Book Review: Revelations

My wife handed me M. Scott Byrnes' Revelations, saying "Here, I can't read any more of this awful book. You like stories with aliens and weird names; maybe you'll like it . . ." The first few pages confirmed my wife's judgement of Byrnes' writing. Nonetheless I trudged on, hoping to discover something interesting lurking behind Byrnes' dreary prose and heroes with "thick" hair. A reader can suspend disbelief only from the grounds of a trusted world. A diver springs up into the unknown air only when water reassures below. In this story, page by page, Byrnes drains the pool. Error after mistake, mistake after confusion, confusion after error, Byrnes erodes the credibility of the worlds of Revelations. In particular, Byrnes does not understand basic concepts of evolution or machine translation, two linchpins of his tale. Were this ignorance revealed among polite company, a hostess would tactfully change the subject to avoid further embarrassment. Revealed in a work of science fiction, Byrnes' ignorance is exponentially annoying. By the last chapter I distrusted every word. I'll give some examples. Let's start with simple stuff.

Simple errors of everyday fact.

The dust jacket tells us that Byrnes lives in Washington DC. Can we trust his description of some local feature, such as the Pentagon?

Tim followed Stentz up the stairway to the east entrance of the Pentagon. When they reached the top, he turned to scan the scene behind them . . . Beyond the far edge of the parking lot, he saw a steady stream of cars on Route One. Out past the four-lane highway, the dark waters of the Potomac River divided the state of Virginia from the District of Columbia . . ."

1. Yes, there is an entrance on the "east" side of the Pentagon. This entrance is known as the River entrance.
2. There is no stairway to the River entrance. Instead, the River entrance doors open onto a portico with wide steps across its whole breadth.
3. When he turns, Tim is looking east and somewhat to the north. Parking lots may still be visible to the right and to the left would stretch the notorious extent of the Pentagon's north parking lot.
4. Editorial aside: What is the mass of a parking lot?
5. He would not see any parking lots in front of him. Instead, he would see the upper part of the River Entrance terrace, under which runs Route 110. In season, this is indeed a pleasant view.
6. Hidden beyond the upper Terrace at that point, Boundary Channel Drive skirts the Pentagon Lagoon before forming the eastern boundary of North Parking.
7. Beyond the Terrace, across the Pentagon Lagoon, the George Washington Parkway borders the Potomac River.
8. The name of the road is "Route 1," not "Route One."
9. Route 1 is nowhere visible from the Pentagon; it is completely hidden by the massive causeways of Route 395 (Shirley Highway), which separate the Pentagon from Crystal City to the south. Route 1 crosses the Potomac into the District on the bridges of 395 before reaching the Pentagon.

Simple errors of bureaucratic turf.

Byrnes' story unfolds primarily within federal bureaucracies. Can we trust his descriptions of these bureaucracies and how they work? Tim and Stentz, a Pentagon-based DoD official, take Martian pictographic texts to a CIA cryptographer, who uses a CIA supercomputer to decode/translate these texts into English.

1. The National Security Agency (NSA), a DoD agency, has responsibility for cryptography and the machines to work cryptographic problems.
2. A DoD official would take a cryptographic problem to NSA, not to the CIA.

Simple errors of ignorance and logic.

Let's go up a level of abstraction. Can we trust Byrnes to make reasonable statements about matters generally known or easily accessible? Can we trust Byrnes to make reasonable deductions from the statements he himself makes? Tim's romantic interest, Bonnie, is a member of a "small think tank" of academics assembled to assess some anomalies newly discovered on Mars. She is introduced by Stentz, himself a PhD:

Doctor Bonnie Hollingshead is our resident expert on paleontology and sociology. She is the director of the Smithsonian Institution's center for advanced primate studies. She's also written over a dozen books on social dynamics among both ancient and modern civilizations, and she sits on the boards of a number of universities in that capacity.

1. Well, to start this bit of deconstruction, a collegial bunch of PhDs usually skip the "Doctor" bit when they introduce each other . . .
2. It would be rather a stretch for anyone to be a recognized expert in both paleontology and sociology. It would still be a stretch if Byrnes really meant paleo-anthropology. Now, one could associate cultural anthropology and sociology, but the study of dead bones and living social bones are way too far apart in the continuum of academic expertise.
3. The Smithsonian does support primate research in a number of ways, but it has no center for advanced primate studies. It could have (the willing suspension of disbelief part) but then the name of this center would be capitalized.
4. Primates are typically studied by biologists, zoologists, and anthropologists. For example, the Director of the Duke Lemur Center is a professor of biology. Are we to add biology to paleontology and sociology?
5. Let's just ignore the syntactic garble of "social dynamics among both ancient and modern civilizations." Whatever that garble means to convey, it is not a focus on the study of primates. There is clearly a disconnect between Bonnie's publications and her role as director of a center for primate research.
6. A typical university is nominally governed by a Board of Trustees. Such trustees worry about the practical operation of their institutions: politics, budgets, facilities, organizational policies, and such. Bonnie might serve as a trustee for any number of reasons related to the functions of such a board, but "in the capacity of" an expert on "social dynamics among both ancient and modern civilizations" would not be one of them.

Now we learn that Bonnie is a hottie: Tim "wondered how old she was. Given her impressive resume, she had to be in her late thirties. Looking at her smooth, attractive face and fit body, however, he would have guessed late twenties." So let's estimate her age ourselves. Let's assume that Bonnie is actually a cultural anthropologist; as a cultural anthropologist, Bonnie actually could span the interests Byrnes assigns to her.

1. The National Science Foundation (NSF) observes that a typical anthropologist receives her PhD between the ages of 36 and 40. At this point her publication career would begin.
2. Directors of major research centers typically are appointed to such positions some time after their late 40s. A small sample of directors of Smithsonian centers and of primate centers suggests an average age of 54.
3. If we allow Bonnie to be highly productive, she might average two years to take a book from concept to publication. This suggests perhaps 26 years to publish "more than a dozen" books.
4. Thus it would seem that Bonnie's "impressive resume" would conservatively put her well into her 60s . . .
5. Nota bene:  My daughter Brooke is a cultural anthropologist, and she is a professor at a state university.
   

Larger errors of ignorance I.

Can we trust Byrnes' descriptions of matters scientific? Tim and Bonnie discuss evolution:

Bonnie:	Being a paleontologist, . . . even for specialists in the field of human evolution, there are a lot more questions than answers.
Tim:	Like the fabled missing link?
Bonnie:	Exactly! I mean, with all the technology we have today, you would think we could prove categorically that man evolved from apes. But, alas, we haven't been able to prove that yet...every time [human bones are found], they are either later period bones of man mingled with much older bones of apes, or they fall squarely within one classification or another...either ape or man. Never the transitionary species that we've all been looking for.
Tim:	So...according to all the available evidence, the jump from Australopithecus to Homo habilis—apes to man—can't be explained scientifically...is there any scientific evidence that can explain such an evolutionary jump?...How did apes make the jump to becoming man?

1. Missing link? Bonnie's credibility as a paleontologist? 'Nuff said . . .

Larger errors of ignorance II.

Can we trust Byrnes' descriptions of matters technical? Martian texts, 300 million years old, are returned to Earth. Martian is a a very dead language. No vocabulary or grammar is available for "the" Martian texts. Tim gives a CIA cryptographer a single clue: "That's the symbol for Jesus Christ." The CIA supercomputer determines that the symbols of the Martian text are a "word for word" substitution for the biblical words of Jesus Christ as translated into the modern English of the New International Version bible. One character ineffectually objects to this nonsense, but is silenced by an explanation of the process of breaking substitution ciphers using computers and a comprehensive corpus.

1. This explanation is a baffling non sequitur, which reminds me of Babbage's frustration:

   On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Another challenger is silenced by the rejoinder that the computer "gives a correlation coefficient of 0.942, with only two degrees of freedom." Well, if the computer says so . . .

1. A statement of correlation coefficient is only meaningful if we know what is correlated. Fortunately, the literature of machine translation tells us what is being compared when the notion of correlation coefficient comes up: a machine translation and a human translation of the same material. Without that human translation, the notion of correlation is vacuous.
2. Only one degree of freedom has been fixed in this translation problem: the equation of the Christ symbol. The degrees of freedom remaining in this problem would be something much larger than nw-1, where nw is the number of discrete symbols in the text, because the syntax is as unconstrained as the vocabulary . . .

Errors of exotic fact.

Can we trust Byrnes' descriptions of Mars? Byrnes' character Trainer dies when he falls four miles from the top of the "cliff" that is the south wall of the Ius Chasma. (The point of his fall is conveniently marked as "Discovery 5" on a map printed on the front paper of the book.)

1. We'll overlook minor points: the full depth of four miles isn't reached in the Valles Marineris until further east within the Melas Chasma; at the location of Trainer's "fall," the north wall of the Ius Chasma itself is a mere 135km (85 miles) away, not 200 miles, as Byrnes claims.
2. Trainer's position before his fall is atop the south wall of the Ius Chasma at approximately (lat -9.13; lon -79.07). The bottom of the south wall from that point is approximately (lat -8.78; lon -78.72). The lateral distance between the top of the south wall and the bottom of the south wall at this point is approximately 21km (13 miles). The slope over this distance averages something less than 18.5 degrees. Trainer would need to push himself to merely roll down a slope this gentle.

It just goes on and on . . . A most wretched book.