I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

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I read Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact, soon after it was published in the late 1980’s, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s the story of a radio astronomer, Ellie Arroway, who is the first person on Earth to detect, verify, and begin deciphering a genuine extraterrestrial message.

A considerable part of the story is devoted to the societal implications of Arroway’s discovery, especially among various religious communities. As it’s depicted in the book, Ellie must suffer various crackpots, blowhards, and garden-variety religious leaders (well-meaning but deluded) spouting their superstitious blather in her quest to secure the resources needed to finish decoding the alien transmission and build the Great Machine.

For the transmission includes, among other things, construction plans for a tremendous and tremendously complicated machine. At its center is a capsule that seats five intrepid adventurers. No one knows what will happen when the machine is switched on. Will the capsule launch into space? Travel through time? Pop into a different dimension? Or is it a weapon that will obliterate the Earth?

The trials involved in achieving the goal of building and activating the Machine are portrayed very much as the power of pure reason overcoming the fetters of fear and ignorance. In the end, Ellie and her fellow travelers are propelled across vast distances and have a surprising encounter with a superior but benevolent race. When they return days later, they discover that no time has elapsed on Earth, leaving a diehard core of doubters free to insist that nothing at all happened, even though there is compelling evidence to support the stories told by Ellie and the others. Science is the clear winner, religion the loser, and it’s pure wish fulfillment: what atheist hasn’t dreamed of winning one of those unwinnable arguments about faith and science against a true believer?

In Robert Zemeckis’ film version of Contact, things are subtly different. Ellie is as much an empiricist as in the book, but man-of-God Palmer Joss is much less easy to dismiss out of hand. His interplay with Ellie on the subject of faith leaves her uncharacteristically at a loss, unable to turn him aside by articulating the bedrock principles of skeptical inquiry.

When the time comes to try the Machine, crucially there is room in it for only one person, so that when Ellie returns from her amazing journey there is no one to corroborate her account. There is also a total absence of physical evidence to support her story. Ellie ends up passionately, desperately trying to persuade people to believe what she is certain is true but cannot prove. Palmer Joss sympathetically points out that this is precisely the situation in which persons of faith find themselves.

It’s a marvelous storytelling contrivance, and the dialogue and performances drive the point home economically and convincingly. But I left the theater conflicted. On the one hand, the film had excellent performances and astonishing visuals, it was exhilarating to see an intelligent, uncliched portrayal of science and scientists in a mainstream Hollywood movie, and it was in many respects faithful to the novel. Where changes were made, by and large they were to add some emotional depth that had been missing from Sagan’s plot- and technology-heavy writing. On the other hand, the rebalancing of science and religion changed what the story was fundamentally about! It offended me that Carl Sagan, recently deceased after a lifetime of science advocacy (today would have been his 73rd birthday, by the way), should have his fantasy about the triumph of humanism and reason watered down for a mass audience!

Over time, though, the film version grew on me and I recognized it as something greater than the source novel: an adventure in which reason triumphs and an exploration of the tangled interrelationship between belief and skepticism. Where I had been hoping to see religious moviegoers get schooled in the virtues of rational thought, instead I had received a lesson about the nuances and complexities of the human experience. The science-beats-religion version of the story had become, to me, overly simplistic. (Sorry, Carl.)

After all, even Mr. Spock admits, near the end of a long career working with humans, that “logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

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It’s no spoiler to say that the book deals with some pretty heavy themes, as indeed the climax of a seven-part epic must. The action must rise and the emotional stakes must become almost too much to bear. The author, J.K. Rowling, does not disappoint. There is loss and sorrow and despair and other things too, both good and bad, and Rowling played me like a fiddle. All this week, my mood was good when Harry Potter was safe or happy, but miserable the majority of the time as the themes in the story had me dwelling on Alex, my mom, and various other well-loved things in my life that are ending, such as our sons’ attendance at the wonderfully offbeat preschool Little Arrows. Even finishing the audiobook of Moby-Dick, which I wasn’t particularly enjoying other than as an intellectual appreciation for its place in the annals of literature, was made more poignant by the feelings Rowling was making me have.

It is a further testament to Rowling’s mysteriously begotten powers that finally reaching the end of Harry’s story after spending most of a decade with him did not also fill me with a feeling of loss, but of fulfillment.

Now, back to my RSS feeds…

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Here’s the weird part: as I’ve remarked previously, both Huck Finn and Slaughterhouse-Five, which I was reading contemporaneously, mention a French place name I’d never heard before: Tuileries. Today I heard it again in Moby-Dick! (Chapter 104, to be precise.) What are the odds?

Here’s another interesting connection: both Moby-Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five are hyphenated titles, and they both have subtitles (“The Whale” and “The Children’s Crusade,” respectively).

Well, it’s a little interesting.

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I don’t expect abstaining from the Web to be as easy as abstaining from cable TV has been, so when that book comes on Saturday I’m going to read my little heart out.

And when I’ve finished the book and I’m back online you may be sure I won’t spoil it for anyone else.

Now to aim my wand at my web browser… “Expelliarmus!”

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In last night’s reading, Vonnegut’s hero, Billy Pilgrim, was wandering behind enemy lines near Tuileries in France. And on this morning’s drive to work, Huck Finn’s narration mentioned the flight of Louis XVI from Tuileries Palace.

Never heard the name Tuileries before; now twice in twelve hours from two sources with no particular connection to each other and no particular reason for me to be reading them both now other than random chance. Crazy.

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On the way to New York the other day, I finally finished The System of the World, the third and final volume in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I was immediately sorry it was over and want nothing more now than to begin reading it again from volume 1 (Quicksilver).

Stephenson has a reputation for writing great stories with weak, hurried endings. His seminal novel Snow Crash (a personal favorite) was one such, as was Cryptonomicon, which didn’t quite rise to the challenge of tying together its two plotlines, interwoven but separated by a half century.

One lament among pilots is that you can fly for hours smoothly, swiftly, and safely, but if you get a little bounce on landing, your passengers will judge you unaccomplished. The same thing goes for writers, great stories, and endings. I love Snow Crash — I even once based the name of a startup company on a passage from it — but its pat and hasty wrapup has always nagged at me.

Perhaps Stephenson took this criticism to heart, or perhaps he simply took greater care with this, his masterwork, because I’m happy to say that The Baroque Cycle ties its numerous threads together neatly (but not too neatly!) and very satisfyingly. This goes even for the character of Daniel Waterhouse, whose biography for most of the cycle troubled me insofar as it was not very interesting — except, like Forrest Gump, for the company he keeps (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton) and the historical events at which he’s accidentally present. I detested Forrest Gump for this, but I stuck with Waterhouse on the faith that the author was laying a lot of groundwork for Waterhouse finally to become interesting in his own right, and I was not disappointed.

In all, this Entertainment Weekly review perfectly captures Stephenson’s achievement: “he might just have created the definitive historical-sci-fi-epic-pirate-comedy-punk love story.” Except I’d change “might just have” to “has.” Check it out.

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A new edition of that book was among the gifts from my dad when I turned forty myself recently. It’s witty and well-observed, if a bit depressing. You don’t have to be having a mid-life crisis to appreciate it.

In one scene, two-year-old Leo encounters an authentic two-year-old at an airport. Having by this point in the story suffered several rejections — everyone’s got their own problems (which is more or less the whole point of the book) — Leo bitterly tells the other boy, “If I knew at your age what I’ve learned with grief since… don’t thank me, just listen,” and then offers this advice:

1. Get the grades, but don’t trust what they teach you.
2. Don’t tell them what you’re thinking; they’ll use it against you.
3. Never be rational if you want to have your way.
4. Ignore logic; it’ll cripple your spirit.
5. Look out for abandonment by your loved ones.
6. Don’t be horny after marriage.

Then, as the other boy walks away to board a flight with his family,

7. Don’t mature! Mature people do the shit work!

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Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
A forthcoming, untitled book by historian Ed Kritzler argues that many of the “Spanish” pirates of the Caribbean were in fact Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who took to the seas to flee/avenge the Inquisition. [...]

I’ve just finished volume two, “The Confusion,” of Neal Stephenson’s staggering, scholarly, swashbuckling historical romance, The Baroque Cycle. I highly recommend it so far, and I fully expect to recommend it even more highly when I’ve finished the third and final volume, “The System of the World.” More to the point, though, is that volume two features a character exactly like the one described in the Boing Boing post above — a Jewish pirate named Moseh de la Cruz, marauding across most of the globe (though not the Caribbean) in the 17th century with “Half-Cocked” Jack Shaftoe.

Drink up, me hearties, l’chayim!

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