Category Archives: Books

The Price of the Stars

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The Price of the Stars, by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, is an old favorite which is out-of-print in paperback but is currently on sale for the Kindle for $2.99, one of Amazon’s 100 Books for $3.99 or Less for May. I snagged a copy, and spent some pleasant hours getting re-acquainted.

How to explain the Mageworlds series, of which this is the first book?

Suppose that Han Solo and Princess Leia got married, and had three kids. The first was born during the war itself, and was raised by Chewbacca’s family; he’s a medic in the navy. The middle boy is a Jedi, apprenticed to Luke, the current head of the Jedi order; and the youngest, a girl, is a pilot like her father.

Then Leia is murdered, and Han gives his daughter the keys to the Millenium Falcon if she’ll find out whodunnit. Of course, all three siblings get involved.

That’s sort of the premise of this book, except that it isn’t actually Star Wars fan fiction. The backstory is somewhat similar in its broad outlines, but even if the inspiration is clear the authors have taken it and done something distinctly different with it. I’ve enjoyed the whole series, and especially this book and its immediately sequel. Recommended, if you like space opera.

Thomas Minus Aristotle

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I’m continuing my slow progress through Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (slow because I’m mostly reading it while eating lunch at work on those days when I eat by myself) and I’m rather enjoying it. I’m finding it much more accessible than Gilson’s The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which I attempted a couple of years ago and didn’t get too far with. (To be fair, I think I’d have an easier time with it now than I did then.)

As I commented last week, Gilson is concerned to delineate in exactly how there can be such a thing as a “Christian Philosophy” distinct from theology; and his argument is that there are truths, accessible by philosophical methods, that occurred to Christian philosophers but not to the earlier Greeks purely because they were suggested by Judeo-Christian revelation. The neat thing is that in order to support this claim, Gilson needs to lay out very carefully how scholastic philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, differs from its Greek antecedents.

The result, so far, is fascinating. The books I’ve read previously have generally talked about Thomas and Aristotle at the same time in much the same way. While recognizing that the former received and extended the latter’s thought, they have generally discussed them together, as a unit. And yet there are significant differences.

As an example (and the subject of Gilson’s fourth chapter), Aristotle has the notion of the unmoved mover, the entity ultimately responsible for all motion in the universe. Remember that for Aristotle, “motion” includes all change, including things coming to be and ceasing to be. But for Aristotle, this unmoved mover is simply stirring the pot. The universe has always existed, and new things that come to be are made out of previous things that existed. Most things are in flux, and it’s the unmoved mover that makes that happen. There is no notion of creation in the Christian sense in Aristotle. The unmoved mover is in some sense pure Thought; but it is not (as Thomas would say) Being itself.

In Thomas’ view, and using essentially the same arguments as Aristotle, the unmoved mover becomes the cause, not only of motion, but of being. As Being itself (“I am who am,” as the burning bush tells Moses), the unmoved mover is responsible not only for the changes in things but for their very existence, for the existence of all things other than itself. This is consistent with Aristotle’s understanding; but it goes further and deeper.

In short, Gilson is casting light on both Thomas and Aristotle, and helping me to see both in new ways. I’m curious to see what’s coming next.

Gai-Jin

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James Clavell’s Shogun concerns the rise of the Tokugawa (in the novel, “Toranaga”) Shogunate in Japan around 1600 AD. The Tokugawa dominated Japan for over two-hundred and fifty years until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, an event that set the stage for the modernization of Japan (and ultimately for the Pacific theater of WWII). Fittingly, Gai-Jin, the last of James Clavell’s novels, is a sequel to both Shogun and Tai-pan, taking place in the European enclave of Yokohama in the early 1860’s.

There are two major threads. The first concerns Toranaga Yoshi, a descendant of the first Toranaga and member of the Council of Five that governs the Shogunate. (The current Shogun is a petulant, not terribly bright boy of sixteen who was chosen for the convenience of the Council of Five.) His goal is to abolish the Council of Five and become Shogun himself.

He is opposed not only by other members of the Council and a variety of daimyos (feudal lords) but also by the shishi, ronin samurai who have dedicated themselves to restoring the power of the Japanese Emperor and to the expulsion of the gai-jin, that is, the Westerners.

In fact, the presence of the gai-jin is the dominant political issue of the day, and the various powers in Japanese life are divided primarily about how to expel them and the extent to which it will be necessary to adopt Western ways and technology in order to do so.

The second major thread involves Malcolm Struan, grandson of Dirk Struan, the first tai-pan of the Noble House, and son of Culum and Tess Struan. As the book begins, Malcom is riding near Yokohama when he is attacked by a shishi and is nearly killed; his father dies, and he becomes the ostensible tai-pan of the Noble House; and he falls in love with a beautiful French girl, Angelique Richaud. Tess Struan opposes the marriage vehemently, and Tess usually gets what she wants. Naturally, the Brock family also has a presence in Yokohama, leading to additional conflict.

The two threads are woven intricately together, as both Europeans and Japanese struggle to learn about each other for their own benefit. The result is an entertaining if slow-paced novel; I enjoyed it more than Noble House, if less than Clavell’s other novels.

The Game

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So over the last week I read the kids The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones. It’s copyrighted 2007, so it’s one of Jones’ final books; it’s not too long; and it was OK. Which is disappointing, because Jones is usually outstanding. Oh, the kids enjoyed it, and Jane enjoyed, and I enjoyed reading it. But we’ve been reading a lot of Diana Wynne Jones over the last couple of years, and it was OK.

It concerns a young girl named Hayley whose parents are apparently deceased. She lives with her kind (if distracted) grandfather, and her strict, stern, and thoroughly unpleasant grandmother, and as the book begins she has so entirely alienated her grandmother that she’s been sent off to live with cousins.

And what did she do to alienate her grandmother? Well, it has to do with the young huntsman and his dogs that were just starting to run through her bedroom when her grandmother looked in. They evaporated immediately, of course, but the damage was done.

It’s an entertaining little book; there’s more to Haley and her grandparents and her cousins than meets the eye. But there are many other and better books by Jones to get started with, if you’re not familiar with her.

The Mystery of Consciousness

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Human consciousness is a mysterious thing. As you read this blog post, you’re thinking about the words, which you’re seeing on the screen. You’re conscious of both the meaning of the words, and of the experience of seeing them. You can feel your chair against your body (if you’re sitting down) and possibly a mouse or keyboard under your hand. Maybe you can hear music and smell dinner cooking.

Consciousness is a problem for the materialist types, because it’s not at all clear how our subjective experience of consciousness arises from the functioning of our brains. As John R. Searle points out in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, it’s clear that consciousness does arise from the workings of our brains, because damage to the brain has just a drastic effect on it. (See, for example, Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.) But it’s not clear how. Searle is certain that nothing more than brain function is involved; he’s equally certain that none of the currently popular accounts of how it might work actually hold water. In fact, he’s certain that they don’t.

Searle has written a number of books on more or less this topic, I gather; this one looks at both Searle’s views and the views of the proponents of each of the leading accounts of the subject, including where Searle thinks they fall short. The chapter on Daniel Dennett is especially interesting; Dennett thinks that the subjective experience we all have of being conscious is an illusion. We’re simply meat machines who do what we do for reasons that have nothing to do with our conscious thoughts and experiences, which don’t really exist anyway. Searle points out that you can’t experience an illusion without being conscious of the illusion; and regards Dennett’s views as pathological (which in my view they are). Other thinkers that Searle discusses include Francis Crick and Roger Penrose.

In my view, Searle (like so many others, in so many areas of endeavour) is good at seeing the problem, and perhaps not so good at seeing the solution. He’s right, I think, that none of the theories he discusses really get at the problem; the majority of them, in fact, work more or less by denying that consciousness is real. (To which I reply, you might be an unconscious meat-machine, brother, but I’m not.) Others attribute consciousness to anything that deals with information in any form, including thermostats and automobiles.

But I think Searle’s own views are too limited. He claims, many and many a time, that it is simply a biological fact that consciousness arises from brain processes; that it is purely biological in nature. And when discussing consciousness as we experience it, he mingles perception, memory, imagination, and conceptualization all into the same stew; which is to say, he denies the Aristotelian and Thomist distinction between the Sense and the Intellect.

Now, he’s clearly right that the Sense (perception, memory, and imagination) is in some way physically based; animals have Sense, in the Aristotelian meaning of the word. But the Intellect is an aspect of Man’s immortal soul, and dogs haven’t got one of those. But the Sense is a large portion of what he terms “consciousness”, and a good explanation of how the brain plays into it would be interesting, so more power to him. The trouble is, the methods of modern science might not avail to figure even that much of it out. Aristotle recognized four causes, of which I’ve spoken elsewhere; and the methods of science don’t cover all of them. If there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, there are even more that are undreamt of by the scientific method.

The book itself is both interesting and entertaining (I found it so, at least); and given that most of the chapters started life as book reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, it’s fairly accessible. Recommended.

Human Wave Science Fiction

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Sarah Hoyt, whose books I have not read, has recently begun advocating for what she calls “human wave science fiction.” And I’m all for it.

Check out her manifesto, which is really all about good story-telling. I’m especially fond of her rule #2:

2. Your writing shouldn’t leave anyone feeling like they should scrub with pumice or commit suicide by swallowing stoats for the crime of being human, or like humans are a blight upon the Earth, or that the future is dark, dreary, evil and fraught with nastiness, because that’s all humans can do, and woe is us.

Heretics

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Continuing my jaunt through G.K. Chesterton’s books, I’ve just finished re-reading Heretics, an odd and not entirely satisfactory little book in which Chesterton examines the beliefs of many of the prominent people of his day. Toward the end of the book, he has a few words about progress, about the notion that we are, mentally, ethically, socially, every day in every way getting better and better:

The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut.

What would we say to a physicist who told us that the goal of physics is to know gradually less and less about the physical world? The goal of physics is to know more and more, with more and more certainty, about the physical world. And the same is true in all fields of knowledge, philosophy and religion not least. But if you’d rather not know, well…Chesterton has a word just for you.

Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

Noble House

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Continuing to work my way through James Clavell’s oeuvre, I spent Holy Week working my way through Noble House. I use the expression “working my way” advisedly, as it was a bit of a slog—my least favorite Clavell to date.

Noble House is an immense book, with an immense cast. It takes place in just over a week; and it’s non-stop action the whole time. The basic premise is simple. The book is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960’s. Ian Dunross, a descendant of Dirk Struan and tai-pan of the Noble House. As the week begins, he’s considering a business deal with two Americans, Linc Bartlett and K.C. Tcholok, that will give the Noble House a presence in the New World. For their part, Bartlett and Tcholok will gladly take over the Noble House if they can, and are also in discussions with the interestingly named Quillan Gornt, the descendant of Dirk Struan’s old nemesis Tyler Brock. Gornt is encouraged to trigger a long-laid plan to destroy the Noble House. The whole drama plays out over the next week, against a background of spies (both Russian and Chinese), pirates, drug smugglers, banking, trade, fires, mudslides, torture, and lots of not particularly graphic sex.

It’s amazing how a book that covers so short a period of time can move so slowly. At about half-way through, I was strongly tempted just to move on to something else. At about that point, though, Clavell began to pay off some of the mysteries raised earlier in the book, and I got interested again.

Noble House is not a bad book; and amazingly, Clavell really does tie up all the loose ends and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. And there are other inducements to read it, because he ties together all of his other books. It is a direct sequel to Tai-Pan, of course; Peter Marlowe of King Rat is a minor but significant character; and we even meet a descendant of the Anjin-San from Shogun. The theme of “going native” is still present, though somewhat muted, and there’s so much going on, and so many characters, that it’s a hard book to come to grips with. On top of that, the ’60’s is recent enough that (for me, at least) it doesn’t have that historical novel flavor that I enjoyed with the others.

So read Shogun; read King Rat; read Tai-Pan; if you like ’em, you might give Noble House a try. But don’t start with it.

A Heart on Fire

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Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has a new little book out; it’s what you might call an “e-pamphlet” ($0.99 at Amazon) called A Heart on Fire. It’s about the fault line running through American society these days on the subject of religion and its role in the public square, and about what we can do about it.

Actually, it’s mostly about diagnosing the fault line, because the prescription is really pretty simple. If you want to catch others on fire, you have to be on fire yourself. It’s not enough to complain about others, or about how we Christians are being attacked; in fact, complaints are mostly useless. Rather, we need to live active, dynamic, vibrant Christian lives.

And the key to living an active, dynamic, vibrant Christian life is spending time with Christ himself…which is to say, we have to make time for prayer and the sacraments.

It’s Holy Thursday–a great time to get started.

(Thanks to Richard, who brought the book to my attention.)

The Old Man in the Hat Comes Back

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Quite a few years ago now, when I was reading Dr. Suess to my kids on a regular basis, I was also reading The Lord of the Rings, and somehow I begin work on a little bit of epic poetry, to wit, The Old Man in the Hat Comes Back. I hadn’t thought about it in years, when something brought it to mind yesterday; and honestly, it’s better than I remembered. The scansion is a little forced here and there, and stumbles completely in one or two places, but on the whole I’m rather pleased.

The poem runs from just after the Unexpected Party until the hobbits reach Rivendell. And here you go!

We had no time for adventures
We had smoke-rings to tend.
It was time for some pipeweed
At the door of Bag End.

When old Bilbo left town
With a bang for a joke,
He said we should always
Think of him and smoke.
“Somebody, SOMEBODY
Has to, you see.”
Then he picked out two somebodies,
Samwise and me.

Well…
There we were,
We were smoking like that
And then who should come up
But the old MAN IN THE HAT!

“Oh, no,” Samwise said,
“Don’t stay here on the mat.
That old man is a bad one,
That man in the hat.
He’s lost lots of young hobbits.
Don’t you let him come near.
You know who he took
The last time he was here.”

“Taking hobbits?” the man laughed,
“Oh, my, my! No, no, no.
There are just one or two facts
That I’d like to know.
So sit there and smoke
While we talk about things
Like your good uncle Bilbo
And the location of Rings.”

“I’m sorry,” I said,
“That we can’t stay and chat.”
And a smile crossed the lips
Of the Old Man in the Hat.
Came a bang and a flash
And I knew nothing more
Till we woke up in Bree
With Black Wraiths at the door.

Awakened we were
By a long-legged bloke
With a weather-creased face
And a funny green cloak.
“You’ll have to move quickly,”
The weathered bloke said,
“If you don’t want to wind up
Beheaded in bed.

“The hat man just couldn’t
Be with you today.
But I’ll help you out,
I am Ranger Man A.
I dwell in the wilds,
In forest and fen,
But I come back to Bree
For a wash now and then.”

Sam didn’t like him,
But what could we do?
Of pipes we had plenty,
But of weapons, too few.
Pipeweed is potent,
It’s powerful stuff
But it isn’t much use
Against wraiths playing rough.

The Ranger Man told us
Just how to proceed
As we got our belongings
And our pouches of weed.
“You can’t ignore Wraiths,
It’s not good for your health.
The way you get Wraiths
Off your tail is by stealth!”

So we tried to be secret.
We tried to be stealthy.
We wandered through swamps
That I’m sure were not healthy.
And the wet! O the wet!
I felt just like a newt!
Sam had moss in his hair,
And mildew on each foot.

Just when Sam and I thought
We would never get dry,
Our ranger man said,
“The Great Road is close by.
The Black Wraiths will be near,”
Said the A man to me,
“This is where is we must cross,
And I hope they won’t see.”

But although we used stealth
The Black Wraiths were not slowed.
There were five of the things
Keeping watch on the Road.
We jogged on with great care,
We climbed out of the damp,
And the wraiths were upon
Us before we made camp.

“Escaping these wraiths
Will be hard,” said our guide.
“I can’t do it alone,
I must swallow my pride.
At least I have someone
To help me,” he said,
“Right here in my hat
On the top of my head.

“This is Elven-lord G,
And I keep him about,
And when I need help,
Then I let him come out.”
And there on the top
Of his head stood an elf.
It’s hard to believe,
Though I say so myself.

The elf looked around
From his spot on A’s head.
“You’ve got a bad case
of the Wraiths,” the elf said.
“These Wraiths are a problem.
They stick to you like glue.
And you can’t knock ’em loose
Once they have you in view.

“So if you’ve got Wraiths,
The best thing’s a fast steed.
The way to get Wraiths
Off your tail is by speed!
Now be off,” said the elf,
“You’ve no reason to stay.”
He swept off his hat,
“This is Elven-horse A.”

“Not A!” cried out Sam,
“That’s the Ranger Man’s name.
We can’t have two As!
They can’t both be the same.”
“We’ve no time for your quibbles!”
The Ranger Man yelled.
“It’s his fleetness that matters,
Not how his name’s spelled!”

I don’t know just how,
But A got the horse down,
And he put us on top,
And he said with a frown,
“Now ride for the fords,
Ride fast and don’t stop it,
Or the wraiths they will catch you
And dine on smoked hobbit!”

Then Elven-horse A
Shot away like an arrow,
And we raced through the trees
But our lead was too narrow.
Sam held on with both hands,
And I cried for more speed,
And I wished I was home
With a pipe full of weed.

We crossed over the fords
And we both held on tight,
And when we touched shore
The whole river ran white!

The Wraiths were swept under,
Their horses were gone!
“They won’t be back soon,”
Said a voice, with a yawn.
“Black wraiths are no problem,
They can’t abide mud.
The way to get wraiths
Off your tail’s with a flood!”

The voice was attached
To an elf on the bank.
He lowered his hands
As the floodwaters shrank.
“You don’t know who I am
(And there’s so much to tell!);
I am Elrond Half-Elven.
–My friends call me L.”

“But he cannot be L,”
Sam said, “That cannot be.
If this horse here is A,
Then he ought to be E!”

“That is true,” said the Elf,
“You are wise, for a Sam.
But E was my sire,
And also my dam.
There already were two
In my family named E,
So my parents chose L
For my brother and me.”

That’s it. Sigh.