July 26, 2018 • 50 mins
It's a summer tradition! Once more, Stuff to Blow Your Mind devotes a summer episode to the discussion of fiction, non-fiction and children's books that the hosts read over the course of the last year. So listen in and maybe one of these books will accompany you on your next beach trip.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe M. Cormickin.
We're back with part two of our summer reading series
this year because, as we told you last time, we
(00:21):
ended up talking about our favorite books from this year,
and then we ended up just going for how long
do we talk? Like seventeen hours? It went on a while, yeah,
because what we were talking about the books, but we're
also talking about a lot of the ideas wrapped up
in them, and in doing so, discussing some of the
predominant themes of Stuff to Blow your Mind over the
past year. Yeah, so we decided we had to split
it into Here we are with part two. I think
last time we talked about nonfiction. This time we're probably
(00:44):
gonna be talking about fiction. All right, let's jump right
back into the conversation. Okay, Robert, I think you had
a couple of fiction books you wanted to talk about, right, Yeah,
and again these are both books that you may have
heard me discussed at least in passing before, Because again
I can't if I really like a work of fiction
and it's going to boil out in everything that I
do and until people were sick of hearing about it. Uh.
(01:06):
And So the first book I want to talk about
is Starfish by Peter Watts. From so my fiction pick
last summer I think was Blindsite, but it was. Yeah,
that was a book from two thousand and six. And
and I read that one as well because you were
talking about it. And uh, I think when you told
me I had space vampires in it, I was like, well,
(01:27):
I have to read this now. It's definitely got the
best sci fi vampires of anything I've read. Oh yeah,
without it, without a doubt. So Peter Watts is a
He's a Canadian sci fi author and former marine mammal biologists. Uh. Yeah,
we've certainly talked about him on the show before, and
we've talked about Starfish as well. Um referenced in in
a few of our Underwater episodes earlier this year. This
(01:49):
is actually his first novel, uh and uh and I've
never read it before. I've been working on an underwater
sci fi podcast for How Stuff Works. And then I
realized that Watts had written something more or less in
the genre already. I thought, maybe I did. I think
may maybe he did. Yeah, And so when I realized
that it was that it was an underwater sci fi tail,
(02:10):
as like, well, I've got to I've got to jump
in and see what what Watts did with it. So
it is a just a very um addictive novel. Um.
So it it just to give a quick plot overview. Basically,
you have a crew of psychologically damaged people who undergo
cybernetic enhancement so that they can work on deep sea
(02:31):
geothermal plants in the near future. Uh. And they're and
they're doing this work, very dangerous work among some mysteriously
gigantic deep sea organisms near dangerous hydrothermal vents. And they're
also dealing with the uncertainty of their own psychology and
an emergent biological threat that everyone is totally unequipped to handle.
(02:55):
And that this thing is loaded with science, Like Watts
is an author who just really uh he really packs
a lot of scientific ideas. Sometimes it's more, you know,
scientific hypotheses, but he packs a lot in So this
particular book, for instance, is loaded with deep water biology, spreading,
zone tectonics, and geology, quantum theories of consciousness, AI, molecular evolution,
(03:21):
dream learning neuroplasticity as well as abuse and addiction psychology.
Now I wonder something about it because I haven't read
this yet. I became aware of it uh while back,
and I've I've been wanting to read it, but I
haven't gotten to it yet. So my question is are
there characters that can be loved? Because blind Side, it
was my fiction pick last year because of exactly what
(03:42):
you're talking about, is just packed with thought provoking ideas
and unique bits of world building. Um one of the
most interesting books I've ever read, so much so that
I almost had to like keep constantly putting it down
to like write down thoughts I was having about the
stuff in the book. But it was also a differ
book for several reasons, one of the main ones being
that like, the main character in in blind Side is
(04:05):
extremely unsympathetic. I mean that's by design since his character,
he's a character who essentially has no empathy due to
an experimental brain surgery. This actually played a role in
the plot and made for a very interesting narrator, but
not a very sympathetic or lovable one. So does Watts
throw us more of a bone in this story? As
as far as like character as you can fall in
(04:26):
love with. Well, I would say yes and no, because
on one level, you do see that that same trend
of of a lot of characters that are damaged or
less human, perhaps in different ways, either due to something
that has been done to them or something that they
have voluntarily done through technological enhancement. But I would say
(04:51):
that the protagonist Lenny Clark, she you do root for,
perhaps more than some of the characters in blind Side,
like she's she's a very damaged individual with and she's
essentially transhuman at this point to the cybernetic enhancements and
some other stuff. But in Starfish you are rooting for
there is she is kind of an underdog, and I
(05:12):
think that is one of the things that that pulled
me in with Starfish, probably more than Blindside, is that
I wanted I wanted her to succeed or to survive
at the very least. Well, I'm going to read a
quick passage from the book here just to get everyone
a taste of some of the some of the biological
(05:35):
uh science that is invoked in Let's Hear It. And
in this we were following Lenny Clark as she is
out swimming in the deep dark ocean quote. Everywhere else,
living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls
blink sexual advertisements at two second intervals. Here, a sudden
flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clark's field of view.
(05:58):
Something flees undercover her momentary blindness. They're a counterfeit worm,
twist lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof
of some predatory mouth. There are so many of them.
She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if
something big is just passed very close. A delicious thrill
dances through her body. It nearly touched me, she thinks,
(06:19):
I wonder what it was. The rift is full of
monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter
how much they eat. Their vorocity is as much a
part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws.
Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size. And sometimes,
when the abyss is a desert, no one can afford
the luxury of waiting for better odds. But even a
(06:41):
desert has oasis, and sometimes the deep hunters find them.
They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and
gorge themselves. Their descendants grow huge and bloated over such
delicate bones. My light was off and it left me alone,
I wonder. She turns it back on, her vision cloud
in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to
(07:03):
unrevealed black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty
water wherever she points it. She switches it off. There's
a moment of absolute darkness while her eye caps adjust
to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.
They're so beautiful. Lenny Clark rests on the bottom of
the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her, and
(07:24):
she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from
the nearest sunlight that is only dark when the lights
are on. That's great, man. Well, you know what it
reminds me of Blindside. It reminds me of sort of
the richness of like the the sci fi horror atmosphere
that that Watts can create. Um, his his worlds are
so rich. Yeah, and this book really you can you
(07:47):
get a taste of it here. Like he is an
author that clearly was Slash is in love with the
biology of the deep ocean. And even though this is
a slightly you know, there's some sci fi elements invoked here. Uh,
it is a it resonates with a love for the
the natural wonders of the deep. Robert, I know you
(08:08):
were a fan of the recent games Soma, which you
recommended to me. Do you think that maybe Starfish was
an influence on Soma? I bet it was. Um. Again,
I didn't I didn't even know Starfish existed until uh,
you know, earlier this year really, but uh, but afterwards
(08:29):
I started looking into it. I read somewhere that the
the makers of the Bioshot games were also inspired by
by Starfish, so that would make sense. So I think
it has been highly influent influential in I mean, if
I can't imagine making some sort of underwater sci fi
horror at this point without of course being familiar with
the Abyssum, the James Cameron film, Yeah, Deep Start six, Yeah,
(08:55):
and at least finding out about Starfish and and realizing
that it is an important to to to read in reference.
All Right, if somebody were to make a Starfish movie,
what director should it be? Oh? I don't know. You
gotta have who's the most nihilistic director not there right now,
I don't know. Maybe I guess does Nolan count he's
(09:15):
he has some nihilistic he's nihilistic, Well, no, but there's
a there is a borderline sentimental. Okay, he's but in
terms of I guess I'm thinking about the visual universe
he tends to create. I feel like his his visual
world is nihilistic, even if even if there's hope everywhere else,
a lot of slate grays and stuff like that. I
don't know. So for some reason he comes to mind
(09:38):
um and also his it's it's so humorless, you know.
I tend to find that Nolan's uh movies are they're
they're not very fun. Usually I find that there. I
find they are not fun and they are not certainly
not funny. They're satisfying, they're they're they're beautiful, they're they're
they're excellent films. Uh, but but you don't enjoy them.
(10:03):
I enjoy them, but I don't enjoy them in the
same way I enjoy other things. I don't know. For
some reason, I'm thinking, I think Christopher Nolan might be
the night be might be the director to to helm
something like this Okay, it's time to take a quick
break and then we'll be back with more summer reading.
Thank alright, we're back. All right. Well, I'm gonna go
ahead and hit my my final fiction uh selection for
(10:26):
this year's summer reading. And this is one again that
that if you have been listening religiously to the show
or and certainly if you've if you read it, take
pay attention to our social media. You've probably heard or
seen me mention it before. But it is a two
thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles.
Oh yeah, tell me about it? Okay, Well, Terence Hawkins
(10:48):
he's the author of two books in various short stories.
He was founding director of the Yale Writer's Conference, and
he now runs the Company of Writers, which offers workshop
and manuscript service to writers at all levels of experience.
And incidentally, he also chimes in from time to time
on our Facebook group the Stuff to Build Your Mind
discussion module with with commentary and literary recommendations. But the
(11:09):
Rage of Achilles, this this is a novel, and it's
essentially a novelization of Homer's The Iliad, retold with modern
language and invoking Julian Janes the Origin of consciousness in
the Breakdown of the bicameral Mind. Okay, so, if your
recall from our Bicameral Mind episodes, the Iliad was one
of the pieces of evidence in literature from the ancient
(11:31):
world that Jane's uses to show. Basically, he uses it
to argue that people at this time, First of all,
two main premises were not conscious and did not have
an inner mind space. And number two, they had novel
activities directed by hallucinations that they believed to be the
voices of God's And so he basically he determines that
(11:55):
this is the case for the people who produced the
Iliad because he looks at the Iliad and he says,
there's very little consciousness in the Iliad. You don't get
people reflecting internal mind states. Instead, when people do things,
it says that God made them do it. Yes. And
I want to be clear here, I don't want to
make it sound as if Hawkins wrote a novel that
(12:15):
serves as a teaching tool for the bicameral mind. I
think rather Hawkins uses um uses the bicameral mind as
a means of understanding a lot of the decision making
and divine inspiration that takes place in the story of
the Iliad uh and It's and Also, to be clear,
it's not an epic retelling of the Trojan War. It
(12:36):
is just the Iliad itself, which only occupies a portion
of the Trojan War. So this is definitely a book
for mature readers. Hawkins doesn't shy away from the violent slavery, misogyny,
and sexual violence inherent in the in the culture at
the time. It's not ancient Greeks for great book, No
(12:56):
no uh and and and all of it is also
revealed again through very modern language. The characters speak to
each other like they are modern humans, even if they
in many of the cases do not have modern minds. Because,
especially through the eyes of Odysseus, the reader is is
forced to come to terms with the familiar yet alien
nature of this kind of ancient world. So the book
(13:16):
is grim, it's dark, it's violent, but not in a
way that betrays its historical and literary roots. So that
the book I found does a fantastic job of depicting
what it might have been like to exist as a
bicameral human and what it might have been like to
live among them as a more modern human with a
awoken consciousness. So the vast majority of the characters in
(13:39):
the Rage of Achilles are highly susceptible to bicameral hallucinations.
Odesseus says, our main window into modern consciousness, along with
the Trojan Prince Paris, and when faced with pressing challenges
or cognitive dissonance, the gods speak to these these people,
to the bicameral characters, and even manifest visual the So
(14:00):
in keeping with Jane's theory, these these hallucinations are produced
by the of course, the non dominant hemisphere, and perceived
by the dominant voices within the mind wrapped within the
trappings of an outer pantheon, and the hallucinations range from
helpful to chaotic. For instance, the Achaean king Agamemnon experiences
his desire to claim achilles slave Brescius as a divine command,
(14:23):
and this endangers the entire siege, but it also but
he also rallies his men when Zeus speaks through him.
And then we have Achilles himself, who turns to buy
cameral visions of his mother for guidance. His mother, of course,
to the mythical fetis. And yet the very act of
locking eyes with a horse on the battlefield threatens to
(14:47):
transform into a chaotic hallucination. For Achilles Hawkins is a
is A is a great writer, and he has there's
so many passages in this book that really capture this
uh far better than than I can summarize. H For instance,
there's a part where Agamemnon speaking to Odysseus after Odysseus
has has presented some ideas, and he says, do you
ever have any thoughts of your own? Or is it
(15:08):
always gray eyed athena um talking in there um? The
the idea that like any kind of inspiration, any kind
of like I guess you would say, sort of. You know,
major moments in cognition, they are not your own. They
must be the God speaking through you. And indeed those
with a bicamraal mind would be would be perceiving it
as such. It's a wonderful exploration of the concept. And
(15:30):
I love the idea of novels based on the idea
of the bicameral mind, because that that satisfies both of
my impulses. On one hand, I don't believe it's a
correct interpretation of history. I don't believe it's a correct
explanation of what consciousness is or what past human consciousness
was like. On the other hand, I think it's such
an interesting idea to explore, and so fiction seems like
(15:51):
a perfect realm for it, Like you don't necessarily have
to believe it was ever true, but you could explore
it as a sort of alternative reality. Yeah, I would
love to read more that that that used the bi
cameral mind is a way of of making sense of
of the magical and the divine. Uh. Here's here's another
wonderful passage from the book. No one will speak to Achilles.
(16:12):
No one in his right mind would. All day he
has sat at the foot of Patroclus's unlit pire. The
only company he will tolerate is that of the priests
who flank it, droning away in the language that the
Achaeans spoke when their minds first awakened in the north,
when the ice rivers were still fresh memories to their grandfathers,
whose own grandfathers had been no more than puppets in
(16:35):
the hands of the gods, hunting and breeding with no
more consciousness of purpose than the animals they slaughtered. So again,
this captures a time when the bicameral mind would be
giving way to the modern mind, and you would be
in this this chaotic, uh realm between where you have
(16:55):
you have more and more modern thought. But then you
have these bicameral visions and these bicameral experiences. And then
a few few people such as Odysseus in this novel,
who do not know what it is to have a
bicameral vision and just exists outside of it, just have
to nod along when everyone else is talking about what
(17:16):
the gods told them today. Yeah, I've got to give
this one to read. I recommend it. Uh. Now, there
is another book by Terence Hawkins I want to mention briefly,
and it's a titled American Neolithic. Came out in fourteen.
It's a near future dystopian novel in which a tribe
of Neanderthals have survived into the modern world, and it
features some really thought provoking depictions of how this might work,
(17:36):
how Neandertal biology and cognition um I would differ from ours,
and how their eradication factors into human culture. Uh So
I have to read. Uh one one of my favorite
passages from this and this is told by the protagonist
who is in Neandertal, who has survived into modern times.
(17:57):
Quote you, for whom we have always been the other existence,
buried deep in your racial memories, since the time when
glaciers girdled the world and the contest between man and
animal was yet to be decided. We haunt your legends
as we hunt your dreams, misshapen versions of yourself, bad
copies formally Cobalds or Grimlin's now more locks and orcs. Oh,
(18:19):
that's creepy. So the idea that we we've got all
these humanoid monsters in our fiction, and that this is
coming from deep instincts we have about about other types
of human shaped creatures that very close relatives of ours
that existed, you know, a few as recently as several
thousand years ago. Yeah, yeah, there was there was another.
(18:39):
There was this this slightly inhuman other that we that
we wiped from the earth, and we keep recreating them
in uh, in all of these fantastic forms. It's it's
a it's a wonderful of poetic idea like it, though,
I I also like the idea that it implies, like
Homo sapiens, like us, we were maybe the bad guys actually,
(19:00):
like we demonize them, but we do so unfairly, like
we were really the aggressive main ones that wiped them out. Yeah. Now,
this is an idea that is explored in a book
that we haven't read yet, but we've both discussed reading.
Um uh, what what is the title? The Descendants The
Inheritor The Inheritors? Yes, by William Golding, the author of
(19:20):
Lord of the Flies. Oh yeah, and I've actually read
like the first chapter of it, and I'm very intrigued
to pick it up again later because it is the
story of Neanderthal annihilation from the point of view of
the Neanderthals. Man humans like us can be scary. We're
the worst. All right, Well, it looks like it's time
for me to talk about some fiction, now, Robert, last
time you got to pick a classic, you picked Carl
(19:42):
Sagan's classic nonfiction work. So I'm gonna pick a classic
work of fiction that I just read for the first time. Okay,
what do you have? This is The Haunting of Hill
House by Shirley Jackson nine. It is a Gothic horror
novel first published in fifty nine, with the most classic
of han a house setups. Right, So, you've got a
haunted house, it's got a malevolent ghostly presence reported over
(20:05):
the generations, it's got tragic history. And then there's a
kind of stuffy professor who's interested in the paranormal, and
he hires several psychically sensitive people to come live in
the house with them and study the hauntings that occur there. Now,
this has been made into a couple of movies, and
believe it or not, I've actually not seen either one
of them, or there there at least two. There might
(20:25):
be more. There's one supposedly terrible adaptation from that I
haven't seen, with Liam Neeson, Catherine's Aida Jones, and Owen Wilson,
directed by the guy who made Speed Twister and Speed
two Cruise Control. Oh. I actually saw this one, but
I can't remember a single thing about except I think
it's like a beheading scene or something that's not in
the book. Um. I've heard it is radically different from
(20:48):
the book, but I haven't seen that. I kind of
want to watch it maybe this weekend. It's time for
some some trash ghost movies. Uh. There's also supposedly a
movie version from the sixties that is better, but I
haven't seen either one. But if you've never read this
book and you're in the mood for a good old
fashioned haunted house story, this is a really fabulous read.
It's that kind of mid century New Yorker style of
(21:09):
prose writing. So it's thoughtful, really funny actually, but also reserved,
and um, I have to admit, for me, at least
genuinely scary. At least I thought so maybe you'll write
in so I didn't think it was scary. You know,
you're you're a cry baby. But I thought it was scary.
And I'm not alone. Stephen King wrote an introduction to
the book in which he wrote that quote. It seems
(21:32):
to me that the Haunting of Hill House and Henry
James Is The Turn of the Screw are the only
two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years. Interesting.
It's a bold pronouncement. But you know, I do agree
that when a when a ghost story is done well,
it can be so terrifying. A ghost story, though, is
(21:55):
is like a lot of things in art, is typically
not done well. Uh yeah, you're right about that, and
and it is genuinely horrifying. And I think it's interesting
that can be genuinely horrifying two people like us who
are horror fans and who are largely desensitized to the
most piercing aspects of horror like I think I may
(22:15):
have contemplated this on the podcast before, but I just
want to bring it up again because this is such
a perplexing question to me. Why are ghosts the scariest
of all monsters? I feel like this must be measurably
true because I'm you know, we're both horror fans. I've
asked a lot of my friends who are horror fans
about this. We've had this conversation a bunch of times.
(22:36):
Once you're used to horror books and horror movies, vampires, werewolves,
hell beasts. They're great, They're great fun. We love them,
but they're not really scary anymore, are they. I mean,
do you find yourself really worrying at night in the
dark about vampires or anything like that? I I certainly don't.
(22:57):
Now the ghost I think one of the reasons it
can be so so effective is that it's something that
really doesn't have to obey the rules. I mean, yes,
you can get into you do have treatments of it
that have a lot of rules and throw in some
ghost fighting, pseudoscience and some proton packs and you have
a different situation. But I feel like the best, the
(23:18):
most effective ghost stories are the ones in which the
protagonists are the protagonist are totally out of their element
and do not know how to deal with the threat.
I think that's one of the reasons that UH that
the at least the initial incarnations of the Ring movies,
both the original Japanese and the and and I would
also classify the original UH English language remake. They both
(23:43):
succeed in presenting a supernatural threat that does not seem
to obey law. I mean, it oldbys certain laws, but
but once you've you've awakened it, there's no stopping I think.
I think there's something about that. Yeah, the ghost in
the Ring is terrifying to me in a way, I
mean less so now that I'm so used to it,
like it's kind of a joke. That was the other
(24:03):
great thing about it is that it felt so fresh
at the time. Yes, when I first encountered it, it
was truly terrifying to me. And I think part of
it has to do with it it's non corporate reality,
like that it doesn't have a specific body that's bound
to a place. You know that it can kind of
appear anywhere. Um, as soon as you give a monster
(24:24):
a body. I mean, I love monster designs, all those
those beast designs are great, but it immediately becomes a
thing that's like, Okay, I could run from this, I
could fight this with a ghost. It. In fact, with
ghosts in most stories, ghosts are not even really a
physical threat. They're not gonna grab you and bite you
and tear you asunder and harm harm your physical body.
(24:45):
They attack your mind. But as far as I know,
here's one aspect of hauntings that's never really explored, and
that is that the idea that a ghost could lower
your rent. Well, I know that that it would you know,
reduce your property taxes or something to that effect. Like
this seems like prime territory for exploitation. With with with
with haunting fiction, uh, the idea that the presence of
(25:08):
the ghost would actually make the the haunted location more
desirable to individuals willing to put up with it. Wait
a minute, is this is not part of the plot
of The Frighteners, is it? I don't know, I've never
seen The Frighteners. Uh, I haven't seen it in a
long time. I'm vaguely recalling something like this, like a buddy.
Oh maybe maybe he's just like, uh, there's a human
(25:30):
character who's got ghost buddies and he uses them for
hauntings and then maybe he charges for exorcisms. I think
maybe that's what it is. But it struck me in
the in the moment that there could be some kind
of real estate scam where you like, you know, you
rent out of property and then you get your ghost
buddies to haunt it and so you can get your
rent lowered. Yeah, if only ghosts actually existed and we're
(25:54):
you know, verifiable through science. Yeah. So there is, of
course the fact that ghosts don't exist, but there are
some great insights about our psychology. I think we can
gain from thinking about why ghosts are so particularly terrifying.
So one example that I want to talk about briefly,
the e book version of Haunting of Hillhouse that I have,
(26:14):
has an introduction by Guiermo del Toro, and so he
writes about the way that the horror and the story
comes from the way the house itself in the book
behaves like a predator in the wild. And he also
points out how the novel praise on our ancestral fears
of being alone, being separated from the herd. He writes,
calling it quote a fascinating piece of nature documentary. Hill
(26:38):
House is the lion pouncing in slow motion on the smallest,
weakest gazelle in the herd. And he's talking about a
particular character who the House praise on in the book.
But then he points out how the book accentuates the
terror by driving home that our vulnerability and being alone
isn't just present when we're physically alone, because we're always
(26:59):
alone with in our own minds, and the very fact
that you can't share your consciousness with other people means
that we're always subjectively separated from the herd, no matter what,
vulnerable to the predations of ghosts. Interesting. Yeah, I like
this treatment of the of the ghost, the haunting, the
poulter Geist as a predatory force because we do see this.
(27:20):
I feel like what this motif is U is used
well and some of our best haunting fiction. You know
that it's not just the ghost is just trying to,
you know, warn you about the perils of not believing
in Christmas or what have you. Like that it is
it is a nasty customer that just wants to hurt you.
So what you say, I mean just bringing up the
ghosts in Christmas Carol. I mean that does play on
(27:41):
another big part of the ghost law, right, which is
that ghosts are very often on a mission. They're concerned
with something in some way. They want to teach you
a lesson, or get you to do something for them,
or get you to you know, avenge some wrong on
their behalf or something like that. So many stories in
this way. Um. I don't want to spoil anything about
(28:02):
the Haunting of Hillhouse, but it's a great kind of
reprieve from a lot of the corny plot wrap ups
that you often see in ghost stories. Nice. Well, you know,
I've never read it. It's it's it's been on my
list for a very long time. So maybe this Halloween
it you should read it this October, Robert, I would
love to see what you think. Uh, you know, speaking
of October, I believe it was last October we had
(28:25):
an episode of Stuff to Play in Mind come Out.
This is what I did with Christian where we we
took various ghost stories from around the world and tried
to get break them down and figure out like what
what do they reveal? These individual stories reveal about the
human condition or you know, cultural elements. Uh. And it
was a pretty fun exercise. So I feel like it's
(28:46):
possible that we could we could we could bring that
model back out again this October and and see what
we could find. You know, maybe, I think I think
last last time, most of the ghosts ended up revealing
something kind of horrible about colonialism. Um, maybe we could
find some examples of of ghost lore that reveal more
(29:06):
about human psychology. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean the ghost
archetype is kind of a master key to the lock
on the human mind, where you open it up and
rummage around with all the on all the images and
fears we've got in there. It's sort of like a
perfect cipher for for what's deep down in there suppressed.
How about the film Ghost Shark? Does Does that exist?
(29:28):
It does exist? I haven't yet. I gotta see it
does exist. That's good. Now does it still eat people
even though it's a ghost? I don't know. Maybe it
eats your ghost. Maybe it has to work with another shark,
like real shark eats you, and then ghost shark eats
your ghost. That's what I'm hoping for. Maybe I'll also
find out about this this Halloween. I don't know how.
How does a ghost shark attack your mind? It doesn't
(29:49):
seem with teeth teth. Well that's a good attack. Also,
while I'm talking about ghosts and horror, I just wanted
to mention another book that is. It's not on the
list because I haven't finished reading it yet, but I
love it so far. It's a book of horror short
stories I've been reading for a while now called After
the People Lights Have Gone Off from fourteen by the
(30:10):
author Stephen Graham Jones was a great horror writer that uh,
I've just been getting into recently, and I really enjoy
some of the stories in there. Yeah, I'm very excited
to check out some of his fiction at some point
as well. Um, especially his tales that speak to the
Native American experience. Oh yes, some of the stories do
deal with those themes. One of my favorites in the
(30:30):
collection that I've read so far as a short story
called Brush Dogs, which is I believe set on the
on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, and it's a great story.
It's really haunting. Deals again with I don't want to
say explicitly with ghosts, but it's got a very ghostly
aura about it. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going
(30:50):
to take a break, but then we'll be right back.
Thank alright, we're back. Well. This leads us to the
final selection for today's episode. In this one, it is yours, Joe. Alright,
My final pick for this year is a fiction book,
and it is The Three Body Problem by Sit Cheen
Lieu or I guess actually would be inverted in the
(31:12):
Chinese Blue Ching. Oh, this is a great one. I've
read this one as well. Yeah, and so this is
I'm sorry if I didn't pronounce his name perfectly. I
know my Chinese pronunciation is not great. But so this
one was first published in Chinese around ten years ago,
published in an English translation by Ken liu In. And
I saved this one for last because I struggled to
(31:33):
decide whether or not to include it, specifically for the
reason that so much of the pleasure of this novel
is the slow gradual revelation and development of its themes
and what's going on in the plot. And thus it's
kind of, unfortunately one of those books that's just chock
full of stuff to talk about but in talking about
it with somebody who hasn't read it, you inevitably kind
(31:55):
of spoil or at least undercut a few wonderful surprises
of the plot. So for this entry, I want to
talk about what I love about the book generally. Then
I'll give a warning before we discuss a few more
specific things. So listeners who haven't read the book plan
on reading it and want it to be a complete
surprise to them can hop out if they need to.
But I'm not doing that just yet. So first of all,
(32:17):
I want to say that this is my favorite kind
of science fiction book in that it's one that deals
not just with the future or with technology futuristic technology,
but with scientific concepts themselves, and makes the problems of
scientific discovery crucial to the advancement of the plot. So
the science is not near mcguffin, it's not mere like
(32:40):
plot element. It is. It is part of the backbone
of the entire work right in a way. It's about
science um and so it won't spoil much to say
this because it's there in the title. The book deals
with themes like predictability, unpredictability, and chaos, and so there's
this idea of the three body problem in physics. That's
(33:01):
what's referenced in the title. It's a classic problem that
goes something like this. Let's say you have two objects
interacting with one another in space, and you know Newton's
laws of mechanics, and you know the starting position of
the two objects, you know their velocities, and you know
their mass. If you know all those things, you can
create a robust solution that will predict their behavior and
(33:24):
easily predict their positions at any given point in the future.
They orbit a center of gravity in a very clear
and simple way, and you can create a closed solution
that will show you where they'll be at time t
But if you add a third object to the mix,
suddenly chaos and unpredictability takeover. And the objects are still
(33:46):
perfectly governed by the laws of physics. It's not like
a ghost win in there and did anything crazy. But
but their interaction suddenly can't be predicted in a concise way,
and they'll appear to change orbits and positions sort of
crazily as each object repeatedly gets pulled in surprising directions
by the other two. If you want to see what
this looks like, you can look up the three body
(34:06):
problem or three body orbit online and there are lots
of videos that simulate it so you can see it.
But just imagine what it would look like if you
try to put three objects orbiting each other in space.
I mean, they just go all over the place. And so,
in keeping with these themes of predictability and unpredictability, it
also deals with the ways that we can't predict which
(34:27):
of our ideas in science and technology will be most
applicable and in what ways. So there, I feel like
there's a lot of stuff in this book about people
sort of working in the dark and not knowing what
they're working towards before realizing how their work becomes crucial.
And that's the theme I like a lot. Now I
have to I have to mention that I didn't read
(34:48):
it so much as I listened to it. I had
the audio book version of this, and the audio book
is terrific. Uh. I love a good audio book presentation,
and this is certainly one of those. I think you
mentioned that the reader does the detective character in a
real gruff way or something. Yeah, it's kind of a
kind of a gruff voice like this, you know, kind
(35:09):
of like an old time Yeah, and he does. He
has some other very interesting voice choices later on as well. Um.
I was actually listening to the audio book version and
my wife was reading a hard copy of it, and
I have to say, this is one of those books
where if if you were, say, a hundred pages ahead
of someone else, like you are of radically different thoughts. Yeah,
(35:32):
you have radically different thoughts. It's almost like you're in
a different book when you start trying to compare notes
on what's happening. Oh man, I loved it. I loved
how you would you'd get into these parts of the
book where you're just like, what is going on? What
does this have to do with anything? Uh? Specifically, there
is a crucial virtual reality video game in the book
(35:55):
that when when you start getting into these sections of
the book, I just remember thinking like, how on earth
does this have anything to do with with the broader plot?
But then it connects in I think a brilliant way. Yeah,
this is like a it's a it's a virtual depiction
of an alien world that's threatened by by by by
these periods of like burning and freezing. Right, they're trying
(36:18):
to figure out what are the celestial mechanics with multiple
suns that are that are just burning out the world
in in a way that directly echoes the Chinese myth
of Ho Yee the the archer who shoots the surplus
suns out of the sky. And a number of other
mythological and historical figures are also referenced in this virtual world. Yeah,
(36:39):
I think there's a legendary Chinese emperor in one of
the yes yes uh in one of the simulations, but
also some Western figures as well as I recall. Oh yeah,
I think, like I don't remember who all they are,
but like like Einstein and Socrates and Jesus show up
or something. There's a tremendous sense of unpredictability with this book.
I mean, part of it just be due to the
originality of the book itself, but I also wonder how
(37:01):
much of it is the fact that most of us
probably do not read a lot of Chinese literature, more
certainly Chinese science fiction, so you know, we're not as
keyed into what some of the trends are. I don't know.
I think I'm embarrassed to say this, but I think
this might be the first modern Chinese novel. I have read.
(37:23):
I don't. I want to think of another, but I
can't that that is a huge blind spot in my reading.
I guess I should read more, but yeah, this is
the only one I can think of. Yeah, yeah, I'm
I've I've read some older works by by various Chinese writers,
but this is this is the only work of contemporary
science fiction that comes to mind, for sure. And but
it's certainly not the only translated Chinese science fiction work
(37:46):
out there. There are there are a number of other
ones of note. Oh yeah, of course. Well, so, Robert,
maybe I think we should transition to a slightly more
spoil ery discussion. So if if you're planning on reading
the book, you don't want anything spoiled, maybe you should
hop out now. But but before you go, if you
are leaving early, let me just remind you that there
will be a complete list of all of these books
(38:07):
and links to where you can buy them or obtain
them or find out more information about them. Uh. They'll
all be on the landing page for this episode. It's
stuff to blow your mind dot com. Yeah, Now, if
you do want to stick around, we hope you will.
You don't plan on reading this book or you've already
read it, or maybe you just don't mind having a
few kind of like themes talked about at greater length.
I want to talk about some of the ideas explored
(38:28):
in this book. So first of all, we can talk about,
now that we're over the gap, the fact that this
turns out to be a disastrous first contact novel. Yes, uh,
first contact between an alien civilization and Earth, and that
it ultimately ends with the alien civilization taking a hostile,
(38:51):
colonizing position towards Planet Earth looking at us within v
s eye. Yes, And when I when we've talked about
how it's a different book at later on, that it
is in the early goings, I have to point out
that you start with what seems like it's going to
be a very historically based novel, take place in the past,
but you do reach a point where it's just page
(39:11):
after page from the the aliens point of view. And
if you're listening to the audio book, their voices sound
like the moon and nights on what's this show? The
adult swim show, U Aquaritine hungerful. Yes, this is the
voice that sort of sounds like this. This is the
voice of the aliens. That's great. It works. The aliens
(39:33):
have a calm malevolence that is not mean spirited, but
but is perfectly aggressive and cruel in a way that
mirrors one of my favorite lines from a sci fi
horror movie. Did you ever see the you know, the
late seventies invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland?
And then I've never seen that one. Oh well, now
(39:56):
I have to spoil something for you. There's just a
great line where where one of the characters who still human,
is talking to the uh, the people who have been
turned into aliens, and he says something like, we hate you,
and one of the aliens says to him, we don't
hate you. It's just a brilliantly chilling thing to say.
I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can definitely see
(40:17):
the echo of that in the In This War. But yeah.
So so there's there's this attack coming, and a lot
of what the book ends up being about is the
ways that the Aliens have have sent a sort of
information based advance force to try to cripple Earth's ability
to protect itself from the alien invasion before they actually
(40:39):
get here. And so that's where where a lot of
the fascinating ideas of the novel come in. Uh, it's
about what could an advanced alien civilization do to stop
Earth from being able to protect itself before they get
to us. And so one of the things that they
come up with is they're like, we gotta stop science
(41:00):
from happening on Earth because they're afraid it's going to
take a long time for them to get to us.
And what if while they're in transit, we make a
lot of advances in particle physics and stuff and drastically
increase our technological capabilities. Yeah, I mean it is the
absolute best thing that we have as a culture, Like,
it is the thing that has produced the modern world,
(41:21):
and it is the thing with the with with probably
the most unity among all human endeavors exactly. So they
come up with this plan to be because so they
want to colonize Earth, but they can't like send a
big heavy spaceships fast enough to get to us. So
instead they create a supercomputer inside an extremely tiny particle
(41:43):
that can be sent at at super fast speed towards Earth,
like with the speed approaching that of a photon. Right
that the idea exactly, so it gets here ahead of
when they could actually get here with all of their
heavy stuff, and it gets to Earth first. And mainly
what it goes about doing is trying to drive all
of the world's leading scientists and particle physicists and everybody
(42:06):
to despair and insanity. And it does this by making
them doubt the existence of scientific laws, like trying to
give them is. So they do the same experiment twice
and get different results. So it seems like the laws
of science are either breaking down or clearly we didn't
understand everything to begin with, and this the ladder of
(42:26):
science is no longer the sure way to ascend anywhere.
Another truly genius move that I think is there in
the plot, and I can't maybe this has been done
in another science fiction work that because it's so obvious,
I feel like somebody should have thought of this, But
this is the first story I can think of really
exploiting this plot to its fullest. And the idea is
(42:46):
the aliens figure out how to exploit existing ideological and
political fractures within human kind to work the human population
against itself on their behalf. Isn't there isn't there a
series of I remember seeing these in bookstores when I
was a kid, but they're like alternative timeline books where
(43:07):
alien showed up during World War Two. Oh, I'm sure
it's happened. I bet it's probably explored in that in
those works for sure, and and others as well well.
I mean, so one of the things you often see,
it's it's a common point of of of the plot
in like Independence Day and stuff like, you know, all
these alien invasion movies, is suddenly we all realize that
we must set aside our petty differences and uh and
(43:30):
join together if we're going to face off against the aliens.
And there is some of that in this, in this
we should mention. This is also the first book in
a series. I haven't finished reading the other books yet,
but I've started the second one. Um, and so there
is eventually some solidarity in banding together in the face
of the aliens. But one thing the aliens figure out
they can do is that, you know, if there is
(43:51):
a if there is a frustrated faction that already hates
part of humanity, you can play to their biases and
play to their in flat or them and get them
on your side. And this is something that actually even
you know is commonly used in in human colonization, international
relations and all that exploiting factions within a target group
(44:14):
in order to play them, play them against each other
along their existing fractures. You don't have to make new fractures,
they're already factions within any given group of people. Yeah,
I'm instantly reminded us some examples from from Soviet history.
You know how how you end up dividing up these territories.
Make sure that you have a territory that has locked
(44:35):
into it to rival groups so that they're always fighting
each other and not fighting the the occupying power. You
know what. George Washington, the first president of the United States,
he had a lot of really lucid thoughts about this.
In his farewell address in seventeen, he was warning about
the nature of political parties. He was essentially saying, like,
(44:58):
don't get going with political par parties, because they will
be the death of you as a nation. So Washington's
talking about internal party factionalism, you know, fighting amongst each other,
and he says it serves always to distract the public
counsels and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community
with ill founded jealousies and false alarms. It kindles the
(45:19):
animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which
finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the
channels of party passions. Thus, the policy and the will
of one country are subjected to the policy and will
of another. And if you just replace Planet there for
(45:42):
country there, you've got what happens. Uh in the novel.
I don't know if you was thinking about George Washington,
but it's a perennial insight. I guess, yeah, yeah, I
think so. Since we're having our spoiler laden discussion here,
one thing that I wanted to mention from the second
novel in the series, the one that comes after The
Body Problem, is this great moment that I haven't finished
(46:04):
this novel yet, but there's a part where the particle
that the Aliens have sent ahead, the supercomputer AI that
they've sent ahead that's about the size of a particle
and is flying around the Earth trying to prepare the
Earth to be invaded. There is a great scene where
it first learns that human beings, unlike the aliens who
(46:26):
sent it, have the ability to lie. Because the aliens
are not they're not individually deceptive because they don't communicate verbally,
they essentially share thoughts with one another in a detectable way,
and thus to think something is to have that thing
(46:46):
be perceptible by another member of your species. And so
thus you can't misrepresent your thoughts. If you have a thought,
someone can see it on you, And so they don't
really have a concept of lying. And when the supercomputer
sent by the Aliens as they're on their way to
invade first becomes aware that human beings have the power
(47:08):
to say something that is not what they really think,
the supercomputer processes for a moment and then it says,
I am afraid. Alright. So so just to sum it up, um,
humans versus aliens humans advantages, we have science disadvantages. Um,
(47:29):
we have we fight with each other, fight with each other,
and have political disunity. And then kind of a pro
and a con. Uh, there's the whole lying thing because
we lie to each other all the time, which doesn't
help our case. But then we can also lie to
the aliens if we're on talking terms with them. So anyway,
I highly recommend three Body Problem if you're in the
mood for some thought provoking science fiction. All right, Well,
(47:52):
there you have it. I feel like we've presented quite
a grab bag here of fiction, nonfiction, a little children's
literature thrown in as well. Uh. As I mentioned earlier,
I'll make sure that we have links to all of
these books on the landing page for this episode. It's
stuff to bow your mind, because inevitably you're gonna ask, well,
how do you spell that author's last name? What was
that book you mentioned? Maybe we didn't say the title
(48:12):
clearly enough. We'll have it all listed here, and then
you can continue your research into which books might best
suit your palette. And the other cool thing is that
you know this is just the beginning of a discussion
really because inevitably, uh, many of you have read these
books as well, or some of these books, and you
have thoughts on them that you would like to share
with us or perhaps share with other listeners, say at
(48:34):
our Facebook group on stuff Toble your Mind discussion module.
And then perhaps you have all new recommendations for us
books that you that you you're thinking, well, if you
like this, then you'll definitely like this. Yeah, please send
them our way. Obviously we don't have time to read
all of the books that you recommend to us, but
a lot of times we do find out about books
that we end up reading from listener recommendations, so so
(48:55):
by all means yes, send them in. In the meantime,
be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's where you will find all of the
podcast episodes and then of course includes all of the
previous summer reading episodes. UH. You'll also find links out
to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
et cetera. And if you want to support the show again,
(49:16):
the best thing you can do is to rate and
review us wherever you have the power to do so.
Big thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex
Williams and Arry Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback about this episode or
any other, to recommend books to us, to recommend a
topic for the future, just to say hi, let us
know where you listen from, maybe how you found out
about the show. You can always email us at blow
(49:38):
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
stuff works dot com? They point four point four foo
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe M. Cormickin.
We're back with part two of our summer reading series
this year because, as we told you last time, we
(00:21):
ended up talking about our favorite books from this year,
and then we ended up just going for how long
do we talk? Like seventeen hours? It went on a while, yeah,
because what we were talking about the books, but we're
also talking about a lot of the ideas wrapped up
in them, and in doing so, discussing some of the
predominant themes of Stuff to Blow your Mind over the
past year. Yeah, so we decided we had to split
it into Here we are with part two. I think
last time we talked about nonfiction. This time we're probably
(00:44):
gonna be talking about fiction. All right, let's jump right
back into the conversation. Okay, Robert, I think you had
a couple of fiction books you wanted to talk about, right, Yeah,
and again these are both books that you may have
heard me discussed at least in passing before, Because again
I can't if I really like a work of fiction
and it's going to boil out in everything that I
do and until people were sick of hearing about it. Uh.
(01:06):
And So the first book I want to talk about
is Starfish by Peter Watts. From so my fiction pick
last summer I think was Blindsite, but it was. Yeah,
that was a book from two thousand and six. And
and I read that one as well because you were
talking about it. And uh, I think when you told
me I had space vampires in it, I was like, well,
(01:27):
I have to read this now. It's definitely got the
best sci fi vampires of anything I've read. Oh yeah,
without it, without a doubt. So Peter Watts is a
He's a Canadian sci fi author and former marine mammal biologists. Uh. Yeah,
we've certainly talked about him on the show before, and
we've talked about Starfish as well. Um referenced in in
a few of our Underwater episodes earlier this year. This
(01:49):
is actually his first novel, uh and uh and I've
never read it before. I've been working on an underwater
sci fi podcast for How Stuff Works. And then I
realized that Watts had written something more or less in
the genre already. I thought, maybe I did. I think
may maybe he did. Yeah, And so when I realized
that it was that it was an underwater sci fi tail,
(02:10):
as like, well, I've got to I've got to jump
in and see what what Watts did with it. So
it is a just a very um addictive novel. Um.
So it it just to give a quick plot overview. Basically,
you have a crew of psychologically damaged people who undergo
cybernetic enhancement so that they can work on deep sea
(02:31):
geothermal plants in the near future. Uh. And they're and
they're doing this work, very dangerous work among some mysteriously
gigantic deep sea organisms near dangerous hydrothermal vents. And they're
also dealing with the uncertainty of their own psychology and
an emergent biological threat that everyone is totally unequipped to handle.
(02:55):
And that this thing is loaded with science, Like Watts
is an author who just really uh he really packs
a lot of scientific ideas. Sometimes it's more, you know,
scientific hypotheses, but he packs a lot in So this
particular book, for instance, is loaded with deep water biology, spreading,
zone tectonics, and geology, quantum theories of consciousness, AI, molecular evolution,
(03:21):
dream learning neuroplasticity as well as abuse and addiction psychology.
Now I wonder something about it because I haven't read
this yet. I became aware of it uh while back,
and I've I've been wanting to read it, but I
haven't gotten to it yet. So my question is are
there characters that can be loved? Because blind Side, it
was my fiction pick last year because of exactly what
(03:42):
you're talking about, is just packed with thought provoking ideas
and unique bits of world building. Um one of the
most interesting books I've ever read, so much so that
I almost had to like keep constantly putting it down
to like write down thoughts I was having about the
stuff in the book. But it was also a differ
book for several reasons, one of the main ones being
that like, the main character in in blind Side is
(04:05):
extremely unsympathetic. I mean that's by design since his character,
he's a character who essentially has no empathy due to
an experimental brain surgery. This actually played a role in
the plot and made for a very interesting narrator, but
not a very sympathetic or lovable one. So does Watts
throw us more of a bone in this story? As
as far as like character as you can fall in
(04:26):
love with. Well, I would say yes and no, because
on one level, you do see that that same trend
of of a lot of characters that are damaged or
less human, perhaps in different ways, either due to something
that has been done to them or something that they
have voluntarily done through technological enhancement. But I would say
(04:51):
that the protagonist Lenny Clark, she you do root for,
perhaps more than some of the characters in blind Side,
like she's she's a very damaged individual with and she's
essentially transhuman at this point to the cybernetic enhancements and
some other stuff. But in Starfish you are rooting for
there is she is kind of an underdog, and I
(05:12):
think that is one of the things that that pulled
me in with Starfish, probably more than Blindside, is that
I wanted I wanted her to succeed or to survive
at the very least. Well, I'm going to read a
quick passage from the book here just to get everyone
a taste of some of the some of the biological
(05:35):
uh science that is invoked in Let's Hear It. And
in this we were following Lenny Clark as she is
out swimming in the deep dark ocean quote. Everywhere else,
living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls
blink sexual advertisements at two second intervals. Here, a sudden
flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clark's field of view.
(05:58):
Something flees undercover her momentary blindness. They're a counterfeit worm,
twist lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof
of some predatory mouth. There are so many of them.
She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if
something big is just passed very close. A delicious thrill
dances through her body. It nearly touched me, she thinks,
(06:19):
I wonder what it was. The rift is full of
monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter
how much they eat. Their vorocity is as much a
part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws.
Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size. And sometimes,
when the abyss is a desert, no one can afford
the luxury of waiting for better odds. But even a
(06:41):
desert has oasis, and sometimes the deep hunters find them.
They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and
gorge themselves. Their descendants grow huge and bloated over such
delicate bones. My light was off and it left me alone,
I wonder. She turns it back on, her vision cloud
in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to
(07:03):
unrevealed black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty
water wherever she points it. She switches it off. There's
a moment of absolute darkness while her eye caps adjust
to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.
They're so beautiful. Lenny Clark rests on the bottom of
the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her, and
(07:24):
she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from
the nearest sunlight that is only dark when the lights
are on. That's great, man. Well, you know what it
reminds me of Blindside. It reminds me of sort of
the richness of like the the sci fi horror atmosphere
that that Watts can create. Um, his his worlds are
so rich. Yeah, and this book really you can you
(07:47):
get a taste of it here. Like he is an
author that clearly was Slash is in love with the
biology of the deep ocean. And even though this is
a slightly you know, there's some sci fi elements invoked here. Uh,
it is a it resonates with a love for the
the natural wonders of the deep. Robert, I know you
(08:08):
were a fan of the recent games Soma, which you
recommended to me. Do you think that maybe Starfish was
an influence on Soma? I bet it was. Um. Again,
I didn't I didn't even know Starfish existed until uh,
you know, earlier this year really, but uh, but afterwards
(08:29):
I started looking into it. I read somewhere that the
the makers of the Bioshot games were also inspired by
by Starfish, so that would make sense. So I think
it has been highly influent influential in I mean, if
I can't imagine making some sort of underwater sci fi
horror at this point without of course being familiar with
the Abyssum, the James Cameron film, Yeah, Deep Start six, Yeah,
(08:55):
and at least finding out about Starfish and and realizing
that it is an important to to to read in reference.
All Right, if somebody were to make a Starfish movie,
what director should it be? Oh? I don't know. You
gotta have who's the most nihilistic director not there right now,
I don't know. Maybe I guess does Nolan count he's
(09:15):
he has some nihilistic he's nihilistic, Well, no, but there's
a there is a borderline sentimental. Okay, he's but in
terms of I guess I'm thinking about the visual universe
he tends to create. I feel like his his visual
world is nihilistic, even if even if there's hope everywhere else,
a lot of slate grays and stuff like that. I
don't know. So for some reason he comes to mind
(09:38):
um and also his it's it's so humorless, you know.
I tend to find that Nolan's uh movies are they're
they're not very fun. Usually I find that there. I
find they are not fun and they are not certainly
not funny. They're satisfying, they're they're they're beautiful, they're they're
they're excellent films. Uh, but but you don't enjoy them.
(10:03):
I enjoy them, but I don't enjoy them in the
same way I enjoy other things. I don't know. For
some reason, I'm thinking, I think Christopher Nolan might be
the night be might be the director to to helm
something like this Okay, it's time to take a quick
break and then we'll be back with more summer reading.
Thank alright, we're back. All right. Well, I'm gonna go
ahead and hit my my final fiction uh selection for
(10:26):
this year's summer reading. And this is one again that
that if you have been listening religiously to the show
or and certainly if you've if you read it, take
pay attention to our social media. You've probably heard or
seen me mention it before. But it is a two
thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles.
Oh yeah, tell me about it? Okay, Well, Terence Hawkins
(10:48):
he's the author of two books in various short stories.
He was founding director of the Yale Writer's Conference, and
he now runs the Company of Writers, which offers workshop
and manuscript service to writers at all levels of experience.
And incidentally, he also chimes in from time to time
on our Facebook group the Stuff to Build Your Mind
discussion module with with commentary and literary recommendations. But the
(11:09):
Rage of Achilles, this this is a novel, and it's
essentially a novelization of Homer's The Iliad, retold with modern
language and invoking Julian Janes the Origin of consciousness in
the Breakdown of the bicameral Mind. Okay, so, if your
recall from our Bicameral Mind episodes, the Iliad was one
of the pieces of evidence in literature from the ancient
(11:31):
world that Jane's uses to show. Basically, he uses it
to argue that people at this time, First of all,
two main premises were not conscious and did not have
an inner mind space. And number two, they had novel
activities directed by hallucinations that they believed to be the
voices of God's And so he basically he determines that
(11:55):
this is the case for the people who produced the
Iliad because he looks at the Iliad and he says,
there's very little consciousness in the Iliad. You don't get
people reflecting internal mind states. Instead, when people do things,
it says that God made them do it. Yes. And
I want to be clear here, I don't want to
make it sound as if Hawkins wrote a novel that
(12:15):
serves as a teaching tool for the bicameral mind. I
think rather Hawkins uses um uses the bicameral mind as
a means of understanding a lot of the decision making
and divine inspiration that takes place in the story of
the Iliad uh and It's and Also, to be clear,
it's not an epic retelling of the Trojan War. It
(12:36):
is just the Iliad itself, which only occupies a portion
of the Trojan War. So this is definitely a book
for mature readers. Hawkins doesn't shy away from the violent slavery, misogyny,
and sexual violence inherent in the in the culture at
the time. It's not ancient Greeks for great book, No
(12:56):
no uh and and and all of it is also
revealed again through very modern language. The characters speak to
each other like they are modern humans, even if they
in many of the cases do not have modern minds. Because,
especially through the eyes of Odysseus, the reader is is
forced to come to terms with the familiar yet alien
nature of this kind of ancient world. So the book
(13:16):
is grim, it's dark, it's violent, but not in a
way that betrays its historical and literary roots. So that
the book I found does a fantastic job of depicting
what it might have been like to exist as a
bicameral human and what it might have been like to
live among them as a more modern human with a
awoken consciousness. So the vast majority of the characters in
(13:39):
the Rage of Achilles are highly susceptible to bicameral hallucinations.
Odesseus says, our main window into modern consciousness, along with
the Trojan Prince Paris, and when faced with pressing challenges
or cognitive dissonance, the gods speak to these these people,
to the bicameral characters, and even manifest visual the So
(14:00):
in keeping with Jane's theory, these these hallucinations are produced
by the of course, the non dominant hemisphere, and perceived
by the dominant voices within the mind wrapped within the
trappings of an outer pantheon, and the hallucinations range from
helpful to chaotic. For instance, the Achaean king Agamemnon experiences
his desire to claim achilles slave Brescius as a divine command,
(14:23):
and this endangers the entire siege, but it also but
he also rallies his men when Zeus speaks through him.
And then we have Achilles himself, who turns to buy
cameral visions of his mother for guidance. His mother, of course,
to the mythical fetis. And yet the very act of
locking eyes with a horse on the battlefield threatens to
(14:47):
transform into a chaotic hallucination. For Achilles Hawkins is a
is A is a great writer, and he has there's
so many passages in this book that really capture this
uh far better than than I can summarize. H For instance,
there's a part where Agamemnon speaking to Odysseus after Odysseus
has has presented some ideas, and he says, do you
ever have any thoughts of your own? Or is it
(15:08):
always gray eyed athena um talking in there um? The
the idea that like any kind of inspiration, any kind
of like I guess you would say, sort of. You know,
major moments in cognition, they are not your own. They
must be the God speaking through you. And indeed those
with a bicamraal mind would be would be perceiving it
as such. It's a wonderful exploration of the concept. And
(15:30):
I love the idea of novels based on the idea
of the bicameral mind, because that that satisfies both of
my impulses. On one hand, I don't believe it's a
correct interpretation of history. I don't believe it's a correct
explanation of what consciousness is or what past human consciousness
was like. On the other hand, I think it's such
an interesting idea to explore, and so fiction seems like
(15:51):
a perfect realm for it, Like you don't necessarily have
to believe it was ever true, but you could explore
it as a sort of alternative reality. Yeah, I would
love to read more that that that used the bi
cameral mind is a way of of making sense of
of the magical and the divine. Uh. Here's here's another
wonderful passage from the book. No one will speak to Achilles.
(16:12):
No one in his right mind would. All day he
has sat at the foot of Patroclus's unlit pire. The
only company he will tolerate is that of the priests
who flank it, droning away in the language that the
Achaeans spoke when their minds first awakened in the north,
when the ice rivers were still fresh memories to their grandfathers,
whose own grandfathers had been no more than puppets in
(16:35):
the hands of the gods, hunting and breeding with no
more consciousness of purpose than the animals they slaughtered. So again,
this captures a time when the bicameral mind would be
giving way to the modern mind, and you would be
in this this chaotic, uh realm between where you have
(16:55):
you have more and more modern thought. But then you
have these bicameral visions and these bicameral experiences. And then
a few few people such as Odysseus in this novel,
who do not know what it is to have a
bicameral vision and just exists outside of it, just have
to nod along when everyone else is talking about what
(17:16):
the gods told them today. Yeah, I've got to give
this one to read. I recommend it. Uh. Now, there
is another book by Terence Hawkins I want to mention briefly,
and it's a titled American Neolithic. Came out in fourteen.
It's a near future dystopian novel in which a tribe
of Neanderthals have survived into the modern world, and it
features some really thought provoking depictions of how this might work,
(17:36):
how Neandertal biology and cognition um I would differ from ours,
and how their eradication factors into human culture. Uh So
I have to read. Uh one one of my favorite
passages from this and this is told by the protagonist
who is in Neandertal, who has survived into modern times.
(17:57):
Quote you, for whom we have always been the other existence,
buried deep in your racial memories, since the time when
glaciers girdled the world and the contest between man and
animal was yet to be decided. We haunt your legends
as we hunt your dreams, misshapen versions of yourself, bad
copies formally Cobalds or Grimlin's now more locks and orcs. Oh,
(18:19):
that's creepy. So the idea that we we've got all
these humanoid monsters in our fiction, and that this is
coming from deep instincts we have about about other types
of human shaped creatures that very close relatives of ours
that existed, you know, a few as recently as several
thousand years ago. Yeah, yeah, there was there was another.
(18:39):
There was this this slightly inhuman other that we that
we wiped from the earth, and we keep recreating them
in uh, in all of these fantastic forms. It's it's
a it's a wonderful of poetic idea like it, though,
I I also like the idea that it implies, like
Homo sapiens, like us, we were maybe the bad guys actually,
(19:00):
like we demonize them, but we do so unfairly, like
we were really the aggressive main ones that wiped them out. Yeah. Now,
this is an idea that is explored in a book
that we haven't read yet, but we've both discussed reading.
Um uh, what what is the title? The Descendants The
Inheritor The Inheritors? Yes, by William Golding, the author of
(19:20):
Lord of the Flies. Oh yeah, and I've actually read
like the first chapter of it, and I'm very intrigued
to pick it up again later because it is the
story of Neanderthal annihilation from the point of view of
the Neanderthals. Man humans like us can be scary. We're
the worst. All right, Well, it looks like it's time
for me to talk about some fiction, now, Robert, last
time you got to pick a classic, you picked Carl
(19:42):
Sagan's classic nonfiction work. So I'm gonna pick a classic
work of fiction that I just read for the first time. Okay,
what do you have? This is The Haunting of Hill
House by Shirley Jackson nine. It is a Gothic horror
novel first published in fifty nine, with the most classic
of han a house setups. Right, So, you've got a
haunted house, it's got a malevolent ghostly presence reported over
(20:05):
the generations, it's got tragic history. And then there's a
kind of stuffy professor who's interested in the paranormal, and
he hires several psychically sensitive people to come live in
the house with them and study the hauntings that occur there. Now,
this has been made into a couple of movies, and
believe it or not, I've actually not seen either one
of them, or there there at least two. There might
(20:25):
be more. There's one supposedly terrible adaptation from that I
haven't seen, with Liam Neeson, Catherine's Aida Jones, and Owen Wilson,
directed by the guy who made Speed Twister and Speed
two Cruise Control. Oh. I actually saw this one, but
I can't remember a single thing about except I think
it's like a beheading scene or something that's not in
the book. Um. I've heard it is radically different from
(20:48):
the book, but I haven't seen that. I kind of
want to watch it maybe this weekend. It's time for
some some trash ghost movies. Uh. There's also supposedly a
movie version from the sixties that is better, but I
haven't seen either one. But if you've never read this
book and you're in the mood for a good old
fashioned haunted house story, this is a really fabulous read.
It's that kind of mid century New Yorker style of
(21:09):
prose writing. So it's thoughtful, really funny actually, but also reserved,
and um, I have to admit, for me, at least
genuinely scary. At least I thought so maybe you'll write
in so I didn't think it was scary. You know,
you're you're a cry baby. But I thought it was scary.
And I'm not alone. Stephen King wrote an introduction to
the book in which he wrote that quote. It seems
(21:32):
to me that the Haunting of Hill House and Henry
James Is The Turn of the Screw are the only
two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years. Interesting.
It's a bold pronouncement. But you know, I do agree
that when a when a ghost story is done well,
it can be so terrifying. A ghost story, though, is
(21:55):
is like a lot of things in art, is typically
not done well. Uh yeah, you're right about that, and
and it is genuinely horrifying. And I think it's interesting
that can be genuinely horrifying two people like us who
are horror fans and who are largely desensitized to the
most piercing aspects of horror like I think I may
(22:15):
have contemplated this on the podcast before, but I just
want to bring it up again because this is such
a perplexing question to me. Why are ghosts the scariest
of all monsters? I feel like this must be measurably
true because I'm you know, we're both horror fans. I've
asked a lot of my friends who are horror fans
about this. We've had this conversation a bunch of times.
(22:36):
Once you're used to horror books and horror movies, vampires, werewolves,
hell beasts. They're great, They're great fun. We love them,
but they're not really scary anymore, are they. I mean,
do you find yourself really worrying at night in the
dark about vampires or anything like that? I I certainly don't.
(22:57):
Now the ghost I think one of the reasons it
can be so so effective is that it's something that
really doesn't have to obey the rules. I mean, yes,
you can get into you do have treatments of it
that have a lot of rules and throw in some
ghost fighting, pseudoscience and some proton packs and you have
a different situation. But I feel like the best, the
(23:18):
most effective ghost stories are the ones in which the
protagonists are the protagonist are totally out of their element
and do not know how to deal with the threat.
I think that's one of the reasons that UH that
the at least the initial incarnations of the Ring movies,
both the original Japanese and the and and I would
also classify the original UH English language remake. They both
(23:43):
succeed in presenting a supernatural threat that does not seem
to obey law. I mean, it oldbys certain laws, but
but once you've you've awakened it, there's no stopping I think.
I think there's something about that. Yeah, the ghost in
the Ring is terrifying to me in a way, I
mean less so now that I'm so used to it,
like it's kind of a joke. That was the other
(24:03):
great thing about it is that it felt so fresh
at the time. Yes, when I first encountered it, it
was truly terrifying to me. And I think part of
it has to do with it it's non corporate reality,
like that it doesn't have a specific body that's bound
to a place. You know that it can kind of
appear anywhere. Um, as soon as you give a monster
(24:24):
a body. I mean, I love monster designs, all those
those beast designs are great, but it immediately becomes a
thing that's like, Okay, I could run from this, I
could fight this with a ghost. It. In fact, with
ghosts in most stories, ghosts are not even really a
physical threat. They're not gonna grab you and bite you
and tear you asunder and harm harm your physical body.
(24:45):
They attack your mind. But as far as I know,
here's one aspect of hauntings that's never really explored, and
that is that the idea that a ghost could lower
your rent. Well, I know that that it would you know,
reduce your property taxes or something to that effect. Like
this seems like prime territory for exploitation. With with with
with haunting fiction, uh, the idea that the presence of
(25:08):
the ghost would actually make the the haunted location more
desirable to individuals willing to put up with it. Wait
a minute, is this is not part of the plot
of The Frighteners, is it? I don't know, I've never
seen The Frighteners. Uh, I haven't seen it in a
long time. I'm vaguely recalling something like this, like a buddy.
Oh maybe maybe he's just like, uh, there's a human
(25:30):
character who's got ghost buddies and he uses them for
hauntings and then maybe he charges for exorcisms. I think
maybe that's what it is. But it struck me in
the in the moment that there could be some kind
of real estate scam where you like, you know, you
rent out of property and then you get your ghost
buddies to haunt it and so you can get your
rent lowered. Yeah, if only ghosts actually existed and we're
(25:54):
you know, verifiable through science. Yeah. So there is, of
course the fact that ghosts don't exist, but there are
some great insights about our psychology. I think we can
gain from thinking about why ghosts are so particularly terrifying.
So one example that I want to talk about briefly,
the e book version of Haunting of Hillhouse that I have,
(26:14):
has an introduction by Guiermo del Toro, and so he
writes about the way that the horror and the story
comes from the way the house itself in the book
behaves like a predator in the wild. And he also
points out how the novel praise on our ancestral fears
of being alone, being separated from the herd. He writes,
calling it quote a fascinating piece of nature documentary. Hill
(26:38):
House is the lion pouncing in slow motion on the smallest,
weakest gazelle in the herd. And he's talking about a
particular character who the House praise on in the book.
But then he points out how the book accentuates the
terror by driving home that our vulnerability and being alone
isn't just present when we're physically alone, because we're always
(26:59):
alone with in our own minds, and the very fact
that you can't share your consciousness with other people means
that we're always subjectively separated from the herd, no matter what,
vulnerable to the predations of ghosts. Interesting. Yeah, I like
this treatment of the of the ghost, the haunting, the
poulter Geist as a predatory force because we do see this.
(27:20):
I feel like what this motif is U is used
well and some of our best haunting fiction. You know
that it's not just the ghost is just trying to,
you know, warn you about the perils of not believing
in Christmas or what have you. Like that it is
it is a nasty customer that just wants to hurt you.
So what you say, I mean just bringing up the
ghosts in Christmas Carol. I mean that does play on
(27:41):
another big part of the ghost law, right, which is
that ghosts are very often on a mission. They're concerned
with something in some way. They want to teach you
a lesson, or get you to do something for them,
or get you to you know, avenge some wrong on
their behalf or something like that. So many stories in
this way. Um. I don't want to spoil anything about
(28:02):
the Haunting of Hillhouse, but it's a great kind of
reprieve from a lot of the corny plot wrap ups
that you often see in ghost stories. Nice. Well, you know,
I've never read it. It's it's it's been on my
list for a very long time. So maybe this Halloween
it you should read it this October, Robert, I would
love to see what you think. Uh, you know, speaking
of October, I believe it was last October we had
(28:25):
an episode of Stuff to Play in Mind come Out.
This is what I did with Christian where we we
took various ghost stories from around the world and tried
to get break them down and figure out like what
what do they reveal? These individual stories reveal about the
human condition or you know, cultural elements. Uh. And it
was a pretty fun exercise. So I feel like it's
(28:46):
possible that we could we could we could bring that
model back out again this October and and see what
we could find. You know, maybe, I think I think
last last time, most of the ghosts ended up revealing
something kind of horrible about colonialism. Um, maybe we could
find some examples of of ghost lore that reveal more
(29:06):
about human psychology. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean the ghost
archetype is kind of a master key to the lock
on the human mind, where you open it up and
rummage around with all the on all the images and
fears we've got in there. It's sort of like a
perfect cipher for for what's deep down in there suppressed.
How about the film Ghost Shark? Does Does that exist?
(29:28):
It does exist? I haven't yet. I gotta see it
does exist. That's good. Now does it still eat people
even though it's a ghost? I don't know. Maybe it
eats your ghost. Maybe it has to work with another shark,
like real shark eats you, and then ghost shark eats
your ghost. That's what I'm hoping for. Maybe I'll also
find out about this this Halloween. I don't know how.
How does a ghost shark attack your mind? It doesn't
(29:49):
seem with teeth teth. Well that's a good attack. Also,
while I'm talking about ghosts and horror, I just wanted
to mention another book that is. It's not on the
list because I haven't finished reading it yet, but I
love it so far. It's a book of horror short
stories I've been reading for a while now called After
the People Lights Have Gone Off from fourteen by the
(30:10):
author Stephen Graham Jones was a great horror writer that uh,
I've just been getting into recently, and I really enjoy
some of the stories in there. Yeah, I'm very excited
to check out some of his fiction at some point
as well. Um, especially his tales that speak to the
Native American experience. Oh yes, some of the stories do
deal with those themes. One of my favorites in the
(30:30):
collection that I've read so far as a short story
called Brush Dogs, which is I believe set on the
on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, and it's a great story.
It's really haunting. Deals again with I don't want to
say explicitly with ghosts, but it's got a very ghostly
aura about it. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going
(30:50):
to take a break, but then we'll be right back.
Thank alright, we're back. Well. This leads us to the
final selection for today's episode. In this one, it is yours, Joe. Alright,
My final pick for this year is a fiction book,
and it is The Three Body Problem by Sit Cheen
Lieu or I guess actually would be inverted in the
(31:12):
Chinese Blue Ching. Oh, this is a great one. I've
read this one as well. Yeah, and so this is
I'm sorry if I didn't pronounce his name perfectly. I
know my Chinese pronunciation is not great. But so this
one was first published in Chinese around ten years ago,
published in an English translation by Ken liu In. And
I saved this one for last because I struggled to
(31:33):
decide whether or not to include it, specifically for the
reason that so much of the pleasure of this novel
is the slow gradual revelation and development of its themes
and what's going on in the plot. And thus it's
kind of, unfortunately one of those books that's just chock
full of stuff to talk about but in talking about
it with somebody who hasn't read it, you inevitably kind
(31:55):
of spoil or at least undercut a few wonderful surprises
of the plot. So for this entry, I want to
talk about what I love about the book generally. Then
I'll give a warning before we discuss a few more
specific things. So listeners who haven't read the book plan
on reading it and want it to be a complete
surprise to them can hop out if they need to.
But I'm not doing that just yet. So first of all,
(32:17):
I want to say that this is my favorite kind
of science fiction book in that it's one that deals
not just with the future or with technology futuristic technology,
but with scientific concepts themselves, and makes the problems of
scientific discovery crucial to the advancement of the plot. So
the science is not near mcguffin, it's not mere like
(32:40):
plot element. It is. It is part of the backbone
of the entire work right in a way. It's about
science um and so it won't spoil much to say
this because it's there in the title. The book deals
with themes like predictability, unpredictability, and chaos, and so there's
this idea of the three body problem in physics. That's
(33:01):
what's referenced in the title. It's a classic problem that
goes something like this. Let's say you have two objects
interacting with one another in space, and you know Newton's
laws of mechanics, and you know the starting position of
the two objects, you know their velocities, and you know
their mass. If you know all those things, you can
create a robust solution that will predict their behavior and
(33:24):
easily predict their positions at any given point in the future.
They orbit a center of gravity in a very clear
and simple way, and you can create a closed solution
that will show you where they'll be at time t
But if you add a third object to the mix,
suddenly chaos and unpredictability takeover. And the objects are still
(33:46):
perfectly governed by the laws of physics. It's not like
a ghost win in there and did anything crazy. But
but their interaction suddenly can't be predicted in a concise way,
and they'll appear to change orbits and positions sort of
crazily as each object repeatedly gets pulled in surprising directions
by the other two. If you want to see what
this looks like, you can look up the three body
(34:06):
problem or three body orbit online and there are lots
of videos that simulate it so you can see it.
But just imagine what it would look like if you
try to put three objects orbiting each other in space.
I mean, they just go all over the place. And so,
in keeping with these themes of predictability and unpredictability, it
also deals with the ways that we can't predict which
(34:27):
of our ideas in science and technology will be most
applicable and in what ways. So there, I feel like
there's a lot of stuff in this book about people
sort of working in the dark and not knowing what
they're working towards before realizing how their work becomes crucial.
And that's the theme I like a lot. Now I
have to I have to mention that I didn't read
(34:48):
it so much as I listened to it. I had
the audio book version of this, and the audio book
is terrific. Uh. I love a good audio book presentation,
and this is certainly one of those. I think you
mentioned that the reader does the detective character in a
real gruff way or something. Yeah, it's kind of a
kind of a gruff voice like this, you know, kind
(35:09):
of like an old time Yeah, and he does. He
has some other very interesting voice choices later on as well. Um.
I was actually listening to the audio book version and
my wife was reading a hard copy of it, and
I have to say, this is one of those books
where if if you were, say, a hundred pages ahead
of someone else, like you are of radically different thoughts. Yeah,
(35:32):
you have radically different thoughts. It's almost like you're in
a different book when you start trying to compare notes
on what's happening. Oh man, I loved it. I loved
how you would you'd get into these parts of the
book where you're just like, what is going on? What
does this have to do with anything? Uh? Specifically, there
is a crucial virtual reality video game in the book
(35:55):
that when when you start getting into these sections of
the book, I just remember thinking like, how on earth
does this have anything to do with with the broader plot?
But then it connects in I think a brilliant way. Yeah,
this is like a it's a it's a virtual depiction
of an alien world that's threatened by by by by
these periods of like burning and freezing. Right, they're trying
(36:18):
to figure out what are the celestial mechanics with multiple
suns that are that are just burning out the world
in in a way that directly echoes the Chinese myth
of Ho Yee the the archer who shoots the surplus
suns out of the sky. And a number of other
mythological and historical figures are also referenced in this virtual world. Yeah,
(36:39):
I think there's a legendary Chinese emperor in one of
the yes yes uh in one of the simulations, but
also some Western figures as well as I recall. Oh yeah,
I think, like I don't remember who all they are,
but like like Einstein and Socrates and Jesus show up
or something. There's a tremendous sense of unpredictability with this book.
I mean, part of it just be due to the
originality of the book itself, but I also wonder how
(37:01):
much of it is the fact that most of us
probably do not read a lot of Chinese literature, more
certainly Chinese science fiction, so you know, we're not as
keyed into what some of the trends are. I don't know.
I think I'm embarrassed to say this, but I think
this might be the first modern Chinese novel. I have read.
(37:23):
I don't. I want to think of another, but I
can't that that is a huge blind spot in my reading.
I guess I should read more, but yeah, this is
the only one I can think of. Yeah, yeah, I'm
I've I've read some older works by by various Chinese writers,
but this is this is the only work of contemporary
science fiction that comes to mind, for sure. And but
it's certainly not the only translated Chinese science fiction work
(37:46):
out there. There are there are a number of other
ones of note. Oh yeah, of course. Well, so, Robert,
maybe I think we should transition to a slightly more
spoil ery discussion. So if if you're planning on reading
the book, you don't want anything spoiled, maybe you should
hop out now. But but before you go, if you
are leaving early, let me just remind you that there
will be a complete list of all of these books
(38:07):
and links to where you can buy them or obtain
them or find out more information about them. Uh. They'll
all be on the landing page for this episode. It's
stuff to blow your mind dot com. Yeah, Now, if
you do want to stick around, we hope you will.
You don't plan on reading this book or you've already
read it, or maybe you just don't mind having a
few kind of like themes talked about at greater length.
I want to talk about some of the ideas explored
(38:28):
in this book. So first of all, we can talk about,
now that we're over the gap, the fact that this
turns out to be a disastrous first contact novel. Yes, uh,
first contact between an alien civilization and Earth, and that
it ultimately ends with the alien civilization taking a hostile,
(38:51):
colonizing position towards Planet Earth looking at us within v
s eye. Yes, And when I when we've talked about
how it's a different book at later on, that it
is in the early goings, I have to point out
that you start with what seems like it's going to
be a very historically based novel, take place in the past,
but you do reach a point where it's just page
(39:11):
after page from the the aliens point of view. And
if you're listening to the audio book, their voices sound
like the moon and nights on what's this show? The
adult swim show, U Aquaritine hungerful. Yes, this is the
voice that sort of sounds like this. This is the
voice of the aliens. That's great. It works. The aliens
(39:33):
have a calm malevolence that is not mean spirited, but
but is perfectly aggressive and cruel in a way that
mirrors one of my favorite lines from a sci fi
horror movie. Did you ever see the you know, the
late seventies invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland?
And then I've never seen that one. Oh well, now
(39:56):
I have to spoil something for you. There's just a
great line where where one of the characters who still human,
is talking to the uh, the people who have been
turned into aliens, and he says something like, we hate you,
and one of the aliens says to him, we don't
hate you. It's just a brilliantly chilling thing to say.
I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can definitely see
(40:17):
the echo of that in the In This War. But yeah.
So so there's there's this attack coming, and a lot
of what the book ends up being about is the
ways that the Aliens have have sent a sort of
information based advance force to try to cripple Earth's ability
to protect itself from the alien invasion before they actually
(40:39):
get here. And so that's where where a lot of
the fascinating ideas of the novel come in. Uh, it's
about what could an advanced alien civilization do to stop
Earth from being able to protect itself before they get
to us. And so one of the things that they
come up with is they're like, we gotta stop science
(41:00):
from happening on Earth because they're afraid it's going to
take a long time for them to get to us.
And what if while they're in transit, we make a
lot of advances in particle physics and stuff and drastically
increase our technological capabilities. Yeah, I mean it is the
absolute best thing that we have as a culture, Like,
it is the thing that has produced the modern world,
(41:21):
and it is the thing with the with with probably
the most unity among all human endeavors exactly. So they
come up with this plan to be because so they
want to colonize Earth, but they can't like send a
big heavy spaceships fast enough to get to us. So
instead they create a supercomputer inside an extremely tiny particle
(41:43):
that can be sent at at super fast speed towards Earth,
like with the speed approaching that of a photon. Right
that the idea exactly, so it gets here ahead of
when they could actually get here with all of their
heavy stuff, and it gets to Earth first. And mainly
what it goes about doing is trying to drive all
of the world's leading scientists and particle physicists and everybody
(42:06):
to despair and insanity. And it does this by making
them doubt the existence of scientific laws, like trying to
give them is. So they do the same experiment twice
and get different results. So it seems like the laws
of science are either breaking down or clearly we didn't
understand everything to begin with, and this the ladder of
(42:26):
science is no longer the sure way to ascend anywhere.
Another truly genius move that I think is there in
the plot, and I can't maybe this has been done
in another science fiction work that because it's so obvious,
I feel like somebody should have thought of this, But
this is the first story I can think of really
exploiting this plot to its fullest. And the idea is
(42:46):
the aliens figure out how to exploit existing ideological and
political fractures within human kind to work the human population
against itself on their behalf. Isn't there isn't there a
series of I remember seeing these in bookstores when I
was a kid, but they're like alternative timeline books where
(43:07):
alien showed up during World War Two. Oh, I'm sure
it's happened. I bet it's probably explored in that in
those works for sure, and and others as well well.
I mean, so one of the things you often see,
it's it's a common point of of of the plot
in like Independence Day and stuff like, you know, all
these alien invasion movies, is suddenly we all realize that
we must set aside our petty differences and uh and
(43:30):
join together if we're going to face off against the aliens.
And there is some of that in this, in this
we should mention. This is also the first book in
a series. I haven't finished reading the other books yet,
but I've started the second one. Um, and so there
is eventually some solidarity in banding together in the face
of the aliens. But one thing the aliens figure out
they can do is that, you know, if there is
(43:51):
a if there is a frustrated faction that already hates
part of humanity, you can play to their biases and
play to their in flat or them and get them
on your side. And this is something that actually even
you know is commonly used in in human colonization, international
relations and all that exploiting factions within a target group
(44:14):
in order to play them, play them against each other
along their existing fractures. You don't have to make new fractures,
they're already factions within any given group of people. Yeah,
I'm instantly reminded us some examples from from Soviet history.
You know how how you end up dividing up these territories.
Make sure that you have a territory that has locked
(44:35):
into it to rival groups so that they're always fighting
each other and not fighting the the occupying power. You
know what. George Washington, the first president of the United States,
he had a lot of really lucid thoughts about this.
In his farewell address in seventeen, he was warning about
the nature of political parties. He was essentially saying, like,
(44:58):
don't get going with political par parties, because they will
be the death of you as a nation. So Washington's
talking about internal party factionalism, you know, fighting amongst each other,
and he says it serves always to distract the public
counsels and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community
with ill founded jealousies and false alarms. It kindles the
(45:19):
animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which
finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the
channels of party passions. Thus, the policy and the will
of one country are subjected to the policy and will
of another. And if you just replace Planet there for
(45:42):
country there, you've got what happens. Uh in the novel.
I don't know if you was thinking about George Washington,
but it's a perennial insight. I guess, yeah, yeah, I
think so. Since we're having our spoiler laden discussion here,
one thing that I wanted to mention from the second
novel in the series, the one that comes after The
Body Problem, is this great moment that I haven't finished
(46:04):
this novel yet, but there's a part where the particle
that the Aliens have sent ahead, the supercomputer AI that
they've sent ahead that's about the size of a particle
and is flying around the Earth trying to prepare the
Earth to be invaded. There is a great scene where
it first learns that human beings, unlike the aliens who
(46:26):
sent it, have the ability to lie. Because the aliens
are not they're not individually deceptive because they don't communicate verbally,
they essentially share thoughts with one another in a detectable way,
and thus to think something is to have that thing
(46:46):
be perceptible by another member of your species. And so
thus you can't misrepresent your thoughts. If you have a thought,
someone can see it on you, And so they don't
really have a concept of lying. And when the supercomputer
sent by the Aliens as they're on their way to
invade first becomes aware that human beings have the power
(47:08):
to say something that is not what they really think,
the supercomputer processes for a moment and then it says,
I am afraid. Alright. So so just to sum it up, um,
humans versus aliens humans advantages, we have science disadvantages. Um,
(47:29):
we have we fight with each other, fight with each other,
and have political disunity. And then kind of a pro
and a con. Uh, there's the whole lying thing because
we lie to each other all the time, which doesn't
help our case. But then we can also lie to
the aliens if we're on talking terms with them. So anyway,
I highly recommend three Body Problem if you're in the
mood for some thought provoking science fiction. All right, Well,
(47:52):
there you have it. I feel like we've presented quite
a grab bag here of fiction, nonfiction, a little children's
literature thrown in as well. Uh. As I mentioned earlier,
I'll make sure that we have links to all of
these books on the landing page for this episode. It's
stuff to bow your mind, because inevitably you're gonna ask, well,
how do you spell that author's last name? What was
that book you mentioned? Maybe we didn't say the title
(48:12):
clearly enough. We'll have it all listed here, and then
you can continue your research into which books might best
suit your palette. And the other cool thing is that
you know this is just the beginning of a discussion
really because inevitably, uh, many of you have read these
books as well, or some of these books, and you
have thoughts on them that you would like to share
with us or perhaps share with other listeners, say at
(48:34):
our Facebook group on stuff Toble your Mind discussion module.
And then perhaps you have all new recommendations for us
books that you that you you're thinking, well, if you
like this, then you'll definitely like this. Yeah, please send
them our way. Obviously we don't have time to read
all of the books that you recommend to us, but
a lot of times we do find out about books
that we end up reading from listener recommendations, so so
(48:55):
by all means yes, send them in. In the meantime,
be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's where you will find all of the
podcast episodes and then of course includes all of the
previous summer reading episodes. UH. You'll also find links out
to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
et cetera. And if you want to support the show again,
(49:16):
the best thing you can do is to rate and
review us wherever you have the power to do so.
Big thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex
Williams and Arry Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback about this episode or
any other, to recommend books to us, to recommend a
topic for the future, just to say hi, let us
know where you listen from, maybe how you found out
about the show. You can always email us at blow
(49:38):
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
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