Retro Review - John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit (1969)

Introduction

A decadent computerized future civilization in which social tensions have torn nations apart and only a computer-savvy reporter, a psychiatrist, a mystic seer and an artificial intelligence stand between the world and overwhelming disaster. 

Cyberpunk?  Too early, but obviously one of cyberpunk's inspirations.

This is the basic premise of The Jagged Orbit (1969) by John Brunner, a book which I had somehow managed to avoid reading until a few days ago.  I found the book fascinating, both in its prescience about particular possibilities and in the ways in which its social concerns were limited by the outlook of the late 1960's left.  It had both many of the strengths of the cyberpunk of the 1980's and 1990's -- and also many of its weaknesses.

Setting

In the year 2014 -- some 45 years in the future of 1969, when the book was written -- the West has become more racially divided than ever before, and governments are collapsing under the stress.  Inspired by South African apartheid, America, Britain (and by implication the rest of the Western world) officially classify people as "blank" (white) or "kneeblank" (non-white), and enforce this distinction at law.  The kneeblanks have actual, formally-recognized enclaves (mostly in the inner cities) in which the blank government's writ cannot run.

Strained both by this system of apartheid and by repeated failed foreign wars, national governments have greatly lost access to talent, loyalty and economic resources, and power is devolving into the hands of corporations and smaller government units.  Religion, faced with the superior success of the socialist states of the East, has also lost its power to persuade, and the people have turned to drugs, psychotherapists and superstitious cults -- some of which command actual psychic powers.

There are almost-regular race riots, which are often murderous and sometimes escalate to the rioters sniping at random passerby with laser rifles and the police levelling whole apartment buildings with attack helicopters.  An Evil Corporation run by the Mafia family of the Gottschalks (yes, that's what they are called in the book!) sells weapons to all sides to encourage tension and hence sell more weapons.  Unsurprisingly, most people want to stay indoors, and increasingly communicate only by videophone and computer terminals.

This immediately raises questions which are never answered in the book, and interestingly these tend to be the same questions which are gaping holes in most cyberpunk settings.  I'll quickly cover them here:

If the Communist countries have both been more economically and militarily successful, why does there seem to be no actual Communist expansion or any societal consequences of same?   If the Communist states have weakened just like the West, then how have they been more successful?  If they haven't weakened just like the West, then what's stopping them from gobbling up the whole rest of the world?  Why, it's almost as if Only the West Is Real, and the rest of the world merely backdrop.

Why couldn't the democracies respond to crisis by electing competent leaders and attracting competent people into the civil and military services?  Whatever possessed the nation-states to do anything as monumentally-stupid as ceding national territory in their heartlands to anti-government racial minorities?  How exactly do these minorities, occupying what are essentially lots and lots of isolated little ghettos, avoid being wiped out by angry majorities following the frequent race riots?

Given that the world is still divided into many Powers, why haven't some of the Powers tried racial equality and benefitted from having sane and integrated societies rather than the nightmare-world of Watts Riots In Perpetua that seems to describe the rest of the world?   Why do the nation-states tolerate the sale of heavy weapons to civilian militias and rebel groups by the Gottschalks?  As in much cyberpunk, national governments seem to be frozen by a strange inertia.

Here's a minor question, but one which annoyed me.  Supposedly, the global privatization of the TV networks have led to a situation in which almost all airtime is devoted to advertising.  There are regulations meant to prevent this, but the "UCC" (a global FCC) is weak and openly despised by the networks, who refuse to obey these regulations.

Ok, but ... how exactly do they force viewers to watch TV shows which are close to 100% advertising?  In-story, it's said that most of the viewers just de-rezz the picture and take lots of drugs to get high to the video melange, but are we seriously supposed to believe that no significant number of people want to watch actual television shows?  What, in Brunner's anarchic future, prevents at least one network, at least some of the time, from actually offering such shows, and hence gaining a greater audience share?

No explanation -- I guess corporations are just United in their Evil.

I mention this because it's actually important to the plot, and because a far more egregious example of cunning corporate stupidity is central to the plot, as it motivates the novel's main villain.

Plot

Matthew Flamen, the world's only remaining "spoolpigeon" (essentially a video blogger with a TV show on a major network)  wants to bring down the Big Bads whom he feels are ruining the world, but he can't even seem to stay on the air.  It seems as if his own network is sabotaging his transmissions, the better to put on more commercials instead of his show.  Matthew's wife Celia has been insane for months, and has been committed to Ginsberg (a mental asylum, and we all get the joke), which is run by the psychiatric guru Dr. Mogshack, whose therapy only seems to be making her worse. 

At Ginsberg, an honest psychiatrist, Dr. James Redeeth, is also growing suspicious of Dr. Mogshack's therapeutic techniques.  Dr. Redeeth faces two major questions in his life:  what to do with a mysterious kneeblank ex-soldier, Harry Madison, who appears to have been committed and remained committed for essentially absurd bureaucratic reasons; and how to convince his lover, Dr. Ariadne Spoelestra, who believes love to be unscientific and unworthy of a psychiatrist, to accept his love in the full, old-fashioned sense in which he means it.

Lyla Clay is a pythoness -- a woman who uses drugs, meditation and her own psychic power to read the people and events around her and utter prophecies.  When Lyla is invited to prophesize at Ginsberg, she realizes that Harry Madison is not only completely sane, but saner than anyone she's ever met.

Pedro Diablo is the propagandist for a neeblank enclave, but he is expelled from the enclave when it is discovered (ironically, by a white South African racialist expert) that he is insufficiently "melanist" by biological heritage to qualify for full kneeblank status.  Pedro Diablo winds up becoming Matthew Flamen's partner on his TV show.  Together, they discover that there is indeed something suspicious going on in high places.  They call in Xavier Conroy, essentially the Last Sane Intellectual, to help them.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary Morton Lenigo has been admitted into the United States under threat of neeblank rioting in Detroit -- source of most of America's military vehicles -- if they refuse to admit him.  Lenigo promptly sparks unusually-widespread and violent race rioting.  This is secretly the fault of Anthony Gottschalk, the up-and-coming new blood of the Gottschalk family, who has an Evil Plan to realize unprecedented arms sales from the ensuing social chaos.  He is also making something called "Robot" Gottschalk in the depths of his fortified bunker.

Lyla Clay's agent/boyfriend is murdered by the rioters, and the police arrest her for no obvious reason other than that they found her with the corpse.  Dr. Redeeth finally releases Harry Madison, who escorts Lyla back to her apartment.  Harry helps her evict a squatter who took over her apartment because the police left the door open (apparently in the Jaggedorbitverse, the police are there to make false arrests but refuse to evict trespassers, to the point where taking over someone's apartment and keeping it by brute force is a viable house-hunting strategy).  Harry, who is well over six feet tall and broadshoulders, displays great strength and fighting prowess, apparently taught him by the army.

Then Lyla goes walking with Harry looking for food, which is futile since no restaurant will serve them both due to being a mixed couple.  They are then kidnapped and taken to a high-rise apartment by the minions of Michaela Baxendale, a poetess who wants to perform some sort of weird drug-erotic ritual with them for inspiration.  The drugs trigger a strange state in Harry Madison, in which he fights off all eight of the kidnappers, injuring many of them, and killing one (who he threw out of a forty-fifth-story window).

In the course of the fight, Harry uttered a prophecy:

"Even at this relatively late stage it was possible for an unarmed man of sufficient determination to overcome considerable opposition.  It was not until after the Gottschalk coup of 2015 and the concomitant introduction of System C integrated weaponry that hand-to-hand combat became effectively pointless ... The equipment of individuals with armament adequate to level a medium-sized city nonetheless did not immediately put an end to such combats.  For a while, an attempt was made to codify human behavior on a basis analogous to the legandary Code of Chivalry; however, this represented such a radical reversal of current psychological trends that -"

Harry is arrested but promptly released, a fact which amazes everyone because he killed someone.  (Here's the strange thing:  the reason why they expect him to be imprisoned without bail is the killing, not his race.  But the person he killed was a kidnapper who was actively trying to prevent the escape of the victims, and this in a world where mass death in rioting is just shrugged off as unavoidable!  Apparently, in the Jaggedorbitverse, celebrities can kidnap people at will, rioters can kill them at will, but outside of a declared riot the right of self-defense is not honored.  This is odd because given the other details of the society, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that kneeblanks are not allowed that right against blanks, as was the case in the real-world Old South).

Most of the main characters meet and discuss the situation.  Harry Madison reveals himself to be none other than Robert "Robot" Gottschalk, a cyborg built by Anthony Gottschalk and given the mission to maximize Gottschalk sales.  When the Gottschalks marketed their "System C" weapons system -- essentially, powered armor armed with plasma guns and micronuclear grenade launchers -- to civilians on all sides of the social divides, the fighting which resulted destroyed human civilization.  The Gottschalks survived and continued to supply arms to the increasingly-depleted population, but profits began to decline as the human race approached extinction.

Then, in 2113, Robert realized that it was the very intensity of the fighting caused by the arms sales which was destroying the Gottschalks' own market.  He (somehow) travelled back in time and incarnated himself in the bodies of various combatants throughout history, trying to find a solution to the paradox.  Because the process of his incarnation destroyed the previous personalities resident in the bodies of the combatants, he chose only those whose personalities had already been destroyed by madness.  

He finally incarnated himself in Harry Madison, but was committed to a mental hospital for years.  Now free and having assembled the necessary force of helpers, he is able to inform enough people to stop Anthony Gottschalk and turn the Gottschalks to a slower and less destructive program of arms sales, so that the release of System C in 2015 never happens.  Then Harry returns his superhuman intellect to the time stream, to ensure the survival of humanity in the future -- and hence the Gottschalk arms market.

Happy endings all around.  Matthew and Celia Flamen are reconciled, and Matthew Flamen and Pedro Diablo become media partners..  Lyla Clay reallizes that she can use her powers for more than just entertainment, and dedicates herself to trying to improve the world (though presumably not to complete non-violence, else the arms dealers won't have a market).  Dr. James Redeeth has rescued Dr. Ariadne Spoelestra from death near the novel's climax, and presumably she appreciates him more.  The Jaggedorbitverse goes on its messed-up way.

Theme

John Brunner's clear point is that only by coming together in peace rather than dividing ourselves in war can we know happiness.  He clumsily bookends this with his "Chapters" 1 and 2 and 99 and 100.

Chapter 1:  "I -"
Chapter 2:  "-solationism."
Chapter 99: "You-"
Chapter 100: "-nification."

And I do mean "clumsily."  Though the writing is often good, the moral is handled so anviliciously and with a disregard for basic logic that I'm amazed that anyone not on lots and lots of drugs could have been inspired by it.  I liked the book, but when I saw his bookends I groaned at the atrocious pun.

The Good

Brunner manages to depict a society with advanced computer and commuinications technologies, though like almost every pre-1976 science fiction writer he misses the significance of the personal computing revolution (while, oddly, assuming that every middle-class person has his own videophone/computer, the "comweb," which however may be a terminal to a central unit).  All major organizations and enterprises are utterly dependent upon computers, to the point where "comping" (predicting through analysis and simulation) a proposal is vital to its execution.

In particular, he correctly predicts the importance of blogging, or "spoolpigeoning," as he calls it.  Since that's what I'm doing right here, I have a soft spot for his prediction.  However, since he assumes that one can only make a blog with the resources of a major corporation, and that there is almost no audience for them outside of the audience of a major TV network, he misses just how widespread and influential blogging would actually become.  This failure of prediction is necessary for the plot of his novel.

He even predicts ....  well, I'll let Xavier Conroy take the mike:

"It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making!  Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they'd ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other?  Twenty miles apart!  They'd never even kissed!"

Though this being Brunner's Crapsack World, this is seen as a bad thing.  It never seems to enter Conroy's head that the emotional relationship described is quite real, and twenty miles is hardly so great a distance that the couple could not eventually manage to meet in person and physically consumnate their romance.

Brunner, in short, managed to predict the Internet and cybersex, but chose to regard this as a distancing rather than unifying technology.

The Bad

Merchants of Death

The Big Bads (and, oddly, also the Big Goods) of The Jagged Orbit are the Gottschalks, arms merchants who encourage and perpetuate a state of slow civil war, the better to sell arms to private citizens.  The threatened end of the world comes from System C, essentially powered armor.

Now this is neither the first nor will it be the last time that arms makers get blamed for the evil that men do with arms.  This is an apparently-irresistible temptation.  States and their populations start a war, everyone marches off enthusiastically to glory.  The war proves less glorious than expected.  After the war, who is to blame?  Certainly not the Enthroned People or their Beloved and Highly-Respectable State!  No, it is the fault of the weapon makers!  Had they not pushed their terrible weapons at us, the world would have remained at peace, as it always had before such weapons were invented -- um, don't think about that.

What's particularly silly about the premise in this book, though, is that System C is so destablizing.  The book has already established that there are man-portable micro-nukes, capable of levelling whole blocks or neighborhoods; and lethal hand-held energy weapons, already on the civilian market.  There's no mention of powered armor, but it must be available if the Gottschalks are able to mass-produce it and market it at a mere $100,000 a unit including the weapons systems to civilians.

So, wouldn't the armed and police forces already have such weapons -- if not as good, then only marginally inferior?  And with those weapons, routine defensive technologies and tactics against them?  (System C incorporates both physical supermetal armor and energy shields, which must therefore be proven technologies).

In fact, wouldn't national militaries and security forces be the logical markets for such weapons?  (This is how the arms industry works in the real world:  it sells first to the military, and only as a technology becomes widespread to first the police and then civilian markets).

Sure, that would get in the way of sparking a multilateral global civil war, but then why would Anthony Gottschalk want to do that?    It never seems to occur to Anthony Gottschalk that, once the civil war has leveled everyone else's factories and farms, he won't be able to get goods and foods for his own purposes either; that once everyone else is dead, he'll have no one with whom to trade, and no market on which to spend his profits.  In the Jaggedorbitverse, it apparently takes a super-intelligent time-traveling cyborg warrior to realize that if you destroy the economy, selling anything to anyone becomes an activity of very little purpose and profit.

Deus ex Machina, Deus EST Robota

Harry Madison, while set up as a Man of Mystery from the beginning and with clues dropped about what he really is in at least two places in the novel, still comes off from my POV as a bit of an Ass Pull.  While there are reasons why an arms company might want to build a super-powered cyborg, there is neither any obvious reason nor method by which that cyborg would, a hundred years later, be able to time-travel and somehow possess the bodies of others, turning them into super-powered cyborgs.  I would call this comic-book logic, but comic books are a bit better thought out.

Notice that every other authority figure in the book is monumentally incompetent and irresponsible.  No nation-state, and certainly not the United States of America, seems to see anything problematical with an arms-making corporation starting what amounts to a self-defense cult and selling micro-nuclear weapons on the open market.  None of them seem to be aware that the Gottschalks are building System C, and none of them seem to try to do anything to try to block it in the timeline that led to Robert's first run up to 2113.

Only Robert can save us, and only because Anthony Gottschalk, in a monumental fit of stupidity, ignored the IBM representatives and programmed the robot to be fanatical about maximizing sales, to the point where Robert is able to extend this to a "Zeroth Law" ("I must protect humanity because only humanity can buy Gottschalk weapons").  This is really absurd, and I don't blame Robert the Robot Gottschalk for grasping the concept of "laughter" when he fully realized the purpose of his existence.

Bad Supplier Choices

Why does the entire USA rely on the neeblank enclave of Detroit to build all their motor vehicles, from trucks to their aircar "skimmers," and including their military vehicles?  Since society's been on the verge of a race war for years, with several actual outbreaks of fighting, why hasn't it occurred to anyone that this would leave America vulnerable to a major supply disruption?

Brunner seems to be thinking something along the lines of "The Detroit Automakers are Too Big To Fail, so they're still in business and still have the whole market share, and they're the Detroit Automakers so of course they operate from Detroit."

But jet back.  What exactly has prevented the Detroit Automakers from relocating and becoming the [somewhere-else] Automakers?  Presumably the neeblanks don't own the auto companies -- is there something about working on an auto assembly line that mystically belongs only to black DNA?

Is this the same as the real-world American energy dependence on Mideastern oil?  No, it's more as if all our energy, for all purposes, came from the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Do you think that we'd tolerate such a situation for long?

The Weird

Only Two Races?

Astute readers will have noticed the obvious problem with the "blank-kneeblank" racial system of the Jaggedorbitverse, which is that it segregates whites from blacks.  Ok, what happens to every other racial group on Earth?  Are they blanks?  Neeblanks?  The novel never says, despite the fact that the existence of Middle Easterners and Chinese are mentioned (the former classed as "blanks," the latter never classed as anything but apparently able to live in the blank areas).

What about mixed-race people?  A major plot point (Pedro Diablo's expulsion) hinges on this, yet they appear to be a very tiny group, easily overlooked by the kneeblanks, or incorporated into blank society.  I wonder if Brunner was aware that the vast majority of American blacks have significant white ancestry?  The "one-drop" rule might apply, except that (as Pedro Diablo found out) it doesn't.

This a major failure of vision.  If you're going to have a strictly racialist system in your storyverse, you have to work out the implications for the major ethnic groups.  Brunner's lapse makes it all too evident that his apartheid exists only as a moral foil for the main characters, and that he can't really see how it would work in practice (as South Africa found out, it doesn't really work very well in practice at all).

Magical Negroes

At one point it is mentioned that black people are literally "magical" in the sense that they have a greater affinity for psychic powers than do white people.  This doesn't really bother me so much, but I find it funny -- after all, there are plenty of stereotypes about other ethnic groups on which Brunner could have drawn, some of them even famous in science fiction.  Mystical Celts -- especially those named Kinnison or MacDougall -- I'm looking at you!

Naked and Slutty For Social Awareness

This risible speech comes from the 20-year-old Lyla Clay, who is explaining how she came from a good family but had to go down to the streets in order to activate her psychic talents:

"... I was sent to this very proper school, with uniforms and everything - incredibly Victorian -- and I never had the slightest suspicion that I might be a pythoness until I ran away from it.  I came to New York.  I hadn't any money.  I was sleeping on strangers' floors, I was practically in rags because my clothes were wearing out, and all of a sudden when I was wearing more dirt than cloth, then bang.  There was the talent.  It sort of scared me at first, but I adjusted.  And eventually, after I met Dan, I started to figure out how I could encourage it ...

"You're not a kid, Mr. Flamen.  How the hell do you think someone learns to identify with the maximum number of other people?  You do what they do.  You starve with them, you sleep with them, you eat and drink with them, you let them do to you what they want to do, and you don't pass judgement."

"Bang" indeed.

This has to be seen in the context of the late 1960's, when lots and lots of naive kids from middle- and upper-class backgrounds were doing exactly what Lyla did -- or pretending that they were doing what Lyla did -- in the belief that this was going to lead them to some sort of amazing revolution in personal consciousness.

It is symptomatic of the era of writing that at no point does Lyla explain, nor does the author nor any of the characters feels that there is any NEED for her to explain, just why this rich teenaged girl decided to run away from her family and school to live as an urban derelict, and stuck to this way of life when she presumably could have gotten out of it at any moment with a single phone call.

There's also a major setting anamoly here.  The rich kids who "dropped out" in the Late Sixties were dropping out into the relatively safe streets of America and Britain of their day.  I would imagine that life would be considerably worse for people trying to drop out into the streets of the Jaggedorbitverse.  If the police are willing to take out whole apartment buildings with airstrikes to get single snipers, killing dozens or hundreds of working people, how do they treat their HOMELESS?  How does the criminal underworld treat them?  Think the Brazilian slums are bad?  What would they be like with the addition of random airstrikes and occasional nuclear terrorism?  Do you really think young Lyla Clay would be likely to survive the experience?

Note also the character-copout here.  Lyla Clay in-story is shown with only two romantic attachments -- her previous manager Dan, who conveniently gets killed at around the time that he stops being so much fun; and Harry Madison, who turns out to be an asexual super-cyborg from an alternate future.  Lyla in this passage implies that it was when she started having sex with Dan that her powers activated.  She also implies (here and in another flashback) that she has had sex with lots of other people, but at no point is this specifically shown.

This is significant, because the exact same character-copout was being displayed toward the rich-kid hippies of the Late Sixties by the Left intellectuals, of whom John Brunner was one.  On the one hand, the hippies were supposed to be seen as sweet lovable Holy Fools who were leading us toward a consciousness revolution.  On the other hand, these were in fact teenage to early-twenties kids who were engaging in all sorts of risky behavior which was in practice destroying them, and which did destroy any and all of them who did not either leave the hippie culture by around 1975, or weren't able to make a lot of money off of said culture, or who simply got unlucky.

The notion that one will emerge from

You starve with them, you sleep with them, you eat and drink with them, you let them do to you what they want to do

with a sense of loving identification with "the masses" is pure Late Sixties fantasy.  Think about real homeless kids you've known.  Are they loving?  Non-judgemental?  The ones who live through it tend to be cynical and mistrustful, even paranoid, and with good reason.  They've experienced how people treat people who have no safe refuges.

Oh, and most of them have at one time or another had to resort to prostitution, whether of the explicit("Wanna date") or implicit ("I'd do anything for a place to sleep.") variety.  Those who haven't have usually had the benefit of at least one utterly-trustworthy friend (often a sibling, boyfriend or girlfriend) and have been very, very lucky -- most notably in not having been homeless for very long before they found a job and housing.

And they left home for reasons more serious than "just because."  Kids who run away "just because" run right back home after a few days or weeks of suffering.  If they don't, it's usually because they were running from something (most often an abusive parent).

The more I think about this, the more Brunner's romanticization of Lyla Clay and her situation really disgusts me.  The more so because it may have led some poor sap to attempt to duplicate the experience.

Conclusion

The Jagged Orbit is an interesting book with some good concepts and a variety of characters, but it ultimately fails because it is too tied to the precise and very unusual situation of the Late Sixties, in which the West was reeling before a campaign of Communist disinformation and the Boomers were just growing up and playing with the idea of revolution, at the same time that racial equality was being born.  Brunner tries to extend this era another 45 years, with the same cultural dynamics, and it just doesn't work.  The situation of the Late Sixties was unstable, and the Jaggedorbitverse was never a very likely outcome from it.

Of course, it was meant as a cautionary tale -- the point being "if this goes on" (computerization and racial segregation) it would lead to a badly-alienated society on the brink of a race war.  But Brunner failed to grasp that computerization, distributed among many individuals, would lead to less alienation  (and failed to grasp it despite including a clear example of social media in his novel!), and that the key victories against racial segregation had already been won at the time of writing.

He also, more seriously, failed to grasp the fundamental strength of the West.  Had the West faced serious racial separatism in the Late Sixties, we would have put it down.  Western governments were not so weak, and the value of "two army corps" is if anything greater than it used to be.

Ironically, since he mentions Islam in passing, he missed the real separatist danger that would menace Europe -- religious separatism.   And still I doubt that this separatism will lead to long-term independent enclaves, simply because sovereign States don't tolerate that sort of thing on theri own national territory.

The world is more robust than John Brunner imagines.  For which we may all be truly thankful. :)

Review of "Guyal the Curator" (2009) by John C. Wright

Introduction

"Guyal the Curator" is a short novella (about 12 thousand words) which John C. Wright set in Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" storyverse, and available in the Songs of the Dying Earth anthology.

The `verse is probably familiar to a lot of my readers, but basically the "Dying Earth" stories are science fantasy, set in Earth's far future (1) -- many millennia, or even millions to billions of years from our time -- when the Sun is guttering out, whether from natural senesence or from having its energy drained by generation after generation of human engineers.  The humanity of Earth, which at one time attained a very high level of technology including interstellar and transdimensional travel, lives among the ruins of of its past scientific and psionic achievements, many of which they no longer understand and treat as magical.  A few humans, called "magicians," have made a study of these lost arts and have learned to channel transdimensional energies through their own minds, through memorized spells (2), or by studying and collecting artifacts of the lost technologies, using them without fully grasping the sciences behind their operation (3).

Description

The city of Old Romarth dates back to that earlier age of lost science, and is literally built on a tell atop its own ruins, some of which were solidly enough built to be essentially intact.  The city has fallen far, and is reduced to selling relics of its own past in order to survive in the present.  Since everyone expects the Sun to go out sometime within or not too far after their lives, nobody really sees any flaw in this mode of existence (4).

Manxolio Quinc is a minor magician and nobleman of that city, whose reputation rests largely on his possession of "the Implacable Dark Iron Wand," a relic weapon from an earlier age, of whose function and command he has very little concept, but which looks very impressive.  One day, Manxolio encounters a stranger, who tells him more in a short conversation about the Wand and the ancient history of Old Romarth than Manxolio has managed to learn in his entire life.  However, the stranger has forgotten his own name and nature (5).  Manxolio offers to help the man, and thus the quest begins ...

Analysis

I don't want to spoil the story for anyone.  I will say flat out that this is one of the best "Dying Earth" stories I have ever read, and this is against stiff competition, including Jack Vance himself, Robert Silverberg and Neil Gaiman. 

Wright makes us care about the two main characters -- including the less likeable Manxolio Quinc, who serves as viewpoint character in limited third-person (6). The incidents are fantastic, the secrets deep, and the ultimate revelations truly awesome, having an immense impact on our concept of the past and future of the Dying Earth, and all this without rendering the story inconsistent with Vance's own work or other authorized fiction set in that 'verse.  Most importantly, it all makes sense -- there is never a moment where something deeply stupid happens that slices the threads of your willing suspension of disbelief -- and is profoundly moving.

Conclusion

With this story, coupled with his work in the universes of A. E. Van Vogt's World of Null-A and William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, John C. Wright is establishing himself as not merely a great writer and creator of his own fictional worlds, but also as a supremely-talented worker in other people's worlds.  This is harder than one might realize on first consideration:  the writer who wishes to tell effective stories in other people's universes must manage to convey his own message in a manner consistent with the existing setting and themes.  In particular, he must not flat-out contradict anything already established as true in that setting, and he must handle any established characters and other elements of the setting in such wise as not to jar with the mood of that setting, even if his ultimate message is DIFFERENT from that of the original creator.  Not only is this difficult to do, it is extremely difficult to do well, to do in a manner which results in a story which is both true to the old and memorable for the new (7).

John C. Wright had an especially tough row to hoe here because he was using a character from a previous Jack Vance story in the setting, to tell a story whose theme close to contradicts one of the main assumptions of the setting, and he managed to show with reference to other Vance works in and out of setting, exactly why this all made sense in terms of the setting.  He even made an implicit analogy between one of the protagonists and the hero of another very famous Jack Vance series, which was not originally part of the Dying Earth 'verse, by syncretizing the two 'verses.  And it was done subtly -- I didn't explicitly realize the thematic connection between "Guyal the Curator" and the famous Jack Vance series until I sat down to write this review.

Read this story.  Mortgage your home and unimportant family members to get hold of a copy of the anthology in which it appears (8).  Then read John C. Wright's other works.

It's well worth your time.

END.


=== NOTES ===

(1) - An obvious inspiration for Jack Vance was Clark Ashton Smith, whose Zothique series, set on "Zothique, Earth's Last Continent" (a future supercontinent somewhat similar to Pangaea Ultima), is essentially sword and sorcery in a decadent future world dominated by often-evil magicians -- though averaging a lower level of general technology than Vance's "Dying Earth."  Both are classed as being in the "Dying Earth subgenre" of speculative fiction.

(2) - Using the system even more familiar to many from Dungeons and Dragons, in which a magic-user can memorize and cast only a certain number of spells of certain levels per day.  However, Vance did not here copy D&D -- the first "Dying Earth" stories were written in the 1940's and 1950's.  It was actually Gygax and Arneson who copied Vance, and in some cases lifted spells wholesale from his stories.

(3) - This interpretation of the fantasy elements in the `verse developed over time and is the one Wright used in the story under discussion.  It also is one which makes a lot of sense.

(4) - And humans do the same thing in ancient cities and countries of the modern Earth, or otherwise sell off literally-irreplacable resources with no plan for supporting their economies after the deposits have run dry.  The antiquities and oil trades of the modern Mideast are the obvious example:  but there are less obvious ones, such as the mammoth tusk ivory trade.

(5) - Self-discovery seems to be one of John C. Wright's favorite story subjects:  consider the children from his "Chronicles of Chaos" series, or the multiple deceptions that have been practiced on Phaethon in his "The Golden Age" trilogy.  All I can say about this is that it's one of the strongest possible literary themes, and Wright always handles it well, with self-discovery leading to even larger discoveries which turn out to be vital to the whole story setting,

(6) - Which works interestingly and effectively, because Manxolio is the one whose scope of knowledge is most similar to that of his contemporaries, allowing the other character numerous and well-handled opportunities for exposition to the reader as he explains things to Manxolio; but the other character is the one with a moral outlook more similar to men of our age).

(7) - In the good sense of the word.

(8) - Or you could just visit your public library, like I did.  But where's the fun in that? ;-)

FINALLY

John C. Wright maintains a blog at

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/58124.John_C_Wright/blog

which is more than a bit interesting.  I recommend it to one and all.

Retro Movie Review - "Queen of Blood" (1966)

Introduction
I turned on this movie a few years ago, expecting it to be MST-able Grade B nonsense. I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found. Though the special effects are lame and its concept of space travel primitive by modern standards, it was actually an intelligent and well-thought-out movie -- one which deserved better treatment than it could get at the time (it was shot for only $56,000, and included stock footage from a totally-different Russian movie).

Characters

Basil Rathbone, as Dr. Farraday, a scientist, who acts as mission controller from Moonbase.
John Saxon, as Allen Brenner, sent on the second rescue mission who is in love with the character of
Judi Meredith, as Laura James, who is sent on the first rescue mission.

Plot

In the year 1990, the human race has numerous atomic rocketships and a moonbase, and is preparing to take the next step and go to Mars. Suddenly, the Earth receives radio messages from an alien civilization. The aliens are more advanced than Mankind and announce their intent to send an embassy.

The alien ship launches for our Solar System. For some reason, instead of landing on the Earth the ship crashes on Mars. The International Space Agency dispatches the rocketship Oceana to Mars with a crew of four to rescue the aliens. The Oceana encounters a solar storm and uses too much of her fuel energizing her shields, and lands on Mars uncertain of when she can return.

The Earth astronauts find the elien ship crewed only by a corpse. There is evidence that a lifeship has been launched from her. Oceania launches satellites and the alien lifeship is discovered on Phobos -- which Oceania does not have the fuel to reach.

A 2-person rocket is sent from Luna to land on Phobos and rescue the aliens. This small ship does not have enough fuel to return, and will have to be rescued later. On Phobos the crew find one unconscious alien, and (leaving 1 crew member on Phobos with enough supplies to await rescue) the other crewman (whose lover is on the Oceana) takes the ship's lander (a Dyna-Soar like craft) and lands on Mars with the alien survivor).

The alien survivor is female. She has green skin, an oddly-shaped pointed head (think of a beehive hairdo but with skull under the hair) and a sinister smile. When she regains consciousness, she does not talk, is willing to drink water but recoils from solid food, and appears terrified of needles. She does not like the only female on the Earth crew.

The Oceania blasts off from Mars for Earth. Along the way, they discover what the alien survivor eats. She is a vampire, and takes enough blood at a time to kill a human. She kills one crew member -- the one who was most sympathetic toward her -- before the three remaining astronauts realize what is happening. After feeding, she is glutted with blood and sleeps for days -- the condition in which they originally found her.

The crew have a dilemna. The alien is clearly a deadly threat, but their orders are to bring her back alive. So they tie her up and use up their stores of blood plasma feeding her. When given blood plasma, she is apparently uninterested in attacking humans.

But before they can reach Earth, the blood plasma runs out. The captain plans to use blood donations from the crew to keep the alien alive, but before they can do this, she uses her hypnotic power (as she had done before, unbeknownst to the astronauts) to immobilize him so that she could drain his blood.

The two survivors -- Allen Brenner and Laura James-- tie her up while she's in her glutted state and discuss what to do. Allen wants to kill her, orders or no orders. Laura persuades Allen to keep her alive.

Unfortunately, the alien has another mind-trick left, pyrokinesis. She can focus her will strongly enough to burn through her bonds. She attempts to kill Allen, but Laura springs furiously upon the alien and scratches her slightly in a fight. The alien screams, runs back into her cabin, and collapses.

They discover to their suprise that this minor wound has actually killed her. Apparently, her species is very vulnerable to any injury that breaks the skin.

Allen discovers something else, though. The ship is full of eggs the alien has laid and concealed. The astronauts contact Moonbase and Dr. Farraday orders them to preserve the eggs for study. Allen thinks this is a terrible idea but obeys the direct order. They land on Earth and step out into the sunlight, but Allen worries if the human race will not regret keeping the alien eggs alive.

Comments

Given the incredible cheesiness of the special effects (save for the spaceship exterior shots, which were stock footage from a 1959 Russian movie), my pleasant surprise was just how good were the basic science-fictional concepts, and their exploration. Let me go through them, point by point.

(1) - Slingshot Maneuver

I do not know whether or not this was a happy accident, but the movie strongly implies that Oceania gets to Mars by executing a gravitational slingshot around the Sun -- the likeliest reason why a ship headed for Mars from Luna would pass close to the Sun in the first place, which was necessary for the plot-important solar flare. If so, this was prescient, as interplanetary slingshot maneuvers were in 1966 purely theoretical.

(2) - Gravity

The movie suffers a fail on its depiction of gravity. The astronauts appear to be under a 1G field through the entire film. This is remotely possible if the ships are fusion torch vessels under continuous acceleration (but this would be very advanced tech for 1990, even from a 1966 POV), but of course in that case they wouldn't be doing gravitational slingshots. And of course, on Mars and even more so on Phobos there's no way they'd be in a 1G field (on Phobos, they'd be under microgravity).

OTOH, given the tiny budget there is no way that the film could have simulated zero-gee, since back then it would have had to have been done with complex wire arrangements and carefully-angled shots (the way it was done for 2001: A Space Odyssey two years later). So I'll forgive it this failing, because there's no way they could have avoided the situation.

(3) - Solar Storm

The movie calls it by some hokey term, but the Oceania encounters a solar flare on the way to Mars. This is quite plausible and is indeed one of the major problems facing modern astronautical engineers planning such a mission. Damage to equipment would be possible with an intense flare. Pain to the crew would not -- that degree of radiation sickness coming that quickly would be fatal -- but I'll cut it a pass for that because the health effects of solar radiation were not well understood at the time, not even by NASA.

(4) - Electromagnetic Shield

The Oceania's crew survives the solar storm by raising an electromagnetic shield which, unfortunately, greatly reduces their energy (which is why they have trouble on the return flight). This is absolutely plausible -- in fact, electromagnetic shielding is one of the measures being contemplated in the design of real interplanetary spacecraft. (The movie misses the simpler solution, which is a metal-and-water-shielded "storm shelter," but then I'm not sure that even NASA had by 1966 come up with this alternative).

(5) - Limited Fuel

Though used as a plot device, the movie is quite correct that even high-capability atomic rockets of the sort presented would be very much limited in terms of fuel supplies. It's quite plausible that a ship might have enough fuel to take off from Mars for Earth but not stop at Phobos.

(6) - Mysterious Aliens

Even though this film could have taken the easy way out and said "The aliens are evil and their goal is conquest," given that it features an alien vampire who murders three people on a ship sent to rescue her, it didn't. We get the very strong impression from the limited depiction of the aliens in their own culture (they are absolutely silent and move stiffly) and from the behavior of the "Queen of Blood" that they are eusocial telepaths, probably with a reproductive caste, and that the alien survivor is a literal "queen" in the sense of a eusocial insect colony -- in other words, she is of their reproductive caste.

We never find out what the aliens originally wanted, however, and there is no proof that their original intentions were hostile. Something went wrong (we never find out what) which led to the aliens crashing on Mars instead of landing on Earth. On Earth, there would have been an effectively infinite supply of animal blood from the POV of a small alien group (probably no more than one drone and one queen), with absolutely no need to attack humans. It is fairly likely that the aliens ran out of supplies, and that the queen slew the drone, which is why they find his corpse on Mars.

An obvious interpretation of the QOB's actions is that she interpreted the situation on Oceania as a colony similar to her own eusocial structure. There was one Earth female and three Earth males -- what else would she assume but that the female was a queen or potential queen, and the males merely her servants / reserve food supply? She may have never realized that she was doing anything more aggressive or hostile than sneaking food from the icebox would be in our culture. Note that she never attacks or even threatens Laura, even though she obviously dislikes her.

In the end, you are left wondering. Was this all a tragic mutual misunderstanding? Are the aliens really hostile? Will saving the eggs turn out to be a boon or a curse for Mankind?

And that unanswered question, which so easily could have been given a glib answer in one or the other direction, makes this a better movie.



Conclusion

This movie is well worth seeing. Get past the crappy special effects, and enjoy a film which is not merely horror with science-fictional trappings, but true science fiction.

How Wilful Ignorance of Inconvenient History Ruins Kristine Kathryn Rusch's 'G-Men' (2008)"

Introduction

I recently read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's short story "G-Men," which is an alternate history murder mystery set in October 1964 -- an important month indeed, when I personally entered the world, and also some minor stuff started happening in Southeast Asia.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, his personal assistant and possible lover Clyde Tolson, and three other FBI agents have been murdered outside a seedy gay hangout in New York City, and the question is:  "Whodunit?"

The story was interesting and engaging, and a fascinating examination of how attitudes toward crime and law enforcement were different almost a half-century ago.  But it seriously collapsed in its climax, because the author was forced to bend her interpretation of the history of LBJ and the Kennedys to fit the received wisdom as to the JFK assassination, as understood by the modern Left.

Dialogue and Monologue From the Climax

In the climactic scene, RFK (Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's competent younger brother, the Attorney-General) and LBJ (President Lyndon Baines Johnson), are facing-off over the secret political files of the deceased FBI Director.  Historically, J. Edgar Hoover had the dirt on virtually every politician and even celebrity in the country, and used these files both for occasional political blackmail and even more to prevent overreaching Presidents from using these files for systematic political blackmail).  LBJ can fire RFK, whom he hates, and seize the files, but RFK points out that LBJ can't do this without either taking a lot of time to go through procedures or creating a huge political scandal.

Here, LBJ and RFK talk, and RFK muses, about his brother's assassination.  LBJ says:

"... There's a lot of shit running around here that says your brother's shooting was a mob hit, and I know personally that J. Edgar was doing his best to make it seem like that Oswald character acted alone.  But now Edgar is dead and Jack is dead and the only tie they have is the way they kowtowed to your stupid prosecution of the men that got your brother elected."

Kennedy felt lightheaded.  He hadn't even thought that the deaths of his brother and J. Edgar were connected.  But LBJ had a point.  Maybe there was a conspiracy to kill government officials.  Maybe the mob was showing its power.  He'd had warning.

Hell, he'd had suspicions.  He hadn't let himself look at any of the evidence in his brother's assassination, not after he secured the body and prevented a disastrous autopsy in Texas.  If those doctors at Parkland had done their job, they would've seen just how advanced Jack's Addison's disease was.  The best kept secret of the Kennedy Administration -- an administration full of secrets -- was how close Jack was to incapacitation and death.

Analysis

Now, this exchange and interior monologue makes literally no logical sense -- and worse, it makes LBJ out to be a virtual traitor and RFK out to be a coward, which is probably not what the author intended.  Note that LBJ is saying that he thinks the Mafia has decided to kill Presidents and FBI Directors of which it disapproves and he isn't going to do anything to stop them from continuing to do this (a blatant violation of his Oath of Office) and RFK is thinking that he had to acquiesce to letting go the people who had not merely killed a sitting US President  but also HIS OWN BROTHER because he is afraid that otherwise people would have learned the JFK was seriously ill (which is a fact that would have become entirely irrelevant the moment JFK died).  At a minimum, one would have to assume that both LBJ and RFK were imbeciles incapable of logical planning -- for instance, wouldn't it occur to LBJ that his number-one priority should be to take down this dangerous conspiracy which might target him next?

This makes no sense on the face of it.  If this were a story set in an entirely fictional world, one would accuse Ms. Rusch of an incapablity of handling basic reasoning as it applies to political maneuvering, conspiracies and even common sense.

But of course this isn't set in an entirely fictional world, and that's the reason why Rusch's logic here stumbles.

Two Assassinations

It is part of the received wisdom of the modern Left that JFK was secretly an enlightened Leftist who if allowed to remain President would have avoided the Vietnam War, ended racism in America, and accomplished all sorts of great Leftist things such as would have pleased the hippies of 5-10 years after his death -- and that for this reason he was murdered by a Right-wing conspiracy, probably including the CIA, Mafia, and (depending who you ask) everyone else from the Dixiecrats to the Boy Scouts.  It is also part of the received wisdom of the modern Left that RFK was also such a Lightworker who would have made the hippies happy, etc. etc., and was bumped off by the same people.

This is called "retconning" when applied to fiction.  JFK was a hardline anti-Communist -- he was in short on the right wing of the Democrats on every issue other than race (the real right-wing Democrats on race were the Southern Democrats aka "Dixiecrats," who then and for the past century had worked hard to keep blacks down).  He didn't merely talk an anti-Communist line, he practiced it -- he invaded Cuba, upon the failure of this invasion repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, and ramped-up American intervention against Communists everywhere from Central America to Southeast Asia.  He was one of the architects of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

When he was murdered in 1963 -- based on overwhleming evidence, by a Castro-sympathizing Communist ex-US Marine by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who if he did not act alone was probably taking orders from Fidel Castro (who actually had a very good motive, means and opportunity) -- his Presidency was aborted.  And the kids who grew up admiring JFK, who then went to college and became the proto-Counterculture -- were free to imagine that their childhood hero believed and would have done any old thing that they wished he believed and would have done -- and those mean old Establishment types killed him to prevent him from doing so.

And so began and proliferated the conspiracy theories.

Amusingly, Rusch misses the most obvious conspiracy theory, the one which RFK if he had decided his brother was killed by conspirators including US Government officials and/or the Mafia helped by a US Government coverup, would likely have believed.

Who profited the most by JFK's death?  Why, his Vice-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.  JFK hated LBJ and the hatred was cordially returned.  LBJ was going to be dropped from the ticket in 1968, but JFK's assassination instead catapulted LBJ into the Presidency.  And LBJ was the one man whom, if any other conspiracy was plotting to kill JFK, had to be brought on board in at least passive acceptance of the plot, because otherwise he would have been in a position to punish the conspirators for the murder of an American President -- a crime which his own power and safety demanded he not permit.

Yet in the confrontation, RFK does not even show a hint of suspecting that LBJ may have had his brother murdered.  Why?

Because LBJ is also a hero to the Left because of his Great Society program (they tend to forgive him the Vietnam War, because after all it was just a lot of redneck Americans and swarthy foreigners who got killed in that little fracas).  They can't have one hero of the Left getting mad at another hero of the Left for murdering yet another hero of the Left -- why, that might imply a certain degree of insane violence on the American Left, and we can't have that.  Better to blame the Mafia -- who really expects any better of the Mafia, anyway?  And as for the CIA ...

As for RFK, he was murdered in 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, who was the prototype and first American example of the Angry Arab whom we all have to sympathize with because George W. Bush was such a meanie to them.  Even worse, Sirhan was a Palestinian, who killed RFK because RFK was sympathetic to the Israel (as was the whole Left, before the PLO started hitting Western targets and this scaring the Western Left into croaking "how high?" when the PLO asked froggie to jump).  This makes Sirhan Sirhan doubly sacrosanct and hence obviously the stooge of some Evil Conspiracy involving, um, the Mafia, the CIA, the Phone Company, and the Boy Scouts.  Or something like that.

RFK, of course, had decided to "get out front and lead" the New Left, much to the dismay of the actual New Left leaders, who were especially upset that their followers were forgetting that they were supposed to be rebelling against society, not joining the bandwagon of a rich Democrat who was very likely to become the next President of the United States of Amerikkka.  One could concoct a conspiracy theory involving the American New Leftists, except that those bozos clearly couldn't have organized a group of horny sailors on an outing to a whorehouse (as the Weathermen were shortly to begin demonstrating).

The Actual Denounement

I won't spoil the story, save to mention that the Mafia didn't kill J. Edgar Hoover -- and that the author sets up the real culprit quite professionally.  Which is to say, all that stuff in which LBJ and RFK are made to look like fools, cowards and traitors was just a red herring -- but of course Rusch didn't realize she was making LBJ and RFK look like fools, cowards and traitors.

She thought she was telling real history, the way she imagined those people actually thought.  They come off as imbecilic because she is resolutely avoiding confronting any historical truths which might blow the lid off just how imbecilic is the modern Left's version of the history surrounding the LBJ and RFK assassinations.

Conclusion

When one corrupts data, one corrupts the information one can construct from the data.  A lie or severe mistake regarding history will corrupt historical fiction derived from that history.  (Imagine if I believed that Europeans had possessed good maps and sailing instructions to the New World from AD 750 on, and then tried to comprehend the strategy of expansion of European polities under that belief!)

Here, the lies and mistakes which are required to keep JFK, LBJ, RFK and simultaneously Communists and the Palestinians as sympathetic historical actors, when it was a Communist (Oswald) and a Palestinian (Sirhan) who murdered JFK and RFK respectively, and LBJ who did nothing to avenge either death.

Truth will out.  Sometimes, by corrupting the conclusions of the liars.

END

Generational Social Variance in Future Histories: Sexual Mores of the American Mandate

Introduction

Too much science fiction creates only one set of social customs for "the future" -- it basically assumes that things change a bit from today until they have adapted to "future technology," and then remain frozen in that form from now until the heat-death of the Universe.  Well, maybe not that long, but it sometimes seems that way.

In this article I'll show a simple way that this can be avoided in the construction of a future history, by charting in a very basic fashion the variations in sexual mores of an imagined future society, my "American Mandate."

The American Mandate

The "American Mandate" future history is based on Spenglerian and Toynbeeian cyclic history.  It assumes that, over the 21st century, the present-day global order coalesces around the United States of America  as the Universal State of the West.  In the West's last great burst of creativity and expansion, other worlds of the Solar System are colonized, but then the West sinks into its cultural "winter."  America, now a semi-fascist republic under "Chief Commanders," sometimes referred to as the "American Mandate," rules the Inner System; while new cultures, collectively called the "Outies," are born and grow great out beyond the Asteroid Belt.  Eventually, America declines and is conquered by the more vital and energetic "Outie" civilizations.

The Sexual More Rating System

Since I'm being simple here, I will analyze the population in "generational" cohorts of 25 years (an oversimplification as real "generations" are more on the order of 20-22 years).  This allows me four cohorts born per century, as follows "01-25," "26-50," "50-75" and "76-00."  The precise length chosen for one's cohorts is arbitrary, though note that real human customs rarely change drastically over any period of time shorter than a decade, and when they do change that rapidly it is usually under some extreme stress such as a devastating plague, disastrous war or major philosophical upheaval.

Again keeping it basic, we will analyze sexual mores on a unidimensional "strictness of morality" (which is a major oversimplification) with five levels:  from least to most strict we shall call them "Licentious," "Free," "Normal," "Restrained" and "Puritanical."  We shall set "Normal" to be the equivalent of American morality in the mid-20th century, with "Free" being the equivalent of American morality today, "Licentious" the "free-love" subculture of c. 1965-75, "Restrained" being Edwardian middle-class and "Puritanical" Victorian middle-class values.

Here we go:

Period         Level                       Comments
2001-2025:  Free                          Present-day.
2026-2050:  Normal                     Continuation of current conservative trend.
2051-2075:  Free                          Period of foreign and civil wars:  fall of the Republic.
2076-2100:  Normal-Restrained   Formation of American Mandate, new idealism.
2101-2125:  Restrained                Heavy propaganda preventing renewed sexual liberation.
2126-2150:  Restrained-Normal   Moral decline under the mad Commander, Lee III.
2151-2175:  Normal-Free             Continued moral decline under the two later Lees.
2176-2200:  Free-Normal             Lees fall, Mandate reformed, public morality recovering.
2201-2225:  Normal                     Moral recovery, but not to restraint of earlier Mandate.
2226-2250:  Restrained                Despite First Solar War, the Inner System long stable.
2251-2275:  Normal                     Social exuberance in first decades of Long Peace.
2276-2300:  Free                          Society relaxes in the enjoyment of Long Peace.
2301-2325:  Normal                     Moral reform under Murasaki the Great.
2326-2350:  Restrained                America at apogee:  great morality and public pride.
2351-2375:  Restrained-Free       Near social collapse under the shock of the Metaplague.
2376-2400:  Free-Normal            The Mandate recovers from demographic devastation.
2401-2425:  Normal-Licentious  Second near collapse due to defeat in Second Solar War.
2426-2450:  Licentious-Free       The Mandate begins a partial recovery.
2451-2475:  Free                         Society remains troubled:  plots and finally a civil war.
2476-2500:  Licentious               The Time of Troubles:  all values are adrift.

(Note:  split-values means that the early part of that generation learns the first-named value set, while the later part of that generation learns the last-named value set.  Change is usually only by one level per generation, but under exceptional circumstances can happen more rapidly).

There you have it:  five hundred years of social history (in the single aspect of sexual morality) condensed into twenty lines -- very much oversimplified, but providing a quick way to imagine part of the background of any character from this universe -- and containing a hidden complexity.

The complexity lies in the fact that a person's basic values are formed in their first decades of life.  A person born in, say, 2088 ("Restrained") will by age 60 in 2148 in a "Normal" era, but this does not mean that his own values will have changed as rapidly as those of the younger generation.  He may well look at the immorality of the younger set with disapproval and disdain.  Likewise, the person born in 2288, in the "Free" times following the conquest of the Jovian System, will at 60 in 2348 be living in the "Restrained" period of Murasaki the Great, and may find the younger folk to be boringly strait-laced by his standards.

Conclusion:

What this does to science fiction is offer the prospect of social change:  and not just the unidirectional social change of "In the Past we lived [like we do in 2011], but now we live [like the author's ideological hobbyhorse].  Real history doesn't work like this:  customs change back and forth, often in a rather cyclic fashion.  Technology enjoys a "ratchet effect," as I've described, but society does not:  it drifts about under the influence of various forces.   Even if it moves in one direction for a long time, eventually some new factor will push or pull it in another.

I demonstrated how to do this for sexual customs, but social change can be charted for any social factor.  Liberty, economic growth, the popularity of novelty fake-noses-and-moustaches -- anything.  This is a tool of considerable power and versatility, which can help a future history come alive, and I urge its more general use.

Why I Am NOT Into Group Identity Based Anthologies

From time to time, one sees an anthology containing stories by authors all belonging to some similar group -- they are women, black, Jewish, Russian, whatever.  And some of the stories, and indeed whole anthologies, may indeed be quite good.

Nevertheless, when I see such an anthology, I start from the assumption that it is probably not as good, on average, as an anthology based on some other criterion (such as subgenre or year of publication).  Why do I have such a prejudice -- and am I being irrational?

My reason is simple.  The more criteria one applies to a selecting a story, other than its quality, the greater the limitation on the set of stories from which one is selecting a subset.  This in turn means that the average quality of the stories in the subset is likely to go down.

Suppose, for instance, that one is creating an anthology, The 100 Best SF Stories Of All Time.  This anthology could include very good stories written by anyone at any time.  If we assume that 1 million science fiction stories have been written in the whole history of the genre, we could select out 100 stories, even the worst of which would fall into the top 0.01%, and these stories would be very good indeed.

Now let's suppose that we create an anthology, The 100 Best SF Stories By Women Authors Of All Time.  If we assume that exactly 50% of all science fiction stories have been written by women, and that women write just as well as men, then this means that the worst story in the anthology only falls into the top 0.02% of all science fiction stories.

If the anthology is retitled The 100 Best Science Fiction Stories Written By Women in 1992, and we assume that 1% of all the science fiction ever written was written in 1992, now the stories range over only the top 2% of all science fiction stories ever written.

If we now change it to The 100 Best Science Fiction Stories Written By Black Women in 1992, and we assume that 10% of all science fiction writers are black, now the stories range over only the top 20% of all science fiction stories ever written.

This develops inexorably from the search criteria.  The more narrow the criteria, save that of quality, the lower the average quality of any selection assuming the number of stories selected is equal and that the statistical universe of stories is large enough (if my "anthology" consisted of one story, and if we assume that the best SF story of all time was written by a black female gay Mormon, then The Best Science Fiction Story Ever Written By a Black Gay Mormon Woman would perforce contain that tale, even if that was the only science fiction story ever written by a black female gay Mormon).

Those of you who have been paying attention may note a possible flaw in my argument.  Namely, it applies to any non-quality based search criteria, so why am I focusing on gender-ethnic-religious based ones?

Indeed, the most common limitation on the selection of science fiction stories is year of publication.  Most of the long-running anthology series limit themselves in this fashion.  The next most common limitation is subgenre, often cut extremely fine:  so we see Elf Fantastic, Horse Fantastic, Plumber Fantastic, etc. etc. etc.

Year-of-publication fails to bother me for two reasons.  The first is that, given the lack of access to time machines, new material becomes available to editors on a time-limited basis.  It would be impossible to publish an anthology The Best Science Ficton of All Times Including the Future, because future stories haven't yet been written or submitted to the editors of such a tome.  Editors want new science fiction stories, so year is the most obvious means of organization.

The second is that I unashamedly confess to a strong interest in the history of science fiction.  Even though the stories in The Best SF of 1971 aren't exactly "new," it fascinates me to see what themes were being explored, and how, forty years ago as compared to today.  The existence of series of anthologies of this sort is a useful tool in studying the thematic and technical development of the field.

As for subgenre-based anthologies, these are useful because not everyone is interested in the exact same sort of science fiction.  Indeed, the assumption that "science fiction," rather than "speculative fiction" or "space-based science fiction" or "space-based science fiction about colonizing Vesta," is the useful unit of examination is arbitrary:  it was hardly decreed by the Muses.  Sometimes, I want to see an overview of what's been written specifically about spaceships, or robots, or whatever.

Having said that, I will point out that my prediction holds true.  The average quality of the work in the year-based or subgenre-based anthologies is generally below that of the all-time or all-genre based anthologies, and when one combines the two limitations, one often sees the publication of truly execrable work.

Ok, but I admitted that I'm not too much bothered by the year-based and subgenre-based anthologies.  So why do author group-identity based anthologies bother me?

Basically, it's because I'm a strong believer in the equality of races, sexes and (to some extent) religions (*).  Believing in this equality, I don't think that any very important piece of information is being conveyed to me when I learn that a writer is male, female, black, white, Christian or Jewish.  Hence, an anthology which limits its selection by such criteria is reducing the average story quality without forming a group of stories which are in any important way similar.

Now, some will say that it is important to produce such group-limited anthologies in order to give (Group X) a chance, because members of (Group X) have been historically underrepresented in the set of science fiction authors, published science fiction stories, or whatever.  Or, alternately, that this group has a special "voice," a unique perspective on things, which should be heard in order to promote a diversity of viewpoints in the genre.  Surely, we should give the writers from this group what they deserve?  Surely, we should listen to their voice?

The problem with the first argument is that what science fiction writers "deserve" is to have their stories fairly judged on content, which is to say quality and length.  Being black, or Jewish, or Armenian, or whatever, does not logically give one a special claim on publication resources.  If one is good, then one should and will be published regardless of one's ethnic or gender identity.  If one is not good, the one should not and will not be so published.

The problem with the second argument is that it is both polylogistic as regards the genre and monolithic as regards the ethnic groups concerned.  Polylogistic, because it asserts that there is some special black (or female, or Armenian) conciousness which cannot be understood by whites (or men, or non-Armenians).  Monolithic, because it assumes that all members of such a group will agree on certain matters, and in practice authors who do not show the "correct" attitudes will be excluded from such anthologies.

This gets to yet another problem with the "group identity" anthologies.  In  many case the diversity of ideological content is less than it would be in a non-group identity anthology, even from members of the specific group.  What's more, the group identity anthology will tend to focus on a limited set of themes:  I've seen this in, to take the most obvious case, "Jewish SF" anthologies, which tend to focus on the religion of Judaism in science fiction settings.  This fact glares so obviously because so many of the "big name" SF writers of the 1940's through 1970's actually were Jewish (**), and hence are abundantly represented in more general science fiction anthologies.

Real and meaningful diversity -- especially in an intellectual field such as a genre of literature -- lies in diversity of ideas, not diversity of group membership.  We find excellence by seeking the excellent, not by asking people to show us their identity cards.

===
(*)  Since religions are philosophies, and hence are to some degree chosen by their adherents, I consider prejudice against persons based on religious affiliation far more rational than prejudice against persons based on race or sex.  Having said that, I don't consider most religions to be any wiser or sillier than their competitors, so my religious-based prejudice is minimal.

(**)  In some cases they used nom de plumes, but in most they didn't.  Isaac Asimov was their most prominent representative, and he generally wanted to display his own name in as big letters as would fit on a book cover ;-)

"A Scientist Rises" (D. W. Hall, 1932) w/Commentary

"A Scientist Rises"

(c) 1932 by D. W. Hall

On that summer day the sky over New York was unflecked by clouds, and the air hung motionless, the waves of heat undisturbed. The city was a vast oven where even the sounds of the coiling traffic in its streets seemed heavy and weary under the press of heat that poured down from above. In Washington Square, the urchins of the neighborhood splashed in the fountain, and the usual midday assortment of mothers, tramps and out-of-works lounged listlessly on the hot park benches.

As a bowl, the Square was filled by the torrid sun, and the trees and grass drooped like the people on its walks. In the surrounding city, men worked in sweltering offices and the streets rumbled with the never-ceasing tide of business—but Washington Square rested.

And then a man walked out of one of the houses lining the square, and all this was changed.

He came with a calm, steady stride down the steps of a house on the north side, and those who happened to see him gazed with surprised interest. For he was a giant in size. He measured at least eleven feet in height, and his body was well-formed and in perfect proportion. He crossed the street and stepped over the railing into the nearest patch of grass, and there stood with arms folded and legs a little apart. The expression on his face was preoccupied and strangely apart, nor did it change when, almost immediately from the park bench nearest him, a woman's excited voice cried:

"Look! Look! Oh, look!"

The people around her craned their necks and stared, and from them grew a startled murmur. Others from farther away came to see who had cried out, and remained to gaze fascinated at the man on the grass. Quickly the murmur spread across the Square, and from its every part men and women and children streamed towards the center of interest—and then, when they saw, backed away slowly and fearfully, with staring eyes, from where the lone figure stood.

There was about that figure something uncanny and terrible. There, in the hot midday hush, something was happening to it which men would say could not happen; and men, seeing it, backed away in alarm. Quickly they dispersed. Soon there were only white, frightened faces peering from behind buildings and trees.
Before their very eyes the giant was growing.

When he had first emerged, he had been around eleven feet tall, and now, within three minutes, he had risen close to sixteen feet.

His great body maintained its perfect proportions. It was that of an elderly man clad simply in a gray business suit. The face was kind, its clear-chiselled features indicating fine spiritual strength; on the white forehead beneath the sparse gray hair were deep-sunken lines which spoke of years of concentrated work.

No thought of malevolence could come from that head with its gentle blue eyes that showed the peace within, but fear struck ever stronger into those who watched him, and in one place a woman fainted; for the great body continued to grow, and grow ever faster, until it was twenty feet high, then swiftly twenty-five, and the feet, still separated, were as long as the body of a normal boy. Clothes and body grew effortlessly, the latter apparently without pain, as if the terrifying process were wholly natural.

The cars coming into Washington Square had stopped as their drivers sighted what was rising there, and by now the bordering streets were tangled with traffic. A distant crowd of milling people heightened the turmoil. The northern edge was deserted, but in a large semicircle was spread a fear-struck, panicky mob. A single policeman, his face white and his eyes wide, tried to straighten out the tangle of vehicles, but it was infinitely beyond him and he sent in a riot call; and as the giant with the kind, dignified face loomed silently higher than the trees in the Square, and ever higher, a dozen blue-coated figures appeared, and saw, and knew fear too, and hung back awe-stricken, at a loss what to do. For by now the rapidly mounting body had risen to the height of forty feet.

An excited voice raised itself above the general hubbub.

"Why, I know him! I know him! It's Edgar Wesley! Doctor Edgar Wesley!"

A police sergeant turned to the man who had spoken.

"And it—he knows you? Then go closer to him, and—and—ask him what it means."

But the man looked fearfully at the giant and hung back. Even as they talked, his gigantic body had grown as high as the four-storied buildings lining the Square, and his feet were becoming too large for the place where they had first been put. And now a faint smile could be seen on the giant's face, an enigmatic smile, with something ironic and bitter in it.

"Then shout to him from here," pressed the sergeant nervously. "We've got to find out something! This is crazy—impossible! My God! Higher yet—and faster!"

Summoning his courage, the other man cupped his hands about his mouth and shouted:

"Dr. Wesley! Can you speak and tell us? Can we help you stop it?"

The ring of people looked up breathless at the towering figure, and a wave of fear passed over them and several hysterical shrieks rose up as, very slowly, the huge head shook from side to side. But the smile on its lips became stronger, and kinder, and the bitterness seemed to leave it.

There was fear at that motion of the enormous head, but a roar of panic sounded from the watchers when, with marked caution, the growing giant moved one foot from the grass into the street behind and the other into the nearby base of Fifth Avenue, just above the Arch. Fearing harm, they were gripped by terror, and they fought back while the trembling policemen tried vainly to control them; but the panic soon ended when they saw that the leviathan's arms remained crossed and his smile kinder yet. By now he dwarfed the houses, his body looming a hundred and fifty feet into the sky. At this moment a woman back of the semicircle slumped to her knees and prayed hysterically.

"Someone's coming out of his house!" shouted one of the closest onlookers.

The door of the house from which the giant had first appeared had opened, and the figure of a middle-aged, normal-sized man emerged. For a second he crouched on the steps, gaping up at the monstrous shape in the sky, and then he scurried down and made at a desperate run for the nearest group of policemen.

He gripped the sergeant and cried frantically:

"That's Dr. Wesley! Why don't you do something? Why don't—"

"Who are you?" the officer asked, with some return of an authoritative manner.

"I work for him. I'm his janitor. But—can't you do anything? Look at him! Look!"

The crowd pressed closer. "What do you know about this?" went on the sergeant.

The man gulped and stared around wildly. "He's been working on something—many years—I don't know what, for he kept it a close secret. All I knew is that an hour ago I was in my room upstairs, when I heard some disturbance in his laboratory, on the ground floor. I came down and knocked on the door, and he answered from inside and said that everything was all right—"

"You didn't go in?"

"No. I went back up, and everything was quiet for a long time. Then I heard a lot of noise down below—a smashing—as if things were being broken. But I thought he was just destroying something he didn't need, and I didn't investigate: he hated to be disturbed. And then, a little later, I heard them shouting out here in the Square, and I looked out and saw. I saw him—just as I knew him—but a giant! Look at his face! Why, he has the face of—of a god! He's—as if he were looking down on us—and—pitying us...."

For a moment all were silent as they gazed, transfixed, at the vast form that towered two hundred feet above them. Almost as awe-inspiring as the astounding growth was the fine, dignified calmness of the face. The sergeant broke in:

"The explanation of this must be in his laboratory. We've got to have a look. You lead us there."

The other man nodded; but just then the giant moved again, and they waited and watched.

With the utmost caution the titanic shape changed position. Gradually, one great foot, over thirty feet in length, soared up from the street and lowered farther away, and then the other distant foot changed its position; and the leviathan came gently to rest against the tallest building bordering the Square, and once more folded his arms and stood quiet. The enormous body appeared to waver slightly as a breath of wind washed against it: obviously it was not gaining weight as it grew. Almost, now, it appeared to float in the air. Swiftly it grew another twenty-five feet, and the gray expanse of its clothes shimmered strangely as a ripple ran over its colossal bulk.

A change of feeling came gradually over the watching multitude. The face of the giant was indeed that of a god in the noble, irony-tinged serenity of his calm features. It was if a further world had opened, and one of divinity had stepped down; a further world of kindness and fellow-love, where were none of the discords that bring conflicts and slaughterings to the weary people of Earth. Spiritual peace radiated from the enormous face under the silvery hair, peace with an undertone of sadness, as if the giant knew of the sorrows of the swarm of dwarfs beneath him, and pitied them.

From all the roofs and the towers of the city, for miles and miles around, men saw the mammoth shape and the kindly smile grow more and more tenuous against the clear blue sky. The figure remained quietly in the same position, his feet filling two empty streets, and under the spell of his smile all fear seemed to leave the nearer watchers, and they became more quiet and controlled.

The group of policemen and the janitor made a dash for the house from which the giant had come. They ascended the steps, went in, and found the door of the laboratory locked. They broke the door down. The sergeant looked in.

"Anyone in here?" he cried. Nothing disturbed the silence, and he entered, the others following.

A long, wide, dimly-lit room met their eyes, and in its middle the remains of a great mass of apparatus that had dominated it.

The apparatus was now completely destroyed. Its dozen rows of tubes were shattered, its intricate coils of wire and machinery hopelessly smashed. Fragments lay scattered all over the floor. No longer was there the least shape of meaning to anything in the room; there remained merely a litter of glass and stone and scrap metal.

Conspicuous on the floor was a large hammer. The sergeant walked over to pick it up, but, instead, paused and stared at what lay beyond it.

"A body!" he said.

A sprawled out dead man lay on the floor, his dark face twisted up, his sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, his temple crushed as with a hammer. Clutched tight in one stiff hand was an automatic. On his chest was a sheet of paper.

The captain reached down and grasped the paper. He read what was written on it, and then he read it to the others:

There was a fool who dreamed the high dream of the pure scientist, and who lived only to ferret out the secrets of nature, and harness them for his fellow men. He studied and worked and thought, and in time came to concentrate on the manipulation of the atom, especially the possibility of contracting and expanding it—a thing of greatest potential value. For nine years he worked along this line, hoping to succeed and give new power, new happiness, a new horizon to mankind. Hermetically sealed in his laboratory, self-exiled from human contacts, he labored hard.

There came a day when the device into which the fool had poured his life stood completed and a success. And on that very day an agent for a certain government entered his laboratory to steal the device. And in that moment the fool realized what he had done: that, from the apparatus he had invented, not happiness and new freedom would come to his fellow men, but instead slaughter and carnage and drunken power increased a hundredfold. He realized, suddenly, that men had not yet learned to use fruitfully the precious, powerful things given to them, but as yet could only play with them like greedy children—and kill as they played. Already his invention had brought death. And he realized—even on this day of his triumph—that it and its secret must be destroyed, and with them he who had fashioned so blindly.

For the scientist was old, his whole life was the invention, and with its going there would be nothing more.

And so he used the device's great powers on his own body; and then, with those powers working on him, he destroyed the device and all the papers that held its secrets.

Was the fool also mad? Perhaps. But I do not think so. Into his lonely laboratory, with this marauder, had come the wisdom that men must wait, that the time is not yet for such power as he was about to offer. A gesture, his strange death, which you who read this have seen? Yes, but a useful one, for with it he and his invention and its hurtful secrets go from you; and a fitting one, for he dies through his achievement, through his very life.

But, in a better sense, he will not die, for the power of his achievement will dissolve his very body among you infinitely; you will breathe him in your air; and in you he will live incarnate until that later time when another will give you the knowledge he now destroys, and he will see it used as he wished it used.—E. W.

The sergeant's voice ceased, and wordlessly the men in the laboratory looked at each other. No comment was needed. They went out.

They watched from the steps of Edgar Wesley's house. At first sight of the figure in the sky, a new awe struck them, for now the shape of the giant towered a full five hundred feet into the sun, and it seemed almost a mirage, for definite outline was gone from it. It shimmered and wavered against the bright blue like a mist, and the blue shone through it, for it was quite transparent. And yet still they imagined they could discern the slight ironic smile on the face, and the peaceful, understanding light in the serene eyes; and their hearts swelled at the knowledge of the spirit, of the courage, of the fine, far-seeing mind of that outflung titanic martyr to the happiness of men.

The end came quickly. The great misty body rose; it floated over the city like a wraith, and then it swiftly dispersed, even as steam dissolves in the air. They felt a silence over the thousands of watching people in the Square, a hush broken at last by a deep, low murmur of awe and wonderment as the final misty fragments of the vast sky-held figure wavered and melted imperceptibly—melted and were gone from sight in the air that was breathed by the men whom Edgar Wesley loved.

END.

==================================================================

"Commentary on 'A Scientist Rises'"

(c) 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Back in the days of classic pulp science fiction, there was combined a strong worship of scientists and engineers (pulp sf was not always clear on the difference) as noble and superior benefactors, with an older attitude of fear of them as impious delvers into divine secrets.  The attitudes reinforced each other in dichotomy:  if a scientist was not a noble and superior benefactor, he was liable to be corrupted by his burden of knowledge and tempted by the desire to force men to follow his high intellect, becoming a Mad Scientist or even an Evil Genius.

Consequently, the good guy scientists of pulp science fiction have a tendency to be saintly characters.  Action-oriented ones will be a Science Hero, possibly a Gadgeteer Genius and perhaps a Genius Bruiser (to let him mix it up with the bad guys personally).  More purely intellectual good guy scientists will be an Omnidisciplinary Scientist, perhaps a Mentor to the more action-oriented characters.  Good guy scientists are very important to pulp (or indeed any) science fiction because they provide exposition:  they let the writer explain the scientific concepts on which his story is based.

There is a strong mind-body dichotomy imposed in addition to the good-evil dichotomy, which roughly stands in for the real-world dichotomy between science and engineering.  Mind-oriented scientists will tend to renounce the flesh:  their objectives will be cerebral ones (whether benevolent or malevolent) and they will often be entirely celibate (if one has a child then the scientist will almost always be a widower).  Body-oriented scientists will have more earthy objectives:  a Science Hero will pursue his One True Love, while his villainous counterpart will either be lecherous or (if not) celibate only because he has arrogantly high standards (consider Dr. Zarkov and Emperor Ming, or Richard Seaton and "Blackie" DuQuesne).

"A Scientist Rises" has as its (utterly silent, yet expressive) main characters one of the most pure examples of a Good Guy Scientist and the worshp of such a character to be found in the pulp sf genre.  Dr. Edgar Wesley develops some technology based on expanding or multiplying atoms, allowing objects to become much larger (and less dense).  We never find out just what the practical applications of this might have been (though I can think of a few) (*), because when a foreign agent tries to force Dr. Wesley to give him the process, Wesley brains the spy with a hammer and then commits suicide (?) by using the process on himself.  He leaves the community of mortal men because he fears the damage his discovery might do in evil or callous hands:  there is a strong symbolic (and perhaps real) implication that in the end he becomes some sort of god.

Notice that as Dr. Wesley takes his final walk (to avoid growing inside and destroying his building), he hurts absolutely no one (**), taking great care to avoid trampling people (we're not entirely sure if his density decreases at the same rate that his size increases, or how this affects the strength of his molecular bonds until the very last dispersal).  He is both literally and figuratively a gentle giant, towering over mere mortals and benevolently looking down on them.  From his note it is obvious that he sacrificed himself for love of his fellow man.  His atoms will now mingle with the world:  it is possible that his spirit still animates them.

This should be corny, but in the story it works.  It works because the imagery is so powerful, and because Hall manages to characterize Dr. Wesley so well despite the fact that all he has to work with are the man's actions, expressions and his suicide (?) note.  Edgar Wesley is a hero of the intellect, a literally Titanic figure who discovered something too dangerous for Man to use in his current condition, and sacrificed himself rather than let it destroy the human race.

It's a sad story, but a hopeful one.  And it's even the more poignant when one considers the year of its publication -- and what was about to happen in reality.  There is something innocent about the Interwar Era.  They'd been through Hell, and they naively hoped that in doing so they had earned safety.  They did not know that they were to have to go through it all over again.

But it was not a doomed society that could produce the concept of a Dr. Edgar Wesley, and the dawn would come again too.  And from the Interwar Era came stories of strange beauty, like this one, which by existing show the value of all science fiction.

Notes

---------

(*) - If he can apply the process rapidly, he has an explosive, possibly one approaching the destructiveness of real nuclear weapons.  If he can stablize it, he can reduce the density of a substance to some unknown limit, which means that he has a lift bag for airships.  If he can reverse it, he can implode objects or make ultra-dense projectiles.  And so on.

(**) - He had previously slain the spy, but that was clearly in self-defense.