Tropes and Patterns

Generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories - that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean Seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a God who is crucified on Golgotha.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

The storytelling tropes collected in TV Tropes (warning: the site can consume hours of your life) are, in a way, analogous to software designs patterns, only for fiction writing. Although some should be considered antipatterns more than anything else...

One can daydream about expressing all those tropes in a machine-understandable form, and feeding them to some kind of automated story generation device.

See also The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, The Big List of RPG Plots, The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés and Strange Horizon's Stories We've Seen Too Often. Let's not forget Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, either. More pop-culture goodness at Don Marksteins's Toonopedia, Scott Shaw's Oddball Comics, and of course at Superdickery.

Through other eyes

Laguagehat has a post on Proust as a sf writer. The following passage is quoted:

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is...

With that same premise, R. A. Lafferty wrote a story both funny and profound, unsurprisingly titled "Through Other Eyes". It is part of his collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

As the story begins, eminent scientists Gregory Smirnov and Charles Cogsworth have just completed their exploration of the past using a Time Machine. They were present at the most important events in History, they have met the central characters face-to-face. And they were bored. The great events were not as spectacular as advertised, and ended too soon. The kings, poets and philosophers turned out to be an uniformly dull and annoying lot. For example:

"I wasn't too happy with Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his!" Three hours he had them all busy curling his beard. "And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?"

"No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound."

(R. A. Lafferty: Through other eyes)

So, the Time Machine was a failure. But they have a new toy to play with: a device that allows one person to see through the eyes of another, not only in a strictly visual sense, but in the sense of inhabiting the other person's particular experience of the world.

"As he grew older Charles Cogsworth came to many signs that the world he saw was not the world others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world."

(ibid.)

They soon test the machine on friends and associates:

"He is a greater man than I [...] And he lives in a better world."

It was a better world, greater in scope and more exiting in detail.

"Who would have thought of giving such color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. [...] It is a finer sky that I have known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins."

(ibid.)

The problem comes when Cogsworth tries to see the world through the eyes of his enchanting female colleague, Valery Mok. The results are not what he expected:

"And to her the grass it self is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. He sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them."

(ibid.)

This fiery view of the world is too much for Cogsworth, who ends having to spend six weeks in a sanatorium to recover. He now regards Valery as a base and excessively sensuous creature. Conversely, Valery finds Cogsworth's experience of the world to be stale and dead:

"Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass. [...] How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn't know you were dead like that. [...] By the way, who gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don't you even know that blood is red?"

"I see it red."

"You don't see it red. You just call it red. That silly color isn't red. What I call red is red."

(ibid.)

"Redness" is the canonical quale. Laffety's story serves as a good illustration of the inverted spectrum thought experiment in Philosophy of the Mind. The essay "What it is like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel also touches on related themes.

Analíticas

Recibir los resultados de un análisis de sangre me enerva sobremanera.

No sólo porque el colesterol esté muy alto (que lo está) o los leucocitos muy bajos (que no me acuerdo si lo están o no). Es más bien el descubrir que tu sange no es una substancia simple, sino una mezcolanza de fluidos diversos en delicado equilibrio.

Aunque todos los numeritos se mantengan dentro de los límites recomendados, la mera constatación de tu pluraridad sangínea basta para recordarte lo efímero y poco esencial que es tu cuerpo. Lo que tiene partes se descompondrá algún día, y por si fuera poco está sujeto a paradojas sobre su identidad, como la del barco de Teseo. Por cierto, en nuestros cuerpos hay más bacterias que células propiamente humanas.

Por las venas de los dioses olímpicos fluía una sangre enrarecida e incolora. Las analíticas que se hiciese Apolo no le harían preocuparse por los triglicéridos o la bilirrubina. Como mucho, habría una línea avisando de excesivos niveles de icor, que podrían resultar venenosos, no al mismo dios, sino a los mortales cuya sangre salpicase.

Me desagrada tener estructura interna. Por dentro yo quiero ser de barro, como los golems del folclore judío. En mi opinión, los cuerpos de Adán y Eva deberían haber seguido siendo barro después de su creación. ¿Cómo habría transcurrido el crimen de Caín si Abel no hubiese tenido sangre, la cual -una vez derramada- clamase a Dios por justicia? ¿Habría permanecido Caín impune?

Y ya que hablamos de la sangre de Abel, apuesto a que tenía el colesterol alto. Recordemos que Abel era pastor, y ofrecía a Dios sacrificios de carne. Caín en cambio era agricultor y probablemente seguía una dieta mucho más sana, aunque menos sabrosa.

Uno se siente tentado a reescribir Génesis incluyendo una forma alternativa de pecado original, que tuviese que ver más con la simple gula que con el ansia de conocimiento o de igualarse a Dios. Después de todo, cuando salimos a la calle nos encontramos con más obesos que Faustos. De manera análoga, el asesinato de Abel podría reinterpretarse como el producto de una rivalidad entre cocineros que compiten por la atención de un cliente muy selecto (o de tres, según se mire). La hipercolesterolemia sería entonces la marca de Caín.

Tengo que dejar de comer tanto chorizo.

Edit: un bonito recordatorio del horror de la carne, y de lo deseable que resulta tener un cuerpo mineral, o incluso etéreo, se puede encontrar en el relato de Terry Bisson They're made out of meat.

Ancient Germany Map

This post at Strange Maps is very interesting. Kind of makes want to play Darklands...

One branch of the suebi tribe mentioned in the post eventually settled in Galicia.

Edit:

After the kingdom of the Suebi was conquered by the Visigoths in 585, Braulio of Zaragoza (590 - 651) depicted the region as "the edge of the west in an illiterate country where naught is heard but the sound of gales".

(Wikipedia page for suebi)

Broken swords

If swords are phallic symbols, then what to make of the recurrent "sword that was broken but now has been reforged at last" motif so common in epic fantasy novels? Consider for example the sword Narsil in LOTR.

My take is that the motif is really a metaphor for the overcoming of a long period of sexual impotence, maybe with the help of the elven alchemist Viagh'Grah.

Palabras que suelo confundir

asébeia y asabiya (y también aristeia).

El concepto de asébeia es interesante. Que una religión carezca de dogma no implica que carezca del concepto de impiedad.

El concepto de asabiya, central en la obra de Ibn Jaldún, lo encontré por primera vez en el libro "Los moriscos del reino de Granada" de Julio Caro Baroja.

Dicho concepto también juega un papel importante en las teorías cliodinámicas de Peter Turchin (teorías que el resto de sus colegas historiadores no parecen tomar demasiado en serio).

Four Paths to Utopia

In Gray’s telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaeda’s technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian “war on terror” are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.

(Scott McLemee: What Price Utopia?)

That "Black Mass" book by John Gray sounds interesting. But perhaps I should read Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millenium" first. It has been sitting in my "to read" pile for a long time.

The halting problem and qualia

"Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input."

(Wikipedia entry for the Halting problem)

The undecidability of the halting problem is a well-known result in the Theory of computation. There is no Turing machine that can both solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs AND be garanteed to always achieve the answer in finite time. Turing Machines tasked with solving the halting problem may themselves never stop!

Now, imagine that the functionalist conception of the mind is the correct one. That means some Turing machines, when run, can have (produce?) minds, and qualia. Obviously, not all of them do. I don't think a machine that continuously writes in a tape an alternating sequence of ones and zeroes -or my computer for that matter- is as conscious as me. (Though my computer is certanly evil.)

So we need a way to decide which computations produce minds and qualia, and which don't. This could be a pressing issue in a post-singularity scenario, where computation is pervasive and a bewildering menagerie of vastly different minds and bodies have come into existence. In that scenario, the problem of other minds would be no mere solipsistic daydream, but a very real issue and a matter of utmost concern. Why?

Contingent facts, like that every human brain has been shaped by the same evolutionary processes, ensure that we all have roughly similar bodies and minds, and that we experience roughly similar mental states and qualia. If I pinch somebody, I can be pretty sure that he feels pain. For one, I feel pain when pinched, and his body and nervous system are structurally similar to mine. Also, he might complain in a language I can understand, or simply start wailing.

After the singularity, we would have no such anchors. Every sufficiently complex algorithm being executed in the universe could turn out to be a mind. Perhaps a completely alien one with which communication would be impossible (like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris). Or perhaps a mind very much like ours living in a simulated environment, only the algorithm is such that we can't easily realise that (imagine for example a mind running on obfuscated code). Unknowingly stopping the execution of such an algorithm would be tantamount to involuntary mindslaughter.

So, should we refrain in the future from ever closing our screensavers? That doesn't seem practical. What we need then is a Turing machine which, given the description of another Turing machine, can predict if the execution of that machine will produce a mind. We could test our screensavers with it, to check if we are morally allowed to close them.

But, what if the "is-there-a-mind" problem turns out to be, in a way, analogous to the halting problem? If any possible Turing machine for solving the "is-there-a-mind" problem may itself develop a mind? If a machine cannot "detect" pain without feeling pain, or "detect" love without falling in love? That would bring with it a host of difficult issues.

I think this is a nifty premise for a science fiction story. (If such a story already exists, I'll be pissed off. One would like to have an original idea once in a while.)

Rereading Vance

Jeff VanderMeer recently reread Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. A few months ago, Robert Silverberg did the same.

Elizabeth, The Golden Age

The storm threatens the Spanish Armada; the spaniards, fearful, turn to prayer. And to whom they pray? Well, to the Virgin Mary, of course! They are catholic, you see. (Also pay attention to the rosary sinking into the depths. SYMBOLISM!)

That got me thinking. I realized that Elizabeth was being portrayed as another Virgin Mary, in a way. Consider the repeated emphasis on her virginity, or the light that bathes her during the failed assassination attempt, which can only be described as a saintly aura... or maybe the glow was a just a toned-down version of The Power of Love?

Anyway, Cate Blanchett looks better as a warrior queen in armor than as a bipolar Virgin Mary, in my opinion. Someone make a Boudica movie and give her the part, please.

The spaniards are depicted as the bad guys through and through, no doubt about that. I was puzzled mid-movie because torture against members of a religiously motivated insurgency was being portrayed as neccessary for the safety of the kingdom. In our post-Guantanamo days, this is a complete no-no for movies. But near the end, the film pulls an unconvincing (and unhistorical, though I may be wrong) plot twist that shows all the torturin' to be ultimately counterproductive.

All things considered, the movie is more than just anti-catholic: it is anti-religion in general. Protestantism seems to be used as a mere placeholder for our enlightened modern ideals of toleration. Not a lot of protestant religious fervor is shown.

The best way to enjoy the film is to accept its outrageousness and embrace it as a camp masterpiece. Revel in the pretty images that come by every now and then, and improve the dreadful dialogues in your head as they are being perpetrated.

The moment when Elizabeth asks John Dee about the battle, and he prophetizes that one great kingdom will end but doesn't make clear which one, is reminiscent of the Delphic oracle's answer to Croesus.

Lastly, I really liked the figure of the jesuit assassin, though he was woefully underutilized. Jesuit assassins are the most entertaining part of the black legend's imaginarium, in my opinion. More movies should feature them (the albino killer in "The Da Vinci Code" was the only remotely sympathetic character in that cinematrocity). Another jesuit assassin appears in the comic Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot. What are some other examples?

Doorlocks and the Theory of Everything

When arriving home the other day, I met a neighbour who was having problems opening the front door to the building. "The lock's broken again", she complained. Actually, it wasn't. She just had been turning the key in the wrong direction. For two minutes.

I, too, sometimes forget which way to turn the key. Fortunately, there are only two possible ways. As part of their work, theoretical physicists have to deal with rotations in many dimensions of mind-bogglingly complex mathematical structures, like E8. So perhaps I wouldn't do too well at theoretical physics.

Southland Tales

"I'm making fun of myself, the angry liberal," Kelly said. "The joke is that things have gotten so bad that even neo-Marxists have been forced to bear arms."

(Richard Kelly, talking about Southland Tales)

Marxists, bearing arms? What an unlikely idea! This Richard Kelly guy has quite an imagination.

Avestruz versus Cerdo

Esta mañana mi padre vio a un avestruz importunar a un cerdo. El puerco estaba tan feliz retozando en su barrizal cuando el avestruz se le acercó y comenzó a asestarle picotazos. Y los picotazos de avestruz no son moco de pavo.

En vez de la reacción furiosa que cabría esperar, la víctima se limitó a emitir sin demasiada convicción periódicos gruñidos lastimeros. Y nada más, ya que la molicie del puerco se impuso a su incomodidad y le llevó a permanecer, estoico, en su barrizal, que otrora fuese Edén.

Al parecer la escena resultaba tan hilarante que mi padre y la demás gente que le acompañaba no pudieron contener las carcajadas. Todo el mundo que pasaba por el lugar se detenía un buen rato a contemplar el espectáculo.

Aunque me hubiese gustado estar allí, la hilaridad animal tiene sus peligros. Recordemos que, según la leyenda, el filósofo estoico Crísifo murió de risa mientras contemplaba a un burro borracho que intentaba comer unos higos.

Ojalá ningún avestruz furioso se entrometa en nuestros lodazales particulares. Y si lo hace, al menos que no haya testigos.

¡Chúpate esa, Descartes!

Lichtenberg afirmó que Descartes se equivocó justo en lo que pensaba que era lo más cierto. No debería haber afirmado que un pensador tiene que ser una entidad que existe separadamente. Su famoso Cogito no justificaba esa creencia. No debería haber afirmado, "Pienso, luego existo". Aunque esto es verdadero, resulta engañoso. Descartes podría haber dicho en vez de eso, "Se piensa: el pensamiento tiene lugar". O también: "Esto es un pensamiento, por tanto, como mínimo, se piensa un pensamiento".

(Derek Parfit: Razones y Personas. Antonio Machado Libros, Colección Teoría y Crítica)

Mereological nihilism and its activists

Mereological nihilism [...] is the position that objects with proper parts do not exist (not only objects in space, but also objects existing in time do not have any temporal parts), and only basic building blocks without parts exist (e.g., electrons, quarks), and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (if we could see clearly, we'd not see compositive objects).

(Wikipedia entry for Mereological nihilism)

The Null-Os in Philip K. Dick's eponymous short story could be thought of as active (and enthusiastic!) followers of mereological nihilism:

Null-O is a 1958 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. This rather brief story examines the concept of totally unempathic and 'logical' humans. These beings view individual collections of matter, i.e. any object, as subjective structures and see the true state of reality as an 'undifferentiated world of pure energy'. After attaining positions of power they proceed with a plan to ultimately return everything in the universe to this state. This is to be done by the construction of successively more powerful bombs, ultimately resulting in the rather improbable 'U-bomb' that will homogenise the whole universe.

(Wikipedia entry for Null-O)

It's a really wacky story, and not exactly a literary masterpiece I guess, but nevertheless it is among my favorite PKD works. I have already quoted from the story in an older post.

Is "Null-O" a satire of A. E. van Vogt's "The World of Null-A"? Possibly. Dick wasn't very keen of the idea of superpowered, superintelligent, omnicompetent mutants coming to save the day. See also: The Golden Man.

War, Altruism, Genes, Morality

Throughout history it has been almost axiomatic that a nation seeking to avoid subjection to a foreign overlord must itself achieve and exercise the powers of an overlord, and will succeed in doing so only by having at its disposal substantial military capabilities—and using them. One must rule or be ruled; there is no middle course.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)

Altruism—benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself—and parochialism—hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group—are common human behaviors. [...] Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

(a scientific paper quoted in this post at Dienekes' Anthropology Blog)

Once we see that our moral beliefs are simply an adaptation put in place by natural selection, that is an end to it. Morality is no more than a collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends.

(Michael Ruse)

Each of the quotes is unsettling enough by itself, when taken together the picture becomes almost unbearably grim. Not only war is an inescapable evil but, ironically, our nobler instincts are mere byproducts of it, arrived at through a blind process of natural selection that has nothing to do with any kind of objective moral facts, which indeed may not exist.

On the other hand, consider puppies. Puppies are cute.

Google Hollow Earth

There are other worlds, but they're all in the mind of D&D nerds and they're full of sissy elves.

(Paul Eluard)

Sometimes, when I wallow in my abject nerdom and my already tenuous link with reality gets streched even further, I ponder that versions of Google Earth for imaginary worlds would be mightly cool, and useful to boot. For example, Google Tschai would be an invaluable tool for planning your incursions into the Carabas in search of sequins. And in some cases, the very fate of the world depends on a properly planned quest. One does not simply walk into Mordor, but consults Google Middle Earth first (Galadriel's mirror has a really cool interface, by the way, even if the search results are a bit erratic).

However, such projects would be fraught with technical difficulties. Our world is pretty simple: emerged bidimensional surfaces (save for some slight bump here and there, like the Himalayas) which are easily observed by the prying eyes of satellites. Fantasy worlds are more complicated. What about underground kingdoms, like the Underdark or Foreverness? Satellites won't be of much use in those cases; we would need something like Barrington Bailey's "antronoscope":

A more detailed exercise in alternative cosmology is found in "Me and My Antronoscope'' (1973), which is set in a rigid universe where life exists in bubblelike lacunae. A rebellious individual in one such lacuna challenges the reigning orthodoxy with his notion that the continuum contains other worlds, and sets off defiantly in his solidity ship in order to search for them. After a long journey he breaks through into a new cavity, and, though it is empty and lifeless, he feels that its existence vindicates his theory. He perishes, convinced that he has been the pioneer who will lead his race to the conquest of the universe. This little drama is perceived by the inhabitants of another world by means of an antronoscope, and their activities form a frame narrative offering the merest glimpse of the other wonders of the infinite universe which this marvelous device exposes to their eyes.

(Brian Stableford's review of Barrington J. Bayley's The Knights of the Limits)

And let's not forget underwater kingdoms, and cloud kingdoms. The latter ones may change position -or even form, or dissolve- in a matter of days according to the prevailing winds. The map may quickly become obsolete unless it is frequently updated.

From the shelf Gersen took down an untidy portfolio, containing ballads, odes, dithyrambs: A Growl for Gruel, The Juices I Have Tramped, I Am a Darting Minstrel, They Pass!, Drusilla's Dream, Castles in the Clouds and the Anxieties of Those Who Live Directly Below by Reason of Falling Objects and Wastes.

(Jack Vance: The Palace of Love)

Besides the difficulties with data acquisition, the layer functionality of Google Earth would have to be greatly extended to allow switching between all those superimposed realms. And I'm not even going to discuss the possibility of alternate versions of the same world in parallel dimensions, or lovecraftian Dreamlands. No doubt those at Google were aware of all the hurdles I mentioned. That's why they decided to tackle the simplest case -the real world- first.

One last thing: what type of map projection is the one best suited to hollow earths, in particular those hollow earths open at the poles, in which the external and internal surfaces communicate? And for worlds in the shape of mobious strips, or klein bottles? These are pressing questions, in my opinion.

In general, the concept of GIS for fantasy worlds offers untapped, if challenging, possibilities.

Edit: How naive of me. Apparently, Google Middle Earth already exists.

Hola, soy yo

Cando llames al portero automático de tu casa y pregunten "¿Quién es?" no respondas "Soy yo". ¡Por supuesto que tú eres tú! ¿Quién ibas a ser, si no? Esa afirmación es siempre cierta, quienquiera que la diga. Por lo tanto, no le sirve a la persona en el piso para determinar quién es el que está en el portal. En todo caso, lo hará basándose en el tono de tu voz u otros aspectos ajenos al contenido proposicional de tu afirmación.

Deja de decir "Soy yo". Intenta comunicar algún pequeño dato fácilmente obtenible que pueda resultar marginalmente útil a la persona en el piso, como por ejemplo la hora, el tiempo que hace fuera, o si al venir has visto un gato.

Lost books, imaginary books

Lost books -see this post at Memorabilia Antonina- fascinate me. So do imaginary books. They're both a tease, suggesting unexplored literary landscapes while reminding us of that they're out of our reach.

I'm trying to remember examples of fantasy works wherein an imaginary book is regarded as lost. Right now I can't come up with anything, but they exist for sure. Conversely, I wonder if some of the works which we now regard as lost in truth never existed; a joke played on posterity by our ancestors.

Has any fearless classicist ever tried rewrite a lost work? To provide plausible, if fanciful, reconstructions the two missing parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy for example? The techniques pioneered by Pierre Menard could be of use...

Perhaps we should consider these two conditions, being lost and being imaginary, as part of the natural lifecycle of books. Because every book starts as an imaginary, unbirthed entity in the mind of its author. And every book will eventually be lost and forgotten at some point; entropy will take care of that.

Horses and Mules Exempted

The imposition of the death penalty (otherwise extremely rare in The Laws) for intercourse with pigs, dogs, and sheep might reflect Hittite society’s repugnance at bestiality. But that seems to be negated by a clause (200-a) which explicitly exempts from punishment those who indulge in sexual relations with a horse or a mule. Speculation on why one may have sex with such animals but none others has led to a number of explanations in the scholarly literature which are ultimately inconclusive, even if they have the merit of being ingenious and entertaining.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)