Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

The nature reserve runs along the coastal bluffs. Wide trails run along the tops and through scrub habitat. The trails are fenced, graded, and mostly flat, suitable for an easy stroll and probably wheelchairs. A good place to spot seabirds as well as scrubland birds like white-crowned sparrows. No shade, but plenty of ocean breezes.

On clear days you can easily see all of Catalina Island across the channel to the south, and the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, across the bay to the northwest.

Around the corner is the Point Vicente Lighthouse, which is visible from most parts of the park and the southern part of the reserve. The actual lighthouse grounds are managed by the Coast Guard. They run tours once a month, but I always think of going sometime other than the second Saturday of the month…so I still haven’t managed to tour the tower!

Between the lighthouse grounds and nature reserve there’s a city park with grass, trees, and picnic areas. (The park has shade!) A visitor center features restrooms, drinking water, a few maritime and nature exhibits, and a curated native plants garden, and is sometimes used for event space.

The park isn’t part of the reserve, but a trail with interpretive signs runs along the edge of the cliffs from from the south edge of the park to the north end of the nature reserve, wrapping around several coves that make for interesting views.

I have a Flickr album with more photos from walks over the years.

Nearby

At the north end, the trail winds between the clifftops and a very expensive-looking residential neighborhood until it reconnects with Palos Verdes Drive. At the south end, the next stop along the road is Pelican Cove, which has some interesting geology that I still haven’t gotten around to checking out.

Uphill and across the road, there’s Alta Vicente Reserve which offers slightly wilder hiking with…let’s say a lot more vertical variation.

Getting There

You can drive around the peninsula from either end, and turn into the parking lot from either direction, though the signage isn’t very clear either way.

Heading south from Torrance it’ll be the first right tern past Hawthorne Boulevard and Golden Cove shopping center. And yes, that’s the same Hawthorne Boulevard, so if you prefer driving over the hill instead of around it, you can do that.

Coming from San Pedro, it’ll be past Terranea and Pelican Cove (which has a large rock formation sticking up between the road and the cliffs), and it’ll be a left turn toward the ocean. (This would also mean driving over the landslide, which is its own kind of trip.)

Leaving, you can only turn right, so if you’re heading for Torrance, you’ll need to make a U-turn at Terranea.

This Indian/pizza fusion place opened in the spot where Union Pizza used to have a second location (and Neno’s Café before that), right off the freeway on Artesia. You can get pizza and calzones, you can get curry and tandoori, or you can get them combined. So far I’ve tried the chicken tikka and tandoori chicken pizzas with curry sauce, and they’re both really good.

The traditional pizzas are good too. We got pepperoni with regular tomato sauce as a backup one time in case the teenager didn’t like the curry (spoiler alert: he did). Just nothing with ham, since they’re halal. They also assured me the first time I ordered that they don’t use lentils or chickpea flour in the pizzas, which was something I’d been concerned about for allergy reasons.

There are a couple of tables, but it’s small, more suited for take-out and delivery.

Written in the aftermath of several controversies over racism and sexism in the science-fiction community in the early 2010s, The Old Iron Dream traces the strain of of military authoritarianism and white male supremacy through the history of the genre. From John W Campbell’s days editing Astounding Science Fiction, through Robert Heinlein’s polemics and Jerry Pournelle’s hyper-military eugenicist advocacy, right up to Ted Beale’s blatantly racist and sexist remarks getting him kicked out of the SFWA. (This would be followed up by Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, Gamergate, Comicsgate, and the 2016 US Presidential race.)

The title is drawn from Norman Spinrad’s satirical 1972 novel, The Iron Dream, which takes that strain to its logical (and gory) conclusion. Spinrad drives the point home by crediting it in a framing sequence to an alternate-reality Adolf Hitler, who became a science-fiction writer instead of a dictator, but with the same twisted ideals…ideals that were no strangers to pulp science fiction.

Elitist With a Thousand Faces

I’ve been aware of the broad strokes for a while now. That Campbell had a very limited view of who should count as a hero, or a writer, or generally as a person, and he used his editorial power to shape the genre. That Heinlein got really wrapped up in militarism and libertarianism. (Starship Troopers is a fascinating book, but there really isn’t a way to read it where it isn’t advocacy for military dictatorship and beating your kids so they don’t grow up too soft.) That Pournelle tended to prefer military stories and didn’t approve of “soft sciences,” like sociology, and that he and Larry Niven were involved in Reagan-era government-adjacent think tanks. (I lost a lot of respect for Niven when I found out he’d suggested spreading conspiracy theories to discourage “illegal aliens” from seeking medical care.) Orson Scott Card’s homophobia is well-known, and Gregory Benford shared Campbell’s limited perspective on the genre.

But there are a lot of specifics that I didn’t know. Pournelle’s connection to Newt Gingrich, for instance. Or Heinlein campaigning for more nuclear weapons testing. Or Card claiming that President Obama would elevate street gangs and send them after his personal enemies. Or that Benford, who couldn’t bring himself to look past his own subgenre, accused feminist science fiction writers of having a limited imagination. And other details I’d forgotten, like the cannibal army in Lucifer’s Hammer being largely made up of Black people. (On the other side, there’s the absolutely vicious criticism Michael Moorcock leveled against this viewpoint back in the 1970s!)

Seeing them all tied together in a continuous thread is…enlightening.

That’s Not Optimism

I’ve often thought it’s ironic that people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen would get techno-fascism and an utter disdain for democracy and for people who aren’t like them out of the “genre of ideas.” But this is a clear reminder that some readers (and writers, and editors) aren’t interested in expanding their thinking so much as they are in finding new ways to dominate others, and justify themselves in doing so.

The Tombs of Atuan is still my favorite of the Earthsea books. There’s something fascinating about a labyrinth that you must traverse in total darkness, keeping a map and counting turns in your head. It’s actually what got me curious about what was then still a trilogy in the first place.

Ged is still involved, but he’s not the main character this time through. He’s older and wiser, and the viewpoint shifts to Arha, another teenager with a different kind of power. A priestess in a society that abhors magic and writing, whose name has been erased, who instead of sailing the ocean stays in one place, on land, in the middle of a desert, whose domain is the darkness within the earth.

The first half of the book focuses on Arha growing up at the temple complex, dealing with her changing relationship with the other priestesses to other gods as she grows into her role as the sole priestess to the Nameless Ones, and as she discovers (or rediscovers?) their realm in the dark. Petty rivalries, politics between priestesses of different faiths (only some of whom actually believe), friendships that can never truly be equal.

I’ve seen reader reviews complain that “the main character” (meaning Ged) doesn’t show up until halfway through the book, and let me tell you, they really missed the point. The story isn’t about Ged finding the lost half of the Ring of Erreth-Abke. It’s about Arha and what she does when he literally casts a harsh light on her world. It’s about her figuring out what to do about him, and what his presence reveals about the life she’s lived and the powers she’s served up until now.

And it’s about her figuring out who she really is. Is she merely The Eaten One? Is she Tenar? Is she both? If she’s Tenar, who is that, when she hasn’t been Tenar since childhood? It’s a recurring theme in Earthsea: True names matter, but who you are is a deeper question: Ged and his shadow, Arha/Tenar, Arren and his destiny, Tehanu, Dragonfly and so on.

(Spell)Casting

This time through, I realized two things about my mental images of the characters: first, that Tenar has always been Jennifer Connelly in my mind. (What can I say? Labyrinth made an impression!) Second, I have now headcast Sendhil Ramamurthy as Ged/Sparrowhawk (Heroes-era for the later parts of the first book and this one, and his current age for the rest).

My mental image of the place has changed over time as well. Between re-reads I sometimes forget it’s a desert at all. Knowing now that it was inspired by the Oregon High Desert, and remembering that it’s on a river, I see it more as the chaparral of Anza-Borrego rather than the drier, emptier parts of the Mojave.

You Had To Bring Up Reincarnation

Arha’s position at the Tombs is based on the belief that she’s the previous priestess reincarnated. This book doesn’t really consider whether it’s true, only whether it matters. Is she merely the latest in the line of Eaten Ones, or is she herself? It seems to contradict what we see of the land of the dead in the first and third books, but it’s still possible to imagine an exception. I haven’t gotten to The Other Wind yet in my re-read, but the truth of the matter is one of the questions that Le Guin wanted to explore.

But she does come down very strongly on one side of Tenar’s crisis of faith regarding the Nameless Ones. They do exist. They do have power. They do rule the domain she’s lived in all her life. Ged admits all that readily. The question she really needs to answer is whether she should (or even can) continue serving them.

Forrestal is the eastern end of a chain of nature reserves managed by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy that form a continuous corridor along the hillsides facing the ocean away from the Los Angeles Basin. And between upthrust layers, ancient landslides, recent landslides, and an abandoned quarry, it’s what you might call “geologically interesting area.”

Hiking trails range from nearly flat to infuriatingly steep. There’s not much shade unless you’re short and the sun is low.

What Goes Up…

The steepest trail runs up a ridge along the east edge of the reserve. Along the way it looks down into that quarry, splits off horizontally to a much easier trail along the hillside and across a narrow valley, and continues upward as an out-and-back spur of loose rock and slippery dirt called the Cristo que Viento trail, which I think translates as “Christ, how windy!” It took me several visits to reach the top, since I’d let myself get out of shape, and while I’ve built back enough stamina back to handle it now, my calves still complained most of the way up, and my knees complained all the way back down. The view wasn’t even worth it. It wasn’t that much different than the view from the Mariposa Trail.

The second-steepest trail runs up a hillside along the west edge of the reserve toward a viewpoint, connecting to a trail that runs along the top of a cliff, then back down to the lower areas. This one’s more worth it, because you look out across a canyon that looks like it was formed by a section of the hill detaching and sliding down toward the ocean. And this trail has some switchbacking to it. The last time I was there I approached it from the other side, and heard another hiker complaining breathlessly on his way up!

Canyons and Hillsides

The rest of the trails aren’t that bad, even the ones with significant grade to them.

The Fossil Trail runs through that canyon, and more trails run up and down both sections of the hill. The Vista trail offers a nice view of the cliffs. The Mariposa Trail has some good ocean views, and crosses a narrow valley with an intermittent streambed and actual trees (the only real shade in the place). And you can probably guess how the Cactus Trail got its name.

The southwest corner used to connect to the Portuguese Bend Reserve. Unfortunately that whole reserve has been closed due to the current slow-moving landslide activity. I spent 10 years saying “I should hike there someday” and never got around to it. (Who knows, maybe it’ll stabilize while I’m still healthy enough to hike.)

Getting There

One way or another, you need to go around the hill. Coming from the east you’ll either need to go through the hills or all the way out to San Pedro. Coming from the west, you’ll be driving through the active landslide area where the road’s been slipping and repeatedly patched. Either way, you need to turn inland away from the golf course entrance, then up a curving residential street, past a park on the left, to an open area with a gate that’s usually open during the day.

The main trailhead is near the gate, and you can park on either site of the road. There are two more trailheads, one at the end of the road and along another spur that goes past the sports fields, but you’ll have to hike to get to them since the road is closed to vehicles past a certain point. There’s also a city park near the gate, where there are picnic areas and a new community center with bathrooms and a water bottle filling station.