Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...

Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker

I love Charlie Brooker. Love him for his demented rants born from having any kind of conscience in the modern world, love him for his balls-out rudeness about minor celebrities and reality TV idiots (all of whom are asking for it, in my opinion). Yes, I think I have a bit of a crush on him, despite the fact that I've a shrew notion he'd be whiny and high-maintenance in person. Anyway, you don't want to hear me say it's funny, you want a look at the funniness itself:

• “My least favourite Hazel McWitch lookalike” = Gillian McKeith
• “If a penis could chose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it'd end up looking like Duane “Dog” Chapman star of Dog the Bountyhunter.” I especially liked the bit about how Duane's hairstyle looks “like the entire cast of The Lost Boys crossed with a gay lion”.
• “Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God.”
• Deborah Meaden of Dragon's Den, “could chew the tin balls off a Cyberman”
• A BB contestant is described in the following terms, “With a face like a perineum with tiny dots drawn on it for eyes, he was the human equivalent of a cock- shaped novelty pen with ego problems”

So the Brooker book (which the whole English-speaking world except for me got for Christmas) is pretty funny. It's also ecologically sound, being constructed entirely from recycled Guardian columns.

One thing which strikes me as bit unfair about Brooker, though is this: He's funny, but is he actually funnier or cleverer than the people you know in real life? I'm not sure he is. CB's humour reminds me strongly of my friend TLO - I suspect that the only reason Charlie has a newspaper column and a TV show and TLO doesn't, is that TLO is actually better equipped for real-life and therefore able to hold don a 9-5 job.

What are the scores, Jorge Borge?

This month I have mostly been reading "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Apparently, Mr Borges writes “metafiction”so the first thing I had to do was look up what the hell that was. I also looked up “symbolism” as that was allegedly a big influence. Having read the definition of symbolism, I felt no wiser as to what it actually was so I just had to get on with reading the book in continuing ignorance.

The book is collection of short stories and essays. The stories are short, but at the same time immensely dense, referencing any number of other pieces of fiction inside them. This is really, really confusing as Borges’ fiction also makes liberal use of describing books that don’t exist, false biographies and deliberately false attributions. I end up feeling that I must have guessed wrong at least once about which bits were fact and where the words have come from, therefore I have been proven to be as daft and ignorant as all those people who thought Ghostwatch was a genuine documentary. Not only that, but the subject matter takes in big philosophical questions about such things as identity, free will, consciousness and reality. And the words are really hard.

My mind is pretty much blown.

Much like the film Primer, I have enjoyed Borges, and I’d recommend him, but I can’t honest claim to have understood the half of these stories. I liked the “Library of Babel” which struck me as much like the internet in that it contains everything you might ever want to know hidden amongst tides of lies and crap. I also liked the story about the magician who dreams a man into existence. This was easier going for someone who spent their youth with PKD!

How many words did I have to look up? LOTS!

Cosmogony – The study of the origin of the universe

Numina - Plural of “numen” which means a presiding divinity or spirit of a place; Creative energy; genius.

Verisimilar – having the appearance of truth; probable

Apodictic - Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible

Tetrach - A provincial ruler or vassal king who owed allegiance to the Roman Empire.

Nitid – bright, lustrous.

Teleology – I wish this meant the study of television, but alas it does not. Apparently it is the belief that everything has an ultimate, original cause and the search for evidence of design in nature. Sounds like a cross between a child recursively asking “Why?” and the endlessly moronic “intelligent design” doctrine. The study of this ology looks like a waste of neurons. I am cross that such a word even exists. Why not join with me in deliberately misusing it to mean “The study of television”? Eventually, the meaning will change!

Pullulate – to send out shoots, to breed or multiply, to swarm or teem.

Panegyric – an elaborate formal compliment.

Borges is another person who is done no favours at all by the modern desire for photos of the author. He was obviously scarily intellectual, but looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Galapagos tortoise.