Briefer for Busier Times

I'm not sure how many years it's been since I read Stephen Hawking's phenomenal best seller - A Brief History of Time.  It was published in 1988, and I'm guessing I read it at some time in the mid 1990s.  I recall finding parts of it really fascinating, but much of it a bit overwhelming - so I was really pleased to see that Hawking and collaborator, Leonard Mlodinow teamed up to reissue a revised, renamed and somewhat easier version of the classic.

This Briefer History of Time is a great introduction for the lay person, and of course for the interested high school student, to major concepts of cosmology, including the somewhat mind-bending concepts of Einstein's theories of general and special relativity - and the truly mind-blowing and bizarre concepts of quantum and string theory.

I found the inclusion of God in this work to be problematic.  Instead of discussing how current theories relate to beliefs in God, the authors at times seem to just assume - without evidence that God does exist.  Consider this excerpt from a discussion of the search for unified theories:

"Actually, the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time.  Time is a property only of the universe that God created.  Presumably, He knew what He intended when He set it up!"

And a bit later in the book, in the conclusion they write:

"The question remains, however: how or why were the laws and the initial state of the universe chosen?" ("[C]hosen" seems an odd choice of language here)! 

I think it would have just been better to include a separate chapter on the religious implications of the current state of cosmology, but regardless, the book is still very strong and compelling.

All The World's a Maze

Source of graphic

The Maze Runner by James Dashner
New York : Delacorte Press, c2009.
375 p. ; 22 cm.

This powerful and well-reviewed novel finds the main character - Thomas - entering a strange world as disoriented and confused as the reader.  The novel is set in a prison-like construct of the Glade where one teen boy is  delivered once a month by a one-way elevator.  The Glade is at the center of a massive maze, many square miles in expanse and populated by the half-animal/half-machine Grievers - large and agile slug-like creatures bristling with instruments of carnage and pain (saws, pincers, needles, etc).  The Grievers are especially active at night, when the massive walls of the Glade slide shut - and the massive walls of the maze rearrange themselves.

The novel revolves around Thomas and the other Gladers trying to find a solution to the maze, trying to figure out what malign agents have put them in the Glade, and trying to recover any memories of their lives before being delivered to the Glade.  Each boy has arrived in the Glade with his memory wiped, and able to sense and recover some memories from the past.  The action of the novel is raised to a pitch and pushed toward a dramatic climax by the delivery of a girl - a first, and the sudden end of the predicable patterns of the Glade - no more sunshine, no more deliveries of supplies, and no more closed walls at night when the Grievers are at their most predatory and active.

Several reviews I read felt that this was a great introductory novel to the sequels which will follow - see the series website here - but I found myself enjoying the novel as a metaphor for the human condition.  Like the boys and one girl in the glade, we find ourselves born into a world of malign forces over which we have almost no control, in which many of us have to struggle for survival in often tedious, meaningless ways, and where we are forever trying to figure out where we came from, where we are going and "what it all means."  This existential horror was what I really loved about this book.  The book leads to a half-resolution, setting itself up for a sequel - and this is probably what will draw many readers in as they look forward to learning about the world outside the maze, the purpose of the maze and the life and death adventures of the young men and young woman from the Glade.

This book might well appeal to fans of The Hunger Games and compares in an interesting way to The City of Ember.  I also thought of Ender's Game and Lord of the Flies as other books that could be compared to this  new dystopian novel.