Modified
Saturday, June 7, 2008 2:48 AM
Mike RoamLinks to Publishing Companies | Some Online Magazines and Newspapers | Book recommendations, by title | Book recommendations, by author
Still Reading | 2008 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 | 1999 8 7 6 5 4 0-3 | 1989-8 7-5 4-3 | 1982-79 | 1978 & before | 1975 or before | 1971 | 1970
Note: these pages were created as an exercise: I've written the programs that convert my database into validated xhtml interlinked webpages that are sorted by different fields (date, title, author), and that in one case (date) have internal links to the various dates. 2007: I'm starting to investigate LibraryThing.com. --Mike
I've long been interested in the multiple horribly fascinating topics that Lindqvist touches on. I spent several years growing up on air force bases, building model planes, and resolving to be a pacifist (for the most part). A college course on the history of the arms race included a guest lecture by Freeman Dyson himself, and included reading Sherwin's "A World Destroyed" which Lindqvist cites for his argument that the Japanese were trying to (conditionally) surrender before the atom bombs were dropped. My Dad was in Strategic Air Command for four years (1967-'71) and spent one of those years in Vietnam, and furthermore I went through high school in Montana, round about the time it (Montana) became major nuclear missile launchpad, sprinkled with missile silos as well as grain silos. (Our 'joke' in the 1980's was that Montana would have the world's third largest nuclear army if it seceded.)
Mom and Dad both became flight instructors in Montana, and one day Dad was zooming along a few hundred feet above the ground (well, "puttering along" is more accurate) following the train tracks, when he realized that the train ahead on the tracks below him was all white, with machine guns mounted on it. It was evidently one of the nuclear warhead transport trains (which always varied their schedules so saboteurs, thieves, and protesters couldn't intercept them) and it was time to make a quick turn or risk being shot down.
Dad's story would seem unlikely (he's willing to bend the truth for dramatic purposes) except I know he likes to fly low (his Montana pilot friends used to say, "Let's go out and scare the snakes!"), and I'd heard about the "white trains" from antinuke groups in college, and the railroad track does lead directly from Billings (our home) to Hardin, site of the flying school (and of the Little Big Horn/Custer battlefield).
The page-jumping in Lindqvist's book made me feel as if I were an airplane, taking off from one page and landing on another. Because the overall structure was chronologically organized, I liked seeing the many ways that Lindqvist's essays linked events from different eras. I was bothered that there was no index, and little mention of suicide/car bombs, but glad that he seemed somewhat evenhanded about criticizing many of the major powers. (I was instantly suspicious of his propagandism when his first essay claimed that he and his boyhood friends ONLY played war games: all the boys I've ever seen --or heard of-- play many other games as well as war, but Lindqvist won me back with the depth of his research.) I wish he had given more of an explanation of why the apocalyptic fantasy stories were significant: saying that some novelists created characters who wanted to destroy Asians or Africans is a long way from saying that this was the policy (or dream) of major leaders.
If some of that limitless solar energy in outer space could be safely beamed down to Earth, we wouldn't be so hungry for oil, nor so polluted by cars and coal-burning power plants. This could be a tremendous boost for health, environment, prosperity, you name it. After reading this engaging, thoughtful, and exciting book I'm inspired to read more recent books, and am designing a high school course about space colonies, space-based solar collectors, microwave energy transmission links (spacefuture.com project 2000 and 1992 article), Buckminster Fuller, Stella (Systems Analysis software), and the Civilization IV game (fanatics) with its "manage a country" role-playing, and ecological modeling (as was attempted by Biosphere). Princeton professor Gerard K. O'Neill did early space colony analysis, and his Space Studies Institute has links to a wonderful FAQ and links page. A little googling has shown me that there are annual space colony (NASA) and settlement (spaceset.org) design contests for high school students.
More: NASA, spacefuture.com, space.com, marsSociety.org.
(pg. 27) “It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, "What would have happened if . . ." and subsitituting one chance occurrence for another, observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one's life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a "thus" and and "otherwise," with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.
“All these simple thoughts about the wavering nature of life come to mind when I think how easily I might never have happened to rent a room in the house at 5 Peacock Street, or meet Vanya and her sister, or Roman Bogdanovich, or many other people whom I suddenly found, who started to live all at once, so unexpectedly and unwontedly, around me. And again, had I settled in a different house after my spectral exit from the hospital, perhaps an unimaginable happiness would have become my familiar interlocutor . . . who knows, who knows . . .”
recurring elements: a gun, (a shooting), intercepted letters, people & cars in mirrors & windows, the "what else might have been", Edgar Allen Poe, Sherlock (Holmes), scenes that reveal they were "just" dreams,
Modified
Saturday, June 7, 2008 2:48 AM
Mike Roam