Tag: books

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!

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.