Book Review: The Alien Effect by Cary Neeper

The easiest way to write a Science-Fiction novel is to do away with Old Earth.  Let the action take place on some planet in a distant galaxy, long ago, or even better, lets just destroy Earth completely and let man explore the stars in their ragged looking spaceships, like some nomadic band of camel riders in the foreign desert.  I guess it's Romantic that way, to push the future away, for the goals that mankind has reached and surpassed are so far away from us now, we could never reach them.  Or at least, that's what we realistically think.

But of course, the Science-Fiction writer's most fervent wish is to bring the message of a better Earth back to his or her reader.  Than mankind can be better than what he is now, knock down the obstacles that hold him back, find his way through the unknown and progress to a Utopia that must be reachable.  There are frontiers out there, if only we could get past our own failings and reach them. However, the challenge for the writer is to portray an Earth that has changed sometimes beyond what we could even imagine it being, for the better or, more often, for the worse.  A world of biological or nuclear wastelands, of endless pollution, of environmental catastrophes, or of a population that has to live in a world like The Fifth Element or Corsucant from the Star Wars series.

It's hard, really it is, because a story taking place on Earth has to contend with the myriad of issues that plague our homeland. It's possible to become overwhelmed by them.  And more likely than not, if you bring the hope of progress to the reader, they will find cynicism and discouragement, as it's something that, given the condition of the world currently, it would be impossible to achieve.

I say all this as a preface to a review of Cary Neeper's third book in the Chronicles of Varok series, The Alien Effect.  You can read the first two reviews here (A Place Beyond Man) and here (The Webs of Varok), and you must read the first two books first before this one (unlike the second book, which is easily read without the first).  It's the first criticism of the book, that a prologue might be in order, to catch a reader, even if they have read the other two, back into the groove of the novels themselves. The third book continues Neeper's quest of bringing a palatable model of steady-state economics to the attention of the world. And unlike most other scholars on the subject, she's trying to do it through the application of the system in a fictional world.  And unlike most other Science-Fiction writers, she accomplishes her goal with remarkable, robust characters with a similarly developed culture.  The Varoks, Ellls, and Ahlorks (Nidok's dialogue is excellent!) are great alien races, who are developed by dialogue, which is the best way to write a Science-Fiction novel.  I cannot praise enough the characters that Neeper has made.  As a writer, she has this aspect completely mastered.

Unlike the first two books, the plot suffers from being on Earth, with all of the complexities that must be taken into consideration when dealing with the world we live on. I found some parts, especially on the boats out in the Pacific, to be gold mines of interaction between Alien and Human, places where the general plot can be fleshed out.  I would have loved to have heard the conversations between Orticon and the Captains, or Nidok and the humans aboard ship.  The plot twists, the sudden storms, the traps laid by fishing vessels, they tend to just appear, in a couple of sentences.  The difference between this book and the other two is that the plot in The Alien Effect is progressed by external events and directions, whereas the first book took place within a small moon-base, and The Webs of Varok took place on a small, hidden moon of Jupiter.  The crises in both novels were internal, happening within the minds of the characters.  In The Alien Effect, Neeper has to bring that conflict to Earth, to handle the problems and complexities of bringing the Steady-State system of Varok to our own planet.

In most Science-Fiction stories, like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, for instance, this problem of plot isn't a big deal.  I love Anathem, and as long as I don't have to worry about the plot, I can read that book forever, with its philosophical conversations filling pages upon pages.  But again, bringing the setting to Earth makes doing this much more complicated.  The scenes with Shawne at the Economic School on Earth tends to become a background issue, one that is mentioned only as a backdrop for Shawne's moods and her attraction to visitors later in the book.  The idea of population control, one that is essential for Steady-State to work, is whisked away by objections by devout religious students, who suddenly disappear, taking their argument with them.  The futility of Shawne's efforts with mankind becomes evident, and I'm not so sure that we don't need more of that hope here. This combines with the diary or textbook sections that talk about the actual "Alien Effect," which show that the actualization of Shawne's dream doesn't happen for millennia, and only because of extraterrestrial influences on human evolution (without the black monolith and the usage of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra").  This part also needed some fleshing out, with maybe some of the students becoming actual characters, which would have been great, as Neeper's ability to make outstanding characters would have added to this section.  Shawne and the Varoks and Ellls could have had a Plato-like discussion which would have been essential in bringing the ideas of Varok to the fictional Earth and to our own world as well.

And while I criticize the book, I would easily rate it (on the Amazon scale) as 4 stars, because I've read the other two novels, am familiar with the ideas of Steady-State Economics, and love the interactions with the characters.  This is never a problem at all with any of the stories, and is usually the main criticism I have of other idea-based Science Fiction novels.  To see what I mean, without taking too long to wade through an entire book made by, say, Robert Silverberg or Clifford D. Simak (both have written amazing books, by the way, so I'm not saying don't read them, but just to throw out a quick example) go watch the first Science-Fiction feature film to hit theatres, Rocketship XM, which was covered by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 90's.  This demonstrates how characters should not be created.

So to end the review part of this, go read the first two books, then read this one, and anticipate future novels, and you'll have no problem with the shortcomings of the third book.  I don't either, actually, but as a reviewer I have to maintain an honest opinion of the book as written, separate from the rest of the books in the series.

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Now, to the ideas presented in The Alien Effect.  All you have to do is walk into a Wal-Mart to appreciate the idea of runaway materialism that is plaguing our society.  Mounds upon mounds of crap.  It's all it is.  I've presented many times the idea of material inflation.  In fact, a great example happened to me just yesterday.  I broke a coffee cup.  I cleaned my office at work, and, finding an old coffee cup (with Brookhaven College on it, which is where I work), I decided to take it home and wash it.  Well, I dropped the bag it was in, and broke it.  Instead of weeping and ruing the loss of a cup which could have easily been the only one I owned, had I lived a century ago, I just shrugged, threw it away, and looked at the dozens of other ceramic coffee cups I have sitting on my counter. We have no problem with planned obsolescence, or of the casual ruin of the things we own, as we can always go out and get more, at substantially cheaper costs.  It's is amazing how many brand name, high quality clothes I find at Goodwill for a fraction of the costs of getting something new.  But walk into a Walmart, and you'll see mountains of product just waiting to be bought, used, set aside, and find its way to our growing landfills.  And all for the boost of dopamine that Neeper talks about in The Alien Effect.  It's so true.  I've seen children scream and cry "I want a TOY!!!!" and, just to get the child to shut up, they buy him or her whatever trinket they want.  More than likely, the object will either be thrust back into the parent's hand as the child runs off to gaze into the Vending Machines (you know, those little rings and rubber things in mysterious bubbles, just waiting to be bought, lottery style. That's Dopamine X 2!).  The child didn't want the toy, they wanted the dopamine boost, as well as the feeling of attention and love that they got when their parent bought them something.  Materialism and Love are the same thing.  And that's something that has changed dramatically from even a century ago, when possessions were so much more valued, coming out of world-wide depressions.

It's easy to see, then, where the dopamine boost comes into play, with materialism at the store, with collecting of action figures and other worthless objects (and I know, I still collect the State and National Park Quarters), with the episodes of Hoarders, where throwing away anything will cause temper tantrums to erupt.  Entire economies are based upon the buying of trinkets that cause that momentary dopamine boost, and there are whole factories of children in China hoping to make that boost happen.  How much of that same boost, then, happens when people have yet another child?  Can material inflation be extended to People Inflation?  Why should we care if someone on the south side of Chicago gets into a gang war and is shot dead? There's always more people where that came from.  The body count on the news rarely becomes news anymore, unless the death can be used by political parties or other organizations to increase negative emotions, and therefore, donations to their coalitions.  But I digress.  Why should we care about people at all if there are so many of them?  And this attitude is in addition to the resources that those people use day to day.  In essence, most of the issues of this world, from the Environment to Crime to Disease to Politics, come down to Population Control.  This, too, is a result, especially in modern times, of a desire for brain chemical boosting.  In other words, the erotic pleasures of sex.  And as everyone knows, Pregnancy is a by-product of sex.  As long as we have a system where continued child bearing is rewarded, and self-discipline is unnecessary, we will continue to see parents of 8 children walking around Walmart trying to keep their kids from screaming by buying them whatever they think they want at the time.

What I have been consistently impressed with by Cary Neeper's ideas (and by extension, the ideas of other Steady-State Economic thinkers), is that these ideas exist outside of current political modes of thought.  While ideas like Carbon-Capping and Environmental Regulations sound like ideas right out of the Democrat's playbook to extend power over businesses, the ideas themselves are neutral in political ambition.  The idea is to make the world a better place to live, and to sustain the world as a healthy place to live for all the inhabitants of the world.  In other words, for mankind to live in a symbiotic relationship with the world that they value.  I have said many times that, while I have no desire to join modern environmentalists and go hug trees (and you can start here for some ideas I have on the subject), I am earnestly a proponent of taking care of the world we live on.  The ideas that Shawne had in her classes were ones that Conservative thinkers could agree on.  I especially liked the idea of regulation and oversight by local, non-centralized governments.  In Neeper's America, the Nation-state is decreased to geographical regions, such as the Pacific Northwest, or Southern California.  The idea of Nationalism has waned as problems on Earth became too complex and too impossible for large governments (such as our own) to provide for people's safety.  A great example of that is the recent Ebola outbreak.  When the Federal Government refused to block travel from West Africa to different airports in the US, individual states enacted regulations.  This sort of thing is the best way to maintain optimum living quality in any given area.  This is also something that every Conservative should agree with.   That Conservatives (of which I happen to be one) and Liberals can work, compromise, and achieve real solutions to major problems, is something that should be very exciting for anyone working to solve the world's problems.  However, this dream fall short when it is blocked by politicians hoping to keep themselves in power and comfortable by the contributions of lobbyists.  In today's world, nothing will get done at all on any subject as long as the political atmosphere of Washington DC continues to fester.

Lastly, I want to address the issue of technology.  In this case, I disagree with the descriptions of The Alien Effect when they find technology to be an unneeded part of establishing a proper steady-state system.  There are very few ways that you can fundamentally change the ways of thinking by any culture.  Religion is one way.  It takes a long time, to change the religious beliefs of any one culture, especially the entire Western World.  The other one is Technology.  And while technology can be used to further manipulate and entrench current thinking patterns into any given culture (see Neil Postman's Techonopoly), there are examples of fundamental changes brought about by technology that are immediate and obvious.  The food replicators in Star Trek, for instance, or the wormhole creators in Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days.  Both these innovations would ultimately forever change the way we think. And I think there are technological breakthroughs which are quite within our reach that would do the same.  Take Clifford D. Simak's Ring Around the Sun. In it, aliens (or a further evolution of mankind) start to mysteriously create light bulbs that would last forever.  In getting rid of planned obsolescence, the economy of the world is changed in an instant.  Razors, cars, houses, all that never break or wear down, and all made so that anyone can afford them.  It breaks down the consumer society, and leaves us with no wants in the material sense.  The dopamine push is gone, and then we have to find our chemical boosts in other ways, perhaps from exercise of the development of our own minds, the progress of mankind itself.  This is what Roddenberry envisioned for Earth of the 24th century.

In the end, it comes down to those Millennium that Neeper talks about at the end of .  It would, in that world, take countless generations before a Steady-State world would stabilize Earth, and in our finite mode of thinking, that's too long.  Heck, in our world, something that takes more than a week is too long.  If we can immediately change something to make it better (from Obamacare to a struggling Football team firing their coach...etc...) then that is something that must be done quickly.  It might even be a band-aid, something to cover up the underlying problem, but that's better than actually solving the problem, because it's something that can be done quickly.  When the solution would take more than an election cycle, or a football season, then why bother.  We want pleasure and satisfaction now, not later... that doesn't give us bliss.  

Noel Paul Stookey (and I'm going to mention this for the umpteenth time) said that there's two ways for us to miss things.  One is if the world goes by too fast.  The other is if we go by too fast.  Some people look up one day and see a tree, fully grown, and they had never noticed, while other, more fortunate people, can simply watch the rings form.  It might take half our lives to see a tree grow from seed to mature towering being, but the tree will be more worth it if we do.  Same thing for our own world.  It might take us countless lifetimes to make our world a paradise, but it will be infinitely more worth it when we do.  

On My Own

Taken from a rock in the South River. North Side.

I'm very proud of myself.  I finished walking the entire section of the South Rockdale Community Park River Trail.  The northern end of the trail is even more beautiful than the southern half.  Think of a path covered with trees, sun shining through in spots, and the sound of a river flowing past, little rapids, the plop of frogs jumping into the stream.  Not to mention turtles... big ones.  Like the southern part, the Power Lines come into view and stretch to the horizon where a distribution center sends the power off to be used.  What an amazing world we live in, and it's all right here, in our own county.

I was walking under the power lines, actually veering off on a path that goes to the South River, and all I could imagine was the scene in Clifford D. Simak's Ring Around the Sun where Jay Vickers sees the power plants and industry units in the parallel Earth he was walking in.  He walked for days without seeing a person, surviving on his own abilities.  I tried to imagine walking down this path, and being the only person for miles, or even further, and this whole place was for me to enjoy.  I'm selfish, I admit that.  A part of me wants to delete all these blogs posts about the River Trails and not let anyone else know that there are wonders just down the street.  A part of me wants to be Will Smith (you know, but without the undead things around), or Thoreau sitting in his log cabin beside Walden Pond. Because there is the joy of being free from societal constraints, from bills paid and job schedules and aesthetic norms.  There is the freedom from the constant drone of people's conversation, of television banter, of political animosity.  There is the squirrel that jumps out into the pathway and looks at you, and sees just another animal, and hops along, trying to find a seed to munch on.

Below the Power Lines on the North side, a trail to the South River.

What if we did what Jean Craighead George did in so many of her works (may she rest in peace), and send a teenager out into the wilderness to fend for themselves, without the GPS systems and cell phones and ipods and everything that keeps him or her connected to this world.  And what if, instead of a week, some kind of ritual into adulthood, we only send him out for a couple of hours, onto these paths, and not let anyone else travel them.  They would be totally alone.  It would be Glorious.  At least for me it would be, although I don't know if today's teenagers could take it.  It would be akin, to them, as child abuse.  It makes me think that maybe with all the wires and data streams connected to their bodies, if they aren't actually less advanced than their ancestors, a mere three or four generations ago.  I long for those days when no data transmissions flew through the sky above me at the speed of light.  When the only way to communicate was through the mouth, to the listening ear.  And if there were no people around, then you listened to yourself, and understood.  How is it that the great works of literature, the marvels of human thought, most of them were created before the 20th century?  Those that are post-invention of the telephone, television, etc... talk about how communication between people has broken down.  T.S. Eliot talks of the people on the bridge in "The Waste Land," or the confused J. Alfred Prufrock, and for all the breakthroughs in communication, we spend less time knowing our neighbors and more time knowing our machines.  Could we name the people living next door to us?  I can't.  But let us relive a quest from World Of Warcraft or name our Sims characters, and we can do that readily.

Wooden bridge on the South Side. Amazing construction!

The greatest danger we face in today's world is never being alone.  It becomes a scary silence, as when someone turns off the lights in a school classroom filled with kids.  They immediately start yelling, because they must identify that there are other people in the room.  If not, they are left with only themselves, hearing or seeing nothing.  And then they must come face to face with their own being.  That is something, I fear, that few people want to deal with.  They have to be constantly fed stimuli. Data from computers, TV broadcasts, the flicker of screens with strangers faces, even far into the night, when they are asleep.  This is normal, they say. Those that want to be alone are crazy.  Why would they want to walk, outside, alone, with nothing but their own thoughts to keep them company?  It is unfathomable that, just a century ago, most people were like that for a majority of the day.  As they slept, only the cicadas and the frogs gave nightly reports.  The thoughts were of the day, or of the past, memories to bring sweet joy upon recollection. Now we can't even do that.  The present is consistently upon us, demanding that we assimilate data and respond, for the future is "coming up!" as the news reports say. 

View from a small trail on the North Side.

 Then let me be alone, and I will walk the paths of Rockdale County.  But I will not be alone.  I will have the understanding of Thoreau, picking blackberries on the hillsides of Concord.  I will listen to the 4/4 beat of my walking stick, and keep time with my steps.  And if I find a path that takes me off the trail, into the woods, to some secluded spot on the South River, then I will enjoy being off the trail.  I will find my way back; I am certain of that.

Reviews: Everything Matters, Ring Around the Sun, Foundling

Book Review: Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr.

A modern Candide. Voltaire used his episodic tale of misery and woe to demonstrate that happiness can never really be found, not until the very end, when the main characters all live in a shack and tend a garden outside. Living life is the only true happiness that mankind can have, and no amount of philosophical reasoning, or wealth, or fame, can ever get him that status. Except that's not the book I'm here to review.

I love apocalyptic books. I can remember reading When Worlds Collide by Wylie and Balmer at Band Camp, laying on the couch in the building next to our cabin and loving every minute of the book (well, the comfy couch and air conditioning helped.) There's nothing like the end of the world, and Currie's book is all about that. Except, the main character, Junior Thibodeax, has known all his life that the world will end on a certain day in the future, and it's the alien voices' experiment to see whether the knowledge of impending doom has any impact on his life. Whether, in a world where nothing matters, if anything matters at all. Starting with a blow by blow of his deliverance in the hospital, to his destruction by asteroid (maybe), the book details his life with a sardonic irony and humor that is quite entertaining. With Junior's knowledge and intelligence he sets out to save the human race, trying to fight the prediction that everyone will die in a gigantic fireball.

However, whether he succeeds or not, we aren't really sure, because the aliens come to him right before the end date and explain to him something he already knew... that the Earth he lived on is only one of millions of possibilities in a multiverse separated only by a sliver of a second. That basically there is a ring around the sun of different realities, and in each of those Earths, Junior makes a different decision, from not squashing a bug to not telling his big secret to his girlfriend, which effects the outcome of the world tremendously. It's the whole butterfly in the Sahara theory. A bit of a spoiler, but, the ending chapters are considerably different than the rest, and nothing much happens, but in the end, Junior's realization that Everything Matters proves the aliens wrong in their original assumption, and proves Voltaire right.

Book Review: Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak

I read this book right afterward because it influences so many authors and novels in the present day. Simak is one of the most important Science Fiction writers of the early 1960's, mostly because he created novels of marvelous ideas, ones with much potential and meat on them, if you understand. But Simak didn't always create great characters and plots to go along with those ideas (like so many other science fiction novels, the ideas are more important than the story). However, Ring Around the Sun is not one of those. It is a marvelous sci-fi novel, centering around the very idea that Currie used in Everything Matters, that the Earth is only one of millions of Earths existing in multiple space-time planes. This book is mentioned in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis and influenced King in his Dark Tower series. It is, in my opinion, a book that should be included in the modern Western Literary Cannon, mainly because it merges literature and science in a way that most high school students could easily understand it and enjoy it.

In the story, Jay Vickers, on his way to a meeting with a Mr. Crawford, sees a shop selling Forever Light Bulbs, as well as a razor that never needs sharpening, a car that runs forever...etc... This, explains Crawford, is crippling the industries of the world, causing chaos and fear. Vickers is supposed to investigate it and expose it in articles to be published. But it's not all that simple, because the people behind the Forever Light Bulb are trying to save the world, not destroy it.

A fabulous book, one that I've read twice now. It's very rare for me to do that. The other books I've read twice include LOTR, Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson, Dragonriders of Pern by McCaffrey, and Dandelion Wine by Bradbury. Simak's book easily ranks among these.

Music Review: Foundling by David Gray

Okay... this is the album Gray should have released instead of Drawing the Line. A work of introverted folk musings that is more reminiscent of a Monet painting than music itself. It is, like most of his albums, in need of a little tweaking. But that is easily done with modern MP3 players. Take out a couple of tracks from CD1, and add a couple from CD2 (a double disc album), especially "Who's Singing Now," and you've got an album that can be repeated over and over in your car or as background music in the home. Fantastic!!