Different Books at Different Times

One of my favorite things about books is how the same book can seem completely different at different times in your life. The best books can be profitably read again and again, with new insights each time. There have been a few books I tried to read, but I found that I had no enthusiam for them. For example Farmer Giles of Ham, by J. R. R. Tolkien. I found the short story rather boring the first time I read it, but I came back to it a few years later, and I greatly enjoyed it. Conversely, there have been books I really liked the first time I read them, like The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson, that I had to put down unfinished on a second reading. I hope it means my taste is getting better, but there really is no telling.

After recently finishing Burning Tower, I moved back to the Seafort Saga, by David Feintuch. I started these books two years ago on the recommendation of my late friend John J. Reilly. John's website, now defunct [but available on the Wayback Machine], had a review of the 5 of 7 books in the series that were available in 1996.

Who says they don’t write space-opera like they used to? I do. The Seafort Saga is a good example of how science fiction bears the imprint of the period in which it was written.

In some ways, this series might have been written in the early 1950s. Certainly the author makes assumptions that science fiction writers have been making for fifty years. Thus, a way has been found to travel faster than light and the United Nations has become a world government. More generally, certain aspects of life in the future closely resemble life in the author’s favorite area of the past, which in this case seems to be Queen Victoria’s navy.

John was my intellectual mentor on the internet, so I see things through lenses I got from him. I got into this series because I am interested in the cycles of history, and Feintuch created a world where the Second Religiousness took the form of a unified Christianity with a distinctly Anglican flavor. In fact, the whole world has a very English flavor, the United Nations Navy in space is an imitation of the Victorian Navy, and the social mores of the world have an early Victorian flair to them.

The first time I read this book, I was struck by the character of the eponymous Nicholas Seafort. I think he seems a lot like me, in a bad way. Whereas Colonel John Falkenberg is the man I wish I were, Nicholas Seafort is the man I am afraid I am. Perfectionistic and self-critical to a fault, alternating between decisive action and the brink of despair, awkward with the men under his command, apt to legal literalism, and quite lucky. I found the series a bit too depressing, and I had to put the book down.

The second time through, now I am struck by the kinds of choices Seafort makes in command, comparing and constrasting them with other novels about command that I like (cf. Pournelle corpus), and my own actions as the leader of an engineering team. I'm just enough older to feel more comfortable in my own skin, even though I still see in Seafort something of myself. I also see the strictness of the neo-Victorian navy's regulations in a different light. The regs are interpreted with an eye to the long term stability of the entire system, rather than looking primarily to see that justice be done here and now.

Burning Tower Book Review

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
$7.99; 655 pages

I reviewed Burning Tower along with Burning City a year ago. I recently re-read them both, so this seemed like a good time to expand upon my rather cursory review of Burning Tower.

Burning Tower picks up a year after Burning City concludes, Yangin-Atep is myth, the Greenroad is open, and no one knows how Tep's Town will survive exposure to the outside world. The focus of the book is on the budding romance between Sandry, the finest young Lord of his generation, and Burning Tower, the youngest of Whandall Feathersnake's children. Whereas in Whandall's story, we saw an entire lifetime in one book, Burning Tower slows down time so that we can see Sandry and Tower begin to love one another, and overcome the obstacles that could keep them apart.

Sandry and Tower come from different worlds. Sandry is Lord Sandry, representative of the legalistic and militaristic Lords of Lordshills. We get to see much more of the Lords' society in Burning Tower, see what they do and why they do it. Tower's mother and father represent the other two factions of Tep's Town, the kinless and the Lordkin, but Tower is more a child of the Hemp Road.

Dynastic politics is both bane and boon to Sandry and Tower. Normally, Lords marry within their own kind, but Whandall's escape from Tep's Town and subsequent success as a merchant prince has both elevated his status and set in motion a chain of events that threaten to undermine the power of the Lords, and the stability of Tep's Town. The possibility of marrying into a trading empire allows Sandry the opportunity to follow his heart, and it leads him from Tep's Town, across the Mohave, up the Mogollon Rim, and past Meteor Crater to Aztlan.

As a secret history, Niven and Pournelle based this book upon existing art, legend, and archeology, with their own special twists. I greatly enjoyed their version of the foundation myth of the Aztecs. There is a little bit of fun metahistory, some unusual tidbits thrown in for color, and perhaps just a bit of snark towards bureaucracy. A really, really, fun book. Anyone who likes Niven and Pournelle will like this one, and fans of secret histories should as well.

My other book reviews

CrossFit 2013-03-27

Warmup 500m row

Grace

• 30 clean and jerks [40 kg]

Time 6:40

Last time 3:59

Dessert 2x20 back extensions

CrossFit 2013-03-21

Warmup

• 500m row

Time 1:56

Back squats

• 9-9-7-5-3-1
• 40-50-60-60-70-80kg

Dessert

• 15  pullups

CrossFit 2013-03-18

A random day. I was feeling sore and stiff, so I just did whatever I felt like.

• 500m row
• 50 back extensions
• 50 kettlebell swings [20 kg]
• 50 bench presses [95#]
• 25 ring dips

Tire Jumping

CrossFit 2013-03-13

Habemus Papam! This one is Italian in honor of our new Pope Francis.

• 1/2 mile run
• 21 tossing Italian twists
• 1/2 mile run
• 15 tossing Italian twists
• 1/2 mile run
• 9 tossing Italian twists

Time 15:20

Last time 15:41

Thumos

The Art of Maniliness has a good post today on Thumos [θυμός]. It reminded me of something I read just yesterday on James Chastek's Just Thomism, The American Student.

Here is the passage from Got Thumos?:

Why is it that many men seem so lacking in thumos today?

Thumos is a potent force – left wild it destroys, but harnessed it creates. The thumos of man is responsible for the lion’s share of society’s progress.

Yet in our modern day, instead of helping men to harness their thumos for positive ends, society has decided it is better to neuter the force altogether. To protect some people from getting hurt, we’ve tried to breed it out of men, even if it means its positive effects will be sacrificed along with the negative. It is like getting rid of electricity, and all the benefits that have come with it, because some people get electrocuted.

From an early age, boys are taught to sit still, to be quiet. Physical fighting of any kind results in suspension. Competition is frowned upon because it means some will be left out and feel bad. Rewards and recognition are distributed equally; everyone is given a prize to avoid hurt feelings. As a result, boys feel less motivated to fight to rise to the top.

We’ve unfortunately come to think of elements of thumos, like anger, as entirely bad. Instead, what we need is an understanding that anger is neither bad nor good – it’s all in how it’s directed. There is such a thing as righteous indignation. The anger that drives one to stand up for that which is just and right. If you snuff out the force that makes bad men hurt the weak, you also eliminate the force that moves good men to protect the vulnerable.

Plato argued that you didn’t breed fierceness out of men, you trained it. Men of the warrior class, he argued, should be trained to neither be watchdogs who barked at everything – even innocent noises — nor watchdogs that only whimpered and rolled over when someone invaded the house. They were gentle with those they knew, and fierce with strangers of ill-intent. Their thumos was ready, if needed, to fight.

And here is the passage from The American Student:

-Within the educational system, the nature of little boys is met with an urgency, severity and unrelenting violence that rivals any hagiographical story of a desert monk chastising his nature with penance and prayer. If the educational system attacked concupiscence and the sense appetites with the same intensity that they presently attack masculine irascibility, aggression, and lack of ability to sit still and pay attention, then within five years we would have ten million six year old boys living in the wilderness on the top of fifty foot poles.

Thumos is simply something that we cannot abide, and so we aim to stamp it out. Thumos was a big element of C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man. He called its absence, men without chests, since thumos was said to reside in the chest, while reason was in the head and emotion in the belly. The relevant bit here, however, is this:

...we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still posseses.

Good luck on making those little boys sit still.

CrossFit 2013-03-11

Warmup

Run 1/4 mile at 7 MPH

Miracle Mile

3 rounds of:

• Run 1/4 mile
• 15 pullups
• 30 push presses [2x15#]
• 45 bodyweight squats 

Finish with 1/4 mile run.

Time 27:48

Last time 26:59

Cooldown back extensions on GHD

10-10-15

OREO Separator Machine

It is astonishing that technology that was unthinkable in manufacturing 50 years ago is now so cheap and so easy to do that you can play around with it. Also, the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.