Howard V. Hendrix

In an afterword to the 2010 edition of Lightpaths, Howard V. Hendrix lists several Golden Age writers as his literary influences, among them Heinlein, Stapledon, Clarke, Bester, Sturgeon, Bradbury, and Leiber. He has a billionaire building a utopian community on a space habitat who resembles the protagonist of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Stapledon and Bradbury inspired his cosmological scope and poetic style. The space habitat he owes to Clarke. It is not a happy group marriage. The whole performance seems self-indulgent and overwritten.… (más)

review of
Howard V. Hendrix's Lightpaths
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 14-22, 2020

For the complete review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1318307-howard-v-hendrix

Another new writer to me although, not uncommonly for 'newness' for me, this bk is from 1997, so it's hardly 'new'. I've already come to dislike the term 'Millennial' but, perhaps, this is 'Millennial SF' in the sense that it's from 1997, not in the sense that its author is a so-called 'Millennial'. I ended up being engaged by this pretty quickly, partially b/c one of the main characters has an interest I potentially share.

""I got the fellowship because of an avocation of mine—an interest in utopian fiction. I'm sure that you know that the Orbital Complex has the world's largest collection of utopian and dystopian materials—"" - p 3

"Oh, Jhana knew the broken-rhythm hype, all right. Home, home on Lagrange / Where vanishing creatures still play" - p 9

It seems a bit much to explain such things sometimes but there're probably readers who don't understand the above dual reference. The original song lyric referred to would be "Home, home on the range / Where the deer and the antelope play" — the song being called "Home on the Range". The changed lyrics may be a reference to "In existence between 1843 and 1848 The LaGrange Phalanx was one of about 30 such towns constructed by followers of Charles Fourier a French philosopher who believed in a Utopian Socialism. Today the town is completely gone with only a roadside marker to represent its location." (https://historyinyourownbackyard.com/video/the-lagrange-phalanx-ghost-town-brushy-prairie-indiana/) Then again, it may not. My current favorite SF writer, Mack Reynolds, has written a series of "Lagrangist" novels which I haven't read yet. It wd be typical of him to make reference to an obscure part of socio-political history. I vaguely remember reading a non-Lagrangist novel by him in which Lagrange was mentioned & my apparently poor memory of this has "Lagrange" not as a place but as a socialist-utopian philosopher (not Fourier). I was unable to find that reference in an admittedly hasty search.

ANYWAY, this novel is about a utopian community of scientists & so much more.

"Lakshmi called up the habitat's Public Sphere, the "marketplace of ideas" virtual construct where Lev spent a lot of his time, particularly in the "anti-Platonics" group area, pontificating and soapboxing to all who might be interested about how rigid specialization was what made Plato's Republic fascistic at base, how that was what lead him to banish the polymorphous poets, how the city-state of this habitat must be an inverse of that, strongly anti-specialist, if it hoped to preserve its participatory democracy" - p 13

Personally, I don't trust anyone who experiments with naked mole rats & I've known thousands of them (or am I getting confused?).

""Yes, but I'm sure they'll provide it all. Naked mole rats, Ethiopian sand puppies. NMRs, ESPs, as I like to call them." He crouched down, looking directly into the mole-rat colony's main chamber. "They're misnamed, you know. They're not rats, they're not moles, and they're not really naked. Heterocephalus glaber. Smooth other-headed ones. Hairless, different-headed creatures. The perfect gene source for creating transgenic, less problematic humans."" - p 24

My thoughts exactly — exact I wd've sd "namedmis" & "kedna". It's like pictures of women that I find attractive — even though I know the pcture was taken 100 years ago & that the actual person is long since dead, a goner.

""What?" said a whey-faced young sitcomedian with an exagerated shrug and knowing smile. "You think 'cause it's the end of the 2020s everybody's got perfect vision?"

"A laugh track dutifully cranked out a string of mixed chuckles and chortles from another place and time. Jhana dumped her luggage at the foot of the bed, recalling as she did that the 2020s line had quickly become the comic's personal trademark, the tag line of the decade, before it became just another outdated rerun. But if it was such a funny line, then why did the viewing audience have to be told it was funny? Or was everybody just supposed to keep laughing along, herd-style, because once upon a time anonymous people had been anonymously recorded in the act of laughing?

"That was the spooky part: much of the "source laughter" on the tracks had been recorded fifty or sixty years ago, and many of those laughing were now dead, gone to ashes or worm's meat. When Jhana laughed along with the tracks, she was laughing with the dead in one big happy haunted human comedy...." - p 30

The worst part is when the dead people think you're laughing at them instead of w/ them — then all heck breaks loose. At any rate, that kinda sums up 2020 doesn't it? I mean what w/ the Ivory Billed Activist being endangered n'at.

""She'd also say this place is a college campus in the sky and we do too much ivory tower theorizing. She'd say we have too much faith in technological progress. She'd start talking about how we're a rich and privileged elite in the ultimate castle on the highest hill. She'd say all HOME's claims of multiethnicity are bull. She'd sound off about Master Race in Outer Space types fleeing to an orbital suburb of Earth City, a lifeboat for the powerful, another technofascist nonsolution to human problems—"

"Ekwefi took a quick sip of wine, her index finger held up to indicate that she still had more to say and did not want to be interrupted.

""—and I don't know if maybe she doesn't have a point after all. I mean, doesn't it seem sortof odd that all of us up here who are so dedicated to peace and social justice and world-saving are at the same time so isolated from the world we're trying to change? A plot to wall off activists and dissidents and idealists in a big isolated holding pen couldn't have done a better job of getting us all up here! To the people living in the trashlands down there, an elitist paradise in space must look pretty hollow."" - pp 53-54

If this were 'real life', I'd be one of the people living in the trashlands, maybe making the best of it if possible, & hatefully envious of the people in the utopian satellite colony. But, still, in the novel, I'm rooting for the colonists. I'm sick of complaining.

""It's like the two ancient snakes that intertwined themselves about the staff of Hermes or Asklepios," Lev replied, walking around the hovering, twisted halo of the thing, "but at the same time it suggests—I don't know, a model of the interlocked base-pairs of the DNA double helix.["]" - p 60

Ring a bell for any of you SF readers out there? Philip K. Dick discusses the very same staff / DNA similarity in his Valis (& I used that Dick passage in the movie of me getting my very 1st tattoo in 1986: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Tattoos1.1986DNA.html ). Or how about this?:

""So Tao-Ponto's your tribe of cash-flow hunter-gatherers, eh?" he said, staring quizzically at her as she followed him through the Genetics Lab. "They still big into Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue?"

""I'm afraid I've never heard of that, sir," she replied, trying to be polite.

""Yeah," he said, giving her an appraising look. "You are pretty young. I don't suppose they'd want to talk about it to their employees, either—black mark and all. A potential Worldgate—scandals and conspiracies always used to be called gates back then—but they covered it up good. Only place you could probably even find a reference to it would be in an old copy of Covert Action Information Bulletin, or some source like that.["]" - pp 61-62

CAIB!! One of the most important periodicals in my world, certainly one that I learned an enormous amt from. It lasted from 1978 to 2005. I lament its passing.

"She tried to remember her history. Didn't the old Right fear Big Government, and the old Left fear Big Corporations? Larkin seemed to be paranoid about both." - p 62

Ha ha! I'm w/ Larkin. Reading just about anything these days in the time of the PANDEMIC PANIC evokes the present tension for me. Ditto w/ the above. I'm an anarchist, I could relate to the 'left' as long as it resisted the murderous control freaks of the Military-Industrial Complex. The 'right' always seemed too kill-happy & bigoted for me to relate to. These days? The 'left' is pathetic, its humanitarianism seems skin-deep & it's practically begging to have Big Brother's boot on its neck — as well as on everyone else's. It's all such a mess. I don't want Big Government, I don't want Big Corporations, I don't want a 'team' to conform to the subcultural norms of. To hell w/ the 'left', to hell w/ the 'right'. Just sayin'. Hendrix seems to've been very well-informed about the political struggles at the time of this bk's writing. I wonder: was/is he a political activist? It wd make sense.

""Message recorded for Atsuko Cortland, from Global Trade Authority," her PDA (personal data assistant) said quietly. Atsuko grimaced. She knew she should never have agreed to accept the post of colony council liason to the GTA—an organization which she always thought privately of as the Global Trade Autocracy. Descendant of the GATTs and G7s and WTOs of the last century, the international trade-coordinating body had grown into quite the behemoth. She should have known better than to liase." - p 68

""What exactly are you trying to do?" Roger said, sounding genuinely curious."

[Really, I'm just trying to get thru this review, trying to get 4 more reviews done in 2020, trying to endure my life, trying to not have the review be generic, it's hard right now, I'm not enjoying this, even tho I thought the bk was excellent, I'm just not into it, I'm not into anything]

""Well," Marissa began, taking a deep breath, wanting to impress Roger and hoping he wouldn't shoot her idea down from the start, "my research with your mole rats indicates it should be possible to design viral vectors to speed up the evolutionary pace of the immune system, supercharge its rate of reactivity. At the same time, it should also be possible to use reverse transcriptase's ability to translate viral RNA into host-cell DNA—as a means by which to vector into the genome the immortalizing capability from teratoma tumors. A noncarcenogenic telomere alteration. These immortalizing vectors can then be targetted at, among other places, Human Chromosome One—particularly at the gene series on that chromosome which programs senescence and allows death to occur."" - p 74

What can I write here? I cd write xbxbxvvvxbxxbxccc, that wd at least be different from what one might expect in a review &/OR I cd comment on how Hendrix's presentation of his fictitious character's immortality research might really be based on something already in-progress &/OR might inspire actual research. This comment might imply that Hendrix must've been pretty inspired here. Or I cd interpolate a shockingly cynical comment & say that I don't want to be immortal, I just want all of my enemies to die before me & that that might be tantamount to the same thing. OR I cd just move on to the next quote.

""Oh, that's all controllable too. We can control levels of light intensity, photoperiod, day/night cycles, you name it—just by using screens on the lightpaths."

""Lightpaths?" Atsuko asked, feigning ignorance. "Like the light bar above us? Is it some kind of new technology?"

"The wiry woman in coveralls looked at her strangely.

""New technology? I don't think so. New use of an old idea, maybe. The purpose of lightpaths is to bring light into darkness. That's one thing we have a lot of out there—light. This habitat is in high circular orbit, above the Earth's radiation belts and below the moon, so eclipses are very infrequent. We have virtually unlimited sunlight. The lightpaths are paths of reflected sunlight. All the light in the agricultural tori is sunlight reflected from the mirrored surface of the space colony's central axis—what you're calling a light bar. The light inside the big central habitation sphere is reflected sunlight too, only instead of the lightpaths bouncing off the central axis they bounce off the mirrored surfaces around the sphere itself and come in through the light zones or glass latitudes near the 'poles' of the sphere."" - p 80

NOW, humanity having such an ability for spawning the malignant, one wonders what security precautions these colonists might've made against a hostile entity taking control of the reflectors & preventing them from providing light/energy to the colony &/OR causing too much focused light to cause conflagration. Funny how even as an anti-war activist I've become so accustomed to having such 'dark' thoughts about the possibilities of my fellow humans. The colonists are far from lacking in wisdom:

""That area there, for instance, the one that looks like a field gone wild? That's based on Native American milpa polyculture, corn and beans and squash all growing together. The high-growing corn plants shelter the more delicate beans, and the squash vines grow from mound to mound among and between the corn and bean plants. The squash provides good, moisture-preserving cover for the soil, while the beans in turn fix nitrogen in the soil and aid in the growth of the corn and squash."" - p 82

You mean monocrops might not be the way to go?! You mean monoculture might not be the way to go?! You mean monotony might not be the way to go?!

""A meme is an idea that takes on a life of its own," Larkin said, "replicating itself through minds the way a gene replicates itself through bodies. Lots of our big ideas are memes. Paradise, apocalypse, utopia—those are memes. The idea of a world savior, a Christ or a Buddha—that's a meme. Most of what Jung was talking about in terms of archetypal imagery and the collective unconscious—those are memes and constellations of memes, too. At some deep level, the most successful memes seem to be fundamentally related to biology, to the experience of being born, growing up, living and dying as a biological being. So deeply related that they seem almost genetic."" - pp 87-88

Keep in mind that this bk was written before memes became known to the general populace as those squares w/ an image & a few pithy words related to the image that circulate thru social media. I find that newer definition shallow & get very tired of people tossing the word around as if it makes breasts & scrotums bounce in nude volleyball. But then I can be persnickety about words.

For the complete review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1318307-howard-v-hendrix… (más)