Pratchett released Unseen Academicals six weeks ago. If you’re a Pratchett fan, have you read it yet? And if so, what do you think of it?

I liked it, more than I had feared, especially since all I know about Foot-The-Ball I learned from TBoggs and translations of the Japanese manga Whistle. It’s not one of the top five Discworld novels, but it’s still miles ahead of, say, the first two books in the series. The plot construction wasn’t as sinewy and water-tight as we have come to expect. A better acquaintance with British football (Comrade Scrutinizer, for instance, connects the UA to Manchester’s AU, Arsenal United) would certainly improve one’s enjoyment of the usual Prachettian in-jokes and satires. Lord Vetinari talked too much, but then he was supposed to have imbibed at least a dozen strong ales before doing so.

I think Mr. Nutt, Glenda Sugarbean, and especially Pepe are all worthy additions to the Discworld Canon. Your thoughts?

Quoted in I09*:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization.

It’s a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells’s stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.

It lets off utopianism far too easy to say that it works less well than dystopian thinking to make society better. Without exaggerating, I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done. It is not even a debatable point. Communism started as a utopian ideal. Gated cults that commit mass suicide (or worse) nearly always stem from a utopian vision. In general the concept of utopia is one of the most efficient means ever found to get well-intentioned people to do awful things.

Fictional dreaming of dystopia is not just less dangerous, it has the polar opposite effect.

Think of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Can you remember one utopian work? 1984 and Animal Farm weave so deep in the western psyche that almost every criticism of government that doesn’t go straight to Hitler (that is to say, the effective ones) references Orwell instead. Ditto Lord of the Flies for group psychology. Brave New World looms over every discussion of science ethics since the year it was published. Maybe hippies cared about Ecotopia, but environmentalism has Silent Spring to thank. I read it part way through an ecology degree at an extremely liberal school, in 1998, and the book still punched me in the gut. Has the kook right attacked Edward Abbey lately? I doubt it. They love him just like they love Earth First! and the ELF and any other group that follows Callenbach’s utopian line of thought. If you want to know why the pollution lobby and their GOP pets still throw hate at a marine biologist who died in 1964, read her book. Fifty years later and it still changes minds.

Obviously this doesn’t mean that writers must shelve whatever book project or the world will end. On an average year the United States prints over 150,000 books. The UK prints over 100k more. Throw in the hundreds of thousands printed everywhere else and you have almost a million, save four or five, that people a century from now will never know existed.

It doesn’t bother me that Kim Robinson doesn’t roll with the dystopian cool kids. Admit it, zombies and Atwoodian parables and world-ending Emmerich movies are getting stale. The prob here is that Robinson took it one step further and justified his artistic (or commercial, whatever) decision with an academic argument that could not be more wrong if he took the truth and made a photographic negative.

(*) Although our current version of WP hides it for some reason, this is a link.

I’m actually kind of excited for the series opener of V tonight- I wonder how it will compare to the series from the 80’s. With Morena Baccarin, they have the hotness factor covered, that is for sure.

Also kind of excited about Dragon Age. Everything Bioware touches turns to gold (and I still think KOTOR is one of the greatest games ever made).

A small TV happy for me, and John Cole: TV Squad reports that TNT has secured the rights to Southland, primarily the rights to the seven episodes from last season and the six episodes that NBC made but refused to air:

If you want more episodes, the solution is pretty simple. Show up in droves to watch these. They start airing on Tuesday, January 12 at 10 p.m., ironically against the very show that many people think killed it: The Jay Leno Show. So if you really want to make a statement that NBC might notice, turn TNT’s Southland into the next Sons of Anarchy and actually beat Leno head-to-head!

Good cops are the opposite of the Yankees, because they work hard in defense of the little people. Southland ain’t Boomtown, much less The Unusuals, but I look forward to seeing more episodes… although not on Hulu, if Comcast (another Evil Empire) succeeds with its vile plans.

Also, I think Steve Gilliard would have loved The Unusuals, because it was a very Ankh Morpork New York City series.

In my opinion Steel Wheels marked the moment when the ‘Stones demoted themselves from legitimately cool to a legacy band on permanent tour. Discuss.

Coming home from the theater the other day, it occurred to me that Ayn Rand was Russian and presumably literate, and yet she never acknowledged that Fyodor Dostoyevsky laughed at her juvenile philosophy a hundred years before she wrote it. Doesn’t everyone who reads Crime and Punishment or sees it performed have the same reaction? Just wondering.

I tend to believe the various generalizations about the supposed savvy of younger people today, mostly because, in my experience, they generally seem smarter than older people. Two older friends of mine told me they thought John McCain had a chance to win New York State (and even argued with me when I told them they were out of their minds); my students were always talking about 538.com before class. My aunts and uncles obsess about “clutch hits” and batting average; my cousins know that OPS is a better measure of a hitter’s value than his batting average. It’s not hard to see why this is: younger people typically google things when they want facts, while older people typically try to recall what they heard on CNN or ESPN last week. And quite simply, statements made by Nate Silver and BaseballAnalysts.com have much greater predictive value than statements made by David Broder and Dan Shaughnessy.

A guy at AEI has a piece about how younger voters feel about health care. He begins with a relatively accurate description of how he thinks younger people today function, calling them “generation choice”. Then he posits three reasons why younger voters might be better disposed towards health care reform than older voters: (1) they haven’t analyzed the bill, (2) they care more about the fairness of expanded coverage, and (3) they don’t care much about health care because they’re young and healthy. There’s an obvious fourth reason: they know that our system costs nearly twice as much as anyone else’s and is consistently ranked at the bottom in quality among western countries. Hence, they would choose a different system if possible.

It’s always important to remember that many, if not most, beliefs and customs in our society exist because of the widespread propagation of falsehoods. It’s why some people believe we have a great health care system. It’s also why some American League managers continue to use the sacrifice bunt.

For whatever reason, the internet has curbed the spread of these falsehoods among (the mostly younger) people who are able to navigate the internet without using AOL key words (though it may well have hastened the spread among people who are not). And that may well mark a sea change in American politics.

On at 10 tonight on AMC.

I’m a little sick of the constant references to it in the New York Times, but it’s my favorite show on tv since “The Wire”. What makes it great, to me, is that Don Draper and Peggy Olson actually seem like intelligent people. There are times when you feel like you see them thinking. The only other examples of this I can think of on tv are Lester Freamon on “The Wire” and Frank on “Homicide”.

I do have one quibble, though. Could they have found two more unlikely Kennedy-haters than Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper? Sterling’s obviously as Irish as a pint of Guinness and Cooper has a Boston accent.

Another name from my youth:

John Hughes, the producer, writer and director whose 1980s films such as “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” offered a sharp-eyed look at teenagers and their social habits, has died, according to a statement from his representative. He was 59.

Hughes died of a heart attack while taking a morning walk in Manhattan, according to the statement.

He made so many fun movies it is hard to choose favorites, but if I had to, I would go with Weird Science or Uncle Buck. Every time I see an old beater of a car on the road, I think of the music that played when Candy’s character in Uncle Buck was driving anywhere.

Tom Levenson, friend of the blog and MIT Professor of Science Writing, has a new book that fits neatly in a growing but still unnamed literary niche, one that transplants already perfectly famous historical figures into a hyperbolic action-thriller setting. One of my favorites in the genre pits Mark Twain, Nichola Tesla and Bertha von Suttner (you may need to look that last one up) against JP Morgan, Guglielmo Marconi and others trying to open a demonic gateway to hell.

My own entry would go something like this.

The setting: America. While World War II rages across the oceans, another war quietly builds at home. Fueled by prohibition, modern technology and detective work that still has one foot in the nineteenth century, organized crime has exploded from a nuisance to a mortal threat. FDR cannot admit the extent to which mobsters have penetrated his government or the antediluvian state of forensic science. Al Capone has hatched a bold but credible plot to install his own agents at the top of the FBI. Desperate and nearly overwhelmed, the United States turns to the only man who can bring hoods and hooligans back under control: Albert Einstein.

Eager for a break from academia, Einstein maps the American underworld in unprecedented detail. The new sherriff catches less careful gangsters totally by surprise. Gradually the prisons swell with small-time sharks and potential informants. However, major problems remain. For one, the march of technology has provided criminals with tools that law enforcement agencies have not even started to grasp. For another, big fish like Capone understand the danger well enough. Nonetheless, Capone’s ambitions launch him into an epic contest of wits against Einstein himself. To win Einstein must modernize forensic science and bring down history’s greatest mobster. His reputation and the future the United States hang in the balance.

Normally I could admit that no publisher in his right mind would consider a turgid precis like that. But now that I’ve read Tom’s book, I won’t do that. That crazy stuff actually happened. Even the superlatives.

Levenson plays with a series of story elements that each would make a fine topic for one of those OCD books that belabor a single topic (salt, cod, Pi, zero, the low-top beige Converse All-Star). Some of you might know that Isaac Newton (yes, that Isaac Newton) managed the English mint for a while in the late seventeenth century. Some might also know that England faced a currency crisis at the time; something to do with the lopsided value of silver on either side of the Channel. Also relevant: the Bank of England was founded around that time, to support a war, and issued what we now know as the first government-backed paper money. That and the crude medieval coins that still circulated created an epic market for counterfeiters and a number of other currency scams.

When you add these things together with new information about Newton’s detective life that Levenson uncovered with original reporting, you have a bizarre, gripping crime story that is completely true. Counterfeiting and terrible currency management almost brought down the British empire. Isaac Newton in fact crafted what might be the first recognizably modern monetary policy, he modernized the mint and in his spare time he personally jailed much of the English counterfeiting community. A gifted counterfeiter named William Chaloner did make a play for control of the mint itself, and if not for the mint’s Warden he appeared more likely than not to win. In a position like that, with England mired in a war that already wrecked the economy and saddled with terrible monetary policy, Chaloner could have condemned the Empire and made himself almost unimaginably wealthy.

Levenson’s deft writing style makes me feel a little guilty for indirectly linking it with the dross that I wrote above. His chapters, which alternate between top-down perspectives on the initially separate lives of Newton and Chaloner, transition with a verbal and conceptual wit that recalls the spectacular conclusion to Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club. The book is a one-handable read (this is important for people like me who stand on the bus a lot); the pace moves briskly and compacts necessary historical digressions into paragraphs that keep the narrative going far better than footnotes or Melvillian soliloquies would do.

Those who enjoy science biography, crime drama, narrative history, monetary policy or comics where Jack Kerouac and James Watson go back in time and punch robo-Hitler should definitely check out this book.

***

As with all things in life, a greater sense of satisfaction can be had if you buy it through the Amazon link at top right.

***Update***

Several commenters have asked about Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, which apparently also covers Newton’s tenure at the Mint. Tom mentions in his book that he scrupulously avoided Stephenson’s work to make sure that Stephenson’s characterizations did not influence his own.

James Joyner thinks the coverage of MJ’s death is over the top, and I completely agree. I will, however, note that while the MJ coverage is over the top, it still pales in comparison to the three day self-absorbed wankfest that followed Tim Russert’s death.

Also, via Michael Calderone, we learn that Meet the Press is bleeding out, losing close to a half million viewers since MC Rove’s dance partner took over from the late Russert. Clearly the bizarre strategy of packing every show with right-wing pundits and spewing right-wing talking points immediately following an election where the country told the Republican party to go to hell is paying dividends. Clearly what Meet the Press needs is more appearances by President Gingrich.

*** Update ***

This week’s guests- Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham. Atta’ boy, Stretch. You can lose another half million if you try.

Sixty-two is too damned young. Yes, I owned the poster.

How is it that the Federal Trade Commission kicked that car warranty scam extremely hard in the junk, yet they can afford to saturation bomb my teevee with new ads?

Discuss.

***Update***

Apparently the phone scam and the TV scams (which I assume is a scam since they present customer ‘testimonials’ without showing or naming any actual customers) are run by different firms.

***Update 2***

How profitable can dubious car warranty scheming possibly be? It must bring in more dough than I guessed if the economy can support that many firms at once.

Because there are a number of Terry Pratchett fans here, and some suspense /mystery readers as well, I would like to recommend Castle Freeman Jr.’s novel ALL THAT I HAVE.  It’s a little book, only 165 pages, because that’s exactly enough pages to tell the story (stories) it wants to tell.  Imagine Sam Vimes as a Vermont sheriff, responsible for 17 towns in a mostly-depopulated corner of a thinly-settled state—or maybe the son of Captain Vimes and Esme Weatherwax, serving and protecting Lancre and a double-handful of similar hamlets in his own remote corner of the Ramtops.

Sheriff Lucian Wing (as he’s known in this corner of the metaverse) has to deal with a bunch of very dangerous people From Away, who are looking for something the local bad boy may have taken from them, while dealing with various domestic complications caused by the fact that very few people can be content with exactly what they’ve got.   This doesn’t sound humorous, but (as told in Sheriff Wing’s dry voice) it’s very funny.  And it doesn’t sound tragic, although many of Wing’s anecdotes concern all the sorrows of the human condition.  It’s one of those rare books you read quickly, because you can’t wait to see how it comes out, and then go back and start re-reading immediately, because you’re afraid you might have missed something the first time through.

I think I picked it up on a recommendation from a Boston Globe review, comparing ALL THAT I HAVE to one of Donald Westlake’s novels.  Which is a pretty good comparison, if you can imagine one of Parker’s plots narrated by Dortmunder.  It’s available through Amazon, as are a couple more novels and some essays by Castle Freeman Jr., which I am already starting to acquire.

(Late-night test post, not related to anything in particular, just to see if I can get this thing off the ground without getting caught in the trees.)

Went out to dinner with my parents, who are in town on their way to Baltimore (pronounced Ballmer, tyvm) for my mother’s 50th High School Reunion, and on the way home heard about this story on NPR about scientists discovering that there are animals besides humans who can dance to a musical beat:

Two famous parrots and a bevy of YouTube videos have now convinced scientists that people aren’t the only ones who can groove to a musical beat.

Dancing has long been thought to be uniquely human. Toddlers will spontaneously bob along with music, but you never see dogs or cats listen to a tune and tap their tails in time.

So a couple of years ago, a neurobiologist named Aniruddh Patel was astonished when someone e-mailed him a link to a YouTube video of a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys.

“I said, you know, this is much more than just a cute pet trick. This is potentially scientifically very important,” recalls Patel, who studies music and the brain at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego.

I can’t find a way to embed the NPR videos, so you will have to go to their site to watch their videos. However, there is this offering of Snowball in action from youtube:

Apparently, Snowball’s favorite band is the Backstreet Boyz, so while he can dance, there is no accounting for taste.

At any rate, this is a rather long-winded way of just expressing how much I like NPR. For pennies of the federal budget, almost anywhere you go in the country, you can tune in to high-quality broadcasts for free. It is cheap entertainment, it is informative, and I simply can’t imagine driving without NPR.

I never really understood conservative opposition to funding for the arts and funding for public radio and television when I was a Republican, and I still don’t now. If somebody was willing to do what NPR does for a profit, they would. But they don’t, and it would be a cultural disaster if we were to some day lose NPR.

Maybe I’m different than most people in my love for radio, as I got my FCC license when I was fourteen, dj’d for a while at the local college station, and wanted nothing more than to work in radio as an adult, so I have always loved it. But to me, there really isn’t anything better than NPR. I have really slacked at donating and am going to make a point to support it more in the future.

/babble