Politics and Religion

Are there two more dangerous things to discuss, even with friends and family, then political and religious topics? I have to doubt it.

In fact, when it comes to politics, especially as the U.S. presidential election draws closer and closer, I find myself going out of my way to avoid all the ranting, rumor-pushing, lying and media bias that seems to be everywhere. Frankly, it doesn't matter which side it comes from - all of it irritates me and I can't wait for the election to be over because of the way that the subject of politics is now creeping into even those few places I used to be able to go to escape all of that nonsense.

Political blogs are easy to recognize and that makes them easy to avoid. When it comes to magazines and newspapers, it's not too difficult just to skip the political commentary sections but I find myself generally reading magazines and papers less than ever because they tend to allow biased politics to creep even into their entertainment and news sections. I know which movies are little more than political propaganda, which directors seem to have gone off the deep end, and I can very easily ignore them. I know that most of the cable news programs, and even those on the national networks, are run by biased people, especially the talking-heads who host them, so I don't watch unless morbid curiosity gets the best of me.

Really, all of it is pretty easy to avoid. But now I'm seeing politics "discussed" even in book blogs, sports blogs, tech blogs and music blogs, and that bugs me because I read those blogs to relax and to learn about subjects that interest me. Frankly, when I read a blog about baseball, music, books, computers, and the like, I really don't want to hear about the blog author's political leanings. I don't care what they think about politics. I find the whole topic to be an irrelevant, but jarring, distraction that ruins the whole experience of the blog. And what is most irritating is that I sometimes find myself being sucked into a discussion that I later kick myself for getting involved in, an experience that ultimately leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I can't wait for things to get back to normal.

"The Jewel of Medina" Finds a Publisher

Almost exactly one month after Random House chickened-out of its deal to publish The Jewel of Medina, a novel about the pre-teen wife of the prophet Muhammad, author Sherry Jones has a new publisher and it appears that the book will now be published all over the world.

U.S. publisher Beaufort Books has bought a novel about the Prophet Mohammad's child bride a month after Random House canceled its release, citing fears it could "incite acts of violence."

The publishing house will release "The Jewel of Medina" in October and a sequel in 2009, Beaufort president Eric Kampmann said in a statement released on Friday.

...

In a statement, Jones said that she was pleased to have found a publisher "that wouldn't be spooked by controversy."

Deals have now been reached with publishers in Britain, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain and other countries, Jones's literary agent Natasha Kern said.

The novel traces the life of Aisha from her engagement to Mohammad, when she was six, until the prophet's death.

This is good news for the publishing world and I am looking forward to getting a look at the book.

Yellowknife

Canada’s Northwest Territory has always seemed a little unreal to me and, consequently, my imagination allowed me to create my own version of a larger-than-life world there, one populated by some of the hardiest people on the face of the Earth who found their way that far north for lots of bizarre and personal reasons. You know what I mean – a world something like the stereotypical version of what life was like in the American West in the 1870’s when residents were either gunslingers or people who were afraid of gunslingers, with not much in between.

Then along comes a novel like Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife and I start to wonder if what I figured was a farfetched distortion of what life up that way was like might only be off by a matter of degree. Zipp’s fictional Yellowknife is filled with the kind of people I imagined would be there, people who have been drawn to the remoteness of the Canadian North for reasons of their own and who relish living in an environment that scares most of the rest of us to death.

Some come to Zipp’s Yellowknife looking for the easy money they imagine to be there. Others come because they are fed up with people and big city life and imagine that immersing themselves in Mother Nature will ease their spirit. A few come because they need to get lost for a time or because they want to reinvent themselves among people who don’t much care about where they started from. Some, of course, have lived there for generations and can only chuckle and shake their heads at what they observe.

Yellowknife, much like the early novels of John Irving, is not the kind of book that a reviewer can ruin for its readers by revealing a key spoiler or two. There is just too much going on, too many stories being told as the characters come and go, interacting with each other and recombining in ways that are sometimes simultaneously surreal and brutally realistic. Zipp’s characters embody the deepest secrets, dreams, fears and plain old weirdness that the rest of us manage to keep hidden from everyone but possibly ourselves.

There’s a dog-food-loving, self-made private detective who calls himself Dan Diamond and who learned everything he knows about sleuthing from watching bad television. There’s the guy with a secret entrance cut into one of the walls of his home that opens directly into a mine tunnel from which he seems to illegally gather enough gold to support himself and his wife. There’s a government environmentalist so infatuated by mosquitoes that he allows them to feast on him during his field research and who discovers a snow white species of mosquito no one but him has ever seen. There’s the government-employed computer geek who can’t be fired because he’s so good at hacking into the system and erasing all records of his dismissal, and who just might have saved the world with the Y2K-solution virus he unleashed in late 1999. And that’s just the short list.

My favorite sections of the book, though, involve places as much as characters. Zipp’s description of the colony of misfits who live on the grounds of the town dump and mine it for the treasures they need to survive in the town’s warmer months is great fun. And the winter festival during which so many of the townspeople hope to turn a profit by selling something to their fellow citizens is a reminder that, despite it’s location, life in Yellowknife may not, deep down, be all that different from life in any small town. But best of all is when Zipp places his characters deep in the Artic wilderness and, ready or not, they are on their own and it is literally sink or swim.

Yellowknife is one heck of a ride and I disembarked still not quite sure what was exaggerated truth and what was pure fantasy. But maybe that’s the point. For readers like me, who have never seen the Northwest Territory, the mystery surrounding it remains intact, and that’s what just might get me up there one of these days.

Rated at: 4.0

Computer Crash

In my outrage at what I was reading last night about Governor Palin's young daughter I continued to follow link-to-link in an attempt to find out who was creating some of the lies and was most enthusiastic about the whole process of destroying a young woman's life that way. Well, I should have known better. When you go into a sewer you are going to smell bad when you come out of it.

That's what happened to me. My home computer system suddenly crashed and I have apparently picked up a bad enough virus that I will be lucky if the system survives it. I'm in the process of reformatting the hard drive right now, but you all know what that means: a computer with the original factory settings from three summers ago, no software, no internet connection, lots of garbage from AOL, Quicken, etc. to clear out.

I decided to reformat after everything else failed after more than 8 hours of trying for a fix. The bug even managed to disable my virus protection software so I have been unable to identify exactly what I picked up.

This is just a note to make you aware that I'm having a huge problem that will slow me down for a few days. I do have a laptop that might work to a degree if I can get it set up properly. But tonight I'm going to focus on the desktop to see if I can begin to get it back at least close to what it was before I picked up the virus I stepped in last night. (I only had three hours sleep last night and that, on top of a long day at the office, means I'm not felling real frisky at the moment, so I hope I don't make things worse - wish me luck.)

Mars Life

I haven't read a great deal of science fiction in recent years but I grew up on the novels of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, and Ben Bova's Mars Life reminds me a whole lot of the style used so successfully by those guys. Those writers were at their peaks in socially simpler times, when the dialogue of books and movies seldom reflected the harsh reality of street language and the raciest sex scenes described were of the relatively tame James Bond style. Their plots were seldom over-complicated, their character types rather predictable and their dialogue not always very realistic sounding. But, taken as a whole, the style worked, and today many of their books are considered to be science fiction classics. So the fact that Mars Life reads like a throwback to that science fiction era is not at all a bad thing.

This book is actually the third in Bova's Mars series but readers like me who have not read the first two books in the series will have no problem reading and enjoying it as a standalone novel. In fact, Mars Life is actually the sixteenth novel in Bova's "Grand Tour" series begun in 1993, which also includes a book of "Grand Tour" stories.

Navajo tribesman, Jamie Waterman, discovered Martian cliff dwellings on his first trip to Mars and has ever since that time dedicated his life to keeping the Mars exploration program focused and well-funded. Now, much to the dismay of Waterman and everyone associated with the program, both governmental and private funding is drying up and the existence of the program is threatened. Partially, that is because the United States government is facing the tremendously complicated and expensive prospect of relocating a substantial portion of its population due to all the flooding caused in recent years by global warming.

But even more importantly, a group of religious fundamentalists known as the New Morality has become so powerful that it can determine the outcome of elections at both the state and national levels by simply choosing whom to support. And New Morality leadership sees the archeological work being done on Mars as such a threat to its core religious beliefs that it wants the whole project shut down. Private donors have been intimidated into withdrawing their support from the Mars program, and the President and members of Congress told to do the same if they want to have any hope of being re-elected.

Mars Life is a race against the clock during which anthropologist Carter Carleton tries to uncover as much of the Martian village and cemetery discovered beneath the cliff dwellings as possible before everyone is forced to leave the planet and Waterman desperately searches for new sources of funding. It is also an intriguing look at what might happen if the clash between science and religion were to get so out of hand that extremists end up with the power to shut down scientific exploration any time that it threatens their shaky religious beliefs, something that seems more and more possible every day.

Rated at: 4.0

Stephenie Meyer's Next Book "on Hold Indefinitely"

I suspect that most writers consider the internet to be the most useful new tool for promoting their work to come around in the last half century. Via the net, authors can create virtual book tours that include interviews and conversations with readers that are of a much higher quality than is possible by physically traveling across the country - all at a tiny fraction of the cost. Word-of-mouth can be a wonderful thing when it comes to selling something, and the sheer number of reviews that are being written exclusively for the internet ensures that even obscure authors and books have a real shot at building an audience for themselves.

That's the good news, but there is also some bad news. Sometimes, still relatively rarely for written material, a new book will be leaked to the internet before its publication date by some thief who is totally unconcerned about the harm being done to the author. According to Jack Schofield of the Guardian, that is exactly what has recently happened to Stephenie Meyer and the theft is apparently going to have a serious consequence for her fans:

"I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being."

...

"My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James [a vampire tracking Bella] would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story.

"In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely."

Schofield goes on to wonder whether Meyer's decision to put the book on hold might have been influenced by all the negative comments coming from readers regarding her most recently released book in the series. Maybe so, but if that's the case Meyer is making a big mistake by letting the criticism influence her to make such a drastic choice about her new book.

I can't resist noting Schofield's next-to-last sentence, "Well, the internet has no shortage of self-righteous assholes, as we know only too well." Nice, that. But he should keep in mind that the internet does not have an exclusive on that type and that the print medium has more than its share of the same folks. I stumble across some of them on a daily basis, in fact.