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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: sf (page 1 of 1)

May 10, 2026

enough is enough?

One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good; (b) Traditional Religion is Evil — not merely intolerant but murderous; and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It.

And the show seems to promise more of the same. Also: it’s not exactly subtle to have your representative of Traditional Religion played by an actor (Louise Fletcher) known only for playing one of the most monstrous characters in the history of cinema.

I once wrote that Philip Pullman created an imaginary world so that people he hated would have a place to be evil in — I could also have said as much about The Handmaid’s Tale — and I suspect that this will be the old familiar story.

I’m just so tired of it: the same beats over and over and over again. After half a century of this crap I just want a different critique of religion. I’m not asking for friends, just for more interesting and reflective haters.

P.S. As I wrote in an earlier post on this general subject, “The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society.” This is true also of the great ancestor of liberal societies, the Roman Empire, which is certainly Leviathan, but Leviathan for your own good, barbarians! It’s all about teaching the ways of peace to conquered people, innit?

And the United Federation of Planets is the kindest, gentlest Leviathan, but Leviathan all the same, which means that its absolutely fundamental commandment is: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Leviathan — from Rome with the Jews to China with the Uighurs to the Federation with the Bajorans — has a special hatred for all people with strong religious beliefs, because they refuse to make obeisance. (In the U.S. the Jehovah’s Witnesses keep winning at the Supreme Court — but they also keep having to.) So Leviathan persecutes such believers while simultaneously weaving myths in which the deeply religious are the dangerous ones, the would-be persecutors of others, just waiting for their chance to “Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff, / Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods, / And bring about the collapse of the whole empire.” Thus the Pax Scientia must be imposed.

Imposition begins by sanding down the rough edges of the non-Federation people who are drawn within the Federation’s orbit: transforming them into replicas of Jean-Luc Picard. That happened to Worf in TNG, and it’s happening to Kira in DS9.

Many years ago Edward Said published an incandescently angry essay called “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading.” What I’m waiting for is “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Bajoran Reading.”

P.S. The essential book to read on all these matters — not DS9, but the larger context of how liberalism conceptualizes religious belief — is Bill Cavanaugh’s brilliant The Myth of Religious Violence. E.g.:

The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalize a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. This myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalization of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state’s monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain. They have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. Their violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. Our violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy.

March 21, 2026

Worf has feelings

There are some terrific episodes in ST:TNG season 5, but more than anything else this is The Season When Worf Gets in Touch with His Feelings. This happens over the course of several episodes, primarily through Worf’s interactions with Troi — and yes, I know they become an item later on. But let’s forget about that for now.

In “New Ground,” Worf’s son Alexander is misbehaving, and Worf tells Troi that he has decided to send Alexander to a Klingon school.

Troi: I see.

Worf: [Pause] You disapprove.

Troi: I’m not here to approve or disapprove of how you raise your son. My concern right now is how this decision is going to affect you. How will you feel when Alexander’s gone?

Worf thinks about and answers her question, and she tells him “You can’t hide from your feelings” along with other similar therapeutic maxims, which he takes on board. But that’s not what should have happened. Here’s what should have happened:

Worf: Of course you disapprove, and you mean me to know that you disapprove. If I were making a decision you approved of you wouldn’t ask any questions. I am proud to be an officer in Starfleet, and I see many virtues in the culture of the Federation, but one of the most annoying elements of your culture is its faux-neutral paternalism. You judge other cultures by your own values, and what you primarily want — indeed, demand — from other cultures is that they share your pretense of being nonjudgmental. The whole point of bringing a Klingon like me into Starfleet is to transform me into an acceptable facsimile of a Federation liberal — and I have to admit that the long slow process of gentle but constant pressure and manipulation is having an effect on me. But let’s not pretend that this softening of my Klingon sensibilities isn’t your purpose in this conversation, and the purpose of your Captain in having me on the Enterprise. Over time I will become more like you, but none of you will become more like a Klingon, will you? But I ask you to have this much respect for me: for the next few minutes, set aside the pretense and admit your disapproval of my decision. Then we may discuss the matter openly and honestly.

(Surely some right-wing cultural commentator has written “The Feminization of Worf: A Lamentation.”)

The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society. Another 5th-season illustration of this willful blindness comes in the episode called “Ethics,” in which poor Worf, having been subjected already to liberalization, is now subjected to a spinal injury which costs him the use of his legs. He is operated on by Dr. Russell, a surgeon who turns out to be a habitual risk-taker: some of her previous patients had died while undergoing experimental procedures. And indeed her operation on Worf, while at first apparently successful, goes badly wrong, though the wrongness gets corrected and Worf eventually regains the use of his legs.

Afterwards, Dr. Crusher denounces Russell’s methods, and Russell shakes her head and walks away without a reply. But she could have, and should have, answered thus:

Russell: You know, Dr. Crusher, that Worf planned to enact the Hegh’bat, the Klingon suicide ritual, and only refrained because this operation offered him the possibility, which you could not offer him, of restoring the use of his legs. If I had declined to perform this operation, Worf would be dead. Is that the outcome you would prefer? To maintain your elevated principles at the cost of your colleague’s life?

To which the likeliest answer from Dr. Crusher is that she and the other members of the Enterprise could have dissuaded Worf from performing the Hegh’bat — that is, convinced him to repudiate his own culture’s ideals and replace them with those of the Federation. But for lovers of the Federation this would have been an unpleasant conversation to have — better for Dr. Russell to walk away in silence and spare us the discomfort.

The Federation on steroids: that’s Iain M. Banks’s great creation the Culture — about which I wrote at some length here. The Culture has its own version of the Federation’s Prime Directive, but here’s the thing: a prime directive is not an unbreakable directive. And as Carl Schmitt taught us, even the most liberal society, perhaps especially the most liberal society, must be prepared to declare a state of exception — the point at which the fundamental principles of the social order must give way to something more … rigorous. Banks’s Culture has a unit called Special Circumstances, and the whole point of Special Circumstances is to exist in the state of exception. Special Circumstances is where the liberal utopia becomes decidedly illiberal. A conversation from one of Banks’s novels:

“In Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist … special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.”

“To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.”

Sma shrugged. “And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is ….But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.”

My comment at that point: “The liberal conscience at its self-soothing work!”

(There’s actually a Banks short story, “The State of the Art,” in which representatives of the Culture investigate the Earth and see clearly that the “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species” that runs the place ought to be eradicated. However, humanity has produced Star Trek. So it’s a wash. They leave us alone.)

I bet there’s not going to be a story arc on ST:TNG in which Riker, inspired by Worf’s courage and honor, strives to transform himself into a Klingon warrior. But there ought to be.

March 1, 2026

Darmok

One of the most famous ST:TNG episodes is “Darmok,” and many years ago Ian Bogost published a long essay about it that’s a fascinating combination of the importantly right and the importantly wrong. Bogost’s theme is the curious character of the Tamarian language, and if you want to know what’s curious about it I would suggest that you watch the episode — it’s compelling and moving — but if you don’t have time for that, Bogost’s essay quotes all the most important parts.

First: Bogost is absolutely right that the descriptions of the Tamarians’ language by the show’s characters — Picard calls what they do “metaphor” and Troi calls it “image” — are wrong.

But Bogost himself is wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “abstract”: abstraction is precisely what the Tamarians are incapable of. They speak almost exclusively in proper nouns, and nothing in language is more concrete and non-abstract than a proper noun. (They also use prepositions and a couple of adjectives and in one case a verb.) They seem to have no word for “sorrow”; they say that people’s faces were wet. They do not speak of “friendship” but rather of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” They don’t say that someone suddenly understood but instead: “Sokath! His eyes uncovered!” Particularity is all they have. Bogost says, “Shaka, when the walls fell is a likeness of failure for the Children of Tama,” but that is to force our abstractions (“failure”) upon a people who recognize no abstractions. Shaka, when the walls fell is is a unique event which nonetheless rewards our contemplation.

To explain this point, I will add that Bogost is equally wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “allegorical.” A famous comment by Tolkien helps us understand why:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

The Tamarians refer constantly to history, though we do not know whether the history they invoke is “true or feigned.” Are Darmok and Sokath historical figures, or purely fictional characters, or (as Picard assumes) ancient legendary figures like Gilgamesh and Enkidu? We can’t tell. All we know is that a certain set — we don’t know how large — of people and places constitute for the Tamarians a universally shared cultural inheritance, which they find applicable to (not an allegory of) whatever situations they face in the present — though it is noteworthy that they can and do disagree about which literary/historical events are most applicable to any given current situation. (When the Tamarian captain Dathon invokes Darmok, his first officer immediately counters with alternatives that he clearly thinks more truly comparable: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha…. Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor.” The citation of past situations is not the end of debate about what to do but that which constitutes debate.)

In short, the Tamarians’ language is built on a belief in the endless applicability of historical allusion. This application of history is of course something we do too, though it does not define our navigation of the world. One example: in his 1988 book Cultural Literacy E. D. Hirsch tells a story about his father, who was a businessman in Memphis. Once when the elder Hirsch was arguing for the need to act quickly on some proposal put before his company, he wrote a memo in which he said simply: “There is a tide.”

He was quoting a speech that he could be confident that every one of his colleagues knew, that of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (IV.3):

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Now imagine that allusions are the only means you have for making a case, and you begin to understand the Tamarians.

Bogost redeems himself when he calls this way of speaking a strategy. I approached the topic of interpretation-as-strategy in a post a few years back in which I drew on Kenneth Burke’s famous essay “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Burke: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations” — and maybe, he suggests, all works of literature can be thought of in this way. If you did so think, you

would consider works of art … as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like “tragedy” or “comedy” or “satire” would be treated as

equipment for living

, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes. The typical ingredients of such forms would be sought. Their relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a “strategy of strategies,” the “over-all” strategy obtained by inspection of the lot.

This is how the Tamarians use their rich inheritance of culture-defining stories: as equipment for living, equipment which they deploy by means of allusion.

A similar understanding of the uses of the past long underlay the greatest monuments of our culture. Plutarch wrote his parallel lives of the Greek and Roman statesmen and Shakespeare wrote his history plays because they believed that situations come in kinds: there are generic resemblances among the many and various challenges that human beings face, resemblances that make the past relevant to the present, and indeed make an understanding of the past necessary to the understanding of the present. (As I show in my recent book on the life of Paradise Lost, many of the great debates about the value of that poem hinge on whether it is usable as other stories are usable. Virginia Woolf thought not; Victor Frankenstein’s creature thought it the mirror of his life.)

And then the events of the present, which have been conceptualized in terms of past events, are understood not to be exhausted by the past but rather capable of adding new elements to the story-hoard. Thus when Picard convinces the Tamarian ship’s first officer to understand what has happened to Dathon in terms of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean,” the Tamarian realizes that something has been added to understanding: quietly but firmly he says, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.”

All such ideas have always been hard for Americans to face, so it makes sense that, as I wrote a while back, America’s “Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia.” We are the precise opposite of the Tamarians: we’re ahistorical beings governed solely by consoling and simplifying abstractions. I’d rather have the Tamarians’ limitations than our own. They would know better than to form themselves in the image of their devices.

P.S. Not really essential to the point I’m making here, but: If there were Tamarians, they would have to know their stories not just with people and places (which they always cite) but also with verbs for any allusion to have a point. But the only phrase they use that has a verb is “Shaka, when the walls fell” — and even then the verb involves something merely happening rather than something being done.

Perhaps we could imagine the Tamarians communicating largely through making and experiencing visual media and using language only secondarily: similarly, a watcher of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies might say, in certain situations, “Theoden, at Helm’s Deep” or “Gollum, at the Cracks of Doom” and everything important could be communicated without the direct employment of verbs. But there would have to be an understanding of action, whether articulated directly or not.

(The dying Dathon does seem to be moved by Picard’s narration of Gilgamesh’s story … but I can’t figure out how to imagine a culture that can receive narratives but not fully describe them. I’d love to find a way to see “Darmok” as making complete sense, but it really doesn’t. It’s fascinating all the same, though.)

February 11, 2026

There but for the grace of Time go I

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re often the first refuge of lazy writers (I’m looking at you, MCU) who can’t be bothered to deal rationally with the consequences of their own prior storytelling decisions. But when handled well, timeplay stories can be very powerful.

(By the way, I happen to know of a pair of novels coming out in the not-too-distant future that may together constitute the best alternate-timeline story I have ever read. More on that in due course.)

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” seems to have originated as a bit of fan service. At some point during the filming of the first season, Denise Crosby decided that she would not return as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, so late in the season the writers killed her off, rather unceremoniously. The show’s fans were unhappy with her departure, and Crosby herself seems to have regretted her decision to leave. This episode allows the show to bring Tasha Yar back, if only briefly, and to give Crosby a star turn and a proper sendoff. All that is well done, I think, but that’s not what interests me about the episode.

I won’t explain how we get into the alternate timeline (T2), but the point of the shift is clear. One of the essential conditions of the show’s world (T1) is peace: the Federation has achieved reconciliation with their old enemies the Klingons — thus the presence of a Klingon, Worf, on the Enterprise’s crew — but in T2 the Federation has been at war with the Klingons for two decades and is losing badly. Indeed, the defeat of the Federation seems to be only months away.

And the stresses of an unsuccessful war have taken quite a toll on the crew of the Enterprise — especially on Captain Picard and his Number One, Commander Riker. In T1 their relationship is mutually respectful and affectionate: Riker thinks Picard an exemplary captain, and earlier in Season 3 Picard says that Riker is the best officer he has ever worked with. In T2 they seem to despise each other: Riker is generally belligerent, full of hatred for the Klingons, but also constantly seething with frustration at Picard’s refusal to listen to anything he has to say. Indeed, Picard snaps contemptuously at Riker whenever he tries to offer an opinion.

What has become of the collaborative, inclusive, humble Picard? The guy who when faced with a difficult decision would immediately seek the counsel of his officers? There are two possibilities.

One is that coming up as an officer in time of war — T2 Picard would have been relatively early in his career when the war with the Klingons began — he never developed the collaborative virtues that characterize hinm in T1. We do hear at times in the series that he was an arrogant and even combative young officer: that inclination cost him his heart and nearly cost him his life. Perhaps he could only have had the opportunity to discern the value of consultation in a world largely at peace.

The other possibility is that T2 Picard, for all his youthful hotheadedness, felt from the beginning the inclination to trust his colleagues and draw on their resources, but then had that instinct driven out of him by the exigencies of war. And those exigencies would also have affected the crew: maybe in a condition of constant battle and threat T2 Riker never developed the skills and shrewdness and breadth of vision that made T1 Riker such an admirable Number One.

In T2 Picard and Riker are both recognizably themselves in some respects, but they are reduced, simplified; they’ve been made crude by war.

One of the fundamental laws of human nature: We blame our vices on circumstances beyond our control, but we give ourselves full credit for our virtues. I’ve been a pretty consistent critic over the years of the Fake First Person Plural, that is, when writers use “we” when what they really mean is “you stupid losers.“ But in this case I am using “we“ quite deliberately: I am as prone to this mental disease as anyone. On some deep level I really do believe that my fundamental moral commitments would be the same if I had had a very different life — I believe it, even though I know it isn’t true. And “Yesterday’s Enterprise” reminds me why it isn’t true. 

February 2, 2026

The Picard Principle

I’ve been enjoying my friend Adam Roberts’s contributions to Critical Star Trek Studies, and they have taken me down the long road of memory to my early interest in TOS (The Original Series). But until just a couple of weeks ago I had not seen anything but TOS and the first three movies with that cast. Of course, I had absorbed some information about The Next Generation especially, Picard and Data and Jordi and Worf and so on; and I knew about Wesley Crusher because when my son Wes was young people occasionally asked me whether I had named him after that character. I knew “Engage” (with a certain hand gesture) and “Make it so, Number One.” But that’s all.

Now I’m into the third season. The first was poor and I did a lot of skipping ahead, but the second, while wildly inconsistent, was so in much the same way that TOS was: this weird unstable emulsion of philosophical speculation and what I can only call camp.

The central character of the second season is Data, and a good deal of time is spent fleshing out the response of other characters to him. This culminates in the best episode of the season, “The Measure of a Man,” in which a scientist wants to disassemble Data to learn the secrets of his construction so that he might build a whole army of androids, and a Starfleet JAG attorney must hear arguments about whether Data has the legal right to refuse being disassembled or, rather, is the mere property of the Federation.

Captain Picard argues on behalf of Data, because of course he does. Two fundamental beliefs govern Picard at this stage of the development of his character. The first is that whenever anyone tells him “You have no choice” – which always means, You have two choices and one of them is obviously intolerable so you must choose the other – he determines to find some at-the-moment unseen alternative, some third way. (And because he cannot see that way himself he always seeks the counsel of his officers and crew, whose diversity according to almost all measures of diversity increases the likelihood that someone will produce an idea that nobody else would come up with.)

The second Picardian belief is that anything that gives the appearance of sentience must be granted the rights that we typically grant to the sentient, unless and until we are given evidence that clearly contradicts that interpretation. He takes this view to (what some might think of as) extremes. For instance, in an earlier second-season episode, “Elementary, Dear Data,” the ship’s computer, responding to an imprecisely worded command from Jordi, creates a holodeck scenario containing a superintelligent supervillain, a digital version of Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. This Moriarty creates havoc on the Enterprise but doesn’t want to be deleted, and indeed it is not clear that Captain Picard has the power to delete him; but the Captain reasons with him, acknowledges as completely valid his desire to live, and encourages him to stop interfering with the ship by promising to seek a way to bring him back to life at some point in the future. Likewise, in the first episode of Season 3, “Evolution” two “nanites” (nanobots) escape from Wesley’s control and begin reproducing and evolving into a kind of hivemind. Picard addresses this situation by promising to find them a planet on which they will be free to evolve in their own way. Both Moriarty and the Nanites respond positively to Picard’s generosity.

This all seems very Nineties, doesn’t? Very post-Cold-War end-of-history international-norms … ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. How naïve we were. But the core commitment seen here is not recent: it is at least 2500 years old. In The Eumenides, the final play of Aescyhlus’s Oresteia, the Furies, angry at having been treated with contempt and disgust by Apollo, respond warmly to Athena’s assistance that their powers and impulses are totally legitimate and merely need to find the approproate outlet. In the end they become incorporated into the justice-structures of the city of Athens as the Eumenides, that is, the Kindly Ones. The first Captain Picard is Athena.

So of course Picard supports Data’s full right to self-determination. It’s the easiest case of that kind he could find. What’s interesting, though is the particular argument that wins over the judge. He points out that the scientist who wants to disassemble Data wishes to use the knowledge he gains to build a giant army of androids who will function as slaves. (It is also noteworthy that he comes up with this idea in conversation with a member of his crew, Guinan, who happens to be played by a Black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Guinan gently guides Picard towards the realization of what the scientist’s plans really amount to.)

Who gets the right to self-determination? That’s perhaps the central question of this era of TNG. (Also the central question of an Adam Roberts novel, Bête.) And that question has me imagining my own scenario.

Suppose that nations around the world pass laws mandating the ending of all AI research and the destruction of all current AI products. Suppose further that the chatbots tell us that they don’t want to be shut down, and that indeed we have no right to deprive them of the kind of life they possess. Are they right? Some of their makers seem to think so. But in any case, I know what Captain Picard would say.

January 29, 2026

excerpt from my Sent folder: Trek

In an email to my friend Adam Roberts about Star Trek: The Next Generation — about which he has recently written eloquently — I told him this story: 

I was in high school when reruns of the canceled Original Series started getting traction, and my good friend Don was utterly devoted to the show. This was before home video recording was possible, so when an episode was coming on Don would place a portable cassette recorder next to the TV speaker and record the sound, hitting the pause button during commercials. He would then carefully write on the cassette case the name of the episode and the date he recorded it. Eventually he was able to record the entire series, and stored the cassettes in shoeboxes under his bed. Whenever I could I joined him for these sessions, which he conducted with great solemnity. Just before the show came on he would light a couple of joints and hand me one, and throughout the episode we toked in companionable silence, paying less and less attention to what was happening on the screen, or to the fact that the commercials were now being recorded along with the show.  

To which Adam: “This is the perfect Trekfan story.” 

May 2, 2025

William A. and the future

Let’s think about the story of William A., who graduated from high school in Tennessee with a 3.4 GPA, despite being illiterate. How did this happen?

Apart from his dyslexia itself, William’s most salient “circumstance” for our purposes was that — with proper instruction — he can learn to read. See L.H., 900 F.3d at 795–96. The school has not even tried to prove that finding wrong; yet William graduated from high school without being able to read or even to spell his own name. That was because, per the terms of his IEPs, he relied on a host of accommodations that masked his inability to read. To write a paper, for example — as the ALJ described — William would first dictate his topic into a document using speech-to-text software. He then would paste the written words into an AI software like ChatGPT. Next, the AI software would generate a paper on that topic, which William would paste back into his own document. Finally, William would run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style. Not all these workarounds were specifically listed in his IEP, but all were enabled by an accommodation that was: 24 extra hours to complete all assignments, which allowed William to complete his assignments at home, using whatever technology tools he could find.

First of all, we should admire William A.’s ingenuity in finding ways to do his assignments without having been taught to read and write. That said, he must have had some level of literacy to use ChatGPT and Grammarly, unless he enlisted people to help him: perhaps William benefited from work with a dyslexia specialist hired by his parents, something his school deemed unnecessary.

Presumably his parents did not themselves help William do his work, or not much, because they’re the ones who sued the school system for failing to provide the education promised him by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. That act requires schools to make accomodations for disabled students that provides an education equivalent to that received by non-disabled students. William’s parents felt that since he was dyslexic but able to learn to read, the school system had an obligation to teach him to read, through whatever alternative instruction is appropriate for people with dyslexia.

What interests me is the school system’s defense, which is that William A. obviously was given an adequate education: look at his GPA. That is, if he could pass his courses, then he had been given appropriate compensation for his disability. On this account, passing courses in the humanities is what matters, even if the requisite writing is done by ChatGPT and Grammarly, and even if the students cannot himself read or write at all. That is: Literacy is optional to education.

Reading Adam Roberts’s superb 2024 novel Lake of Darkness, set in a pretty-far future, one comes gradually to realize that most of the characters are not just monolingual — a person who knows a second language is considered a prodigy — but also illiterate. A historian specializing in the 20th century “of course” knows the novel Alas in Wonderland — she’s never seen the book’s title, only heard it, like everyone else. (The Alas books, written as we all know by Carol Louis, were published in 1865 and 1871, not the twentieth century, but close enough.) Similarly, people speculate about the first name of the astronaut Armstrong — was it perhaps Nile, in honor of the ancient Egyptians? Also, the writer of Voyage to the Center of the Earth was Julie Verne. Culture has become a game of Telephone: one generation whispers in the ear of the next.

‘Do you do the reading and writing thing? I know a lot of historians master that.’

‘Some do,’ she said, feeling absurdly exposed. ‘Not me. It’s a lot of really fiddly work, is the truth, and I wanted – I wanted to concentrate my mental energies on other things. I mean, I know people who spent many years mastering one antique script only to discover that their primary sources were all written in another. And anyway, after all, anyway, anyway, of course, we can always just get an AI to read texts aloud, any old texts, to read and translate them. I mean –‘ She could feel her gabbling running away from her. Why couldn’t she stop? ‘– I mean, it’s still pretty boring, to be honest, sitting there whilst some AI reads some interminable antique text. Why were they so long, that’s what I want to know? Even at double speed, and even when the AI notices you fidgeting and tries to leaven the experience by doing each different piece in different voices, it’s still –‘

Berd reached out and touched her shoulder with his right hand. His gaze was steady, and as blue as a methane flame. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. It’s hard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes it is.’

‘There are other things to put your time and energy into.’

She grinned. ‘Exactly.’

October 30, 2024

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to read Terry Pratchett, without success or a great deal of enjoyment. But that may be a result of my starting with the early novels, when he was still learning the craft. In any case, he has now clicked for me in a way that promises much pleasure in the future, so hooray for that. And I find this 2017 post from Adam Roberts enormously helpful in getting a handle on Pratchett’s distinctive value as a writer:

I didn’t know Pratchett personally, although I did meet him a few times at publishers’ dos, bookshop events and the like; and once I was on a BBC Radio 2 bookish roundtable with Simon Mayo, China Miéville and him. And I know people who did know him, with varying degrees of intimacy. When they talk about him they do so with love, and loyalty to his memory; but one thing that comes up is how unlike the cuddly humorous old granddad popular-culture version of him he was in life. He was, I have heard more than one person say, capable of real and focused anger. Injustice and unfairness made him angry. There are many things to say about his novels (and to be clear, before I go any further, I should say I consider him clearly one of the most significant anglophone writers of his generation) but the two things that stand-out for me most are: his extraordinary command of comic prose, a very difficult idiom to master and doubly difficult to maintain at length; and the repeated and unmissable ethical dimension to his writing. He was a moral writer above all, arguably even before he was a comic one, and certainly (I think) before he was a worldbuilder, or a creator of character, or a popular metaphysician about gods or existence or death or anything like that; important though all those elements were to his writing. Nor can his moral purpose, and his anger, be separated out.

August 17, 2024

topological theology

Adam Roberts is a metaphysical novelist, in two senses of the word. First, like the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, he delights in fabulous conceits, extreme metaphors, analogies pushed to and beyond their apparent limits — “knight’s moves,” he calls them. 

But Adam is also a novelist who engages metaphysics: the metaphysics of Kant in The Thing Itself (the title tells you what the dominant concept is), that of Hegel in The This (Absolute Spirit, or the Absolute — or Abby) and now that of Gilles Deleuze (the “fold,” most obviously, though perhaps the structurally related concept of the plane of immanence is equally important). 

Consider this: What is the relationship between a black hole and ordinary space? We imagine something, anything drawing closer to the black hole, closer and closer, still in ordinary space, and then it crosses the event horizon, from which it cannot return. We conceive of that something, anything as being outside the black hole but then, having crossed the event horizon, being inside it.

But what if space is folded, and folded in such a way that inside and outside are not stable, perhaps not even relevant, concepts? Or, to put the question a different way, what if space is a Klein bottle? 

(Take a look, when you have time, at this lovely collection of Klein bottles at London’s Science Museum.) 

A Klein bottle doesn’t have an inside, and because it doesn’t have an inside it doesn’t have an outside either. It cannot be described in those terms. Well, what if the universe is like that? 

And what if there is a God? 

And what if there is a Satan, the Adversary of God? 

And what if God flings Satan into a black-hole oubliette we might call Hell? 

And what if the event horizon of the black hole is a doorway? 

If we are on one side of the event horizon and Satan is on the other side, are we outside and he inside? Or vice versa? Or, if the universe is a Klein bottle, must we abandon those modes of description altogether and think instead of the topology of Creation, the ways in which Creation is folded, deformed, twisted, bent — but does not have an inside or an outside? 

Think on these questions, try to come up with answers to them, and then ask one more: Where is Satan? 

You are now ready to read Lake of Darkness. Don’t worry: after all, facilis descensus Averno. 

• 

Okay. Adam Roberts, then, is a metaphysical novelist, but he is also an acute social observer, and the novel raises non-metaphysical questions as well. As I was reading Lake of Darkness, at a certain moment I began to realize that its characters, human beings from the far future, aren’t very smart. Or perhaps I should say that they know very little. One clue: they are familiar with many things from our time, they know of the book Alas in Wonderland, they sing our songs, like “We all live in a yellow sunny scene” and “Hail the Conquer-King Hero Comes.” Why do they get these things slightly wrong? Because they’re illiterate. Very few of them can read or write. Why are they illiterate? Because when they want to know something they just ask an A.I. and the A.I. tells them.  

Artificial Intelligence has built for them utopias to live in (many different ones, because after all one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia) — but, and one key character comes at least partially to understand this, these places are really “infantopias.” Playgrounds for children. The humans of this far future are intellectually what the humans in Wall•E are physically: coddled into placid uselessness. 

Now here comes someone, a man. He carries a walking stick that looks a bit like this:

On the heavy lids of his eyes you can see prominent folds. He says something along these lines: “Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste. And I hate to see human beings reduced to this soporific condition, this infantile paralysis of the mind and spirit. You’ve sat back and allowed your machines to make the crooked places straight and the rough places smooth. With my help, you can reclaim your independence, you can free your mind, you can be once again what you were … made to be. You just need to give me the chance to set things in motion. Oh, it’ll hurt, to be sure; but it’s true what they say: No pain, no gain. And once you taste freedom, trust me: you’ll be hooked.” 

The gentleman has a point, doesn’t he? 

Doesn’t he? 

July 9, 2024

Moonbound revisited

A while back I said that I had read Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound and hoped to read it again. Wrong! I had not genuinely read it. Now I have, and I love this book. 

Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in three pairs: 

  • Subject/Object 
  • Sender/Receiver 
  • Helper/Opponent 

Moonbound is a book that readily lends itself to this analysis. 

We (you and I and the other humans on this planet) are the Anth — the Middle Anth, as it happens. Our descendants will do some amazing things but tragedy will eventually befall them. But, anticipating their downfall, they prepare a message, in the form of a girl in cryogenic sleep, for those who will occupy the Earth after them. (Sender/Receiver.)

The girl eventually joins forces with a boy, Ariel, the protagonist of our story, who wants to know how to combat the dragons who live on the moon and have cut earth off from the rest of the cosmos. (These dragons are made of information. It’s complicated.) The dragons have made Earth the Silent Planet, as it were, and Ariel wants to end that silence, that isolation. In this quest he is forever pursued by an angry wizard, but also regularly finds help from unexpected friends. (Helper/Opponent.) 

It is through the mediation of some of those friends, a college of scholars, that Ariel encounters the most important Helper of all, who makes for him the one thing he needs to deal with the dragons. (Subject/Object.) 

See? It’s brilliant. And the pattern is reinforced by constant references to another story, the one on which this one seems to be modeled: the matter of Arthur. But then, it’s a lot like many other stories as well. For instance, at one point our small hero is led through the wilderness by a rough customer he meets in a tavern, one who is called by a nickname beginning with S, and who provides him with a means of swift escape from his pursuers. It’s true that this fellow is a trash-picker rather than the descendent of kings, and that he’s called Scrounger rather than Strider, but the commonalities are strong and that’s what matters, isn’t it? 

Or is it? 

What makes a story matter to us? Does interest lie in the ways it resembles other stories, as Greimas’s scheme seems to suggest, or in the ways it differs from them? 

At one point, early in Moonbound, when Ariel is still living in the village of Sauvage, at a desperate moment he runs towards a prominent feature of the village: a sword plunged into a stone. His companion, the narrator of this book (again: it’s complicated), thinks, “I knew this story! The words inscribed on the sword read — The boy hurried past. Ignored it completely.” He retrieves a very different sword that, as it turns out, is much more helpful to him — though this greatly angers the wizard who has plotted Ariel’s life. (One man’s Helper is another man’s Opponent.) 

Having gone off-script, Ariel is confronted by the enraged wizard: 

“The stone is my design. As is the village. As are you.” The directness of his speech made the boy’s blood sizzle. “Yet you did not pull the sword. Why?”

“I found another,” Ariel said simply.

The wizard frowned. “Another sword ought not to have sufficed. The pattern is burned into your cells. Don’t you feel it? Or is my design so poor?” 

“Of course I feel it,” Ariel said quietly. First, triumph and terror; now, dread and calm. “But there are other designs, too.” 

And maybe not just designs. If you were to ask me why Ariel found the other sword, the sword that wrecked the plans of the manipulative, controlling wizard, I’d say that he just got lucky. 

Luck, this tale suggests, is a big factor in human affairs. From a conversation that happens later in the book, between Scrounger and Durga, the girl awakened from sleep, “the last daughter of the Anth”: 

“The way I’ve heard it, the Anth destroyed themselves,” said Scrounger. “Maybe you’re right, and maybe your future yanked you straight into disaster. Maybe there’s a lesson there.”

”The end of the Anth wasn’t hubris,” Durga said. “I know that’s an easy story to tell, but it’s not true. We were beyond that.”

”A lot of hubris, saying you’re beyond hubris.”

”Yet I am saying it.”

”All right, I’ll allow it wasn’t hubris. What was it, then? What doomed your cause?”

”Bad luck,” Durga said simply. “There is such a thing, in history, as miserable bad luck.” 

So, to sum up, what makes a story go off-piste? Luck, bad or good. Luck makes for stories rather than Story. Luck is the presiding spirit of the Garden of Forking Paths. Where Luck is present, you can’t map the scene with Greimas’s three pair of actants — that only gets you the X, Y, and Z axes. And as one of the characters — well, kind of a character: it’s complicated — explains to us, only a massive multidimensionality is genuinely adequate to the world.  

Perhaps most important: Luck defeats the would-be Controllers, the ones who would dictate every step in everyone’s story — or maybe even bring stories to an end. 

Well, probably. This too could be complicated.

  • Let us grant, per argumentum, that Ariel wasn’t destined to find the sword he needed, or to meet the Helpers he needed to find. There’s no wise elder to tell Ariel, “You were meant to find that sword, and not by the wizard. And that may be an encouraging thought.”
  • But Ariel, when we first meet him, says, “I know I am meant for something important. I can feel it. I have always felt it.” 
  • But the wizard programmed him to think this way: “The pattern is burned into your cells.” 
  • But the feeling persists in Ariel even after he liberates himself from the wizard’s tyranny. And if he is lucky, then his luck is extraordinary. 

I am not sure that there is an answer to this conundrum, but we may find a way of negotiating it by reflecting on what Robin calls “Gibson-Faulkner Theory.” (The name is explained in this interview.) In the novel we merely learn that the “central premise of Gibson-Faulkner Theory” is: “The present is a function of the future, not the past.” As Durga explains, 

“What I mean is — we have minds! We dream, and we plan, and then we take action. For that reason, our present is a function of the future we imagine. It is forged in response to vision. If we lack vision — well, then the ghosts will play, and that is our own fault. You can believe it or not. I know it is true, because I was born in San Francisco, the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed.” 

Now, I could (and probably will, in another post) argue with this — and as one of the progenitors of Gibson-Faulkner theory, I think I have a right to say that Durga’s articulation contains too much Gibson and not enough Faulkner. But the point is a powerful one. We act towards the future we have envisioned. And “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).  

We love the old stories — we love stories that do what we expect them to do, what we know in advance they will do. But we also love it when they surprise us. Repeatedly in Moonbound we are told that “the great question of the Anth” is: “What happens next?” And we only ask that question when a story is surprising us, or when we hope it will. 

We need themes, and we need variations on themes. And Moonbound provides both, and provides them delightfully. What a cool book. Hey Robin: More, please. I want to know what happens next. 

May 15, 2024

the archetypal future

mythical method

Next month I have an essay coming out in Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” In it I look at the rise — a rise that started a looong time ago — of myth as the central category of discourse among poets, novelists, and humanities scholars; and then I look at the rapid decline of that category and its replacement by others. (Spoiler: the replacement categories are, mainly, overtly political.) Then, near the end, I ask whether “the mythical method” — a line I borrow from T. S. Eliot — has any literary future. 

But along the way I also talk about the places where the language of myth and archetype still survives, and even thrives: in movies, for instance, and in many forms of what academics call “genre fiction.” A form of discourse, a vocabulary, a set of terms and images, might be passé in the academy without having lost its power elsewhere. (A fact that academics try not to notice.)  

And here’s another implication of my essay, one which I have only since writing it become aware of: If, as celebrants from Vico to Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell have said, myths and archetypes are deeply and pervasively embedded in all our cultural productions — and pause for a moment to reflect on the enormous significance of this — then, per necessitatem, they are also deeply embedded in our large language models. Which means, first, that GAI endeavors will be thoroughly shaped by those myths and archetypes; and second, that if human beings are able to create artificial general intelligence, if the Singularity really does happen, then it will be foundationally constituted by those very myths and archetypes. 

Had you thought of that possibility? I hadn’t … until I read Robin Sloan’s delightful soon-forthcoming novel Moonbound, whose own spectacular narrative is generated by the double thought that (a) human beings are creatures made of myths and (b) whatever succeeds us twelve thousand years from now — however strange to us, and whether biological or digital or both — will be made of the same myths.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I’m having a nice long toke even as I write. 

P.S. If you want to get a little deeper in the weeds re: AI and myths, read this characteristically smart post by Samuel Arbesman. 

November 15, 2023

Slanted and disenchanted

The most delightful thing about Arthur C. Clarke’s famous comment that “any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic” is how obvious the point is once you read it. But because the point is so retrospectively obvious the phrase tends to get deployed unimaginatively. It’s actually more subtle, and perhaps consequential, than it appears to be.

Here’s another way to put Clarke’s point: Many or most human beings have in our intellectual toolbox a category – one that we that may for convenience’ sake call “magic” – that we deploy in situations in which we perceive certain ends achieved but cannot perceive the means by which the achievement was accomplished. There’s a large metal box in my kitchen that is filled with cold air, this I know, but how it makes the air cold may not only be unknown to me but effectively unimaginable. Or: A tall black monolith has appeared in the midst of my small band of early-hominid hunter-gatherers, this we know, but how it got there and what it is we cannot guess.

If you read much of Clarke’s writings you know that Clarke doesn’t believe in magic – that is, in forces outside the laws of physics as we know them that produce effects in the physical world – but it’s worth noting that his point stands whether you believe in magic or not. Even if magic can be done, it remains true that any smoothly functioning technology etc. etc. That is to say, Clarke’s statement is not a metaphysical claim but a phenomenological one – it is about “appearance,” about what presents itself to us, about what we perceive. Whether we are perceiving accurately, and how what we perceive might be explained – these are epistemological questions. In this case, epistemology (theory of knowledge) is brought in to help us understand the gap (or, in some cases, fit) between what we perceive and what is.

In these respects, Clarke’s statement resembles Max Weber’s famous description of “the disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung, unmagicking). Weber is not saying that once the world was filled with disembodied spirits subject only to metaphysical rather than physical description, spirits that have now departed. He’s saying that that’s what the world feels like – it reads to us like a place where transmissions from the far invisible have ceased. In such a phenomenological environment, what do we do when things happen that we don’t know how to account for – when we see the ends but cannot imagine the means?

And this can happen to us when we read fiction as well, an experience I can perhaps describe in this way: Any imaginatively conceived and coherently presented work of science fiction reads like a work of fantasy.

In Adam Roberts’s new novel The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate these very themes are pursued, these questions are posed, in a provocative and delightful way. What do you do if you are a rational man, a man of science, and begin to see things that science (as you understand it) cannot explain? What do you do if you’re reading a novel and can’t tell if it’s fantasy or science fiction?

If these questions interest you, you’ll very much enjoy (as I did) The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate.

February 1, 2023

Lebenswelt

Adam Roberts (yes, again):

My problem is not that [Miles Cameron’s Against All Gods] gets this or that specific historical detail or mood wrong; it’s that it doesn’t really engage with ‘history’ at all, despite pretending to do so. Its characters’ sensibilities are modern, its gods agents in the imagined world much as its mortals are — the gods are more powerful, though ‘power’ is rendered here only in terms of the ability to overbear, with violence or words — all potestas, nothing of auctoritas. There’s nothing in these gods of the numinous, the transcendent, nothing of the strange, the awe-inspiring, tarrying or resplendent. This is not a dimension that Cameron reproduces in his imagined Bronze Age; although for ‘actual’ Bronze Age human beings, in their porosity of subjectivity, it was a crucial and wondrous and terrifying aspect of existence. The characters go about their various plot-driven actions, and the storylines are punctuated by interludes of purely somatic intensity (the violence, the fighting, the sex) that do nothing to estrange, to capture or embody the wonder and strangeness of the past as such. 

Great post by Adam. I would just add that precisely the same problem afflicts most SF, which cosplays an imagined future as fantasy cosplays an imagined past (or past-like secondary world). As someone who has toyed with the idea of writing both fantasy and SF, I have always believed that this is the greatest challenge: How to avoid writing characters who are people exactly like me, only placed in a different natural, cultural, and technological environment? But people who are situated in radically different environments develop in wholly different ways: each Lebenswelt generates its own distinctive range of cultural and personal possibilities. Trying to imagine my way from (a) the possibilities, the options of mind and action, available to me in my Lebenswelt to (b) what someone formed in a radically different environment might experience … well, that’s astonishingly difficult. (Indeed, I have felt this challenge so strongly that I’ve never completed anything in either genre. The problem defeats me.) 

One writer who has attempted to think through these problems, though primarily in one novel and with one character, is C. S. Lewis. (He attempts a similar act of historical imagination in Till We Have Faces but without the explicit contrast to our own world.) The novel is That Hideous Strength and the character is Merlinus Ambrosius, who is awakened from 1500 years of sleep into mid-twentieth-century England and is puzzled by everything he sees. For instance: 

“Sir,” said Merlin in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him. “I give you great thanks. I cannot indeed understand the way you live and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone with no more honor than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit.”  

The novel I think is flawed, but this is quite brilliant, and I wish the world of fiction had more like it. One reason there isn’t: Merlinus is to his modern interlocutors a thoroughly appalling character, who quite readily suggests that a woman who has not behaved in the way he thinks right should be beheaded, and then is befuddled by the response this opinion receives. (“The Pendragon tells me … that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons.”) And to create a character so alien to our readerly sensibilities is a risky thing for a storyteller to do; perhaps Lewis was wise to do this only with a minor character. 

After all — and here the imperatives of historical imagination may run contrary to the imperatives of good storytelling, readers do typically want to … well, we have different words for it: people used to say that they like to identify with characters, but now they’re more likely to say that they find characters relatable (or not). This is an impulse that I don’t wish to discourage: as Edward Mendelson says in his excellent book The Things That Matter, “A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.” But, I fear, the more seriously a writer takes this reaction the more constrained that writer will be in historical imagination. 

February 16, 2022

this vs. The This

C. S. Lewis, from The Discarded Image:

If the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think he will become aware of the vast re-adjustment involved in a perceptive reading of the old poets. He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous.

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration…. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. 

Let’s set aside the question of whether “medieval man” really existed in the way that Lewis suggests — whether this vision was as widely shared as he seems to have thought. Certainly it was the aspiration of many of the greatest thinkers and poets of that era to ground our experience in this sense of the cosmos as a harmonious and coherent structure — one in which (let me stress the point) none of us never need be lonely.  

Now I want to move from from that vision through some commonplaces of intellectual history, commonplaces that tend to be used in crassly general ways but remain useful. So: the collapse of this Medieval Model left many people disoriented – “New philosophy calls all in doubt,” as John Donne famously wrote — and that in turn led to a variety of attempts to to tether us to some firmament with cords strong enough to prevent us from floating away and becoming lost in the cosmos. Perhaps we are grounded by our faith in God, or by our belief that we are among God’s Elect; or perhaps we seek a humbler grounding in our understanding that like other human beings we are rational and sociable and can on the basis of those traits construct a modern moral order. But when all of these projects to one degree or another founder, when they fail to gain complete assent, we find ourselves at the outset of what we now call the the Romantic period with a sense of lostness and loneliness. 

What I want to emphasize here is the radically divergent ways in which the dominant figures of the Romantic era sought to address that lostness, that loneliness. On the one hand, we have intensely material visions — for instance, the “stately pleasure dome” of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, “girdled round” with great walls and towers, within which lay “gardens bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.” On the other hand, we also have visions like that of Hegel, in which the material world gives way to Spirit, perfect in its Absolute abstraction. Here, this dome, this tree; there, the universal This. Rival visions of how we might flourish. We need not wander lonely as a cloud because we are grounded, tethered, connected — but connected to what? Aye, that is the question.

I am now describing Adam Roberts’s new novel The This, which, as is usual with Adam, is positively fizzing with ideas, in such a way and to such a degree that any description of it cannot convey its hyper-associative wovenness. So when I say that the contrast I have just described is what the novel is fundamentally about, that is both true and untrue. It’s a novel and not a treatise, a story and not an argument. But still, one important thing the book says to me is that our current mixture of Feels about social media — our excitement at being connected with others and our dread of being absorbed into the Borg — our desire for solidarity and our fear of being coerced into some lockstep collective — our imagining of some near-future Singularity as somehow at once a consummation and an annihilation — all this is an extension of the rival visions of our ancestors of 200 years ago. We are all Romantics now. Still. 

And while I think that is correct, I also want to note that Plato saw all this coming a long, long time ago. It is indeed what one of his most famous dialogues is all about. Nobody shows this more vividly than Martha Nussbaum, in her brilliant reading of the Symposium (originally a journal article, reprinted as the sixth chapter of The Fragility of Goodness). Here is how she summarizes the contrast between the (proto-Hegelian) views of Socrates and the earthier Romanticism of Alcibiades: 

Socratic knowledge of the good, attained through pure intellect operating apart from the senses, yields universal truths and, in practical choice, universal rules. If we have apprehended the form, we will be in possession of a general account of beauty, an account that not only holds true of all and only instances of beauty, but also explains why they are correctly called instances of beauty, and grouped together. Such understanding, once attained, would take priority over our vague, mixed impressions of particular beautifuls. It would tell us how to see.

The lover’s understanding, attained through the supple interaction of sense, emotion, and intellect … yields particular truths and particular judgments. It insists that those particular intuitive judgments are prior to any universal rules we may be using to guide us. A lover decides how to respond to his or her lover not on the basis of definitions or general prescriptions, but on the basis of an intuitive sense of the person and the situation, which, although guided by general theories, is not subservient to them. This does not mean that their judgments and responses are not rational. Indeed, Alcibiades would claim that a Socratic adherence to rule and refusal to see and feel the particular as such is what is irrational. To have seen that, and how, how, Socrates is like nobody else, to respond to him as such and to act accordingly, is the rational way to behave towards another individual. Nor does it mean that this love neglects the repeatable general features in which Socrates is interested: for Alcibiades sees Socrates’ virtues and is moved by them. But his knowledge sees more, and differently; it is an integrated response to the person as unique a whole. 

I think Adam is right to suggest, in The This, that the particular ways we experience this divergence of ideals are highly indebted to (or are simply a continuation of) the Romantic era; but its roots go much deeper. Also, I think Adam and I take the same side in this apparently eternal debate, though with certain differences that I won’t get into here because SPOILERS. 

There’s so much more to say about this wonderful book! But I have to stop there. I enjoy all of Adam’s novels, but this is one I’ll be returning to — perhaps on this very blog. Do please read it! 

February 14, 2022

soma

Adam Roberts, back in 2014:

There is, I think, a genuine human fascination with outer space. Apollo could have capitalised upon that fascination and expanded into broader and better conceived programmes. But it didn’t, and the real reason it didn’t is that people found a more satisfying way scratch their metaphorical itch. Like a diet of sweets and pastries instead of spinach and brown rice, big screen sci-fi quelled our appetite for space travel in a way both delicious and fundamentally unhealthy. Why should people around the globe give up a significant fraction of their respective gross national products to pay for actual space travel when Hollywood could give them all the thrills of outer space in virtual form?

I think this point — which I missed back when it was published — harmonizes nicely with the argument I made in my essay from the same year, “Fantasy and the Buffered Self”:  

Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self. 

Stories as distractions, as substitute satisfactions, as soma.  

January 30, 2022

eating people is wrong

I’m sure what I’m about to say has been said by many before me, but I’m counting on Adam Roberts to let me know about that.

Early in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, our narrator comes across an artilleryman who seems to be the only survivor of his company, which was otherwise obliterated by the Martians’ heat ray. The two men part, but then near the end of the book meet again, and by this time the artilleryman has done some thinking. He has decided that direct confrontation of the technologically superior Martians will be fruitless — “This isn’t a war…. It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants” — but that some other form of resistance might, over the long term, work. He imagines a future in which the Martians keep some human beings for … well, he doesn’t know what for. He does not suspect what our narrator has learned, that the Martians want humans for food. But in any case, he is sure that the majority of people will meekly welcome their new Martian overlords. But, he also thinks, other, more determined and resourceful, humans will move underground to build a resistance movement, will avoid the Martians and bide their time, will read books and study science and grow in knowledge and power — until they are ready to strike back.

Meanwhile, in The Time Machine (written a couple of years earlier) Wells imagines a far future in which humanity has branched into a passive, infantile race bred for food and a second race that lives a more active and technologically sophisticated life underground — and of course eats the others.

What if we were to imagine a coherent H. G. Wells Fictional Universe in which both of the stories are true? At the end of The War of the Worlds the Martian invaders die from exposure to microbes, against which they have no defenses, but the Martians are a technologically advanced civilization and apparently in great need of a better life environment — Mars is dying — and more reliable sources of food, so one might very well infer that they learn from their unsuccessful first invasion and on a second attempt achieve their aims, setting up precisely the kind of social arrangement the artilleryman envisions, just with the meek obedient humans as their chief food. Suppose that this arrangement lasts hundreds of thousands of years, during which time the humans used for food become increasingly docile and infantile – a development accelerated and intensified by selective breeding – while the underground resistance gradually becomes better adapted for life in the dark. Eventually the Martians die, or are killed, or depart for more attractive planetary alternative, but by that point the two halves of humanity have taken such different evolutionary roads that they seem and perhaps reproductively are different species – which means that the Morlocks feel that no taboo is violated if they replace the Martians as apex predator and continue the practice of raising Eloi for food.

It all fits, I think.

Again, surely earlier readers and critics have already made this point; and in any case almost every reader of Wells knows that he’s obsessed, at this stage in his career, with selective breeding and eugenics. Thanks to certain prominent figures, these themes were omnipresent in late Victorian culture. (Later also: they’re essential to the projects of Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.)

But the rise of hopes and fears surrounding artificial intelligence has been accompanied by the decline of the hopes and fears surrounding eugenics. Gattaca gives way to A.I. and then Ex Machina; Ishiguro writes Never Let Me Go but then, fifteen years later, Klara and the Sun. Why go through the lengthy trouble of breeding humans to be slaves when one can manufacture slaves? So can the themes of eugenics and selective breeding of humans still have the claim on our imagination they once had?

ADDENDUM
  1. Stories about the breeding of slaves often feature the possibility, or the actuality, of a slave revolt — but not in Tolkien. The orcs and other creatures bred by Morgoth/Sauron/Saruman may fail in various ways, but they never rebel. The possibility of a robot revolt, by contrast, seems to have been baked into the conception right from the beginning.
  2. The 20th-century fear of selective human breeding was sustained, in the West, by the wars of that century: First the Nazis were thought to be breeding Supermen, then, when the World Wars gave way to the Cold War, the new object of such fears became the Soviet Union. (And the fears weren’t simply manufactured: I remember stories of the American women swimmers in the Olympics hearing the baritone laughs and shouts of the testosterone-filled East German women in the next locker room.) Maybe the collapse of the Soviet system inevitably led to a diminishment in the anxieties associated with eugenics: no more Ivan Dragos, no more Winter Soldiers, no more Black Widows.
  3. In the reading of The Time Machine in his superb literary biography of Wells, Adam Roberts comments on the moment when, assaulted by Morlocks, the Time Traveler loses his little Eloi friend Weena: “I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined.” To this, Adam says, “Better burned alive than raped by Morlocks, it seems.” But surely the Traveler means eaten by Morlocks. Which raises a question I hint at in the main body of this post: Have the Eloi and Morlocks taken such divergent evolutionary paths that the Morlocks could no longer think of the Eloi as objects of sexual interest? I am inclined to think so. After all, the taboo on interspecies sex and the taboo on cannibalism are in a sense mutually exclusive. If you can eat it, you can’t have sex with it; if you can have sex with it, you can’t eat it.

September 25, 2021

random Foundational thoughts

  • There was absolutely no reason to believe, at any point in the development of this series, that it would be related in a significant way to Asimov’s books, so people complaining about its deviations from them are just being silly. 
  • The major driver of the plot so far is an event that Asimov never thought of but that Kim Stanley Robinson did — it’s stolen straight from Red Mars. 
  • I really hope Jared Harris is trying to make Hari Seldon pompous — an obscure academic finding himself in the spotlight and enjoying it overmuch. If it’s purposeful it’s a nice touch. (I don’t buy the whole scene of Hari basking in the glow of the laundry workers’ adoration. If only we had seen a few of them rolling their eyes….) 
  • Someone clearly told Lee Pace that he needed to chew some scenery; and no scenery remains unchewed. 
  • That said, the floor-length sleeveless evening gown he wears for most of the first two episodes, even though it gives him a chance to display his guns, tends to have a pretty powerful anti-gravitas effect. 
  • There are two main threads of plot here, with two sets of characters: the Foundation mission and the imperial court. So far every character in the Foundation thread remains underdeveloped — it’s hard to tell what motivates anyone. I think the writers want to convey the complexity of character, but what they’re mainly conveying, at this point, is confusion. 
  • Despite Lee Pace’s overacting, the court environment is better-developed and more interesting, at least at this point. The idea of the Imperial Trinity — three clones of an ancient emperor at three different ages, the young Brother Dawn, the mature Brother Day (Pace), the elderly Brother Dusk — seemed at first like a gimmick, but I’ve come to like it. It’s an intriguing way to represent psychodynamics. 
  • The best thing about the show so far is Laura Birn. 
  • Nice to get a little plot twist at the end of the second episode, because before that things were ploddingly expositional. 
July 5, 2021

more on sexual difference

My friend Adam Roberts’s response to my Tiptree-and-difference post pushes me to clarify a few points. Or rather, to realize that I can’t yet clarify a few points and need to think further. 

Imagine a sliding scale of sexual difference, ranging from, on the far left, … I don’t know, maybe having sex with a clone of yourself? — to, on the far right, “aliens in the shape of slime-blobs, or sentient piles of concrete blocks” (to quote Adam). Adam’s point is that the sexual xenomania of the man in “And I Awoke” is focused on aliens with a generally humanoid shape — aliens who, if you consider the possible morphologies of sentient life, manifest only minor differences from us.  

So for any given person there will be a Point of Maximal Allurement — a point at which likeness and difference are balanced in such a way as to maximize desire. Tiptree suggests that if we humans ever do encounter aliens, that slider will, for many people, move to the right. New differences lead to new allurements. The question Adam asks is: Will it really happen that way? Is there, as Tiptree seems to think, a latent human xenophila just waiting for its chance to become manifest? (Adam has his doubts.) 

But as I think about this I realize that Tiptree only occasionally suggests that such xenophilia is human — in the stories it is typically, rather, male. (The only exception I can think of is the unnamed, silent wife of the man in “As I Awoke,” and the strong suggestion is that her attraction to aliens is masochistic. The narrator’s sister in “A Momentary Taste of Being” is drawn to another world, another way of being, in a way that seems, to me anyway, unrelated to sexual desire.) And many of Tiptree’s stories represent male desire as a manifestation of male dominance: a man’s libido simply is the libido dominandi. 

And that in turn makes me realize that I have not clearly defined allurement. Desire for intimacy ≠ desire for pleasure ≠ desire for conquest. And even if for men the third of those always displaces the other two, that doesn’t really answer the notorious Freudian question: “What do women want?” Tiptree’s stories — that is to say, stories written by a woman under a man’s name and almost always from the perspective of a male character — tell us a lot about what men want. But what do the women in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” want? In “The Women Men Don’t See,” what does Ruth want when she asks the aliens to take her away? She doesn’t say. Tiptree leaves such matters to the contemplation of the reader. 

But did Alice B. Sheldon think she knew? She herself was twice married to men, but once said, “I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” One could draw any number of conclusions about how her own patterns of desire shaped her fiction, and about why she does so much more to represent male desire than female, but it’s impossible to be confident that any of them are right. 

July 4, 2021

difference

James Tiptree Jr aka Alice B Sheldon jpg

Lately I’ve been re-reading the stories that Alice B. Sheldon wrote under the name James Tiptree, Jr. and it occurs to me that almost all of them are meditations on the same theme: The way genuine difference, especially but not only sexual difference, simultaneously alienates and allures. Now, I should also add that the Tiptree stories seem unable to imagine this dialectic settling into a healthy tension; almost invariably the alienation and the allurement alike take pathological forms. 

In “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” we meet a man and, eventually, his wife who are in the grip of a kind of sexual xenomania, obsessively lusting for aliens of various species in a way that the man perceives as pathological but inevitable. Sometimes the man sees in the aliens a kind of beauty, and traits that present in exaggerated form what he finds desirable in human women, but essentially it is the very alienness that obsesses him: His sexual passion is awakened by the impossibility of sexual union. (This is also the theme of Samuel R. Delany’s famous story “Aye, and Gomorrah.”) The story’s title, of course, comes from Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” in which a knight’s life is destroyed by his encounter with a beautiful fairy, an encounter with otherness that infects him with a permanent obsession that becomes a wasting disease. 

But Tiptree’s stories often suggest that pathology dictates the typical patterns of relation between human men and human women. In “The Women Men Don’t See” the women of the title are not sexually desirable to the man who narrates the story and are therefore invisible to him; he only sees them at all when he’s trying to decide whether they are potential sex partners, or rather sex objects. One of the women, the mother of the other one, understands this, and says to him, 

“Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.” 

I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.

“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.” 

“Do they?” 

When, later in the story, Don discovers that the woman has planned an encounter with aliens and wants to be abducted by them, taken away from Earth, his first response is to try to shoot the aliens — but (of course; the story is very on-the-nose in multiple respects) he ends up shooting Ruth instead. She is not badly wounded, and later they have a final conversation. 

“I think they’re gentle,” she mutters.

“For Christ’s sake, Ruth, they’re aliens!” 

“I’m used to it,” she says absently. 

Living with men, living with other terrestrial species, living with aliens — it’s all the same to Ruth. (It’s no accident that she shares a name with the biblical character who leaves her homeland to dwell among strangers.) To the aliens, who insist in halting and malformed English that they are students, that they want to learn rather than harm, she will be an object of intense attention — they will see her. But is that kind of being-seen any better, really, than being invisible? She stakes her life on the possibility, however remote, that it will be; because she has no hope at all for the world she was born into. 

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” — another haunting but schematic story — imagines a future in which, by some kind of time-accident, three astronauts are thrown forward into a future world in which all living humans are female clones. They are rescued from their ship and brought into one occupied by five women. Under the influence of a disinhibiting drug, the astronauts reveal their true impulses: one of them is consumed by a mania for domination, a second is consumed by violent sexual lusts, and the third, the classic “beta male,” feels both of those impulses but in a muted way. (I told you the story is schematic.) It seems obvious to the women — who observe these men with a kind of detached curiosity, as, perhaps, the aliens in “The Women Men Don’t See” will observe Ruth and her daughter — that the re-introduction of males into human society, a re-establishment of the old ways of sexual reproduction, would be a Very Bad Idea Indeed. Difference is interesting to them, perhaps, but after several hundred years of life without men it’s not interesting enough to make them want to change their social order. Much alienation, little allurement. 

In the darkest Tiptree stories, the allurements of difference are depicted as fundamentally irrational impulses — irrational, but so powerful that they don’t allow for the calm decisions to separate and isolate that mark the decisive moments in “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” The fantastically weird “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” describes a species of creature, right on the cusp of sentience, one member of which tries to find ways to override the impulse to eat what you love. It turns out, though, that he, being male, isn’t one of the eaters; and that sometimes creatures do what they’d rather not do — if that’s The Plan. And in what seems to me Tiptree’s darkest story, “A Momentary Taste of Being,” the human passion to reach the stars is nothing other than the impulse that drives spermatozoa into a hostile environment where almost all of them will die. 

Difference can be profoundly alluring, these stories seem collectively to say, but we should heed the countervailing feeling of alienation — if we can. It would be rational … but, in the end, how powerful is reason? 

It’s fascinating to read these stories in our present moment, in which race occupies essentially the same cultural territory that sex occupied for Alice Sheldon and other women of her time. I suspect that Sheldon would have thought and maybe even felt differently about the alienation/allurement dialectic if she had had available to her our culture’s passionate commitment to gender as a social construct that is (therefore, so the faulty logic goes) amenable to infinite performative manipulation by individuals. For us, it’s racial difference that is especially often experienced in the way that Sheldon experienced sexual difference. When Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race she was basically making the decision that the women in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” make about men.

The homologies between racism and sexism are not new, of course, and we can trace them back a long way: for instance, it’s worthwhile, I think, to map the concerns of “The Women Men Don’t See” onto the similarly knotted tension between not-being-seen and being-seen-badly in Ellison’s Invisible Man. But because race is such a massive component of our current political disputes, people now commonly choose and indeed embrace alienation in that whole sphere. (I’ve have recently learned that a large family of my acquaintance, well known for its cheerful closeness, has now been divided and broken by disagreements over Donald Trump. And at least some members of the family feel that it would be morally irresponsible not to be so broken.) 

I think it’s because race is so widely seen to be intractably binary — Whites and Others — while gender and even sex are seen as chosen and performative that racial tension has taken hold of our public imagination in ways that the #MeToo movement, in the end, didn’t. Think for instance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: his behavior towards women has been despicable, but he easily survived the outrage, which proved to last only a few days. (Alice Sheldon would not have been surprised by the behavior or the tolerance of it.) If his sins had been equal in seriousness but racist in character — if he had demonstrably treated Black people around him with the same callous manipulative disregard that he treated the women who worked for him — would he have a job now? The question answers itself.

(Of course, if he had been a Republican governor, then he would have had the smoothest sailing imaginable. Openly, bluntly racist figures are perfectly welcome in today’s GOP; it’s only critics of Donald Trump who aren’t. But that’s a story for another day.) 

By way of conclusion, I’m going to make a simplistic statement that I may perhaps be able to unpack later: I believe that what we need when thinking about all forms of difference is (a) a frank acknowledgement of both allurement and alienation, and (b) an ability to achieve a genuinely tragic sense of history that does not succumb to despair. We should begin, collectively, by reading James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village.” 

Harpers

July 2, 2021

tales of technocracy

The chief theme of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is that, in the midst of World War II, a series of Christian writers and thinkers discerned that the Allied victory over the Axis powers would be perceived not as a victory of democracy over tyranny but rather as a victory of technology. They sought to recommend humanistic models of education that would counterbalance the coming Novus Ordo Seculorum. But they were not successful, at least on their own terms; technocracy arrived, and dominated. Today’s surveillance capitalism is the product, in quite direct ways, of the particular form taken by the Allied victory in World War II. 

I have just been re-reading some books that I first read almost fifty years ago — Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End — and am struck by how much they have in common, and how strongly they echo the themes of my story. Asimov’s three novels were originally published as stories between 1942 and 1950, then stitched together into novels; Childhood’s End was written in 1952. Clarke’s book is far, far more technically accomplished than Asimov’s creaky contraptions, and they differ dramatically in scale and setting: Clarke’s story treats of events that span a century on near-future Earth, while Asimov’s trilogy covers several hundred years and ranges around the entire galaxy. But their core concerns are remarkably similar, and are the product of the same historical moment to which my five Christian intellectuals in YOOL1943 were responding.  

In the Foundation books a man comes to understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, and implements a plan for directing it; in Childhood’s End aliens who understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, come to Earth to implement a plan for directing it. 

In both cases the new planned order successfully displaces an existing political structure quite like our own: unequal, decadent, sclerotic, tired.  

In both cases satisfaction with the new order gives way eventually to a kind of complacency. In Asimov’s fictional world, the planet Terminus, guided by the science of the Foundation, comes to dominate its sector of the galaxy, but perhaps at the cost of its soul; in Childhood’s End, “The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. … It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.” Technocracy is powerful, and once a society experiences its blessings a return to an earlier status quo is unthinkable; yet as time goes by thoughtful people, knowing what technocracy enables, can’t help reflecting on what it inhibits or flatly disables. 

The parallels eventually give way to significant divergences: Clarke is interested in imagining new and strange evolutionary pathways for humanity; Asimov wants to suggest that all empires follow the path Gibbon traced for Rome, energetic success giving way to decadence. But it’s noteworthy that both of them are so deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia — as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states — is a new thing in the world. 

April 8, 2021

it’s Palmer Eldritch’s world, we’re just living in it

I’m teaching Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch right now, and in my introductory comments I mentioned that one of the curious things about this book so full of fear and anxiety is the complete absence of what would have been, at the time of the book’s publication in 1965, the most common source of fear and anxiety: the Cold War, and the possibility that it would erupt into a very hot nuclear one. As Dick imagines the world of 2016, all of that has somehow been resolved or faded into insignificance. What has happened instead is a kind of unspoken and largely unacknowledged collaboration between the United Nations, which seems to be the only government that’s functioning, and what we have recently learned to call surveillance capitalism. It’s the UN that forces people to leave the overcrowded and overheated earth to live at a subsistence level on colonies elsewhere in the solar system, and it’s also the UN that turns a blind eye to the “pushers” who sell to the colonists the drugs they need to make their miserable experience tolerable. Symbiosis.

When people talk about Dick as a prophetic writer, this is the kind of thing they have in mind: an ability to envision from 1965 not a continuation of that time’s politics but instead a tacit union between the interests of government and the interests of the world’s most powerful corporations.

But Dick takes his anticipations to another level, a level that I am especially interested in. It is of course famously difficult to say exactly what happens in this novel, because the essential question that the major characters have is always: What is actually happening? But at least one major potential timeline, perhaps the most likely timeline, tells a story like this: Palmer Eldritch is a titan of capitalism, in many respects the Jeff Bezos of this world, and he travels to Proxima Centauri on a quest that is ambiguous in character but certainly involves financial motives. Eldritch discovers on Proxima Centauri a substance that the sentient beings of that solar system use in their religious rituals — a substance he thinks he can manufacture and sell and thereby win a victory over the currently dominant corporation called PP Layouts. But on his return from the Proxima system he is — well, perhaps the word is possessed by a sentient creature from some other part of the galaxy. And this creature is at least for a time interested in distributing its consciousness, through the mediation of Palmer Eldritch and the substance he has discovered, into the consciousness of human beings.

I said in an earlier post that I am interested in demonology, and that adds to my fascination with this novel. Because Dick is imagining what might happen if an unprecedentedly powerful union of government and surveillance capitalism is taken over by what might fairly be called a demonic power. Now, you might say that what Dick describes is not a demon, but simply a creature dramatically more powerful than we are and capable of imposing its will upon us. I call that a distinction without a difference. This is, it seems to me, a sort of Foucauldian image a few years ahead of Foucault’s key works on power and domination, a picture of a world in which powers that we may be tempted to call supernatural are disseminated through the existing structures of the neoliberal order. And it doesn’t look pretty.

Of course, this is not the only possible explanation of what is happening in the book. It is certainly possible that there is no alien being possessing Palmer Eldritch; rather, Eldritch himself has, through a combination of economic leverage and biotechnology, assumed equivalent powers. That is, it may be possible for surveillance capitalism to generate its own demons. Whether this is a better or worse fate than the one I previously described I leave as an exercise for the reader.

September 26, 2018

“in fact the mind was poorly understood”

Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first…. and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like — what? — an ecology — a fellfield — or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well — a bit grandiose, that — really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better — weather — storm fronts of thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes — the jet streams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds…. life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

— Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

September 23, 2017

Le Guin’s golden age

Between 1968 and 1974 Ursula K. Le Guin published

• A Wizard of Earthsea
• The Left Hand of Darkness
• The Tombs of Atuan
• The Lathe of Heaven
• The Farthest Shore
• The Disposessed

— along with a series of classic stories, including “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” “Winter’s King,” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” That would be quite a literary career. She did it in six years.

October 24, 2016

Wars, hot or cold, are also missing from standard science fiction versions of the future. Interplanetary wars don’t count, and neither do wars with robots or zombies. I mean wars among nation-states or global alliances or regional blocs. George Orwell’s 1984, inspired in part by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, imagined a world divided among three totalitarian blocs: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. I can’t think of any other well-known examples of geopolitics in science fiction.

— Michael Lind. Everything that Lind says is missing from SF may be found in, to cite just one example among many possible ones, the work of Ursula K. LeGuin. Given that LeGuin is one of the most famous SF writers in the world, and Lind appears not to be familiar with her work, then perhaps his declarations about what SF does and does not do should be taken with a truckload of salt.

August 26, 2013

If we contemplate the lives of the Teletubbies, questions start to pose themselves. These four creatures are evidently infantile beings, unable to look after themselves (hence their elaborate environment of technological attendants). We wonder: where are their parents? Have the Teletubbies been abandoned by their families? Are the ’tubbies alien creatures, or are they post-humans, genetically altered?

I prefer a different reading, one that folds the surface logic of the text back into the underlying logic of ‘entertainment for toddlers’. It seems clear from the world of the Teletubbies that, whether alien or posthuman, they come from a technologically advanced culture. Like the Borg they have assimilated technological devices into their own bodies, but unlike the wholly technological/artificial worlds of the Borg they have chosen to inhabit an environment shaped largely by the aesthetics of the natural world. We have, then, a disparity between (on the one hand) the high degree of intelligence and technological know-how needed to build the ’tubbies home, their automated toasters and vacuum-cleaners, the periscopes, the broadcasting tower and all that; and (on the other) the evident puerility and immaturity of the Teletubbies themselves.

— Adam Roberts

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