When I first ran into The Da Vinci Code I knew it was
nonsense; as history buff, I already had enough general historical
knowledge under my belt that it smelled really bad. Nevertheless, it
prompted me to go out and see what I could find on the specifics, and
this book is the first fruits of that.

The History of the Church is the earliest history we have of the
Christian faith in its first few centuries. Eusebius was born around 260
AD, and wrote most of the book between 315 and 325 AD. It begins with
Jesus and the apostles, and traces the apostolic succession down to the
early reign of Emperor Constantine. Along the way Eusebius discusses a
variety of persecutions, martyrs, heresiarchs, and the like, along with a
number of comments on the canon of the New Testament, and in so doing he
quotes a vast number of sources at great length. Indeed, in some ways, that’s the chief
value of Eusebius; he wasn’t an original thinker, but he had a large,
well-stocked library and quoted from it liberally. Many of the passages
he cites we know only from his quotations; where we have the source
documents as well, he is shown to be fairly trustworthy.

So what did I learn from Eusebius?

First, that the canon of the New Testament, although still somewhat fluid
even up to the end of Eusebius’ life, was nevertheless pretty well
thrashed out. All of the books we currently have in the New Testament
were well-known to Eusebius and his sources, many of which date from the
first and second centuries, and were liberally quoted by them. In
Eusebius’ day there was still some controversy about Revelations, Paul’s
Letter to the Hebrews (Eusebius maintained that it had indeed been
written by Paul, but in Hebrew, and was translated into Greek by Clement
of Rome), and some of the so-called “Catholic” letters. On the other
hand, the various “gnostic” gospels so beloved of certain scholars these
days as holding hidden knowledge–the Gospel of Thomas, for example–were
also well known to Eusebius and his predecessors, and were generally
dismissed as bogus. (The discussion often involves comments on the style
of the various authors; it sounds quite contemporary to my ears.)
In short, the New Testament was too well known and
too widely quoted in earlier times to be the work of Constantine, as
Dan Brown would have it.

Second, the early Christians were dedicated to (among other things)
preserving the faith as they had received it from the apostles, and as a
result they had a short way with heresy.

Most of you are probably now picturing witch hunts and
auto-da-fés, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Christianity was never spread by violence until it became married to the
power of the state by Constantine, and even after that it was spread
violently much less frequently than most people would suppose. But
be that as it may, in the time period of which I’m writing Christianity spread from
person to person without any form of coercion–the early Christians had
no power, and hence no way to coerce anyone.

The way they dealt with heresy was manifold. Heretics were shunned.
Books and pamphlets were written refuting their heresies; a number of
these have come down to us. If a bishop
should fall into heresy a synod, or council, would be convened and the
matter thrashed out; if the council found that the bishop was indeed in
error, he would be stripped of his position. If heretics repented, they
were received back into the fellowship–but were never again given
positions of responsibility. And that was the extent of it. Some heresies and their purveyors persisted for decades, but the early Christians stood firm against them, and in the end they came to nothing.

It’s notable that heresy was usually
linked to a lust for power and wealth; even allowing for exageration,
Paul of Samosata sounds like a third-century Jim Bakker.

This is yet another reason why the so-called “gnostic” gospels were
abandoned–the church as a whole, which at that time was a collection of
city churches united in one faith but distributed over the whole of the
Roman empire, judged them false and didn’t preserve them, because they
didn’t accord with the faith received from the apostles.

Third, the early Christians were willing to die for their faith. It was customary for
Roman citizens to make certain sacrifices during the course of the year;
and in many cities, especially in Asia, the emperor or his predecessors
were accorded divine honors. The early Christians refused to have
anything to do with such sacrifices, which led to the initial waves of
persecution. Christians were accused of a variety of evil practices
(including incest and baby-eating), they were imprisoned, they were
flogged, they were burned at the stake, they were given to wild beasts in
the arena, they were starved, they were torn apart and thrown into the
sea to feed the fishes, they were tortured in various ways, periodically,
all through the first three centuries of the church.

What impressed me particularly was the way most of the martyrs died. They had
taken to heart Christ’s saying from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are
you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of
evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is
your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets
who were before you.” Under the torture, some certainly renounced their
faith; of these, some few repented later. But most seem to have gone to
their deaths rejoicing that they had been thought worthy to suffer and die
as witnesses to Christ. “Witness” — that’s what the word “martyr” means.

It’s not that these early Christians were so eager to die that they went
looking for trouble. But if trouble came to them, they were determined
to die as well as they possibly could.
We’re all familiar with the image of the Christians being thrown to the
lions; it was even used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. (Yosemite Sam, the
captain of the Imperial Guard, had to find a victim for Emperor Nero.)
What I didn’t know is that sometimes the lions, for whatever reason,
balked–so that the martyrs had to encourage them to eat. And they did.

Think about that for a moment. It seems crazy–until you remember the
pearl of great price.

As a follow-on to Eusebius, I’ve found a book that has material written
by four of his sources: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin
Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Clement and Ignatius date from the first
century; Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons from the second. (As an
indication of the size of Roman empire and the rapid spread of
Christianity, note that Irenaeus was the head of a sizeable church in the
city of Lyons, in what’s now France.) It took me many months to work my
way through Eusebius, so don’t hold your breath.

This is the sequel to Sagan’s Idlewild, and I confess I’m not
sure what to make of it.

It begins about 18 years after the conclusion of its predecessor. The
human race has been all but destroyed by the Black Ep virus; the only
survivors are Halloween and five others, and the children they have since
brought into the world. Their chief goal (indeed, their reason for being)
is to find a permanent cure for Black Ep and then repopulate the world.
But Halloween and his age-mates didn’t have what you’d call a normal
childhood with a stable home-life, and raising children is a tricky
business indeed. Most of the kids are doing OK, having normal adolescent
angst, but one or two of them, well…

In fact, that’s probably the best way to describe this book–it’s about
parenting, and how to raise sociopaths. As such, I don’t find it
entirely convincing; the proportion of truly amoral people in this book
seems to me to be a little too high.

There’s an interesting note on the effect of a religious upbringing. Five
of the kids are raised in the Sufi tradition (Sufi is a mystical branch of
Islam). The most stable kid in the whole bunch is one of these; he’s also
the most devout. He’s balanced by his two older brothers, who had the
same upbringing; one abandons his faith for atheism and the bright
lights, while the other abandons Sufism (Sufiism? Sufi-ism?) for a more literal
reading of the Koran and becomes mightily annoying to all around him.

On the whole, I don’t think I like this book as much as its predecessor. It
takes a while to get started, and it’s less convincing. Moreover, the
point I draw from it–that kids need a moderate, firm level of
discipline, giving them neither too much nor too little freedom of choice
and experience–seems obvious to me. But then, I grew up in a functional
family.

Bottom line: I dunno. I’m curious as to what happens next, though.

I just discovered an album on iTunes Music Store that I do not believe I will buy, though I confess I wouldn’t mind listening to it once or twice. It’s called “When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You’d Hear” and it features some very odd tracks:

• CSN&Y’s song “Ohio”, performed by Devo.
• Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey”, performed by Don Ho!
• AC-DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”, performed by Leslie Gore!! (With a certain amount of flair, I might add, though it’s a far cry from “It’s My Party”.)

Wow.

And here’s a piece that claims that Peter Jackson hasn’t given us the authoritative The Lord of the Rings movie treatment, but only an interpretation of Tolkien’s book; and that (with the cost of special effects continuing to decline, and the quality of those effects continuing to increase) there will be remakes every twenty years or so.

Considering that Jackson was not the first attempt to bring The Lord of the Rings to the big screen, it’s hard for me to disagree.

Here’s an amusing take on the Arts and Arts funding; for me, the payoff comes in the very last panel. (Via Peeve Farm.)

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a representative of Penguin Books
(Penguin Books! How cool is that?)
whether I’d like to review a new science fiction novel by Nick Sagan, son of
the famous Carl Sagan. It sounded interesting, so I said OK. My only
concern was that the book was a sequel to Sagan’s first book, which I’d
not read. He responded by sending me both books, for
which I am truly grateful.

I admit I opened the book with some trepidation–Sagan has a famous name,
sure, but can he tell a story? Turns out he can, and with style. He
begins with the hoary-but-effective plot contrivance, the man with
amnesia. Our hero wakes up, injured and alone, and unable to remember
where he is, how he got hurt, or his own name. Bits of memory begin to
creep back as he explores his surroundings–his quite remarkably outré
surroundings. He lives in a house shaped like a cathedral, complete with
gargoyles; he is served by nightgaunts; his name, apparently, is
“Halloween.” And it’s almost certain that someone is trying to kill him.

Meanwhile, a global pandemic is raging, and people are dying in vast
numbers. The killer is a virus called Black Ep, it’s invariably fatal,
and there’s no known cure. Worse, it has an incubation period of years,
and is highly contagious, so virtually everyone on the planet has it. A
small team is working against time on a scheme to defeat the virus and
preserve mankind from extinction.

And how are these two disparate plot elements related? Therein hangs
the tale, which I won’t spoil for you.

As I say, Sagan’s a good storyteller; he kept me interested and turning
pages, not an easy feat with four kids in the house and the Olympics on
TV. If I have a complaint, it’s that there’s little here that I haven’t
seen before. Even if he built the story from familiar parts, though,
the resulting edifice still has a number of striking features and
surprises, and there are a number of absolutely images. I particularly
enjoyed it when Halloween throws a luau and has nightgaunts in Hawaiian
shirts passing out the drinks and canapés. And if I’m occasionally
reminded of Roger Zelazny, or Greg Bear, or even
Stephen King, I suppose that’s no bad thing in a first novel.

August is shaping up to to be the month with the least number of books read and reviewed since I started putting reviews on-line seven-and-a-half years ago. It’s partially because I’ve been putting a lot of time into Snit, partially because of the Olympics (remember them?), but mostly because I’ve been otherwise occupied…..playing video games.

Yes, it’s true. If I were a member of the Truly Literary Blogosphere Establishment, I’d probably have to turn in my badge and my tie tack; fortunately, my deep and abiding love of genre fiction has saved me from such a humiliating fate.

And the game I’ve been playing recently is an RPG called Dark Cloud 2, which, frankly, is almost too goofy for words while remaining an enjoyable game. Computer games aren’t known for having deep, complex, satisfying plots, but this one is silly beyond the conventions of the medium.

You start the game as Max, a kid who likes to build things. He’s the son of the wealthiest man in town, but he prefers to spend his time doing odd-jobs for Cedric the inventor. You live in the little town of Palm Brinks, which has been completely shut off from the outside world for some years now. No one knows why, and no one really seems to care, and somehow life goes on–with a pretty good standard of living, needless to say. Heaven knows where all of the manufactured goods come from.

Anyway, a circus comes to town. A circus comes to town? But Palm Brinks has been completely shut off– Oh, never mind. A circus comes to town, and the ringleader, an evil-looking clown with an evil-laugh, is after a red stone that Max wears on a chain around his neck. Max is forced to flee into the sewers (you knew there’d be sewers didn’t you? You haven’t played this kind of game much if you didn’t expect sewers) where you have to fight for your life against sewer rats, frogs, evil mincing clowns, evil balloon-headed creatures, and a variety of stranger things. You’re armed only with a small pistol and your trusty adjustable wrench, which by the way makes a really good club.

After you leave the sewers, you discover that the reason Palm Brinks has been cut off from the outside world is that the outside world is almost completely destroyed. And then you meet a red-headed girl named Monica, who wields a great big sword and a magic armband, and has a blue stone that matches your red stone. Whoa. Plus, she’s from the FUTURE. Wow! Plus, she has a pony-tail that goes down to her knees, and looks really cute in pumpkin shorts. Woo-hoo!

Pumpkin shorts? That’s what the game calls them. I don’t see anything pumpkin-like about them, myself.

Anyway, Monica tells you that the future isn’t what it used to be; somebody’s been changing things in the past to destroy the future. She’s come back to fix things, and she wants your help. Fixing things, it turns out, involves the restoration of “origin points”. You go to the place in the Past (that is, in Max’s era) that matches a place in the Future, and then you build houses, persuade people to come live in them, and so forth, so that everything that’s needful is there for it to develop into what it’s supposed to be in Monica’s time. As you do this, you can travel to and from the Future and see how things are working out. And really, you have to do this–the reason you pick the places to restore that you do is because there are people in the future whose help you need who won’t exist unless you restore their places.

In the meantime, you spend a lot of time fighting your way through dark forests, deep canyons, sea caves, and who knows what all, slaying fearsome monsters, collecting the raw materials you need to do your building, and levelling-up your weapons. That’s right; the game system is a little odd. In most RPGs, your character gains endurance, strength, and so forth as he or she gains experience. In Dark Cloud 2, it’s your weapons that gain experience. At the moment, for example, Max is wielding the dreaded Poison Wrench and a machine-pistol called Star Breaker, while Monica has a claymore.

Oh, and occasionally you have to go fishing. And sometimes you have to play golf. No, really. When you’re not indulging your photography hobby, which is essential to completing the game.

You fight a variety of weird monsters, including Auntie Medusa, the Weird Old Spider Lady, a variety of walking skeletons and elemental spirits, vicious moles, walking plants, pirates, walking fish, tree creatures, golems, elephants, dragons, the Rainbow Butterly, weird robot things, and dog statues, among other things. You meet a variety of odd people. You go many odd places, and get to listen to lots of awful nonsense about sages.

It’s a Japanese game, of course. Monica the cute redhead should have given that away; every Japanese video game I’ve played has a cute redhead, though usually she has pigtails that stick straight out to the sides instead of a ponytail.

It’s a fun game, though, and I’ve been enjoying it–even if I’ve been fast-forwarding through some of the dialog because I don’t want to try to explain it to the kids, because it’s so doggone goofy.

Anyway, I’m about halfway through. I’m trying to fit in some books, though. Wish me luck.

If The Lord of the Rings is about resisting great evil in one fell
swoop, the Lord of the Isles series is about coping with one
damned thing after another. Through to Drake’s excellent storytelling we
get to come along for the ride, and a fun ride it is.

The world of the Isles consists largely of ocean, with a ring of largish
islands (think England rather than Hawaii) that extends from the tropics
on the south to the cold regions of the north. At one time the Isles
were united under a single king, and it was in that time that
civilization in the Isles reached its zenith. The united kingdom fell
apart a thousand years prior to the beginning of our story, but the
memory of that Golden Age is so strong that even now the lords of the
island of Ornifal style themselves “King of the Isles”.

The kingdom fell after the death of Carus, last King of the Isles.
He was approaching the island of Yole with his warfleet (the Duke of Yole
having rebelled) when the Duke’s wizard sent him and his warfleet to the
bottom of the ocean. The Duke of Yole was thus saved from having to
fight Carus’ army, but he didn’t live to enjoy it; the forces raised by
his wizard inadvertantly sank Yole and all its inhabitants beneath the waves.

It seems that every thousand years, the forces of magic are strengthened
for a time. Hedge-wizards become strong; great wizards become strong beyond all
imagining–and beyond their own understanding. The Duke of Yole’s wizard
saw that he could drown Carus, fleet and all, but the repercussions were
(one presumes) rather a surprise to him.

This increase in magical power has two effects. First,
dark-lord-wannabees come out of the woodwork. They have great ambition,
and great power, but usually little experience. Second, powers dormant
for a thousand years awaken, and endeavour to forward plans which might
span millenia. Neither effect is particularly conducive to peace for the
Isles and their inhabitants.

Enter Garric-or-Reise, the son of a tavern-keeper in a small village on
the island of Haft, and the lineal descendant of King Carus. He’s given
a medallion by his father, a medallion that commemorates the coronation
of Carus himself. And after he begins to wear it, he finds Carus
speaking to him, first in his dreams, and then later in his waking
moments of abstraction. Carus has knowledge of politics and warfare and
royal courts and hand-to-hand combat to share with his descendant; and
also the wisdom that comes from 20-20 hindsight and a millenia to reflect
upon one’s own failings. Garric brings his own contribution to the
party; he’s big and tough, full of peasant common sense, and thanks to
his father, once a court functionary, he can read and is thoroughly
grounded in the classic authors. He’s no dummy, which is a good thing,
for Garric’s task is to reunite the Isles so that
they can stand together against the forces of evil, whatever they might
be.

That’s the premise of the series, and it’s a surprisingly good one.
There’s no single Dark Lord to defeat; Garric must deal with both the
purely human troubles of courts and politics and ambition, and also the
myriad magical threats to the Isles. As a result, the series is nicely
open-ended–each book deals with one cosmic threat, while advancing the
story of Garric and his friends. As I say, it’s just one damned thing
after another.

Garric isn’t alone, of course. There’s his friend Cashel, the shepherd.
Cashel’s a big guy–the sort who’s so wide he looks short until you get
close and realize you’re looking up at him. He carries a metal-shod
hickory staff, and when he starts to spin and swing it he becomes the
nearest thing to an immovable object you’re likely to run into–unless
it’s an irresistable force you’re in need of. He’s not too quick
mentally, our Cashel, but he’s got his head on straight, he always
does what he thinks is right, and his instincts are usually correct. Oh,
and he’s only half-human. It’s not entirely clear what the other half is,
but it makes him almost impossible to defeat.

Then there’s Cashel’s twin sister Ilna, the weaver. She’s smarter than
Cashel, and colder than Cashel, but just as concerned with doing the
right thing, as she sees it. She’s a master of her craft, and thanks to
a mis-step in the first book of the series she can weave patterns that’ll
turn your head inside out if you look at them. She’s interested in
Justice, is our Ilna, and she definitely makes Mercy look good.

And finally there’s Garric’s sister Sharina, who compared with her
brother and his friends is almost refreshingly normal. She’s just
strong, mentally tough, able to take care of herself in any situation
(you learn how to do that, growing up in a tavern), and she has the most
amazing knack for making friends when she needs them. (I do not mean
that salaciously; she and Cashel are a definite item.)

If the books have a fault, it’s that there’s a bit of a formula to them.
In each book, you know that our heroes are going to be faced with both
political and magical problems. You know that the magical threats are
going to appear to be coming from several different sources, but they are
all going to be linked together in the end. You know that several of our
heroes are going to be in some way translated to other magical
worlds/planes/eras, and have to find their way back home. You know the
bad guys are going down, especially if Cashel is facing them.

And yet, even with all that, none of the books has repeated the pattern
exactly; and the latest book, Goddess of the Ice Realm, has a
truly chilling twist at the end–no pun intended. Seriously.

When I read the fourth book, I thought the series might be on the verge
of becoming tedious–but I admitted at the time that I’d read it while
afflicted with a bad cold, which might have affected my opinion. On
re-reading it, I think that on the whole it was better than I first
thought, but still a little silly. The new book is better, and I’m
looking forward to the next installment.

Ian links to an on-line quiz on Greek Mythology on which he scored 6 out of 10. Yours truly got 10 out of 10, which I attribute to several causes.

First, as a youth I steeped myself in the myths of Ancient Greece (really, I did. I can picture the covers of the books I had even now). I haven’t paid much attention to them in the last 25 years or so, but some things you never forget.

Second, it was a multiple choice quiz. Even if I didn’t know the answer to a particular question, some answers just seemed more mythological than others. There’s one about how a chariot race was won by a clever ruse, and one of the four just seemed a little more worthy of being remembered than the others.

Third, Ian seems to have (inadvertantly, I’m sure) saved the URL of the quiz in such a way that it preserved his answers. You might want to fix that, Ian…..

Since my initial post about the iTunes Music Store, I’ve bought a few more tunes. Since there was a fair amount of interest the first time, I thought I’d list them.

Jump, Jive and Wail, by Brian Setzer. Me, I like the Louis Prima version, but Jane likes this one.

Pink Cadillac, by Bruce Springsteen. This one is just fun and silly, and man, it goes.

I’ll Make A Man Out Of You, from the Mu Lan soundtrack. This is another pick of Jane’s, but it’s a darn good scene, I have to admit.

Don’t Bring Me Down and Mr. Blue Sky, by Electric Light Orchestra. The first brings back memories of high school dances; as to the latter, it’s the closest Jeff Lynne ever got to recording a Beatles tune, and it’s fascinating to see just how close–and how far–it was.

Tusk, by Fleetwood Mac. I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan, particularly, but this one is just so delightfully weird. And anyway, Jane spent a year-and-a-half at USC.

Bad to the Bone and Who Do You Love?, by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. There was a time when I got really tired of George Thorogood, but even then I liked these two songs. We’ve also got a recording of Bo Diddley singing Who Do You Love?, which is arguably more authentic, but Thorogood’s is the version I heard first and know best.

The Battle of New Orleans, by Johnny Horton. I needed this to counterpoint The Battle of Camp Kookamonga, by Homer and Jethro.

Dixie Chicken and Let It Roll, by Little Feat. Let It Roll is the one I went looking for, but I ended up getting both of them.

Born To Be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride, by Steppenwolf. ’nuff said.

Something in the Air, by Thunderclap Newman. They made one album, and had one hit. I used to have the album; this is the hit. You’ve probably heard it, and don’t know it by name.