The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

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"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

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"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

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* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.

Scientifiction for Froods

"A number of letters have reached the Editor's desk recently from enthusiastic readers who find fault with the name of the publication, namely, A M A Z I N G  S T O R I E S.

 

These readers would greatly prefer us to use the title "Scientifiction" instead.

[...]

Several years ago, when I first conceived the idea of publishing a scientifiction magazine, a circular letter was sent to some 25,000 people, informing them that a new magazine by the name "Scientifiction" was shortly to be launched. The response was such that the idea was given up for two years. The plain truth is that the word "Scientifiction" while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine.

[...]

We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up AMAZING STORIES and read only one story, our cause was won with that reader [...] A totally unforeseen result of the name, strange to say, was that a great many women are already reading the new magazine. This is most encouraging. We know that they must have picked up AMAZING STORIES out of curiosity more than anything else, and found it to their liking, and we are certain that if the name of the magazine had been "Scientifiction," they would not have been attracted to it at a newsstand."

 

Hugo Gernsback, opening editorial to the 6th issue of AMAZING STORIES (the first SF periodical) 1926/09

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The namesake for the Hugo Awards was a somewhat colorful character. Aside from being a total jew about contracts and payments, he could discuss topics in electrics and radio quite cogently but was himself a poor storyteller and in addition invented baffling gadgets like a helmet to block out distractions that couldn't possibly be more distracting in itself if it were Vonnegut's random noise-phones. Still, credit where it's due, his periodical got SF as genre off the ground, aided I would guess to no small extent by H.G. Wells still actively contributing stories at the time. Also... I guess he was less racist than John W. Campbell? So that's a plus.

 

He wasn't wrong about the term "scientifiction" being a bit of a mouthful, either. Though, let it be noted, sixteen years later The Notion Club Papers apparently expected it to still be in use in the 1970s and '80s. (It was not.) Tolkien also had one of his characters (his C.S. Lewis placeholder?) mock the very notion of "ships" in outer space, when every discerning futurist knew you went to Mars via dreams or seance. Quite. (So that must be why Musk's SpaceX keeps blowing up billions upon billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded rockets; not enough pipe-dreams.) Hey, if it was good enough for Burroughs...

 

As this April marks the centennial of Amazin' Scientifiction's inaugural issue, what can we learn from the genre's first official century?

 

First off, Gernsback also probably called it straight when it came to their readership's gender skew. Was it because males are more open to the ridiculous or outré than their counterparts? Because the word "amazing" instead of focusing on content instead promises emotion therefore panders better to women's greater narcissism? Or was it simply that science, technology, the disinterested intellect interfacing with reality, is more compatible with masculine thought than with feminine interpersonal manipulation? In any case, the precept persisted through the generations, as my own experience by the '90s was of females of all ages turning up their noses at the mere notion of scienceyfiction as an obsession purely for twelve-year-old boys who were expected to grow out of it by dating age and join women in praising more refined fare, like, say, dating dramedies and sitcoms.

 

If you would contend not only SF but Fantasy and superheroes have been mainstreamed in the past couple of decades, I'll retort that no, those genres have instead been watered down and dumbed down for the mass market. Superheroes are the very measure of mass-produced schlock, outpacing even zombie flicks, fantasy became emo romantasy (thanks for nothing Anne Rice) and "science" fiction got bogged down in feminist scare propaganda with men in place of zombies, when it's not airheaded space wizard science fantasy (how many Star Wars are we up to now?) or painfully generic plots spackled over with some irrelevant robots to seem fresher.

 

But then, it's hardly the first time that's happened. 19th century fiction had its own waves of Hollow Earth and ghost stories watering down earlier exploration stories and gothic horror. Then Wells and Doyle were rapidly snowed under. Though Gernsback did encourage scientific oversight of SF plausibility, AMAZING STORIES did not so much usher in a golden era of intelligent futurism as popularize the unimaginatively pugilistic planetary romances and space westerns which cemented the early 20th century image of SF as tween boy pulp. Then in the latter half of the century it was Fantasy's turn to lose Tolkien's insightful grasp of myth and archetypes in favor of a decades-long flood of generic sword-and-sorcery paperbacks. Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke's brief golden era of more thoughtful SF was quickly diluted by that same wave into science fantasy with mad scientists standing in for evil wizards.

 

The 1990s saw our most recent such blip of intriguing futurism. You can see the flip from ST:TNG's early science fantasy plots to its peak in quality from '90-'93, then again descending toward ghost stories, space gods, etc. But by then Red Mars had come out in '92, and the middle of the decade saw a spread of personal computers, then internet access, X-Files-fueled arguments over UFOs, the more thoughtful Neuromancer diluted out to the more crowd-pleasing Matrix, etc. At that point though, computers were somewhat user-unfriendly and fiddly and inherently, stereotypically nerdy, to the point you hardly had to add "computer" to the word nerd to conjure up the image of a male shut-in sitting in front of a screen. Internet obsessions only hit the mass market a decade later during the 2000s, with cat memes and World of Warcraft. And once again, mainstreaming diluted and drowned quality. Only this time it wasn't just one genre at a time. It's everything: SF, Fantasy, Horror, Super-men, all of it.

 

But we can worry about that some other time. For now, note

1) Every upswing of futurism cannot help but skew toward males: computer nerds in the 1990s, Heinlein publishing in the Boy Scout magazine in the 1940s, rocketship exploration or Doyle's plateau rehashing the high seas exploration stories marketed to young boys earlier in the industrial era, or the SF stories published in Playboy, looking forward always depends on a core audience of intelligent, educated young males. Gernsback may have gloried in goosing his sales figures by marketing a feeling instead of a field of study, but he was reaping the existing interest of ganders in order to sell them out.

2) In the real world, it is technology, not feelings, which has lent us this brief period of relative well-being. "We believe the era of Scientifiction is just commencing." Yes, with good cause... and the era of the pugilistic monkey?

3) The mass market kills creativity, complexity, everything that makes for compelling Science in fiction. We can talk about the mainstreaming of "geek" interests or obscure genres at the start of the 21st century, but truthfully, they've been mainstreamed before. Supernatural stories were quite popular during the Victorian era, overlapping with the spread of actual belief in psychic, occult, and other supernatural charlatanism like Theosophy. "Science" fiction grew very popular a hundred years ago, so long as you accept a definition of science as laser six-shooters and every planet another Earth. And every single time, such fads end up as shameful historical footnotes, masses of chaff no-one in later decades will admit to having enjoyed, be it penny dreadfuls or the pulps or wearing pointy plastic ears to conventions.

4) A crucial feature of such decline is the transition from the scientist as hero to hero's helper. We descend from praising the heroic man of science building his own machine and venturing of his own accord "into futurity" to science fantasy, techno-wizardry in which the idiot hero need perform no more cerebral a feat than punching, but will be supplied, (either from offscreen or by a ridiculed throwaway nerd) with the technological means to achieve all his ambitions. He's just handed a lightsaber with no need to invent it. Stories of science subverted and enslaved to the demands of the everyman signal decay. 

 

Beyond those points I'm at a loss as to a specific finish to this page, except to point out that a movie about a platform jumping button mashing 'toon topped the movie market this year, and that the newest technological advance, Large Language Models and the automated manipulation of the public, has not passed through the futuristic speculation of the nerd cabal before working its way into popular fiction, or in truth popular fact. Unlike nukes or mutation or outer space, it has been fed directly into the mass market cesspit, before it could even be thought on.

Thou Art Moloch

"Behind the veil is the machine
It steals your soul, devouring all your dreams
My hand is firm upon the wheel
I control, I am the demon"

 

Jamison Boaz & Jason Charles Miller - Resist and Disorder (Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack)

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"The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream"

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Earth's Holocaust

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In 1965 Harlan Ellison published "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, a short ramble against the clockwork pace of mechanized life. It sat in the same issue of Galaxy Science Fiction as a spy story by Robert Silverberg about techno-theocracy and also Laugh Along with Franz, by one Norman Kagan who apparently lost the ensuing inaugural Nebula nomination to Ellison* who kept the narration hopping better than Kagan's more didactic exposition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the difficulty in meshing analytical and creative thought (stupid Vladimir and Estragon never stop bickering) he seems better known as a film scholar.

 

Aside from that, though, Laugh Along with Franz is yet another techno-dystopian tale. Hey, the hippie era had its fixations. Here, it's automation making almost all humans redundant, with the ensuing anomie driving much of the populace to crime, insanity and general monkey-business. Sorry, is that a bit apropos of our current arguments about chatbots?

 

Let's ramble aimlessly about a different SF yarn instead, Robert A. Heinlein's Waldo from 1942, which incidentally later became the name for such teleoperation devices. It's always been one of my least favorite Heinlein works, for the anti-intellectual twist it takes halfway through. Then again, though Wikipedia erroneously describes "the journey of a mechanical genius from his self-imposed exile from the rest of humanity to a more normal life" Heinlein actually (in contrast to, say, Valentine Michael Smith's maculate conception by towering intellects) has his customary mouthpiece curmudgeon explicitly debunk Waldo's mystique as genius, being instead an above-average intellect deriving much of his success in the field of mechanical engineering by hyper-focus and a personal stake in the machinery allowing him to live with myasthenia gravis. Which made only slightly less galling the denouement of the cranky, reclusive brainiac becoming the life of the party and carousing with the reg'lr folks after getting cured of his ailment, as though the hopeless experiential and existential gulf between competent minds and the subhuman norm were a disease of the intelligent, to be doctored back to accursed normalcy by hillbilly magic tricks.

 

Waldo's side plot about energy beams afflicting all humans with weakness is just the water fluoridation conspiracist icing on that cake, but it did mesh for me with the recent episode #466 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast, titled "What is technology doing to us?" which does indeed counterpose the nefarious influence of social media and chatbots against human interpersonal relations. As though the abuses of technology, from facebook gossip to nukes, were not the direct result of human effort to out-compete other humans as human social instinct dictates. As though every single Twit were not twittering of its own accord. The customer's always right.

 

'Course, that's an old dodge. Going back 99 years, I'd never bothered watching Metropolis until now. Compared to most stuff from the 1920s it's more cohesive than I'd expected, plus more modern in its action scenes, dramatic face-offs or hero, sidekick and love interest trinity. Though of course, given its outsized stylistic impact, it's hard to tell how much of that was foresight or later life imitating its art. But as far as the plot goes, imagine me blowing a very loud raspberry. Even if you look past a sludge of Biblical references, the story and moralizing are tired cliches not just for 1927, but could've been dismissed as a rip-off of Dickens or fairytales even fifty years prior. The dashing young prince saving the kingdom from an evil wizard who lusted after the queen, aided by a fetching maid pure of heart and defrosting his crusty old father's aging heart, a whopper of a quarter-hour 'think of the children' scene, villain falls off a cliff, holy Mother Goose the triteness just does not stop.

 

Has never stopped, in fact. I've commented before on the absurdity of dystopian flicks like V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc. pandering to their audience's herd conceit with evil wizards oppressing the salt of the earth multitudes, ignoring the dystopia could not persist without the collusion of those multitudes. The prototypical Metropolis itself places all blame with intellect, with industry, anything outside the plains-ape tribal norm. Even the climactic riot scene paints the murderous rabble as somehow innocent dupes of an inhuman infiltrator, ignoring that they literally built the system of injustice. Their instinct to murder and replace the prince presupposes such princely positions in the first place for the workers' competitive instincts to aspire to; each worker wants to be the one in the palace and for that there must be palaces, even if their own backs break in the gebilding of such.

 

You could, of course, look at the issue at even baser levels: "Who told you to attack the machines, you fools? Without them you'll all die!!" quoth a rightly enraged shift supervisor in Metropolis' lone glimmer of lucidity. No such moment comes in Waldo, where we deliberately sidestep the population pressure creating such ever-increasing demand for energy because the smooth apes reproduce with the speed of any degenerate vermin. Laugh Along with Franz ends in trite primitivism, the hero losing/abandoning his high-tech job to refocus on his relationship with a female as opposed to self-worth by social rank, but the whole pious genuflection before hormonal tyranny ignores the females are the ones imposing the race for social rank in the first place, ignores that without his fancy job she'll dump him in a heartbeat. Ellison's harlequin will not admit the people don't want to be saved from their degenerative drudgery, though unlike other examples here, Ellison was aware enough of human nature to show where that leads his hero.

 

Whose demand fuels industrial supply?

- and no money down!

I've been warming up to Cyberpunk 2077 more and more by ignoring the grind and just wandering about now and then. At least they included a tiny bit of content out in the badlands, away from the video billboard hellscape. Y'know, for us Gangrels. I was especially thrilled when I discovered the composting composition of the hills to the south. A landfill, bigger than the city itself (albeit not all in the game map and summarily rendered) is one element every modern-day setting should include, considering such do in fact exist. I don't mean just the increasingly continental great Pacific garbage patch, but paradisiac spots turned blemishes upon the face of the planet like Thilafushi.

 

It's all good to rail against Apple pushing a new smartphone every year, but where's the outrage against the billions stupid enough to buy it? You rail against chatbots as the new techno-Moloch, but it's not Sam Altman forcing reddit to fill up with AI slop. The users themselves are eating it up. Musk's Cybertruck may be an overpriced, malfunctioning road hazard, but plenty of suckers lined up for the nouveau-Hummer a few years ago. How many cases of makeup does the average ditz run through yearly? Or even monthly? How many plush orangutan dolls will soon be thrown away because millions of monkeys want to do like the monkey they saw? Until they spot the next fad...

 

In over a century of techno-dystopias the masses have been fed exactly the fantasy of victimhood they demand, an unending pretense of wizardly bogeymen exculpating the villagers with pitchforks and torches, the cold, inhuman metal face of science masking the subhuman appetites driving industry's depredations. Is technology dehumanizing? Good. Dehumanization would be the best possible outcome. "Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

 

 

 

 

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* Ooops, turns out they were in different categories. Kagan lost to Zelazny, three times at once.

Hie Thee to Space, Cowboy

"Now I'm lost in a sea of sunken dreams
While the sound of drunken screams echoes in the night"

 

Brandi Carlile - Dying Day

 

 

Continuing my thoughts on space cowboys, I chanced a sub-genre which should have been right up my apocalyptic-minded alley, Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. From the very first couple of short stories I was surprised to find his influence quite palpable in role-playing games -- and only then remembered the D&D spell memorization mechanic is indeed occasionally called "vancian" magic. Not to diminish the touch of Tolkien's fantasy races and Moorcock's chaos/order conflict and even older works, but the general feel of D&D, of "you all meet in a tavern" and the confused mix of tech and magic and quest hooks and magic devices and the adventuring party and bluff checks appears to owe most and most directly to Vance. He may not have originated all of them, but a surprising number of little details like, say grues and de(m)odands, prismatic sprays or the imprisonment spell and such-and-such-wizard's such-and-such-spell made it into game lingo over the decades. Which is not to call these, in themselves, detailed.

 

I've only bothered with the first couple of volumes, and am unlikely to continue. Being published decades apart ('50, '66, '83) those first two at least each read slightly different. The eponymous first is a collection of random short stories and has a more general fairytale atmosphere with alternate worlds, gigantic gods embodied, fair maids riding horses through meadows, a character shrunken and put in a jar, etc. The Eyes of the Overworld is another string of disparate chapters only slightly held together by featuring the same picaresque protagonist, but feels more consciously post-LotR in its more down-to-earth themes. In both cases though it takes very little time to spot weakness after weakness in the writing.

 

In his notion of preindustrial manners and mores Vance seemed content with mimicking Alexandre Dumas, with every single possible character from wizards to fishermen, priests to scullions and princesses to rat-men discoursing up and down, from phrase to phrase and page to page in nothing but the pompous, flowery boasts and imprecations of ancien regime dandies. His world-building is in fact... none of such. The geography could as easily be flipped upside down and jigsawed backwards. Grues, deodands, demons and other monsters are all the same breed of nondescript boogeymen. He may as well have called them all goblins or vampires. Per pulp fantasy routine, impressive-sounding place names and ancient empires lie strewn through the text, most forgotten by the next sentence, and even the few recurring ones no more developed than "place hero visited" with, if they're very lucky, precisely one colorful custom.

 

But to me the most infuriating part was the title: The Dying Earth. You'd think that would have something to do with it. No it does not. About once every other short story, a character might toss in a phrase like 'in this time when the sun is dying' to remind you what the setting should ostensibly concern. "Turjan of Miir" begins with the notion of preserving humanity before devolving to generic spell-slinging and "Guyal of Sfere" manages, by its last couple of pages, to scrape up a thematically appropriate concern for the preservation of knowledge in the face of decay. Aside from that, the entire opus may as well have been set at Scarborough Fair for all it matters. There's nothing to it but the same utterly generic sword-and-sorcery tripe supplied by a thousand other contemporaries. Even the few repetitions of "the sun will go black" make no sense. How often do you think about the sun eventually going orange? Or having shone brighter upon Snowball Earth? Societies which display no other notion of time or history, each isolated tribe utterly unmoored from its global context, somehow all uniformly know and believe this one token scene-setting sound bite, an event so slow they would have no way of tracking it. And it affects their lives not in the slightest.

Had these books not been picked up by DnD, would anyone remember them? Hell, considering even I was willing to try a second volume (more than I did for E.E. Smith) maybe Vance did something right after all. Look at the Numenera setting taking up and running with the 'use magic device' skill displayed by characters pointing tubes of blue whatever at each other in Eyes of the Overworld. Look at the roguish thieving Cugel disarming traps in a wizard's mansion (albeit by poking random furniture with a stick) and it's not hard to see how among the budding pastime of role-playing games in the '70s, players could let their imaginations fill in what became class features. The very vagueness of Vance's random babbling, the half-assed name-dropping of imaginary locales and featureless monsters, invites 'this would read cooler as:' extrapolation. (And probably explains why so many of his fans try to emulate such nonsense sensibilities.)

 

That's probably the best influence bad writing can hope to exert.

 

For comparison, though (so as not to rehash my overused reference to The Time Machine) try a very brief 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Forgotten Enemy. Here we have, just as the central point unjustly claimed by those Dying Earth buckle-swashes, Clarke's human remnants dwindling in the face of a cosmic shift. But this time the plot stays true to the central theme, the protagonist's circumstances changing according to logical ramifications, the conclusion fully in keeping with the premise.

 

More than other factors, that separates true speculative fiction from space cowboys, space operas, unresearched historical fiction and fantasy worlds whose characters are indistinguishable from adolescents of the writer's own social milieu. Is the setting in fact relevant? Or did the writer substitute the supernatural for incompetence in conveying both the super and the natural?

 

But, conversely, this also demonstrates our need for speculation. Fine, yes, send your cowboys to space. Just don't forget to make the space count for something. Even slapped together as a superficial pretext, the fantastic can spark activity in other minds who will complete the original half-baked idea, in a way that yet another war story or domestic drama simply will not. Half a century of dice and character sheets may not necessarily count as a writer's saving grace, but it's at least a saving throw.

Harrison Bergeron

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

________________________________________

"Hell emission
Sell emotion
Sick devotion
Down in the gutter"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco

________________________________________ 

 

 

It's news to me that (according to TVTropes at least) there have supposedly been various moves to read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron backwards, as a parody of dystopian fiction. Sounds like a bunch of Lit. students ran out of thesis ideas again. ("See the cradle? See the cat?") I suppose his somewhat flippant black humor would be easy to mistake for parody if you'd never noticed he employed the same in even grimmer contexts.

 

If Vonnegut mocked anything in the field, it was the highfalutin' tone of standard dystopian villains, the bloviating political scholars masterminding the brainwashing of the populace via secretive and sophisticated technological and psychological methods accessible only to some reclusive aristocratic cabal. Here, on the other hand, the end of civilization is not a fiendishly plotting mad scientist. It's a thug with a shotgun, standing up for the average Joe.

 

While Fahrenheit 451 has distinguished itself among famous dystopian works by illustrating the bottom-up anti-intellectual nature of information-age social decline so long before it became obvious, Bergeron closed the gap last decade as the political correctness police began actively enforcing the handicapping of anyone they deemed 'privileged' in the name of 'equity' to the point forcing you to wear a weighted yoke no longer falls outside the realm of their political discourse.

 

But Vonnegut's vision warrants even more recognition vis-a-vis ramping technological invasion of personal attention like infinite scrolling following on the heels of pop-ups and other ever more intrusive advertisement, algorithmically tailored personal content feeds, Linked-In spamming messages that You Are Being Watched and of course, most recently, chat-bots. For a decade I was aware my own attention span was shrinking, that I am increasingly prone to skim rather than read, clicking thoughtlessly back and forth through browser tabs, picking up whatever game quest pops up next. But then I was assuming I'd kill myself soon, so it just seemed a natural part of my decline. Might I presume that mindset illustrative of our entire society's willingness to succumb?

In case you got distracted and missed the point, Bergeron's dystopia imposes never gonna give you up equality by weighing down the strong and fast, by masking the beautiful never gonna let you down, and most importantly by forcing anyone of more than a gnat's intelligence to run around and desert you wear headphones blaring random noises at random intervals, constantly disrupting the thinking of everyone deemed a danger to the peace of mind of peaceful minds. Methods as crass and primitive as befits the system's populist rhetoric. Why just limit, manipulate, subjugate and police thought when you can outright prevent it?

Those computer game random pop-up barbarian attacks I cited last Sunday made me think back to said headphones. In a strategy game, it's a given that some places will be safer than others, that you will define front lines, guarded flanks and pastoral backwaters, that you will shift resources according to a greater, long-term... y'know... strategy? As with other examples like Ixion or cRPGs' overuse of ambushes behind doors or any other system where anything can blow up at any moment, those barbies teleporting in from offscreen seemed to imitate the handicapper general jumping in from stage left with her shotgun.

 

[Kramer bursts in. Audience cheers]

But don't forget why we have this. Because it sells. Because this definition of "fun" which should amuse none older than an infant without object permanence is upheld by 9/10 of our fellow apes. Serenity now.

 

As a last point, it seems many cannot reconcile Vonnegut's socialist views with his egalitarian dystopia. Except of course imposing equality is by no means implied when preventing wealth from imposing inequality. By the way, the rich are robbing you faster than ever. In the end, it turns out the thought-erasing headphones were merely sold in stores, and bought up by an all-too-eager audience.

See You to the Door, Space Cowboy

"A knight without armor in a savage land"

Have Gun - Will Travel theme song

 

Nothing much has come of any of the four? five? amateur MMO projects which sprang up in the wake of City of Heroes' closing, partly for the MMO genre collapsing and the reveal of fan-run CoH servers, but also because 'make Paragon City great again' never amounted to much of a business plan or creative direction in the first place. Even when straining for a bit of originality, Ship of Heroes for instance came up with "The new Superhero Sci-Fi MMORPG with Magic"* which... I suppose just about covers it? All of it? Maybe throw in some elves, killer clowns and xenomorphs and start intoning "tha voyd" just to top off the old pop culture grab-bag. After all, superhero comics have a long tradition of repackaging even longer traditions, slapping a cape on everything, be it Atlanteans, witches, Norse gods, extraterrestrials, and selling it to ten-year-old boys as a "new" copyrighted crime-fighter. A less defined genre there never was. But then, popular entertainment has always suffered from knockoffs given a perfunctory spackle to fit the ignorant masses' latest fad.

 

(Exemplifying the gratuitous, look over the past century's accumulation and stop me if you've seen this movie scene, comic page or book cover:

Back to a wall, squaring his broad shoulders, hefting his weapon, the hero leans his head toward a corner behind which approaches a menacing figure, at his other arm the requisite plucky yet palpitating damsel legitimizing his violence. He might be a cowboy, a noir detective, a barbarian, a space-man in a bubble helmet. His glorious tool of socially-acceptable carnage may be a sword, a pistol, a laser phaser blaster; the enemy a robot, mobster, desperado or dragon-goblin-zombie-pirate. Whatever.)

 

Of course, we can't really blame 'the-kids-these-days' for such superficiality, as I rather pointedly had to admit to myself a year or two ago when I finally decided to try reading one of 'Science' Fiction's most famous reference points, the Lensman books. I could barely struggle three quarters through Triplanetary before deciding I didn't really need to find out whether the hero gets the girl. Now, alright, lest I sound too unfair to E.E. Smith, maybe I should have started with Galactic Patrol (the real earliest story) instead of the officially less scientific prequel about space wizards gallivanting about entire galaxies for bajillions of years, conveniently locked in their own version of medieval stasis in perpetuity. I'll also admit I was instantly put off by the heavy emphasis on telepathy (especially as heroic) which made the novel's other events appear rather irrelevant. But the point remains that Smith's space opera could only count as more scientific by comparison with the truly absurd pugilism of the Barsoom books or other planetary romances preceding the 1930s. Lensman often gets cited for the dramatic escalation in destructive power the good guys and bad guys hurl at each other, but after a bit of Triplanetary I began to suspect this was motivated more by Smith's failure to maintain perspective or think through any ramifications of the poweroverwhelming space-stuff he wanted to hurl back and forth and merely jumping to the next and next cozily familiar scene of grimly determined heroes delving dark dungeons on solo missions to foil dastardly plots. Then more explosions.

How Robert A. Heinlein could apparently idolize Smith was beyond me until I realized the latter author made good on his predecessor's babbling by dragging the superman routine back to reality with scientific learning and practical applications. The Heinlein story most slavishly copying Smith's style (aside from a couple gun nut superspy novels) would have to be the ludicrous early effort Lost Legacy, with its emphasis on brain magic conveniently bypassing rational thought and the same breakneck rush through grandiose yet unanalyzed plot points. Of course, it doesn't help that by the time Smith re-tooled his early '30s serials into a supposed novel series it was ~1950, and a lot of James Bond -like early Cold War rhetoric was seeping into what may have already been heavily colored by the Red Scare of the early 20th century. It's hard not to read the supposedly physical villains being beaten by more 'spiritual' heroes as a jab at godless Bolsheviks' rapid industrialization. (Overcompensatingly insecure at that.)

 

But whatever else it is, it's poor Science F.

 

A fabulist as an "honest liar" must be judged partly on the parsimony of his fabulism. A good one will openly and honestly ask the audience to suspend disbelief for the necessary amount of phlebotinum to drive a plot. A bad one will counterfeit all aspects of a story, gratuitously, whether from incompetence or intellectual laziness or for pandering to the audience's more primitive emotional responses, and will demand you swallow the whole mess despite its incoherence. For comparison, try a novel I've mentioned before, H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon. It required a phlebotinum, an invented material which blocks gravity, to get its dynamic duo to said moon. Once there they meet a race which proves mostly benign, except that in acting toward their own security the selenites find it necessary to play the antagonist. Now switch back to Lensman with its angels vs. devils dichotomy following no natural motivations, its ever-growing slag-pile of technologies and superpowers, its Siegfried braving various dragon lairs to prove his superiority. At least 13th-century peasants marveling at Robyn Hode's marksmanship weren't pretending to have just invented bows and arrows.

 

Yes, it's an author's job to be unrealistic to some extent (otherwise you could just watch C-SPAN for fun) but the whole point of the super-normal is how it interacts with the normal. Otherwise you rapidly hit Robert Sheckley's Panzaism, where the weirdness grows mundane. You're spinning the elfemism treadmill, substituting superficial specialness for itself. A space cowboy with a laser pistol and a personal rocketship becomes just another cowboy on a horse with a pistol. Limiting such tech excuses makes for a better Spike. Conversely, it's one thing to have a cowboy call himself Paladin to deliberately evoke worlds and ideals past or imagined and question their congruity with brutal reality. It would've been quite another to fill the Wild West with plate armor and swordfights in the name of round tables.

 

Note, not only is such excess unbelievable but also unwieldy. It violates Poe's one effect, Chekov's gun and conservation of detail in general. The two problems can be encountered separately. Poe himself, despite being a solidly Romantic writer, channeled a great deal of fascination with (for the time, cutting-edge) forensic science into his Auguste Dupin stories. Here's one of the more extreme examples from Marie Roget:

"Now the human body, in general, is neither much lighter nor much  heavier than the water of the Seine; that is to say, the specific gravity of the human body, in its natural condition, is about equal to the bulk of fresh water which it displaces. The bodies of fat and fleshy persons, with small bones, and of women generally, are lighter than those of the lean and large-boned, and of men; and the specific gravity of the water of a river is somewhat influenced by the presence of the tide from sea."

No space cowboys here. That is a solidly realistic argument relevant to the story's plot and setting. However, the fact it drones on for three pages demonstrates that authors can always get lost in the weeds, especially when trying to provide background information. (To me, an even worse offender was Melville's wealth of sailing vessel minutiae in Moby-Dick.)

 

Now just imagine how much worse it would be if he were describing an imaginary magical property of an imaginary species in an imaginary fluid. The Florgles float in the Grimble unless it be the season when the mome raths outgrabe. That's what substituting a laser for a pistol does.

 

Sadly, the vast bulk of audiences will in fact demand meaningless detail precisely so that it can be ignored in favor of the same old limbic pay-offs, so they can pretend to engage with storytelling while merely seeking yet another fix of "hero punches villain; saves world" to the point the setting can be forgotten altogether. But as this has run on long enough, I'll get to The Dying Earth in a couple of weeks. (Then perhaps tear into Clarke's third law.)

 

__________________________________________________________________

 

 

 

* Y'know, there's this old story called The Argonauts. It's public domain and everything. Superheroes on a ship. There for the taking. Just sayin', unoriginality need not be so wholly undignified.

It Can't Happen Here

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip." 

 

 

There's a book I've been quote-mining recently, and you can expect me to keep doing so for a while longer. That's not due to its trenchant futurology or its lyrical virtuousity. Not that it's terribly written, but Sinclair Lewis' style is decidedly prosaic and strained a bit too hard to interweave It Can't Happen Here with both the middlebrow diction and jargon of 1935 and real-world references or analogies which have somewhat dropped out of public consciousness in the intervening ninety years and counting. Purely as a dystopian vision, it measures poorly against the field's defining works like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. It lacks the same grandiose sweep, the same universal insights. But, weirdly, all of the above can also be seen as its strong point.

 

I can't remember how I ran across the book, but its central villain's rise to power has tracked eerrily in every description and plot point that more modern phenomenon of Trumpism, from a lack of even casual acquaintance with the truth to blatantly insane campaign promises to fickle political alliances, to the blatant idiocy deliberately ignored by his supporters, to even the artificial folksiness and crass, casual dudebro mannerisms which should rightly shame any public figure out of the public eye. But don't.

 

Described from the viewpoint of a small-town New England newspaper editor, instead of dropping you in medias res into a dictatorship already established, this alternate America's rapid crash into fascism lays out the venal or delusional psychological tricks by which commoners allow or collude with their own descent into helpless subjects of a despot, during each step of heightening restrictions, privations and terror. As such the story falls into that rarer subgenre of an apocalyptic procedural, outlining day by month the personal impact of social decline, every social nicety you lose, every right you never knew you'd miss, every tiny vanishing luxury, every fresh insult piled upon injury.

 

But others surely have done all that better. The novel's true strength lies in the flip-side to its lacking universality, because it is indeed a vision of how it can happen (and is currently happening) here, in Anytown, U.S.A. Lewis captured facets of small-town yankee psychology which the more ambitious or flamboyant dystopias miss. The distinction is a white-collar vs. blue-collar one drawn elsewhere between, say, the Addams Family with their old-world manners and obscure tastes and The Munsters with their more limited appeal to the "meat&potatoes" 'Murican baseline, but also one of shallower social structures. I've said before that it's damned hard to find the traditional European gemeinschaft represented anywhere in American life, or, as a result, in their artistic output, except in stories about backwater dregs like Winter's Bone. Thus, while for example a previously discussed description of social decline in Il gattopardo might center on customs whose origins lay forgotten in the mists of time, ancestral homesteads, generational debts, restrained manners and privilege and art and millennial institutions like The Church, the cast of It Can't Happen Here inhabit a looser milieu of social clubs and college sports teams and puritanical frigidity.

 

Lewis manages to drive home the point that Americans' more confused loyalties in no way insulate them against a fascist takeover. Sure, the demographic friction might be a few centuries shorter in the making, but "niggers" 'n "kikes" nonetheless made acceptable targets of opportunity for profit-minded yankee rabblerousing. Instead of a few gigantic levers of traditional grievance which a European dictator might pull, a fascist takeover in the States must press a myriad tiny buttons, but these are still open enough for the pressing and less protected by a self-respecting bourgeois intelligentsia available overseas. All it takes is a few slogans, a few marching songs, a bit of folksy babbling about the good old days (whatever those might be) and the ever-useful harnessing of envy against one's neighbours, and up spring the gulags in Vermont as surely as they do in Siberia.

 

In may not be the most artfully penned world classic, but it's one everyone on this side of the pond probably should have read fifteen years ago.

The Engines of God

"Grabbed a book and read the cover
It honestly was beautifully done
Like trying to hide the daylight from the sun"

 

Modest Mouse - Fire It Up

 

 

Having spent much of my fiction reading the past decade on Wells, Heinlein and other duddies of venerable fuddiness, I've been meaning to catch up on more recent (relatively speaking) science fiction. Thus, based on the authors' recommendation below some page or another of A Miracle of Science I picked up Jack McDevitt's The Engines of God, the 1994 opener to what is apparently a rather lengthy series starring the same protagonist. That fixation dampens my further interest, but the first installment was palatable enough.

 

Aside from the necessary phlebotinum of a warp drive, the story sticks to fairly hard science basis. Heroic archaeologists are struggling to discover why a now-extinct alien culture got knocked back to the stone age before a bunch of rich fucks pave over the planet to breed more mindless wage slaves. Also, why would aliens visit our solar system without stopping by to say hello? And most importantly, what species in its right mind would plan construction projects on a boring geometric grid?

 

The core puzzle concerning various alien civilizations works out quite well in fact, slyly teased and corroborated just gradually enough to let the reader keep guessing, and delivers a memorable finale. Problems arise mostly with the stuff in between. It may seem a bit harsh to dredge up Ambrose Bierce's old witticism that such-and-such novel's covers are too far apart, but here we pretty clearly have a shorter novella interspersed with two or three short stories to pad it out to 400 pages to fit the mass market publishing paradigm.

 

As a flaw common to SF writers, characters take awkwardly long to differentiate, and some have little personality beyond filling a set piece like romance subplot or tragic death or disposable redshirt, which gimmicks as we all know all fiction must include on pain of conciseness. A Miracle of Science would actually serve as good counterpoint in looping its apparent digressions back into the main plot, which The Engines of God repeatedly fails to do with its designated comic relief and heroic stand and so forth. To fill the supposedly critical human interest components, an unnecessary proliferation of characters are given an unnecessary quantity of page space, which they by necessity spend engaging in various hijinks in parallel to the main attraction as a way of - supposedly - maintaining readers' interest.

 

But it's those humanizing elements which in fact feel more artificial, included to satisfy a lowest common denominator of social acceptability. The story needed a more tangible, physical conflict for its climax, plus an injection of tragic sacrifice, and it needed exactly 1.35 units of empowered modern heroine who must be supplied with a love interest as per subsection A, paragraph three of the storyteller's chewed cud of conduct, and we simply must have <A WHIMSY> by which to showcase her free spirit.

 

Too bad all that monkey-friendly storytelling is tainted by a legitimately interesting cosmic phenomenon and a well-paced intellectual, exploratory effort to unravel it, or it might have qualified as "literature" instead of lowly genre fiction.

The Crowd

 "Right now, I want to throw that word 'escape' out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled "escapist" if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane's characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and "escapist" to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only 'standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

[...]

Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder."

 

Ray Bradbury - 1956 editor's introduction to the fantasy collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories

______________________________________

 

 

When did I buy my copy of The October Country? Early teens, early '90s. The '80s paperback version was still on the shelves. It expanded my understanding of the word "horror" beyond slasher flicks and creature features to those more diffuse fears I had been taught to ignore. Fear of being ugly and despised, subverted by your own body, of being trapped and tethered, of loneliness, of the slow grinding passage of time. Hopes lost and the self dissipated. But though Uncle Einar, The Emissary or The Cistern made more of an impact on me, The Crowd maintained a background fascination for making much of so little.

 

"The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

 

It was only after moving to Chicago that I learned one of the most infuriating terms in the lexicon of mob stupidity: gaper's delay. Highways bottlenecked not by traffic accidents but by moronic hordes slowing their cars to gawp at the wreck. ("Rubberneckers" they also call 'em - cause even if you hung them from the nearest branch like they deserve, they'd bounce up and down endlessly blocking your way.) More infuriating are those who try to excuse such behavior by saying that "they're just people" or "it's only human" because of course they're right. It is human. Normal human behavior. Reiterated behind millions of windshields. An overwhelming, pervasive tribal ape need to participate in the suffering of others.

 

"It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum."

 

I had not appreciated, reading The Crowd so young, why it stuck with me, that it is not a story about traffic accidents at all, its events almost irrelevant when compared to the language in which they're described, the dripping disgust at compulsive group participation. This is a night for storytelling, and to most that means dissimulating and externalizing. The stories we tell ourselves keep us safe from deeper horrors. Chief among these the cozy belief that the monster is an alien thing, lurking out there in the dark beyond the safety of our campfire.

 

Except we killed those monsters a thousand, ten thousand years ago. The Nemean Lion's bones have long since rotted away, and the rest of the biosphere is following. A million species which took fifty million years to develop must die, not so that sapience might adventure to the stars or rise above the limitations of flesh, not for great works of art, philosophy and science, but so that billions of sacks of redundant simian flesh can hold hot-dog eating contests and bow for the ten thousandth time at a meteor or an elephant-headed statue or drawl patriotic songs into half-empty bottles of vodka or praise The Party while it grinds them into five-year plans. And any individual who disapproves of this grand nine-billion-fold pinnacle of creation must be silenced, effaced, erased, unmade, made one with the herd or the ground beneath its hooves. Don't you dare tell them they could or should be better.

 

The monster is ever-encroaching normalcy. It is every subhuman degenerate whose personality is the logo on its t-shirt or purse and the slogan on its throw-pillow or baseball cap. Is that not what every fanged and goggle-eyed mask would reveal if dropped, the very necessity for masks, for costumes, for uniforms and business casual attire? To camouflage the shame, the filth, the degeneracy of humanity? Enforced ignorance.

 

"that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous"

 

And for the proprietors of the apocalypse, a more refined torture: knowing you cannot escape the unknowing. What use is your prepared folder of evidence and reasoned argument when they have brute impact? They will make you one of their own, clean up your ragged frills of analysis and argumentation, smooth out the wrinkles in your brain, make you happy, make you excited at the prospect of the spectacle of the crash. No wonder, no criticism, just the mob and its appetites.

 

And the crash. 

Shallow Time

"If I had to do the same again

I would, my friend"

 

ABBA - Fernando

__________________________________________

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.""

 

Robert A Heinlein - from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

__________________________________________

 

 

Mentioning my mother and collections of fiction reminded me of struggling to find a few flicks we could both watch and discuss last year as family bonding. She being more diplomatic than myself picked a fair smatter of scifi, anime and other stock geek staples whose plot twists I dutifully predicted. Until, that is, we hit an Agatha Christie adaptation. Long story short, if you want your ass kicked in a trivia/trope contest try quizzing a sixty-something woman on Agatha Christie. There Will Be (tastefully minimized) Blood.

 

But then I've never been a fan of mystery/police/spy genres in the first place. Not even E.A.Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, prototypical as they're viewed of detective fiction. (Well, I tried leafing through The Purloined Letter in high school. Didn't grab me. Don't remember it.) Going through Rue Morgue and Mystery of Marie Roget the "proto" to the typical becomes fairly obvious, with much page space given over to superfluous details or bloviation which modern readers simply would not now accept in any genre except perhaps high fantasy. "Ripped from the headlines" had a long way to go to the now painfully familiar "bing-bong" of Law&Order.

 

Or maybe not that long when you think about it. One of those superfluous details concerns much of Marie Roget's plot happening along the Rue Pavee Saint Andree. Few hiways or byways retain such names now, but it sounded authentic in 1842. Not even two centuries. How short a time ago, historically, it was yet noteworthy for a road to be paved, and in the world's most famous and modern capital to boot! Even that doesn't imply a familiar environment (admittedly I'm also playing loose with a bit of linguistic ambiguity) as the "paving" at the time would've meant cobblestones. The smooth dark-gray roads so familiar to us now mostly proliferated with automobiles over the last century, and may or may not survive that shift to clean energy we won't be making anyway. From my understanding, a big reason we have so much asphalt is that the petroleum industry produces massive quantities of otherwise useless tar as a by-product of drink cups and fidget spinners.

 

"History" sounds long - especially in high school. But as I age I grow more aware of just how feeble a blip civilization has charted. We've all seen diagrams like this attempting to convey the minuscule sliver it occupies in geologic time, or heard the clock metaphor in which all recorded history occupies only the last split-second of a universal/planetary day. But maybe you could more fruitfully compare that duration instead to your own lifespan. Taking Hammurabi as rough milestone (~1800B.C.) you can round off to 4000 years of anything resembling sociopolitical thought as we'd understand it. By the time you hit forty you will have lived through 1% of it. If you're twenty, that's 1% since Jesus and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Even if you stretch history back to the agricultural revolution, retirees can claim 1% of that.

 

Does 1% not sound like much? But what other axes of human existence are only a hundred times greater than you?

If you're 1.6m in height, the Earth's equator is ~25 million times as long.

You are one in soon-to-be 9 billion naked apes on the planet.

Should we even try to compare how much of the extant (and ever-increasing) supply of fiction you've experienced? Or how much of the body of physical science you grok? Or how much of the world's GDP you've got cluttering your apartment?

1% is massive!

 

As a result, history sits less incomprehensibly beyond human experience than other fields of study. Many now laugh at such a passe fad of yesteryear as fidget spinners, but it's almost literally yester-; the population which spun them in grade school has not even hit voting age yet. Randall Munroe runs occasional xkcd gags making you feel old for how many memories (film releases, etc.) happened closer to your birth year than today... but simply finding so many within a single human lifespan says something about the length of our experience relative to cultural shifts, which are themselves anchored to their time and place. Do Agatha Christie stories sound dated with their interwar railcars and corded telephones? But then the entire crime mystery genre may well become 20th-century period fiction given how smartphones have narrowed and invalidated its gamut of plots.

 

Continuing that train of thought, how many of the institutions and ideas you've always taken for granted as permanent fixtures of human life are in fact spring chickens? I don't mean just the obvious ones like teh internets, but literacy, mass production, mental health, or even something as basic as countries. Not that republics of one form or another did not exist here and there, but the tipping point where they became the accepted norm was the wave of revolutions which swept Europe in 1848... and even then it didn't immediately stick. You can argue just how far a head start France, Switzerland, Britain or the U.S. got in such matters, but the world as a whole lived and died more for the country's king than for other permutations of the two.

 

If your great-grandparents are still alive, ask them for stories from their own great-grandparents about it. Peoples, tribes, kinship were acknowledged, sure, but the idea of a nation being based, bottom-up, on its inhabitants' perceived similarity was generally ignored for most of history. Land was owned by nobles and anyone who was not a noble got bought and sold with the land, or died on behalf of the nobles to decide who would own them. For all the the jabber about "pro patria mori" it was not nationalism or patriotism which defined honor, duty et cetera but fealty to a ruling autocrat or oligarchy, and oaths were sworn to rulers instead of abstract borders on a map. That borders defined rulers and not the other way around was still a novel concept by the time asphalt started replacing cobblestones from 1900 onwards. That would be in your grandparents' grandparents' time. In that same timeframe Communism rose and fell as ideology and practice. My own grands were born swearing fealty to The King, spent most of their lives pretending not to hate The Party and died cursing the omnidirectional grift, graft and cronyism of modern multi-party politics.

 

For much of the world autocracy never stopped being the norm, even where pretense of elections is staged.

 

So how confident are you that the era of nation-states, younger than even Poe's invention of the detective, will persist for the rest of your 1%? Here in the U.S. at least there is no devil more reviled by the hillbilly right wing than "globalism" (which is to say anything not wrapped in an American flag) except perhaps those damn dirty liberal elites. The yokels would facetiously cite nationalistic devotion as a primary motivation. Yet they've elected a would-be theocratic emperor to tear the nation down. Maybe you never had a choice in preserving nations past their bicentennial expiration date, but only deciding what came next: an open world in which ordinary citizens have access to global culture and trade, or regression to a neo-feudalism in which everything must go through His Majesty Trump I and Tsar Putin making common cause against their carefully corralled peasantry, at least until Emperor Xi once again claims the throne above the intersecting axes of the universe.

 

And what comes after that... is sticks and stones, because with every 1% energy and material reserves deplete, the biosphere degrades, and history slides back full-cycle toward prehistory. The next 1%, or the 1% after that, appear less and less likely to be recorded.

The Cycle of Undeath

"Parasite. Slowly I approach him. Cancer. He allows his eyes to meet mine. Disease."

V:tM-Redemption - NYC Hub Rap

 

Lovecraft's The Shunned House (which you may want to read if you hate spoilers) feels fairly typical of his brief career's early half in its gothic horror scene-setting. But like Herbert West, it also draws upon Science Fiction sufficiently to hint towards his later shift toward materialistic explanations. Seriously, how many vampire stories culminate in defeating the monster not by religious rite or secrets of the ages passed down by quaintly ethnic informants, but by the thoroughly modern sanitary expedient of jugs of sulfuric acid? After all, vampire myths were at least as likely to resemble ghosts in most mythologies rather than solid corpses. In fairness, memorable but not HPL's finest work. His customary purple prose ran away from himself, as did his effort to provide historical context for his purple people-eater. But that whole gritty, slimy, chthonic nastiness imbuing what is rather explicitly a reimagined vampire myth got me thinking about the waves of vampiric (and to a greater extent, undead) portrayals as either super or natural.

 

Stoker's Dracula provides a bit of both. Educated, refined and imperious its antagonist may be, but one of the book's best executed scenes had him descending a sheer stone wall head-down in a splayed-limb, reptilian crawl, a suddenly alien, animalistic perspective shift. By the time movies rolled around in the early 20th century, monsters were expected to be monstrous and Count Orlok (rather exactly contemporary to The Shunned House) played up the second angle. Bela Lugosi was more ambivalent and Christopher Lee (conscious of the character's power/sex/violence appeal, especially to women) transitioned more fully toward the first. By the time I took an interest, the market was already redefined by Anne Rice's sexualized, romanticized vampires, which her own characters in Interview consciously verbalize as a new evil for a new age: no longer bedraggled graveyard ghouls but sleek, idealized Prince Charmings. Notably, even imitators from other genres, like the electric space vampire haunting a candle (yes, seriously) from ST:TNG's laughably terrible Sub Rosa episode, toed the new line of ethereal, sanitized parasitism, replete with dainty Victorian duds.

 

The inevitable overshoot into Twilight's idiotic emo sparkles made most genre fans finally aware that something, somewhere, had gone un-horribly off the rails. But though attempts have cropped up with some regularity to return vampirism to its monstrous roots, these have hardly contested three decades of Rice-Meyer dominance. Maybe Bloodlines 2 will help with that. Maybe not. One hopes.

 

What truly mentally clicked into conjunction with The Shunned House though was a surprisingly engaging third act of WH40K: Rogue Trader, concerning the setting's Drow knockoffs the Drukhari. Though technically evil space elves, physically thriving on Sadism of the most vicious bent also brings vampirism into the mix.

Apostrophic violation! Summon the Grammarian Imperialis!

A reliance on telepathy which could unduly sanitize the proceedings is offset by the sheer gruesomeness of their methods of extracting said psychic suffering. Something of the Orlokian ghoul seeps back into their bloodthirst and mangling torments. As with Sub Rosa, I find this side attraction merely touching on the genre more informative than official "Vampire" fare as an indicator of undercurrents moving with or against the main tide, not least because like Star Trek, Warhammer is a market force in its own right, and (again like Star Trek in the '90s) one striving for legitimacy.

 

Granted throughout all this pop culture has fixated on a different breed of undead, zombies, which have proliferated since the Living Dead days like... some kind of infectious plague. But though they really are monstrous, deformed, animalistically vicious, their core feature of losing control or intelligent planning makes zombies a very different narrative device, demonstrated by every zombie plot shifting away from them and toward survivor infighting as source of conflict. Nevertheless, the proliferation of movies about earthier, less powerful, more physical ghouls at the same time as vampires lost such traits demonstrates a market reaction against prettified monsters.

 

The new age movement has come and gone, so maybe its new evil can follow. The idea that villainy or monstrosity can be sanitized, or excused as women's sexual ideal, needs a solid stake through its heart.