Reading log, no. 4

Jimmy's father spent more and more time at his work, but talked about it less and less. There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.

The rewards in the case of success would be enormous, Jimmy's father explained, doing the straight-talking man-to-man act he had recently adopted with Jimmy. What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can? NooSkins for Olds, said the snappy logo. Not that a totally effective method had been found yet: the dozen or so ravaged hopefuls who had volunteered themselves as subjects, paying no fees but signing away their rights to sue, had come out looking like the Mould Creature from Outer Space -- uneven in tone, greenish brown, and peeling in ragged strips.

Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake was Book Club's monthly reading selection for March -- for five minutes -- before we switched to the other dystopic Margaret Atwood novel, Handmaid's Tale. I previously read Handmaid in college, and I decided to go ahead and read Oryx instead. Actually, I decided to read both, but I didn't finish Handmaid in time, and so you'll be reading my thoughts on it in next month's reading log. Which comes out this month because this reading log is late.

Whew. I'm glad we got that all straightened out.

So Oryx and Crake. It depicts a very bleak Malthusian doomer scenario come to fruition. Whereas Handmaid is all about breakdown of sexual equality, Oryx is all about the failure of humanity to exercise self-restraint. The planet is wrecked, the corporations are running what's left of the show, but the well-to-do are going on about their decadent and superficial lives in all the same ways as we always do -- only humanity is frantically employing ever more sophisticated technology to patch the problems stemming from its upkeep. The solutions make for more problems, of course. And, of course, the outcome is the extinction of homo sapiens and the proliferation of a tribe of genetically modified people free from religion who spend their time munching on grass, creating lines of defense out of urine, and having some serious sex orgies. How else could it go?

Oryx and Crake is over the top, but so is Handmaid's Tale. Both novels are great for stimulating thought and discussion.

* * *

Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed to be capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions.

Margaret Atwood
Hair Jewellery
Dancing Girls and Other Stories

A short-story collection is to me a lot like a jar of peanut butter. It sits on the shelf, ready-made for quick, low-commitment consumption and tantalizing with its dense nourishment. Here! Read me! You can read one story before bed each night. No bookmarking, no leftovers, I'm low upkeep! It's only after I begin reading the short stories that I realize that I rarely like collections of them as much as I do a full novel and that the lure of dense nourishment was a false promise. And the no-bookmarking thing never works out. Instead I'd have been better off taking the time to make myself a pot of oatmeal. But perhaps I'm getting mixed up in my analogy.

March ended up being Margaret Atwood Month for me. It just worked out that way. I picked up Dancing Girls at the library as an impulse checkout. For a collection of short stories it wasn't too bad. In fact, I liked a lot of the individual stories. It's just that somehow I rarely like short-story collections. I think I'd prefer it if novels included a single short story in the back, kind of like dessert, rather than reading a slew of short stories all together, like a full meal. Just like peanut butter.

* * *

But then he thought of something else, another line of thought that he well remembered Hallam himself had dealt with in one of the articles he had written for popular consumption. With some distaste, he dug out the article. It was important to see what Hallam had said before he carried the matter further.

The article said, in part, "Because of the ever-present gravitational force, we have come to associate the phrase 'downhill' with the kind of inevitable change we can use to produce energy of the sort we can change into useful work. It is the water running downhill that, in past centuries, turned wheels which in turn powered machinery such as pumps and generators. But what happens when all the water has run downhill?

"There can then be no further work possible till the water has been returned uphill -- and that takes work. In fact, it takes more work to force the water uphill than we can collect by then allowing it to flow downhill. We work at an energy-loss. Fortunately, the Sun does the work for us. It evaporates the oceans so that water vapor climbs high in the atmosphere, forms clouds, and eventually falls again as rain or snow. This soaks the ground at all levels, fills the springs and streams, and keeps the water forever running downhill.

"But not quite forever. The Sun can raise the water vapor, but only because, in a nuclear sense, it is running downhill, too. It is running downhill at a rate immensely greater than any Earthly river can manage, and when all of it has run downhill there will be nothing we know of to pull it uphill again.

"All sources of energy in our Universe run down. We can't help that. Everything is downhill in just one direction, and we can force a temporary uphill, backward, only by taking advantage of some greater downhill in the vicinity. If we want useful energy forever, we need a road that is downhill both ways. That is a paradox in our Universe; it stands to reason that whatever is downhill one way is uphill going back.

Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves

In I. Asimov Isaac Asimov wrote that the two chief criticisms he received about his science fiction were firstly that he rarely if ever incorporated aliens into his stories and secondly that his stories had too little sex. So in the 1970s, after he had semi-retired from writing science fiction but before he made his big comeback, he wrote The Gods Themselves, and in it he wrote not just of aliens and not just of sex but of alien sex.

Needless to say, the book immediately found itself at the top of my reading list.

The story's plot centers around a not-too-distant fantastic invention called the Electron Pump that, in short, generates seemingly limitless, seemingly consequence-free energy by pumping electrons from our universe to what is called the para-Universe. And in the para-Universe live what we call para-men who operate what must be some sort of positron pump, which pumps positrons from their universe to ours. Being in different universes and almost entirely barred from communicating with each other, men and para-men can only speculate about each other's existence, but we fortunate readers get both perspectives. Meanwhile, both universes benefit from receiving energy out of the process -- a real perpetual motion machine.

And, of course, the story's plot involves lots and lots of alien sex. Asimov went over the top with his descriptions of it. It's really rather gratuitous though entirely decent due to the sex's utterly bizarre and, well, alien mechanics. I think this was precisely Asimov's point. I won't go into details about the details, but let's just say that the sex gives a different meaning to the Modern English song lyric "I'll stop the world and melt with you."

But this is not some mere alien-orgy fiction. This is a story about the consequences of the laws of thermodynamics and how even seemingly limitless and seemingly consequence-free energy isn't so limitless or consequence-free after all. It would take a rather dense reader not to replace "Electron Pump" with "fossil fuels" and "supernova of the sun" with "climate change". Yes, The Gods Themselves was written in the 1970s and predates our current incarnation of pop-environmentalism. Great science fiction is timeless.