior and takes on the role of guardian angel/patron saint, ultimately bringing Rabo to New York to apprentice to Dan Gregory. Rabo eventually loses his virginity to Marilee and then foolishly takes her “you have to leave now” speech at face value, always thinking of her for years but never trying to win her back.

When next they meet, she upbraids him thoroughly for this, and through her Vonnegut has some harsh words to deliver about war and women:

“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

“They can pretend pretty hard sometimes,” I said.

“They know that the ones who pretend the hardest,” she said, “get their pictures in the paper and medals afterwards.”

The “condition” to which Marilee refers is the situation of being desperate for food and protection for themselves and their children. Viewed in this way, war is a mechanism for the oppression of women. The reward for participating in this oppression is glory and power, which is exactly what is promised for participating in colonialism/imperialism as well:

Lecturers traveled all over Northern Europe with such pictures in olden times. With assistants to unroll one end and roll up the other, they urged all ambitious and able persons to abandon tired old Europe and lay claim to rich and beautiful properties in the Promised Land, which were practically theirs for the asking.

Why should a real man stay home when he could be raping a virgin continent?

It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but there is also a layer of seriousness here, because Vonnegut is both condemning the imperialism of the past (which is easy to do) and criticizing our society for letting it continue. We acknowledge the wrongs of the past even as we deny those of the present. I know that, for me personally, we learned about atrocities like the residential schools in Canadian history class, but there was always this subtext that “things are better now”. Well, they are better, in some ways, and maybe in other ways they’re worse too. When you grow up and leave the history classroom for the less comfortable world outside, you realize that nothing is really so simple as the textbook makes it appear. And so I conclude with my single most favourite quotation from Bluebeard:

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

I was born in 1989, so I can’t attest to the zeitgeist Vonnegut was addressing when he wrote Bluebeard. Nevertheless, the above quotation certainly captures my mind in 2011. We celebrate—and rightly so—the declarations of human rights, of equality regardless of gender or ethnicity or sports team, the victories we have so far achieved. Yet there is still so much to do, so much inequality to address, not only within countries that lack or struggle with democracy but even in so-called “developed” countries like Canada and the United States. Yes, in 1867 we became an independent dominion, and a parliamentary democracy as well. But it wasn’t until 1918 that women could vote federally. And, I did not know this, but according to Wikipedia, prior to 1960, First Nations people had to give up their status in order to vote! So we can be proud of being 144 years old, Canada, but it has been a long, hard road towards equality, and we still aren’t there yet.

But I digress. I digress, because even though Bluebeard is a thin book with a light tone, it makes me meditate upon weighty subjects. I have to commend Vonnegut for this, for he has created a book that raises important questions yet still leaves me curiously uplifted. With that secret in the potato barn, I feel like Rabo is saying to us, “Come on, people, let’s get our act together: we can do this!” We can remember the past, learn from the past, and avoid repeating its mistakes. But first we must remove the scales from our eyes and sacrifice our illusions to see the world as it is. And this is where I attempt to connect all of this to the motif of abstract art, which thus far I have lamentably neglected. Rabo can draw so realistically that it is scary; he doesn’t exercise this talent, however, because, “it’s just too fucking easy”. And as we see repeatedly throughout Bluebeard, depicting the world ultra-realistically is not the same thing as seeing it. Sometimes a strip of tape is secretly six deer in a forest glade.

This is exactly what I needed after the disappointing Clan of the Cave Bear. Nancy Kress is an author whose ability to make me think never fails, even if I don't always enjoy her characterization. She doesn't just touch on or grapple with Big Ideas; she stalks them, lassos them, and puts them to work doing her bidding. And she is really, really smart. Wikipedia doesn't tell me what she specialized in during her formal education, so I'm not sure how much of the knowledge that shines through her stories comes from that and how much is the result of careful research. In any event, Nancy Kress is a truly amazing author. I've read several of her novels, but they have all been set in the near future. Probability Moon, on the other hand, is hard science fiction set in a universe where humanity has begun colonizing the stars. I couldn't wait to see Kress' take on this.

This book has great back cover copy. I read it aloud in a dramatic voice twice, and it rocks. It could be the opening narration for a video game cutscene. To summarize the summary: humans get around using space tunnel technology left behind by a long-gone species. They're in a war with another species, the Fallers. They've discovered a planet whose inhabitants experience "shared reality". More importantly for the human military, one of the moons orbiting that planet is an ancient weapon built by the same species who built the space tunnels. It's Nancy Kress, and it's hard science fiction. So it's going to be awesome, right?

In hindsight, I confess my expectations for this book were probably too high. As the first in a trilogy, it concludes one of its plots but leaves the larger mystery behind Orbital Object #7 unresolved. When I finished, I felt like I could have begun Probability Sun immediately, and I was sorely tempted to do so. I have avoided that temptation, partly because I don't yet have a copy of Probability Space. But these books are short and the action and dialogue makes them snappy reads; I could easily devour this trilogy in a weekend.

As has been typical in my experience with Kress, we differ when it comes to characterization. I found the villain in Beggars in Spain to be rather disappointing. Occasionally, Kress' characters approach a level of caricature that does not reflect well upon the story. The same thing happens here with David Allen, graduate student in xenoanthropology who accompanies the expedition to World and slowly succumbs to delusions of grandeur and megalomania.

Antagonists who are mad are much less interesting, in my opinion, than run-of-the-mill garden variety sane antagonists. There is something of a loss of volition that accompanies madness, or at least a loss of judgement, that makes these characters less threatening in an ideological sense. In that respect, someone like Jennifer Sharifi from the Beggars trilogy is a superior antagonist to someone like David Allen—she might have seemed cold and inhuman, but she was rational and all of her faculties were functioning. That made her much scarier. If the choice is between a villain who is aware of what he or she is doing but utterly believes in his or her position and a villain whose actions are the result of a medical condition, the former is always going to be more imposing. I couldn't take David Allen very seriously, and I found the parts of the book where the narrator visits upon his perspective more annoying than anything else.

I am relieved and happy to report that this is the only major flaw with Probability Moon. Although the other two plots do not quite approach the levels of epic awesomeness required to make my head explode, they still combine to create a decent science-fiction novel.

On World, everyone experiences "shared reality". This is a very interesting and, at least at first, poorly-explained concept. Basically, Worlder who does not "share reality" will experience headaches of increasing intensity. "Sharing reality", as far as I interpret Kress' explanation, means sharing the way other people look at the world. We don't actually get that many concrete examples aside from how people who do share reality regard those people who don't—the unreal, as they are called, who are ignored or driven out until the government department of Reality and Atonement declares them real once again. One of the central issues in Probability Moon surrounds the ambiguous status of the Terran expedition: are they real or unreal? Until Reality and Atonement makes that call, they live in a limbo where other Worlders deal with them, but always somewhat uncomfortably. The Terrans take steps to ensure they give the appearance of sharing reality, but of course it's difficult. One of their goals is to uncover the source of shared reality—is it a pathogen, is it genetic, is it a neurological feature? In the end, as one might expect, it turns out to be related to the mechanism of Orbital Object #7.

The weapon orbiting World and military physicist Syree Johnson's attempts to understand it are the most interesting parts of Probability Moon for me. Don't get me wrong: the combination of both plots are what make this book so interesting and, ultimately, successful. Probability Moon is, to use a term I hate using even though I've used it several times in this review, "hard" science fiction in the way Kress treats space travel and technology in general. Yet it is also "social" science fiction. It is a blending that testifies to Kress' talents as a writer and belies the very possibility of meaningful distinctions like "hard" and "soft" or "social" science fiction. Probability Moon is just science fiction, really good science fiction.

Still, I will own up to favouring the investigation of Orbital Object #7 over what's happening on World. I'm a technophile, OK? I can't help it. I love technobabble, and to Kress' credit, she is either familiar enough with these concepts or has done an impressive amount of research to make her technobabble sound plausible to people who are actually familiar with these areas. For example, here's how she describes Orbital Object #7:

The artifact emitted no radiation of any kind, had no magnetic field, and no thermal gradations. The hull, 0.9765 centimeters thick, was made mostly of an allotropic form of carbon that resembled a known class of fullerenes but was subtly different. The artifact contained no heavy metals, nothing with atomic number above seventy-five. It massed slightly less than a million tons. Inside was mostly hollow, although unidentifiable structures were suspended inside (how?) in an extremely complex but partial manner, without direct connection to each other. These unknown but stable structures appeared to be without any mass—an impossibility. When the computer ran mathematical analyses, the suspensions suggested a complicated web wherein each curve folded back on itself many times, a sort of multidimensional fractal. Computer breakdown further suggested a strange attractor, a region in which all sufficiently close trajectories were attracted in the limit, but in which arbitrarily close points over time became exponentially separated. Syree figured the Hausdorff dimension of the suggested fractal. It was 1.2, the same dimension as the galactic filling of the universe.

I admit I have no idea how to build a space tunnel myself, and I'm not quite sure what Kress means when she says "galactic filling of the universe" (quantum foam, maybe?). Regardless, it tickled me to see her talk about fractals and Hausdorff dimension. I was reading this while having lunch with my friend Aaron, who is actually studying such areas of mathematics for his masters degree. So I immediately distracted him from the Dresden Files book I had lent him to make him read that paragraph. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time I have seen the Hausdorff dimension mentioned in a science-fiction book. Go Kress! Later references to concepts like Swarzschild radii, while less exotic, were still quite welcome.

Syree Johnson is also probably the most interesting character, such as she is. Kress gives us quite a bit of her backstory, explaining how she comes from a long line of strict military families and thus excuses herself nothing when it comes to weakness. Nevertheless, Syree is obviously not just a military officer but a genuinely curious scientist who wants to understand how Orbital Object #7 works. She is torn between that curiosity and her duty to destroy the object before it can fall into Faller hands. And she's also the face, for us, of the human military.

In Probability Moon, humans sort of drop out of the sky (TVTropes alert) to visit the World. They are mindful of possible contamination but still rather blasé about the entire business. Worse still, it's all just a cover so that the human military can steal one of the planet's moons. Sure, the moon happens to be an ancient superweapon. But still. It's a moon. It's kind of important, not to mention nominally the World's. We don't see any sort of arguments related to cultural imperialism or the fact that taking Orbital Object #7 without even asking is nothing short of theft. Nevertheless, I think it's implied in the way Kress frames the entire situation: at least, to me, it was clear that we humans were waltzing into the system, taking what we wanted, and leaving little if anything of value behind. It could happen. (TVTropes)

Probability Moon has its fair share of action and tension; as far as drama and pacing goes, this book is pretty good. As is common for trilogies, it leaves me wishing I had learned more about the war with the Fallers—in particular, I'm curious to learn about the political fallout from what happens regarding Orbital Object #7. The book ends rather abruptly, not so much with a cliffhanger but with a definite sense that the story is far from over. This is definitely not something I would read if I were looking for a standalone novel, although your mileage may vary. I enjoyed this new facet to Nancy Kress' writing; I liked reading a story by her that involves space ships and relativistic weapons and quantum phenomena. It makes me look forward to the rest of the trilogy, which I'm sure will have more answers. Probability Moon did not, unfortunately, quite manage to make my head explode—but as with anything Kress writes, it still took me hostage.

My reviews of the Probability trilogy:
Probability Sun →

One day I hope to read a Nancy Kress novel full of amazing, deep, complex characters who manage to transcend the stereotypes often demanded by plot and story. Alas, that day has not yet come.

Probability Moon ended on a bittersweet note. The Zeus and its crew was destroyed when Orbital Object #7 exploded rather than go through the space tunnel. The anthropological team left on World was rescued—just in time, from their perspective, because the Worlders had declared them “unreal” and therefore condemned to death. But in the end, the people of World rescind this label when it becomes clear that one of the expedition members, David Allen, died to warn the Worlders about deadly radiation from the sky. So when humans return to World in Probability Sun, they find they are not unreal, as they first feared, but extremely welcome.

So naturally, they decide to rape the planet.

As we discovered in the previous book, there is another artifact on World, a smaller sphere of similar construction to Orbital Object #7 buried in the Neury Mountains. This expedition’s priority is to study the object and, if it might prove useful, extract it and return it to the Sol system. Of course, after stealing a moon in the last book, perhaps liberating a 25-metre sphere is small change in comparison—indeed, the leader of the expedition, Lyle Kaufman, calls it “ridiculously easy”. However, whereas the theft and subsequent destruction of Orbital Object #7 was wrong, it did not seem to damage World or its inhabitants in any tangible way. As the Ann discovers, the same can’t be said if humanity steals this second device: it will destroy the Worlders’ conception of shared reality, and with it, civlization As World Knows It. If you thought humans were the bad guys in Probability Moon, watch out, because we are all kinds of bastards in Probability Sun.

The culture clash between humans and the people of World, as well as the mechanism of shared reality itself, is much less central to Probability Sun. I don’t miss it; as interesting as shared reality was, Kress explored it fully in the first book, and I think she made the right decision to treat it as backstory and focus on new developments. Instead we get to learn more about the Fallers, with whom humans are at all-out war for our existence. The human military manages to capture a Faller alive—no small feat, for Fallers never allow themselves or their ships to be taken prisoner—and deliver it to Kaufman’s team. Kaufman assigns Marbet Grant to open communication with the Faller. Marbet is a Sensitive, someone with an increased level of empathy and awareness for body language. This makes her a “freak” in the eyes of her contemporary society, so it is a talent she strives to keep hidden. This ostracism is reminiscient of the treatment of the Sleepless in Kress’ series of the same name; it also reminds me of Arlen’s children, from her Hugo-nominated novella Act One.

Marbet slowly develops a rapport with the Faller captive, eventually teaching it the rudiments of sign language. Before she can progress much further, matters go awry and she ends up arrested for treason, although later in the novel we do learn a little more about the Fallers’ knowledge of the artifact Kaufman and his team are studying. Although there is much that could be said about the moral dilemmas Kress poses when it comes to the treatment of the Faller prisoner, to the extraction of the artifact from World, etc., what I really enjoy about this subplot is learning more about the Fallers themselves. The war is part of this trilogy’s backstory, but in Probability Moon the Fallers are essentially a faceless enemy. Now I know more about them (although it’s disappointing that we might be heading toward a climactic genocide dilemma) (TVTropes).

The final main character is civilian physicist Tom Capelo. Unlike the military physicist of Probability Moon, Tom is neither reasonable nor level-headed; in fact, he is a jerk (except to his two daughters). He is the typical “brilliant yet eccentric” scientist du jour, the only one who has a hope in hell of uncovering the physics behind these artifacts. And, of course, his wife was killed by a Faller attack on a civilian colony, so you can guess what happens he finds out Kaufman has been keeping a Faller around on the ship….

I know Kress is striving for Big Moral Dilemmas in this book. There’s the tension between Kaufman and Marbet over the treatment of the Faller, who might be the source of valuable intelligence to the war effort. There’s tension between Kaufman and Tom over whether Tom can figure out how the artifact works and maybe even duplicate it. And there’s the tension between Kaufman and Ann when it comes to the latter’s refusal to endorse the destruction of World’s civilization. Amidst all this, we learn that Lyle Kaufman is not a bad guy, that he hates making these decisions and carrying them out, but that he believes this is genuinely the only way to win the war.

I also know I have harped quite a bit on my dissatisfaction with Kress’ characters in other books, from my experience with the Sleepless trilogy all the way to Probability Moon. Actually, Nancy Kress is beginning to remind me a lot of Robert J. Sawyer: excellent use of plausible physics and technology, but really weak characterization. Nevertheless, I can’t stop reading either of them, because they still write great stories with fascinating themes about society-changing advances in science and technology.

I’m an avid science/technology geek, of course, so Probability Sun’s focus on the physics behind these artifacts is right up my alley. In jumping into our future, Kress has chosen to endorse string theory as the theory-of-everything candidate that wins out in the end, unifying our understanding of quantum mechanics with relativity. Even armed with this knowledge, however, we still don’t know how the alien space tunnels can do what they do—a convenient way for Kress to insert them into her story without having to make the science behind them plausible.

The focus of the science in this book isn’t the physics behind the space tunnels but rather that of their cousin artifacts, the probability weapons that affect whether an atom is going to decay and emit radiation. The scientific speculation gets really heavy in this book, especially compared to Probability Moon. I am able to follow along just, enough to recognize the nods to existing theories—Kress mentions “Calabi-Yau spaces”, which are real things. You’d have to consult a real physicist (or student of physics) to point out where Kress starts to stretch the fabric of the theories (to my knowledge, no one has yet hypothesized the existence of a probability-carrying boson, or “probon” yet), but it’s clear that Kress has done her research and striven for a balance between plausible physics and interesting science fiction. Sometimes the dialogue and exposition is a little heavy—it could have stood being broken up into smaller chunks—but in general I think she gets it right.

Although the colonial dilemma on World and the moral dilemma regarding the Fallers are important parts of Probability Sun, the scientific and philosophical results of Kress’ look at the role of probability in physics is the centrepiece of this story. Always with the human interest angle, Kress reminds us that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, that the release of neurotransmitters in the brain takes place on a small enough scale that quantum effects become important. And at the quantum level, probability—or more specifically, the probability amplitude—dominates. Quantum effects are indeterministic and uncertain, and hence we express them as probabilities. But what conveys those probabilities? Is there some kind of messenger particle, much as photons convey the electromagnetic force, for “probability” force? (Or is our conception of “probability” entirely model-dependent?)

These are big questions and big ideas, and yeah, it makes me head hurt. But I have to give Kress kudos for managing to wrap them in an entertaining story about humanity exploring space and defending itself against an implacable threat. Probability Sun is no less and no more interesting than Probability Moon; the books are remarkably similar, and I expect much the same from Probability Space. But they are definitely “the good stuff” if you are a science lover like me.

My reviews of the Probability trilogy:
← Probability Moon | Probability Space → (forthcoming)

I make no secret about the fact that I love science, and of all the sciences, I will make no secret about my love for physics, for theoretical physics, and for cosmology. These fields help us understand the universe, that crazy thing that’s all around us, and the fact that we have come so far is simply amazing. In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow reflect upon how physics achieves this understanding of the universe, with a particular emphasis on how physics can explain the origin of the universe in a way that removes the need for a deity (whom we’ll call God).

Mlodinow gets his name on the cover, but this is clearly a Hawking book first and foremost. His name is bigger, and the inside of the dust jacket begins, “The first major work in nearly a decade by one of the world’s great thinkers…" (emphasis mine). Sorry, Mlodinow! You’re a nice guy, but I guess you’re just not a “great thinker”. (Actually, although I think I’d heard of him before, this is the first time I have encountered one of his “his” books, and now I can go and mark down a bunch of his other books to read. But I should probably talk about this book now.)

I shall hereafter refer to Hawking and Mlodinow as “H&M” because it tickles my fancy to fantasize that a clothing chain might write a book on physics.

The Grand Design is certainly an engaging treatise, but it is also problematic. I had a lot of fun reading it, and although I have a lot of experience reading about science, I feel confident recommending it for people who might otherwise quirk an eyebrow and say, “Erm … science? I don’t know….” It’s a very short book; it’s extremely conversational in tone, with plenty of analogies; and there are no tests at the end. There are even pictures (albeit not very good ones)! By problematic I mean that, from my own reading and from what I have read of reviews here on Goodreads, H&M confront the role of physics vis-à-vis religion in a way that doesn’t lend itself to clarity and suasion. There seems to be a disconnect between the evidence they present (which is very good) and how they phrase or otherwise communicate the conclusions they draw. This results in an ambiguity that means people will often misinterpret those conclusions or dismiss them out of hand. The Grand Design, one might say, suffers from a grand design flaw.

(I am so sorry for that last sentence.)

I can give an example from the very first page of the book, which, by the way, begins not with a foreword, preface, or introduction, but Chapter 1. It’s true that this first chapter is very much an introductory chapter that lays the ground for the rest of the book, but I have to give H&M and their editors credit for not subjecting us to another scientist pontificating about these guys or a token preface. The conciseness of this book is appreciated, even if it leads to pithy statements like this:

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

As someone who unequivocally supports science as a way to discover and understand the universe, I must nevertheless shake my head at this passage. Taken literally, it seems like an unnecessarily harsh indictment of philosophy, particularly contemporary philosophy, which is very much alive. Even leaving aside philosophy that concerns itself with things other than those questions (such as “Who are we? Where did we come from?”), philosophers routinely discuss developments in science in their philosophy. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that most scientists also become philosophers—as you will see if you read this book, it is clear that H&M are. However, to be fair to them, I think that what H&M are trying to distinguish—albeit sensationally—is the difference between purely attempting to reason about our existence and our origins (rationalism) and using tools to collect data and make inferences about that existence and those origins (empiricism). The program founded in the Western world by Aristotle and raised onto a pedestal by the Enlightenment scientists has failed: we cannot know the world through reason alone. Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Franklin, etc., realized that we must experiment—we have to conduct tests that anyone with the appropriate knowledge and equipment can reproduce. So philosophy alone cannot take us the entire way, and science provides that next crucial step.

If you haven’t read the book, and especially if you approach physics with more wariness than I do, you will find this very weird, but I found the first half of the book much heavier than the last half (with one notable exception). Following that incendiary introductory passage, H&M segue into a deep discussion of what science is, where it is coming from, and where it might be going. Specifically, they introduce a concept called model-dependent realism. And I think this is a fascinating, perhaps even peculiar decision on their part, because I doubt many of their readers would have ever heard of this term—whereas, in comparison, even most laypeople will have heard words like “quantum mechanics” and “general relativity”. H&M have great confidence in their audience, for they have faith that the audience will not be deterred when they drop some philosophy of science in the first chapter.

It makes sense to talk about model-dependent realism, though, because it is relevant to M-theory, which is the group of theories that H&M discuss as a candidate for the ultimate “theory of everything”. And kudos to H&M for trying to pull back the curtain on the somewhat mystical way “theories” are constructed and viewed (at least by some scientists). In particular, I love the analogy they use with a map of the world: we can’t accurately transfer a three-dimensional sphere to a two-dimensional surface, so no matter what projection we use (e.g., Mercator, Robinson), it will always be distorted. So just as different projections provide different but useful models of our world, different theories provide different but useful models of the universe. Some of these theories have been collected under the name “M-theory”, and together they might be “the answer” when none of them alone could make the cut.

Of course, I like model-dependent realism, because I am a realist, and as H&M say, it “short-circuits all this argument and discussion between the realist and anti-realist schools of thought”. I won’t go into realism versus anti-realism here; that is probably best left for a deeper discussion of the philosophy of science. Suffice it to say, science is not about establishing a single, fixed “truth” outlined by a single set of theories. As H&M point out, Ptolemy and Kepler’s model of a geocentric orbit using epicycles is as valid as our heliocentric model—one certainly can regard the rest of the solar system as “orbiting” the Earth. Yet the geocentric model is fiendishly complex and quickly becomes unwieldy if one ever wants to perform actual calculations; the heliocentric model has the advantage of being simpler and more elegant. So these are all thoughts that H&M want us to consider as they launch into an overview of the state of physics in the twenty-first century.

I like that H&M go to the trouble of distinguishing between “probability” as we use the term colloquially and the role probability plays in quantum mechanics. Nancy Kress discusses probability in quantum mechanics at length in Probability Sun, but she only alludes to the difference rather than explicates it. Quantum mechanics is weird and strange and revolutionary precisely because of one word: uncertainty. It blew away the classical world, particularly the deterministic aspect. That pesky Heisenberg uncertainty principle means we’ll never know exactly where a particle is and how fast it is moving. Hence, according to quantum mechanics, asking where a particle is is a meaningless question. Rather, ask what the probability is of a particle being in a particular point in space-time. There is a probability that all the particles in my left arm might actually be in Switzerland right now, but the probability is tiny compared to the probability that they are, in fact, attached to my left shoulder! (And for this I am thankful.)

Similarly, The Grand Design finally clarified for me what a boson is. I just have these song lyrics stuck in my head:

They suppose that particles have mass because
There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon — it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ***
And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force
And makes particles take orders from the field that is its source.

If you haven’t already seen it, the Large Hadron Rap is one of the most amazing science raps I have ever seen, and it does an excellent job at explaining what scientists are trying to achieve using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However, I still wasn’t clear on this idea of bosons and force fields. Something about the way H&M explain bosons in The Grand Design finally made it click for me:

… according to classical theories, forces are transmitted by fields. But in quantum ield theories the force fields are pictured as being made of various elementary particles called bosons, which are force-carrying particles that fly back and forth between matter particles, transmitting the forces.

So the field and particle are dual concepts, one of which applies to classical theories (like relativity) while the other applies to quantum theory. Particles are the language of quantum mechanics, and so force fields have been replaced by a particle that conveys each force: photons for electromagnetism, gluons for the strong force, W and Z bosons for the weak force, and perhaps gravitons for gravity (we haven’t found them yet!). That’s really cool, and I am glad H&M cleared that up for me. This is why I read so many books that cover the same scientific concepts, even similar books by one author: each different method of explaining a concept aids my understanding in some small way.

This kind of incremental learning is present in science as well. H&M mention, “Modern technology is sensitive enough to allow us to perform many sensitive tests of general relativity, and it has passed every one”. That relativity is testable and falsifiable—and, correspondingly, has passed all of the tests we have thus far devised—lends great credence to its accuracy as a scientific model. There are, of course, more subtle questions about the roles of testability and falsification play in judging a scientific theory (e.g.: Evolution is arguably not testable, nor is string theory.) What’s important is that H&M emphasize that science is not some kind of mysterious black box where we plug in data in order to obtain inviolable laws of nature. So that’s why I’m fine with people criticizing, say, evolution, because all science should be open to criticism—but the moment that criticism rests on an objection like “it’s only a ‘theory’!” I will stop listening. Our scientific principles are theories because science is self-correcting and constantly improving upon and revising those principles. That is why science is so powerful, so important, and so very cool.

By far the most mind-boggling concept in The Grand Design comes at the end, and it is the exception to my earlier remark that I find the first part of the book the heaviest in terms of mental exertion. The ultimate thesis of this book is that we can explain the origin of the universe without invoking a creator deity, a God. I think it is very important to note that H&M are not saying that science can disprove the existence of God, nor is that an objective of The Grand Design. While it is clear that H&M, like myself, do not believe a God exists, this is not their argument. Instead, they are merely removing the necessity of God’s existence. I can see how one can misinterpret the book—hence my initial comments about the disconnect and design flaw. H&M’s scepticism is vividly demonstrated, and they raise some of the problems with attempting to fit God into cosmogony—namely, if God created the universe, who created God? If the answer is that “God is eternal and has always been here,” then why can’t we just replace “God” with “the universe” and leave it at that?

This might seem impossible, for we know the universe is not eternal in that sense: we can measure its age (with some degree of precision), and it’s only 13.7 billion years old! Moreover, we know that the universe will eventually reach some sort of end, whether it is heat death, a Big Crunch, etc. H&M resolve this, and that unfortunate singularity at the origin of the universe that prevents our physics from explaining anything, by saying:

In the early universe—when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory—there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the “beginning” of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe.

Read that twice: asking what happened “before” the universe existed is meaningless, because time itself did not exist as we regard it today. If that sounds too strange and too incredible to accept, believe me: you are certainly not alone. Much like my experience with bosons, I am only now, after confronting this several times, beginning to wrap my head around this explanation. We are just so obsessed with our view of linear time that thinking of a universe where time functions differently boggles our intuition. It is definitely the most difficult concept H&M present in this book, and as with some of their other explanations, I do not think they entirely succeed in presenting it the way they probably hoped.

The Grand Design is ambitious. It is also brief and conversational, as physics books go, and at times this runs up against that ambition. As someone who loves the philosophy of science, loves physics, and has read quite a lot of books about physics, I enjoyed The Grand Design and found it enlightening. Although I recommend it to others with less experience, because it really is a very accessible book, I do so with one reservation: if this is your first physics book, don’t let it be your last. There are so many good ones out there, and while The Grand Design is a fine place to start, it is not the last word on the theory of everything.