My Summer of Fantasy

I've always been an avid reader of science fiction but never really got into fantasy. In an attempt to expand my horizons - and after watching the incredibly cheezy but enjoyable (in a Xena kind of way) "Legend of the Seeker" - I recently picked Terry Goodkind's "Wizards' First Rule." I was trying to decided whether I should start the rest of the books after reading some mixed reviews online claiming the series gets pretty unbearable towards the end. (Critics in a nutshell - little character development, bad writing, Objectivist rants.) Anyways, Since I know lots of my facebook friends are super-geeks (like me), I asked their advice. While I'll probably hold off on reading more Goodkind for now, here's the list of recommended books that I compiled from the ensuing discussion.

Piers Anthony - A Spell for Chameleon (Zac)
Robert Aspirin - "Another Fine Myth" (Zac - humor fantasy)
Patricia Briggs - Moon Called (Chris W.)
Terry Brooks - Running with the Demon (Jason)
Terry Brooks - Magic Kingdom For Sale--SOLD (Zac)
Molly Cochran & Warren Murphy - The Forever King (Zac - Arthurian spin on its head)
Rick Cook - Wizards Bane (Zac - a universe where computer programming languages can be used to make magic)
Diane Duane - So You Want To Be a Wizard"(Zac - YA with female lead)
Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen (Kelly)
Barbara Hambley - The Ladies of Mandrigyn (Zac - best female lead written in fantasy)
Robin Hobbs - Assassin trilogy (Dave R.)
Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time series (Jason)
Mercedes Lackey - Winds of Fate (Zac)
Ursala LeGuin - Earthsea series (Mary, Zac)
Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind (Zac)
Maria Doria Russell - The Sparrow, Children of God (Max)
Mary Steward - The Crystal Cave & the rest of her Arthurian series (Zac, my mom)

I'm also looking into feminist-friendly fantasy books currently, and will post a list of what I find. Let's see if there's anything out there that doesn't use the damsel-in-distress and violence-against-women-as-plot-motivaters tropes in excess. (For many examples of the latter in comics, check out the excellent Women in Refrigerators website.)

Looks like my summer reading list is getting full! Thanks to all for the great suggestions!

Pouring money down the drain

After months ... no, make that years of putting it off, I finally cleaned out my storage unit the other day. I had to dig up the original contract the find my unit number and gate code. It had been that long since I'd been inside.

I only had a vague idea of what was in there, but I assumed it must be important since I took the time to rent the unit and haul a bunch of stuff into it. (I rented it when I moved from a townhouse in upper NW with a basement to an apartment in Dupont with no stoarge space.) So I rolled up my sleeves and started sorting. First, I have never seen so many dead bugs in my life. Gross! Second, 75% of the stuff in it was junk. Absolutely worthless. There were some gems - old debate medals, science fiction paperbacks, letters and cards from college. I'll be sorting through this stuff at home. (And scanning what I can.) But I was able to fit everything I wanted to keep in one medium-sized load in my car. The rest - total crap!

Being the masochist that I am, I wanted to figure out how much money I have wasted on storing my junk. The contract listed that I originally rented the storage unit in April 2003. Damn. I've been paying rent on it for seven years. That's 84 months of making a payment of $100-120. (The rental fee went upgradually over those seven years.) So I figure I have spend $9000-10,000 on this storage unit.

Let me repeat that - NINE TO TEN FRAKKING THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!!! To store mostly crap. Think of all the things I could have done with that much money.

I vow to never, ever rent a storage unit again ... Unless, of course, I really need it to house all my valuable future sutff :)

Long time no see ....

Me: Oh, hello blog. It's been a while.

Blog: No shit! What happened? I thought you fell off the face of the planet!

Me: I've just been so busy that I haven't had time to visit.

Blog: Not even time for a letter? Or a short text?

Me: I know. I'm a bad blogger. I promise it will never happen again.

Blog: Whatevs. I'm already so over it.

(Not so) Awesome 80s

I just found an old cassette mix that I recorded off the radio in 1985. I was in 5th or 6th grade at the time. It's so awesome in it's badness.

Before I throw it away I must have a record of the track list for posterity:

1) Boys of Summer - Don Henley
2) Material Girl - Madonna
3) Against All Odds - Phil Collins
4) Baby Come to Me - Patti Austin and James Ingram
5) Easy Lover - Philip Bailey and Phil Collins
6) Raspberry Beret - Prince
7) All I Need - Jack Wagner
8) Like a Surgeon - Weird All Yankovic
9) Susssudio - Phil Collins
10) Hot Blooded - Foreigner
11) View to a Kill - Duran Duran
12) Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears
13) The Search is Over - Survivor
14) Heaven - Bryan Adams
15) Axel F - Harold Faltermeyer
16) Mislead - Kool & the Gang

Just one question - why three Phil Collins songs?

Monday Mission

When the door bell rang this afternoon, I thought maybe the some workers had locked themselves out again. But instead, two nice, clean-cut young men in navy slacks and white, short-sleeved collard shirts with name tags and a book in their hand were at my door. Here's how the exchange went:

Nice Young Man: Hello ma'am. I'm XXX and this is XXX. What a lovely house you have? Have you lived here long? It looks like you're just moving in.

Me: We moved in a couple months ago but we're still finishing some renovations.

NYM: We're new to the area as well.

Me: So you guys are on your mission in DC.

NYM: (Looking a little surprised). Why, yes.

Me: I've had Morman friends before so I know a bit about your faith.

NYM: Well we're out here today to spread the message about Jesus Christ. Do you have a few minutes to talk.

Me: Thanks but I'm actually not religious, so I'm probably going to be a tough sell for you guys. But there are lots of nice people in this neighborhood who you might find to talk to.

NYM: So do you mean that you don't believe in god at all or you just don't belong to a particular church?

Me: I'm an atheist. But I'm glad we live in a county where we both can believe whatever we want and still all get along.

NYM: Well take this card in case you ever have any questions about the meaning and purpose of live.

Me: Thanks. Good luck and have a nice day.

NYM: You too!

It was actually a very pleasant exchange with lots of smiles. Even though I clearly don't agree with their beliefs, I can appreciate that it must be hard for barely adult Mormons to go door to door trying to talk about their religion with strangers. I'm sure they get lots of rude responses and doors slammed in their face (even from other Christians). And regardless one's own views, I think you should always be cordial and polite.

I also hope they walked away with a better opinion about atheists. How ironic if one of the friendliest faces they encountered today was someone who doesn't even believe in god?

Two of my favorite things together!

Earlier this month, Joss Whedon was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism by the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. As most people reading this will know, I am an enormous fan of Joss Whedon and all his work on television and other media, including Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Dr. Horrible. I actually did not know that he was a secular humanist until I saw this clip. The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy is a

It's a great clip that touches on, among other things, the importance of free-thinking and education. My favorite, though, is the end, when Joss says:

"The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God is believing, absolutely, in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers."

Watch the whole thing. It's a great speech that touches on things that many people, both believers and non-believers, will agree with. Go Joss!

Technophobia, evolution, race, and religion: thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica finale

Me – Anders is the worse hybrid ever. He needs to be saying more cryptic things and helping put out all the fires on the Galactica.

David – He must be a Ford Hybrid.

After four seasons of some of the best television currently on, Battlestar Galactica came to an end last Friday night. I was bracing for an apocalyptic “everybody-dies” kind of ending, so while the finale was certainly not touchy-feely happy-ending-y, it was a lot less dismal than I was expecting. I was thoroughly enjoying it until about 2/3 of the way through, when the writers decided to totally frak everything up, IMHO.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

I cannot emphasize how much I hated the anti-technology ending. This is such a cliché of mainstream scifi. The idea that humans don’t have the moral capacity to deal with the power of modern technological advances, and that the people would be happier in some pastoral utopia is a way overused theme. If the theme was ever delved into or discussed with any great care in the show, maybe it would make sense. But I felt like the “let’s all become noble savages” theme came out of left field. (As symbolized by Baltar, Caprica’s greatest scientists, returning to his agricultural roots.) So we just give up medicine? And what about all the people who had been injured in the battle against the cylon colony? We just leave them to suffer and die from easily treatable infections and conditions?

Okay, granted technological advances allowed humans to create cylons, and cylons are what almost destroyed humanity, but technology is also what allowed the BSG humans to survive. Being able to live in spaceships and wander the galaxy for years, medicine to cure sickness, weapons to shoot at the cylons, and Hera, the supposed key for the survival of both cylons and humans, are all a result of technology. To me, BSG has always been an allegory about racism, prejudice and xenophobia, and not about the dangers of technology.

My understanding is that the reasons the Centurions rebelled is because of humanity’s treatment of them as basically slaves rather than equal sentient being. We also know that the holocaust that occurred on the 13th tribe Earth was caused by the Centurions. Perhaps the original humaniod Cylons didn’t treat the Centurions any better than humans. To me this is a more a metaphor for the dehumanization of groups of people, usually along racial/ethnic, religious, gender, class, etc. lines, in order to subjugate them, that has persisted through our human history. In order to enslave, abuse, rape, kill we often have to see these humans as objects, as less than human, as somehow lesser than “our” kind.

Pegasus’ Lt. Thorne’s use of rape as a method of interrogation of GinaSix and Athena is a good example of this kind of dehumanization. The constant referral to cylons as toasters and machines, as unfeeling and incapable of emotion, and therefore, by implication, not deserving of the same rights and treatment of “real” humans, is another example of how humans justify their attitudes towards (and sometimes torture, abuse, and rape of) cylons. This is even more pronounced in regards to the Centurions, who lack biologically constructed bodies and therefore don’t “look like us”. (And it’s interesting to note that the Centurions seriously desired biological bodies. Perhaps they had internalized some of the messages of their human masters.)

The point here is that it was not technology itself that caused the near annihilation of humanity. It was their lack of ethical development; their inability to recognize intelligent beings who were not human as deserving of the same rights and respect that they gave other humans. This is why the key to both human and cylon survival was cooperation and acceptance of one another as equal beings. This acceptance was critical to stopping the cycle of mutual violence and genocide.

The BSG humans and cylons who settled on our Earth maybe finally accept one another as equal. They also recognized the independence of the Centurions by giving them leave to go off to pursue their own destiny. But clearly getting rid of technology doesn’t solve the problem of dehumanizing the “other.” We only just construct different “others.” We have thousands of years of our human history to say otherwise. If anything, modern technology can help provide empirical support against certain kinds of constructed racial distinctions that have justified centuries of dehumanizing and othering. The fact that all of modern humanity shares a common ancestor of Hera/Eve could only be discerned by modern scientific methods.

Speaking of human origins, the finale made me even more confused about where humans come from in the BSG world. Kobol is origin planet of BSG humans in their mythology. So what are the odds that evolution would happen in exactly the same way on both Kobol and our Earth to produce humans that can interbreed? Basically zero if just natural forces are at work. So maybe the humans on our Earth were descendants of the Kobol humans that somehow lost technology. Of course, let’s not forget that the twelve human colonies from Kobol were named after the 12 signs of the zodiac. On Kobol they discover a replica of the night sky as seen from Earth with the 12 zodiac constellations in the location you would see them from our Earth (i.e. the Earth from the final episode, not the 13th colony post-apocalypse Earth that the final five come from). So what the frak does that mean?

Maybe our Earth was actually the origin planet of humans. They developed into a space-faring civilization, colonized Kobol, forgot about our Earth, and the Earth inhabitants somehow lost their civilization, language capacity, etc. (And then how does the Zodiac enter into our Earth’s history tens of thousands of years later? And what about all the Greek mythological names of BSG characters?!? And the fact that the names of the Lords of Kobol were all gods from Greek mythology? Never explained, but more on that later.)

Of course, the easy answer is what the BSG writers are implying - that evolution on our Earth (and maybe Kobol) was guided by a divine hand. Great. Go intelligent design. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with the spiritual overtones of the show. I think it made for some interesting plot points and moral discussions, especially the whole Cylon monotheism v. human polytheism. But sweeping away all these unanswered questions about the origins of humanity in the BSG universe with a last minute default to “a higher power did it” seems like a big cop out to me. It’s like the writers didn’t want to wade through the thick history and mythology they created to sort it out. Better to wave the “god did it” wand and make all the questions go away. This also applies to the question of what were HeadSix, Head Baltar, and back-from-dead Kara. Easier to say they were Angels than to actually delve into the metaphysics of their existences. (More on this later.)

One final thing that really struck me was the neo-colonial overtones of the BGS humans’ colonization of our Earth. I know this was probably not intentional, but the image of a bunch of white people (and a few Asians) checking out the “primitive” Africans, and commenting on how they could teach them language and agriculture was a little off putting. So the white people bring the Africans knowledge and technology (well, not too much technology since we swore that off as bad), and their descendants are able to be civilized. That’s not playing on any racists tropes . . .

Of course, maybe that’s exactly what the Lords of Kobol did to humanity that evolved on Kobol. Oh wait! An idea is forming.

Okay, so here’s my theory. The BSG human mythology said that humans evolved on Kobol in harmony with the Lords of Kobol (their gods) for thousands of years until about 2,000 prior to the show. At this point, for some unexplained reason, gods and humans departed (which is why Athena’s mythological namesake committed suicide), and the humans settled into the 12 colonies, with the humanoid cylons going to fake Earth. So who were these Lords of Kobol? As I mentioned before, they have the same names as Greek gods – Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, etc. Maybe they were actually some super-advanced alien civilization that gave humans technology (think Prometheus myth) and maybe even guided human evolution (think Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 series). Then some cataclysmic event occurred that ruptured this peace. Maybe the humans and humanoid cylons were warring.

In any case, the Kobol lords got the heck out of Dodge and perhaps ascended to some higher plane of being (or maybe they were already there). They basically left humanity alone until they saw the human/cylon warring cycle about to start all over again. So they manifest themselves in the form of HeadBaltar and HeadSix to start setting things right. They also directed humanity and humanoid cylons towards both fakeEarth and, finally, our Earth, in effort to make sure we could just all get along. Resurrected Kara was also part of that plan. While humans and cylons might use the terms “god,” “gods,” “angels,” we’re really just talking about incredibly advanced technology. (As Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So see! Technology saves the day again. Ha!) And maybe they appear to the Greeks as some point to influence the development of human civilization, which is why Earth Greek mythology and the zodiac are so similar to the Kobol myths of the BSG humans.

But, of course, my theory would actually have made the finale make sense. And we can’t have that, now can we?

Some unanswered questions:

- If BSG humans arrived 150,000 years ago in Africa, then why didn’t Earth humans develop language until and agriculture until much later? Current scholarship places the development of language in humans at around 50,000 years ago and the invention of agriculture at around 10,000 years ago.

- Where do all the Greek mythology references fit into this? It would have made much more sense for the BGS humans to arrive on Earth right before the rise of classical Greek civilization.

- Why do they final five, Starbuck, and Hera hear “All Along the Watchtower”? Does this mean Bob Dylan is a Lord of Kobol?

- Is the dying leader that will lead them to Earth Kara and not Roslin?

- What happened to Michael, the humanoid cylon model 7? Ellen says Cavel kills him out of jealousy, but there were some hints that he was Kara’s father. Was he?

- Can the humanoid cylons die of old age? And if not, barring accidental death or murder, does this mean the Chief, Ellen, Tigh, and all the Twos, Sixes, Eights, could possibly still be living? I have this vision of the Chief being the inspiration for some Celtic god in ancient Scotland.

- Is anyone still reading this post at this point? If so, you’re more of a geek than even I am :)