The Fredösphere

I invested far too much of my Christmas vacation time on reading Island in the Sea of Time.  (This is all Instapundit's fault.)  It's the story of how the entire population of modern-day Nantucket Island is suddenly transported to 1250 B.C.  It's got lots of cool problem solving (think of it as a Swiss Family Robinson with less smugness and more plot) and anthropological guesswork.  The riskiest move on the part of the author was to make the main character, a Cost Guard captain (and later, the island's de facto military leader) a black lesbian.  At times, she seems complex and believable (if very unusual -- she wields a mean katana).  Later, she turns out to be omnicompetent and downright numinous -- very annoying.  And in the ending of the novel, the author is more concerned with setting up the sequel than giving the reader a satisfying ending.  Sorry buddy, I don't think I'll reward your behavior by reading the next installment.  Not until I retire, anyway.

One way I judge a sci-fi work is the plausibility of its religious environment.  Much of the sci-fi I read growing up fails in this regard, particularly that written by guys like Asimov and Clarke.  Island in the Sea of Time scores very high on this test.  On Nantucket Island, Christians are a presence, and they behave much like any ordinary, complex bunch of people:  the Event disorients them for a while, and a few of them run amok, but most learn to live with the new reality and make it a part of their total metaphysical package.  That's exactly what I would expect.  Not everyone realizes this, but Christianity is a religion which by necessity knows how to display adaptability, maybe because of its early status as a minority religion, with it gestating in the catacombs, where people used fish necklaces to attain mystic mental states and communicate with Elijah -- no, wait, that was Philip K. Dick.

Ron Avitzur showed some adaptability when Apple Computer canceled his project and fired him.  He responded by refusing to stop showing up for work:

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.

Read it all in The Graphing Calculator Story.