Tag: book review

Review: In Defense of History by Richard Evans

In Defense of History by Richard Evans, 1997

This is a book about what historians do: Research (looking at lots of documents and other markers of the past in the present), and then writing books, essays, podcasts, or what have you, purporting to explain what their research has revealed about some aspect of the past. It is also a book obsessed with Postmodernism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Defense of History is a critique of the impact (positive and negative) of Postmodernism on the research and writing of history.

Postmodernism is epistemically nihilistic in its extreme forms—there is no such thing as “truth”, everything can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, all interpretations reflect power relationships (men over women, straights over gays, capitalists over labor, the politics of the day, etc) in our present or the present in which some book was written, and reinterpreted today. In this extreme form, Postmodernism is self-contradictory. If there is no “truth,” then why should we think that Postmodernism has anything valuable to say?

But Postmodernism also has a milder side. It comes down to saying that genuine “truth” is approachable, but there is no such thing as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” This can be understood purely in the present, never mind the writing of history. Suppose I am a witness to a traffic accident involving a half-dozen vehicles. I watch the sequence unfold from a position where I could pay full attention to the event. Later, I recount my recollection to the Highway Patrol. My account is valid, but not the “whole truth.” Someone bearing the same witness from the other side of the highway might describe a slightly different sequence of events. The two descriptions will essentially match up, but not be identical.

We are “perspectival creatures.” We see events from a particular angle and bring to our witness some particular experience. When we research history, the limitations of perspective are compounded. We are looking at documents (mostly) and must not only grasp their meaning (perhaps in translation, already a remove) in context. I find a document in an archive that reads like the transcript of a court proceeding. But in the absence of corroborating context, it might just as easily be a few pages torn from an otherwise lost novel. The further back we go in time, the worse this sort of problem gets because the volume of corroborating documents declines and the dating of those that are found becomes less sure. 

When we write our history book, we add another layer of perspective: our own life experience in a political and cultural environment that may have emerged from the times we are studying, and so on. Such things pull us away from “the whole truth,” while the discovery and incorporation of more documents, more monuments, and so on pulls us towards it. And thus is good history writing done. More truth, a better perspective, but never “the whole truth.” I think this is the sum and substance of Evans’ argument in this book.

In a long “afterword” chapter, Evans takes on his critics. There are more than a dozen, many of them the same people whose work he discusses in the body of the book. Some of these critics, Evans acknowledges, make good points, but most misrepresent him, and he goes to some lengths to illustrate his charges. This afterword thus amounts to a succinct summary of the whole book in which Evans clarifies, in a few sentences, some of the arguments that take pages in earlier chapters. 

One other thing I noted about the afterword. These historians can be really nasty! Some of the criticisms demonstrate a complete lack of attention to what Evans says and castigate him for claims he never makes. I was a graduate student in a university philosophy department at the height of the Postmodernist craze—the late 1970s. I read many critiques of contemporary philosophers by their contemporaries. I do not remember any of them being as careless and hot-headed as the historians appear to be.

Postscript: One of the historians (and Postmodernists) Evans mentions several times is Frank Ankersmit, but Evans does not discuss any of his work in detail. I read and reviewed one of Ankersmit’s books here. Written in 2012, the book makes quite reasonable claims in my opinion. Ankersmit must be one of the mild and rational postmodernists, or perhaps, by 2012, Postmodernism had moved past its zenith.

Ankersmit’s book is more interesting than Evans’ in my opinion. Ankersmit makes philosophical contributions, for example, on the relation between historical representation and art. Evans makes a competent statement of the down and up side impact of Postmodernism on the writing of history, but history moves on, and what was a significant debate in the last decades of the twentieth century is now made moot by the evisceration of academic humanities including history departments, not to mention the virtual victory of the more extreme versions of Postmodernism in political discourse (disinformation anyone?) and that of the political elite themselves.

Review: Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit

Author’s note: This review was originally written and put on Amazon in 2019. It was not included on the blog because there were no additional philosophical issues I wished to address. However, it is one of my important reviews, and now that I am no longer posting reviews on Amazon, I decided to bring this one over here.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit, 2012

I am neither a historian nor a philosopher of history, but it’s always worthwhile to expand one’s scope, and especially so with such an engaging book. Dr. Ankersmit is engaged in a multidimensional exploration, not of “philosophy of history” (though variations are touched upon), but rather of the philosophy of writing history.

Ankersmit’s beginning is “historicism”, broadly the idea that what we are today (politically, culturally, economically, and so on) has emerged through history; the actual track that each of these things (and more) took between the past and the present. This idea seems pretty obvious to me, but apparently was not always so considered in the writing of history or philosophy of history. From this point, he explores the difference between science and art as they relate to history, and comes down on the side of art, with contributions from the practice of science playing their part. He argues that art and history are representational. It reflects, to the viewer or reader, an aspect of the work’s subject.

Aspects are related to perspectives. Individuals have perspectives. They are the subjective gestalt of our individual consciousness. Aspects are derived from the external world and constitute a kind of reflection from the world back to our subjective perspective. We project our viewpoint. We get back an aspect — one aspect of a potentially infinite number of them. Aesthetics in art has much to do with aspect (something Ankersmit explores in some detail), and it is the author’s claim that the same is true in the writing of history. Like a piece of art (he uses both painting and literature in his examples), each written history (assuming it respects records of the past and doesn’t merely make stuff up) reflects to the reader an aspect that can be said to genuinely reflect, and so represent, the past to the present.

From here, Ankersmit argues that, unlike [philosophy of] science in which the truth of propositions (and by extension theories) is the primary focus (the “meaning of it all” being secondary), the primary focus of historical writing is the representation of an aspect bearing meaning to the reader in the present. As in art, propositional truth is of secondary importance in historical writing and emerges from the representational meaning of the written work. This is the central insight of the book, carefully built up through its first two-thirds.

In the last third (roughly) of the book, Ankersmit explores the outworking of the insight in various historical writings and how, in particular, aspects build on one another from one history to another, covering the same topic (for example, the Renaissance). The meaning of these aspects emerges only through the reader’s encounter with multiple aspects of the same subject. In effect, the reader has not gotten the “aspectural meaning” of the Renaissance, having read only a single history of it. But meaning emerges (like depth in vision) the moment one reads a second and grows richer with the third, fourth, and so on. Truth in history emerges from meaning (not the other way around, as is the case in science), and meaning emerges from the collective aspects reflected to readers from multiple histories.

There is far more to this book than I can touch upon in a short review; for example, it’s examination of the role of language and the contrasting roles played by it in science, and history/art. The book is beautifully organized. Each chapter has a clearly delineated introduction, arguments divided into sections, and a conclusion that summarizes the chapter’s key points. There are extensive chapter notes that should be read, as many enhance the perspective of the text, though many (not the majority) are not translated from their original German or French. I also found it odd that, while all the works cited are extensively documented in the chapter notes, the Kindle edition (I am not familiar with the paper edition) lacks a bibliography.

This is a book that deserves to be read by every historian and philosopher of history, or, for that matter, art. The historian will more fully appreciate what her writing of history is really accomplishing, and the philosopher will better understand both the scope and limitations of historical writing, which is, after all, the philosopher’s access point to history about which she is writing philosophy.”

Review: Pegasus by L. Richard and S. Rigaud

Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud 2023

This book is an exposé written by two senior journalists at the long-form news entity Forbidden Stories in Paris, France. Thanks to some serious hacking talent, this outfit was apprised—in about 2021—of a list of fifty thousand telephone numbers from all over the world. The list contained telephone numbers and dates of attempted cyber intrusion attacks for purposes of surveillance.

The outfit that created the software and other parts of the architecture to do this work was an Israeli company called NSO, the initials of the three founders. The software was Pegasus. NSO sold their software to governments who were supposed to use it to help apprehend criminals and terrorists—we’ve all heard that before, right—but besides those uses, most of these governments (almost all autocratic), including Israel, used it to monitor political opposition figures, journalists, and others who just happened not to favor the regime in power. The Moroccan government, for example, was keeping a close eye on virtually the entire French executive, including the president.

Surveillance software had been around before Pegasus, but most of it focused on computers. NSO was the first (roughly 2012) to recognize that everything important was shifting to the smartphone. Like other hacks, surveillance by Pegasus would begin with a user clicking on a link that then downloads software, triggering the rest of the infection chain. This process should be familiar to anyone today. However, NSO added another twist in 2017, known as “zero-click intrusion.” That meant the phone only had to be on to be invaded. The user doesn’t need to click on anything.  

Once onboard the phone, Pegasus could acquire “root authority” and essentially operate every app on the phone. After offloading the phone’s logs, images, emails, texts, and recordings onto client servers, Pegasus deleted itself to avoid detection. Once zero-click intrusion became available, the Pegasus user could re-access the phone and download its latest data at any time they wished. 

Users would not know of the intrusion. The software could also deliver other malware, such as ransomware attacks, or monitor conversations in real-time, among other things. For example, your government might want to imprison you, but you haven’t committed any crime. They could use Pegasus to put some child porn on your phone in a folder they create. They arrest you, confiscate your phone, and voila, discover the criminal evidence.

The book gives few details, but it says enough to understand that zero-click attacks are not trivial. Some app on your phone (we all have dozens) must have an exploitable weakness. It was the job of the NSO programmers to find these exploits and update their customer software when phone manufacturers found and closed any particular loophole. 

The target apps with the greatest potential for attack are those that receive data from the telephone network and then perform an action without requiring user intervention. Every app that notifies you of something (such as texts, emails, or alerts of all kinds, including weather applications) can be an infection vector, but they are not alone. How many apps do we run that do not need access to your microphone, camera, or contact list, yet they default—on installation—to having such access.

To make a successful attack, the attacker must have your phone number. What kind of phone you have (every OS has different vulnerabilities) also makes a difference, but Pegasus could look for all of them. Client updates to Pegasus likely contained an extensive library of the various hacks needed for any given vulnerable app on every kind of phone. If, starting with your phone number, one attack fails, Pegasus tries again. Eventually, it finds an app on that target’s phone that lets it in. 

All of this revelation about the capabilities of Pegasus are scattered throughout the story which focuses on the the people who figured out how to detect prior infection (Pegasus deletes itself when finished culling your data, but as it happens, it leaves a few illegitimate process names in the phone’s logs), the process of proving prior infections on hundreds of phones in the original list of fifty thousand (mostly journalists and a few political opponents of various regimes), the journalists themselves (a multi-continental collaboration that miraculously maintained its secrecy until their stories were simultaneously released), and the NSO company.

So what happened when all of this got out? As one might easily predict, very little. The NSO company was destroyed, but the talent that created the technology merely scattered to other places—some paid obscene salaries—and duplicated the tech for their new employers. There are now numerous Pegasus clones worldwide.

Supposedly, the Israeli government did not permit Pegasus sales to Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran (they allowed sales to Saudi Arabia). However, China has undoubtedly had this ability (developed in China [see NOTE]) for years now (see We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter, 2019), and there is no reason to believe that, in 2025, the other three do not also possess it. In the U.S., the NSA surely has this ability. They are building (or is it operational?) the world’s largest data center for a reason after all.

NOTE: Unique among nations of the world, China, and likely also North Korea, have no need for zero-click technology based on vulnerabilities. The Chinese and North Korean States have the power to mandate that all phones sold in their respective countries come with a built-in, non-removable app that allows the government to access the phone at any time.  

Review: Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek 2025

Žižek is my favorite socio-cultural-political critic! This short book does not disappoint (Amazon link).

Žižek gave a speech at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2023. The significance of books was a theme, but so was the war between Ukraine and Russia and the slaughter in Palestine—topics he says he was asked to address by the fair’s organizers.

The ‘zero point’ is some nadir in the economic, cultural, political, or social sphere from which no tinkering with the situation through conventional mechanisms will fix things in the sense of making everybody (or at least most) better off. Only the destruction and rebuilding of what exists can help, a process, he admits, that is usually “violent and bloody.” Žižek comes from the political left. In my humble opinion, he is correct in that, besides the sexual divide (male and female), the class divide (capitalist one percent vs. everyone else) is still the world’s most significant economic and political fault line, but the modern left has abandoned it. I am personally somewhere down in the ninety-nine percent and have watched “progressive identity politics” eviscerate the Democratic Party in the United States.  

The book begins with a half dozen short essays addressing the global situation in broad strokes. The upshot of all this is that we—that is, Western society—lie to ourselves. The international situation is growing worse rapidly now. We cannot “fix” climate change. Wars and economic exploitation around the world (Žižek here covers not only Palestine and Ukraine but also Sudan, Yemen, and the Eastern Congo) have gone beyond the capacity of any power to resolve. Things got this bad because the powers themselves benefited economically from the conflict.

The book’s second half is a series of essays responding to various criticisms of his Frankfurt speech (reproduced in the book’s appendix). Žižek is, of course, attacked from both the left and the right. As he says (taken from Hegel), this is a sign that he is on the right track. 

I’m not going to comment on Žižek’s take on Palestine. He goes out of his way to nuance what he says. I believe he is right about the entire situation going back to before Israel’s founding and now accelerated to a substantial degree by its political turn to the right. Both sides are to blame (and this goes back a long way). Neither side wants peace other than with the annihilation of the other side. That makes the present situation a zero point.

As for Ukraine, Žižek lays the entire blame on Russia, and he is undoubtedly correct as concerns the utterly unprovoked—in a military sense—present war. But Žižek does miss something concerning Ukraine. He fails to account for a Russian strategic military problem. If my reader will permit me I will use a few sentences to explain.

Between Napoleon and Hitler, Russia was invaded three times—always through Ukraine. Russia does not need Ukraine to be a formal part of a union. Still, like Belarus, Russia does need a Ukraine that is not politically and economically in a formal alliance with Western Europe. 

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton promised Russia (Yeltsin) that NATO would not move east—not incorporate countries of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania), Russia’s second-layer buffer beyond Ukraine and Belarus. Yet a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this is precisely what happened (the Baltic nations—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—hard up against the Russian border, are now also NATO nations).

Some might object that, with or without Ukraine, Europe has no intention of invading Russia. That is true now, but what about fifty years from now? From a strategic military viewpoint, a country with Russia’s geographic vulnerability (shorn of an eastward-oriented Ukraine) cannot ignore this calculation. That is the threat Ukraine’s decisive turn towards the West poses for Russia. Does this excuse Russia’s present invasion? No, but Žižek does miss this point.

Žižek must feel like he’s been banging his head against a wall for decades. I’m not a big fan of his psychiatric (Lacanian) and metaphysical turns of phrase—the ‘Other,’ the ‘Real,’ ‘surplus pleasure,’ and so on. Such things might belong to relations between individuals, but they are, at best, metaphors when applied to geopolitics. Metaphor or not, they are in Žižek’s blood. In this little book, Žižek’s grasp of the world’s desperate plight reflects—it seems to me—a personal resignation. In his earlier books, he exhibits hope that things can get better. I sense little hope here.

Review: The Gutenberg Parentheses

Amazon link: The Gutenberg Parentheses by Jeff Jarvis, 2023

This book is a history of mechanical printing from the original Gutenberg invention in 1450 through all the various forms of printing and the institutions to which it gave rise — mass market books, newspapers, pamphlets (political, religious, and otherwise), business forms, not to mention more—if not entirely—standardized written languages, and so on. All of this took time. We became fully emersed in the parentheses when print entirely supplanted scribes—by around 1550—the first institution to be wiped out by the new technology. 

In Mr. Jarvis’ opinion, we are now leaving Gutenberg behind. The parentheses are closing. Why? What has changed? Two things. First, what characterized the Gutenberg era was that word impressions were transferred to paper using ink in one way or another. Second, while there came to be many printers, not everybody could become a printer, and eventually, most (never all) printing became consolidated behind large corporate entities that ultimately controlled content.  Even where electronics became part of the process (sending photos and text stories by telephone, telegraph, and so on), at the end of the line, again, ink met paper. Mr. Jarvis claims that with the invention of the Web (1992-4), we entered a new era in which communication, text or otherwise, is no longer conveyed by ink on paper. Also, everyone (those with Internet connections) can be a producer in the new era. The mass conveyance of authorial output is no longer dependent on controlling institutions like publishers. 

The author believes and advances the argument that the internet age is already eroding what went before (newspapers are being wiped out, for example) while new, emerging institutions—NextDooor?—are beginning to replace it. The reason for replacement is not the same. Printing was much faster than scribes. Except for the loss of some artistic merit to transcribing by hand, Print’s efficiency was what mattered. In the Internet age, newspapers are being wiped out not because the Internet is more efficient but because advertising—which did not exist until 150 years after Gutenberg—has moved over to the Internet, depriving the papers of the income needed to print.

Jarvis believes we are roughly where Guttenberg was thirty years after his invention. He fails to account for technology’s accelerated timelines. We are more like 100 or even 150 years on compared to Gutenberg. That still leaves a long way to go. The institutions that printing spawned did not fully emerge until some 400 years after Gutenberg. New institutions will undoubtedly emerge from the Internet. Some have already been tried and found wanting. The hypertext novel doesn’t work because it is too distracting. The Internet suffers from a problem inverse to the limitations of print: trading limited access to publishing technology for such easy access that the sheer number of voices drowns any one of them out.

Surely, Jarvis is right that there is still more change to come, and we cannot anticipate its details. Printing wiped out the scribe. The Internet will not wipe out the printing business, though it will (and has already) skewed its economics. Ebooks on backlit devices tire the eye faster than paper and ink. Kindles are exceptions, but they also require electricity. Jarvis thinks (implicitly) that electricity will be around forever. Pages printed on cotton rag paper can be read for hundreds (and more) of years. Even quality (wood-based) “acid paper” (not newsprint) will last one hundred years or more. If electricity disappears with modern civilization’s climatological, ecological, and economic unraveling, the Internet and everything written upon it will disappear. More than half of what has been written on the net since 1994 is already gone forever. Technology will not be of much help. Bits can be “permanently” stored on tape or other technologies for ten or even a hundred years. There will soon be “glass storage” technologies that will hold terabytes of data for thousands of years on something about the size of a credit card. Still, access will require electricity (not to mention other advanced technology). Contrastingly, printing the old mechanical way (a la Gutenberg) requires no electricity and only fifteenth-century technology.

Jarvis’ book is a well-written history of printing, often reminding us that books were and are only a part—relatively small—of printing’s products. He is also undoubtedly right that the net will engender new institutions even if it doesn’t entirely eclipse the old, as Gutenberg’s invention did the scribes. Alas, that evolution depends on sustaining our present, highly technological (and for many reasons unsustainable) civilization long enough to serve that gestation.

Review: The Glamor of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark

Amazon link to The Glamor of Grammar

I write this little review for the sake of my #writer friends on X (formerly Twitter) and because it was a nice book pointing to many helpful writing notions. There are a lot of chapters, but they are all brief. The author’s aim seems to be a general overview of the writing forest, beginning with its soil and nutrients (letters and words), progressing to its more significant structures, tree types, and forest ecology (sentences, paragraphs, dialog, metaphor, and theme). How do you like my forest metaphor?

Clark literally begins with the letters A, B, C, etc. In particular, how some letters have come to function in English. He moves to words: simple words, more complex words, some history, and some observations of their impact, hard, soft, ambivalent, etc. He admonishes writers to watch their spelling. From words, we move to punctuation and sentences. Punctuation books are mostly dull, but not this one. Clark taught me nuances in using commas versus semi-colons or M-dash versus parentheses, which I hadn’t considered before. It turns out that setting off an independent clause is not the only possibility for the lowly semi-colon!

Sentences and paragraphs are the center of the business. Many forms serve particular purposes… Chains of short words are dramatic and hurried. Longer words strung together suggest slower moods. He addresses consistent usage of active and passive voice, present and past tense, uses and abuses of alliteration, and a little about authorial point of view. I like his attitude. Rules are general principles of good usage, but when you show that you know them, you can break them when there is a literary purpose for the exception.

Finally, moving from the soil to the treetops, he looks at the forest from the sky and comments on thematic consistency, metaphor, and the application of all that has gone before to a thread that ties the writing together. 

There are a lot of chapters, but as noted above, they are all short, two or three pages. All of Clark’s many subjects are presented on a high level. There are interesting acorns—using my forest metaphor to tie my theme together—everywhere. Whether a writer or an inveterate reader, this little book has insights to be found.

Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways: 

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do. 

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working. 

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms! 

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point. 

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!

Book Review: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, 2019 on Amazon

This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.

Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else. 

But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.

But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!

The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.

What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind. 

What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.

My Fiction

As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.

Foreign Agent. 2021

Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. 2022

Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.

Cult of Aten. 2023

Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

LoveMe Inc. 2024

My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!

The Out of Town Buyer (Kindle only)

The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”

The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.

Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.

***

Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.

Review: End Times by Peter Turchin

This is a book about a socio-economic bubble. Like economic bubbles, when they pop, political, financial, and social chaos can ensue. Unlike economic bubbles, which always seem to grow larger than common sense should allow but from which nations usually recover, this bubble often, though not always, results in the collapse of the country or civilization involved. I have briefly covered Turchin’s theory in my Amazon review (attached below).

There are ten “planetary boundaries” which, if crossed—and we have crossed six or seven—will certainly doom our present industrial civilization and possibly human life. Briefly, the ten are:

Ocean acidification — Even now impacting our food chain.

Ocean and freshwater deoxygenation — Occurring at an alarming rate planet-wide.

Atmospheric aerosol loading — particles (smoke from forest fires, anyone?) pumped into the atmosphere. Many sources.

Biochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus) — from farming and other sources. One cause of deoxygenation in bodies of water.

Stratospheric ozone depletion — we beat this one. Now it’s back.

Biosphere integrity – biodiversity loss – collapse of the food chain — already underway.

Fresh water resource stress and loss — Whole nations—India, for example—are running out of water. 

Deforestation and other land-use problems contribute to the collapse of the biosphere.

Novel entities – Land and water pollution — heavy metals, plastics, non-biological wastes. 

Climate change — the big kahuna! Impinges on all of the above.

See this link for more details on these.

What do these ten items have to do with Dr. Turchin’s socio-economic theory? Among other things, Dr. Turchin tells us that external factors like hostile nations, wars, and stresses like the ten listed above—all having economic implications—act to make collapse triggered by the socio-economic cycle he describes more likely.

According to Dr. Turchin, the United States came close to a collapse into populist autocracy following the Depression of 1929 thanks to the same dynamics—stagnant wages leading to the immiseration of the working class, a gigantic wealth gap, and the overproduction of elites. Franklin Roosevelt’s election and policies—taxing the rich and using the money to build real public assets—pulled us back from the brink. Ironically, World War II gave his policies an unexpected lift, and the good they did helped the nation coast through mostly good economic times for over thirty years following the war. 

But things began to turn downwards again in the mid-1970s. Working-class wages stagnated, and taxes on the rich were reduced to the extent that overproduction of the elite class and an enormous wealth gap were inevitable. In Roosevelt’s time, the American Congress was not as fully captured by the monied elites as it is today, and perhaps even more significantly, planetary physical systems had not crossed any of the ten planetary boundaries listed above.

In the 1910s, there was, in fact, an interconnected, globalized world, albeit with a lower bandwidth than in our present. An Englishman in Bristol could pick up a telephone and order cigars from India with a reasonable expectation of delivery—though not in two days. World War I put an end to that early version of globalization. Since World War II, it has reassembled itself, this time at a far more frenetic and energy-intensive pace. 

There was a crisis of asset prices in the 2007-10 financial meltdown that might have ended us. In the U.S., Obama’s policies ended it, but not like Roosevelt! Roosevelt took money from the rich and built tangible assets—dams, electric grids, highways, etc. Obama didn’t touch the rich, but re-inflated asset prices (mostly homes and the stock market) on internationally borrowed money. See “Ages of American Capitalism” by Johnathan Levy for more. Rather than correcting the excesses, Obama increased them by making room, in Turchin’s terms, for more elite overproduction.

The Trump presidency made matters worse by increasing U.S. debt to over one hundred percent of our gross national product for the first time. The COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the Biden administration to do more borrowing, was—and still is—another stress bearing on Truchin’s thesis. Today, the U.S. is embroiled in two wars (Ukraine and the Middle East), a quasi-war with China, and trying to deal with ever-ballooning bills for weather-related disaster relief. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the election of Donald Trump in 2024 could be the spark that brings to its end four hundred years of “Western civilization” since the Enlightenment. If I read Turchin and the world situation correctly (have I ever? We shall see), and as I’ve said for years now, this time civilization, such as it is, and sooner rather than later, doomed.   

End Times by Peter Turchin 2023

A well-written, high-level analysis of why societies—throughout history—cycle between growth and strength and then weakness and [potential] collapse. Often, the heights and depths to which these cyclic ends go are determined by factors like climate, geopolitical environment, institutional resilience, and the character of individual leaders. But the cycles themselves are the result of an impersonal and shifting movement of wealth within any given society, and this seems to be true of every culture the author could study going back to ancient Rome, China, Europe, and the U.S., from roughly 1600 to today is the focus.

Turchin calls his method Cliodynamics (‘clio’ ancient Greek for history). It involves the collection and cataloging of vast troves of historical data and systematic analysis of that collection using models tuned by taking the data of social growth and decay (for example, from 1500 through 1850) and then running the models through to the present to see how well they predict what we already know to have happened.

Three short appendices describe the process in non-mathematical terms. The bulk of the book, its first half, reviews the results of the cliodynamic investigation for our present time. The short of it is that we—the U.S. (Turchin’s main focus) and much of the world—are at a cliff’s edge, and the cliff is unstable and about to crumble, hence the book’s title.

There is the immiseration of the larger—laboring or unemployed—population. This means that wages are falling in real terms from decade to decade. Salaries do not cover the cost of living, often with two working adults in the household. At the other end of the economic pyramid are the economic elite, in today’s terms, the billionaires. Because they control so much of the total capital, they can dictate the economics of the laboring class. Government labor policy is heavily influenced, even outrightly purchased, by their money. To the extent that it controls coercive power, the government itself is a facet of the elite. In between the immiserated and the elite is an educated (in the technical sense) technocratic class and a group (call them the entrepreneurs), even better educated, who aspire to become elites.

Instability arises because there is room economically for only so many elites. Eventually, so much wealth concentrates in elite hands that the immiserated starve, depriving the elites of even low-cost labor. This isn’t good for anyone, so more frequently, some of the elite aspirants become counter-elites. They become the opposition, populists, and revolutionaries. They have the organizational and political skills to utilize starving labor as muscle in the business of overthrowing the system and establishing themselves as the new elite class.

Every culture and every time will vary in detail. How the revolution fares depends on the coordination of the masses, the unity of the elites in response to the challenge, and factors external to all. In the 1920s- 30s (U.S.), the then government was strong enough to force the elites to reduce their numbers (via taxes) and pay to alleviate the impoverishment of the laboring class. From the 1940s through the 1970s, wages grew in real terms. There were fewer of the truly impoverished. A large middle class arose.

So what happened? The middle class invested in the education of its children, resulting in an explosion of elite aspirants! At first, there was room at the top. There was money to be wrung out of the labor pool. Eventually, labor was immiserated again, and the elite ranks became overcrowded. New counter-elites arise, and the cycle begins again.

This is the oscillation Turchin describes. His version is more nuanced and sprinkled with historical examples that mark the various cyclic turnings. I hope I am not being unfair to Turchin. I’ve read and reviewed six or eight books on the theme of why nations fail, or why a particular nation failed, or the present day’s economic predicament, or the roots of Trumpist populism in America, and so on. End Times is consistent with all of them and gives the reader a bird’s eye view of a larger process rooted in economics and human psychology—humans are greedy. They want what is best for their families and class (though, to be sure, sometimes they do not understand what that comes out to in the short term). That leads to an inherently unstable competitive dynamic because the point at which the elite class becomes numerically saturated and the point at which that fact is recognized can be a generation apart.

As I noted above, the details and time frame vary considerably from place to place and age to age. Much depends on factors in both the internal and external environment of the society under study. Turchin gets into all of this, the what, how, and why of the process. An excellent read for anyone interested in the cycles of history and power politics.