Friday, January 28, 2011

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch, and Last Watch are all books part of a tetralogy by Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko.  I've just finished the first two books as audiobooks and have to remark that it is some of the most intriguing and thoughtful fantasy I've ever read.  The books deal with people who have supernatural abilities and are able to perceive the supernatural world.  These people are called "Others" and don't actually consider themselves human. Once they plunge into the supernatural "twilight", which is like an unseen alternate world that regular humans can't see but surround them, they lose their status as a human and attain the supernatural abilities of an Other. When this happens, they have to pick their controlling force (think light side and the dark side in Star Wars) which is either towards the light (the good) or the dark (implied as evil but better described as simply lacking morality in the conventional sense and living for oneself).  While you might want to classify these books as simple creative fantasy, think again.

What Lukyanenko creates in these books is more than a complex intriguing storyline in a well thought out complex world.  He creates characters and archetypes that permit discussions on morality, theology, and philosophy much in the way that Fyodor Dostoevsky did in books such as Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov.  The world presented here is the literally a world ruled by the laws of yin and yang. Light and dark Others are in constant opposition to each other striving to tip the scales from a balance that is meticulously maintained through laws of a truce between the two sides. The onces who enforce the balance are the Night Watch (who monitors the dark Others and ensures they live according to the treaty) and the Day Watch (who monitors the light Others and ensures they live according to the treaty). The two sides are constantly trying to find ways to outwit the others within the bounds of the treaty to shift the balance towards their own side in the world. The books focus on members of these watches and as you can imagine by the book titles, the first book focuses primarily on the Night Watch and the second book focuses primarily on the Day Watch.  Not only are the plots and conflicts intriguing, the dialogs are rich in philosophical contemplations on the forces of good and evil, of free will and destiny, and are littered with references on topics from music to religion.

If you like fantasy, and you like to read things that will make you think, then these books are for you.  Be warned though: this is not the kind of fantasy that is jam packed full of action and events.  This is the kind of fantasy that moves at a methodical pace interlaced with a significant amount of thought provoking and heavy dialog.  There's plenty of action as well, but if you don't enjoy lots of discussion and dialog, then these books aren't for you.

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Sunday, January 9, 2011

Thoughts on the Novel: Anthem by Ayn Rand

Unlike many dystopian novels that provide discourse and critique on politics and human values, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, written in 1937, delves into a deeper discourse on human nature and juxtaposes the concepts of living for the collective whole (the “we”) and for the self (the “I” or “ego”).  I’m not going to give a summary of the book since I mainly want to discuss a few thoughts related to this juxtaposition of “we” and “I” as presented in this book (very briefly so I apologize in advance for any poorly laid out ideas).  I encourage anyone who hasn’t read the book to do so and it can be found as a free download in both ebook and audiobook form from various sources on the web.

Society in Anthem revolves around the peace and equality of the collective whole. The goal of the society is to provide a social construct where everyone is equal, all jobs are equal, all working knowledge is equally accessible, and where there is no “I”, only “we”. In fact, people here do not even know the word “I” and refer to themselves and the whole indiscriminately as “we”. The people in Anthem are trained to be more like clones than individuals. By stripping away individualism, people do not need to rate or compare themselves to everyone else. Since only the most intelligent could possibly comprehend advanced knowledge and technology, knowledge and technology have all been stripped down to only what everyone can understand equally so that no one is smarter than anyone else. In fact, when the main character tries to introduce electric light as an invention to further mankind, it is rejected over the candle primarily because the knowledge that would be comprehended by few would give them power over those who couldn’t comprehend.  Society of the “we” is simply to live as “we”, not to advance itself and fall victim to the times of inequality and knowledge of their past (modern civilization).

The moment people decided to reject the “I” and accept the equality and unity of the “we”, they forever limited the power of the collective whole to the weakest link.  This idea seems counter-intuitive at first because working as a group allows people to make great advancements in science, technology, and society.  There is a distinction that should be made though of a group of individuals working together, with their own individual perceptions of their strengths and weaknesses, to a single collective hive-type society, where every single unit of the whole has a specialized function to maintain life for the whole without individual conceptions that their purpose is any higher or lower than anyone else. In a collective “we”, individualism (i.e. the ego) would destroy the entire structure of the whole with impulses such as individual desires and goals that would conflict with those of the collective good.  While maintaining peace and satisfaction of the collective good through absolute equality may be a noble cause, it stifles any progress since the initiation of each new idea or invention must be carefully planned out to carefully maintain the delicate and structure of that equality. Thus, if equality means unanimous peace at the cost of progress, then inequality is the biggest threat to aspirations of peace in society as it is and has always been. Since inequality stems from the ego, or individuality, then human nature itself is the largest hindrance to achieving peace among its own race.

The juxtaposition of ultimate peace and disorder, the “we” and the ego, and of equality and inequality, forces us to accept a couple of implications. If humanity strives for absolute peace of the collective whole through equality, then the pleasures of individual desires and experience must be given up. Conversely, if we strive to fulfill the desires and goals of the ego, then humanity at the same time must accept that conflict is the result. While Anthem abstractly places these absolute positions on opposing pedestals, we all have desires stemming from the ego and desires for the whole. Rather than live for one or the other, isn’t life about living with a compromise between the two?

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