Review: Patternmaster by Octavia Butler (1976)

The time is millennia in the future. The place is unnamed. (Although the flashy back cover of my copy proclaims ONCE THIS LAND WAS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, it’s not explicit in the book, and I’m more comfortable with the text’s assumption that our current geographic definitions are long gone.

Homo sapiens have evolved into three species: Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks. Patternists are the ruling elite, who possess powerful telepathic abilities and constantly vie for power. Mutes are humans just like you and me, who work hard, express themselves through ritual, and rely on their Patternist masters for protection. Clayarks are savage, gun-wielding mutants who constantly raid Patternist territory. Into this harsh world are united Coransee and Teray, blood brothers and sons of the immensely powerful Patternmaster whose power controls the whole civilized world. As the younger and more naïve brother, Teray must use all his wits to retain his life and his freedom from Coransee, who with all his being craves becoming the next Patternmaster and will stop at nothing to destroy his younger brother if his ambition becomes threatened.

From the very beginning, I appreciate Butler’s ability to have us meet the book on its own terms. Although every fiber of the setting is science fiction, the plot begins on page one and doesn’t stop for lengthy explanations. Yet even the most outlandish concepts were not convoluted enough to send me back to reread previous sections for illumination. This is one of the most important goals when writing speculative fiction, and probably the most difficult to achieve. It takes many skills, especially good pacing and solid, intelligible creative concepts. All the core creative concepts of Patternmaster are contained my short summary above; the rest is detail.

The story is somewhat more tortuous. Again, I don’t normally judge a book by its cover, but the ‘70’s pulp sci-fi cover on my copy screams out in illustration and capital letters that the main conflict will be between Teray and Coransee. They meet as soon as enough exposition has happened, but after some initial squabbling, their feud is left waiting just offstage for many, many pages. This is a nice touch in that it kept me turning pages while also surprising me with the emergence of smaller woes and struggles that befall Teray for more or less the whole book.

Finally, of course, I have a word on the politics. Butler speaks as a black woman in 1970’s California to me as a white man in 2010’s New York about many issues which we bemoan continuing to live with, but which are actually timeless. Consider the political structure of this Southern California: a small, elite class controls a large, less powerful class, and the two live together to protect themselves from a third, alien class. This skeletal archetype, devoid of ideological context, is reflected all throughout human history on many scales, and through Patternmaster Butler presents that it will still be the basis for societal interaction thousands of years hence.

I can’t help but compare Octavia Butler with Ursula K. Le Guin, who was also writing paperback science fiction on the West Coast around the same time, and whom I know much better. To Butler’s credit, she is worthy company to Le Guin. Where a woman writes original science fiction about human nature and society, you’ll find me on board.

Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966)

In the year 2075 "Luna" is a penal colony for Earth, and revolution is brewing. Four conspirators decide to overthrow the Authority that rules them; Mannie, a Jack of all trades and third-generation "Loonie"; Wyoming Knott, a surrogate mother with a personal vendetta against the Authority; Professor de la Paz, an anarchist by profession; and Mike, a self-aware computer, the only one of his kind, who controls all the electrical systems on Luna. The foursome pool their skills to concoct a scheme that will forever change life on the moon and politics on Earth.

They don't give out the Hugo award for just anything; this book has a lot to say about human nature, politics, and power. Its stance on human nature is classically comedic: the characters have many flaws and trivial affairs, but there is hope for all of them. Heinlein makes the plot believable by combining these very human characters with intricate descriptions of physics and sociology; of all the science fiction books I've ever read, this is one of the few I half-expect to come true.

I'd like to spend some time on where the Lunar society intersects with our current social struggles. Despite being founded on a population of convicts, Luna is mostly a peaceful society where crime is low and war is impossible. However, there are instances which are commonplace there but shock visitors from Terra (Earth); the concept of "eliminating" wrongdoers, and the Loonie response to violence against themselves. Elimination is a certain kind of murder in which a group of Loonies forces someone out of an air lock and onto the vacuum of the moon's surface. There are no written laws on Luna, but everyone seems to know whether someone deserves to be eliminated. New conscripts often face this fate due to social blunders. Even more violently, there are several scenes in the book when agents of the Lunar Authority attack, and when this happens, Loonies of all ages drop whatever they're doing and fight with whatever they have at hand until every last offender is dead. Women literally tear rapists apart, and children fearlessly wield kitchen knives against intruders with laser guns. It's an interesting outcome of the setting's effect on social understanding, and I appreciate the fact that it doesn't seem to be driven by a political agenda.

This agenda's back seat to the story is somewhat opposite to what I have to criticize about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (you knew I couldn't get too deep into science fiction without bringing her up). In fact, the setting itself is ideal, even metaphorical, for creating a politically clean slate upon which to see politics afresh, as though experimenting with a control group. The characters hail from every nation on Earth. Because of their polygamous family structure, it's impossible for most of them to be sure of their ancestry, in contrast with the ethnically segregated United States. Rather than taking a swing at a particular ideology or group, Heinlein suggests that we all share the blame for political oppression by showing that the Lunar Authority is made up of nationally diverse politicians. This suggestion is cemented by the scheming that begins among Loonies almost as soon as they begin to envision life without an Authority. These characters are as close as they can be to a political and physical vacuum, but they go on being political creatures just as they keep on breathing air.

Into this mix is a personal note: one of my biases toward the book is the fact that Prof, one of the best fleshed-out characters, shares my political views more than any fictional character I've ever read. He adheres to "rational anarchism," a term Heinlein apparently invented. Essentially, he believes that political systems are imaginary constructs, and that with each person lies his own responsibility for his own actions. This viewpoint reinforces three things: the Loonies' ability to envision a society with a different kind of government than what history has shown them; Earth's ability to set aside political differences when they believe their economy is threatened from above; and Heinlein's ability to imagine people accepting or rejecting an ideology even when doing so is the hard choice.

From the stance of science fiction, my fascination was drawn over and over to Mike the computer. His name is short for Mycroft, the brother of Sherlock Holmes, and his motivation for participating in the coup is to test the limits of his intelligence. We see him do various incredible things, such as divide his personality, invent CGI, and calculate probabilities for future, qualitative events. It is a credit to Heinlein's writing that these are described with such emotion and curiosity that we can believe they are happening for the first time in human history. Moreover, in many ways, Mike is the most sympathetic character in the book. The first scene details Mannie patiently, fraternally explaining humor to Mike one joke at a time; much later, when Mike has learned and practiced enough to control and calculate far more than anyone ever expected of him, he still longs for a simpler future when he and Mannie can go back to trading jokes.

Read this book! It's a wonderful monolith of science fiction, and you'll be sure to learn something about your own relationship with society.

Review: History in English Words by Owen Barfield (1926), and a Sapir-Whorf glimpse at fantasy

Owen Barfield, long-time member of the Inklings (the legendary Oxford University book club whose members included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis), liked words.

He liked them so much that he drew from them a detailed history of Western Europe's epistemic development.

History in English Words is a plunge into etymology that claims that the words we use contain a pattern that impacts more than language hobbyists. The basic thesis is this: if we know our history, and know which English words are borrowed from which other languages, we can put two and two together to trace the introduction and evolution of concepts we as a civilization now consider given, but which we did not always know. Thus we can gain a new lens through which to see our cosmology and learn from it.

Fascinating, right? If you're not a fan of etymology, linguistics, or history, don't worry; I'll have another science fiction review up soon. My recommendation of this book is simple: if you like etymology, absolutely read it; if not, give it a try, but don't feel bad if you don't get all the way through it.

For my fellow word nerds, this is an important book. First of all, most of the book is a detailed walkthrough of the various periods and categories of English's lexical history, beginning with its oldest known (to Barfield) ancestor, Indo-European. Different chapters give us windows into subjects like Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian doctrine, to name but a few. His sequence is mostly chronological. Most of the subject matter consists of specific examples of words we use every day, many of whose present meanings have escaped completely from their original metaphor or intention.

Speaking of metaphor, there's a sub-theme to the book concerning the creation of words that is relevant to anyone who seeks to write creatively. I've said before that it's our responsibility to take an active role in the maturation of the language we speak, but only here did I learn that this action is actually metaphor at its root. Barfield's example is the word "prevaricate," which a modern dictionary defines as "to speak or act in an evasive way," but whose Latin roots mean "to plow in a furrow." Barfield argues that we can't actually conceive of new ideas in any way other than building on concepts we already possess. So if you can't just point to an object and place a new word on it, the only way you can create it in an understandable way is to compare it to something which it actually is not: a metaphor!

While I'm here, I might as well point out the implications of this conclusion on fantasy. G. K. Chesterton, from whom the name of my blog is ripped off, has written that "the test of fairyland [is that] you cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail." This reminds me of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which basically says that the language we learn to use influences the concepts we are able to envision. I propose that how we write, read and accept fantasy, a genre naturally experimental with metaphor, indicates what we are able to conceive as a culture, and by omission what is unimaginable to us.

I may revisit this hypothesis, and I hope those of you who decide to read Barfield are as delighted as I am with both his adventure into our language and with how far our imagination can take us.

Writing is Healing

Welcome back! Three years isn't much of a hiatus, is it?

A lot has changed since my last post. In short (because this isn't a blog about my life), I started and finished a graduate program in business administration and lived for two years on a mountain with a community of Franciscan friars. Now I'm living with relatives while I look for a job in a non-profit or service cause.

I never intended to take a break from writing, and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer. I can't even say that life got in the way; after all, I've never been busier than when I was an undergraduate, and I did far more unprompted writing during that time than in the rest of my life combined. Yet graduate school was a desert experience for me: I had few friends, and most of my energy was divided between physically exercising, discerning my future, and the yet-undiscovered experience of studying. And the Franciscans run an intentional community, which means that although I was never bound by their vows, to participate fully in their lifestyle I needed to focus my creative energy on hospitality.

* * * * * * * *

Although this isn't a blog about my life, I need to talk about my return to writing in order to re-invite you into your own genius. And to do this, I need to get personal and messy by talking about my own demons.

I believe there are two kinds of demons we face every day. You can call them vices, addictions, illnesses, obstacles, challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, or whatever works for your own experience; I prefer to personify them. The first kind are the ones that will be with us our whole lives. They show up in different ways depending on our situations. Most importantly, however difficult they make life for us, they are not intrinsically bad, for they are part of us. They do harm primarily when we pretend they don't exist or try to kill them, but we can accomplish great good by embracing them.*

My own include perfectionism, loneliness (especially for intimacy), and self-doubt.

The second are exterior and not intrinsic to us. In fact, we often use them to try to drown out the first kind of demons, the ones that are the parts of ourselves we don't like. They should be either moderated or eliminated. They include coping mechanisms like substance addictions, promiscuity, and the pursuit of tangible achievements such as money.

My own include procrastination, internet overuse, and obsession with achievement. When I indulge in too much of even one of these, my writing crashes faster than a state trooper in a Blues Brothers movie.

The first two go hand in hand. To illustrate, here's a list of what I've done on my computer while writing this post:

-helped a friend revise his Magic: the Gathering deck.
-watched six action movie trailers.
-looked up Mass times for a local church.
-mapped this morning's run.
-mapped the total area I've run while living here, then catalogued it with my other running statistics.
-checked my email.
-volunteered for a walk-a-thon.
-checked my LinkedIn page.
-checked the twenty-one webcomics I follow, then read a handful more pages of webcomics.
-read an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.
-read an issue of The Fantastic Four.
-researched Project A119 (this one's actually quite interesting, especially if you like history).
-read an article about marriage.
-read an article about a human stress index.
-read a list of stupidest posts on Twitter.
-read a list of celebrities who look like Pokémon.
-read a list of stupid bosses.
-played a set of trivia quizzes.
-researched the answers I got wrong on said quizzes.
-listened to Christian rock on Youtube.
-listened to rock that is decidedly not very Christian on Youtube.
-watched a short cartoon.
-read about Hiyao Miyazaki.
-updated my blog profile.
-taught myself how to count to twenty in sign language.
-played about thirty games of Su Doku on "evil" mode.
-checked my Facebook profile about eight thousand times, wherein I saw exactly three notifications and two messages, one of which was about those movie trailers and Magic: the Gathering cards.

And if that doesn't look to you like a problem, I did all this in the time it took me to write this post's second paragraph (about twenty-two hours). You might have other coping methods, but with smart phones becoming ever more ubiquitous, I doubt I'm in the minority with this issue, especially among my generation.

As for obsession with achievement, notice the fact that I can quantify what I've learned today.

* * * * * * * * *

In my confused, teenage years, writing itself was a coping mechanism, through which I could order my thoughts and feelings on my own time and in my own medium, where they made more sense than they did when I was put on the spot or had to conform to values I didn't understand. When my emotions were well integrated, writing became a powerful way to process them. When they were poorly integrated, my writing flagged and I suffered what I've come to know as "dark moods," where it was difficult for me to focus on anything but a yearning for intimacy.

My writing hiatus was accompanied by a hiatus of this dynamic. This owed itself to a commitment of my spiritual time toward hospitality and fraternity, as well as an extremely difficult relationship which made all intimacy significantly less savory.

Now that I'm back in what we may call a "non-intentional community" (better known as a "suburb"), my balance between creative effusiveness and anxious yearning has begun to return. It fits to consider this a vacillation between extroversion and introversion: sometimes I long for company, while other times I long for solitude. And while I think the rigors of community life have given me more maturity, still I find myself returning to coping mechanisms like idle internet surfing, which, were I better integrated, surely I wouldn't need. Would I?

Willpower or discipline can certainly help, but I think the key to the healing which each person needs uniquely is balance. So here are, in my opinion, the key elements of balance of which writing is a cornerstone in my life:

Human needs: I tell this to college students whenever I can. I was never the sharpest tool in the shed, but I got good grades because I was one of the only students in my school who got a good night's sleep most nights of the week, exercised regularly, and have still never tasted Ramen noodles. Maslow figured it out long enough ago; when our other needs are met, we can focus our attention on the mysteries that make us human.

Work and play: Work allows you to create a positive difference in your community, while play allows you to explore yourself with a different set of consequences. I tend to enjoy labor-intensive work and mentally-intensive play, so writing is play for me, but it flourishes only when I can also be of service to others through work.

Company and solitude: Too little socializing can drive anyone crazy, but often so can too much. Because writing is a solitary experience for most people, it should be complemented by regular human interaction, especially intimacy. However, I've found it can also help to process loneliness by creating communication. Loved ones can also help us with the creative process by discovering our blind spots.

The familiar and the strange: Perhaps it's the fantasy writer in me, but I find something romantic in exploring new places and meeting new people. Yet few of us find it easy to appreciate both novelty and familiarity. A balance between the two of these is essential for knowing your writing material. You'll need to have characters you know like your own heart, and you'll want them to be exposed to things that surprise them, or your story isn't going to convince me.

Standards and forgiveness: This is the most important balancing act because it pervades all the others at every moment. As a perfectionist, I find it especially difficult. I want to live a balanced life, but what happens when I don't? What happens when I can't? (Impossible!) My tendency is never to give myself room to put all the standards down and laugh at myself before picking them back up. It probably has a lot to do with my long hiatus from writing. Other personalities might skew the opposite way, and be too lenient on themselves, lacking the discipline which balance often takes.

I have deliberately failed to make this list exhaustive; it's here for you as artists and human beings to pick it up and play with it. It is a result of my embracing perfectionism, loneliness, and self-doubt, rather than running from them or denouncing them as evil. It is also an example of the baring of the imperfect self that needs to happen for true creativity to awaken. After all, if we understood life perfectly, what would be left to write about?


*I recommend Helen Palmer's book on the Enneagram personality model, or any trustworthy book on the subject, on the matter of our lifelong behavioral biases. Specifically to the Enneagram, I'd dissuade you from taking a questionnaire and pinning a type on yourself without reading further; most questionnaires I've taken have gauged me inaccurately.

Where the Sun Sails and the Moon Walks: About Tolkien's Eagles

There comes a time in the life of every reader when he's re-reading his favorite book for the twenty-seventh time and he comes across a plot hole. This is the final test of a book: whether it can withstand the self-doubt of a reader's dedication. It forces you to be introspective, to decide whether you can still see yourself in the story you love, or loved.

A famous hole has been pointed out in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings since almost immediately after its publication. Don't worry: I won't spoil the ending here. The argument concerns the giant eagles who live upon the peaks of Middle Earth. They're smart, they can talk, and they sometimes help the protagonists out of sticky situations by carrying them away on their backs.

The plot of The Lord of the Rings is this, in oversimplified terms: Frodo, our protagonist, has possession of the Ring of Power, the greatest weapon of the tyrant Sauron. Sauron is ready to take over the world unless Frodo destroys the Ring, which can only be unmade where it was forged: in Mount Doom, a volcano in the heart of Sauron's territory. So Frodo and eight companions must travel by foot to Mount Doom, while every step brings them closer to danger and every day sees more people killed by Sauron and more allies become his devoted slaves.

The million dollar question is this: why did the journey have to be on foot? Gandalf, the wizard even non-Tolkien fans know and love, is a friend to the Eagles, and even calls them to rescue him at one point. Couldn't he ask the Eagles to fly them to Mount Doom? Shouldn't the Eagles want to help out, since Elrond and Gandalf make it clear that Sauron is trying to conquer absolutely everybody, which includes the Eagles on their lofty peaks?

I wouldn't give this criticism time and energy if it weren't a reasonable one. Now, perhaps you've read or heard my theories about the division between high fantasy and sword and sorcery. Read carefully: this question encompasses the entire divide between the two, as well as many other ideologies. I'll have to divide my reply into two parts: what the question misunderstands about Middle Earth, and what the question misunderstands about the Earth we all inhabit.

There are several reasons for the Eagles to withhold their services. The first and grittiest is that it's not their job. Elrond makes sure to say that only those who freely decide to take the quest must accompany Frodo, and the Eagles don't show up. I don't think that this is because, in Dungeons and Dragons mentality, Gandalf forgot they were in his inventory. Rather, the Eagles prove themselves quite capable of knowing what's going on and responding to it when they choose to do so.

Equally importantly, we're specifically kept from seeing exactly what Sauron can do on his own. My generation's audience, which has forgotten that a hidden monster in a book is scarier than the gory reveal provided in IMAX special effects, is also prone to forget that a character may have been able to do more things than they showed in the movie. Sauron's un-Ringed form may look like just a big, red eye, but Tolkien and even Jackson indirectly let you know that he's still the most fearsome person in Middle Earth. It's more impressive, not to mention less anal-retentive, not to tell you exactly how. As far as the Eagles are concerned, those key critics fail to notice that the Eagles only enter Mordor airspace after the Dark Tower has fallen (well, I guess there have to be some spoilers). To do so beforehand could have meant anything, because unlike the modern know-it-all, the Eagles weren't going to underestimate the man whom everyone fears will conquer the world. Flying over his wall would have been the quickest way to tip him off, especially since, because he is an eye rather than anything else, the only thing we have to know about Sauron is his ability to see threats coming. And since, if he had gotten his Ring back, he would have been unstoppable, our favorite Dark Lord could have considered this surprise air mail.

No, careful reading of the book tells us that the quest had to be in secret, carried out by the lowliest people in the most unlikely way, in order to avoid Sauron's all-seeing Eye. But even this wasn't the issue Tolkien took with the question of flying the Eagles.*

Tolkien called the Eagles a 'dangerous machine,' and why not? It would have been so easy to end his story about seven hundred pages earlier by flying the Ring to Mount Doom, and the book would not have been worth reading. "'Nine Walkers' and they immediately go up into the air!" he says to this suggestion. To him, the essence of the story was not the fact that good wins in the end, but the struggle that good must undertake to get there. Hence he needs "a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer." It is, quite literally, a journey toward the thing most feared, requiring the utmost courage because of its slow, dangerous way. If the matter of the story lay exclusively in its resolution, then the action would do nothing but appeal to voyeuristic thrill-seekers and narcissists. Instead, it speaks to people interested in actual courage to see the Ring in the hands of Frodo, a small, peaceful person who has no place in war.

I must stress again that the whole difference between high fantasy and cheap action lies in this question, and that it's a distinction that plays into every day of your life. You don't have to change what you read. Just understand that the world isn't quantified into what we can see; money, science, power, and all other numbers don't dictate another person's usefulness to you. Without these barriers you may discover what ominous mountains are on your horizon, and whether you, too would fly toward them without the slightest idea what awaits you there.

'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.'

Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance. 'If I understand aright all that I have heard,' he said, 'I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will... Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it? Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck? 

-The Fellowship of the Ring

*Quotes here are taken from #210 of the collection of Tolkien's letters.

In Defense of Linguistic Prescriptivism

Those of you who know me know that one of my biggest hobbies is linguistics. I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I regularly dabble in many different languages, trying to sort them out like fluid puzzles. It helps me realize how cloistered we unilingual (read: American) folks really are, especially when I see variations on the most basic parts of human syntax.

Like anything else, language is bombarded by various colorful and interesting opinions about how it should be used. You've heard some of them. Perhaps you think everyone who moves to your country should learn to speak your language, or perhaps you think it's wrong for the supermarket express lane to indicate its use for fifteen items or less rather than fewer.

I'm concerned with both of these issues, but my real beef is with the latter. After all, I could find enough well-informed people to nod their heads if I chose to rail about how closed-minded America is, and how much smarter we could become if we tried to become bi- or tri-lingual. What bothers me is how many well-informed and well-intentioned people condemn the practice of regulating grammar. The most prominent modern linguists divide their practice into two schools:

linguistic descriptivism - the method of studying language by observation and analysis, focusing on what people actually say and how their brains construct meaning

linguistic prescriptivism - the method of meddling with language in pursuit of better communication; for example, teaching that the double negative, "We don't have no milk," is less logical than a single negative, "We don't have any milk." (This example was actually the result of English scholars trying to standardize the many foreign influences that had worked their way into English grammar. They decided to condemn the double negative because, for lack of a better preference, it was inconsistent with classical Greek logic. Many world languages and recognized dialects of English, such as Ebonics, use it.)

Now, in all of the post-1950 books and all of the blogs I've read on the subject, descriptivism is the way to go. Actually, people can be quite nasty in their dislike of people who want to influence language by way of standardizing it (see Tom Scott or Steven Pinker). They have good reasons: everyone has, at some point, been leapt upon by a grammar Nazi who wasn't even part of the conversation. But beyond this, professional linguists and hobbyists are almost universal in their wish for language diversity. The fact that English, Mandarin, and Arabic are devouring endangered languages at a rate of one every three months is, to us, as great a tragedy as the loss of endangered species to habitat destruction. After all, language diversity is the best display of the potential range of human thought, without which we waste countless opportunities for creativity and understanding.

My friends, the direct opposite of this is standardization.

Yet it's possible to take all of this too far. Grammarians who speak about correct versus incorrect speech don't always have a reason beyond having learned a rule out of context in middle school, but it's worth listening to those who speak about useful speech. Whether or not I think it's correct to mention ten items or less, "fewer" is a word that creates additional associations in the brain. With scarcely any more effort, we become conscious of two ways in which quantity is divided. This is the kind of linguistic variation that speakers ought to pursue, and precisely what universal standard languages are beginning to weed out. My dream is not a limiting prescriptivism, by which immigrants must learn English and clods spend all their time worrying about the differences between "affect" and "effect," but a prescribed expansion of language. Let us create new terms and understandings! You don't even need institutional authority to do that, as any dialect could show you.

My formula for linguistic prescriptivism is a simple one, and these are its components:

1. Become proficient in at least two kinds of grammar. These don't necessarily need to be of two different languages. For example, you may have noticed that you write differently from the way you speak. This is especially true if you write a lot, or if you use tone significantly to express meaning. But if you're aiming not to be bilingual, but to examine your own English more closely, make sure you can find many potential deviations in the way you communicate.

2. Use standard grammar as a starting point. This point is where I'd like to draw the most ire from descriptivists. Communication affects individual thought, but its strength is tested better in group situations such as, for example, whether an entire community can understand each other. This is standard grammar. Descriptivists and I have it backwards; their logic implies that language is a piece of individual property which adjusts to fit group standards. Pinker supports this with his thesis that each infant creates language from scratch. But I prefer to think that language is a body of collective reasoning that each individual adjusts for himself. To me, this fits better with the examples of deaf individuals who, passing the adolescent window of rapid linguistic development, never develop the logical processes that neurologists associate with language. We all have to start from somewhere, and that place is the group of reasoning skills we get from hearing people communicating using rules that were decided before we were born.

3. Use your own reasoning to experiment. Do you think you can express yourself better? Do it! Here's an example: I think it's more efficient to refer to a hypothetical individual as someone of your own gender. Instead of "he or she," I say "he." If I were a woman, I'd say "she." That's nowhere in any English rule book I know, but it doesn't make me any harder to understand. And it's how language has always evolved.

4. Be respectful of other people's speech. You are never "right," and they are never "wrong." It can be counterproductive to tell someone that you speak better than he, when his rules make just as much sense to him as yours do to you. And if that ain't enough reason, courtesy is right.

5. Don't be afraid to talk about speech. I worry about descriptivists making the same mistake about "politically correct" fanatics: in taking the underdog's side, they refuse to speak objectively about any of the underdog's issues. In this case, people who think a certain dialect should be given higher esteem may refuse to hear any merits of the mother language, or even any valueless comparisons of the two. This is just a way for elitists to take the high road. Don't stifle communication! Act on a microscopic scale: talk to your friend about why you say "fewer" when he says "less," or vice versa. Don't do it to change him; do it to help the two of you understand each other better.

Please tell me your thoughts. This theory of mine is in its infancy, and still highly disorganized. I'd love to hear feedback from anyone, whether you think you know more or less than I do.

Review: A Man Rides Through by Stephen R. Donaldson (1987)

You may have read my take on a high fantasy novelist writing middle-quality romance. This, friends and fellow readers, is the sequel and conclusion to that story.

Terisa Morgan, a young woman transplanted from her "real" world into the fantasy kingdom of Mordant, has just watched her only friend, the bumbling nobleman Geraden, escape into a mirror after being framed for murder. This escape, though miraculous, leaves Terisa defenseless against a castle full of people who believe that she aided the criminal's flight. Tensions are high, because two marauding armies are racing to that same castle, knowing that whichever takes it first will hold the position to conquer all of Mordant. Meanwhile, old King Joyse refuses to raise a hand in defense of his kingdom. It is up to Terisa alone to escape from her desperate captors and reunite with Geraden, who is her only hope of discovering how an alliance of rogue Imagers (wizards who can pull anything imaginable out of mirrors) are able to translate alien horrors anywhere they please, and whose sinister influence is behind the war that stands at Mordant's door.

I was underwhelmed with the first book; it's not nearly as awe-inspiring as Thomas Covenant, it's too complicated to be a page-turner, and it's not bad enough to be funny. This trend continues into A Man Rides Through. Many, many plots are going on at the same time; after all, Donaldson wrote these two right after the sixth Thomas Covenant, when he was at his peak in terms of subplots. The man is a hydra in that for every subplot he resolves, he creates two more. And he never leaves a thread hanging. This sounds fascinating but is really so only if the story is worth the commitment, and in the Mordant's Need plot, you need a special interest in the characters or the mirror fantasy to feel so involved. Alone, the drama does not justify itself.

Then something incredible happens. About halfway through the book, all the plots take a turn and begin to converge again. The result is like listening to a middle-grade concerto which suddenly reveals that all its disparate melodies, when played at the same time, form a cohesive harmony. It's a load of ordinary devices that fit together with uncanny precision. For a few hundred pages near the end, it's a nonstop hurly-burly of characters picking up Chekhov's guns, only to discover that their targets were wearing Chekhov's bullet-proof vests, but in turn those characters had paid for their vests by borrowing money from Chekhov's loan sharks... It goes on. Every previous action of named character is somehow justified until the plot collapses down to the climax which is a singular event.

To me this instantly makes a fantasy book worth it, but obviously there's more to a novel than structure. Terisa becomes less annoying than in the previous book, but in doing so she loses the better part of her individuality as a character. It frustrates me because Donaldson can write women brilliantly, but Terisa's function is to be a bit shallow. If ever I were to name a problem with this author, it would be his ability to intentionally fall short of his stylistic potential in order to achieve that unerring symbolic consistency.

Overall, the story is entertaining. I enjoyed the various experimentation with monsters created out of mirrors. They're a silly compromise between something grounded in the laws of reality and something from a carnival nightmare. As usual, it takes a stretch to suspend belief of some of the physics, because the magic is symbolic in function. But to me this is refreshing when done right, rather than as a lack of better imagination.

Review: Life of Christ by Fulton J. Sheen (1958)

As Monty Python has taught us to say: and now for something completely different! Don't be surprised if a non-fiction book shows up here now and then. Sometimes I read 'em, and they always like reviewing.

Fulton Sheen, one-time bishop and wacky television personality, explores themes across the four Gospels, attempting to put together a biography of Jesus only as the Bible portrays him. His biggest theory is that rather than Jesus' bringing his glory to the Cross, the Cross cast a shadow backward across his life to the moment of the Annunciation. Sheen doesn't move systematically from Gospel to Gospel, but tries instead to construct a chronological portrait of events, bringing the perspective of each applicable Gospel to each chapter.

The best part about this book is its readability. Look up Sheen's videos online; he wasn't a televangelist as much as he was the Bill Nye of Catholicism, albeit with a chalkboard instead awesome sound effects. Sheen manages to break concepts down without dumbing them down. This sometimes lengthens his topic considerably, but I admire the way he manages to weave the longer, more intricate themes among specific, shorter examples in order to keep the flow of the book moving.

Plenty of Sheen's contemporaries, a friend tells me, looked down on him for his surface-level theology, which engages in simple observation more often than complex reasoning. Although I don't deny that detailed analysis of theological concepts, scripture, reports of miracles, and other starting points can be the basis for useful conclusions, Sheen's work is more valuable to me than that of a Dantean super-scholar. His thesis is fresh but not tough to grasp, and it's not his main purpose for writing. As on his television show, he aims here to teach basic theology in a useful way, so that we regular folks who haven't spent decades in the seminary can keep up. It turns out most people enjoy learning: even people who aren't Catholic priests have brains!

Sheen can be a little over the top at times, but his fervor doesn't surpass cheerful enthusiasm. And, in case you're worried, proselytism isn't the name of the game, either. In fact, if you're a stranger to the Gospel and just looking for a basic education of the concepts without a guilt trip, this is a surefire hit. And if you're a connoisseur of Christian theology, this covers all the bases.

Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

Shevek is a physicist from the planet Anarres, which has a single society without government. Everybody is raised from infancy with the teaching that every individual must have freedom, but that nobody may own possessions or impose upon each other. Objects, food, ideas, and even sexual partners must be shared in order to prevent an imbalance in societal benefit. Thus Shevek is not just a physicist; he contributes whatever his society needs of him at the time. Yet when he arrives at a theory that could result in teleportation technology, he gradually realizes that the eternal bogeys of human nature, including envy and an instinct toward selfishness, cannot be eradicated. Although Shevek remains a faithful citizen, he encounters opponents who believe that his Principle of Simultaneity must be stifled in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the people of Urras, the twin planet of Anarres. On Urras, there are such things as nations, capitalists, communists, possessions, inequity, and war, all of which are antithetical to Anarres's society. Shevek, steadfast in his belief that all good things must be shared, resolves that if his own people will not use Simultaneity, he will deliver it to the Propertarians, as the Anarres call those on Urras. Thus does Shevek become the first of his kind in more than a century to visit Urras, but he quickly finds himself out of his depth, among people for whom manipulation is a way of life. Unable to comprehend the reality of social inequality, he must learn how to survive while standing for people who stand for nothing at all.

Although I haven't always agreed with Le Guin's arguments, I find myself coming back for more. So far, all of her work I've read, with the exception of one novella, falls between 1968 and 1972 (this includes the first three Earthsea books as well as The Left Hand of Darkness.) In the tradition of hate being a variation of love, I think I'm so attracted to her writing because it handles the touchier subjects I appreciate in almost exactly the way I would handle them. She's the most talented science-fiction writer I know, so why does she fall short by just an inch?

Good news: in The Dispossessed, I think she finally hits the bull's-eye. And it's not for lack of trying, or for shirking the juicy stuff; once you wrap economic policy, sexual values, and science in the same package, there's nobody who's uninterested. If anyone's playing with fire, it's this lady.

What first impressed me was the ambiguity with which each character is portrayed. Shevek's description is simple for a long time. His life, habits, and tastes are each human and objective, and they build to a whole that is not a symbol for anything. In fact, it could be this uncertainty that makes him a perfect candidate to go to Earth. Anarres is held together by a solid goal of survival; Shevek intends to share his discovery, but he doesn't know what he wants, which makes him an outsider in both worlds. Similarly, all of the inhabitants of Urras are established like humans we all know, which makes them indescribable and alien to Shevek. But since we've already learned to relate to our protagonist, it's like looking in a mirror for the first time, without any disguise or prejudice, and not knowing what to think.

It's also great to see the underlying instability of Anarres. The subtitle for this book is An Ambiguous Utopia, and it shows. At first everybody is cheerful and cooperative, and you might be tempted to hail the society as the success of socialism's giving spirit or to damn it if you're suspicious of socialist tyranny (that's before Shevek meets real-life socialists and can't tell them apart from capitalists). But he discovers, with some help, that the manipulation of information, especially concerning his theory, is only mankind's oldest demon wearing new makeup. Power is never equal; even a supreme effort to level the playing field only distances the arbiters from the people playing the game. It warms my heart to hear a dedicated liberal like Le Guin understand this principle; there's an uncontrollability of life that the majority of the twenty-something demographic can't understand. In a way it makes Shevek all the more noble, because he would rather face the unexpected than allow his principles of indefinite equality to destroy something that could do a world of good.