Mountebank Blog

Last week I finished Peter Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon. It’s a fun read, although it’s not as ambitious (or as successful) as his Night’s Dawn trilogy, and it’s not a start of a new trilogy (I don’t think) like Pandora’s Star (not as promising as P’s Star, either).

It’s especially fun because of the way the future military/corporate/imperialist forces work in the book as an echo of what’s going on now. The book was written, it seems, just as (or before) our occupation of Iraq was getting started, so the echo may not be directly intended, but that occupation is far from unique, and it’s obvious that Hamilton had exactly the kind of contemporary imperialism we’re practicing in mind when he wrote the book. In Fallen Dragon, hugely powerful multi-national corporations own colonies, most of which they obtain by assuming the debts incurred by other corporations. And when they own a colony, they expect a return…so the way they get it is to send in a military force to invade, occupy, and loot. Then they go away and come back a decade or so later to loot some more. They’re essentially pirates, and they act like pirates, and they excuse their piracy with very blatant commercial/economic reasoning.

Of course, because it’s Hamilton, there’s also quite a bit of pseudo-spiritual deus ex machina wonder-working. But that’s OK, since (also because it’s Hamilton) the engineering and scientific explanations work quite plausibly, and the violence is fast and furious, and the gadgetry (especially the “skin”–the best powered armor for military uses since Starship Troopers) works to full effect.

And the characters are (mostly) believable and worth following. This is primarily important in the case of the protagonist. He’s an occupier, an invader, a pirate–but with morals. We get to see (many flashbacks) why he is who he is, and how (like, I’m sure, Americans in Iraq) he’s not a pirate, not a villain, in his own mind (although many of his superiors are). Hamilton’s clearly got a lot to say. The religious/philosophical/spiritual side of that was clear in Night’s Dawn, and here we see the political, too.

Richard Dawkins is one of my favorites, and I’m really enjoying his latest book The Ancestor’s Tale, but he does have a very big problem in an introductory chapter. The point is not at all central to his argument, and it’s really contained just in an analogy, but it’s a problem that I encounter far too often, and I would have hoped he’d be beyond this.

Frustratingly, oral tradition peters out almost immediately, unless hallowed in bardic recitations like those that were eventually written down by Homer, and even then the history is far from accurate. It decays into nonsense and falsehood after amazingly few generations. Historical facts about real heroes, villains, animals and volcanoes rapidly degenerate (or blossom, depending upon your taste) into myths about demi-gods, devils, centaurs and fire-breathing dragons.

What he’s missing here is that oral tradition (and “factual” “historical” writing, too, for that matter), is an intentional, creative, discourse. It’s literature–with a purpose and aesthetics that often have nothing to do with “accuracy.” People don’t just tell stories (or write them) about centaurs and dragons because the stories have somehow “degenerated” from the “real” events. They tell those stories because they like them.

Of course, Dawkins finishes that paragraph by saying that “oral traditions and their imperfections needn’t detain us because, in any case, they have no equivalent in evolutionary history.” And that is true. But I’m a little disappointed in him that he insists on seeing these features of oral tradition as “imperfections.” This may be a problem that’s particularly hard for scientists to overcome. It’s an unfortunate blind spot.

Stephen Maturin in his diary…meditating on life. Not a terribly appropriate type of sentiment for a man (me) on the eve of his tenth wedding anniversary, but Maturin, like all of us, is sometimes subject to these meditations. I am not tonight, but I have been before, and will be again.

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving – childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health – poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion.

A very funny little lesson–thanks, Sir J!
Yiddish with Dick and Jane.