Against the Fall of Night

After many years, I re-read Against the Fall of Night recently, with the "alternate version" of The City and the Stars waiting in reserve. I hadn't remembered much about the (shared) plot of these works, even though I have at least the memory of a memory of one or both of these being among my favorite science-fiction stories read at the age of eleven or twelve. I was interested in a friend's remark, itself incompletely recalled now, about one of Clarke's versions of the story telling more than showing, and I determined to read them one at a time and react without refreshing my memory of his specific judgment, to see whether I'd notice anything similar ab nihilo. I'm guessing now that the shorter, earlier (earliest) work is the more "telling" version – one must in a matter of course "show" more in longer works – but I don't know yet whether I'll agree with my friend's judgment. I loved the short version, and marvel at how much more elegant Clarke's prose is than the run of the mill of the period. I know I'm over-reaching a little, but for me the speculative tone in this beginning of Clarke's writing career is reminiscent of Borges. While simply moving a fairly uneventful narrative forward (in the sense that conflict is not the dominant mode of creating interest in what's going to happen), he wrestles with the philosophical themes that entranced me as a boy: could a human society be created stable enough to last millions rather than thousands of years? How might the equilibrium of such stability be upset? Would we characterize the upset as inevitable, a matter of infinitesimal probabilities finally catching up with the best-laid plans, or as a wonderful matter of human initiative re-emerging – in which case, how could it possibly have taken hundreds of millions for someone like Alvin, merely requiring a stronger will than the prevalent, to be born and act?

Back from the greatest camp ever

     Back from a week in the mountains (Sierras, near Sonora) at the Lair of the Bear, the UC Berkeley alumni camp. We all had a fine time, having made allowances for living with dirt and not sleeping well at night. Jenny turned three single cots into a king-size bed, with the help of our traveling mattresses and her own ingenuity, and our tent cabin became a very comfortable hideaway. The girls painted their faces, played and swam. The college-age staff kept us well fed, and I didn't even try the Wi-Fi connection for the first four days – after which, I limited myself to an hour a day on the laptop, which seemed to strike the right balance between wanting to keep up and not wanting to work.

     I spent afternoons at camp engrossed in a book called The Greatest Trade Ever, about John Paulson and his short-trading of credit derivative swaps against collateralized debt obligations during the crash of 2007-2008. The author, Gregory Zuckerman, writes for the Wall Street Journal and is an excellent story-teller, to the point of drawing out the action perhaps more than needed to be done to make a book of adequate length. The main points of "suspense" in the book, given that we as readers already knew that the protagonists' biggest uncertainty (whether there'd be a crash) had been resolved by ensuing events known to all, was whether they'd figure out how to make money off of their analysis and expectations. The three elements that needed to conjoin for that to happen were the design of an instrument (the product that would allow investors to profit if housing crashed), finding lots of counterparties (which turned out to be banks who wanted to maintain the apparent value of their investment portfolios on their books), and timing (not getting in too early, but getting in earlier than others). All in all, a book to restore my faith in markets in the face of their most egregious failures,