Jack Vance y un tal Ortega

Mensaje de lord Jaiko Jaikosa, presidente de la Cámara Ejecutiva de la Asamblea General del Valhalla, en Valhalla, Sistema Solar de la Estrella Tau de Los Gemelos, 8 de agosto de 1028:

«Os exhorto a no avalar tan siniestra medida. La humanidad ha tenido muchas veces tristes experiencias de lo que son las fuerzas de policía dotadas de excesivos poderes. Tan pronto como la policía deja de estar bajo la firme mano de una política responsable, se vuelve arbitraria, inmisericorde y construye una ley para su uso particular. Deja de pensar en la justicia para establecerse como una élite colmada de privilegios. Equivoca la actitud normal de precaución e incertidumbre de la población civil, y en vez del respeto comienza a utilizar sus armas de un lado a otro, con una euforia megalomaníaca. La gente deja de ser personas para convertirse en sirvientes. Una policía así se transforma simplemente en un conjunto de criminales uniformados, cuya característica más perniciosa es que resulta sancionada por la Ley. La mentalidad policíaca no puede considerar a un ser humano en otros términos que el de un objeto al que hay que procesar o expedientar. Nada significa la conveniencia pública ni la dignidad; las prerrogativas de la policía asumen el estado de una ley divina. Se pide la sumisión más completa. Si un agente de la policía mata a un civil, el hecho se considera una circunstancia lamentable; el agente actuó con un exceso de celo profesional. Si un civil mata a un policía, se conmueve el propio infierno. La policía echa espuma por la boca. Todos los demás asuntos quedan pospuestos hasta que el culpable de semejante y espantoso crimen es descubierto. Inevitablemente, al ser capturado es maltratado o incluso torturado por su intolerable presunción. La policía se queja de que no puede funcionar eficientemente, de que los criminales se le escapan. Es mejor siempre un centenar de criminales incontrolados que el despotismo de una fuerza de policía que actúa sin freno.»

(Jack Vance: El Rey Estelar)

Vance pone el discurso en boca de uno de sus personajes; su propia opinión quizás sea distinta. Aunque cabe mencionar que en el Oikumene de Los Príncipes Demonio, la policía (excepto a nivel local) es una organización privada sin estatus oficial especial o conexión directa con el gobierno. Un poco como el sistema que proponen algunos libertarios estadounidenses, o el que funcionó en Islandia entre los siglos X y XIII.

uno de los fenómenos más alarmantes de estos últimos treinta años [es] el aumento enorme en todos los países de las fuerzas de Policía. [...] es una inocencia de las gentes de "orden" pensar que estas "fuerzas de orden público", creadas para el orden, se van a contentar con imponer siempre el que aquéllas quieran. Lo inevitable es que acaben por definir y decidir ellas el orden que van a imponer — y que será, naturalmente, el que les convenga. [...] Cuando, hacia 1800, la nueva industria comienza a crear un tipo de hombre — el obrero industrial — más criminoso que los tradicionales, Francia se apresura a crear una numerosa Policía. Hacia 1810 surge en Inglaterra, por las mismas causas, un aumento de la criminalidad, y entonces caen los ingleses en la cuenta de que ellos no tienen Policía. Gobiernan los conservadores. ¿Qué harán? ¿Crearán una Policía? Nada de eso. Se prefiere aguantar, hasta donde se pueda, el crimen. "La gente se resigna a hacer su lugar al desorden, considerándolo como rescate de la libertad." "En París — escribe John William Ward — tienen una Policía admirable; pero pagan caras sus ventajas. Prefiero ver que cada tres o cuatro años se degüella a media docena de hombres en Ratcliffe Road, que estar sometido a visitas domiciliarias, al espionaje y a todas las maquinaciones de Fouché". Son dos ideas distintas del Estado. El inglés quiere que el Estado tenga límites.

(José Ortega y Gasset: La rebelión de las masas)

No sé no sé... me pregunto si la gente que vive en barrios conflictivos podría permitirse el lujo de mantener opiniones semejantes.

En esta página se puede encontrar información sobre la evolución de la policía en el área de Londres entre los siglos XVII y XIX.

Ah, y ya que estoy en plan de comparar a Vance con autores españoles, aprovecho para recordar este post.

Our Friends The Cows

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.

(Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

I, too, love cows. Not enough to stop eating them, though.

I wonder how many of us flesh devourers would turn vegetarian if we had to slaughter the animals ourselves, instead of finding their meat neatly and innocently packaged at the supermarket, with nary a hint of the corresponding bovine assasination. I guess I could kill a pig: they are ugly and nasty, and would no doubt eat me if they had the chance. But a cow? That sweet, good natured animal?

Hunt your own food, coward, division of labor be damned! Take your spear and pursue the mammoth! Otherwise, wait until In vitro meat becomes a practical reality.

What I feared most, but perhaps only through ignorance of zoology, was, lest, whilst my sleeping face was upturned to the stars, some one of the Brahminical-looking cows on the Cambrian hills, one or other, might poach her foot into the center of my face. I do not suppose any fixed hostility of that nature to English faces in Welsh cows: but everywhere I observe in the feminine mind something of beautiful caprice, a floral exuberance of that charming wilfulnes which characterises our dear human sisters I fear through all worlds.

(Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

City Of Tiny Lites

Mormon transhumanism

It exists.

Actually, not as absurd or incongruous as it seems at first sight. According to my (admitedly very limited) knowledge of Mormonism, some tenets of the religion resonate with transhumanist principles an awful lot. I'm thinking of the physical nature of God, the belief in continual eternal progression, the possibility of, in time, becoming a god yourself, and so on.

God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another.

(Joseph Smith, Jr. : King Follett Discourse)

To inherit the same power, the same glory and the same exaltation, until you arrive at the station of a god, and ascend the throne of eternal power, the same as those who have gone before.

(ibid.)

If there were a point where a man in his progression could not proceed any further, the very idea would throw a gloom over every intelligent and reflecting mind. God himself is increasing in knowledge, power and dominion, and will do so, worlds without end. It is just so with us.

(Wilford Woodruff: Journal of Discourses, Vol. 6)

I wonder about the relative compatibility of other religions with transhumanism. Could there be a transhumanist Buddhism? A transhumanist Christianity?

Transhumanism itself could be understood as a secular religion for nerds, a movement based more on wishful thinking than in sound science or an understanding of human nature.

Meanings, symbols

everything, whatever happens, has three meanings. The first is the practical meaning, what the books calls, 'the thing the plowman sees.' The cow has taken a mouthfull of grass, and it is real grass, and a real cow. [...] The second is the reflection of the world about it. Every object is in contact with all others, and thus the wise can learn of the others by observing the first. That might be called the soothsayer's meaning [...] The third is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion with him, so all must express his will -which is the higher reality. [...] The book is saying that everything is a sign.

(Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer)

Everything of which we are conscious…has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.

(Oswald Spengler, quoted in Jack Vance's The Star King)

There were four categories of allegory used in the Middle Ages, which had originated with the Bible commentators of the early Christian era. The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning. The second is called typological, which is connecting the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life with the stories of the Old Testament. The third is moral (or tropological), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story". The fourth type of allegory is anagogical, dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies.

(Wikipedia entry for Allegory in the Middle Ages)

Vance visto por PKD

Hace unos meses escribí una entrada sobre la percepción que Jack Vance tenía de Philip K. Dick. Pues bien, un pequeño atisbo de la idea que Dick tenía de Vance se puede encontrar en una historia suya, muy menor, titulada La Araña Acuática:

Un hombre fornido y atezado pasó junto a ellos, y Tozzo se dio cuenta de que aquel era Jack Vance. Vance, pensó, parecía más que nada un cazador de caza mayor... tenía que tener cuidado con él. Si tenemos un altercado Vance podría dominarnos fácilmente.

(Philip K. Dick: La Araña Acuática)

¿Qué pasa con tus historias serias?

Otro problema que tenía para conseguir que la gente me admirara por haberlo vendido era que mi cuento no se trataba de un relato normal para una pequeña revista, sino que era un cuento de ciencia ficción, un género poco leído por la gente de Berkeley en aquel tiempo, excepto un reducido grupo de aficionados muy excéntricos; parecían vegetales animados. «¿Qué pasa con tus historias serias?», preguntaba la gente.

(Philip K. Dick: Aquí yace el Wub - Cuentos Completos 1)

Mi primera historia publicada, en la más deleznable de las revistas baratas que se vendían en aquel tiempo, Planet Stories. Cuando llevé cuatro ejemplares a la tienda de discos en la que trabajaba, un cliente me miró y, con ciertos reparos, me preguntó: «Phil, ¿tú lees esta clase de basura?». Tuve que admitir que no sólo la leía, sino que también la escribía.

(ibid.)

The Flow Of History

History stuff in the form of diagrams and flowcharts, arranged for you in a tasteful and edifying sequence. A great reminder!

Not only for reading

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them.

(The Great Unread)

I have no problem with that. Books can be beautiful objects, even books consisting exclusively of advertisements, like this one spotted at Design Observer.

Plus, sometimes the practice can have unexpected and delightful results. When I was a teenager, my parents bought a batch of books in order to fill an underpopulated shelf in the living room. They were part of the complete collected works of Camilo José Cela, noted spanish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. They had sober and nondescript covers; when at last I got to inspect them, I found out to my delight that most of the lot consisted in a multi-volume dictionary of erotism edited by Cela, which I proceeded to read exhaustively in the next few weeks, with adolescent eagerness (no Internet then).

I am reminded of the character in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler who never reads books, but uses them as material for his strange sculptures. And also of the blind librarian (a clear stand-in for Borges) in Gene Wolfe's Shadow Of The Torturer:

I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.

(Gene Wolfe: Shadow Of The Torturer)

Watch your step, nerd

Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.

(Plato: Theaetetus)

While Mr Townshend was at Glasgow, the Doctor conducted him to see the different manufactures of the place; and particularly to a very flourishing tan-work. They were standing on a plank which had been laid across the tanning pit, the Doctor, who was talking warmly on his favourite subject, the division of labour, forgetting the precarious ground on which he stood, plunged headlong into the nauseous pool. He was dragged out, stripped, and carried with blankets, and conveyed home on a sedan chair, where, having recovered of the shock of this unexpected cold bath, he complained bitterly that he must leave life with all his affairs in the greatest disorder, which was considered an affectation, as his transactions had been few and his fortune was nothing.

(Times Obituary of Adam Smith)

I guess peripatetic philosophers are at greater risk of suffering job-related injuries than stay-at-home philosophers.

Styles of self-praise

One of the great peculiarities of ancient eloquence was the frequent opportunity afforded for self-recommendation or self-praise. That good taste or modesty which shrinks from mentioning its own merits was far less cultivated in antiquity than now. Men accepted the principle not only of acting but of speaking for their own advantage. [...] there can be no doubt the Roman people listened with admiration to one who was at once bold and skilful enough to sound his own praises well. Cicero's excessive vanity led him to overdo his part, and to nauseate at times even well-disposed hearers. From the fragments of Gracchus' speeches that remain (unhappily very few) we should gather that in asserting himself he was without a rival. The mixture of simplicity and art removes him at once from Cato's bald literalism and Cicero's egotism.

(Charles Thomas Cruttwell: The History of Roman Literature)

William James on Consciousness

I believe that 'consciousness,' [...] is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy.

(William James: Does 'Consciousness' Exist?)

Jumping, Falling

Jumping:

Falling:

Gene Wolfe on the Spartans

Yes, The Spartans were the most totalitarian people that I have ever come across. They made the Nazis look like Boy Scouts and they really did it, and they did it for it for a hundred years and they were so totalitarian as to be almost unbelievable. One of the strange things about Sparta was they had the two kings and I am sure you realize. [...] One of the strange things is that the kings really represented the good past in Sparta. They were relics from the time when Sparta was a Greek state much like other Greek states. They were slowly being constricted and crowded out by the totalitarian ethic.

(Gene Wolfe, in an interview)

I would like to hear Wolfe's opinion on Frank Miller a Zack Snyder's 300...

By the way, in that same interview, a bit after the passage I quoted, Wolfe mentions a very nasty thing the Spartans did after Thermopylae (warning: it's a bit of a spoiler for Soldier of the Mist):

when the Spartans were fighting the Persians, they were fighting them with their light infantry, and their skirmishers and so forth were bands of armed Helots. At the end of the war they said, we are going to reward you Helots by giving those who did most in the war their freedom. And they will be not equals __________who would be able to run for office and vote and so on and take part in the government but they would be free individuals living in Sparta and free as such people were. And so you are to name for us those Helots who were your leaders in the late war who should be rewarded like this. Then they held a ceremony which I described in detail, exactly as it was and they gave each Helot who was to be awarded his freedom as a climax of the ceremony a young Spartan as his companion to lead him through the ceremony. And at a given signal each companion killed that Helot that he was responsible for. And they were all killed [...] and all of [...] them who had gone in the ceremony were butchered. And they really were, this took place.

What classical sources mention that episode? I don't remember reading about it in the works of Herodotus or Thucydides.

Imagination

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

(Wallace Stevens)

Missing history, excess history

This Wikipedia article about the New Chronology of crackpot mathematician A. T. Fomenko reminded me of a weird story by R. A. Lafferty titled And Read the Flesh between the Lines. I know, I know: "weird story by R. A. Lafferty" is somewhat of a redundant phrase.

Anyway, the premise of the tale is exactly the inverse of Fomenko's theories: that historical periods like the Middle Ages and the Renaissance lasted in reality much, much longer than we now assume, and that we only know condensed and abridged versions of them.

Were there eight kings of the name of Henry in England, or were there eighty? Never mind; someday it will be recorded that there was only one, and the attributes of all of them will be combined into his compressed and consensus story.

(R. A. Lafferty: And Read the Flesh Between the Lines)

I'm not sure what was Lafferty's intent in writing the tale, but I think it serves as an accurate metaphor for the science fiction genre. Because science fiction is not really about the future, but about projecting and expanding into the future the concerns of the present. Writer Bernard Wolfe said it much better than I could, when talking about his novel Limbo:

Anybody who "paints a picture" of some coming year is kidding -- he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then, is a rather bilious rib on 1950 -- on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.

Also, take Neuromancer by William Gibson. That book is a hip, distilled, concentrated version of the eighties, spread like delicious butter over a loaf of bread Twenty Minutes Into The Future long. The video arcades (now almost defunct thanks to consoles), the late Cold War still hanging in the air, the fears of japanese economic dominance...

So, reading old science fiction is like getting glimpses of that laffertian "expanded history", instead of the shorter version that is found in our textbooks and encyclopedias. I bet D. D. Harriman reached the Moon before NASA did; it just got edited out.

Some links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Dictionary of the History of Ideas

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834

The Cost of Knowledge

If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language -these are his own words- and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single - drachma course, and therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters.

(Plato: Cratylus)

"I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and decisive language; for ten I use a professional cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce I babble in an unknown tongue."

(Jack Vance: Guyal of Sfere)

El ingeniero como mesías

Impresionante mural de Diego Rivera, el marido de Frida Khalo. Algo había oído sobre la tecnofilia de Rivera, pero aún así me ha dejado alucinado...

Visto en Claw of the Conciliator.

Fuligin

A few days ago, I blogged about a new technology that reminded me of a passage from Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer. Well, here comes another (also via Centauri Dreams):

Scientists have created the world’s first film that casts practically no reflection. A vast improvement over current nonreflective materials, the new technology could revolutionize solar cells, intensify light-emitting diodes, and possibly help solve mysteries in quantum mechanics by mimicking a “black body,” an object that absorbs all light.

If I understood correctly, that film has properties similar to that of Severian's fuligin cloak ("the color that is darker than black").

Paprika

This trailer for the japanese animated movie Paprika looks interesting. The plot seems to be reminiscent of that of Roger Zelazny's The Dream Master.

Was Zelazny's novel the first to feature a psychologist entering his patient's dreams? That premise is shared by a few novels published afterwards (like Greg Bear's Queen of Angels). But I can't recall any example older than The Dream Master. The closest thing I can think of is the solipsistic nightmare towards the end of Bester's The Demolished Man, and when the protagonists of Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky enter each other's concretely manifested personal worldviews.

The Weight of Wickedness

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

(Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God)

Michel Houellebecq sobre R. A. Lafferty

Alcanzada la madurez a finales de los años 50, apenas hace poco [la ciencia ficción] ha dado signos reales de agotamiento –un poco como la literatura fantástica, inmediatamente después de la aparición de Lovecraft. Sin duda es por esta razón que ningún autor, hasta hoy, ha tenido realmente la necesidad de expandir los límites –de cualquier manera muy flexibles– del género. La única excepción podría ser este extraño autor, muy extraño, que es R. A. Lafferty. Más que ciencia ficción, Lafferty da a veces la impresión de escribir una especie de filosofía ficción, única en cuanto a que la especulación ontológica tiene un lugar más importante que las interrogaciones sociológicas, psicológicas o morales. En El mundo como voluntad y papel tapiz (el título en inglés, The World as Will and Wallpaper, da además un efecto de aliteración), el narrador, queriendo explicar el universo hasta sus límites, percibe al cabo de un tiempo repeticiones, se ve de nuevo en situaciones similares, y termina por tomar conciencia de que el mundo está compuesto de unidades de pequeña magnitud, nacidas cada una de un acto de voluntad idéntico, e indefinidamente angustiosos. En Autobiografía de una máquina ktisteca, Lafferty va aún más lejos en la modificación de las categorías de la representación ordinaria; pero el texto se vuelve desgraciadamente casi ilegible.

(Michel Houellebecq: Salir del siglo XX)

Creo que Houellebecq se equivoca un tanto sobre las prioridades de Lafferty. Lafferty era un católico extremadamente devoto, y muchas de sus obras tienen un contenido moral o, al menos, religioso. Pero tiene toda la razón al calificarle como uno de los pocos autores de ciencia ficción realmente experimentales.

Una interesante crítica de la novela histórica de Lafferty The Flame is Green se puede leer aquí. Unas interesantes críticas de las novelas de Houellebecq Las Partículas Elementales y Plataforma pueden leerse aquí y aquí.