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Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

(May 2008)

"Formulating Decisions: Tree and Differential"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,jl@simegen.com  for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  
Find these books.
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The Beast Must Die DVD 2006 release of 1974 film

Moon In The Mirror, P. R. Frost DAW HC, Sept. 2007

Reap The Wild Wind, Julie E. Czerneda, DAW Sept. 2007

The Sagittarius Command by R. M. Meluch, DAW Nov. 2007

How do smart people make mistakes?

There are two major elements in decision making that are rarely considered or exercised by drilling in primary school, which is the age at which it must be learned.

One element we’ve discussed at length over the years of this column is Identity (see lightworks.com or simegen.com/reviews/ for my column archive). As we learn studying the Tarot, all major decisions are rooted in minor habits of thought which bespeak your Identity.

The other main element is your Philosophy, or your World View, your visualization of the macrocosmic all which we’ve discussed at considerable length.

Current educational theory trends toward allowing local PTA’s and Boards to select which World View to hammer into children’s heads, so we all have different ones. Some modern theories allow for developing the child’s sense of identity, and some repress it. So we all come out of school with a narrow and possibly distorted, and probably unique basis for decision-making.

This morning, I saw a 1974 film, The Beast Must Die, on AMC cable. Based on a story by James Blish originally titled There Shall Be No Darkness, (yeah, also the author of the first Trek novel, Spock Must Die! 1970) this is a gimmick mystery where you are introduced to 8 characters and have to guess which is the werewolf.

In this film, and the three novels I have here, the main character (i.e. the reader’s avatar) has to revise either a worldview (there are no werewolves) or their identity (oh, I’m a werewolf!) in order to make sense of their world.

The film is not stellar, but it is a good example of Blake Snyder’s Monster In The House genre, (see Jan 2008 column) thinly written so you can reverse engineer it.

As in the whole Mystery genre, (all good novels have some mystery) the fun is in sorting out what I think, what I believe (which is very much about who I am), and what’s real. But the game is between you and the Author of the story. In real life, the game is between you and the Creator of the Universe, way out of your league.

So when we read novels, we are really gaming with an author, a creator of this little circumscribed universe which is small enough for us to understand.

The payoff, just as in video gaming, is a feeling of power you can never get from the real world.

You can’t learn what the real world is by reading novels – you can only gain strength in your ability to analyze worlds. If you’ve read enough novels, you may reach a point where no author can beat you at the game. So how much you enjoy a novel or film can depend on how old you are, for we all seek a jousting match with an equal.

But our schools have neglected the set of decision making cognitive skills for decades. So, it’s a skill you must teach yourself – or buy software to do it for you! (see .palisade.com/ )

Employers have not found the necessary skill sets in the workforce, so they’ve replaced the skill with decision-making software, just as most math skills have been replaced by calculators.

Palisade.com sells Excel based software that utilizes the classic Decision Tree method (Google Decision Tree and read Wikipedia if you don’t know what that is.)

Medical diagnosis is done by a method known as differential diagnosis, which is a form of detective work. The skill of the diagnostician lies in detecting patterns. That’s a cognitive skill that seems like psychic intuition because it works so fast and uses data unseen by onlookers.

But even if the diagnostician already "knows" the answer intuitively, he/she has to prove it by systematically eliminating everything else "it" could be.

Most of you have spent a few hours on 800 Tech Support phones doing diagnostic routines to cure your computer. The Tech has a manual to follow and is trained never to deviate from that routine, intuition be damned!

That’s because the decision tree and differential diagnosis methods are efficient and they really work.

One reason new writers find it so hard to sell a novel is that they haven’t mastered these methods at a level higher than the intended readership for the novel, so characters don’t seem to be logically motivated. The novelist has to be as good at it as the readership. And if better than the readership, the novelist must dumb everything down to the level common among our school’s graduates.

The SF/F genre is called The Literature of Ideas because the writers and the readers are expected to have keenly honed cognitive skills. And they sharpen those skills on each other for fun.

P. R. Frost has brought us a worthy sequel to Hounding the Moon which I reviewed here, February ’07. In Moon In The Mirror, the Tess Noncoire, who caught the Imp Flu in Hounding the Moon, acquired a supernatural sidekick and some talents, and saved the world from demonic incursion, is now making her living by writing her adventures into fantasy novels.

She’s acquired two suitors whose pasts are mysteries. Is one a demon, or half-demon? Is the other some new sort of supernatural creature? Or guilty of something horrid?

She’s acquired supernatural enemies in a cross-dimensional hunt for an escaped criminal. She knows what side she’s on – but not whose side she’s on. Deciding who to trust is an exercise in cognitive discipline and heart reading. These books feel like a nice Buffy spinoff.

Series novels are "in" again, and Julie E. Czerneda brings us #1 of the Stratification series, Reap The Wild Wind. People who are apparently "human" with genetic psychic Talents and strange mating-bonding, live on a planet with two other species.

This novel uses an almost tight single Point of View, my favorite, which gives the story a solid, comfortable velocity. The hero is a disobedient, maverick girl with a massive psychic gift who discovers that her whole world view is wrong. There are offworld visitors disrupting the truce among the three indigenous species – and one of them is searingly attractive. This is Darkover in a new guise.

R. M. Meluch has a great series here, Tour of the Merrimack, in interstellar swashbuckling naval tradition.

The Tour started with The Myriad, which is the first encounter with an interstellar alien species that eats anything organic and can’t be stopped. Period. Can’t be. It travels space naked, and gobbles planets whole. It’s destroying the interstellar Roman Empire which is at war with the USA, but not the rest of the nations of Earth.

Wolf Star is #2 and continues the struggle, with our Hero’s life becoming ever more politically complex as he gains recognition. Worse yet, he’s from a highly placed family with lots of siblings. Everything he does is magnified. So he dares not express sexual interest in the one woman (under his command) who has really attracted him.

The Sagittarius Command is #3 in the series, but could easily stand alone once you grasp the idea that Ancient Rome is reincarnated out in the galaxy and Our Hero (named Farragut) has forced a devastated Rome to surrender to the USA and combine forces to fight the alien menace.

The 3rd book begins to reveal the origin of that menace and put together a task force of ships to go fight it on its own turf.

Now the one remarkable, brilliant, and delightful element in the Merrimack series is a human character whose nervous system has been made into an interface (well, Interface is what I called this type of character in my Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends novels).

Meluch calls her interface a Patterner. He is the result of Roman technology. The USA has nothing like it because the USA will not experiment haphazardly on human brains.

The Patterner is a Roman through and through, loyal to Caesar and the Honor Code of the Roman soldier. Ironically he is a possession of Caesar. When Farragut conquered Rome, Caesar seconded his Patterner to Farragut as a tool in fighting the enemy. He has been wired to sift computer networks for data and make patterns out of far-flung bits and pieces that nobody else would connect.

The patterns he discerns gradually reveal the errors in world views that the other characters have to remedy. But Farragut seconded the Patterner to the CIA, and hasn’t used the man’s skills. The CIA starved him for data. So he hates Farragut beyond measure.

All three series give us plenty of mental exercise in decision making. Study how you joust with the authors in finding facts, and fitting them together into patterns. Then try out the technique in the real world and see if it works as well there as in a constructed reality.

To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,  jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  

 

 

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