Plague Books: Plague Book

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, Vintage Books, 2006

Provenance: This is a re-read: I read it many years ago and thought well enough of it to hold onto as opposed to pass on to others, intending to write something about it. Now is the time.

I think this was one of the last books we got from the Quality Paperback Book Club. The QPB was (and maybe is, for all I know) one of those monthly book clubs where they mailed you the selection and gave you a catalog with other options. And we were pretty happy with it when we lived in Lake Geneva, but once we moved out here, we were less and less interested in their offerings and finally opted out.

Apparently, QPB is an extremely shadowy group, and no one knows who is really running the works (the Book of the Month club is handling fulfillment, and a query to the Wikipedia dumps us there). It is sort of a book club Illuminati, an interesting piece of the publishing industry, a vector for moving print like a virus, but that is only tangential to the book itself.

Review:  To all outward appearances this is a traditional work of fiction - simple, raised, embossed silvered title, "National Bestseller" running along the top margin,  pull quote from the Washington Post Book World, artistic photographic cover design that would put it at home next to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on the shelves. A little digging even reveals that its first chapter was displayed in The New Yorker.  A confluence of traditional New York publishing tropes that declare " This is a modern novel."

But it is a science fiction tale that hangs on a fantasy assumption When one dies, one's spirit/
identity/soul/existence transposed into a limbo, a City, where it continues on in the much the same way as in life, until the last person who remembers the once-living dies as well. Only at that point does the spirit move on to an unknowable future. So what happens to The City when a world-wide plague destroys humanity?

The tale is told on two fronts - The City itself, and Antarctica, where the last survivor of the plague - "The Blinks" - struggles to survive.  Those within the city are swept up with a huge tide of the newly dead, then are confronted with people disappearing as quickly as they arrive, the only ones who remember them are themselves brought down by the disease. The City itself is shrinking as well, as no one still living remembers it.

The survivor is Laura Byrd, employee of the Coca-Cola company, stranded in a former research stations at the bottom of the world. The world of the (now-near) future is as expected - the large mammals are all dead, the sea levels are rising, there is continual warfare, and bio-engineered plagues are common. Laura is there because of marketing - Coca-Cola pushing the idea that their sweetened soft drink is made with the last pure water on earth (yes, similar to the various bottled-watered claims). Ultimately, the soft drink is the vector to kill the world. Her companions die and she is left alone to try to get off the continent while the rest of the world succumbs.

The writing is first-rate, and the story carries through both from Laura's viewpoint and the community of the dead, who come to realize that their continued existence hinges solely on Laura's survival. They vary from long-time friends and colleagues and family to individuals she saw once and remembered afterwards - Laura's gaze is all-encompassing. While the plague burns the world, those who live on in her memory congregate in The City. But Laura is herself dying.

Back when I first read this, I was talking to a friend who worked in the New York publishing. "Why is is marketed with the monotone photos of New York's version of literature?", I ask. "Set in the then-future, talking about bio-warfare, discussing the afterlife. How is this not an SF novel?"

"Vintage does not publish science fiction," he responded simply.

Indeed. Yet even shorn of its physical similarities, the book holds forth with the vibe of  Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and other end-of-the-worlders. In bringing it tightly into the orbit of Laura and the citizens of the City, it has an attraction that makes it worth reading, and then re-reading years afterwards.

More later,

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This is a  post about John Conway and Enrico Fermi.

John Conway passed on recently, of COVID-19. He is one of those people, who if you know his work, you feel a little sad, and if you don't, you still feel a little sad but in more disconnected way. John Conway did many things, but he also created the Game of Life.

No, I'm not talking about the Milton Bradley/Hasbro game where you start with a car, you must get married and you load up on kids and you make life decisions that will end up in the wealthy retirement home (Much more the American Dream than Monopoly). No, this is a mathematical game about growth and death, which I first discovered in high school in an issue of Scientific America. It is played on graph paper (at the time) and later in computers, and is an interesting simulation. You draw a pattern on the graph paper, and you evolve it through some simple rules:

1. Any filled-in space with fewer than adjacent two filled-in spaces becomes empty (dies).
2. Any filled-in space with two or three adjacent filled-in spaces continues to exist.
3. Any filled-in space with more than three adjacent filled-in spaces becomes empty (dies).
4. Any empty space with exactly three adjacent filled-in spaces is filled in. 

 With these four rules, you can take any pattern and see how it evolves over time. Computers made this even easier (and engineering students, though wealthy in graph paper, quickly adapted it to computers).  So you can sketch any pattern, and follow their evolution until they stabilize, go extinct, or move off the board entirely.

Some patterns and parts of patterns go extinct - they don't have enough adjacent squares to survive. Some stabilize into a solid pattern that will no longer evolve - a two-by-two square is the simplest. Some stabilize into patterns that lose parts and gain other evenly - the most basic of these oscillators are "blinkers", a line of three vertical squares that, the next turn, become three horizontal squares, which then become three vertical squares until the end of time. And the last group moves out over time in a stabilizing pattern - the simplest version of these is the "glider", which moves slowly forever, until it rules into something else like a map edge or a stable pattern or glider.

OK, let's move on to Enrico Fermi, who is ALSO famous for many things, but the thing we want to talk about is Fermi's Paradox. The basics of this is the question - If the universe is ancient, and extraterrestrial life has had the chance to rise, evolve, and spread out, where are they? Even given the titanic distances of space, why haven't we encountered them?

This was formalized in the Drake Equation, which looks at the following factors:

${\displaystyle N=R_{*}\cdot f_{\mathrm {p} }\cdot n_{\mathrm {e} }\cdot f_{\mathrm {l} }\cdot f_{\mathrm {i} }\cdot f_{\mathrm {c} }\cdot L}$ 

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R_∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point

f_i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

This is grist for many SF novels, with answers ranging from "they are already here" to "they are avoiding us" to "space is really, really big" to "something is out there eating civilizations" to "all these factors make N so small that we are effectively alone - did we mention that space is really, really big?".

We can argue the numbers, of which we really don't have a large enough sample size to even make a good guess, but, to quote the old joke - "Now we're just haggling." Another way of looking at this is through the lens of Conway's Life.

Some extraterrestrial life will not get to the point where it games sentience, or space travel, or communications, much the factors laid out in the Drake equation - they will die out. And some will reach a stable condition, either technologically or geographically, where they will enter a self-sustaining stasis - gaining a little, losing a little, but staying pretty much in the same location and tech level. And some will become gliders - leaving parts of their past behind them as they continue to evolve in a particular direction.

And these gliders would continue in a relatively stable state, until they hit something else - the edge of a map, another glider, or an existing stable system. And yet (if we are thinking in spacial terms), they are a straight line in a huge three-dimensional space - the chance of them hitting any particular point (like, say, our sun) is tiny. Yet in an infinite universe, or, just saying a extremely large sample size like our galaxy, it remains possible.

And I think that's where we are. I'm not sure if everything really connects here, or there are just similarities, and definitely don't have the maths to back any of this up (like I said "We're just haggling."). But it is an interesting thought experiment for the day, and unites Mr. Fermi and Mr. Conway.

More later,

Leonarda Obarski: 1934-2015

Leonarda Obarski, Kate's mom, passed away this past Tuesday. Here is her obituary:

Leonarda Obarski, aka Nardi Novak, age 80, recently of Kent, Washington, passed away April 14, 2014. “Nardi” was born August 15, 1934 in Camden, New Jersey to Herbert and Stephanie Obarski, and lived many years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is survived by her daughters, Catherine Grubb, Sharon Novak, Elizabeth Thorpe, her grandson John Michael Thorpe, and her sons-in-law John Jeffrey Grubb, Michael Weiss, and John Thorpe. 

Nardi and Me, many years ago.

Nardi graduated from Collingswood High School in New Jersey and attended Temple University for 1 year. While raising her 3 daughters, and serving as a Girl Scout leader, Nardi went back to school and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English Writing and a Masters in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Before retirement Nardi worked as a teacher at University of Pittsburgh, Robert Morris College, Dusquesne University and Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University and as a trainer at the Center for Victims of Violent Crime in Pittsburgh, PA, but her first love was acting and the theatre. 

Nardi studied acting from childhood and she appeared and directed on many stages in the Pittsburgh area, had small roles in a few movies and a soap opera, and later worked with the Haddonfield Plays & Players. She was a founding member of the South Park Conservatory Theatre and of the New Works Festival in Pittsburgh. She also worked as a patient simulator, helping medical professionals craft their skills. She was a member of AFTRA/SAG.  

 In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to your local theater.

Leonarda was a wonderful human being, and we will miss her dearly.

More later, 

Philip Jose Farmer

Long before Alan Moore gathered his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or recast the Charleton Heroes as Watchmen, Philip Jose Farmer was mining the rich vein of the deceased and the public domain and forging weird tales from the foaming broth produced..

The first PJF book I ever read was The Other Log of Phineas Fogg, which posited the Verne hero of Around the World in 80 Days as an alien agent fighting for an ancient artifact against another alien agent, who was Captain Nemo AND Moriarty, and ending up on the deck of the Mary Celeste. High weirdness indeed.

And the epic strangeness continued with the discovery of Tarzan Alive! and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, which tied bevies of Pulp and Victorian characters together under a single continuity (and a single group of families). And of course Riverworld, in which the dead of thousands of earth years (with a few interesting exceptions) were all recreated on an alien planet consisting of one great river valley. Mark Twain and Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) and Alice (the one who inspired Wonderland) were the heroes.

Weird stuff indeed, even for the early 70s, and it made for one of the not-sucky SciFi Channel movies from back in the day when they made movies based on real ideas as opposed to a title and a bit of monster animation.

Oh, and he was Kilgore Trout, too, Kurt Vonnegut's fictional SF author that sounded suspiciously like Theodore Sturgeon.

He passed on at age 91, peacefully, in his sleep.

Good luck on the Big River, sir.

More later,

George Carlin

Is it me, or does it feel like God is just picking up the spares right now?

Carlin, Tim Russert, Stan Winston, Jim McKay, Cyd Charisse, Bo Diddley,Yves St.Laurent, Harvey Korman, Algis Budrys, Sydney Pollack, Erick Wujcik, Dick Martin, Arthur C. Clarke. People famous enough to be missed, their passing viewed with sadness by the people they entertained and influenced.

If there is any justice in the world, the navel-gazing media will fly into a weeklong mourning for Carlin, the way they did for Russert.

And the tombstone reel at the Oscars is going to be longer than most of the "best-music" entries.

All I can say is that the afterlife is hosting a heckuva "Welcome to the Neighborhood" brunch.

More later,

Update: Tits? Still doesn't belong on the list.