Eighty Directions

There are about eighty directions in which I could go in this post. However, I've been advised by TPTB(PTJ) to keep my posts more to a length befitting posts and not essays. No promises on the reflections, though, and I plan to continue making pictures of Carl Schmitt and Telly Savalas. Feel free to skip down a little. I've made it obvious when the good stuff starts up.

I simultaneously immensely enjoyed and detested The Sparrow. While reading, I would come to those discordant conclusions at the same instant. If anything, this led me to deeply respect Russell as an author... and the Wachowski brothers, perversely. I've caught the second Matrix about ten times in the last two weeks. Every program in the Matrix is deterministic, perhaps most notably the Keymaker. So listening to Sandoz's deterministic, hindsight-biased view of the events that unfolded before him struck me as farce. We all know that stories don't work that way these days. Neo chooses Trinity, the Matrix doesn't get reloaded, Elrond takes over the world.

Of course, this is Sandoz's fatal flaw: thinking that God was playing a role in his life. The final description of God is the one that I'll use to link to the one other of the eighty directions I'll go in for this post. The whole thing about the sparrow falling, how bad things happen to good people, why a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. You know, those little injustices. And it finally comes down to the idea that if there is a creator (leaving "God" out of it), he abides by the laws that he created and does not interfere. He can love his creation, he can watch it, he can laugh and cry at and with it, but he does not interfere. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice; Stephen Hawking later replied that God does, indeed, play dice. In fact, God doesn't have the dice anymore.

Which brings me to my point. (START READING HERE) The discovery of the radio signal purposely alludes to Carl Sagan's Contact. How am I sure?

"See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence."-p93

In Contact, the message that Earth receives from Vega is, at first blush, a repeating series of prime numbers. And:

"Yeah, well, we're about as likely to collect as Carl Sagan is, and he's been dead for years."-p103

If there was any doubt in my mind that this section is a direct allusion to Contact, this removed it. Further, the concepts of skepticism and truth found through science are brought up a number of times in the next few pages. Anne, for her part, "played Official Skeptic," capitalized and everything, though she was not particularly good at it. Skepticism itself is treated as somewhat of a joke:

"Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternative explanations... 'But none of it sounds like what we picked up.'"-p113

And finally, the people chosen to go on the first contact mission (this is different from the movie version) are a diverse bunch with religion playing a significant role on who is chosen to go. As I'm trying not to make this an all-out dissertation comparing Contact and The Sparrow, I'll try once again to confine myself to a few points.

One of the reasons why I like and detest the book at the same time is the treatment of skepticism and the role of actual hard science in first contact. Additionally, I find the weird run-up to the launch to be, well, stupid. This is part of the overall problem I have with the first section of the book: it explains that the world is different, but only gives us tiny glimpses into it. At the same time, I enjoy these same sections because they seem farcical considering what we know will happen to Sandoz and the others. Satirizing would be too strong a word, warning to soft, to describe what I think Russell is going for in this depiction. Further messing with the whole thing is how weak Anne is as a skeptic:

"I believe in God the way I believe in quarks... People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did."-p110

Obviously, she has never heard of Occam's Razor. As we find out in the end, quarks fundamentally describe the universe; God does not. And if God is not necessary for the universe to exist, or rather is the more complicated answer, God does not belong in the equation. Quarks do.

I have more, but it's a discussion probably best confined to people who have read both books. Mainly so I don't give anything away. As usual, my substantive post has ended up a bit sprawling and directionless; class tomorrow will surely better order my thoughts for my reflection.

[A personal note on the author: I'm three degrees of separation from Mary Doria Russell, apparently. Mary Doria Russell married the college roommate of my parents' tax attorney (a huge sci-fi fan - I sent him a copy of our syllabus). He went to their wedding in the '70s and later even got his copy of The Sparrow autographed. I also feel a special bond with Chicago-based Russell because of the brief mentions of us long-suffering Cubs fans. Pity that in her world, we haven't won yet - this "100th anniversary of our last World Series title" thing this year has got me hoping, anyway. As any Cub fan can tell you, hope springs eternal. Go, Cubs, Go!]