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.