First seen in science fiction?

The narrative device of having one character annotate a work written by another character, grossly misinterpreting it to suit his own cynical ends and/or delusional worldview, is most famously used in Nabokov's Pale Fire where, in fact, the anotations to an (intentionally) dreadful poem constitute the bulk of the novel. Gene Wolfe has mentioned his admiration for Pale Fire in one interview, and it's easy to see how the book influenced Wolfe's own oblique style and penchant for unreliable narrators.

A previous, more limited use of that device can be found Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, published ten years before Pale Fire. One section of the book consists in the old diaries of the main character, written amidst the horrors of World War III. In them, he expounds a demented program for achieving world peace that involves the mass voluntary amputation of limbs as a way to curb the aggresive instincts of the human race.

The plan was clearly intended as satire by the protagonist, in the "Irish people should eat their children" manner. However, a former colleage of his got hold of the diaries, and took them literally. In fact, he goes on to become the leader of a post-apocalyptic US on a pro-amputation platform. The diaries are published as a kind of seminal political manifesto, conveniently and obtusely annotated to justify a literal interpretation.

Are there other uses of the "misguided commentary" device that predate both Pale Fire and Limbo? Or is Limbo the first novel to feature it, even if it is circumscribed to one part of the book and does not overwhelm the "main" text?

Anyway, Wolfe's novel is unjustly forgotten, and worth a read despite its misogyny and overuse of freudian jargon. Some (not misguided!) commentary on the book here.

Impotencia selectiva

el 11 de mayo de 1453 el arcediano de Segovia, sede vacante a la sazón, leía un sentencia de divorcio por él pronunciada, declarando nulo en matrimonio entre Enrique y Blanca a los trece años de contraído. [...] La causa de nulidad alegada era la impotencia de Enrique, aunque sólo en relación con Blanca, puesto que el arcediano había recurrido al testimonio de ciertas mujeres públicas de Segovia, las cuales estaban dispuestas a jurar que, con ellas, había tenido "trato y conocimiento de hombre con mujer".

(Luis Suárez Fernández: Nobleza y Monarquía)

Calabresas, Islandesas

Las mujeres tienen en la Ndrangheta un papel importante. [...] Las mujeres también son las que mantienen vivas las faidas, las venganzas, además de organizar matrimonios de conveniencia entre las familias amigas. "No os he criado para pagar las facturas de la luz y el agua", se escucha en una interceptación a Saveria Strangio, viuda de un capo, durante las escuchas que la policía realizó en la casa milanesa de uno de sus hijos.

(María Signo: El poder de la mafia calabresa. En La Voz de Galicia del Domingo 26 de Agosto)

"Cold are the councils of women" reads a famous line from Njáls Saga, and in times of feud women are repeatedly portrayed in the sagas as demanding blood vengeance. Demanding and getting are not the same, and the self-willed women of Njáls Saga at times found it difficult to goad their men into action.

(Jesse Byock: Viking Age Iceland)

"Bolli, your brother's killer, lives there. You have certanly turned out very different from your noble kinsmen if you don't want to avenge a brother like Kjartan. [...] It's a sad thing to have shirkers for sons. [...] Olaf's worst misfortune, that he was cheated when it came to the kind of sons he got."

(Laxdaela saga, quoted in Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland)

Zibarro

I have just finished All-Star Superman #8 and enjoyed it a lot, especially the character Zibarro.

Despite superficial appearances and Zibarro's own proclamations, I think he is an opposite of Superman like regular Bizarro, only in subtler ways. He gives up easily while Superman perseveres, he despises the other bizarros while Superman -basically an alien god- loves and appreciates normal Earth people, and so on.

Finally (this might sound far-fetched, but let's remember that Morrison has a penchant for playing with the fourth wall) while Superman is a character in a story, Zibarro is himself an author of stories. At the end of the issue, he is tasked by Superman with writing the events that have just transpired! Maybe the whole issue has been written by Zibarro?

Una nueva y excitante tecnología

El explorador de hipertexto no lee, no escucha, no ve televisión. El explorador de hipertexto navega en un vasto océano de información textual, sonora y visual, buscando sus propios caminos de conocimiento a medida que se adentra en niveles cada vez más profundos del libro absoluto.

(Muy Interesante, Especial Comunicación. Verano de 1990. 350 ptas.)

En el hipertexto, la información se organiza de la misma forma como lo hace la mente humana. Y el sistema de recuperación funciona de manera muy parecida al cerebro cuando quiere acceder a los datos almacenados en la memoria: por asociaciones de ideas y por el contexto en que se producen. [...] Sólo que en el hipertexto, en lugar de un desencadenante neuroquímico, como ocurre con los mecanismos de la memoria, utilizamos una herramienta electrónica: el ratón o la pantalla táctil.

(íbid.)

Para explicar estos conceptos, se usa como analogía el libro poliédrico. Imaginemos un libro en forma de cubo que se pueda abrir por cualquiera de sus seis caras. Cada una de ellas representa el comienzo de un camino distinto para recorrer el contenido de todo el libro. Se empiece por donde se empiece, al final hemos alcanzado toda la información, aunque por caminos diferentes. Los jóvenes lectores de novelas interactivas tal vez estén más preparados para comprenderlo. En el hipertexto, cada portadda del libro poliédrico -que no hace falta que tenga únicamente seis caras- simboliza un bucle de presentación a partir del cual parten, hacia dentro, decenas, centenares o miles de otros bucles interconectados. Y por ellos navega el lector-explorador.

(íbid.)

En el horizonte: la megapedia universal que reúna los archivos históricos de toda la humanidad. [...] Cualquier ciudadano, desde su propia casa, tendrá la oportunidad de conectar su terminal doméstico al gran conocedor, un superodenador central con billones y billones de fichas-bucle.

(íbid.)

Suena excitante, casi como un salto a un estado superior de conciencia. (Supongo que no se estará hablando de una simple evolución de las referencias, índices, y notas a pie de página de toda la vida, ¿no? Eso sería tan prosaico....)

Las "novelas interactivas" que leen los jóvenes supongo que serán aquellas de "elige tu propia aventura". Ah, tiempos...

Aprovecho para mencionar el excelente blog Paleo-Future, dedicado a cartografiar cómo era antes el porvenir.

"Glassy-eyed zest"

This blog post comments on a felicitous turn of phrase by Jack Vance: "spasm of zeal".

For my part, I want to mention another one I like very much: "glassy-eyed zest". It appears in the first chapter of The Green Pearl (freely avaliable here in PDF form for you to sample, dear reader.)

The expression is used in the context of some erotic exertions on the part of one of the characters, performed with a certain lack of genuine enthusiasm.

Dead Brothers

Dick’s early history is at once tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the rest of his life by his missing Other.

(Adam Gopnik: Blows Against the Empire)

Another insane/weird genius haunted by a lost brother (although not a twin) was Salvador Dalí:

When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation,[8] which he came to believe.[9] Of his brother, Dalí said: "… [we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections."[10] He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."[11]

(Wikipedia entry on Salvador Dalí)

Calle Amargura

A ver si alguien más puesto que yo en toponimia urbana me puede resolver la siguiente duda...

Existe una Calle Amargura en el casco viejo de A Coruña. En ella se encuentra una librería de segunda mano que suelo frecuentar.

Hay calles con el mismo nombre en Pontevedra, Sevilla, y Cáceres. Para la de esta última ciudad, al parecer existe una leyenda que atribuye el origen del nombre a ciertos eventos trágicos que sucedieron en ella. Pero entonces, ¿cómo se explica que otras calles en otras ciudades se llamen igual? ¿Cuál es el verdadero origen del nombre?

Edit: También hay una Calle Amargura en Tarifa. Y en Málaga.

Edit#2: Y en este otro sitio.

Edit#3: Resulta que existe una Virgen de la Amargura. Más información, aquí. Imágenes, aquí. ¿Relacionado?

"Al agote garrotazo en el cogote"

Nunca había oído hablar de este grupo étnico.

Inhumanity makes us human

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

I posit a theory: the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call "inhuman."

(R. A. Lafferty: Arrive at Easterwine)

A barrage of divine truths

Like the Marinids, the Mamluks, and other crude conquerors fresh from the steppe, the Ilkhans were quick to surrender to the sophisticathed civilization that enveloped them. Indeed the mind of the Mongol warrior was so culturally deprived that it presented a vast blank on which all sorts of refined and humane influences could be written.

(Ross E. Dunn: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta)

Genghis had set a policy of toleration for all religions within the empire, and ultimately the formless tribal shamanism to which he remained loyal withered under a barrage of divine truths which missionaries of all the world-universalist faiths fired at his various successors.

(íbid.)

Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet

The Principle of Diachronic Integrity

Profundando

Era un barbeiro de sábado que amaba os libros que non entendía e gustaba de lélos todos enteiros. Unha vez atopéino coa testa pousada nas mans, ó xeito dun pensador, e díxome:

- Estou profundando.

(Castelao: Cousas)

Un día pousóu os ollos no mar -endexamáis reparaba en cousas miúdas- e dispóis de ter profundado un bo retrinco de tempo deitóu na orella do seu compañeiro ísta frase:

- O mar ¿sabes? O mar... ¡é un fenómeno!

(íbid.)

Simpatizo con el barbero, a pesar del retrato satírico que de él hace Castelao. ¿Qué tiene de reprobable, o de risible, entrar en comunión con el misterio numinoso del océano?

I knew it

From here:

"There's a lot of hype around the alleged harm that people do to themselves" with enhancements, Hughes says. "But in head-pounding sports, you face a lifetime of disability. In soccer, heading the ball often enough lowers your IQ".

Myself, I have always been wary of heading the ball. I surmised the practice wasn't doing any favors to my beleaguered neurons. Thank God I no longer play that brutish sport.

SFnal Titles

I think it was Samuel R. Delany who said that science fiction is better understood as way of reading than as a property of the texts themselves. For example, consider the sentence: "Her world exploded". It could simply refer to a woman undergoing psychological trauma, or... to an actual planet exploding (I suppose the woman in question would suffer psychological trauma in that case too). See here.

It also happens with titles. In fact, some mainstream book titles would be perfect for science fiction novels! I have no idea what A Thousand Splendid Suns is really about, but to me it conjures visions of an epic voyage of space exploration.

In Search of Lost Time? What better title for a time-travel story?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is obviously the tale of posthuman astronaut marooned on an unhabited planet.

And, of course, there's Invisible Man:

Mr. Ellison said, ''Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells's old novel, 'The Invisible Man,' but I fought to keep my title because that's what the book was about.'' Mr. Erskine recalled, ''His novel doesn't have the article in its title, although the mistake keeps cropping up, and I've been telling people to drop the word 'the' ever since the book came out.''

(Ralph Ellison, quoted in this article)

On the other hand, Nabokov's Pale Fire sounds like part 1 of 5 of a trashy fantasy series. Ditto for Heart of Darkness and The Magic Mountain.

Talking about movies, it's simply criminal that Last Life in the Universe is not a piece of far-future sf. And Till Human Voices Wake Us (beautiful title!) should be about a couple that enters suspended animation shortly after a cataclysmic event, and awakes to a drastically changed future.

The trouble with AI

This article (spotted at Brains) is an excellent reminder of the problems with Artificial Intelligence, a welcome dose of reality against the naive triumphalism of people like Ray Kurzweil.

When the author discusses the connectionist approach, he touches on the intractable complexity that would plague the development process of a connectionist brain:

If each synapse were handled by the equivalent of only a single line of code, the program to simulate the cerebral cortex would be roughly 25 million times larger than what’s probably the largest software product ever written, Microsoft Windows, said to be about 40 million lines of code.31 As a software project grows in size, the probability of failure increases.32 The probability of successfully completing a project 25 million times more complex than Windows is effectively zero.

He doesn't mention potential ways to sidestep that problem. For example: evolving a population of complex artificial brains from a population of much simpler ones, through the use of random mutations and artificial selection. Conceivably, AI could be achieved by that method without the need for humans to understand in every detail how the evolved brains work, or how to design them explicitly.

Of course, that approach would face severe problems of their own. As the article mentions, simulating a single human brain would require a humongous amount of computing power. Simulating vast populations of them through innumerable generations would require much, much more. And then there are the problems of finding the proper encoding of the "genomes", the proper mapping between "genotypes" and "phenotypes", how to measure fitness, and so on.

Interestingly, the author does not claim that AI is impossible in principle. He never mentions arguments like Searle's The Chinese Room, or the ones spoused by Penrose involving non-computability. (Myself, I think the virtual mind/systems reply is a very convincing answer to Searle. I don't fully understand Penrose's argument, but I suspect the non-computable, Gödel's Theorem-defying aspects of the human mind he talks about are not really there.)

Edit: See also this post on Gene Expression.

Recursive Science Fiction

This is an interesting site about science fiction works... that are about science fiction. (Spotted at Tim R. Mortiss' blog, La Explanada de Avente.)

Polygamy

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."

(Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature)

In some instances concubines had wider latitude to act in their own interests than they might have had in poor marriages. An Icelandic folk saying of uncertain age goes, "Better a good man's frilla [a kind of concubine] than married badly."

(Jesse Byock: Viking Age Iceland)

Since some icelanders had more than one woman, others must have felt very cold indeed, alone in bed during those icy icelandic nights. The disadvantages of polygamy for non-elite males should be evident to anyone who was taught New Math at school:

Non-injective and non-surjective: BAD (unless you are lucky A, that is)

Bijective: kind of OK for everybody I guess. Surely better than this.

Nineteenth Century LOLCats

London is peculiarly fertile in this sort of phrases, which spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how. Many years ago the favourite phrase (for, though but a monosyllable, it was a phrase in itself) was Quoz. This odd word took the fancy of the multitude in an extraordinary degree, and very soon acquired an almost boundless meaning. When vulgar wit wished to mark its incredulity and raise a laugh at the same time, there was no resource so sure as this popular piece of slang. When a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor's unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz! When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his chums, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him. Every alehouse resounded with Quoz; every street corner was noisy with it, and every wall for miles around was chalked with it.

But, like all other earthly things, Quoz had its season, and passed away as suddenly as it arose, never again to be the pet and the idol of the populace. A new claimant drove it from its place, and held undisputed sway till, in its turn, it was hurled from its pre-eminence, and a successor appointed in its stead.

(Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)

They break; you can see through them

Six months did Thomas remain confined to his bed; and during that time he not only became reduced to a skeleton, but seemed also to have lost the use of his faculties. Every remedy that could be thought of was tried in his behalf; but although the physicians succeeded in curing the physical malady, they could not remove that of the mind; so that when he was at last pronounced cured, he was still afflicted with the strangest madness that was ever heard of among the many kinds by which humanity has been assailed. The unhappy man imagined that he was entirely made of glass; and, possessed with this idea, when any one approached him he would utter the most terrible outcries, begging and beseeching them not to come near him, or they would assuredly break him to pieces, as he was not like other men but entirely of glass from head to foot.

(Miguel de Cervantes: The Licenciate Vidriera. See also this post on Claw of the Conciliator.)

The bank had been modernized. It was a transparent young lady who waited on him. It wouldn't have startled him in any of the other worlds, but it did at home.

"I am unsure," he said. "Are you people?"

"I also am unsure," said the young lady, "since our position is presently under litigation. Actually we are the newest thing in people. Soon there will be none produced in the old manner. You will have to admit that it was a very grotesque arrangement."

(R. A. Lafferty: Space Chantey)

Plants and minerals, seas and athmospheric vapors here enjoy an absolute transparecy. Only the humans and higher animals stand out clearly above that whole by the opaline transparency of their bodies. Only their eyes, constructed like ours, are of an entirely opaque white. The muscles of that human race have the appereance of fibrous fasciculus, or amianthus. The blood which flows through their arteries is similar to lymph; the veinous blood seems to be of chyle or milk.

Despite a complexion offering in all its parts the vitreous appearance of a milky opal, the men of Élier are large, agile, and well proportioned. The women, a little smaller, are delicate and slightly diaphanous.

(C. I. Defontenay: Star)

The first symptom is a scaliness of the skin; itch, flakes upon the clothing, inflammation. There follows a weakness in the bones as the calcium is dissolved. One grows limp and rubbery, but this is still an early phase. Soon the outer tissues harden. Thick, opaque membranes form on the surface of the eyes; the nostrils may close and seal; the skin grows coarse and pebbled. In this phase prophecy is common. The sufferer partakes of the skills of a Somnambulist, and utters oracles. The soul may wander, separating from the body for hours at a time, although the life-processes continue. Next, within twenty days after the onset of the disease, the crystallization occurs. While the skeletal structure dissolves, the skin splits and cracks, forming shining crystals in rigid geometrical patterns. The victim is quite beautiful at this time and takes on the appearance of a replica of himself in precious gems. The crystals glow with rich inner lights, violet and green and red; their sharp facets adopt new alignments from hour to hour; the slightest illumination in the room causes the sufferer to give off brilliant glittering reflections that dazzle and delight the eye.

(Robert Silverberg: Nightwings)

I suppose a quote from Ballard's The Crystal World would belong in this post, but I haven't read that book yet.