What I mean by that is that in Stross’s futuristic world, the definition of human has modulated past the point that we ourselves would be able to recognize it. Through his history of the future, he described a range of existential options from the archaic way humans are naturally, to neural implants offering pervasive internet presence, to posthumans who have evolved past the point where normal human intelligence could understand them all the way out to aliens, uploaded (and endlessly downloaded and re-downloaded) consciousnesses, simulations of consciousnesses and entire galaxies which have become gigantic thinking machines beyond all comprehension.

It is, needless to say, a dizzying view of the future. A quote by Cory Doctorow on the book’s back cover suggests that the book makes psychedelics obsolete. While that’s a bit far-fetched, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the book. Especially in the beginning, as Stross unloads terms and concepts at the reader at an incredible rate. It can make for some very slow and tedious reading as you get up to speed with the changes in the world he’s describing. Stross seems also to have gotten rather ahead of himself too, as the book is punctuated with expository passages set in a different font which are strictly there to dump data on the reader about what’s happening in the world and universe. They aren’t especially disruptive to the reading experience, but they do often read as though they were simply outline notes created for the book, which Stross was unwilling to excise from his final version.

For all the technical data and the grand scope that Stross is trying to pull off, I also feel like the characters themselves get lost in the shuffle. The actual people in this story seem far less important and interesting to the author than all the whiz-bang technology he is describing and its implications for the future of humanity and posthumanity. Despite being shuffled back and forth among various members of the family which plays the pivotal role in Stross’ future, I never really felt like I could connect with any of them, that I knew what any of them really thought or felt, or frankly that I much cared.

My main drive then to crunch through this overly long book (415 pages) was to acquaint myself with a sci-fi vision of what the Singularity will be like, and how it will impact people. Towards that end, Stross seems to conclude that escaping death and escaping the body and the universe will not allow us to escape the problems and weird foibles of simply being human. It is a moral that would have been driven home a lot stronger, however, if his characters had been portrayed as more human.

It’s hard to say if it was Stross’ own viewpoint coming through, of if he was just trying to accurately extrapolate a thoroughly scientific worldview into the future, but the book takes a rather hardline stance against religion. It seems that any time religion is portrayed, it’s done in a rather negative light, as sort of kooky or antiquated. He mentions a few times some new religions that are proselytizing in the future, but never really goes into what they look or feel like, which I think is too bad. Instead, the over-riding religion of this book is science. Mind is equated with soul, and immortality is achieved by making back-up copies of the mind ad nauseum. Consciousness and all of life is reduced to computer jargon. This passage from page 399 I think illustrated in a nutshell a great deal about what this book’s underlying message or at least worldview seem to be:

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that pre-dated the singularity used to be the inevitable halting state for all life forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

What this character seems to be forgetting (and I don’t want to mistakenly attribute this viewpoint to the author by means of this one character’s dialogue) is that science too, by way of the vehicles of science fiction and transhumanist speculation is also a “transmissible memetic virus” which is beginning, more and more, to promise us life beyond death. Maybe not for us, but perhaps for our children. When such technology does indeed arise, what kind of “life” will that really be granting us? These are the questions posed by Stross’ Accelerando…

It is, of course, an introductory work on Afro-Carribean magic and religion, detailing a bit of the history of the religion, along with a smattering of spells and legends related to it. It also features a chapter dedicated to brujeria - “black magic.” As a survey, it never gets very in-depth. But moreso than that, I didn’t feel like it did a very good job of introducing these traditions to the outsider. The information was certainly conveyed in a straightforward and easy to understand way, but it didn’t really “connect the dots,” so to speak. Everything was sort of disjointed and it didn’t leave me feeling like my understanding of Santeria was at all richer for the experience of having read the book.

From my own perspective, I would have appreciated getting more of an understanding of the world-view associated with the religion, as this is the part of the tradition which I think is most inaccessible to outsiders. It’s easy to relate myths and give ingredients for spells, but doing so doesn’t transform the reader’s understanding, nor does it philosophically or emotionally key them into the personal undercurrents of what the religion is all about.

Unfortunately, I am just beginning to read up on Santeria and associated Afro-Carribean religious systems, so I’m unable to recommend a similar and better book on the subject. My final analysis of Gonzalez-Wippler’s book though is that it’s only worth picking up if you come across it in a used bookstore or perhaps a library. There must be better, more modern and more thorough books that have been written on the subject over the last thirty years.

He was explaining to my house-mates that he didn’t normally dress like this as he looked at my room, sizing it up to see if he wanted to rent it after me. He was only dressed like this – apparently – so that he could promote his novel, Battle Neverending. One of my house-mates, an old man named Ed was more than skeptical.

“You know you’re schizophrenic, right?” Ed said to him.

I thought that was more than a little harsh of a thing to say to a perfect stranger who was a guest in your home. But I went to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich rather than get embroiled in any intra-house warfare. From the next room, I heard our mild-mannered dread-locked superhero philosophizing about Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and it’s similarities to Christianity.

Ed toiled away to undermine him, but after that weird subject matter which was right up my alley, I decided I had to introduce myself. “I’m Tim,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“Saab,” he said.

“Sob?” I asked him, not sure if I’d heard him correctly. “You mean like S-O-B?” I wasn’t trying to imply, of course, that he was a son of a bitch or anything. Quite the opposite…

“No, Saab – like the car.”

I realized then he had copies of his book with him for sale, which was obviously a low-budget and quite-possibly home-printed affair. “How much for one of your books?”

“Only five dollars,” he said proudly.

Seemed a little steep to me, but how many times did the universe drop real-life superheroes on my doorstep? I decided to bite and bought myself a copy of Battle Neverending.

As nice as Saab was in person though, this book is quite difficult to get through. First off, the back cover describes it as a novel, when it is clearly a collection of short stories and poetry. The writing also leaves a lot to be desired. The stories are built almost exclusively of expository dialogue in which Saab’s ultra-left wing characters reference a litany of real-life radical figures from history in order to “stick it to the man where it hurts.” Lofton slips in and out of this grandiloquent radical aesthetic, spicing it up occasionally with painful lines in the vernacular like “ain’t no way in hell this nigger done transported me to some fucking island.”

Saab himself seems to appear as a variety of characters in the book, from a left-wing guardian angel named Dudley, to a struggling left-wing conspiracy author named “JB Stoner,” to a (you guessed it!) left-wing superhero named Tomorrowman whose business card reads “The People’s Superhero” (and who has been granted special powers by aliens to protect the earth, deciding to use them to black out CIA spy satellites).

Although I didn’t care for the writing or for the author’s naïve belief that the left-wing is perfect and always right, there are definitely some pretty cool concepts here and there. I enjoyed his depiction of God or the Universe or Infinity as basically a collective entity composed of all aspects of existence. When you die, Infinity takes a very democratic/communist vote to decide whether or not your are worthy to be united with it for all eternity.

As much of Saab paints his characters as left-wing heroes, there are some unfortunate and heavy-handed depictions of women through the book as well. In fact, I can’t recall any female characters who weren’t either vile demonic temptresses, prostitutes, KKK members or Neo-Nazis. He also seems to have a special axe to grind with the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan and their teachings that black people come from another planet. There is also a strong fixation with the beneficial industrial uses of hemp (along with copious use of “the chronic”).

One really odd thing about this book though is the final story, from which the book gets it’s title. It is a transcript of a fictional interview between Bill Moyers and Tomorrowman, who has broken into Moyer’s house to get him to transmit his left-wing superhero message to the world. Aside from being a kind of tedious read, this interview makes mention of a violent attack on Washington, DC occurring in January of 2001. The book itself is copyrighted 1997 according to it’s inner cover. It also talks about a presidential election riddled with fraud, which turns into riots, a recount and President Bill Clinton declaring temporary martial law (before turning the reigns over to President-Elect Ralph Nader). The events, of course, are rather jumbled, but they do bear an eerie similarity to some of what has actually transpired over the past several years.

I’m not going to say that I think Saab Lofton is any kind of visionary or prophet necessarily, but maybe there’s a good reason he is dressed up like a superhero and seems to see himself on a mission from God. You’d of course have to ask him, but I would bet dollars to donuts that Saab has undergone some type of significant transpersonal, psychological or intense spiritual events which gave him the drive to put together Battle Neverending and possibly provided some of the actual material for his book. Taken as a self-portrait of one man’s inner struggle to make sense of it all makes this book a more interesting (if not well-written) read.

The book chronicles the story of a child, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who has been genetically engineered to be a master strategist. The future of the planet earth rests upon his prepubescent shoulders in an on-going hundred year war with a marauding alien race nicknamed the “buggers.” At the tender age of only six years old, Ender is drafted into the outer-space Battle School where he is pushed to his limits day in and day out, to prepare him for the final battle where he will lead Earth’s space fleet to the bugger home-world.

Most of the book details the cruel “game” that Ender is placed in by his military commanders during his time at Battle School. They intentionally isolate him from the other boys. They place him into increasingly impossible situations. In short, they seek to break him. If he does not survive, then he is not fit to command the fleet to victory. The game he is caught in is a perfect parable for life at it’s absolute cruelest, when the very forces of the universe themselves seem to be conspiring against you to bring you hardship and pain. It becomes inspiring in the sense that it allows you to imagine that when you own life seems impossibly bleak, that you are perhaps being prepared for something greater and more important than you could ever envision.

Through this grueling routine which lasts years, Ender is molded into a perfect cold-blooded killer. He is uniquely able to re-orient himself into the perspective of his enemies, ruthlessly exploiting their weaknesses and blind-spots. But this ability comes at a great personal cost to him. He is only able to do what he does through an extraordinary helping of empathy and love that he has for his enemies. As he explains in a key passage:

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them -”

“You beat them.” For a moment, she was not afraid of his understanding.

“No, you don’t understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”

I really like how this book is put together. It’s an interesting story and uses the classic sci-fi mythological set-up of the man-child who has near divine powers flowing through him, but must manage somehow to fit into an all too human world. Despite or possibly because of his exaggerated differences from ordinary people, he becomes sort of an everyman, plugging through larger than life versions of the same struggles we all face day to day. Taken in a new extrapolated sci-fi context, we are better able to see the heroic qualities that we all struggle with in ordinary life.

Card does a great job also of not letting his futuristic world and technology get the better of him. His sci-fi elements are smooth and silky. Through Ender, we are exposed to all manner of strange almost magical technology, but it never gets in the way of the story. In fact, elements of it are used to great effect to instill wonderful dreamlike episodes, such as in Ender’s ongoing struggles with the computerized fairy tale land, the giant and the tower. It’s a really cool way to make a very internal and symbolic struggle into something very concrete and easy to relate to.

There are also some really good philosophical bits comparing the human strategies to the way bugger consciousness works. And it’s very satisfying to see ths dichotomy overcome by Ender towards the end of the book. It is this ability to overcome central plot conflicts rather than use them as a crutch that I think separates a decent writer from a great writer.

I think this is a great book (and a reasonably fast and easy read) that could possibly even appeal to people who aren’t that into science fiction usually. The only thing I could see some people getting hung up on in this book is how much time and detail Card devotes to detailing Ender’s exploits in Battle School. There are maybe a few too many zero gravity combat situations, but I think they are worth sitting through as they contain a lot of worthwhile characterization and plot development. All in all though, I highly recommend checking this book out – whether you’re in zero gravity, on an airplane or sitting quietly in your bed dreaming about the stars and the world to come.

At the top of the pyramid is Reverend Sabbath, an evangelist extraordinaire, and CEO of the fabulously wealthy Risen Lamb corporation. Think Pat Robertson on spiritual steroids. Sabbath epitomizes everything screwed up about a contemporary Christianity wedded to power, money and violence.

Slaving away somewhere in the middle of the pyramid is Johnny Greco, a washed-up journalist whose career was ruined by Sabbath’s anti-blasphemy laws. Greco works for a seedy tabloid called the Inquiring Mind, and specializes in fluff reports about crazies and con artists. Greco’s career and personal despair turn around, however, when he uncovers somebody who just might be the real deal: a young Latino preacher and miracle worker named Jay (initials J.F.K.) who claims to be Christ returned to earth. Christ, of course, this time around wears a dark hooded sweatshirt, travels around in a beat-up van with an ex-porn star and uses copious basketball metaphors.

The story basically chronicles Greco’s selfish mix of trying to get the exclusive scoop on Jay, while struggling with his own desire to finally put aside his professional skepticism and believe. Intertwined in all this, of course is Sabbath who catches wind of the returned Christ and is determined to stamp him out this time. Sabbath declares at one point, “We corrected Christianity, Christ. Worked out the kinks. We don’t need you.”

As much as I personally agree with a lot of the points Tony Hendra is making with this book, I was a bit disappointed that he opted for the obvious cartoon dichotomy of Sabbath’s contemporary “evil” Christianity and Jay’s authentically human street Christianity. It makes for a fairly entertaining and quick read, but tends to lack any lasting punch because it is everything that you’d expect in a pop religious satire. There aren’t any surprises waiting for you in the book, and no real exploration of the possibility that maybe everybody is as right as they are wrong, that maybe that’s just life, and we ought to just make the best of it regardless of the potential saviors who are paraded in front of us.

Also disappointing is that none of the characters really have any depth or reality too them. The bad guys look and act like idiots and of course get what’s coming to them. The good guys are so good that they are completely lifeless and boring. And not surprisingly, the truth prevails in the end. Well, sort of… It’s hard to say if any of the characters are really transformed by any of the experiences. And not just in a sort of postmodern way, but in a sort of way where you kind of end up feeling like, “Well, why did I read this?”

All that said though, there are some decent modern updates of Christ’s teachings (like the speech he gives at the military base) – even if none of it is really that mind-blowing. And there are some pretty fun sci-fi moments – even though I wouldn’t by any stretch call it a sci-fi novel. My favorite has to be when the returned Christ is captured on an Amish farm by robots leaping out of stealth helicopters. And there are also some subversive elements thrown into the mix, like the American government breezily planning false flag terror attacks as pretexts to launch Armageddon-style wars.

In the end, I would say this is a bit lighter novel than I typically enjoy, but as the dust jacket says, it may be a good read for people not usually inclined in the direction of religious fiction. But reading it, you have to wonder if it really is any less preachy and evangelizing than the sappy Christian fiction it goes to such great lengths to mock. It may quite simply be the same thing packaged for a different more “hip” audience. And that may be okay at the end of the day, because there are room for as many tellings of the story of Jesus as there are people on this planet. As the book makes plain, no one has a monopoly on the truth.

But as Nicholas St. James, the president of one ant tank, discovers when he ventures to the surface to find an artificial pancreas for a dying repairman, the actual truth is something different altogether. The war ended long ago, but the powers that be kept going the lie so that those dwelling under the earth would be motivated to keep the system going while living in virtual slavery.

The plot twists and multiple layers of reality inverting again and again are all pure Philip K. Dick. The overall thrust of this book deals with the necessity of lies and violence to sustain a social order - and whether they really are necessary at all. You could easily draw parallels between the imaginary war in this book to a lot of what’s going on in the world today in the “War Against Terrorism.” But this book is nowhere near as polished as a lot of his other work, especially the later stuff.

One of the things that really got to me was his excessive use of made up jargon and abbreviations. The book is chock full of it and it really impedes the reading process. Also very aggravating is the constant internal italicized monologues that take place right in the middle of conversations. It’s almost like Dick started out with a basic fifty page story and then fleshed it out with all these damned italicized passages later on so that he could push it towards 200 pages. Whatever the case, they really slow down the reading process.

About halfway through though, the damn finally breaks and the novel starts to pick up. I don’t want to spoil the fun of what happens, but I think the second half makes the first half worth reading. Overall though, if you’re anything but a hardcore PKD fan, I would recommend you start elsewhere, like maybe with Ubik, Flow My Tears, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In the almost forty years since this book came out (1967), a lot seems to have changed. If you mention the name R.D. Laing anymore, few people - if any - even know who he was, let alone what was so astonishing about his work that kept people in a buying frenzy and talking about it for years to come.

First getting into this book is a little bit difficult. Laing has sort of a peculiar writing style that goes to great lengths to delineate the relationships between people and to one another’s experiences. One of his big points is that we typically don’t interact with people, so much as we interact with their behavior. At the same time, they interact with our behavior - and the complexity arises in that the actual experience of another person is always occluded from us, always clothed in their behavior. It’s a seemingly simple point that he uses as an implement to slice apart everyday interactions between people, and finally society itself.

His work isn’t just philosophical meandering though. It has very vivid and useful concepts which are as true today as they were forty years ago. A nice sample comes from page 94:

All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same thing, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive - you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.

Laing is also linked today with what’s referred to as the Anti-Psychiatry movement. His ideas, like those of others in this group challenged the prevailing notions of what mental illness really is. Laing seems to have believed that it was not really even illness at all, but a natural healing process. In fact, the ultimate and breath-taking conclusion of his book is that it is not the mentally ill individual who is sick at all, but it is the society itself. The society, he believed, was insane. To undergo a transformative inner experience, which we might refer to as mental illness, is in tune with the individual’s attempt to free herself of that insanity, and to become whole and sane herself.

Overall, a very worthwhile book to read if you’re interested in psychiatry, psychology, modern philosophy or the under-pinnings of the counter-culture of the 1960’s, 70’s and even today.