The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

This book written by R. Heinlein in 1985 is about paradoxes, multiple time universes, and self-aware computers. The book is fast paced, action packed story of Colonel Colin Campbell and his partner, a beautiful and sophisticated lady, Gwen Novak. The story is situated sometime in the future when humans live in space colonies and they have already colonized the Moon. Our two characters are descendents of the Methuselah's Children (also name of another Heinlein’s book), a new generation of long-lived breed of humans with their life span between several hundred to several thousands years. Ok, it will get even more complicated. Heinlein is representing his idea of so called Pantheistic solipsism, the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them. For example the Land of Oz is somewhere real. They are not only real but also they can coexist simultaneously on different time lines. Our two characters take part in Time Corps, the organization that travels between those parallel universes, manipulates the time and thus adjusts the events to keep all these universes in peace. We should not forget the self-aware computers. The computers of the future can self-program, self-upgrade, and self-improve themselves. We should not be surprised that some of them after several thousand years of this self-development process reach self-consciousness similar to the human one. These self-aware computers are important key for time-travel between the parallel universes. In this book there are a lot of characters and ideas used in other Heinlein’s works and the author seemed to pack them nicely all together. The cat in the book refers to famous Schrödinger's cat from quantum mechanics.

Monday Begins on Saturday

This is another book from the Russian writing sci-fi workshop of brothers Strugatsky. It can be labeled as a fantasy book but I would describe it as an absurd or comedy sci-fi. It has many comedian and interesting characters. Sasha, a young programmer meets on his vacation two strangers and is offered a programming job in highly classified "Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry" located in some fictional Russian town. This science institute is inhabited by various scientists and you may start guessing correctly that not the ordinary ones. The front desk person is vampire Alfred, the head of the department of prediction is Merlin, and many more. You will find out that the Sorcery and Wizardry computer programming is very similar to the regular one except the programming syntax is different and the computers can get easily upset and sometimes even violent and can dismember the bad programmer. All employees are supposed to work hard willingly and if they don’t the hair start growing from their ears. There are also many funny unanimated characters, as for example Sasha describes in his words “two spider-like mechanisms of smaller size suddenly jumped out of an alley. Before I could begin to react one of them quickly shined my shoe and the other washed and pressed my handkerchief.” Everybody can create his or her doubles to do some simple work like doing the laundry or shopping (I would like that) but they can mess things up since they are not very intelligent. This book is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy and use a lot of Russian classic fairy-tale characters and it is fun to read.

Brave New World

Welcome to the utopian Brave New World of Aldous Huxley! Word dystopian is also used which by Wikipedia means the “vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia.” This famous novel was written in 1931 has lost nothing in truthful description of any totalitarian regime nowadays or in the future. This novel is often paired with George Orwell’s 1984. I haven’t read 1984 but saw the movies 1984 (with the same name) and Brazil that were based on the books. The Aldous Huxley’s story is a twisted reality of some utopian everyday life in the year of 2540. In this fictious reality the most of the world is unified into a peaceful society of so called World State where people are born from glass-tubes. The human embryonic egg development is conditioned and people are divided into castes. The lowest ones have lower intelligence and growth and the highest one can fully develop. Everybody uses some drug called “soma” and recreational sex that sometimes changes into a mass orgy is an integral part of this society. But there are still some people who live in so called savage reservations where these rules don’t apply. Now John, one of those savages, accidentally gets into this World State society and the power of this book is that the reader experiences all John's adventures. I was surprised that after reading this book I couldn’t help comparing our society to this utopian (dystopian) one.

I, Robot

I remember when I read this classic Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories my book was confiscated by our high school teacher (more then 20 years ago). That is to say I read it during the class under my school desk and it was found out. I was to get this book back at the end of the school year. This was a customary punishment in the Czech Republic high schools. Fortunately she brought my book back in about two weeks and said that she was really surprised how those stories were beautiful, human, and very readable. I definitely agree! It seems to be about robots, their laws, and their impact on the humanity, but it is all about our humanity. There were even several movies based on those stories. The latest one was filmed in 2004 and a lead role of a detective Spooner plays W. Smith. He investigates the mysterious murder of one of the employees of U. S. Robotics and the suspect is a robot. By the way this international word “robot” was invented by the Czech writer K. Capek and first appeared in his futuristic novel R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1921. The movie with the name “I, Robot” kind of mixes two or three of the stories from the book. The book that was written in 1950 is much better though. It is how robots have to deal with humans, and humans with robots. Robots are depicted very humanoid, they have human shapes, they talk and think with their positronic brains (Star Trek borrowed this idea for its character Data) but they have to obey Asimov’s famous three robotic laws that I couldn’t help not to cite here:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It seems that they have to obey them but it may not be so. There are other stories that may the reader even move emotionally. “Robbie” is one of them. All stories are good and you will feel sad when reading the last page of the book.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Do you grok? You might have heard this expression somewhere and it was invented by an American sci-fi author and futurologist Robert A. Heinlein. Cited from his most famous book Stranger in a Strange Land: “grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed.” The book opens with “once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.” All right, we know now that there are no Martians and probably no life at all on Mars, but the story is really interesting and it is not about planet Mars. And how come that the Martian has an English name? The story starts with the second expedition to Mars, the first one failed for unknown reasons. This second one which is happening many years after is more like a rescue operation. Upon successful landing on Mars surprisingly they find not only one survivor but also that the planet is inhabited by Martians. The survivor’s name is Valentine Michael Smith and he is our main character in this book. Smith was born on Mars to the couple from the first expedition. He was orphaned when the crew died and then raised by the Martians only. Now he is in his adulthood and came back “home” to Earth. The story is about how Smith adjusts himself to our culture, tries to understand it and also how people try to understand him. Is he more an Earthman or a Martian? Martians taught Smith some really useful tricks, he can levitate, slow down his metabolism and stay underwater for hours, converse telepathically, and many more. And he is able to teach us all of this! But we are not so easy to understand other cultures not to mention other extraterrestrial ones. It is a good read!