It Was Only a Canting Humbug

"Pretentious attention

Dismissive apprehension"

 

Serj Tankian - Empty Walls

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"what was sadder for a man of heart was the sight or the canting humbugs, who, from fear of blows, kept at an equal distance from the two camps, and who, although they allowed their selfishness and cowardice to be visible, claimed admiration for the generosity of their sentiments and the nobility of their souls. They rubbed their eyes with onions, gaped like whitings, blew violently into their handkerchiefs, and, bringing their voices out of the depths of their stomachs, groaned forth: “O Penguins, cease these fratricidal struggles; cease to rend your mother’s bosom!” As if men could live in society without disputes and without quarrels, and as if civil discords were not the necessary conditions of national life and progress. They showed themselves hypocritical cowards by proposing a compromise between the just and the unjust, offending the just in his rectitude and the unjust in his courage."

 

Anatole France, parodying the Dreyfus affair in Penguin Island

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"There was no room in the same world for men who belched and men who wouldn't tolerate belching."

Philip K. Dick - The Chromium Fence

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"I just wanna say, y'know, can we, can we all - get along? Can we, can we get along? Um... can we stop makin' it, makin' it horrible for, for the, for the older people and the, and the, an' tha keeds?..."

Rodney King, 1992

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Due to it so thoroughly embracing the short story format and Poe's "one effect" I find myself able to recall the exact endings to Science Fiction more than any other genre, the moments when our expectations of a sappy ending are turned, if not upside down, at least sideways. George R. R. Martin in particular provided some delightfully hard-hitting ones before getting himself bogged down in the fantasy epic with no ending in sight, so for the purpose of this rant let's mention Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels. Without spoiling too much, we hear tell of a far future where the human race has diverged into eloi and morlocks space men and tunnel men, on one side technocratic malaise and on the other brute primitive vitality. Then <something happens> and though it's a humdinger of a finale* I only recently noted an irksome detail. The story presents us two narratively and existentially equal breeds, yet we wag our finger directly at the educated space-man. There's really no expectation that the ignorant troglodyte in turn should have predicted error or tamped down its impact, or even had the foresight or developed the means to make the crucial overture to begin with. So why then are they still presented as matching halves of a conundrum? If you expect better from one side, then you implicitly admit it is better. Superior. And not just because it lives in the sky.

 

But sometimes both sides truly are equal(-ly stupid) and so often what was phantasmagorical reductio ad absurdum seventy-five years ago reflects all too aptly on a culture wallowing in its decay. As Hollywood has maladapted every single other PipKDick story they could get their grubby mitts on, I find their avoidance of The Chromium Fence rather glaring, especially as for a SciFi story it's inordinately easy to illustrate with make-up effects and one animatronic psych-bot. In the near future this time, American society has diverged along a political divide in... cosmetics. No shit. Actually, no sweat, or mussed hair, or bad breath, or most any natural bodily functions, unless you're on the "natural" side of the argument, in which case you make a point of being as grubby and smelly as you can be. This glorified debate over legally enforcing deodorant grows so deeply divisive that it becomes apparent whichever side wins will either forcibly convert or violently purge the other half.

Sound ridiculous? Then I'd like to remind you that countless individuals in the West now risk being fired as hostile in the workplace environment for refusing to address a self-important eunuch or virago by the royal "they" and conversely your right to buy a cake depends on whether you like hot dogs or tacos. And just like a supernumerary nipple might get you executed as a witch, it seems to matter little how little the pretexts really matter. Each new or old cause merely serves its fanatics in attacking targets of convenience, convenient means of competition for social apes obsessed with social standing. After all, it really doesn't matter why your neighbours disappear so long as you get their TV, right? If any woman has the right to order her male superior fired and move into his office by merely accusing him of <something sexual> then crime shall be supplied to fit that market demand for social "justice" by whatever definition seems most convenient. We purge the faithless and immediately forget past purges, but the opportunistic scum that got their coworkers fired and threatened lawsuits to move up corporate ladders will never be punished, and the politicians who rode lynch-mobs into office need never fear legal pursuit.

You say we should refocus on more important issues than the culture war, more practical ones (the economy, stupid) but if the fanatics are willing to murder or at least fire us for the sake of their fanaticism, that concern is quite practical. There's a universal and very real fear underlying cases like Dreyfus': that rulership willing to chase scapegoats threatens everyone, and there are no two sides to coercion or proscription enacted on imagined pretexts. It is not a debate between catholics and jews, but self-preservation in the face of such delusion as leads to walking off cliffs expecting to float.

The willingness of the left wing to embrace mass delusion has led exactly to where I predicted, all these years I've been telling you the right wing simply does that better than you, feeding back into the older mass delusions of troglodytic degenerates who literally believe that electing a grifting nepotist robber baron to destroy the government from the inside will somehow summon up a two-thousand-year-old zombie rabbi to lead them all to the land of milk and honey.

There are endless conflicts fabricated solely to supply false pretenses for powermongering, countless cases where we should get along. The trick lies in selecting the right criteria, knowing when a rat is just a rat. In particular between reason and make-believe though, the choice is life or death.

 

You've been picking the wrong one at every turn. How long did you think your luck would hold out?

It'll be your turn to play Dreyfus soon enough.

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* This is at minimum the third time I'm ripping off Martin's parting words just on this site.

No Sex Scenes

"Tell me, have you ever thought of writing for a living? Rather than preaching?'

‘I don’t think I have the talent.’

'Talent shmalent. You should see the stuff that gets published. But you must hike up those sex scenes; today’s cash customers demand such scenes wet."

Robert A. Heinlein - Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)

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"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."

 

George Orwell - 1984 (1949)

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“Now, concerning this vidshow.”

“Tuf and Mune? You’ve seen it, then?”

“Indeed,” said Tuf.

“Goddamn,” Tolly Mune said, grinning crookedly. “So what’d you think, Tuf?”

“I am forced to admit that it evoked a certain perverse fascination in me, for obvious reasons. The idea of such a drama has an undeniable appeal to my vanity, but the execution left much to be desired.”

Tolly Mune laughed. “What bothers you the most?”

Tuf raised a single long finger. “In a word, inaccuracy.”

She nodded. “Well, the vidshow Tuf masses about half what you do, I’d say, his face is a lot more mobile, his speech wasn’t half as stilted, and he had a spinneret’s musculature and an acrobat’s coordination, but they did shave his head in the interests of authenticity.”

“He wore a mustache,” said Haviland Tuf. “I do not.”

“They thought it looked roguish. Then again, look what they did to me. I don’t mind that they took fifty years off my age, and I don’t mind that they enhanced my face until I looked like a Vandeeni dream-princess, but those goddamned breasts! ”

“No doubt they wished to emphasize the certainty of your mammalian evolution”

[...]

“To my best recollection, at no point was carnal knowledge of your body included in my terms, Portmaster Mune. [...] the purpose of this melodramatic albeit daring voyage was to return [my cat] to my custody, as per the terms of our agreement, and not to deliver up your body to my” he blinked “lusts. Furthermore, you made it perfectly clear at that time that your actions were motivated by a sense of honor and fear of the corrupting influence the Ark might have upon your leaders. As I recall, neither physical passion nor romantic love played any part in your calculations. ”

Portmaster Tolly Mune grinned. “Look at us, Tuf. A damned unlikely pair of star-crossed lovers. But you’ve got to admit, it makes a better story.”

Tuf’s long face was still and expressionless. “Surely you do not defend this grossly inaccurate vidshow” he said flatly.

The Portmaster laughed again. “Defend it? Puling hell, I wrote it!”

 

George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging, Second Helpings (1985 - a decade before he started publishing "Tits and Dragons") 

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Hey, internet, wanna know one of my deep, dark, thick and stiff secrets? In addition to this crap I've also written pornographic stories (under a different alias, so don't bother searching (I said stop that!))

I toyed with the notion and scribbled a few paragraphs here and there for about a decade before working up the nerve to post a few to a free site several years ago, in a fit of desperation over my lack of productivity in writing other fiction, and over my lack of talent in my many additions to this blog. This was it, I thought, this is all I'm good for, this is the best I can do, the lowest possible dreck, jackoff material, so I might as well.

 

And it worked. Where I can't even bring myself to finish a "true" work of fiction beyond a couple of pages (growing ever more painfully aware of its worthlessness with every shuttle of the cursor) the porno-tales didn't matter, didn't scare me, and by now have accumulated a combined word count in the five digit range. Worse yet, hit counts revealed even my least popular such sodden yarn was ten times as successful as my most viewed page here on the blog... which isn't saying much, but in context still twisted the proverbial knife. Seems if I want to be heard on any topic from politics to food to space travel to primitivism, I'm better off doing so in between typographical hip thrusts. Kerning your brains out, so to speak.

I had, in other words, made a startling discovery: sex, it would appear... sells!

 

At least I find myself in abundant company along my slide toward the lowest common denominator. When Ghost in the Shell wanted to convey its status as not children's animation, it did so within five seconds with a naked chick backflipping off a high-rise. Netflix made a decade's worth of profit marketing ridiculous teen sex comedies, then when it wanted legitimacy gained it by more complex shows like Dark, starting every other episode with a teen sex scene. Cyberpunk 2077 may have bugged out at release whenever you shot... or drove... or picked something up... or breathed, but they made damn sure the customizable hoo-hoos and ding-a-lings were fully operational, I tell ya wut, and tossed a naked chick at you as soon as you start. Also, yes, I am quite the vivid eroauteur. Thank you for noticing.

 

But to me this topic has become inarguably symbolized by George R. R. Martin, largely because I was a fan of his older works long before I got into A Song of Ice and Fire in the early 2000s, and I was more aware than most of his keen ability to impart both gut punches and food for thought without the need for any of Boobs and Dragons' sex and little of its violence. A Song for Lya or Dying of the Light for instance tied their entire plots around a sexual relationship as did to a lesser extent Fevre Dream's cusp of mate protection, but in each case it is enough to know the characters in question are horny for each other (or... not) for the relationship to impact the rest of the narrative. Lya's tame sex scenes even seem gratuitous for its length at a couple sentences each. Precisely because of its universality, reproductive behavior requires no lengthy explanation or illustration. While Hooters and Dragons has plenty to teach about mythopoesis, historical revisionism and the willful ignorance of medievalism, the need for a sense of proportionality and antithesis in fantasy fiction, political factionalism and fractionalism, personal fables, superweapons and overdependence on same, religious idolatry, the tragedy of the commons, etc., you would lose none of that by dropping the half of the epic minutely describing people taking their pants off. Any more than anyone remembers anything else from those books about punching Martian goblins besides Dejah Thoris' wardrobe, or anything from the later Dune books besides the Honored Masturbators.

And yes, I get it: ASoIaF was written to sell, and it certainly did, a half-sordid, half-brilliant nest egg toward the end of an otherwise respectable career. But, just as I realized I can't promote my sociopolitical or aesthetic views in erotic stories whose target audience will skip any paragraph not detailing the conjoining of groins, I doubt the watered-down Seven Kingdoms manage to impart any meaningful impression beyond that to the vast majority of an audience who just came for the hawt codpiece clanging, and the author of The Sandkings deserves to be remembered better than "that Melons and Dragons dude."

As for us plebs scuttling about in the shadow of such colossi to our assured dishonorable graves, we should keep in mind the issue of gratuitous sex is only part of a larger spectrum of dishonesty in artistic expression. Resorting to sex scenes to hold the audience's interest is merely a sign of poor writing, a glaring lack in developing your other themes to stand on their own. In fact, one of my observations upon taking a serious look at erotic story sites (aside from the surprising abundance of incest themes - Freud was apparently more right than he knew) is the common albeit sparse attempts to pervert sexuality itself into propaganda on some hot-button political issue like firearms or abortion or marijuana. Almost invariably, it makes for poor eroticism illustrating the pitfall of engorging any secondary consideration to subvert a work's main interest, be it political or religious pandering, shilling to some financial backer, sport, crime and astrology, etc. Sex is merely the most obvious such trap for its lowest-of-the-low common denominator status and its role as the most frequent source of cultural taboos across time and space.

And having reached that topic of demonization, I shall shelve the remainder of this discussion for the second half:

Yes Sex Scenes.

The Voyaging Morons' Congress

"In Catholic school

As vicious as Roman rule

I got my knuckles bruised

By a lady in black"

 

Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark

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"So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone."

Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars

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"The gun is good! The penis... is evil! The penis shoots seeds"

Zardoz

(a movie which I have never watched, for reasons including but not limited to Sean Connery's crotch)

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Population control is not just a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is inevitable.

 

About half a year ago at the height of the pandemic, I heard someone complain how heavily isolation measures were hitting families' internal dynamics, with children kept home from school every day to drive their progenitors insane. Even heretofore comfortably middle-class parents were suddenly discovering that 2.5 children were two too many. I reacted... perhaps predictably lycanthropic: well, who made them breed in the first place? The rejoinder came more cogent that I'd normally expect: their family size was planned in the context of a wide array of social services, guarantees on which their society unexpectedly defaulted in 2020. These people were born and indoctrinated into a culture encouraging them to follow their mindless, already dominant evolutionary prerogative to drown out their competitors in a tide of redundant progeny, assured they could simply jail their psychopathic little cacodemons for five days a week in communal care.

Stashing offspring in institutions (while always an option for the wealthy to dispose of the spare in "an heir and a spare") seems to have been popularized beyond limited monastic / military use by the British obsession with boarding schools. Sure, sure, you may not think of it that way, but public schools over the past century have acquired more and more of the functions of child jails, from fluff in curricula to justify extra hours to the proliferation of extracurricular activities. Sports clubs, drama clubs, sportsier clubs, music clubs, sportsiest clubs, religious clubs, clobbering clubs, anything, whatever it takes to ensure those hordes of disgusting, superfluous larval vandals don't see the light of day from September to June. The implied (false) promise is that you should breed as much as you can and we'll raise your kids for you.

 

In fact, the amount of encouragement states provide toward procreation makes an interesting observation: for all that no politician will ever utter the phrase "population control" the hunger of the rich for always more cannon fodder, always more wage slaves to lord it over, always more bipedal dogs to eat dogs, ensures that most societies do exercise population control... in the wrong direction!

So, with a billion of us soon to be vaccinated against the (current) pandemic and everyone presumably eager to resume bodily contact, let's reminisce about three Science Fiction tales speculating on the topic of population bombs.

 

Major spoiler alert for all three.

 

 

1) The Palliative

"Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. [...] it is out of a deep sense of compassion and for the highest humanitarian reasons that this chemical hoax has been perpetrated"

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971) opens with a scientific conference on overpopulation in which all arguments lead to concluding the end of the world. The narrator finds himself drugged and hallucinating, thereby experiencing one of the proposed solutions to controlling the masses firsthand. Placed in suspended animation, he awakes in a future built around a fully mature science of chemical mind control. After delving its deep dark secrets, seeing sequential layers of narcotic haze are covering up a reality of abject poverty, sickness and overcrowding, he once again wakes up in the present day to discover it was all a chemically-induced hallucination after all.

If this sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot, Lem turns out to have been a fan, which Dick in his customary paranoia interpreted as a COMMIE PLOT OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Though it slightly drags its build-up and rushes its climax, the book retains more than enough punch by its sequential unveiling of just how far denial of reality can drag a society. It supports my oft-repeated point that telepathy negates science as the solution to every problem becomes not solving it but making everyone think it's been solved. When introducing Lem's Return from the Stars I likened it to the softest, Brave New World sort of dystopia while counting The Futurological Congress as his version of a mid-severity, Fahrenheit-451 variety. This may seem odd, as the ending reveals standards of living to have dropped to 1984 levels... but they did so from neglect, greed and myopia, not active malice. Though obligated to point out the plot hole of absent libido-depressing mind control chemicals, I can almost accept the villain's claim that past a certain point, once the species' creative capacity was so terminally outpaced by its procreative capacity, little remained possible but to cushion its gradual collapse into itself. Like Bradbury's prophetic view of our futurepresent, Lem's is an Apocalypse bought and sold by market forces and the mindless glut of mass appeal.

2) The Surgical

"while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children - breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth (1951) likely the most influential (if not directly famous) of these three examples, centers on dysgenics. A 20th-century scheister gets frozen by electricity (yes) and awakens to a monstrous population boom of common imbeciles mitigated by a desperately outnumbered minority of intelligent humans. With sterilization impossible for the sheer bulk of ape flesh which also makes warfare too risky (five hundred million tons of rotting flesh) the geniuses of the future, too honest for their own good, need the help of our common con-man to convince the human vermin of the world to exterminate themselves of their own accord. Inspired by Hitler's public relations campaigns for concentration camps, our hero sets up a program of fake rockets to "Venus" meant to lift five billion sub-humans out of the atmopshere where they won't stink up the joint. As a last measure, the future ubermenschen shove him into one as well, and the story ends with him hoist, quite literally, by his own petard.

 

Several points:

 

- The image of a compulsively dishonest real-estate speculator making absurd promises to hordes of degenerate rabble applauding the brilliance of such plans rang painfully true in the 2016 U.S. election, and has by no means lost relevance with the "other" party in power. "Defund the police" - how's that for a three-word rabblerousing slogan?

- Also, in 1951, with the world population closing on 3 billion, Kornbluth's vision of a future swarmed by 5 billion vermin might have seemed apocalyptic. We're now closing in on 8. Eight billion subhuman apes incapable of thought, of creativity, of reason, of anything to elevate them above the existential experience of rats, capable in fact of little beyond murderously producing more voracious, murderous walking redundancies.

 

- Impractical warfare, while necessary to set up the catchier plot point of rockets to "Venus" comes across as too forced. The five billion corpses wouldn't all rot at once. China's upcoming attempt to coin a new term, exclusive speciecide, shows how easy it is to prioritize the Tibetans or Mongolians, then Hong Kong and the Uighurs, then Taiwan and Korea and Vietnam, then Japan and Indonesia, then Europe and Africa and gradually the remnants of non-Han humanity. Just a few dozen million rotting corpses at a time. Perfectly manageable.

 

- Kornbluth's most memorable point however (and one glossed over by works he inspired like Idiocracy) is that dysgenics and overpopulation go hand in hand. The more primitive a mind, the less it can extend beyond its instincts, the more easily it is driven to self-destruction in ensuring numeric supremacy for its gametes, the more easily it swallows the precepts of moral and racial purity and other big lies. Conversely, the more human life is cheapened by overpopulation, the more the rich can employ sheer numbers of wage slaves and cannon fodder in place of innovation or careful planning, the more that infernal coalition of rabble and rabblerousers can afford to exterminate the superior intellects they so fear and despise. 

 

 

3) The Preventive

"there is no rational, equitable, scientific, technological, or human answer to the dilemma of a population increasing in an insane geometric progression. It admits to answering only with miracles - loaves and fishes, manna from heaven, and the like. Twice I failed as ecological engineer. Now I propose to succeed as the god that S’uthlam requires. Should I approach the problem as human a third time, I would assuredly fail a third time, and then your difficulties would be resolved by gods crueler than myself, by the four mammal-riders of ancient legend who are known as pestilence, famine, war, and death. Therefore, I must set aside my humanity, and act as god."

Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin (1986) is a book I've mentioned in passing once before. Though I'd hoped the success of Boobs and Dragons would revive attention for some of his older, better works, I'm not hearing much chatter to that effect. Tuf's draconian problem-solving (think Stannis Baratheon) especially in Manna from Heaven which closes his short story collection, might have something to do with that.

The series begins with Haviland Tuf acquiring a biological warfare spaceship and needing it repaired. To pay for said repairs, he indebts himself to Malthus-Spelled-Backwards, a planet increasingly unable to feed the constantly growing population it is unable to curb due to a religious prerogative to go forth and multiply... and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and -

He "solves" their problem by increasing their food production. Repeated returns to the planet for further payments find that every time, the S'uthlamese have taken the extra food and used it to extra-extra-copulate, bringing themselves time and again to the brink of mass starvation. By the end their military build-up hints they've arrived at the inevitable conclusion of every overpopulated society: let's forcibly under-populate some other place and split the difference!

Tuf gives them one final gift: a miraculous fast-growing plant yielding absurd amounts of food, thriving under nearly any conditions... and whose commensal microflora will sterlize 99.9% of humans.

 

Science Fiction can place in the realm of palatable, dramatic speculation ideas otherwise too uncomfortable or distant from our daily concerns for honest discussion. Population control will happen.

1) No matter if you can "mascon" your way to willful ignorance for a century (as we already have) you will eventually find your streets choked with humans playing the role of automatons.

2) Dysgenics and overpopulation are conceptual twins. The most basic function of life is reproduction at the expense of other reproducers. The more degenerate, the more basic your populace, the more its actions revolve around that single unanalyzed drive of murderous genomic replication.

3) Population control is inevitable. If it is not undertaken consciously, rationally and deliberately, it will occur naturally, by the time-honored expedients of starvation, epidemics and genocide. In the face of uncontrolled reproduction, any compensating scientific advances can only buy diminishing amounts of time.

 

 

Birth is murder. Life kills to live, supplanting other life. Quoth the giant talking stone head filled with guns: "Go forth... and kill!" A rising population is a de facto declaration of war against one's neighbours, because those extra humans will inevitably demand their lebensraum. The rich hoard and spend human lives like any other currency. If you see them investing in superfluous reserves of population, it's only so they can out-bid each other by lavish expenditure of same in bouts for supremacy. The marching morons and their populist drummers will always prove willing to control the population - of other populations.

Now, in keeping with this theme, I feel inclined to overpopulate this post by a fourth example of three:

4) The Endemic

"This is the year when the computer tells us that the planet is full at last; the goal is achieved; all the striving of evolution crowned."

2430 A.D. by Isaac Asimov (1970) is a short story about the date when the mass of human flesh replaces all other land biomass. On the entire planet exists naught but human cities and oceans filled with a rapidly-reproducing plankton slurry to feed humanity and recycle its waste. That is all... except for one oddball who keeps a few non-human animals as pets, preventing his species from achieving the perfection of totality. In the end, he is convinced to give in to the "enlightenment" of the majority.

And kills himself.

"Over the vast continental buildings some five trillion human beings placidly slept; some two trillion human beings placidly ate; half a trillion carefully made love. Other trillions talked without heat, or tended the computers quietly, or ran the vehicles, or studied the machinery, or organized the microfilm libraries, or amused their fellows. Trillions went to sleep; trillions woke up; and the routine never varied."

 

The Malthusian nightmare is generally presented in terms of inevitable collapse. Yet success makes an even more horrifying scenario, in which the human disease is never treated but metastasizes into a uniform post-plasm, a fully evolved but terminally primitive totality having eliminated all possibilities beyond self-reproduction.

 

What's your end-game?

Tuf Voyaging

I wanted to say something about one of my favorite webcartoonists' recently completed space opera, but in comparing its dark humor to a convenient Science Fiction example I find a need to establish that point of reference. So it's Martin today, Baldwin tomorrow.

Tuf Voyaging is not a novel per se. It is a collection of short stories written in a similar style featuring the same title hero. Through his long career before starting the sprawling fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire which thanks to HBO interference has slowed to a crawl in favor of adaptation, George R.R. Martin wrote precious few novels. Aside from a couple of slim novellas like Dying of the Light or Fevre Dream, he was mostly known for morally ambiguous SciFi short stories, hard-hitting vignettes of wanton destruction like The Sandkings.

That's where the collection conflated as Tuf Voyaging starts, with the crew of a salvage vessel greedily and callously eliminating each other as they scramble for possession of a devastatingly powerful warship. Think of it as Survivor with plagues and monsters. From there, the stories get less directly violent but more morally charged, showcasing Haviland Tuf's maybe-rational, maybe-callous, pleasingly trenchant problem-solving abilities. Though much of the stories' initial lure for readers hinges on the image of Tuf himself (the book's Wikipedia entry accurately if superficially describes him as "an exceptionally tall, bald, very pale, overweight, phlegmatic, vegetarian, cat-loving but otherwise solitary space trader") they ultimately remain memorable for Tuf's grimly comical difficulties in aiding the self-destructive.

Whether you're left with a sour taste or a warm feeling of satisfaction at the end of the collection I should think largely depends on whether you agree or disagree with Tuf's draconian beneficence in Manna from Heaven and the example of S'uthlam is a case-in-point for Science Fiction's role as a court jester, a safe, publicly derided yet subversive venue for those progressive ideas too dangerous to be spoken of as nonfiction.

Many of Tyrion Lannister's lines in A Song of Ice and Fire betray Martin's own constant awareness of this sad reality, and Tuf is the no-bullshit representation of Martin's style which you're not likely to find on cable television. Stannis Baratheon is little more than Haviland Tuf's somewhat diminished reincarnation.

Fevre Dream

So, here's Halloween again. I'd like to take this occasion to offer a counterpoint to one of the great scourges of Samhain, the cute/sexy vampire. First off, let's establish that glitter is not an appropriate costume accessory for a ghoulish bloodsucker, no matter what that idiotic farce, Twilight, has taught you. Second, I am in no way maintaining that we can never diverge from the oldest representations of storybook monsters or their first accepted literary interpretations. Bram Stoker's Dracula was by no means a great novel and we need not limit ourselves to it as inspiration. However, it falls on the correct side of the dividing line between staying true to its fairytale inspiration in spirit and simply exploiting a word like "vampire" in a nonsensical but crowd-pleasing fashion.
There have been many reinterpretations of vampirism in the past century or so, based first on Dracula and later on Anne Rice's rapidly-deteriorating book series. Twilight is guilty of picking up where Rice's fame-flustered derangement left off, with its supercharged, sexy vamps and pup-men prancing around like they own the place. Not everything has followed that linear decline however, and in the spirit of Gustave Le Rouge's semi-coherent yet oddly captivating vampires on Mars (sure, why not) I'd like to encourage everyone to read George R. R. Martin's little head-trip about vampires on steamboats. I mean, sure, why not?

Come on. I know "steampunk" is a popular albeit ill-defined trend these past few years and as a long-time George Martin fan I'm constantly annoyed at his newfound fanbase which only knows the sexed-up seven kingdoms and not his older, more thoughtful works. If you can't dredge up much interest in a nearly emotionless albino ecoengineering-warship captain, a dying planet adrift through transience or short stories about people getting swallowed by blobs and shooting a rat, only a rat, then at least give his take on de-mystified vampires a look.

Fevre Dream is an attempt to create a rational, non-magical vampire race, based loosely on the biological explanation of porphyria as the root of the vampire myth itself. And yes, just as the main theme is the meeting point between myth and reason, the setting is the short-lived, transitional world of steam-power and institutionalized slavery along an 1850s Mississippi. It is, amusingly enough, not fantasy but science fiction set in the past, and much like other good but relatively short works of science fiction it suggests a lot more than it states explicitly. One of the trends running through Martin's work over the decades has been a fascination with the mentality and ethics of power or leadership and Fevre Dream does an excellent job of exploring the biological roots of power-mongering, juxtaposing  the racial slavery of the American south with the willing slavishness of pack-hierarchies.

Mostly though, it's about vampires. How they eat, how they think, how they burn, how they bleed. If you want a case-study in recreating an old myth through the lens of science and reason, in rationalizing superstition and the cultural capital it's created, Fevre Dream is as good as any. And the Halloweenish beauty of the whole thing is that it does not abandon vampires' proper role as shadow-dwelling boogeymen. In fact, Martin's vamps are all the more terrifying for being merely dangerous beasts, eliciting a visceral fear of the predator in our monkey brains akin to the timeless image of Dracula, limbs splayed lizard-like, crawling face-down along a sheer stone wall. This primal terror of the hungry beast is so deeply rooted in our primate brains that's it's a pity to dilute it in the more detached, magic-ridden interpretations of the myth.

Give the glitter a rest and read something about real vampires. Let Mr. "Game of Thrones" teach you how to rethink fairytales.