What I read last month, running the gamut from Homer to Jim Butcher.
Best book of the month by far, and of special interest to the political blogs, was John Brunner's fantastic, prescient The Sheep Look Up. But there's more, much more. Enjoy.
War (huh!), what is it good for?: The Iliad, by Homer
Still moaning and groaning, mighty Atrides--why now?
What are you panting after now? Your shelters packed
with the lion's share of bronze, plenty of women too,
crowding your lodges. Best of the lot, the beauties
we hand you first, whenever we take some stronghold.
Or still more gold you're wanting? More ransom a son
of the stallion-breaking Trojans might just fetch from Troy?
Though I or another hero drags him back in chains...
Or a young woman, is it?--to spread and couple,
to bed down for yourself apart from all the troops?
How shameful for you, the high and mighty commander,
to lead the sons of Achaea into bloody slaughter!
Sons? No, my soft friends, wretched excuses--
women, not men of Achaea! Home we go in our ships!
Abandon him here in Troy to wallow in all his prizes--
he'll see if the likes of us have propped him up or not.
Look--now it's Achilles, a greater man he disgraces,
seizes and keeps his prize, tears her away himself.
But no gall in Achilles. Achilles lets it go.
If not, Atrides, that outrage would have been your last!
They say that Helen's was the face that launched a thousand ships, and by God, every one of them is listed in book II of the Iliad along with its full crew complement! One of the very first pieces of literature in the western canon, it skips the first nine years of the Trojan War and stops before we get to the death of Achilles due to a dirty heel, the trojan horse, or the sack of the city. Instead, 3/4 of the book is dedicated to watching the champion of the Greeks throw a hissy fit and give himself a big time-out because the king won't give him his choice of women to rape. A half dozen or so other Greek "heroes" take up the fighting instead, and battle after battle ensues in which we are told that the Gods cause various warriors to hit or miss their targets, to gain or lose willpower and dexterity points, or to be whisked off the battlefield entirely when the going gets tough. Sometimes one of the champions knows full well that, if he burns a particular ship or kills a particular enemy or goes to Za'ha'dum, he will himself die, but he does it anyway, claiming either to be able to outwit gods, or that there's no avoiding destiny, or that the prophecy is not certain, or more likely, all three in the same paragraph.
It's very hard to either take it seriously or be entertained by it. Having seen 300 since the last time I read it, I found it a lot more plausible if I imagined Achilles as a 20 foot rock troll, Hector as an 18-foot elf-knight, Big and Little Ajax as those yellow blob-things from the old "Herculoids" cartoon, and the other champions as various hulking ogres of assorted sizes. In fact, I'm kind of surprised a big budget movie in that vein doesn't already exist, specifically for the Iliad.
Among them all, like Bugs Bunny, is Thersites, the only common soldier in the whole epic who gets to speak out loud. His lines are the ones quoted above. He is portrayed as the ugliest, feeblest person there, and yet no matter how ridiculous Homer makes him, there's no denying he's right. The big guys to whom he speaks truth don't bother to answer him; they just beat him up and laugh. It remains one of my favorite passages from the story anyway, because we’ve come so far in over 3,000 years that people are now allowed to speak truth to power without fear of repercussions. Of course.
No phone, no light, no motor-car: Victory, by Joseph Conrad
For fifteen years, Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a ‘queer chap.’ He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected his wisdom.
Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father’s pale distinguished face in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
Joseph Conrad is always strange. Things that look straightforward always turn out to symbolize something else. In this case, we have the apparently straightforward tale of the man Heyst who attempts to remain by himself on an Indonesian island after the mining company he works for, the sole occupant of said island, goes into liquidation and leaves...except that he’s not left in peace at all. First he gives sanctuary to a woman in trouble; after that a trio of bad guys shows up thinking he has a treasure hidden with him.
Except that Heyst is actually a symbol of man trying to escape from civilization, and the three bad guys are symbols of that civilization—barbarism, expansionism and decadence—in pursuit of the nonconformist. At least, that’s what I got out of it. The woman probably symbolizes something, too (taming influence?), but I failed to discover what.
The book first appeared immediately before the start of WWI, and the offensively colonial attitude distracted me so much that I may have missed a great deal of what Conrad was trying to say. Racial slurs are bandied about freely. A Chinese manservant is depicted as inscrutable, alternately servile and disloyal, and a thief. When he and Heyst are the only two on the island, it is assumed that, like Friday, he is to be subservient to the white man. A South American aborigine is depicted as more monkey than man. A thoroughly despicable villain is given deference by most of the population simply for being white. Another villain attempts to rape the woman in a scene with undercurrents that made no sense to me until the author flat out states that the woman is expected to simply trade loyalties and give herself over to the home-invader who attacks her and Heyst, on the grounds that the invader is better able to protect her—and what a shocking twist it is that the lady instead fights this man with everything she’s got.
The tropical island atmosphere comes to life vividly. So does the air of rocks being turned over to reveal dark psyches beneath. For all that, Victory is definitely a “Dead White Guy” book and not for everyone.
I’m sick of this $&#$ corpse in this $&#$ snowman! The Corpse in the Snowman, by Nicholas Blake
The children, side by side, leaned out of the window. As they watched, the crack at the top of the snowman’s head had deepened. A segment of snow slid, as smoothly as a camera shutter, off its face. Its face ought to have gone. But it was still there. The squat, shapeless snowman still had a face—a face almost as white as the snow which had covered it, the dead, human face of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all.
John and Priscilla gave each other one frozen, terrified glance. Then they raced for the door and went pelting downstairs.
“Daddy! Daddy!” John yelled. “Come quick! There’s someone inside the snowman! It’s...”
Blake apparently presaged the era of tales in which the title summarizes the entire plot, like Snacks on a Plane or Cowboys and Aliens. See, there’s this snowman! And it’s got a corpse inside it!
I was worried that the title would spoil the plot, as the cover blurb indicates that the discovery of the corpse occurs late in the action. Actually, it occurs in chapter one, and then most of the book is a flashback to things that happened leading up to it, and part of your matching wits with Blake is deducing who ended up inside the snowman. You may imagine that, somewhere along the line, somebody in the English manor will go missing at about the time a snowman is built, and that, if the mystery is worth anything, the solution will be a bit more complicated than the obvious inference, and you’d be right. These plots are pretty dang innovative, even 70 years after they were written and the whodunnit genre mined to ashes in the meantime.
CalvinSailing: Coot Club, by Arthur Ransome
Up and down they sailed in the sunshine, first one and then the other at the tiller, while Tom held the main-sheet so that nothing could really go wrong. They very soon stopped catching their breaths every time a harder puff of wind sent the Titmouse heeling over, and Tom said they would do all right as soon as they had learnt that when you are steering you must think of nothing else. He said this after Dick had had a long turn at the tiller. Dick was careful enough when there was nothing to look at, but keen as he was on being able to sail, the sight of a bird was too much for him, and as Ranworth is full of birds of all kinds, the Titmouse, with Dick at the tiller, had sailed a very wriggly course.
But it was not much better with Dorothea. Her mind too kept slipping away. She was sailing, yes, and all of a tremble lest she should do something wrong, but she could not help thinking of the outlaw and the Margoletta, and of the Admiral quietly painting in the well of the Teasel, but at the same time ready to give warning of approaching hullabaloos. How would it be to make a real sentinel’s post in one of the taller trees at the outer end of the straits? What would happen if, suddenly, now, this minute, the Margoletta, full of enemies, were to come roaring out into the Broad? “The boy outlaw leapt overboard and swam for the reeds, bullet after bullet splashing in the water round his head...”
The sixth Swallows and Amazons book isn’t set in the lake area, nor does it have any Swallows or Amazons in it. This one has Dick and Dorothea, who became friends with the characters in book four, having their own adventure on the Norfolk Broads (waterways that the Thames meets before reaching the North sea at Yarmouth), so that Ransome can introduce young readers to the joys and pitfalls of river sailing. Picturesque scenery, tugboats, quanting, low and movable bridges, dangerous tides, storms, fog, collisions, falling overboard and shipwrecks are all explored.
I love the egalitarianism of these books. This book was first published in 1934, and it wasn’t until after I’d finished it that I noticed that there hadn’t been the slightest implication of anything unusual in the fact that the twin girls, Port and Starboard, were the most experienced sailors among this group of kids, who accepted and were grateful for their experience and leadership as a matter of course.
One of the main plot devices was a little hard to swallow. Early in the story, one of the boys unmoors a boat containing a family of obnoxious tourists, from the spot where it threatens a coots’ nest. The motorized boat floats for under a minute before the people aboard notice, and no one is in any danger. For the rest of the book, the protagonists have to avoid and flee this boat, the inhabitants of which apparently waste their whole vacation chasing them all along the river trying to get that boy who untied their boat. This seemed to me the equivalent of a road rage driver going miles out of his way to chase the driver who offended him across several state lines. But whatever. Anything for dramatic river adventures, right?
An Abundance of Plot Devices: Aithiopika, by Heliodorus
She stood there a good while without harm and the fire went every way about her, but approached not near to do any hurt, giving place rather when she came thereinto, so that by reason of the light around her her beauty was made the fairer and more wonderful, seeming like to a bride married in a chamber of fire. She went sometimes into this side and sometimes into that, marvelling what it meant and hastening to die; but it prevailed not, for the fire always gave way and fled as it were from her. The tormentors for their part ceased not to lay on wood and reeds—Arsace with threatening nods charging them so to do—to make it burn more fiercely; but it did no good, save that it troubled the people more, who supposing that she had help from heaven cried: “The woman is clean, the woman is not guilty”, and coming to the fire put the tormentors aside.
This is an ancient prose romance, written by a Greek, in the days of the Roman Empire, concerning a war between Ethiopia and Persia, in Egypt, and told with many of the cliches that appear in the Arabian Nights. Here are two lovers, distinguished from mere mortals by his otherworldly bravery, her otherworldly chastity, and both of their otherworldly charismatic force, subjected to the usual array of wars, pirates, arranged marriages, treachery by people they trust, and despairing attempts at suicide when each thinks that the other is dead, before they finally end up happily married to each other.
Yes!—supernatural forces favor them because their love is pure, and, Yes!...everywhere they go, the ruler, depending on the ruler’s gender, falls in love with one of them and schemes to put the other to death, and Yes!...half the tale consists of various characters (usually in prison, awaiting execution) telling stories about what has happened before. The whole trope of beginning in the middle and having characters relate the beginning is described in the introduction as something innovative that began with Heliodorus; too bad I recently reread the Odyssey, which does the same thing centuries before Heliodorus (and millennia before Quentin Tarantino).
The story is all plot. Things happen on every page, and narration shifts between characters frequently, to the point where I had to flip back frequently because the narrator had changed and was no longer the person I thought was speaking, and if you blink, you can lose the train of story. The characters, other than being “good guys” and “bad guys”, are interchangeable, so it’s hard to feel that much of an urge for the predestined lovers, in particular, to finish up with each other. If you like high adventure without much characterization, this one might be for you.
All We Are Is Dust In The Wind: Lesser Physical Tracts, by Aristotle
With regard to the shape of each star, the most reasonable view is that they are spherical. It has been shown that it is not in their nature to move themselves, and, since nature is no wanton or random creator, clearly she will have given things which possess no movement a shape particularly unadapted to movement. Such a shape is the sphere, since it possesses no instrument of movement. Clearly then their mass will have the form of a sphere. Again, what holds of one holds of all, and the evidence of our eyes shows us that the moon is spherical. For how else should the moon as it waxes and wanes show for the most part a crescent shaped or gibbous figure, and only at one moment a half moon? And astronomical arguments give further confirmation; for no other hypothesis accounts for the crescent shape of the sun's eclipses. One, then, of the heavenly bodies being spherical, clearly the rest will be spherical also.
More Aristotle! This month, it was "On the Heavens", "On Generation and Corruption" (how things are created and decay), "Meteorology" and a handful of very short tracts on the senses, dreaming, and death. Unlike last month's disappointing Physics, these contain actual early attempts at science, instead of metaphysical navel-gazing. In fact, you might as well just skip the Physics altogether.
Aristotle get a lot of it wrong, of course, starting with the conclusion that the earth is the center of the universe, but he gets other things right that astonished me since the medieval Christians had his works and suffered from his mistakes, and yet never seemed to hold onto the idea of the earth as a sphere, for example.
As always, tracts this old are hardly cutting edge science, and are useful mostly for historic value and maybe as a way to teach students how to ask the right questions. Not for everybody.
Dresden Levels Up: Death Masks, by Jim Butcher
Ortega smiled, showing teeth. Just regular teeth, no long canines or anything. The vampires of the Red Court look human—right up until they turn into something out of a nightmare. “The point, Dresden, is that the war is unprofitable, undesirable. You are the symbolic cause of it to my people, and the point of contention between us and your own White Council. Once you are slain, the Council will accept peace overtures, as will the Court.”
“So you’re asking me to lie down and die? That’s not much of an offer. You really need to read that book.”
“I’m making you an offer. Face me in single combat, Dresden.”
I didn’t quite laugh at him. “Why the hell should I do that?”
His eyes were expressionless. “Because if you do, it would mean that the warriors I have brought to town with me will not be forced to target your friends and allies. That the mortal assassins we have retained will not need to receive their final confirmations to kill a number of clients who have hired you in the past five years. I’m sure I need not mention names.”
This book marked the point where I finally said, to hell with the rough edges, I am a Dresden Files fan. The White Wolf-ization of Chicago has been defined to the point where it makes sense within the context, the major characters are developed to the point where one of them can just enter a scene and you can smile or gasp knowing what’s about to happen, and Dresden is coming into his own to the point where he doesn’t always need to get his skinny ass saved by someone else. The series plot arc has developed and interlocked nicely with the ‘monster-of-the-book’ plots, and new and better characters keep popping up. In Death Masks we get introduced to ancient kung-fu master prototype Shiro, master thief Anna Valmont, and (my new favorite) an entity known as “The Archive”, who can’t be described without spoilers. At least two of these characters, I hope, will be back in further episodes.
Dresden and most of the super-powered allies he loves to annoy must deal with a duel to the death with a senior vampire, a quest for the stolen Shroud of Turin, a cabal of badass demon-like beings, and a plague that combines several deadly viruses into one. Dresden also joins October Daye, Buffy, Captain Sheridan and others in the “No way out, the prophecy says you’re definitely going to die and yet the series continues with you” club. The plot kept me guessing well into the final third. Higher recommendations than the earlier volumes.
Soylent Spring: The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner
”It’s an arsenical compound they invented in the First World War. Didn’t get around to using it, so they dumped it in the ocean. What happened in florida was that they’d dropped a batch into the hatteras Canyon, and one of these new deep-trawling fishing boats hauled a lot of it up. They had no idea what they’d got—after sixty years they were all crusted up with barnacles and things, of course—so they cracked one of the drums open, thinking it might be valuable. When they found out it was dangerous, they just pitched the lot overside again, but by then they were in shallow water and some of the drums smashed on the bottom rocks. A hell of a lot washed up on shore.”
“I never heard about that”, Thorne whispered.
“Would you expect to? It would have ruined the winter vacation trade—not that there’s much left of it anyway. I got out because I wanted clean beaches for my kids, not because Florida was so healthy I didn’t have enough patients.” With an ironical chuckle he turned to examine Nancy again; the oxygen had had its effect and she was breathing easier.
Pollution, global climate change and overpopulation have become a growing concern.
Well-to-do people don’t drink tap water any more.
In major cities, traffic jams are common, and the polluted air stings people’s eyes. In some cities, they even have “air booths” where you can drop a coin in and get a few breaths of high-oxygen air.
Wealthy corporate interests are selling purified water and air to the people, and making high-chemical fake food to send to impoverished nations at an exorbitant profit.
In fact, actual food grown without pesticides is marketed as “organic” and sold at premium prices that the working class can’t afford.
Meanwhile, a lot of crop-eating pests have become immune to the pesticides anyway. Crop failures are up.
Birth defects are up, too.
The economy is unstable. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Wealthy people live in gated communities with armed guards at the gates.
In many countries, populations are rioting in escalating cycles of destruction.
The government is bought and paid for by the corporations to the extent that it does not respond to the needs of the majority of the people. The President of the United States is a half-wit admired for his “affability” and the folksy aphorisms with which he responds to any question.
An American leader who tries to warn about the “unpleasant truth” (the book’s words) surrounding the consequences of pollution and unregulated capitalism is shouted down and ridiculed, primarily by the media and corporate interests within his own country.
Talk of armed revolution is high, and sometimes seems to be the only way out, not just for the poor and wretched, but for the population of Earth. Meanwhile, people who indulge in property damage as a form of protest, or even talk about the need for sustainability, are denounced by business, government and their handmaidens in the media as “terrorists” and prosecuted to a harsher degree than people who commit crimes against persons.
This is a work of fiction.
The Sheep Look Up was written in 1972. From the satirical tone of the book, I believe it was intended to portray some sort of unimaginable dystopian hell-hole of a world, exaggerated to the point of absurdity, designed to make people shudder in revulsion at the thought of the extent of the damage to the world and our quality of life might (you know, some of it, anyway) ensue, if humanity didn’t heed the warning signs.
Humanity didn’t heed them. In 2011, most of what Brunner’s over-the-top living conditions are what we take for granted. Except the prices; in real life, inflation has far outpaced the “shocking” price increases referenced in the book. Also, few Americans are protesting the real problem; they’re too busy lining up to piss in bottles for their owners job-creators.
Where has Brunner been all my life? Why has no one pointed me at his work until now? Why is The Sheep Look Up not a household name along the lines of Brave New World and 1984? I had to take a “Which Science Fiction Author Are You?” quiz on FaceBook (really) to find out that he existed. It’s nice to know I “am” Brunner; he kicks ass.
He makes great use of the “scientist being interviewed, as a way to explain the science part of the book to lay readers” trope. Perhaps the most chilling part of all was the psychology expert talking about the reasons American kids are dumber than their parents and less motivated to learn or even make a living for themselves than their can-do, resourceful forefathers.
Further, it wasn’t until I’d read it all the way through that I realized that The Sheep Look Up is the polar opposite of, and the most crushing answer I’ve seen to dat to, Atlas Shrugged. With a few similarities—panoramas of nationwide disaster in vignette form, large sections of the book set in business centers of Colorado, a climactic speech to the nation by a charismatic figure (albeit this one’s only five pages, and actually riveting)—the situation is an exact opposite of Ayn Rand. Here, the captains of industry, not any parasitical peasant class, is destroying America, and the world is crying out for someone to stop the motor of the world before they all asphyxiate on the fumes. And where one book ends with a view from high overhead of the lights going out, the other ends with things lighting up in a big way, with the most perverse promise of hope I’ve ever seen.
When I got to the end, I immediately re-read it again. It’s that good. And no, I’m not sure I’ve done that before, ever. Very highest recommendations.
Three Years Before the Mast: Sailing Alone Around The World, by Joshua Slocum
I found that she was the cutter-yacht Akbar, which had sailed from Watson’s Bay about three days ahead of the Spray, and that she had run at once into trouble. No wonder she did so. It was a case of babes in the wood or butterflies at sea. Her owner, on his maiden voyage, was all duck trousers; the captain, distinguished for the enormous yachtsman’s cap he wore, was a Murrumbidgee whaler before he took command of the Akbar; and the navigating officer, poor fellow, was almost as deaf as a post, and nearly as stiff and immovable as a post in the ground. These three jolly tars comprised the crew. None of them knew more about the sea or about a vessel than a newly born babe knows about another world. They were bound for New Guinea, so they said; perhaps it was just as well that three tenderfeet so tender as those never reached that destination.
It’s what the title says: From 1896 through 1898, Slocum became the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat, by himself. It’s a mystery to me why Charles Lindbergh is still a household name for the first transatlantic solo flight, and hardly anyone I know has even heard of Josh Slocum in a day and age when we have teenagers trying to duplicate his feat and getting rescued by helicopter in the Indian Ocean.
Part of the answer may be that Slocum just doesn’t read that well. He was a sailor, not a writer, and while Jack London was inspired by Slocum to by-golly get a boat of his own and zoom about the Pacific, London’s Cruise of the Snark (Bookpost, December 2010) was much more riveting than Slocum’s account of his much greater in fact achievement.
Slocum is the master of the understatement. His tone reminds me of the straight-man narrator in the sci-fi books of his time, like in Jules Verne’s books, only more subdued. He can be capsized in his lifeboat-dinghy off the coast of South America, clinging all the more determinedly to the boat “because I remembered that I could not swim”, and, well, he gets to shore all right, and that’s that. A goat chews up his navigation chart in the middle of the Atlantic, and Slocum’s response is one of mild annoyance. I guess you’ve got to learn to be calm in a crisis when you’re a sailor and captain, but a little less calm in the telling might have sparked the story considerably.
Two Days Before the Mast: We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea, by Arthur Ransome
”Oh, John!...No!...NO!”
But already he had climbed out of the cockpit. He was sitting on the cabin roof, clinging to the hand rail, wriggling himself forward. A sea leapt up on the quarter and splashed aboard. She saw him look back at her...Not to let her come too...Keep her steady...She must...She must...She pushed at the tiller with all the strength she had. Again she saw John’s face. He said something, she could not hear what, but she could see from his face that she was doing right. He was going on, inch by inch, along that dancing, swaying, dripping cabin roof. And no matter how she fought the tiller, the Goblin leapt and pitched as if she were trying to jerk him off.
Number seven in the Swallows and Amazons series has just the four swallows—no amazons, no dick and Dorothea—again, far from the lake where the first book took place. I’m disappointed. It was the lake itself that made me love these books so much, as they reminded me of the lake where I grew up. But then there are other attractions to this one.
This is the first in the series where there is actual life-threatening danger. Not that Ransome is about to tragically kill off any character here, but it’s suspenseful. The kids make a new friend and spend the night aboard his cabin sailboat in the harbor, promising their mother that nothing bad will happen. Except that the friend goes ashore “just for a moment” for supplies, and the boat ends up adrift and swept out into the north sea on the tide, straight into fog and storms and a castaway to be rescued as they go all the way to Holland and back while teaching young readers a thing or two about sailor knots, lighthouses, and survival at sea.
Honestly, there was more suspense here than in Joshua Slocum’s account of his three year around the globe real life adventure. I suppose it helps if you get to just make up what happened.
Needler in a Haystack: A Question of Proof, by Nicholas Blake
The masters had scarcely settled down again in the common room when there was heard a clatter of boots outside, and a figure passed the window at a shambling run going towards the headmaster’s private door. A few minutes after this, a message came requesting Tiverton’s presence in the study. And almost before Gadsby had time to fire off a salvo of rhetorical questions, Tiverton returned, dazed and white in the face.
“Percy wants you all in his study. They’ve found Wemyss in the hayfield. He’s been strangled. They found him when they were dismantling the haystacks. In one of the haystacks.”
My fourth Nigel Strangeways mystery resurrects the popular "English school" murder (see Michael Innes' Seven Suspects and J.C. Masterman's An Oxford Tragedy for other good examples. This one is in a boys' school. The victim is a Molesworthian brat, and the primary suspects are six schoolmasters and their head. Unfortunately, I got off on the wrong foot by picturing the masters as the cast of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which made it a bit hard to take the murder seriously. Then again, while the masters aren't exactly clownish, they and Strangeways do tend to make more witty comments than you'd expect among teachers when a student is dead and the police think one of them did it.
With the exception of the amazing The Beast Must Die (see last month), these are pretty much popcorn mysteries where the solution is pretty obvious if you think to consider it as a possibility. They're about as difficult as your average Agatha Christie. Highly recommended anyway, simply as good examples of classic English fair-play detective fiction.
A World of Ideas: Timaeus and Critias, by Plato
So speaking, he turned again to the same bowl in which he had mixed the soul of the universe and poured into it what was left of the former ingredients, mixing them in much the same fashion as before, only not quite so pure, but in a second and third degree. And when he had compounded the whole, he divided it up into as many souls as there are stars, and allotted each soul to a star. And mounting them on their stars, as if on chariots, he showed them the nature of the universe and told them the laws of their destiny...And anyone who lived well for his appointed time would return home to his native star and live an appropriately happy life; but anyone who failed to do so would be changed into a woman at his second birth. And if he still did not refrain from wrong, he would be changed into some animal suitable to his particular kind of wrongdoing, and would have no respite from change and suffering until he allowed the motion of the Same and uniform in himself to subdue all that multitude of riotous and irrational feelings which have clung to it since its association with fire, water, air and earth, and with reason thus in control returned once more to his first and best form.
These are among the very few "dialogues" in which Socrates does hardly any of the talking. In fact, almost all of Timaeus consists of a speech by the title character purporting to explain the creation of the world and piling on so much ridiculousness that I'm tempted to think Plato left Socrates out because he was either putting us on or didn't want to have to justify it.
Once again, the only things that really exist are immutable ideas; everything else, those things that are changeable, are "becoming", which is different from "is". All matter is reduced to fire, air, water and earth, the atoms of which are made of little polyhedral dice. The existence of an unnamed fifth element must be referred to in passing to explain the D-12. People (men) who live bad lives are reincarnated as--oh the horror-- women, and then as even dumber critters, to teach them to be more virtuous--kind of like teaching abstinence from drugs by deepening people's addictions. Some of the crazier assertions seem to have gotten a lot of traction throughout history, becoming tenets of faith that the religious were forced to profess belief in on pain of torture in the middle ages.
Timaeus is maybe the nadir of Platonic philosophy. Plato becomes every bit as dense and hard to comprehend as Aristotle, with the distinction that he's still spouting nonsense. I'm disappointed that it apparently had such a wide influence while Aristarchus's heliocentric universe theory never made it out of Ancient times and had to be rediscovered.
Critias is much shorter and is at least somewhat entertaining. This is the one in which the title character relates (read: Plato makes up out of whole cloth, just like in Timaeus) the supposed history of the lost continent of Atlantis, apparently the land of the Geometers. Critias gets about as far as describing a palace within concentric moats and plots of land in a checkerboard pattern before it ends, incomplete. Probably just as well.