Andrew Hickey

Me: Hey, you wanna know what’s the weirdest thing in the world?

Krissy: (sighs) What’s the weirdest thing in the world?

Me: Why did you just sigh there?

Krissy: I didn’t sigh, I just exhaled heavily.

Me: That’s actually the definition of a sigh.

Krissy: You were telling me about the weirdest thing in the world.

Me: Okay, so, In 1977, the Donny and Marie Osmond show did a whole bit on Star Wars and Donny played Luke and Marie played Leia.

Krissy: Okay.

Me: They are brother and sister, and they were playing Luke and Leia, who were brother and sister, too, but no one knew that at the time. They were the first people in any media to accurately portray the relationship between Luke and Leia. They were totally ahead of the curve. Donny and Marie. Osmond.

Krissy: George Lucas probably knew.

Me: Did he, though? The whole thing about Luke and Leia being siblings didn’t come out until Return of the Jedi. It was kinda hinted in Empire but that Yoda utterance about there being another was really open ended. Look, I’m a writer. The whole idea that we have any idea how a whole trilogy is going to while we write the first installment is mostly bullshit. We’re all making it up as we go along. I think George Lucas was thinking about what the hell he was going to do with Luke and Leia in future movies, had no clue, then watched this episode of the Donny & Marie show and was all, like, “oh, siblings, that’s a really good idea,” and then tucked it away for later. Then, bam, Jedi, and suddenly they’re twins.

Krissy: You seriously think George Lucas got the “Luke and Leia are siblings” idea from Donny and Marie.

Me: All the evidence fits!

Krissy: And you think this is, in fact, the weirdest thing in the world.

Me: Can you think of anything weirder?

Krissy: Not off the top of my head.

Me: There you go.

Krissy: Are you saying this came off the top of your head?

Me: Well, no, I’ve been thinking about it for a while.

Krissy: How long?

Me: (checks watch) About 46 years.

Krissy: (sighs)

— JS

The case of the romance author who faked her own death has taken a couple more twists. At least one of those twists feels like a psychic curse that we may have wished upon the world…the involvement of Declan Finn et al.

On January 8 people interested in the case of Susan Meachen, an author who apparently faked her own death to publicise her book began Tweeting out screenshots of a set of responses the now apparently revived author had given as direct messages.

This worried me and not because of the whole returning from the dead thing but because of who was being quoted:

“People are tweeting links to an extremely dodgy website because of an update on that author who faked their own death”

https://twitter.com/CamestrosF/status/1611892885796028418

The website in question was the substack-based review blog Upstream Reviews, which is the right-wing, puppy-orientated blog written mainly by Michael Gallagher but which also involves long-term topic of this blog Declan Finn. “Upstream” here being a reference to Andrew Breitbart’s adage “Politics is downstream of culture”.

You can read the second version of the article that had the alleged “replies” here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230108002247/https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/not-dead-yet [archived version]

Upstream Reviews started as a regular WordPress blog but after apparently suffering technical problems it shifted to a Substack site (credited as copyright Declan Finn). When File 770 covered that the old site appeared to be down, Upstream wrote a very snide reply on the new substack site https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/sorry-file-770were-still-here The site also promoted the SFWA hack and the troll site O and A forums that have been directing harassment at author Patrick Tomlison.

So getting more mainstream promotion by accounts oblivious to the nature of the site was a bit of a coup for them, all fuelled by the possible-zombie Susan Meachen replying to their direct message. However…it is now unclear if Susan Meachen did reply to them at all. After publishing the responses, claims have been made that the Twitter account they DM’d is fake.

Upstream Reviews has since retracted the responses from Susan Meachen saying:

“UPDATE: Since the original publication of what we believed to be Mrs. Meachen’s response and her answers to our subsequent questions, a number of people close to her on social media have expressed doubt as to whether or not the individual we spoke with in fact was Susan Meachen. Additionally, Mrs. Meachen has apparently denied that it was her we spoke to on other platforms. As we are currently unable to verify this, we have made the decision to hereby retract those parts of the article. What was originally reported has remained. We apologize to Mrs. Meachen and regret the error.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20230109171809/https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/not-dead-yet

In short, there are conceptually three Susan Meachens:

• The original Susan Meachen, who may have but probably didn’t die
• The Susan Meachen who more recently claimed not to have died
• The Susan Meachen who owns a Twitter account that replied to Upstream Reviews

Whether there conceptual Susan Meachens are all the same person is an open question. Not unreasonably, the question of whether Susan Meachen may actually have in truth died and the whole back from the dead is itself a sick prank, is also open. Put another way, there are Susan Meachens online who collectively do not provide a coherent story.

Upstream Reviews appear to have been genuinely pranked. I don’t think they were trying to trick people with a fake scoop. Having said that, people really shouldn’t have credulously boosted their post regardless.

Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren’t. They didn’t have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No instincts. No desires. Just a porridge of cultured neurons, really: four-digit IQs that didn’t give a rat’s ass whether they even lived or died. Somehow they learned through operant conditioning, although they lacked the capacity either to enjoy reward or suffer punishment. Their pathways formed and dissolved with all the colorless indifference of water shaping a river delta.

—Maelstrom, 2001

There’s an obvious contradiction in those last two sentences. Reward/Punishment is the very foundation of operant conditioning; how can it work on something that experiences neither? I wasn’t sure, back at the turn of the century. I knew what feedback was. I knew that the pseudoneurons of neural nets had weights attached to them, that the odds of one of them firing would increase some fractional amount every time it made the “right” move. I figured that by the time my story took place, people would have figured out how to make the meat act like the software. It was far from the biggest liberty I took in that novel. No one rang me up to call bullshit on it, anyway.

Now, a quarter of a century later, I have my answer. Yes, folks, it’s time for another ripped-from-the-headlines story about Head Cheeses IRL.

This one comes via the latest issue of Neuron courtesy of an Australian outfit called Cortical Labs, where Brett Kagan and his buddies grew a neuron culture in a dish and taught it—more accurately, spurred it to teach itself—how to play Pong. Some of you started sending me the link a couple of weeks back, and I’ll admit at first blush I thought the whole thing was a step backward. Neuron cultures playing Pong in 2022? Weren’t we talking about hooking them up to power grids and stock markets over ten years ago? Weren’t researchers from the University of Reading using them to control little robots back in 2008? But I followed the links, and the title—”In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world“—caught my eye.

Signs of sentience, you say.

Okay. Show me what you got.

What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades. If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them.

But the fundamental point that ties this school of thought together is right there in the name: Free Energy Minimization. Self-organizing complex systems are just plain lazy, according to FEM. They aspire to low-energy states. If they’re the kind of system that acts in response to input from an external environment, the way to keep things chill is to keep them predictable: know exactly what’s coming, know exactly how to react, live on autopilot. Surprise is anathema, surprise means the environment isn’t doing what you expect. You have two choices when that happens: either rejig your predictive model to conform with the new observed reality, or act on that observed reality in a way that brings it more into line with your predictions. If you’re a weather simulation you might update your correlations relating barometric pressure and precipitation. If you’re an earthworm you might move away from an unpleasant stimulus that’s pushing you out of homeostasis.

In each case you want to minimize energy costs, and that means minimizing the difference between what you expect to happen and what actually does. Consciousness exists in the space between those two things. The wider the difference—the greater the surprise—the more “conscious” the response. Conversely: the more accurate your model, the lower the informational entropy and the less awake you are^[1].

And right there: that’s your motivation. You don’t need pain or pleasure centers. You don’t need to program specific imperatives or win states. The tendency to “low informational entropy” is an intrinsic part of the system. That’s what the FEM lobby claims.

Which means that if you’re a neuron culture spread across an electrode array like peanut butter on toast, and some of those electrodes feed you information about whether a ball is hitting a paddle, while others take instructions from you about how to move that paddle—and if you receive a predictable signal when the ball hits the paddle, but a burst of random static when it misses—you will learn, on your own, to minimize the frequency of those bursts of surprise. You will learn to play Pong.

That’s what Kagan et al did. They let “Dishbrain” grow over an array of electrodes: some arbitrarily defined as motor nerves, others as sensory nerves. The sensories sent signals corresponding to paddle/ball dynamics; the motors received commands on paddle motion. Kagan et al set Pong in motion, shocked or stroked Dishbrain as appropriate, and waited.

Dishbrain figured it out in five minutes.

Well, sort of. The paddle intercepted the ball significantly more often than random chance would predict. That’s not to say it ever became a black belt at Pong: there’s a lot of daylight between better than random and world champion, and in some cases Dishbrain performed barely better (occasionally even worse) than one or another of the control cultures. I’m guessing the impressive videos presented in the paper, while described as “representational”, were cherry-picked.

Still. Dishbrain learned to hit the ball, in some cases apparently anticipating where it would arrive before it even hit the backboard. A puddle of neurons, finding itself in a virtual game environment with unknown rules—without even so much as the “maximize score” instruction granted to that Starcraft-beating headline-grabbing DeepMind you’ve read about— organized itself on the fly to act in a way that minimized unpredictable input. Score one for FEM.

As for the claim that dishbrain is “sentient”: predictably, it’s proven controversial. Kagan et al use a particularly narrow definition of the term—”responsive to sensory impressions through adaptive internal processes”—attributed to Karl Friston (a high priest of FEM, who also happens to be one of the paper’s authors). Others have bristled at the term, since it generally connotes subjective experience. Dean Burnett out of Cardiff Psychology School isn’t willing to go beyond “thinking system“. Even Kagan admits that Dishbrain shows no signs of consciousness.

Personally, I think they’re playing it a bit too safe. Sure there’s no hard evidence that Dishbrain is “awake” in the commonly understood sense—but then again there’s no hard evidence that you’re awake, and not just a sophisticated iteration of Google’s Lambda in a meat chassis. A few years back PNAS published a paper that made a pretty good case for insect consciousness: insects might not have the specific brain structures associated with consciousness in we mammals, it said, but they have structures that perform analogous functions. They acquire information from their environment; they monitor their own internal states; they  integrate those two data sets into a unified model that generates behavioral responses. Many argue that it’s that integration that results in subjective experience. Vertebrates, cephalopods, and insects are all built to do that in their own way, so it stands to reason they’re all phenomenally conscious (unlike, say, nematodes). Dishbrain also embodies those three components—in a rudimentary form, certainly, but perhaps not that much simpler than you’d find in a bristletail. Who’s to say that it isn’t conscious, even in the wider qualia-based sense?

There’s excitement in these findings. The idea that all self-organizing networks have at least one “motive” baked in is a revelation (to me, anyway). But that’s the beginning of inspiration, not the end. What do you do with that insight, as a science fiction writer? What are the consequences that can be explored narratively?

How can all of this go wrong?

Well, here’s something: all motives are not created equal. The universal motive accruing to self-organizing systems is Predictability, not Survival or Reproduction. So take Dishbrain. Take a head cheese. Put it in an environment that generates predictable feedback not when it paddles a ball but when it throttles its nutrient supply, or otherwise degrades its own integrity. Reward it for self-harm; watch it commit suicide.

What might that look like if you scaled it up to a human brain?

We may not even have to speculate. There are people out there who serve, if not as real-world examples, at least serve as real-world analogs. It’s not a perfect point-for-point mapping: we have actual brains, and that means brains stems and amygdalas and evolved agendas that do tie directly to survival and reproduction.

And yet people exist who offer a glimpse of how such a hack might manifest, people who do seek to physically compromise themselves. They experience the unshakable conviction that one of their body parts doesn’t belong to them, that it is alien, that it needs to be removed. They’ve been known to try sawing off the offending limb, or blow it off with a shotgun. One soul tried for decades to damage his leg enough to force an amputation, finally succeeding after immersing it in dry ice.

And when these people succeed in losing the offending arm or leg—they feel happy. They feel that they have finally become who they truly are. They feel whole.

The clinical term is Body Integrity Dysphoria^[2], and while it’s extremely rare, researchers have been able to tag certain tentative neurological correlates. Diminished skin conductance response distal to the desired amputation point, for one thing. Reduced gray matter in the superior parietal lobule, for another.

Interesting thing about the superior parietal lobule: it’s part of the somatosensory cortex.

You remember the somatosensory cortex, aka the Penfield homunculus: that strip of brain that maps the body in terms of sensory and motor processing. And you know about Phantom Limbs, which result from the fact that even after a limb has been amputated, the corresponding part of the homunculus—the map of that particular somatic territory—persists in the brain. As long as that part of the switchboard is still firing, a person will feel sensation from the corresponding limb regardless of whether it’s still attached. (It has also been commonly observed that the parts of the strip that map feet and genitals butt up against each other; leakage between the two might explain why foot fetishes are the most common sexual kink. But I digress.)

To me at least, BID seems like nothing so much as a bizarro Phantom Limb Syndrome, where the brain—instead of registering that something’s there when it isn’t—somehow registers that something isn’t there (or at least, shouldn’t be) when it is. And if the one syndrome results from a piece of the map being there when it shouldn’t be, maybe the other results from a part of the map being missing (reduced gray matter, remember?) when it should be present. In both cases, the internal model of the self-organizing system is at odds with incoming data. In BID the system takes action to reduce that dissonance. To eliminate the surprise. To minimize informational entropy.

Move the paddle; remove the limb. Maybe the same thing, when you get right down it.

All speculation, of course. That’s what we do here. Then again, with fewer than 500 cases on record, hard data are not exactly thick upon the ground. And the limited MRI results we do have seem consistent with Penfield’s involvement.

What might a suicidal Dishbrain look like if you scaled it up onto Human architecture? Well, we’ve been playing around with ways to program neurons for decades now. Transcranial magnetic stimulation. Compressed ultrasound. Sony even filed a patent a couple of decades back; who knows how far they’ve come since then?

Say they pull it off, learned how to tweak to somatosensory cortex. (That’s what they were aiming for: a way to plant input directly into the brain, without having to go through those messy eyes and ears and noses. They were pitching it as the ultimate game interface.) Imagine, twenty minutes in the future, we all have Sony headsets talking to our homunculi. Imagine someone hacks them to erase certain parts of that map, induce Body Integrity Dysphoria on command.

The thing is, arms and legs are not the only limbs we have. The neck is a limb too.

I wonder how comprehensive Sony’s liability insurance might be.

1. This relationship, by the way, inspired me to write a story about hive minds and all the catastrophic things that are bound to go wrong if Neuralink works the way Elon Musk wants it to. I’m told that story has caught the eye of one of Neuralink’s cofounders, which is especially remarkable given that it hasn’t been published yet.↑

2. If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu here: yeah, the parallels to gender dysphoria and transitioning are pretty striking. The experts opine that BID is a related syndrome, but nonetheless a distinct one. ↑

I'm not sure I've ever told this story anywhere in public. Forgive me if I have…and please, as you read it, keep in mind that I was eighteen or so at the time. At any age, it's possible to say something off the top of your head that comes across as rude (when you didn't intend rude) and/or seriously meant (when you intended it as a joke). And it's more likely at that age when you're kind of an adult and kind of not-an-adult and not quite sure how to be either.

People always ask me what my pal Steve Sherman and I did on those comics where we "assisted" Jack Kirby, as on his Fourth World comics and Jimmy Olsen. The honest answer is "very little." We did some production work. We wrote some storylines, a few of which he used some of. Our greatest contributions might have been when we listened to him describe a story he was about to start working on and we said something like, "That sounds great, Jack!"

Once in a while, when he then wrote and drew that next story, it would even wind up resembling the story he'd told us.

I sometimes had an added duty. If Superman was in the story, Jack would usually not draw in Superman's chest insignia as he went along. He never quite "got" the way it was supposed to look. It was not the kind of thing Jack Kirby could have cared a lot about and the folks back at DC Comics in New York treated it as a major defect in the work. The inker or one of the guys they had on staff back there could have fixed all the emblems in one story in, literally, about three minutes but this was somehow a big issue.

At times, it felt like given the choice of an exciting, dynamic story with chest emblems that needed some correction or a boring, hackneyed story with proper emblems, they'd have preferred the latter. So Jack would leave Superman's chest barren until such time as he was ready to send the story off to New York.

If — and only if — it would not delay delivering the job much, he would wait for a day when Steve and I were there and Jack would have me draw in all those "S's" throughout the story. It was the only thing — and I mean the only thing — I could draw better than Jack. He'd go outside for a breath of canyon air, I'd sit at his drawing table and do it, and by the time he came back in, it would all be done.

If, however, we weren't coming out to work in the next day or two, he would draw them in by himself, ship the story off to New York and then brace himself for the inevitable phone call from someone: "Jack, you're getting Superman's emblem wrong again…"

So one day, Jack was an hour or two from finishing a Jimmy Olsen story and we were there. I was doing busy work, waiting for my moment, sneaking glances at whichever page he was working on. Jack did not do his best drawing when someone was watching. I noticed he had drawn Superman in a certain pose I'd seen him use many times before. It was the pose on the two images below and every Kirby fan reading this can probably recall other places he used it.

I opened my big, fat mouth and said, "Oh, you're using that old pose again!" It sounded funny in my head, but I realized as I said it, it sounded pretty damned smartass rude coming out of my mouth. If I'd said that to Alex Toth or a dozen other great, experienced comic book artists I've known, I would have gotten and probably deserved a scolding that began with something like "Who the f word are you to…?"

Jack said nothing of the sort. In fact, he said nothing. He just picked up his eraser, completely eradicated that lovely drawing of Superman and replaced it with another equally as fine (or maybe better) of Superman. In a different pose.

An hour or two later, I'd done my little insignia-drawing and Steve was packing the artwork up to go to the post office the next day. Jack came over to me and said in a sincere tone, "Thanks. You helped me there."

I said something like, "Hey, if you're ever ready to end your career, we could trade jobs. I could draw the story and you could draw the Superman emblems! We'd both be out of the business within a week."

Jack chuckled and said, "No, I meant about telling me I was overusing that pose. Any time you see me doing something like that, please let me know."

I think that says a lot about Jack Kirby as a creative force. There are lot of things one could nitpick about his work — the way he drew fingers, the way he drew women's hair, the way he even drew Superman's chest emblem when he drew Superman's chest emblem. But if you understood the way he approached that work, you could never say that he did the minimum effort necessary to get the check. The job did not leave his studio until he was satisfied he'd done his best work.

I learned a lot of things about comics from Jack but I'd like to think I learned even more about being a person.

There’s an obvious visual difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Where Kirk’s Enterprise looked like a sterile battleship, Picard’s looks like an office. Soothingly beige, carpeted, with comfy chairs and the occasional potted plant. (Most of the waiting rooms I’ve known in my life have felt very Enterprise D-ish, which is fine by me; who’d want to wait for their dental appointment in a battleship?).

It’s not just an office, of course. The Federation is meant to be a utopia, so the Enterprise is also a home and community. Everybody hangs out in the lounge, attends concerts and amateur drama, gets plenty of free time for hobbies. Everybody on Star Trek: The Next Generation has a great work-life balance.

The Six Thousand Ship, the setting of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, is something else. Among the themes of The Employees is an approach to space travel I haven’t often seen: if a starship is a workplace, its crew has nothing but their workplace, floating in an empty void. It’s implied the Six Thousand Ship’s crew signed up for a one-way journey—it won’t return to Earth in the crew’s lifetimes. Much of the novel is an exploration of the psychological effects, the damage done when there’s literally nothing outside of “productivity.”

Space is the corporate dream: the one place your employees can’t walk off the job. Not if they want to keep breathing.

The Employees is structured as a series of statements to managers holding listening sessions to “gain knowledge of the local workflows.” The statements are anonymous. We rarely hear a name. The protagonist is the whole crew. Given SFF’s emphasis on worldbuilding, it’s weird it doesn’t do fictional mass observation more often. Adventure stories or bildungsromans starring singular heroes are the default, to the point the average SFF fan might think The Employees is more experimental than it really is. SFF tells stories about different worlds, but defaults to focusing on how those differences affect a singular, special, hero as they chase self-actualization. Even SFF novels with multiple POV characters (i.e., A Game of Thrones) often feel less like social novels than like multiple hero stories broken up and braided together. The Employees is instead a portrait of a society.

Toiling alongside the human employees are “humanoids,” artificial workers indistinguishable from humans. (We often don’t know whether a statement is made by a human or a humanoid.) Humanoids were built to work. They don’t know Earth, they have no experience of anything but employment. One is baffled to hear a human colleague say there’s more to a person than their work: “what else could a person be?”

The human employees find themselves nostalgic for everything they had on Earth—family, nature, shopping. They sound surprised. These weren’t feelings they’d expected to have. Some employees keep simulated holographic children as substitute family. Eggs are a recurring image. One employee dreams about tiny spheres like fish eggs breaking out of their skin. In the real world human employees come down with cases of warts, like the dream is trying incompetently to come true. The humans disappear into their roles, becoming interchangeable parts: “As long as you’re in the suit and pass through the corridor to be cleansed, you’re the first officer.” Later there’s a mutiny and the ship’s funeral director doesn’t know how to respond as anything but a funeral director: “I haven’t always felt that my capabilities were being utilized to the full.”

In this environment employees’ full potential as people goes unused and unusable—humans and humanoids both.

As I write this internet junkies have gathered to morbidly gawk at the train wreck that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, which he is running like the world’s drunkest railway signalman. Paid verifications let pranksters pose as his advertisers! People can’t log in because he turned off the two-factor authentication server! He’s getting dangerously close to violating the GDPR!

Most relevantly, as soon as Musk bought Twitter he laid off half the work force, on the theory that anybody left could just work harder. Many have. One proudly posted a photo of herself sleeping at the office, which provoked horror but also some cheering from Musk fans, one declaring “This is how great new things are built.” Which… they’re built badly, but, yeah, this is how a lot of the tech industry works. It’s a standard part of the stereotype: clownish startups filling their headquarters with cereal bars and foosball tables in a vainly half-assed effort to take the edge off long days in the office. Video games are built on “crunch.” Musk demanded his ever-shrinking pool of workers sign a loyalty oath declaring their willingness to be “extremely hardcore” which means working “long hours at high intensity.” The workplace comes first. (Nothing outside of productivity.) In a development that surprised Musk and absolutely no one else, most of the remaining employees took severance instead. That’s where space comes in!

The humanoids suspect something is missing. The humans who identify with their jobs are suffering cognitive dissonance over a bad and irrevocable career choice. Having no past to look back on gives the humanoids time to look at their present, and they’re not sure they want to be tools. At the same time they’re growing their curiosity and optimism as fast as the humans lose it. The company can upload and redownload the humanoids’ minds; they’re likely to survive after the humans are gone. Maybe they’ll someday see Earth. Maybe they can survive on the alien planet the Six Thousand Ship has been studying. “I may have been made,” says one, “but now I’m making myself.”

The statements keep circling back to “the objects,” artifacts from the planet, which hold a strange fascination for the crew. They’re called “the objects” because nobody knows what else they could be. They look like eggs, or tubes, or stones. Sometimes they feel alive. “It’s a dangerous thing for an organization not to be sure which of the objects in its custody may be considered to be living,” says one person. They could be talking about the objects, or the humanoids, or the whole crew.

The objects are the reason The Employees was written in the first place—if you want to get metafictional, you might say they were there at the creation of the crew’s universe. The objects are based on the work of a sculptor named Lea Guldditte Hestelund who asked Olga Ravn to write a text for an exhibition, which became The Employees. The novel mentions the Six Thousand Ship has white walls and orange and gray floors. So does the museum space in the photos at the site I just linked. We’re probably meant to visualize the ship as resembling the real-world museum.

The crew doesn’t understand their own feelings towards the objects; they’re both attracted and disquieted. (A quietly throbbing egg is not as straightforward as a foosball table.) Maybe the objects, in their sheer inscrutability, are envoys from outside the bounds of the crew’s imagination. If these objects are beyond understanding or conception, what other possibilities are they missing? The crew who’ve experienced life outside of work, who know what they’ve lost in moving to a world of pure productivity, are making their imaginations smaller to adjust. It’s that or stop breathing.

“I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it,” says one crew member.

Have I mentioned Elon Musk is the guy who wants to run a Mars colony? I think he’d get takers. Americans are carving away at their imaginations as you read this.

Given this blog recently enjoyed great success with a whole book centred on right-wing shenanigans in 2015, I perhaps shouldn’t complain about the latest culture war gambit. I say “latest” but I can’t think of a better way of putting it than “let’s do 2014/15 again”. A lot of this is coming from the Twitter chaos and Elon Musk bringing back names like Sargon of Akkad to the platform, long after their relevance has passed. Yet, aside from that we also have Milo Yiannopoulos attempting a comeback on Kanye West’s coattails. Earlier in the year, unrelated to Musk’s Twitter or West’s electoral shenanigans we had multiple profiles of neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.

I suspect part of this is the increasing irrelevance of MAGA/Trumpism in the online right. Electorally, it is far from dead but it has long since stopped being edgy or cool. The right also has a dearth of ideas regardless. What became in 2015 the alt-right wasn’t a great idea and neither was the confused rationalisation of the neoreactionaries. However, they were what were on offer as something akin to an intellectual framework for the right beside neo-conservativism or the increasingly untenable libertarianism. During the Trump years, Qanons omniconspiracy became increasingly baroque to the point that the movement became dominated by people coming from wellness/new-age ideas.

Now it is 2022, Biden is in office and enjoying a surprising degree of electoral success. For internet right it is like the Obama years all over again, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that the right is turning back to what they think worked last time.

I saw an email circulating the other day from a boomer-aged relative that unironically included the term “get woke, go broke”. Technically I knew that had to have been more recent than 2015 but it had that same vibe to it. When I checked on when it originated I read this:

“On April 17th, 2018, the Milo Yiannopoulos-run news site Dangerous published an article about sci-fi author John Ringo, which quoted Ringo using the phrase “get woke, go broke” in the context of organizations that cave “to SJW pressure.””

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/get-woke-go-broke

Oh but of course. I think I did know that but I’d mercifully forgotten it. It arose during that phase when lots of cons were adopting codes of conduct and several ex-Puppies were finding themselves disinvited as guest speakers. The article was written by Jon Del Arroz. Which, in case you had forgotten, he might not have got paid for writing because Dangerous, you guessed it, went broke that same year. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/grift-all-the-way-down/

In the previous post in this increasingly irregular series, I looked at the thread of esoteric thought within science fiction and how it worked syncretically with the genre’s apparent philosophical materialism and pro-technological stance. The idea in these essays is that there is something in particular about rockets that joins multiple separate topics:

• Militarism
• The Campbellian heroic engineer
• Science fiction
• Western esoteric groups
• Far-right politics

These connections aren’t simple ones and in some cases, the connections are one of overt opposition. What unites them, I suspect, is the idea that for a very smart person there might be a kind of secret hack to unlocking the universe. It is an idea that appeals to a specific kind of individualism that can find expression in multiple ways.

The proverbially difficult discipline of rocket science was a technological outlet for this idea in the 20th century. Complex, challenging but also a discipline that prior to World War II at least, was accessible to gifted amateurs and hobbyists. Few people exemplify this better than John Whiteside Parsons.

John Whiteside Parsons was a key figure in the establishment of what would become NASA’s groundbreaking Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the 1930’s Parsons (in his twenties) helped establish a rocket research group associated with the California Institute of Technology (aka Caltech). Parson’s work included using rockets to help military aircraft launch, in what would later become known as jet-assisted take-off (JATO) — technology that found active use during WWII. In the thirties, Parson also achieved some public fame as a key expert witness (on explosives) in the trial of a prominent Los Angeles police officer, Captain Earl Kynette, who had conspired in the attempted murder of a private detective with a car bomb.

Young, brilliant, good looking and with a polymath’s interest in multiple disciplines, Parsons resembled the archetype of the heroic engineer of the golden age of science. Parsons, at the invitation of Forrest Ackerman, spoke to the Los Angeles Science Fiction League about rocketry and would occasionally attend other meetings of the league. Parson’s talk would leave a lasting impression on a youthful Ray Bradbury:

“When Parsons finished speaking, Bradbury asked him a barrage of questions. Many years later Bradbury remembered the incident well. “A young man, some six or seven years older than myself, was there, talking about Rockets and the Future,” he recalled. “He was wonderful. I chatted with him, after, but was afraid of him because I was an uneducated non-student, a newsboy … and with no way of joining the rocket society the gentleman spoke of.” Little did Bradbury realize how lacking in credentials Parsons was himself.”

Pendle, George. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (p. 127). Orion. Kindle Edition.

Although from a wealthy background, Parsons had little in the way of formal qualifications. Parsons almost certainly had an undiagnosed specific learning disorder.

“Throughout his life he would misspell words, and his handwriting in particular—the words usually printed in capitals rather than written in cursive—indicates a learning disorder. At the time dyslexia was not considered a legitimate complaint, and children who suffered from it were generally supposed to be backward or stupid. For anyone, let alone such an avid reader as Parsons, the variable grades that resulted from this learning disorder would have only fueled a dislike for establishment education.”

Pendle, George. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (p. 44). Orion. Kindle Edition.

I can say, from personal experience, that having trouble writing and spelling during your school years is a difficult experience. It would have been doubly so during a time when such difficulties weren’t recognised as something other than an unwillingness to learn.

The Los Angeles Science Fiction League also led to Parsons meeting Robert Heinlein. Impressed by Parsons, Heinlein would go on to include him in his circle of writers and thinkers, including Cleve Cartmill (see the last episode) and L. Ron Hubbard.

Parsons, as a polymath, autodidact, rocket scientist and charismatic and good-looking man, was almost an avatar of the Campbellian ideal.

Parsons had a lifelong interest in the occult but that interest would coalesce in 1939 when he became involved with a local group following Aleister Crowley’s Thelema religion. The group had very permissive attitudes to sex and relationships, with Parsons becoming involved with his wife’s younger (17) half-sister Sara Elizabeth Northrup (known both as Sara and Betty).

Both Betty Northrup and Parson would then become increasingly embroiled in the life of L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons would end up loaning/gifting Hubbard for multiple schemes, while Northrup ran away with Hubbard. If there was bad blood between Parsons and Hubbard over this, it was smoothed over by 1946 when Parsons began his largest occult project called the Babalon Working. After an initial phase in January 1946, Hubbard would become involved in March of that year:

“After Parsons’ initial contact with the astral plane during this second working, Hubbard began acting as seer, although Parsons continued to call him “Scribe” in his notes, and it was actually he who was “scrying in the Aethyr” while Parsons took notes. In regard to Hubbard’s vision of the catlike beast and naked woman, it should be recalled that Crowley repeatedly referred to the Beast and his Scarlet Woman in the Book of Revelation, which Crowley identified as himself and his current consort, corresponding also to the Gnostic-Christian heresiarch Simon Magus and his Helen. The woman was Sophia incarnate, and Hubbard’s vision was once again seen as the cover picture for the first edition of Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (from 1948).

Carter, John. Sex and Rockets (p. 136). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

Parson’s accidental (or possibly suicidal or, if you read more fanciful speculation, murder) in 1952 in an explosion in his home laboratory led to news stories focused on the more scandalous aspects of his life: ties to communists, occultists and his views of sexual freedom. Those scandals did not prevent recognition of Parsons’s legacy in US rocket science (including a crater on the moon named after him) and his influence as a seminal figure in counter-culture has been cited by figures such as Alan Moore:

“I also started looking at people like Jack Whiteside Parsons. There’s a crater on the moon named after him—the Parsons Crater. That’s because Jack Parsons invented solid rocket fuel, without which it would have been impossible to reach the moon. He was a distinguished scientist. He was also a member of the Golden Dawn—the Caliphate OTO; the Ordo Templi Orientist (OTO). Crowley had been the head of the order at one point. The more I started to look at it, the more it seemed that… most of the leading scientists, artists, musicians—most of the key thinkers in human cultural history, seemed to be blatantly and overtly involved in magical thinking of some sort. I mean nearly every artist that you would care to name… You’d think there’d be nothing more formal and scientific than those sort of divided rectangles and squares of Mondrian’s, but no, that was all based upon theosophy. Even baseball was created by a theosophist.”

Alan Moore in an interview with Clifford Meth https://web.archive.org/web/20050301092443/http://www.cliffordmeth.com/alanmooretalkstocliff-pt2.htm

In the foreword to John Carter’s biography of Parsons, Robert Anton Wilson saw the apparent contradictions in Parsons’s manifold legacy as overlapping within the aspiration of pre-war science fiction:

“Look at it this way: in John Parsons’ 1930s–1940s sci-fantasy world, everybody he knew had already started discussing the possible “humanity” and “human rights” of extraterrestrials and robots; they created alternate societies much more rational and adventurous than most “normal” people of that time could possibly imagine; they assumed (partly due to the influence of Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics) that information and technology would further accelerate their synergetic accelerations even faster than they had in the previous century (Parsons’ friend, sci-fi-psi author A.E. van Vogt had studied with Korzybski personally); they created Alternative Worlds where anything currently considered goofy—from new economic systems to long-suppressed Gnostic doctrines—might function as efficiently as the pencil sharpener.

Robert Anton Wilson in Carter, John. Sex and Rockets . Feral House. Kindle Edition

Post his death in 1952, the space of ideas that Parsons was occupying would become increasingly to be seen essentially conflicting positions. Parsons had early pre-war connections with Communists but also held a set of liberatrian ideas that in the following decades would become increasingly co-opted by the right. Parsons interest in genuine alternative religions and powers of the mind would be warped by his former collaborator L. Ron Hubbard in the from of the pseudo-scientific dianetics and Scientology.

In 1969 after The Sunday Times published a story about Hubbard’s pre-Dianetics involvement in magical rituals, the Church of Scientology offered a rebuttal, stating:

“Hubbard broke up black magic in America: Dr. Jack Parsons of Pasadena, California, was America’s Number One solid fuel rocket expert. He was involved with the infamous English black magician Aleister Crowley who called himself ‘The Beast 666.’ Crowley ran an organization called the Order of Templars Orientalis over the world which had savage and bestial rites. Dr. Parsons was head of the American branch located at 100 Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California. This was a huge old house which had paying guests who were the U.A.S. nuclear physicists working at Cal. tech. Certain agencies objected to nuclear physicists being housed under the same roof. L. Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the U.S. Navy [and] because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad. Parsons wrote to Crowley in England about Hubbard. Crowley “the Beast 666” evidently detected an enemy and warned Parsons. This was all proven by the correspondence unearthed by the [London] Sunday Times. Hubbard’s mission was successful far beyond anyone’s expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and never recovered. The physicists included many of the sixty-four top U.S. scientists who were later declared insecure and dismissed from government service with so much publicity.”

Statement by the Church of Scientology, published in The Sunday Times, quoted in Carter, John. Sex and Rockets (pp. 191-192). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

Having tried to assert that there is a strange commonality between the esoteric, fandom, and military invention there is something bafflingly odd about Parsons appearing to personify all of that as one person at the very critical period in the twentieth century. The idea shouldn’t be so neatly summed up by a person who personally knew Aliester Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard and Werner Von Braun. While on paper the timelines of those three characters overlap, they each fit into different mental boxes. Parsons chaotic and troubled life seems in this regard almost too neat of a package.

.

Recent Reading 2022–01

Microworlds

In 1973, the Science Fiction Writers of America gave Stanislaw Lem an honorary membership. In 1976, they found an excuse to take it away. They’d found out what Lem thought of science fiction, and SFF culture is deeply petty. Lem was one of the genre’s harshest critics and Microworlds is 280 pages of what the SFWA was reacting to.

What’s striking about Microworlds is how relevant it feels, though it was published forty years ago and collects essays that are even older. A running theme is Lem’s belief that science fiction’s pulp roots—in his view, its status as a commercial genre—holds it back. One point he keeps coming back to is that science fiction is intensely conformist in the kinds of stories it tells; most defaults to adventure stories or detective stories, and the resulting novels lack the tools to grapple with the bigger themes they gesture towards. And, yeah… this is a phenomenon I’m familiar with even from current SFF.

And Lem calls fans out on that two-step maneuver where they insist science fiction is important literature—maybe the most important literature of all—but when it’s subjected to serious criticism they pull back and insist it’s just entertainment and the critics are being pretentious. SFF fans pull this one out on a regular basis to this day. Fandom likes to congratulate themselves on how much SFF has evolved, but the truth is today’s SFF has a lot of the same problems it had back in the “golden age.”

All Systems Red

Speaking of not grappling with themes…

Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has snagged a couple of Hugo awards. In early 2022 I decided I should finally get around to reading the first book, All Systems Red. (Yes, it’s been that long since I took notes for this review.) It’s fine, I guess. It’s entertaining on the same level as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche or one of the better Star Trek novels. I’d have been more impressed if that were what I’d expected going in. SFF grade inflation strikes again.

This is one of the many SFF novels that don’t recognize their own best ideas, or push them far enough. Murderbot is a “SecUnit,” ostensibly a security robot, though in fact it’s (it goes by “it”) a human being with cyborg parts. Murderbot loves television. All it wants to do is watch television and it’s constantly telling us how it spends every spare moment on its shows. But it doesn’t tell us what its favorite shows are like. This is a large and weird narrative hole. First, a chance for fun metafictional commentary on science fiction is left on the table. More importantly, this is a missed opportunity to characterize both the narrator and its world. What stories does Murderbot gravitate to? What kind of stories get told? (Or what kind of propaganda? Because corporations are in charge here and, as in our world, TV is corporate IP.) How are this world’s stories different from our stories, in broad outline or in detail? How does Murderbot’s life differ from the clichés? We don’t find out.

Which means they effectively aren’t different. All Systems Red leans on the reader’s knowledge of what television looks like to fill in the gap. This is admirably baldfaced pandering—Murderbot’s a media fan, just like you! (It reminds me of how so many musicals are about musicals, because the one topic the entire audience is certain to care about is musicals.) But the whole book feels sketched in. We don’t get a sense of what the protagonists’ spaceship or habitat module is like because we’re assumed to already have usable mental models for “spaceship” and “sci-fi base.” We don’t know what Murderbot’s armor looks like because we have a mental model for “space armor.” No good novel catalogs every detail of every environment, but they will offer surprising or thematically relevant details to pull readers away from our mental defaults. Here we’re working with our defaults.

The human characters are an indistinguishable mass. There’s a sympathetic one, a paranoid one, and some other ones. The book could be doing this on purpose to signal Murderbot’s disinterest, but it’s hard to tell.

All Systems Red is one of those books that start in media res with an action scene. These openings make it hard to care what’s happening. We don’t know yet who anyone is, or what world they live in, and can’t put the action in context. It feels like All Systems Red never gives enough context. The narration is a bald and mechanically paced description of events in a generic first person that could easily be converted to third person (a popular default style in contemporary SFF). This happened, then this, then this. Murderbot only narrates what’s happening right now; the structure of the novel doesn’t let it think back or stop to contemplate.

This could be clever, because the book works like a recap of a TV episode where events play out at a steady pace and what isn’t “on screen” isn’t important. But I’m not sure the book is doing this thoughtfully. One important event in Murderbot’s past needed more exploration. This event would have been a traumatic turning point in its life. It would be the first thing to affect how anyone who knew of it thought of Murderbot. But after a brief initial allusion the book mentions this event only a couple of times, briefly, when it comes up in dialogue. The book’s straight-ahead moment-to-moment style doesn’t allow exploration of Murderbot’s past, and doesn’t allow introspection. Murderbot thinks about one of the most significant moments of its life slightly more often than it thinks about rutabagas, and with similar emotional weight.

The end reveals the entire novel was a letter from Murderbot to another character explaining its decision to strike out on its own, rejecting both the security corporation and the second-class citizenship experienced by free cyborgs. But until the reveal the novel doesn’t read like a letter, and at no point does it read like a letter meant to explain anything. Murderbot describes events but rarely has opinions on them beyond mild annoyance at anything that isn’t television. Until the decisive moment all it seems to want is to slide through life with minimal awkwardness or responsibility. The novel never feels like an argument for why Murderbot would make this risky and uncertain decision now, as opposed to any other point in its life. Murderbot has an epiphany just because there’s one scheduled for the end of the novel.

All Systems Red doesn’t explain what it claims to be explaining. It’s more like… well, we can see it’s wrong for SecUnits to be second-class citizens, and we’re meant to identify with Murderbot, so it should be able to see what we do. So we fill in the book’s argument like we filled in the nature of the spaceships and the armor and the planet this all happened on. This book is not about what it wants to be about in any meaningful way.

I’m normally happy when a book hands me implications and asks me to fill in the gaps, but it doesn’t feel like All Systems Red is implying anything. What’s explicit is meant to be enough.

This is not exactly a review of All Systems Red. I mean, it is, but I wouldn’t have bothered to write it if I didn’t have these exact frustrations with so much other science fiction and fantasy. So much popular SFF is so thin. (And by no means am I only talking about current SFF here—but the older thin books are no longer popular.)

It’s not that the All Systems Reds of SFF are bad books. They’re skilled, professional novels. But it feels like that skill and professionalism is focused on streamlining books down to nothing more than a plot and a moral, precision-engineering away any accidental subtext or ambiguity. The resulting novels have skins, and skeletons, but not much of a heart.

So we're into the Conservative Party leadership run-off campaign, and the two candidates are throwing policies at the base that, to outsider ears, sound increasingly bizarre. But there's a lot we can learn from them about how the Conservative elite perceive the state of the UK today, and some of it (who am I kidding? Most of it!) is disturbing.

In the latest move, potential Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (the richest MP in parliament, a former Goldman Sachs employee and hedge-fund manager who married a billionaire) has vowed to phase out university degrees that do not improve students' "earning potential":

... Yeah, I know what you're thinking: "train the serfs for work, actual education is for the wealthy elite". But there's a lot more to it than that.

The Guardian: Rishi Sunak vows to end low-earning degrees in post-16 education shake-up

For starters, "earning potential" is only testable in hindsight. Work is changing, many jobs are being automated, and the earnings of graduates with a given degree over the previous decade is not a good predictor for the success of new graduates with that degree.

I have two STEM degrees from the 1980s which are totally obsolete now and of almost no relevance to my current occupation.

You can't predict educational outcomes for future employment on the basis of priors because, like the old "job for life" culture, the degree-for-life has died. Personal anecdote: after a regrettable initial career choice—nobody needs a pharmacist with ASD/ADHD, it's a really bad combination of personality traits for that career—I returned to university (something I wouldn't be able to do today) and graduated for the second time, with a CS degree, in '90, right in the middle of a recession. The only work I could find was as a technical author (I had the writing chops and bluffed my way in). I have worked as a programmer since then, but only for 5 years out of the past 33. For 18 out of those 33 years, my occupation has had almost nothing to do with either degree. And today, a 1990 CS degree is about as useful in the CS workplace as a 1923 aerospace engineering degree (if such a thing existed).

Priors are not predictors, especially in an unstable working environment.

Here's an illustrative thought experiment: imagine you have a time machine. Now pick a worker at random from some time and place in the past 5 centuries, and carry them forward by 30 years. will they be able to earn a living?

Until 1900 the answer was probably "yes", because most work was unskilled agricultural or factory labour. (Even basic literacy was optional.)

Then it got harder. A 1945 factory worker might be able to adapt to work in a 1975 factory. But a 1975 factory worker would be utterly adrift in a 2005 factory that had gone from drill presses to CNC tools, from painting stuff by hand to using robots.

And it'd be the same with office workers, medics, miners. A 1800 doctor would have relatively little to learn to practice in 1830. Even a 1910 doctor wouldn't find the innovations of 1940 too complex to grapple with. But the shift from medicine in 1960 to 1990 is dizzying: that was the era of the pharmaceutical revolution, when all sorts of new treatments became available, things that hadn't even been recognized as disease states became medical specialities, and a whole new set of diagnostic tools became available. A 1960 doctor in 1990 who hadn't kept up with their training might as well start from scratch all over again.

So: I'm going to hammer this point again (it's vital context for understanding what higher education is for) a degree does not equip you for a job, even for a specific job for a couple of years in the very near future.

So what's Sunak really talking about?

Until the 1990s universities in the UK were private entities that ran almost entirely on government funding for higher education. (The Polytechnics were vocational training institutions, and state-owned, until they were renamed Universities and privatised in the 90s.) With privatization the government gradually withdrew the education funding: first loans were brought in for subsistence, replacing the previous student grant, then tuition fees were added on top. All to a background of trying to push as many people as possible through the institutions of higher education in order to certify that the individuals were sufficiently tractable to obey orders, perform rote tasks, and conform to expectations—necessary prerequisites for employment.

(Because in an unstable working environment HR departments can't rely on references from previous employers.)

What evolved was essentially a Ponzi scheme. Workers needed a certificate of obedience to show they were suitable employees. The universities that issued such certificates were private institutions: the more certificates they could issue, the more money they could make. At the same time, the finance sector boomed—not so much through student loans at first (the Student Loan Company was thoroughly regulated initially) but through side-projects like the highly profitable student housing construction boom. Also, once a worker-unit was certified and in employment, paying off their student debt, they could be trained to accept other debts. Credit card debt, mortgage debt, anything at all that could be monetized. And the universities that could recruit and certify the most students made the most money.

All good things come to an end, though. The slow-motion economic disaster that is Brexit (hint: 13% inflation predicted later this year, close to full employment but nearly half the in-work population qualify for Universal Credit—government income support—because they're so badly paid, economy in recession for the next couple of years and expected to shrink by about 6%), combined with a global energy crisis and a pandemic, is choking off the supply of willing debtors needed to sustain the Ponzi scheme.

The sheepskin is no longer enough to get you a job that pays well enough to cover the interest on the loans you took out to buy the sheepskin. So why buy the sheepskin?

Sunak is coming at this with the mind-set of a financier—and specifically, a disaster capitalist. His objective is typically short-sighted: he wants to deflate the higher education bubble in the UK just enough to stave off a catastrophic crash (damaging to the interest of the investor class), and he's going to do so by shedding the least-remunerative debtors, the ones who earn below the loan repayment threshold.

(Now would be a good time to sell your shares in student housing companies if you have any, by the way.)

The stupidest aspect of this is that for cultural reasons specific to the Conservative party membership he's going to trash arts education funding.

The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back.

But it's ideologically suspect to gammons' eyes. Gammons—the Tory party membership, whose support Sunak is canvassing—are predominantly white males aged over 60 living in the South East of England, authoritarian by inclination and well-off but poorly educated.

Authoritarian followers are very conformist: submissive towards those they perceive as powerful, need rigid guidelines for conduct, and distrust and despise nuance and complexity.

Art, by its very nature, can't be conformist. So they hate it and have no use for it, and it's easy to rally them against "liberal arts" long-hairs.

So, in order to prevent a chunk of the financial sector imploding due to the higher education certification Ponzi scheme crashing, Sunak is going to wreck the UK's biggest export-earning industry.

Nicely played!

PS: this is how you get V for Vendetta.

(I need to blog more often, so here's one of hopefully a series of shorter, more frequent, opinions ...)

NOTICE (as of comment 322): the discussion is about the book, not the Verhoeven movie, which I have not seen. Stop with the movie discussion or I will start to delete comments. I run this blog for my amusement and I have zero interest in movies/TV adaptations of this novel.

Anent the "Heinlein was a fascist" accusations that are a hardy perennial on the internet, especially in discussions of Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie, which I have not seen because it's a movie): I'd like to offer a nuanced opinion.

In the 1930s, Heinlein was a soft socialist—he was considered sufficiently left wing and "unreliable" that he was not recalled for active duty in the US Navy during the second world war. After he married Virginia Gerstenfeld, his third and last wife, his views gradually shifted to the right—however he tended towards the libertarian right rather than the religious/paleoconservative right. (These distinctions do not mean in 2021 what they might have meant in 1971; today's libertarian/neo-nazi nexus has mostly emerged in the 21st century, and Heinlein was a vehement opponent of Nazism.) So the surface picture is your stereotype of a socially liberal centrist/soft leftist who moved to the right as he grew older.

But to muddy the waters, Heinlein was always happy to pick up a bonkers ideological shibboleth and run with it in his fiction. He was sufficiently flexible to write from the first person viewpoint of unreliable/misguided narrators, to juxtapose their beliefs against a background that highlighted their weaknesses, and even to end the story with the narrator—but not the reader—unaware of this.

In Starship Troopers Heinlein was again playing unreliable narrator games. On the surface, ST appears to be a war novel loosely based on WW2 ("bugs" are Nazis; "skinnies" are either Italian or Japanese Axis forces), but each element of the subtext relates to the ideological awakening of his protagonist, everyman Johnny Rico (note: not many white American SF writers would have picked a Filipino hero for a novel in the 1950s). And the moral impetus is a discussion of how to exist in a universe populated by existential threats with which peaceful coexistence is impossible. The political framework Heinlein dreamed up for his human population—voting rights as a quid pro quo for military (or civilian public) service—isn't that far from the early Roman Republic, although in Rico's eyes it's presented as something new, a post-war settlement. Heinlein, as opposed to his protagonist, is demonstrating it as a solution to how to run a polity in a state of total war without losing democratic accountability. (Even his presentation of corporal and capital punishment is consistent with the early Roman Republic as a model.) The totalizing nature of the war in ST isn't at odds with the Roman interpretation: Carthago delenda est, anyone?

It seems to me that using the Roman Republic as a model is exactly the sort of cheat that Heinlein would employ. But then Starship Troopers became the type specimen for an entire subgenre of SF, namely Military-SF. It's not that MilSF wasn't written prior to Starship Troopers: merely that ST was compellingly written by the standards of SF circa 1959. And it was published against the creeping onset of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the early days of the New Wave in SF, so it was wildly influential beyond its author's expectations.

The annoying right wing Heinlein Mil-SF stans that came along in later decades—mostly from the 1970s onwards—embraced Starship Troopers as an idealized fascist utopia with the permanent war of All against All that is fundamental to fascist thought. In doing so they missed the point completely. It's no accident that fascist movements from Mussolini onwards appropriated Roman iconography (such as the Fasces ): insecure imperialists often claim legitimacy by claiming they're restoring an imagined golden age of empire. Indeed, this was the common design language of the British Empire's architecture, and just about every other European imperialist program of the past millennium. By picking the Roman Republic as a model for a beleagured polity, Heinlein plugged into the underlying mythos of western imperialism. But by doing so he inadvertently obscured the moral lesson he was trying to deliver.

... And then Verhoeven came along and produced a movie that riffs off the wank fantasies of the Mil-SF stans and their barely-concealed fascist misinterpretation: famously, he claimed to have never read the book. I pass no judgement on whether Starship Troopers the move is good or bad: as I said, I haven't seen it. But movies have a cultural reach far greater than any book can hope to achieve, so that's the image of Starship Troopers that became indelibly embedded in the zeitgeist.

PS: I just want to leave you wondering: what would Starship Troopers have looked like if it had been directed by Fritz Lang, with Leni Reifenstahl in charge of the cameras?

PPS: I don't agree with Heinlein's moral framework, although I think I can see what he was getting at.

While Bitcoin was originally proposed as a currency, it has most of the attributes of a commodity bubble, including a huge halo of swindlers and scam artists working to exploit it. It's also horribly energy-inefficient and contributes to the current global semiconductor shortage, neither of which are desirable. Even worse: attempts at fixing Bitcoin mostly revolve around tweaking the "proof of work" required to add a transaction to the blockchain. Currently, BtC and relatives are computation-intensive. Other paradigms exist, including the new fad for Chiacoin, currently big in China, which is storage intensive — this is what happens when the designer of Bittorrent brings his own personal obsessions to bear on the problem of manufacturing scarcity, and if you want to upgrade your SSD or hard drive in the near future you'd better get right to it before this catches on.

(And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. So fuck off and die if you own any, and especially if you thought pirating some of my work and turning it into NFTs would be a good way to milk the gullible.)

However, these aren't the only options.

It occurs to me that if you want a blockchain secured by scarcity and diminishing returns, you might consider other options that don't totally fuck our lived environment and that can't be gamed trivially by, say, running Chiacoin (the storage-space coin protocol) as part of the burn-in for new consumer grade drives your employer has you shoving in racks at Amazon S3 or maybe Arsebook. (Who totally have a first-mover advantage on that brain-damaged currency in the "phone my customer account manager at Western Digital, tell him I want another ten million terabytes of non-shingled platters" stakes.)

For example, to Elon Musk, a modest proposal:

Hork up a bunch of space probes going somewhere of interest to JPL or NASA or ESA, as both a tax write-off and an apology to the international astronomical community whose night skies you just vandalized with Starlink. Order, say, a dozen. For energy where they're going and for what's coming next they're definitely going to need RTGs, but you're not as fussy about maximum launch weight as the US government (you have Falcon Heavy and, soon, Starship to launch them with) so you can order up something running on, say, Strontium-90: it'll be heavier, but who cares. You're also going to use some of the power from it to run ion rockets for positioning and slow long-term acceleration (hint: Starlink uses ion propulsion for station keeping/reboost: presumably SpaceX have got quite a bit of experience with this tech by now).

So, you kindly donated a couple of dozen probes to Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and the rest of the gang (and the dwarf planet wonks are ecstatic).

But you're not going to be using much bandwidth for sending back data, most of the time. So what to do with those radio transmitters you just kicked out at something above solar escape velocity?

Code signing, that's what you do.

Each probe has a dedicated crypto processor and a very VERY private key. It receives a constant uplink from the ground, and replies by signing and echoing back to Earth the blockchain transactions it receives. The further away from Earth it gets, the longer the delay. Also, the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. You might be able to make an end run around the queue by bribing someone, but gambits based on building hardware are going to run into the wee problem that Deep Space Tracking Networks aren't off-the-shelf commodities and even if they were, you couldn't force the receding space probe to listen to your transmitter and reply (presumably the uplink is secured by the coin owner's own PKI system).

Upshot: it's a cryptocoin system with a big up-front setup cost (as in, billions), which is good (it deters low-end me-too systems), guaranteed scarcity of signing resources, and absolutely no advantage accruing to anyone buying up earthly power or material resources. So it shouldn't drive scarcity in hard disks/GPUs or unreasonable power demands. Flip side: there's a centralized chokepoint (the deep space network) that can be throttled by governments. But some might see this as an advantage ...

PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. Let's hope other governments follow suit rapidly and we can say goodbye to this Trump-grade lunatical grift before it degrades our lived environment any more.

PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...

(I’ve been reading the stories that got both Hugo and Nebula nominations. To see all the posts in the series, check the “Joint SFF Nominations” tag.)

Last time, in 1967, we saw the SFF world give awards to aesthetically and politically conservative stories. But the New Wave hadn’t gone anywhere. In his essay “Racism and Science Fiction,” Samuel R. Delany recalls at the following year’s Nebula awards an “eminent member of SFWA” gave a speech fulminating against “pretentious literary nonsense.” (The proximate cause of the speech was apparently Delany’s Nebula-nominated The Einstein Intersection, which the speaker had heard described but had not read; when he did he was taken aback to discover he liked it.) There’s still a tug-of-war between SFF’s pulp roots and its avant garde, and we’re about to see the rope pulled back in the other direction in the awards of:

1968

In 1968, four novels scored nominations for both the Hugos and the Nebulas: Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, Piers Anthony’s Chthon, and Robert Silverberg’s Thorns. The Delany won the Nebula and the Zelazny won the Hugo. Those two novels are still remembered and read; the other two not so much.

These are the short stories, novellas, and novelettes nominated for both awards:

• Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah” (Won the Nebula for Best Short Story): An astronaut between trips doesn’t quite connect with a woman.
• Harlan Ellison, “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”: A gambler encounters a slot machine possessed by a woman who died playing it, who promises him jackpots.
• Philip José Farmer, “Riders of the Purple Wage” (Tied for the Hugo for Best Novella): An artist prepares for his latest exhibition in an age of universal basic income. Puns ensue.
• Fritz Leiber, “Gonna Roll the Bones” (Won both the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette): A gambler gets into a high stakes craps game, bites off more than he can chew, and barely escapes with his skin.
• Anne McCaffrey, “Weyr Search” (Tied for the Hugo for Best Novella): On a medieval planet, dragon riders visit a castle looking for more people to ride dragons.
• Robert Silverberg, “Hawksbill Station”: A few days in the life of political prisoners marooned in the Cambrian era by a time-traveling government.

The big theme for 1968 is Dangerous Visions. This was a massive anthology edited by Harlan Ellison (the author of “Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman”). “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Riders of the Purple Wage,” and “Gonna Roll the Bones” were first published there. All three won at least one award. “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” was published elsewhere but written by Ellison, the anthology’s editor and chief creative influence, so it shares a sensibility. Three more stories from Dangerous Visions received either Hugo or Nebula nominations. Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” and Larry Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man” turned up on the Hugo ballot, and a Nebula nomination (bizarrely) went to Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”

Before I get into Dangerous Visions, though, let’s deal with the two stories about which I have the least to say: “Weyr Search” and “Hawksbill Station.”

Safe Visions

It says nothing good about the SFF world in the sixties that, three posts in, Anne McCaffrey is only the first woman we’ve covered. One of her stories will fall into our Venn diagram for three years straight; then she drops out of the story. Why everyone was briefly excited over McCaffrey isn’t clear. “Weyr Search” is a pulp adventure story indistinguishable in quality or style from any number of others now forgotten. The prose is bland and sometimes descends into clumsiness. (“This, then, is a tale of legends disbelieved and their restoration. Yet—how goes a legend? When is myth?” When is myth what?) Characters have names like F’Lar, F’Nor, and Fax. I assume “Weyr Search” stood out because in the sixties there weren’t many stories for dragon lovers—as discussed last time, this is another epic fantasy under a science fiction veneer. It’s technically also a story with a female protagonist—again, rare in 1968—but in practice most of the story is told from the POV of F’Lar (or was it F’Nor?).

We’re going to be seeing a lot of Robert Silverberg for a while. At any given time a few writers show up on SFF awards lists over and over for several years, after which they drop off for new favorites.[1] We’re already seeing Harlan Ellison come up a lot; future favorites will include George R. R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Connie Willis, and Mike Resnick. Here I’ll admit my biases: Ellison’s fine, but these are usually writers I’m not into. It feels like they please crowds not because their stories are great, but because there’s nothing in them to put anyone off. They’re not bad, just beige. Their work feels like a rainy Sunday morning when someone is watching a fishing program on TV in the next room. Silverberg is one of those.

“Hawksbill Station” is a perfectly good story. It’s a solid character piece with no real flaws. Silverberg writes good prose. It just feels a bit thin. The first thing we read is “Barrett was the uncrowned King of Hawksbill Station.” When he learns he could return to the future but chooses to stay, nothing about his decision is a surprise. Silverberg later expanded “Hawksbill Station” into a novel and it may have made Barrett’s motives more complex, but in the novella it just feels like he wants to be a big trilobite in a small pond.

Dangerous Visions

So, Dangerous Visions. Like I said, this was a big deal. Partly this is because non-reprint anthologies were unusual at the time (although by this point Damon Knight’s series Orbit had started up), and this was a big one full of major writers. But Ellison had bigger ambitions: He kicks off the book by proclaiming “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.” Ellison was prone to hyperbole the way fish are prone to swimming, but he really was taking this seriously: he sunk $2700 of his own money into the project (according the online inflation calculator at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over $20,000 today) and borrowed another $750 from Larry Niven.

So what was revolutionary about Dangerous Visions? Ellison had a couple of goals. One was to publish strong and even experimental writing styles in a genre that too often defaulted to “transparent prose.” The other was there in the title: Ellison wanted “dangerous,” taboo-breaking stories. In his introduction Ellison argues a SFF writer’s work is “precensored even before he writes it” because most editors started as fans, and deep down in their subconscious what they really wanted was stuff like the stories they grew up with. So they wouldn’t buy literary styles, or stories with sex or (certain kinds of) politics. Ellison wanted radical stories. Stories that tore walls down and busted doors open. Stories no one else would buy because they were too mind-blowing.

How this worked out in practice…

Secretions

One way to asses the strengths and weaknesses of Dangerous Visions might be to look at “Riders of the Purple Wage.” Of all the stories in Dangerous Visions, “Riders” is both the longest and the most… well, the most.

At one point in “Riders” an art critic declares “every artist, great or not, produces art that is, first, secretion, unique to himself, then excretion. Excretion in the original sense of ”˜sifting out.’ … The valor comes from the courage of the artist in showing his inner products to the public.” And man is Philip Jose Farmer not afraid to show us his inner products. He’s one of those SFF writers who feel like outsider artists. I’ve read the Riverworld series and the first of his World of Tiers books. In the former he excitedly plays with historical figures like a kid smashing his action figures together; the latter feels like he brain-dumped his weirdest daydreams onto the page. Whatever else I think of Farmer’s writing, I have to admit he writes what he damn well pleases.

“Riders” follows Chib Winnegan as he prepares his latest painting for an exhibition. It’s 2166 and most people live on a universal basic income, the “purple wage.” Meanwhile, Chib’s Heinleinesque great-grandfather watches the world through a periscope and editorializes. As an exercise in style, it’s amazing. It’s a delirious slapstick picaresque, fast-paced and as packed with baroque detail as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It’s in love with wordplay: there’s a pun every few lines. For several pages a psychiatrist analyzes Chib and his artists’ group, the Young Radishes, through etymological free-association. Farmer is no James Joyce but he’s under Joyce’s influence here, as acknowledged in the story’s climactic pun. Focus on the prose, grab hold of form and let content go, and parts of “Riders” are enormous fun.

That content, though. Farmer opens with an off-putting sex dream in which Chib imagines himself as a giant phallus. If you make it through this first chapter you’ll find it sets the tone. Chib’s mother is enormously fat and it’s a cue to read her as a grotesque. One of her friends urinates in her living room because the “sprayers” will clean it up. White dropouts change their names and live in the forests as pretend Native Americans. 22nd century Earth has legalized incest. One allegedly “funny” scene involves a sexual assault and the discharge of an entire can of spermicidal foam in someone’s living room. This was the first time I’d read “Riders”—I read a lot of Dangerous Visions years ago, but not every story—and I cringed on every page. This isn’t just values dissonance between a fifty year old story and my 21st century sensibilities. Farmer is out to shock.

Here’s something else that happened in early 1968, around the time SFF fans and writers were deciding what stories from 1967 were most award-worthy: The first issue of Zap Comix came out.

Zap kicked off the underground comics movement. It wasn’t the first underground comic (that was probably Frank Stack’s The Adventures of Jesus, although some online histories cite Jack Jackson’s God Nose). But Zap was the most famous and most of what was to come was either modeled on or reacting against it. If you’re not familiar with underground comics, first recall that in the sixties comics were aimed at children and their content was governed by the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was a Hays Code for comics, private self-censorship guidelines instituted by comics publishers hoping to dodge government censorship after Congress freaked out over E.C.’s gory horror comics. The undergrounds were small-press satirical comics aimed at adults and not bound by the CCA. They tended towards the surreal and often threw rapid-fire random crap together like Farmer in “Riders of the Purple Wage.” In the pages of Zap, cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay Wilson could express themselves freely and explore any themes they chose.

The results… well, Jeff Goldblum has a line in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” If you can focus on style and ignore the content, a lot of Zap is amazing to look at. I love Moscoso’s style and Crumb’s draftsmanship skills are genuinely great. But you can’t ignore the content. The underground cartoonists were so drunk with the opportunity to draw anything they plunged right into drawing the most taboo-breaking things they could come up with. And breaking taboos, it turns out, is not inherently courageous. Mostly the underground cartoonists drew images they should never have let out of their heads: racist caricatures, creepy sex, huge genitals, sadistic violence, and misogyny. So much misogyny. If you have any taste at all, Zap is unreadable.

Dangerous Visions is science fiction’s underground comics. Not that it’s unreadable. Some of these stories are good. Some are real classics, including “Faith of Our Fathers” and “Aye, and Gomorrah.” But where Dangerous Visions fails, it fails like Zap. We’ve already discussed Farmer’s story. Ellison’s own story described killings by Jack the Ripper in too much detail. Robert Silverberg wrote about an astronaut torturing his old girlfriends. Miriam Allen deFord’s “The Malley System” is little more than an excuse to describe brutal murders from the murderers’ perspectives. Henry Slesar’s “Ersatz” is a joke with a transphobic punchline. The prize for most inadvisable story has to go to Theodore Sturgeon, who must have taken Ellison’s invitation as a challenge to come up with the worst thing he could think of. This was the incest-promoting “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister,” a story utterly inexplicable except maybe as the most tasteless possible parody of Robert Heinlein in lecture mode.[2]

Invited to write “dangerously,” writers defaulted to “edgy”—Unpleasant sex! Gore! Cannibalism! Misogyny! Also, maybe religion is bad! Am I blowing your tiny minds? There weren’t many actual taboos in SFF by the late sixties. Most of the ones Dangerous Visions could find were taboos for good reason—say, the taboo against starting a story with a giant slithering penis, which was just saving writers from themselves. The taboos that need busting aren’t the ones that make people say “eww, yuck” when you break them. They’re the thoughts you don’t notice you’re not thinking. For instance, let’s return to the Samuel R. Delany essay I linked at the top of the post and look at something else that happened to Delany in 1968:

"Three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.

[…]

It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it… .) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry… . "

Among the things you didn’t see much of in sixties SF—even the progressive kind—were stories that didn’t treat whiteness as the default state of humanity, and stories about worlds without misogyny.[3] But it didn’t occur to anyone that these were taboos, or that they could break them. Dangerous Visions wasn’t dangerous in any way that mattered.

And Yet: Style!

On the other hand, that goal of publishing stories with style? Complete success. The best stories in Dangerous Visions (and they’re generally the least taboo-breaking stories) are just fun to read. Take “Gonna Roll the Bones,” which begins like it’s exploding:

Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he’d have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him.

There’s a rhythm running all the way through the story, spiced with long sentences patched together with commas and conjunctions that seem to tumble to a stop like rolling dice: “Then he threw back his shoulders and grinned his lips sneeringly and pushed through the swinging doors as if giving a foe the straight-armed heel of his palm.” “As Joe lowered his gaze all the way and looked directly down, his eyes barely over the table, he got the crazy notion that it went down all the way through the world, so that the diamonds were the stars on the other side, visible despite the sunlight there, just as Joe was always able to see the stars by day up the shaft of the mine he worked in, and so that if a cleaned-out gambler, dizzy with defeat, toppled forward into it, he’d fall forever, toward the bottommost bottom, be it Hell or some black galaxy.” It’s propulsive, like the story is pushing you forwards, and hard not to keep reading. Fritz Leiber modeled “Gonna Roll the Bones” on tall tales and the narration sounds like a storyteller, a rough one who rambles a bit and can’t get the words out fast enough when he’s excited.

Interestingly, “Gonna Roll the Bones” looks almost exactly like the American south in the early 20th century but casually mentions spaceships as just a normal thing. Like “Weyr Search” or last year’s “The Last Castle,” this is another future that looks like the past—but it feels odder, because it’s not emulating a Tolkien-style fantasy world. It’s like Lieber wasn’t sure a Twilight Zone-style story would fit Dangerous Visions without a science fiction veneer.

You’ll excuse me if I bring “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” in here. Again, this is not a Dangerous Visions story, but it’s an Ellison story and feels of a piece with his editing work. And, like “Gonna Roll the Bones,” this is another story about a gambler in over his head, which after Dangerous Visions itself is the most obvious thematic link between any of these six stories. It’s written in multiple styles, straight third person for present-day scenes, fast-moving, impressionistic italics when it flashes back to Maggie’s biography. As this strand closes in on Maggie’s death it dips into her stream of consciousness, putting us directly in her head. For a page the story turns into concrete poetry: a short funnel of text, then sentence fragments broken by black bars like pinball bumpers, falling into to a cramped text box as the machine traps her soul.

In “Bones” gambling is risk-taking; in “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” it’s addiction, obsession. Our protagonist, Kostner, watches a fellow gambler mechanically feed coin after coin into the slots, “almost automated.” She animates only to glare at a winner; she’s gambling to fill some hole—maybe chasing the freedom money brings—and resents the winner having something she can’t. Mediocre SFF often doesn’t try to set up patterns of imagery. “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” is one model of how to do it. Kostner gets more numb the more he wins. The pit boss’s grin is “conditioned reflexes,” the floor manager’s eyes “held nothing of light,” the casino owner’s smile seems “stamped on him.” Maggie is “An operable woman, a working mechanism,” she’s objectified in that men treat her as their object, in the sense of an objective. A goal, a prize. Las Vegas is part of a system that reduces everyone it touches to things, machines for wanting.

In the section on underground comics I mentioned there’s an undercurrent of misogyny running under some of these stories and it’s detectible in “Gonna Roll the Bones” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.” But in each story it’s of a different kind. In “Gonna Roll the Bones,” the misogyny is Joe’s; the narrative just doesn’t judge it because it’s in his head. This is a point contemporary readers might stumble over. These days SFF fans expect protagonists to be heroes, characters to identify with. Outside of SFF, that’s not always how it works. Joe’s an abusive lout; we don’t identify with him, we’re just interested in him. Specifically, we’re interested in seeing him humbled. Which he is—Joe’s in a good mood as the story ends but he’s not in the mood to go home, which from his wife’s perspective has got to be a win.

The problem is “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” has a touch of misogyny running not through a character but through the story itself. I think it’s unintentional. The story flashes back to Maggie’s life and into her head because it wants us to know she doesn’t act out of malice, just self-defense. Men have not been her allies. But it also relays Maggie’s life with more than a hint of condescension (“operable,” a “mechanism”), and in the end, with Kostner taking Maggie’s place in the machine, this is the story of a hapless schlub stabbed in the back by a seductive femme fatale. This story has empathy for Maggie, but parts of it push back against the work it does to humanize her.

Don’t Mention the War

In June of 1968 a pair of ads appeared on facing pages of Galaxy magazine. One read “We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country,” followed by a list of names that included Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Robert A. Heinlein, and John W. Campbell. The other read “We oppose the participation of the United States in the War in Vietnam,” followed by a list including Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Kate Wilhelm and Judith Merril organized the anti-war petition; Poul Anderson put the pro-war petition together in response.

There are a couple of things to notice here. First, the anti-war side has an infinitely better pool of writers. It includes not only almost all our award nominees (Anne McCaffrey didn’t sign either statement) but other great writers both famous (Ray Bradbury, Peter Beagle) and underrated (Margaret St. Clair, Sonya Dorman.) The only serious talent on the other side is R. A. Lafferty.[4]

More relevantly, the Vietnam war was by this point arguably the most all-consuming political issue in the United States, and SFF writers were as engaged with it as anyone else. So it’s interesting the double-nominated stories that year… well, aren’t. Maybe the two sides cancelled each other out in voting?

“Hawksbill Station” feels political but the politics are background scenery in a story about something else. Here we have communists imprisoned by a right-wing government, but you could tell the same story with the roles reversed. Being heavily into feudalism is about as far as the politics of “Weyr Search” go. “Aye, and Gomorrah” wants to broaden SFF fans’ outlook on gender and sexuality, and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” touches on capitalism and inequality.

The most topical story is “Riders of the Purple Wage,” though the current event Farmer is riffing off of has been forgotten. In 1964 a group of activists and academics calling themselves “The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution” wrote a memo called “The Triple Revolution,” which they sent to President Lyndon Johnson. The committee was concerned with nuclear proliferation and civil rights, but the main thrust of the memo was about what they called the “Cybernation Revolution.” They believed increased automation would lead to increased unemployment or underemployment, and serious economic inequality (and, honestly, I can’t say they were wrong). The committee had immediate suggestions for dealing with this but their long-term hope was that the U.S. would institute what we now call a universal basic income.

It’s not clear whether Johnson ever got the memo, but it impressed Philip Jose Farmer. In his Dangerous Visions afterward Farmer enthuses, “this document may be a dating point for historians, a convenient pinpointing to indicate when the new era of ‘planned societies’ began. It may take a place alongside such important documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Communist Manifesto, etc.” In his guest of honor speech at the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention, Farmer even called on fans to form a nonprofit organization, to be called REAP, to promote the aims of the Triple Revolution committee, pointing out that earlier that year fans had organized to keep Star Trek on the air.[5] He was disappointed when no one took him up on the offer.

But the story’s politics are muddled. Farmer agrees a basic income would be a good idea. At the same time, “Riders of the Purple Wage” argues most people don’t have great unrealized talents: “They believed that all men have equal potentialities in developing artistic tendencies, that all could busy themselves with arts, crafts, and hobbies or education for education’s sake. They wouldn’t face the ”˜undemocratic’ reality that only about ten per cent of the population—if that—are inherently capable of producing anything worth while, or even mildly interesting, in the arts.” Most people in Farmer’s story sit around watching TV. Farmer can’t quite imagine a science fiction story without someone to sneer at.

“Aye, and Gomorrah”

The one story we haven’t touched on is “Aye, and Gomorrah.” I first came across it in David G. Hartwell’s World Treasury of Science Fiction.[6] I was 12. I don’t recall my reaction to “Aye, and Gomorrah” but I’m sure I didn’t understand a word of it.

Its first words are “And came down in Paris,” and anytime the first word of a story is “And” you know you’re starting in the middle of something that’s been going on a while. Scenes are punctuated by regular repetitions of “And went up” and “And came down,” and the story ends in an “And went up” to match the initial descent. This is a regular pattern in the narrator’s life, and it feels circular.

We’re dropped in without context. A common worldbuilding technique in SFF is to avoid directly explaining the world, instead writing from an in-world perspective and letting the reader piece it together from the clues. “Aye, and Gomorrah” uses this tactic but doesn’t give us enough information to orient ourselves until mid-story—we’re off balance, out of our element, just as the narrator is out of their element on Earth. They’re a Spacer, an astronaut, and Spacers are something apart: people dismiss them with an oddly ritualistic “Don’t you… people think you should leave,” pausing like they need to search for the word people.

The narrator meets a gay man in France, and he thinks they might once have been a man. They meet a prostitute in Mexico, and she thinks they might once have been a woman. They are apparently neither. They ask both man and woman whether they’re a “frelk.” Spacers have frelks on the brain. Is this person a frelk? How about those guys? Where are the frelks? In Istanbul the narrator meets a frelk and their conversation gives us the context we were missing. In space radiation does a number on your gonads, so Spacers are neutered; this leaves them asexual and they’re considered non-gendered. “Frelk” is slang for people attracted to Spacers. They’re attracted to people who won’t be attracted back in the same way. Most Frelks pick up Spacers surreptitiously and pay for their favors.

Samuel R. Delany is a gay man in the late sixties writing about people whose affections and gender identities aren’t recognized as legitimate. He’s communicating the feel of this by translating it into a situation less threatening to an audience immersed in casual homophobia. Something that’s worth noting here—and I’m not at all the first person to notice this, see for example this post at the British Science Fiction Association’s blog Vector—is how the frelk decorates her apartment: “Marsscapes! Moonscapes! On her easel was a six-foot canvas showing the sunrise flaring on a crater’s rim! There were copies of the original Observer pictures of the moon pinned to the wall, and pictures of every smooth-faced general in the International Spacer Corps.” If science fiction readers responded to “Aye, and Gomorrah,” maybe it’s partly because it treats SF fandom as a sexuality.

More broadly, this is also a story about two people failing to connect. The frelk wants to make a real emotional bond with the Spacer but she’s also exoticizing them (“You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land”). She can’t make a real connection to a romanticized version of the person she’s trying to connect with. And the Spacer refuses to believe the frelk might not see this relationship as transactional. And it’s all depicted with empathy for both sides.

That’s what makes “Aye, and Gomorrah” a classic. It’s a story of miscommunication and awkwardness, but written with compassion and genuine affection for humanity. Delany actually seems to like people. “Aye, and Gomorrah” is the last story in Dangerous Visions and coming after a volume of cynical, often edgy stories this is especially striking. Heck, it’s striking compared to most SFF. Science fiction and fantasy writers like adventure stories, and adventures need villains; it’s a rare SFF story that doesn’t include a character it wants the reader to look down on. It’s great to end this essay on a story that just feels kind.

In the first part of this series I described Harlan Ellison’s authorial persona as a guy whoâ€d walk up to people who hadn’t even noticed him and shout “What are you looking at?” This also describes science fiction/fantasy fans who carry gigantic chips on their shoulders about SFF’s respectability, or lack of it. One time somebody suggested they read something besides The Lord of the Rings, and it scarred them for life. In one breath they dismiss “literary fiction” as nothing more than stories written by obsolete old men about professors sleeping with their students. In the next they insist fantasy is just as good as literary fiction, dammit. Nothing can satisfy them: SFF dominates pop culture. Science fiction is taught in college courses. Octavia Butler and Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin have been canonized by the Library of America. Still science fiction fandom lies awake worrying that, somewhere, a junior high English teacher is sneering at them.

Some years they deserve the sneers.

For instance:

1967

In 1967, three novels made both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists were Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel–17. Babel–17 is a classic novel by one of SFF’s greatest authors. Flowers for Algernon is fondly remembered even by people who aren’t into science fiction. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is… um, a Heinlein novel.

But we’re concerned with short fiction. Here’s the list of double nominees, with executive summaries. You’ll notice it’s longer than the previous year’s. In 1967 almost the entire Nebula ballot also received Hugo nominations, the one exception being a story by Avram Davidson called “Clash of the Star-Kings.”

• Brian Aldiss, “Man in His Time”: An astronaut returns from Mars shifted three minutes into everyone else’s future.
• Gordon R. Dickson, “Call Him Lord” (Won the Nebula for Novelette): A bodyguard takes the crown prince of the galactic empire on a tour of Earth, which is maintained as an Amish-style low-tech cultural reserve.
• Robert M. Green, Jr., “Apology to Inky”: A composer goes home to visit an old girlfriend and has visions of his younger self.
• Charles L. Harness, “The Alchemist”: A chemical company discovers an alchemist on the payroll.
• Charles L. Harness, “An Ornament to His Profession”: A chemical company discovers a demonologist on the payroll.
• Hayden Howard, “The Eskimo Invasion”: You really don’t want to know.
• Richard McKenna, “The Secret Place” (Won the Nebula for Short Story): A geologist looking for a uranium mine in the desert during World War 2 meets Helen, an eccentric young woman with a connection to the land that seems to reach back to prehistory.
• Bob Shaw, “Light of Other Days”: “Slow glass” delays light that passes through it, allowing windows that show scenes from years past. A couple buying a pane discovers the seller has a secret.
• Jack Vance, “The Last Castle” (Won the Hugo for Novelette and the Nebula for Novella.): In the far future, decadent humans who’ve enslaved four alien species face consequences.
• Roger Zelazny, “This Moment of the Storm”: A cop lives through a hundred-year flood on an alien planet and gets to shoot some looters.

The science fiction world in 1967 agreed with remarkable unanimity that these were the finest science fiction stories of 1966.

They’re mostly shit.

Okay, One I Liked

I’m being a bit unfair. “Apology to Inky,” “The Secret Place,” and “Light of Other Days” are very good and not out of place on an award shortlist, although my personal reaction to them was amiable indifference. “An Ornament to His Profession” is great and memorably weird. It opens with patent lawyer Conrad Patrick contemplating the problems waiting at work. He has a dubious contract to write. Also, an employee applied for a patent on an invention he cribbed from a student thesis he now can’t find or identify, which the company wants to co-opt or bury. Patrick recently lost his wife and daughter in a car accident and work is all that’s keeping him grounded. The scene is a genuinely good and sensitive treatment of depression and eroded self-esteem.

So he meets with the people involved in the patent and the contract. The contract guy abruptly starts explaining how he summoned the devil.

Wait, what?

If you think back you remember when Patrick was thinking of the contract he thought about selling someone’s soul. In context, it sounded like a figure of speech. But no: this chemist wants to sell his soul to get a new production process working. After all, in some sense isn’t everyone in the company selling some essential part of themselves? Patrick thinks the chemist needs to see the company psychiatrist, but he also needs to keep the guy happy because the new process is worth a lot of money. Also the chemist knows hypnosis, so, hey, maybe he can help the patent guy remember the name on that thesis. And both plots come together in this strange and ambiguous image, and questions about what it means and what Patrick really values. “An Ornament to His Profession” is uncanny and ambivalent and the best discovery I made reading these stories.

Those others, though…

Decadent Castles and Virtuous Villages

Well, last time I had praise for “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” but “The Moment of the Storm” shows the limits of Roger Zelazny’s ability to punch up a banal story with great prose. It’s overlong and has little to say beyond clichés about disasters unleashing people’s worst selves. “The Alchemist” is about nothing. Like a lot of bad SF, it takes a premise and plays out the consequences but manages to avoid saying anything thematically beyond “Look at this premise!” It doesn’t even have any interesting accidental subtext. (It’s weird that two similarly-premised stories in the same series, starring the same characters, by the same writer are at opposite ends of the quality spectrum.) “Man in His Time” has interesting ideas and goes in unexpected directions but is let down by basic conceptual flaws.

I suppose I should deal with the winners. “The Secret Place” is a perfectly fine story that feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone with a happier-than-normal ending. I find I don’t have a lot to say about it in isolation.

“The Last Castle” is Jack Vance, so if nothing else it has style. Here are all Vance’s hallmarks—entertainingly amoral characters, surface-polite verbal fencing, baroque vocabulary—and he deploys them as wittily as always. But the sweet spot for Vance is a battle of wits between charming con artists. Here he’s trying to write about fatuous aristocrats realizing, or failing to realize, their civilization is built on a great crime. As good as he is at his usual business, Vance doesn’t have the specific chops he needs to develop this situation convincingly. So he stumbles into a rushed and far too neat ending. The humans repatriate the aliens and leave their castle to live in simple villages, and this is somehow all the redemption necessary. This is juvenile. “The Last Castle” doesn’t have the tools to deal honestly with its theme, and the story doesn’t bear up under its moral weight.

Vance is always at least readable, though I find if I read too much of his stuff at once it gets repetitive. Gordon R. Dickson… well, the words are spelled correctly, and he doesn’t make obvious grammatical errors, and there’s nothing to stop you from reading his stuff very fast so at least it’s over quick.

I wasn’t even born yet in 1967 and as I write I’m actually kind of angry that “Call Him Lord” won a Nebula. In 1967, a room full of professional SFF writers and alleged adults agreed “Call Him Lord” was the best SFF novella anyone had written in the last year. And it’s a bad story. And I’m not saying itâ€s immoral here, which is what SFF fans usually mean when they call a story bad—though I’ll be saying it in a few paragraphs, because its politics are in fact lousy. What I mean is that, judged merely on its technical merits as fiction, “Call Him Lord” is incompetent.

The hero is a plastic He-Man, simple, honest, and tough. The prince is a sneering, whining wastrel impossibly devoid of common sense and self-preservation. They’re both exactly who they appear to be the first time we see them and do not at any point reveal new depths. The hero’s briefly-glimpsed wife Just Doesn’t Understand, begging him not to go before falling into his arms crying:

Ever since the sun had first risen on men and women together, wives had clung to their husbands at times like this, begging for what could not be. And always the men had held them, as Kyle was holding her now—as if understanding could somehow be pressed from one body into the other—and saying nothing, because there was nothing that could be said.

Have they, though? Because there’s nothing convincing about this scene. (It doesn’t even make sense in context: as it turns out, Kyle’s job isn’t that dangerous.) Gordon R. Dickson writes like he’s never met a human but is trying to understand them by cobbling together pulp clichés. There is not one honest insight or accurate observation of human behavior anywhere in the story.

For science fiction “Call Him Lord” is weirdly regressive. “Call Him Lord” is about how rough, simple people are superior to decadent civilized folk. Earth sticks to 19th-century technology with just a few carefully selected modern devices. The worldbuilding is vague but you get the sense this is an agrarian society. Dickson is looking to the past for his ideals, not the future. And there’s a parallel in “The Last Castle”—Vance’s good humans reject not only slavery but also technology like radios and solar power. They live in rural villages and have a gendered division of labor, men chopping wood and women gathering berries. And the society they walked away from was already archaic, having reinvented feudalism. These stories are examples of a strand of back-to-the-land science fiction more interested in resurrecting old technologies and social structures than inventing new ones. The people who’ve adopted those old ways are often depicted as stronger, more honest and more rugged.

There’s an uncomfortable eugenic subtext here which in “Call Him Lord” becomes text. Earth is kept in technological and social stasis to maintain healthy human genetic stock in case human colonists—who are said to have wiped out at least one alien species—lose something “essential” living on other planets. Whatever that essential something is, the prince doesn’t have it. At the end of the story Kyle kills him for being a “coward.”

And I haven’t even gotten to the real turd in the punchbowl.

This Is It, Folks, the Worst Hugo and Nebula Nominee Ever

I said you don’t want to know, but I guess we’d better deal with it. In “The Eskimo Invasion” an anthropologist visits a previously unnoticed Inuit tribe who have a lot of children and say things like “Good dream protect us from bad ice. Good dream help you like us better tomorrow.” They really want to be liked. The anthropologist sleeps with a woman, because he’s a cad. (There’s a very weird paragraph where he thinks about how his “only” sexual experiences were with a long run-on sentence full of women.) In less than a month, the woman has had his baby. And this tribe worships a bear spirit who will come “when we have covered the world for him!”

“The Eskimo Invasion” may be the single most racist science fiction story ever to get a major award nomination. It is literally nothing more than fascist, white supremacist paranoia about being outbred. And the SFF community of 1967 nominated it for a Hugo and a Nebula. And the next year Hayden Howard expanded it and some sequels into a fixup novel, and they nominated it for a Nebula again.

You may have noticed the writers listed at the top of the post are all male. Apart from Samuel Delany, they’re also all white. One of the biggest factors keeping science fiction and fantasy from becoming fully adult genres—and I don’t think we’re there yet—is that their core is organized around a small, insular fandom culture. Science fiction writers, editors, and fans read the same magazines and attend the same conventions and writing workshops; writers usually start as fans. Editors rarely make an effort to look past fandom for new voices and other points of view.

This has consequences. The relevant one here is that in 1967 the genre was very hostile to women and to anyone who wasn’t white. Organized fandom grew out of clubs that were mostly white and male. Ideas like “don’t sexually harass people” were not on their radar. Meanwhile the SFF world’s insularity meant a single editor could gain an outsized influence and set much of the tone for the science fiction genre. As bad luck would have it that editor was the notoriously racist John W. Campbell. So there was hardly anyone to push back when writers and fans nominated Howard’s story.

Reading “The Last Castle” in this light I can’t help noticing the ending suggests fixing a monstrously racist society is easy. Jack Vance’s privileged humans wash themselves clean just by walking away. No further reparations are due. I’m not condemning Vance here, because amoral characters were his thing and it normally works for him. But you have to wonder what about that story might have appealed to the same people who liked “The Eskimo Invasion.”

So, Moving On

Besides racism, what other themes appealed to SFF fans in 1967?

Seeing through time. Slow glass slows the light that passes through it, showing images from years past. In “The Secret Place” Helen’s personal fairyland incorporates visions of other geologic eras. The hero of “Apology to Inky” sees himself as a small boy and a young man. Jack Westermark in “Man in His Time” exists three minutes into the future; from his perspective everyone else is three minutes slow.

Whatâ€s interesting is that this is all nostalgia—no one is looking into the future. “Apology to Inky” ends in a meeting with the hero’s older self, but otherwise everyone sees only the past. Meanwhile the people in “The Last Castle” and “Call Him Lord” have returned to older technologies and social structures. The colony in “This Moment of the Storm” resembles “the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest.” The chemists in “The Alchemist” and “An Ornament to His Profession” revive prescientific ideas, reinventing alchemy and magic.

In 2001 Judith Berman wrote an essay called “Science Fiction Without the Future” arguing that science fiction had turned away from trying to imagine the future, instead indulging in nostalgia for the past. In 2012 Paul Kincaid made a similar argument in an essay called “The Widening Gyre”, calling science fiction “exhausted” because it had “lost confidence in the future.” It turns out this was nothing new: science fiction fans in 1967 were looking backwards.

Dead wives. If the people in these stories are nostalgic, it might be because their wives are all dead. Mr. Hagan the slow glass salesman lost his wife and son in a car accident and spends his days watching their images through his slow glass windows. Conrad Patrick, the protagonist of “An Ornament to His Profession,” also lost his wife and child in a car accident. The narrator of “This Moment of the Storm” lost a wife back on Earth and loses his fiancé at the end of the story. If you find yourself in 1967 don’t marry a science fiction man!

Alienated astronauts. Space travel is a fundamental science fiction trope, usually one fans get excited about. But “This Moment of the Storm” and “Man in His Time” are ambivalent about space travel; it’s not exciting but alienating. “This Moment” doesn’t have faster-than-light travel. Space travelers are put in suspended animation and wake up at their new planet centuries later. It’s a one-way trip into the future and once you leave your planet you’re forever out of sync with everyone else. The narrator has moved planets several times. He’s always looking for the perfect place that might exist the next solar system over, and failing to connect with where he is.

In “Man in His Time” every planet has its own local time. When Jack comes back to Earth he’s stuck in Mars time, three minutes into the future. One of the conceptual flaws I mentioned earlier is that it’s never clear how this works. Other people can bump into the place he was standing three minutes ago, and when he reads a magazine he needs help turning pages, but he seems to have no trouble eating or wearing clothes. He answers questions three minutes before anyone asks them. From his perspective, when he asks a question he has to wait three minutes for the answer.

What happens next is unexpected: Jack starts thinking of himself as a superman—everyone else is so slow. Soon he’s a megalomaniac. He plans more expeditions and thinks of himself as the first of a new breed. Meanwhile his condition baffles his wife, and his mother keeps thinking of her husband who killed himself driving too fast. (“This progress thing. Bob so crazy to get round the next bend first, and now Jack…”) Interestingly, the story ends here in unresolved mutual incomprehension. As humans move into space they’ll move into their own time-streams, getting further and further apart until they can’t understand or interact with each other at all.

But here we also come to the bigger conceptual problem. Jack’s mother says, “Jack is so strange, I wonder at nights if men and women aren’t getting more and more apart in thought and in their ways with every generation—you know, almost like separate species. My generation made a great attempt to bring the two sexes together in equality and all the rest, but it seems to have come to nothing.” A scientist studying Jack tells his wife, “You could not think what you suggest because that is not in your nature; just as it is not in your nature to consult your watch intelligently, just as you always ‘leave aside the figures,†as you say. No, Iâ€m not being personal; itâ€s all very feminine and appealing in a way.” “Man in His Time” mixes its alienation with gratuitous gender essentialism, suggesting an unbridgeable gap between men and women. Men are egotistical but forward-looking and scientific, women are down-to-earth but imprecise. Obviously this is problematic, but the sexism is as much as anything an aesthetic problem. This theme isn’t based on accurate insight into how people work, but on received ideas about men and women. Like “The Last Castle,” “Man in His Time” lacks emotional truth. It’s possible for a story to reflect a writer’s bad ideas while still being on the whole good, but in this case the gender essentialism is lodged too deep in the story’s core and it sinks the whole thing.

Quiet Stories. The one thing I like about the 1967 shortlists is that they have room for stories about ordinary people dealing with ordinary human problems that just happen to be tied up with fantastic concepts: grief, loneliness, how people find meaning in their lives. There’s not enough of this in SFF. The genre loves superhuman characters and dangerous, high-risk problems. It often pays only desultory attention to the kind of ordinary human concerns that make stories relatable and relevant. “Light of Other Days” is a perfect example: where other SF stories take a new invention and build an absurd conspiracy or an adventure around it, Bob Shaw asked how slow glass might actually be used by real people. His answer was logical, inevitable, and devastatingly sad.

Sort of fantasy, but not really. Some of these stories, like “The Alchemist” or “The Last Castle,” have what look like fantasy premises under a science fiction veneer. Other fantastic stories, like “Apology to Inky” or “An Ornament to His Profession,” leave it ambiguous whether the fantasy elements are happening in reality or in the characters’ heads. In the sixties Lord of the Rings was only just out in paperback and fantasy barely existed as a marketing category. Writers who wanted their work to sell tended to slap a sci-fi façade over their fantasy stories.

One useful substitute for magic was “psionics.” For a modern reader “The Alchemist” has a weird tone; everybody throws the word “psi” around like it’s an unproven but familiar idea. This makes more sense when you realize John W. Campbell published the story in Analog. Campbell really believed in psychic powers; building a story around them was a good way to get his attention.

A Small World

I said earlier the SFF world in 1967 was insular. I’m not letting modern SFF off the hook, here. It’s no longer actively exclusionary—Award nominees these days are as likely to be all women as all men. The fandom that nominated “The Eskimo Invasion” is dying, though maybe not dead. But SFF is still a small world that rarely looks beyond itself. SFF writers and editors still attend all the same workshops and conventions, still mostly read each other’s stuff, and still generally come up from fandom. The main effect is that the genre is still aesthetically conservative—SFF tends to stick to a limited range of styles and subjects.

And it still has, to put it gently, variable standards. The quality of modern awards shortlists still swing wildly, mixing brilliant, worthy nominees with baffling mediocrities. Both in 1967 and today, I get the sense people nominate stories based on whether they feel good, but make no distinction between work that feels good because it’s moving or mind-expanding, and work that feels good because it flatters their preconceptions, presses their buttons, and doesn’t challenge them to grow. The fandom that nominated stories as ordinary as “The Alchemist” and “This Moment of the Storm” is alive and well.

So I love SFF, but unlike the fans I described way back at the top of the post I don’t blame people who think it’s not Literature. After all, when they look at the genre and find that, year after year, major awards have gone to stories on the level of “Call Him Lord” and “The Last Castle”—work that is flat out not up to the maturity and complexity of the stuff in the Literary Fiction aisles—what the hell else are they supposed to think?

The science fiction and fantasy genres love awards. They have two big ones, the Hugos and the Nebulas, and both hand out trophies for short stories, novels, novellas, and novelettes, the last two being stories longer than short stories but shorter than novels. You might ask, “Science Fiction, why do you need two words for stories bigger than short stories but shorter than novels? Why can’t you get by with one?” Listen, these people love trophies, okay?

It’s surprising how often these award winners drop out of sight. Not so much the novels, although there are definitely Hugo and Nebula winning novels whose stars have fallen. But pretty much all short SFF feels immediately irrelevant. A story wins a Hugo, or a Nebula, and next year it’s just… not part of the conversation anymore. Well, okay, short stories in any genre haven’t been popular for decades. And the extent to which there’s a cultural conversation around written SFF at all isn’t great. But when people do talk about short SFF they’re usually talking about short SFF still new enough to nominate for something. As soon as award season is over it drops off the radar.

So I’ve been looking for some direction for my reading, and I thought it might be interesting to read some older SFF award winners, most of which I haven’t read in many years if at all. Specifically, stories that made the shortlists for both the Hugos and the Nebulas. These are popular awards, but popular within a subculture. The Hugos are voted on by the few hundred or thousand SFF fans who attend science fiction conventions, and the Nebulas are voted by members of a professional group, the Science Fiction Writers of America. So these awards don’t quite represent the tastes of the much larger group of readers who will pick up some fantasy novels at the library but aren’t interested in arranging their social lives around them. Still, the overlap between the two shortlists is probably a decent guide to what made an impression on readers at the time. Do they hold up, or are they deservedly forgotten? We’ll see.

A few notes on this series:

1. This project will cover novellas, novelettes, and short stories, and few if any novels. Including novels would involve a lot of reading. More to the point, it would involve reading a lot of books life is too short to read again, or at all.
2. I’ll only write in detail about joint winners, or other stories I find interesting. Otherwise future posts will be broad summaries of whatever themes I noticed in that year’s stories.
3. The series will be written slowly and posted irregularly, and will continue until I get bored or distracted. I’ve got to be honest, I may not get out of the 1960s here. I’ll stop before I reach the 2010s in any case, since it’s harder to have critical perspective on writing from the last decade.
4. I can’t promise it will be comprehensive. I’m an amateur critic writing for my own amusement, and if I have trouble finding a story I’m only willing to go to so much trouble and expense to track it down.

That said, let’s start with:

1966

1966, the first year Nebulas were awarded, makes for an easy start: only two stories were both Hugo and Nebula nominees (along with Frank Herbert’s Dune in the novel category; it won the Nebula and tied with Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal for the Hugo). That might seem hard to believe given the Nebulas’ overstuffed first-year shortlists—27 stories in the short story list alone—but that year the Hugos had only one category for short fiction. By the time they expanded, the Nebulas had figured out how to trim their shortlists to a sensible half dozen entries. Nevertheless, future years will feature longer lists of shared nominees.

So the obvious place to start is Harlan Ellison’s “’Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” which won both the Hugo and Nebula for best short story in 1966. (For stories published in 1965. This series is going by the dates of the awards; the stories in each post will have been published in the previous year.) And having asserted old short SFF isn’t part of the cultural conversation I must admit we have an exception here, at least to the extent that “Repent, Harlequin” is obviously being taught in literature classes: Google it and you get pages of prefab essays for incompetently lazy students to plagiarize.

Which is weird, because you’d think students wouldn’t need the help. Ellison starts “Repent, Harlequin” by flat out telling you what it’s going to be about. “For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know ‘where it’s at,’” he pastes in a long paragraph from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” Which also tells you about its tone. It is, first, looking for a fight. A narrator immediately certain his readers are demanding to know “where it’s at” feels like the kind of guy who’d shout “What are you looking at?” at people who hadn’t even noticed he was there. (Harlan Ellison has a distinctive voice, and this would be a big part of it going forward.) At the same time there’s something playful about a story that provides its own Cliffs Notes.

“Repent, Harlequin” is set in the capital-S System, a society so monomaniacally efficient its systems have no give at all. So it notes whenever anyone is late for anything and deducts the time from their projected lifespan; rack up enough lost minutes and the Ticktockman shuts your heart off by remote control. The Harlequin dresses up as a jester to prank the System by, for instance, gumming up the moving sidewalks with $150,000 worth of jelly beans. The story asks where he got $150,000 worth of jelly beans, then admits it doesn’t care. Jelly beans are the thematically right tool for the job and their origin is thematically irrelevant, so the Harlequin just has them. It’s fiction. Deal with it.

It’s not hard to see why Ellison felt like writing about civil disobedience in 1965. The civil rights movement was winning real victories (Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August) and opposition to the Vietnam War was picking up. What’s more surprising is a synchronicity with something that hadn’t happened yet, though it would be part of the cultural context for the Hugo and Nebula voters. Namely, the premiere of the Adam West Batman in January 1966. “Repent, Harlequin” is a superhero story about a costumed crusader facing off against a masked villain, and like Batman it’s self-aware and self-parodying. The jelly bean incident is followed by a deflating domestic scene in which the Harlequin’s relatively normal girlfriend takes the piss out of his overdramatic dialogue and (accurately) points out how ridiculous he is. This wouldn’t happen to the square-jawed engineers and space marines who were the stereotypical SF heroes ten years earlier.

Speaking of differences from earlier SF, maybe it’s time to talk about the prose. This is a vast oversimplification, but fans and critics tend to divide mid–20th-century SF into two distinct periods, the “Golden Age” (the 1940s through the 1950s) and the “New Wave” (the sixties through the early seventies). One difference between these eras was stylistic. Most Golden Age SF writers wrote slapdash pulpy prose meant to deliver a plot reasonably clearly, without much attention given to the work the prose was doing beyond simple description. (Advocates call this “transparent prose.” The idea is the prose is a “window” through which you watch the story without noticing the glass.) The New Wave writers’ tastes were more literary and they paid more attention to how language communicates feelings and images beyond its surface meaning.[1]

Ellison was a New Wave writer with a distinct voice, and knew how to make words work for him. When writing about the Ticktockman the prose keeps a regular rhythm, short sentences, or short phrases separated by commas: “You don’t call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life.” The confrontation between the Harlequin and the Ticktockman is a metronomic tennis-match back-and-forth dialogue. During the jelly bean assault the narrative begins straightforwardly, speeds up to a run-on sentence as the Harlequin looses his beans, switches to short choppy single-sentence paragraphs when the System notices its schedule is off, and goes openly exasperated, all italics and question marks, as it asks what is going on? Every line of “Repent, Harlequin” is crafted to not only describe what happens but express how what is happening feels.

The prose carries you along like a carnival ride. It’s not until the ride is over that you might start to poke at it. “Repent, Harlequin” has, arguably, failings matching the weak points of left-wing culture in the late 1960s.[2] You might wonder whether scheduling, that tool of The Man, is pernicious enough to invite parody; if you asked me to list the problems with a regimented, unequal, surveillance society, things happening at predictable times would be far down the list. In Paingod and Other Delusions Ellison admitted to being chronically late and pointed out the similarity between Harlequin and Harlan; he’s not protesting injustice here so much as something that’s just harshing his mellow.

You might discern an uncomfortable, reflexive disdain for squares. (See again that opening line, presuming a fight the reader wasn’t actually picking.) When the Harlequin buzzes a crowd they faint and wet themselves, and there’s that bit of Thoreau: “In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.”

And maybe “Repent, Harlequin” has a slightly too naïve faith in the power of protest: those Vietnam protests went on for years, involved tens of thousands of people, and did nothing to stop the war. Civil disobedience isn’t a virtue in itself but a tactic, which can be deployed effectively (as the Civil Rights movement did) or ineffectively (all those Vietnam protests). And it’s not clear the Harlequin was effective. As his costume suggests his pranks are in the spirit of carnivalesque protest—balloons and giant puppets, billboard détournement, attempts to levitate the Pentagon, the kind of street protests that shade into street parties—which was popular with a large chunk of the activist left who opposed the war. Say, the Youth International Party (Yippies), who would get their start in a couple of years. But the point of medieval carnivals, with their reversals and tweaking of authority, was that they didn’t challenge the system, just acted as a release valve. After Carnival was over everything went back to normal. “Repent, Harlequin” says “if you make only a little change, then it seems to be worthwhile,” but the little change is that the Ticktockman is three minutes late… which he just denies. “Check your watch.” Who’s going to argue? This is still the guy who can revoke the minutes of your life. Your watch says what the Ticktockman says it says, because the Harlequin did not at any point tip the balance of power and the moral of the story doesn’t account for that.

That said, the prose does carry you. It’s a good ride.

“The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, by Roger Zelazny, is an evocative title for what is basically just a fishing trip. But it earns the title. Zelazny was having a good year. In addition to tying for the best novel Hugo, his “He Who Shapes” tied with Brian Aldiss’ “The Saliva Tree” for Best Novella at the Nebulas.

The title comes from the book of Job, in which God brags about this awesome fish he made:

10 None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.

19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.

You can find leviathans on Venus. They haven’t yet been caught. Carl Davits tried, and was so awed by the Godzilla-sized fish he froze and couldn’t press the Fish Catching Button. Now he’s been hired as a bait man by Jean Luharich, his ex-wife, who’d like a big fish herself.

“Doors” is an old-fashioned adventure story with lots of technical detail about how a 300-foot fish is caught. (It’s not quite as simple as pressing a button. But there is a button. It’s very Jetsons.) But as with “Repent, Harlequin” it’s the style that matters. Carl has a poetic soul and his descriptions of Venus—how the sky looks at sunrise, what it’s like to approach from orbit—are vivid. Sometimes he slips into self-parody; the story’s last words are “the rings of Saturn sing epithalamium the sea-beast’s dower,” and I defy anyone to read this story without having to look up the word epithalamium. But I think this is more characterization than clumsiness on Zelazny’s part. What makes Carl memorable is the contrast between his inner monologue and his outer presentation as a rough port bum, as when he’s asked what it’s like diving at night:

I puffed, thinking of my light cutting through the insides of a black diamond, shaken slightly. The meteor-dart of a suddenly illuminated fish, the swaying of grotesque ferns, like nebulae-shadow, then green, then gone—swam in a moment through my mind. I guess it’s like a spaceship would feel, if a spaceship could feel, crossing between worlds—and quiet, uncannily, preternaturally quiet; and peaceful as sleep.

“Dark,” I said, “and not real choppy below a few fathoms.”

There’s a The Old Man and the Sea vibe to this story. It’s about humans pitting themselves against nature to prove their courage. But unlike Hemingway it’s not exclusively masculine; the gender politics are not modern but for a mid-sixties SF story (and that’s a big caveat) they aren’t bad. Jean organized this expedition as a publicity stunt for her cosmetics company, but her marketing is about adventure and heroics more than beauty. And she’s a competent adventurer. Their marriage failed because she and Carl were too alike.

If “The Doors of His Face” feels old-fashioned it might be because it feels like a screwball comedy. A critic named Stanley Cavell once identified a subgenre popular in the 1930s–40s called the “comedy of remarriage.” Examples are The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday (Cary Grant turns up in them a lot). They’re about couples who split up at (or before) the beginning of the movie but realize they belong together at the end; they were a way to create an exciting but Hayes-code-friendly simulation of infidelity as the couple dally with potential new partners. Structurally that’s what we have here. Jean also freezes at the vital moment, but because Carl is there to give her some “you can do it” encouragement she unfreezes and presses the Fish Catching Button that defeated him. (If landing the fish seems absurdly simple, it’s probably to keep a hundred percent of the reader’s attention on the drama.) And, well, that’s where the epithalamiums come in. Once you notice this it’s hard not to imagine “The Doors of His Face” as a black-and-white movie, with Katherine Hepburn as Jean and Robert Mitchum as Carl, with leviathans by Ray Harryhausen.

The one thing “The Doors of His Face” doesn’t resemble in the slightest is the book most critics claim as an influence: Moby-Dick. It’s not Moby-Dick, people. I assume you’re all saying this because you’ve never read Moby-Dick but it’s the only book you can think of about a giant sea creature. Moby Dick is unconquerable Nature. The leviathan is a big Filet-O-Fish. Who can open the doors of his face? Apparently these people. “The Doors of His Face” is New Wave in style but its heart is still in the Golden Age; it doesn’t doubt humans can conquer anything.

So I found the politics of “Repent Harlequin” a touch naïve, and called “Doors of His Face” old fashioned. Am I saying these stories aren’t worthy award-winners after all?

Oh, hell, no. These are great. “Doors” is less likely to reveal new facets on rereading—“Repent, Harlequin” is literature, “Doors” is an adventure yarn that just happens to be really, really well done. But they’re both classics. It is, again, all about style. Roger Ebert had a maxim he called Ebert’s Law—I think he might have codified it in a review of a movie called Freeway—that states “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.” The same is true for stories. This lesson is, unfortunately, still lost on a lot of SFF, especially at novel length. Scores of novels are published every year that bury a few interesting ideas within but are written like plates of limp noodles with no sauce at all. You can’t say that about these stories; as unimpressed as I am with Dune, I’d say the award voters did pretty well in 1966. On to 1967 in… maybe a couple of weeks? We’ll see.

Source - Patreon

With all the problems in the world today, it's amazing that people find time to get outraged about things like six obscure Dr. Seuss books that no one was reading being taken out of print or some episodes of The Muppet Show rerunning with disclaimers. This week's way-outta-scale outrage seems to be about Pepe LePew, a character who during the "Golden Age" of Warner Brothers cartoons appeared in eighteen short cartoons, all of them the same.

And like you, I was amazed to find out that they made eighteen of those things. I thought they made three and just ran them over and over.

I was and am a huge admirer of Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese and the other folks who concocted these cartoons but I think I liked everything else they did more. And I don't think I'm alone in not having a whole lotta love for the horny skunk, even back when date rape was an acceptable subject for humor. Maltese, who wrote the cartoons, wasn't even too fond of him.

I knew Mike a little and I recall him saying something like, "We made one and it went over well so we did it again because that's what we did when something went over well. And then the second one won an Academy Award." That was a distinction which no one in the business thought went to the best cartoon each year — it had more to do with what the guys who ran the studio chose to submit — but when it did, to quote Mike, "We had to keep making them."

The audiences for which they were made laughed at them, as Linda Jones (daughter of Chuck) notes. But I don't think Pepe ever rose to the popularity of other characters her father worked on or others that came out of that studio. When I was growing up, I had Bugs and Daffy and Porky and Tweety and Sylvester and Elmer and Sam and the Road Runner and the Coyote and several of their comrades on my t-shirts and lunchboxes and toy shelf…but only once in a while did you see Pepe.

He didn't even have his own Dell or Gold Key comic book like all the rest of them did at one point or another or always. Every year or three, Pepe might pop up in someone else's comic on a puzzle page or a short back-up story or somewhere but it was extremely rare. I suspect one reason was that no one knew what to do with him. Okay, so he chases around a female black cat that happened to get a white streak painted on its back. What's the plot of the next issue?

One of his few appearances in comics of the preceding century was a one-panel cameo in an issue of Bugs Bunny that I wrote for the Gold Key line back in 1975. It was a story about Elmer Fudd deciding to join the French Foreign Legion and I think I only wrote it because I thought it would be funny to have Elmer keep saying "Fwench Foweign Wegion." Speech impediments were funnier then too. Here is that one panel from "Beau Fudd"…

I'm not sure if it was on this story or one other one I wrote that had a three-panel cameo of Pepe but it was a hassle getting him in there. When my editor at Gold Key, Del Connell, saw I'd put Pepe into the script, he said, "Pepe LePew? We haven't used him in years! I don't think we even have a model sheet for what he looks like." I suggested that maybe they oughta have one.

As I mentioned back in this post, the Warner Brothers studio wasn't actively producing new cartoons then. There were however folks there in charge of supervising what was done with their characters, merchandise-wise. Del called them and asked for some reference on Pepe. According to him, they said, "Oh, we don't have any. There's not enough interest in that character these days."

Fortunately, the artist on that particular comic book I wrote was Tom McKimson, who'd worked for the cartoon studio and he remembered…kind of. So we stuck Pepe in the comic and as far as I could tell, nobody cared. That's the character that some people are now furious is being "canceled."

When DC Comics later took over issuing comic books of Bugs and Friends, they did a few short stories of Pepe and I gave him a cameo in a Superman/Bugs Bunny crossover series I wrote for them. But I think at that point, Pepe was just appearing to see if there was any merchandising potential in the character…and apparently, there wasn't.

I am against losing great work because someone somewhere might take offense to it. But when things go away because they haven't aged well or no one really cares about them anymore…well, that's not a hill on which I choose to die or even suffer a slight scratch on.

Not everything that was funny then is funny now. I don't think drunks are as funny as they used to be. I know most of the racist gags of the thirties and forties — jokes of the Mantan Moreland variety — don't bring down the house the way they used to. And given the changes in fashion and in how we view adult sexuality, I don't think your basic man-in-a-dress, as practiced by Milton Berle, Flip Wilson and the movie Some Like It Hot, is the sure-fire laugh-getter it once was.

And I don't think the amorous M. LePew skipping after some terrified pussycat was ever that funny…and it's even less so now. I'm against giving in to pressure groups that scream about things they don't understand. If this was my government banning something, I'd be out on the Capitol dressed like the QAnon Shaman, trying to occupy Nancy Pelosi's office. (Well, no, I wouldn't…)

But when a company that owns something decides there's no market for it at the moment, I'm okay with that, just as long as the material still exists somewhere. I'm not sure there ever was that much of a market for Pepe.

(Blogging was on hiatus because I've just checked the copy edits on Invisible Sun, which was rather a large job because it's 50% longer than previous books in the series.)

I don't often comment on developments in IT these days because I am old and rusty and haven't worked in the field, even as a pundit, for over 15 years: but something caught my attention this week and I'd like to share it.

This decade has seen an explosive series of breakthroughs in the field misleadingly known as Artificial Intelligence. Most of them centre on applications of neural networks, a subfield which stagnated at a theoretical level from roughly the late 1960s to mid 1990s, then regained credibility, and in the 2000s caught fire as cheap high performance GPUs put the processing power of a ten years previous supercomputer in every goddamn smartphone.

(I'm not exaggerating there: modern CPU/GPU performance is ridiculous. Every time you add an abstraction layer to a software stack you can expect a roughly one order of magnitude performance reduction, so intuition would suggest that a WebAssembly framework (based on top of JavaScript running inside a web browser hosted on top of a traditional big-ass operating system) wouldn't be terribly fast; but the other day I was reading about one such framework which, on a new Apple M1 Macbook Air (not even the higher performance Macbook Pro) could deliver 900GFlops, which would put it in the top 10 world supercomputers circa 1996-98. In a scripting language inside a web browser on a 2020 laptop.)

NNs, and in particular training Generative Adversarial Networks takes a ridiculous amount of computing power, but we've got it these days. And they deliver remarkable results at tasks such as image and speech recognition. So much so that we've come to take for granted the ability to talk to some of our smarter technological artefacts—and the price of gizmos with Siri or Alexa speech recognition/search baked in has dropped into two digits as of last year. Sure they need internet access and a server farm somewhere to do the real donkey work, but the effect is almost magically ... stupid.

If you've been keeping an eye on AI you'll know that the real magic is all in how the training data sets are curated, and the 1950s axiom "garbage in, garbage out" is still applicable. One effect: face recognition in cameras is notorious for its racist bias, with some cameras being unable to focus or correctly adjust exposure on darker-skinned people. Similarly, in the 90s, per legend, a DARPA initiative to develop automated image recognition for tanks that could distinguish between NATO and Warsaw Pact machines foundered when it became apparent that the NN was returning hits not on the basis of the vehicle type, but on whether there was snow and pine forests in the background (which were oddly more common in publicity photographs of Soviet tanks than in snaps of American or French or South Korean ones). Trees are an example of a spurious image that deceives an NN into recognizing something inappropriately. And they show the way towards deliberate adversarial attacks on recognizers—if you have access to a trained NN, you can often identify specific inputs that, when merged with the data stream the NN is searching, trigger false positives by adding just the right amount of noise to induce the NN to see whatever it's primed to detect. You can then apply the noise in the form of an adversarial patch, a real-world modification of the image data being scanned: dazzle face-paint to defeat face recognizers, strategically placed bits of tape on road signage, and so on.

As AI applications are increasingly deployed in public spaces we're now beginning to see the exciting possibilities inherent in the leakage of human stupidity into the environment we live in.

The first one I'd like to note is the attack on Tesla car's "autopilot" feature that was publicized in 2019. It turns out that Tesla's "autopilot" (actually just a really smart adaptive cruise control with lane tracking, obstacle detection, limited overtaking, and some integration with GPS/mapping: it's nowhere close to being a robot chauffeur, despite the marketing hype) relies heavily on multiple video cameras and real time image recognition to monitor its surrounding conditions, and by exploiting flaws in the image recognizer attackers were able to steer a Tesla into the oncoming lane. Or, more prosaically, you could in principle sticker your driveway or the street outside your house so that Tesla autopilots will think they're occupied by a truck, and will refuse to park in your spot.

But that's the least of it. It turns out that the new hotness in AI security is exploiting backdoors in neural networks. NNs are famously opaque (you can't just look at one and tell what it's going to do, unlike regular source code) and because training and generating NNs is labour- and compute-intensive it's quite commonplace to build recognizers that 'borrow' pre-trained networks for some purposes, e.g. text recognition, and merge them into new applications. And it turns out that you can purposely create a backdoored NN that, when merged with some unsuspecting customer's network, gives it some ... interesting ... characteristics. CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is a popular NN research tool, a network trained from images and their captions taken from the internet. [CLIP] learns what's in an image from a description rather than a one-word label such as "cat" or "banana." It is trained by getting it to predict which caption from a random selection of 32,768 is the correct one for a given image. To work this out, CLIP learns to link a wide variety of objects with their names and the words that describe them.

CLIP can respond to concepts whether presented literally, symbolically, or visually, because its training set included conceptual metadata (textual labels). So it turns out if you show CLIP an image of a Granny Smith, it returns "apple" ... until you stick a label on the fruit that says "iPod", at which point as far as CLIP is concerned you can plug in your headphones.

And it doesn't stop there. The finance neuron, for example, responds to images of piggy banks, but also responds to the string "$$$". By forcing the finance neuron to fire, we can fool our model into classifying a dog as a piggy bank.

The point I'd like to make is that ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations, much as shitty internet-of-things gizmos usually run on an elderly, unpatched ARM linux kernel with an old version of OpenSSH and busybox installed, and hard-wired root login credentials. This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances: metaphorically, cameras that you can fool by slapping a sticker labelled "THIS IS NOT THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR" on the front of the droid the camera is in fact looking for.

And in five years' time they're going to be everywhere.

I've been saying for years that most people relate to computers and information technology as if they're magic, and to get the machine to accomplish a task they have to perform the specific ritual they've memorized with no understanding. It's an act of invocation, in other words. UI designers have helpfully added to the magic by, for example, adding stuff like bluetooth proximity pairing, so that two magical amulets may become mystically entangled and thereafter work together via the magical law of contagion. It's all distressingly bronze age, but we haven't come anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel yet.

With speech interfaces and internet of things gadgets, we're moving closer to building ourselves a demon-haunted world. Lights switch on and off and adjust their colour spectrum when we walk into a room, where we can adjust the temperature by shouting at the ghost in the thermostat, the smart television (which tracks our eyeballs) learns which channels keep us engaged and so converges on the right stimulus to keep us tuned in through the advertising intervals, the fridge re-orders milk whenever the current carton hits its best-before date, the robot vacuum comes out at night, and as for the self-cleaning litter box ... we don't talk about the self-cleaning litterbox.

Well, now we have something to be extra worried about, namely the fact that we can lie to the machines—and so can thieves and sorcerors. Everything has a True Name, and the ghosts know them as such but don't understand the concept of lying (because they are a howling cognitive vacuum rather than actually conscious). Consequently it becomes possible to convince a ghost that the washing machine is not a washing machine but a hippopotamus. Or that the STOP sign at the end of the street is a 50km/h speed limit sign. The end result is people who live in a world full of haunted appliances like the mop and bucket out of the sorcerer's apprentice fairy tale, with the added twist that malefactors can lie to the furniture and cause it to hallucinate violently, or simply break. (Or call the police and tell them that an armed home invasion is in progress because some griefer uploaded a patch to your home security camera that identifies you as a wanted criminal and labels your phone as a gun.)

Finally, you might think you can avoid this shit by not allowing any internet-of-things compatible appliances—or the ghosts of Cortana and Siri—into your household. And that's fine, and it's going to stay fine right up until the moment you find yourself in this elevator ...

I notice everybody is talking about copyright again and I asked Tim if he wanted to do a column on it but he just shouted “write your own half-baked nonsense!” I think that is progress, as it least it implies what he writes is half-baked nonsense. I mean…it’s more raw nonsense to be honest.

Anyway, copyright: can’t live with it and can’t get prosecuted for photocopying books without it. My proposal uses a little used quality in these discussions: mathematics. See, some people want copyright on books to expire quickly and some people (typically those greedy author types, selfishly hoping to make a living and be able to afford food and shelter) want it to expire long after the author has died. Surely a compromise is possible?

First we need some parameters:

1. P: this is the “author is not a thoroughly appalling human being” parameter. It only goes up to 5 and if you are just occasionally mean to people on Twitter or a full-on living saint, you get 5 – you don’t get bonus points for saving kittens or curing a pandemic . If you are otherwise one of those people who use their fame to be really shitty to people you get scored on a 0 to 5 basis. 0 is if you are former dictator or something. It’s a judgemental parameter but not a very strict one.
2. µ: this is the “have you already made shit-loads of money” parameter. No? Ok then it is about 0.08. Yes? As in you are deciding how many golden bath tubs to buy in your huge multi-bathroom mansion? Then it is, say, 0.5.
3. x: number of years since the book was published.

Now, enter my magic formula. Instead of copyright expiring on your book straight away, the formula determines the amount of copyright protection your books has. For example to start with it’s just a bit less than100% (normal fair use) but then it will slide to 50% and people can “fair use” half of your book. The good news is that the formula has an asymptote at the far end – in theory it never entirely goes out of copyright. Centuries later some microscopic fraction of a single letter will still be in copyright!

Here’s the formula:

Percentage of the book in copyright = e(P - µx)/(1+e(P - µx))

Here’s how a non-appalling and not very wealthy author’s copyright curve would look:

And here is how some mega-wealthy author who is trying to police the genitals of people going to the toilet would look:

Now you may say that this isn’t a remotely workable copyright scheme and is actually just an excuse for you to say rude things about certain best selling authors who annoy you. That isn’t true. It is also an excuse for me to draw graphs.

We don’t need to wait on history to recognize that the fall of Donald Trump’s literal and figurative fortunes over the last week is the stuff of a Greek tragedy, not lacking the Furies driving him from the stage. On the morning of January 6th, Trump had lost the presidential election, yes, but he was still a force to be reckoned with. Twitter account in hand, he was, for better or worse, the front runner for the GOP’s presidential candidate slot in 2024 — and if he couldn’t be or didn’t want to be the candidate, he could still exert massive influence on who would get the slot. If not king, then the kingmaker. Skeptics (waves) would and did point out the myriad of legal and financial issues awaiting Trump in his post-presidency. But Trump had been in legal and financial quagmires before, and had always managed to fail upwards. It was possible, against all odds and with a pool of fervent, credulous former voters, that he could do so again.

On the evening of January 13th — a mere one week later — the best Trump could do for himself was keep his presidential pension. He was, most obviously, impeached for a second time, on the (accurate) charge of inciting an insurrection. His senate trial will apparently have to wait, but the historic shame of a second impeachment is his forever. He is literally half the presidential impeachments in the history of the United States. He is radioactive politically; all but the dimmest of QAnonic political figures have (correctly) disavowed him, in name if not in policy.

Trump’s business and financial connections have severed themselves from him dramatically and unambiguously; he has no way to raise money in his post-presidency now, and has hundreds of millions in debt waiting for him. His biggest fans are now wanted by the FBI. His Twitter account, the violent nuclear heart of his power, is no more. He doesn’t even have Parler at this point; at most he can settle for Gab. And of course he still has all the legal issues he had before the attempted coup — and more now, all waiting for him when he’s finally shown the other side of the White House door six days from today.

Who is to blame for this historic fail, and this monumental fall? Why, he is, of course. Trump’s inability to process defeat and his abject terror at being branded a loser is the very cause of him becoming, definitively, the biggest loser in American history. He has lost not just an election; he has lost his power. He’s lost his aura, his invincibility, his mojo, his swagger. In place of his heedless and fear-inducing bluster, he now has a querulous whine, a mutter as he wanders the White House halls, complaining not to social media but to hapless, bored aides about an election that wasn’t, in fact, stolen from him and which he now has no power to make others pretend it was. Here is a defeat of his own making, one for which he cannot blame others, although he will, since he is psychologically incapable of blaming himself.

We don’t have to wait on history, but as it happens, this is how history will remember Donald Trump: Not as a forceful, charismatic authoritarian, but as a corrupt and pathetic wretch, who spent the final days of his presidency shouting at the walls about how the world is against him.

He is correct in that much. The world is against him, because the world, finally, no longer has to pretend to tolerate him. He has done this to himself through fear and hubris and a smallness of soul. The rest of his life will be spent in the full knowledge that his name represents not success, but a failure so abject and profound that there is no other comparison to it.

He will pretend it doesn’t bother him. We all know that will be a lie. It will bother him, every day, from now to his end. He will deserve every moment of it.

— JS

Source - Patreon

I have a theory about the Republican Party, and it is that around the time Newt Gingrich became the head of its brain trust, the GOP added a fourth functioning principle to its previous tripod of “Southern Strategy to corner the racist vote,” “Abortion to corner the Evangelical vote” and “Tax cuts to corner the capitalist vote (and money).” The fourth principle was not about kettling and controlling a voting bloc, but rather a principle to maximize its power and to motivate the voting blocs beyond whatever the GOP could offer them politically.

That fourth principle, to put it in its shortest and bluntest form, is:

“But what if we… didn’t?”

Somewhat more broadly, the Republicans recognized there was a suite of political conventions and traditions that were designed to make it easier for things to get done, and that this suite of conventions and traditions were exploitable by denial. While people in both parties (and the parties themselves) would occasionally use this exploit, it was not done systematically.

That is, until Gingrich saw that practice as a weakness to be attacked. Here’s an early version:

“Treat the members of the other political party as colleagues rather than bitter enemies? Okay, but what if we… didn’t?“

And it worked! Which is to say that it got attention, raised temperatures and was an effective political cudgel against those who didn’t understand (or didn’t want to believe) that the political ground was shifting underneath their feet. Gingrich was a political genius (until he wasn’t), and he set the pattern of Republican contravening of norms that advanced inexorably over the years.

Mitch McConnell, seen above, is a master of the “But what if we… didn’t?” school of politics. Allow a sitting president of the opposite party to name a Supreme Court justice? Okay, but what if we didn’t? Stick with the principle that you established with regard to Supreme Court justices being nominated in an election year? Okay, but what if we didn’t? Actually choose to have the Senate be a legislative body rather than just a rubber stamp for conservative judges of questionable competency? Okay, but what if we didn’t? And so on. McConnell understands the depth of his transgression against political norms, you can be sure — he’s been in Congress long enough to remember how it was before — but like Gingrich, he doesn’t particularly care. He doesn’t care, because it get results. The ends justifies the means.

In this, Trump was — and make no mistake, still is — the perfect GOP president. Trump has no loyalty to tradition and operating principles; indeed his entire appeal is transgression. He no interest in procedure, regulation or rule of law. To be sure, he was less “But what if we didn’t” than “I’m just not gonna,” but the effective difference between the two is subtle and in any event abetted the GOP’s “what if we didn’t” principle to a significant degree.

The 2020 election was a perfect storm of “but what if we didn’t?”

So: Joe Biden won the 2020 election and has to be acknowledged as the president.

Okay, but what if we didn’t? Let’s say the election was tainted by fraud!

The facts show that the election was not tainted by fraud and indeed it was one of the most secure elections in US history, and we have to acknowledge those facts.

Okay, but what we didn’t? Let’s take it to court!

More than 60 court cases, on both state and federal levels, rule that, yes, in fact, the election went for Biden without any significant fraud. His electoral count stands and is uncontroversial and should be acknowledged as such when Congress convenes to count the votes on January 6.

Okay, but… what if we didn’t?

Well, now we know what happens when they didn’t.

The Republicans want us to believe they are surprised an insurrection has happened, but why should we believe that? These are not (all) unintelligent people. They knew what they were doing, they knew how they were transgressing, and they knew, every step of the way, what the result of each transgression was meant to be, both in terms of the fabric of democracy in the United States, and on the expectations of the Republican voting base.

There was a Republican mob at the Capitol yesterday because the GOP put them there. Not just yesterday, or through the course of the election, or the four years of the Trump administration. The storming of the Capitol is the (current) culmination of a decades-long project by Republicans, a project of denial, in which they didn’t recognize the validity of power being shared, or the equality of the other party, or the supremacy or desirability of democracy, if democracy meant a diminishment of their power and goals.

Democracy? Okay, but, what if we didn’t?

The Republicans aren’t surprised that this is where we are, and make no mistake that if at any point in the 2020 post-election they could have gotten away with subverting the will of the voters they absolutely would have done so. Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes and 7 million more popular votes than Trump, an unambiguous and, realistically, unassailable number. The Republicans chose to assail it anyway — not just a few members of the party, but as a matter of policy from the top all the way down. What is the number of electoral votes a Democrat now must win to be acknowledged without contestation as the winner of a presidential election by the GOP? We don’t actually know, except to say it has to be more than 306.

Yesterday our nation’s capitol was invaded and looted, and our democracy was shamed, and even then a half dozen Republican senators and more than a hundred GOP representatives who a few hours before were stuffed into shelters for their safety decided to play the “But what if we didn’t?” card. Sedition was preferable to being put on record as acknowledging a loss of power and privilege. Don’t come to me in the light of day and tell me this wasn’t where the GOP understood we would one day end up. The only problem the Republicans have with where we are at the moment is that, for once, “but what if we didn’t?” didn’t do what it was supposed to.

The Republican Party is a traitor to the ideals and practice of democracy in the United States. It fomented, aided and abetted an insurrection. A regrettable number of its members in the national government have signed on for sedition over the peaceful transfer of power (“The peaceful transfer of power? Okay, but what if we… didn’t?”). These seditious members should be drummed out of Congress, right now, and some Republicans who are in power should be charged with crimes. The Republican Party got us as close as we have gotten since the Civil War to the collapse of our democracy, not by accident, but by design, and had the implementation of that design been only a little more competent, both now and over the last few years, it might have succeeded. The GOP is an enemy of the United States — not conservatism as a whole, but its party (although at the moment I have no great kind thoughts about conservatism, either) — and if it had any institutional capacity for shame and self-reflection, it would end itself.

To which I see the Republican Party saying, “Okay, but what if we… didn’t?” Because even now I can tell you that from the GOP point of view the problem isn’t the damage that party has wreaked upon the US and its people. The problem is its plan didn’t work.

The GOP always meant for us to be here. The thing is, there’s somewhere beyond here the GOP still wants us to go. We shouldn’t pretend that the GOP won’t get us back to here as soon as practically possible. And then past it, to the ruin of us all.

— JS

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon