The Plight of Mongo

Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I would recommend this book to any author who is looking to frame a global disaster. Larry Niven keeps his focus on a select group of people, forms a more tangible conflict for his characters, and the cometary impact itself is reduced to a couple of chapters. However everything before and after those chapters pivots upon them.

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Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
After reading the Illuminatus Trilogy, I was really anticipating this novel. Robert Anton Wilson’s high mind style of writing is enjoyable, if a bit fractured. I really had high hopes.

This book fell kind of flat however, as Mr. Wilson attempts to visualize the concept of the multiverse my creating different versions of each of his characters, many of whom first appeared in the Illuminatus. However what the author does not do is adhere to any kind of real plot, and just when you think you might have a bit of a narrative or the resemblance of a coherent story he changes the world again.

The point of the book is to show you how everything you do or do not do, is inversely done or not done in a connected universe. I believe the author is also trying to convince us that we are all Schrodinger’s cat, living in a state that is neither living or dead, up until the moment we are observed, upon observation we will either die or live.

However, I could not stop reading this book, as the vivid imagination of Wilson’s is enticing and extremely visual. Having read the Illuminatus first, I recognized the characters, and how he was attempting to show the variations based on quantum variability.

A good read overall, but not nearly the quality of his first Trilogy.

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During a rare quiet morning this weekend, with both child and lady still asleep, I gave myself time to watch some science fiction.  This kind of event has become rare these last couple years, so I try to keep what I watch to some level of quality.  I recently made a decision to watch 2012, and now I have to relearn basic math.  Seriously, that movie actually forced part of my brain to leave.  I understand it it trying to go back in time to prevent the Mayan people from carving their calendar so there would be no reason to ever make 2012.

Anyway, in an attempt to cleanse my brain of the new lesions afflicted upon it, I watched Moon, created by Duncan Jones, son of David Jones (he goes by David Bowie I hear), and staring Sam Rockwell.  I had heard good things about this movie, and someone thought it was a good idea to ruin the big plot point for me.  I will attempt to not do the same.

250,000 Miles from home, the hardest thing to face is yourself.

The story opens with Sam Bell (Rockwell) as a sole miner on a Helium 3 mine on the Moon, who for company has the robot GURDY (voice of Kevin Spacy).  The H3 is used for clean fusion energy back on earth and in the opening sequence we learn that it has solved all of mankind’s problems.  Or something like that, the baby was crying by this point.  Oh well for quiet morning.

Anyway, he fell back to sleep, and the movie began again.  Its the last two weeks of this lonely miners 3yr contract, and all he wants is his wife and daughter.  It appears that his mind is slipping, and he seems to hallucinate in his sterile white bunker.

One of these hallucinations happens while out on a rover to collect H3 from the mining drones, and he crashes.   Sam awakes in the infirmary and is told of the accident, however he does not recall it.  Things become suspicious and Sam arranges to sneak back out to the site of the crash, only to find himself in the rover, badly injured.

As Roger Ebert put it “The movie is really all about ideas. It only seems to be about emotions. How real are our emotions, anyway? How real are we? Someday I will die. This laptop I’m using is patient and can wait.”.

Moon is a study in what we believe is self, and what self truly matters.  Rockwell is brilliant as Sam Bell, twice.  He spends the entire film speaking to himself, literally.

I recommend this as a lazy morning film, there is no action, very little real tension, but it will keep your attention and make you think.  I like thinking with coffee.