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Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez 

The Rise of Rome by Anthony Everitt 

Just picked these up from two authors I very much like, though sadly, Everitt’s Hadrian also sits in my antilibrary waiting to be read. My normally manic reading pace took a major hit this past year due to my being ridiculously overscheduled and admittedly, underdisciplined, but I am hoping to cure that this fall. Despite an academic foundation in US-Soviet diplomatic history and economic history, I find myself frequently gravitating to classical antiquity these days. Everitt’s biography  Cicero was a masterpiece that overshadowed his sequel, Augustus. What I would like to see Anthony Everitt do, were I able to give him advice, is to write  a biography of the indomitiable  Cato the Younger, whom Everitt blamed most of all for the death of the Roman Republic.

I rarely have time for fiction anymore, but Daniel Suarez is on my very short list of authors next to Stephen Pressfield and William Gibson. Shlok did a nice review of Kill Decision here at ZP and at his own blog. As qa result I am kicking Kill Decision to the top of my book pile.

[ by Charles Cameron — Corbin on Queen Bilqis, Qur’an and hadith regarding jinn, Pew statistics on belief in jinn — with some earlier Natsec implications & a non-serious suggestion from contemporary physics ]
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La Jinn the Mystical Genie of the Lamp
from the Yu-Gi-Oh card game

I’ve been “fond” of the jinn (djenoun) since first encountering them in the brilliant short stories of Paul Bowles, and notably his A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard.

But that’s a literary fondness, neither science nor belief-based on my part. In my view, that’s only right and proper, since djenoun belong in the realm of imagination — or better said, the Imaginal, as Henry Corbin terms it — see note 16, p, 326. of his Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, where he speaks of the Sheikh’s Bilqis Queen of Saba in his poetry as a being “born from a jinn and a woman” — it’s a fascinating passage, connecting Bilqis with Jesus in terms of the (unorthodox) angelology that Corbin envisioned uniting the Abrahamic faiths at a visionary level.

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Here are two of the mentions of jinn in the Qur’an:

And the Jinn race We had created before from the fire of a scorching wind. [Sura 15, 27]

Say: It has been revealed to me that a company of Jinns listened (to the Qur’an). They say ‘We have really heard a wonderful Recital! It gives guidance to the Right and we have believed therein: We shall not join (in worship) any (gods) with our Lord. And exalted is the Majesty of our Lord: He has taken neither a wife nor a son.’ [Sura 72, 1-3]

And here is a tale of the Prophet and a jinn, as narrated by the Companion Malik ibn Anas:

The Prophet said to the jinni: “This is the stride of a jinni, as well as the tone of his voice!” The jinni replied: “My name is Hamah ibn Laqqis ibn Iblis.” The Prophet said: “Only two generations seperate you from him [Iblis].” He replied: “True.” The Prophet asked: “How long have you lived?” The jinni replied: “Almost all of time. I was a small boy when Abel was killed. I believed in Noah and repented at his hands after I stubbornly refused to submit to his call, until he wept and wept. I am indeed a repentant — God keep me from being among the ignorant! I met the prophet Hud and believed in his call. I met Abraham, and I was with him when he was thrown in the fire. I was with Joseph, too, when his brothers hurled him into the well—I preceded him to its bottom. I met the prophet Shu’ayb, and Moses and Jesus the son of Mary, who told me: ‘If you meet Muhammad, tell him Jesus salutes thee!’ Now I’ve delivered his message to you, and I believe in you.” The Prophet said: “What is your desire, 0 Hamah?” He said: “Moses taught me the Torah, Jesus the Gospels, can you teach me the Qur’an?” So the Prophet taught him the Qur’an.

The Tasneem Project

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Literal vs metaphorical, let alone imaginal belief is not something the interviewers who conducted the Pew poll had the leisure to distinguish — but for the record, here are their findings as to the Muslim belief in jinns:

According to the Quran, God created jinn as well as angels and humans. Belief in jinn is relatively widespread – in 13 of 23 countries where the question was asked, more than half of Muslims believe in these supernatural beings.

In the South Asian countries surveyed, at least seven-in-ten Muslims affirm that jinn exist, including 84% in Bangladesh. In Southeast Asia, a similar proportion of Malaysian Muslims (77%) believe in jinn, while fewer in Indonesia (53%) and Thailand (47%) share this belief.

Across the Middle Eastern and North African nations surveyed, belief in jinn ranges from 86% in Morocco to 55% in Iraq.

Overall, Muslims in Central Asia and across Southern and Eastern Europe (Russia and the Balkans) are least likely to say that jinn are real. In Central Asia, Turkey is the only country where a majority (63%) of Muslims believe in jinn. Elsewhere in Central Asia, about a fifth or fewer Muslims accept the existence of jinn. In Southern and Eastern Europe, fewer than four-in-ten in any country surveyed believe in these supernatural beings.

In general, Muslims who pray several times a day are more likely to believe in jinn. For example, in Russia, 62% of those who pray more than once a day say that jinn exist, compared with 24% of those who pray less often. A similar gap also appears in Lebanon (+25 percentage points), Malaysia (+24) and Afghanistan (+21).

The survey also asked if respondents had ever seen jinn. In 21 of the 23 countries where the question was asked, fewer than one-in-ten report having seen jinn, while the proportion is 12% in Bangladesh and 10% in Lebanon.

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Two markers concerning National Security concerns regarding Pakistan, nuclear weapons and those who believe (literally, energetically) in jinns — from the early 2000s, but dating back by implication to the era of Zia ul-Haq:

Just after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., Pakistan’s intelligence service detained two retired nuclear scientists who had met with senior members of al Qaeda, including Mr. bin Laden, during charity work in Afghanistan. One, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, was a former director at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and a controversial Islamic scholar who had postulated that energy could be harnessed from fiery spirits called djinns.

WSJ, Inside Pakistan’s Drive To Guard Its A-Bombs

But as a subscriber to a brand of what is known to practitioners as “Islamic science,” which holds that the Koran is a fount of scientific knowledge, Mr. Bashiruddin Mahmood has published papers concerning djinni, which are described in the Koran as beings made of fire. He has proposed that these entities could be tapped to solve the energy crisis, and he has written on how to understand the mechanics of life after death.

NY Times, Pakistani Atomic Expert, Arrested Last Week, Had Strong Pro-Taliban Views

— together with a Pakistani critique:

If a scientist is European or Hindu he will be restricted in his vision by reason. A Muslim scientist has unlimited scope; he will relate his science to miracles, mostly performed by himself. Sultan Bashiruddin, our top enrichment expert, believed he could draw electricity from a captured jinn. (For Pakistan’s needs just one jinn would suffice.)

Khaled Ahmed, Scientists, our kind

There are times when beliefs have, or might just have, consequences.

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Jinn are significant not only for their own sakes, so to speak, but also for their etymological implications. To quote again from the Tasneem Project:

One saying of the Prophet (aws) mentions that, “God divided the jinn and the humans into ten parts. One part makes up the human race, and the other nine parts is made up of the jinn.” The invisible is everywhere. The Arabic language itself bears witness to how the invisible realm insinuates itself on everyday life. In Arabic, each time the two letters jeem and nun occur together, as in jinn, they convey the meaning of invisible or hidden. Thus, paradise is jannah because paradise is hidden from the human sight; janin is the foetus in the womb; the expression ajannahu al-layl means the night covered him.

The jinn, like paradise itself, are among the hidden secrets…

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And how large is the universe, that it might encompass the angels and jinn? Hugh Everett III quite brilliantly argued for what has come to be known as the “many worlds” hypothesis in quantum measurement while still a grad student:

Hugh Everett III was a student in his mid-twenties in 1957 when he presented his revolutionary formulation of quantum mechanics in his PhD thesis. Everett himself called his theory variously; pure wave mechanics, the relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics, and the theory of the universal wave function. His theory, however, came to be popularly known as the many-worlds interpretation, because it predicts that everything that might happen, does in fact happen. As the physicist Bryce DeWitt later described it, Everett’s theory predicts that our universe is composed of countless parallel universes that are each constantly splitting into yet further copies, and in the process, creating copies of each observer, each of which subsequently observes a different quantum universe and splits into further copies.

While a science fiction fan might embrace such a theory simply by dint of how cool it would be if something like that were true, one might naturally wonder what good scientific reason one might have for believing that our universe is in fact composed of countless parallel splitting universes.

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The whole article from which that quote was taken, The Quantum Measurement Problem and the Everett Interpretation, is indeed worth reading. But whereas physicists and (most) science fiction writers might confine their “many worlds” to physical, “materialist” universes, students of the imaginal are under no such restriction, as the same Tasneem Project article suggests:

The Muslim universe has always been made up of multiple worlds – the Qur’an itself refers to “universes” in the plural, in its open chapter al-fatihah. According to prophetic tradition, the cosmos consists of 18000 universes. …

So the jinn when summoned might come — somewhat unexpectedly — from one of Everett’s more hidden “many worlds”, perhaps?

[ by Charles Cameron — apocalypse out-movied, science fiction overwhelmed, what in the world is the world coming to? and whither SF? ]
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I could hardly be expected not to share with you my delight in this, from the Onion [turn down your volume control before you click, it’s preset to wake the dead]:

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But I don’t think the Book (of the Revelation of St John on Patmos) is the only thing that’s getting out-gunned these days. Consider this tweet from Caitlin Fitz Gerald aka @caidid:

The thing is — aside from terraforming Mars [Frederick Turner, Kim Stanley Robinson] or visiting spaces deeper out, we’ve accomplished or are accomplishing much of what “hard” (ie science-based) science fiction imagined for us. And to my mind, that suggests the possibility that writing hard SF will be getting a whole lot more difficult, and that character and culture will increasingly be what divides the best from the bland.

Still plenty of room for the likes of Jack Vance and his brilliant and beautiful Moon Moth, though.

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So, will the End Bang be bigger than the Big Bang? Or is there a principle of symmetry that makes them exquisitely equal and opposite?

Shlok Vaidya is a longtime friend of zenpundit.com and is a consultant on technology and security issues, including terrorism and the Naxalite insurgency. When I heard that Shlok had received a coveted advance copy of the latest novel by Daniel Suarez, I cordially invited him to cross-post his review here. Vaidya blogs on books, technology, warfare and resilient communities at Shloky.com.

REVIEW: KILL DECISION BY DANIEL SUAREZ

by Shlok Vaidya

Kill Decision is startlingly real. And equally plausible.

Suited masters of perception playing games with reality while skipping scotch in Crystal City. D.C.’s incestuous relationship between big defense business and… everyone else. Nameless, compartmentalized operators fighting through the night in cesspools loosely labeled as countries. Drones raining from the skies.

For those familiar with the constellation of clandestine units, private military contractors, and information warriors that comprise much of America’s counter-terrorism capacity, this book will feel very, very real.

(If you’re not up to speed, I heartily recommend Marc Ambinder’s The Command as a quick/cheap/quality introduction to that world.)

But Kill Decision takes that reality a step forward. In a way that perhaps cements Suarez’s position as the best near-future fiction author of the post-9/11 era. He folds in equal parts science, warfare, and informed futurism to take today’s sleek drones to their logical conclusion. The results will gnaw on your brain like a swarm of gnats, for weeks after you read the book.

This is possible, of course, due in large part to his foundation in John Robb’s work (something Suarez graciously mentions in his acknowledgements). Readers of Brave New War and Global Guerrillas will find themselves nodding along.

Kill Decision is that real, yet, like Suarez’s Freedom and Daemon, it’s also a lot of fun. Great action sequences that just scream MAKE A MOVIE. Compelling characters. Quality narrative. It’s all in here.

Grab it today if you want to see tomorrow.

[ by Charles Cameron — from the Glass Bead Game via the HipBone Games to Sembl ]
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Play most assiduously is how Edgar Wind translates the motto of Marsilio Ficino — the man who more or less single-handed, built the Florentine Renaissance: studiossime ludere. Play most studiously.

Play as if your life depends on it.

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Hermann Hesse crowned his life-work with the great, boring, utterly riveting novel Das Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game, sometimes better known in the English-speaking world by the (Latin) title, Magister Ludi — which means both school-teacher and Master of the Game.

And game there is: the Glass Bead Game itself, or GBG for short.

The book centers around a game of ideas — a game in which the most profound conceptual systems of all human cultures are brought together in a grand architecture that Hesse calls “the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind”:

A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts.

Here Hesse mentions astronomical, musical and textual concepts — the game, like the digital world of the internet, allows mathematical, textual, musical and visual elements to be juxtaposed and combined, just as Sven Birkerts described in an interview with Cliff Becker:

There are tremendous opportunities, and we are probably on the brink of the birth of whole new genres of art which will work through electronic systems. These genres will likely be multi-media in ways we can’t imagine. Digitalization, the idea that the same string of digits can bring image, music, or text, is a huge revolution in and of itself. When artists begin to grasp the creative possibilities of works that are neither literary, visual, or musical, but exist using all three forms in a synthetic collage fashion, an enormous artistic boom will occur.

Birkerts was concerned that these “tremendous opportunities” might drown out “the old quiet pastime of reading mere words” — but Hesse’s great game is a contemplative one, in which Hesse proposes:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

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Play…

We play, we play games, we play music… we play wargames… all the world’s a stage, and we are (merely) players.

Consider: Play is what children do to learn, so brilliantly, language, languages, geography, mathematics, history, chess, go, music, politeness, discipline, excess, consequences, moderation… And play is what masters do to express their mastery — Picasso plays, Casals plays, Einstein plays… And the motto of Ficino, mentor to the Florentine Renaissance, is play most assiduously.

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The Glass Bead Game is a game, then, to compare with the greatest of games — Chess, Go, name your poison — indeed, with the greatest of intellectual endeavors — the Encyclopédie, the gesamtkunstwerk, the long-sought Theory of Everything…

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

How can taking that idea and making it playable not be a worthy challenge, in this world that is daily more absorbed in digital play in its arcades and cinemas, on its consoles, tablets, phones, and computers?

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Just reading the book made me want to play the game, but I like to keep things simple. I needed to be able to play it with a pencil and paper napkin over a cup of coffee — or on an email list or in the online forums that were beginning to spring up while I was figuring out some early boards and rules. I took Hesse’s basic concept of juxtaposing ideas and applied it on simple graph-like boards, on which each circle represents an idea, and each line a resemblance. I called my playable variants the HipBone Games.

More recently, my friend and colleague Cath Styles has been working on the development of iPad and web-playable versions of the games. We call them Sembl, because they explore the resemblances between things, ideas — and at a deeper level, the patterning of the world itself.

But the game remains the same: to juxtapose one thing — an idea, an object, a work of art, song, person or event — with another, in a way that generates the aha! of creativity. And to do that repeatedly, weaving an architecture of related ideas, on our way to weaving Hesse’s cathedral of Mind.

Our world has never been in greater need of creativity and connectivity — our future depends on them — and in the Sembl game, every move you make is a further link in the pattern that connects, every move you make is a creative leap. More on that in my follow up post, The crackling energy of a Sembl move.