Finitude

I’ve been thinking a lot about the finitude of the world recently. What I mean by that is this: While we interact with the physical world as if it were infinitely variable – everything can be subdivided, including time and space – it seems scientifically quite likely that this is not in fact the case, that rather the world is finite, that there are finitely many particles in the universe, that each of them has finitely many positions, and thus that the universe has finitely many possible states – an absurdly large number, but still finitely many.

This possibility disturbs me, and I think I’ve figured out why. Mathematically speaking, if we have infinitely many points, we can find only one equation that fits it, for it is a smooth curve, a definite function – the universe would have only one explanation. But if we have finitely many points, there are infinitely many equations that would fit the given data – for example, if we just have the points (0,0) and (1,1), the equations y=x and y=x^2 both equally well describe the data. If we have (0,0), (1,1), and (2,0), both y=-(x-1)^2+1 and y=-(x-1)^4+1 work. Et cetera. And those were all just polynomials – there’s lots of other kinds of equations out there. So a finite universe means that the universe has many possible explanations, and even at the end of time, when all is said and done, there’s no way to know which one was correct.

So finitude somewhat scares me. Then again – if the universe is finite, there are many possible explanations, but one will, I hope, be much more elegant than the others, and that will be the “true” one… that, or, since by “the universe is finite” I really mean only the physical world, the atoms and quarks and leptons and dimensions of space and time, meaning will in the end be found not in the physical, but the metaphysical. That is, I suppose, what I believe – but I’d would like to be able to find meaning in both.

Does finitude scare anyone else, or is it just me?

Educating a Wizard

More stuff about Harry Potter.

So, I agree with that article in almost every aspect, and I thik it makes mary good points. But the entire argument relies on the following:

I like to hope that if most of us were handed a magic wand (literally) that removed a lot of the drudgery of modern life, we’d use that extra time in cultural pursuits. We’d read more, write more, take a dance class, go backpack around Europe, etc. We’d produce magical three-dimensional movies, and paintings conjured out of our dreams. Magic would be a tool for knowledge and truth and beauty. And yes, I know that most of us would just watch more TV. But still: magic would (theoretically) give us the opportunity to devote ourselves to the liberal arts, or at least explore them more than our non-magical lives currently allow.

But for the wizards of Harry Potter, magic is an end unto itself.

So the question becomes – why? Why are all of those “cultural” things worth doing, if there is absolutely no drudgery to modern life? What point is there in leisure, if our entire lives are leisure? This is the question Harry Potter accidentally raises but refuses to answer, getting around it by having wizards spend all of their time working in cubicles. Essentially, Rowling turns their lives into drudgery even though there is no need to do so within the logic of the world. She does it anyway.

So what should we take away from this? That Rowling is a bad writer? (Perhaps. In certain respects, she certainly is.) But the other possible interpretation is, that human life cannot be made sense of if there are not certain things we must do in order to survive. If we have no duties, this interpretation says, our lives cease to have meaning.

This interpretation makes a certain amount of sense in a Christian light, actually. God cursed Adam and said he would have to work for his food. This is not just a change to the how easy man’s life is – it was easy, now it’s hard – it is also a change to how human life is correctly structured. In the postlapsarian world, we ought to do work; it is unnatural not to have to struggle to survive.

Any world in which no such struggle is necessary, then, will feel hollow – because that aspect of Adam’s curse has been lifted, but not the part that made it necessary. It’s just like how immortality, it is often said, would be tortuous – because, while in man’s unfallen state he is immortal, fallen man is not capable a good immortality.

In this interpretation, the world of the wizards in J.K. Rowling is somewhat hellish; the wizards have nothing to do, and so they have to occupy themselves with pointless work to distract themselves from how meaningless their lives are.

It would have been fascinating if the books had actually explored this question.

Book Review: Watership Down

I apologize for my lack of posting this last week; I’ve been busy securing an apartment to live in this coming semester and buying furniture to put in it. I’ll be doing that for another week, then I move in August 31st and the semester starts. Until then, though, I have a decent amount of free time.

Well. That said, even though I wasn’t posting, I found the time last week to read Watership Down, one of my favorite books from years gone by. The premise: a group of rabbits leave their warren on the basis of a vision of doom one of them had, and they set out trying to make a life for themselves on remote Watership Down. Once there, they realize their group is entirely bucks, no does, and so they try to find a warren that will give some females to them. Instead they find a warren led by the Nazi-esque General Woundwort. Meanwhile, a mythology is being built up of Elahrairah, the rabbit folk hero.

Anyway, I hadn’t touched it in over three years, and decided I needed to revisit it. Verdict: It is, as I remembered, awesome; it’s maybe even better than I remembered it being. (So, if you never have, if you get nothing else out of this post – go read it!)

But there’s an interesting caveat to this endorsement I want to explore. The book’s awesomeness is definitively not because of the characters. I like Hazel, and Fiver, and Blackberry, and Bigwig; General Woundwort is indeed a disturbing villain, for a rabbit; Elahrairah makes a cool folk hero, Lord Frith and Prince Rainbow are both well-done gods, and the Black Rabbit of Inle is awesome in its role as the Grim Reaper. But -

Those characters aren’t why the book is amazing. It’s rather how well the author, Richard Adams, paints the outlines of the rabbits’ world, making up his own “rabbit language” and convincing the reader that it is real (“silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” is left untranslated in the text of the book, but the reader already knows what it means by then, and using it doesn’t break suspension of disbelief at all), showing how differently they think about things (they don’t realize cars are machines; only the most intelligent among them understand floatation), in general presenting rabbitting society as alien and yet compelling.

And probably it’s that very achievement – the establishment of so alien a culture for all the characters to live in – that makes it so the characters are hard to relate to. In the end, Hazel’s a good guy, but he’s just a rabbit, and I could never have a conversation with him, even if we spoke the same language; we’d have nothing to talk about.

And because the lack of compelling characters is a direct result of the nature of the book as semi-anthropomorphic fiction, I doubt Adams could have done any better. It’s a problem with the medium he’s working in.

Realistic World-Building

This is a fun website, for a certain definition of fun: Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

Sites like that make me wonder how  much I ought to worry about such things when writing my own speculative fiction. I guess it is important, for believability, to make sure the numbers roughly work out (so that it’s believable that everyone won’t starve, for example) – but the page itself encourages you to fudge the numbers however much you want to get the desired result.

I also wonder how much thought the greats of speculative fiction put into things like this. When he was drawing his maps, Tolkien must have thought about roughly how much land they’d need to support the populations of the different countries of Middle-Earth, but then again he rarely if ever gave exact population accounts, so he didn’t have to worry about it too much.

Or take Gene Wolfe; how did he decide how many cities there were inside The Whorl (c.f. Book of the Long Sun)? The only way I can see would be by calculating the surface area in the hollowed-out part of the asteroid, deciding how much cultivated land there would be, then using something like the page linked to (though presumably requiring more research) to find out how many cities there could be. (Incidentally, I also sometimes wonder how the city of Nessus, in the Book of the New Sun, fed itself, since it didn’t appear to grow its own food and it was so big that shipping the food in seemed impractical.)

Then I consider that most of the short stories I write take place in completely unbelievable worlds – in one of them there is no food, people live on light, and in another there is actually more land in the city itself than in the rural areas – and I stop worrying about it, at least until I write a story that set in a world whose rules are remotely similar to our own.

Review: Battlestar Galactica

So, I finished watching Battlestar Galactica earlier this week, and I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what I have to say about it. I don’t think I have anything particularly deep to offer up. I like the show; it has its flaws, but then, so does every television show. The show attempts something more interesting than most, and succeeds, for the most part, which makes it better than most in my books.

The basic premise of the show – the last remnants of the human race are trying to escape the mechanical Cylons who revolted against them and find the mythical planet Earth, home of the 13th colony – and the general flavor of the setting – a space opera with strong mystic undertones and a theme of paganism vs. quasi-Christianity – are great. The basic story arc works as well (find Kobol, find New Caprica, settle there, be forced out, find the Temple of Five, find old Earth, find it is a nuclear wasteland, find new Earth, become our ancestors).

The show does have several weaknesses, though. One of the worst is its tendency to become too much of a soap opera. I never minded that part until the fourth season, I think; the bed-side hospital scene (with Caprica Six miscarrying while Saul tries to convince her he loves her – the only way I can justify this is by saying it’s proving that Cylons are people too, even in the petty soap-opera-y ways) was just a bit much, though. As was a lot of other stuff in season 4 (like Cally’s son turning out to have been Hot Dog’s, not Tyrol’s, which I’m pretty sure they did just to get around the fact that otherwise, the child would be half Cylon, making Hera not nearly as special – that seems like a cop-out to me).

There’s also the fact that, about halfway through season 3 (after they find the Algae Planet, essentially), they give up trying to explain how they stay alive. I think the show would have benefited from being more about the day-to-day survival of the fleet, though it would be hard to work that in with all the other stuff they were doing. And the ending, while overall a good close to the series, is somewhat unbelievable (you mean to tell me everyone willingly gives up their technology, just like that? I don’t think so, not that easily. They would be on Earth for a few months, realize “hey, I like being able to easily hunt and move around and have shelter – let’s re-invent guns and cars and houses!”, and there goes the continuity with the real world).

But one think the show does really well is evoke a kind of mysticism, that everything happens for a reason. I think so, anyway. My dad doesn’t buy it – he thinks all the coincidences are just the writers’ way of getting out of corners they’ve backed themselves into – but I think it does a good job of seeming magical/mystical/destined/whatever without, for the most part, feeling contrived.

Anyway, overall, good show, you ought to watch it; just be aware that it definitely has its flaws and it’ll go smoother.

Magic as Mystery

You probably know about Clarke’s Third Law, which states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I would like to propose a related theorem, but one with a very different meaning:

Any sufficiently rule-bound magical system is indistinguishable from technology.

I’m going to explain what I mean by this, but be warned, it’s a long and convoluted post, one that makes many broad statements but does a poorer job of backing them up (though I believe every one of them).

So.

Consider any secondary world that has elements that would be described as “magical,” “mystical,” “faerie.” What we mean by these words, I posit, is incompatible with a system of pure cause-and-effect, codified rules, where A=>B is all you need to know about A and B. So any system of magic that is described as a system of cause-and-effect rules will not be truly magical, mystical, wonderful, faerie; it will come across, to the reader, as merely a technology specific to this universe. And while there are interesting things we can do with that, it’s not what magic is.

There are two things I’m trying to do here. The first, is to define a word – magic – that i believe has been misdefined. (From here on out, all mis-uses of magic will be in quotes – “magic” – and all valid uses will not.) To achieve that, I’m going to elaborate on two examples of fantasy universes, and explaining in what senses they are and are not magical. After that, I’m going to explain why true magic is probably best off being left mysterious.

First, for the two examples. Consider the universe of Harry Potter (much of what follows might not make sense if you haven’t read the books, but, you probably have, so I press onward). The so-called “magical” elements of that universe can, I believe, be divided into three categories: the whimsical, the scientific, and the truly magical.

The whimsical aspects are all of the oddities that Rowling throws in to make the universe seem more outlandish: the Every Flavored Beans, the pictures that move, the Monster Book of Monsters, etc. This stuff seems worthless to me, except for comedic value; it adds little to the magic of the setting, and completely destroys its believability. She includes it to make HP a children’s book; I think that was a mistake.

The scientific aspects are the rules for how “magic” works in the HP universe: some people are “magical,” some aren’t, and it is passed on genetically; if one is “magical,” one can say words and cause certain things to happen, each set of words with a specific result tied to it, including effects such as levitation, transformation, making areas larger on the inside than outside, mind-control, torture, death, etc; there are many more natural species than were previously realized, such as dragons, hippogryphs, leprechauns, mermaids, and some of these have powers that are not physically explicable but which follow a set of “magical” rules nonetheless.

These aspects are interesting and not out-of-place in a magical literary universe, but they’re not what’s essential to magic, and I often think they’re overused. It’s possible to have too much of this stuff. And if some of this is going to be used, the author has to be careful to actually follow the rules to their logical conclusions (one of my major complaints with HP is that the Weasleys shouldn’t be poor).

The truly magical aspects are the ones that don’t seem exactly rule-bound, but not illogical either; they follow a set of not-exactly-rules and are integral to the moral fabric of the universe. The best examples of this in the HP universe are: the wands, how each wizard is “meant” for a certain wand; the Sorting Hat, Goblet of Fire, and other such mystical selection processes; the Higher Magic (or whatever Rowling called it) that protected Harry through his mother’s love; whatever the hell it is that happened when Harry and Voldemort’s wands clashed in the graveyard in book 4; how created a Horcrux “tears your soul in two”, whatever that means.

These truly magical elements, I believe, all stand out when reading the books; they seem somehow more magical than the “magic” itself, more magical than “say Expelliarmus => their wand flies out of their hand.” That’s not magic, that’s technology.

That’s it for Harry Potter for now. We move on to considering the Star Wars universe. There are three different “magical” elements of the SW universe I want to talk about, though they don’t really correlate with the above three. These are, the actual technology, the Force used as a tool, and the Force as a moral, uh, force.

The actual technology is, according the Clarke’s third law, “magic”; they have laser guns, FTL travel, protective energy shields, etc. These are functionally little different from Avada Kedavra, apparating, and protective charms. Clarke says this is because the technology is so fanciful as to be essentially “magic”; perhaps so, I say, but another way of looking at it is that the “magic” in HP is just an attempt to cloak technology in fantastical trappings. The flavor of a universe with laser guns is different from that of a universe with Avada Kedavra, but that’s the same thing as saying a universe with swords has a different flavor than a universe with light sabers. There’s nothing metaphysically different about them. Technology is “magic”; “magic” is technology; rules of cause-and-effect are rules of cause-and-effect, however you disguise them.

The Force used as a tool, then, is functionally the same as HP universe “magic,” or SW universe technology; it’s just another way of getting stuff done. Does the fact that it’s restricted to some people mean it’s magical? Does the fact that only some people in HP universe have “magic” mean it’s magical? I don’t see why. This isn’t to say you couldn’t write interesting things about a universe where some people had telekenesis and some didn’t, but there’s nothing particularly magical about the setting.

But then we consider the Force as a moral, uh, force. The Light Side and the Dark Side, the Force as somehow in all living beings (ignoring that mitichlorian nonsense), the business about one coming who will balance the Force which is currently unbalanced, etc. There does seem to me something magical about that.

I’m going to try to cast in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics. Things have four kinds of causes: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, the final cause. (If you don’t know what these are already, read the Metaphysics, it would take way too long to explain them here.) The rule-bound “magic” systems I was talking about are cast entirely in terms of the material and efficient causes; the actual magic, as I’ve described it, seems related to the formal and, even more so, to the final cause.

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So now, for why magic ought to be a mystery. This question, I believe, comes down to ‘why can’t actual magic be integrated into a “magical”/technological system that humans manipulate?’ Phrased like that, it answers itself. If humans control it or understand it, becomes a tool, a system of cause-and-effect; it is no longer magical. The wands destined for their owners, the Hat and the Goblet, the Love magic, the Force as moral arbiter, are all things we can’t really wrap our heads around.

And they would (except for the wands destined for their owners) work just as well if the technological/”magical” trappings of their universes – the spells, the light-sabers, etc – were removed entirely. I find that rather interesting.

True magicians, I think, are in the end never characters we can relate to or understand, not just by how they are presented to us, but by their very nature. Gandalf is the classic example of a fantasy literature wizard; what most people forget is that he’s not even human, or elvish; he’s one of the Istari, essentially an angel. It is that distance that makes us accept his ability to seemingly understand magic when we ourselves cannot.

There’s a reason that witches, warlocks, sprites, and pixies are never the main characters of fairy-tales. The magical, mystical, wonderful, Faerie is that which is beyond, that which we cannot understand, that which is mysterious; by trying to make it immediate, we destroy it.

Problems of Scale

So, I’m currently watching Battlestar Galactica from start to finish. I just finished season 2. I’ll probably make a more comprehensive post when I’m done with the series – in fact, I’m considering writing a series of posts similar to my one about epic metal back in November 2007, this time about my favorite TV shows (of which BG is definitely one). But right now, I’m just going to talk about something that bugs me about BG – and almost all sci-fi, really.

That is the problem of scale. Particularly, that science fiction universes almost always completely fail at actually depicting what the stated facts imply their universe would be like. Consider:

Up through season 2 on BG, there’s been action on four planetary bodies so far by my count, these being Caprica, the unnamed moon Starbuck crashes on, Kobol, and New Caprica. All of these are presumably about as large as Earth – certainly no smaller than the moon, since they all appear to have roughly Earth-like gravity. And yet:

• There seems to be only one city on Caprica, in which two groups of characters, separated at the beginning of the series, meet by chance even though neither of them is searching for the other, and only one forest, where a group of characters trying to rescue those left behind on Caprica are able to find them in a matter of hours.
• When Starbuck crashes onto the moon, the Cylon raider she shoots down happens to land within walking distance of her own wreck. And it is considered plausible (though not likely) that a few dozen Vipers can fly over the surface of the moon and (not even using sensors, but rather relying on visual contact!) find Starbuck and rescue her before she runs out of air.
• When the Raptor crashes on the surface of Kobol, it just happens to land in the middle of the ancient City of the Gods. And that’s exactly where the rescue party goes to find them, even though they had no way of knowing that’s where they’d be.
• When they settle on New Caprica, an effort at least is made to explain why everything is so small – only a small portion of the planet is inhabitable. And that’s where they settle, and who cares about the rest? So New Caprica is the most believable of the planets.

There’s more problems, on a deeper level. There are the 12 Colonies, each with their own distinct culture (though I can only remember a few distinct characterizations – Gemenon is religious, Caprica is the capital, Saggitaron was oppressed, uh…). But these are entire planets! Does anyone think that if there were eleven other planets as densely populated as Earth, that that would mean Earth’s culture would become homogenous? Hell no. There would just be many, many more cultures out there.

Part of the problem, of course, is the very nature of the show; it wants to depict a civilization of only a few thousand people travelling across a distance of hundreds of light-years (and this is what it would take, nevermind the Cylon’s claim that they were “an entire light-year away” when they found out where New Caprica was. Gimme a break. Alpha Centauri – the nearest planet to Earth – is 4.6 light-years away). Each different planet and star system is really more on the level of a city-state in Greece in the ancient Mediterranean. Or, in what is a more apt analogy, on the level of the 12 tribes of Israel when they made the exodus from Egypt. BG never really wanted to portray what a civilization that spread across 12 planets and multiple star systems would be like.

But of course this isn’t just a problem with Battlestar Galactica. Consider Star Trek – every episode I’ve seen involving a planet treats it like there is one city on the planet, just one civilization to deal with. Star Wars is the same way; Tattoine is “small village in the desert”, Coruscant is “large city”, Naboo is “seaside city”, etc.

In other words, we achieve diversity at the interplanetary level – which is what we want, since this is space opera – at the expense of actual planets. Instead we get a bunch of city-states floating in space with blank space between in which to fight and arbitrary rules for how long it takes to get from one planet to another.

The best attempt to avoid this problem that I’ve seen is Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle (the three Books of the New Sun, Long Sun, and Short Sun). BotNS takes place on Urth, which is Earth, but not just “on Earth” – it’s in South America, in the city of Nessus, ruled by the Autarch, whose lands are bounded on the north by the Ascians. The BotLS takes place entirely within a generation starship made from a hollowed out asteroid, but it involves a number of different city-states all living inside it – Viron, Trivigaunte, Mainframe, etc. The BotSS actually involves the main character going on an Odyssey-like journey to a bunch of different cities on the planet Blue. Etc.

The question, I suppose, is whether this is a problem that needs fixing. It is an irritant, to a certain extent – I know I laughed at that line about “an entire light-year away” in Battlestar Galactica. But for the most part we manage to ignore it. Would we really be better off forcing BG to take place on a single planet, or perhaps a single star system with a few planets in it, and modifying the entire plot to deal with the rule-change?

Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea

So I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while that I finally borrowed from someone last week. I’m glad I read it; it’s well-done; but, well, it’s not all I was led to believe it would be.

As a work of mythopoeia, it is extremely well executed. The archipelago-rather-than-giant-continent aspect is well done and interesting. I really like how she does magic with Words, which represent Forms; very Aristotelian. This was probably my favorite part of the book. Also, there were never really any parts where I said, “wait, whaaa…?” and immersion was broken. All of these are good.

As a story, it’s interesting, but not inspired. The twist at the end – that the name of Ged’s shadow is “Ged”, and they are really the same – was somewhat predictable. After all, it couldn’t just be something random – it had to be something that appeared earlier in the story, or it doesn’t feel real (it’s like Chekhov’s gun rule, but reversed – you have to show the gun in act one before you can have it go off in act three), and having it named “Ged” makes more sense than any other possibility. It does have some interesting philosophical implications about life and death and accepting mortality. But other than that the story was basically “let’s wander around Earthsea and see as many islands as we can in a string of vaguely connected adventuers”, each of which was interesting but not extremely so.

The biggest problem, I think, is that Ged isn’t that interesting a character; he’s your standard intelligent, proud, teenager who is going on a quest to learn about himself and the nature of the world. I felt I could predict exactly what he could do in every situation he was in. Of course he would decide to go to Roke rather than remain with Ogion, of course he would accept Jasper’s challenge and bad things would come of it, of course he would almost be seduced by lady on Osskil but not be (and the fact that that Lady was the same as the little girl was predictable too), etc etc… being able to predict to a certain extent a character will do is necessary, of course, otherwise he’s just acting randomly and isn’t believable as a person. But if he always does what you expect he and any other intelligent, proud teenager would do in his situation then he becomes too generic. He becomes just a vehicle for exploring the physics and metaphysics of the world of Earthsea. I’m not opposed to that, per se, but it makes for what is only a good story, not a great story.

Finally, the prose is competent, but not inspired the way, say, Gene Wolfe’s is, and there were very few parts where I stopped and said “that’s a really cool of describing that”. LeGuin isn’t really a wizard with words.

Of course, in saying that A Wizard of Earthsea is only decent, not great, fantasy, I’m ignoring the fact that it came out in 1968. I think it’s comparable in quality with something like Sabriel, but Sabriel was written in the 90’s, nearly thirty years later. Clearly Garth Nix owes a lot to LeGuin’s work. And perhaps part of the reason I wasn’t hugely impressed with the book was that so much more recent fantasy was directly inspired by it – I could understand people who read the Lord of the Rings after reading more recent works of high fantasy having the same reaction. Not seeing how trailblazing these books were because we’re already at the end of the trail, and all that.

Hue, Value, Saturation, Mythopoeia

Every color can be described with three basic numbers – hue, value, and saturation. The hue is whether the color is red, green, or blue; the value is darkness vs. light; the saturation is how much “color” there is in the color (a really bright red has high saturation; a faint red that’s almost white has low saturation; both of these would have the same hue and value).

Now, when I look at things qualitatively, especially when thinking about mythopoeia, I tend to think of them in terms of colors. For example, in Orbivm, there’s a lot of color imagery – Lavinians=red, Sidhe=green, Marauders=blue, for starters – and that’s all intentional. Somehow those colors just seem to fit with those civilizations.

These are all different hues, clearly, but basically the same value, somewhere around the middle (though there’s some variation). This because good is white and black is evil, traditionally. There’s not really any civilization in Orbivm that could be qualitatively considered as “black” or “white”… they’re just different hues.

There’s a reason for this, I think. If you have one civilization that is pure black and another that is pure white, then their average saturation is zero. So it seems out of place for there to be a red, or green, or blue group; the fantasy world has been cast in terms of black and white, and there’s no room for color.

Which isn’t to say that black and white fantasy is impossible or pointless. The last few short stories I’ve written have been very dichotomous – light versus darkness, and all that. But when you do this it’s necessarily simpler – with only value, you can do much less than with hue, value, and saturation.

What’s hard to do well, I think, is combine light vs. darkness and red v. blue v. green. It requires forcing each civilization, which was originally just red, or blue, or green, without any real moral alignment, to pick a side. What you can’t do, as someone on the Wesnoth forums tried to, is leave the RGB valueless and just add two more groups, one black, one white. Doing so is conflating hue and value; they’re simply different things, and have very different implications for a fantasy world.

Three Days to Never

First of all; I leave for Rome in three days (Wednesday morning, to be precise). But that’s not what this post is about.

No, I’m talking about the book Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers.

In my recent post about Doctor Who, I talked about how that show, while lacking somewhat in plot, manages to have interesting characters, and, for all its inconsistencies, and interesting secondary world. The works of Tim Powers seem to me to have the opposite strengths and weaknesses; he has interesting plots, and does a quite good job with the world-building, but his characters are poorly done.

So far I have read Declare, about spies during WWII and the Cold War who are trying to find a second Ark built by Djinn who are trying to escape, and Three Days to Never, about how Einstein actually discovered time travel and his grandson/great-grand-daughter need the help of the Mossad to stop that technology from falling into the wrong hands.

In both of these, Powers takes actual historical facts – none of his books, supposedly, directly contradict established history – and weaves them into an alternate universe that is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy. For example, the 1973 Israeli strike against Iraqi military facilities was not intended to destroy WMDs, but rather to destroy this time travel machine. And there are demons who live in 5-dimensional space who are guiding the progress of the evil forces trying to get their hands on this time travel technology. And so on. And he has just the right amount of scientific explanation and correspondence with reality to make this stuff at least somewhat believable. It’s quite impressive, really. (It’s also interesting how Powers is a practicing Catholic and the worlds he creates are always pretty much consistent with the Catholic worldview.)

But, well, Powers can’t portray characters effectively. There are romances in both of these books, and neither of them are really believable. They both follow the formula of “flawed heroine who has enough good in her to redeem and be redeemed by the hero”. They even both have the female character start out working for the bad guys but switch over to the good guys. And neither of them are really sympathetic. He has problems with the other characters too – they seem cliche, for the most part – though his main problems are with the females.

Still, they’re enjoyable books. If nothing else, read them for his theories about the truth behind Djinn, ankhs, swastikas, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Mossad.

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And a small digression about Harry Potter. As I mentioned above, it seems possible to look at fantasy fiction writing as having three main categories – the characters, the plot, and the mythopoeia (this is obviously ignoring the quality of the prose, but I’m OK with that). Now, Harry Potter has good plot, and decently laid out characters (though I dislike most of them) – but horrible mythopoeia. Truly horrible. It’s not just that J.K. Rowling is bad at it  – it’s that she doesn’t care about having it make sense, at all. She prefers throwaway gags (like all of the silly character names and titles of the magical textbooks) to building a world that is actually somewhat convincing. This is my main complaint with her, and it is a huge one. She ends up with a fantasy world that no one would ever believe existed or could exist.

Now, Doctor Who isn’t coherent either, but this is less of a problem because Doctor Who is intentionally absurd – one of the main messages of the show is that the universe is much more complicated than we know, and we will never understand all of it, so it makes sense for the world to be somewhat chaotic and incoherent – while Harry Potter has a serious, straightforward plot. There’s no excuse for an absurd fantasy world. It’s as if Rawling just said “well, it’s magical, so it doesn’t have to make sense!” and went from there.