Author: Mark W. Tiedemann

Great Blunders, Great Wars

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

High school history provides us with the basics of World War I and does so by making it appear that something akin to an earthquake happened.  Archduke Ferdinand, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo and a month later Germany invaded France, triggering a catastrophic series of treaty-obligated interventions by Russia, England, and so forth.  Simple.

Except, what?  Why would Germany do that because the heir to a throne not theirs is shot by a lone assassin in a city in a country allied with Austria?

The connective tissue was always missing.  Something (mumble mutter) to do with Serbia and Austria blaming them for the murder (by an independent terrorist!) and Russia insisting Austria leave Serbia alone, Germany insisting Russia leave Austria alone, France insisting Germany leave Russia alone, and England insisting everyone leave Belgium alone (Belgium? How did Belgium get into this…?), and suddenly you have the international equivalent of a schoolyard pile-on.

Many books have been written attempting to explain the complicated set of relations between the so-called Great Powers and how they all triggered each others’ worst responses in what amounted to a game of chicken.  But that high school myth persists, that WWI happened almost out of the blue.

Sean McMeekin has produced a worthy examination of the month between the fateful assassination and the opening of hostilities on August 4th, 1914.  In July 1914:  Countdown To War he takes pains to show how all this transpired.  It happened quickly, to be sure, as international interactions go, but it was not either unexpected or inevitable.  The major element, besides considerable attention to a chronology which he lays out with admirable clarity, included is what so often is left out of history courses—personality.

McMeekin’s portraits of the players—Kaiser Wilhelm II, his chancellor, Bethmann, the Austria foreign minister Berchtold, army chief of staff Conrad, Russia’s Sazanov, Tsar Nicholas II, Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey of Britain, and all the rest—open the curtains on how the fatal mix of personalities led to the catastrophe that reshaped Europe so much that in many ways we are still sorting through the rubble.

Starting with the ongoing hatred among the hawks in Austria toward Serbia.  Begin with that and the long history behind it and we begin to see that nothing was really a surprise other than the fact that it actually happened.  The first blunder was the connivance of the Austrians to obtain German backing for a punitive action against Serbia for sponsoring the assassination of the archduke—an archduke, by the way, who was unpopular in his own family and whose loss as a successor to the throne was something of a relief to the Emperor.  Begin with that and the next series of events—diplomatic wrangling, lying, obfuscation, and, above all, haste—makes sense.  Insane sense, but sense nevertheless.

And because McMeekin is dealing handily with the personalities of all these people, questions of reason, caution, experience, and the deliberative conservatism one might expect from old established states become moot as we watch them all jockeying for position to prove points, gain support, establish—or in the case of Austria, re-establish—reputations.

Reading this, one is put in mind of the rush to war in Iraq in 2003, under conditions wherein insufficient information, curtailment of debate, and a drive to do overrode all other considerations.  Hindsight is frustrating.

McMeekin’s concluding chapter, wherein he discusses responsibility and offers a variety of arguments over inevitabilities, is more than just a summation.  Rather it is a sobering analysis of the fragility of circumstance and the importance of character, which so many of us would like to pretend doesn’t matter.

Iain Banks Is Gone

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have nothing much to say that I didn’t already say.  He wrote some of my all-time favorite books.  I envied the scope and depth of his creations.  If I imagined what kind of work I wanted to write in my ideal world, Banks’ Culture  stories would be one of the examples.

He went much too soon.  He thought he’d have more time.  We thought so, too.

One of the pitfalls of science fiction is that we can read about all these wonderful places and times where things like this can be dealt with and the world is more at our command than it is, but when the book is finished and we close the cover, we still live here.  And here we lose people every day to things we know we should be able to beat.  Because we’ve seen that future, laid out for us by fine writers and great minds.

Some day.  Writers like Iain Banks showed us.  Some day.

Jack Vance: No Place At Saponce

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 6 Comments

Jack Vance wrote idiosyncratically in a field of idiosyncracy.  The very lushness of his prose bespoke an era well past its prime that, when sought, could never be found.  Azure, jeweler’s brass, roseate and softly crystalline.  Contradictions made to coexist and cross-inform.  Footprints trace a path along the the receding shore of a sea once filled with more deliberate monsters than now, the waves gilded by a fading sun that somehow shines proudly if wearily, attesting to empires whose ruins are more wondrous than any new powers might contrive.

He often wrote of the stuff of melancholy, while avoiding melancholy itself.  One could see how tales told about these times and places might turn maudlin for greatness lost, but not yet, not now.  Now we must see what fascinations recomplicate in a present not yet to form a past still waiting.

Was it science fiction? Fantasy?  Did it matter?

Suis generis is sometimes used only when imagination fails to pigeon-hole, where appreciation falls short, and the thing judged is greater than those judging.  Works can signify its proper definition, but more often individual writers are better gauges.  Jack Vance wrote science fiction (The Last Castle, Araminta Station) and fantasy (Lyonesse, Maduouc), and amalgams of both (Mask: Thaery, Dragon Master, The Dying Earth) that even within their clearly defined provinces did not quite fit with expectation.  He was an altogether sensual writer more concerned with moving the reader slantwise into a state of mind to perceive in unique ways places that ran counter to any norm than might be applied.

Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet.  Such was Mazirian’s garden—three terraces growing with strange and wonderful vegetations.  Certain plants swam with changing iridescenses; others held up blooms pulsing like sea-anemones, purple, green, lilac, pink, yellow.  Here grew trees like feather parasols, trees with transparent trunks threaded with red and yellow veins, trees with foliage like metal foil, each leaf a different metal…

He established a quasi-mystical ground for what might loosely be called science-fantasy, worlds where physics and genetics obtained but suggestively and where the motivations of alien minds twisted landscapes into ur vistas against which struggles for power played out in atypical fashion.

In The Languages of Pao power resides in grammars, linguistics the key to control, and a strong and unusual acknowledgement that cultures are latent repositories of destiny.  In The Last Castle a comfortable ruling class is suddenly face with the fact that their servants have become more powerful than they and because thought was never given to them as more than labor, any basis for negotiation is completely unknown.

Vance seemed to write most eloquently about the days just before declines begin.  A last Indian Summer played out sometimes across galactic stages.  He was never less than grand.

The impact of an artist can be seen in his or her heirs, those who internalize their vision and produce new works.  Gene Wolfe paid homage to Vance in his Book of the New Sun even as he did something wholly his own and in some ways superior.  Vance was certainly not the first to try to combine science fiction with fantasy, but he was one of the most successful, and writers like Roger Zelazny, Lin Carter, and Michael Moorcock benefited from the results.

There is a bit of Tolkein to be found strewn throughout his prose, but Vance began publishing before Tolkein’s epic appeared, so the apparent influences are coincidental only.  They shared, if anything, a sense of the vastness of time and the importance of even forgotten history.  Vance’s stories are weighted with the awareness of pasts.

Vance retired from writing several years ago.  Eyesight failing, health precarious, he withdrew.  Now he has gone.  Other writers of his generation—Heinlein, Asimov, de Camp, Silverberg, Williams—seem to have garnered more attention.  At least more vocal advocates.  But each of them held Vance in high regard and the enormous body of work Vance has left us seems to be tenaciously inspiring new works and reassessments and gaining new readers.

“There is your home; there is Saponce.  Do you wish to return?”  

She shook her head.  “Together we have looked through the eyes of knowledge.  We have seen old Thorsingol, and the Sherit Empire before it, and Golwan Andra before that and the Forty Kades even before.  We have seen the warlike green-men, and the knowledgeable Pharials and the Clambs who departed Earth for the stars, as did the Merioneth before them and the Gray Sorcerers still earlier.  We have seen oceans rise and fall, the mountains crust up, peak and melt in the beat of rain; we have looked on the sun when it glowed hot and full and yellow…No, Guyal, there is no place for me at Saponce…”

Guyal, leaning back on the weathered pillar, looked up to the stars. “Knowledge is ours, Shierl—all of knowing to our call.  And what shall we do?”

Together they looked up to the white stars.

“What shall we do…”

 

Veering Into The Present

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

An attractive pitfall of popular history is the Pivotal Moment.  The writer centers on an event or an idea that signals a shift in the course of history, leading somewhere other than where it had been heading.  The Donation of Constantine, the First Crusade,  the invention of moveable type, Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, Newton’s codification of the law of gravity, things like that.  The point being made is that these events are so tectonic that Everything Changes.

The pitfall is not so much that they are wrong but that they are taken as solely responsible, isolated moments, forks in the road.  It is easy to ignore or forget everything else around them.  Focusing only on the Emperor Constantine can suggest that without him, Christianity might not have become the official religion of Rome and thus history might have taken a different course.  (Personally, I think Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire east was far more significant as something he alone could have done, or caused to be done.)  It overlooks the fact that Christianity had become a tremendous movement by then.  Had Constantine been of a mind to resist it, he might have delayed its ascension for another emperor, but it would have become what it did in any event.  Constantine was being politically astute.  (After all, he left Rome to the Church even as he moved the center of imperial power to the new city of Constantinople.  It’s telling that he chose to isolate them geographically.)  The Crusades were important as expressions of political currents leading to a contraction of Rome’s vision of itself and certainly set the stage for subsequent events in the Levant, but not even the death of Richard the Lionheart changed all that much in even British history.

Newton might be arguably more important, at least for the calculus, but such things were in the wind.  Leibniz, rival and competitor to Newton, invented a calculus, and while the debate goes on as to who was first and which was better, such a mathematical tool was going to emerge.

Picking pivotal events, therefore, is a challenge.  Placing them in context is a duty and one it is often tempting to underplay.  It makes a better story if the singular event is the hero, as it were.  But it can sometimes make for bad history.

Stephen Greenblatt avoids that problem admirably in The Swerve: How The World Became Modern.  Even though the title is a bit hyperbolic and suggests the kind of history more consistent with a tabloid approach, what one finds within it first-rate history written for a general audience about a rather arcane subject:  the way ideas can change entire cultures.

The story is about the discovery of a manuscript, De Natura Rerum, an epic poem by the Roman Lucretius (99 B.C.E. to 55 B.C.E.), an acolyte of Epicurean philosophy who died just before Rome became an Empire instead of a Republic.  De Natura Rerum—“On the Nature of Things”—is a a surprising work in that it espouses ideas which we think of now as wholly modern.  That the universe is composed of atoms, that time and space are unbounded, that life evolves, that matter is all there is.  If one squints, one sees the foundational ideas of contemporary physics in all this.  Physics and cosmology.

But it continued on to suggest that pleasure is the highest moral purpose, that doing that in life that increases one’s pleasure and the pleasure of those around us, is the primary aim of a moral life.

It’s easy to see how this might run afoul the kind of moral philosophy that has dominated Western culture since before the rise of Christianity.  But Lucretius was not advocating hedonism, but the more constrained program of Epicurus, the 4th Century B.C.E.  Greek philosopher who advocated philosophy based on the two standards of ataraxia and aponia, namely peace and freedom from fear (ataraxia) and the absence of pain (aponia).  To do this, one must lead a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends and occupying the mind with constructive and pleasing contemplations and treating the body to that which brings pleasure.  Though the name has been linked to self-indulgence, hedonistic abandon, and all the ills of unrestrained pleasure-seeking, what Epicurus had in mind was something very different, and defined by moderation.  The kind of self-indulgence we assume attends such a life he did not see as peaceful, pleasurable, or free from pain.

He also believed that when we die, nothing survives.  The soul is an aspect of our physical existence like anything else and fades to nothing once the container ceases to function.

Lucretius wrote a poem of purportedly great beauty in support of this philosophy.

It is a common misapprehension that the Greco-Roman world of that time would have embraced all this eagerly.  The fact is, Christianity rather easily took root in the Roman Empire because it bore much in common with ordinary Roman morality.  Epicurus was almost as disdained under the Caesars as his ideas were later despised under the popes.  Christianity succeeded largely because of its commonalities with pagan culture, a culture which found Epicurean ideas almost as off-putting as any later devout Catholic might.

A culture which fully embraced the spiritual side of attitudes toward the material world that relegated this life to a condition of transient, burdensome necessity, pain, and suffering which must be borne with the faith and dignity of an acolyte who seeks a better existence in an afterlife, fully convinced that nothing in this realm matters.  A culture that had no use for the idea of atoms, that believed the universe to be bound tightly in a very local set of spheres, and with a time limit on its existence that was easily comprehensible—a few thousands of years.  People wanted the comfort of believing existence to be closely bound, finite, with a way out.

Lucretius’ poem faded from memory.  Rome’s collapse was as much a result of neglect as of catastrophe, and by the 9th century, much of the written legacy was sequestered in monasteries, scattered, mouldering, often ignored, certainly unstudied.  It required that civilization rise back to a certain material level before interest in ideas, old manuscripts, and the past could matter.

Enter Poggio Bracciolini, Florentine, scholar, humanist.

Humanist meant something a bit different in the 14th and 15th centuries than it does today, but it is possible to see the connection.  Poggio was one of that group of avid collectors who scoured the monastic libraries for old books.  Most of them were copies of even older books, the remnants of a vast ancient world epitomized by the Library of Alexandria, most of which seemed to offer glimpses into a Golden Age.  Aristotle had long been seen as the basis for rationalizing certain troublesome aspects of Christian theology.  The flood of recovered books from the Reconquista has been both benefit to a slowly recovering European civilization and troublesome bane to a Church that saw itself as the final arbiter of what it was proper to know, to consider, to believe.

Poggio worked for a succession of popes.  In his “spare” time, he hunted manuscripts, and helped return them to circulation.  He found Lucretius’ tome in Germany, a 9th century copy.  According to Greenblatt, he may not even have realized what it was.  He’d only heard it mentioned with respect and some reverence in other ancient manuscripts.

The Swerve reveals the events surrounding the poem’s creation, loss, rediscovery, and subsequent dissemination throughout a culture that was on the verge of becoming something other than what it had been.  The ideas embraced in the eloquent lines are ideas with which we are more than familiar today.  Indeed, they are common coin in debates on the right and the good and resonate in the foundations of modern science.  Greenblatt suggests that it was this book—its reintroduction to a wide audience—that caused the veer into what has become a secular civilization.

He is careful, however, to contextualize his assertions.  Something like this, it seems, would have had to be invented if it hadn’t been found.  Its arrival at the onset of the Renaissance was fortuitous.  Coming along when it did—when science was beginning to coalesce out of the mish-mash of alchemy and reactions to Aristotelianism, when people like Bruno, Galileo, Newton, and many others were present to respond—hastened events, gave focus to certain schools of thought, fed the furnace that was recasting conceptualizations of nature and the universe.  It lent the weight of a more complete philosophical conception to the fragmented components of what would one day become the modern world.

It is perhaps surprising (and somewhat disillusioning) that the arguments spawned by De Natura Rerum are still being waged today.  Reading Greenblatt’s examination of the central ideas of the poem and the subsequent responses to it is itself a lesson in historical context, because we can look around and find exactly the same kinds of debates—and sometimes bitter battles—going on around us.

But it is also encouraging.  Ideas survive.  People keep them alive, even over centuries, millennia.  Greenblatt is, in his own way, continuing that fragile, necessary, and yet astonishingly powerful tradition, passing on to the future what is important not only for today but what has been important all along.

A Country Of Distant Voices

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 2 Comments

In the opening scene of his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed,  Khaled Hosseini shows an Afghan father telling his children a story. The story is about life’s fragility in the face of an unpredictable and unnegotiable universe, the loss of children, and the tenacity of memory. In the story, the father is offered a choice—having a lost child returned to him to live a life he knows will never be more than difficult, often harsh, or leaving the child in the relative paradise to which it had been spirited while the father is granted the gift of forgetfulness, so he might return home with no memory of loss. The father chooses the latter.

But all around him, when he returns, memory remains, part of the landscape, continually troubling his life with fleeting moments of doubt about something he cannot name.

He has left his memories far away, in the mountains.  But the mountains are always there.

So, it turns out, are the memories, recognized or not. The real mountains in the novel are the tectonic accumulations of intersecting lives, which in some ways seem to have no real point to their connections, but over time—generations, really—build into massively instantiating forms, repositories of meaning.  Some of these characters climb over them, others live at their roots, still others move away from them, trying to lessen their dominance. But every word they speak echoes back laden with the textures of their beginnings.

The novel begins with the story of Abdullah and Pari, brother and sister who share a deep bond. Pari collects bird feather in a tin box, feathers Abdullah helps gather for her, and their playground is the village of Shadbagh. Life is crushingly hard for their parents. The father is a laborer. His first wife, Abdullah’s and Pari’s mother, died giving birth to Pari. His second wife has given him another son, Iqballah. Her brother, Nabi, lives in Kabul, the personal servant to a man of wealth who is married to  a woman more at home in Parisian society than in her native Afghanistan. The necessities and desires of these people bring them into association with each other in the most unexpected way, resulting in the separation of Abdullah and Pari.

Thus the series of separations which are the echoes of the novel.

Pari is taken into her new home, much too young for the memories of her time spent with Abdullah to be retained in other than a lifelong sense of hollowness.  The woman who becomes her mother is a poet, herself severed from the connections to home and family that might supply a sense of welcome in the world through which she moves.  Talented, beautiful, she is nevertheless a refugee even in her own country.  When her husband suffers a stroke, she takes the opportunity to flee, back to Paris.  With Pari, who over time forgets almost everything and is left with a persistent feeling of separation she cannot quite explain or ignore.

The trajectories all these people follow seem at a glance to have little to do with each other, even though certain events lie at the start of their paths.  Their lives settle into orbits that are tethered by those events, and no matter how far they go or where they settle in, a constellation forms of which each of them represents the rough boundary of a country that, while it seems to have no place on any map, claims them as native.  The echoes from that initiating event form the borders.

Which makes And the Mountains Echoed an exploration of that country, through the eyes of its unwitting inhabitants, all of whom, regardless of their point of origin, are native to a specific topography, bound by common experiences—of loss, abandonment, and escape.  He takes us on an expedition of a place of which the only maps are in the psyches of its residents.  Along the way he works a variation on the old aphorism “You can never go home” by showing that, in profound ways, we never leave it.

On another level, there is a very real country at the center of these explorations. Hosseini is writing, as always, about Afghanistan—its wonders, its tragedies, its costs, and its possibilities.  It is, he seems to tell us, a land of incredible potential, but to date the only possibility to realize it is for those with the talents and will to leave it, go where their particular gifts—themselves—can manifest, beyond the overwhelming gravity of a past that too often has no history of a future, no memory of what could be different that is not bound up in forgetting.

Like the story Abdullah’s and Pari’s father tells at the start.

At least one of his characters recognizes the innate conflict:

It saddens me because of what it reveals to me about Mama’s own neediness, her own anxiety, her feat of loneliness, her dread of being stranded, abandoned.  And what does it say about me that I know this about my mother, that I know precisely what she needs and yet how deliberately and unswervingly I have denied her, taking care to keep an ocean, a continent—or, preferably, both—between us for the better part of three decades?

Hosseini writes with an unflinching clarity of what Afghanistan is, tempered by hope for what it could be.  It is not that this potential Afghanistan does not exist—it does, he shows us, just not there.  It exists in the imaginations of those who have left and are nevertheless citizens of the country of their heart. That country is nascent in the echoes that will some day return from their journey.

Primary Influences

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 3 Comments

Reading and writing are inextricably linked, but it’s a lopsided relationship.  One can be a voracious reader without ever feeling the need to write, but being a writer by necessity demands voracious reading.  There are some who seem to believe they can write without having to read extensively (or at all!) but I imagine this is a self-correcting delusion.  It may be a more obvious problem in this age of self-publishing ease, when one’s shortcomings can make unfortunate and sometimes wide spread public displays, but the simple absence of any kind of artistic æsthetic on which to base the work is fatal to the endeavor.

Besides, what would be the point other than a profound narcissism.  Part of the fantasy of “being a writer” is to join a fraternity whose past membership has provided the delight you hope to offer, a delight you have presumably found in reading.

I imagine that for some writers, the desire grows gradually, a cumulative response emerging after many books.  Specific texts are less important than the experience itself.  For others, there’s a turning point, a moment when the reading experience in a given work sparks the “I want to do this!” response that grows, if nurtured, into a lifelong obsession.

I can pinpoint my own turning point.

foundation covers

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire was the book that decided me.  I bought it at the corner drug store in 1968.  Mr. Leukens had a spinner rack from which I’d been obtaining paperbacks for almost a year by then.  I can say quite honestly and without embarrassment that it was the cover that caught my attention.  That Don Punchatz rendering radiated “significance” in a way other covers failed to achieve.

I’d been reading science fiction in one form or another for as long as I could remember.  Comic books, mostly, but once I’d obtained my library card, the occasional SF novel came home with me.  A lot of them seemed…well, stodgy compared to the movies.  I admit to being disappointed with science fiction that was set in more or less the present day.  I was a kid, after all, I was after the gosh wow! more than the cerebral pleasures that are the chief attribute of the form, at least in those days.  I wanted Forbidden Planet and John Carter not stuff stuck on Earth.

Asimov I knew from another novel, Pebble In The Sky, which I had read earlier in the year.  I still wasn’t connecting authors with preferred experiences, at least not as a guide to find more of the same.  Partly this was because I had no reliable way of getting more by a given author.  Leukens Pharmacy was my primary source and the fact is he had no control over what ended up in that spinner rack.  It was hit or miss.

That month, the only one of the trilogy available was the second volume.  (I didn’t even know what “trilogies” were yet.)

Gradually, I came to regard Avon as the imprint that provided me with the kind of material I most wanted.  Along with the Foundation books, I got a lot of Robert Silverberg, B.N. Ball, James Blish, and later they published the Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections.  Their books had a particular “feel” and quality that seemed lacking (or at least different) from other imprints.  (So in a peculiar way I was initially more aware of publishers and editors than authors.)

Asimov sold the first Foundation story to John W. Campbell in 1941 and went on to write all the stories that comprised these three books by the early 1950s.  I read them out of order.  The middle book first, then the first one, finally, after months of searching, the last one.  The covers above are from a slightly later edition, but basically the same ones I eagerly sought and devoured.

They were everything, at the time, that I wanted from science fiction.

But what was that?

I was 13, almost 14.  My reading had been chaotic though wide and I had a smattering of history (not nearly enough to form any cogent opinions of events) and I had the sense that a lot of fiction, especially in the movies, was disconnected from all that went before whenever the events of the story took place.  Right off the bat, Asimov offered a simple, elegant way to imply a concrete history by the epigrams of his fictional Encyclopedia Galactica (an obvious but nevertheless effective play on Encyclopedia Britanica and American).  That “scholarship” existed on which the chronicler of these wholly fictional and fantastic events could draw provided a basis of  “authenticity” that completely sucked this reader in.

What followed was a self-consciously analytical treatment on the way history might work.  The premise is Cartesian—if one knows enough about enough, then one can make reliable predictions.  The sheer control offered by Seldon was profoundly seductive.

And then, of course, there was the Empire, spanning the entire galaxy, thousands of worlds, a massive civilization bound together by hyperdrive and the Imperial center on Trantor.  Trantor itself was such a startling idea, an entire planet completely covered by a single city.

Gaal Dornick’s arrival on Trantor, on later reflection, was the arrival of any young man from a more rural part of America to New York via Grand Central Station, and the awe of such a massive construct.  (Samuel R. Delany rather elegantly recapitulated this in the opening scenes of his Atlantis: Three Tales with the actual New York.)  In a way, Dornick’s reaction is very like the reaction of a new reader who suddenly “gets” it.

Considerations of cost and the unlikelihood of achieving any fraction of the kind of homogeneity, political or otherwise, never entered into it.  Asimov had loosely based his Galactic Empire on the Roman Empire and that itself was a highly improbable collection of provinces under a single banner.  If you could accept the one (which had actually existed) you could accept the other, especially since as the story opens the Empire is beginning to crumble.  By this device, Asimov acknowledged the latent impossibility of a “galactic empire” by letting us watch its demise from sheer social and political entropy.

New things are born from the ruins of the old, and the rest of the series is about these new things.  What I found so appealing was the inherent historicity of the Foundation stories.

Of course, the idea of mathematically predicting future events with the kind of precision suggested in these stories is fantastic at best.  The notion behind it is not fanciful, there is something to the dynamics of large groups in motion that lends itself to patterning.  Asimov simply worked a variation on actuarial math and raised to dizzying heights.  It is a criticism of which he was well aware, one I already agreed with since I’d begun with the middle volume—the one in which The Mule appears to completely overturn everything Seldon had constructed.  The fey element, the unpredictable, the unaccountable.  Asimov subverted his own premise.

But that opened the narrative up to a more sinister thread, one which has also been geared into history: the secret society, the hidden group which from time to time people believe to be the real rulers.  In this, Asimov was still playing with the plausibilities of accepted historical narrative.

It was easy then to accept that Asimov was writing about the collapse of the Roman Empire—and the perfectly agreeable desire to shorten the inevitable “dark age” following the fall of such a huge and apparently monolithic construct.  But as one grows older and continues the kind of necessarily broad and voracious reading essential to being a writer of any worth, such simple comparisons erode.  The falls of empires probably always follow certain patterns, but in the details they differ.  I now suspect Asimov, if he was being intentional in his subtexts at all, was writing about the vanity of empire rather than of any particular one, and the costs of such things to those who become dependent.  Asimov was a refugee, born in Russia.  Perhaps too young to remember anything of his early childhood there, no doubt he heard the stories, and of course there was World War One, the first death blow of a European Order that went back a millennia at least.  By the time Hitler was trying to establish a new Roman Empire (at least in terms of territory if not intent), it was obvious that the old regimes were done for, and the future was about to be in the hands of the bureaucrats, apparatchits, and opportunists in a way never before seen.  In such a world, the idea of preservation itself might be seen as the only worthwhile enterprise—the preservation of knowledge, which would make Seldon’s Encyclopedists the first moral actors in a post Imperial age.

I think Asimov was writing about the world he lived in rather than either the Roman Empire (or Republic) or the Galactic Empire.  Naturally, insofar as science fiction is always really about the present, viewed through the distorting lens of a future tense.  But more than that, because he was establishing priorities.  Empires rise and fall—the Foundation itself becomes an empire (much as America did after WWII, if not in fact at least in influence) and all empires become pieces on a larger chess board in a game played by those behind the scenes—but what matters is the continuity of knowledge and access to it for all those people who must survive the changes in political fashion.

I couldn’t possibly have recognized all this when I first read these books.  Some of my peers, and certainly many of the adults around me then, dismissed them as they did all SF as “mere” entertainment, idle speculation, and, at worst, a waste of time.  But for me, what may or may not have been latent in the text was sufficiently present to inspire.  The seriousness with which Asimov approached his subject was very different in tone and effect from, say, Doc Smith.  Insofar as I have ever been scholarly, the Foundation series spoke to me on that level, and triggered the response that led me to start writing my own stories.

It’s telling that in Asimov’s autobiography, In Memory Still Green, he claims that he had no idea what he intended to do after writing and selling that first Foundation story.  But he had put a hook at the end of it which demanded a second story, thinking himself clever that he had in some way trapped Campbell into having to buy the sequel in order to answer the question, without quite realizing that he then had to deliver.  He goes on to claim that he never could work from an outline, not then and not later.  Maybe not on paper, but there was an outline in his head somewhere that provided a reliable template.

Of all the SF I read back then, I find few I can reread with any pleasure.  This is one of them.  It still enthralls me.  I can still see the vast deeps between the stars and the terrible force of history unfolding and enfolding across time the matrices in which we nevertheless decide for ourselves what we want and struggle to accomplish.

That, at least, is my story.

Culture’s End (The Ends of Culture)

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 9 Comments

Once in a while, work comes along that, while not doing anything apparently new, turns a settled form inside out and frees possibilities.   In writing, this generally means that, in the wake of such work, the things it is possible to say and the ways in which they are said broaden.  Branchings occur, reactions, new growth, inspiration ripples along.

Iain M. Banks triggered—at least for me—a renewal of an old science fiction mainstay, the Space Opera.  Practically from the beginning of the modern form in the 1920s, interstellar adventures have been woven into the DNA of the genre, replete with strange planets, exotic aliens, and occasional examinations of political systems, albeit not on a very sophisticated level.  Everything from the Roman Empire to a kind of United Nations model has been used, sometimes to unintentionally silly effect.  Given the suppositions on hand, it is not a small task to plausibly imagine such a universe.  Some of the best works have ignored the details, lest unwanted hilarity result, suspension of disbelief sabotaged by, of all things, the wallpaper.

Space Opera lost some of its cachet in the Seventies in the wake of Star Trek, which combined much of the long history of the form in a single popular television show, and made it difficult to write anything that didn’t look like Star Trek.  In written SF, Space Opera receded in prominence.  Then in the early Eighties, with Neuromancer by William Gibson, Cyberpunk muscled its way into prominence and one of those moments of expansion occurred.  For the next two decades, it seemed,  reaction to Cyberpunk dominated the field.

But in 1987 a novel was published in England (a year later in America) that signaled the coming resurgence of good ol’ fashioned Space Opera.

Consider Phlebas was a thick, densely-detailed, elegantly-penned adventure that seemed to have come from the mind of a literary writer who had no real idea there had ever been such a thing as Space Opera.  But that was impossible, since it handled the conventions of the form with such grace and sympathy as to suggest a lifelong devoteé.  Iain Banks simply didn’t write from a traditional æsthetic, even when it seemed he did.

One of the most interesting choices he made in the novel was putting his major invention—the Culture—in both a background position and as an antagonist.  One might be forgiven if, from reading just this book, one thought the Culture was a throw-away idea, never to appear again.  Because the other civilizations depicted, several of which are at war, are so vividly and thoroughly imagined that any one or five of them might have served as the solid foundation for a series of breathtaking novels.

To be clear, what the Culture subsequently became, in novel after novel (and a handful of short stories) was not a hero’s preserve.  The Culture seems often like the Good Guy, but just as often they are a meddlesome, arrogant, dangerous collection of diplomatic bullies.  What Banks constructed with the Culture is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of an interstellar empire.  It is what it needs to be in any given circumstance.  And like any real government, expedience is its chief operating mode.

But.  And this is a large exception.  Because the Culture actually has no material needs—it is what we’ve come to term a “post scarcity civilization”—its political motivations are a bit more abstract.  The Culture has a moral compass, one which it seems to ignore as often as it follows, and has, in complete contradiction to the famous and also often ignored Prime Directive of Star Trek, no compunction about interfering with another civilization at all.  In this way, Banks created the perfect sociopolitical tool to examine what might be termed Moral Expedience.

Rather than confirm the essential uselessness of Space Opera, Banks made it relevant by making cases for right action within a vast and complicated set of interlocking political, social, and ethical systems.  Philosophy 101, in many cases, but deftly handled and often pointedly specific in its potential relevancies.

By further expanding the players to include wholly autonomous machine intelligences—ships that owned themselves and acted according to their own interests, AI advisers, habitats both awake and involved—he opened the dialogue on the question of rights as a, if you’ll forgive the seeming contradiction, concrete abstraction.

If one of the primary attractions of science fiction is the examination of the question “How, then, shall we live?” then one could do much worse than Iain M. Banks as a complete buffet of fascinating riffs, postulates, improvisations, and dialogues on exactly that question—which, at its heart, is the primary concern of what shall be done with virtually unlimited power?

All this would imply a dry, discursive study, plodding expositions, info-dumps that slow the action (what there may be) to a near halt.  That would be a mistake.  Banks’ skill has been to lay all this depth and contemplative meat, bone, and gristle into exceptional adventures with high stakes and finely-drawn characters.  Everything in a Banks novel is profoundly personal.

Space Opera has enjoyed a come-back since that first Culture novel came out.  Banks is now one of many well-respected practioners of the form.  It may be that the field was ready to revisit it anyway.  But without Banks, it may be wondered how satisfying such a visit might have been.

As we shall be wondering when there are no more Culture novels.

Iain M. Banks has announced his last novel (not a Culture novel) because he has terminal cancer.  The 59-year-old writer of eleven Culture books and sixteen other novels says he has perhaps a year to live and his new novel, as yet unreleased, will be his last.

An appreciation of Banks’ Culture stories is only the half of it.  He has enjoyed the enviable ability to write so-called “mainstream” works under “Iain Banks” all along.  His first novel, The Wasp Factory was an experimental work that bordered on SF, reminiscent of both J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.  He has written thrillers, literary novels, satires.  Since 1984 his work has made a significant impression in the U.K. and has gained a large following in the United States.

He is only 59.  If there is any justice, he will be long remembered as a pivotal voice in Western Letters.  Treat yourself.  Go read one of his novels.  Then read another.  Repeat.

Knowing Who To Follow

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 5 Comments

Choosing the right character to carry the story is one of the essential jobs of constructing a solid narrative.  Often that character will seemingly do the work for the author in the telling of his or her story.  Everything follows from viewpoint.  If the wrong one is chosen, the work can still be finished, the story told, but it can be an arduous task and, except in the hands of the most skilled, the effort shows in the finished product.

From certain writers we expect the right choices as given.  It never occurs to us to question them the way we might question a less seasoned author.  Reputation is based on the repeated nailing of all the important factors.  Such respect can be so ingrained that when a mistake is encountered, a wrong choice made, and the narrative doesn’t flow as it feels it should, there’s a tendency to blame ourselves.  We’re not reading it with sufficient attention, we’re not getting all the cues, we have failed to pierce the caul of metaphor and see into the purpose of the work in hand.  We are deficient, not they.  If we are bored, it is because we are boring, never that the author to whom we grant such status has bored us.  We are philistines, unworthy of the temple secrets.

Sometimes, this is true.  There are such works that are so densely construed and meticulously articulated that they require superior attention, often more than a couple of readings, and demand that the reader bring something substantive to the text before page one is even begun.

There are also works which pretend to be like that.  They can be difficult, opaque, and on the surface pointless.  Often, rather than admit the possibility that the work is flawed, we may find ourselves inventing the nous and telos of such a work, doing ourselves what the writer actually failed to do, or at least failed to get right.  If nothing else, the elegance of the sentences, the lexicon and vocabulary alone, convince us that this work must be good.  We couldn’t write anything so self-evidently beautiful, concise, lush…artful.

Doubt is also an essential element in literature.  The writer doubts in the act of writing, because there are many choices that must be continually made, from the macro to the micro.  There are doubts the reader has as the story unfolds, questions to be asked and, we hope, answered.  But also the basic doubt—is this book worth our time?

The work must earn our trust, assuage our doubts.  Being kicked out of a narrative, something we’ve all experienced, even with the best work, is an aspect of unanswered doubt.  The writer loses us when the work fails to keep interest high and doubts low.

With some writers, those with Reputations, this process gets reversed, and a work that might otherwise be set aside had it been written by a lesser light then consumes us in a quest to find the flaw in ourselves that causes us the discomfort of entertaining the possibility that this work is not what it should be.

In a recent piece in Salon.com, Robert Lennon tackles this idea.  We are told certain works are worth our time because they are the epitome of what we should aspire to, both as writers and as readers.

A case in point—with regrets—is William Gass’s new novel, Middle C.  The prose are fine, there is a playfulness with language reminiscent of Pynchon and Gaddis and, occasionally, Fowles, and some passages are beautiful.  The whole does not live up to the potential of its components.

This is a difficult realization.  Gass is one of those with Reputation.  His essays are acknowledged masterpieces, his novel The Tunnel is considered a 20th Century classic.  Middle C  is his self-professed Last Novel.  The conceit that launches the narrative—a man who changes cultural identities in order to survive the coming catastrophe of World War II, and then continues to drag his family from one set of personae to another, trying to stay one step ahead of those who may force him to conform to moral conditions he cannot abide—is fascinating, and the stage is set beautifully.  Distantly reminiscent of Gaddis’s The Recognitions, fraud and imposture inform the lives of his family throughout.  The attempt to find a place while simultaneously seeking an identity with which they can comfortably live, set against the backdrop of a post-war America that seemed to change both its sense of self and its expectation with each passing fad should have produced an electric work of neon clarity.

Instead, the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, is so intent on passing unnoticed through everything and among everyone that he never becomes his own Self, but remains a potential buried within the layers of subterfuge and fraud he uses to get by.  If it was Joey’s intention to keep everyone out, Gass allows him to succeed, and we are left with a skilled cipher who never engages with anything.  His passion is music, but, presciently, one of his early instructors tells him flat out that he pretends to play well, that he does not let himself know the music, and so will remain a talented mediocrity.

Gass seems to have chosen the wrong character to follow.  We know everything we are going to know about Joseph Skizzen by page 50.

Now had he gone with Joey’s father, we might have had a narrative with some unadorned vigor.  Rudi Skizzen took chances, acted, moved, and seems to have possessed a moral center that, while manifesting in rather unexpected and abstruse ways, drove him.  Had Gass followed him when he abandoned his family to head for Canada…

But we don’t have that book.  We have the careful examination of the near wreckage of his family as they try to get by.  Not succeed.  They don’t try for that (except the sister, Debby, who embraces the plasticity of America and seems to become a Happy Suburbanite—not much a choice, perhaps, but wholly hers and made without apparent regret) but turn inward to self pity and a constant fear of being found out.

Joey Skizzen—Professor Joseph Skizzen—does not wish to be noticed.  When people notice you, he suggests, then you are expected to do something, to live up to their criteria.  This is well and good if you have a set of criteria of your own and work to live up to them,  but Joey’s phobia removes from him any desire, apparently, to have any expectations at all of himself.  He just wants to pass through, get by, be left alone.

The reader doubts, especially when confronted with a book by someone we are expected to appreciate, that his or her reactions have any merit when those reactions are negative.  At best, this leads to a bit of wasted time spent muscling through a novel searching for what we are told to expect.  At worst, we take our inability to gain intellectual purchase in the novel as proof that our intellect is wanting, that our taste is lacking, that we are ourselves the philistines at the gate.  It is hard to realize that sometimes even a great artist produces flawed and occasionally fatally flawed work.

I was reminded of another work while going through Middle C, namely James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, which also told the story of people trying to change identities and pass as other than they were and dealing in various moral frauds in order to achieve questionable short-term ends.  The difference was that in Cain’s work all of them had something to lose, all the way up to the end, which made the work a first-rate tragedy.  In Middle C all the loss happens early, nothing is regained, and instead of tragedy we find farce.

There are some fascinating passages in this book, and the ideas with which Gass is playing are rich.  But the path he followed seems to take the long way around and doesn’t go where the beginning would suggest it should.  No one ought to feel inadequate as a reader in the face of such a work.

To Be Good Again

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Redemption is a complex thing.  We like to pretend it’s straightforward.  Do this, forgiveness, atonement, compensation can be made.  The greater the need, the larger the act required.

There are two things wrong with this.  The first is that we can know everything about what we have done (or not done) that requires an act of contrition.  The second is that contrition—forgiveness, atonement, compensation—is the same as redemption.

Khaled Hosseini shows how this is a mistake in his deceptively simple storytelling in The Kite Runner.  He understands that redemption is not about atoning for something you did wrong.  It is about changing what it is that allowed you to do something wrong in the first place.  It is about becoming.  One is redeemed by taking the responsibility—and the risk—for who one is and making that consistent with what one can and should be.

He also understands that part of the journey to that new state is learning the truth of our life.

Sometimes that may be simply impossible.  Things disappear, memories fade, people die.  The components that comprise our Self can be lost or overlooked, the connections broken or never made, and without a sufficiency of such information we may simply be unable to know what we need to do.  This fact has been central to tragedy since Sophocles, probably even before him, and has never become untrue.

In the absence of knowledge, choice is necessarily limited.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but sometimes it means we live with a sense of guilt difficult if not impossible to explain—usually because we did something for which atonement is necessary.  Where redemption comes in is when we know we must atone, but in order to do so we must become something else, someone else.

The elements of young Amir’s life in Kabul, son of a local hero, a wealthy man larger than life who has done much good for those around him, combine in a negative way to render him not the person his father wants him to be.  He senses it in so many ways, from the belief that he is at fault for killing his mother (in childbirth) to the disappointment he feels from his father because he is not athletic, to the jealousy he feels for the affection his father shows to Hassan, the son of their servant, who is also Amir’s best friend.  Amir cannot be wholly himself because there is a conflict between who he seems to be and what he wishes to be in his father’s eyes.

Here, then, is where Hosseini  displays the depth of our complications.  The faults Amir senses in himself react with the faults his father clearly sees in himself.  The only genuinely unconflicted person among them is Hassan, but even he is not wholly unalloyed.  There are layers upon layers, ethnic divisions, class divisions, history itself seems bent on distorting the clean emotions among them.  Amir comes to resent his friend, not for anything his friend has done, for Amir’s failure in his own mind to be what he should be for Hassan, and ends up driving Hassan and his father away, an event that breaks Amir’s father’s heart.  The need for redemption here is thwarted because the truth of the situation is not shared, not even admitted.

And then the Russians invade Afghanistan, forcing Amir and his father to flee, first to Pakistan and then to America, where they start over.

Here, in a new place, with new rules, Amir grabs a chance to leave all those uglinesses behind.  No one knows, no one sees, he can live up to altered expectations, take on a new life, be someone his father can respect. He falls in love, he marries, he begins a career as a writer.

During all this, his father passes away.  Baba dies proud of his son.  And yet it is not enough.

Then Afghanistan reaches out for him and brings him back for one more chance at a redemption Amir thought—hoped—was no longer necessary.

His father’s best friend calls him in 2001 and asks him to come to Pakistan to see him. There is a way to be good again.

That is the key to Hosseini’s understanding of redemption.  A way to be good again—but one which requires Amir to finally become who he had never been able to be before.  In order to fully achieve it, though, he must learn things he never knew, could not know, things kept from him which nevertheless contoured his life, forced him into certain channels, directed him, and stunted his potential.  He fights it, of course, but inevitably he sees that he simply can’t avoid becoming the person he always needed to become.

That is redemption.  Transformative.  Atonement and forgiveness, he suggests, are pointless if they are only rituals, acts that leave the essential person unchanged.  Redemption is in the change, in the new life, in recognition and response that remake us.

Clarity

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

One of the most perverse aspects of American culture is the contradiction between our self-professed guiding ethos and what many of us actually do.  This is the country of the self-made, the independent thinker, the individualist.  We build elaborate mythologies extolling the virtues and victories of our heroes, who are all of a piece, wholly their own creatures, dependent on no one and nothing to be what they are.  Daniel Boone to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the self-sufficient American is our national role model.

Yet a look at our actual history shows that we as a people are surpassing great joiners.  We attach ourselves to collectives, to movements, to institutions, and borrow ideologies from them, speaking with a group voice and shunning those whose independence of thought causes them to criticize whatever party our fellows have joined that gives them a sense of worth.  We have been known as the most religious country on Earth, per capita, and any close look at the religious movements that have swept this country over more than two centuries shows a deep approval of support for such causes even at the expense (sometimes especially at the expense) of those who are genuinely independent in thought and action.  Americans often readily bury their freedom of conscience in support of all manner of mass social incarnations, be they labor unions, political parties, or churches.

For a nation founded on an idea of letting people be who they wish to be, America has a questionable track record, with periods of tolerance punctuated by spasms of intolerance, but always with an apparent acceptance of a preference for belonging that runs counter to our professed pride of independence.  This also runs counter to the related “virtue” we like to boast of being hard-nosed skeptics.  To be sure, many of us are, and most of us exercise a degree of skepticism at least in certain areas of our lives, but again we are inconsistent, especially, it seems, when it comes to religions.

Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, delves into one of the most quintessentially American religions of the 20th Century.  Generated in the 1950s out of the imagination of one man, it has grown to international proportions, and along the way has been subject to as much if not more controversy than any other movement of comparable size, in some ways akin to Mormonism.  (In significant ways, Scientology and Mormonism share a great deal—both creations of single individuals who then went on to uproot a community of followers, creating an insular ideology that separated members from the wider world, based on cosmologies invented almost from whole cloth, establishing themselves in the minds of their adherents with such visceral force that no amount of fact seems capable of dislodging faith in the central tenets, fact in both instances far more easily produced and demonstrated than in most other religions.)

Going Clear

Many books have been written about Scientology, the majority by or about former members whose objectivity may be doubted.  This is not, on the inside, a religion that seems content to allow its membership the kind of options we expect from more mainstream faiths.  You may join the Baptists, stay awhile, and then, if it doesn’t suit, leave.  According to most accounts by ex-Scientologists, there is no apparent regard for such an option, and those who do leave are rarely left alone.  (By contrast, when a Mormon repudiates the faith, the opposite tends to happen—they are closed out and shunned.)

Wright has no axes to grind.  He is an investigative journalist telling a story.  He did exhaustive research, covered as much material as he could, found many people to talk to, both in and out of the church, and has produced what may be to date one of the most evenhanded treatments of the subject yet published.  The evolution of the movement, from the imagination of its founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, is charted clearly, as is the growth of the church from the size of a club to a cult to a major religion boasting millions of members.   One of his guiding questions, however, has to do with volition:

If Scientology is based on a lie…what does it say about the many people who believe in its doctrine…?

Throughout the book, this question hovers in the background.  We see people from all walks of life encounter Scientology and then surrender themselves to it, sometimes for life, sometimes for a few years, for a myriad of reasons.  Wrights finds people who swear by the efficacy of the doctrines, who use it to be better people.  He seems to find just as many who have apparently few other options for self-discovery and actualization.  After long enough, it becomes difficult if not impossible to conceive of life outside the church.

The ones that cause the deepest stirrings of concern are those born into it, at least those born into it within the deepest circles, the Sea Org and administration.  They grow up never knowing enough, if anything, about the outside world to be able to function anywhere but within the church.

There are orders of renunciates the world over, retiring groups who close themselves off from the world at large.  Their existence calls into question criticism of Scientology for doing essentially the same thing.  However, as the story of the interior world Hubbard created unfolds, we see a disturbing absence of all the aspects of free will, free choice that we take for granted.  Yes, strictly speaking, these people joined on their own and stay by choice.

But so, too, did the followers of Jim Jones or David Koresh.  A close look at Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church reveals a similar break from the standards of free association we associate with the exercise of rights.  Coercion takes many forms and the most effective are those that manage to convince people to place the chains on themselves.

And yet…and yet…

The doctrines created—invented—by Hubbard come straight out of science fiction.  Hubbard was a pulp writer in the 1930s, he wrote fantastic fiction (as in content not necessarily quality), he was a colleague of Heinlein, de Camp, others who established the idioms of what we know today as science fiction.  When you read the ideas that informed Hubbard’s central mythos for the church, it is straight out of science fiction, but of an earlier era where some of the constraints of science, even in passing,  did not pertain.  It is difficult to take any of it seriously.  Much of it flies in the face of physical fact (the universe is 14 billion years old, not 4 quadrillion) and defies the logic of evolution.  It combines elements of pop psychology with Antlantean mythology with flights of fancy that would be ridiculed today by savvy readers if the attempt were made to foist it onto them.  How can anyone swallow this stuff, we may ask, incredulous at the apparent gullibility of adherents.

But, then, the same could be said of the basic doctrines of any religion.  Joseph Smith was a con artist and his frauds were documented, yet people virtually worship him as the avatar of their theological universe.  Fact has little bearing on the need to join and believe exhibited by so many people.  Cordons sanitaire are drawn around the primary ideologies of any religion, exempting them from even the most mundane of critical analysis.

Few have been so closely guarded as those of Scientology.

What is striking, though, is the apparent ease with which such movements attract followers in a place where supposedly the defining cultural motifs all promote the idea of not being gulled, not being fooled, not be led unquestioningly.  Wright has no answers to such dilemmas.  What he has given us, however, is a clear-eyed look at method and process and, it may be hoped, a possible antitode to self-imposed slavery.