An open letter to all science-fiction/fantasy authors

This morning, I strolled down to the coffeeshop to relax and read a book by an author I’ve always enjoyed (it’s Spring Break, I get to do that!) I started on this book I’d checked out from the library, and it was…a novel about a multiverse.

I hate multiverse stories. All of them. I want you all to stop writing these lazy, incoherent, chaotic exercises in the dismissal of any logical causality.

It’s not that I have any say in the matter, you can go ahead and write whatever you want, but jesus, this crutch to remove any element of rational causality, to allow you to just magically allow anything to happen, leaves me cold. And annoyed. And disappointed. I don’t get that many mornings where I can just sit down with a book and a cup of coffee and unwind.

Look, I don’t expect rigid realism. I’ll read a book about a supernatural killer clown haunting the sewers, or about an interstellar diplomatic mission, and it’s fine. I can suspend disbelief, no problem, as long as I can see consequences playing out and conflicts resolved within the frame of the premises. When suddenly the author has carte blanche to rewind all events and schlep in a character from an “alternate universe” to turn the plot around and go off in crazy directions, I don’t care anymore.

It’s also that they never present the implications appropriately — it’s always about a small handful of people in a crisis, and they invoke A WHOLE COMPLETE VAST ALTERNATE UNIVERSE to save Uncle Billy from a couple of monsters. I hate it. Spare me. Try to find a small flyswatter in your plot to do what needs to be done, rather than relying on a cosmic intergalactic nuke to rescue your little corner of a story.

I’m not saying what book ruined my morning, because usually this author is reliably entertaining.

Libraries rule, Amazon drools

I took a break and visited my local coffee shop for the first time in a few weeks, and I sat down with a cup and thought I’d read for a bit. I had my tablet with me, and I figured I could grab some quick, free reading from Kindle Unlimited, and I slurped in a sci-fi novel. I wasn’t making a big commitment to something complex, just an hour of light reading, and I figured anything would do.

To paraphrase part of the opening scene in this “book,” in which our intrepid hero has crashed on an alien world…

Fortunately, days on this planet were exactly 24 hours, just like Earth days, but unfortunately, hours were 100 minutes long.

Aaiieeee. My brains curdled in my skull. If I had a soul, it would have withered at this taste of Hell. I closed that sucker up and just finished my coffee while glaring at the wall.

This is a problem with Amazon. They have this program to pay “authors” for generating content for Kindle, but there is absolutely no quality control. There are people churning out multiple schlocky novels a week and dumping them on Kindle, creating a swirling cesspool of terrible writing, and the bad content is overwhelming the work of any sincere authors who are trying to get published, somehow. I’m not going to bother with Kindle Unlimited anymore.

I do have a better alternative. In my region, the Viking Library System provides e-book services through an app called Libby, and I can get good books at home or at the coffeeshop. Availability is significantly more limited that what Amazon offers, but I’m learning that drowning in dreck is not better than having to wait for a book I’ll appreciate to become available.

Also, did you know that public libraries positively impact community health and well-being? Take advantage of them before the Republicans close them all.

Bad books

Here’s a short blurb promoting a podcast, If Books Could Kill.

If Books Could Kill focuses mostly on the impact many of these books had on society, and through multiple episodes has broadened their scope to examine how the authors of these books are impacting society in many negative ways. Although it always feels good to hear a bad book eviscerated — there’s a reason we all read the 1-star reviews of our most hated books on Goodreads, right? — hearing the motivations behind these self-help superstars is enough to make you raise your eyebrows. IBCK covers the exploits of Robert Kiyosaki and his years-long real estate grifts, the cringeworthy gender essentialism behind John Gray’s Men Are From Mars series, or the head-scratching evolution of conservative politics after reading William Frank Buckley, Jr.’s 1951 book, God and Man At Yale. And as a listener and a skeptic of self-help generally, it feels so good to understand why exactly these books are so obnoxious.

I remember John Gray from my college years — we had a copy of that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus crap somewhere in the house, getting kicked around but never read. It looked terrible. I wouldn’t be caught dead reading Buckley, and Kiyosaki is one of those investment gurus who endorsed Trump. These aren’t particularly interesting topics to me, but maybe they are to you.

Then it mentions a book by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve met that guy…didn’t like him, but would I be interested in reading his book? No, I don’t think so.

I was personally affected by one of these books. As a high school graduation gift I was given the bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, warning me against the “brainwashing” that I was sure to encounter in university. I read it — I make a note to read every book I am gifted, damn it, it’s the right thing to do — and there was something about it that didn’t feel like it was adding up to me. Surely, I thought, in the midst of all this fearfulness about how my generation is going soft, there had to be something more than punching down on student activists rightfully making their voices heard? To then encounter IBCK discussing exactly why the arguments of the book don’t hold up — such as how it misrepresents recent student protests — are vindicating.

But I was still curious, so I turned to the summary on Amazon. Uh-oh. It was worse than I thought.

Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen?

I’m not afraid to speak honestly, and I’m not walking on eggshells. I think some speakers should be shouted down, or better yet, not even invited on campus. These sound like fictitious problems. They sound like what right-wing Fox News viewers imagine is going on at college campuses. I read further, skeptically.

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Whoa, what kind of horseshit is this? Their three terrible ideas are not part of any standard educational curriculum I’ve ever encountered.

what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker: Nope. That’s nonsense. I do believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is false, but that doesn’t mean their inversion of the cliche is true. In what context is anyone teaching that terrible idea? I don’t know where a discussion of the merits or dangers of exposure to something that almost kills you would come up.

always trust your feelings: Oh hell no. Feelings are valid and feelings matter, but they are also treacherous things that you should be wary of. Test your feelings, maybe? Investigate them? Try to figure out the source of your feelings? This is another Great Untruth that no one is teaching.

life is a battle between good people and evil people: Amazing. You know how every conservative accusation is actually projection? I thought us liberal wimps were all talking about shades of gray and rainbows and rejecting that black-and-white dichotomy. But now Lukianoff and Haidt are saying we explicitly teach it? Madness.

This is just confirming my opinion of Haidt — he’s railing against imaginary dangers. I guess that’s one tactic for drumming up sales.

Reading history will make you aware of the wall you’re about to hit

I’ve been reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin in the evening, when my mushy brain allows me to focus for a bit. It’s good, but weirdly on-the-nose for someone living in America in the 2020s.

A quick summary: William Dodd, an ordinary history professor, gets selected to serve as the American ambassador to Germany in 1933, largely because the usual gang of civil servants all said “Holy shit, no, Hitler is coming to power and that dude is nuts.” He agrees to it because he thinks he’ll be freed up from his many university duties to write his magnum opus, a multi-volume history of the Old South, which, spoiler alert, he’s never going to finish. I sympathize a bit — escaping committee work and teaching for a few years, to host an occasional social whirl among the wealthy people of Europe? Sounds tempting. Except for the “Oh, right, Hitler” part.

So he gets there and steps right into the back-biting internal politics of the diplomatic corps. He’s a middle-class, fairly conservative but politically liberal fellow, plunged into a social scene ruled on the American side by an axis of privileged, filthy rich Harvard/Princeton/Yale alumni who love indolence and the perks of their offices; they’re all maneuvering behind his back to undercut his austerity initiatives, and seem to spend more time defending their right to send lengthy telegrams across the Atlantic while partying to all hours and getting up at 10am than in dealing with the crisis at hand. Dodd is being undermined, while at the same time he’s acquiring a reputation as the Cassandra of American diplomacy, because he’s horrified by the Nazis.

Many of his peers are busy with propping up policies of appeasement — they don’t want their gravy train tipped over. They know Hitler is a jumped-up nobody, and they keep predicting that the sensible German people and their well-established representatives will eventually set the lunatic aside, nobody could possibly let him run roughshod over such a civilized nation. He’s a flash in the pan. Cooler heads will prevail.

Unfortunately, for those who know a little history, in 1934 the Night of Long Knives happens. Dodd, as a diplomat, knew everyone involved — Röhm, the leader of the brown shirts, lived just around the corner from the embassy. Himmler and Göring were familiar social acquaintances; his daughter, Martha Dodd, was sleeping with Rudolf Diels, commander of the Gestapo (she seems to have jumped into bed with any prominent Nazi she could find, and also with Russian NKVD agents — she was a liberal modern woman. She initially admires the Nazis, eventually becoming disillusioned and transferring her adoration to Russian communists. She was also a naive woman.) It’s stunning how much horrible history was happening right there in this corner of Berlin, in these few years of history.

From there, it descends into a seemingly inevitable spiral of chaos, and we know how that ended up. Dodd is eventually squeezed out and returns home to wander the lecture circuit, telling everyone how evil the Nazi regime was.

What most struck me, though, was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism. The Americans opposed Nazi policies of imprisoning and murdering Jews, for sure…but behind the scenes all the American civil servants are nodding and agreeing that yes, there is a “Jewish problem” and gosh, Jews sure have crept deviously into positions of influence, like Jews always do. These were the people of power and influence, all assuming that yes, Jews are undesirable, but it just won’t do to kill them outright like the Nazis were doing. Even Dodd was making these kinds of arguments, accepting the Nazi premise but only rejecting their methods.

Dodd’s wikipedia page makes this same observation.

Edward M. House, a veteran in Democratic Party circles since the Wilson administration, told Dodd that he should do what he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings,” but cautioned, “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” Dodd shared House’s views and wrote in his diary that “The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or talents entitled them to.” Based on this view of the proper role of Jews in society, he advised Hitler in March 1934 that Jewish influence should be restrained in Germany as it was in the United States. “I explained to him [Hitler],” wrote Dodd, “that where a question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as to not give great offense.” Hitler ignored Dodd’s advice and responded that “if they [the Jews] continue their activity we shall make a complete end of them in this country.”

This kind of mealy-mouthed defense is ubiquitous in the book. There are no heroes, only a few people who had glimmerings of the consequences of the bigotry that they also shared.

The author makes the point that maybe the Nazi catastrophe wasn’t inevitable at all, that what it required were people of integrity to point out that it was all built on lies and hatred, but when the people you depend on to stand for what is right are all Ivy League dickheads who don’t even recognize the humanity of the Jewish people, all responses will be ineffectual and actually enabling. I felt like the diplomatic corps prior to WWII was made of an army of Tucker Carlsons. No wonder Hitler got away with so much criminality early in his career!

The book did not fill me with confidence about the future. I see the same phenomenon going on around me right now: we have media that are constantly making the case that Jews, or Palestinians, or black people, or trans people, or <name your hated minority here> are less than fully human, that we can abridge their rights because they are lesser beings, and we are becoming inured to this kind of language. Nick Fuentes is not some amusing comedian, the Proud Boys are not a fraternal organization, Fox News is not just echoing the perspective of a simple demographic. These are all kinds of monstrous haters who are building a foundation for an unimaginably evil future.

You can try to pretend it can’t happen here…but it’s happening here.

Textbook Giveaway #3!

I’ve told you the way this works a few times now. Just leave a comment telling me which book you want and why, and I’ll choose someone to receive a free book. These are generally not easy to read popular books — these are reference texts, kind of on the dense and heavy side, but full of information.
Your choices this time are:
Fundamentals of Human Physiology, by Stuart Ira Fox. Yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’ve taught A&P. I hope I never have to again, so I can bear to part with this one. I’ve still got several others.
An Introduction to Biological Evolution, by Kenneth Kardong. This is a fairly slender paperbound text, a little on the light side for what I want when teaching evolution. It’s not bad, though.
Neuroscience, by Purves and others. Also pretty good, if not the massive magisterial monster text of Kandel. This one I think is already earmarked for someone who asked for a neuro text in Giveaway #2. (Trust me, you don’t want Kandel unless you need to press a witch to death.)
There are many more on my shelves. If you don’t get it this time, check again next month for a different selection.

This is as announced on my Patreon page, but you don’t need to sign up to win a book.

Do you hate dinosaurs?

Do you like thinking about their last days, when they were set on fire and hurled about by terrible storms, and the survivors then starved to death in a transformed world? Well, you’re in luck! Smithsonian has published an excerpt from Riley Black’s new book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, and you can read about an Edmontosaurus in the last moments before it got the surprise of its life!

If you’re not a brutal sadist, there’s also lots of good information for dinosaur-lovers, too, as most of us are.

Book Giveaway #2!

It’s the end of my semester, just one optional final to give and then I’m off to live with the spiders for a few months. Look at the photo! The UMM BioClub gave me a little succulent as a present!
Last week, I gave away a few old textbooks, and this is going to be a weekly tradition for a while. Today what I’m giving away* are:

  • Neurobiology, 3rd ed., by Shepherd. Another good text I’ve used in classes in the past. I’ve got a few of these general neuro texts that I can part with, since I’ve also got the monster tomes by Zigmond et al. and by Kandel et al., which have me covered for reference works.
  • Principles of Development, 4th ed., by Wolpert & Tickle. This has been my go-to text for developmental biology for years, but I’ve got the 6th edition, so this one is redundant.
  • Introduction to Cancer Biology, by Hesketh. I’ve used this in undergrad cancer biology courses because it is a lot more digestible than that dense volume of Weinberg’s standard biology of cancer text.

Last time, I also gave away evil, bad books, but this week I decided to be kind. If you want stupid books to laugh at, let me know and maybe I’ll include some in future giveaways.
So how do you get your hands on one of these? Easy, just ask, either here or on Patreon. You don’t need to be a patron to get one, I’ll just read the requests and pick those that seem worthy to me. If you don’t get what you want this time, I’ll be posting a selection every week. I’ve got to get these bookshelves cleaned up a bit!
*Evolving Darwin playset, Darwin bobblehead, box of Eppendorf pipette tips, or any of the miscellaneous other clutter on my desk not included.

And the winners are…

The first textbook giveaway is settled. I’ll be sending a few books away as soon as I have addresses to send them to.

Set A, Essential Cell Biology and the wretched Behe book, goes to logicalcat, the EMT with aspirations.

Set B, Essentials of Genetics with the atrocious Jeanson garbage, goes to Eric on Patreon, who wants to be more up to date on plant hybridization.

Set C, Neuroscience plus Meyer’s narcissistic tome, goes to Crip Dyke, who wants to supplement their knowledge of psychology.

Those will go in the mail as soon as they email me an address.

There are more books to go! I’ll post the next set tomorrow, so if you lost out, you’ve got another shot.

Textbook give-away!

As I announced yesterday, I’m clearing out the accumulated bookage of my office shelves and giving away free books on Patreon. Patreon has a few rules I have to follow, though:

  • I can’t bribe people to sign up for Patreon, which is fair enough, so it has to be open to anyone and everyone.
  • I can’t use chance to decide who gets the books, because then it would be a raffle. No gambling allowed!

So here’s my plan. I’m going to show you three pairs of books, each pair consisting of one lovely, useful, science-filled textbook, and one horrid, wretched, lying piece of garbage. You have to accept them as a set, although they’re yours at that point, and I can’t tell you what to do to them. I only ask that you don’t give away creationist trash to libraries or whatever; let’s keep those away from impressionable minds, OK? The good texts are still useful, they’re older editions or redundant copies, and not white elephants at all. The others? Just trash I want to get rid of.

The way this will work is that I’ll list 3 pairs, Set A, B, and C, and you can comment on Patreon and let me know which set you want. Say why! I’ll use your comment to judge who gets them this time. If you don’t get it, don’t panic! I have lots and lots of books, and plan to do this weekly.

I have to add one other pragmatic criterion: I’ll favor North American recipients, and will be sparing in sending them overseas, just to save myself some extravagant shipping costs. I won’t totally exclude you furriners, though — if you give me a really good reason, I’ll find a way.

Here are this week’s choices:

Set A: Essential Cell Biology, 4th edition, by Alberts and others. It’s a good basic cell & molecular textbook. I’ve got a couple of copies of the most recent edition, so I can spare this one. I’ve paired it with one of Michael Behe’s, The Edge of Evolution. I’ll never read that book again, it was a waste of time the first time, but maybe you can a use for it.

Set B: Essentials of Genetics, ninth edition, by Klug and others (this one is paper bound). It’s a solid introduction to transmission genetics. Again, I’ve got multiple editions and copies, and I teach out of Concepts of Genetics, so this is another quality text I don’t need. I’m throwing in Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin, since if you understand genetics at an undergrad level you’ll be able to see why it’s crap.

Set C: Neuroscience, 3rd edition, by Purves and others. Most of the neurobiology texts I’ve gone are great thick monsters, but this one is comparatively slender and digestible. It’s still a good reference text, though. I’m flinging Meyer’s ungodly bad Signature in the Cell at it, since he seems to be under the delusion that he understands intelligence and the mind. He doesn’t.

Let’s give this a try! If you’re interested, leave a comment that says which set interests you, why you would find the books interesting, and mention if you live overseas (which won’t disqualify you, it just means I’ll be limiting my expenses a bit). I’ll make a decision by next weekend and get another set ready.

Help me clear 20cm off my bookshelf!