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.

Variable Star

Milking a famous author's name after death seems almost inevitable (see "Herbert" and all the books which are very much not Dune) but even when done with the best of intentions and a modicum of talent, the result usually disappoints.

 

Variable Star was based on a seven (8-1) page outline discarded by Robert Heinlein in 1955. Its core plot recalls his other stories from that time to the point of repetitiveness, especially Starman Jones and Time for the Stars (and I already said one reminded me heavily of the other) but much of the rest reads like fan fiction. So if you're into dropping a lot of names and references from Heinlein's career, it's not the worst thing to spend a couple days on. But it's still, unmistakably, Robinson's book and not the master's.

 

Characters adopt a 1940s "wise guy" patter more than Heinlein's cowboy gentleman banter, military references are replaced with jazz, lessened social transgressions would freak out few mundanes and alien mindsets are not delved. Still though, it was nice to catch echoes of The Roads Must Roll and Farmer in the Sky and the core plot's individualism shines through and though I'm not crazy about his style, for the life of me I can't deny Robinson "gets" the old sailor so thoroughly that no digressions come across as insulting to his memory. If you go into it looking for an homage and not a recovered work, you'll probably enjoy Variable Star well enough.

 

But I do have to wonder at returns on time investment.

Though I've sampled a bit of each, I generally avoid the by-products of creativity: adaptations, fan works, biographies, comment sections, etc. They leave a sour aftertaste of idolatry, no matter how interesting the central opus or personage, a squelching muck sensation of group validation. Though I've spent far more time on The History of Middle Earth, its frequent tedium has been offset by added value, not that of fiction but of a study in the creative process itself. The same was to a lesser extent true of For Us the Living, which retained enough meat on the original bones to be contrasted fruitfully with the author's later approach to storytelling. Something like Variable Star, on the other hand, cannot help but feel watered down in its primary field (SF) for all the effort spent on referencing the original author, which references in turn serve no further purpose but fan service.

 

At some point it probably is best to let dead authors lie.

Time Enough for Love

"Your goddess is bathed in gold while keeping us in line
We're killing each other for a woman in the sky"

 

"The end is the same for everyone
Should be enough for us to be as one
Watch me fall apart over you
Watch me fall apart tryin' to please you"

 

Nothing But Thieves - I'm Not Made By Design / Six Billion

 

 

Though marketed as a novel, we're really talking about a collection of short to novella-length stories, plus a couple sets of aphorisms composing The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - a fix-up novel if there ever was one. But being a fan generally of Heinlein's other work, the book also carries a bitter note. Time Enough for Love marks the beginning of the end, the tipping point of decline in the master's career, after which he focused increasingly on the "world as myth" notion which bore little fruit despite encompassing four volumes and spare.

 

I'll grant I'm also biased against its central figure. Though Lazarus Long has been touted as Heinlein's chief protagonist (and is indeed the most recurring one) I've always considered Jubal Harshaw the better type specimen. Where Heinlein's earlier works (especially the "juveniles") promoted boy scout grade honesty, as he aged his heroes acquired more and more of a distasteful taste for lying under the moral umbrella of some underdog status, e.g. Friday. In Time Enough for Love at least, the heavy emphasis on Lazarus as unreliable narrator and lovable scoundrel begins to wear on itself after the twentieth repetition.

But most will focus on the collection's recurring theme of, well, love. Illicit love. Illicit sexual love. Computer programs, age differences, homosexuality, prostitution and especially incest in several directions. If it seems a tad over-stretched, consider it was published in 1973, as the hippie era waned and free love was once again ground under the heel of Americans' habitual puritanical repression. The book reads, more than anything, like a last orgasmic gasp of the sexual revolution before being subverted by superstitious ritual, romantic fables and (in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal) feminist condemnation of sexuality as male aggression.

He takes it in some odd directions even by his own standards, for instance the stance he adopted in more than one book that overpopulation should not be addressed by population control but by interplanetary and interstellar travel, a new wave of colonial expansion. Unrealistic from simple thermodynamics, but also leading more than once to passages sublimating the joy of sex into a pregnancy fetish, a bit Freudian as the author himself died childless. The lengthy discussion of the twue meaning of wuv winds down into the same unintended(?) head-trip as it seems Lazarus' entanglement with Dora instilled both romantic love and a death wish in him. Reading through not just that but the passages at the end where Lazarus is shamed by his family into enlisting to die in WW1 (an echo of that nastier Starship Troopers machismo Heinlein normally kept in check) put me in mind of one of my older linguistic observations.

I find the phrase "make love" both primitively hokey and weirdly apt. Pair-bonding is the fabrication of attachment, literally making emotion in another, inducing devotion to be cashed in later, a spell serving the caster not the target. And that, in turn, makes me think of the one story in Time Enough for Love not dealing with love as a primary topic: that of the lazy farm-boy who ends up dodging his way through the military for a pension, and surviving, and thriving, instead of being packed off to death in the trenches with a white feather because a man's gotta do. I very much doubt Heinlein intended his book to send the message that for men love is death, at least not consciously, but given enough rope he would appear to have hanged himself.

Cc: Utnapishtim

Around 2010 I was reading something from the 1950s and was amused at realizing the author had been inspired by work from the 1890s. More recently I read something that other worker had worked in 1915, and found it odd to see him reference something from 1775. But is it so long ago? 109 years vs. 140, give or take a generation, still amounts to a house of mirrors. Maybe that's what writers are, prisms through which the incommensurate past may be broken into intelligible wavelengths, and refracted futures focused onto a microscope slide. If you can only point your antenna through the static...

Friday

"People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living."

We begin with a spy thriller in medias res, segue into a series of mildly suggestive quasi-sexual encounters, fly on supersonic jets, praise cats, sneak across some borders, more canoodling, some vague kvetching about economics and multiple currencies, win a lottery, maybe get back to that spy stuff at some point...? Maybe. Oh, and clairvoyance. Spaceships! And did we mention genetic engineering? Lots of punching, at any rate. Plus a space elevator! In bed!

I had avoided Heinlein's Friday until now because his last few books (excepting the excellent Job) were a bit dodgy, and the basic premise of "sexy superspy" seemed too blatantly riding the Cold War spy thriller craze. Comments from people who had read it (like "I don't know what he was trying with Friday") certainly didn't help, and pretty much any review will comment on its disjointed lack of narrative.

 

After a full read, I would guess that in format, Heinlein was likely emulating picaresque novels, a style influential yet largely outgrown by modern storytelling and our greater awareness of causality and plot progression. Compounding that, some of the heroine's convenient lucky breaks (admitted as such toward the end) only make sense as contrivances to fit Friday into Heinlein's latter-career "world as myth" books, as interventions by his time traveler brigade. Also, you can see the ending's general shape forty pages into a novel pushing four hundred, and though a good enough ending, it only emphasizes the gratuitously circuitous route to reach it.

 

You're left with the title character herself to reflect on those by-roads' significance, but she simply does not change enough, does not learn enough, does not contemplate enough to lend the events relevance. The whole point of a picaresque protagonist as I understand it is watching a clever, relatable yet somewhat contemptible bottomfeeder slither through society's cracks, and this simply does not mesh with Heinlein's general style, in which heroes simply KNOW BETTER THAN YOU and aren't afraid to bloviate about it. Simply put, he strained too hard to make Friday sympathetic and superior for her travails to truly connect, and the way half the cast rematerialize as accessories to her denouement clinches it.

Weirdly, the book might've read better stretched out to a sequel to allow each individual episode proper development and contextualization. As it stands, episode after episode are dropped in as set pieces, many of them lifted from previous works and just as quickly dropped. One glaring example would be the interjection of space distance calculations as in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, there befitting its teen hayseed's sense of wonder yet here clashing with the technically adept and worldly superspy. Too much of Friday gives the impression of The Author merely playing the role of himself, impulsively aping his own style with no end in sight.

Yet still... maybe not... maybe... that ending. For those who've had to tightwire between freedom and isolation, for those stranded by their own transcendence, for alien, alienated half-men, it cannot help but twinge.

A Tale of Two Titles

"I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea."

I've been re-reading Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky... or, well, skimming the tedious Boy Scout filler to reach the couple of meatier chapters about farming in the sky. That line caught my attention because it's put into the hero's mouth purely to prop him up as a strawman to be knocked down into an appreciation of womankind later on. Heinlein did in fact use it elsewhere (damned if I can find it now) with an adult commenting on a boy that when he hits his teens he should be placed in a barrel and fed through the bung-hole, and at adulthood either the lid removed or the bung driven in. Both times Heinlein was apparently paraphrasing Mark Twain (though the original quote seems to have been muddled by history) who had been more firmly on the pro-bung lobby. But it is interesting how much softer Heinlein applied the same quote to girls (strawman opinion to be torn down) versus boys (grumpy comment, still comedic but left to stand.) A second look at the novel raises the question of why the female characters were necessary at all, being, as mentioned, a Boy Scout story in which a teenager and his father move to Ganymede to plant beets or beans or broccoli or whatever. It would've made a perfectly workable young adult Robinsonesque yarn. Why were the men not sufficient unto themselves?

On a completely unrelated topic, my eyes fell across a book title recently: Staging Masculinity. I almost walked on by without a second thought. For once I'm perfectly happy to judge a book by its cover and assume it the same social constructionist palaver we've all seen reiterated a thousand times a year, spackled over with some playwright jargon, some excuse to shit on men for an easy sale to soccer mom amateur theater groups. But the title itself reminded me how strenuously we avoid turning the same critical eye toward women's behavior.

How do women stage their femininity?

not sure if this is InXile's or GoG's ad copy

I deleted some spam recently urging me to buy the "Colorado Collection" of Wasteland 3, which I won't be doing anytime soon given the game's good initial setup but poor handling of factions, companions, encounter diversity, character advancement, economy, plot, etc. and its transparent attempt to cover up these lacks with feminist pandering to distract critics. Doesn't seem they've changed their tune either, telling me to take command of a squad of:

- Desert Rangers

- lawmen

- women

Y'know... women. Law-men, and also wo-men. Class: women. Race: women. Background: women. Education: women. Qualifications: women. Prior experience: women.

Entitlement: women.

I did run across another title recently, and this one I probably will look into: Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman. Don't get me wrong, I'm expecting a hefty dose of primitivist hippie garbage riding the naturalistic fallacy into the ground - but juxtaposed with 1950s social repression it should still yield a few good observations. What really piqued my interest though (in a "my enemy's enemy" sort of way) was Wikipedia's insistence on including this line in the book's very introduction at the top of the page: "in later years, retrospective reviewers criticized Goodman's exclusion of women from his analysis" - and also Zimbabweans, yak herders or the line-up of the 1960 Icelandic national football team.

 

Heavens forfend a male speak without subsuming himself to the interests of women. Why exactly? It's not like women at the time could not publish anything from pulp detective novels to social critiques. In fact The Feminine Mystique launched around the same time and as far as I can tell out-sold Growing Up Absurd at least three-fold. How does yet nobody bat an eyelash at this hypocritical core dogma of female chauvinism: that women are more capable and superior to men in every possible way and never need a man's help, and also HOW DARE YOU slack off white-knighting for us for even a single second, you filthy pigs!

Staging Masculinity - book titles like that are themselves the staging of femininity. Nothing is more feminine than entitlement, whether to demand men's service or pass judgment on men or seek to invalidate men's right to live their own lives, or simply claim, by blanket uterine fiat, that everything must be for and about women.

And we haven't even gotten to the question of for whose benefit, for which audience is that masculinity being staged?

The King, the Pirate and the Nomenklatura

"Oh, there are cracks in the road we laid

But where the temple fell
The secrets have gone mad
This is nothing new
But when we killed it all
The hate was all we had"

 

Slipknot - Psychosocial

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"'Pravda' doesn't mean 'truth.' Pravda means whatever serves the world Communist revolution."

Robert A. Heinlein - The Future Revisited (1961)

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One of my various surreal encounters with a feminist professor was prompted by her using the word "patriarchy" to condemn a hypothetical situation of a family being dragged down by a grandmother's leadership. I pointed out that "pater"-"archos", father rule, does not inconceive whatever she thinks it inconceives, and was racking my brain trying to remember the correct anthropological context for elder male figureheads. Luckily she pre-empted any embarrassment due to ignorance on my part... by indignantly declaring that, no "in my classroom patriarchy is any system where men and women have different roles" and that sure as hell shut me up. I never knew being an assistant professor at a backwoods state university empowers one to simply redefine all language with the confidence of a fourth grader playing Scrabble. She sure kwyjibo-ed herself out of that mess!

Ah, screw it. I don't want to ruin my mood today by talking about feminism. I just did a page on it last week. Let's watch a movie instead.

The King is... well, it's about one of Shakespeare's various kings, which I've never read aside from Dickie Tres. This one's about Hank the count-your-fingers (fun fact: he eventually shat himself to death) and his swaggering embarrassment of a friend Falstaff, one of the Immortal Bard's more celebrated characters... and that's saying something. Good flick all told, albeit woefully misrepresenting the source material if you believe the history and literature departments. They didn't even do that one speech. Still, good acting (man, I have got to see that new Dune adaptation) and costumes, lovely cinematography, and manages to truly own its dramatic pauses. It does carry obvious hints of riding Game of Thrones' coat-tails, including making the Dauphin into a cackling cartoon villain worthy of the Lannisters or Targaryens. But, this same approach lends the various battle scenes a welcome realistic lurch and crunch. Overall though, you're still better off watching The Hollow Crown.

 

Then, after two hours of men butchering each other in tribal territorial contests, enter a princess the better to browbeat them.

Ah, crap.

You idiots are just trying to push me toward antifeminism, aren't you? Fine.

Skimming the original play reveals Katharine's part stretched only as far as some weak comic relief filler about awkwardly negotiating a bilingual handjob. Reimagined here, she's a purse-lipped, contemptuous moralist openly mocking both her dead brother and his killer her bethrothed in flawless English, plus her father the madman for good measure. In the original script she laid it on even thicker: "My father is old and tired and he no longer has the will to fight. But I am young and I have that will in abundance." She's also prescient about the Hundred Years' War's eventual outcome (remember, according to feminists women have "different ways of knowing") and spouts anachronistic lines like "all monarchy is illegitimate" in 1400, two hundred years before even open revolutionaries would work their way up to mere parliamentarians. And of course it's only her input which allows Hal to unveil the mastermind who led him into declaring an unjust war.

Note this femtastic denouement is doubly gratuitous. For one, the movie already included a nearly identical scene of Hal being warned about court intrigue by his sister, who did not display the same sneering condemnation. For another, it's not as though Shakes couldn't have written Kate as a righteous, bitter, incisive spitfire if he'd wanted to. Ol' Mags in Richard III fills that role quite nicely. No, the real issue is that in order to sell today, the script absolutely needed to climax (pun very much intended) with a scene of a(ny) woman openly bashing a(ny) man as "vain" "foolish" "easily riled" "easily beguiled" and scorning his accomplishments. The fact she calls him "young" might seem odd given the actors look about the same age... until you find the historical Catherine of Valois was in fact fifteen years younger than the historical Henry. Given the movie's a nonstop cavalcade of misrepresentations and blatant lies from start to fin, casting the future Muad'dib as Henry was motivated by standard Hollywood prettiness, but don't imagine if they'd cast an older actor they would've missed the opportunity for Catherine to lambaste him as a washed-up geezer. Every detail is yet another opportunity to tack on one more insult to the openly anti-male diatribe serving as pay-off to two hours of male suffering. Just as with video game examples described in other posts, the real point is to hammer home the righteousness of female supremacism by juxtaposing a positive female with negative males. Oh, that poor angelic, brilliant young Katey, beset on all sides by her husband's rashness and gullibility, her father's insanity, her brother's sadism, her screenwriters' utter indifference to fairness or reason...

 

See, that's the problem with me not wanting to talk about FEMale chauvINISM. There is no modern creative field which has not been utterly, mortally suffused with anti-male vitriol. No books, movies, serials or games. Nothing is written, acted or doodled today but it is immediately repurposed to openly abuse men somehow, to say nothing of rewriting older works like The Lord of the Rings as propaganda for female superiority and entitlement.

Which brings us back to Heinlein's description of he and his wife's visit to the USSR.

 

"Mrs. Heinlein told [other tourists] that we were now going to Vilno and in answer to more questions, she explained that Vilno was the capital of Lithuania, one of the Baltic republics taken over by the U.S.S.R. about twenty years earlier. A Russian translator, a young woman about twenty-three, was in the waiting room some distance away; she overheard this - and rushed over and butted in. With shrill indignation she informed us and the others that Mrs. Heinlein was lying - that Lithuania had always been part of the Soviet Union! [...] every word, every source of information available to her has been government controlled - books, magazines, television, radio, newspapers, everything. It is almost impossible to describe this; it has to be experienced - but it feels a little like being smothered in cotton wool. It is a very odd feeling and it overtakes one after only a few days in the Soviet Union. I can’t describe it, put it over emotionally… but try to imagine a situation in which every textbook, novel, magazine, you name it, is published by the Government Printing Office, every editor is a political employee - and censor. [...] But the last and most important factor is that it starts so young. [...] We were taken into a kindergarten class, perhaps thirty boys and girls five or six years old - they had not yet learned to read. They gave a little performance for us - a little girl recited a poem, a little boy delivered a memorized prose recitation, the class sang a song. The children were healthy and clean and well dressed and happy and it was all very charming indeed, much like a parallel welcome to a visitor in one of our own kindergartens.
After we were outside and temporarily out of earshot of any of the local people, Mrs. Heinlein asked me if I had understood it; I admitted that I had caught only half a dozen words - I do not speak Russian - ordering a meal or directing a taxi driver is my outside limit.
'Well,' she answered, 'the little girl was reciting the life of Lenin, the little boy gave a speech about the Seven Year Plan, and the song the class sang was about how we must all fight to preserve our revolution.'"

Some of you might scoff at Heinlein's description as hyperbolic, or a relic of the fifties. Allow me to shatter that delightful skepticism. I was one of those children, or at least a beast very much of their circus. I was in fact born into one of those old Second World regimes before emigrating to the States, and my first grade year was interrupted by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sometime in the preceding year, my class gave exactly the sort of performance the Heinleins witnessed, and my family still ribs me about getting up there and confidently belting out a poem about the "Beloved Party" not that I remember the event aside from indeed reciting something in front of a crowd. I can only assume my teacher made me memorize it. The political content held about as much meaning for my five- or six-year-old self as would a dissertation on gynecology.

But you Love the Party, don't you?

Don't you?

DON'T YOU?!?

Even more of you might contend that the U.S.A. or other countries given over to politically correct propaganda are not policed by a Government Printing Office. True... but then The Inquisition was technically never a single institution either. Didn't matter. Go ahead and ask your neighbours if any of them are practicing Cathars.

 

As all forms of mass insanity feed on the same human weaknesses, similarities between popular movements, be they religious, racist, political or psychosocial, are by no means accidental; purging the intelligentsia is always one of their early moves. By entrenching themselves in universities' humanities or soft/social science departments and increasingly bloated administrations over the past two generations, feminists gave themselves veto power over definitions of education or a civilized upbringing. From there their precepts trickled outward into lower education, training and rehabilitation programs, and from there public and business policies. The rabid witch hunt that is the MeToo movement is merely one of the manifestations of a mass insanity half a century in the making.

And, like any effective brainwashing, it gets you young and never lets go. Slogans on posters in grade schools promoting "equality" always implying this can be achieved by more concessions and sacrifices from men; workplace harrassment policies leading to re-education facilities; campus rape counseling teaching young women that they are not responsible for their own actions, that any dissatisfaction is cause for banishing a male; but most of all, our lovely modern media. Our public figures are not hired or discovered; they are appointed by political lobbies, and the largest one retains its veto power. Their output toes the "man bad, woman good" party line, and anyone who steps over it gets slapped with a harrassment lawsuit or is simply fired under threat of fanatical backlash. You can't make a video game about fantasy dwarves fighting fantasy orcs without constantly reiterating the superiority of she-dwarves and she-orcs, because that's the only fantasy we're permitted. You cannot make a movie about soldiers choking to death in the mud at Agincourt in 1415 without tacking on a few scenes where a perfect female browbeats those inferior males.

Luckily, The King at least makes an easier job of my habitually awkward segues, because Catherine the Sanctimonious was played by Lily-Rose Depp. Yes, as in that Depp, the one everyone's talking about. Let's remember the problem with #MeToo witchcraft libel is not that individuals accuse each other. Such accusations are a perfectly reasonable facet of a fair society. The problem is that everyone is already primed, by both protective instinct and vindictive indoctrination, to believe a woman's claim against a man. This is hardly a new issue. "When did you stop beating your wife" was popularized as a stereotype of bias for a century before hashtag mobs precisely because such slander is most easily swallowed. We instinctively protect the females of our tribe. It doesn't help, however, that entire generations have now grown up imbibing nothing but media in which the woman is always right and the man is always wrong, in which male guilt is pre-judged before we even meet a plaintiff. Lily-Rose Depp poured her own drop of fuel on her father's narrowly extinguished pyre, as did everyone else involved in The King.

 

As a matter of fact, Johnny Depp himself carved his own name more deeply into the ostrakon with every scene where Jack Sparrow absorbed a slap from a woman while increasingly accepting that he deserves to be slapped by women. So I'm not particularly encouraged by his court victory if all it does is enable him in making more movies where women are always entitled over pre-emptively wrong men.

As for the rest of us, I think the segments of the populace who've gotten sick of the feminist inquisition breathing down their necks might be celebrating a bit prematurely. It would be nice to think women can no longer simply have a man fired and blacklisted (or tortured to death in prison as a rapist) by no more than pointing their fingers at him... but don't hold your breath. Remember they control the horizontal spread of information by dictating media platforms' censorship policies, and the vertical by retaining control of every single humanities and soft science department.

 

Feminists will now do what tyrants always do when faced with dissent: crack down even harder. They will simply move the goalposts, redefine the issues to retain their martyrdom and moralistic fiat, just as that professor did by redefining "patriarchy" at a moment's whim to suit herself. I honestly don't know how successful they'll be. Likely the looming economic crisis will remind many women of just how useful a self-sacrificing male provider can be, which could push their methods of control (overt vs. covert) in either direction. But remember Edward Scissorhands is still stuck in complacent suburbia. We still live in a society where any six year old already knows women are better than men, and men deserving of abuse, with the same unthinking acceptance as I knew the virtues of The Party, because hundreds of millions of youths have been raised on a feminist's definition of equality: she makes the rules and you shut up you filthy pig!

They have the media, they have the schools, they have the government and an overwhelming mass of institutionalized true believers. They appoint the bureaucrats. They write the Pravda.

You have a cartoon pirate whose great victory amounts to not getting lynched.

Rocket Ship Galileo

"They were headed skyward, out and far."

 

They're gonna fight Space Nazis! In space!

 

Having missed out on reading the so-called Heinlein Juveniles as a juvenile, I initially hesitated picking them up in my thirties. Luckily, for the most part, the 'young adult' slander doesn't stand up to a comparison of Heinlein's writing to anything that passes for mature popular entertainment, either then or now. Start with anything with a laugh track and work your way to reality TV, with a stopover in FiftyShades-ville, all set to a soundtrack of dime a dozen 'oooh baby baby I love you baby' pop songs. Aside from their consistent viewpoint of a clever young small-town lad exploring the universe, these novels are more thoughtful, more scientifically literate and more transgressive than a Star Wars audience can stomach.

Rocket Ship Galileo, though, stands as a noteworthy exception deserving of its 'juvenile' condemnation, more similar to his loosely affiliated boy scout story A Tenderfoot in Space than the wider collection in its plot and moralistic simplicity. Written in 1947 at the very start of Heinlein's career, it also mirrors By His Bootstraps in displaying far more outside influences than the author's own personal style. The gentleman scientist cobbling together his own means of transport to the moon can't help but recall Jules Verne, as does the cannon-like phlebotinum of atomically-volatilized zinc to justify a rocketship the size of a recreational vehicle with no necessary infrastructure, none of the mad scramble for funding tying together the more realistic plot of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

 

The rest is fairly generic, with space nazis as blatant stand-ins for desperados or pirates (substitute "terrorists" in the present day) and the three eager young space cadets' personalities overlap to the point you'll be confounded in recalling which one of them has the camera and which one's the pilot and which one... is also there. (Was he the one working the radio?) The grand reveal of a long-dead Lunar civilization (unlike the similar moment handled as a heroic denouement in Farmer in the Sky) is here just glossed over as a de rigueur Scie Fie gimmick, immediately forgotten in favor of duking it out with the aforementioned Space Nazis in space. The supposedly moon-shaking realization that moon craters come not from meteorites but from a long-ago nuclear war comes across as gratuitously paranoid for Heinlein, usually reluctant to trade verisimilitude for drama or treat worthy topics as shock value one-liners.

Still, though much like For Us, The Living this early effort remains of interest only to Heinlein's established fans, it contained enough germs of his future style to remain recognizable. Written in the immediate memory of the threat of Nazi rocketry, with the ENIAC as front page news, it peaks somewhere around the story's midpoint, after the initial western themes of defending their rocket-ranch from banditos and before getting bogged down in a by-the-numbers conflict with Space Nazis in space. Scenes of the first test flight, their voyage, the initial moon landing and base camp sneak in a few technical details on interplanetary courses or line of sight for broadcasting, and emulate old adventure stories not only in their cheesy worst but their hopeful best. The boys' dogged insistence on braving death to go where no man has gone before, the grand old theme of physical and intellectual exploration by personal agency and independent enterprise, captured that feeling you might more recently find fictionalized in Kerbal Space Program, when one of your launches breaks out of atmosphere, shedding the clinging, oppressive pull of gravity second by second: freedom.

Time for the Stars

"We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a footnote in science books; there wasn't room for us in the news. I decided that even a footnote averaged well and forgot it."

 

Superficially, Time for the Stars is very similar to other "Heinlein juveniles" - stories written early in his career (late '40s/50s) for the young adult market. Headline: plucky small-town lad adventures through space! Like the others however, it was deliberately written to expand science fiction past pulp laser pistol duels, and little beyond the protagonist's improbable age would doom them as "juvenile" - certainly not in a market where James Bond and Star Wars are considered perfectly acceptable grownup entertainment. Time for the Stars in particular expands upon some logical consequences of telepathy and relativistic spaceflight. Remember that drawing your junior high science teacher used to explain relativity to you, of two twins aging differently as one of them flies near the speed of light? This is about that twin.

As with other Heinlein stories, he doesn't miss the opportunity for social commentary, but where to modern writers that would mean #killallmen or #killallwhites or #killallstraights fanaticism Heinlein tempers even his favorite topic of individual freedom with reminders of the grim necessities of shipboard life and unified action in the face of unknown dangers. And, as the opening quote's equanimity indicates, most opportunities for the hero to angst over / bemoan his fate are quickly brought up against the reality check that he entered his career by informed choice and in all fairness doesn't have it that bad. I find it most similar to Starman Jones (albeit rather more chipper and less fixated on shipboard etiquette) in how pointedly it builds up the stereotypical hero's journey only to break it down. In fact its last-chapter musings by a temporally-dilated fish out of water seem like they might've been at least partly inspired by Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars (<--- caution: entirely unresearched speculation.)*

 

Strangely, a recurring theme throughout the novel is the hero's lack of understanding of the true nature of his adventure, whether due to his youth, his low rank or his uncharacteristically average intelligence for a Heinlein hero. The author even emphasizes the irrationality of their proposed mission statement (and by extension, interstellar colonization as a SciFi trope) halfway through: "There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time - just shoot every other one." Eventually, the book becomes less about the trials and victories of daring explorers (or the "specialness" of their skillsets / superpowers) as about the necessity of maintaining the spirit of exploration so as to prevent humanity from falling into scientific and social stagnation. 

 

 

______________________________

* edit 2023/10/18

As Return from the Stars was published five years after Time for the Stars (and only decades later in English) the reverse would appear to be the case. Lem even starts his story basically where Heinlein's wraps up, revisiting the theme of the spirit of exploration.

(slight wording edit 2026/03/24)

 

Civil Fuck

"You cannot sedate all the things you hate" 

Marilyn Manson - Dogma

____________________________________________________

 

"I am a citizen of the world"

Diogenes (a man who did a lot of hating but no sedating)

____________________________________________________

 

"Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of - well, you, for example - quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are not civilized."

"Huh?"

"Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh?"

Duke grudged a grin. "Maybe you've got something there. I wouldn't want to take a chance on my ex-mother-in-law. She hates my guts."

"You see? Or how about our charming neighbour on the south, who is so casual about other people's fences and livestock during the hunting season? I wouldn't want to bet that you and I wouldn't wind up in his freezer if we didn't have that taboo. But Mike I would trust utterly - because Mike is civilized."

"Huh?"

"Mike is utterly civilized, Martian style."

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

_____________________________________________________

 

"- should not listen to fascism. It should not be tolerated in civil society. Nazis are not welcome in civil society."

"Fuck tha police! Power to the people!"

 

two civil socialites interrupting the We Need to Talk About Diversity panel at Portland State on 2018/02/17 - minute 20:45 in this video

_____________________________________________________

 

"Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

 George Orwell - Politics and the English Language

_____________________________________________________

 

"considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours of men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labours of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and pine and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture"

 

Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot (1948) (Lucky's Speech (or rather, for reasons unknown, just part of it... and yes, what is more, it goes on like that))

_____________________________________________________

"You brought up this idea of cultural evolution, um, so, cultural like biology is evolutionary, and a principle of evolution is to select, the selection of advantageous traits under varying conditions and environmental forces, but when you apply that framework to our culture and society, um, sort of neglect to address how the predominant environmental forces, the adaptive pressure that's influencing the selection of certain valuable traits, in our roles and our culture, are the interests of a capitalist white male patriarchal ideology that has defined gender and race roles for generations in our society, I'm curious to know why we're so dismissive of the power and influence that this force has had in generating the gender and racial differences or stereotypes that you're defending as natural -"

Boghossian finally interrupts: "What's the question? What's the question?!"

 

Lucky questioner during the question&answer session at the We Need to Talk About Diversity panel

(a lovely example of being torn between two desires; he'd obviously like to dress up his grandstanding in scientific jargon but doesn't want to be thought a heretic by his antiscientific friends of the same "intersectional" faith, and so oscillates endlessly from jargon to jargon like Buridan's ass)

 

______________________________________________________

 

"Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and ‘fellow-travelers’.

[...]

The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books. 

[...]

The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism."

 

George Orwell - The Prevention of Literature

(1946 !)

______________________________________________________

 

The Good Place proved surprisingly palatable, for TeeVee fare. After a lively first and half of second season, its writers were ultimately permitted to pull things together again at the end of season four for one of the more memorable endings in the history of the medium. As for intervening filler, well... an even mix of Brady Bunch grade TV triteness reinterpreted via the prosocial insanity of our times, bashing straight white men at every turn for guaranteed applause moments. Without spoiling too much, the show deals with the fairness or unfairness of heaven and hell, with cackling demons talking about torturing human souls with penis flatteners (but no vaginal lava) for the crime of sexual harrassment (but never for sexual entrapment) etc. Standard schtick. Later episodes present a possible alternative, but it's quite literally a case of "meet the new demons, same as the old demons" except now they're doing it for your own good... so long as you obey.

"If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men - whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds - will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting the pyre" - Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2004

Fifteen years ago in the mid-2000s, we would've found ourselves at a loss for examples of facetious dogmatism in popular culture to rival inquisitorial soul-saving. Lucky we're "woke" now. The cruelest lie of religion, Job's promise that all evil serves the higher good, of an invisible master plan to right all wrongs, is now openly touted on the supposed left wing of politics via "equity" campaigns rehashing tired old Bolshevik promises of absolute equality by pillage. Under the tutelage of the Malleus Maleficarum of our age, we're assured that only witches would deny being witches, and no amount of abuse is too much to force them to admit guilt. After all, you're helping whites overcome their "fragility" by forcing them to admit to arbitrary crimes and punish themselves by stepping aside for those born a more moral breed. You're saving their sick souls, really. What could be more noble?

 

The key word in "power to the people" is power, "people" being defined according to political convenience. The vandals who shouted or implied it in that Portland State video above would certainly blanch at the notion of including straight white men (or any combination thereof) as "people" deserving of power. Implicitly, they have also endowed themselves with the singular power to decide who are "the people" and who are "Nazis" - to rule on others' right to speak or to be censored. Of course, why stop at Nazis? Why not expand the definition to everyone who might be a Nazi - say, anyone born the wrong skin color, a Nazi color. That'll root out the racists!

 

As for "fuck tha poh-leece" well now, that's just masturbation. We've had ample evidence through the past decades that snowflakes, social justice warriors and associated activists are no more than self-aggrandizing, sadistic, powermongering control freaks, every bit as multimillennially mundane as the holier-than-thou church ladies and inquisitors preceding them. Let's not forget where the term snowflake came from: "you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." Just as the older religion would prefer to reframe the discussion of Life of Brian from its critique of mindless faith to an imaginary insult against Jesus, the faithful of the new faiths in the moral superiority of women, blacks, gays, etc. would very much like to reframe the "snowflake" brand as attacking weakness, that they melt at stress. Oh, nonono children. We despise you for your narcissism in appointing yourselves the thought police.

 

Look all around you, in every medium, for the innumerable proofs that the neon-haired, falsetto-sermonizing, self-appointed saints and martyrs of these new religions of anti-maleness, anti-whiteness and anti-straightness have no interest in equality, that they hunger only to establish new pecking orders with themselves at the top. It might seem absurd or only quaint for instance for a webcomic to uphold the right of a furry to crash a ren-faire, until you remember the author has immersed herself in a subculture obsessed with flash and showing each other up, all about who's wearing the grandest hat, that since furries are simply FANCIER than people in clogs and tunics and therefore more special, they're just BETTER and deserve to lord it over. Just as humane meat farming had to be one-upped by vegetarianism, which in turn had to be one-upped by veganism, which in turn had to be one-upped by ever loftier character levels of veganism, which in turn had to be one-upped by breatharianism, just as politicized gay rights had to be usurped by gay marriage and gays' limelight had to be usurped by transsexuals, and transsexuals had to be usurped by sexualities in thirty-one flavors, just as older religions constantly schism into ever more "saved" brands of KoolAid quaffers, just so, every new brand of borrowed self-righteousness, every popular cause, as soon as it becomes popular enough to be called a "group" or a "movement" or a "community" taking pride in its disciplined action, will inevitably breed ever more fanatical true believers.

 

They used to ask whether you marched in the May Day parade. Now they demand to know why you didn't march in the Pride Day parade. We're talking about the same people. Mrs. Grundy's just wearing a new hat. Observe the glee with which they corner their victims, the rush, the exhilaration, the power trip inherent in hunting down heretics, be they "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobic" (or better yet all three and other slurs besides) or in other words anyone who does not bend the knee to the newly bootstrapped aristocracy. John Oliver does not need to rationally convince you that a man actually becomes a woman by the thaumaturgy of plastic surgery, only to force you to cognitively dissonate from observable reality on his command for fear of social stigmatization. It's about power - the power to make you say 2+2=5, or call a random narcissist by the royal "they" or self-flagellate for being born the wrong sex. The students of  Evergreen College can attack you with bats, then demand authorities destroy evidence of their crime, and twenty million rabid vermin can riot and rampage, looting and torching city block by city block, then claim all the damage was secretly done by a handful of subversive infiltrator neo-nazis, because they have been taught by fifty years' worth of post-modernist anti-intellectualism that they can redefine reality to suit themselves. The righteousness of a jihad justifies any extremes and makes any lie a truth, any sin a virtue, so long as it serves the cause.

 

Like most good art, Waiting for Godot is open to interpretation, moreso for its deliberate vagueness. While most cling to religious or psychoanalytical approaches, its composition in the years following World War 2 positions it at the root of new waves of class struggles and political idolatry which would dominate the next half-century, with the two protagonists representing middle-class intelligentsia both analytical and aesthetic, and Pozzo and Lucky the upper and lower classes respectively. That scene linked above, especially, makes a poignant jab at Marxists' hollow glorification of the proletariat: a draft animal adorned with a superficial badge of class (to wit: a hat) which can output only an incoherent stream of nonsensical blather drowning out all else not by erudition but by volume, driving the more articulate to madness. In retrospect, I'm more impressed by Beckett's foretelling of social "sciences" and especially humanities' vertiginous plunge into the circle-jerk of circular quotations and stock phraseology facilitated by denial of objective reality. I'm even more amused by the observation that when the rich grows annoyed with his pet's braying, he orders the middle-class to disarm it... then "hold him up" so that the system does not collapse. Repeatedly. One of the defining ironies of the facetiously populist George Floyd riots is that they overwhelmingly attacked easily accessible (and lootable) middle-class workplaces, not seats of power or the mansions on the hill. Just as Lenin loved his useful idiots, the rich so wholeheartedly encourage these puffed-up new faiths of social "justice" through dictatorial fiat because they serve the timeless dictum divide et impera, pitting women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, and no-one against multibillionaires. "I'll orientate him!" indeed.

Whatever the solutions to social issues might be, you will not find them expressed by an incoherent gaggle of narcissistic sadists justifying themselves by fanatical adherence to a newly minted orthodoxy of social superiority based on base superficialities. These little corporals with their baseball bats and megaphones, with dreams of imperial thrones in their eyes, represent nothing but tyranny. Want a little secret? Lean in close to my barrel an' lemme piss on yer leg: the measure of civilization (to whatever extent we find it desirable) is not eliminating hatred, but coexisting with people you hate. It is not found in badges of membership to hierarchies old or new, in unshakable inquisitorial righteousness, but in the atheistic, cautiously anarchistic civis mundi.

 

I am not a very civilized cynic, but I avoid you to minimize coexistence. Prosocial "justice" activists seek to hound bad thoughts out of existence precisely because they too are uncivilized, because to them, animalistic impulse equates to action. We need civilized rules against harmful action, not speech. Action like preventing others from speaking. We need to acknowledge that powermongering is neither an aristocratic trait nor a capitalist one, neither a male one nor a white one but a human one, an animal one, an evolutionary adaptation. The self-described left wing shares in it as much as the right; mob rule is every bit a dictatorship, and in fact the former props up the latter.

Child, Get Acquainted

"If you live among [humans] long enough, one day you will see how funny we are – and you will laugh."

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

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Spoilers gradually increase in severity down this page. Definitely read Stranger. If I can convince you of nothing else... just read it.

______________________________________

I don't mention this book nearly as often as I should. I love Heinlein's work in general (not to say he didn't have his weak points) but it was the reluctant hero's mentor Jubal Harshaw who, in my late teens, became first among the equals of Elrond Halfelven and Paul Atreides and Ender Wiggin and Spock and Hamlet and Professor Challenger and Rahan and all the other aloof or offputting, cerebral heroes so rarely given their due in popular entertainment.

 

Stranger is a book about understanding. Do not take this to mean sympathy, though it can incorporate it. It coined the term "grok" meaning immersion, imbibing of a concept to the extent of conjoining with it. Unfortunately the novel's storied past, from the apocryphal anecdote about it being written on a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, to its shocking the mores of polite society even to this day and onward, to the impact it had on '60s hippie culture in the U.S., to Heinlein's distaste for his fans' literalism, can easily overshadow the narrative's own beauty. Commentators will gleefully miss the forest for the myriad barbs Heinlein deliberately planted, from religious arguments to whether female characters are empowered / demeaned, to nudism or free love or authoritarianism or economics or anarchism or the rampant pacifist murders or the cannibalism, etc., etc.

It is a packed little novel, and it needed to throw so many elements at you precisely to put its characters to the test most readers fail. It epitomizes Science Fiction's mind-expanding attitude in focusing on individuals' intellectual ability to adjust their perception to a shifting reality. It should be required reading for today's degenerate snowflakes, our politically correct pro-censorship lynch mobs whose attitude is rather to outlaw reality because it offends their parochial sensibilities. Despite Jubal's rants as author's avatar, despite unabashedly bashing religion and prudishness and the human ape in general, Heinlein never failed to return to the topic of intellectual growth allowing Mike to transcend the human condition insight by insight. For all its intrinsic if muffled shock value, Stranger in a Strange Land pivots on its most deceptively innocuous passages.

 

"Nurse, have you ever seen that sterile laboratory at Notre Dame?"
"No. I've read about it."
"Healthiest animals in the world - but they can't ever leave the laboratory. Child, I'm not running a sterile laboratory. Mike has got to get acquainted with 'filth,' as you call it - and get immunized to it."
[...]
"They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite "No Feeding" signs.
She tossed one to a medium sized monk; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knucks against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered - after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.
Mike threw back his head and laughed - went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.
[...]
"Of course it wasn't funny - it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about in the time I've been with my own people and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing."

 

 

Hilariously in retrospect, those lines on "filth" were prompted by a woman's outrage at a pornographic image yet followed just a few pages later by visiting a new-fashioned, feel-good megachurch. One can practically hear the author chuckling in the background: Filth? Let me show you some real filth!

More importantly, the discussion of laughter and filth sets up the Man From Mars' headlong dive into human culture to observe the animal in its self-imposed habitat, including a carnival and the zoo trip above, to wade in filth. While the start of the novel might prompt readers to expect Mike to impose presumably superior Martian values onto a backward humanity, by the end, having grokked his own people, he explicitly states his goal to avoid such a scenario. His closing act deliberately exploits humanity's worst tendencies for a chance at long-term logical reaction in the opposite direction to allow the species to expand on its better tendencies, not by redefining social reality but by understanding and building upon it.

In other words, this work of fiction so common to the development of left-wing thinkers over the past fifty years proposed the exact opposite of today's "progressive" head-in-the-sand attempts to rewrite the world by denying it. Reality hurts. And we must be able to laugh at it.

The Unmarried Mother

"If you want, we're concerned with systems, and so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?"

 

William Gibson - Count Zero

Though I generally avoid television, I finally cracked some years ago and made a Netflix account and have repeatedly re-activated it while lying to myself about the wasted money. Unless you're dying to watch Yet Another Zombie Movie or Dating Sitcom #4593 their lowest common denominator line-up has precious little to offer beyond classic Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes. However, I confess to being downright impressed by Dark, a low-key German Science Fiction series with a plot requiring several flowcharts to follow. Literally. As in, they're on Wikipedia.

 

Rounding the halfway point of the third season, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the finale to do it justice. This entails repeating two mantras:

1) Please don't pull a "Lost" - remain a Science Fiction show instead of retreating into facile supernatural excuses.

2) Cool it with the stupid sex scenes already.

I merely rolled my eyes at the pilot episode opening in medias ingress and wrote it off as a bearable attention-grabbing concession to mass appeal. But instead of leaving it at that and focusing on more relevant details, later seasons stubbornly waste more and more screen time showing us the central characters humping. Will the heroine's mathematically precise panting pattern turn out to decode a diary's cipher? Will the hero's swiveling his hips before thrusting unravel a causal paradox? If not, there's no excuse for continuing to include such scenes. By the second season, much less the third, either you managed to grab your audience's attention or not. You should be done with the gratuitous gimmicks.

For many years now (ever since playing The Witcher) I've been meaning to write more on the issue of gratuitous sex scenes and romantic subplots, and the medium does not particularly matter. For the purposes of this post, it's the endless repetition of sex scenes, episode after episode, which lowers Dark's value and which I struggle to explain. Time and again, apparently, the audience must be permitted to transpose themselves into the form of limber, photogenic adolescents mindlessly reiterating mammalian pair-bonding rituals, to identify with the characters on screen via the basest, lowest of all common denominators, "young love". For my own part, the character whose lines even remotely echo my own conclusions so far is Adam. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, let's leave it at that.

I do not easily identify with either fictional characters or the personas of others. As far as games go, the mere existence of Twitch TV turns my stomach. Granted, I was never big on old-fashioned spectator sports either, but "e-sports" in particular make me want to strangle you cretins with your mouse cords. For actual sports, real-world sports, sports which merit the designation of sports, at least doing and watching were separated by a significant gulf in activity level, but I cannot for the life of me fathom the mindset of sitting in front of the same screen at the same keyboard yet watching some degenerate mouthbreather across the world play the same game you yourself could be playing right now at the same moment on the same machine... I... how? What? Huh?

 

The answer once again looms in this mystical "identifying with" the object you observe, that in passively devoting your attention to the perfect tragic romance or the perfect rocket jump you somehow feel yourselves included in, invested in, profiting from, the perceived value of the act. While not immune to this mental disease, this spiritual communion and prayer unto higher realms of base commonality, I cannot imagine a life of endlessly repeated enrollment, of being caught up, constantly, in shared experiences. So many times I've sat amidst a crowd and felt a communal action flow into being around me, whether it's a chant, a peal of laughter, a pattern of motion, a round of applause, yet I can no longer discern either its origin or its beachhead upon your herd psyche. What can it be like, to live one's entire life as a vehicle for others' thoughts, to have notions, impulses, scenes, continually enter and exit one's head unaltered, unanalyzed, to be ridden with and by memetic cacodemons, to have forsaken one's existential foundation as an individual pattern of information processing. Processing, not absorption and automatic reiteration.

Fads are bad enough. Slogans are worse. But cyberspace handles have perplexed me more and more. I took it for granted, when I started playing games and posting online, that I was taking the reins of my personal fable, a far greater control over my own becoming, a knowing means of "making a soul" as Ursula K. LeGuin's characters might say, wandering in introversion among a planet full of introverts. I became a symbol of myself as naturally as breathing. I have been Werewolf, Werewolfe, Werwolfe, for two decades now. Imagine my consternation every time I see anyone using throwaway aliases or worse still, some variant of real-world names like "SuperBob1234" - how do they avoid collapsing into miniature black holes under the negative pressure of their own inactive synapses?

Thus, with black holes, we return to Dark. I've repeatedly made a distinction on this blog between Science Fiction and Fantasy based on personal agency. Fantasy, clinging to the supernatural, hinges on top-down cosmologies, power flowing mysteriously down to supplicants from an ultimate source of its own accord. Science, on the other hand, is a bottom-up process in which rational agents construct solutions via materialistic means. The show indulges in some heavy religious symbolism via names, but in the end it could go either way. Adam and Eva could master their chosen roles or be subsumed by them, could "identify with" their tulpas or define a mythology unto themselves.

Robert Heinlein, an early master of such stories saw the potential in foreknowledge and framed the temporal paradox not as a trap but as the ultimate opportunity for self-determination.

"I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come from?"

The Year of the Jackpot

"What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them"

Robert A. Heinlein - The Year of the Jackpot


I rarely find myself agreeing with public opinion, but I'll gladly echo one increasingly voiced sentiment: the year 2020 can go fuck itself with a rusty piece of rebar. Whether it's the weather, disease, economics, politics or just mundane insanity, it's getting harder finding any aspect of the world which hasn't gone cockeyed this year.

So in the spirit of this dispiriting time I'd like to recommend one of my favorite author's less known stories: The Year of the Jackpot, published in 1952 and underappreciated for the surprising punch its thirty-ish pages pack. Its heroes fit the usual Heinlein mold: a mathematically inclined, free thinking renaissance man accompanied by a cuddly yet plucky spitfire of a love interest, both bantering like a whole troupe of gangster movie wise guys, navigating a crisis by taking charge of their destinies.
Did I say "a" crisis?
Correction: as the statistician hero explains, 1952 is to be the year that all of humanity's behavioral cycles (long or short) peak, from fashion to sexuality to religion to bellicosity, etc. As the sinusoids sync up and the crises accumulate, the two escape the city just as...

Hell, go read it. Heinlein was a master of the craft, and this was hardly the first or last time he demonstrated a firm grasp of dramatic escalation. For those of you who don't mind

*SPOILERS*


- I will comment that there's something incredibly powerful about the heroes embracing through the last gasp of the solar system (after struggling through disaster after disaster, each more preposterous than the last) which comes across as neither cloying nor gratuitous nor nihilistic nor cruel. It is merely an acknowledgement of the indifferent grandeur of the universe, the callous horror of impermanence which Science Fiction, more than any other literary genre, is best suited to capture thanks to its transhuman, posthuman, inhuman scope.

The heroes, as in every other Heinlein story, really are hypercompetent suvivalists - they make it, beyond all reasonable expectation, as far as anything can be made. Does the lack of a happy ending detract in any way from their positive qualities as representatives of the human ape? Why do we so rarely appreciate competence in the face of futility?

Starman Jones

"Where can you find pleasure
Search the world for treasure
Learn science technology?"

Village People - In the Navy


___________________________________________
Spoilers for the book in question follow. While not one of Heinlein's greatest, it's a touchingly bittersweet adventure to leaf through for fans of his other tales.
___________________________________________

Robert Heinlein wasn't shy about abusing the classic hero's journey when it suited him, but in Starman Jones it's more obvious than even in the rest of his "juvenile" books. The innately clever farm-boy hero of a noble lineage is set out of his home by an inimical presence, befriends a grizzled, slightly abrasive old mentor possessing arcane lore belying his unassuming appearance, sets out on a quest to better his station in life, meets a plucky princess love interest and a recurring high-ranking antagonist, establishes cooperation with an animal guide, crosses over into uncharted territory, is captured along with his damsel by inhuman monsters, executes a daring escape, saves the damsel, witnesses his mentor's heroic sacrifice and finally puts the lessons he's learned during his voyage to use in navigating himself and all his companions back to the mortal realm, restoring the status quo thereby returning to his old farm a hero. For a story to get any more monomythic than this, it'd have to be indented into clay tablets by some olive addict in a robe.

Its uncharacteristically bald-faced by-the-numbers basic plot suggests that Heinlein paid more attention to other elements, two of which are rapidly accentuated before even the halfway point: militarism and cynicism.
For one, shipboard ranks and their interactions are laid out in lavish detail, along with quite a few details of conduct and ethics. While Heinlein frequently touted the (questionable) charms of uniformed life, he rarely did so in any great detail, with the exception of Starship Troopers which would be written several years after Starman Jones.
For another, while the background and events of the book are nowhere near as bloody or disastrous as some of his other works, they are presented in a surprisingly bitter tone:

"When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked. "But they put you in jail for that!"
"Where do you think you are now?"
"Well, I'm not in jail. And I don't want to be."
"This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that. What chance have you got? If you aren't born rich, or born into one of the hereditary guilds, what can you do? Sign up with one of the labor companies.""

Heinlein's protagonists never had an easy time of it, sure, but none of them sounded quite as hopeless and lost as Max Jones the illicit enrollee prey to his own impostor syndrome, catapulting himself through military ranks out of desperation at standing still, fearing escape even more than he fears discovery of his imposture.

It took me over half the novel to connect these two aspects, to realize the smattering of SciFi or social commentary dressing them up matters as little as the plot's monomythic skeleton. This book's not about the romance of space travel, or about the necessary equanimity of inter-sapient communication, or about politics and legal systems or about science or leadership. This one's about the Navy life, the life denied to Robert Heinlein decades prior by tuberculosis. Even the oppressive caste system in Starman Jones, left unexplained in contrast to the detailed future histories the author would normally imagine, serves only to highlight the pining for that idealized, more meaningful meritocracy, to be sought even as a quasi-stowaway shoveling manure in the lower decks.

One might wonder whether Heinlein would have retained such a hopeful outlook of military life if he'd stayed in to continue dealing with officers like Max Jones' antagonist, had that life not been denied to him, had it not become a forbidden fruit, but even that is beside the point. He weds his bitter sense of loss to the figure of the countless adolescent hayseeds throughout man's history desperate to prove their worth, who abandon their ramshackle multi-generational homesteads to sell their lives as cannon fodder in (vain, realistically) hopes of glory or betterment. And, true to his masterful touch, by the end of the story Heinlein makes good on false promises. In the last few pages he brazenly abandons the hero's journey.

Max Jones returns to his home in the Ozarks to find it abandoned. He is not welcomed as a hero, or even at all. He does not reclaim his heritage but instead cuts his ties to his past. He does not get the princess. He does not, in fact, even retain the riches he's earned, as they're sacrificed in payment for his deception. He just sets off towards port once again, eyes to the horizon, having gained nothing more or less than a way out.

A mediocre adventure story with a beautiful ending.