Ending With A Bad Taste

1st up, "Interference", by Sue Burke, 2019, 400 pages, 108k words. This is the sequel of "Semiosis", blogged here. I stumbled across that review and noted that I had liked that book, so I decided to read this sequel. A good read. Plotting a little choppy tho. There is almost a prequel, maybe 20% of the book, developing a character who then doesn't play that much of a role in the rest of the book. Then in the main story line, after the narrative thread switches somewhat frequently between various humans, it then switches to the mostly immortal sentient bamboo for most of the last 1/2 of the book. Kind of like having the narrator suddenly become god. Plus the ending didn't seem strong.

2nd, "Iron Council", by China Miéville, 2004, 593 pages, 161k words. The last book of the Bas-Lag Trilogy. After reading the 1st book years ago, I read the 2nd in January and figured I'd finish the series off. Miéville has quite an imagination, very surreal stuff. Kind of a slog, but a (not particularly?) satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy. He uses a lot of interesting words, and some of them are real words, not just stuff he has made up. I should have captured them. I keep meaning to do that, to harvest new words from the books I'm reading. Hopefully I'll get consistent about it at some point here.

3rd, a quickie, my Patreon story of the month from Tobias S. Bucknell "Where the Glass Winds Blow". Set on an extrasolar planet with very little metal, a simple and memorable story.

4th, "Oath of Fealty", by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, 1981, 313 pages, 90k words. A definite page turner, but ...

On twitter, I have been replying to or retweeting tweets involving covidiots with the tags

#DarwinAwards #EvolutionInAction #MotherNatureBatsLast

"Darwin Awards" goes back to the mid-80s. "Mother nature bats last" I would attribute to Kim Stanley Robinson in "New York 2140". But where did "Evolution in action" come from?

I thought John Brunner from the late 60s to mid-70s: "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Sheep Look Up", or "Shockwave Rider". So I purchased these (I am looking forward to rereading these), searched them, no dice. I tracked it down to "Oath of Fealty". Per the Wikipedia article:

Notable Quote: "Think of it as Evolution in Action"

The book is a quick read, a page turner - but painful. It definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

I remembered Pournelle as being a libertarian - worse, his wikipedia page says he was a "paleoconservative". He was born in 1933 in Louisiana and grew up around Memphis, and was a man of his times. He died in 2017, age 84.

The book revolves around the huge arcology sitting in a burned out area of LA, and the conflict between the genius ubermensch in the arcology and the mud people outside in LA. The book is dedicated to Robert Heinlein - warning. One of the main characters is the genius ubermensch designer of the arcology, last name Rand - warning. There is a fair amount of sex in the book, a lot of it between the executives, and 1 assistant, in the uber-corporation that owns the arcology - no #MeToo moments involved I'm sure.

White privilege, fascism, patriarchy, white grievance, general hate and smugness. And the female corporate executive gets raped. I really don't like reading about rape. Ugh, I'm tired of writing about this. Here's some quotes:

welfare was a lot less popular than power plants.

...

This whole project could go down in bureaucratic regulations. The way the rest of the country’s going.

...

As long as welfare and food stamps and aid to dependent children and social security and all the other benefit programs pump in money, there’ll be something to steal.

...

The way she dressed would be enough to drive most men nuts if they had to work closely with her, and she must know that.

...

legally he was conceived out of wedlock, and I don’t have any claim on him at all.

...

A dozen hostesses circulated through the crowd; long-legged, pretty girls in their best party dresses, obviously models hired for the luncheon.

...

Half the government is lawyers, and when they make laws they don’t write them in English.

...

The night four of us lucked into a Beef Wellington [That is some fine, fine white folk food!]

...

The TS [arcology] guards might or might not turn you in to the LA cops, but more important they might hurt you. A lot.

...

Did you think we’d leave you for the eaters?

...

then it’ll be my turn with that sadistic bitch. She’s probably a Lesbian.

I was amused by the anachronisms. I guess Pournelle thought they added authenticity, but they definitely didn't age well. And this story was presumably set in the future of 1981??? And Pournelle was a technology writer???

He’s got his office, a DEC computer [I worked for DEC 1977-1980.]

...

It’s a role-playing game. MAN FROM UNCLE hunt club.

...

thankful for the touch-typing course his father had made him take in high school. [Ha ha, my mom made me take it in HS night summer school.]

...

Dump it for them at 300 baud.

...

Makes a pretty big file—” MILLIE, what is the total stored in Rand’s directory?
23,567,892 bytes. [Wow, 23 meg! LOL!]

...

He took a Xerox from his desk

...

the car had a powerful relay system, good anywhere in line of sight to the large antenna on top of Todos Santos [Ha ha, pre-cell phone!]

"Evolution in Action" occurs in the book 21 times - definitely its catchphrase. "Think of it as evolution in action" is 1st quipped by Rand in reference to the deaths of an 18 and a 20 YO who had broken into the arcology and were pretending to be terrorists with bombs, who were executed by arcology security with poison gas. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

So #EvolutionInAction is outta here. I have replaced it with #RealtimeNaturalSelection, from the 5/31/2020 Doonesbury cartoon.

I will go out on a limb here and say, I find lots of the current gay/trans/non-binary foo annoying/boring/lame. But at least it is not totally offensive, as this old libertarian white man crap is.