James Morrow, Reality by Other Means **

Reality by Other Means is a short-story collection from the ... sci-fi? fantasy? philosophical? satirical? ... author James Morrow. I picked it up as a pure bookstore impulse buy, based on the inner flap's characterization of the contents as "fictive thought experiments" and the author as worthy of a special issue of the academic journal Studies in World Literary Genres –– an honor bestowed on just one other writer, Ursula K. Le Guin.

When done well, science fiction and satire are both excellent vehicles for providing new perspectives on abstract ideas. When done poorly, though, they can feel like embarrassing attempts to be clever. Morrow sets out to emulate Kurt Vonnegut, with absurd premises illuminating serious ideas, but ends up sounding like a smug college sophomore.

Exhibit 1: In "The War of the Worldviews," the diminutive inhabitants of two Martian moons fight each other in New York City. The casus belli is a philosophical dispute between idealism and realism; the narrator and three mental asylum inmates resolve the conflict by making a convincing argument for one side (chosen by a coin flip).

The title is unimaginative. There is no reason for the battle to be on Earth, and no explanation for how the mental patients understand the aliens' worldviews. The theme and the action have no relationship to each other: the aliens' behavior is not influenced by their philosophy; the plot doesn't hinge on the ideas. We don't learn anything about idealism or realism or hear anything about human conflicts (such as the Crusades) fought for similarly abstract ideals.

Exhibit 2, sampling Morrow's 'humor': "Arms and the Woman" recounts the Trojan War from Helen's point of view. Before taking her to bed, Paris slips on "a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box". Later he complains about her aging and suggests that with a combination of ox blood and river silt she can "dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula."

Sally Mann, Hold Still **** 1/2

I was not familiar with the photographer Sally Mann or her work before I picked up this "Memoir with Photographs" from a featured book table at Powell's Books. I was attracted by the way she used photos in the text, commenting on them directly rather than just using them as illustrations. For example, she talks  about (and illustrates) how as a little girl she insisted on running around naked until one day her mother told her she had to wear clothes if she wanted to hang out with the carpenters building a cabin on their property; turn the page and there's a photograph of young Sally with the carpenters, wearing just a pair of underpants.

Mann covers a lot of ground: biographical stories from both sides of her family, descriptions of her working methods, consideration of the complicated legacy of the South, rumination on the meaning of art. Her writing style is conversational, with unpredictable and seemingly casual transitions between subject. Her tone is calmly rational even when discussing lurid or charged subjects such as murder-suicide, the exploitation of photographic models, racial relations, escaped convicts, and decomposition.

I loved the chapter where she described her quest to capture an image of her son Emmett in the river that runs through their property. She wanted to "exorcise the trauma" of a recent accident that had nearly killed him. She tried several approaches before coming to the river. She saw something she liked in each of the first three pictures she took, then started in pursuit of a picture that combined all of those virtues. They spent hours there, with Emmett getting colder and colder. The chapter covers her artistic motivation, her aesthetic search, her tenacious process, and the questionable demands she put on her model (and child).

I was also impressed with the forthright way she addresses the "contradictions" of the South: "the gracious splendor of its lost world founded on a monstrous crime... elucidated in an accent and vernacular that are lyrical like no other." 

Down here, you can't throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them. ... I am one of those. ... Only now am I wondering about these things. How did she get something as simple as her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from eight in the morning to eight at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill. ... What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions? That's the mystery of it––our blindness and our silence.

The penultimate chapter is the astonishing story of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as the Body Farm. They lay donated bodies on the property and study how they decompose. It's an interesting subject that also sheds light on Mann's unusual preoccupation with death (inherited from her father).

Larry Niven, Ringworld ***

Ringworld is a hard sci-fi classic from 1970. Aliens known as Pierson's puppeteers discover an immense circular ribbon world and send a four-person cross-species team to investigate it. They end up crash-landing on Ringworld and need to explore it to figure out a way to get back home. It's world-building at its most basic and literal, similar to another book about exploring an object of unknown provenance, Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

The story is constructed purely as a scaffolding for imagining how the artificial world would work. The adventure is exciting enough but plays second fiddle to conversations about Klemperer rosettes and hyperdrives. The characters, too, are little more than mouthpieces for scientific theorizing. Each individual, alien or human, gets a single defining trait (Louis is curious, Nessus is cowardly, Speaker is aggressive, Teela is lucky) that completely determines their actions.

The lack of fleshed-out characters is one way you can tell that Ringworld is a genre book from 1970. Another sign of the times is that a motivating concern for the intergalactic action of multiple alien species is overpopulation.

Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing **** 1/2

I expected this book about "The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds" to focus primarily on the mysteries of avian navigation, something like We, The Navigators but for birds. However, it takes a far more expansive look at avian biology and ecology.

The author does a beautiful job of balancing between travelogue, science, and advocacy. He provides lovely natural descriptions of his birding expeditions:

The world was precisely equal halves of gray, divided by the flat line of the horizon––the smoky silver of an overcast sky, unmarked and smooth, and the darker, mottled granite and charcoal of a mudflat that stretched to every side, paper-thin sheets of water lying on its surface reflecting the clouds or ruffled by the breeze.

Clear explanations of biological marvels:

Migratory birds can grow and jettison their internal organs on an as-needed basis, bolster their flight performance by juicing on naturally occurring performance-enhancing drugs, and enjoy perfect health despite seasonally exhibiting all the signs of morbid obesity, diabetes, and looming heart disease. A migrating bird can put alternating halves of its brain to sleep while flying for days, weeks, or even months on end ... get[ting] mentally sharper under such conditions.

And practical illustrations of environmental activism:

Land managers knew that some ag[riculture] lands, like rice fields, can provide good habitat for waterbirds, provided they're flooded at the right time and to the proper depth. Looking at eBird data, they also realized that many migrants were only using the Central Valley for a few weeks... Farmers would be paid to keep a few inches of water in their fields in late summer and early autumn, when shorebirds are migrating south through the region.

I appreciated how the book showed interconnections between elements of the ecosystem, such as the so-called "carry-over effects" of conditions in the wintering grounds onto breeding season. Spring is coming earlier in the Arctic but celestial cues in the tropics are unchanged, resulting in birds arriving too late for the caterpillar boom; the fragmentation of forests results in more "edges" and therefore more predators like raccoons, skunks, and crows. I also appreciated that Weidensaul includes success stories to ameliorate the hopelessness of many works of conservational activism.