Category: science

history

The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

I just finished skimming through a fascinating little bit of fannish history, Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?  Fannish in the sense of science fiction fandom.  It has a rich and varied history and the concerns within the genre are as fraught with angst, ennui, and ambition as any literature.

I am always a bit bemused when I read about this sort of thing, because I came into science fiction through the rotary rack at my local drug store.  (Literally—Leuken’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Shenendoah and Compton, a good old fashioned drug store with a soda fountain, a magazine stand, and two circular racks for paperbacks, two blocks from my house.)  I had no idea about where these books came from, who wrote them, how, not to mention the whole publishing industry and its workings.  I used to think authors were “gray eminences” who occasionally deigned to write a new book and “gift” it to the public.  The notion that they did it for money or to meet a contract deadline or anything so mundane never occurred to me.  It was a wholly mysterious process, with arcane rituals and secret rites.

Nor were all books created equal in my mind.  For some reason—purely aesthetic—I early on decided that the best science fiction, the stuff with true weight and merit, was all published by Avon.  They did Asimov’s magisterial Foundation Trilogy, after all, and that was Significant Literature!  They put out a lot of Zelazny and some Silverberg.

But I knew nothing about fandom.  Occasionally I’d see a notice in the back of one of the magazines I read—If, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex, Venture—for a convention somewhere, usually a “World Science Fiction Convention” (!), but I thought they would necessarily be by invitation only (where all the gray eminences met to determine the future offerings, etc) and I’d never go to one.

Kemp’s little tome is the result of a survey he sent out around 1960, asking the title question, among others.  Damn.  I started reading the magazines regularly around 1963 or ’64, so if already in 1960 there was concern over SF being dead, then…

Most of the seventy-odd respondents thought SF was not dead at all, but was in the doldrums.  This was right after the so-called Golden Age has ended (roughly between 1938 and 1954 or so) and there was apparently a sense that the Next New Thing hadn’t arrived yet and maybe it wouldn’t.  It was right on the cusp of New Wave and a few years before Campbell changed the name of Astounding to Analog.  There’s the sense of people sort of milling around, waiting for Something To Happen.

Well, it was five years before Dune and seven years before Dangerous Visions, two books that arguably changed the field.  In a way they represent two extremes, the last great epic of traditional SF and the compendium of All The Wild Shit coming down the pike.  (Both books are almost continually in print to this day, and while Dune has become more a media and franchise phenomenon, Dangerous Visions and its sequel is still a touchstone for serious literary study and the taking-off point for the changes in approach and trajectory that drove everything until Gibson, Sterling, and Cyberpunk worked another set of changes on a field that has always been as good as its most recent thing.)

The general consensus throughout the responses was that magazine SF was not dead (and there did seem to be an over-emphasis on the magazines, which at the time were still seen as the major outlet for SF.  Book publishers had not yet really crowded into the field as they did by the end of the decade, although some were putting out quite a lot, like ACE) but it was sick as hell.  I’ve sat in on similar conversations over the last three decades of my own involvement in fandom and I was struck reading this by the similarity in tone and even in content of the arguments.  (Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy, thought everything was fine except for too much psi.)

Kurt Vonnegut chimed in with a particularly venomous assault, that not only was it dead but he would be glad to help find the corpse so it could be properly buried.  He wrote a note to Kemp later apologizing and blaming his attitude on his isolation from the field.  Vonnegut made his bones in SF and took many opportunities to diss it because he didn’t want to be regarded by the critics—and therefore his potential audience—as a hack.  Fair enough, but sometimes I wonder if something else was going on there.  He could have distanced himself without pissing all over the whole genre.  Or maybe not.  I have to bear in mind that the critical arena is not what it was then.

The last section of the book contains revisitations some 20 years later, when science fiction was going through an enormous boom.  Some of the pessimism of the earlier responses had to be explained.

A lot of of them credited Star  Trek  with the “revival” of science fiction.  It did bring a much larger audience into the field.  It did open the door for many of those new readers to discover that, as good as they thought Star Trek was, the stuff between two covers was much better.

That all changed again in the 80s with the massive upsurge of Fantasy, all, in my opinion, in the wake of Star Wars, which did something very similar—brought many tens of thousands of new fans eagerly into the field.  But in this instance, a different realization occurred that led to a collapse of science fiction.  Instead of discovering that the material in the books they were now buying was better than Star Wars, they found that it was utterly different—and that they really didn’t like it.

Star Wars—and I’ve said this before, often—is not science fiction (even though Lucas rather hamfistedly and stupidly tried to retrofit it as science fiction in the “first” three movies) but heroic quest fantasy in space.  Or, simply, Fantasy in Skiffy drag.  Audiences went from this to the less reifying work of writers like Brin, Bear, Clarke, Benford, Cherryh, et al and it must have been like a cold shower.  Science fiction requires thought, analysis, its virtue is in the explication and championing of reason, logic, and science, and while there are heroes aplenty in SF there’s not a lot of destiny or “born to the throne” heroes who just Are.

As fast as they blew up the SF bubble, they left it for all the Tolkein clones that began to dominate the publishing field by the late 80s and still command a hefty market share.

Science fiction, it seems to me, has always been a minority taste.  It appeals to people who also find science appealing.  It has always had a fairly solid core of supporters and as a percentage of the publishing market has remained fairly constant, with certain boom times punctuating a more or less steady, dependable foundation.  Science fiction offers marvels, of course, but they are, the best of them, marvels still grounded in an idea of reality.  And reality is tough.  It takes work to survive and thrive.  A good sword arm won’t do you much good when a meteor has holed your ship and all the air is leaking out and you have to figure out how to fix it.  Orbital mechanics couldn’t care less that you’re of the House Royal as your ship starts spiraling down to a nasty end because you didn’t do the math right for re-entry into atmosphere.  Science fiction says “Yes, the future can be wonderful—but it will still be Real and you’ll have to deal with it the same way you deal with what’s real now.”

So, who killed science fiction in my opinion?

Lot of assumptions in that question with which I do not agree.

culture

Preferred Position

I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well.  Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.

Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree.  In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them.  The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.

If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question.  You can pick this up from context, from body language, from tone of voice, from a hundred small cues that accumulate into the preferred position of the asker.  And while there are many permutations, and shades of gray, it usually—not always, but usually—comes down to two formats.

There are those, few though they may be, who are honestly interested in a philosophical discussion.  This is the “how do you see this god question” conversation, which can lead to very interesting and fruitful dialogues and can be immensely enjoyable and even enriching.  These are people who, while they may have a preferred position, aren’t interested in pushing it on anyone, they really want to explore the topic.  One key feature of such people is that they are not threatened by the unorthodox, the heterodox, the outre, the radical.  They want to have a conversation about this admittedly complex topic.

Then there are those who are looking for a reason to pigeonhole and proselytize.  They don’t want to know your ideas, they want to know if you’re With Them or Against Them.

Atheists and Believers fit into this description and I unhesitatingly claim that there is no functional difference between them if this is all they are interested in.  They don’t want a dialogue, they want a chance to tell you how wrong you are, or hold forth on all the idiots who don’t think like them.

I’ll admit right here that I’ve fallen into that paradigm on many an occasion.  There’s no real defense for it, but there are reasons.  I do get tired of certain positions on certain topics and the shortcut to ending the harangue often seems more desirable than any possible benefit that may come out of trying to address the questioner as if he or she belonged to the first group.

Do I believe there is a god?

Depends on what kind of a god you’re asking me to believe in.  But right there you see the potential for a long explanation.  The concept is not reducible to a simple statement of fact, because all gods have been believed in and it is an insult to suggest that such belief automatically meant one set of acolytes was dumber than another.  When belief faded, the god became an artifact of history.  Do I then belief there never was such a god?  Depends on your requirements for a god.

There are many aspects of the proposition with which I can categorically disagree.  But the thing that makes it impossible to dismiss out of hand is Belief.  To me, asking if I believe there is a god has many of the same characteristics of asking if I believe there’s such a thing as an idea.  You can’t see either one, there’s no physical evidence for them other than how they motivate people, it is easy (and done all the time) to say that ideas aren’t real.

It’s in the realm of human action where the problems with both the discussion and the notion of a god pop up, but to my mind that’s a separate issue.  If someone creates a great good—hospitals, art, music, a new way to see—in the name of a god they believe in, it is easy enough to accept that they drew their inspiration from that god and except for some diehard ideologues no one has an issue with the conflation.  No one goes around beating them up for that belief.  If, on the other hand, some one goes around killing, maiming, stirring social ill-will against groups of people because they claim their god wants them to, everyone gets uncomfortable.  The people who may believe in the same god have a problem, atheists use it as an excuse to deny agency, and the zealot feels justified in his or her isolation and martyrdom.  Nothing is solved.  We seem hard put to separate out the issues because inevitably questions are raised as to the nature of belief and the nature of god.

To me, all gods are real and at the same time they are all irrelevant.  They’re real because people believe in them.  They’re irrelevant because I don’t and do not wish to.  And yet the world functions, regardless which position is true.

You want to know where I think god is?  In the dialogue.  Whatever it may be.  God, however you choose to define it, appears in the midst of honest communication.  When someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to us about the stars, the universe, the cosmos, and we listen—there’s god.

When that doesn’t happen, when people don’t communicate—there is no god.

I invite you all to chew on that idea for a while.

Unless you think ideas aren’t real.

culture

All Or Nothing

I don’t do many posts about evolution here. It is a topic of interest to me and many years ago I went through a spate of reading everything I could find by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and a few others to try to wrap my head around it. What I came away with—and this is very important for a point I intend to make later on—is that I am persuaded that evolution is real, that this is a pretty accurate description of how life operates, and that our future understanding of biology will be based solidly on these principles.

I do not have to be an expert on it to accept it.

But this is usually what is required by those who oppose evolution, especially on religious grounds—if you can’t answer their questions with definitive, rigorous fact and keep it all straight, then you are totally wrong and their definition of how life operates is automatically true.

As a technique for debate, this is maddeningly stupid and often effective in the short term. But before I go on, I’d like to present this video, which shows a rather remarkable process going on within the creationist community even as we ponder this difficulty:

For those of you who may not know, Kent Hovind is an apologist for creationism and has been conducting seminars and giving talks for years as to why evolution is categorically wrong. Yet when you look at what’s happening in his own models, it’s obvious he’s accepting certain elements of evolution, just renaming them so as not to evoke the offensive label which is seen now as a counterargument to Genesis. Hypocrisy? Maybe not. After all, every major shift in knowledge occurred, individually and collectively, in opposition to an accepted position. It was a usually a gradual change. It evolved.

Now, the one thing that is not addressed, except very briefly toward the end and rather cheekily, is the main bugbear of all creationists. Human evolution. Maybe creationists don’t get quite so strident about it anymore, realizing that a categorical argument for special treatment doesn’t play as well as it once did, but this can be traced back to Darwin’s day and possibly the best encapsulation of it came from William Jennings Bryan, he of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial.

The man in the 20th Century who came to exemplify the fundamentalist response to evolution said in his famous Menace of Darwinism speech: “…our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry…evolution in plant and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.”

There you have it. The hangup is Man. It says in Genesis that Adam was hand-crafted by the Almighty and anything suggesting otherwise is simply unacceptable.

Well, the problem is everything we’ve learned since the Enlightenment and Cuvier and then Darwin. That homo sapiens sapiens is a mammal, an animal, and in every respect but our self-delusion we obey the same genetic and environmental laws as every other critter. Furthermore, if we try to pretend otherwise when it comes to medical care, the results are spectacularly ineffective.

But the thing I really wanted to talk about here is this debate tactic that requires us—someone like me—to know everything about the position I defend in order to have even a chance at making an impact while my opponents don’t have to know anything, either about my position or theirs. Argument by default, basically. If I am in error in any detail, if I misremember a fact, or don’t know the proper answer to a particular question, then I am instantly wrong and the Default Position is automatically—and inarguably—right.

Recently, in Waco, TX, Bill Nye—yes, the Science Guy—caused a controversy by saying that the moon reflects the sun. It was a minor point, but it was a contradiction of a poetic line from Genesis in which Yahweh is said to have made “two lights” in the sky. Nye was explaining that the moon does not radiate its own light but reflects the light of the sun and a group of people stormed out on him, loudly claiming that “We believe in God!” Well, you may say that this is simply an example of local stupidity, and you’d be right. Not only didn’t these folks understand astronomy and how the solar system works, they didn’t realize that a good deal of the Bible is metaphor and poetry—you know, not literal. If asked “Okay, if it didn’t happen as science has shown us it did, then how did it happen?” they would probably come back with a pat “God did it!” Well, sure, but how? What’s the process? And how come what is described contradicts what we actually see? They wouldn’t have any answers, not only because they don’t know anything about science but they know just as little about their own holy book or theology. All they “know” is that they don’t like questions that seem to undermine that special feeling they’ve always had when it comes to the “fact” that they were “hand-made” by god.

Which they weren’t.

But it’s that debate technique that interests me here. Because it crosses all disciplinary lines. Politics, economics, history—if I offer a perspective that runs counter to common prejudice, I am required to know every bit of the fact involved in my position and not one iota of it can be in error, otherwise I am completely wrong. Contrariwise, though, my detractors aren’t required to know a damn thing factually.

Carl Sagan once stated that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But lately it seems it is the extraordinary claim that seems to require no evidence and the claims of reason are under siege by a requirement that its supporters know ALL. Of course, many if not all “extraordinary” claims along the lines of creationism have no evidence behind them, so requiring it is a bit disingenuous, but really, shouldn’t people even know a little something about what it is they’re defending?

The problem with fact, though, is it doesn’t go away at the behest of ideology. Hence the contortions of the Kent Hovinds, who are trying to find ways to address what is undeniable that don’t contradict their beliefs. Eventually, they may even find out that what they’ve been defending all along has been, well, a misinterpretation. Their positions will evolve.

Meantime, for the record, let me state that I am not an expert on evolution. Nor am I an expert in history, political science, physics, or any philosophical school. I don’t have to be. Because I can look it up.

It’s called using your brains.

culture

What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains.

Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative.

I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing.

I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait.

That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.  Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.)

What they seem adamantly opposed to is spending on people.  By that I mean, social spending.  Welfare, MedicAid, unemployment relief, housing subsidies, minimum wage supports, education, and so forth.  With a few exceptions, we have seen conservatism take on the mantle of Scrooge and move to cut people off.  This has been in the name of States Rights as often as not or welfare reform, but in the last ten years it has come out from its various nom de guerre’s and stood on its own as an attack on Entitlements.

When you look at all the things, say, Ron Paul wants to eliminate from government, you can’t help but thinking that he believes government should do nothing for anyone.  If the factory up the road dumps toxic waste that gets into the water table and poisons your farmland, government should have no brief to take that factory to task and see to it you’re made whole again.  I assume the thinking is, well, you can take the factory to court, just like anyone else.  By “anyone” I take it they mean anyone with the means to mount a protracted legal battle.  Why isn’t it better to enforce laws to prevent the pollution in the first place?  If your boss pays you less for the same or more work based on your gender, according to this thinking there would be no governmental recourse to making your boss either explain the situation or do anything to rectify it.  Likewise, I suppose, in matters of race.  The assumption, I suppose, is that if you feel unfairly treated in one job, you have the right to go get another one.  This ignores the possibility (indeed, the fact) that this situation is systemic.  That’s something no one in the GOP seems to want to address—systemic dysfunction—unless of course they’re talking about all the aspects of government of which they disapprove.

Of course, this is not just Ron Paul.  Most of them, with the notable exception of the two candidates who haven’t a chance in hell of the nomination, seem to have some variation of the “smaller government” mantra as part of their platform.  Taken with the chart linked above, you have to wonder what they mean by “smaller” when it seems they spend as much if not more than the Democrats.  Obviously, Republican administrations have never cost us less money—it’s just that the money gets spent in ways that make it appear they’re focusing their attention on what is “important.”

Debating what is or is not important is certainly legitimate and we’ve been doing that for over two centuries.  And certainly intractability has never been absent from our political discourse—such intransigence led, most famously, to the Civil War.  But we have also grown accustomed to such stances being in the distant past, not part of our present reality.  Meanness in politics has always been around, but it seems the GOP has, at least in some of its members, embraced it in particularly pernicious ways.  The gridlock of the last couple of decades is indicative of the quasi-religious fervor with which members of a major political party have adopted as a tactic.

Newt Gingrich oversaw a government shut-down by instigating an intransigent position.  It can only be seen in hindsight as a power play, since the fiscal policies of the Clinton Administration saw one of the last periods of general economic well-being that reached a majority of citizens.  We wonder now what that was all about.  Gingrich’s “contract with America” was billed as a way to return control and prosperity to the average American, but that happened to a large degree without the hyperbolic posturing he indulged, so it’s a question now what happened.

I’m not going to review the politics of the time here, only point out that what was on the GOP’s collective conscience then and continued to be was their goal to disassemble the apparatus of government that militated against vast accumulations of wealth.  Again, in hindsight it is obvious, and Clinton himself was seduced into the program by signing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, which has led directly to the current economic situation.

Now here lies the peculiarity of our modern times.  You can lay out the causal chain of Republican collusion with the economic catastrophes of the last three decades and find general agreement, even among Republicans.  But when asked if they will continue to vote Republican, well, of course.

Why?

Anyone with a smidgen of historical memory cannot but see Obama as a right center president.  He has done virtually nothing that Reagan would not have been proud of (with the single exception of the Affordable Health Care Act).  Yet you would think he is the devil incarnate if you listen to the Right.  Hatred of Obama has grown to phobic proportions, coupled with more and more strident positions among the suite of Republican contenders for some kind of new rapprochement with Americans to establish—

What?  I’m not altogether sure they understand the kind of country they’re advocating.

Now John Huntsman has bowed out of the race, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney, who is still being viewed with suspicion by the far right of the party—hence the conference in Texas mentioned above.  Not that Huntsman would have had a chance with the evangelicals.  Not only was he reasonable about many issues, he was two things the Right cannot abide: one, he is an advocate for science, supporting both climate change science and evolution, and two, he actually worked for Obama as ambassador to China.  He is, therefore, tainted.

From the few things he has said about them, Romney is fuzzy on climate change and evolution.  One suspects he tends to accept the science but he’s been careful not to come right out and say it, which is tiresome.  But the fact that he has felt it necessary to soft-pedal his positions on these is a telling clue as to what the Right wants.

What they want, briefly, is an America as they always thought it should be.  The strongest, the richest, the least controversial, the purist, and able to do what it has always done in order to stay that way.

If this sounds like a fantasy, well, it is.  It’s Camelot, the City on the Hill, the New York That Never Was.  It is greatness without cost, freedom without dissent, progress without change.

It is also elitism without earning it.

Just as one example, the continued harangue for deregulation.  The case is made—or, rather, asserted—that growth, including jobs, depend on less regulation, that regaining our standard of living and reinvigorating American enterprise requires less government oversight.  How this can be said with a straight face after three decades of deregulation have brought commensurate declines in all those factors, leading finally to near-Depression level unemployment, astounds.  This is surely a sign of psychosis.  From 1981 on there has been a constant move to deregulate and in its wake we have seen devastation.  The airlines were deregulated and within less than two decades most of them had been through bankruptcy, many of them no longer exist (TWA, Pan Am?), and service has suffered.  Oil was deregulated with the promise of holding prices and increasing production, but we have had regular if staggered rises in price, chokes in supply, and an environmentally worse record of accidents.  The savings and loan industry was deregulated which resulted in a major default and rampant fraud, the loss of billions of depositors money and a housing crisis, and we then watched the same thing happen with the deregulation of banking.  How much more evidence is required before that mantra of “deregulation will lead to more jobs and better service” be seen for what it is—a lie.

The Far Right of the GOP is living in a fantasy.  The problem with that is they have a profound influence on the Party mainstream, which is exactly why reasonable candidates like Huntsman and Johnson have no chance of garnering Party support and people like Romney have to waffle on positions in order to woo the tail that is trying to wag the dog.

What I do not understand is how those who make up the mainstream of the Party can continue to support policies that make no sense.  Momentum is one thing, but this has gone on far too long to be attributed to that.

I do not here claim that the Democrats have legitimate and sensible alternatives.  They have their own set of problems.  But Democrats have generally been willing to abandon a policy that is shown not to be effective.  Right now that says a lot.  It’s not much of  a choice, but frankly it is more in line with the country I grew up understanding us to live in.

 

 

 

 

Art

China Mieville and the Ideology of SF

Now for something fascinating having to do with writing. I just saw this lecture by China Mieville, who I feel is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s tackling a subject I’ve chewed over quite a lot—the distinction between SF and Fantasy and the theoretical arguments about SF exceptionalism. I have some quibbles, but I would love to sit down with this guy and hash this through, because, to my ear, he’s exactly where I’ve been in terms of what to look at when talking about this.

 

 

I don’t disagree with a single critical element he brings up—and, as he points out, none of what he brings up is particularly new.

One quibble I have is a minor historical point, and this may be a result of my arrival in the genre as a potential practitioner at a time in which advocates of Fantasy were the ones making the grand argument that science fiction was “merely” a subgenre of fantasy—a claim many SF writers (and readers) took loud exception to. Fantasy was gaining ground then in the market and was shoving SF aside as the apparent preferred genre of fantastic literature and was basking in its ascendancy and making claims about how the two really weren’t any different. (Interesting that Darko Suvin’s assertions were published in 1979, about the time this argument was being made most forcefully, a few years before the market reflected the preference of Fantasy over SF.)

For my part, aside from matters of taste, I’ve never really argued that SF is “better” than Fantasy, at least not in any theoretical sense. Only different. I’ve found most examples of hybrids problematic at best, absurd at worst, because of—as Mieville points out—the ideological underpinnings informing them as genres. So the only reason I have ever had a dog in that hunt came from the assertion made by Fantasy advocates about SF being a sub-form and, occasionally, inferior (sometimes by virtue of being hypocritical, sometimes by virtue of an embarrassing specificity).

(As a personal observation, I find I prefer reading SF and find it very difficult to read Fantasy. However, I can watch Fantasy easily and pleasurably. Only when the quite different faculties employed in reading come into play do I find most Fantasy simply unappealing.)

Anyway, I’d like to offer the video above. I found it quite fascinating and lucid and I agreed with about 90% of it.

Art

A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

Actually, just one.  I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction.  I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist.  Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it.  I don’t do that.”)  A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work.  But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

There are two things wrong with this.  One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious.  Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF.  Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability.  But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence.  This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out.  Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless.  Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually.  Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale.  No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens.  We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

But more than that, the points we’re making are different.  We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago.  John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans.  That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction.  Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition.  Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance.  Science is about figuring out how things work.  Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious.  It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.”  And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe.  But that’s not the point of religion.  And the source of the awe is very different.

I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas.  I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it.  In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter  because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference.  Maybe no one will really pay any attention.  That, too, will be a shame.

culture

Steve Jobs: A Quality of Expectation

I do not own an Apple computer.  I do all my work on PCs because, well, it worked out that way.

I had an Apple.  First-generation MacIntosh, to be precise.  It didn’t last.

My partner, Donna, got interested in computers back in the early and mid-80s.  When I say “interested” I mean on the level of “hm, that looks cool, I wonder what it would be like to…”  and not on the level of “that way lies the future, we gotta have one!”  Being somewhat dense when it came to reading her enthusiasms (and separating hers from my own), by various strange avenues, she ended up getting a MacIntosh for Christmas.  Computer and printer.

Her enthusiasm lasted a month.  She’d gotten a job with a small tech company and worked on PCs all day and when she came home at night, the last thing she wanted to do was more work on a computer, even if it was hers.  Besides—and this may sound odd—the MacIntosh was too easy to use.  She was interested in the programming and the guts and the software.  The MacIntosh was plug-n-play before there was plug-n-play and the software available for it—because it was Apple, it was all proprietary—was expensive!  We acquired a math program and something else.

I was writing on my IBM Selectric.  The MacIntosh just sat there.

Then it broke down.

This is embarrassing.  The motherboard was flawed and one day it just went comatose.  However, because we had used it so little, we didn’t push it to failure until it was out of warranty.  We didn’t know it was the motherboard.

But before that we had run up against some of the annoying short-comings of the MacIntosh, one of which was file size.  I decided to try writing stories on it.  The rudimentary word processing program—MacWrite—was fine except I could never figure out how to put headers on it and the maximum file size was something like 8 or 9 pages.   That wasn’t the annoying part.  What was annoying was that it would let you get there and then lock up.  There wasn’t enough memory left to delete anything so you could, you know, save the file.  So if you didn’t take care—if, for instance, you got caught up in the story you were telling—you’d reach that limit and then lose the whole file.

(To be fair, this might have been an issue with that flawed motherboard, but we didn’t know, it was just maddening.)

It really was kind of a useless thing in our house.

But it was also kind of very cool.  I mean, I write science fiction.  I was looking at PCs and thinking “that’s not what computers are supposed to look like—the Mac is!”  And I really wanted it to work right, to be as cool as it looked.  There was something about it that prompted an “if only” sentiment.

Then I got accepted to Clarion.  We decided I could take the Mac for my writing instrument.  We got it fixed.  That’s when we found out it was the motherboard.  At the same time, we upgraded the memory (to ONE megabyte!) and bought an external floppy drive for it.

Because we had also discovered by then how difficult it was to translate Mac files to PC (to get a decent print out—-we had an AppleWriter dot matrix printer and I frankly never found a font that was usable; you have to recall that this was at a time when magazines and publishers were refusing to accept dot matrix manuscripts and I wanted to get clean laser printer copies, but the only laser printer we had access to was at Donna’s work, which was for PC…) we intended to trade it in on a PC when I got back, but it was just the right size for the trip.

I was the only one at Clarion with a Mac.  Everyone hated the printer fonts I used.

Also, there was a heatwave that year in Michigan and the Mac turned out to be very susceptible to overheating.  I had a small fan which I ended up training on the Mac.  I backed up often to the external drive.  It was a trial.

I was so glad to trade it off for a usable PC.

But I always had a soft spot for the idea of the Mac and later when they started coming out with better models and then the massive improvements after the whole Lisa thing made it the hardware to have, I wanted one.  But by then I was doing all my work on PC and I was online and publishing worked almost exclusively with PC and and and…

And Apple products were so damn expensive!

Aside from that first generation MacIntosh, we have only ever owned one brand new computer.  And now the PC products seem to be as cool as the Apple, so…

It’s fairly obvious that the coolness of newer PCs, the improvements in speed and reliability, the slick programs available, all that came about as a direct response to the challenge of Apple and Steve Jobs.  Jobs created something with growing gravitic force that has been bending the rest of the computer verse into orbit around it.

And Apples are science fiction computers.  I’m speaking aesthetically now.  What they do, how they look, the ease of interface—this is where it should be according to the scenarios playing in the heads of science fiction writers.

I would like to upgrade all my computers to Apples.  I’ve wanted to do that for years.  It’s like really wanting to drive a high end, state of the art car, wear Armani suits, play a Les Paul, and drink only the best wine.  It’s a Leica to everyone else’s Nikon, Luxman to Sony, Bose to a box with a speaker in it.

Steve Jobs made people want better.

Not everyone.  A lot of people wouldn’t know “better” if it walked up and introduced itself.  But many people.  And he made them feel they deserved it.

And that there is a reason for better.  This last may seem odd, but think about it.  Many people settle.  They get by.  They manage.  They accept what they think they have to and make do.

From time to time someone has to remind us that quality is not only justified but essential.  That life shouldn’t be shabby just because we don’t think we can have better.  For all the technical innovations Jobs spurred and enabled and midwived, it was this aesthetic for which he will long be remembered.  He never settled.  He didn’t think we should, either.

One of the years, I’ll own a Mac again.

Art

Denial of Agency and Being Off Base

Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me.  On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base.  I asked why and the response was  “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”

That annoyed me.  Actually, it pissed me off.  The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned.  The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it.  I withdrew (except for one more exchange about why it had troubled me since as it continued it turned into a typical “does god exist” thread.  My annoyance was with the assumption that stories can be judged automatically off-base because they don’t take into account a particular belief.

When pressed, the original commenter admitted that it was Asimov’s world view in general that was the problem—which means that the beliefs (or disbeliefs) of the author were used a priori to judge the quality of the stories.

Here’s the problem with that:  fiction is about the human condition and the writer is responsible for getting the character and interactions within a story right.  In other words, to tell the truth about people, how they feel, what they do, why they think or act certain ways.  To do this, the writer must imaginatively assume the viewpoint of the characters (to greater or lesser degrees) in order to treat them honestly so what is then written about them is a true picture.

To do that, the writer must be an observer, a very accurate observer, a student of people, of humanity, even of civilization and culture.

To claim that a writer cannot write truthfully about the human condition unless he/she already holds a particular world view is sheer, slanderous nonsense.  At its most basic, it suggests that to hold a particular world view might guarantee that a writer not only can but will write the truth, and that simply doesn’t follow.

But further, it suggests that the truth of human beings is hidden from a writer who doesn’t believe a particular way.  Extend that, and you can take the position that a writer of any other religious view must be incapable of writing accurately and truthfully about people as compared to  a writer who holds a preferred view.  You are immediately immersed in the unsolvable debate over which view is the Truth (capital T) and which false.  Or, furthermore, you would have to accept that a believer would be incapable of writing as honestly about atheist characters, since that is a world view not shared.

We would, very simply, be unable to speak honestly and truthfully to each other.

One would have to accept that stories written (truthfully, honestly) by a believer would somehow be different than stories written (honestly, truthfully) by an unbeliever.  But that would deny the universality of human experience.

On a meaner level, this is a denial of agency.  It’s very much like the argument put forth by those who think Shakespeare is a pseudonym for another author, one of which is the Earl of Oxford.  The argument says that “William Shakespeare” lacked the education and aristocratic sensibility to have penned works of such insight about nobility.  This completely discounts the richness of imagination writers must apply to any subject of which they lack first-hand knowledge.  It says I, if I were Shakespeare, could not possibly have imagined what I wrote and told the truth so accurately because I didn’t possess the proper “world view.”  You can see this argument used against any author or group of authors another group (usually not authors) seek to deny validation.

(I suggest finding a copy of the late, great Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Womens Writing  for a detailed examination of this process.)

It suggests two things that are false—one, that there are human experiences to which only select groups are privy and that no one on the outside can possibly know about, and two, that human experience is not universal on some basic level that underlays all successive experiential additions.

If a religious writer wrote truthfully about two people falling in love and an atheist wrote about the same two people, and both told the truth of what they observed and described the experience of those two characters honestly, how might they differ?  For either of them to make the case, within the story, that their world view mattered in the telling of human truth, the author would have to intrude and, to greater or lesser degrees, proselytize.  You would end up with a bad story at best, propaganda at worst.

Throw a dozen or two dozen stories on a desk without attribution.  No one knows who the writers are.  Tell me what the beliefs are of the author of each story.  (This presumes excellent stories, truthful stories.)  The idea that an atheist, a humanist, would write “off base” stories because of their world view is a denial of agency.  What that says is that no writer not a believer could write a truthful story about believers, or that a believing writer could not possibly write a story about atheists.

Nonsense.

On the question of whether the universe would be depicted differently, well now that is a bit more interesting, but the fact is that the universe is how it is and both atheist and believing scientists see it, measure it, explain it pretty much the same way.  They may argue over first causes, but in the advent of thirteen billion years since that event, both see the cosmos essentially the same way.  Atoms operate the same way for both, gravity is the same for both, the life and death of stars…

But in fact, it was not the stories that prompted that initial remark, but a knowledge of the author’s world view that colored the perception.  (Of course this is one more reason I tend to tell people that if they really love an artist’s work, see, hear, read as much of the work as possible before finding out anything about them.  The personal facts of an artist’s life can ruin the appreciation for the work.)  This is a dishonest gage.  It sidesteps the only valid metric, which is, does this story say true things about people?

I won’t go so far as to say that a writer’s world view doesn’t affect the work.  The whole point of doing art is to express personal opinions about subjects.  But at the level of good art, all authors’ work must hold up in the court of truth, and to suggest that certain world views de facto  prevent someone from telling the truth about the subject at hand is overreaching at best.  You can certainly say of certain writers “his/her beliefs so color their work that it is skewed from truth” but it is not correct to say “these beliefs guarantee that their work will be skewed from truth.”

It also suggests that personal experience can be disingenuous at its core if it leads to conclusions inconsistent with a preferred world view.

Denial of agency indeed.

 

 

culture

Fiction Matters

What I do puzzles some people.  Always has, even before I was doing it.  All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading.  Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.

I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading.  I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense.  But after a couple of months of slipping out of the actual, fenced-in playground and finding a spot behind the bushes fronting the stone wall of the church and sitting there till the bell with a book, a trio of “friends” found me and took my book away.  You can imagine the game of keep-away that ensued, a game I never won.  The teacher caught us—we were technically out of the playground, which was a no-no—and the issue was resolved, as far as I’m concerned, in their favor: I had to return to the general population.  (This kind of thing happened all the time, every time I thought I’d found a way to avoid having to be Out There with the rest of them.  Always the kids making it difficult for me ended up losing me my privilege.  Taught me a lot about how power works in a bureaucracy.)

Anyway, I kept trying and found new places to hide and these same three kept rousting me out and taking my book away.  Finally I found a place inside the school, up in a room above the stage in the gymnasium that no one else seemed to know about.  They never found me there.

But my point is, they just didn’t get it.  Even those who didn’t ridicule me about it tended to be baffled.  What, you’re reading a book?  For  fun?  (To be fair, right about age 13, several of the girls “got it” and for a brief time I was popular with them because I provided them with books they otherwise might never have gotten their hands on.)

So now I write.  Most of the people I associate with now are either writers or readers.  My “group” if you will includes almost no one who doesn’t read.  But I don’t live under a rock so I do run into people from time to time who exhibit dismay at the very idea of writing fiction.

Well, The Guardian  has an article which provides some ammunition against such dismay.  Seems reading fiction promotes empathy.  Interesting, that.  In a country in which reading for pleasure is a minority indulgence, all you have to do is look around at the current political landscape and notice how much this may explain.

Of course, to those of us who’ve been reading since we were old enough to hold a book in our lap this is nothing new.  It’s just nice to have it recognized.

(Although I must admit that my empathy for those assholes who tormented me in school has never been much more than formal or, shall we say, academic?)

culture

Our Dreams Are Sleeping

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my favorite science pop star. He is right up there with Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in terms of ability and scope and style when it comes to explaining science to the public. I’ve heard that a follow-up mini-series to Sagan’s superb Cosmos is in the works with Tyson as the narrator.

After this, I have to say, I love this guy:

Back in the Seventies, Robert A. Heinlein testified before congress about the benefits of the space program—the ones people don’t generally know about. Among some of them was the surprising fact that suicides among seniors was sharply down since the Gemini program and the announcement of the Apollo program. Years later I noted that suicides were back up after several cancellations.

We do not pay enough attention to dreams anymore. I don’t know what happened to us. Even in the dark days of McCarthyism we dreamed big dreams. What, have we suffered exhaustion? Possibly. But the more we gut the things that make people give a damn about getting up tomorrow, the worse everything is going to be. It is not all about money, as some would have us believe. Money is a tool. What are we doing with it? One part of our society seems bent on destroying the mechanisms of improvement for the average American while the other part seems unable to make a stand and say stop the carnage. One part has convinced another part that the problem is all about government redistribution of wealth and we should end entitlements and cut out all this useless spending and let private enterprise do everything. As far as I can see, right now, all private enterprise is interested in doing is building more casinos and feeding larger dividends to people who don’t want to pay taxes to support the dreams of the country.

It might help, though, if we actually had some dreams again. Time to wake them up and let them play. Before we forget how.