Sometimes I encounter a book that, upon its completion, makes me wonder: “Just why did this author feel the need to write this book?” I encountered just such a book this week. It is 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the classics of science fiction, a truly fine novel that is often obscured by the elephantine shadow cast by its companion film. The sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, was an excellent book, if not on the level of its predecessor. I don’t recall much about 2061: Odyssey Three, except that I wasn’t particularly impressed. 3001 gives the series some closure, which is Clarke’s biggest mistake. This is not a story that should have closure, at all.

The book opens with a comet-prospector finding a non-cometary object floating in a near-deepspace orbit. It turns out to be the body of astronaut Frank Poole, the co-pilot of the spaceship Discovery who was killed in the first book by the schizophrenic computer HAL-9000. Medical technology has advanced such that Poole is able to be revived, and the book then deals mostly with his assimilation into a society that is as far ahead of him as he was ahead of the people of the Dark Ages. The society that Clarke presents is really nothing new; it’s the standard Star Trek-style utopia in which religion has been left behind (and is even characterized as a form of psychosis), material needs are a thing of the past, et cetera. The most interesting thing in the book is Clarke’s construct of a gigantic artificial ring-system around the earth, but this strangely is left undeveloped. Clarke posits that people who live on the Rings cannot live long on Earth, and yet he never develops the hint that two entirely different societies would evolve from such a state. Do the Earthbound folks look on the Ring-people with suspicion? do the Ring-people look down — figuratively and literally — on the Earthbound? Clarke doesn’t indicate anything of the sort. His society here is conflictless, and thus not very interesting to read about. This is a pity.

The book’s most serious problems, though, come when Frank Poole journeys to the Galilean Moons (formerly of Jupiter, the gas-giant planet having been converted into a second sun late in 2010). Here he apparently means to make contact with his old friend, Dave Bowman, who along with HAL has become one with the monolith. Frank doesn’t seem to feel any emotions at all in this. Would he feel any anger toward HAL for killing him? would he feel concern for Dave’s plight? would he feel anything? Not really, if Clarke is to be believed. This was a lost opportunity. Perhaps it couldn’t be any other way; Clarke’s books and stories have never much been about emotion and feeling. But the lack of it here totally undermines his characters. They begin to feel like automatons in a plot.

The book’s climax arrives when it is discovered that the Monolith (the really big Monolith, the one on Europa, as opposed to its smaller twins on Earth and the Moon) may very well be on the verge of destroying humanity (the reasons for this involve time, distance, and the speed of light). Poole must play the vital role in defusing the threat of the Monolith in a way which is unfortunately reminiscent of the ending of Independence Day, a fact which Clarke bemoans in his Afterword. The whole threat lacks conviction, though, and instead it makes plain the book’s largest error: it explains the Monolith. What made 2001 so memorable is the fact that even at the end, after Dave Bowman has been reincarnated as the Star Child, we still don’t know what the Monolith is or who made it or why it has been left here or what its purpose at all is — we don’t even know if the Monolith is an alien artifact or an alien itself. It was this air of mystery, that sense of the cosmic unknown, that elevated 2001 to the level of a classic. Even 2010 left much of the mystery intact, even as it continued the story. But in 3001, Clarke tells us that the Monolith is a mindless automaton, and he even refers to its internal circuitry. We shouldn’t know that much about the Monolith. It ceases to be a constant pointer to the eternal reality that there will always be an unknown, and instead joins the ranks of things we’ve figured out. It has been said that the most critical aspect of the best science fiction is the intangible “sense of wonder”. 2001: A Space Odyssey had it in spades; 2010 had it but to a lesser extent; 2063 didn’t have a whole lot of it but was still a readable novel. 3001‘s biggest problem is simple: no wonder. Reading it makes me feel as if Samuel Beckett had written a second play, called Oh, There’s Godot.

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I was tinkering with my blog setup, and it occurred to me that my “current reading” section was inadequate. After all, how long could it take to read a tome on English history or a book of poetry? (In the latter case, quite a while. It’s a big book.) I realized that I was approaching some of those books differently than the others that I list there. Thus I arrived at my current metaphor: reading as a journey.

I like the idea of “companion books”. These are books that have a long-term place on the table beside my chair or on my desk, books into which I dip frequently and over a long period of time, be it a page or two or a chapter or two or a poem or two. These are different from what I now call “waypost books”, which are the books to which I actively devote more time at once — but are left behind when they are done. The waypost books yield an experience that is very different from that afforded by the companion books. All books need not be read in the same manner. A book may start out as a waypost book, but may reach the level of companion book; likewise, a companion book may become a waypost book if the journey leads in such a direction. Neither change is good nor bad; they are necessary events in the evolution of a reader and his/her relationship to the books.

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I’ve recently noticed a seasonal trend in my fiction reading. My genres of choice tend to be science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I’m likely to read horror any time of year, but as for the other two I tend to read fantasy in the fall and winter while turning toward science fiction in the spring and summer. Maybe there is something about fall and winter which lend themselves to the nature-type tropes that abound in fantasy; and maybe my summertime science fiction tendency is a holdover from my childhood, when each third summer was marked by the arrival of a Star Wars movie. I haven’t noticed any remarkable seasonal tendencies toward my nonfiction reading; my interests tend to be all over the map, and thus I tend to grab whatever looks interesting and jump in.

Anyhow, I finished a couple of books this weekend, one SF and one about baseball.

The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald is the first book in a series of space operas called Mageworlds. (For those unfamiliar with the various sub-genres in science fiction, “space opera” denotes those types of stories with larger-than-life heroes, staging that is galactic in scale, and generally concerned with the classic struggle of good versus evil. Star Wars is pure space opera, as is — in many of its episodes — Star Trek. The classic example of a space opera from the standpoint of literary SF is E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen Chronicles.) At first glance, Mageworlds appears to be a riff on Star Wars: scoundrels and space pirates abound, toting weapons called “blasters”; there is an order of warriors called “Adepts” (read: “Jedi”) who tap into the universe’s lide energy (read: “The Force”) and fight with specialized weapons (staffs, but in the Adept-fight scenes my mind kept substituting lightsabers).

The story involves a female space pilot, Beka Rosselin-Metadi (one of the most cumbersome names I’ve ever encountered in a novel), who is trying to make her way in the Universe despite the fact that her father is a prominent military officer and her mother some kind of Very Important Person. Beka’s life is changed forever when her mother is assassinated and her father presses her into finding those responsible, promising in exchange to give her his personal spaceship: the Warhammer, an apparently circular-shaped freighter that has been equipped with souped-up engines that make it the fastest hunk-of-junk in the Galaxy. (Yes, I kept picturing the Millennium Falcon.) As she pieces together the trail of the assassins, Beka assembles a motley crew of allies — her hulking brute of a brother, a kind-hearted medical technician whose skills extend greatly into non-medical areas, an Adept who suffers from a lack of self-confidence, and a mysterious elderly figure known only as “The Professor” (and whose voice sounded, in my reader’s imagination, a bit like Sir Alec Guinness).

The book is enjoyable as an action-romp, although the two main action set-pieces tend to ramble, and the characters are fairly interesting. The problem I had with the book was this: it feels like a rough draft for a longer work, with character motivations too often left unexplained and historical events constantly referred to but never explored. Just a day after finishing the book I couldn’t explain why Beka’s mother is killed even if I wanted to, and the “Mageworlds” named in the series title are never explained. We are told that a war with the Mageworlds has just ended, with the defeat of the Mages, and we gather that the Mages are a people to be greatly feared — but we never know why. Maybe this is all explained in subsequent novels in the series. I do plan to read them, but I’m not making that a high priority. I recommend The Price of the Stars as a quick, entertaining diversion.

The other book I read was Joe Morgan’s baseball volume Long Balls, No Strikes: What Baseball Must Do to Keep the Good Times Rolling. Joe Morgan has been my favorite baseball commentator for years (he generally provides the color commentary for games on ESPN, while Jon Miller provides play-by-play). This is because Morgan not only conveys his immense love of the game, but he also communicates his immense knowledge of it as well. I learned a great deal about the game by listening to Joe Morgan, and I learned some more by reading his book.

Baseball may be the most troubled of the four major professional sports in the United States. While only the NFL has avoided a labor-related work stoppage in the last decade (the last NFL strike was in 1987), baseball is the only sport to have actually forced the cancellation of its playoffs and championship due to a strike. It happened in 1994, when the owners and the players’ union collided mainly on the issue of a salary-cap, which the owners insist will restore financial sanity to the game and which the players reject as foolish and unfair. In the years following that strike, which forced then-acting Commissioner Bud Selig to cancel the World Series, baseball saw its attendence plummet and the sales of MLB-related merchandise suffer a related drop. Only in 1998 did baseball begin to show signs of recovery, and Morgan’s book outlines his thoughts on what baseball must do to build on the successes of that amazing season.

(A bit of recent baseball history is in order. In 1998, the New York Yankees won 115 games, nearly eclipsing the all-time record for regular season victories en route to their second World Championship in three years. David Wells pitched a perfect game. Cal Ripken Jr. ended his consecutive-games streak. And most memorably, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased each other into baseball immortality as both eclipsed Roger Maris’s 37-year-old record by hitting 70 and 66 home runs, respectively.)

Morgan’s suggestions for improving the game on the field are fascinating. He is wary of the current trend toward over-reliance on the home run, noting that where it once took a player more than one hundred stolen bases to lead the league in that category over a season, in recent years base-stealing has fallen off to where season leaders in SBs now post numbers like 65 or 70. He believes that restoring base-stealing as a key to offense will liven up the game, and it is hard to disagree with him. Morgan also advocates elevating the pitcher’s mound and requiring umpires to enforce the official strike zone, which would tilt the balance-of-power back toward hurlers.

Morgan also writes about improving the game’s financial problems, arguing convincingly for comprehensive revenue sharing. Baseball’s lack of revenue sharing, a staple in the other major sports leagues (and handled with particular brilliance by the NFL), is the largest reason why teams like the Yankees can compete every year by putting forth whatever payroll they need to win, while teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates can never hope to enter into bidding for players like Ken Griffey, Jr or Greg Maddux. Contrast that to the situation in the NFL: in 1992, the most coveted football free agent was defensive end Reggie White. He ended up signing with the Green Bay Packers, the NFL’s smallest market. That would be utterly impossible in Major League Baseball, where the richest teams can pay one player more than some teams pay all of their players combined. However, Morgan doesn’t let the small-market teams off the hook, pointing out instances where the teams have made very bad decisions — such as the Pirates’ signing a few years back of B J Surhoff, a decent but unremarkable player whose salary would have been better spent on young talent and prospects for a moribund farm system.

These are all good ideas, and Morgan writes them engagingly. The book’s last chapter, though, is both remarkable and depressing. It is the book’s longest chapter, and it deals with baseball’s problems with race. Minorities are almost never hired — or even interviewed — for front office positions in baseball today, and it is a travesty. Morgan writes with barely-contained outrage that white men who have no managerial experience in baseball have been made major-league managers in recent years, while Cito Gaston — who managed the Toronto Blue Jays to four division titles and two World Championships between 1989 and 1993 — has been relegated to once again “proving himself” as a hitting coach or wherever he is right now. And it isn’t just in the front office or managerial ranks that baseball’s quiet racism rears its head. The Arizona Diamondbacks, in their inaugural season, had Devon White — a black man — as their centerfielder. White is one of the finest fielders ever, and his presence in an expansion team’s outfield — plus his experience as a member of two World Series champions (the 1992 and 1993 Toronto Blue Jays) — should have been invaluable to a group of young players. But after their first year, the Diamondbacks refused White a contract, saying they couldn’t afford him. They then proceeded to sign as his replacement the white outfielder Steve Findley for twice the amount of money for which White had asked. I found that anecdote rather saddening. Morgan further sees baseball’s treatment of African-Americans in general as a reason why so few blacks are now entering baseball, instead turning toward football and basketball.

I enjoyed this book, and I wouldn’t mind hearing what Morgan has to say on these same topics now that more than three years have passed since that great season. He has a chapter where he compares the 1998 Yankees to the 1975 Cincinnati Reds (“The Big Red Machine”), and of course he finds in the Reds’ favor. (He played for them, after all!) But then he says something interesting: for the Yankees to be truly considered great, they would have to win not one championship but two in a row — because that is a much more remarkable feat. Well, Joe, the Yankees won not one more championship but two more, and they nearly won a third. So how do they match up to the Big Red Machine now?

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Just a reminder that I will be taking the next few days off from posting. I’m a firm believer in occasionally recharging the batteries, and the time seems right. I will post again either Sunday or Monday.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Detail from Tuesday, by David Wiesner.

David Wiesner won the Caldecott Medal for this book in 1992. What is so interesting about his books isn’t merely the stunning artwork, but the fact that Wiesner tells inventive, whimsical stories that are full of fantasy and charm without using any words at all. His work is visual storytelling in the purest sense of the word, and his clean pictures — with their sense of motion, as well as their simultaneous realism and fantastic qualities — make plain the events that are transpiring. He even conveys a sense of character, no mean feat for a person not using words to tell his stories. He is one of the finest authors of children’s books today.

(The picture links to Wiesner’s official website.)

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My current screensaver is the SETI@Home program, which uses those ununsed CPU cycles — the ones that would otherwise be drawing pictures of pipes or scrolling marquees or a Star Trek-like scrolling starfield — to process data collected by radio telescope, in hopes of identifying possible signals from alien civilizations. I am a big fan of the SETI project, and I am thrilled to have this opportunity to help.

This kind of “distributed computing” project is not unique. There are many such projects out there, harnessing computer time donated by regular people to process data. Using a single computer to process these data would require a machine of enormous computing power, and many of these peojects do not have the funding to secure sufficient time on, say, a Cray mainframe or a Big Blue machine to do the work. Thus, they break it up into small chunks and farm it out to people with smaller machines like the Hewlett-Packard with 1.3 GHz Athlon processor sitting on my desk. It’s a wonderfully fun way to participate in a cause in which I believe strongly.

SETI@Home may be the most famous distributed computing project, but it is by no means the only one. If looking for LGM’s isn’t your speed, you may find a more interesting project here.

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Did you know that the scene in Star Wars Episode II where Obi Wan eludes Jango Fett’s ship in the midst of a dense asteroid field is scientifically impossible?

If you’re in the mood to scientifically nitpick Star Wars Episode II or a number of other SF films and TV shows, check out Bad Astronomy. This site is fun (the author loves his subject, but doesn’t take himself too seriously) and informative. Check it out.

(That scene is impossible because in a planetary ring system the “asteroids” would have long-since ground each other to dust particles.)

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Last week I wrote about Buffalo wings. I should note the other great Buffalo delicacy: Beef on Weck.

At first glance, this is a roast-beef sandwich. However, the meet is generally sliced a bit thicker than what you’ll find on the sandwiches at Arby’s. It is also kept sitting in its own juices until the sandwich is made, when it is piled high on a Kummelweck roll (hence the “Weck”). A Kummelweck roll is a hard, Kaiser-style roll which has also been topped with caraway seeds and pretzel salt toward the end of baking. Then, the thing is slathered in fresh horseradish (again, the real thing, not that “Horsey sauce” from Arby’s) and devoured — preferably with a very cold beer.

I’m not sure how these compare, healthwise, with Buffalo-style chicken wings. There is no deep-frying involved, but the Weck rolls are very salty, and these sandwiches are generally stuffed very generously with meat. But the plus side is that the proper amount of horseradish will keep one’s nasal passages wide open while eating the thing.

(An addendum to the earlier article on wings: True Buffalo-style chicken wings are NEVER breaded. Hooter’s can call their wings Buffalo wings until the End of Time, but the breading means that they are NOT Buffalo wings.)

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This article from The Buffalo News today reports that the City of Buffalo has been named the 9th best destination for the arts in the United States by American Style Magazine. The top ten, by ranking, are:

1. New York City

2. Santa Fe/Taos, NM

3. San Francisco/Berkeley

4. Pittsburgh

5. Chicago

6. Seattle

7. Washington, DC

8. Boston

9. Buffalo

10. Philadelphia

Buffalo’s appearance on a list like this will come as no surprise to people familiar to the area, with its vibrant arts community that includes such facilities as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, and events like the annual Allentown Arts Festival. It’s somewhat amazing to think that Buffalo, a city that has been experiencing economic hardships for nearly two decades and that is known nationwide for its weather and its football team’s failure to win a Super Bowl, could nevertheless be a better arts destination than such cities as Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis, or Atlanta. And this recognition appears to be based mainly on the visual arts; Buffalo’s performing arts scene is also fairly healthy: the Shea’s Performing Arts Center has in the last few years been renovated and its stage expanded so as to be able to meet the demands of today’s blockbuster touring productions (Phantom of the Opera, for example). The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, under the leadership of music director JoAnn Falletta, has in recent years overcome the kind of financial hardships that have plagued many of the nation’s major orchestras (including such powerhouses as the Chicago and St. Louis Symphonies); the orchestra has even begun recording (for the Naxos label) and has had several concerts broadcast nationally on public radio. Add to all this artistic variety and life the fact that Buffalo is home to a large number of buildings that are considered to be architectural masterpieces, and one must conclude that the arts are what Buffalo does best, and that the arts are the key to Buffalo’s future now that the days of the Erie Canal and the steel mills are over.

Sadly, the powers-that-be in Buffalo have apparently drawn a different conclusion. Budgetary mishaps of staggering proportion — for example, the recent admission by City Controller Anthony Nanula that he is unable to account for the city’s recent budget shortfall — and the failure of the State of New York to ride to Buffalo’s rescue (it seems that some other uses for the state’s money cropped up unexpectedly, right around September 11) led to the elimination of all arts funding by the City. Of course, the City government managed to come up with a large set of incentives in order to keep a single K-MART location open after that company recently announced plans to close four local stores following its declaration of bankruptcy. Of course, the City and State governments rolled out the red carpets for Adelphia Cable to build a new office building downtown, insisting that this would create upwards of 1000 new jobs in the city. That project is now in serious jeopardy in the wake of Adelphia’s “Enron”-style meltdown which also seems to be leading toward bankruptcy. And of course, the City and State are lurching toward casino gambling as the latest bit of ambrosia that will bring Buffalo back to life.

I remember exactly one thing that the guest speaker at my high school graduation said: “Figure out what it is that you do best, and then do it better than anybody else.” It seems to me that Buffalo has just been told what it does best, and that except for a few exceptions Buffalo does it better than anybody else. Maybe Buffalo’s leaders might realize it too.

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I’ve chaged my Archive frequency to monthly instead of weekly, now that I’ve generated enough material that the long roster of archive weeks at left to look cluttered.

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