How To Spot A Psychopath

There was me thinking that vanity-published books-by-loonies didn’t come any better than the inimitable Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say “No” to Drugs. (The same author, with her husband, has also written Spicy True Stories, Investigators Lies, Slanders And Stocks. This latter volume is a chronicle of paranoid-delusion which I contend is indeed made more “spicy” by the author’s decision to spell the word “stalk” as “stock”, throughout the work.)

All that is in the past, though, for I have just this moment - which is to say, a couple of months after a million other people - discovered the landmark work Birth Control Is- I’m sorry, BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL IN THE CHRISTIAN MARRIAGES and also ROBBING GOD OF PRIESTHOOD CHILDREN!!, by Ms Eliyza- oh, darn it, I made that same mistake again, I meant to say by MS ELIYZABETH YANNE STRONG-ANDERSON.

MS ELIYZABETH would just be another unhinged religious ranter were it not for two decisions on her part.

The first is that she appears to have decided upon a list price for her book of one hundred and fifty US dollars. (Currently on special for only $135!)

The other, a true stroke of genius, is that BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL ET CETERA appears to be ENTIRELY IN UPPER CASE. Amazon have a “Look Inside” for the work, which only gives you the usual few pages, but reveals a distinct lack of lower-case anywhere other than the “and also” on the cover, and the text of the copyright page.

Amazon reviewers have rewarded MS ELIYZABETH with the adulation she deserves.

This slim volume strongly resembles a pocket Bible.

Translucent crinkly gilt-edged paper, ribbon bookmark, cheapest-possible leather-ish binding, text in 6.5-point Myopia. It even numbers every second line of text, to make it easy to quote chapter and verse, as it were.

It’s rather slim, though, with only 206 pages.

And it is, if you ask me, likely to be rather more useful than a Bible.

It is The Expert at the Card Table, by the mysterious “S. W. Erdnase“. This 2007 edition is published by the Conjuring Arts Research Center, but you can get others, because the author didn’t renew his copyright after he wrote the book in 1901.

As is the case for many other mildly odd books that look as if you’d have to dig through dusty used-book shops to find them (that Tintin book with the big-lipped savage natives in it, say), you can buy a brand new copy of The Expert from Amazon for fifteen US dollars.

Amazon also have a nine-dollar paperback version, which might be more practical for actual study, especially if your eyesight isn’t the best. And because the book’s not copyrighted - though many of the engravings still have “Copyright, by S. W. Erdnase, 1902″ under them - you can also legally download various e-book versions of it. Here’s one in PDF format, for instance; here’s another.

I don’t have very high hopes of ever actually mastering many of the techniques in The Expert, but I shall do my best to study it with the devotion it deserves. I think the world would be a better place if more people did.

The other day, for instance, I met a very nice lady who believes one J.Z. Knight is on the level when she claims to be able to channel “Ramtha“, a 35,000-year-old spirit from Lemuria who was responsible for most of the quantum flapdoodle in “What the Bleep Do We Know!?“. The nice lady explained to me one of the reasons why she chooses to keep up her membership of what some people might describe as the slightly kooky Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. That reason is that some other members of the Ramtha organisation are “able to see through the back of playing cards“, even if those cards come from a brand new and untouched deck!

She thought it was very closed-minded of me to observe that this sounds not unlike a card trick.

It actually, now that I think of it, doesn’t sound like much of a trick at all - it’s more like the exercise you do to learn how to read your marked cards, or interpret what your plant in the audience is signalling to you, or practice your off-by-one reading in which the card that’s shown to the audience is actually one you’ve just been looking at face up, while pretending to concentrate on a different one. Or, you know, whatever. A good card magician could probably do this trick every day for a month without repeating a technique.

Perhaps this amazing gift from Ramtha has more to do with page 182 of The Expert, “The Prearranged Deck”. I don’t think there’s actually anything about marked cards in The Expert, though. Stuff like that is very much below an actual card mechanic. (Not to mention plain useless, because card sharps often prefer to avoid inserting prepared cards into play, since this can lead to the classic aces-falling-out-of-your-sleeves situation.)

When a card mechanic rips you off, you at least know you lost the game, though you may think it happened fairly. Religious hustlers make their audience think they’re buying something of value.

The Expert at the Card Table is a fine addition to my Tiny Book Library.

My dusty old 9th Edition Pocket PC Ref is of very limited utility these days, but Pocket Ref will go on forever. I just flicked it open to three random places, and got a trigonometry table, RF Coil Winding Data, and the specific gravity and angle of repose of granulated sugar.

(I’m not sure what that portends. I should probably ask that nice Ramtha lady.)

The Metafilter thread about Michael Crichton’s unexpected death is less respectful than most death-threads there.

Which is, of course, no big deal. Someone always says “show a little respect, you wouldn’t act like this at the guy’s funeral” when obituary-thread commenters not only omit the traditional moment-of-silence dot, but even say bad things about the deceased.

But Crichton’s grieving family are probably not frantically refreshing Metafilter right now. And MeFi users are, overall, pretty enthusiastic about the advancement of human knowledge. And Michael Crichton did human knowledge a few significant injuries, especially with his later books.

A lot of commenters said they loved Crichton’s books when they were kids. I bet I would have, too, but I think I just didn’t read any. Maybe The Andromeda Strain, but I’m not sure.

I’m glad only the earlier, less anti-science ones would have been available then, though.

That’s because I read State of Fear as an adult, and the only part of it that seemed obviously stupid at the time - never mind the implausible environmentalist Giant Conspiracy, stuff like that’s normal in thrillers - was the magic gadget that caused enemies of the enviroterrorist baddies to be struck by lightning, in cheerful defiance of basic electrophysics.

(Enviroterrorists with the ability to suck lightning out of clouds wouldn’t need to be enviroterrorists any more. They could just start building lightning power stations.)

The real scientific problem with State of Fear whistled right over my head, though. The book contains several Author Filibusters about climate change - or, more specifically, the allegedly poor quality of our knowledge about climate change - and all of those sounded plausible enough to me at the time.

Only because I looked into it later do I know that Crichton was talking absolute cock, and had to be either fully aware of this fact, or senile, or wilfully ignorant.

(See also: Poor old Antony Flew.)

Crichton didn’t seem to be very good at dealing with criticism. He famously named a throwaway character in a later book after someone who’d given State of Fear a very bad review. The throwaway character was a baby-rapist. Classy.

Anyway, I like to think that if I’d read State of Fear when I was twelve, I’d also have looked up the facts afterwards. But I bet I wouldn’t have.

The world is, self-evidently, well-stocked with people who don’t do any more due diligence on what they read than I would have when I was a kid. People believe bestselling thrillers that make statements about the nature of the world, especially when those statements are the core of the whole story, as they are in all of Crichton’s works. If you’re writing about things that happen on Planet Zarnax or in the Cthulhu mythos or whatever then that’s one thing, but if a book’s whole anvil-subtle thesis is that the scientific consensus about climate change is wrong, you need to take your share of the responsibility for everyday voters believing that you’re right.

Heck, even utter garbage like Left Behind has an enthusiastic audience of people who don’t even bother checking its statements against the Bible. Much less check to see whether, to name just one of a very long list of outrageous wall-bangers, the United Nations really does have the power to take over the whole world on a whim.

Given the power of popular books, it’s simply irresponsible to put misinformation about matters vitally important to the whole world in books which you - and your bank account - know are read by orders of magnitude more voters than read the scientific papers that prove you wrong.

If you’re the only loud voice that’s talking rubbish, then it’s not such a big deal. But when there’s a genuine culture war going on about climate change, or evolution, or dear-god-now-they’re-coming-after-neuroscience, the side you pick matters. State of Fear seems to have become a sort of easy-reading textbook for climate-change deniers. Look, for instance, at whole-hearted support Crichton got from fellow bullshit artist James Inhofe.

People should be allowed to write, publish and read whatever the heck they like, no matter how contrary to fact it is.

But if you’re in the business of lying to people about matters of grave global importance, I for one am not going to shed a tear when you die.

(On the subject of books that contain wise and wordy characters who entirely agree with the author, see also Robert Heinlein, whose books I loved as a kid. In my memory, Time Enough For Love is completely awesome. So I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to read it again now. Fortunately, kids’ sci-fi that actually gets the science more or less right also exists.)

Steve Fuller, unpersuasive testifier for the defense in the Kitzmiller Intelligent Design trial (you know, the one that led a conservative Christian judge to conclude that Intelligent Design was obviously just creationism with a fake moustache), has written a book explaining his views.

That book has been reviewed by Norman Levitt, who has himself written a book which addresses similar subject matter from a somewhat different point of view.

Levitt’s review is not complimentary.

It is, I think, on par with Roger Ebert’s review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

It seems to me that Levitt tired of the serious-thinker-versus-stoned-dimwit-with-a-high-opinion-of-himself beat-down fairly early, so he started throwing in hundred-dollar words to keep himself interested.

The other day, I realised I could only remember two of the kids’ science fiction series that shaped my young mind.

First and foremost, beyond question, were the Danny Dunn books.

I loved them, not least because they made a solid attempt at getting the physics right.

Example.

When people get shrunk to the size of ants in practically any other sci-fi or fantasy story you care to name, they carry on with their lives more or less as normal in their scary new world of bus-sized cockroaches and bean-bag-sized blood cells, or whatever.

Which is wrong, for the same reason that it’s wrong that Superman is so often able to take a firm grip of one end of a battleship or something and lift it bodily out of the water.

We can accept that normal physics doesn’t apply to Superman himself, just as we can accept that absent-minded Professor Bullfinch in Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine has indeed managed to construct the eponymous Machine. But Superman doesn’t magically make the battleship as tough as he is just by laying hands on it. The ship is still subject to normal physics, so when Clark grabs and lifts he should end up with two large handfuls of torn steel, and look like an idiot.

(Image Comics did this right at one point, with the new and clueless Mighty Man trying to lift a car by the bumper and, of course, just ripping the bumper off.)

Anyway, when Danny and company get shrunk, they find they can’t walk any more. Because, of course, the acceleration due to gravity is still 9.8 metres per second squared, and if you’re scaled down to a thousandth of what you were, that now looks like 9.8 kilometres per second squared.

So if you’re standing up and tilt slightly forward with the intention of starting to walk, BANG you’re on the ground. Just like an ant would be, if it tried to stand on its hind legs.

You suffer no damage, since scaling down makes you tougher in scale terms, but bipedal locomotion is completely out of the question unless your body and consciousness are accelerated by the same factor by which they’ve been shrunk.

Which, in the Dunn stories and in all of the crappy Incredible Voyage/Honey I Screwed Up The Physics Hollywood versions, they never have been.

So there.

(Warning! This sort of thing can lead to long conversations later in life about the stability of the Ringworld, which is even worse than prolonged Monty Python quoting when you’re at a party and should be meeting girls.)

The other sci-fi(ish) series I could remember was Norman Hunter’s immortal Professor Branestawm series, which takes a lot more liberties with physics but is plainly doing so in the service of humour. Branestawm is more of a wizard than a professor; he’d be perfectly at home in Unseen University.

(The Branestawm books, or at least the good editions of them, were also illustrated by nobody less than W. Heath Robinson!)

There was another series, though, that I just couldn’t pin down. I could remember it featured a family adventuring around the galaxy in an old spaceship, with memory implanting machines to school the kids, and the spaceship needed its engines de-coked in at least one book… nope, no useful search strings arising from those memories.

(I include them here so that now someone who can only remember the de-coking, or indeed decoking, or decoked or decoke or coke engines spaceship books, will find this post.)

Anyway, considerable Google-bashing finally reminded me that those books were the Dragonfall 5 (or indeed but incorrectly Dragonfall Five, frustrated searchers!) series.

All three of these series are significantly dated these days, but I think that, in itself, has more educational value for the kind of nine-year-old who’ll find them interesting. They’re all out of print, too, but seem pretty easy to find on the used market, and should be available from any half-decent library.

It sucks when you like someone’s artistic work and then find out that they’re a jackass.

Piracy helps, of course. If you just can’t stomach making some mad religious bigot richer every time you see one of his movies or listen to one of his albums - rip ‘em off!

That’s harder with books. I suppose you can do it if you buy them second hand, but that can be tricky for books that are (a) recent and (b) not rubbish.

I was all set, you see, to write a happy clappy post about how much I’ve enjoyed a couple of Neal Asher books.

Neal, I presume, wanted to tell some bloodcurdling tales of the sea. But nothing that’s ever happened on any sea here could possibly be bloodcurdling enough for him, so he invented a planet, “Spatterjay”.

Spatterjay’s fauna is almost constantly brutally violent, its human inhabitants get tougher and tougher as they get older and older (and older…), and all sorts of entertaining things happen there. Plankton that eats people, people that don’t die even when they’ve been eaten, treacherous alien slavemaster crabs, cybernetically animated corpses, giant robot pterodactyls…

It goes on. It’s a lot of fun.

I’ve only read a couple of Ashers so far. “The Skinner” was the first one set on Spatterjay, then came “The Voyage of the Sable Keech”, which isn’t as good (and doesn’t seem to have been nearly as well proofread…), but is still a rollicking old tale of blood, guts and hundred-ton-sentient-mollusc rape.

Then I noticed that Neal Asher has a blog.

And everything went downhill.

Look, if you can be coherent about your bitter right-wing realpolitik throat-slitting, I’ll read it with a song in my heart and a smirk on my face. But if you keep trotting out arguments that I could see didn’t work when I was using FidoNet at the age of 16, you’re letting the free speech side down.

Neal reckons that it’s bad that governments want to tell us what to do, but we should definitely let them kill us. Before we’re convicted, if at all possible.

He doesn’t know much about climate change (what a shame there isn’t someone you can ask!) but he does know it isn’t happening and if it is then it doesn’t matter and if it does then it’s not our fault and if it is then there’s nothing we can do.

And then, there’s this.

It’s not that he says things I disagree with. He says many things with which I agree. It just seems that he doesn’t think too hard about anything he says, and I don’t like encouraging that sort of thing by helping to make his books bestsellers.

I don’t ask for much from the authors I like. A bit of coherent thought now and then, an affection for orangutans, a few obscure references to Tony Hancock, a recognition that AK-47s for everybody is not necessarily a great way to run a railroad.

Or, of course, just telling your adoring fans to bugger off while you write another vast tome involving hot-swappable mistresses.

That’ll do.

Neal Asher does not make the cut.

I propose that the sci-fi-writer version of this Creative Jackass Syndrome be referred to as The Orson Scott Card Problem.