Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 2. Haunted Castle

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed earlier); The Haunted Castle (reviewed here); Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This story begins, “Arjana worked in the only place at Joyworld Moscow where you did not have to smile: The Haunted Castle.” Arjana and Zef were two Albanian teenagers from a village destroyed by the Serbs. Arjana couldn’t smile because of what she saw, especially the face of the smiling, ruthless Serbian soldier who chased her and Zef but could not find them. When they sneak onto a train going to Moscow, they find a shipment of costumes for Joyworld, and decide the best place to hide is faraway but in plain sight. Zef played a cowboy at a fake frontier town (Russians were killing Siberians at the same time white Americans were killing Natives). Arjana worked the ticket counter of Haunted Castle, a train that wound through fake graveyards and dangling ghosts. But the soldier found Zef and shot him dead; the visitors thought it was part of an act. Other visitors thought it was part of the act when the soldier found Arjana and tried to rape her. (“The fake blood looks so real!”) But a small and silent act of heroism saves Arjana.

One thing I found very interesting about this story was that Arjana’s ability to play dead was an adaptation to danger. Animal adaptations to escape from danger are as varied as the animals themselves.

An evolutionary puzzle is, why do people so intensely hate those in other racial or cultural groups? An evolutionary argument can be made for why individuals or groups, in competition with one another, would hate each other. But the intensity of hatred seems too much for biology or evolution to explain. It is almost enough to make one believe in Satan.

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, Story 6. Entropy

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles; Light Apparel; Flow of Blood; Wisdom Builds Her House; Rock Bunnies (all reviewed earlier), Entropy (reviewed here), Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air (reviewed later). As in the previous stories, Entropy teaches some deep science in a context of humor

Manfred and Meave are tech nerds who have their whole lives in perfect order: they know exactly what and when they would eat (spotlessly cooked meals); what they would play (Monopoly over and over); and when they would get married. Then their perfect order was disrupted by entropy, which is disorder. First, Manfred’s perfectly ordered meal is disrupted when he hides an engagement ring inside of a beet for Meave to find; second, the astonishingly beautiful illegal immigrant Cornelia arrives unexpectedly and gets Manfred in bed with her. Then she brings her whole family. Meave’s latent energy explodes when she finds out about this…until she finds out that she really likes Cornelia’s family. When Cornelia’s family leaves, they do something that makes it impossible for Manfred and Meave to ever be torn apart again.

The spiritual lesson in this story is that you have to be ready for surprises to come along, rather than imposing your own idea of order on all of life. Being a rigid Puritan—none of whom read this blog, I assume—is not only bad, but also impossible. This lesson makes up about half of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. But also, you have to be open to surprises if you are to notice the wonder of creation. Cornelia tells Manfred, “You have a map of the heavens, you think, because humans have made up names for the stars and drawn little lines between them. You think that constellation over there looks like a Big Dipper. Our people think it looks like a Volkswagen Bug. Just kidding. But, seriously. Do you have a map of the Streets of Gold? When you get glimpses of heaven, and you get them every day, it leaves you bewildered. But you better get used to it. You better be content with feeling a little bit lost, because the heavens are so big, you will never have answers to everything.”

This story also squarely faces one of the most important current issues of our time: illegal immigration and what ICE can or should do about it. Rice does not, of course, provide an answer.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 5. Rock Bunnies

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Rock Bunnies (reviewed here), Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Rock Bunnies, once again, Rice takes an idea from the fiction of H. G. Wells, in this case from The Time Machine. In Wells’s novel, the human species has evolved into two: the infantile Eloi and the shabby but hard-working Morlocks, as different as any two animal species. In Rice’s story, the Urbanites are rich white technologists who have evolved into a slightly-different race that lives in artificial cities, while the dark poor Rock Bunnies live in places the whites have destroyed. This story is set in the Black Hills, which (as anyone visiting Mt. Rushmore knows) is currently covered with pine trees, but in this story, set in the future, is a desert. The Rock Bunnies leap from cliff to cliff and live off of mountain goats and little clumps of edible wild plants.

A white Urbanite graduate student out in the desert sees a Rock Bunny who, as they almost never do, fall from a cliff and injure herself, perhaps mortally. He wants to rescue her but her fellow Rock Bunny vandals have destroyed his car, and he becomes their captive. The Rock Bunny woman, however, is the niece of their chief. They develop a friendship, and the chief—whom they call the Scientist, because he keeps the spirit of science alive among his people—wants the white man to stay with them as his son-in-law.

In this view of the future, which is otherwise bleak, Rice shows that this tribe of Rock Bunnies reveres science and its practitioners. Nice fantasy.

An Urbanite helicopter comes and finds the white man. The white man assumes it is to rescue him. In this, he is quite wrong.

As in other stories in this collection, Rice makes a strong case that altruism—the evolutionary basis of love—is the most important human adaptation. This is the message of both science and religion. As in many other Rice stories, there is also the theme of racism.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, part two. Light Apparel

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles (reviewed earlier), Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

In Light Apparel, a physicist, Hadley, discovers how to weave light into a fabric from which clothing could be made. People could now go naked but look like they were clothed, and this was very popular in a globally-warmed world. At least they appeared clothed to everyone except Hadley; he could use his equations to make spectacles that could unscramble the light and reveal their nakedness. Hadley lived in an endless fantasy world.

The only person who rejected this light-apparel was a young Christian woman, Xan, who wore cloth. She stood out among the naked bodies as surely as if she were the only naked person. Hadley was attracted to her, as she tried to save his soul. But her parents sneaked into his room and stole his secrets. The father was ready to destroy Hadley’s financial empire, until Xan shoots her father.

The question that this story raises—but does not answer, since it is just a story—is, why do humans wear clothing? Is it for modesty? Is it to curb unbridled sexual lust? You can think of an almost limitless number of reasons these cannot be the reasons. Some tribes and nudists manage to have modesty despite nakedness. Instead, from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, clothes are power, sometimes hiding, sometimes revealing, sometimes emphasizing, what people want others to see. In the history of every culture, clothing is much too complicated and ornate to simply serve as a covering against nakedness or to keep warm. Clothing is a product of cultural evolution in our species of otherwise naked apes.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

Rice explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course. For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part one.

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part two

Two of the main characters in Stan Rice’s Glass Cathedral are Dan and Misty. Dan is the atheist and Misty is the Christian, only of course it is not that simple. They are real people who are working through big questions, not like the stifling two-dimensional characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.

By the time God appears in the sky—or not—outside the California desert town of Susurrus, Dan is already an atheist. So what he sees is an unexplained natural phenomenon. But he does not arrive at his atheism thoughtlessly. His whole view of the natural world began when, as a kid, he saw a horsehair worm several inches long protruding from the anus of a cockroach. Nature, he realized, was an arena of struggle and parasitism. (He thus earned the name of Buttworm Boy.)

He did not have a comfortable atheism. He meets, is fascinated by, and is then attracted to a Mormon girl named Margaret. Dan never alters his strong opinion that Mormonism is the stupidest piece of illogical thinking he had ever encountered. But Margaret is not stupid. And as they slip into a physical relationship closer than either had expected, Dan finds himself wanting to believe as Margaret does. But he cannot. Dan’s background story is truly funny. He and Margaret end their contact as he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Misty, also at UCSB, begins as a dreamily idealistic Christian who lived for her weekly Bible studies and for her fiancé Dwayne. Dan meets Misty just long enough to fall in love with her. Misty and Dwayne plan a mission trip to Ecuador, to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism, something of which the Catholics were not fond. Neither were the communist terrorists, who kidnap Dwayne. Just as they release him back into Misty’s loving arms, the communist terrorists shoot him dead, splattering Misty with fragments of the man who was her life.

It’s not supposed to happen this way, Misty thinks. Long after Dwayne’s death was no longer in the national news, Misty visits her old UCSB Bible study. She has changed; they have not; and she realizes how they all had such easy answers to the big questions. She grabs a Bible from one of them and reads from the book of Job, in which God Himself tells Job, you think you have all the answers, don’t you? Well, you don’t. That was her message to her former compatriots as she stomps out.

Misty encounters Dan and they have, despite their religious differences, a truly meaningful conversation. They end up working at the same newspaper out in the desert, where God appears—or not—in the sky. This event seems to wipe all doubt away from Misty’s heart. Or does it? Does it need to? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's story

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Anna Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.