My Take on Barbenheimer

I wasn't into Barbies or most dolls when I was a girl; I preferred books and stuffed animals. I'm also not into military history the way my husband and son are. Nevertheless, I knew we would be seeing Oppenheimer as a family (especially since I'm the one with the AMC app and account). Once I became aware of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, I decided I wanted to be a part of it. Since my husband works on Saturdays, we normally go to the movies Saturday night. I wound up watching Barbie by myself Saturday morning and seeing Oppenheimer with my family that evening. I even wore pink-and-black to mark the occasion, and my manicure was pale pink with black crow nail stickers.

The two movies are so wildly different in tone I don't need to point it out. Barbie was fun to watch, with plenty of pop culture references even I caught. I appreciated the feminism and diversity in it, though you can't fully discuss gender roles without considering non-binary and transgender viewpoints too. I was a little disappointed in the ending, since it didn't commit to gender equality and prioritized body parts over other aspects of being human.

As for Oppenheimer, it's a much longer, more complicated movie, jumping between three storylines (Oppenheimer's life and work, the kangaroo hearing to discredit him, and Strauss's failed Cabinet confirmation hearing.) Of the three, I preferred the main one focusing on Oppenheimer's career and thought the Strauss subplot least relevant, even if it was part of the book the movie is based on. Since the movie is rated R, I expected violence but not the frontal nudity and simulated sex. I'm not sure what my 16-year-old son thought about that. After the movie, my son asked to get the audio version of the book, so he's interested in other parts of the story, at least. We have the paperback too, but I have so many other books to read that I won't be getting to it for a long time, if ever. However, if you want to learn more about women's contributions to the Manhattan Project, I recommend The Girls of Atomic City.

While Barbie is my favorite of the two movies, I'm glad I was able to watch both of them. If you saw either or both movies, what did you think? Feel free to comment below.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

As a naturally speedy reader, I can finish a typical novel in a few hours. This is one of the ways I'm able to read so many books every year. Sometimes, though, I want a change of page and am willing to read something longer and thought-provoking. This is the case with The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. It took me almost two weeks to read this book, and I'll need still longer to digest it.

The Dawn of Everything (hereafter to be abbreviated as TDoE), proposes alternate ideas for how civilization (specifically, agriculture, cities, kings, and the rise of states) developed--or, in some regions, was deliberately rejected. They discuss a variety of cultures and archeological sites, from Egypt's First Dynasty (around 3100 BC) to 17th and 18th century encounters between Europeans and Native Americans. They look at cities from Mesopotamia to Central America, slaves in ancient Rome and along the Northwest Coast, and more topics than I could possibly list. I can't summarize all the key ideas the two Davids discussed, but here are a few that I remember:

• Many cultures experimented with farming but didn't settle down to do it full-time. They might spend part of the year at one site and spend the winter fishing or hunting.
• Women may have been the ones experimenting with agriculture and textiles.
• Care-giving used to be valued more highly. However, slave-owning cultures may delegate this work to slaves.
• Two settlements close to each other may deliberately adopt opposite values to distinguish themselves. 
• Some ancient cities lack palaces or other signs of an elite class, suggesting the occupants may have governed themselves through networks of obligations. There are prehistoric sites where people may have temporarily gathered for rituals or big projects, but there are no signs they were forced to do this by a leader.
• Kings come to power by control of violence, control of information (administrators), or personal charisma. 
• The classification of a group of people as a tribe or state is less important than how they organize themselves.
  

Most importantly, many Native American cultures defined freedom as the ability to relocate, the ability to disobey or disregard orders, and the ability to imagine alternate ways of organizing themselves. (I think of these as freedoms of body, will, and mind.) For example, a chief may have absolute power in his village, but the rest of the tribe may choose to live out of his reach. Tribes may choose to be ruled by a council and require representatives from every clan to be part of the decision-making process.

With so many sweeping generalizations in this book, there were a few that I thought went too far (specifically, saying Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries who were taken into Native American groups unanimously returned to them when given a choice. Another statement I didn't agree with was the idea that animals never accumulate a surplus of food. What about bees or ants? A New York Times science article from last week states that in some species, animals can inherit high status or even tools from their parents, which give them an edge.) It would have been helpful to have footnotes on the page with the text instead of at the end (though since the Notes section was about 80 pages, that might not have been practical.) Still, in a world where most of us are not able to relocate easily or disregard orders, a book that restores the ability to imagine other lifestyles is invaluable, especially for speculative fiction writers.

The End is Always Near (Book Review)

 As a writer, I consider any non-fiction book I read potential research for stories. One book I recently borrowed from the library for research is The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. The author is Dan Carlin, who hosts a podcast called Hardcore History. I wasn't familiar with the podcast before reading this book; I prefer to take in information visibly instead of audibly. This book consists of several chapters that apparently are revised versions of some of Carlin's podcasts. (A Goodreads reviewer pointed this out.)

As I write this blog on Sunday, I'm only partway through this book. Some of the early chapters don't seem to meet the theme of this book, such as the one on parenting. While it's an interesting read, it wasn't what I expected. Another early chapter discusses how tough people are today versus those from previous areas. Carlin seems to think earlier people were tougher, ignoring the health and education benefits we have today.

Later chapters deal with historical events that fit the theme, like the fall of the Roman Empire and pandemics. These chapters not only describe what happened but also discuss the ramifications (such as the Black Death giving peasants opportunity to claim farmland). One thing I don't like about Carlin's writing style is his putting so many asides in footnotes. This disrupts the flow of the main text.

Despite its flaws, the book is worth reading. I'm not sure yet if I'll listen to the podcasts.

Do you enjoy reading about history? If so, do you have favorite eras? Feel free to share in the comments.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

If you enjoy reading about spies and secret codes, you'll love the biography The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, by Jason Fagone.

Elizebeth (yes, that is the real spelling) Smith Friedman was a former schoolteacher who was hired by a rich man to help verify secret messages left by Bacon in Shakespeare's plays. (Spoiler alert: There aren't any.) While she stayed at his estate in Illinois (not too far from where I live), she met a geneticist named William who also worked for the millionaire. Elizebeth and William gradually worked out a scientific approach to codebreaking, fell in love, and got married. The couple both became highly sought after codebreakers during World War I and served the country through World War II. They wrote volumes about the science of cryptography and trained others in the techniques. They learned how to break book ciphers (where a cipher key is taken from a book) without ever seeing the text and even learned how to crack Enigma machines manually. Some of their projects were so secret they couldn't discuss them with each other. During Prohibition, Elizebeth worked for the Coast Guard deciphering messages from smugglers. She gained fame as a codebreaker, but she promoted her husband's work in front of her own.

All of this codebreaking served as a warmup to Elizebeth's work during World War II. She was assigned to decrypt radio messages sent by Nazi spies in South America. The spies hoped to promote fascism in the region with the ultimate goal of using the continent to target the United States. Elizebeth broke multiple codes used by the spies, including those using Enigma machines, and passed the information along to authorities (including Hoover and the FBI). They had to be careful how they used the information she gleamed from the spies, for fear if the spies learned their codes were no longer secret, they would change them. Eventually, the English were able to kidnap a low-ranking German spy and "extract" information from him. From that point, the FBI worked with local police to break up the spy ring. Hoover got the credit, and Elizebeth was told never to discuss her World War II work with anyone. Fortunately, records of her work were saved. This unsung heroine passed away in 1980 at the age of eighty-eight, but she's been rediscovered.

Do you admire any little-known historical figures? Are you interested in codes? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Great Courses: How Great Science Fiction Works

Although listening to audiobooks feels much slower than reading, I like listening to lectures through my Audible account. I just started listening to How Great Science Fiction Works, narrated by Gary K. Wolfe. It's about 12.5 hours long, broken up into roughly-30-minute lectures. The first two lectures discussed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Amazing Stories, with particular attention given to early contributors such as Welles, Verne, and Poe.) I'm about halfway through Lecture 3 (comparing science fiction with historical fiction, along with the topic of time travel) as I write this. According to one reviewer, this series is more of a history of the science fiction genre, not a how-to course on writing great science fiction. Nevertheless, it should be a interesting listen, though it'll probably take me a few months to complete the course.

Have you ever listened to one of the Great Courses? If so, which one (or ones)? Feel free to share in the comments.

Who's the Real Parent of Science Fiction?

I normally don't read SF Signal, and I don't expect many of my blog readers do either. However, last week, a controversial post stirred up discussion among some of my Facebook friends and writer groups. This post, called "Staying on the Cutting Edge of Science Fiction," discussed only white male authors. (The author said later in the comments section that he didn't remember reading any women authors. I guess I should send him a free copy of SF Women A-Z.)

What especially caught my attention about this post was that the author credited Kepler with writing the first science fiction story, a piece called Somnium. (You can find it online here.) As a member of Broad Universe, I have always considered Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to be the first science fiction novel, and I do take pride in having her as an role model. (At one point, BU had buttons that had an image of Shelley with the slogan, "Who's Your Mama?") Obviously, however, Kepler predates her considerably. Does the history of science fiction matter today? Well, we can only view the past (and future) through the lens of our own present-day views. If that lens is distorted, we miss a lot of detail and voices that enrich history.

Kepler's work describes a trip to the moon (the traveler is carried by daemons) and what he imagines life on the moon to be like. The story is framed as a dream, perhaps to make it less challenging to authority.

As I read some more about the history of science fiction on Wikipedia (OK, it's a starting place, not the be-all and end-all of research), I came across another early forerunner of science fiction: The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish, who was not just a duchess, but a scientist and writer. Her work is from 1666, a few decades after Kepler's. Her work also describes a trip to another world (the lady traveler is taken from her home and travels by boat to the North Pole, where she crosses into a utopia and becomes its empress).

One odd thing about the history of science fiction is that the Wikipedia article lists a couple of 17th century works and several 19th century works, but only one from the 18th century, when the modern novel started to take shape. Was there less interest in scientific fiction during this period? If so, I'd like to know why.

I'm currently reading The Blazing World, despite the long, rambling sentences and changes in spelling over the centuries. I also plan to read Kepler's Sonmium so I can evaluate how well both books match what I think of as science fiction. Since I'm used to more recent works, my bias may still incline me toward favoring Shelley. Even if her work may not be the first to be based on science, the way she used contemporary scientific knowledge for a novel application is a step beyond what earlier works did. However, even if Shelley may not be the "mother of all science fiction," thanks to the article in SF Signal, I've rediscovered the grandmother of science fiction, and she seems like a very accomplished woman. Let's not forget any of the voices that helped shape this genre.