Book Review: Sci-Phi - Philosophy from Socrates to Schwarzenegger by Mark Rowlands - Page 2

The philosophy tackled here isn’t the simple stuff. It’s the hardest questions philosophy asks. What is life? What makes me me (Frankenstein)? What is real? What can we know with certainty (The Matrix)? What is me? The mind or the body (The Terminator I & II)? Personal identity, free will, morality, good and evil, and of course, death and the meaning of death using Blade Runner, where Rowlands gets all giddy and closes up the book.

His writing is very accessible. He knows how to broach philosophy without sounding like an old decrepit bored-with-life teacher in a stuffy college. But he also doesn’t write in a condescending way that alienates a reader made to feel stupid. Au contraire, he reaches for the layman and draws him in toward knowledge instead of force-feeding the reader with uninteresting pedantic jibber-jabber.

Probably the only complaint one could make is that Rowlands quickly abandons references to the movie he speaks of to a point where the reader has to remind himself by mining his memory or back-tracking to the chapter’s beginning to remember which movie is discussed. Instead he goes off into explanations using the old-guy philosophy by sticking to “the old ones”. Since the answers are supposed to be found in the movies, I felt the frequent sinuous strays into classical philosophy were unwarranted, and only toward the end of the chapter does he drift back into the sci-fi part. I felt there was more meat on them bones to use as examples from the movie that Rowlands could have just run with it.

The physical book also has a huge drawback that I found annoying. The chapter and title font is simply unreadable and tacky. If an editor is going to use such a font he should ensure that the printing quality will be very high. The printing quality here is choppy, both with absorbent, low-quality paper and an illegible font The book is, however, worth the reader's time if only to read Rowlands making the case for Schwarzenegger being the greatest cinematic philosopher of all time and getting you to swallow it and agree with him.

I rate it four dodged bullets out of five.