Choose your name

They all had tough names except Ceran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says "Move," you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own—to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker.

"Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!" Manbreaker would thunder. "Why don't you take Storm Shannon? That's good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list."

(R. A. Lafferty: Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

Mur took the paper into the cottage, and puzzled out the sense of the characters, with occasional help from Eathre. His face grew longer and longer as he read: "Bougozonie, the Seven-Spasm Ecclesiarch. Narth Homank, who ate but one nut and one berry each day. Higajou, who reorganized Pure Boy training. Faman Cocile, who allowed himself to be gelded by Shimrod Forest bandits rather than alter his creed of non-violence and peace. Borgad Polveitch who denounced the Ambisexual Heresy..." At last Mur put aside the paper.

"What is your selection?" asked Eathre.

"I can't make up my mind."

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Neuromancer movie in the works

Looks like William Gibson's Neuromancer is finally coming to the big screen. It's going to be directed by Joseph Kahn, the guy who did Torque (check out this expressive review of the movie on CHUD).

As I have noted before, Neuromancer is so utterly Eighties that the only way it could work is as a retrofuturistic nostalgia piece. Nothing wrong with that; in fact I would absolutely love to see the movie done that way.

Gibson's Matrix was a powerful metaphor for the information age, but in a world full of World of Warcraft addicts, perhaps the idea, although prophetic and visionary in its time, isn't as new and exciting as it once was. Only unrealized visions are able to maintain their lustre.

The abstract, neon-lit empyrean envisioned by Gibson was an escape from the flesh. MMORPG users want to escape from their own flesh, too, but into the idealized body forms provided by their avatars. I guess Cronenberg was more prescient in that aspect.

Don't forget to check Paul Brians' study guide for the novel.

What is best in life?

Some of the Mongol tribes were literate, so we have written collections of the history and traditions of the Mongols, as well as accounts by Persian and Chinese chroniclers. One of the most telling is Genghis Khan's purported value statement. During a respite from his campaigns, he once asked some friends what the greatest pleasure was. After they variously answered hunting, falconry, or archery, Genghis is reputed to have said:

"The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms"

Or to paraphrase it in the bluntest possible modern terms: "To kill people, take their property, see and enjoy the pain you have caused their families, and rape their women as a final gesture of power."

From here. (And from here, too...)

At a party with fellow Bolsheviks in their Siberian exile shortly before the revolution, everyone present was asked to name their favourite pleasures. Several mentioned the seduction of women, others chose more politically correct activities in the service of the proletariat. Stalin, who had just seduced and impregnated a 13-year-old girl in the village, chose what was for him a more intense satisfaction: "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." His comrades did not take him seriously, which was to be their misfortune, to say nothing of the whole country's.

From here.

Empires of the land, the sea, and the air

Fuelled by grass, the Mongol empire could be described as solar-powered; it was an empire of the land. Later empires, such as the British, moved by ship and were wind-powered, empires of the sea. The American empire, if it is an empire, runs on oil and is an empire of the air. On the world’s largest landmass, Iraq is a main crossroads; most aspirants to empire eventually pass through there.

(from this New Yorker article by Ian Frazier)

I'm currently reading a spanish translation of The Travels of Ibn Battuta. Battuta was a muslim traveller form the fourteenth century, roughly a contemporary of Marco Polo. The book paints a pretty depressing and desolate picture of Baghdad, reduced by the mongol invasion to a shadow of its former glory under the abbasids.

Here is a nice collection of links to material about Ibn Battuta on the web. And here is the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Baghdad (1258).

John Dolan wrote an interesting piece on the Mongols, avaliable here.

I have a copy of The Empire of the Steppes I found really cheap on Abebooks, but I still haven't got around to reading it. This other book also looks very interesting.

Let's finish by quoting this post from The Toynbee Convector:

But now we come to the great revolution: a technological revolution by which the West made its fortune, got the better of all the other living civilizations, and forcibly united them into a single society of literally world-wide range. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. This use of the Ocean, first by sailing ships and then by steamships, enabled the West to unify the whole inhabited and habitable world [...] The steppe-ports were put out of action when the ocean-going sailing-ship superseded the camel and the horse; and now that, under our eyes, the ocean-going steamship is being superseded by the aeroplane we may ask ourselves whether the centre of the world is not likely to jump again – and this time as sensationally as in the sixteenth century – under the impetus of a technological revolution that is at least as radical as the sixteenth-century substitution of da Gama’s caravel for Babur’s tipuchaq.

Jack Vance interview on YouTube

Vance was interviewed in November 12th, 1976 for the radio program "Hour 25".

I have uploaded the interview to YouTube. Here is a link to the first part (out of twelve).

Today I heard two people...

...talking about web services on the street.

True story.

I also heard one elderly person telling another (in Spanish): "You don't know how time flies... Yes, time does fly."

True story.

La insuficiencia del psicoanálisis

A mi juicio, uno de los fracasos de la teoría freudiana es no haber atribuido suficiente importancia en el desarollo de la personalidad masculina a la humillación infantil de quedar el último cuando se eligen los equipos de fútbol en el patio del colegio. Experiencia traumática e inconfesable que sospecho está en la raíz de innumerables neurosis. Vamos, que el Complejo de Edipo es una nimiedad a su lado. (Todavía no he decidido qué nombre daré a mi neurosis balompédica.)

Quizás, estimado lector, consideres que las idea que acabo de exponer es absurda. Algo comprensible, ya que posiblemente tú mismo hayas sufrido la experiencia sin haber conseguido asimilarla, lo que se manifiesta como una reticencia inconsciente e irracional a aceptar mi teoría. Como ves, tu misma crítica termina reforzándola.

Yesterday's Futures

Paleo-future is an interesting blog about past conceptions of the future.

Tales of Future Past is a site with a similar theme, also very interesting.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Retrofuturism.

Terminal City is an enjoyable retrofuturistic comic.

And here is the inevitable link to William Gibson's short story The Gernsback Continuum.

Casting lots for divination

In Jack Vance's novel The Chasch, part of his Planet of Adventure series, the magicians of the emblem tribe practice divination by casting lots:

The Chief Magician departed, to return with a box carved from a single huge bone. He turned to Jad Piluna. "To which moon do you call for justice?" [..] The Chief Magician reached into the box, brought forth a disk, on one side pink, on the other blue. "Stand clear, all!" He spun the disk into the air. It tilted, wobbled, seemed to float and glide, and landed with the pink side on top. "Az, moon of virtue, has decided innocence!" called the magician. "Braz has seen no cause to act."

This is a good example of how Vance's imagined societies aren't as implausible as they seem at first sight. The casting of lots for divination occurs in a few places of the Hebrew Bible; in fact the Urim and Thummim may have served for that purpose.

Another reality-inspired (and not at all exotic, judging from current events) bit in Vance's work is the custom of awaile, depicted in The Wannek.

In this post of his blog, John Crowley calls for sf/fantasy authors to imagine societies at least as strange as actually existing ones:

One of my contentions about fantasy novels, and science-fantasy and future-world novels too, is that the society of the distant future, or an alien species, or another planet, or an alternate universe, ought to be at least as complex and unlikely-seeming (to Western European/American-culture-based writers in English) as the societies, mentalities and cultures that humans have in fact produced.

This advice is all to often ignored. Although Vance, as we have seen, can't be accused of doing so.

The Milleriad

Here is a less than ethusiastic evaluation of the work of Frank Miller (link spotted at John C. Wright's blog).

Here is a non-appreciative review of 300 by the War Nerd (which agrees with the first essay on Victor Davis Hanson's current state of whoredom).

Finally, here is Lucius Shepard's review of the movie Sin City (registration required; use BugMeNot).

28 pitufisemanas después

Ya casi no me acordaba de este estremecedor episodio de Los Pitufos... empieza normalmente, pero a partir de 2:15 se transforma en una versión pitufa de 28 Semanas Después y su predecesora 28 Días Después. Los pitufos infectados exiben todas las características de los "zombies rápidos" imaginados por Danny Boyle: extrema agresividad, un aumento de su fuerza física... cierto que les falta vomitar pitufisangre, pero quizás fue censurado para emisión. Tendremos que esperar a la edición especial en DVD con el director's cut.

Los Pitufos: una serie adelantada a su tiempo. Ahora supongo que debería comenzar con las típicas bromas sobre Pitufina, y el carácter totalitario de la sociedad pitufa. Pero te las ahorraré, estimado lector. Tienes cosas más importantes que hacer con tu tiempo. (Ojalá la un tanto sobrevalorada Donnie Darko hubiese tenido la misma delicadeza.)

Quimioterapia y Gas Mostaza

Hojeando el libro El cáncer se cura, del doctor José Ramón Germà Lluch (editorial Planeta) me encontré con un dato que desconocía: el primer tratamiento de quimioterapia fue básicamente una versión intravenosa del gas mostaza empleado en las trincheras de la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Al parecer, durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, un grupo de personas fue expuesto accidentalmente a la substancia. Los consiguientes análisis (y autopsias) revelaron que el gas mostaza atacaba sobre todo a las células que crecen más rápidamente, lo que llevó a algunos médicos a conjeturar que podría ser empleado para combatir el cáncer.

2001 and Intelligent Design

I don't understand why proponents of Intelligent Design haven't culturally appropriated 2001: A Space Odyssey for their own ends. Because Kubrick's movie (and even more Clarke's novel) can be understood as the most effective artistic representation of their ideas. Mankind evolving not exclusively by natural means, but receiving periodic visitations from a brick that prompts it to advance to the next level and so on.

Of course, Clarke wouldn't appreciate that interpretation, but that's irrelevant. The book speaks for itself. In fact, science fiction as a whole seems fascinated by Intelligent Design. There are more mysterious "progenitor" races than you can shake a stick at. It's almost as if the plain vanilla conception of darwinian evolution was boring, and you need to have your ADN trampled by some exotic alien race or transcendent being to be considered cool.

Would a strictly Darwin-compliant version of the movie still seem as "deep" and "profound"? We could try. I want my monolith-free cut of 2001, now!

The Children of Hurin Linkorama

Here is an interesting interpretation of The Children of Hurin by an eccentric commentator. Here is a less interesting review from The Washington Post.

And here is the best review ever penned of Peter Jackson's version of Lord of the Rings.

Aural perils of chick flicks

I accompanied my girldfiend to see the movie Music and Lyrics, in an act of retinal immolation for the sake of love. And now, no matter how much I try, I CAN'T GET THIS DAMN SONG OUT OF MY HEAD!!! (Warning: do not go through that link unless you want a good portion of your mental throughput co-opted by that campy yet insidious musical concoction.)

It's driving me crazy. Maybe I should fight fire with fire...

Eight, sir; seven, sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;
Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun.

See here.

Dwarf Fortress and the Great War

Dwarf Fortress seems to be a very interesting roguelike game about... dwarfs building a fortress. I can see how planning and slowly expanding your settlement while fending off external threats must be hugely compelling.

I would like to play a variation of this game, in which you don't build fortresses, but WWI-like trenches. In a way, it would be very similar: trenches in the Great War started simple but grew to become extremely complex and expansive constructions over vast areas, warring fortresses separated by half of a kilometer at most, pitted one against the other in a mutual siege.

This base building oriented approach seems to me the only viable way to make a "realistic" game about trench warfare. I don't think a game from the perspective of an individual soldier would work, much more than a game in which you play a lamb going to the slaughter.

I can't wait to watch the Christmas truce reenacted by dwarfs symbolized by ampersands.

Geography Time!

A neat -if extremely basic- flash game to test your knowledge of Geography. Is there a similar one, but with more things included, such as cities, geographic features, and the like?

Narrative Beings

The article I linked to in my last post is fairly interesting:

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

Our identities, created by narratives? That reminds me of a passage from the preface of R. A. Lafferty's The Devil is Dead:

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes out of the box. Arrange it as you will.

Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers, the ships and the oceans of middle space, the corpses and the revenants, set them off in whatever apposition you wish. [...] Build with these colored blocks your own dramas of love and death and degradation. Learn the true topography: the monstruous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not in your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out.

By the way, some people think that Nabokov's Lolita has the best opening for a novel ever, but they're wrong. That honor corresponds to Lafferty's novel.

Travelogues

One of the reasons why I like travel literature is because it offers a delectable tension beteen its supposedly "it really happened!" quality and the unique opportunity for the author to invent a story about far away lands out of whole cloth, with no one in the vincity to contradict him. The classic example in fiction would be Odysseus spinning his tale for the Phaeacians. Giant monobrowed sheperds? Insatiable sex goddesses? Yeah Ody, suuure. Whenever I read a travelogue, ancient or modern, I'm constantly second-guessing the author. This could have happened... this was for self-aggrandizement... this was inserted or altered to resonate with an earlier event... In pure fiction, that tension doesn't quite exist.

For example, in Paul Theroux's excellent The Great Railway Bazaar, there are two running gags. One about people who don't manage to catch the train in time ("duffilled" writes the author) and another a tale told by various travellers about spending a night with a beautiful woman only to discover with the morning that "she" was really a man. There's a story-like progression in those running gags, however simple. At the beginning, a companion of Theroux is duffilled, near the end, he is duffilled himself. He is told the story about the transvestite a first time, and then a second, this second time with the twist that the narrator admits he didn't mind at all.

To what degree the original facts were bent to adopt such a story-like quality? Maybe they weren't bent at all, at least intentionally. Maybe it's just that we tend to remember not simply unrelated factoids, but sequences of events that make sense for us, that seem to go somewhere. Maybe it's not just a tendency, but an absolute requisite for our past experience to become intelligible. See this article.

Another neat thing about travelogues is that the author usually ends up telling us as much about himself -however indirectly- than as about the places he visits, despite the pretense to the contrary. And I like that pretense. In your face "this is going to be about ME ME ME" works, á la Rousseau's Confessions, feel a little too blunt.

Amok, Awaile

Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok (also spelled amuck or amuk), is derived from the Malay word mengamuk, meaning "to go mad with rage" (uncontrollable rage). In typical cases, a man who has shown no previous sign of anger and no inclination to resort to violence will take up a weapon in a sudden frenzy and attempt to kill everyone he meets. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the amok-runner being killed by bystanders. The contrast between what was seen as the normal placid character of Malays and a sudden outburst of frenzied violence played to Western perceptions of the 'irrational' East.

(Wikipedia entry for Amok)

"What is this place?" he asked the driver, who gave him a glance of mild wonder.

"The Circle, site of Pathetic Communion, as you can see. You are a stranger in Settra?"

"Yes."

The driver consulted a yellow cardboard schedule. "The next event is Ivensday, when a nineteen-score comes to clarify his horrible desperation. Nineteen! The most since the twenty-two of Agate Crystal's Lord Wis."

"You mean he killed nineteen?"

"Of course; what else? Four were children, but still a feat these days when folk are wary of awaile. All Settra will come to the expiation. If you're still in town you could hardly do more for your own soul's profit."

(Jack Vance: The Wannek)

Dordolio gave an uneasy laugh. "There is a dark side to humanity, which is like a stone pressed into the mold. The upper side, exposed to sun and air, is clean; tilt it and look below, at the muck and scurrying insects...We of Yao know this well; nothing will put an end to awaile. But enough of such talk!"

(ibid.)

"It was awaile. The refuge from shame."

(ibid.)

A pair of links

The first is Explorion, a digital library full of historical travelogues in the public domain. I particularly recommend the narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

And, once you have vicariously sated your wanderlust, go to the Hermitary to learn how to retreat from the world.

Come to think of it, are the hikikomori modern hermits? I would say yes. Pornographic anime watching hermits, but hermits nevertheless.

Ports of Call reviewed at sfsignal

A review of Jack Vance's novel Ports of Call has been posted at sfsignal.

The best way to read the novel is in the Science Fiction Book Club volume that contains both Ports of Call and its continuation Lurulu. I found my copy dirt-cheap on Ebay.

Keeping track

Reading long novels in PDF format is a chore. You are tied to your computer and, furthermore, Adobe Reader doesn't allow you to create your own bookmarks. At most, it can reopen a document at the same place you left it the last time, but that's hardly a substitute. Go back a few pages to check something, and you'll need to find your way again. INCONVENIENT!

I had to resort to the crude meatspace practice of writing in a notebook the numbers of the pages at which I stopped reading. This is cumbersome, and besides cumbersome I feel it is inelegant, to track your progress across a complex tapestry of words with something as prosaic and brutally matter-of-fact as a string of numbers.

So now what I do is to copy some singular phrase and later use the search funcion to locate it. It's a bit more work, but if feels right. Plus, now when I finish a novel I get a little dadaist poem as a bonus. The last phrase in my notebook is currently "the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars".

For physical books, the absolute best way to keep track would be to rip and burn each page once you have read it. It's the same for the book of your life: the past exist nowhere, and your memories are just the ashes of burnt days.

And, when dealing with the all-important genre of bathroom literature, already read pages can have other uses. Although that would create an odd link between speed reading and diarrhea.

Un error de traducción

El argumento de la novela de Walter M. Miller Cántico por Leibowitz gira en torno a un monasterio católico situado en unos EEUU que se recuperan lentamente de un apocalipsis nuclear. (Miller quedó traumatizado por su participación en el bombardeo del monasterio de Monte Cassino durante la 2ª Guerra Mundial; posiblemente sea ése el germen de la novela.)

En el comienzo del libro, un novicio está en el desierto realizando su ayuno cuaresmal, cuando se encuentra con un anciano judío que viaja a pie. El monje, que ha hecho voto de silencio, se ve en un aprieto ante las preguntas del anciano. Intenta comunicarse con él escribiendo:

El novicio cogió un pedazo de piedra caliza. Que el viajero supiese leer era estadísticamente improbable, pero decidió probar suerte. Ya que los dialectos vulgares empleados por el populacho no tenían ni alfabeto ni ortografía, escribió en latín: «Penitencia, Soledad y Silencio» sobre una gran piedra plana y las repitió debajo en inglés antiguo. Esperaba, a pesar de su no declarado deseo de tener alguien con quien hablar, que el viejo comprendería y le dejaría en su solitaria vigilia de cuaresma.

El peregrino sonrió burlonamente ante la inscripción. Su risa pareció una mueca fatalista más que otra cosa.

- ¡Vaya, escribiendo aún cosas periclitadas! -dijo, aunque sin condescender a admitir que había comprendido la inscripción.

La versión original en inglés de la última frase es:

"Hmmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward," he said; but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it.

El traductor se equivocó. La palabra "backward" se utiliza aquí no en el sentido de "pasado de moda, periclitado", sino en el sentido de "al revés". El anciano está haciendo referencia a que el Hebreo, al contrario que el Latín, se escribe de derecha a izquierda.

The Lives of Others

This movie was about the conflicts inherent in a monopoly on sexual satisfaction. The handsome dramatist with a magnetic personality manages to sport luscious, neumatic girlfriends in whatever sociopolitical system he finds himself in, while the awkward stasi agent and the porcine minister remain alone and sexually frustrated for the most part, having to resort to methods either pathetic or ignoble to receive their share of smoochies.

I think the movie was also about communism or something like that.

Down with Symbolism and Allegory!

Is there symbolism in Mirror?

No! The images themselves are like symbols, but unlike accepted symbols they cannot be deciphered. the image is like a clot of life, and even the author may not be able to work out what it means, let alone the audience. Pushkin's "My sadness is radian" is not a symbol but a an image. Tolstoy's dying Ivan Ilych feels as if he is confined inside a narrow intestine pipe, and cannot get out. What he feels is what the sick mans says. As long ago as the Middle Ages Japanese writers were decrying the interpretation of symbols in art. And quite rightly! The fewer symbols the better! Symbolism is a sign of decadence.

(Andrei Tarkovsky, in an interview)

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

(J.R.R. Tolkien)

Better never to have been

This book by Oxford University Press looks very interesting. From its Amazon editorial review:

David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. [...] The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view -that it is always wrong to have children- and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

I suppose the conundrums referred to are things like the Repugnant Conclusion. From the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Christoph Fehige (1998) has suggested, in the tradition of Schopenhauer, that there are no lives with a positive well-being. In his account, only frustrated preferences count, and they count negatively, whereas satisfaction of preferences has no positive value. Since it is possible that a population with very high welfare only involves lives with complete preference satisfaction, the Repugnant Conclusion is avoided since any population with complete preference satisfaction is better than any population involving at least one frustrated preference. More troubling, however, is that this view implies a strong version of the Reversed Repugnant Conclusion: A population with very high positive welfare can be worse than an empty population. Since most lives with very high welfare can be assumed to have at least one frustrated preference, such lives are worse than non-existence according to Fehige's theory. Moreover, a theory about welfare that denies the possibility of lives worth living is quite counter-intuitive (Ryberg 1996a).

The user reviews are not uniformly positive: "A suicide note in book form", "Intergalactic cosmic spam", "You need a PhD to be this stupid". I suspect the adverse reactions come from fanaticised pro-existence zealots. However, members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement should love the book (I used to think the VHEMT was a joke, now I'm not so sure).

The short story Mutation Planet, by Barrington J. Bayley, features an alien race who collectively aspires to never to have been:

"And you," Eliot demanded, "What do you seek?"

"We," answered Zeed with an icy lack of hesitation, "seek NULLITY. Not merely to die [...] but to wipe out the past, never to have been." [...] "On my planet..." Zeed seemed to hesitate, "we regard it as an act of compassion to kill our offspring at birth. The unlucky ones are spared to answer nature's call to perpetuate the species. [...] We believe that ever since the first nervous system developed, the subconscious feeling has been present that it has all been a mistake."

A bit later, the same character declares:

"We all inhabit a vast dark," he repeated, "in which there is neither rhyme nor reason."

300

Si vais a ver 300, dejaos el neocórtex a la entrada: para apreciar esta película basta y sobra el cerebro reptiliano.

La película me ha enseñado una serie de valiosas lecciones. Que matar al mensajero es una buena idea. Que retirarse del campo de batalla para poder luchar otro día es innoble (supongo que Miller prefiere los 300 a los 10000). Que la muerte en dicho campo de batalla es algo a lo que todo hombre que los tenga bien puestos debe aspirar (¡igualito igualito que los terroristas suicidas!). Que el mejor método para desenmascarar un traidor es darle matarile directamente.

Hay una casi constante voz en off que básicamente se limita a narrar lo que ya vemos en la pantalla con nuestros propios ojos. Posiblemente fue incluida a petición de la ONCE, a beneficio de los espectadores ciegos.

Aunque debo reconocer que la peli tiene algunas cosas que valen la pena. La imagen del árbol con los cuerpos ensartados (que recuerda al árbol del Alcaudón en Hyperion). Y la escena en el harén de Jerjes durante la cual Gollum es tentado por mutantes sexuales, deliciosamente decadente.

Lo que me pregunto es: ¿cuál será el próximo paso en la involución mental de Frank Miller? ¿Un vídeo en YouTube donde aparezca jugando con sus madelman, haciendo él mismo los ruiditos, explosiones, y pronunciamientos?

En cuanto a Zack Snyder, su mejor momento como director sigue siendo ese apocalipis suburbano a ritmo de Johnny Cash que es el comienzo de El amanecer de los muertos.

Cherries and kisses

I climbed up the tree, and threw down bunches of fruit, while they threw the stones back at me through the branches. Once Mademoiselle Galley, holding out her apron and throwing back her head, presented herself as a mark so prettily, and I took such accurate aim, that I threw a bunch right into her bosom. How we laughed! I said to myself, If my lips were only cherries, how readily would I throw them into the same place!

(Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Confessions, book four)

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.

Liking What You See

From here:

The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.” [...] Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

So, they were kicked out because they were ugly. Maybe the way to avoid future debacles of this kind is to implement the method described by Ted Chiang in his story Liking What You See:

In "Liking What You See: A Documentary," a cheap and readily available technology called calliagnosia neutralizes aesthetic reaction to human appearance. The story describes the debate around making calliagnosia obligatory on one college campus, mimicking contemporary debates about sexual and racial behavioral codes. How did "Liking What You See" come about? Does that story represent a kind of wish fulfillment?

(Interview with Ted Chiang at infinity plus)

The Evil of Big Books

Big book, big evil

(Callimachus)

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression--for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with anything that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones--that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a physical necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one-half of the "Paradise Lost" is essentially prose--a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions--the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect.

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition)

NOVEL, n.

A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes -- some of which have a large sale.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

And here's someone who is not a fan of Callimachus:

The enthusiasm of the Alexandrian scholars had made them pedants. They gradually ceased to care for the thought of literature, and busied themselves only with questions of learning and of form. Their multifarious reading made them think that they too had a literary gift. [...] The maxim of Callimachus (characteristic as it is of his narrow mind) "mega biblion mega kakon" was the rule on which these poetasters generally acted.

(Charles Thomas Cruttwell: The History of Roman Literature)

To Live Forever, a review

The following is my review of To Live Forever, Jack Vance's first "mature" novel, predating even The Languages of Pao. It was published in 1956. Warning: huge spoilers ahead.

The megalopolis of Clarges is the last civilized enclave of a future Earth that has reverted to savagery. There, the secret of immortality has been discovered. But it can't be given to everybody: that would cause runaway overpopulation. Therefore, a division of the citizenry into a pyramidal rank structure is established. Each rank (or "phyle") is conceded a longer timespan than the one immediately below, the comparatively few people in the top rank being granted full immortality. The task of killing the persons that have exceeded their allotted lifespans is carried out by an assassin organization under the control of the government.

Upward mobility in the rank structure is allowed on strictly meritocratic principles. Excel in your field of activity and you will rise your "slope":

At this time the word "slope" was charged with special meaning. Slope as the measure of a man's rise through the phyle; it traced the shape of his past, foretold the time of his ultimate passing. By the strictest definition, slope was the angle of a man's lifeline, the derivative of his achievements with respect to his age.

Rise you slope enough, and you will move up phyle. This calculus-related metaphor for human striving within society reminds of Evgenij Zamjatin's We, only in that novel the metaphor used was an integral, not a derivative (quite appropiate for a collectivist dystopia).

The perpetual striving for excellence has brought a flourishing of the arts and sciences, but it also takes its toll on the citizens. Since the number of people in each phyle is fixed, competition for longer lifespans is a brutally unforgiving zero-sum game, a grim rat race. Increasing numbers of people can't stand the psychological pressure and become "cattos": they enter a catathonic state interrupted by occasional lapses into maniacal violence. The movie Zardoz, which also deals with the theme of immortality, featured something very similar: the apathetics. But apatethics become so because of boredom and ennui, not because of the unbearable stress of competition (anyway, let me assure you that there is no diaper-wearing Sean Connery in Vance's novel).

The irony that the chance for immortality ends up, in a way, enslaving the citizenry, is explicitly stated by one character who is given an offer to abandon Clarges:

"I could not leave my surrogates; our empathy would fail; our souls would diverge; there would be no identification, no continuity. I would not dare take them along, there is too much risk of total termination. So " -she made a wan gesture- " I am fettered by my own freedom."

See also the post Freeing Constraints at Philosophy, et cetera.

The novel's protagonist is characteristically vancean: somewhat of an outsider, who is inflicted what he thinks is a wrong and sets out to find justice, exposing in the process the contradictions of the society in which he lives, and ultimately causing the downwall of the ruling order. However, he is harder-edged and more ruthless than other vancean main characters (except for Cugel). Maybe because he acutely perceives the zero-sum game nature of his society; that each extension to your life comes from the shortening of another's:

Waylock nodded. "One Amaranth per two thousand population is the allowed ratio. When you were received into the Amaranth Society, an element of information entered the Actuarian. Two thousand black wagons went forth on their missions; two thousand doors opened; two thousand despairing creatures left their homes, climbed the three steps; two thousand times"

...

"It is simple dog-eat-dog," said Waylock. "It's basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded."

The novel also features many other motifs that would become mainstays in Vance's work: the seedy fair-like place where the members of a society that suffers unacknowledged problems come to find catharsis (Alastor: Wyst), the spurned lover that creates a clone of the woman who rejected him, a gusto for describing theatrical representations (Emphyrio, Showboat World), an interest in foods, a skeptical view of religion... There's even a veiled reference to Lyonesse.

The weak points of the book are unlikely decisions on the part of some of the characters (though neccesary for the plot, the way by which the protagonist becomes Vice-Chancellor is somewhat of a strech) and, most of all, the wholly unconvincing avenues for humanity proposed after the downfall of the old order, and the return of the prospect of overpopulation. One is to go into space, the other to colonize the rest of the barbaric Earth:

"Where is this living space, where can we go to find it? First, in all the various wildernesses and Nomad-lands of Earth. We must expand, we must take our way to the barbarians; but we must go as pilgrims and missionaries, not as soldiers."

This is exceedingly naive (or maybe cynical). "The immortal man's burden", so to speak. And going into space would delay the problem for a time, only to be encountered later on a vastly larger scale. This failure to come up with viable alternatives is not surprising. The field of population ethics is a very thorny one, as shown by Derek Parfit with his Repugnant Conclusion. The possibility of vastly varying, artificially determined lifespans within a society only complicates it more (has any philosopher already dealt with this?).

Vance seems to think that the quandary is an inevitable product of human progress:

The events which brought the desperate surge to the streets of Clarges represented a culmination to the Industrial Revolution, to the defeat of disease in the twentieth century, to the Malthusian Chaos, to the Reach of Clarges itself. They were a product of civilization, and in this sense foreordained.

To Live Forever is an interesting speculation on the problems of immortality, but its real merit lies in exploring a more general (and unsettling) notion: that in the allocation of limited resources, even perfect meritocracies are not exempted from tensions.

The New Space Princess Movement

Got the meme from sfsignal. I'll contribute with Ylin-Ylan the Flower of Cath, as depicted in the comic adaptation of Jack Vance's The Wankh. (An oddly germane title given the nature of the meme. Maybe a bit too germane.)

Also, let's not forget Doña Vicenta Gabriela de Rokha from Jodorowsky and Giménez's The Metabarons:

Borges and Lovecraft

A penchant for inventing fictional books. A disregard of the mere human experience as a worthy subject for literature. A preference for the short form. Bookish protagonists. Overbearing mothers. A horror of sex.

Technical difficulties

For some reason the Technorati searchlet doesn't return any results, even for searches that should return a few. I don't know exactly for how long has this been the case, but possibly since I updated Blogger to the new version. I am at a loss to understand what the problem is.

Oh well.

Jack Vance invented rating sites!

No, really. Tell me the following passage doesn't remind you of sites like Hot or Not:

The attendant asked, "The Naked Truth or the Decorous Truth?"

"The Naked Truth!" said The Jacynth.

...

The attendant conducted them each to a booth. "You may disrobe in here. Hang the numbered placard around your neck. You will carry this microphone with you, and to any comment, criticism, praise or disparagement of people you will meet, prefix the number of the person in question and speak privately into the microphone. As you leave you will receive a printed copy of comments made about you."

...

At the exit they were handed folded sheets of paper imprinted with the words THE NAKED TRUTH. Inside were collected the comments of those whom they had met within, generally the bluntest and most candid observations imaginable.

(Jack Vance: To Live Forever)

The novel was published in 1956.

Mark and Ray

Most of you [...] are likely to be around to see the Singularity.

(Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns)

Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

(Mark 13:30)

Mad, Mendacious, or Misogynistic?

Weston's voice was speaking gently and continuously. [..] It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories [...] They were all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world's history and in quite different circumstances. [...] The heroines of the stories seemed all to have suffered a great deal-they had been oppressed by fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, happily: sometimes with honours and praises to a heroine still living, more often with tardy acknowledgment and unavailing tears after her death [...] At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise details were often not very easy to follow. Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches or perverts.

(C. S. Lewis: Perelandra)

Oh Mr. Lewis, you cad! I wonder what was his opinion on Sophocles' "Antigone".

Anyway, since the post is about Perelandra... I have always thought that a great idea for a christian CRPG would be a game where you play as some kind or Ransom (or Weston) figure that visits a series of prelapsarian worlds, the objective of the game being to help the primordial couple avoid temptation (if playing as Ransom) or to precipitate the Fall (if playing as Weston). That way you are unburdened with the fixed outcomes and necessarily rigid nature of Bible stories. (You failed to bring your people into the Promised Land! Game Over!)

It would be like Façade, only in the Garden of Eden, with a clear objective, and minus the suck.

Space Rapture

Check out this online doctoral dissertation: Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization (via Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean).

The author interprets the "High Frontier" vision of Gerard K. O'Neill (and the push for space colonization in general) as a modern, secular version of Rapture theology:

Space colonization, like its predecessor ascension fantasy, the Rapture, has always involved a tension between the liberation of a holy vanguard and the imminent destruction of the Earth. With the rise of modern technology, rocketry and space travel became, for fundamentalist Christians and technological determinists alike, the manmade tools and signs of an imminent apocalypse.

There's a similar dissertation waiting to be written about belief in the Technological Sigularity, first spoused by Vernor Vinge. Not to mention Frank J. Tipler and his book The Physics of Immortality. Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod notoriously said that the Singularity is "Rapture for nerds".

By the way, what kind belief/movement would count as techno-gnosticism?

A mood, an effect

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition)

When I start a story, I do have a mood, which is hard to explain – a certain feeling, or an idea. Then when I write the story, I make every aspect of it relevant or appropriate to this mood – which would include landscape, architecture, [...] language, costumes, everything. [...] All the parts of the story should be consistent and in line with the mood, generating the mood, reinforcing the mood.

(Jack Vance: interview in Cosmopolis#42)

Versatilidad

Como prueba, me sugirió que reescribiese La Ilíada con el estilo y enfoque de los personajes de Sin novedad en el frente, y viceversa. Ambas tareas fueron completadas, y Oannes me felicitó. En consecuencia, juzgó que yo estaba capacitado para contar esta historia.

(Juan Miguel Aguilera y Javier Redal: Hijos de la Eternidad)

I want to know

Gloop and Gleep from The Herculoids. Were they shoggoths?

Perhaps in a new, edgy adaptation intended for mature tastes. Also, Zandor, Tarra and Dorno should become a dysfunctional family, because that would be more mature and stuff.

Mistagogos Melindrosos

No se encontró ningún pasillo subterráneo después de tumbar las paredes y levantar los suelos de las habitaciones inferiores, aunque Morghi llegó incluso a retirar las losas de piedra bajo una imagen obscena de Zhothaqquah, que ocupaba una de las habitaciones más inferiores. Dicha operación la había llevado a cabo con verdadera repugnancia, ya que el dios peludo y rechoncho, con sus rasgos de murciélago y cuerpo de gusano, resultaba terriblemente desagradable para el supremo sacerdote de la diosa-cierva Youndeh.

(Clark Ashton Smith: La Puerta de Saturno)

The narcissism of minor differences

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of 'the narcissism of minor differences', a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.

(Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its discontents)

The cantons of Shant were alike only in their mutual distrust. Each regarded as Universal Principle its own customs, costumes, jargon and mannerisms, and considered all else eccentricity.

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Except for rivers, the land lacks natural boundaries, but boundaries and borders aplenty have been created, to delineate 1,562 separate dominions, each jealous of its identity, each cherishing its own rotes and rites, each celebrating its distinctive cuisine and scorning all others as filth and scum, each considering itself the single home of civilization among 1,562 barbaric, incomprehensible and unpleasant neighbors.

(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)

A crappy way to die

As Golyakhovsky remembered it, a severely burned man identified only as "Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant," was brought in by stretcher. "I couldn't help shuddering," Golyakhovsky recalled. "The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. ... It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive...."

Golyakhovsky saw the man's mouth moving and bent down to listen. "Too much pain -- do something, please -- to kill the pain" were the tortured words he could make out.

"Sergeyev" was scorched everywhere but the soles of his feet, where his flight boots had offered some protection from the flames. With great dimculty the doctors inserted intravenous lines into his feet (they couldn't find blood vessels anywhere else) and administered painkillers and medication. "Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed," Golyakhovsky remembered realizing immediately. "And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering." The man lingered for sixteen hours before dying.

From here.

Lem's Solaris, or, Kuhn before Kuhn

At one point in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, the protagonist goes to a library and examines the avaliable literature on the science of "Solaristics". He finds that the history of that discipline is characterized by a succession of paradigms and research programs that begin with a hopeful earnestness, then become mired in the fundamental inscrutability of the planet Solaris, and are finally discarded in favor new-and-coming approaches that promise a fresh and more fruitful way of looking at things.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination.

(Stanislaw Lem: Solaris)

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloidomechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the 'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data.

(ibid.)

The publication of Lem's novel in 1961 predates that of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a year. Lem was certanly in tune with the zeitgeist, because passages like the ones I quoted above are powerfully reminiscent of Kuhn's conception of the history of science.

Solaris is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of science. The novel presents a worst-case scenario, where any real progress in impossible. Since its object of study is ultimately inscrutable, the history and evolution of "Solaristics" is sufficiently explained in sociological terms. I wonder if string theory has a bad case of "Solaristics".

The english translation of Solaris is based on the french translation from the polish original, so english readers are twice removed from Lem's original words. Strangely appropiate, since one of the themes of the novel is the impossibility of communication.

Bad Ronald, de nuevo

Han colgado una interesante reseña de la novela de Jack Vance Bad Ronald en el blog planells fact&fiction:

Este artículo fue un informe para una editorial, escrito en 1984, a fin de interesarla en la publicación de la novela de Vance aquí comentada. Innecesario decir que esta novela sigue aún hoy día inédita en castellano, lo cual debería avergonzar a todos los editores tanto de entonces como de ahora.

Incluso en inglés resulta difícil de encontrar, al menos por precios razonables. La Edición Andreas Irle imprime bajo demanda volúmenes agotados de Vance, pero hace falta un número mínimo de potenciales compradores. Consultar la página para más señas.

¡Vanceanos políglotas! Os conmino a mandar un correo a la editorial mostrando interés. Si se suscita el suficiente, quizás se decidan a publicar la dichosa novela.

Mi reseña de la tv-movie setentera basada en Bad Ronald se puede leer aquí. Y si algún cinéfago ha visionado la adaptación francesa, Méchant garçon, estaría interesado en conocer su opinión.

M. John Harrison on worldbuilding

He doesn't like it.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Harrison practices what he preaches. In his series of tales about the city of Viriconium, he purposefully frustrates the reader's expectations on worldbuilding by eschewing continuity both in setting and in character. The city is a little different each time (even the name changes). The characters are permutations of a few archetypes, and don't carry over from tale to tale.

And yet, I think that technique is not completely successful in frustrating the cult of the imaginary world. Character archetypes and their variations are a staple of role-playing games. Dungeon Masters routinely modify existing settings to suit their whims. The changing nature of reality is a feature of settings like Planescape or Mage: The Ascension. One could say that Harrison has actually made it easier to become obsessed with Viriconium, in a more interactive way.

There's a similarity with videogames here. Videogame makers also hate worldbuilding. Not for aesthetic or moral reasons, but for economic ones. Each little detail in a gameworld must be put there by some guy. Paying that guy costs money. Waiting for him to finish costs time. That's why some designers resort to procedural content generation, an approach through which a new gameworld is created every time you start a game, by arranging a few basic building blocks in a random (to some degree) fashion. This approach could be considered the gaming analogue of Harrison's technique. If The Lord of the Rings is Final Fantasy, then Viriconium is Dwarf Fortress.

By the way, I think Borges' short story The Aleph is a very fitting literary illustration of Harrison's concerns:

As in many of Borges's short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail.

(Wikipedia entry for The Aleph)

Not to mention that Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is actually about the dangers of becoming too obsessed with worldbuilding.

Diaper-wearing astronauts (and Barry N. Malzberg)

The whole Lisa Nowak affair seems straight out of a Barry N. Malzberg novel. Malzberg delighted in depicting the Space Program as a futile enterprise mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, and astronauts as mentally imbalanced people. Check out his novel Beyond Apollo, for example.

As sometimes happens, the craziest and/or more depressing author has turned out to be the most prophetic. Anyway, it's almost comforting to know that astronauts are not always superhuman paragons of achievement and rationality, but can flip out and drive 1000 miles wearing diapers to kill some poor fellow with whom they have a grudge. Just like the rest of us.

The image of a former astronaut driving a car in such awkward conditions, and the general deranged quality of what happened, also reminds me of Lem's The Chain of Chance.

A gap in knowledge

From the Christian Science Monitor review of the book Made to Stick:

The Heaths discuss, for instance, what they call "the gap theory" of curiosity. This is the notion that a gap in knowledge is painful – it's like having an itch that needs to be scratched.

That reminds me of:

Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:

"Why do squares have more sides than triangles?"

"How will we see when the sun goes dark?"

"Do flowers grow under the ocean?"

"Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?"

(Jack Vance: The Dying Earth)