乡村教师
Posted on July 27, 2010 at 9:56 pm by kyliu
Tags: bookreviews, chinese, scifi
Filed Under read | 2 Comments |
刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin) is one of the China’s best science fiction writers. 《乡村教师》(“The Rural Teacher”), written in 2000, is my first exposure to his work.
The story weaves between a dying elementary school teacher in one of China’s poorest, remotest provinces, and the aftermath of an interstellar war between the Carbon Federation and the Silicon Empire. I can’t say much more about it without giving away the whole plot, but it is one of those stories that moved me close to tears.
There’s a deep humanism and compassion in Liu’s work, which suffuses and gives meaning to the beauty and grandeur of his imagination. Under his pen, the life of a single teacher in rural China plays a part as wonder-inducing as a grand space opera spanning a billion stars. The story makes you want to cry and at the same time leap up in joy at the plain, patient, enduring grace of Chinese civilization and indeed, humanity as a whole.
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Songbirds End Up in European Bellies
Posted on July 24, 2010 at 1:59 am by kyliu
Tags: culture, hypocrisy, newyorker
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Europeans love to lecture the rest of the world, especially Asia, about how “barbaric” their eating habits are and how damaging such eating habits are for the environment.
Not sure where they get the moral superiority.
Jonathan Franzen chronicles the massacre of European songbirds to satisfy the appetites of Europeans in and around the Mediterranean, justified by the locals by tradition.
Of course, Franzen doesn’t address the elephant in the room. He finds it appalling that songbirds are killed by the millions as a delicacy by these particular Europeans, but I didn’t see much outrage about the massacre and torture of chickens by the billions to feed the other Europeans and the rest of the world. Is the life of one bird any less precious than that of another?
The greatest threat to the habitats and lives of wild animals, of course, remains our need to convert nature into the pastures, fields, and factories for industrial agriculture. The eating habits of “barbaric” Mediterranean Europeans and East Asians have killed far fewer animals and threaten the environment far less than the need to produce beef, pork, poultry and fish to feed the civilized world.
That is the real problem worth solving.
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The World Without Us
Posted on July 21, 2010 at 9:30 pm by kyliu
Tags: bookreviews
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Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us is a meditation on our effects upon the natural world — told through the conceit of a fantasy whereby our species is suddenly removed from the Earth. What happens next? Cities crumble, roads disintegrate. Within a few centuries the lush natural world will begin to efface traces of our existence, a testimony to life’s resilience. And yet, some troubling aspects of our time on Earth will remain: nuclear waste, poisonous chemicals, plastic products that are virtually immortal will linger long after we are gone to continue to assert our cancerous time here. It’s a fascinating book for anyone interested in how our technological progress has really impacted our world, and many of the insights are not obvious at all (e.g., rats and cockroaches may not be the ones to survive in a New York devoid of people, and our HVAC systems actually do quite a bit to keep buildings stable). The discussions about the way our ecosystems looked prior to industrialization are fascinating, and the sections on places like Chernobyl and the Korean DMZ, where human presence has been eliminated, are haunting.
The book appears to be well-researched (though some of the statistics claimed seem suspect, as is inevitable when we are dealing with speculations in the absence of hard data), and Weisman writes evocatively, and the result is a book that at its best approaches the grandeur and grace of Jared Diamond’s books. It is a difficult task in the world to
Unfortunately, Weisman’s book is marred in places by a lack of consideration (or an excess of condescension) for the population of the world’s developing countries. For example, at the conclusion of the book, he advocates a kind of global population control program to reduce our impact on Earth without explaining how resources in such a world would be shared. In a world where intellectual property laws are designed to extract wealth from the poor countries and transfer them to wealthy countries while borders keep the poor populations from freely migrating to wealthy countries, the only “advantage” that poor countries have is a large pool of cheap labor, which allows them to compete against vastly more productive machines in wealthy nations and raise their standard of living slowly. A global population control scheme will essentially age the populations of the developing nations before they become wealthy — as is happening in China right now due to a horrific population control policy — and keep them in a permanent state of weakness vis-a-vis the developed world and grant them access to a disproportionately small share of the world’s resources. Perhaps some would be fine with that. I am not among them. (One of the great ironies of the Chinese population control policy is that it quite likely provides a great deal of benefit to the West — and the planet as a whole — at incalculable and inexcusable cost to the Chinese themselves (that’s what you get with authoritarian states). And China is going to get no “credit” for this sacrifice.)
There are also some strange, gratuitous remarks against China that seem out of place. As one example out of many, during a discussion about the fall of the Maya, Weisman writes: “Population rises to insure enough food-producers. War itself often increases populationóas it did in the Aztec, Incan, and Chinese empiresóbecause rulers require cannon fodder.” Given that the context is Classical Mayan civilization, the reference to Aztec and Incan history may make some sense. But the use of the “Chinese empire” as the only non-ancient Americas polity in this context is odd and inexplicable. War leading to population increase in preparation for more war is a drama that has played out in countless other empires, both ancient and modern — the British, German, Soviet, and American empires among them. The “baby boomers,” after all, are the products of war. Why mention only China here?
One the whole, the book is quite good, but flawed.
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Dirimens Copulatio
Posted on July 17, 2010 at 12:57 am by kyliu
Tags: rhetoric
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Dirimens copulatio is a rhetorical figure whereby one takes a position, followed by a qualifying statement contrary to that position. E.g., “Steve Jobs has claimed that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone available, though he has also admitted that it is not perfect and has weaknesses.”
It’s related to the figure of in utrumque partes, in which one “argues both sides of an issue” to give the appearance of fairness and to anticipate the arguments of those who may disagree.
I probably do both a little too much.
Btw, I learned dirimens copulatio in, of all places, comments to the Red Sox blog at the Globe. Who says that blog comments are useless?
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Readercon 21
Posted on July 11, 2010 at 9:09 pm by kyliu
Tags: readercon, scifi, writing
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Went to Readercon 21 for the day — my first convention. I very much recommend the experience. Got to meet some editors and authors I’ve long admired, and without exception they were fantastic people. Picked up some great tips too. Really, if you haven’t been, make sure you go next year. The entrance fee is completely worth it.
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The Baseball Codes
Posted on July 11, 2010 at 8:54 pm by kyliu
Tags: baseball, bookreviews
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The title of The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime pretty much tells you what it’s about. If you are interested in the subject — as I am — this is a fascinating collection of anecdotes about the history of the Code. If you are not, then this is going to bore you to tears. But you already know that.
One thing that I got out of this book — unexpectedly — is a further confirmation of my belief that the “steroid scandal” is no scandal at all. “Cheating” to get an edge has been a part of baseball for as long as people have played it: corked bats and thumbtacks in pitcher’s gloves were as much cheats as steroids, and players and fans have always tolerated them up to a certain point. The moralizing — by reporters and some fans — about steroids is as hypocritical and futile as it is unfair to the players. The minute people decided to catch a baseball with the aid of a glove and to run with the aid of spikes, there was already no principled line to stop the “enhancements” to our physical limits.
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Literomancer to Appear in F&SF in Sep/Oct 2010
Posted on July 10, 2010 at 12:14 pm by kyliu
Tags: f&sf, literomancer, writing
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“The Literomancer” will appear in the Sep/Oct Issue of F&SF.
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Another Sale
Posted on July 6, 2010 at 11:14 pm by kyliu
Tags: personal, scifi, writing
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Just sold another story to F&SF. So far I’m batting 0.286 for the year, which is like a V-Mart or Marco Scutaro, and that’s not bad at all. 
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What?
Posted on July 6, 2010 at 11:04 pm by kyliu
Tags: esther, pictureaday, pictures
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And that concludes the month-long picture a day experiment. I’ve enjoyed it, and hope you have too.
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Early Light
Posted on July 5, 2010 at 11:10 pm by kyliu
Tags: pictureaday, pictures
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