Otherland, Tad Williams and Jared Diamond on farming

Well, daughter's still sleeping so I'll take this 15 minutes or so to catch up. Just got a notice that the second part of the Otherland triology is ready for me at the library. City of Golden Shadow, the first part, was all about an extremely detailed virtual reality built in the near future by a group of rich, secretive people. It was long and meandering, and had too many passages that didn't add anything new to the story. There's only so much I can take of Renie being desposdent and about Paul feeling confused as to where he was (yes, Paul's an amnesiac thrown into the virtual realities, but still, I got the point early on).

So why keep reading it? Well, the characters are not bad, the journeys through the various virtual realities can be quite interesting (a club for sadists, Meso America not conquered by the Spaniards, a chess-board land, Egyptian gods come of life), and I want to know why this group is building this extremely expensive virtual reality (apparently it's not just for fun, there's something that may be an alien or something otherwordly involved too).

One of the main characters is a Bushman named !Xabbu, whose dream is to recreate (virtually) the life of his people, which has been pretty much wiped out. He speaks quite evocatively of the hunting-gathering life and the bonds within and among tribes, and interestingly enough I read an article by Jared Diamond yesterday about the disastrous mistake humans made in turning to farming (I thought I first read it on edge.org but couldn't find it so I've linked to another site).

Diamond first lays out evidence that hunter-gatherers (h-g) were taller, less subject to disease, had better nutrition, had more leisure time, and in general were better off, than farmers. So why turn to farming? Population pressures - you can support more people on the same land by farming than by h-g'ing. In essence, you give up quality (of life) for quantity. Another interesting point he makes is that farming makes "class" possible; in h-g there are no resources that one can grab and keep for oneself, but in farming land becomes a resource that can be owned, and crops can be appropriated by the elites.