[BRIEF NOTE] Ben Bova and Me

I used to be a big fan of Ben Bova until I read his 1993 novel The Trikon Deception, co-authored with Bill Pogue. The plot's interesting enough, with a private corporation operating a high-security lab in Earth orbit tasked with preventing Earth's ecological collapse, but one lthrowaway line in a character's bio tripped me. She was born in Quebec City; she had experienced, Bova and Pogue went on to say, in a community that had experienced language strike.

Quebec City is 95% Francophone. If there's any Québec metropolis not torn by ethnic strife, Quebec City is it.

The failure of his fact-checking in this instance made me wonder just how much of his material was similarly wrong, in areas that I was unfamiliar with. Later, I came up with more reasons for distancing myself from Bova, like his wooden prose style and his identikit plots.

[BRIEF NOTE] Has Harper's Magazine jumped the shark?

I ask this because the latest issue of this venerable magazine includes AIDS denialist Celia Farber's article "Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science." This article makes use of a sort of rhetoric that I first encountered on reading Erich von Daniken as a credulous adolescent, combining partially accurate explanations of potential anomalies with a barely suppressed tone of outrage at the lies invested by the relevant authorities in their false picture of the world. Farber uses the space in Harper's to repeat many of the same claims that she made here, starting by identifying people who responded badly to HIV medication, going on to identify dodgy-sounding research programs, and then going from this ill-reported and contentious issues to make a claim that Peter Duesberg is in fact right about AIDS having no correlation to HIV at all. In Farber's article, AIDS is just a collection of unrelated diseases given a common label by pharmaceutical companies out to make money.

Others have dissected these claims. HIV causes AIDS. The cases of people who received HIV-tainted blood transfusions and medical workers who suffered needlestick accidents, went on to become HIV positive, and eventually developed AIDS seem particularly confirmatory in this context. Though I hasten to add that my judgement is only that of the moderately informed layman, I feel comfortable in accepting the medical authorities' word on this. As for Farber's contentions that the bad side-effects from anti-HIV drug regimens prove the pharmaceutical companies' malign intents, all that I can say is that I, too, would like to live in that wonderful world where drugs never cause any side-effects.

I hope that Harper's fact-checking simply slipped up on this one. For the time being, all I can say is that this wonderful magazine has taken the fight against big business rather too far.

[BRIEF NOTE] Thoughts on Cultural Reproduction in SF

I'm a fanboy of (for?) Canadian/British SF writer Geoff Ryman because of his The Child Garden. Taking a look at the late great Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood, I think I'm becoming a fan of her as well. Right off the bat, Ryman and Butler seem to have two things in common.

• Their major works deal with new forms of biological and cultural reproduction in environments made hostile by human prejudices and humanized by non-human technologies and beings.


• Neither author is straight; both authors produce works populated substantially by non-heterosexuals, or at least by people not wedded to traditional heterosexual moral structures.

I admit that I may be projecting from my own personal experience, since I'm not very likely to produce biological offspring via a traditional-style heterosexual marriage. Then again, these two authors really are strongly preoccupied with the transmission of culture made horizontally to one's peers, not vertically to one's descendants. Is it possible that this horizontal transmission is a major theme in GLBT-themed science fiction? I'm inclined to say so, but I've not read enough of said subgenre to be able to come to a conclusion.

My readers, what say you?

[BRIEF NOTE] Let's try peace first

Writing for Tech Central Station ("Give Civil War a Chance"), James H. Joyner Jr argues that if Iraq descends into civil war the United States should not try to prevent that conflict, but that it should instead withdraw. He quotes blogger Stephen Green as arguing that "the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, and the American war between the states of where internecine conflict settled major disputes and paved the way for a much brighter future for all concerned." Joyner defended himself at Outside the Beltway, arguing that for reasons of strategy the United States should regretfully decline.

Even if you did grant that it would be a good idea to have maniacs kill each other in huge numbers--a point that I don't grant for reasons of a priori morality--the problem is that they also kill other, uninvolved people in rather large numbers. In central Europe and the British Isles, double-digit percentages of the population perished, as did double-digit percentage of the South's male population. Standing by and allowing mass murder to happen doesn't strike me. As Metternich said of Napoleon's judicial murder of the duc d'Enghien, such would be "worse than a crime, it is a mistake." Creating an explosive situation and then withdrawing just in time to avoid getting caught up with the victims would be a rather bad thing to do indeed.

Then agan, it doesn't seem as if many of the hopeful policymakers care about such things. Look for yourself at springheel_jack's screen capture of a Fox News debate on whether there would be an upside to civil war. Arendt's conclusions on the banality of evil resound in our time, all the more strongly if you accept her detractors' claim that she underestimated Eichmann's genocidal anti-Semitism and over-estimated the autonomy of the destroyed Jewish community.

[BRIEF NOTE] Tourism and Murder

The recent murder in the Mexican resort city of Cancun of visiting Canadians Domenico and Annunziata Ianiero has caused quite a controversy here, not least because of suspicions over the integrity of the investigation and the strong doubts about whether the two visiting Canadian women named by the Mexican police as likely suspects are, in fact, professional killers.

The murder of two happy middle-aged Canadians visiting Mexico for their daughter's wedding isn't Dreiser's American Tragedy. What it is, instead, is demonstration of the truth of John Ralston Saul's bon mot in his The Doubter's Companion that Florida (and by extension the Caribbean basin) is the potential irredenta where Canadians went in search of warmth. The further complications--alleged police corruption and incompetence, the transgression of the murder's simultaneity with some of the most intimate rites of the ideal Canadian family, the pretty scared women who deny their involvement--just add spice. Something reminds me particularly strongly of Muriel Spark's marvellously chilling 1970 novel The Driver's Seat, and of that novel's conclusion.

( Spoilers for The Driver's Seat. )