Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (16 page)

Time Traveling with Science and the Saints

by George A. Erickson

Prometheus, 177 pages, hardback, 2003

The thesis of this short book is stated succinctly in its Afterword: "History reveals that religion in general and Christianity in particular [have] retarded social and scientific progress and been the source of immeasurable woe." The book is thus a staunch rebuttal, reinforced by copious historical examples, of the commonly held fallacy that, despite all the multitudinous evils committed in its name, Christianity has overall been a civilizing factor.

Erickson begins his historical analysis by discussing the fate of Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century freethinking cleric who was tortured and burnt at the stake as a heretic for espousing and promoting the Copernican hypothesis. And it is upon the Church's still continuing and often horrendously bloody struggle to suppress scientific endeavour that Erickson, quite rightly, chooses almost exclusively to concentrate; for science, despite the frequently flawed behaviour of its establishment (as witness the derision heaped upon Wegener for advocating the notion of continental drift), is almost by definition ever in the vanguard of free thought, and, without the technology that science brings in its wake, freedom of thought must often be subjugated to the simple struggle to survive.

It is certainly the case that, as Erickson amply demonstrates, when science ushered in the Enlightenment, the thinkers of that era were merely picking up where the ancient Greeks had left off
fifteen hundred years earlier
. And it is also certainly the case, as he again demonstrates, that this 1500-year diaspora of indescribable misery and appalling brutality was largely imposed upon the West by the doctrines of the Christian churches and their imposition, often through the agency of secular tyrants, by supposedly Christian establishments whose primary goal was worldly gain and who had no interests in the teachings of Christ except insofar as they could be perverted in order to facilitate that goal.

During that 1500-year-long nightmare there were of course the obvious Christianity-inspired slaughters of the innocents: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-hunts, the Thirty Years' War. What go less generally recognized are the other casualties caused by the repression of scientific advance. The violence-enforced bans not just on medical experimentation and research but also even on medical
speculation
killed countless millions. The prohibitions on work in the physical sciences – of which Copernicus's seemingly pure-theory deductions were a part – crippled engineering and other life-saving technologies, thereby causing countless more millions of unnecessary deaths. Deaths aside, the sheer human misery engendered by the theistic tyranny is incalculable.

Erickson retains the full force of his rhetoric for the modern proponents of religion-based ignorance and stupidity in the West. The final two sections of his final chapter offer a devastatingly effective piece of polemic directed against the modern forces of intellectual repression, from Pope John Paul II and President George W. Bush on downwards, and in defence of those who, often shamefully beleaguered, pursue freedom of thought. He mercilessly exposes the nonsense of those who describe Creationism as a "science"; of those who ban birth control yet take no responsibility for the inevitably ensuing bastards, poverty, suffering and starvation; of those who use the words of the Prince of Peace as a justification for war and genocide; of those who make the laughable claim that in order to preserve freedom of thought we must suppress it. Here is Erickson on Ronald Reagan:

Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least intelligent man to ever be elected president until George W. Bush, felt comfortable appointing fundamentalist James Watt to be the Secretary of the Interior despite Watt's apocalyptic belief that led him to advise Congress not to worry over environmental issues because, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

It is shameful that we elect men like Reagan, who once inquired, "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"

The "intellectual curiosity", one need hardly add, that led to the development of the camera and motion pictures.

Though compulsively readable, the book is not without its flaws. Because of its brevity it must naturally miss some highlights during its brief trip through scientific and religious history – although it does, to its credit, cover all the major bases. On one or two occasions the text seems slightly jumbled, as if Erickson had been interrupted a few times while making his final revisions, so that a sentence seems to be in the wrong place on its page. There's a bizarre tendency to use the spelling "eigthteenth", and Sir Humphry Davy is described repeatedly as "Sir Davy". Erickson says that Priestley, on discovering oxygen, called it "phlogiston"; of course, Priestley called his new-discovered gas "dephlogisticated air", believing that it had been deprived of the theoretical (in fact, imaginary) substance phlogiston posited by Stahl a few decades earlier to explain weight-change during combustion – it was Lavoisier who, being told by Priestley of the behaviour of "dephlogisticated air", leapt to the correct conclusion that air is made up of more than one gas.

And there's one real chronological howler:

In the end, the aging Copernicus entrusted his manuscript to a liberal Nuremberg cleric named Andreas Osiander, who knew that the Vatican theologian Cardinal Bellarmine had condoned, if not arranged, the murder of Giordano Bruno for holding similar views.

Unfortunately for this statement, Bruno was burnt in 1600 while Copernicus died over half a century earlier, in 1543.

It is to be hoped such matters will be corrected when the book reprints.

Erickson nowhere explains the title of his book, but I choose to interpret it in the sense that we're being encouraged to participate in countless mental voyages of time travel in order to ask the question, not so much "what if?", as "what if
not
?" What if the Roman Catholic Church, later enthusiastically joined in the persecution of free thought by the Protestant churches, had
not
come to power – even, had
not
existed? It is almost incontestable that our civilization, for good or evil, would currently be at a level well ahead of where we are now. In this, of course, Erickson more than sufficiently makes his intended rebuttal; as a side-effect, he has also given us a book that serves as a possible source – almost a blueprint – for countless alternate history stories. It would even be reasonable to assert, although Erickson does not, that this book, through its depiction of the negative, itself depicts an alternative history-that-never-was. That
alas
never was.

Time Traveling with Science and the Saints
can be recommended not just for your own reading but as a book you might like to give to any young adolescent of your acquaintance; it is easily readable enough and short enough even for younger children, but some of them might be seriously disturbed by the accounts of the antics of the Inquisitors and others. Whether we like it or not, our young people are bombarded at every turn by the seductions and indoctrinations of the religious, whatever their sect; I can think of no better gift to ensure that a youngster will at least be able to make up her or his own mind.

—Infinity Plus

Artifacts

by Mary Anna Evans

Poisoned Pen Press, 267 pages, hardback, 2003

Any author whose name so closely resembles the real name of George Eliot clearly has a lot to live up to ...

Faye Longchamp lives on the fringes of the law, or a little beyond them. She is a pothunter – which is to say, she digs illicitly for archaeological specimens in order to sell them on the black market. Her purpose is to keep body and soul together while, somehow, retaining possession of her ancestral home, Joyeuse, on Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast. Unlike many pothunters, she has in fact trained as an archaeologist, although circumstances forced her to drop out of her training before its end; still, Professor Magda Stockard is more than eager to hire her services for the occasional
bona fide
archaeological dig. At the moment Magda's team, Faye included, is engaged on a dig on a little archipelago called the Last Isles, offshore from Joyeuse; Faye is also pothunting on the side.

One night, two of the college students employed on the dig are murdered. Faye discovers, during her extramural activities, a skeleton dating from a few decades ago, and concludes the remains are those of Abigail Williford, whose disappearance, still unsolved, was a
cause célèbre
of its day. Unable for obvious reasons to report the matter directly to the law, she begins to research the case, while simultaneously, thanks to the chance discovery of an old journal, researching her own origins amid liaisons between slavers and slaves.

Soon it becomes evident to her that various local notables were more closely involved in Abigail's disappearance than they have ever publicly admitted. More old burials of murder victims are discovered by the members of the dig; it was in an attempt to prevent discovery of these that the two student archaeologists were shot. The murderer of Abigail and the others will clearly stop at nothing to avoid detection, yet Faye is driven to try to identify him before her own life becomes forfeit.

Artifacts
is an extremely charming novel, and its central character – the mixed-ancestry Faye pluckily striving to survive despite the leviathan of the state and the schemings of a murderer – is enormously appealing. So too are some of the minor characters, notably her faithful friend Joe Wolf Mantooth, a simple-minded child-of-nature Native American. The journal extracts that pepper the text are engrossing in their depiction of the barbaric society that existed in Florida not so very long ago, when human beings depended for their very lives upon "owners" who could be either sadistic or benevolent. The depiction of Faye's emergent pride in her own ancestry, and hence in herself, is genuinely inspiring. The writing is smooth and the tale grips from beginning to end.

The only element of
Artifacts
that doesn't work so well is – oddly for a mystery novel! – the mystery itself, whose solution becomes reasonably obvious from about the halfway mark. Yet such is the charm of all the rest that this barely matters.

Read this book. You'll enjoy it.

—Crescent Blues

Fever 42

by Christopher Fahy

Overlook Connection Press, 332 pages, hardback, 2002

Every once in a while a novel comes along which jolts the senses so radically that it can be difficult for the reader to withdraw from the logic of the tale and return to the logic of the real world. Classic examples are Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
and, perhaps paramount, Luke Rinehart's
The Dice Man
. And now there is Christopher Fahy's
Fever 42
.

Comparisons with
The Dice Man
are not out of order. Although there are extravagant differences between the two books, the feel of their narratives has some similarity and, more particularly, there is the same sense that the protagonist has a self-destructive bent the reader is only too willing to share.
The Dice Man
is the more mind-twisting of the two;
Fever 42
gains its strength from being the more plausible and the more human. Where
The Dice Man
focused on the lunacy of permitting one's life to be governed entirely by chance,
Fever 42
focuses on the lunacy born of understandable human failings.

42-year-old teacher Ted Wharton is stuck in a so-so job and marriage. He loves his wife, of course he does, even if she's exasperating and their sex life tedious. He loves his kids, of course he does, even if they're high-octane brats. And so on.

He's wrenched out of this by one of his students, class sex bomb Joy Dollinger; she aggressively seduces him, initiating a reckless affair. Though little more than a third of his age, she is far more sexually experienced than he is, and delights in educating him in the wilder and more inventive practices she knows – delights he's never even dreamed existed. They couple in seedy motels but more often in places where their exhilaration is intensified by the possibility of discovery, notably on school premises. His life becomes a maelstrom of porn videos and magazines, bizarre gadgetry ... and
excitement
, the excitement that's been missing from his life for too long. Wharton's is a midlife crisis
par excellence
.

Obviously, it's also a recipe for disaster. The liaison cannot forever go undiscovered; neither can the graphic polaroids and videos they've made of each other
in flagrante delicto
more flagrant than the most flagrant delictos many of us have attempted in the privacy of our own homes. Worse: Joy declares she loves Ted forever and persuades herself he's going to ditch his family and marry her, and when he declines to do so starts manipulating him by threatening to reveal the truth to all – particularly, of course, that she was legally underage when the boffing began. Before that, at least a hundred pages before Ted, we know his life is going to be destroyed; we want him to stop his frantic career toward catastrophe, and yet at the same time we know even more so that stop is the last thing we want him to do.

Sure enough, the inevitable calamity comes to pass. But Fahy manages very beautifully – without the slightest trace of cloy – to give Ted a redemption of sorts.

Ribald, erotic, hilarious, deeply serious and tragic, often all at the same time,
Fever 42
is one of those rare books that restores our faith in the mainstream novel – and, strangely, in humanity.

—Crescent Blues

Through the Wormhole

by Robert J. Favole

Flywheel, 182 pages, hardback, 2001

Young Michael Banks and his best pal Kate are visited by the apparent ghost of an old horse-riding mentor of Michael's and given what purport to be virtual-reality kits yet which are in fact time-travel devices, made and supplied by a group called CyberTimeSurfers Inc. These have not been delivered for use as toys: it is important that Michael and Kate travel back to the time of the American Revolutionary War to save the life of Michael's ancestor John Banks, a soldier under Lafayette, as otherwise John's whole lineage, Michael included, will disappear from history. After various adventures, the kids succeed in their assigned task and within the allotted timespan.

Elements of the tale are of course pretty arbitrary. Most importantly, there is no real rationale presented as to why the task has suddenly become necessary – since Michael is already alive and kicking it's evident this particular timeline ain't bust, so why does it need fixing? Similarly, there's no reason given as to why CyberTimeSurfers should care at all whether Michael and all his ancestors back to John should survive rather than any other lineage; perhaps Michael or one of his descendants is going to do something important for the human race in the future – who knows?

There is a rationale for the book, though. This is a novel aimed at young adults – youngish young adults. Michael is a (male) Black American, Kate is a female (white) American. Michael is getting flak at school from his peer group because he is crazy keen on the honky sport of equestrian eventing. Kate, whose key sport is swimming, is on the verge of capitulating to the societal myth that there are theoretical – as opposed to artificial – limits to what women can achieve, as symbolized by her habit of funking out just before important school swimming races. Both, through their adventure in the past, learn to buck the imposed stereotypes and be – and be proud to be – what they most importantly are, irrespective of colour or gender: human beings. They discover their genuine identities.

This is a very attractively published book, complete with neat little maps to keep one in touch with events on the ground during the War of Independence adventures. The copy-editing is not quite what it should have been – "But the force of the blow had knocked John to the floor with such force that Michael had been yanked off his feet and pulled down on his back on top of John" – and the writing, which occasionally veers into didacticism, is as a whole rather flat: we are
told
about the musket fire but do not smell it; we are
told
about horseback chases but do not hear the thud of hooves or share the fear of the pursued. Nevertheless, this is a jolly enough tale to while away a few hours, and of course its subtexts, its messages, are important for its designated readership.

There is a further message. John Banks was a genuine historical personage, one of the relatively few Black freemen to fight for Independence during the Revolutionary War. In this book – as presumably was the case in reality – he does so because he believes that the best hope of all Americans, Black and White, lies in self-rule for the colonies. Of course, Blacks were to discover such beliefs were illusory; a long and bloody history of the oppression of Black Americans was to follow, and it is still the dismal case that, despite all legislative measures, they do not enjoy full equality – for one among many stark evidences of this we need look no further than at the comparative rates of capital convictions and executions between the different skin-colours. Of course, there's no reason at all to believe matters would have been any better, and they might well have been even worse in the shorter term, had the revolution failed and the British remained in power. Yet the ghost of John Banks, looking back from today, would surely be wondering bitterly exactly what it was he fought for.

Any reader of this novel will wonder the same – and it is good that they should do so. For this reason alone
Through the Wormhole
would be recommended reading.

—Infinity Plus