Entropy

I remember having to study passages of this book in college and my instructor said that there's no scientific data to verify what he's saying had any merit. And, now, today, mosquitoes and terrorists and brown outs have everybody up in arms. I can't say Roegen is prophetic, but his argument, to me, always did make a whole lotta sense...and, you know, the artists and the poets seem to have always intuited the validity of this great man's message.

What has really put things in perspective for me is my further readings... I've read works from EF Schumacher ("Small is Beautiful"), Rene Dubos ("A God Within"), Jeremy Rifkin ("Entropy"), and more recently, Derrick Jensen. And they all seem to speak to needing a more humane way of capitalism which doesn't seem bent on destroying everything in it's path.

There are many other authors who may be easier to read than Roegen, but you will find, if you are in anyway interested in the fate of the world, they all refer to his seminal work here.

An attempt at steady-state economics (as espoused by Herman
Daley) would be a significant improvement over the present
situation, but would still not be possible in the very long
run because of limitations on the supply of low-entropy raw
materials such as metal ores.

Roegen's point of view is fundamentally in conflict with
current economics, but we ignore his arguments at our peril.
In the not terribly distant future we will run up against
the limits that Roegen warns of.

The book is dense and difficult, but the concepts are extremely
important...

More readable books on the subject are
"Beyond Growth" and "Steady-State Economics"
by Herman Daley.

As a young teenager I devoured Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but it wasn't until college that the Cornelius books held any interest for me, and at that point I had stopped reading SF/Fantasy altogether (I had Nabokov to read...). In many ways Jerry is the mature reader's Eternal Champion--the novels do echo many of the themes found in the other EC novels.

I actually find it quite daunting to sum up The Cornelius Chronicles in such a limited space. My 1977 Avon edition is almost 1000 pages and the four novels that make up the Chronicles (a tetrology?) offer different experiences and styles.

My nutshell: The Chronicles are concerned with Jerry's struggle for identity amidst the entropy of urban life in 1970's London. Satirical, funny, sexy, and sad; filled with a wonderful cast of characters. It really is genre-busting--from 60's spy flick to urban realism. Postmodern (in the literary sense; search for Brian McHale). In many ways it reminds me of Pynchon's V.

Find and buy these books if you can. Hopefully they will, as the author states above, be published again. Of Moorcock's "SF" work, these (with Behold the Man) are the ones that should stay in print--eternally.

The stories were published before in little magazines over a period of almost a decade. Readers who admired Aryeh Lev Stollman's novel The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul as well as those new to him have a special treat waiting for them in his new collection of short stories.

Some of the stories reveal the roots of the ideas Stollman juggles in all his fiction: the vividness of the soul in a failing body and brain, deep loyalties of heart and belief tested by change, the choices of children as they approach the world with less innocence and more reason than we can ever guess. As ever, the Holocaust haunts his work but no more than the universal question of the survival and perpetuation of goodness in a world of evil. He is interested in the origins of man's goodness and imagination. His settings are in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Germany.

I enjoyed reading the stories and hope that the collection will deepen the appreciation of many readers for this wonderful writer. I think this would be a good book for a book club interested in taking on readable literary fiction.

Ironically, in this particular book Buffy has less to do that most of the other characters. It was certainly nice to see that Xander have a bright shinning moment as the substitute Gatekeeper. His character has been the comic relief for the Scooby Gang for so long that you forget he brought Buffy back from the dead at the end of season one. They also do a nice job of getting to what Cordelia is thinking behind her tactless remarks, but Oz is back to quipping a bit too much as he was in Book One and Willow is much more of a successful little spellcaster than she has yet to be in the television episodes. Still, I feel they are on the right track with most of these character developments. However, the character who really shines in this volume is Joyce Summers, dealing with being the mother of the Slayer as best she can.

After including Spike and Drusilla in the previous volume as a minor plot complication (I really was expecting more from them), the authors have Ethan Rayne makes a much more substantive guest appearance in this concluding volume, although he is really nothing more than a plot contrivance. The truly tragic figure that emerges from this trilogy is Jacques Regnier, the young boy who has to become the Gatekeeper following the death of his father. His fate is different from that of Buffy as the Slayer, but he is also a Chosen One and there is a certain pathos to his having too grow up too quickly. The creation of the Gatekeeper and the Gatehouse are the best ideas I have come across in the Buffy books so far, and are worthy of being included in the mythos of the television series. I was surprised to see that the historical flashbacks on the story of Giacomo Fulcanelli, Il Maestro, were substantially less than in the previous volumes, although his back story is concluded.

The resolution to the Gatekeeper storyline in "Sons of Entropy" works pretty well, more so with the Gatekeeper's part of the battle than with Buffy's final battle with the demon Belphegor. I have never really liked the idea that the Achilles heel of the bad guys is that they all lie to their stupid minions who tend to betray them at the right moment. I would much rather see the good guys rise to the occasion and do so without the old chestnut of figuring out the meaning of the key clue at the last moment. The idea of the Gatekeeper and the Gatehouse merging in a new way was a very credible solution. Again, I know that my expectations were so high that Joss Whedon himself would have problems coming up with a conclusion that would truly top the marvelous set up. If you have read and enjoyed any of the original Buffy novels, you have to treat yourself by downloading the Gatekeeper Trilogy.

Robert Shaw is the guy who in the early eighties (together with the likes of Crutchfield, Farmer and Packard) put information theory back into physics. He analysed the [un]predictability of dynamical systems (aka chaos) in terms of the amount of information the system can store, how fast it is losing it and replacing it with noise from the "heat bath", and information flow between parts of the system.

The book ties much of that work together and describes an experimental study of a simple dripping tap, analysed this way, as a case in point that even when we have a "theory of everything" with regards to elementary particles, we are only just starting to understand what makes even the simplest systems tick.

Phase space, Lyapunov exponents, noise, entropy, dimension of a "strange attractor", geometry from a time series, it's all coming together in this stunningly insightful voyage of discovery. The rough typewriter print, handwritten formulae and delightful cartoon illustrations convey well the sense of immediacy, of science in the making.

This is physics for the 21st century. If you're curious about nature, read it. You will never think the same again.