Proximal Eye – Page 7 – Mark W Tiedemann

In Times Long Past…

May 9, 2022 No Comments

In the afterword to Nicola Griffith’s new novella, Spear, she runs down the lists of source material and permutations around the Legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Or, more precisely, those around Percival, who in many tellings is the more important figure. The king is all very fine, of course, but it was Percival who found the Grail. In some versions, it is Percival who returns Excalibur to the Lake. In still others… The point being that such stories, myths and legends, are all repurposed tales that meet multiple needs and adapt to the times in which they are (re)told. Tracing them to a single point of origin is not only virtually impossible, but is irrelevant. The purpose of myth is reification. Among others. But on that point, reification is always tied to the present. Which lends myth its ever-ancient timelessness and relevance. Which is always one of the fascinating things about it, that timeless-timely

Visceral Coding

April 12, 2022 No Comments

Few things generate sustained anxiety as much as genetic engineering. Both positive and negative, for the possibilities and the dread. Since Watson and Crick revealed the double helix of DNA, the science has proceeded apace, and we now live in an era wherein “programming” can refer to both computers and our genes. Jennifer Doudna is a name to conjour with in this transformational time. In 2020 she won the Nobel Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work on CRISPR cas9. CRISPR has become the label in media stories for a process of “editing” genes with the use of a form of RNA. (Almost no one outside the biochemistry and medical community seems to no what it stands for: Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeaters.) Basically minute segments of code in a strand of RNA that repeat and can be used to, effectively, insert modified segments of code into a gene sequence. What began as “pure” research into the methods by

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Pursuit of Taxonomy

March 3, 2022 4 Comments

There are some discussions about literary forms which are of use primarily to the academic, the author, and the dedicated taxonimist obsessed with lists and categories and the minutiae that separate one column from another. For the average readerincluding deep readers, serious in their immersions into literaturemost of this is beside the point, sometimes just a distraction, and occasionally a serious annoyance. Most simply do not care “what” something iswhere it slots in on any spreadsheet of literary typesas long as the book at hand works and provides the pleasures they seek. For the former group, though, these things can matter quite a lot. Tracing the lineage of a form or where a given writer drew inspiration or the cross-referencing of varied texts is a species of archaeology that can enrich understandings of the evolution of literature. Movements, iconoclasts, even the politics of certain writers and groups of writers, the impact specific works have had on whole fieldsall this is

Bridges, Circles, the Pleasure of Continuing On

March 1, 2022 No Comments

As I’ve gotten older, my reading has taken turns I would never have expected. My preferred genre is science fiction, and yet I find the number of SF books I read per year shrinking. Perhaps I’m getting more selectiveand it is getting more difficult to choose, what with the wealth of new possibilitiesbut the total number of books I read per year has not shrunk much. I’ve been reading more nonfiction. (I’m a writer, I have to do a certain amount of investigation of the world, of history, of science, so) But also my consumption of mysteries has increased. In particular, mystery series. Decades ago, I would have been working through science fiction series. I cut my teeth on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, Doc Smith’s Lensmen, Asimov’s Foundation novels, the Dorsai, Pern, even L. Sprague DeCamp’s Krishna books. But then I limited it to trilogies and finally, over the past couple of decades, my preference has been for stand-alones in

Bewildered

February 2, 2022 No Comments

Richard Powers has been skirting the edges of genre for years. He has exhibited the talent of consistently defying category while producing work that can, with a slight shift of perspective, be read as solidly within certain categories. The question has always beenwhat category? He has written about atomic physics, A.I., terrorism, biodiversity, virtual reality, genetic engineering, all convincingly and with a commitment to consequence found primarily in science fiction of the first water. Now he has put science fiction itself front and center in a new novel that powerfully blends the soul of a family with the science of cosmology, neurology, and ecology and the sense of wonder that comes from imagining new worlds. Bewilderment is a profound examination of colliding worlds, both personal, global, and epistemological. Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. His work requires him to imaginatively hypothesize about extrasolar planetary ecologies as part of the search for new worlds. He is plugged into the community involved with

Bones Of Time

January 12, 2022 1 Comment

What are we talking about when we talk about science fiction? A genre defined by its trappings, its tropes? Or a mode of exploration of a kind of telec reification that only came into being with the advent of what we now recognize as science? A form of Gothic? An inversion of the historical drama? A subset of fantasy? Or all of the above? When encountering a writer like Jack Vance, it may be understandable that definitions (or at least taxonomies) fail to clarify how this can be the same as work by Gregory Benford. Aside from certain obvious aesthetic differences, there is the problem of, for want of a better term, scientific verisimilitude. At a certain point, in conversation with anyone who does not “get” science fiction, it comes down to an ineffable quality that, while sharing much with all other forms of fiction, sets the experience apart, both aesthetically and culturally, and the only answer to the question

Out of the Mists

December 21, 2021 2 Comments

The common assumption put forward by several decades of anthropology and associated fields concerning that vast fog known as Prehistory runs as follows: humans, after emerging from the crapshoot of evolution, roved the savannah in small bands, gathering and hunting and painfully inching their way toward a point where they began to make tools (other than spear points and such). Then came a long period of migration, scattered attempts at settlement, until, a critical population mass achieved, agriculture was developed, and very quickly came the abandonment of hunter-gatherer society, leading to regular towns, art, and gradually more impressive engineering feats to serve the expanding agro-economy. At some further point, all this became the foundation of nascent states, after which the whole thing rolled into the “historic” era (marked by the advent of record-keeping) and kings and empires and slavery, and so forth. This is more or less the way it was presented to me back in school, and, I suspect,

Why Read

December 11, 2021 No Comments

In light of the last few years, the question bites. Indulge me in a venting plea. In my experience, limited though it is, I have found that the better read a person is, the more likely they will be to cope with reality, to defend against the twisting delights of both conspiracy theory and pseudoscience, and to be less vulnerable to charlatanry. Not always. Some deceptions come wrapped in marvelous packages that can appeal to the puzzle-solver in us all and present as aesthetically compelling. In my own life I have followed white rabbits in tweed down a number of holes, some part of me convinced that truth lay in some hidden recess along the way. I have been relegated to many sidelines since childhood because of reading, sidelines which at the time seemed harsh and unfair, but in retrospect were actually relatively safe places. Time and space are necessary for a mind to develop. Exposure to stimulating material does

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye