1984 plus fifty - how very apt!

 kw: book reviews, novels, warfare, cyber warfare, world war 4, chinese-american relations

I grew up in the shadow of Communism. Our big fear was the USSR, but even in the 1950's some wiser ones foretold that the bigger danger would eventually be from China. I have many, many church friends from both sides of the Strait of Formosa, and that is the view of them all. I remember the "liberalization" in China after Mao's death in 1976. I remember wondering how long it would last, because Deng was getting old already. Sure enough, in my estimation, each Chinese leader to follow Deng has been worse than the prior one, and Xi is poised to do more damage to the human race than Mao did.

The timeline of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, is set just over a dozen years in the future, so perhaps the authors expect a future Chairman to arise who will outdo even Xi, who will be 80 in 2034, should he live so long. The authors do mention Putin, the Russian President, who will be 82; he plays a part in a side drama.

The premise of the novel is simple: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which already (2021) has the world's largest navy, plus formidable cyber warfare capabilities, will think itself invincible, particularly once the US is found to have a weak President ("…whose greatest weakness is her fear of being perceived as weak."). The weakness of Biden does not bode well…

If I were to go into my reactions and learnings from 2034, I'd have to drop spoilers right and left. Maybe the authors would be OK with that, but I think it better to say that the scenarios of the novel are plausible, and fit right into what I have learned about China and the CCP from friends and acquaintances. I find it very unsettling. The Chinese tactics described rely on their cyber warfare capabilities. All that is keeping events like those in the book from happening right now are that the CCP's cyber warfare and cyber silencing techniques aren't yet quite up to snuff. I don't think it will take a dozen years for that gap to be filled.

A Chinese (not Taiwanese) friend told me recently about the Chinese GPS system, called BeiDou; the CCP will not permit the use of the "Western" GPS system in China. I replied, "It would behoove our military to get a bunch of BeiDou equipment, then, in case their first act of war is to silence GPS!" Needless to say, the NSA would need to take a whack at making sure there aren't any "surprises" buried in BeiDou software. I know of a couple of areas for which my GPS navigator is consistently in error by one mile. I presume it is for a military reason. It is a mistake to make cruise missiles and armed drones, let alone bombers and fighter jets, dependent on GPS.

I can surmise a few reasons for the authors picking 2034 as the year it all begins. For one thing, although Xi and Putin could still be in power, all the senior leadership of both American parties, including Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, and Schumer, will almost surely have died by then. That frees the authors from accounting for the personalities of any of these folks, and of the Clintons, whose last gasp may not yet have been heard. But I think the reason for settling on 2034 in particular, rather than 2040 or even 2027, is that 2034 is fifty years after 1984, and I think it is the right choice; I favor the mantle of George Orwell falling upon their shoulders. My bottom line:

Who is really at sea, the character or the reader?

kw: book reviews, fiction, novels, animals, shipwrecks, mysticism

A friend gave me a paperback copy of Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This may be the most difficult book to review that I've encountered. It is described by the author in his introduction as a story to "make you believe in God." I would say, for anyone who thinks belief in God is a possible thing, it will make that possibility inevitable, and for anyone who thinks belief in God is either impossible or wrong, it will confirm that impossibility.

Near the end of the Revelation given to John, the last book in the New Testament, the angel's final words to John are:

Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy. (Rev 22:10b-11, NIV)

Earlier in the vision another angel had said, "There will be no more delay" (10:6), which the King James Version renders, "There will be time no longer." Together these passages show that once the end times truly arrive, it is too late to repent. Of course, the vile and the wrongdoers believe in neither end times nor in repentance.

Young Pi, the nickname for Piscine (French for swimming pool), leaves nothing to chance. Having an open heart and a keen desire to know God, he has accepted and diligently practices Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. During the major section of the book, which tells the story of his nine months at sea in a lifeboat in the company of a tiger, Pi credits his triple faith for his survival.

The core idea of the story is ambiguity, even irrationality. But "irrational" has two meanings. As a schoolboy, Piscine Molitor Patel, tired of hearing his name mispronounced as "pissing", begins a new school year by insisting that he is to be called Pi, writing on the blackboard of every classroom, "Pi ≈ 3.14". Pi (shown in formulas as π) is the most irrational of the so-called irrational numbers; they are those quantities that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers. In fact, π is the leading member of a special class of irrational numbers called "transcendental numbers", because they are not the result of any simple operations but themselves form the basis for operations: they are sources, not productions. They transcend algebra.

The first number proven to be irrational is the square root of 2, shown as √2. It is the first member of the other class of irrational numbers, the algebraic numbers. Algebraic and Transcendental: these are the two kinds of irrational numbers. And the other meaning of "irrational"? A sort of synonym, even an evil twin, of "illogical".

The transcendental numbers intrigue me. Though few are known, they seem to outnumber all other kinds of numbers. And so I recall Isaiah 45:15, "You are a God who has been hiding Himself." As metaphors, they are even more fascinating, because "transcendental" is a kind of good-angel twin of "divine". If in reading Life of Pi we believe his story throughout (at least, prior to the second half of Chapter 99), he becomes a kind of god to us. Or, at least, an avatar leading us to God. Mr. Pi Patel becomes transcendental. If, instead, we believe the second half of that chapter, seemingly fabricated on the spot to satisfy overly-rational shipping-disaster investigators, we fall from heaven to earth.

Perhaps this story cannot make absolutely everyone believe in God. But it makes a reader clear that the choice of heaven or hell is ours to make, and we will surely attain our choice.

Andre Norton (1912-2005)

kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, novels

Last week I read Echoes in Time, the sixth of seven "Time Traders" novels by Andre Norton—this one co-written with Sherwood Smith. Then today, while looking up the Andre Norton Bibliography website, I found this notice of her recent passing: Andre Norton (1912-2005) - SFWA News. She passed away May 17, 2005, age 93.

The seven Time Traders titles were written from 1950 to 2002. She knew how to return freshness to earlier ideas. Echoes in Time was released in 1999. I like Norton's handling of time travel, that one cannot self-loop. Rather, after spending a week in the past, one must return a week later than one's departure. This, and confining the story line to time trips over centuries rather than shorter intervals, avoids the paradoxes that many authors either fall afoul of, or must resort to a lot of "I had to do that, because it was already done in the future" to gloss over (Harry Potter's saving himself from Dementors via a time loop is a case in point).

The machinery that accomplishes time travel, and the spaceships, are products of alien technology, ultimately stolen from them. The notion that these "aliens" may be human descendants is brought up, and not quite solved in the novel. The short war between these (possible) aliens and others, including humans, is also shown to be a perfectly understandable response on the part of the owners of the technology to their theft.

Other ramifications, including the gene-twisting entity that makes other questions moot, I'll leave you to read for yourself.