Some of My Current Favorite Authors: Pullman, Pratchett, Eddings, Brooks, Rowling, Zimmer Bradley, Tolkien

This post was triggered by the fact that I'm vacationing here in Tucson, (which is odd, because life is just one long vacation, now that I'm retired,) and I bought two books at (one of the branches of) the famous Bookmans store in Tucson.  (Bookmans is apparently basically an Arizona family of stores.)

One of the books is Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett, written around 2001, and from its style, mostly Pratchett's writing.  The other was The Book of Dust, by Philip Pullman, both of them authors whose works I have reviewed on this blog.  I was just reporting on these purchases to the boss, who's back home holding the fort, and the purchases were tentatively approved.  Meanwhile, of course, I'm eating far too much Mexican food; and if you eat the American versions of Mexican food, you end up eating a lot more cheese than is good for you, and that's exactly what I have been doing.  And more of it is coming up for lunch.

The things I scrutinize new stories I read for, are: Is there a jolly good story?  Then: are the characters mostly likeable?  Then: does the writer have a sense of humor?  This is important; our society is becoming relentlessly humorless, and keeping a sense of humor is coming to be more of a survival characteristic than it has been in the past.  Then: Is the author condescending towards his or her audience?  In the case of Science Fiction (or SciFi, if that is more familiar--there, see?  I was condescending right there), a little condescension is inevitable, if you really want to explain some pivotal concept that is not some magical business.  Arthur Clarke was of the opinion that you may as well allow the reader to treat it as magic; I'm not entirely convinced of that.  Already most citizens take an attitude towards technology that is dangerously skewed towards regarding it as magic, or at least deception.  I'm talking about those on the Flat-Earth Spectrum; you know who you are.  Anyway, there's a difference between laughing with the reader, and laughing at the reader.

Terry Pratchett gets high points for his characters, and his humor, and for the first half of his story plots.  But in each case, the endings of the stories tend to unravel rather than to end nicely.  The fact that Pratchett has magic to help him end his stories is a weakness.  A large minority of his stories do have nice, logical endings.  But nearly half of his stories just fall apart, but the fun characters floundering around at the end are a sort of consolation prize with which I can live.

Philip Pullman is an awesome author, whose stories are closely plotted, and whose details seem to be worked out in almost painfully logical fashion, and I don't have enough insight into his work to have an informed opinion about the various characteristics that I'm looking for.  One interesting thing is that his characters are not clearly divided into good and bad ones.  There are always flaws in the good characters, and saving graces in the bad ones.  But I have only read three complete books (the Golden Compass trilogy), and read just 10 pages of this prequel that I've just bought, so I expect to have better informed opinions by the time I finish.

David Eddings is also an excellent author.  He brings to his writing an enormous knowledge of history, and of mythology in general, and of his study of people (which all authors must do, because ultimately the writing is only as successful as their ability to draw on our--the readers'--experiences with people.

Terry Brooks is an author about whom I haven't written before.  This gentleman seems to have a lot of knowledge about mythology, too; among other things, Indian and other South Asian mythologies.  He draws on these things to good effect.  But I do not like the sort of brinkmanship he displays in creating absolutely horrifying scenarios in his stories; I find myself skipping like mad, just to avoid having nightmares.  Call me a snowflake; I take the criticism willingly.  His canvas is also large, and his palette equally large, but that sense of being manipulated is hard to take.

Jane Rowling is a master plotter.  I mean, there are certainly a few stumbles here and there, but they are minor.  I think she should be given credit for being the Tolkien of this generation, and it is impossible to be more serious about one's subject-matter without losing one's sense of humor entirely.  The characters are brilliant (more brilliant for those who are familiar with British children's literature, since they draw on some beloved archetypes), and all the ingredients are there.  I'm not saying that authors will be unable to repeat her writing feat; but it is going to take a lot of very hard work.  (If not for the work involved, I myself would be an author!!)

Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of the Darkover series of books, and several other important books, such as The Mists of Avalon set of books, and The Firebrand, about the Trojan War, is a wonderful author.  One has to come to terms with the particular aspects of magical realism that she uses in the Darkover series, for instance.  I can't understand why some of the details in the Darkover series are so inconsistent; taking a wild guess, I would say that she wrote the whole thing as a single enormous story long ago, and began to publish episodes taken from it.  Or the opposite may be true: she may have started publishing independent short stories initially, (we do know that she did this,) which she subsequently tried to weave into a coherent whole.  Her characters are not all easy to relate to, but many of them are.  He male characters all seem to be unstable and eccentric, and her female characters seem to be unattractive and weak, but with redeeming aspects of strength.  She must have known some very peculiar people, or else the people she admired were the weirder ones among her acquaintances.  Still, I enjoyed reading many of her books.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a fabulous plotsman, and a mythologist, and a character smith.  Mythic characters are a little hard to identify with and enjoy.  The hobbits were the ones we were, I believe, expected to identify with, whereas the Elves and Dwarfs were sort of background furniture.  Still, despite all the peculiarities of his stories to which we have become accustomed, Tolkien casts such an enormous shadow that it is impossible to evaluate him side by side with authors who were influenced by him.  (I'm probably writing someone's term paper for her.)

Of course, none of us have known the exact sorts of people who become characters in all these books; it's always a mixture of types of people we know very well; people who are a little like those we know; and people who completely out of left field, but who are somehow plausible to some degree.  If all the characters echo those we have known, then . . . I don't know; would that be a good thing?  With Pratchett, that's what happens, it seems to me.

[To be continued.  Yeah, right . . .]

Beyond "The Sound of Music," the Story of the Von Trapps

Most of us who know anything about the Von Trapp Family, have learned it from The Sound of Music, the immensely popular movie musical from 1965.  (2015 was its 50th anniversary; the movie made the already well-known Julie Andrews into an even bigger international star.)

Around the time I was in my twenties, interested in folk music and the guitar, and in German music as well, I acquired a copy of the (I believe) first book written by Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Von Trapp Family Singers.  It was autobiographical, and though it was natural that Ms. Maria may have glamorized the account a little, it was a very plausible and convincing description of what had happened.

The story is as follows:  An Austrian submarine captain, Georg von Trapp, who fought in WWI and was decorated, loses his wife to scarlet fever, leaving his many children motherless.  There was already a robust tradition of choral singing in the family, but that was hardly unusual; children of those parts were encouraged to sing on any appropriate occasion.  Singing in harmony might have been barely a little more unusual.

Von Trapp had appealed to the local convent for a nanny for the kids, and a postulant, Maria Kutschera, had been sent.  She had been a lot more successful than earlier nannies, apparently, and Captain von Trapp and she got along so well that they married.  (Maria reported that she married for the sake of the children, but later fell in love with the Captain.)  The kids already sang pretty well, but it appears that Maria at least encouraged them to sing more complex part-songs (madrigals).

[Added later, after I had read the book Memories, Before and After the Sound of Music
The Movie (A Life of Music) was presented as based on the above book.  Unfortunately--and inevitably--the facts are too complex for a movie.  They had to take many of the same short-cuts to tell the story as The Sound of Music took.  In actual fact, the Trapps were 'discovered', and went touring several months to a year before the borders were closed, and life became impossible.  Captain von Trapp was asked to take command of a submarine, and refused, but life continued for a while afterwards, as I understand it.  All that is compressed into what is shown as a few days, until the family leaves right after the performance.  Still, from the point of view of what makes sense in a movie, perhaps this compression is inevitable.] 

At the time, the NAZIs took over Germany, and moved to annex Austria, and Austrian banks folded.  The Von Trapps lost all their savings.

The NAZIs indicated that they were interested in the Von Trapp house.  By accident, word that the Trapp children's choir sang well got around, and there was a struggle between the Captain, on one side, who felt it was beneath the dignity of the family to sing in public, and the children, Maria, and the local musical impressarios on the other hand.  The performance took place, and the singing Von Trapp family's fame spread.

At the urging of Maria, the family escaped by rail, via Italy and England, to the US.

The slightly sensationalized story in the movie musical had been an annoyance for many years, but in time for the 50th anniversary of the movie, a movie that stuck a lot closer to the facts was released, titled "The Von Trapp Family: A Life of Music," based on a book by Agathe von Trapp: Memories Before and After The Sound of Music.

The 2015 Movie

I watched the movie A Life of Music, released in 2015, just yesterday.  It is a sedate and low-key production, featuring songs that the children actually sang (in contrast to the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs in the 1965 movie), and a story line that reflected the facts more closely.  Of course, there has to be a little psychological drama, and this is provided by presenting the story as a flashback.  The framework of the film is a Trapp granddaughter who departs from a family gathering, unhappy with her blended family, due to a divorce.  A grand-aunt follows her to the train station, Aunt Agatha (actually Agathe, the eldest of the Trapp children, who evidently Americanized her name for ease of use in Vermont), who relates the story to the disgruntled young lady.

Captain von Trapp, in actual fact, was a rather mild and kindly man, and in the new film is portrayed as such quite believably by Matthew McFaddyen.  It is quite a contrast to the portrayal by Christopher Plummer in the 1965 movie, but of course the needs of 20th-century cinema demanded a more glamorous Captain.  The new movie also has the musical establishment of the City of Salzburg represented symbolically by Lotte Lehman, the famous soprano, who is known to have visited Salzburg, and possibly have had a hand in the discovery of the Von Trapps.  According to Wikipedia, the Von Trapps did sing at a music festival in Salzburg at Lehmann's urging, and this is amplified to some degree in the new movie.  (Miss Lehmann lived until around 1985, and has said she helped bring attention to the Trapp Family singing.)

The 2015 movie is most definitely not a musical, though there is music in every scene.  There were many opportunities to stuff even more music into it, but then it might have been moved further into the realm of the ultra-romanticized, which was evidently not the intention of the producers.  One gets the impression that the movie was an extreme reaction to the tendency of Maria Von Trapp to sensationalize and romanticize everything, and Agathe von Trapp's impatience with this tendency.  To really learn all about the family dynamics, at least from Agathe's point of view, one would have to read the book, which I have not.

Anyway, I think myself, and all of us, fortunate to have experienced the music of the Trapps, even at once or twice remove.  Musicians are passionate people, who sometimes tend to oversimplify, and then overdramatize their experiences and feelings.  From that point of view, I think the very moderate style of A Life of Music would be very welcome.

Added Later:

I have just learned that the Ave Maria which the Trapps sing (in the 2015 movie) was not even composed at the time, 1938; it is a relatively recent composition, by Vladimir Vavilov, around 1970!  It is so frustrating that movie producers have so little respect for their audiences, and the factual details of their movies!  Every little bit of reliable information is removed, and the movie is made superficially more entertaining.  Well, that's show business, as they say.

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What do we Think About Driverless Cars??!!

This is a topic that is going to come up very soon; it's going to be too late to think about driver-less cars calmly and rationally, when our hot-tempered friends and colleagues get all hot and bothered about the subject!  Many of our problems have stemmed from trying to make decisions when we're not ready, or when we don't have all the information.

I don't have all the information either; I'm just trying to gather some of it here.  I have a little physics background, and I will try to stretch its applicability a little more than it ought to be, but I daresay some of my readers are likely to be at a disadvantage compared to me, so be warned.

Terminology

We should first get our terminology straight.  One outfit that is working to smooth the way to getting ordinary car-owners and citizens using the same language is SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers, the same fellows who set the specifications ('specs') for engine oil.  They have defined five levels of car automation.  (It's inconvenient that the word 'automobile' has the root 'auto' in it; we do not think of cars as auto-anything; when we used to talk about an automatic car, it meant an automatic transmission, which is not even considered much of an automatic thing anymore.)

Levels of Driving Automation (see here)

Level 0:  No automation.  The driver is fully responsible for most aspects of driving, even it the car may give warnings, etc.  Some cars may briefly take control, e.g. when a crash is imminent, in very specific situations, as when you're following a vehicle too closely, and it suddenly slows; this is still Level 0.

Level 1:  Hands On; the driver and the automated system share control.  The system can do the steering, for example, in automatic parking; or changing lanes on an open highway, or stay in lane on a highway; or the system can control speed, such as in cruise control.

Level 2:  Hands Off; the driver need not have his or her hands on the wheel, but must be seated in the driving seat, and be ready to grab the wheel whenever needed.  In some cases, the car will insist on hands being on the wheel, even if not steering.

Level 3:  Eyes Off; the driver need not be watching the road, but must be in the driving seat.  The car will take care of some, but not all, emergency procedures; the driver must be ready to take over for the rest.

Level 4:  Mind Off.  The car will drive automatically, and if it sees a problem that is beyond its capability, it will wait for a set time, and if the driver doesn't intervene, it will park the car and close down.  It is understood that this level of automation will only be allowed in certain safe areas, e.g. bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Level 5:  Steering Wheel Optional, Fully automatic.

How I feel about all this

Safety There is no doubt that, once the systems are close to perfection (or perfected, something that some people will argue about, but perfection is never really achieved, as we all know), a group of Level 5 cars, all communicating with each other, are far less likely to result in a collision than if even one of them is being driven by a person.  That day will come only if the crazy city traffic conditions are completely fenced-off from the 'automation-allowed' traffic zones.  If all traffic is automated, then I suppose Level 5 cars can manage pretty well.  This situation is hard to imagine; I would expect that cities will have most people on public transport, except for extremely ill, or extremely immobile (e.g. ultra-heavy, or handicapped) citizens who may have some special arrangement to avoid having to transfer from one vehicles into another.  Having a car for each person even ten years from now will be a traffic nightmare, unless the 'vehicle' is just a little capsule, and not a full SUV.

Fun  Anyhow, we have all been accustomed to think of driving as something fun to do--when the conditions are right--rather than a drudgery, a necessary evil to get from here to there.  Unfortunately, that attitude simply means that we guzzle a lot of gas, and create a lot of pollution (considering CO2, which is a non-poisonous gas, as a pollutant, from the point of view of the greenhouse effect).

Pollution In addition, large tractor-trailers, which support our maniacal consumption habit, also generate a lot of pollution, and are often at the center of spectacular pileups on the highways, and spills.  Level 5 trucks are a great idea.  Those who earn their living driving trucks--poor souls--would hate the idea of being laid off, naturally.  But from the point of view of the owners of the fleets, a truck, even going at a slow speed under an automatic system, can get goods to their destination just as fast as a human-driven truck, because it can just keep going without stopping.  They will be much less of a danger to private traffic, because of the lower speed, and the predictability of the movements of an automatic vehicle.

To make this work better, they could make on-ramps for cars onto the second lane, so that cars can shoot over the stream of automatic trucks trundling along at 50 mph.  Even if these ramps are fairly rare, it will make the whole thing more palatable for temperamental motorists.  Notice how much like the railway the truck picture is becoming?  Well, we might be stupid, but let's not be permanently stupid.

How Do They Do It?

Cars with a high level of automation combine a lot of inputs into what they decide to do.  The automatic transmission, which was essentially perfected by Chrysler and Toyota (don't quote me; I did not look that up for the purpose of this post) uses the car speed and the engine speed, the load on the engine, and almost nothing else.  This is why it is so amazingly effective; the transmission is flexible to start with (non-rigid), so over transmissions have become almost impossible to notice.  (This is why we get pissed off if the transmission even falters slightly.)

Level 5 cars use a lot of inputs; potentially:

Input from cameras on board, to detect vehicles, obstacles, road information, and pedestrians.

Input from radar- or sonar- scanners aimed around the car, to prevent collision.

Eventually, radio communication with neighboring vehicles, to be able to predict future positions and configurations, and to calculate best motion decisions.

On-board, or off-board, maps or guidance systems.

Eventually, roadside guidance markers, such as markers embedded in the roadway, or on the roadside, or both.

Clearly, Level 5 vehicles will do a lot better if the cars that surround them are also Level 5.

But because we can anticipate that most drivers will stubbornly refuse to let go of the steering wheel, figuratively, these developments will have to be phased in slowly, until such time as this generation of drivers all die off.

In crowded situations (or all situations, really), a car has to keep track of four neighboring vehicles.  It should be possible to program the system to deal with one or two vehicles that are missing the equipment to communicate the information that the automatic system would like, in which case, it could give a warning squawk, and hand the steering over to the driver.  (In that sort of traffic, most of us would prefer to have our hands on, anyway.)  In totally bumper-to-bumper traffic, the Level 5 system would do well, keeping a prescribed distance away from neighboring vehicles--front and sides, anyway; nothing can be done about the back--unless some neighboring joker wants to keep changing lanes all the time, as they seem to want to do on the New Jersey Turnpike, which is maintained for the entertainment of NJ motorists, rather than for traveling.

One Last Idea

The easiest plan to implement would be to set aside a couple of lanes only for Level 5 cars.  This idea will work just about as well as the idea of the High Occupancy Vehicle lane (HOV lane) works, which is: just average; there are always renegades who want to get into that HOV lane and cruise, all by themselves.  It is this omnipresence of renegades in the US that makes certain types of progress very difficult and slow.  Unfortunately, the law and the courts seem to be on the side of the renegades!  Oh well, the price we pay to live in freedom.

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