Sociology

The Caste of Our Insecurities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. 

The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. 

She makes the case.

And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously for most people, expressed by body language, word choice, social assumptions, and a kind of cognitive aphasia in which people simply do not see what they’re doing or who they’re doing it to. Difficult to get the why if the what can be so smoothly unrecognized.

It’s hard reading, and yet fills in blanks that other attempts at addressing racism and class bigotry fall short. For instance, we tend to default to the occurrence of racism based on appearance, and to a great degree that is a major aspect. But any look at the history of it in this country reveals certain baffling inconsistencies, as when Irish immigrants were seen as nonwhites in the mid-19th Century, and how Jews have long suffered a conditional status. Italians, East Europeans, and so forth, all passed through periods of being regarded as, functionally,  not White.

At times, the idea that class is at work more than race, but that will not answer the fact that “success” is no guarantee against automatic relegation to inferior status. Over the last century and a half that African Americans have been removed from enslavement, wealth has proved to be insufficient to overcome systemic biases, even as wealth makes certain interactions easier. 

In the afterwash of the Civil Rights era, many white people would like to believe that the issue has been settled, but we are constantly reminded that it is not. Partly, this has been a consequence of not identifying the problem correctly. The frustration of seeing our best intentions regularly thwarted by behaviors which seem to have no manageable foundation dogs us through history. The key factor in this persistent misidentification is the fact that all our public declarations, beginning in 1776, overwhelming stress our commitment to equality. This pledge masks intentions that run directly counter to the stated goals. It is more than special pleading, it is a refusal to adhere to principles that require us to stop being White.

By White I do not mean the surface markers of what we semi-scientifically term Caucasian. Because, as noted, many groups that have met those qualifications in the past were, at one time or another, regarded as Not White. White is a social and political designation. The term did not exist as a group marker until the 18th Century and was intended as a hierarchical label. It quickly established a kind of “natural” pecking order upon which the future designations of racial groups could be slotted into categories. This quickly became both political and economic fuel for purposes of group identity and justification for exploitation. In America it was used to legitimate not only slavery but miscegenation laws and later eugenics programs. But more consistently, it evolved a rigid caste system with which we live today, albeit diluted sufficiently most of do not recognize it.

Not recognizing, it becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

Wilkerson’s book is, as I say, hard reading. The savagery with which we have treated African Americans, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and establishing the principle of participatory equality, is made all the more terrible because of the ideas on which our country has been founded. To be sure, caste may not be the key to undoing the systemic disregard experienced by millions of people, but upon reading this book I have found some purchase on the problem that, while not rendering it sensible, at least suggests the degree to which the problem is rooted. 

It has also given some slightly more discernible explanation for what just happened in our recent election. And if true, it is a sad and pathetic reality. 

The apparent need sewn into the fabric of our being to somehow be Better Than is a double-edged blade. One can use that need for self-improvement without it becoming a toxic excuse to constantly keep someone else down, to perfect one’s gifts, to aspire to personal achievement. Or it becomes a need to just exercise a false sense of self-entitled privilege over others by virtue of the arbitrariness of birth or group affiliation. This can justify anything from cheating on exams to murder, depending on the pathology of the obsession to simply Be Better as opposed to Doing Better. And of course, if the latter is the path chosen, the goal is already lost. All that remains then is to do all one can to hide one’s inabilities, infelicities, and lack of empathy. 

Expunging this apparently integral notion of caste may be the only way to become the better angels of our stated aspirations. But how does one do something without first recognizing it?

Klara and the Sun

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Klara and the Sun is a simple story built upon a deep substrate of subtlety. It realizes its best effects by the very plainness of its presentation. But given a moment’s reflection it becomes clear how profoundly well-imagined is the world he has constructed.

Klara, the viewpoint character throughout, is an AF—and Artificial Friend. A robot built to act as a personal companion for a child or young adult. It’s a very old idea, almost Victorian, from a time when the wealthy, the aristocrat, would pay someone to be companion to a son or daughter. A constant presence that could be relied on to always be supportive and, more or less, guide the subject on a solid path to adulthood. As the novel opens, Klara is resident in the store where AFs are sold, with a view of the busy urban street beyond.

We learn in short order that AFs are solar powered, that they are intent upon finding a place with a customer, that there are different models with different capabilities (Klara is a B2), and that to a significant extent they are emotionally aware. This last detail has always given me pause because emotion is intrinsically hormonal. Living creatures experience emotions because our bodies give us chemicals in response to event, so we know fear and happiness, embarrassment and depression. Without these systems, machines by definition cannot have emotions. (This is a trope in SF that has always troubled me, but it seems wired into things now.) Ishiguro gets us by this small problem by inference that the emotions are programs that seem incapable of serious modification. Even at the end of the novel, in less than ideal circumstances, Klara’s emotional engagement remains consistent. So we can see this as a matter of program response that is self-referential and operates within a relatively broad but constrained range. (There is within this a nod to Turing.)

Details matter, especially in the construction of plausible science fiction narratives, so I point the above out to suggest that Ishiguro has done his homework and built his world well.

Klara is purchased finally by the mother of Josie, who is around 12 or 13, and is not well. She suffers bouts of debilitation. Eventually we learn that this is a consequence of her having been Lifted, a kind of genetic modification intended to enhance a child’s potential, both physically and intellectually. It does not always work out, though. The Mother, Chrissie, has already lost a daughter to this process and now it seems another may die. So the choice of an AF for Josie is shot through with multiple motivations as well a guilt and hope. Klara determines that she is there to see Josie through this.

The setting is the near future. Things are different yet much the same. The social dynamics have found new bases on which to operate, but the results are much as they have always been. Lifting has become the new standard of acceptance and obviously there is a class component. Josie’s best friend, Rick, has not ben Lifted, and so is sort of a misfit in the social groups Josie’s mother wishes her to join. The tension around the process feels very familiar and yet is a disturbingly dissonant option—for some, not all. What emerges regarding Josie’s difficulties, the dynamics between her and her mother and the estranged father, with Klara in the middle for purposes she is not altogether aware of form the ecology of the novel. Klara’s own apprehension of the problem seems at times both naïve and simply off the rails, with her conviction that the Sun is the solution to all these problems. Because Klara is solar powered, it seems logical that she has what amounts to a belief system centered on the Sun as a sort of deity. 

All these components merge into a disturbing yet disturbingly familiar expression of hope and need for purpose that, even as the answers and solutions sought by Klara are often beside the point, speaks to dedication, loyalty, and conviction. Klara succeeds, even thought what she actually does appears to have almost nothing to do with the actual mechanisms with which she wrestles, and experiences…well, perhaps not “life” as we might accept it, but fulfillment of intent that resonates.

Ishiguro has demonstrated a unique method of writing science fiction that “passes” as not. He has been working toward this for decades now, not quite succeeding in the attempt, until now. Just as he managed to recast the Arthurian legends as an unexpectedly trenchant work of mimetic historical fiction that was more concerned with the underpinnings of legend than with the legend itself, here he has given us a thoroughly-conceived work of SF that works as “literary” in the ways our culture accepts the idea. Certainly one can read this is as allegory, Klara herself as a metaphor, and, if one chooses, ignore the dislocations of the world itself. One can pretend this is a kind of riff on The Prince and the Pauper, a page lifted from Pollyana, a gloss on any number of sickly-child stories, even a study of the emotional fallout of adoption and divorce and loss. I suppose it might even work satisfactorily that way.

But it works best when the underlying conceits, which are wholly SFnal, are accepted and engaged. This is a disturbing world, a decade or two removed from ours, strewn with questions about the ethics of genetic engineering, AI, emotional substitution, and the economics of transformative technologies. One could go back through and pick a dropped line and unpack the meanings and marvel as the implications. 

It has long been pondered what it would look like if one day science fiction became simply another mode of literature. I think this may be one of the best examples.

Year in review

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I read 94 books in 2024. 

Not what I was shooting for, but not by any means unsatisfying. Upon retirement, I imagined myself spending at least two or three hours a day poring over all the books and devouring the things I’ve always intended to.

Well. That didn’t happen.

But as things get more settled, I might exceed my goal of 100 a year. (The highest number I ever reached was my senior year of high school. I had taken a speed reading course the year before, I was cruising through texts at an average of 2000 words a minute, and I cut class most of my senior year. I spent most of those days at the local library—seriously—and got to where I was doing a book a day. I plowed through many of the so-called classics that way and I might have read 300 books that year. Now, I can’t read that fast anymore and I’m much happier for it, because what I read at the more modest pace of maybe 150 to 200 words a minute means more, has more impact, and stays in my memory. Lately I’ve been revisiting some of those classics I read back then and it’s like reading them for the first time. I remember I read them, but not much else, with a few exceptions.) That would be a respectable number, I think. 

I did a lot of filling in this past year. Books I’ve owned for decades and never got around to, some works of SF that are important if not seminal works that I simply passed up. To that end, I read several of the original Ace Specials, edited in the late 60s-early 70s by Terry Carr. While a couple of them did not quite pass the test of time, I was pleasantly surprised by the D.G.Compton’s—Chronocules, Steel Crocodile, The Silent Multitude, and Synthajoy. I found them very mature works, dealing with human interaction in ways much more sophisticated than a lot of popular SF at the time, with premises that, while certainly science fictional, did not dazzle with hi-tech glitz, but supplied a satisfying substrate for the real action, which is how we treat each other. Compton, I believe, holds the record for the most titles published in the Ace Special line. As well, I read a couple of Bob Shaw’s, a writer who has unfortunately been largely forgotten today. The Two-Timers and The Palace of Eternity are sophisticated stories of seemingly minor shifts in the given tapestry of our lives with outsized effects. 

I also filled a couple of Michael Moorcock gaps with The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Distant Stars, and The Warlord of the Air. Moorcock can be uneven, but he possesses a singular approach to science fiction that, when effective, elevates his work to a remarkable degree. 

I also tackled a lot of Robert Silverberg. There is a lot of Silverberg. He is one of the most prolific writers, in any genre, and he crossed genres significantly. In his early career, he wrote a great deal of popular SF, potboilers really, and some of it has not aged well. When Silverberg is firing on all cylinders, he can be brilliant. But the volume of work…well, not all of it rose to such vaunted heights, and we shouldn’t expect it to. But in some ways, work which was once seen as cutting-edge and groundbreaking, especially socially, has worn poorly. But among those I read this year that I think remain remarkable I would put Downward To The Earth. It’s a riff on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Silverberg has claimed Conrad as one of his favorites, so it’s not surprising that he would take a page from him from time to time, and this one is rather well done. Another worthy tale is Sailing To Byzantium. It’s elegant and picturesque and in the end poignant. 

There are novels one should read at the right age or, really, when they first appear if possible. I read several older works that, for a variety of reasons, simply have not held up well, despite clever ideas. Sad, really, because I can see in many cases where I would—at age 15 or 16 or 26—have been utterly enthralled by them. Some of this has to do with the natural changes of style that come with the passing of time. We’ve learned how to write this stuff better. Some of it has to do with the priority given to aspects of certain stories we know were they done today would be differently deployed. Times have changed, tastes have evolved, and for better or worse I am someone who has a difficult time Going Back. I can’t read a lot of older work that I know I loved when I first encountered it, because, well, it doesn’t flow anymore. Expectations have mutated, grown, what have you. (I have this problem with period novels. I know people who can happily get lost in the works of Trollope or Galsworthy, but I trip over the prose and stumble. Oh, there are writers from those periods I can read, there are exceptions, but a great deal of popular work from previous eras just doesn’t work for me and it’s not the fault of the work itself.) I will confess here that there is one type of novel I simply grind to a halt with and that is the broad satire. I attempted to read John Sladek’s Mechasm (another of the original Ace Specials) and it’s Vonnegut-esque, which would be a recommendation for many people. But it’s…well, smart-alecky. Tongues visibly in cheeks, caricatures, and just…clever ideas packaged as a series of absurdities. I’m willing to cop to tone-deafness on my part, but too often I’ve been in the middle of work like this before realizing I’m trying to read smart-ass prose as if they were deadly serious. I’m working on that.

Then there are writers whose approach to subject—their strategies, if you will—fails to engage. I have blindspots about this. I read things others tell me are just marvelous and I find them clunky and all but inaccessible. But so many people extoll the virtues of these writers so much that I suspect many of us who are simply not impressed say nothing for fear of spoiling the party. 

One classic, so called, that was surprising in many ways? I finally read The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. Sloan Wilson’s first novel and  cultural touchstone of sorts. My review is here, so I won’t go into it. I read a few books that in their day were heralded as important. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which I found clever if not altogether revelatory. And then there was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. I understood something about Lem after this one that I hadn’t quite realized before. Lem did not like mot science fiction, especially American SF, and this novel offered a clue as to why that may have been. Lem, I believe, didn’t think humans were…improvable. That we might develop amazing technologies, even make major breakthroughs in science, but we ourselves? Hopeless. I think he may have reacted negatively to the kind of Higher Frontier cheerleading a lot of SF indulges. 

I continue to be impressed with the tor.com series. I’ve read a number of great books from them and not yet encountered a bad one. This year continues with the latest entry in the Murderbot seriea, System Collapse. A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather pushed the boundaries of Steampunk in interesting directions, although I’m beginning to feel that category ought to be retired, at least in many instances. Just because a story is set in a more or less Victorian milieu it should not automatically be regarded as steampunk. Sometimes it’s just alternate history. More often, it seems, it’s an example of horror. Be that as it may, another fine work from tor.com is Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements, a very satisfying kind of space opera. Top of the list from that publisher, though, is Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction, a sobering contemplation on the economics and sociometrics of poaching and the costs of solutions.

Continuing my desultory attempt to catch up on what may have been my Golden Age, I read a couple more Clifford Simak novels—Cemetery World, in particular—and James Blish novels. Blish is another mixed bag. Some of his books have aged poorly, while some are surprisingly still very good. Titan’s Daughter is a mixed bag novel reminiscent of Wells’ Food of the Gods. A thriller of sorts. And Mission To The Heart Stars would seem to be a response to Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, both dealing in different ways with the idea of humanity having to pass muster before a galactic civilization that holds our fate in its grasp. 

Two of the most surprisingly pleasurable reads (for completely different reasons) this year were C.S.E. Cooney’s World Fantasy Award winner  Saint Death’s Daughter and the Booker Prize winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The first because normally I would never have picked it up, but it’s a title in my book group’s roster (this month actually), the second because…well, an SF novel written by literary writer that, being SF, won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet.

Saint Death’s Daughter is a sprawling bit of world-building that, despite its excellent background construction and detail, is very focused on its characters, who are wide-ranging and unique. Despite some touchpoints that suggest this world is some past (or future) iteration of our own, it quickly becomes irrelevant to the plot, which is twisty and engaging and in certain ways compellingly perverse. It deals with necromancy, includes ghosts, resurrection, and an original take on magic which, by the end of the novel, left me wondering if this were fantasy at all. The world is not Earth, not in any traceable way, and I began to see the traces of a nanotech explanation for much of the so-called magic. But it is written in the manner of a fantasy. It appears to be a fantasy and, as such, is not something I would normally pick up. But it more than paid off the investment in a 640 page novel. 

Orbital on the other hand is exactly the sort of thing I would pick up, as much out of a desire to see how well it was done as for its content. I should be used to finding well-done SF written by otherwise non-SF writers by now. These are artists who have come of age steeped in the brew of science fiction that has soaked contemporary culture. It’s not like the “slumming” that one used to find from mainstream authors who attempted the form that they might otherwise have felt a subspecies of Good Writing. It has become much more acceptable for someone like Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel or Mat Johnson to produce a work of unapologetic science fiction (even though some publicists still balk at embracing it), but I’m still cautious and surprised when one is done well. In fact, very well. To be sure, Orbital is easily read as mainstream literary, the SFnal elements smoothly entwined with all the rest to make it feel contemporary. But if one of the chief values of science fiction is how is elucidates the human changes wrought by science and technology which are themselves game-changers—paradigm-shifters, if you will—in anticipatory modes, then Orbital qualifies, and it is the respectful flower of internalizing SF as a valid literary form with significant implications.

This past year I’ve read more SF than the last several. Largely, this was a consequence of having to devote myself to more research, but also because my nonfiction-for-pleasure has increased, and in that regard some of the highlights of 2024 have been: 

Christendom by Peter Heather; Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson; The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell; The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir; White Holes by Carlo Rovelli; Plato At The Googleplex by Rebecca Goldberger Goldstein; Orientalism by Edward Said; The Witches by Stacy Schaff. Again, some catching up going on there, books I should have read but never got to.

So, 94 books. I may tally fewer this coming year as I have several on my pile of epic proportions. That and I don’t know yet how my next couple of projects will distort my strategies. But all in all, I’m pleased with this last one. I have not mentioned several others, many of which were quite good but other than noting that I read them would add little to this summary. One of these years I may start linking to a spreadsheet so everyone can keep track.

I’ll end by pointing out that the last few years have seen declines in reading rates across several demographics. This saddens me. I know the pressures of daily life can make reading seem like a luxury—or a chore—that one cannot afford, but given the state of, well, everything these last several years, I think it is a necessary survival habit. The level of ignorance—specifically, the degree to which people simply do not know things—demonstrated quite publicly by too many people is having a corrosive effect on life itself. Regardless how bad one’s school experience my have been, reading is one of the most civilizing skills available to us. Not just the casual cruising of an internet feed but the kind of reading that stretches the imagination. Take a book, turn off the feeds, sit down, and dig in reading. It seems more and more that we’re going to let the world burn because we just don’t know any better.

Have a better 2025.

The Trajectory of Faith and Historical Reality

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

All histories are potentially divisive. Depending on how one approaches a period, supporters, detractors, identitarians, anyone with a self-appointed mission to either defend or attack certain sacrilized bovines may find agitation to the point of absurdity. The historian must be at least aware of all this before tackling her subject. Not with a view to self-censorship (although that may happen by default) but to know how much referencing and documentation may be required to overcome (somewhat) assaults based on issues having only tangential relation to the history being examined.

Which is one reason a book such as Peter Heather’s new Christendom: the Triumph of a Religion AD 300—1300 is both hefty and well-notated. He is not here interested much in the assertions of Christianity, only in the evolution of the religion over time as a social and political entity. The road from minor cult to the dominant aesthetic and political reality of Europe by the 14th Century is here examined as a system. How did it get to the point where we are still wrestling with questions of cultural legitimacy as they impinge upon the political realities of modern life?

Heather resents his credentials—agnostic, let’s say—as someone interested in what people did and how they did it. This is a history like any history of a country or a people. Dates matter. Major players matter. Shifting demographics matter. This is the story of bureaucracies and armies and successions and, above all, assertions of power. The Christianity that emerged over centuries after Emperor Constantine declared it the state religion of the Roman Empire is, regardless of how individual believers may feel, a political system. After Constantine is certainly became something other than what it started. The road it traveled is fascinating and maps closely to the more usual history with which we are familiar (if we are familiar with it).

This adds a layer as well to the questions of why Rome “fell” and how the Crusades began and failed and the way in which dynastic politics became inextricable from the dissemination of a faith that, in primary ways, was diametrically opposed to everything Europe became.

Two details make this a fascinating take on the topic. One, Heather goes into great detail over the matter of conversion. Of course, we know the famous ones—Augustine, Constantine, the less well-known Pegasios—and by these we understand it to be a dramatic, soul-wrenching experience. But when closely examined, it was never so simple, and for the vast majority of people at the time it was much more mundane. This month we’re worshiping Apollo, next month Sol Invictus, the month after that the Christian God. In order to comply with the law and obtain work, we must change our associations. Constantine’s mandate impacted the Empire through patronage. In order to obtain a position in the government, conversion was required. Heather makes clear with the case of Pegasios (bishop of Ilios, 350s A.D.) that it was a revolving door, as Pegasios had no trouble going back and forth between paganism and Christianity as circumstances dictated. This was not, for him (and presumably many others) a matter of salvation of the soul as it was a matter of livelihood and income.

Moving forward, it then appears obvious that the vast majority of conversions were pro forma. The king has decreed he and his subjects shall be Christians and so the people go to a different church.

This contradicts the idea of a major ideological revolution sweeping the continent. This was political.

Once understood, subsequent Church history makes more and more sense as history. Alliances, territory, prestige—all the values of a strong state—contributed to the eventual displacement of older religions as Christianity became the dominant ideology.

It is in the triumph of that ideology—or, rather, its symbols—that the success is traced. What people followed willingly (and, to our dismay, today) is a successful leader who could demonstrate a special bond to fate. The story of Constantine’s victory at Milvian Bridge is not a single unitarian narrative. There are four versions and it seems obvious in context that each served a public relations purpose. The Chi Rho triumphant, symbol of early Christianity, figures prominently in the story, but not in the same way in the various tellings.

Which is also where Christianity veered off its previous path of peace and harmony and, over time, became a militant religion. The leader who was victorious in battle and claimed aegis of the Christian god got to say which god would be worshiped. The contradiction emerged from the beginning. Peace and War joined in a paradoxical arrangement to underwrite the legitimacy of king or emperor.

The other thing Heather’s history dispels is the myth of the barbarian hordes. We tend to visualize them as rude brutes with no learning pouring brutishly into Roman precincts destroying a sophisticated civilization. In reality, these “barbarians” had learned from Rome and were in many way culturally on par with the empire they were displacing. And they brought with them their own variations of what they saw as True Christianity.

Which leads to another aspect that is oft misunderstood, which is the mythology of the Church Triumphant calling all the shots across Europe. That did happen, but it was a long process and fraught with setbacks and disputes. For much of the millennium being discussed, it was the kings who told the church what to do. Charlemagne’s crowning as the first Holy Roman Emperor was his idea, stage managed on his end, with the Pope going along with it lest there be consequences.

In short, this is an agnostic analysis of the growth of a bureaucratic, political system which follows the twisted paths of such things like any other. And by the time Rome became predominant once more, it was at the head of a religion that barely resembled the early pastoral communities from which it sprang. Each stage was a near-run thing and the unity of the Church was never what it appeared to be. 

Which is a curiously pertinent bit of history to become acquainted with now. Keeping the components separate and knowing how such things happen is a useful tonic in an age where the cries of faiths that claim unalloyed divine cause to overturn anything in their path. 

Destroyer of Worlds

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Oppenheimer is powerful film. Perhaps it requires someone versed in science fiction to do something like this. The world changed when Trinity went off and the only art form that doggedly tackled the ramifications of that change was science fiction. Unleashing the power of the atom was transformative in ways most people at the time could not fathom. Since the introduction of that power was as a weapon, it is natural that people would be, at best, ambivalent about its potential. The way the country dealt with that over the next 15 years did little to ease people into this new reality. We were in the midst of the second Red Scare at the same time, so everyone’s nerve endings were constantly assaulted by things triggering panic.

What the film manages to do is convey that arc from the collapsing world order through the triumph of community action and the achievement of dedicated people to create something new down into the cesspool of post-war anxiety that poisoned everything. What begins as a youthful encounter with new physics on the cutting edge of revelation becomes the hardened pragmatism of survival (theory only takes you so far) and then disintegrates in the endemic distrust of men trying to contain something they categorically do not understand. The impossibility of isolating the discoveries of the American program becomes the paranoid insistence that no one can be trusted, turning the youthful dream into the nightmares of the guilty.

At the same time, we are treated to several well-placed mini-presentations of problem-solving and the nature of the subatomic realm as revealed by the drive to build The Bomb.

Cillian Murphy is amazing as Oppenheimer. We are treated to glimpses of many of the players involved, each distinct, and perhaps the fairest portrayal of General Groves in any dramatic presentation to date.

But the core of the film is that turn from one world—one kind of world—to another. The Trinity test is just past halfway in and much of the event occurs in eerie silence. Probably accurate, but as useful as that may be, it is the symbolism that strikes home. No word is spoken, no sound, either of bell or crying prophet, no whisper in the vacuum of transition. Nolan ties this together with an interaction at the beginning, a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a lake that is unheard (though tragically misinterpreted by the uninvolved witness), and revelation of what was said at the end. Just as in particle physics, we observe small interactions that ramify into huge consequences.

The scientists who were trying to caution the politicians that this was something for which they were woefully unequipped all seem to underestimate the venality of those with whom they must deal. Most of them, anyway. A few understood quite well and acted on their knowledge for both good and ill. Multiple tragedies emerge.

The movie leaves us with much to ponder, but it is we who must do so and conclude what we will. To say they should not have done what they did is pointless. Many of these people were condemned later, for a variety of reasons, early victims in the emerging world of cynical power management that characterized the post-war years.

And for all its excesses and over-the-top drama, it seems that science fiction was always the best tool for trying to cope with what happened after the genie emerged. Mutability is at the core of SF, mutation both subject and theme, and as absurd as some of it may have appeared to the general public, especially through the radiation scares of the Fifties, it has turned out to be more or less on the nose with respect to the cultural reactions. Which, finally, may be why the best dramatization of all this has come from someone who is familiar and skillful with the tools of SF.

Clear-Eyed And Informed

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

One of the quickest ways to end conversations in casual social gatherings is to contradict someone expounding on myth, hearsay, and bad history. You’ve been there; we all have. Someone at some point starts holding forth on some chestnut of popular apprehension and repeats a story that has suffered the manifold revisions of a game of telephone that render the story factless, in service to a line of self-aggrandizing chest-beating at the expense of the truth. Stories many of us take for granted in the first place and, because we’ve never heard or bothered to find out the real story, assume to be accurate. We grow accustomed to thinking about these stories this way and then, when it might matter in ways we never anticipated, we don’t know that they have prepared the ground for us to swallow bigger misconstruals and even outright lies.

Into this, occasionally, steps someone who knows better and points out the flaws in the presentation. A curious thing usually happens. Either the conversation turns away from that topic or everyone gets angry. Not at the one disseminating the broken narrative but at the lone voice that contradicts the nonsense. Such reactions lead eventually one of two interpretations—either that people in general don’t care what the facts are or, adjacent, they like the error-laden chestnut more than the reality.

The reception of the corrective information can have a chilling effect on the one offering the facts. No one likes to be ostracized,

It can be puzzling. What is it about these skewed narratives that people preferred? Well, almost always there is something about them that makes people feel good about themselves—about their patriotism, they beliefs, their affiliations, but mostly about their ignorance. Once we leave school, most of us feel we are done with homework, which no one really liked anyway, and the idea that we may be less knowledgeable than perhaps we need to be just suggests that we need to do more homework. I suspect there’s an unexamined aspect of psychology that says that to be an Adult is to already have all the skills and knowledge we need. More study seems justifiable only if it leads to higher income. Even then, excuses can be made to avoid it.

But the reality is we need always to know more, especially about stories we think we know. The how, why, and wherefore of our history feeds into present issues in ways that, if we are ignorant, can lead to political and social traps.

When reading a first-class historian like Jill Lepore, one becomes aware of how tangled those webs into which we might fall can be. For those of us who may delight in being that one person at the party who will speak fact to ignorance, her books are a delight.

Her latest, The Deadline, is a collection of essays designed to counter the shallow, poorly-understood history that underlies so many of the canards foisted upon us daily as truth. As well, they are a delight to read.

In several books, Lepore has displayed an approach to her subjects that bypasses the various filters with which we view our history, opening side entrances into the underlying realities of which modern myths are formed. She examines the cultural touchstones by which we navigate the pathways of our presumably common identity.

Here, we find a range of essays that cover most of American history, topical subjects, thorny personal issues, memoir, and observations about the nature of knowing—or not knowing—what’s going on. Quite a few pieces are about the business of news itself, covering processes and personalities, and giving us a glimpse of how what we think we know comes to us too often “prepared” so a particular message is put forth, even while it is possible to find out what the other facts are. To that problem, we learn that there is nothing new about “fake news” other than the delivery vectors (and perhaps the speed with which it comes at us) but that even when such distortions seem impossible to counter, somehow we seem not to be fooled for long. That may be changing, though, and Lepore gives us her perspective on that as well.

Essentially, Lepore gives us a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our proclivities, often with the unpleasant but unsurprising conclusion that if we are fooled, it’s because we wish to be. But really there is no excuse for blindly reacting to hormone-spiking jabs at our panic buttons. We just need to know a little better.

As I say, Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians. She has a quirky set of interests (she did a marvelous book about the creator of Wonder Woman as well as penning one of the most interesting histories of the United States I’ve read in a long time) and this allows her to approach even the most convoluted subjects in ways that consistently illuminate. Along the way, she lets us know that one of the best ways to not be fooled is to refuse to accept the soundbite, the meme, or the two-minute report as the end of the story. While each may well contain a grain of truth, we have to understand that it’s only a grain and all that went into it is so much more interesting, richer, and liberating.

Dust and Destiny

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I went to the theater—an Omnimax—to see Dune Part Two. The anticipation for this film since the first one has been a constant background hum. Other films so hungered for have more often than not disappointed. What could possibly live up to the self-generated hype?

My reaction? I was satisfied.

Oh, it was a thrill to watch, don’t get me wrong. For such a long picture, it flowed effortlessly by, feeling much shorter than its nearly three hours. Scene by scene built logically and solidly upon what went before and while everyone knew how it would end, the ending landed with an acceptable sense of resolution that nevertheless left the door open for the next one, but not in a frustrating way.

The changes from the novel mattered not at all. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is its own thing. Based as it is on legendary source material, a challenge for any filmmaker and one that often humbles lesser artists, Villeneuve was clearly not intimidated, but even so it would be hard to live up to over half a century of lore and cultish expectation. He succeeded by telling the core story in his own way and with a visual sensibility that supported his SFnal understanding.

The previous two attempts feel more than anything like run-ups to this.

Let me get this out of the way. David Lynch’s 1984 film is an epic miss. Lynch is not a science fiction guy, but a horror film maker, and it shows in what then were and remain odd choices for characterization. That said, he managed to get large chunks of it more or less right and for its day it was quite an achievement, but it did not flow well and Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul is a stiff suit filled with pronouncement. MacLachlan is a fine actor so I do not fault him. There were other choices Lynch made that with a slightly more SFnal attitude might have worked, but he kept giving us monsters. The underbudgeted SyFy Network production is underrated by too many. Whatever its other faults, it told the story much more smoothly and far more comprehensibly than the Lynch and some of the choices in cast and presentation were inspired. Paul was closer to what he ought to be, the Baron was closer to what we find in the novel, and on and on. (It failed mainly with Feyd, but then, who could beat Sting? Well…)

Villeneuve, if nothing else, gets science fiction. He seems to understand that it is not something you do by fixing up a contemporary sensibility with a couple of odd bits to make it strange, but that it is wholly strange. Other. He took the original Blade Runner, which is one of the best dozen SF films ever made, and immersed himself in the Otherness of it and produced a film that was fully science fiction. Arrival, which is the closest to a contemporary tableau as he has done in this vein, is all about the doorway into that Otherness and it does not try to reduce it to a suburban trope.

Now Dune.

Everything about this film is a masterclass in how to approach science fiction. And he treated the characters as real. Not mouthpieces. People caught up in enormities of process and disruption and groping for handholds and in their groping make the world different, whether they intend to or not. That is what makes it accessible. They become something other in the face of an ecology removed from contemporary sensibilities. That is what makes it science fiction.

The question, now that this masterpiece has arrived and we who have lived with the legendary attempts to turn a groundbreaking novel from the 1960s into a film, is: why Dune?

Descriptions of what Frank Herbert created have changed over the years. It was an ecological novel. It was a political novel. It is a novel about human-directed evolution. It is a novel about religious extremism. It is an attempt to produce the War and Peace of science fiction.

It is, of course, all of these things. But I think at its core it is a novel about hubris.

Every institution depicted in the novel takes on the accoutrements of final arbiter of human destiny. It is an imperial culture. It has divided its cultural anchors into those who deal with genetic lines and those who deal with technology and mathematics. Thinking machines are outlawed. Anything that might take such matters out of human hands has been eliminated or so constrained as to be powerless. Even transportation is the preserve of an elite. It is a classic Hellenistic culture in its defining customs. And it is a mercantilist society based on guaranteed monopolies, because only the elect can manage such power.

As the story opens, all these strains of self-professed competence are colliding with a break point no one can see because no one can see past their own sense of destiny. Hubris bound to a destiny is the most volatile combination in politics and religion and once those two things combine, you have a critical mass that can only explode.

Paul, at least in Villeneuve’s version, sees all this clearly, and yet cannot stop it. Because he discovers that “destiny” is the ultimate crowd-sourced motivator. In the end he makes the choice every leader in his position makes, which is to try to control it by succumbing to it.

It is one of the better examples of Greek tragedy science fiction has produced.

That is the most compelling thread of the films, the way Villeneuve shows us the inevitability of Paul’s choices as one by one his options disappear in the face of—destiny. Destiny that too many others want to see, others work to avoid, and the entire network of people and institutions around him have carefully constructed to reach, no doubt expecting a different outcome.

We can poke holes in Dune as a parlor game—the ecology doesn’t work, the history is missing important links, the choices the emperor makes are absurd, and on and on—but none of its flaws matter against the central idea of the cyclic tragedy of human-made destiny born of hubris. This is the feature that makes this story fascinating over multiple generations. (Lynch didn’t understand this and tried to turn Paul into a hero on a hero’s journey. He’s not and this isn’t. The SyFy version almost got it, but turned it into a “rise of the CEO” story and at the end the CEO has to step down when he can no longer “see.”)

For perhaps too many people, the affection for Dune rests on its novelties—the great sandworms, the desert vistas, the valiant guerilla fights attacking a much larger enemy, the idea of the Navigators who “fold space”—and for them, these films are a feast. Villeneuve sees science fiction, which in its own way has always been a visual art, urging us to see the future (which is why so many movies and television shows over the years have disappointed, with a few notable exceptions, because they always fell short of where the writers were taking us.) But even for them, that theme, those subtexts, act as hooks on the unconscious, which is why we’re obsessed over this story.

But to my reaction. Satisfied? Not thrilled? One can be thrilled at a flawed attempt, but never satisfied. Many not-great films are still fun to watch. But afterward, when contemplation begins…it has to satisfy to succeed. And this one? Yes, it satisfies.

Hild and the World

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Recently, in discussing my own switch from science fiction to history (one novel, testing the waters), I was asked how different the two were to write, and I had to admit that at base not that big a switch. (Science fiction is perhaps more overtly philosophical.) I realized afterward how true this seemed to be, at least for me. Historical fiction used the same muscles, so to speak, as science fiction, and in some ways was a closer pairing than historical and fantasy. If one intends to be true to the historical period in which the work is set, then it must be admitted that it is very similar to visiting a future and/or alien world. The chief difference, of course, is that in history, we have records and we know what happened.

Or do we? 

The farther back we go, the more work we have to do to imagine living in those times, in that world. Because it really isn’t very much like ours, at least not in the ways necessary to move through it. Obviously, on fundamental levels, people are people—we love, hate, grow old, struggle, and feel all the same emotions—but the trajectory and the triggers vary wildly. First Century B.C.E. Romans did not see the world the same way we do, even if emotionally they may have resonated with it much the same way.

And really, how much of those times do we actually know? Some periods are very well documented, we have a great deal of primary material from which to construct (reconstruct) the world. Other periods and places, not so much.

Nicola Griffith reconstructed Seventh Century C.E. Britain almost from whole cloth. We know certain major dates and names of many of the top players, but the world itself? And in the case of her protagonist, St. Hilda of Whitby, we have the remains of her abbey and a taunting reference from Bede. Taunting because Hilda—Hild—is the only woman mentioned in his history of whom he approves (for anything other than chasteness and religiosity), and praised her as an advisor to kings. 

The first question, pulling back from Bede’s history, would be (one would hope), given the context, just who was this woman?

Griffith then attempted to answer that question by building a world in which Hild’s presence, her character, her essence resulted in that singular mention. She wrote a novel so densely imagined and meticulously constructed that one comes away feeling that if it hadn’t happened this way, it should have.

There have been many novels written to such depth, evocative and persuasive. The closest that comes to mind in relation to Hild would be Mary Stewart’s Arthurian/Merlin novels. In a different vein, a few of James Michener’s. Cecilia Holland, Mary Renault. Few wherein the sheer weight of imagined reconstruction counts so significantly. 

Griffith immerses us not only in the details of court life and the politics of the post-Roman Britain, but the environment. The birds, fish, flora, all become players in the life of Hild, who is put forth by her mother, a canny and skillful political manipulator, to be vital to the king. As a seer, a so-called godmouth, a trusted—and occasionally feared—advisor. Hild learns to notice. Everything. She does not, as those with whom she deals, glean knowledge from the air. She pays attention. She has an almost Holmesian capacity to pay attention and recognize patterns. She is a fully present intellect moving through a culture of people easily overawed by mystical confabulations and the power of the supernatural. 

She steps onto the stage at the point in British history when the Catholic church is making inroads against the old pagan gods. There are Irish priests and Anglisc priests and they do not get along, and the king Hild serves is using the tension to enlarge his territory. He decrees that he will be a Christian king and thus the allegiances change, but as Griffith portrays it, there is no ecstatic revelation among the people. This is a matter of allegiance, of loyalty to the king, a practical thing. Hild is baptized, but remains aloof and somewhat puzzled by this whole Christ thing, and in this way Griffith introduces a level of imperial realism at the grass roots of her Britain that is curiously compelling.

In the first novel, Hild, we watch the child grow to young womanhood and not only become an  influential advisor, but also a powerful warlord in her own right, commanding the loyalty of soldiers, and establishing a reputation as she travels as envoy to Edwin King. She strives to make the realm safe from enemies near to hand. 

Her origin story—daughter of a minor king who is assassinated, cousin to Edwin, a wild card to be played even as she learns to be a player—is captivating. As I say, if it didn’t happen this way, it should have. At the end of that first novel, she has found a place she wants to make her own, make safe, and manages to secure it from the king. She marries Cian, who she grew up with, and the bastard son of her father (no one wants to say so, the refrain repeated “Never say the dangerous thing aloud”), who was her sparring partner as a child and grows up to become one of the king’s best warriors. It would seem all may be well.

The place she has found, Menewood, anchors the new novel of the same name. Everything Hild does is aimed at securing this place and its people, making it safe, making it home. 

Menewood picks up where Hild left off and does not disappoint. The time encompassed by the novel is much shorter than the first one, but so much happens, the entire landscape writhes around her, and she must come back from horrific tragedy and loss to step by step engineer alliances and maneuver armies to finally make secure everything she holds dear. It is a hero’s journey of the highest order and Griffith’s command of landscape and emotion and seventh century politics anchors the story in enviable credibility. Hild becomes a force to be reckoned with, as the saying goes. 

As vivid as Hild is, so too are the people around her. She has true friends, people who love her, those who respect her, loyal companions and willing followers, and she is seen to earn it all. These people are the sort one would wish to impress and inspire, be friends in return, and all of them are distinctly themselves. The earning is hard. The consequences of being significant in this world are harsh. We see, though, that Hild has little choice. At times she contemplates running, but she cannot let those who depend on her down. It is not, in the end, who she is. 

But as engaging as all that is, the added pleasure is that Griffith presents us with a world, an environment, that we want Hild to save and preserve and protect. She shows us the bees, the streams and rivers, the hedgepigs, the horses, the seasons, and trees, the fields and makes it all integral to the lives depicted. For Hild, it is all interconnected, one thing. 

As well, there is a thread of social possibility threaded throughout suggesting that the way things turned out later might not have, that relationships could have been less straitened. There are the beginnings of the kind of behavioral autocracy that came to dominate in later centuries, leading to the circumstances in which the Venerable Bede would only think to honor one woman in his histories for anything other than virginity. None of this rises to the level of polemic. Griffith stays immersed in the substance of the period, but it is there to be found.

And there are battles. Two major ones, and they do not disappoint. But rather than minutely-detailed, stroke-by-stroke descriptions of the carnage, what Griffith gives us (more usefully) is context. Preparation determines outcome. She lays out the necessary groundwork for the coming conflict and gives us the details that go into what leads up to what transpires on the field. The heroics of the combatants, noble as they may be, come to naught if the land is not understood, the supplies are not at hand, and numbers are not properly tallied. Success can be months in the making. It is refreshingly realistic.

At the center of all this, Hild carries the knowledge—what works, what fails, why and how, and that which must be done to secure gains and survive losses—and through her, we inhabit this world. 

At the beginning of this I made a comparison between historical fiction and science fiction. It matters in what we have come to know as world building. In Menewood we find the fruit of that process in the inhabitability of the story told, and in significant ways, Menewood is a built world. We know some, and through archaeology and folklore we know enough to fill in the gaps through the imaginary work of world building. It is not a capricious process. The result must work organically because the story must be reliable in ways we might only notice when the work is done poorly or not all. This novel (along with its predecessor) is master class in how it is done.

Welcome to Menewood.

23

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It’s interesting that one of the axioms of retirement is that once entered one will have time to do all the things the day-job obstructed. Like read as much as you like. And like so many such things, it turns out not to be true. The habits of decades are still in force, and while maybe you get more chores done, you find reordering all those deeply-rutted paths more difficult than you thought.

I’m sure in some ways I am reading more, but not the way I’d hoped. I average around 70 books a year, cover-to-cover, with a great deal of spot reading, fragmentary, excerpts, short pieces, dipping into and out of research or sidetrips. I suppose if I did a page count I might find myself in the 150 plus range (total book equivalent), because this past year I did a lot of that, as I’m back at work on a new historical novel and much of my reading is taken up with research, most of which is not whole books.

But other things have also gotten in the way. Well, that’s an ungenerous way to put it. Since my dad’s death, my time spent on mom has gone up considerably—and quite happily—and of course I’m still trying to settle into a new routine.

That said, I read—cover-to-cover—66 books in 2023.

Setting aside the research material, some of which I do include in this tally, quite a lot of it was spent on old novels either read back in my adolescence or for various reasons never read at the time. Catching up, so to speak, on the work that was part of my youthful encounter with, especially, science fiction.

There were a few writers I remember bouncing off of back then. I never quite connected with, for instance, Avram Davidson. I read Rork!, which is a colonial adventure with some curiously subversive takes on the whole idea of imperial encounters; The Island Under The Earth, which I’m still not sure I quite understood, but a sort of mythologically-oriented fantasy; The Phoenix and the Mirror, the first in his loose series about Vergil, again a fantasy (of sorts) and truly magnificently done, a pleasure to read; and A Clash of Star Kings, which could have stood a little more fleshing out, but given the publishing requirements of the time, he delivered a rather fascinating take on the idea that the ancient MesoAmerican “gods” were warring aliens. The pleasant surprise, even with the material I did not quite get, was the beauty of the prose.

I also reread a couple of D.G. Compton novels. Compton died recently, one of those artists one loses touch with and assumes has long since passed away. He published four novels via Terry Carr’s old Ace Special series, the most, I believe, by any single writer, and I know I read them back then (as I read all the Specials because, after all, they were special) but I barely remembered them. They were perhaps too sophisticated for me at the time. But I read Synthajoy and The Silent Multitudes and found both remarkably made narratives about the disjunction between expectation and new technologies or events. His handling of character was quite uncharacteristic of the majority of science fiction of that time (the Sixties) and psychologically fascinating. I will be reading another one for the reading group I host.

Other older titles I read included the complete Cities In Flight by James Blish, which in the end left me a bit disappointed. I thought it began very strongly with the mines of Saturn and the advent of longevity in They Shall Have Stars, but by the last book (chronologically), Triumph of Time, I thought it strained against the limitations of form available at the time. The characters and social milieu did not, in my opinion, match the more cosmological aspects Blish was attempting, but he was never an epic writer in the sense we think of it today. Somewhat more successful was his quasi-fantasy set Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, which dealt with an actual apocalypse and its aftermath. Thematically related to his classic A Case Of Conscience, Blish seemed to have been in his element dealing with the collisions of theology and materialism.

A writer who worked with such themes in quite different ways was Michael Bishop, who also passed away recently. Bishop should, in my opinion, enjoy a much larger and wider reputation than he seems to. At his best, he was compelling and richly engaging. I decided to read those of his early titles I never got around to and with that in mind I read A Little Knowledge and Under Heaven’s Bridge, which he cowrote with Ian Watson. Both examine the impact of aliens on human philosophical concerns, both in different ways. Neither was a great work, but you can see the greatness to come. I also reread his excellent novella Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana which, among other things, took a hard look at South African apartheid. Published before the collapse of that system, it is an uncomfortable read that deals with police-state mentality and brutality and tragedy of enlightenment within a system designed to snuff it out. It carried unfortunate resonances into today in unexpected ways, which the best fiction will always do.

We read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca aloud. The elegance of her prose allows entree into a psychologically engaging family drama that involves murder and shattered illusions and the demands of expectations based on half-truths and lies. What begins as a rather pedestrian romance becomes inexorably a portrait of dysfunction and questions the sacrifices we make in order to find a place in the world with people we wish to love.

Another read-aloud we did was the superb satire The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Russian to its core, it was Bulgakov’s last novel, unpublished during his lifetime, and it is a romp. The devil arrives in Moscow, takes over a theater, begins granting wishes, and thoroughly upends daily life for certain people and leaves the state with a puzzle it is incapable of solving. Delightful.

We also read a couple of Willa Cather novels, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia. Cather is among those authors I’d always intended to read but for one reason or another never got to. But I confess, when I was tearing through the so-called “classics” in high school, neither of these would have stayed in my memory very clearly. I’ve had to grow into a state of mind to appreciate them, so it’s just as well I waited. These are the kind of novels kids like me dismissed because “nothing happens.” Which is to say, the careful setting of character in landscape and examining the evolution of them in concert requires a certain interest. Not that I didn’t encounter such work back then and enjoy it, but it would have been the exception. I’ve now reached the point where I look at some of the works I praised as terrific then and have to admit that, really, nothing happens in them, other than a lot of frenetic running around.

However, I also finally opened up a novel whose virtues are so widely extolled that one feels like a literary troglodyte when its charms fail to excite. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. A few years ago I read Love In The Time Of Cholera and quite liked it. This, unfortunately, left me a bit perplexed. It’s not so much that nothing happens, but rather for all that does happen fails to change anything. Except, perhaps, the women. They change. They alone in this vast epic exhibit a capacity for change, for growth, for evolution, but then all of it is constrained to the task of adapting to men, who do not change and whose inability to do so distorts the lives of these women whose marvels and talents we will never see because they are in bondage to a stagnant domesticity. If this were written to suggest a criticism of such male intractability, then it might be something, but I found the narrative guileless in its acceptance that this is how the world is and one cannot alter it.

The older I get, the more I find my sentiments engaged by the women—writers and characters—who struggle to be themselves and stop conforming to long-desiccated expectations. Which is why I look forward these days to the next novel by Becky Chambers (whose The Galaxy and the Ground Within I read this year and found amazing) or Ann Leckie (Translation State, marvelous), or Malka Older (The Mimicking of Known Successes, a novella of remarkable invention)or S.B Divya (Machinehood).

One of the most remarkable novels I have read in a long time was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. Extraordinary visualizations, great characters, and a rich intellectual conceit. I reviewed it here not long ago.

Once again playing catch-up, I read Greg Bear’s last trilogy, War Dogs, killing Titan, and Take Back The Sky. On the surface, military SF, but that’s just the veneer. Beneath is a twisty interstellar puzzle, a clash of civilizations, and questions around the nature of knowledge and how to discern truth is an ever-changing environment. Bear died last year. I have only a handful of his yet to read. However one might have thought of his perspective, he was a boundary-pusher.

Of the nonfiction I read this year, the stand-outs are A Spectre Haunting by China Mieville, a well-considered reassessment of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. While Mieville is sympathetic, he is no sycophant, and this book would be a good bridge into a reasoned examination of Marx and socialism itself. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, a very good narrative examination of the history of those long ago creatures who somehow have never let go our popular imagination. Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood, a long history of the early republic, one of the Oxford History of the United States entries.

But perhaps the best history read this year was Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy, a history of World War II. Overy casts a wide net, spanning the period between 1931, when he claims the events we now call WWII began, and 1945. He examines the military history, of course, but then he gets into the backgrounds, deeply, and the economics, and then the law, the underpinnings of all the tensions and terrors. He goes well beyond the actual fighting to look at the state of humanity at each stage and provides that ever-so-rare thing, context. It is a brutal read, and very long (I’m guessing a good 300K words) and in the end the book I would presently recommend to anyone who wants one book on the war. He has done an admirable job of maintaining objectivity. Whether he succeeded at that is debatable, but he is not partisan.

The research I’ve been doing has mainly to do with the colonial period of the St. Louis region. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, the Osage. I’m spending a lot of time on minutiae in the constructions of the next Ulysses Granger novel, which I am halfway through a first draft. Some of the books I did not cover here, I have done reviews already on the Proximal Eye.

The pile awaiting my attention is as usual stacked too high, and once in a while I find myself wishing I could recover some of my speed-reading skills from 50 years ago. But I enjoy what I read now and back when I was breezing through texts at 2500 words a minute, I did not. Nor did I retain as much as I’d like. So this suits me. I’m enjoying the meals now.

Have a great 2024, filled with wonderful books. I wish you all good reading.

Across Boundaries

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain In The Sea, is a superb example of asking a simple question and then exploring the ramifications at length. The question? What is intelligence and how would we recognize it in other species?

The novel concerns the discovery of an octopus species that exhibits the kind of behavior till now deemed impossible—unlikely at best—given the nature of octopus biology. Dr. Ha Nguyen accepts an invitation from the head of a global corporation to come to an isolated island in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, Con Dao, to study an anomaly. Con Dao is a protected area, cordoned off by advanced defensive systems to keep predators—human—from coming in and wiping out the ocean life in aggressive sea farming.

On Con Dao she meets two people with extraordinary capacities, one an android, the other barely human after a life of harsh conflict.

The android, Kamran, is the only one of its kind, a remarkable construct built by the woman who owns DIANIMA, Dr. Minervudottir-Chan, the corporation that has brought Dr. Nguyen to Con Dao. Humaniform, erudite, somehow not intimidating, they are set to research the octopuses together. Also on the island, Altansetseg, the security officer, a woman of long experience with the scars and the cynicism as proof, who operates an extensive remote drone net that proves startlingly powerful. Nguyen, Kamran, and Altansetseg develop an alliance centering on the creatures who have found a home in the bowels of an old shipwreck just off-shore.

Other characters in various locations come into play as berserkers, radical actors, fey factors in relation to DIANIMA, which impinge on the whole question of artificial intelligence and emergent sentience. Rustem, the outlaw hacker, who is hired by enigmatic people wanting to hack a code that has to do with (perhaps) autonomous AI; Eiko, a kidnapped worker enslaved to an illicit fishing trawler run by an AI system. But the main subjects in this are Kamran, Nguyen, Altansetseg, and, later, Minervudottir-Chan.

And the octopuses. Against all theory, they seem to have created a community, and developed the ability to communicate symbolically. The details of this are one of the chief pleasures of the novel.

One of.

These people all come together from isolated lives constrained by shells of self-defense and a frustrating inability to get past themselves in order to join community. Any community. They get by, they associate, the have colleagues. But Dr. Nguyen herself makes use of an advanced AI in order to indulge the forms of a relationship without there being an actual person involved. Kamran is alone by virtue of being the only one of its kind. Minnervudotir-Chan is perhaps the most isolated, having as excuse exactingly high standards for any kind of relationship, and finally resorting to build her own creature to meet them…which, of course, Kamran doesn’t. Altansetseg is buried inside a shell created by her entire life as a warrior. Vulnerability for her would be a form of self-destruction.

And yet they are all brought together to make contact with a creature that was supposed to be by nature all alone and has now, apparently, learned to make community.

The layers of revelation and interpenetration in this novel engage the desperate need to Be latent in all of us. And while Nayler does a remarkable job examining that, he is also giving us a material to consider the question of self-awareness at the heart of any discussion of AI. Before we can answer the core questions about AI, we have to answer it for ourselves. We have to recognize also that we need to extend that question to nonhuman life in all its forms. How, basically, can we expect to recognize self-aware intelligence in a machine if we can’t recognize it in biological forms other than our own?

Humans are rather chauvinistic about that. Perhaps understandably so. The question is meaningful only if we want connection, and we of course want it in terms we can understand. The only example we’ve studied in any depth till recently is…ourselves. So the template, the criteria, already presumes the markers of recognition.

“When we try to compare one animal’s brainpower with another’s, we also run into the fact that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

Given that, communication runs aground on the same problem. No one scale on which to measure. And that has to do with expression, never mind meaning.

The Mountain In The Sea is an alien contact novel, make no mistake, only the aliens turn out to our preconceptions and limitations, as defined by the encounter. Every single character in this novel is an alien and they are all trying to connect, whether they realize it or not.