Science non-fiction

More Rain Heading to Washington

The Post: Heavy rain returned to the Washington area this afternoon, bringing a serious threat of additional flash flooding, the National Weather Service warned. ...

The heavy rain that began over the weekend and is predicted to continue tonight has resulted in the closure of major government buildings and museums, and left thousands of homes without electricity. Afternoon showers snarled traffic in downtown Washington, taking motorists several minutes to move one block along gridlocked streets. ...

The rare tropical deluge that began over the weekend unleashed floods Sunday and Monday that swamped homes and highways and forced some people to swim for their lives. ...

"It sounds like a broken record. Rain through Tuesday, Tuesday night, Wednesday, Thursday, possible through Sunday," said Jackie Hale, a National Weather Service spokeswoman this morning. "Here's some good news: They don't mention rain for next Monday."

All this rain in our nation's capital brought to mind a book I read a couple of years ago, Forty Signs of Rain . Publisher Weekly's synopsis reads:

In this cerebral near-future novel, the first in a trilogy, Robinson (The Years of Rice and Salt) explores the events leading up to a worldwide catastrophe brought on by global warming. Each of his various viewpoint characters holds a small piece of the puzzle and can see calamity coming, but is helpless before the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America. Anna Quibler, a National Science Foundation official in Washington, D.C., sifts through dozens of funding proposals each day, while her husband, Charlie, handles life as a stay-at-home dad and telecommutes to his job as an environmental adviser to a liberal senator. Another scientist, Frank Vanderwal, finds his sterile worldview turned upside down after attending a lecture on Buddhist attitudes toward science given by the ambassador from Khembalung, a nation virtually inundated by the rising Indian Ocean.

The book ends, as the title and book jacket portend, with heavy rains falling on Washington. The main character is trapped in an office building downtown by the swiftly-moving flood waters, and is forced to escape via a canoe. The images are pretty unforgettable.

With all the crazy weather in Washington, the debate over flag burning totally slipped past my radar. So it was with a real sense of shock that I read in the Times, Flag Amendment Narrowly Fails in Senate Vote

Carl Hulse: A proposed Constitutional amendment to allow Congress to prohibit desecration of the flag fell a single vote short of approval by the Senate on Tuesday, an excruciatingly close vote that left unresolved a long-running debate over whether the flag is a unique national symbol deserving of special legal standing.

The 66-to-34 vote on the amendment was one vote short of the 67 required to send the amendment to the states for potential ratification as the 28th Amendment. It was the closest proponents of the initiative have come in four Senate votes since the Supreme Court first ruled in 1989 that flag burning was a protected form of free speech.

The opponents — 30 Democrats, 3 Republicans and an independent — asserted that the amendment would amount to tampering with the Bill of Rights in an effort to eliminate relatively rare incidents of burning the flag. They said it violated the very freedoms guaranteed by the symbolism of the flag.

"This objectionable expression is obscene, it is painful, it is unpatriotic," said Senator Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who won the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II. "But I believe Americans gave their lives in many wars to make certain all Americans have a right to express themselves, even those who harbor hateful thoughts." ...

The vote is likely to be an issue in the coming Congressional elections, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who was the chief sponsor of the amendment, predicted the minority who opposed it would be held accountable by voters.

"I think this is getting to where they are not going to be able to escape the wrath of the voters," Mr. Hatch said.

Yeah, the wrath of the voters is focused on flag burning. The article goes on to say if it'd passed the Senate, it likely would have been ratified by the states.

It's scary that the 28th Amendment to the Constitution would've been a bookend to the 1st, as if the two were somehow worthily co-equal rather than being in contradiction. I can't think of a more powerful form of self-expression than burning the flag of a country that you love.

It's pretty shameful that our generation's answers to Washington, Jefferson and Madison spend their time on this....

Incidentally, Robinson is one of my favorite sci-fi authors (Hatch is one of my least favorite). I highly recommend, for a rainy or any other day, Years of Rice and Salt, a 672-page (in paperback) reimagining of how world history may have turned out if the black plague had killed 99% of Europeans, instead of 25%. The world essentially winds up divided between American Indians, Indian Indians, the Chinese, and an Islamic empire.

The issues and tensions Robinson explores mirror in an interesting way many in our 'real' world; he's very good at quickly creating characters and playing out on them broad societal trends without being preachy or boring. A plot device of reincarnation helps ties the book together over its centuries.

I've only read Red Mars and Blue Mars in Robinson's celebrated trilogy (ends with Green Mars), they're in my opinion a little less interesting than YRS, but are still probably the best things I've read on the human dynamics that go along with colonizing another planet.

Robinson basically creates new worlds that echo ours; he reminds me a lot of Orson Scott Card, although of course nothing really compares with Card's masterpiece (and one of my top 10 favorite sci-fi novels), Ender's Game. Ideally everyone should read that around 14; I think I didn't come across it until my mid-20s. The story at root is about social dynamics, told through the classic boy overcomes great odds, expanding upon his innate abilities to achieve something astonishing.

Card is unmatched among sci-fi authors at mixing macro 'fate of civilization in the balance' plots and micro character development; and he's especially good at infusing his plots with philosophy (eastern and western). Not only that, but you can also see him growing as an author through the eight Ender books; the first is still by far the best, just like once you make Star Wars it's kindof hard to create another comparable cinematic experience. But the rest probably do more with less.

As long as I'm on the subject, here's my list of my favorite science fiction works (I'll do the fantasy list in a future post).

Foundation series, Issac Asimov
Any serious list has to start with Asimov's trilogy--Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation. (The series continues in four other books). The plots are unparalleled; Asimov lays out a future universe that feels complete, and explores grand, sweeping themes--usually involving one man vs. society--with great battles on which the fate of planets hang in the balance. His concept of psychohistory has got to be one of the great fictional constructs of all time.

His characters can be a little two-dimensional, and there's a bit of 50s sci-fi rote to some of his prose. But it's like quibbling about Hitchcock's treatment of actresses--he's still the master from whom all else flow.

I also like Asimov's Galactic Empire books, and the Robot series (which I'd also include in any list of the best detective novels).

Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash was like nothing I'd ever read before; and suprisingly, I liked Diamond Age as much, if not more. Although completely separate they both tease out future worlds where people enhance their natural abilities with hardware, software, and drugs. His prose is quick and clever; words matter and are used well, and even though he's inventive with his lingo you can always figure out based on context or rhythmn what's going on. His books are definitely 'weird'; but because they're rooted in the tradition of good literature everywhere, they're not so experimental as to forego good plot and interesting characters. Plus his key characters are just as likely to be female or Asian as white and male. I also liked Cryptonomicon a lot; but didn't like Quicksilver much.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
This may be the most unique science fiction book ever written. It's usually tagged as a 'post-apocalyptic' novel, nominally about a few monks over a few hundred years, each wandering the American Southwest. The language is beautiful, and the philosophic and religious musings are interesting. I was reminded of this book a few years after reading it when I read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which although spare and languid compared to Miller's sprawling and frenetic work, packs the same mix of accurate observation about the West and theology.

Dune, Frank Herbert
The same mix of environment and theology comes out in Dune--but oh, how different, it's Islam to Cather and Miller's Christianity, desert to their sagebrush. Herbert's central characters are even more piercing; and his universe more distinct and detailed. Dune reminded me of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, aka the autobiography of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Herbert must've read it too, he uses some of the same terminology and his portrayal of the desert reminds me of Lawrence on the Sahara.

Witches of Karres, James Schmitz
This book defines the genre of space opera; it's funny, inventive, a bit spare, and features females in its leading roles. Lots of interesting vocabularly too, like Sheewash drive and klatha. Hard to say exactly why I like it so much, except it's perfect for what it is and in a way captures the mix of authority and counter-culture that were the 60s exactly.

Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
If Asimov anchors one wing of science fiction, Dick--in many ways his polar opposite--reigns at the other. His plots are all twisted and spring from small, interesting concepts; while Asimov is well-lit corridors, Dick is all squalid corners. MHC, which is commonly seen as his masterwork out of a career that saw hundreds of publications, posits that the Axis powers won WWII and the U.S. is divided between Japan (West Coast) and Germany (East), with some remnants of resistance in the middle. He's one of the only Western authors I've known who gets the Asian mindset; his portrayal of a defeated but not beaten America feels uncomfortably real.

Reuters photo of Supreme Court building by Jonathan Ernst via Yahoo News.