For those of you who are interested in public affairs, the Department of Defense maintains a website where they list times they have sent letters to newspapers asking for retractions or corrections, along with relevent links.
http://www.defenselink.mil/home/dodupdate/index-b.html
Drew Bittner at SF Revu has this to say about FUGITIVES OF CHAOS: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=4120
Personally, he is a little more gentle in his review than I would be. He says: “Wright deftly handles the trick of explaining the characters’ complex metaphysics without lapsing into pedantry or excessive info-dumping.” I say: “What is his idea of ‘excessive’, praytell? There is a fair dump of infodump in that book.”
I hope he is right. I hope the readers think he is right.
I wish the second and third volumes were being released together instead of split apart. I cannot believe anyone wants to read a story broken in bits that way, or that buyers love going into a bookstore to see Volume Three of WHEEL OF SEQUELS, PART TWO B, without being able to find Volume One, Part Two A.
I don’t think I am giving anything away surprises if I mention that, in this volume of my series, Dumbledore dies, but returns from the the Farthest Shore as Dumbledore the White, either more powerful than before or stripped of his magic, Ron and Hermione end up as a couple,Darth Vader turns out to be Hamlet’s father, foully murdered by Claudio, and ‘Rosebud’ is Charles Foster Kane’s access code to launch the missiles and start the Spanish-American war, and, after the nuclear-magical holocaust Harry Potter is in the ruins of the New York City public library with nothing but an endless time to read and endless books–except that his has broken his glasses! Now THERE is a surprise ending for you!
Where is my copy of SOLDIER OF SIDON, a book I have been waiting for since the late 1980’s? I have now seen the book for sale in dealer’s rooms at SF conventions, and for sale in the bookstore, but my preordered copy has not yet arrived. Why don’t you advertise “Pre-order NOW and have your book arrive LATER THAN if you just wait and bought it at Borders”?
Send it by today, Amazon, before I forget what happened in the first two books!
(NOTE: this would be really really funny if (1) you’d read SOLDIER IN THE MIST and if (2) it were actually funny instead of being painfully, woefully not-funny.)
By which I mean the third X-Man movie, of course. My reaction is very similar to his, and I can sum it up as–too much Wolverine, not enough Angel, good set-up, bad follow-through, and why didn’t they use the anti-mutant mutant kid to neutralize Dark Phoenix?
Here’s Lileks:
Movies: I watched X-Men 3. Might as well have called it X-Men: Let’s Just Kill Off Everyone, Then. I liked the second one, but never really loved the franchise, to use that horrid word. The entire mutant-as-a-metaphor was insulting, anyway –if you know anything about kids you know that a teen with the ability to shoot fire out of his ears would not be shunned as a weirdo freak but elected class president on general principle: dude! Awesome! I can understand parents getting upset if their kid was blue and covered with hairy nodules, but the idea that parents would consider their kid “sick” if she had the telekinetic ability to raise every car in the neighborhood nine feet in the air – please. We have parents who will go across the ocean to adopt a Down’s Syndrome baby; are we to believe that the majority of American parents reject their kids because they can levitate or cough up gold by the quart or exude perfectly formed Neapolitan Ice Cream bricks from their hindquarters? Far from persecuting them, they’d get their own reality shows. Storm would be a TV meteorologist in New York. As for your morning commute, I’ll see what I can do. Stay classy, Manhattan.
And then there’s Wolverine – he’s Troubled and Frowny and Haunted, even though he appears to be a 35 year old man living in a high school with no job, surrounded by good-looking women, and able to kill whoever he wants without any sort of legal repercussions. You almost want some mutant to confront him in the kitchen some night: what you so mad about, anyway? You can heal from a gunshot to the head in six seconds and you got spikes coming out of your hands. Yeah, well, it hurts when the spikes come out. Oh really? I shoot liquid nitrogen everytime I pee. That’s my mutation. I go by the name of Holdit. Wanna switch?
Remember the Pope’s Regensburg lecture, about faith and reason that was widely (and wildly inaccurately) reported by the press as being inflammatory? Remember how exasperating it was not to hear a condemnation of Jihadist violence from Islamic leaders and scholars?
Well, exasperate no longer! They have spoken, and they condemn the Jihadists. I kid you not.
The signatories renounced and condemned violence against Christians in the name of Islam. They accepted without qualification the Pope’s post-Regensburg clarifications, and both accepted and applauded his call for dialogue. They unambiguously denounced and rejected all terrorist interpretations of the word “jihad”; they insisted on the priority of Surah 2:256 of the Koran (“There is no compulsion in religion”), stating explicitly that it is not obviated by later Koranic passages or Hadiths. They went so far as to aver that the declaration of Jesus in Mark 12:29-31 expresses the essence of all Abrahamic religion — Muslim, Christian, Jewish.
(For those of you who don’t have your Bibles handy, Mark 12:29 is where it is said that the whole of the law consists first of loving God with all one’s heart and soul and mind, and second of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. )
IslamicaMagazine reports:
The letter, which is the outcome of a joint effort, was signed by top religious authorities such as Shaykh Ali Jumu‘ah (the Grand Mufti of Egypt), Shakyh Abdullah bin Bayyah (former Vice President of Mauritania, and leading religious scholar), and Shaykh Sa‘id Ramadan Al-Buti (from Syria), in addition to the Grand Muftis of Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Istanbul, Uzbekistan, and Oman, as well as leading figures from the Shi‘a community such as Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri of Iran. The letter was also signed by HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan and by Muslim scholars in the West such as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf from California, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Professor Tim Winter of the University of Cambridge.
All the eight schools of thought and jurisprudence in Islam are represented by the signatories, including a woman scholar. In this respect the letter is unique in the history of interfaith relations.
The Open Letter itself strikes me, upon reading a little way into it, as possesing that same reasoned tone as the Pope’s original address. Note, for example this passge:
There are two extremes which the Islamic intellectual tradition has generally managed to avoid: one is to make the analytical mind the ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of human understanding to address ultimate questions. More importantly, in their most mature and mainstream forms the intellectual explorations of Muslims through the ages have maintained a consonance between the truths of the Quranic revelation and the demands of human intelligence, without sacrificing one for the other.
To me this sounds like the same balance that men of good will always strike when discussing matters of religion. Reason is not the ultimate arbiter of truth (for, if it were, what can be used to verify the truth of reason itself? Modern nihilism has its roots in the attempt to cut reason from its roots, for its roots are in matters of wisdom and common sense not open to analysis) but to deny reason has the power to address ultimate questions is to retreat into, at best, a zenlike silence on any topics of faith and morals.
And here again:
If a religion regulates war and describes circumstances where it is necessary and just, that does not make that religion war-like, anymorethan regulating sexuality makes a religion prurient.
Good point, I have heard non-Quaker denominations of Christianity called warlike because they have Just War theory; we have all heard Christianity condemned as prurient for its rules to bring sexual activity within the bounds of reason.
If some have disregarded a long and well-established traditionin favor of utopian dreams where the end justifies the means, they have done so of their own accord and without thesanction of God,His Prophet, or the learned tradition.God says in theHoly Qur’an: Let not hatred of any people seduce you into being unjust. Be just, that is nearer to piety (al-Ma’idah 5:8). In this context we must state that the murder on September 11th of an innocent Catholic nun in Somalia—and any other similar acts of wanton individual violence—‘in reaction to’ your lecture at the University of Regensburg, is completely un-Islamic, and we totallycondemn such acts.
Whatever one’s take on the specific questions raised, the condemnation of violence and the tone of reason lend honor to Islam. These men, and one woman scholar, have done their religion a service.
I cannot call this anything but good news.
Pray for peace, my fellow Christians, with uprights hearts on bended knee, and drop the sword to fold your hands; and you virtuous pagans, pray also, for surely Peace is as adored in heaven whether your many gods or our One is throned there; faithful Musselman, Recite! And let your prayers for peace rise up like incense, odiferous in the nostril of God; sons of Israel and daughters scattered in exile, pray, for your people are the lamp of the world, and a blessing to all nations. The God of Abraham, whose worship divides us into three armed camps seething with injustice toward each other, surely He will smile if we are joined in this, this one thing all three worlds of the Mediterranean unambiguously command.
Agnostics, you may join us in secret. It may be that there is no merit in it, and that to kneel to a fiction is an affront to human reason and human dignity. But if you pray in your closet, none will be the wiser for your momentary, unreasonable, unexplained hope.
Pray, all ye created earth, pray ye all—we may see a miracle yet.
Sometimes, you come across a novel, and you run in a circle barking at your own tail (if you are a dog with a keyboard, like me) because you think: Noy Jitat! Why didn’t *I* think of writing that book! What a good idea!
(Note that you only actually think “Noy Jitat!” if you are from Octopon. If you are from Arrakis, the prefered explitive is “Kull Wahad!”–isn’t it simply pathetic that I took up precious braincells memorizing swearwords in made-up languages? Silflay hraka u embleer Rah! )
WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF WRITING THIS BOOK! WHAT A GOOD IDEA!
Best-selling author S.M. Stirling told SCI FI Wire that his latest novel, The Sky People, posits an alternate history in which Mars and Venus are habitable planets. “We find out that they’re inhabited, by human beings among other things,” Stirling said in an interview. “The first hints that our sister planets have breathable atmospheres come in the 1920s and ’30s, but there’s no definitive proof until the 1950s, so things go pretty much as in the ‘real’ history until then. After that, things change! The space race subsumes the Cold War, as humanity focuses its efforts on reaching the nearer planets.”
Stirling added: “By the 1980s, both the U.S./Commonwealth space service and the East Bloc have small outposts on Mars and Venus. The personnel are the picked cream of millions of applicants, but they’re very few and have to learn their way around whole worlds. The Sky People takes place on Venus, whose highest civilization is a bronze-age city-state, most areas are paleolithic, and … humans and other hominids coexist with dinosaurs and saber-tooths.”
The story found its inspiration in the great pulp writers of SF, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, Stirling said. “They got a much more interesting solar system than we did: lost civilizations on a dying Mars, steamy jungles on Venus, … [which is] much less boring than the baking, sulfuric-acid hell and barren iceball that reality handed us,” he said.
The Sky People will be followed by a sequel set on Mars, titled In the Halls of the Crimson Kings, Stirling said. “Swords, airships, half-ruined cities older than time,” he said. “I’m having a blast!”
James Lileks reports today (10/26/2006 A.D.–note that this is the real date. There is no such thing as ‘C.E.”) his daughter pretending to read a book in the future from the far past, our present, has this to say:
Back in ancient times they put their books on something called paper. They had to use machines to make their books, and they had to hold them in their hands. Today we have robots. They didn’t have robots then. They didn’t even have hovercars. But they had geniuses who could invent hovercars so people could have them in the future. And that’s why we have hovercars today.
Because of the geniuses of the past?
Yes. (Stage whisper: but they’re still in the future.) Yes, that is correct.
The hovercar mystique: it reaches across generations. Everyone wants their hovercars!
As with all things, Mr. Lileks is truer than true about the hovercars. No science fiction movie (with the possible exception of El Cheap-O post-atom-war films made by a raid on the dirty clothes bin of the costume department) is complete without a hover car sliding past the window to show that this is the FUTURE (again, possible exception of MINORITY REPORT, which had car sliding sideways up skyscrapers, which was Way Cool, so that gets included on a technicality).
How far back does the love of the flying car go? The Cavorite Sphere of H.G. Well? The Hippogriff of Ariosto? All the way back to prehistorical Middle East, where Seraphim and Winged Bulls, crowned and bearded, loomed monstrous over the Ishtar gate? Whoever first gave angels wings knew well the human love of flight predates our own flying machine by countless years.
How odd it is to have a flightless race so much in love with flying. Could it be some buried memory of leaping from branch to branch as prehuman monkey-things? Or, if the theosophists have their way, a memory of spirit-life wafting like ectoplasmic silks from star to star?
I would like to see the science fiction story of a race whose dreams are opposite of ours. The gossimer gas-balloon people of Jupiter, let us say, living eternally in cloud, bourne here and there by wind and whirlwind, dreaming of what it must be like, the joy of standing on solid legs like pillers, atop a cloud that is a motionless as they appear in the distance, able to stand still with the wind streaming past, and only your hair is blown. Ah! What steadfastness a race of solids would exhibit! With what joy they would perambulate across the motionless substance of the hypothetical ‘firm cloud’ knowing no breeze could whirl them from their destination! How firm in their affections, how steady in their words, would this godlike race of not-moving-much creatures be! Surely they would rejoice every day, and adorn their feet with paint and silk and leather housings.
What are the best Literary SF books out there?
I find this a difficult question to answer. In my mind, ‘Literary’ means primarily concerned with observations into the human condition, detailed portrayals of realistic characters, and emphasis on the beauty of language and expression.
This knocks most of my favorite books out the the running from the get-go. My tastes run to GALACTIC PATROL, and Black DuQuesne is my idea of an in-depth character study, my idea of true poetry is “Bugs, Mr. Rico! Zillions of ’em!”
I cannot list anything by CS Lewis, much as I love his work, because his characters were simple, and nothing of background, description, or art is remarkable in his tales. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is perhaps the most famous SF book paid honors by the literary establishment (regarded so highly that most people refuse to call it SF), but it has neither characters nor description worth mentioning, nor is it a meditation on any deep human question aside from the intellectual dishonesty of totalitarianism. ATLAS SHRUGGED is arguably dystopian SF addressing deep philosophical ideas, but the characters are deliberately romanticized into perfect heroes and utter villains.
Lemme see…
1. SHADOW OF THE TORTURER by Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is the best living novelist in America today, and all Academia would be enraptured by him, were it not that he writes what is marketed as SF. Like all geniuses, he simply transcends genre. Don’t get me wrong: THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance is SF; so is ZOTHIQUE by Clarke Ashton Smith. Both men wrote things I very much admire—but SHADOW OF THE TORTURER is something else, deeper, richer, grander. Read them side by side and you will see what I mean.
2. LORD OF THE RINGS by Professor Tolkein. I am not sure if his characters are sufficiently detailed to count as ‘literate’, but they surely suffer and overcome, and ponder the meanings of deep things in the world, the nature of man and mortality, the meaning of honor, the character of mercy. The language is elevated, and in places soars to poetry, not to mention the actual poetry in the text. He not merely transcends genre, he created it. The fantasies written before him, such as VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS or THE WORM OROBOROS were a different sort of creature, more odd and more unreal, not speaking in plain terms to the pains and pleasures of common men.
3. LITTLE BIG by John Crowley. Good, if odd, character development, many passages showing poetry and craft, but a little weak on weight and depth of speaking to the great ideas. I add it here because I honestly cannot think of any other literary SF at all.
Also a genre-breaker. One might argue that is actually a mainstream book with fantasy elements, not really a fantasy; but in truth it can be classified only with itself.
4. Honorable mention goes to: HYPERION by Dan Simmons. The artist here changes his narrative style in this retelling of Canturbury Tales, and does indeed touch on the great ideas of literature: predestination and hope, freedom and security, God and Time. The characters are better developed and studied more in depth than John Crowley’s quirky Drinkwater family.
I never knew that Geo Orwell reviewed Jack Lewis. Here, as a historical curio, is the famous dystopia-writer’s view of Lewis’ famous dystopia.
The Scientist Takes Over
review of C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)
by George Orwell
Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945
Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251
On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.
Mr. C. S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.
In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.
His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.
There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand paople to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.
It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.
One could recommend this book ureservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.
They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.
Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.
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Mr. Orwell (or mMr. Blair, take your pick) makes interesting comments, but only one really betrays the typical limitations of his secular philosophy: “When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. ”
As a man who struggled against evil, he should have known better, even if he sought no supernatural aid.
Come now: is Milton’s PARADISE LOST without drama? We know Adam is going to win, don’t we? He has supernatural aid in his stuggle against the devil, doesn’t he? Or how about little Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom? The One Ring would not have come to him if he were not meant to have it. That means a mysterious supernatural fate is assuring him of victory in his struggle against Sauron, right? Ergo there is no drama in the story. The miracle of Gandalf’s resserection, the miracle of Aragorn raising and commanding the Hosts of the Dead–all this robs the tale of interest, right? There is no drama in the ILIAD, look at all those gods peopling the tale; and none in CINDERELLA, because how can a girl with a fairy godmother lose?
Bah. What utter humbug Orwell says. Some people suffer from fairy-story depravation, or something, and hence do not know what real life is about.
More bloviating on Ayn Rand
Chambers (correctly) upbraids Rand for her heresies.
The first is Manichaeanism. She has an absolute black-and-white moral code. Her bad guys are all utterly bad; her good guys are all utterly good.
Considering the type of debate that swirls around the question of the morality of capitalism, I myself see such Manichaeism as inevitable: by that I mean that any flaw, no matter how small, of the free market system, is inflated by its enemies, and any virtue of command-economies is exaggerated.
An attempt to give a nuanced or balanced view of the matter, in a work of fiction, is doomed to failure. If John Galt had any flaw, no matter how small, the enemy would point at it and crow: See! That proves capitalism is Evil!
So instead Ayn Rand took the route of being analytical. In a world of gray, when the paint is being spread from one white tube of paint and one black, and the argument is over whether the white tube is spreading black paint, that is, every failure cause by market intervention (e.g. the Great Depression) is blamed on the market, not on the intervention, then the only way to argue is to isolate the variables, and look at what the market would do under perfect conditions. Only by isolating the white tube can you confirm that it is the source of the white paint.
Considering that Chambers commits (I assume deliberately) the egregious error of mistaking her anarchism for totalitarianism, I have entire sympathy with Ayn Rand’s approach. She is being as black-and-white as possible in order to be as clear as possible. She is attempting a romantic fiction rather than a realistic fiction, because her purpose is to inspire and uplift. She wishes to restore to liberty the moral sanction it has been unjustly denied.
I do not find her villains to be any more absurd or unrealistic than the villains in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. Wesley Mouch could be the brother of Wither; Simon Pritchett could be Professor Frost. Realism is useful for certain types of books (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, LORD OF THE RINGS, ILIAD) and not for others (ORLANDO FURIOSO, VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, PILGRIMS PROGRESS, PRINCESS OF MARS). Not only do I regard the charge that her characters are ‘unrealistic’ as an unrealistic charge, I regard it as actual lunacy–for it leads me to believe the reviewer has not read any books outside a very narrow modern range; in which case I wonder why he is reviewing.
Ayn Rand is also guilty of the heresy of Pelagianism. Her characters are paragons of moral uprightness, and John Galt, by his own admission, is a prelapsarian man: Adam who knew no Fall. In one essay, she proposes that taxes be abolished, to be replaced with voluntary user-fees or payments. I suppose an unfallen man would always pony up his share of the public expense, and that unfallen princes would not demand beyond what pure reason dictated for needed public expense—of course, since there are no wars in Eden, and no crime either, it is not clear why the prelapsarians have any public expenses at all?
I can take proposals to abolish taxes as seriously as proposals to abolish death. The dear Ms. Rand loses my admiration and respect when she goes on in this vein. I am happy with unrealistic romance in novels; I am unconvinced by unrealistic romance as a program for political revolution.
(My stoic resignation to taxes does not extend to the income tax, capitation, or other direct tax. Such were among the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The Sixteen Amendment should be repealed immediately–the Founders knew what they were doing when they specifically forbad such perniciousness.)
I agree that businessmen, no matter how rich, must be governed by the same laws which govern other men. Theft, fraud, breach of contract, must be enforced with absolute rigor against the wealthy: perhaps with greater rigor, due to the influence of their wealth over, the example they set to, others. I do not agree that particular regulations of labor, insider trading, allowing and forbidding certain trade practices, anti-trust regulations, and so on, are just, logical or practical.
I am a lawyer: I studied anti-trust law. A more unreasonable, unworkable and pointless set of regulations cannot be imagined. No businessman, no matter how sincerely he desires to conform his conduct to the requirements of law, can in fact do so: the laws are vague and self-contradictory. If his prices are the same as his competitors, this is evidence of collusion; if below, evidence of predatory pricing; if above, evidence of superior market dominance… all three of these are grounds for finding a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
If you do not believe me, look at the Alcoa case, look at the GE case, look at International Shoe. Judge Learned Hand in Alcoa specifically said it was unfair and unlawful to hire good help and seek business opportunities in a rational, competent way.
But I do believe that the courts betrayed the interests of the workingman forming a doctrine that a workingman consents to the risk incumbent in his job, even when the risks are hidden, or the conditions less safe than is reasonable and standard in the field. The legislative solution was Workman’s Compensation, an outrageous provision that bars the workingman from suing in a court of law. It is a prime example of regulatory capture: the Workman’s Comp boards became instruments of business policy.
Chambers is right that Ayn Rand’s characters fornicate with no provision made for the rearing of the young. These nymphs and satyrs who indulge in sex only when it is a rational expression of their highest values to do so are fortunately sterile. Children would be a messy exception to Rand’s otherwise clean system of reducing all human interactions to marketplace exchanges of mutually beneficial consent among equals. This flaw, call it “The Childless World” theory, unfortunately follows her libertarian followers to this present day.
The Childless World theory is just as absurd for other dependants, widows and orphans, the lame, the mad, the infirm. A just people would make provision for all such, as a just man makes personal provision for his family. Even ordinary friendship is poisoned if put onto a value-for-value basis.
Rand, by the way, was not an apologist for Big Businesses any more than she was for an aristocracy-of-birth. I am actually puzzled how anyone could read her to mean this. The first scene in the book concerns the unfairness of a Big Business (Taggart Transcontinental) using an unfair union-style regulation to squeeze out the competition (Phoenix-Durango) in a fashion that is Starkly, Utterly, and Unambiguously condemned as wrong and immoral by the characters who serve as the author’s sock puppet. Some of her heroes are big businessmen, true, but an equal number of her villains are. For every good philosopher there is a bad philosopher; for every good scientist there is a bad scientist. I can think of no other author who went so far as to line up the oppositions so symbolically and systematically.
Perhaps you are assuming free enterprise automatically favors the large, established businesses. She the makes the point, and I think correctly, that the opposite is the case. Little firms like Microsoft (remember back when it was little?) in a free market, are always overturning giants like IBM. It is when markets are regulated that the little guy has no chance to overturn the dominant dinosaur, and for the reasons Lordbrand gives above. In other words, love of the free market means indifference to big business, not love of big business.
Some of her superheroes are little guys running start-ups, railroad employees, a bus driver, a housewife. She lionizes not business for its bigness, but free enterprise for its fairness.
As a Christian, I reject both Manichaeism and Pelagianism. I assume businessmen are as prone as anyone to sin, and the warning against the wealthy men reaching heaven in the Gospels should give anyone whose treasures are store up in this world a moment of chilling introspection, if not terror. But neither does my Christianity incline me to favor a command economy. We Christians render unto Caesar that which is Caesars, and pay our taxes on time–but it is worse than folly, it is a positive evil, to look to the Big Brother for salvation.
I may look to outside observers like a libertarian, merely because my mistrust of the swords of the powerful is greater than my mistrust of the coins of the rich. The rich you can refuse to do business with, by refusing their coins; the powerful you can refuse nothing.
For those who have not read it, here is famous book review on ATLAS SHRUGGED, “Big Sister is Watching You“.
This had Ayn Rand drummed out of the conservative movement in America. One wonders if we would have gone through the horrors of the Carter years had her approach been adopted of defending Capitalism on the grounds that it was the only rational and moral system for human law.
I had read this before, both back when I was an arch-libertarian along Heinleinesque lines, and now, older, happier, and wiser, when I am something more Chestertonian and conservative.
It amazes me that Chambers could so mistake and misplace the whole point of Rand’s argument, considering that she is both the most blunt, most repetitive and most single minded of messengers ever to trumpet out a message.
“Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite… When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau.”
Big Brother? Elite? Bureau? What the hell is he taking about? Nothing remotely related to ATLAS SHRUGGED, that’s for sure.
Elite? Ayn Rand’s supreme Hero, John Galt, is a self-made man, whereas Francisco D’Anconia is a wealth scion of a well-connected family: the point is made within the text, more than one place, that it is individual ability, not birth, which defines a man’s role in life.
Bureau? The concept that Ayn Rand was urging the creation of a government bureau to create her policies is one which is explicitly raised and rejected in the text, in the scene where the Head of State offers John Galt exactly that position: economy czar. he rejects it with derision, and gives a philosophical argument to show its innate illogic. One cannot mandate freedom by regulation.
How can he read the founding text of the Libertarian movement in this country as a call for dictatorship? No one makes an innocent mistake of this magnitude: Mr. Chambers’ hostility is primarily emotional and illogical, although he expresses it in dispassionate terms.
In the next sentence he confesses he is making up objections from his own imagination.
“She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be).”
Pure hogwash. Nowhere does she express the idea of ANYTHING being beyond good and evil. This is the most moralistic writer of the last two centuries. Even innocent and neutral topics such as bus driving and symphony-writing Rand explicitly casts in moral terms. To say that she is supporting a dictatorship that should be “beyond good and evil”, and that she feels opposition to a dictatorship would be criminal and sinful, when she made ALL HER MAIN CHARACTERS rebels against creeping dictatorship is not just an untruth, it is the diametric opposite of truth. As if Chambers were to condemn Marx on the grounds that Marx was too laissez-faire in his pro-Capitalism.
Certain criticisms are so far off the mark that one cannot take them seriously.
“Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?”
There is no way an honest man could read ATLAS SHRUGGED and reach this conclusion that this was her intent. Rand’s book has the simplest, cleanest, most shrill, more oft repeated message of any book in modern literature. How can you miss the meaning of a message written in letters the size of skyscrapers?
Rand, at least, had no trouble in seeing the similarity between Nazism and Communism: her philosophy is one of the few where the brotherhood of all collectivists, whether collectivists of race or of economic class, is taken as given.
Ayn Rand deals with the question of who is to run the world and in whose interests by saying, over and over and over again: only a cannibal, a moocher, or a looting thug could ask this question phrased this way. Rational men do not seek such advantages of rulership over each other, and do not seek to rule rather than persuade. Her philosophy does not admit of conflicts of interests between rational men–so for her the question of whose interests are the be sacrificed to whose is not merely a moot point, but an abomination.
“From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!””
I can think of many objections one might raise to ATLAS SHRUGGED. But this is not even remotely in the realm of an honest difference of opinion or interpretation. This is the woman, keep in mind, who is practically an anarchist–and his criticism is that she wants a Nazi regime?
At this point, I must depart from a counterargument and degenerate into invective. Chambers is a liar. Chambers is beyond being merely ridiculous here: the man is a liar, and is telling an outrageous lie. The only question left is, what makes him think he can get away with it? What is he counting on?
How in the world could he miss the point? I will tell you how: he himself, Mr. Chambers, is perhaps one of those Ayn Rand villains whose portrayal he regards as so simplistic. And yet, here he is, and coming out of his pen are the exact same words and phrases she puts in the mouths of her cardboard villains—the insistence on “humor” (as if not taking something seriously were a merit in a serious work) the insistence on the complexity of life (as if any complexity can be analyzed without analyzing it into simpler components). His counter-argument is one of the least effective I can imagine, and the most dishonest. It is that same sort of sly, winking, sneering innuendo, fact-free and argument-free screed which figures in the Ayn Rand book only in the mouths of the psychology she criticizes.
Indeed, judging from an objective point of view, when a book describes a critic with bull’s-eye accuracy, and a critic describes a book with no accuracy at all, my faith in the judgment of the writer of the book is increased, and my faith in the critic evaporates. I don’t believe the critics means to be taken seriously.
<>If his objection is that she has written a shrill and moralistic Jeremiad, and his logic is that anyone who is shrill and moralistic is a Nazi at heart, my response is to ask whether Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE was Nazi at heart? Or the Book of Jeremiah? Come now, let him expound on how the tale of the Children of Light versus the Children of Darkness is always a tyrannical mass-murdering message at heart, and then let him explain the Book of Revelations. Or any other serious, humorless, moralistic work?
If he is engaged in the task of reading secret messages into Ayn Rand—the writer who, of all writers, is the least mysterious, and has no hidden implications—he should have noted that, despite her Jeremiad, her main characters act with Christian ideals of self-sacrifice when it comes to Galt’s decision to embrace suicide rather than risk his true love’s safety. In the next scene he is being crucified on an electric torture wrack, and giving instructions to his enemies on how to fix the machinery to be used to torment him. “Forgive them, father! They know not how to replace a worn electric circuit.”
Rand’s subtext is the opposite of what Chambers supposes. If you want to indulge in the stupid game of supposing a writer does not know his own mind, and that you know it better, reading a hidden admiration for self-sacrifice, despite all the brave anti-self-sacrifice talk, into Ayn Rand can be supported from the text; reading a hidden admiration for totalitarianism from the only woman to give a complete, simple and entire rejection of collectivism root, stock and branch, on moral ground, intellectual ground, pragmatic ground, metaphysical ground—a rejection even conservatives cannot match for intellectual rigor and purity and vehemence—is simply unsupportable.
No, ‘unsupportable’ is not the word.
Contemptible.
The Fermi Paradox asks, given our present understanding of the universe, why the stars are silent? If you plug in even rather conservative values for the Drake Equation, there is still a question as to why the whole Milky Way was not overrun long ago with the intelligent super-machines the Forerunners must have long ago built.
Who knows the mind of the Omniscient? It may have pleased Him to make all this jeweled emptiness in its vast ethereal splendor that we might be awed by it, as a size of the majesty of its creator.
Or every world might be as crammed with life as even deep caves and the abysses of the sea, organisms that exist on volcanic vents, or subsisting on the decay of radio active rocks … and all manner of intelligent life is crouched behind the constellations waiting for the archangel’s signal to bring up the lights and shout SURPRISE! And welcome earth into some unimaginable galactic celebration.
Or the Eldil may be maintaining radio silence, since Thulcandra, our sphere, is under quarantine.
Or the Federation might forbid First Contact with us, because their Prime Directive wishes not to disturb our quaint native ways, our wars and genocides. Or the Destroyers are maintaining radio-silence as they slide toward us through the endless night so as not to disturb their prey. Or the Dolphins long ago make contact with the space-whales telepathically, and are carrying on a brisk trade in nine-dimensional musical-philosophical spin-values with Tau Ceti, and we are no more aware of it than a plover in a cliffside nest in Greenland is aware of Wall Street.
Myself, I am prone to think (and, boy it really hurts when I am prone to think, especially when I am supine with indifference) that life might be so abundant that the high-tech supercivilizations simply don’t bother to answer when we call. They’re busy. And we don’t know what the electromagnetic signature of their industrial activity is like because we have no notion of who and what they are up to. Whole classes of astronomic actions we take to be natural might not be–wouldn’t it be ironic if every star off the main sequence was odd because they had been engineered for some megascale purpose?
But whatever the truth might be, I note that the idea that man is unique fits in without difficulty to the Christian world-view, whereas the silence of the stars needs some ad hoc explanation to save the appearances in the science-fictional world view. (I call it science-fictional, because I do not consider the Drake Equation to be real science: it is not a disprovable statement, merely an airy speculation phrased as if it were an equation.)
New York Court to Catholic Charities: You Have No King But Caesar
Those who complain that the separation of Church and State is breaking down usually forget who are the breakers and who the breakees.
Here is a case where the individual conscience counts for nothing because it goes against the legally-mandated State Orthodoxy. (The State Orthodoxy, by no coincidence, happens to be the one glorifying the role of the State.)
Respected Tom Disch asks who is the greater genius, Van Vogt or Asimov? http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/67542.html
After taking care to hide my Slan tendrils under my hat, I venture to answer the question thus:
I wonder if this kind of question tells us much about the topic as opposed to merely the tastes and preferences of the answerer. You may discover little more than that I am a devoted fan of Van Vogt; but I will nonetheless try to answer the question candidly.
Asimov had a greater influence on the genre. No question. His method of constructing a story as a solvable puzzle, his heavy emphasis on real science, his optimism that reason could carry the day–all this made him the quintessential writer of Campbellian Hard SF. Heinlein and Clarke are the only authors to be mentioned in the same sentence, in terms of influence.
BUT—you asked about genius. What is genius? Genius is a genus unto itself: something one-of-a-kind, something magical, hypnotic, overwhelming. A.E. van Vogt was all that and more.
Sadly neglected these days, Van Vogt had a better grasp than any of these writers what the real core of science fiction was: the magic of science, if I may use an oxymoron. One reads an Asimov tale. One is immersed in a tale by van Vogt.
Reading Asimov is much like doing a crossword: entertaining, yes, gripping, no. Can anyone honestly remember the names of the main characters in the FOUNDATION series, without looking them up? Were those stories actually about anything in terms of plot, character, or action? No: they were intellectual puzzles to see how the Seldon Plan would unfold in the current crisis. Chess puzzles are not like seeing a real game in action, they are intellectual exercises. The plots in Asimov were like chess puzzles, not like chess games.
Compare this with WORLD OF NULL-A, THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, or with SLAN. The central conceit of science fiction, the magical core, so to speak, is the strangeness and wonder of the future, that feeling of disorientation or delight in realizing that the things this generation takes as permanent are not so: or the shock when science show how matter is mostly empty space, and time is relative to a frame of reference. None of the certainties of the world are safe in science fiction. Van Vogt’s tales were like games where the rules changed every 800 words, and you had to adapt fast, or be lost.
Van Vogt’s genius was to capture that sense of uncertainty. Amnesiac superhumans struggle against hidden enemies to control their strange powers before they are destroyed…this is a common theme in Van Vogt, and an apt image for the human race that might destroy this world if we fail to rise in glory to the stars. In a way, the advance of science and its incredible powers makes the whole modern generation into a superhuman that has lost its way, a world of Gilbert Gosseyn.
Compare that to an average Asimov tale. Here is a galactic empire whose rise and fall is controlled by equations no one can do anything about. There is a broken robot which, upon the application of some detective work, we can deduce the error and correct. There is neither passion nor hope nor despair nor brilliance here. Asimov makes a workmanlike product whose workmanship is much to be admired. But genius? No.
The way Tolstoy wrote a vision of the world, so that certain folk could dedicate themselves to it, and call themselves Tolstoyan, it is possible (though not feasible) to take seriously the philosophy of the world implied in Null-A or Nexialism or the philosophy of the Weapon Shops, and call oneself a Van Vogtian, a follower of his ideas: or, to be more modest, since these theories are not rigorous, one can be inspired by Van Vogt’s bracing vision of the indomitable spirit of man. But what would it be to be a follower of Asimov? His stories are about puzzles, not ideas, cleverness, not visions.
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Greg Feeley, a man once aptly described as “The Anti-John-Wright” (his love of the irrational contrasts sharply with my love of the rational–a Dionysos to my Apollo, to dignify him perhaps overmuch) offered this comment:
“It sounds as though people are setting up a tidy dichotomy, with Asimov the rationalist and van Vogt the nutty visionary. This allows one to slot in various indisputable facts — that Asimov could put together an intelligent, craftsmanlike piece of fiction, while van Vogt seemed to steer by the seat of his pants or by nutty little self-taught tips (e.g. throw in something striking every 900 words). Apollonian vs. Dionysian, to dignify it perhaps overmuch…
“…..As for van Vogt, there’s no question that his crazy ideas often gave his early, best work a great irrational shimmer, although most of his notions were just dumb (The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free), and I don’t think he ever thought through the question of how much he believed them. (I’m not sure that he thought through anything.) After “Slan,” one or two very early stories, and bits of the Weapon Shop and Null-A series, is there really anything worth one’s attention?”
My reply:
In my opinion, the SILKIE, one of Van Vogt’s later works, is unparalleled even compared to modern writers, in terms of the wonder and invention of the plot, the breathless pace, the sheer magnitude of the setting. It also investigates one of those quirky Van Vogt ideas the strangely compelling concept of “Logic of Levels.” There is simply no ideas as startling or thought-provoking in all of Asimov.
Asimov’s closest approach to a startling new idea is the theory of Psychohistory—a somewhat fatalistic concept, if you think about it, whose implications Asimov did not think through. That job was left for Donald Kingsbury in his brilliant PSYCHOHISTORICAL CRISIS.
If you are going to list Van Vogt ideas that are “just dumb” I goggle in astonishment that you bypass all fashion of airy nexialism and nonaristotelianism and instead list the one idea in all his body of work which is entirely a matter of common sense not open to serious dispute. Unarmed men enjoy their liberty only if armed men stand ready to defend the same, and only to the degree the generosity of the armed men permit.
Whether you agree with the legal theory behind the idea, the idea itself that independence cannot be granted, only won, is one of ancient heritage in the West, as well as current application. More importantly, it is an idea common in other Campbellian SF (for example Robert Heinlein’s maxim that “An armed society is a polite society”).
Had you used the example of the Theory of Finite Logic expressed in DARKNESS ON DIAMONDIA, or Van Vogt’s theory behind the sexual roots of violence neurosis in THE VIOLENT MAN, you could have safely mocked a theory that was Van Vogt’s own, belonging to no other man. As it is, you have decided to mock an entire body of literature, both SF and mainstream, not to mention a long history of political thought, reaching from the modern Second Amendment back to the bloody field of Thermopylae.
I am 45 years old. This means I am old enough to be your grandfather, barely, assuming you are fifteen, I and my oldest child both married at fifteen and both had a child within the year; or assuming the three ages average to fifteen.
Georgia allows for such marriage with parental consent; Michigan with parental consent and approval from the probate court; North Carolina any age, with parental consent, if the bride is pregnant or has born a child. California has no statutory minimum, those under 18 must receive approval of a superior court judge and parental consent. Canada, 16 with parental consent, but 14 with judicial consent (because in Canada the courts know better than the parents, I suppose); Mexico 16 for males or 14 for females only with parental or legal consent. In Iran, 13. In Yemen the age of marriage is the onset of puberty, which tradition sets at age 9.
So it is not likely I am old enough to be your grandfather, but it is legally possible in certain jurisdictions. In Switzerland, I am not old enough to be your grandfather, and will not be until 54.
What did I get for by birthday, you ask? I reply in three words: BEST. BIRTHDAY. EVER.
Every present was one that I asked for, or put on a wish list, but which I had entirely forgotten about until unwrapping. This was the perfect way to enjoy having a bad memory: every moment is a pleasant surprise. Friends whom we invited over for a visit showed up only after we thought we missed them. Another surprise!
I since I both visited my sister and my friends, my wife baked not one birthday cake, but three. (Cake number two was ravished by son number two in a particularly brutal display of chocolate blitzkrieg. Chocolate was everywhere. It was like watching Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, except if the redeeming substance that washed away sins was chocolate, or if when the Jews called down a curse upon themselves, they asked for chocolate.)
Loot? What loot did I get, you ask? I got a book, another book, and another book. The first book was a book about books. The second book was a book. The third book was a book I read as a kid and which I hope to read to my kid, to get him interested in books.
What else? A flashlight, no doubt to use in reading books, and a razor, no doubt to allow me to shave so that my whiskers do not get in the way when I read books. I also got a fancy mug and a sweater, both of which I can drink from or wear (though it is less comfortable to drink from the sweater and wear the mug) while reading a book. I did not get a giant, perfect ruby to be used in the construction of a giant space-laser array, so that I can take over the world, but maybe next year.
Oh, and there are two more books on order, that haven’t arrived yet.
On Saturday I went to a Science Fiction convention and met my editor, and we talked about books. And my wife met a man who, if he likes her book and buy it, will be her editor. Both the editor and the possibly editor-to-be expressed regret that they had not gotten around to their tasks yet, so we remain patient and hopeful. I served on panels discussing books. And she held a writer’s workshop on how to write books.
My wife (BEST. WIFE. EVER. ) in addition to baking me three cakes, granted me three wishes. I used my first Birthday Wish on my wife to get her to go out and do an errand while I took a nap, the second to command a burrito from the burrito factory which she picked up, and I used by third and last Birthday Wish to force her to watch MASTER AND COMMANDER-FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD with me, a movie I think is simply the finest film of the last ten years, but which she would not have watched had it not been for the power of the Wish. Turns out she enjoyed the movie for a reason entirely invisible to my masculine eyes: apparently Russel Crowe is Da Bomb, and the Napoleonic-era uniforms show off a man’s sexy leg to best advantage.
Three perfect wishes. Eat your heart out, Darby O’Gill.
