Lee Denning’s Monkey Trap Blog

A couple of books I recently found interesting, for quite different reasons…

Carl Sagan’s 1977 The Dragons of Eden, speculations about the evolution of human intelligence over eons, and
Michael Kilday’s 2009 Truth Never Changes, Earth Changes, speculations about dramatic shifts in the world in the next few years.

A lot has happened in the 30 years since Sagan’s book of speculations was published. What more will happen in the next few will confirm or refute to one degree or another Kilday’s speculations.

But, hey… in just a hundred years we went from a primitive biplane flying a few feet above the beach at Kitty Hawk to the F-22 fighter jet. Think about that for a moment, the implications… math and physics and a whole new science of aerodynamics, materials science, chemistry, computers… an explosion of technology. Could the Wright brothers have envisioned those things right around the corner? Then think about possibilities in the biological sciences and medicine over the next few years… gene manipulation, viruses or snippets of RNA as cure carriers, nanobots slipped into the brain’s blood supply to encourage neurogenesis. Can we imagine what’s right around the next corner?

Big stuff comin’ down the pike… a thought that brings joy to some and horror to others. Anyway, the reviews…

THE DRAGONS OF EDEN by Carl Sagan — A Review

Carl Sagan died in 1996, a loss to us all. But his resonances linger.

He might not agree with me on that — because after all he was a hard-nosed scientist — but one of his resonances intersected my thoughts the other day and wouldn’t leave me alone. I reflexively Googled the list of usual suspects and homed in on his 1977 The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.

Google. It’s fascinating how the mind works these days in concert with the internet’s near-instantaneous, finger-tip access to information. What’s more fascinating is that the internet wasn’t around — at least in its public form — thirty-some years ago when Sagan wrote this book.

Sometimes — as Santyana observed — it’s useful to look at the past. Sometimes, it’s just fun.

First, the context of the past… When this book was published in 1977, I was an environmental engineer, working for a nuclear utility, seven years out of Vietnam and six years out of graduate school. Sagan was a renowned scientist at the time, a well-known leading-edge thinker and popularizer of science. I admired not only his ability to distill science to a level understandable to the layperson, but also his stern advocacy of scientific method and skeptical inquiry. So I bought the book, read it, enjoyed it.

Then I put the book in the attic.

Fast-forward to the present… The resonance had to do with computer games. I was watching my grandson play one. Sagan had talked about games, I remembered, in the context of their potential for human development. I had an attic-cleanout going on at the time and — lo and behold — suddenly there’s the book in my hand. Another resonance, maybe. Faded red cover, yellowed pages, a paperback. I found what I was looking for pretty quickly: toward the end of the book Sagan observes that Pong and Space War “suggest a gradual elaboration of computer graphics so that we gain an experiential and intuitive understanding of the laws of physics”. I went back to watch my grandson play — on a high-def screen, with enormous processing power in a tiny chip, mind you — and reflected that “elaboration” of the graphics over thirty years hasn’t been exactly “gradual”. Not sure what game my grandson was playing, or what if any potential he was developing, but one thing was clear: the kid had a fine intuitive appreciation of physics. I didn’t play; he would’ve wiped me out in thirty seconds.

Another resonance as I thumbed through this old book: Sagan talks about “extrasomatic” (i.e., outside the body) extensions of the human brain. He has an interesting chart that plots the number of bits of information that can be stored in the brains of various organisms. Mammals, and modern humans in particular, have the greatest capacity. But if you were to include the bits of information available to humans outside their brains — in libraries and similar cultural sources — Sagan points out that human capacity would be completely off his chart. Which brings us back to Google (or other search engines or computer databases or even the digital world in general)… think about it: something you were trying to recall, or maybe figure out, is now just a mouse-click away. And that capability is accelerating. Is that edifying? Enlightening? Enabling? Frightening? Or all of these?

But computer gaming and extrasomatic brain extensions are really just little off-hand slices of this still-topical book. Sagan talks both broadly and deeply about the many fascinating aspects of the evolution of human intelligence. He speaks of the development of the physical brain; for example the early neocortex and its adaptation to increase survival skills. But he also covers more subtle non-physical influences on evolving intelligence, for example cultural feedback paths such as introspection. I was particularly struck by his observation that “the richest, most intricate and most profound of these [introspections] were called myths”. He goes on to agree with the Roman historian Salustius’ definition of myths as “things which never happened but always are”. Now that’s clearly another resonance, because as a writer (with my daughter) of metaphysical sci-fi, we’re always trying to tap into fundamental myths and recast them in the trappings of modern science and technology.

So, I really enjoyed looking back, re-reading this book, comparing it to the present. I was struck again by the approachability of the man’s writing, the depth of his knowledge, his humanity. Some fascinating speculations here, by a masterful communicator. Thank you, Dr. Sagan.

Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)
June 28, 2009

TRUTH NEVER CHANGES: EARTH CHANGES by Michael Kilday — A Review

I guess I should tell you something about me at the outset: I’m a mathematician, a scientist and an engineer. By training and profession — as well as birthright, probably — I’m a natural skeptic, and a pretty hard-nosed one. So reviewing a book that deals with purported coming “end-times” in the near future runs smack up against my natural inclinations.

And yet… and yet…

Isn’t it good to challenge your natural inclinations? Healthy to step outside your mind’s box once in awhile? To avoid the trap Paul Simon identified in The Boxer “…still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”? Sure it is.

So I took a look at the book. And got hooked. Not so much by the science, which is occasionally conflated with interpretations that favor the theme… but by the philosophy, the empathy, the pure humanity of the viewpoint.

The book in a nutshell: in addition to being the cautionary tale one would expect, it’s a loosely-structured polemic against the social ills, past and present, that have worked humanity into a position where imminent demise is possible. Kilday includes as sources of some of these ills the religious fundamentalists (both Christian and Muslim) and their end-time myths, the Catholic Church’s debasing of Christ’s true message into a literalist dogma over two millenia, and the greed of accumulated power — religious, secular or cultural — that wants to preserve its status and prerogatives. So this is not at all a religious end-time book, like the fatuous Left Behind series. It is a much more secular and philosophical work, and engages in a much more balanced interpretation of myth and metaphor. The writer clearly feels and believes what he writes, and freely acknowledges the multiplicity of uncertainties and interpretations that attend a subject like this.

The early part of the book contains (near-verbatim) predictions about the near future from a medium channeling a deceased Dr. Fischer; this apparently was a seminal event in the author’s life. The embodied spirit told the author some things I think are scientifically plausible and some I think are not. Plausible: sea levels rising as the icecaps melt. Implausible: seismic annihilation of Hawaii. (But, haha, that one sure made me sit up straight — the destruction of Hawaii would be terribly inconvenient since I’m planning to build on the Big Island next year. In any case, the scientific basis for such a possibility is weak: the islands sit in the middle of the Pacific Plate, and not on a tectonic rim where more catastrophic events are likely. And the islands’ vulcanism is caused by the plate drifting northwest over a magma hot spot over millions of years, a situation that’s geologically gradual rather than seismically cataclysmic.)

Some middle segments of the book in aggregate remind me of the long soliloquies in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (although the viewpoint is quite different, of course). The saving grace is that these sections are liberally laced with observations and anecdotes that resonate with my own sense of reality and truth: we have gotten too greedy; we have drifted too far from fundamental respect for the planet; we have allowed a dangerously skewed distribution of wealth and resources. But will God — or karma, or Mother Nature, or The Force, or whoever/whatever may be in authority — demand redress by physical cataclysm? Or even psychic/spiritual cataclysm? Personally, I doubt it. But on the other hand I respect the possibility of some kind of seminal event on the horizon and the myths behind it (in fact, my daughter and I weave such stuff into our own sci-fi stories with gay abandon). So for me the questions raised and thoughts stimulated made the reading well worthwhile.

Some of the later segments offer “mythological evidence” or “psychic evidence” in support of Kilday’s theme. Of course, neither would be evidence under the rigors of strict scientific method (which requires, for starters, the use of the null hypothesis: a claim is not true until demonstrated otherwise). And both types of evidence are easily dismissible — as the skeptic Michael Shermer puts it — as entirely human foibles of “patternicity” and “agenticity”. That is, our mind imposes patterns where it expects to see something, and then assumes there is an agent behind those patterns. Paul Simon again “…a man hears what he wants to hear…”.

And yet… and yet…

There are paranormal or psychic effects that now have been demonstrated to be quite real, beyond any reasonable doubt, with standard scientific method — solid experiment design, neutral investigators, double-blind tests, statistical rigor, and so forth. The Institute of Noetic Sciences is particularly good at that, for example. So even if skeptical I’m keeping an open mind. Besides, I like what Niels Bohr once observed, “your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true.”

Now, Truth Never Changes: Earth Changes is not your classic adventure story; nothing is getting shot at or blown up. It is not a book you take to the beach this summer; it more comfortably fits with a bleak and lonely winter evening when there’s time to speculate and wonder (preferably in front of a fire with a brandy or something similar). It’s a deeply felt expression of one man’s philosophy, evolved over much of a thoughtful lifetime, that — right or wrong, like it or not — is worth pondering. Even if you don’t agree, it’s a good way to engage your mind in some really fascinating questions, and I absolutely recommend it for that.

Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)
June 19, 2009

In the 1960s(?), Harry Belafonte sang a nonsensical little ditty called (I think) “Man Piaba, Woman Piaba”. Or possibly it was a wry commentary on life and actually made a lot of sense, but I was a typical male teenager and too stupid to realize it at the time. One of the lines recently came to mind (funny how long-term memory works): “… your Rorschach shows you’re a Peripatetic…”.

Sometimes I think my daughter (and co-author) Leanne and I are student Peripatetics, itinerant wanderers down some winding road toward truth. Or maybe truthiness, it’s getting harder to tell the difference these days. (Lee is better at differentiating than I am, possibly because the kid wasn’t nearly as stupid a teenager… although, ahem… she did have her moments.) Anyway, two of the stones in that road that we recently stopped to ponder while casting our idea net wider (for metaphysical and philosophical input to our third book Splintered Light, now in draft) are discussed below — book reviews of Coelho’s Brida, and Cogan’s Winona’s Web.

But first, two items of recent news:
(1) I created a book trailer video (mt-short-finalbooktrlr) for Monkey Trap (our first novel). It’s also on YouTube. We’d be very interested in your opinions on it.
(2) Hiding Hand (our second novel) was recently short-listed by ForeWord Magazine for its Book of the Year Award in the sci-fi category. Winner to be picked in May.

BRIDA by Paulo Coelho — A Review

Brida, the subject of this tale, is a young woman roughly the age of my daughter. She’s an embryonic witch and her story arc takes her through the stages of becoming one.

A quick disclaimer up front: this is not your classic adventure story; nothing is getting shot at or blown up, no witches are being hunted down, no heroes are at real physical risk. All Brida and her cohorts have to overcome is their own doubts. But those doubts have value, so they must be honored, and not overcome too easily. This complex — but very human — theme is a constant thread through what’s basically a spiritual or philosophical journey. So if that sort of journey doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, stop right here…

Story in a nutshell: Brida realizes she’s a different kind of being, searches for her true self, acquires a male mentor (the Magus, later a lover), acquires a female mentor (Wicca, the Magus’ ex, a nice plot touch), studies, meditates, gets initiated into witchcraft, and ultimately learns that when “…male knowledge joins with female transformation, then the great magical union is created, and its name is Wisdom. Wisdom means both to know and to transform.”

So… transformation. That’s this book’s major appeal for me, I think. Certainly it’s a fascinating story theme — especially the concept of transforming together, turning a duality (Brida and the Magus, after a few reversals and sidesteps to amp up the mystery and suspense) into a unity. Wrapped tightly around this theme, which is simultaneously spiritual and sexual, is the concept of a soul mate. Or two sides of the same coin. Or anaim cairdi, as the old pagan Celts would say. In Coelho’s telling, when you find your soul mate you see not only the light in their eyes, but also a point of light over their left shoulder. (Of course you have to be a trained witch or magus to have that kind of vision. But when you consider that a weak electromagnetic biofield does in fact surround the body, an interference pattern generating something that might be perceived as light by an eye that sees a broader spectrum is not too implausible; a willing suspension of disbelief isn’t too difficult.) Lovers may come and go, Coelho observes, but soul mates have real staying power, they last down through different incarnations. This is not a new idea in literature, but it is one that resonates on an emotional level, especially when couched in Coelho’s beautiful language. Full disclosure: my mind is analytical (mathematician, scientist, engineer) but my heart is romantic (I cry at sad country songs).

The book’s secondary appeal is toward my analytical side, and that’s actually what drew me to the book when thumbing through it in the local library — Coelho produces a detailed religious backdrop that is (I think) historically accurate, and then weaves it seamlessly into the story. He delves heavily into the past of the Catholic Church, and relies on its saints and its sinners to provide context around Brida’s journey. (In a prior incarnation, she was burned to death in 1244 when the Catholics exterminated the last of the Cathars, a heretical splinter group.) Coelho intersperses Christian religion and concepts with older pagan belief systems such as the Tradition of the Sun, the Tradition of the Moon, reincarnation, resolution of human dualism into divine unity. Analytically… how the story coheres so neatly, how all its parts fit… it’s just a nice job. An added benefit to my daughter and me… we’ve been steadily developing an off-spec Jesus for the culmination of our Nova sapiens trilogy, and so for us this tale is really interesting food for thought.

Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)

WINONA’S WEB by Priscilla Cogan — A Review

In American Indian mythos the Spider Woman radiates the labyrinth of her thoughts. At the hub of this web resides the mind of Winona, an aged Lakota tribeswoman. The story finds its center in her, though the narrative comes through her therapist, Meggie. Meggie is hired by Winona’s daughter when the old woman announces her own death will come in two moons.

Meggie’s goal is to “figure out” why Winona believes she will die in a matter of months, but instead she finds herself wondering, right from the get-go, just who is helping whom.

During therapy sessions, Winona portrays not only her personal history, but the history of her people. For someone who doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “my people”, the closest account I can muster is the experience of going home. (I remember scanning the luggage reclaim area at LAX, thinking as I looked around at faces—so many different faces—“These are my people”—as if “my people” could include just about anyone.)

Let’s cut to the essentials: readability, captured interest, other components of a good story… all are certainly present in this book. But some stories have a scope beyond the written page. Take, as a rough example, The Never Ending Story. The boy, Bastien, sits curled up in a library attic reading. As Bastien reads the novel, lines between fantasy and reality become increasingly blurred until, right up at the end when it matters most, one of the characters actually materializes before him in the attic. (This becomes a nice, neatly wrapped metaphor with regard to how we become the story we are reading because it consumes our mind through our rapt attention and focus.) Bastien’s active participation is required for the story to reach its conclusion.

In my own life, Winona’s Web took on a transcendent quality akin to Bastien’s experience. Cogan includes short poems or quotations at the start of every chapter. These helped orient my thoughts so I could absorb the essential purpose contained within that chapter. Although Cogan does a nice job of keeping it light, a lot of the material is quite profound. More than once, I was blown away by the overlap between my immediate experience and the message conveyed in an introductory quote.

Winona’s Web circles around the powerful heritage and traditions of the Lakota tribes. It’s as though the earth on the North American continent carries their memories—or maybe all places emanate the energies of whoever came before—but strange things happen when one reads this book. It grabs hold of something ancient and magical, something that continues to resonate. There’s plenty of spirituality in the world, and yet what’s compelling about Lakota mythos is this loving connectivity with the earth, sky, and all forms of life. Lakota call the sky “Grandfather”, and the earth, “Grandmother”. When smoking the pipe they pay homage to all their relations. (And if you trace back far enough, that includes everyone. So maybe I wasn’t so far off with the LAX thing after all.)

Leanne
(aka Lee Denning, co-author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)

Your thoughts on these matters are, as always, welcome. The kid and I love a lot of grist for our writing mill…

Continuing our present random-eclectic literature reading of off-spec Christianity and messianic stories, my daughter Leanne and I reviewed an old one and a new one. She looked at Heinlein’s old classic “Stranger in a Strange Land”; I looked at Moon’s relatively recent “The Speed of Dark”. The former is a messiah tale in the classic sense; the latter in the sense of the potential of technology to bootstrap us toward godhood. Both reviews are below. If you have any thoughts to offer, we’d love to hear them… grist for the writing mill…

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein - A Review

Profoundly philosophical, Stranger in a Strange Land contains elements of social commentary, spirituality and pursuit of the utopian society. Mike is the man from Mars, spawn of two astronauts on a mission through outer space. A human, he grows up an alien among Martians. Highly evolved and peaceful, the Martians possess well-developed capacities for insight and empathy. Poor Mike has some serious readjusting to do when he makes the journey to Earth. The physical adaptation comes first, with strengthening his weak muscles as a result of Mars’ lesser gravity. But it’s the psychosocial adaptation that fuels the story’s deeper quandaries.

By nature of his compelling uniqueness, Mike attracts what may be described as a fan club by some, or by others, as a cult. As his fame and popularity grows, so do his troubles. Readers too begin to feel the pressure as the wellspring of joy in Mike’s heart comes at a hefty price. Well-worn beliefs and perspectives plummet into a realm of uncertainty wherein preconceived notions are blasted to pieces. The reader finds himself questioning some of his most basic convictions: Why are most sexual relationships monogamous? Why is money a measure of power and the ability to “get stuff”? Why do we wear clothes? One may settle in with these questions easily enough, with answers such as: ‘Monogamy insulates relationships from jealousy’, and ‘Money is a convenient method of exchange’ and, ‘Clothing protects our bodies’. But the damage has already been done. Not in the sense that one can no longer live in ignorance of his preconceptions. Rather, he now can see the source of his own deeply rooted discontent.

From a psychological angle, one could argue that Mike, thanks to his unusual background, was able to delve into Jung’s oceanic depths of human consciousness and resurface with a collective, holistic view of humanity the likes of which Freud could, and did, reject. The divergent views of these former colleagues parallel the challenge facing our hero. Freud knew only too well the Id’s selfish and irrational drivers that spur a human to action. Jung, conversely, focused on the synthesis of conflicting desires (those of the selfish child, the responsible adult, and the mediating personality between them). Through a process of synthesis and acceptance, the mind transcends the nature of conflict altogether. And this approach worked exceptionally well for the man from Mars and his friends, but humanity as a whole remained stuck in Freud-town.

Truly, Mike is a Stranger to this land and all people; his beautiful and perfect ideas (which may have taken eons of time for the Martians to cultivate) are sadly premature on Earth. Social progress may be as slow to the uptake as Darwin’s Evolution—and concepts like generosity and compassion are oft considered weaknesses ripe for exploitation by those with primitive values. The story’s ending brings the essential question to the fore. Is human nature basically good, but without sufficient foundation auspicious prospects will fail? Or, do we as human beings decide what version of the truth we choose to believe and in so doing, seal our fate?

Heinlein started out writing YA space novels, but his muse danced to a different drummer and eventually he evolved into the writer called “the dean of science fiction”, at least partly because of the philosophical depth of his stories. He’s had plenty of company, of course, in looking at philosophical issues through the lens of speculative fiction, but nonetheless stands out as a true original. If you’re not typically a reader of sci-fi, but you want to try Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the one to read.

Leanne
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)

THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon — A Review

This story is both an intellectual and emotional triumph. It follows the everyday life of Lou Arrendale, an autistic man, as he copes with navigating himself and managing relationships in a “normal” world. Lou has a good job, one that makes use of the wild-card talents of his different brain — he works for a pharmaceutical company where he detects useful patterns in physiochemical phenomena. He gets along well with his co-workers, a small unit of similarly autistic scientific researchers. It’s a productive life, a good one…

But then Lou’s normal world is upended when an unscrupulous new manager decides the autistic unit is a bunch of prima donnas. He decides they shouldn’t have privileges (private spaces, their own gym, music while working) that other “normal” employees don’t have. He decides this against all objective evidence, since the privileges are necessary accommodations to the autistic condition and the unit is a high-performing contributor to the company’s bottom line. However, he tells them, the company has developed an experimental treatment now for autism. It’s worked on apes. It will reconfigure their brains to be “normal”. If they accept it, all will be well. If not, he will dissolve the group, fire everyone. This is of course patently illegal, and the manager gets his comeuppance later in the story. But after that dust settles, the company decides that members of the unit can still elect to volunteer for the treatment. They can — if the experiment works — become normal…

And this is where it gets deeply interesting, because there are critical personal issues… What if the experiment doesn’t work? What if it works, but your brain-made-normal doesn’t have the wild-card talents (valuable ones, at that) of your autistic brain? Will you lose your ability to discern patterns? Should you really mess with a brain that — although different than other folks’ — has served you reasonably well for thirty-some years? Do you really want to be “normal”, anyway? Deal with all those messy human emotions and nuances that your autistic status lets you side-step? The story begs the question of the reader: would you willingly change the fundamental essence of who you are?

The scientific settings Moon describes for these near-future times are really not that much of a stretch — I read the other day where stem cell therapy in mice’s damaged spinal cords now has restored some sensation and motor control. Replicable experiments with statistically significant results, so human trials probably aren’t far off. The treatment posed in this story involves gene manipulation and nanobots and carrier viruses or snippets of RNA. It’s a protocol without much invasive surgery; a combination of technologies is slipped rather gently into the brain to reconfigure portions of its basic structure. And how far in the future is that, really? A few years? A few decades? It’s surely coming… a thought that brings joy to some and horror to others.

Moon’s story-telling technique is fascinating: put the reader in the mind of an autistic man and show how he sees the world from his point of view. Lou, the subject of this story, tells most of it himself — in the first person, present tense. It is a unique perspective, and quite powerful; I can’t remember reading anything quite like it. When the plotline demands it, we get the perspective of some of the “normals” involved in the story — generally in the third person past tense. That offset is quite effective.

Why write a book like this? As it turns out, it’s more than just a fiction wrapped around evolving genetic sciences. The author has an autistic son, and the story conveys a loving philosophical and spiritual depth. I really enjoyed it.

Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)

My daughter Leanne and I currently are on a kick of looking at non-traditional views of Christianity, absorbing background ideas for writing the third book in our own modern messiah myth… so, among others, I reviewed Chopra’s “Jesus”, and she reviewed Young’s “The Shack”. Both reviews are below. If you have any thoughts to offer, we’d love to hear them… grist for the writing mill…

JESUS - A STORY OF ENLIGHTENMENT by Deepak Chopra — A Review

Now here’s a fascinating concept: fill in the blanks for one of the largest figures in the history of Western civilization. As you probably know, there is very little written about Jesus between the time he was twelve and the time he came on-scene again in Galilee in his early thirties. The gospels are largely silent about this period, at least those that have survived to make it into print. And CNN wasn’t around in the first century AD to record events in its more objective digital format. (Well, somewhat more objective, anyway; I’m not going to argue that point.). So… this period of Jesus’ life is fair game for speculation, I guess…

I really enjoyed the book. The plot? It’s more of a metaphysical journey, a chronology of how Jesus evolved from manhood to godhood, with doubts and questions all along the way. Traditional Biblical scenes are woven seamlessly into the storyline, but with some license taken; for example Mary Magdalene is named as the object of the incipient punishment that draws Jesus’ challenge of “… let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. The characters? Jesus is very human, with the usual foibles but also with a driven determination to seek out God. Mary Magdalene is an unwilling whore. Judas is a devious and unscrupulous zealot. They’re both very human too. And they fit neatly into the settings Chopra describes for those times.

Chopra’s story stops short of where the Gospels pick up, leaving Jesus to wander out of the mountains and back down into the Galilee of the Bible to meet his fate. It deals with those later events such as the Crucifixion only inferentially. This is a pretty smart move, I think: it allows the reader to mentally jump the gap to the modern era. Where, for example…

The Dalai Lama, by all accounts a most open-minded fellow, endorses a neurological study of Buddhist meditators. And where, yes indeed, objective scientific results (fMRI brain scans) indicate these monks have a much higher level of control over their minds and bodies (and presumably spirits) than the rest of us mortals. But that’s control of themselves. Can they control externalities? The physical world? Turn water into wine? Chopra doesn’t ask such questions of his fictional Jesus, he just goes with the flow of Biblical scripture, positing the miracles quite comfortably right alongside his very human characterizations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Judas and others. I loved it, the rationality and the ambiguity in contrapuntal doses.

Why write a book like this? As it turns out, it’s not just a writer’s whimsy, a fiction wrapped around a mythos; the book has a philosophical point. But that comes at the very end, after the epilogue. All through his Jesus story, Chopra scrupulously keeps his own philosophical views out of it. (Must’ve been tough, but I think that was appropriate; it would have detracted from the story.)

The philosophical point — several points actually — are in the Reader’s Guide, titled Jesus and the Path to Enlightenment on the last few pages. In a nutshell, Chopra holds (among other things) that:
• God is within us, all of us — Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew.
• Jesus wouldn’t be too happy to see his teachings about the above co-opted into what have become the formal traditions and structures of Christianity.
• We have the capacity, even as mere mortals, to transform and transcend to the God within, and indeed there are ways to approach that in this mortal life.

Now, these points may be anathema to the more orthodox Christians, but they’re nothing really new in the modern world: Copernicus, Protestantism, Eastern-Western tradition blends, a Course in Miracles… they all had problems with the form taken by Christianity, and so chased its substance instead. With varying results, of course, but still there’s been a pretty steady evolution of thought, and steadily more acceptance of divergent religious views. For example, not so many generations ago, Chopra, and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), and even William Young (The Shack) all would have been in deep doo-doo for their books. Today… they’re best-selling authors.

And also today… a Pew Report (http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#) I just stumbled across says that most Americans who practice a religion reject the exclusivity principle — they think that folks with beliefs other than theirs are still allowed into heaven.

Even atheists. Fancy that.

My, my. This is progress, n’est-ce pas?

Now that Chopra has filled in the blanks on Jesus, and on Buddha (in a prior similar book), I’m anxiously awaiting his take on Muhammad…

Denning
(the elder half of Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap — Hiding Hand — Splintered Light)

THE SHACK by William Young — A Review

This is the story of a man’s confrontation with unimaginable tragedy and suffering amidst the rediscovery of his faith. Mackenzie (a.k.a. Mack), a father of three, loses his youngest daughter Missy when she is abducted during a camping trip. Years pass and Missy’s body is never found. A mysterious note arrives in the mailbox entreating Mack to visit a dilapidated shack in the woods. That same shack once held the only scrap of evidence discovered after Missy’s abduction: her bloodied dress. What follows is a careful blending of the spiritual with the commonplace when Mackenzie comes face to face with the Holy Trinity. The commonplace is the familial relationship they share; eating meals together, engaging in conversation, and gazing at the stars. It’s very homey.

This isn’t the kind of story that fits in with your grandparents’ golden-haired, Caucasian picture of Jesus hanging on their bedroom wall. Instead we see the son of God has a marvelously oversized nose, unmistakably Middle-Eastern complexion, and a tool belt round his waist. I liked him immediately. Young’s fresh and multicultural approach to the Holy Trinity reveals God as a generously proportioned black woman with culinary skills to surpass Julia Child. Jesus would appear perfectly at home in a mosque or temple. And the Holy Spirit, what can be seen of her, resembles a shimmering ethereal Asian woman with a penchant for gardening.

That such a book should be written at all is a wonder. Clearly, Young’s muse is not the standard-issue, fooling around with such an established mythos as the Trinity. And yet… why not? Genesis says God created man in his own image, but the reverse is clearly true: Michaelangelo’s Sistine ceiling painting is a case in point. So Young is entitled. And that he hasn’t been taken to task (at least not much) for blaspheming the traditional Christian model? That says something about our growing capacity for tolerance in these matters, our acceptance of alternative views. Society is evolving.

Mack’s visit with the trio holds a definite purpose: to resolve a whirling mass of confused emotions born when his daughter disappeared and which now cripple his daily life. In Mack’s mind, God is part of the problem, for God allowed his beautiful baby girl to be brutally murdered. Certainly, the faithful have always struggled with profound inconsistencies regarding God’s goodness; so often it is overshadowed by the dark, evil and disturbing aspects of this world. The underlying sincerity of the story is where you find its ultimate truth. The Shack may very well be a God-send those who have faced excruciating loss. And for the rest of us? It’s well worth reading as a simple and heartfelt allegory about faith.

Leanne
(the younger half of Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap — Hiding Hand — Splintered Light)

Confession: I’m not exactly sure what to do with a blog. It could be a direct book promotion tool, I guess, but that’s not interesting because it’s pretty one-directional. Besides, I’m an INTJ and Lee is an INFP; we know what’s on our minds, and we’re much more interested in what’s on other folks’ minds. So… this blog is going to offer you an opportunity to tell us what you think…

Many of the questions below form a philosophical backdrop to the first and second books of our Nova sapiens trilogy, Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand. Lee and I are partway through a draft of the third book, Splintered Light, which will play with a few more of these questions. Now, we’re primarily entertainers, not philosophers, and we like to write action thrillers, not academic treatises. But… we also like to underpin our plots and characters with some interesting speculation about the nature of the human condition… it makes the writing so much more fun! Our questions are grouped — in no particular order — into the three general theme areas scattered through the Nova sapiens trilogy…

POWER
• Power used for domination/subjugation vs power used to improve the common good… where’s the overlap? How do you separate?
• Is power becoming a lesser attraction than, say, love and freedom… as cultures evolve?
• Is pursuit of power/money for its own sake necessarily always disorienting/destructive?
• Does Machiavelli’s observation (“nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things” really apply to a modern (i.e., internet-savvy) world?
• Is instant, rapid, widely-dispersed communication on the internet a natural leveler or antidote for the love of power or its misuse?
• Is Genesis really the first story about the seductiveness of power? Did Adam and Eve believe the serpent’s tale that the apple would give them knowledge, “make them as gods”?
• Is a line from Paul Simon’s 1970’s song “The Boxer” (“still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”) an explanation of the seductiveness of power (e.g., Bush 43)?

EVOLUTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL BRAIN/MIND
• Is the internet’s unleashing/delimiting of individual creativity a quantum leap for brain development in the aggregate population? Or just a better outlet for those individuals with creative ability anyway?
• Are immersive entertainment technologies the next step in the information explosion?
• What role will computer games play in perceiving reality?
• What are the effects of technology changes on individual perceptions of reality?
• Do immersive games or other cybernetic media improve or limit brain states of awareness?
• Is there a feedback loop from technological developments into actual modified physical brain configurations in individuals?
• Do the modifications carry over into DNA, to be propagated genetically downstream?
• How would such modifications affect or be affected by cultural norms of behavior? Of thought?

EVOLUTION OF SOCIETIES/ CULTURES
• What is enlightenment, anyway? Like beauty, is it solely in the eye of the beholder?
• Is enlightenment evolving rationality, all intellectual? Or is there a spiritual component?
• Can evolution of enlightenment be traced down through historical cultural developments?
• Were the “enlightened ages” of ancient Greece and the Renaissance due to explosions in rational philosophy, or to a punctuation in the equilibrium of some other factor?
• Are there empirical measures of enlightenment? How would cultural progress be judged?
• Every culture/society thinks and behaves in ways consistent with their view of reality — how fast can their paradigms change?
• Do cultural changes get reflected by changes in individual’s genetic codes? Over how many generations or over what time spans?
• Is there such a thing as “cultural DNA”? What is the nature of its patterning?
• Is there an empirical way to separate true biological evolution factors from factors that involve learned behaviors in changing cultures? Retrospectively? Going forward?
• Are step-changes in communications capability (i.e., oral history -> written language -> Gutenberg -> radio/TV -> internet) a forcing function on cultural developments?
• Is the internet’s near-instantaneous world-wide reach a quantum leap for cultural change?
• Is there an empathy gene? Is it embedded primarily in female genetic code? How did it evolve?
• War is primarily a male invention; so is it embedded somewhere/somehow in the male genetic code? Is that code evolving?
• Does cooperation/collaboration have an increasing individual/societal survival value in an increasingly technological world?
• How are faiths and religions evolving in a modern technological society?
• How do religious beliefs deal with other plausible (technical/rational) explanations (e.g., patternicity)?
• Is religion just formalized/ritualized superstition? To be gotten over as cultures evolve?
• Has Christianity veered off from Christ’s intent? Islam from Muhammad’s?
• Who is the best arbiter of religion evolution in an internet age? The faithful flock or their church elders?
• From what “cultural DNA” have the various Messiah mythologies derived?

So… if any of these questions resonate with you at some deep level, we’d surely like to hear your thoughts and perspectives… all grist for our writer’s mill… Looking forward to your feedback!

Love fans, especially happy ones! Thanks so much for the note, garalaf! I started this blog but then real life intervened and pressures of our day jobs sucked up most of Lee’s time and mine; so we’re presently stalled on Chapter 10 of the first draft of Splintered Light (about a quarter of the way into the story). Hopefully the first half of 2009 will loosen up a bit and we’ll pick up the writing again. You can read the draft first chapter of Splintered Light on the webpage if you haven’t visited recently…

Denning

Lee and I are pleased to announce that our just-released second novel — Hiding Hand — is doing well on Amazon, and sales of the first novel — Monkey Trap, which was published 4 years ago — also spiked up momentarily in response.

If you’re in Connecticut and interested in getting signed books to give as Christmas presents, I have a couple of appearances coming up…

In Middlesex County…
Saturday, December 13, 3:30 PM at Burgundy Books in East Haddam. This is a neat little indie bookstore (www.burgundybooks.com) a few steps up the road from the Goodspeed Opera House and the Gelston House Restaurant.

For members or guests of CBIA’s Environmental Policies Council…
Thursday, December 18, 11:00 AM holiday lunch, at CBIA HQ in Hartford. I’m a long-term (geez, has it been 30 years?) member of that group, and they’ve kindly allowed me to sing my swan song at the lunch and sign books… the total proceeds of that event will be donated to a homeless shelter in Hartford.

Wishing all our fans and supporters the very best for the holidays! Okay, yeah, so the economy is terrible, infrastructure is falling apart… etc, etc… but… as the song says… “the world is always turning toward the morning…”

Denning

To all the fans of our first novel Monkey Trap… THANK YOU! We appreciate all your friendly words and support over the past several years!

Hiding Hand — the second book of the Nova sapiens trilogy — is coming out next week. Our website (www.monkeytrap.us) has been revised to reflect this. To acknowledge your many kindnesses, I added a little booklet of three short stories to the site for your reading enjoyment.

Please feel free to give us feedback via this blog on your thoughts about the two books… the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of the novels… the characters and their challenges… the psychodrama… or whatever else interests you about the stories… we gain so much by hearing from our readers.

Cordially,

Denning