The 9 Books I Finished in March
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Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past by: J. Storrs Hall
Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1 by: Peter Adamson
Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games by: Jon Peterson
I keep a daily journal, as many writers do. In addition to that habit, every day I am also in the habit of re-reading the entries from a year ago, and five years ago, etc. Which means I spent this month re-reading my journal entries from March of 2020, when everything was shutting down.
As always the exercise was both thought-provoking and cautionary. Reading the March 2020 entries was an experience rich in dramatic irony. But really that’s the case when I read nearly any past journal entry. I know what’s going to happen, the person writing the entry doesn’t. The person writing is frequently wrong. I am that person. It gives one a certain humility.
There were lots of things I didn’t suspect a year ago. I didn’t imagine that the pandemic and wearing masks would become so politicized. I should have. I didn’t think we’d have vaccines so quickly, that mistake was probably more forgivable.
In other areas I was more prescient. I could already sense in my gut by the end of last March that the Rhine River Cruise my wife and I had booked for July (in celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary) was going to get cancelled. We have rebooked it for June of this year, and my gut is once again telling me (as I look at the climbing numbers in Europe) that it’s not going to happen. On the other hand my head is telling me that there’s no way Europe is going to miss another tourist season. Let’s hope my head is right.
I- Eschatological Reviews
By: Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov
350 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The repeated historical cycles of expansion, stagflation, crisis and depression experienced by all nations, with two examples each from England, France, Rome and Russia.
Who should read this book?
I’ve wanted to dive into Turchin for a while, and I couldn’t get any clear sense on where to start. Of all his books I already owned this one, so eventually I decided to start with it. So far I think that may have been a mistake. Not that it’s a bad book, I just get the sense that it’s not a good starting point. But I’ll know more once I read some of his other books. Which I intend to do. All of which is to say at the moment I’m not sure who should read this book.
General Thoughts
The idea of historical cycles has been around for a long time. I’m no expert on this particular area (nor really any particular area) but as far back as the Greeks there was the idea of Kyklos, which I think just literally means cycle. Though they seemed to mostly use this term to describe the transition between the various systems of government, not quite using it so expansively as to describe the broad sweep of societal boom and bust we’re interested in.
In more modern times, my sense is that Oswald Spengler is the person most associated with applying the idea of cycles to Europe and the West. Asserting not merely that the West was caught in the same historical cycles which affected all civilizations, but that we were also nearing the end of that cycle. That our best days were behind us. The idea of cycles was also a big part of Arnold J. Toynbee’s 12 volume, A Study of History, which was enormously popular in the 40’s and 50s. But after this surge of popularity, Toynbee’s books and the idea of cycles fell out of favor, particularly once the Cold War ended. At least that’s how it appears to me.
As you might imagine, with the increasing unrest we’ve been seeing since at least 2016 interest in the subject of cycles has been rekindled. And Turchin is clearly at the head of the pack here, particularly since he started talking about it long before 2016. He’s been predicting worldwide civil unrest during the 2020’s since at least 2010. Which may not seem like much, but for a prediction that’s pretty good.
This book is not about the current day, or even the United States, it’s about him laying out, in meticulous detail, the historical case for cycles. This is not precisely what I was looking for and it’s probably not what you’re looking for either, but building out the foundation of his theory might be a good place to start. But as I already said in the previous section the jury's out on that for now.
The key problem with any theory like Turchin’s which attempts to predict the future by drawing on what happened in the past — deriving trends or cycles or general rules — is that it’s very difficult to make it even approach science. You have no control group to compare against. There’s no way to account for the effects of new technology. And your sample size is tiny. Turchin’s sample size is eight, or four if you only count the nations, and it was the work of hundreds of people and decades of research to compile the information necessary for even this small sample. So you’re faced with a situation where making a case is fantastically difficult and the case you can make isn’t very scientific even if you do go to the effort.
Within the context of these limitations, I don’t think it’s possible to do a better job of making a case than Turchin has. He has pulled in data from several different angles. It’s full of charts, statistics and comparisons. He’s applied his theory successfully to multiple nations, in multiple different settings and historical periods. So, If you’re willing to at least entertain the idea that it’s possible to predict the future by looking at the past, then Turchin has done everything that might be expected towards making such a prediction. I understand he still may be wrong, that he has “proved” nothing, but it’s hard to imagine a more serious attempt than Turchin’s.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, making this case, and assembling all of the data proves to be a very dry read. Which is another reason why I’m not sure who to recommend it to. It probably serves better as a work of reference than something you just sit down and read from cover to cover.
Eschatological Implications
At a high level the eschatological implications of Turchin’s theory of cycles should be reasonably obvious. Unfortunately this book doesn’t give much guidance on where we are at in our own cycle and how that might play out. Though even without being familiar with anything else he’s said this book would lead you to the conclusion that we’re on the downhill side of the cycle and more chaos should be expected.
One draws this conclusion from the many similarities our situation shares with the situations Turchin documents. A few are worth discussing briefly.
First, his analysis and theory owe a lot to Malthusian thinking. Good times lead to an increase in population which eventually outstrips the carrying capacity of the land leading to a stagnant and eventually collapsing population. We don’t seem to be having any problems with food, at least not yet, but we are suffering from a collapsing population. Is this a new thing or is food only the most visible example of “carrying capacity”? Have we reached other less obvious limits to our capacities?
A more obvious commonality is Turchin’s idea of “elite overproduction”. Most people who study civil unrest agree that generally the lower classes don’t spontaneously organize and revolt on their own, they have to be harnessed to that end by disaffected elites who have been excluded from wielding power more directly. Diving into how elite overproduction is playing out currently is beyond the scope of this review, but there are few two word phrases that are more evocative of our current condition.
Finally, plagues play a major role in most of his examples of civilizational crisis, but what’s strange is they aren’t the instigating factor. Generally the crisis and decline has already begun and then a plague comes along. Turchin doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation for why that might be. (Rural overpopulation leads to increasing urbanization, leads to ghettoization, leads to poor sanitation, leads to disease, maybe?) But reading this in light of the recent pandemic was frankly a little bit eerie.
It’s interesting to draw such parallels, but not particularly useful. What we really want is to be able to translate Turchin’s theory into a course of action for our country or our politicians or even just ourselves. Which is not to say I have no ideas, I actually have lots of advice on this subject, I just don’t think reading Turchin’s book has added much to my store of practical wisdom on this topic. It’s added a huge amount of data, and I think the idea of elite overproduction is worth a deeper dive, but beyond that it doesn’t offer much solace for someone observing the end times.
Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past
By: J. Storrs Hall
627 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This is a very detailed examination of why we don’t have flying cars, which ends up pulling in all of the technology we might have had but don’t. Beyond the subject of flying cars this book also includes in depth discussions of nanotechnology, nuclear energy and even cold fusion.
Who should read this book?
In the last post before this one I talked about the metaphorical knobs of society. If you want someone to paint a picture of what it would look like if the knob of “technological progress” was turned up to 11, this is the book for you.
General Thoughts
I should state up front that while I try to limit discussion of individual books to my review posts that this book deserves and is going to get it’s own post, which will be the next one after this one. Why is that? Because this book has enormous bearing on the discussion of technocracies, and the pandemic, and just about everything else I’ve been talking about. As such it deserves a deeper discussion than what I have room for here.
That discussion will be both theoretical and hypothetical, so I’m going to use this space to make sure I cover the practical side of the book. In particular Hall leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the issue of flying cars, going so far as to get his pilot’s license so that he has first hand experience on the difficulties of flying. He also goes into detail about engineering challenges, the disadvantages of helicopters, the unfulfilled promise of the autogyro, and every attempt, no matter how small, at making a commercial flying car.
Obviously one of the big things people think of when they consider the flying car are the numerous times futurists and science fiction authors confidently predicted their imminent arrival, and how wrong all of these predictions were. Less discussed is why these predictions were wrong. Most of the time when I see them offered up, the assumption is just that prediction is hard and the people making these predictions were not as far-sighted as they thought. Storrs went into things with basically this attitude, but ended up concluding that we really should have had flying cars and on the timeline people predicted, but there are four reasons why we don’t:
Flying is harder than driving.
The transition from driving to flying (i.e. taking off and landing) is a difficult technical problem. Airplanes require lots of room, and don’t like flying low and slow. Helicopters are exceptionally difficult to fly and don’t go very fast once they are flying and autogyros never received widespread support.
Flying is expensive, especially for what you get. The amount of additional travel one gets for each additional dollar spent goes down as costs rise. For example helicopters cost easily 10x what a car costs, but only travel at best 3x as fast.
But sitting behind all of the previous points there is the legal and regulatory landscape. Which according to Hall was “insanely overdone”.
In other words the reason those predictions were wrong is only a tiny bit reasons 1-3, and mostly reason 4. And 1-3 would be straightforward to fix, without 4 looming over everything, disincentivizing investment and innovation. Thus, the biggest blindspot of futurists, was the evolution of the regulatory state, and the product liability revolution.
Eschatological Implications
I’ll use my next post to really get into the eschatological implications of this book, including a discussion of the regulatory state, but I thought it was important to point out that unlike most of the books I review in this section, this book puts forth a positive eschatology. It’s all about the wonderful things we can do with technology, and presumably will do with technology once we can get past our current period of stagnation.
This book paints a picture of Jetson like flying cars powered by small nuclear reactors, super abundant food grown with nearly unlimited energy in massive greenhouses, incredibly precise nanotechnology, and trivial control of global warming and the weather. In that last item you may recognize another link to my last post, and hints at interventions which scare a lot of people. Of course as Hall will point out we are already messing with global warming, we’re just doing it in a very unconstructive and damaging fashion.
My overall reception of this book reminds me of a scene from the New Testament. In the book of Acts, chapter 26, Paul is brought before King Agrippa and asked to defend Christianity. Agrippa is obviously hostile towards the faith, but Paul’s defense of it is so stirring that by the end Agrippa says, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” As you may have noticed from the last few posts, I’m somewhat hostile to technocracy, but having read Hall’s defense, I’m inclined to say the same thing, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a technocrat.”
Now to be fair to me, what Hall is describing bears very little resemblance to what we’re actually doing, and we’ll spend the next post disentangling that.
II- Capsule Reviews
By: Steven L. Peck
108 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A Mormon, who upon dying, discovers that Zoroastrianism was the true religion. As penance for not holding the correct beliefs during his life he must spend the afterlife in a library with all possible books, searching for his life story.
Who should read this book?
There is a genre of science fiction novellas, which prioritize M. Night Shyamalan-esque plots over character development. Another apt comparison for such novellas might be the Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone. If you’re familiar with novellas of this style or if this otherwise sounds appealing this book is just the thing to scratch that itch.
General Thoughts
One might almost think that I would put this in the religious reviews section given the subject matter. (And also I have nothing for that section this month.) Though, if it does have a religious message it seems like it would be ‘You better hope the Zoroastrians aren’t right!” Beyond that I liked what Peck did with his initial premise, in particular the book has an unflinching quality which I appreciated.
The book is based on the short story The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges which imagines a library containing all possible books. These have been divided into 410 page chunks. And by all possible books he means not that it collects books that have actually been written but that it contains all possible characters combined in all the possible ways they could be combined over the length of 410 pages.
As is often the case with ideas like this, someone actually implemented it. If we go there and take an example book at random the first 20 characters are:
m.eygvh rbzefwss,ctj
This implementation only includes lowercase letters, periods, commas and spaces, but beyond that, somewhere in its vast virtual bowels there is any book which has ever been written and any book you could imagine being written. Soren Johansson, the main character of the book is tasked with finding the book that tells the story of his life, I don’t want to give anything away, but as you can imagine that is an essentially impossible task. And it’s this impossibility which makes the book strangely compelling.
Cibola Burns (The Expanse #4)
624 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A retelling of the eternal story of poor squatters vs. an avaricious corporation. Only in this telling the squatters and the corporation are fighting over a planet which was once inhabited by a super advanced alien civilization, which adds all kinds of interesting chaos to the equation.
Who should read this book?
I have quite enjoyed the Expanse series. If you’re considering starting it I would. If you’re considering whether to continue past book 3, I would also do that.
General Thoughts
This book somewhat reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Aurora which I brought up in a previous post, specifically the dangers of an alien biosphere, a theme which features prominently in both books. These dangers certainly add an exciting layer to an inflammatory human conflict that is already pretty exciting.
As with all of The Expanse books, this book also engages in the completely ridiculous conceit of having a small group of people end up in the center of all of the action. And the equally ridiculous conceit of that action always being of the super-exciting, nail biting, cinematic sort. The kind you’re lucky to survive once, but these guys have survived similar circumstances over and over and over again.
But if you can ignore how implausible that all is (and I think you should) they’re great books.
Nemesis Games (The Expanse #5)
576 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Four individual stories, one for each of the four main characters, which come together in spectacular fashion.
Who should read this book?
The same people who fit my recommendation for the last book.
General Thoughts
I mentioned the extreme implausibility of these books in my previous review, and it was during this book that I switched from treating them as an attempt to describe the future to viewing them as the log of a role-playing campaign. Unlike most campaigns this one isn’t set in a world of tolkien-esque fantasy, but in the near future, with the crew of the Rocinante obviously being the “player characters” or “party” as they say. You would think that splitting them up would be proof that this is not what’s happening (“Don’t Split the Party” as they say) but in actuality the opposite happened. It could not have been more clear that this book was the retelling of the four side quests created by the Gamemaster to flesh out the character’s back story, a common trope in role-playing games.
Yes I know that this comparison won’t make sense to some of you, but for those for whom it does make sense I think it’s the clearest way of describing the book. Though before I move on two other quick notes.
First other than the implausibility of all the characters being intimately involved in every exciting thing that’s ever happened, the series itself is pretty hard sci-fi. In fact it kind of has an old-school Heinlein vibe to it, particularly since AI and cybernetic enhancements are basically MIA in The Expanse.
Second, it’s tough to talk about this series without referencing the TV show. I watched the first season, and I might, some day, watch the rest. I found all of the actors to be spot on, with the exception of the guy they got to play James Holden, the main, main character. I’m sure he’s a fine person, but he’s not a great actor, IMHO.
Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1
By: Peter Adamson
368 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Western philosophy from the very beginning (there are 12 chapters on the pre-socratics) up through Aristotle.
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a general overview of ancient greek philosophy, this provides that in an easily digestible form. I’m not sure if it’s worth reading on it’s own, and I’m about to discover if it’s useful for providing the background one needs before reading the actual works of those ancient greek philosophers.
General Thoughts
This book went down easy. In fact I got the feeling that it went down too easy, and I’m not sure why. Possibly I have that feeling because I’ve been conditioned to expect that reading philosophy is supposed to be hard and if it’s not hard then you’re not doing it right. Possibly it’s because in covering such a large number of people and ideas Adamson doesn’t spend much time on any of them, and in consequence, the book is superficial.
I’m expecting to be able to answer this question once I start actually reading Plato. He is up next in my “great books of the western world project”. If this book makes Plato easier to understand and particularly if it helps place him in context, then it will have been a success. I’ll make sure to report back.
By: Jon Peterson
698 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
An encyclopedic history of tabletop strategy games as they evolved towards Dungeons and Dragons.
Who should read this book?
The feeling I had while reading this is the same feeling I imagine a rabbi might have while reading the Torah in ancient Hebrew. Most other people reading this book will probably have a very different feeling, that of anyone other than a Rabbi reading the Torah in ancient Hebrew.
General Thoughts
Earlier in this post I said that I’m not really an expert in any particular area. Well Dungeons and Dragons may be the exception to that statement. I’ve been playing it almost continuously since 1980. In fact in addition to the books I read in March I also attended a virtual D&D convention (GaryCon). Which was quite a bit of fun, though a pale imitation of attending in person.
As I alluded to, this book is something of the Torah for role-playing nerds, and any details I could go into would be of limited interest to anyone outside of that group. In spite of that I will go into one part of the early history of D&D because I think I can extract a larger lesson from it.
D&D was initially created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Later Arneson was fired, written out of things and denied royalties. These actions have always been held against Gygax, and while opinions vary on how big of a role Arneson did play, the consensus seems to be that Gygax was selfish and greedy. Having read this book I’m much more on Gygax’s side. Yes, it’s possible it could have been handled better, but the key fact in my opinion is this. TSR, the company producing D&D, was a startup. This makes Arneson basically a co-founder with Gygax, and while Gygax was busting his ass putting out book after book, and tens of thousands of words beyond that in the form of magazine articles and correspondence, Arneson produced basically nothing.
I know people think ideas are worth something, and they are, but not nearly as much as people think. But particularly when it comes to starting a business hard work is vastly more important. If you aren’t willing or able to do the work, then you don’t deserve the money. And to be clear Arneson sued and did get the money. So, after hearing all the details, from my perspective Arneson got more than he deserved out of things rather than less.
368 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The handful of people who survive a global pandemic, and what life is like in the ruins of civilization.
Who should read this book?
This book was published in 1949, before science fiction had really congealed, and it’s a great early example of the form. It’s particularly interesting in light of recent events. If you enjoy either disaster stories or old sci-fi, you’ll like this book.
General Thoughts
As I mentioned this came out before some of the tropes of science fiction had congealed and as such it’s a different take on how people would react to the apocalypse and the story also takes place over a longer period of time. These differences took a little bit of getting used to, but eventually I really came to appreciate them.
Also while it’s clear that there are lots of things he got wrong — for example he made the same mistake nearly everyone does, gas does not remain good for years — he mentioned a lot of things which I haven’t seen anywhere else, but which seem likely to happen in some form. Most of these involve a rebalancing of animal species after the disappearance of humans, with the additional factor of suddenly abundant food, i.e. human corpses, though Stewart mostly avoids the more morbid facts of the apocalypse.
All of which is to say that if you want to know what the apocalypse will really look like I think Earth Abides has a lot to contribute. And it’s a great story beyond that.
The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel
By: Eliyah Goldratt
143 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This is a graphic novelization of The Goal, a business book originally published in 1984. Both are about the theory of constraints.
Who should read this book?
I’m not sure. This book was recommended to me, and these days my book buying is so reflexive that I had purchased the graphic novel version without really realizing it. But if you’re interested in learning more about the theory of constraints, doing it in graphic novel format is actually kind of cool.
General Thoughts
Having read the graphic novel version I’m not sure if I’m going to go on to read the actual book. In large part this is because I have already read the The Phoenix Project, which is basically the IT version of The Goal. The Goal deals with manufacturing, and if that’s what you’re doing then I would probably read the actual book rather than the graphic novel. But if you’re in software like me then I would just skip straight to The Phoenix Project.
From a conceptual standpoint the theory of constraints is very interesting. And I can see it applied to a wide variety of undertakings (as demonstrated by The Phoenix Project) but within the confines of a graphic novel things have to be kept fairly focused. So I’ll probably look into these ideas some more but don’t expect a review of the full book anytime soon.
My average book length for the year is up 13% over last year. That may not seem like much but under the old average I would have read three additional books. If you like the fact that I read long books so you don’t have to (or more likely so you can know if they’re worth reading) consider donating.