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The Jasmine Wars #1-2
The Jasmine Wars: Omnibus Edition: Books One and Two
Experience the beginning of the epic saga of family, love and war. Across a century of chaos and upheaval, follow three generations of heroes who will change the face of China forever. A young boy on the run from the Communists that murdered his family must survive in the harsh Tibetan wilderness… A grandmother and leader of the underground railroad must face her dark past as a young revolutionary… A brilliant but brash colonel races to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that threatens to tear the new republic apart… When a Jasmine Revolution sweeps away the brutal Communist regime, China transforms into the world’s first AI-driven Direct Democracy, ushering in a golden age of peace and prosperity. From the earliest days of revolutionary fervor to the turbulence of war and rebellion, the powerful Zhang family is at the center of the storm. Nowt when protests and terrorism bring ultra-nationalism storming back, the nation’s favorite son, Colonel Ju-Long, must uncover the traitors in his midst before his beloved country explodes into another civil war. But will long-buried family secrets mean it’s already too late?
826 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2016
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October 10, 2017
[This was rejected by Amazon. Too obscure? Is one required to be less obscure than the author? I'm not sure Amazon's rejection is good or bad, though I don't have the energy to consider all the whys, so let's try it here . . . ]
Laws, Nature, Laws of Nature and Anarchy. Which side are you on, brother?
Daniel Jeffries is a good story teller. He draws me through his saga even despite sometimes near endless descriptions of the same sort of battle epics from which Hollywood can’t ever seem to sober itself. That must put him in company with Tom Clancy and his ilk, though my gut tells me that Clancy is the better writer. I think that’s because he stays within a domain without really asking the reader to indulge him too much outright invention. Stories don’t always benefit by techno removes from character and plot, and I have to say Jeffries plots are pretty boilerplate once you remove the whiz-bang.
This ilk begs the question always about what’s the difference anyhow among Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolff, say or throw in Agatha Christie for good measure. I’m talking about a continuum through craft to artistry; storytelling to literature. And I am no enemy of outright invention, if it moves me somehow.
I have no idea whether Daniels pretends to literature. I think he’s just turned on by tech and storytelling, so let’s stay there. I’ve already said that I like the storytelling well enough, but I don’t buy the tech so much. I think he embodies what I find to be a profound confusion in the post-humanist crowd.
One strain of this sort of thinking strikes me as inspired and profound. That’s the kind which is really talking about what comes after the triumph of humanism, that powerful product of the Western European enlightenment. These thinkers take note of the inferior place reserved for women and people of color, not to mention those from non-western cultures, among those humanists who identify with divides between man and nature.
On the other end are the anti-humanists who focus on the divide between man and God. The Goddists in turn get derided by the humanists for being some sort of pre-human, still willing to take orders in the model of preconscious bicameral mammalian pavlovian-susceptible brain function.
Taken en-masse (if indeed they exist in any number), the post-humanist crowd doesn’t seem to know how to distinguish among the enlightenment hallmarks that they would like to leave behind and those they’d like to keep.
It seems a cinch to me that most of what is meant by technology extends a triumphal stance over God and Nature both, and builds on clear distinctions between mankind and all the rest of our zoosphere. The Anthropocene is characterized by the destructive side of man’s celebration of cognitive ability; the imposition of a singular dimension for God which mankind intends to fill.
I was attracted to Jeffries in part because I did believe that he had made some effort to penetrate Chinese culture. He surely has, but seems landlocked on the current Chinese iteration of endless cleverness and social ordering which has buried anything Chinese in China; especially the stuff which might prove commensurate with Western enlightenment thinking. He doesn’t seem to get the deeper parts, and that makes me wonder as well if he gets the deeper parts of Western civ. We’ve buried most of our good stuff too, natch.
None of this matters, of course, since he’s likely a bit-player among tech-titans. He certainly won’t be inducted to the club of literati. But much of the work he does is on the side of humanity ([sic]-here I mean the side of the angels, of course) by my view, and good tech differs in what I might call positive ways from the work of the more garden-variety power mongering and self-aggrandizing tech titans.
I would like to distinguish among varieties of tech. I am tired to death of hearing DNA, for instance, being subsumed under the category of “technology.” My ex used to like to say that alcohol is a drug, which fingernail-on-blackboard grated in my ears, just like those who would call schools a category of business enterprise, and try to name its customers. Alcohol has been with us (so, of course, have certain drugs, just not so much in the mainstream) in the same way dogs have to where they are as human as blacks and injuns for crying out loud. A different kind of animal from, well you know where I’m trying to go with all this.
A hammer or a crutch or a wheel is just simply not in the same category as a jet airplane, LSD, or a moonshot. I would put Jeffries’ work with block-chains on the side of the hammer. The good side. One can love one’s tools, develop a feel for them, be proud of the way they extend one’s artistry. Or one can use them toward destructive ends. As Jeffries seems fully to grok, there is a profound difference between tech for and tech against humanity. The divide is approximately that of warfare and policing versus the tech of ordinary commerce. Things get scary when power concentrates, and Jeffries seems here to be on the side of the angels again, which would set some direction against concentration.
Power seems always to be a concentration of cognitive and administrative power without the human heart.
Now I would and do maintain that humanity remains aspirational and not something already accomplished, unless we wish to count Jesus, the Buddha and Mohammed as prototypical instances of what we might become.
So when I talk of the human heart, I’m looking forward to something I have yet to see much of. For me at least, artistry is the most reliable compass. That would be artistry relieved of man-made rules. The God that can me named and spoken about is not the true God. Art in service to the social order, which includes the economy, stupid, is not art. Religion being, of course, a set of rules designed only to demean what would be God beneath the patriarchal priesthood overlording it.
This is not to say that artists need to starve, although one might require a day job to be free to jam at night. And beauty can be found in all sorts of places, not only or maybe even hardly ever among the output of artists.
This aspirational humanity will never be defined by cognitive ability. It will relate more closely to whatever it is that we mean by heart.
I do continue to find Chinese culture to be a good foil against Western European humanism. There is no unitary God there, and there is no distinction between “heart” and mind in the Chinese rendition for a human center. Humanity is more process than God-given ascription. And sure the endless scientific quest for universal and pre-existing law is less certain within a (Chinese) brand for “science” which fails to find ex-nihilo anywhere, and doesn’t dismiss random out of hand as meaningless accident.
Or in other words, in the Chinese tradition, creativity is not opposed to arduous discovery, and singular “credit” for genius is subsumed within a tempering social order. In the Chinese tradition, man is much more likely to remain implicated in uncovered natural law, which is much less likely in turn to be seen as existing in some separable ideal and eternal space, cognitively catalogued by math, and susceptible to completion in the mind.
Furthemore (“And another thing,” said with raised finger), emotion remains cosmic as a part of humanity, defined as mankind having a center, more toward what we mean by heart and less toward what we seem to mean by mind.
This Chinese culture has been as actively destroyed from within China as it has from without. But in the same way that the Chinese written language did not prove inferior in the way of computing to our alphabetic ways which are themselves starting to seem downright barbaric again, the Chinese do seem to be growing a more sure sense of their own cultural traditions than we could ever find from over here. We are certainly as lost from our own humanity which makes post-humanism premature to say the least.
So with Jeffries’ writing, I am dismayed that what we still call nature is relegated to the far background as a despoiled continuum from our past. He doesn’t seem to have the heart to include that quite, in the ways he characterizes his protagonists. He doesn’t seem to know how, except to foreground the awesome power and (even while sometimes evil) beauty of cyborg creatures which inhabit the games his readership must play. He might worship Nature in the same way that he evidently worships Mom, but he hasn’t escaped from his habituated condescension.
Damn him to hell for his laziness, for his block-headed blockchain work really does have the promise to unseat those few and overconfident mostly men still occupying the centers of power. It is a kind of good tech which doesn’t side with war and destruction. For so long as one understands that it must be constructed to level, and not to concentrate wealth and power. From my perch, techies are pretty conflicted on this matter.
There is a corollary to what I write, and I write it for myself and not as praise or criticism for someone else’s writing. As I tend toward my life’s limits, I am more certain than ever about discoveries I made in my extreme youth. These were not original with me, having previously been found by whomever was originally inspired to organize what has become of religious or scientific truth.
We have become too full of ourselves to realize that quantum physics was already the end and not some new beginning. That the bomb was but metaphor for the power as yet to be released by love. And that mind is not something that we can grow exclusive to ourselves individually or collectively, but that it is something primordial and pre-existent that won’t be contained within man-made laws especially when these are represented as having been discovered and not invented.
We will return to nature if and as we allow the fates back in, of course. That’s what evolution means, stupid! This would mean to define accident as something other from meaningless, and to risk the extent of our individualized and namable selves, according to the dictates of love. We honor such people every day now in our brave new world of mass-mediated man-made disasters. But still we only elevate the cognitive geniuses, who promise only collective remove from accident. We elect mere anarchy. We call it the NRA and mistake it for law and order.
Jeffries, alas, still celebrates the weaponry yet to come.
Laws, Nature, Laws of Nature and Anarchy. Which side are you on, brother?
Daniel Jeffries is a good story teller. He draws me through his saga even despite sometimes near endless descriptions of the same sort of battle epics from which Hollywood can’t ever seem to sober itself. That must put him in company with Tom Clancy and his ilk, though my gut tells me that Clancy is the better writer. I think that’s because he stays within a domain without really asking the reader to indulge him too much outright invention. Stories don’t always benefit by techno removes from character and plot, and I have to say Jeffries plots are pretty boilerplate once you remove the whiz-bang.
This ilk begs the question always about what’s the difference anyhow among Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolff, say or throw in Agatha Christie for good measure. I’m talking about a continuum through craft to artistry; storytelling to literature. And I am no enemy of outright invention, if it moves me somehow.
I have no idea whether Daniels pretends to literature. I think he’s just turned on by tech and storytelling, so let’s stay there. I’ve already said that I like the storytelling well enough, but I don’t buy the tech so much. I think he embodies what I find to be a profound confusion in the post-humanist crowd.
One strain of this sort of thinking strikes me as inspired and profound. That’s the kind which is really talking about what comes after the triumph of humanism, that powerful product of the Western European enlightenment. These thinkers take note of the inferior place reserved for women and people of color, not to mention those from non-western cultures, among those humanists who identify with divides between man and nature.
On the other end are the anti-humanists who focus on the divide between man and God. The Goddists in turn get derided by the humanists for being some sort of pre-human, still willing to take orders in the model of preconscious bicameral mammalian pavlovian-susceptible brain function.
Taken en-masse (if indeed they exist in any number), the post-humanist crowd doesn’t seem to know how to distinguish among the enlightenment hallmarks that they would like to leave behind and those they’d like to keep.
It seems a cinch to me that most of what is meant by technology extends a triumphal stance over God and Nature both, and builds on clear distinctions between mankind and all the rest of our zoosphere. The Anthropocene is characterized by the destructive side of man’s celebration of cognitive ability; the imposition of a singular dimension for God which mankind intends to fill.
I was attracted to Jeffries in part because I did believe that he had made some effort to penetrate Chinese culture. He surely has, but seems landlocked on the current Chinese iteration of endless cleverness and social ordering which has buried anything Chinese in China; especially the stuff which might prove commensurate with Western enlightenment thinking. He doesn’t seem to get the deeper parts, and that makes me wonder as well if he gets the deeper parts of Western civ. We’ve buried most of our good stuff too, natch.
None of this matters, of course, since he’s likely a bit-player among tech-titans. He certainly won’t be inducted to the club of literati. But much of the work he does is on the side of humanity ([sic]-here I mean the side of the angels, of course) by my view, and good tech differs in what I might call positive ways from the work of the more garden-variety power mongering and self-aggrandizing tech titans.
I would like to distinguish among varieties of tech. I am tired to death of hearing DNA, for instance, being subsumed under the category of “technology.” My ex used to like to say that alcohol is a drug, which fingernail-on-blackboard grated in my ears, just like those who would call schools a category of business enterprise, and try to name its customers. Alcohol has been with us (so, of course, have certain drugs, just not so much in the mainstream) in the same way dogs have to where they are as human as blacks and injuns for crying out loud. A different kind of animal from, well you know where I’m trying to go with all this.
A hammer or a crutch or a wheel is just simply not in the same category as a jet airplane, LSD, or a moonshot. I would put Jeffries’ work with block-chains on the side of the hammer. The good side. One can love one’s tools, develop a feel for them, be proud of the way they extend one’s artistry. Or one can use them toward destructive ends. As Jeffries seems fully to grok, there is a profound difference between tech for and tech against humanity. The divide is approximately that of warfare and policing versus the tech of ordinary commerce. Things get scary when power concentrates, and Jeffries seems here to be on the side of the angels again, which would set some direction against concentration.
Power seems always to be a concentration of cognitive and administrative power without the human heart.
Now I would and do maintain that humanity remains aspirational and not something already accomplished, unless we wish to count Jesus, the Buddha and Mohammed as prototypical instances of what we might become.
So when I talk of the human heart, I’m looking forward to something I have yet to see much of. For me at least, artistry is the most reliable compass. That would be artistry relieved of man-made rules. The God that can me named and spoken about is not the true God. Art in service to the social order, which includes the economy, stupid, is not art. Religion being, of course, a set of rules designed only to demean what would be God beneath the patriarchal priesthood overlording it.
This is not to say that artists need to starve, although one might require a day job to be free to jam at night. And beauty can be found in all sorts of places, not only or maybe even hardly ever among the output of artists.
This aspirational humanity will never be defined by cognitive ability. It will relate more closely to whatever it is that we mean by heart.
I do continue to find Chinese culture to be a good foil against Western European humanism. There is no unitary God there, and there is no distinction between “heart” and mind in the Chinese rendition for a human center. Humanity is more process than God-given ascription. And sure the endless scientific quest for universal and pre-existing law is less certain within a (Chinese) brand for “science” which fails to find ex-nihilo anywhere, and doesn’t dismiss random out of hand as meaningless accident.
Or in other words, in the Chinese tradition, creativity is not opposed to arduous discovery, and singular “credit” for genius is subsumed within a tempering social order. In the Chinese tradition, man is much more likely to remain implicated in uncovered natural law, which is much less likely in turn to be seen as existing in some separable ideal and eternal space, cognitively catalogued by math, and susceptible to completion in the mind.
Furthemore (“And another thing,” said with raised finger), emotion remains cosmic as a part of humanity, defined as mankind having a center, more toward what we mean by heart and less toward what we seem to mean by mind.
This Chinese culture has been as actively destroyed from within China as it has from without. But in the same way that the Chinese written language did not prove inferior in the way of computing to our alphabetic ways which are themselves starting to seem downright barbaric again, the Chinese do seem to be growing a more sure sense of their own cultural traditions than we could ever find from over here. We are certainly as lost from our own humanity which makes post-humanism premature to say the least.
So with Jeffries’ writing, I am dismayed that what we still call nature is relegated to the far background as a despoiled continuum from our past. He doesn’t seem to have the heart to include that quite, in the ways he characterizes his protagonists. He doesn’t seem to know how, except to foreground the awesome power and (even while sometimes evil) beauty of cyborg creatures which inhabit the games his readership must play. He might worship Nature in the same way that he evidently worships Mom, but he hasn’t escaped from his habituated condescension.
Damn him to hell for his laziness, for his block-headed blockchain work really does have the promise to unseat those few and overconfident mostly men still occupying the centers of power. It is a kind of good tech which doesn’t side with war and destruction. For so long as one understands that it must be constructed to level, and not to concentrate wealth and power. From my perch, techies are pretty conflicted on this matter.
There is a corollary to what I write, and I write it for myself and not as praise or criticism for someone else’s writing. As I tend toward my life’s limits, I am more certain than ever about discoveries I made in my extreme youth. These were not original with me, having previously been found by whomever was originally inspired to organize what has become of religious or scientific truth.
We have become too full of ourselves to realize that quantum physics was already the end and not some new beginning. That the bomb was but metaphor for the power as yet to be released by love. And that mind is not something that we can grow exclusive to ourselves individually or collectively, but that it is something primordial and pre-existent that won’t be contained within man-made laws especially when these are represented as having been discovered and not invented.
We will return to nature if and as we allow the fates back in, of course. That’s what evolution means, stupid! This would mean to define accident as something other from meaningless, and to risk the extent of our individualized and namable selves, according to the dictates of love. We honor such people every day now in our brave new world of mass-mediated man-made disasters. But still we only elevate the cognitive geniuses, who promise only collective remove from accident. We elect mere anarchy. We call it the NRA and mistake it for law and order.
Jeffries, alas, still celebrates the weaponry yet to come.
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