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Peter and I attended a book lanch for Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel called "The Affair". At the Random House book launch, was Duncan who had last year won the Jack Reacher look-a-like competition. Duncan was written into the latest novel as a character, so he's both real and fictional. They offered door prizes, and Peter won the first prize, and posed for some pictures with Jack Reacher, and I joined in:

I'm now half way through "The Affair", the first Jack Reacher novel I've read. Good fun!

Today I found a Christian Theologian attacking Richard Dawkins in the Sydney Morning Herald The article was actually an advertisement for the Creationist's new book. Was it a free ad? Or was he a paid contributor?

It was no surprise that an article entitled "Questions Darwinism cannot answer" was written by a Creationist. "Darwinism" is a word only used by Creationists. Perhaps the article should have been labelled as the advertisement for his book that it surely was?

What are these questions for "Darwinism"? After slogging through a personal attack on Richard Dawkins and implying that every atheist is an evil murdering fascist, it turns out they're Christian Apologetic questions and not scientific questions at all. I'll start with the questions and get to the slog afterwards.

The first question was "When does design become domination?" If the Universe is an artificial artifact as Mr Creationist insists, then it emulates a wild natural environment extremely well and we are living in The Matrix. If we are living in The Matrix, then any "Act of God" like a murderous bush fire is an infringement of free will - which is domination. The administrators of fake reality would be cruel and unethical to impose so much suffering without the consent of the free beings who inhabit the fake world.

This question assumes that that the world we are informed of by our senses, our instruments and each other is fake. If the world is a simulation then its either being run by non-human aliens, or its being run by our post-human descendants as an ancestor simulation. If the persons running the simulation impose suffering and limit choice, then they are dominating.

"Why did God create human beings, lay a good life out before them and then include the capacity to behave otherwise?" he asks. Again this assumes that the evidence of our senses is faked. Evolution and geology and nuclear physics show that life developed through small changes over very long periods of time. They show that the universe is full of things moving around in random ways, except where humans create artifacts. Humans were not created, they evolved from earlier forms of hominid and the hominids from earlier primates, the primates from earlier mammals, all the way back to the earliest self-replicating molecules that weren't properly alive. However, as good theologians we should ignore the evidence. If we didn't have free will we'd be zombies who just reacted to stimulus from a pre-programmed script. That answers your second question. If we live in a simulation as Creationists insist, then the persons who run the simulation didn't want zombies. There's no evidence that we live in The Matrix.

Finally, "Would knowing why there is something rather than nothing make a difference to life?" Darwin's answer is that curiosity is a behaviour that promotes the spread of genes, so it was selected for in the random evolution of our ancestors. Most of us want to know the answers of our origins, and we are not satisfied with silly stories about a stork or a dove.

Mr Creationist claims that evolution cannot explain the origin of life. We have seen self-replicating molecules start replicating from non-living matter. We have found the organic molecules essential for life in distant clouds of interstellar gas. We can scientifically explain the origin of life. He concludes that evolution cannot cast light on life's destiny. Evolution shows us that life doesn't have a destiny, the Watchmaker is blind. Evolutionary processes can build eyes up, or blind them, depending on the environment that animals live and breed in, but the process is random, and the environment changes randomly.

"Evolutionary theory" does NOT require or imply "continuous creation" Mr Creationist. Evolution doesn't require any intervention by magical persons at all, its the inevitable outcome of mutant survivors of disasters breeding their inheritable traits into the next generation. Mutation and sexual recombination produce variation, predators and changing environment provide the random selection. The inevitable outcome is that some variations will breed more than others and species change over very long periods of time.

Mr Creationist, quoting notable people is an Argument from Authority. With your high academic station, you surely know that its a logically invalid argument, so why did you use it? "These lines of reasoning do not prove God's existence". Could it be that you simply don't have a valid argument?

Ad Hominem attacks are not valid arguments, either, but this doesn't stop you from personally attacking Richard Dawkins. Of course the attack is simply a disguise for the same vilification of atheists as mass murdering fascists as used by Toongabbie Anglicans a few weeks ago in their sermon "Does God exist?". Mr Creationist vilifies atheists as supporting "imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, forced sterilisations and infanticide." He then admits that reality doesn't match his opinion, because his vilification is false. Instead of apologising and explaining his error, he accuses Richard Dawkins of lacking commitment, courage and philosophical conviction. It looks like a classic case of Freudian projection.

Mr Creationist uses arguments which he admits are invalid, vilification which he admits is invalid, claims of definition which are easily shown to be invalid, and questions which are for his contradictory Creationist cosmology and not validly for Darwin at all. Perhaps Mr Creationist lacks the courage of his own philosophical convictions? Could he have abandoned valid methods of argument and persuasion because he doesn't believe his position can be validly argued? Or is this just the usual request to open your wallet?

MP3

Goat experiments by the British Navy and the US Army, and the link to Uri Geller through Jon Ronson's wonderful book The Men Who Stare at Goats

Story by Ian Woolf, questions by Patrick Rubie.

This is a kill or cure for paranoiacs, with an embarrassment of riches of conspiracies - complete with detailed evidence which is easily referenced. The mout outrageous and silly conspiracies are true (the Principia Discordia quotes are real), and some of the more believeable stuff is false. Wilson and Shea call it "guerilla ontology". Some people may find the viewpoint character changing so often to be distracting, but I enjoyed it as part of the trip. Its very seventies hippy culture, and very funny and perceptive. Its mind-blowing to realize it was written before Watergate and the Nixon insanities were publically known.

This is the book that started the Discordian movement. Its the Discordian "bible" God is a crazy woman, called Eris by the ancient Greeks, and called Discordia by the ancient Romans. This is a very subversive anti-dogmatic satiriacal look at religion and mysticism and a lot of fun. My original copy came from "Loompanics":http://www.loompanaics.com and was borrowed by Tristan Gutsche, along with my Ren and Stimpy video tapes, and my escapologist's thumbcuffs . I never saw him again. . I eventually bought my new copy from Amazon.

Using a modified version of Timorthy Leary's Six circuit model of the brain, this book illustrates how each circuit is imprinted and work, and has exercises at the end of every chapter for you to play with how your own brain is wired, and to show you how to rewire it for more fun and flexibility. AS life changing as "How to Win Friends and Influence People". I used to lend this book out on a regulat basis in my undergraduate years to friends I deemed intelligent enough to benefit from the experience. Eventually I loaned this one with "Real Magic" to David Eggleton in 1994, and I never heard from jim again, so I no longer own a copy of what was one of my all time favourite books. The brain is a wonderfully flexible toy, and Wilson shows you how to discover how yours has been programmed by your life experiences, and how to take over for a more satifying life.

Every science fiction and fanstasy writer should read this book. Bonewitz has the first "Bachelor in Thaumaturgy" from a Californian University. He takes the assumption that psychic powers exist, and then runs with that through a very logical and rational process to how they must work in a universe where such things are true, drawing on anthropology and psychology and the occult. A facsinating read for believers and skeptics alike. Invaluable for writers. If psychic powers are real, this is how they would work.

An Introduction to Critical Thinking: How to: Win an Argument, Defend a Case, Recognize a Fallacy, See Through a Deception

A witty and entertaining tutorial on the art of informal logic. He shows you how to recognize when logic is being abused, by teaching you how to win arguments by abusing the rules of informal logic. So you learn the rules by being taught to cheat!

You are introduced to all of the logical fallacies you may have felt were wrong, but previously never had a name for, and then how they can unfairly be used to win arguments. This way you learn how to conduct fair arguments and to avoid the fallacies yourself. Every high school student and undergrad should be given a copy to study, certainly everyone who has ever been in an argument.

Every geek should have this on their shelf by age 10, and study it and put it into practice. This book changed my life and helped me learn social skills and insights which have served me so well that they are second nature. I am constantly horrified by the number of people who have never read this most important work.

I'm a Sydney-sider in Canada in winter for the first time, and I developed bronchitis five days ago. So take that into account. On the one hand I have the time to read while I rest, and I want to escape into an interesting story. On the other hand my body and my environment feel miserable. "Coalescent" by Stephen Baxter is my current science fiction read. I'm on page 360 of 470, but its sat unread for a whole week. It was a reluctant read the week before that. The chapters alternate with Regina, a girl in ancient Roman Britain from the fall of the Roman Empire about sixteen hundred years ago, and with her descendant, George, in the modern day. Baxter has lovingly filled in the details of ancient Roman Britain, and he gives an impressive vision of how modern and civilized the Roman Empire was, and how quickly the foundations of a civilised system can just go away. Regina goes from incident to incident as she grows up, including time with a historiaclly plausible King Arthur, all throw away history to justify the Society she secretly sets up to make sure her family survives the fall of civilisation. The chapters with the modern world were much less interesting, and in fact I was constantly annoyed by the formulaic manner in which the central character shows no interest at all in the alien artefact discovered in the outer regions of the solar system, unless forced to by outside events. I don't like George at all, he's a boring character. This is the first book in a series called "Destiny's Children", and I'm not sure I'll care enough to find out what his inevitable connection to the alien artefact will be. Its page 360 of 470, the Coalescents are a nice idea, but you have to *DO* something with them! Or else George and the others have to be interesting enough to draw me in so that I'm patient enough to plough through the next books and find out what on Earth the point of all this is. Sometimes, writers will conclude a story so brilliantly, that you change the way you see all the characters and events that you've experienced, and you feel the difficult journey was justified. Perhaps I'm being unfair to post something this early, but with the doom-laden words "Destiny's Children Book One" as the sub-title on the cover, I have little faith. OK, I finally read the last 110 pages, and Baxter does finally do something with the Coalescents. He takes you into the far future and shows you what the Coalescents are really about and where they're going. Its an interesting vignette, and then he zooms back to the present, which is boring again. He leaves the alien artefact as pointless, and I think he misses part of his own point of the self-pepetuation of large complex memetic systems with the way he ends the book with Peter and the Slan(t)ers. So he does redeem his central itheme of the Coalescents and use them, but it wasn't enough for me to want to go on and read the rest of the series. I found better escape while I was ill in the graphics novels "The Books of Magic" by Neil Gainman, which chronicle Timothy Hunter's initiation as a wizard, written more than a decade before Harry Potterism.

"Midnight Lamp" by Gwyneth Jones, was a fun, engaging view of a future not very far from now when the instability of Britain predicted by Ken Macleod and other authors has come to pass. Rockstars have taken control. The world has quietly been complicated by the discovery of "effective magic" and "Zen Self" technology, accessing the "information space" that underlies reality and the rockstars are at the heart of it.

This is the third in the series starting with "Bold As Love" and "Castles Made Of Sand", which I haven't read yet. Jones is such a good writer that I had no trouble with starting the story AFTER the major magical battle between the heroes and the monster. She gets the best of both markets by having very English rockstars wandering around a very American Hollywood landscape.

The three-way romance between the rockstar heroes is believable and touching. Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda are all walking wounded, but all are a lot more than they appear to be and always looking out for each other. Ax Preston, with his digitally animated skull mask, is the super-powerful rockstar Ozzie Osbourne fantasized about being, and like Osbourne, he's now older and trying to cope with responsibility and having survived his youth. Sage is a bodhisattva, brought to Zen enlightenment by information space technology, and returned to the Earth with wisdom, but badly injured and recuperating from his magical battle. Fiorinda is a fragile, beautiful redheaded diva who has effective magic without any technology, but who dare not use it because of the schizophrenia the magical battle has brought upon her.

The heroes are in retreat on a beach in Mexico when they get drawn into an American plot to "weaponize" effective magic by the Pentagon. Somebody wants to use black magic to pump a talented candidate up to "Fat Boy" status - a human weapon of mass destruction. The rockstars have to stay free of other people's plans and save the world.

Midnight Lamp will be published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in February 2004, don't miss it.

Bold As Love website

I loved Richard Morgan's first novel "Altered Carbon", and this is the sequel. In the first book, Kovacs has been trained to be an Envoy, an elite government soldier who discovers that the only retirement job is crime. He lives in a future where your mind and personality are routinel;y accurately recorded on an Altered Carbon chip embedded at the base of your brain. The chip can be extracted at death, and then implanted in a forced-grown clone adult body so that you can live again.

Kovacs has been caught, his data extracted, and squirted as information faster than light from his colony homeworld to Earth. Convicts are no longer kept imprisoned in the expensive flesh, instead their chips are removed and kept in a Stack. Kovacs is taken off the stack to become a bonded private detective and solve a murder in "Altered Carbon".

"Broken Angels" takes up Kovacs' career afterwards, and he's returned to the military as a mercenary. His edge over everyone else is his Envoy conditioning and training. This is another story where Zen enlightenment has been adavnced by science into a useuable technology. Not so far-fetched when New Scientist is running stories about how the brain scans of Zen masters are different than average and where they can see in the neurology how Zen practices can make a person feel more inner peace and control. Kovacs can control his emotions and his perceptions utterly, he's always cool. He has skills and reflexes that can transfer over to an unfamiliar body in unfamiliar environments.

Kovacs has been "sleeved", re-embodied, in a war zone to recover an alien artefact before the other side do so. Human life is cheap among mercenaries, but in Kovacs' case, he goes to a market to buy soldiers mind chips, recovered from their battlefield corpses. He's cheerfully served by a man who scoops chips out of a huge pile and charges by the kilogram. Soldier's minds are booted up in a virtual environment, where the recruitment officer asks them if they want to sign up. Since the alternative is death, its an offer that can't be refused.

This is a very different book to the previous one, it was a big jump for me from private detective muder mystery to military campaign, and so I don't know if the feeling I had that we took too long to get to the artefact was because of the change of pace in the switch in sub-genres, or was just my impatience. I love the character and the writing, but the second book wasn't quite the pure joy of "Altered Carbon".

Richard Morgan has a wonderful writing style, and he keeps coming up with further and further implications of his basic world set-up and technology. Kovacs is a punk who doesn't deserve the Zen enlightenment his Envoy conditioning has gifted him, and is enlightened enough to know so. His character grows throughout the two books, and I'll be very interested to see where Morgan has him going next.

Stephen Baxter's "evolution" is a really ambitious piece of writing, he's attempted no less than to novellize ALL human history from our early rat-like primate ancestors scurrying around the feet of giant dinosaurs, all the way through pre-human and more human ancestors, the stone age, the invention of agriculture, all the way up to the modern day, the near future, and then the far future. He's mostly succeeded.

By the very scope of the subject, the book is really a linked series of short stories, where a female ancestor is the central character. Baxter's description of the motivations and perceptions and most importantly, the relationships of his characters is amazing. Starting the book, I wasn't certain I could stay interested in animal stories while waiting for the humans to emerge, but Baxter rewards the reader for persisting.

It was fascinating to read about how our basic body plan evolved way before our brains, and that our bodies are optimized for running. Two legs are faster than four, and we were once the fastest and most persistent of predators, before we could even speak. Just when you start to get impressed with these people, you discover that there are giant sabre toothed tigers that have evolved to out-smart the clever pre-humans. Baxter gets into the minds of our ancestors and convincingly describes how they feel, and to what extent they think. He shows how consciousness evolved in response to social relationship needs, and how originally our ancestors only had "selves" when they interacted with others. The invention of grandmothers has as huge effects as the invention of stone tools.

Baxter charts the time when there were several different human species all living in competition and cooperation, the stagnant millenia when human culture was stuck in a stone-age balance with the environment, the effects of schizophrenia and creativity, deception and political manipulation. Our brains evolved to deal with other people, and the people are realized very sharply and believably.

Baxter has done such a remarkable job that I was almost disappointed when the people have developed into modern humans with an agricultural feudal society with an aristocrat called "Potus" at the head of the empire. POTUS stands for "President of The United States" to fans of the West Wing TV series. However Baxter comes through with continuity from the ancestor characters, and keeps you fascinated, on up to the present, and into the far future.

"evolution" takes a little patience and persistance at times, but you'll come away looking at the world with new eyes.

My first impression of LIGHT was that it was entertaining, but mean. You're reading along enjoying the thread, when people are suddenly, coldly and irrationally killed. And thats before the Lovecraftian horror elements are introduced. Then the thread switches from the near to the far future, and the reader is sucked in the same way again. Its a schizophrenic, but fun ride.

Every chapter is a different thread, and we switch between physicist Michael Kearney of modern day, researching quantum computers and running away from a un-human entity. K-captain Seria Mau Genliche is a brain-in-a-ship of the year 2400, using Kearney's discoveries to navigate her space battles faster than light. Finally virtual-reality addict Ed Chianese of 2400, also running away.

Michael Kearney lives in Britain and has met and objectively verified the reality of the horror that pursues him. Harrison uses the classic element of horror stories, where the reader knows Kearney's work is related to what haunts him, but Kearney is too terrified to deal with it rationally. Everything that happens to him spurs him in a new direction as he constantly reacts to the fear that destiny will eat him up. Is he right, or is he massively over-reacting?

K-Captain Seria Mau Genlicher lives near the Kefahuchi Tract, a huge conglomaration of astronomical bodies centered around a naked singularity that beeds impossibility into the fabric of reality. Humanity has come in sixty-five million years after other intelligent species have tried to find the secrets of the Tract. Humans and aliens alike now mine the ancient artefacts of the peoples who have explored before them; millions of years worth of working technology and ideas. The nightmare and wonder is that everything works. Even when the underlying theories contradict each other, the technology works. Seria wants to believe her inner life and her relationships bring her far past humanity, but she knows she'd do anything to live as a person again.

Ed Chianese is a twink, someone who spends their time and money escaping into virtual reality fantasies. His everyday life in 2400 on the Beach of the KafaHuchi Tract gives a great sense of how bizarre 21st Century life really is. He surfs life without any plan, and is happier that way. He enters the Circus of Doctor Lao, and like the famous legend, he grows from the experience and finds Destiny there.

M. John Harrison has achieved amazing things in LIGHT. The style is fun, and playful, while still filling the reader with wonder and horror by turns. He describes a rich, vibrant, bizarre, but believable and engaging world. I highly recommend you read this book.

"The Space Child's Mother Goose", verses by Frederick Windsor and illustrated by Marian Parry is published by "Purple House Press": www.purplehousepress.com This almost describes my own career... There was a man in our town, An Astrophysicist, Who found a place In Hyperspace By just a twist of wrist. But when he sought the Nearer Now And he gave another twist, He found that he'd Become somehow A Cyberneticist. For those uncertain, the author includes a definition of hyperspace: Regular space is high and wide; HYPERSPACE is just outside.