- NOTE: FeBlueberry 22, 2024.
- I need others to get these HiPiers columns put up on the site, starting with my wife MaryLee, who has been ill. So four columns have been written but not yet put up. Now MaryLee is doing better, so we’ll be catching up with them, maybe another every few days. Stay tuned.
SapTimber 14, 2024 note: it is taking longer than I hoped, but now at last we are proceeding.
- M
- HI–
I finished writing Xanth #49 Knickelpede Knight, at 96,500 words. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that they do save the universe from the zombie invasion, though it’s a considerable challenge. One incidental bit is an encounter with the Dwarf Demon of Typos. You thought they were accidental? Ha! Near him they can even become verbal. Once a man tried to propose to his girlfriend in that vicinity. He said “I loathe you. Will you harry me?” She replied “Guess.” So yes, there is plenty of the usual nonsense here, but also some serious thought. I hope that latter doesn’t turn off too many readers. Now I am pondering #50, which I hope to write next year. It may feature characters from all the prior 49. The tentative title is Limbo, which is where it is set, a region where time is more circular than linear, so that characters can meet their ancestors or descendants without paradox. The protagonist may be Aura, whom you will meet in #49, so called because she is subject to migraine headaches with fiery auras visible to other folk. Sometimes they set fire to passing vegetation. Things can get a bit literal in Xanth. [Note: Limbo is now finished, and in the queue to be published in due course. I am now 41,000 words through #51, Fusia’s Friends. Fusia is a fusion powered lady robot, a nice woman.]
We bought a rotating fan, for coolth, as we have no air conditioning here in the condo. It arrived, I assembled it, we plugged it in—and it does not work. It would be more expensive to bring in a repair man to fix it than it cost in the first place. Returning it would be similarly complicated. So we’re stuck. Par for our course. MaryLee does not call us the Glitchersons for nothing. However, Ivy, from whom we bought the condo, visited and rescued us by opening a window so that now we get a wonderful draft through the length of it, natural air conditioning. Across the nation and the world folk are suffering a record heat wave, but here in Redondo Beach we are pleasantly moderate, even cool. Which brings us to the weather. We left Florida for a tangle of reasons, escaping MAGA country for a more liberal milieu. We hoped to leave the summer hurricanes behind. Of course you know what happened: one followed us. With magic, anything is possible. Hurricane Hilary, the first in this area in 80 years, formed to the south and took direct aim on us. As I have said many times, I have zero belief in the supernatural, yet earn my living from it, so, annoyed, it gets back at me in subtle ways. Such as a rogue hurricane. You wouldn’t want to see an unsubtle signal. But we, still crowded from our move with boxes of clothing, books, papers, and other household items from Florida and Tennessee, couldn’t afford such weather at the moment, so we diverted it inland, where it soaked Los Angeles. I hope the folk there are not too mad at us. At least now they have a taste of Florida weather. Furious at its miss, the storm triggered an earthquake, about 5.5 on the scale, but that, too, missed us by about sixty miles. The eyes of hurricanes are not very good, and their brains are nebulous, so they do have trouble hitting their targets. The weather predicting folk don’t believe in magic, so didn’t see this coming. Now you know the real story of the HurriQuake.
One afternoon there were fire-engine sirens galore, and they converged on our building. They blocked off the street and connected a firehose. Folk gathered outside to watch. We were aware of no fire, no smoke. We did not want to be trapped on the top floor of a building on fire. I went out to the ninth story hall where the elevators stop, and there were two firemen there, just looking out the wall sized window. After an hour the vehicles departed. Apparently it was just a fire drill. We wish they had told us. We also see odd things in the sky on occasion, not planes, not balloons, not kites, not birds, not clouds, that move on without explanation. We do live near Hollywood; maybe the weirdness radiates.
And I had a birthday, turning 89. First time I’ve hit that marker. MaryLee gave me assorted gifts, such as a baseball cap with a picture of a VW Bug on it—my then-wife Carol and I drove VWs for decades—and a pair of dark glasses for my exercise walks. I didn’t want it to be all about me, so I wrote her a poem, as it happened to be her unbirthday. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol describes unbirthdays; many of us have them, about 364 a year, so why not celebrate them on occasion? Here it is, titled “The Landscape of Love”: “As I gaze out across the sea/ I wonder if I know the key?/ Perhaps our love was meant to be/ Across the landscape, MaryLee.” She having driven from Tennessee to visit me in Florida, where we got to know each other better, fell in love, married, and then we drove from Florida to California, across the landscape, not the sea. She loves it. And we do love each other. This does not mean I didn’t love my first wife, Carol, but death did us part. My life changed significantly when I married Carol, and yes, I wrote her poems too; now it has changed again. I suspect this is the final stage, for me. I seem to be in good health for my age, but there are limits. Oh, you want an example of a poem I wrote for Carol? From memory, then, the last stanza of one dating to 1958 when we lived in Oklahoma where I had been a math and survey instructor in the US Army, stationed at Ft. Sill: “Though she is sometimes difficult/ Puts the horse behind the cart/ And smiles and sniffles all at once/ I love her with all my heart.” Have I described your wife too? That may not be coincidence; the genre of femininity has certain common features. Ask any husband. As the adage puts it, you can’t live with them, can’t live without them. No, I don’t know why some women call my humor sexist; don’t they poke fun at men, too? Oh, that’s not the same? Men are supposed to be teased? Live and learn.
One day on my exercise walk a man handed me two bits of paper. These turned out to be trillion dollar bills, looking like dollar bills, but a bit larger denomination. The small print on the back said “The trillion dollar question: will you go to heaven when you die?” It goes on to suggest that even looking at a woman with lust will damn you to hell, that Jesus said so. I, as an agnostic, take issue with that. For one thing, the provocative way women dress means that virtually all straight men who catch glimpses of them will go to hell, and only women will go to heaven. I doubt they would be pleased with that. As I understand it, Christianity’s hostility to sex for anything other than animalistic procreation dates from the days of the Israelites. They were losing men to neighboring religions that featured temple prostitution; why stick to a sour straight laced God when you could celebrate your worship of a sexy Goddess in bed with a ravishingly lovely priestess who really knew how to evoke your passion? So the Israel authorities tried to make sex itself sinful, to eliminate that chronic temptation, and the Christians carry on that attitude. It’s a shame, because human sex is far more than wham, bang, thank you ma’am, and back to wood chopping, buffalo hunting, combat, hiking, gambling, getting drunk, and other manly pursuits without the bothersome interference of weak or moralistic women. It’s a social lubricant that keeps a man around to help with children, economics, protection, and education. Even to provide an occasional bit of social discourse. So that his children survive and grow up to be halfway civilized, enabling our society to unify, prosper and take over the world. Which reminds me of the story about men working out west, away from women so long they hardly remembered them. One said “I saw a woman once.” Another said “I even touched one.” The third man nodded knowingly “Soft, ain’t they?” To condemn sexual interaction as sinful is wrongheaded; it is the religious condemnation of an important and natural aspect of humanity and other creatures that is sinful. I doubt that Jesus really had that attitude; he respected women. I suspect that the prejudice of an ancient priesthood has been spliced into his reported narrative, surely disgusting him. So I take this bill as making me a fantasy trillionaire, and I leave its perversion of Jesus’ true message to rot in deserved isolation. I left religion because of faults like this, and am staying clear. Religion should ennoble; too often it doesn’t. But the trillion dollar bill is a nice notion, fun like Monopoly money.
There is a colony of sea lions here, using a barge the human folk thought to set up for them. Their leader is a male MaryLee calls Sir Barks-a-lot or Sparky Barky, who constantly sounds his doglike warning for other males to stay clear, day and night. But recently he went silent, worrying MaryLee that he ran afoul of the poisonous wastes of an algae bloom triggered by global warming or pollution. We still hear him on rare occasion, but our concern continues. If folk won’t stop polluting to save the world as we know it, maybe they’ll reconsider out of compassion for our sea lion friends?
In 2014 my son in law John Nanci—I tease him that folk may not know from the name whether he is a boy or a girl—gave me an anthology of fantasy stories. Things have been a bit hectic, so it took me a little while to get around to reading it. Now I am starting in, but suspect I will get interrupted before I finish it, as it is over 550 pages. So I will remark on the stories as I read them. First the introductory material. It turns out that the editor suffered cancer, got over it, but after that his health insurance refused to cover him, so when he got it again he had to pay for treatment himself. This is of course one of the liabilities of the American system: insurance is not in it for your health, but for the money. Other countries try to take care of their citizens, but in the US you are on your own, at least until you get old. What to do, as bankruptcy loomed? He got an idea: create an anthology whose proceeds would unfetter his debt. Fantasy authors rallied around, and the volume Unfettered came to be, with no restrictions on what the authors wrote. It is edited by Shawn Speakman, and yes he has a story in it, but it’s the last one, so it will be a while before I can comment on him as a writer. I can however comment on his gumption as a person. Cancer is no fleeting irritation; I know because my daughter Penny died of it. Shawn elected to fight through, and that speaks well for him.
Each story is prefaced by a note by the author, and a one and a half inch square illustration like a woodcut that relates to the story. Readers who are bored with a long review can skip down about 24 paragraphs to get to my reactions to old magazines.
The first story is “Imaginary Friends” by Terry Brooks. Jack was just shy of age thirteen when he got cancer and his survival became uncertain. But his friend Pick Elf, whom Jack’s mother called imaginary, told him to fight off that dragon. He was terrified, but the dragon kept after him until he turned and fought it, backing it into a cage. And his cancer faded. So this can be read as fantasy or analogy; either way, it’s a moving story.
The second story is “How Old Holly Came To Be,” by Patrick Rothfuss. This is a curious one. It starts “In the beginning, there was the wood.” It grew beside a stream, by a stone tower. There was a warm sun, which was good, and climbing vines, which were bad. And a lady, who was neither. She finally departs, but asks Old Holly to keep the tower safe for her return. He does.
“The Old Scale Game” by Tad Williams shows the deal made between and aging knight and an aging dragon in tenth century England, when dragons and other fantastic creatures still resided there. The dragon would raid a community, then the knight, called Sir Blivet—in my day a blivet was a five pound container with ten pounds of feces in it—would kill the dragon offstage, accepting payment in gold. Then he would split the gold with the dragon, who only pretended to be dead. Then they moved on to another community. Gradually they added others to their conspiracy, including a witch who owned a haunted forest and wasn’t bad looking. It was a pretty good deal all around.
“Game of Chance” by Carrie Vaughn has an interesting take on history. Clare is part of a small group of people who are trying to improve the world by making small changes at key points. They have a special sense about the critical events, but can’t act in any major way. Instead they act in minor ways that can subtly influence the situation. Don’t shoot an assassin, make him slip as he fires so he misses his target. That sort of thing. But sometimes they get it wrong. It’s hard to play it exactly right. Chance has so much to do with it.
“The Martyr of the Roses” by Jacqueline Carey has a curious history. The author had a vivid dream that she built into a story, this one. It didn’t find a publisher, but she went on to make its background into a larger series of alternate history fantasy novels. Then came the invitation to contribute to the Unfettered anthology, and here is that story. There are supposed footprints of a dying princess who danced, and the rocks burst forth a profusion of roses. It was thought that anyone who could emulate that dance by stepping in those footprints would bring forth more roses. Many folk tried, without success. Until soldiers shot a man there, and his dying feet matched that pattern, and roses burst forth. Surely a signal from the gods. The man was a martyr. The event is seen by a visiting prince who surely went on to greater things, perhaps influenced by that signal.
“Mudboy” by Peter V Brett features six year old Briar, mercilessly bullied by all his four elder siblings, male and female, trying to get along in a rural region where fearsome demons of every type come out at night. Yes, I know; you think they’re imaginary. Not at all. Only light balks them, and the magic wards the family has around the house. Then there is a fire, and the demons get into the house as the wards weaken. It doesn’t actually say, but my impression is that only Briar survives. I relate to this, because demons stalked me in my childhood. My primary childhood memory is fear. I did manage to survive, I think, and now my unbelief in them protects me.
“The Sound of Broken Absolutes” by Peter Orullian is another different one. You might suppose that music is to charm relaxing folk. Not this music. It can be a devastating weapon. The intricacies are devious, so I will put it simplistically. A master of very special music and singing has a number of students, those with the ability to vocalize certain resonances. When used on a battlefield, such a song can wipe out the enemy, the soldiers falling with blood surging from them. But it has to be the right song for the right type, or it lacks effect. The actual story shows how the master won’t let a leading student go to fight for his invaded homeland, until the student smashes a precious viola to pieces. Slowly the master rebuilds the instrument, while the student goes home and uses his talent to devastate the enemy. After the battle the student returns for an intriguing reunion. They are not enemies, just people with seriously different perspectives, coupled with similarly serious alignment. This is one hard-hitting piece, with nuances of music and character central. I don’t believe I have seen its like before. Do I like it? Not really, but I do respect it.
“The Coach with Big Teeth” by R. A. Salvatore is a childhood baseball story about a ten year old boy who isn’t really good at it, though he tries. Teammates treat him with half veiled contempt, knowing he’s going to foul up and cost them the game. Sure enough, he misses a key catch. Then it gets ugly. The author’s intro says this is not fantasy but the sad reality of far too many shy and overwhelmed children. I agree, having been there. Baseball is supposed to be fun, but when the fever to win rages, the fun dissipates. I remember suffering all three outs in such a game once. Sigh.
“Keeper of Memory” by Todd Lockwood begins like a mild fantasy, as a scholar ventures into the mountains to try to find a special kind of berry used for permanent black ink, to record a record of civilization for posterity. He also has that history in his memory. This culture breeds and trains dragons, somewhat like horses. He encounters a little girl, who tells him where the berries grow, and he is able to pick a nice quantity. Then he goes home, only to discover chaos. The invading enemy is attacking the city, showing no mercy, and they must flee. But they don’t make it, and the culmination is brutal. Mild? Don’t read this to children.
“Heaven in a Wild Flower,” by Blake Charlton is another different one. Here, reincarnation is real and tangible. Babies form in the air and shape into solidity, and living folk can adopt them if they choose. Thus Lopez adopts Olivia when she forms, and his life is bound to hers. All is well, until as a teen she gets leukemia and dies, dissolving into a luminous cloud, and he dies too. She will return to Heaven, but he, not being a reincarnation, will not. I don’t really understand the rationale, but I feel for the daughter, the father, and the wife who will now be alone. It is painful.
“Dogs” by Daniel Abraham tells of a man with an adoring little pet dog who is attacked on the street by three ferocious big dogs and almost killed. When he recovers enough to go home he alienates his dog by being unable to take him to the dog park, and his pet leaves him. He wants another, and looks, but is uncertain. Four out of five dogs are good, but one in five are bad, and how is he to know which is which? This haunts him. Associates at the office where he works don’t understand, but one woman is supportive. It turns out that she was similarly attacked and still bears the scars. She says that as time passes it gets easier, but not better. I wonder if this is reality for some people, and suspect it is.
“The Chapel Perilous” by Kevin Hearne does another take on the Grail of Christian mythology, which it seems derives fandom pagan stories co-opted by the Christians. So this is a pagan Sir Gawain sent to investigate mischief in England involving a cauldron that can produce any kind of food. A nasty Druid had stolen it and was building an evil kingdom. An interesting aspect is the horse Gawain rides, with whom he talks telepathically. Gawain assesses the situation, kills the Druid, rescues the Grail, and clears the way for it to feature in new legends.
“Select Mode” by Mark Lawrence is a story set in the author’s Broken Empire trilogy, but independent of it. A man and a boy are caught by the Select and are taken to “the arch” to be judged worthy or unworthy and killed. They are found unworthy, but manage to kill their captors and escape. I can’t say I understand this one. Maybe if I were familiar with the trilogy I would.
“All the Girls Love Michael Stein” by David Anthony Durham is a cat story. Michael Stein is a cat named after a young woman’s missed opportunity for a boyfriend; they liked each other but neither ever said so, so the chance was lost. Michael Stein got killed, and his human girl Lucy is heartbroken. But he can’t communicate with her, to ease her pain. So he goes to the Catfather and makes a deal: make him visible and audible as a ghost to Lucy, and he will get her to help other ghost cats by telling their concerns to other live people who can do something in the living realm. So her grief is consoled, and so will be the grief of other human cat associates. I’m not really a cat person, but damn, this is a nice idea. Cats get around, especially the ghosts, and know things that could really help humans, if only there were a way to tell them.
“Strange Rain” by Jennifer Bosworth is another different story. Iris and Ivan are congenital twins, born joined at the hip and thigh. They were surgically separated, but Iris still as a teen sees them as uniquely united. Ivan does not. Then she gets struck by lightning and a little black cloud stays with her, obeying her wishes. She manages to get Ivan out in a storm, and he is struck by lightning too, getting fused again with her. The way she believes they were meant to be. They are destined to become special disciples of a prophet, as described in the author’s novel Struck. I admit to being intrigued by the notion of conjoined twins, male and female, with special powers. I may want to obtain and read that book. It has to be unusual.
“Nocturne” by Robert V.S. Redick is yet another different one. I found myself feeling increasingly depressed about life and reality, until I realized that it was the mood of the piece I was reading. I can’t say I understand it; I think it is a description of a man’s mind dissipating so that he no longer knows what reality is. That’s eerie. The character is Anton, which maybe started the process because it is close to my name, Anthony. He seems to be a prince, or a musician, or a lost child, as war destroys things around him and a cold winter invades the palace. The setting is medieval Europe or maybe 20th century America. His innocent teenage sister Julita turns out to be a great aunt in 1986. What is reality? I am not sure, and also not sure I would like it if I understood it. That doesn’t mean that this is a bad story; rather that it has its own strange power.
“Unbowed” by Eldon Thompson is a relatively conventional story of the coming of age by the son of a warrior. When his father is framed and arrested, thirteen year old Kylac sets out to rescue him, assisted by Brie, a local girl a year or so his junior who has talent with the sword, if she can just learn defensive details. He succeeds, but she dies, and with it my hope that she would grow up to be his bride. Sigh; I got caught up in the spirit of the narrative, which is a sign of effective writing. It seems that Kylac is destined to be featured in future novels.
“In Favour With Their Stars,” by Naomi Novik, tells of a human space navy officer interacting with a dragon leader. At first they are a bit wary of each other, but they talk freely together and make strategy to oppose an invading force as the dragon carries the man. The man has combat knowledge that enables the dragon to avoid getting shot, and the dragon has raw physical power that wipes out the enemy in close quarters. The outcome could have been quite different had they not coordinated so effectively. So they decide to continue working together, having leaned mutual respect.
“River of Souls” by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson is actually a sequence deleted from the fourteenth and final Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light. I remember way back when I read and blurbed the first Wheel novel, helping the author gain the recognition he deserved. He went on to fame and fortune and death before age 60, but his work lives on. This excerpt relates to Bao, who, having undergone rigorous training, now tackles a monster that threatens the kingdom. He enters its cave and manages to slay it, thus saving the kingdom and more. That may seem simplistic, but the nuances suggest otherwise.
“The Jester” by Michael J. Sullivan concerns four thieves looking for treasure. A map leads them into water filled caves with monsters lurking. Is it actually a trap left by “The Jester”? They are hesitant to open doors lest they let in predators. But water is filling the last cave. They are the protagonist, his athletic friend, a pig farmer, and a widow who sells candles. They are united only by their desire for riches. They find a safe, which proves to be an exit. There’s a box and a key, which they finally leave behind. Maybe that’s just as well.
“The Duel” by Lev Grassman seems almost tongue in cheek, taking nothing very seriously. The Lorians invade, but agree to decide the issue with a duel between champions. The Lorian champion is super tough, but the Fillorian champion is King Eliot, with phenomenal magic. He has invisible magic armor, and can speed up to ten times normal, and exert impossible strength. So he messes with the Lorian, establishes his superiority, humiliates him, and the enemy departs. Routine, except for completely messed up details.
“Walker and the Shade of Allanon” by Terry Brooks is the second piece by this author in this volume, and not at all the some. Walker has vital business to accomplish, so goes to the Shade of Allanon for advice, as hinted by the title. Here in the Valley of Shale the ghosts hang out, but the dead can be balky. The Shade does answer, but obliquely, and fades away without answering enough. He says Walker can fulfil one dream of those he embraces, but does not say which one. So Walker is left frustrated, which is+ surely the Shade’s purpose.
“The Unfettered Knight” by Shawn Speakman, the editor of this volume, is a vampire story. A vampire has invaded the catacombs beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, wreaking havoc. This signals real trouble for the Catholic Church in Rome. The vampire turns out to be Lazarus, the man Jesus raised from the dead, who now can’t die in the normal vampire fashion. He wants to do spot research to find out how to die. It turns out that he can be killed by the Holy Lance, the spear that punctured the side of Jesus Christ on the cross and gained special powers via the blood of Jesus. Kill him with that, he says, and he’ll be dead and gone. But they don’t quite trust that, and sure enough, he steals the Lance and gives it to a witch who helped him. What she will do with it we don’t know, but it can’t be good. There is surely more to come, elsewhere.
Overall, this is a good volume, and I recommend it to readers. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to report on it in time to maybe do its sales some good.
NEW SCIENTIST February 11-17, 2023. Three new species of nautilus have been found. Hundreds of millions of years ago there were thousands of species, but today only about six, so this is significant. They are shelled relatives of octopuses and squid, looking a little like snails with tentacles. They actually date before the dinosaurs. Global warming may be putting them at further risk. The world is in the midst of the largest ever bird flu outbreak. Can it infect mammals? Rarely, so far, but it is worrisome. The US mega-drought has led to more pollution from power plants. More deaths from air pollution. Now there is a drone that can fly or swim, making like a submarine. It is called Mirs-X, which my eye tries to read as Mrs. X. So if she comes calling, you may have no privacy in air or water with her alluring daughter MissX. Pun there: Miss Sex. Humor apart, there’s a project for coordinating huge swarms of such drones for warfare. But what about when the government starts using them to spy on political rivals? There may be no privacy indeed. Human neurons have been integrated into the brains of rats. The idea is to be able to grow neurons to restore lost functions in injured brains. But suppose there’s a lab leak and rats with human smarts get loose? Sunquakes, which are waves in the sun’s surface that ripple out like the ripples in a pond when a pebble is tossed in, may be caused by high energy electron beams. But where do the beams come from? They’re working on it. Neandertals regularly hunted and butchered enormous elephants over a hundred thousand yearns ago. The flesh from one would have fed a hundred adults for a month. I, as a vegetarian bordering on vegan, say poor elephant. But I guess they didn’t have big hydroponic farms in those days. Google AI’s SingSong generates a musical backing to accompany recordings of people’s singing that seem to work very well. Of course I worry about the next stage, when AI—that’s Artificial Intelligence—generates the original songs too. All the arts may be threatened as AI replaces singers, musicians, sculptors, artists, and writers. When will AI come for me? If you have chronic pain, as one in five people do, don’t count on antidepressants to ease it; they rarely do. They have discovered a new type of ice that is a strange white powder. Maybe this will help them learn more about water, which is vital to our lives but somewhat mysterious. Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for the sheep; they like the panels and graze more. My guess is that the heat absorbed by the panels is like air conditioning for the fields. Doubling tree cover in cities could cut the number of heat related deaths in heatwaves. England’s sewage systems are being overloaded and sewage is being released into the rivers. Too many people there, it seems. I suspect the problem is worldwide. Is it really possible to die from a broken heart? Yes. Stress like bereavement can have direct and damaging effects on the heart. Don’t I know it! When my first wife died I not only felt a sort of burning in my heart, I got diagnosed with a heart condition and am now on expensive medication for it. Yes, I am happily remarried, but the damage remains. Column by Graham Lawton comments on the movement to grant legal rights to nature, to exist, thrive, and regenerate. The movement called Rights of Nature aims to grant fundamental legal entitlements to trees, rivers, ecosystems, and such. For much of human history nature has been regarded as mere property to be exploited. This has driven the environmental destruction that has pushed us into the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. It started in 1972 when Christopher Stone, at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles published an article titled “Should trees have standing? Toward legal rights for natural objects.” It gained force in 2006 when the town of Tamacua, Pennsylvania, banned the dumping of toxic waste on the ground that it was a violation of nature’s rights. Municipalities in other states followed suit, and the movement has gone global. In 2008 Ecuador recognized the rights of nature in its constitution, and in 2011 Nature won a court case there. Other countries are amending their constitutions to recognize the rights of nature. I say, more power to them. Phenomenal picture of a river of fire as Fagradalsfjall erupted in March 2021 after 800 years of volcanic dormancy in Iceland. We see the central crater filled with an orange pool of lava that spills out and down, diverging into two streams. I wonder whether volcanoes will be granted legal rights to be burningly beautiful? They might incinerate the court that says no. Letter by Erik Foxcroft suggests that institutional food doesn’t have to imitate meat; why not have other tasty vegan meals? One from Albert Beale says “When I gave up eating dead flesh a long time ago, the last thing I was interested in was fake ‘meat.’” Me too! Let the unrepentant carnivores eat the fake meat; I certainly don’t crave it. I’d like to see and taste completely new foods unlike anything seen before on Earth. Patrick Gaydecki, a professor of digital signal processing at the University of Manchester, UK, downshifted the cosmic microwave background into the audible range and listened to it. “The sound was unearthly and frankly a little unsettling. We named it the Echo of Eternity.” Wow, I’d like to hear that music. An urban planner is working on a plan to set up a city on Mars. “The first city on Mars will be largely underground.” My concern is that the reduced gravity will vitiate the muscles of inhabitants so they will never be able to return to Earth. In my Space Tyrant series I handled this problem by using a kind of gravity magnifying lens to focus gravity in a central region, surrounded by reduced gravity outside it. But such a lens is not yet on the market. Article by James Dinneen “The 2000-watt challenge” describes his effort to live comfortably on that amount of energy instead of the 3,300 watts in the UK or 8,600 in the US. It’s a considerable challenge I’m not even close to attempting, much as I approve its motive. Indeed, the author failed misercably to make the target. A sidebar lists six ways to use less energy. Turn down the thermostat. Use less hot water. Walk, cycle, and use public transport. Use efficient appliances. Go vegetarian. Retrofit your home. Feature titled “Paranoid, me?” by Kayt Sukel. I remember the convention badge that says “Help! The paranoids are after me.” Why do we think that other people are out to get us? “Paranoia, simply defined, is the unfounded belief that others are trying to hurt you.” I’m tempted to say “unfounded?” but that might put the nutty psychiatrists on my tail. Remember, I’m the one who got excluded on my health insurance for all mental diseases, because my doctor thought I was imagining my symptoms, after he failed to diagnose my low thyroid condition. I also feel that a healthy paranoia is the best approach to the malice of the modern personal computer. It will get you if you’re not constantly on guard. But wry humor aside, let’s get back to the article. “About 1 per cent of the population have experiences of clinical delusions [that involve paranoia] and are likely to be seen in psychiatric settings, but that is very much the tip of the iceberg,” says Daniel Freeman of the University of Oxford. “Somewhere between 1 and 3 per cent of people experience a similar level of severe paranoia although they have never received a diagnosis. And then a further 10 to 15 per cent of people experience milder paranoid thoughts.” Why? “Mild paranoia might have been beneficial for survival throughout human evolutionary history — and continues to be so even today.” Paranoia may be integral to our understanding of what it means to be a social species. There is also “pronoia,” the persistent belief that everyone is secretly conspiring to help you. It seems it is safer to be paranoid than pronoid. The pandemic increased paranoia. There seems to be an overlap between paranoia and conspiracy theories like QAnon, that concoction of the worst fantasies of Trump supporters. Which gives a strong hint where most of the paranoia is. So how do you reduce paranoia? By scheduling “worry periods” for your concerns and tuning them out at other times. A feature titled “In the Shadows” by Michael Brooks is about the search for dark matter. Remember, when astronomers calculated that galaxies were spinning too fast to hold their stars in, rather than allow for something like the electromagnetic force to help, they conjectured extra matter that can’t be detected any way but gravitic, I regard it as fantasy, and have written it into Xanth. But they are determined to find it. They figure that 85 per cent of the universe is made up of it. So they keep looking more inventively, and finding nothing. The alternate explanation is MOND, for MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, which has done about as well as dark matter but isn’t perfect. My own theory is that they simply miscalculated how strong gravity is at galactic range. Maybe eventually someone will say “Ooops!” and dark matter will fade away as if it never existed, unsurprisingly.
NEW SCIENTIST February 18-24, 2023. Have you heard of the Wood Wide Web? Neither had I. It’s the theory that trees communicate with each other via an underground network, maybe via associated fungi. But it is not standing up to later scrutiny, though some still believe in it. Where are couples most in love? Hungary. Those from countries with greater gender equality tend to have higher love scores. The US is about fourth. The lowest score seems to be Pakistan. Entropy is a measure of disorder. A broken coffee cup has more entropy than a whole one. In Xanth I now have a Demoness of Entropy, an associate of the Demon of Chaos. No, they don’t date; that would be too orderly. Curly hair protects us from the sun. which is why it exists more in tropical areas. It keeps heads cooler. Quaoar is a dwarf planet beyond Neptune in our solar system. There is a ring around it that shouldn’t be there. Astronomers are pondering that. Chronic fatigue may be linked to gut bacteria. Lower income folk wait longer for government services and health-care. Black folk are also likely to wait longer. The ancient Hittite Empire encompassed most of what is now Turkey and lasted nearly five centuries—twice as long as the US, so far—was a major geopolitical force. Then around 1,200 BC came a severe drought, and cities were abandoned. It couldn’t happen to us—or could it? “Into the Void” by Jonathan O’Callahan is about nothing. It mentions how a man studied the properties of empty space and freaked out his father when he announced he was an expert in nothing. The fact is all the atoms in the universe’s stars and planets account for only about four per cent of its regular matter. The rest is spread out thinly in the gaps between the stars, in interstellar and intergalactic space. Empty space isn’t nothing, it’s almost everything. The so-called nothingness is brimming with exotic molecules, and pulsing with radio waves, and is divided into gigantic bubbles with their own characters. “We are living in a thick soup of atmosphere. In a cubit centimeter of air, a volume the size of a six-sided dice [sic], there are trillions of atoms…however, in interplanetary space, the conditions are close to a perfect vacuum.” Space is huge, and mostly empty. The same volume contains just five atoms. Beyond the sun the density of matter is equivalent to an orange inside the volume of Earth. Our solar system is inside our Local Interstellar Cloud, and in about 2,000 years will pass into the neighboring G-Cloud. “In cosmic terms, we are right on the edge.” What will happen there? Probably not much change, as it is similar. Both are in a much larger Local Bubble, which is 1,000 light years across. But in the course of the next billion years the sun may get hot enough to boil Earth’s oceans away. “The interstellar medium is much more than just the gap between the stars. It is the ocean in which our sun and all the other stars in our galaxy sail.” So hang on to your hats; the wind is blowing. Feature titled “An intimate transplant” by Alexandra Thompson. Have you heard of bacterial vaginosis, BV for short? Probably not if you’re a man, but probably so if you’re a woman age 15-44, as it is the most common vaginal condition in that age range. It is caused by a change in the balance of vaginal bacteria, and produces a gray watery discharge that smells like fish. Antibiotics can help, but only temporarily. I suspect women don’t like being told by their boyfriends that there’s something fishy about them, especially at the point of intimacy. “Are you a mermaid in your real life? Go back to the sea!” Now there is hope. It’s called a vaginal microbiome transplant, VMT. Our microbiome consists of the microbes that live in our gut and elsewhere in and on our body, and is vital to our health. Changes in it are linked to heart disease, obesity, diarrhea, and depression. As I have said before, we are basically bags of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other junk, such bags thinking they run the world. Delusions of grandeur, maybe. Anyway, if they can swap out the fishy biome for a healthy one, voila! No more mermaid smell. “Machine mind readers” by Edd Gent says that for AI to be truly useful, we need to know what we’re thinking. But how? The ability to infer the mental state of others is called the theory of mind. Animals aren’t good with it, but humans generally achieve it by age five. Can we teach it to machines? “The most fascinating thing about theory of mind is that it’s on the path toward self awareness and consciousness.” I look forward to the day when you walk on a city street and pass folk of all ages and colors, along with sentient, that is, conscious robots, and they’re all people you can amicably interact with. Only in science fiction, so far, but what about tomorrow?
NEW SCIENTIST February 25-March 3, 2023. Can bacteria make you look older? Maybe, because they reside on the skin. If they affect the collagen that acts as a scaffold for our skin so that it loses elasticity, we could look older. Future studies may sort this out. Tiktoolik—that’s not a typo for TikTok—was a kind of fish that managed to crawl up onto land 375 million years ago and may have ancestored land dwelling animals. They are looking at the way the pelvis connects to the spine and the legs. This one seems intermediate between fish and land vertebrates. So we don’t know, but it appears possible. AI is making progress, but if students use it to cheat on homework, what then? I remember how I lagged behind classmates in high school, in grades, in part because I did not cheat. I did best on essays, maybe because no lists of answers could be stolen there. Is that problem about to explode, as AI writes essays on order? That was by no means my only trouble in school, but now I wonder whether the fact that my success in life was so much better than my mediocre grades predicted, relates. Will we soon see grade A students who know nothing? That could be mischief for future business. They are starting to use stuffed bird parts in drones, making them remarkably birdlike. So the bird in your garden may not be exactly what you think. Massive dark holes could be the source of dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe. Some people are getting cured of HIV by cancer treatment. Human beings were getting smaller for maybe 25 thousand years, until about 6,000 years ago. Why? One conjecture is that hunters were over-hunting big animals, leading to a shortage of meat. Then came farming, and suddenly we got larger. Comment on a movie, Next Exit, wherein some form of ghostly consciousness exists after death. To test this, volunteers are needed for painless euthanasia. I’m a complete nonbeliever in any afterlife other than memory or reputation, but this makes me uncomfortable; I don’t think I’ll volunteer. Feature “You are electric” by Sally Adee says that every cell in your body is a tiny battery. Electricity shapes you. Even the membranes around your 40 trillion cells acts like little batteries. It’s called the electrome, like the biome, and has a huge range of roles in the body. Also in plants and fungi and even bacteria. More research is being done; I look forward to its results. Maybe they’ll be electrifying.
NEW SCIENTIST March 4-10, 2023. Long Covid is calling attention to the role of viruses in other conditions, like chronic fatigue syndrome. This interests me, in significant part because MaryLee has it and it is messing up her life on a daily basis. It has been about a year now, and we know others who have had it two years, so no immediate relief is in sight. It is estimated that 10 per cent of Covid cases result in long Covid. I had Covid once or twice, the test on the second being inconclusive, and threw it off, while MaryLee didn’t seem to get it, maybe a symptom-less case, but has the long tail of it. Globally 75 million folk may have it. Symptoms are brain fog, shortness of breath, and tiredness. The article says “post-exertional malaise,” which I thought was too complicated a phrase. When MaryLee tries to do too much, she gets wiped out, and even sleep can make her tired. Just a strong emotion, positive or negative, can leave her in miserable shape. She hates being stifled like this, but getting mad at it will only make it worse. JWST—let’s call it the Just Wonderful Space Telescope—has spotted unusually large and young galaxies, which can’t be explained by current models. You know, the models that believe in dark matter. They say that there was not enough gas in the universe at that point, 700 million years after the Big Bang, to form so many massive galaxies. Yet there they are. I am trying to stifle my knowing smile, with imperfect success. High intensity interval training, HIIT, is now considered safe after a heart attack. This means exercising vigorously for one minute, then resting for one minute, repeated ten times. I never had a heart attack and have had no heart distress, but am on heart medicine and doctor’s orders to take it easy. Maybe I can start revving up a bit more. Bows and arrows were first used in Europe much earlier than previously thought. That is, 54,000 years ago instead of 10,000 years ago. Fasting for a day may weaken the immune system. But a 15 hour fast may be okay. “Drying up,” by Natalie Koch says seven states in the US southwest are legally allowed to take water from the Colorado River. But the drought and population increase and farming have just about used up the river. What about desalination? That demands extraordinary amounts of energy and is unsustainable. The same is happening in the Arabian peninsula as the aquifers run dry. When Saudi investors tried to take advantage of Arizona’s lax groundwater laws, the farmers caused an uproar. The farmers oppose any regulation at all. This practically guarantees that Arizona will run dry too. I remember decades ago when an artist and writer retirement community was being set up in that general area, I was interested, and I wrote and asked about the water supply. They assured me that they had it under control. I thought they were fooling themselves and stayed clear. I was right, of course. “Making the desert bloom through commercial farming has always been a romantic idea. But it has also always been a mirage.” “Another level of weirdness” by Ciaran Gilligan-Lee explores the increasing strangeness of quantum theory. An early example was challenged by Albert Einstein, who called the instantaneous interaction of particles separated by kilometers “spooky action at a distance.” But quantum seems to be proving itself as more testing occurs. I have been a skeptic, but my unbelief is taking a battering. “The baby dilemma,” by Abigail Beall, discusses the issue of whether to have children. Most of us do want to make families, but this needs to be severely curbed in the interest of reducing the global ravages of overpopulation. After three miscarriages my first wife Carol and I feared we would not be able to have a family. But then surgery fixed the problem and we had two children. It seems that having children does not make folk happier, maybe because of lack of sleep, time, and money. Yep, been there, done that. My writing efficiency was cut in half when our first surviving child came on the scene, and it didn’t recover fully until she went off to college. Then she got cancer and died at age 41. I am not happy about that. Yet overall, the experience was well worthwhile. Lakes across the world are rising to record levels. Why? One suspect is climate change caused by human activity. Too bad those lakes can’t be transported to drought regions.
NEW SCIENTIST March 11-17, 2023. You know the missing matter that holds spinning galaxies together? Maybe they’ve found it, and it’s not dark matter. They have discovered hot gas so vast that its mass accounts for what’s missing. There need to be new and better telescopes to confirm it, but this may spell the end of the witch hunt for dark matter. It’s about time. As I have remarked, I write fantasy; I don’t believe it, and neither should astronomers. Deforestation seems to reduce rainfall across the tropics. Well, duh! We need to stop cutting innocent trees down before the tipping point wipes us out along with the forests. Are we smart enough to do that? Well… You know how you can shop at Walmart for things not available elsewhere? The giant lacewing lived through the extinction of the dinosaurs and was abundant across North America until about 50 years ago when it was thought to be extinct in the eastern seaboard. Then an entomologist—that’s a specialist in insects—found one by an Arkansas Walmart store. He took it home, killed it, and pinned it in his collection. So is there a relic population in that area? Maybe so, if it can escape the notice of killer entomologists. Adding wild fungi to soil could make trees store more carbon, reducing pollution. I like to see fungus get credit, as my grandfather, Edward H. Jacob, made his fortune by growing edible mushrooms, and that paid for much of my education. He was known at The Mushroom King, and much of this country’s commercial mushrooms are still grown in that region of Pennsylvania. He was a canny businessman who sold the business two weeks before the great stock market crash of 1929. 500 extra steps boosts heart health, and more boosts it more. A rare bird, the dusky tetraka, had not been seen for 24 years, until being spotted in Madagascar. It’s a cute little fellow, olive green with a yellow throat. Picture of two jugs found on a sunken ship dating from 1682—that’s about 340 years ago—caught my attention. They have faces near the tops, making the bottles look like fat men. Clever. Cities may be making environmental progress. London and New York have twice the tree cover a rural area would need to be defined as a forest. As I look out my 10th story wintdow, here in Redondo Beach, CA, I see about as many trees as buildings. I like that. “Recharging the brain,” by David Robson, says that just as a car engine gets less efficient with time, so does the human brain. Microscopic structures called mitochondria found in every brain cell—and indeed in every other cell—are the engines of our thoughts and feelings. As they age, they generate waste products that slowly poison our brains. Thus Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other motor neuron diseases. If we can recharge the mitochondria, we might reverse some of those conditions. That of course interests me as I forge through the octogenarian territory of senility. Mitochondria are thought to have been independent life forms before entering bacteria and forming a symbiotic partnership that propelled animal life to the top of the heap. Our brains are just two per cent of our body mass, but use twenty per cent of its energy, so the mitochondria are really busy there. Researchers are searching for ways to recharge them or replace them. I hope they succeed soon, before mine poop out. “The truth about cats” by Michael Marshal, says that while dogs are dependent on us for everything including their emotional well-being, cats seem to be sociopathic, hardly caring for us but staying as long as we feed them well. Dogs evolved in packs, and were social, while cats were largely solitary, not much needing company. Cats started hanging out with us when we started farming instead of hunting and gathering. Stores of grain attracted rodents, which in turn attracted the cats. So cats pretty much domesticated themselves. They are smart and independent, so decide for themselves whether to do what their companion humans want, but they do know their names and value the association. Birds are socially monogamous and sexually polygamous, as genetic testing now shows. So one couple may raise chicks with multiple fathers. Cartoon featuring Schrodinger’s dog. There is a question whether the cat in the box is alive or dead. The dog thinks “I never liked that cat anyway.” Cartoon about an odd substance concludes “It is a chemystery.”
NEW SCIENTIST March 18-24, 2023. Room temperature superconductivity has been a dream for more than a century. Has it finally been discovered? Superconductivity allows electricity to flow through a substance with no resistance, which is a dream for power transmission. But substances that do that have to be cooled to down near absolute zero. One that works at room temperature has to be under pressure of one gigapascal, which is about ten thousand times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at the surface. That’s not really convenient for household use. So they are making progress, but are not there yet. The world’s largest “passive house” has been built in Boston. Passive house construction minimizes reliance on energy consuming heating or cooling systems, so is efficient and comfortable. I see it as like a thermos bottle that preserves the temperature, hot or cold, of its contents. This one is a 62 story skyscraper with triple glazed windows, heavy insulation, and compartmentalized floors. If it works out, there should be more of this kind built. Deadly black widow spiders are being stalked and killed by brown widows. That makes me feel sympathy for the poor black widows, something that I haven’t felt before. Why can’t the brown widows leave them alone and mind their own business? Are they racists? Seven mice have been born from male cells that were turned into egg cells, then fertilized with sperm. So now maybe two men or two women can have children. I’m not sure how I feel about that, speaking as one who loves the look and feel of women. We could store carbon as baking soda in the ocean. The technology for pulling carbon from the air is advancing, but still needs to be stored somewhere. If they can get enough carbon from the air, it could halt global warming, so this is important. But until that technology is perfected, we had better quit putting so much of it into the air. “Message from the Stone Age” by Alison George discusses hand stencils made by Paleolithic humans, where people spit red and black paint over their hands placed against cave walls, thus making the outline images. Those stencils are mixed in with the pictures of horses, bison, and mammoths. Here’s the kicker: around half these hand stencils appear to be injured, with some shortened or missing fingers. Is this a message? What were they trying to tell us? Could these be numbers? Language probably started with hand signs as well as vocalizations. Maybe they were sign language we are too dull to read, but visitors from other caves could read them loud and clear, as it were. I wonder if any were what today consists of a single middle finger raised, directed at future readers? Screw you, archaeologists! Keep your noses out of our business. “Is gravity quantum?” by Jonathan Oppenheim compares theories. General relativity says that gravity is the result of mass warping space-time, as a heavy ball might dent a trampoline. Quantum theory says that matter and energy come in tiny discrete—that is, separate—chunks. The one works well in the large scale, the other works in the small scale. But where they overlap they don’t mesh well, like children quarreling. So will gravity ultimately prove to be quantum? Jonathan is betting against that, but we’ll see. Billions of years ago a planet smashed into Earth, shaking things up a bit, gouging out material that orbited Earth and finally formed the moon. Now I learn that they have named that planet Theia. That almost tempts me to write a story about folk living on that planet just before the crash. But I’m afraid it would have an unhappy ending. “Say, maybe we should look where we’re going.” “Naw, that’s too too much trouble. Just settle down and stop worrying about noth—”
NEW SCIENTIST March 25-31, 2023. “1.5 C climate goal is slipping away,” by Michael Le Page. We have to act, and can do so, but will we do so, in the interest of preserving life as we know it? That is in serious doubt. “Those causing the problems are not the ones suffering the consequences.” There’s the reality. Forget about saving the world; there’s money to be made by continuing the pollution. Use expensive air filters to keep out the bad stuff. Who cares about the poor folk who can’t afford filters? I fear we need something like the French Revolution, where the arrogant monarchs were sent to the guillotine, to get in leaders who actually will do the necessary. But France wound up with Napoleon. As the poet Coleridge put it, “In mad game they burst their manacles and wear the name of Freedom—graven on a heavier chain.” I fear that for us. I don’t trust revolutions any more than I trust the old order to do the right thing. So I fear we’re doomed. At least I won’t live to see the worst of it. That’s one advantage of old age. Covid-19 may have first jumped to people via raccoon dogs. They were there at the Huanan market when it started. The best way to spot a liar is to focus on the details; truthful statements are considerably more detailed than deceptive ones. But there’s no perfect guarantee you know the difference. The musician Beethoven drank a lot, and may have died at age 56 from liver damage. Earth’s early oxygen may have come from volcanoes. I understand that oxygen was originally a pollution, a waste product, a poison, until a new form of life learned to use it as an energy source. So we are all creatures of poison. “It’s now or never” by Chris Packham says that achieving a sustainable population is critical if we are to address our overconsumption of resources. Nature is in freefall. We are precipitating the sixth mass extermination of the world’s wildlife. I think the dinosaur disaster was the fifth one. Our population is 8 billion and growing. “Tolerating the genocidal notion that ‘economic growth’–for which read ‘growth in consumption’–is the answer to our problems, and totally ignoring unsustainable population growth, must end. Or we all die.” I agree. I understand that a sustainable human population would be about 2 billion, or a quarter of the present number. How do we bring it down quickly and nicely? No mass killings or deportations to other planets. If someone has an easy answer, let me know. A review of the TV series Extrapolations indicates that this science fiction takes a sledgehammer approach. Set in 2037, it shows our world being devastated by global warming, with forest fires, droughts, winds and floods, and about to get worse. Maybe I’ll get to see it sometime. “Why is the universe just right for life?” by Thomas Hertog addresses this matter, showing that even trace changes in things like the Higgs boson or the density of vacuum energy would ruin it. One explanation could be that we live in a multiverse with an enormous patchwork of universes with infinitely different modes of operation, and ours is the one where life is possible. There are problems with that, but I will settle for it for now. “Far-sighted thinking” by Richard Fisher indicates that our tendency to focus narrowly on the present lies behind the most serious problems we face in the long term. As I see it, that’s because if you don’t survive the next minute, the future hardly matters to you. So we focus on the minute. About political decisions: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” But maybe some of us are able to take a longer view.
These HiPiers columns have been getting late and irregular. It takes me time to write them, then there are delays getting them to our geek to be put up on the website, and delays after he gets them. But I am slowly gaining on them. No, no movies or TV series are in sight for me, and there won’t be as long as the Hollywood writer’s strike continues. I support the writers and am satisfied to wait. I’m just sorry that they have to strike in order to get the upper echelon to even give them a hearing. There should be a better way.
And I am hoping that I can finally establish more direct connections to my incoming email and snail mail, so that I can be back in touch with my fans. I do value them.
PIERS
