Now *that's* how you do science.

The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul J. Steinhardt.
A Nerds who Read Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I have a longstanding complaint about science education.

When I was learning physics as an undergraduate, and during the first year or so of graduate school, the lectures only covered what, for lack of a better term, could be called settled science (Yeah, I get that some of you object to that term. But keep reading and it will be clear what I mean.) One didn't get a sense of how messy the actual sausage-making was—the false starts, the incomplete information, the unpredictable flashes of insight, the dead ends, the egos, the politics, the waits for time on the equipment, the perennial funding crises—students saw very little of this until they were well into graduate school and began their thesis research. Yes, there were undergraduate research projects, but they weren’t quite the same.

Perhaps it has to be this way. Most sciences require considerable grounding in the basics before students are ready to do productive work. But the flipside is that they don't get a sense of what the day to day pursuit of science is actually like until they have committed five or six years to it.

The general public has a similarly warped view of science, thanks to a failure to understand this paradox: that even though science eventually gets to a fair level of certainty, there’s a great deal of uncertainty and questioning along the way. We see this when non-scientists weigh in on the global warming debate. One side focuses only on the holy "certainty" of the end result, and refuses to question anything. The other side focuses only on the questioning, and refuses to believe anything. Neither really understands how science works.

Which is why I thought The Second Kind of Impossible is such a wonderful book. Written by Paul J. Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, this “extraordinary quest for a new form of matter,” tells a true story of science discovery, in all its glorious chaos.

The book takes its title from a conversation the author had with legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the early 1970s. Steinhardt, a Cal Tech undergraduate at that time, was presenting a formula for the motion of a Super Ball. The equation predicted that if the ball were dropped with just the right spin, it would bounce of the floor at a nearly horizontal angle.

“That’s impossible!” Feynman declared.

Steinhardt produced a Super Ball and dropped it with the required spin. In spite of Feynman’s skepticism, it behaved exactly as predicted. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The incident launched Steinhardt on a lifetime of thinking about the word impossible. “I had learned early on to pay close attention whenever an idea is dismissed as ‘impossible,’” he writes.

Most of the time, scientists are referring to something that is truly out of the question, like violating the conservation of energy or creating a perpetual motion machine. It never makes sense to pursue those kinds of ideas. But sometimes, an idea is judged to be “impossible” based on assumptions that could be violated under certain circumstances that have never been considered before. I call that the second kind of impossible. If one can expose the underlying assumptions and find a long-overlooked loophole, the second kind of impossible is a potential gold mine that can offer a scientist the rare opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to make a transformational discovery.

Steinhardt would hear that word “impossible” from Feynman again, and once again it was the second kind of impossible. The year was 1985 and Steinhardt, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had travelled back to his old alma mater to present his theory of quasi-periodic crystals, or “quasicrystals” for short. This previously unknown form of matter demonstrated symmetries that were, well, impossible, according to the laws of crystallography developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by René Just Haüy and Auguste Bravais. It is the story of quasi-crystals that Steinhardt sets out to tell in his book.

The book is divided into three parts, each with its unique character. The first, “Making the Impossible Possible,” tells the story of how a computer model of a rapidly cooled solid showed the symmetry of an icosahedron—the shape of a Dungeons and Dragons die, something “impossible” under the Haüy and Bravais laws. This set Steinhardt and his graduate student Dov Levine on the path that would eventually lead to a theoretical model of quasicrystals. Simultaneously, Dan Shechtman, of the Technion in Israel, discovered an actual, manmade quasicrystal. “Making the Impossible Possible” is the most scientifically challenging part of the book, with many diagrams of crystal structures, diffraction patterns, and Penrose tiles.

It only took about five years to develop the theory of quasicrystals, discover them in a laboratory, and get them accepted by the scientific community. But Steinhardt wanted to take the investigation one step further. He wanted to find quasicrystals in nature. And that would take another thirty years.

The second part of the book, “The Quest Begins,” reads more like a detective or a spy novel than a scientific text. In it, Steinhardt tells the story of a quasicrystal that was found in the collection of the University of Florence’s Natural History Museum. Steinhardt, somewhat prematurely, submitted a paper to the journal Science claiming it was naturally-occurring. When subsequently, objections are raised, he must race against the clock on an international quest to find the origin of the Florence crystal before the publication date, or face the agonizing decision of whether to withdraw the paper.

Along the way we meet many colorful characters, such as Luca Bindi, head of the Department of Mineralogy at the Florence museum. Bindi has an amazing intuition for which crystals are most worthy of study, and an uncanny knack for unexpectedly pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat, earning for himself the title as L’Uomo dei Miracoli—the Miracle Man. Not everyone Steinhardt runs across is so helpful however. For example, Steinhardt claims that Leonid Razin, who had been director of Russia’s Platinum Institute during the old Evil Empire days, demands a hefty bribe before he would say anything—and his old ties to the KGB may just still be lethal.

In one passage, about presenting the project to Ed Stolper, geologist at CalTech, Steinhardt really gives us a sense of the difference between how science appears when you study it in the classroom, and how it appears when you're in the middle of it, and in particular, the human element. It was a high stakes meeting. Stolper carried a lot of weight with some of the senior members of Steinhardt’s "red team"—who would probably bail in the face of a negative review from him.

My pent-up anxiety was slowly melting away as I listened to Ed. It is always hard for me to explain to my university students how difficult it is for a scientist, even an established scientist such as myself, to challenge conventional wisdom. Everything always appears to be simple to others in retrospect. They lose sight of the fact that making scientific progress is always a struggle that requires a great deal of personal endurance. There is a huge amount of peer pressure to conform. For example, after Luca and I suggested that our sample of metallic aluminum might be of natural origin, which was generally thought to be impossible at the time, we were subjected to more than a year of skepticism and withering criticism from certain experts, including our own colleagues on the red team. It had not been easy. The negative comments were sometimes so harsh that the two of us were left dispirited. But work is a great coping mechanism. We kept plowing ahead, incrementally gathering additional evidence to test our thesis. After fourteen months of hard work, it was greatly satisfying for me to hear Ed validate our efforts.

After a series of twists and turns, Steinhardt eventually learns that the Florence sample came from a remote region of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The third part of the book “Kamchatka or Bust” is an adventure story, as Steinhardt and his team travel there to obtain more samples, in the hopes of learning just how nature managed to create such an unusual substance, and whether it was formed deep in the bowels of the earth, or fell from the skies in a meteorite. As they travel across the tundra and up into the mountains in their two “Behemoths”—vehicles that resemble a trailer atop of tank treads—they encounter desolate but beautiful landscapes, fierce hordes of mosquitoes, deadly Kamchatka brown bears, spectacular rainbows, blinding storms, one case of hypothermia, heaps of fresh salmon and caviar, and gallons of vodka.

Now that's how you do science.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Amazon.com

The Meh-dalorian

The Mandalorian, Episodes 1 and 2.
A Nerds who Read TV Review by Michael Isenberg.

It’s hard to warm to a guy with a mask on. So much of our brains are wired for recognizing and responding to faces, that when we don’t get one, it’s difficult to make an emotional connection (with the possible exception of fear).

So if you’re going to have a main character who never takes his mask off, as is the case for the Mandalorian, then he better have something to compensate. Give him some memorable lines to say or some awesome superpowers. Or both at the same time. Remember when Darth Vader force choked that one guy and said, "Apology accepted?" That was bad-ass. Sadly, with the Mandalorian, all we get is blah-ass.

Disney's space western, The Manalorian, premiered this week to launch their new streaming channel, “Disney Plus.” Pedro Pascal plays the title character. The series is definitely set in the Star Wars universe, and fans will see much that is familiar: Boba Fett armor, bizarre CGI creatures, the Force, stormtroopers. Although, since this takes place after the events of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers have seen better days.

The first episode is rather paint-by-numbers, the sort of formulaic thing an unimaginative writer would come up with. We first see the protagonist bring in a run-of-the-mill suspect. There’s a bit of action, but mainly the sequence exists to establish who the Mandalorian is—a bounty hunter. Then he meets with the boss guy to get his main assignment, a higher value target. After a stop with the equipment guy to get his armor upgraded, it’s off to the desolate planet Arvala-7 for the mission to begin in earnest. It was a great formula when James Bond started it, almost sixty years ago, but it’s been done.

Given that it’s the first episode of a series, rather than a movie, there’s one more element to the formula. It has to end with a cliffhanger, in order to hook the viewers so they'll watch the second episode. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say much about the cliffhanger. Just that if you’ve seen The Clone Wars, you’ve seen it already.

Episode 2 is the Mandalorian’s effort to get off Arvala-7 with his bounty. He is hindered by a Crawling Fortress full of Jawas who stripped his ship while he was off doing Episode 1 things. Now he’s stuck there unless he gets the parts back. There’s one twist toward the middle, which you will see coming a mile away. There are some beautiful desert landscapes as the Mandalorian makes his way across Arvala-7, and also a fair amount of action. I like action scenes—I rarely want to watch a show that doesn’t have some. But they’re no substitute for being invested in the main character.

I did like one of the other characters—the Ugnaught Kuiil, played by Nick Nolte. Something about this character just works. Not sure whether it's the grumpy frown, the gravelly voice, the gentle humor, or the Rocky the Flying Squirrel helmet and goggles. We’ve seen his species before—they were the pig-like creatures who were the worker bees of Cloud City in Empire. The ones who tried to melt down C-3PO. Kuiil came to such a barren planet as Arvala-7 in order to find independence as a vapor farmer. “I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.” And he has a great catchphrase, “I have spoken,” which he is able to pull off without sounding like a dick. Sadly, Episode 2 ends with the Mandalorian saying goodbye to him and flying off into space, so I’m not sure if he’s going to be back in future episodes.

The ending of Episode 2 wrapped everything up rather nicely—no cliffhanger to entice me to Episode 3. I’m undecided whether to cancel my subscription to Disney Plus when the free trial ends, or keep it to see more of The Mandalorian (Yeah, I know. There are other things on there. But that's a whole 'nother discussion). On the one hand, while not a great series so far, it’s not bad either. Kind of meh. Might be worth watching if there’s nothing else on. On the other hand, if I really want a space western, I could just re-watch Firefly.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Forbes, Screen Rants, fb.com/tarryk.

Dark Fate at the Box Office...

...and it’s a shame.

Terminator: Dark Fate
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Twenty-nine million dollars. That’s all Terminator: Dark Fate managed to pull in from the domestic box office during its opening last weekend. To put that in perspective, the movie is estimated to have cost $185 million to make. The poor reception is a shame, because it’s a pretty good movie. It wasn’t mind blowing or anything, it’s not going to rock your world. But it’s good solid entertainment with action, humor, and some heart.

Given that schools don’t teach the classics anymore, a quick review is in order. The original Terminator (1984) tells the story of Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence which sometime in the future—Judgment Day—achieves consciousness, launches the nukes, and then builds machines to exterminate what’s left of the human race. The humans, led by one John Connor, fight back, and after an epic war, with heavy losses, beat the machines. In a final Hail Mary pass, Skynet sends a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger), back to the 1980s to kill Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) before John is ever born. It fails. In the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Skynet tries again, this time taking a crack at John himself. Not only do the heroes destroy the Terminator once again, they prevent Skynet from ever being created. The grim future is erased. Judgment Day never happens.

Or so they think. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), we learn “You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.”

We also learn that sometime between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, Sarah Connor died of leukemia.

Which brings us to Terminator: Dark Fate. It begins two years after the events of T2. Sarah and John are hanging out on a beach in Guatemala when a model T-800 Terminator appears without warning and kills the boy. It all happens so fast that Sarah doesn’t have a chance to protect him, as she had done all his life. As they go their separate ways in the wake of the murder, both Sarah and the T-800 are suddenly aimless, alone in the world, and stripped of their missions.

Fast forward two decades. Yet another Terminator arrives from the future (Gabriel Luna). It’s an advanced model, the Rev-9, with the capability to separate its liquid metal and solid components to act independently, which is kind of cool in a fight. Its mission is to kill factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who presumably will have something to do with defeating the machines someday. But the Rev-9 is not the only visitor from the future: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced super soldier, has been sent back to protect Dani.

Needless to say, as Dani and Grace alternately fight and flight from the Rev-9, they eventually cross paths with Sarah Connor and the T-800 and we find out what they’ve been up to for the past twenty years. Sarah still totally kicks ass, and you got to admire the way Linda Hamilton—who is 63—pulls it off. Dark Fate is worth seeing just for that. According to her trainer, a year of intense workouts and strict low-carb dieting went into her preparation for the role.

As for the T-800, in order to avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal much about the arc of his character. Suffice to say, it is rather touching.

The T-800 is also the main source of humor in the movie, and the basic joke is that the robot says un-robotlike things. It works, as it did in T2. Remember “Hasta la vista, baby?” One of my few criticisms of the movie is that, since the T-800 joins the others rather late in the story, there is a decidedly grim lack of humor prior to that.

Dark Fate has been heavily criticized—some are calling it a franchise killer—but frankly I thought many of the criticisms are undeserved. I am at a loss to find anything that’s so terrible about this movie to account for the flop at the box office. It certainly doesn’t suffer from the sort of cringeworthy moments that made past franchise killers like Batman and Robin so painful to watch.

What a real franchise killer looks like

Some critics complain that the murder of John Connor at the beginning erases the events of Terminator 3. I don’t see the problem. Altering the timeline will do that (Albeit what’s harder to explain is how his death prevented his mother from dying of cancer).

Nor did it bother me that the T-800 has aged considerably—Arnold is 72 years old now. Since this model is built from living skin over a machine interior, it actually makes sense.

Some of my right-of-center friends have criticized what they see as the movie’s politics and are gleeful about its flop at the box office. “Get woke, grow broke,” read one Facebook post I saw. I sincerely doubt these critics have actually seen the movie. It’s not really a political film. Yes, it has some female action heroines. It’s even been called “vagina-centric.” But this series has always had female heroines—Linda Hamilton has been badass since the beginning. Well, at least since T2 anyway. It’s not like Hollywood is rewriting anyone’s childhood for the sake of political correctness. Nor does Dark Fate have that mean-spirited girls against the boys vibe that made Captain Marvel so awful.

There is one scene in an immigrant detention center, which of course references current events, but again, it’s not really political. Pitch Meeting pretty much captured the spirit of it:

Writer Guy: I want the next big set piece to take place inside of a detention facility along the US-Mexico border, you know, get some social commentary going on. Producer Guy: Oh, okay. So what’s the commentary? Writer Guy: It, uh, you know, wouldn’t it look cool if a Terminator ran through one of those things? Producer Guy: That does sound cool.

Well, it is a cool movie. Ignore the critics and the box office and go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): CinemaBlend.com, Polygon.com, giphy.com

An Unambiguous Dystopia

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Every once in a while at Nerds who Read, we like to look back at one of the classics.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, but it continues to have relevance in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Occupy Oakland demonstrators were so inspired by its vision of an anarcho-communist utopia, that they chose it as one of the book covers they used to decorate their “shields” during a 2013 protest.

But when Ms. Le Guin first conceived the story that became The Dispossessed, it was not intended as a utopia. It was a character study. She recounts its birth in her essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” which appears in her 1979 collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like her book The Left Hand of Darkness, she says,

the origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever became clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time, a scientist, a physicist in fact I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was more attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time… My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and the novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeblemindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!” All right. All right, what’s-your-name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right, Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia. Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, the he might well come from a better place than this.

Thus Ms. Le Guin put the usual historical process in reverse. Real life communism begins with promises of utopia and ends with a Gulag. Ursula Le Guin began with a Gulag, and ends with promises of utopia. Such as it is.

The utopia is the planet of Anarres. Several hundred years earlier, a group of idealists had left its sister planet, Urras, to found a colony there. Since then, contact between the two planets was limited to a semi-annual supply ship and some radio contact reserved for the elite that wasn’t supposed to exist. Ms. Le Guin wanted to show how her utopia would unfold without outside interference.

The opening paragraphs are a rather ingenious depiction of a wall, which are well worth reading in their entirety:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks and roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important that that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

We then meet Shevek. As in the original short story, he is “escaping,” boarding the supply ship to return to Urras, the first person ever to do so.

From here the book alternates between chapters about Shevek’s experiences on Urras, where he’s lionized as a celebrity, and chapters recounting his life story up to his momentous decision to leave Anarres and return to the mother planet.

Frankly I found it slow going. Ms. Le Guin was so focused on her character, that she didn’t give us much by way of plot. For most of the book, there just wasn’t any conflict with sufficiently high stakes to have me wondering what was going to happen next. Yes, there were hints that Shevek’s hosts on Urras had some hidden agenda, but these were only passing mentions. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through, when Shevek set out to make his second escape, this time from Urras back to Anarres, that the pace picked up and I finally found myself drawn into the story.

On top of that, IMHO, Ms. Le Guin didn’t even succeed at what she set out to do in the first place, create a vivid character who was “attractive, I mean as a flame to a moth…too big for a short story.” I found Shevek to be a bit of a sad sack, a little boring, often passive, with an air of hopelessness about him. There was no flamey attraction at all.

But there is one aspect of the book that intrigued me (besides the opening passage), in a negative sort of way: the utopian aspect. Anarres is a society where all are equal, at least in theory. There is no private property—the absence of possessions gives the book its title. The needs of every citizen are met (sparsely) without requiring money or work. And yet they do work. “The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together,” Ms. Le Guin explains in a 2015 interview. “That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal…Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.”

Ms. Le Guin worked very hard on the utopian aspect of the book. “It took me years,” she wrote in the “Mrs. Brown” essay. “Reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where [Shevek] came from, and could see the landscape about him.” In an interview with Euan Monaghan, available on lithub.com she added, “I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.”

And yet, despite her hard work and schmoozing of bookstore owners, the Anarres utopia is a terrible place. The people barely survive at a subsistence level. Artificial heat and light are forbidden. Even on those rare occasions when there are resources available for them, it’s felt that such luxuries would undermine the virtue of poverty.

The so-called anarchy is not really without government. There’s a central agency that matches workers to available jobs. And when a road needs to be built, or a forest cleared, citizens are drafted, much like the corvée that reduced the medieval serf to slavery. The more perceptive Anarrans are well aware that their claim to have no government is a pretense, as Shevek’s friend Bedap admits at one point.

And yet the real power on Anarres is the amorphous pressure of public opinion. Those who are seen as not pulling their weight are ostracized, which is occasionally enforced by a barrage of rock-throwing. A similar fate awaits anyone with the effrontery to think for themselves. They’re cut off from the work that was supposed to be so fulfilling that they would do it without pay. Another of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, wrote an unpopular play and finds himself assigned to road work. As with dissenters in the Soviet Union, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even Shevek, working at a university, is barred from teaching until he gives up the original research the powers-that-be find threatening. I cringed every time an Anarran described himself as "free."

Anarcho-communism is not freedom. Like all forms of communism, it is fundamentally flawed. To take material goods away from people who produced them, in order to redistribute them to people who didn't, is morally wrong. Without the need to work in order to survive, not to mention the delightful possibility of growing rich, there is little incentive for anyone to put in effort. Without the price mechanism of the market, even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats lack the information they need to balance supply and demand. The result is chronic shortages. And when there are no checks and balances on the power of the collective, the pressure to conform is a tyranny as soul-crushing as anything government can impose.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin set out to create an ideal society, a utopian utopia, and judging from her various public statements, she was sincere about that. But the logic of anarcho-communism led her to its natural, grim conclusion instead. To her credit, Ms. Le Guin was too honest a writer to evade that logic. She never could escape from the Gulag that was the setting of her original short story.

Even Ms. Le Guin conceded, in her "Mrs. Brown essay" that Anarres was a utopia "of sorts." Some editions of The Dispossessed are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” I don’t know if that was Ms. Le Guin’s decision or her publishers’. But I would go beyond that. Anarres is an unambiguous dystopia.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His dystopian novel, Full Asylum, shows what America will look like if it continues down the path of socialism. But since George Orwell and Ayn Rand already wrote the grim version of that story, Dr. Isenberg wrote a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Domingoyu.com.

Not your Dress-up Doll

Battle Angel Alita, Vol. 1-5, by Yukito Kishiro.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I missed Alita: Battle Angel at the theater earlier this year, and am only just now getting caught up, thanks to streaming video. I found it very entertaining, with kickass fight scenes and real heart.

But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read. So, although comparisons with the movie are inevitable, my review today focuses on the original nine-part 1990-95 Battle Angel Alita manga, or to be precise, the five-volume 2017 “Deluxe Edition” re-release (each volume except the last contains two parts).

Some of the story will be familiar to viewers of the movie: How the cyber-doctor Daisuke Ido finds the head and shoulders of a cybernetic warrior discarded in the post-Apocalyptic “Scrapyard.” How he rebuilds her and names her Alita. How she joins him as a hunter-warrior, bounty hunters in a long, twilight struggle against rogue cyborgs. And how Alita fell into a star-crossed romance with the street urchin/handyman/spine snatcher Yugo, whose only goal in life is to leave the Scrapyard and move on up to the mysterious “floating utopia” of Zalem.

Mercifully, the manga does not include the tiresome Jack Skellington part of the story, the sequence in the movie in which the newly-rebuilt but amnesiac Alita darts about the Scrapyard, gleefully exclaiming “What’s that?” at each new sight. On this point, the manga is definitely superior to the movie: we get to the action that much faster (Yeah, I know. Jack actually said, "What's this?" But I think my point is clear).

In spite of this and some other added material, the makers of the Alita: Battle Angel movie (as well as the makers of the 1993 OVA) deserve praise for staying true to the source material, right down to duplicating some of the manga’s most iconic images.

But the movie covers little more than Volume 1 of the manga. After that, Alita goes on to have many new adventures, love interests, and battles. Volume 2 fleshes out her Motorball career. Volumes 3-5 revolve around the relationship between the surface dwellers and Zalem. The floating city imposes a cruel tyranny over the inhabitants below. Zalem appropriates nearly all the resources and manufactured goods of the planet’s surface, only enforces the laws to the extent that they bolster its own interests, and uses the Scrapyard as a dumping ground, with imagery that anticipates the Devil’s Anus in Thor:Ragnarok by two decades.

The people of the surface revolt in what becomes known as the “Barjack Rebellion”, led by the sometime Samurai, sometime centaur, always dangerous Den. Den is interesting in the way that Killmonger from Black Panther is interesting. He’s definitely the villain, and yet one can’t help thinking, “He has a point.” In any case, he turns out to be not what he seems.

We also see a lot more of Desty Nova in these later volumes, who we glimpsed in the movie, the Ed Norton character pulling strings behind the scenes.

My one complaint about the manga is I often found the fight scenes hard to follow. Seriously, what’s going on here?

But aside from that, I think this is a wonderful series. Part of its strength comes from the relationships between Alita and the people around her, in particular Yugo and Dr. Ido. In this respect she reminds me of another diminutive 1990s action heroine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alita’s crush on Yugo is far more layered than in the movie, a beautifully true-to-life portrayal of a teenager in love. She falls hard for this cute boy with a cool bandana and an adorable smirk who knows where he’s going. She waits outside his house all night for him to come home. She does his laundry and makes plans for their future together, at least when she’s not staring out over the city and moping about whether they have a future together. Alas, although he does like her, he’s not as into her as she is into him; he has his own thing going on. Thanks to these nuances, his choices later in the story make a lot more sense than they do on the Big Screen.

But it is Alita’s relationship with Dr. Ido that is the most touching, one of father and daughter. It’s not perfect. Sometimes he’s a great sounding board, for example listening sympathetically, albeit with a touch of amusement, to her romantic problems. Other times she has to lay down the law with him, as when he tries to forbid her from becoming a hunter-warrior.

Indeed the whole plotline about the Barjack rebels is just a side-mission for Alita: she crosses their path while on a multiyear quest across ruined landscapes to find Ido, who has gone missing. Through it all, they both make mistakes, some of which have serious consequences. But they do it because they care about each other.

Comparisons between Alita and Captain Marvel are ubiquitous on the web, and for good reason: both of their movies came out around the same time, both are women with incredible powers who do not remember their origins, and are therefore on quests to find out who they are. Both their mentors try to hold them back, ultimately without success. But IMHO, it’s these relationships with their mentors that set the two superheroines apart. Ido is motivated by love for Alita and holds her back, and even opposes her sometimes, in a misguided effort to keep her out of danger. Captain Marvel, in contrast, is a feminist parable in which her mentor, Yon-Rogg is the very embodiment of The Patriarchy; he holds her back because he wants to control her. Indeed all the males in her life are awful—with the exception of those who are comic relief.

I think this gap between the emotional resonance of Alita and the coldness of Captain Marvel is why audiences split on the two movies the way they did. As of the time I write this, Alita has a 93% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with only 53% for Captain Marvel. Interestingly, the critics, more politically correct, split the other way, 61% for Alita and 78% for Captain Marvel (For a more in-depth analysis of Alita, Captain Marvel, and feminism, see Ian Kummer’s post, “Alita, the Battle Angel, fights her feminist critics” on the Fabius Maximus website).

The other marvelous thing about the Battle Angel is that she’s just so badass. Absolutely unstoppable. In one fight, her opponent literally tears her limb from limb, until there is nothing left of her but her head, shoulders, and one arm. And yet, she wasn't finished. Which brings me to another comparison with Buffy, specifically the Slayer’s fight against Angel in the season 2 finale. Angel has her on the ropes and taunts her, “That's everything, huh? No weapons...no friends...no hope...Take all that away and what's left?”

“Me,” Buffy replies.

Alita shares Buffy's spirit, but is a little more primal about it. When it was her turn to be stripped of everything, she merely screamed out a battle cry and, pushing off with her one arm, jumped back into the fight.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Battle Angel Alita Kindle Edition, Fabius Maximus website, IMDB

Do I Look Like I’m Joking?

Joker.
Movie Review by Derek Power.

Where to begin? No, seriously, where to begin? I’m not kidding here. Why are you chuckling? Do you think this is funny? Am I some kind of clown? Do I amuse you?

Huh? Huh!

I’M ASKING A QUESTION HERE! WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?!?!

…

…

...

Had you there for a second.

But to be so serious, the trailer for Joker, which opens in theaters this weekend, gives us a portrait of a man who’s not quite right to begin with, sometimes rejected and even beaten by the people around him, and eventually donning the clown face and purple suit that we’ve all come to know and love (or not) from decades of Batman movies, comics, and TV shows. All set against the background of a gritty 1970s-looking Gotham which clashes with the cheerful Jimmy Durante Smile though your Heart is Breaking soundtrack like the dissonance of a disordered mind.

Where can you begin in evaluating a film that looks at a character like the Joker?

For a character that’s octogenarian, the Joker still manages to provide new angles and approaches and has become for screen actors what Richard III still provides for stage ones (screen too). For a character from perhaps the most widely-known modern myth, he has become the closest that man has created to something on the level of Lucifer and makes all the other classic mythic antagonists—Ulysses’ Poseidon, Beowulf’s Grendel—seem like, well, clowns. But as an idea, the Joker has also come to embody not just moral evil, but also the non-rational. Thus, a better question to ask is: how can you make rational what is already irrational?

Perhaps the best approach is to start by saying what the movie is not. After all, by eliminating statements you know to be false, you get ever closer to understanding what it is.

It is not a comic book film.

Let’s start simple. Yes, this is all based on characters from DC. But apart from that and the clear influence of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke (more on this later), Joker owes extremely little to any established lore found in any Batman comic. Thus, it is nothing like what we now consider comic book films based on the current crop like that eleven-year effort which concluded with this year’s Avengers: Endgame. But it’s not just a matter of a clear storyline with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist. If anything, the usual antagonist is this film’s protagonist in that everything in the film is shown through Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) eyes.

It is not an origin story of the Joker

Despite its title, this is not a definitive telling of how the Joker became the Joker. For starters, it owes nothing to established comic lore. There is no nod whatsoever to “The Man behind the Red Hood” (originally Detective Comics 168, February 1951), which is the earliest story for the Joker and gave us the “dropped into a vat of chemicals” origin. Even the story that many have used as a Joker origin story—the aforementioned The Killing Joke (written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland)—is not really an origin story and hearkened back to the earlier Red Hood story. In fact, during The Killing Joke, the Joker tells Batman that his own memory of events keeps changing over time, which could be viewed as one of those escape clauses so liberality could trump continuity.

It is not some soft franchise reboot

Without getting too much into the spoilers, there are moments that suggest this is some attempt to restart a DC cinematic universe to compete with the now fairly complete Marvel one. But personally, I don’t see it happening and if it does, it won’t be through this film.

It is neither a rehash of the past, a single allegory of the present, nor a forecast to the future

By this point, you have no doubt heard the numerous comparisons of Joker to the works of Martin Scorsese and, in particular, Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). There is no denying it. Hell, Robert de Niro is even in it as Murray Franklin, who could very well be Rupert Pupkin finally getting his act, and his act together, and becoming a kind of Johnny Carson/Ed Sullivan type. But at the same time, Joker is not a carbon copy of those films. On the whole, it certainly owes plenty to those American films of the 1970s, plus or minus, starting as early as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and even going into the 1980s (for upcoming and seasoned viewers: note a marquee sign toward the end of Joker).

This film is also not some statement about the current state of the world. You can attribute Tolkien for me personally disliking or distrusting allegory, but the Oxford don has a very good point. Allegory is a one-way, single lane interpretation of a story and often marked by a specific time and place. Times and places fade into memory and then into dust. In the end, nothing beside remains. And so, it would be unfair to attribute allegory here.

And finally, the reason why it is not some future forecast is for me the same reason that Stanley Kubrick once gave film critic Alexander Walker about A Clockwork Orange (1971…and another point of comparison for Joker). Walker recounts, “It is not a forecast, it is a fable.” And to tie up all notions of time, any observer of the human condition—and especially over the last half-century or so—will not be surprised (after the shock dissipates) by anything shown here. The reason why Shakespeare is still relevant four centuries or so on is because human beings still do the same stupid nonsense. And like what has happened, a lack of care and forethought will mean the future can be its own “remake” of the past.

A-HA! I think I have something as to what it is. Basically, my Twitter assessment is thus:

It is a film that looks at an apathetic, even violent, world through an insane man who then becomes more insanely violent.

Good night, and good luck?

Joker (2019)
Dir: Todd Phillips
Scr: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
Prod: Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen
Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behaviour, language and brief sexual images

Derek Power is a musician/once aspiring filmmaker who lives in a society somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. He makes music under the name キラヨシ and can be found at kirayoshi.bandcamp.com. He can also be found being too clever for his own good on Facebook and Twitter.

Paradise Lost meets World of Warcraft

Fall; or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

The Amazon reviews weren’t encouraging. 3.2 stars average. But the Neal Stephenson name was good enough for me. I bought a copy of Fall; or Dodge in Hell without even knowing what it was about.

I generally try to make my reviews spoiler-free, but Fall is a difficult book to talk about without spoilers. So be forewarned, there are some below. I’ll try to keep them to the minimum needed to explain the premise and the conflict.

The opening chapter wasn’t promising. A day in the life of Richard Forthrast, aka Dodge, the billionaire video game mogul who we met previously in Stephenson’s 2011 novel Reamde. Anyone who has taken a beginner’s novel-writing class knows not to start with the day in the life cliché. Get to conflict already. And while some novels manage to pull it off—Jack July’s Amy Lynn comes to mind—the way things were shaping up, Fall was not going to be one of them. Too many insignificant details as Dodge prepares to go to an appointment for “a routine outpatient medical procedure”: his thoughts on waking up, the bubbles on his bar of soap, the books he packed in his bag, his interaction with the owner of the bakery/café he stopped at for coffee, the leaf he found on the sidewalk outside the clinic, the music he listened to on his headphones, and so on for thirty pages. It reads like the work of a first-time novelist who's determined to capture all the little details to craft a perfect simulacrum of daily life, though in the meantime some necessary question of the story be then to be considered. Big difference from the hammer blow opening of Stephenson’s previous book, Seveneves, "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." My attention wandered, I looked up my review of Seveneves, and I was reminded that I thought that one started slow as well, but that I really liked it in the end. So I kept reading Dodge.

And then it hit me. I realized what Stephenson was doing: Dodge was not going to survive his procedure.

Sure enough, by chapter 3, Dodge is in a coma, and his family, friends, and lawyers are gathered in the hospital to make the difficult end-of-life decisions. It turns out that Dodge left very detailed instructions for his body to be preserved by freezing, “or through whatever means…were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.” And while freezing may have been state-of-the-art when Dodge signed the papers back in the ‘90s, in the near future in which the book takes place, the “best suited” means are scanning one’s brain and uploading it to a computer.

So Dodge is scanned, uploaded, and booted, and his consciousness awakens in “Bitworld.”

In the beginning, there was chaos. And Dodge, now known as Egdod, created the heavens and the earth, roughly following the seven days of creation in Genesis. He’s a video game designer, after all, so this comes naturally. Other souls who have been uploaded gravitate to “the Land” and take up residence there. Egdod is as a god to them.

As with Seveneves , the world-building part of the story takes up a considerable portion of the novel, and is, frankly, a little slow, with long descriptive passages of Egdod flying about the Land as he fine tunes the leaves and the rocks.

Meanwhile, in “Meatspace,” we take a couple detours. Part 2 of the book is about “the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.” Part 3 is a cross-country road trip with Dodge’s niece, Sophia. These parts are a disturbing look at some current trends projected a decade or two into the future. Technology has advanced and, on the plus side, it’s an America of Google glasses and self-driving cars. But it’s also an America where social media “reality” is more real to some people than actual reality, and the Blue and Red states have split into two rarely interacting cultural enclaves.

I had mixed feelings about these plotlines. Clocking in at almost 900 pages, Dodge is a long book, and these parts could have easily been eliminated without leaving a hole in the main storyline. On the other hand, they are fascinating in their own right, and held my interest in what otherwise would have been a slow part of the book. I would have loved to eavesdrop when Stephenson discussed these parts with his editor. Or is Stephenson now too big to edit?

Anyway, the years go by. Other characters die off, building to a critical mass when there’s finally enough of them in Bitworld for the story to get started in earnest. In the meantime there are lots of conferences and video cons in Meatspace as the leaders of the various corporations and charitable foundations in charge of Bitworld struggle to keep up with the philosophical and technical challenges, including the massive amounts of quantum computing power needed to keep Bitworld running. They’ve built a “Landform Visualization Utility” (LVU) which gives them some visibility into what goes on there, low resolution at first, but with ever greater fidelity as the years go by.

One of the stakeholders in particular doesn’t like what he’s seeing on the LVU, or the way Egdod runs things. He’s a billionaire named Elmo Shepherd, and he’s a real dick. As he approaches his own demise, he's been building data centers, to ensure that his own process will have plenty of computing power when it gets to Bitworld. He's also threatening lawsuits if the other stakeholders don't give him administrator privileges. Elmo is called “El” for short and the book is called Fall; or Dodge in Hell, so it’s obvious to anyone who has read Paradise Lost, or even just knows the rudiments of Christianity, where this is headed. About halfway through the book, El finally dies and is uploaded to Bitworld and the long-awaited cosmic smackdown begins.

The notion of eternity in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game raises numerous metaphysical and practical questions and Stephenson’s answers to these are not always satisfactory.

Bitworld is certainly not the afterlife we typically think of when we think about uploading our consciousness to a computer. Rather, one expects to be part of Meatspace, generally via some sort of robot body. Stephenson yada yadas this. The Dodge process “never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind.” Mostly though, I think that just wasn’t the story Stephenson set out to tell.

It’s not a very nice afterlife. Most of the souls in Bitworld—those who aren’t in Dodge’s inner circle—end up as non-player characters. They either become Beedles—stunted, lopsided drudges who perform most of the grunt work for the Hosts of El. Or they live like bees, carving out a space in a hive and communicating with other souls through a sort of buzzing. I suppose I can understand why people still gave their money to be uploaded, in spite of everything. Immortality as a bee is still better than non-existence. And yet, given that Stephenson has demonstrated in his other books an understanding of what private sector entrepreneurs bring to the table, I’m surprised that companies didn’t spring up to offer competing Bitworlds that advertised a better afterlife experience.

Then there’s the Big Question: how do we know that our own world is not just a cyber-afterlife for some meta-Meatspace? There are hints in Fall that this is actually the case, and that the immortal Enoch Root, known to Stephenson fans from Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, is in fact a visitor from that meta-world. But aside from these occasional hints, Stephenson never really develops the concept.

Once the confrontation between El and Egdod begins, the pace picks up and the book becomes quite enjoyable. After spending weeks slogging through the first half of the book, the second half was a real page-turner and I read through it in a couple of days. The last quarter, in particular, is a classic quest, in the spirit of The Hobbit, but much better in my opinion.

I'm glad I ignored those Amazon reviews.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Amazon.com