John C. Wright's Journal

The plot idea consists of a young musician in love, discovering his fiancée is fabulously wealthy, and, rather than face the highly-structured and disciplined life a wealthy man would have to bear, he joins a one-way trip to a distant star as a colonist, destined to arrive twenty years later ship time, which, due to Lorenz transformation, will be eighty years or more Earth time. 

This beginning is nicely done, and even has some of the wit and pacing, economy of description and thought-provoking ideas to match some of Heinlein’s better works.

Once our hero leaves Earth, he spends his life aboard a ship, a man in a can, with no drama to see except the internal emotional lives of the shallowest people imaginable. Nothing interesting happens until about Chapter Eighteen. A genius could have made an interesting novel out of this material, but, sorry, Spider Robinson is not the equal of Ted Chiang.

The second problem is that Heinlein writes like a man, an irascible and curmudgeonly man, sometimes an outrageous one, but a man. Robinson writes like a highly-emotional schoolgirl.

Let me make the contrast clear with two scenes selected at random. I picked up my copy of STAR BEAST, and read a scene where the police officer, ordered by the mayor, needs to get the giant extraterrestrial pet and his young teen owner to the courthouse for a hearing. The cop wants the monster moved in the pre-dawn hours, before crowds make the job impossible, but the boy is cranky at being rousted out of bed before the sun, argues with the cop, demands to see a warrant, gets all legalistic on his ass. If you have read any Heinlein you have seen twin brothers of this scene in every Heinlein book: the cranky and smart-mouthed little guy knows his rights and sticks it to the overbearing and impatient official. Some Heinlein characters (Jubal Hershaw) have no other personality aside from this selfsame one-line description: little guy gets his dander up when pushed around by a big guy. In fact, most of Heinlein’s libertarian sexual-liberation propaganda is just a variation of this theme: real men don’t like other people telling them what to do, either in marriage or in business or anywhere else. Like it or hate it, it is a noble and masculine trait.

Let us contrast a scene from VARIABLE STAR, again, taken at random. One of the ship’s Zen-Relativistic engineers has survived a nondescript accident that claimed the lives of two characters whose names I cannot bring to mind. The engineer’s therapist, who here is called by the LeGuinesque New Age term ‘Healer’, is also the therapist of the main character, the deadbeat musician. The engineer stiffly prevents any attempts to talk to him about his pain; he will not ‘open up’ with his feelings. In order to break through this wall, the musician writes a special saxophone solo just for him, and, with the help of the engineer’s loving and concerned friends, buttonholes him in his quarters, and forces him to listen to the heart-felt music. The engineer, in order to resist this love-bombing, makes rude faces at his friends.

I am not making that last part up. The character makes rude faces, sticking out his tongue, and so on, as the means of expressing discontent with this assault upon his dignity. 

Ah, but the sax music sooths the savage breast. “If what I played had had lyrics,” writes our musician about himself, “they would have to be ‘Fuck Death,’ repeated in every human tongue ever spoken.”

Okaaaaay, so it is not exactly poetry.

Finally, our hero with his music penetrates the indifference of the broken, shaken, but ever so sensitive engineer character, who then gets in touch with his true feelings. It all ends with tears of gratitude and a homosexual kiss.

I feel physically ill just typing those words. The tears, oh, the tears of gratitude!

Everyone in this book, when they are not laughing like donkeys, are crying their eyes out. The only time characters show any reserve or self-command is when it is a sign to the reader of mental instability or, in the case of the rich guy, pure evil.

The whole book runs along these lines: it is like reading the journal of a not very deep person in alcoholics anonymous, listening to him talk about himself and his therapy.

It is said that an ancient Chinese sage noticed water, if patiently applied, could wear a hole in a rock, and realized the same technique could bore a hole in a man’s head and kill him. Hence, the legend goes, the Chinese water torture commenced. Now, this book is like that: drip, drip, drip of drippy sentimentalism, half-baked New Age spirituality, and feel-goody hippy dipshit ideas. No one of them by itself is particularly annoying, but the steady drip, drip, drip drives you mad.

Oh, what else can I mention? The main character visits his ‘Healer’ who tells him to exercise and meditate on a serious of paintings which show a skinless man gathering energy in his chakras, becoming one with the energy fields of the universe, until he is one with God and he is God. This is one of the religious ideas regarded as non-threatening in the post-Christian future, and so is allowed. Every few pages, the musician makes some additional wisecrack showing how much he hates Western religions, and how superior New Age Hippy Dippiness is.

Oh, what else? Along those same lines, the quantum ramjet technology used to accelerate the vessel to near-lightspeed requires, as a part of its engine process, a Zen Buddhist monk to meditate while watching the engine core. The mechanism for this is not only not explained, the author goes on for page after page telling us why it cannot be explained. Two objections here: first, any science fiction writer worth his salt can cobble together a workable technobabble explanation to make his imaginary gizmos work. To lend verisimilitude to fiction by means of speculation sounding plausibly scientific is the very definition of the science fiction storeyteller’s craft. So it is merely laziness, or perhaps an insult to the readers, to say, “No one can understand this.” Second, since the author spends an absurd amount of time slamming religion, one wonders why Zen Buddhism, in this universe, just so happens to be the one faith tradition required to make starships go. This is because Zen is a religion acceptable to Spider Robinson, and Christianity is not. One can just imagine what the reaction would be from Spider Robinson if he read a story where the only thing that could make a starship go was a Roman Catholic mass, complete with smells and bells. He would object that such an author was no longer telling a SF story, merely uttering approval for a religious point of view, not engaging in speculative fiction. So is Spider doing here, but the mysticism is a gaseous New-Age type.

Oh what else? How about the scene where the main character, drunk, gets into a fight with two drug-heads, and is so incompetent and foolish handling himself in an emergency, that he, not they, end up in front of the judge. Except judges are too judgmental here: the legal system used aboard ship is a meeting of councilors and coordinators, and the hero gets out of deeper trouble by not saying a word. Then it is off to the therapist for three more chapters of therapy, which might be interesting if the therapist gave good and sound advice, instead of a Baby Boomer idea of advice. Compare this to, I dunno, Mr. Rico in STARSHIP TROOPERS, or Mike the Martian in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, or even Kip in HAVE SPACESUIT. All these heroes get involved in fights, and win or lose, they don’t act like fart-joke comedians.

Oh what else? Let me pull out a quote at random: “Sol Short once told me mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening—and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If it thrills you, you become a liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because the Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more.”

I love it when the children tell the grown ups how to run things, don’t you?

This, by the way, is the same character who later is suffering such emotional pain, boo hoo, that he throws a hissy fit when his friends try to comfort his loss, and makes faces at them.

Oh, let us compare this to a quote from G.K. Chesterton: ” My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

I should mention that the irony here is that, when the ship is later threatened by…(well, I won’t give that surprise away) … and the people actually ARE threatened, the talk turns to thoughts of how to fight the threat, and our dink main character, for once, starts talking like a Heinlein man, about how to fight, instead of like a schoolgirl, talking about how to heal. Of course this does not last long: the whole point of the “Thrilled” point of view, of course, is that it does not change when new data are available. Think I am kidding? Read on.

Oh, how about another quote? Here is our Zen Buddhist monk, calming the ship after a disaster of unimaginable proportions, cautioning them against wrath and vengeance. The Thrilled people never react to sneak attacks with anything but talk of therapy and healing.

Zen boy uses for an example a period in history when “… fanatical extremist Muslims from a tiny nation committed a great atrocity against a Christian superpower. Suicide terrorists managed to horribly murder thousands of innocent civilians. The grief and rage of their surviving compatriots must have been at least comparable to what we all feel now.

“Intelligently applied, that much national will and economic force could have easily eliminated every such fanatic from the globe. At that time, there were probably less than a hundred that rabid, and by definition they were so profoundly stupid or deranged as to be barely functional. It was always clear their primitive atrocity had succeeded so spectacularly only by the most evil luck.

“We all know what the superpower chose to do instead. It crushed two tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual terrorists, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that the nation’s leaders had perhaps known about the terror plot and failed to give warning. The second invasion didn’t even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously hostile to terrorists. Both nations were Muslim, as the nineteen killers had been: that was enough. The nation nearly all of them had actually come from remained, inexplicably, almost the only Muslim ally the superpower had in that region.

“The generation of a large planetary web of enraged Muslim extremists was so inevitable it is difficult for us now to conceive of the minds that did it. They were some of the most intelligent and humane people on the planet. What could they have been thinking?

“Of course they were not. They were feeling.

“They were a superpower, and monotheist…”

It goes on in like vein for another page.

Now, I suppose one could argue that this is merely Spider Robinson impersonating Heinlein’s writing trick of showing how much time had passed by having the common men misremember famous historical events, such as the scene in CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY where Lincoln is conflated with Washington.

Or, one could argue that Spider Robinson is a far-left Chomsky-style lunatic, so far out of touch with reality that his contempt for a formidable foe (“by definition deranged”…? ) is matched only by his woeful ignorance of current events. (So the 9/11 attacks, the bombings in Bali, Spain, London, were achieved only by bad luck, was it? Here is a delerium of invulnerability.)

But notice how he manages to get in a little dig against Christianity. (“They were a superpower, and monotheist…”). Yes, yes, if we were all happy agnostic hippies, 9/11 never would have happened, Spidey. You go on believing that.

And notice how he manages, like all good little Lefty smugbots, to pat himself on the back on how smart he is. If the War on Terror had been intelligently run, it would have been easily over by now? This, from the mouth of a character who cannot draw a distinction between the terrorist bombers and the nation states who were supporting and encouraging them?

As if someone were to criticize World War II like so: “We all know what the superpower chose to do after the attack on Pearl Harbor by oriental aircraft pilots. It crushed three tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual aircraft pilots, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that the Japanese nation’s leaders had perhaps known about the attack and failed to give proper declaration of war. The second invasion, this one in Europe, didn’t even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously hostile to the Japanese, and to all non-Aryan races. The third nation was Italy, not involved in any way. The superpower allied with China, inexplicably, almost the only ally the superpower had in that region that also employed oriental aircraft pilots.”

Oh, and what else? Did I mention the unrelenting hatred of Christianity that crops up, over and over again, in the middle of conversation having nothing to do with it? Here is a quote. This is in the middle of a conversation about solar anomalies:

Herb said, “He’s saying it’s a religious question.”

Pat looked scandalized.

“Everyone is going to end up with a firm opinion, based on intuition, but nobody is going to be able to defend his. The first scraps of hard data [are not available].”

“I just hate to use the word religion in this context. It makes my skin crawl.”

The conversation turns to whether the anomalies could be the by-product of a highly-advanced alien species, using some unknown technology:

“Oh, Herb, no!”

He nodded. “Intelligent design.”

Pat tried to speak, but could only sputter.

“That’s exactly why, too,” Herb said, “For some reason, we let the god-botherers appropriate that term as a euphemism for their stupid deities, and let our revulsion for the latter cloud our understanding for the former.”

One must assume all thoughtful men of faith reading this book are in the same position as an African American reading a book that went, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, I hate the niggers: Their thick lips, their funny smells…” over and over again. It is not a writing style conducive to books sales beyond one’s fellow travelers and ideological mates.

I actually admire the unselfconscious perfection of the self-congratulation in the phrase “we let the god-botherers appropriate that term”. It implies that “we”, the invulnerable Leftist intellectual juggernaut, had the right, the capacity, and the willingness to control the vocabulary and dialog of other men, to permit and to forbid the use of certain words, but that a blameworthy negligence on their part allowed the wicked Christians to get away with a malfeasance–for using such words as they, the hoi polloi, not we, the self-annoited elite, were pleased to use. (When I say, ‘admire’, of course I mean ‘stare aghast’, as if at some malformed Quasimodo at a freak show, if Quasimodo had himself twisted his limbs out of proportion, and placed the hunch with pride upon his own back, thinking it a crown.)

Oh, what else? Heinlein could write a lecture to leave a reader on the edge of his seat. When it is Robinson’s turn to do this, he has Wise Old Character talking to Screwed Up Young Drunk Musician about the planet they’re heading toward, and instead of presenting the information in any interesting way, he has Musician stop once and twice and three times to tell the reader that this is a lecture and therefore boring.

Oh, what else? There is the little girl on the hoverboard I thought something would later be made something of, perhaps she would grow into the fine young bride intended for our hero while Lorenz compresses his years? Or I thought the world of Bravo described in such loving detail, a realistic-souding place, an interesting spot to hold a story, would come on stage? I was interested to see how the colonists would cope. Nope. Two scenes were wasting setting up these plot threads, which were dropped and not taken up again.

Oh, what else? Another drip-drop of the Chinese water torture is hearing about the main character’s love life. Since he ran away from his true love and vowed never to look at another woman, I kind of thought, you know, he would keep his oath and be a hero, or something. No, no, no: he is just is baby-boomer me-generation asshole who does not mean it when he takes an oath. So he is chasing skirt for a chapter or two, but the writer decides to make these scenes as boring as possible, by having Screwed Up Young Drunk Musician stop once and twice and three times to tell the reader that hearing about someone else’s love life is boring. Gee, I wonder how the romance book industry manages it. The trick cannot be that hard to learn, Mr. Robinson.

Oh, and main character fellow is so shallow, so very shallow. He fornicates with one wench (outside of wedlock, of course, since we are all hip and cool drug-taking sexually liberated dipshits here, aint we?) has the normal human reaction of feeling some companionship and sympathy for the woman (since only an animal, or James Bond, can make love to a woman without feeling some form of love, howsoever debased), and then she says she is sleeping with everyone else on the ship, and can pencil him in for more cheap meaningless sex two months from now. Are we supposed to feel, what, sympathy for this?

Oh, and the writing is shallow, so very shallow. Another woman invites our hero, the Screwed Up Young Drunk Musician, out on a date, but she is not really dating him, she was just leading him on so that she could tell him she was getting married. To a group of people.

The handling of the romantic interest in the book leave me wondering if the author knows any women or has talked to any women. They don’t act this way. Maybe the sexually liberated nymphs of the future simply bounce without thought from partner to partner, hetero or homo or both… in your dreams, fanboy.

Oh, and what else?

The whole idea is wrong, wrong. The proposition of a group of baby boomers in therapy as the crew of a new colony is enough to make one laugh, if the conceit were not so sad. Real colonists, like the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, or the pioneers out West, were folk of iron character, men and women both, self-reliant, highly religious, honorable, stern, productive. The idea of this shipload of self-pitying, self-indulgent shallow little dinks carving a new world out of harsh and indifferent nature is beyond absurd. 

Never underestimate the power of hate as a motivator. The only reason why I was able to force myself, against immense natural inclination, to reach the last weary page of this dismal book, was hate. I hate this book. I wanted to finish it so that I could express a justified and warranted opinion about the whole composition.

But I am glad I did. The author—almost—managed to save my good opinion.

Much of my annoyance with the author evaporated in the last three or four chapters, because the plot threads laid down in the beginning chapters were taken up again. The big surprise at the end is an idea I have seen before in A.E. van Vogt’s FAR CENTAURUS, but I still liked it. The solution to Fermi’s paradox was also interesting, but, again, I had seen it before in Greg Bear’s ANVIL OF STARS, but, again, I still liked it. Both of these points were good science fiction writing, as was the plot tension over what is to be done with the rich man’s space yacht, which might contain the secret for the survival of the whole doomed starship.

The main bad guy turns out to the be rich guy, but Mr. Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly game is always the bad guy in any book written according to strictly orthodox Leftist talking points, so I expected that.

Let me tell you why I liked the ending, despite how much I hated the boring, preachy, childish, sentimental middle. The books ends on an Heinlein note: mankind is not to be wiped out by disaster; we are not to give up. Our inventiveness, our will to survive, comes to the fore. Beyond all hope and expectation, the two young lovers are reunited, and they spend their lives helping to maintain the fragile links binding Earth’s widely-scattered colonies against a hostile universe.

The thought experiment is only really about risk-reward ratios in gambling in an artificial situation where no justice is possible. The ‘argument’ is nothing of the kind: it is merely the unsupported assertion that men in the original position are risk-adverse. A man with a taste for gambling might be willing to risk landing in a poor man’s miserable life, in return for a larger jackpot should he be ‘lucky’ enough, once the veil is lifted, to land in the rich man’s life. Surely that depends on the amount of wealth in the jackpot, nothing else.

If I have one of ten lottery tickets, and it costs a dime, if the winning ticket nets me more than a dollar, it is economically worthwhile to play; if less, then not. Rawls’ original position is merely that lottery writ large: but his logic is backward. He is assuming that men would be more willing to play a lottery where the winning ticket netted less than a dollar, or order that the loosing tickets recoup at least part of their losses. But no lottery operates that way: if everyone wins a nickel for a ten-cent ticket, there is no point in the game.

One might object that we are talking about men’s lives and not a game, but, of course, this is the very trick, the very slight-of-hand, upon which the Rawlsian argument depends. He is pretending that life is a lottery, that the rewards and losses are a matter of the turn of the cosmic roulette wheel. The whole point of putting men in the original position is to put them in a position where they do not know who has earned what and who deserves what. 

Even as such, the model is flawed. It does not take into account where and how the wealth came about. Imagine a group of amnesiac ten farmers coming across a harvest. They do not know whose field is whose, or who planted which crop. One farmer invested wisely in good equipment, and by a combination of hard work, genius, and luck,  produced five times what the other farmers did on their plot; but they do not know which one. And so instead of giving the harvest to the farmer who earned it, they decide to hold a lottery to divide it up.

Since the whole point of the ‘original position’ is to render unknown to the judges dividing the loot who has a right claim to it, it is puzzling in the extreme how anyone can call this a theory of justice. It is the opposite: it is a theory on the risk-adverse way to divide property by lottery once justice becomes impossible. Once you cannot return property to its owners because everyone is unaware of who earned and deserves it, the owners can be talked into giving up part of what is rightly theirs due to each man’s individual fear that lifting the veil might deprive him of all of it.

Even on this crude level, the thought-experiment makes no sense. For example, might not an ambitious man behind the veil of ignorance decide that the risk of being poor is minimal? He is confident he can work himself out of poverty, provided the rules for property-acquisition are fair; and if the rules for property-acquisition are fair, the rich can keep what they own. He might assume taxing the rich will prevent the rich from lending and spending money, which he, as a potentially poor man, will now be unable to earn honestly? The poor men who build yachts for the rich do not regard a tax on yachts as a luxury tax.

Or suppose a man is just rather than ambitious. He might reason that, unless the lordly rich in their mansions are secure in their property rights, the humble in their hovels cannot be. A law that does not allow for castles cannot treat each man’s hut as a castle. The just man would not reach any different conclusion inside or outside the veil of ignorance: indeed, he would see the veil as the insult it is: merely a sly assertion that men’s ideas of justice are self-interest disguised in noble language.

There are other errors with the Rawls thought-experiment, include his ignorance of what causes a difference in incomes in the free market. He assumes differences in income are due to luck, or bad laws.  

To sum up all these errors, let us simply change one term of the thought-experiment, so that it was criminal justice rather than social justice we are describing. The jurors and the guilty defendant in a capital felony case are gathered into a jury chamber and subjected to the amnesia-ray. While under amnesia, not knowing which one of them committed the murder, the thirteen men discuss the rules for sentencing. Now John Rawls enters the room and proposes that, no matter who committed the murder, he get a lenient sentence: So in this way, uncertain if they are condemning themselves, the thirteen can wisely decide it is in their best interest that justice not be served.

To make the parallel more exact, let us propose that a certain portion of the allotted life-span of the innocent jurors should be given to the murderer, so that he can live longer and they will live a little shorter. (In effect, being lenient to murderers is just such a transfer, since each man’s chance of being murdered is increased by some small but real percent, and the actuarial average of his life is shortened, each time a murderer is punished lightly.) When the guilty and the innocent are mixed in the amnesia ray, Rawls suggests their self-interest is served by allowing the guilty to get some of the years meant to reward the innocent, and that the innocent get some of the pain and fear and shortness of life meant to punish the guilty. 

This may indeed be the best way for the thirteen amnesiacs to gamble—but justice is not served by this process. By definition, the opposite of justice is being pursued. The whole point of the exercise is to frighten each juror with the possibility he himself might be the murderer so that he will agree to give a lighter sentence than the murderer deserves: in other words to substitute self-serving politics for real justice. The whole point of the exercise is to punish the innocent for their innocence and to reward the guilty for his guilt.

And a man who loves justice more than life itself, should spit in the face of John Rawls and say: “The murderer, whoever it is, should die, or suffer lifelong penance for his dark crime, because the crime of murder is so terrible that even if I should die myself for casting my vote, I must vote for the strictest penalty. I am unwilling to gamble that a killer should escape unscathed.” And this man is announcing the ordinary bravery of a cop or a soldier, or anyone else who risks life and limb to save the innocent from the guilty.

(This is from NewScientist.Com, Imagine Earth without People, an article appearing here. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19225731.100)

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.[…]Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof – for anything that cares and is able to listen – that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth – and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along – it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

Now, dear readers, notice the difference between a Saganesque argument that supernaturalism is unneeded for a rational grasp of the universe, and the kind of cynical, evil, anti-life, anti-rational off-the-cuff comment like “…pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement.”

Oho? Are we not the pinnacle of achievement? Are we not? By the standards of Darwinian nature, the war of life against life bloody in nail and tooth, we are indeed. By Darwin’s standards, even the weakest of us has a very good chance of surviving and reproducing, and no serious challenger to human predominance of the Earth is visible.

The only hope any animal has for departing from the battlefield of nature, where every bloodstained hour holds the terror of starvation and predation, is to become domesticated.

The most ferocious of nature, lions and tigers and bears, we keep in cages to amuse the idle hours of our children. They are hardly on the brink of overtoppling us: indeed, were it not for the compassion (a sentiment only known to humans), the creatures would be extinct. Out victory over nature is so complete, that the serious debate among our species now is how to take steps to preserve our utterly routed and defeated competition. If the tigers were about to wipe our species out with their claws, we would not stop to admire them for their stripes.

Is there some other standard to use aside from mere Darwinian generation and population? Aha, but assuming any other standard would be an act of rational abstraction, an act unique to the human species.

Are we pre-eminent above other species in acts of justice, charity, oblative love, beauty, in pomp and circumstances, in the building of cathedrals, the writing of symphonies, the launching of moonshots? The question is absurd in the asking. No animal cares about these things, or has the capacity to understand them. You can have a space race between Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe Stalin. We are not competing with the bears to see who puts the first pawprint on Mars.   

So in what sense is it “perversely comforting” to contemplate the annihilation of our species and the vanity of all human hopes and aspirations? Only someone who looks on man with a shudder of distaste is comforted.

Someone who is rooting for mankind, a human, would not ask these things. Someone who is cheering for the death of humanity, a monster, to him it is the most natural thing in the world.

So here is my question. When did the atheists suddenly turn into monsters?

It is just an illusion caused by my change in perspective? Were we always that way, and I never saw it? Were there monsters among my camp, praising death and unreason, and I never noticed? Or has there been some strange sea-change in the last four years, and the reasonable atheists are retired or dead, and their places in the public forum taken up by the zealots of some perverted secular death-cult?

If you think I am reading too much into this one article, let me reinforce the point from the comments section of the same article. One reader writes in:

The truly hilarious thing in this thread is that those offended by the article actually imagine that they (or the human race in general) are important or worthwhile or are more deserving of existence on Earth than a Grizzly Bear or a mosquito or a Blue-Footed Booby. What a howler.

Guess what? You’re wrong.

God didn’t create the Earth for you. You aren’t superior to, or even more interesting than, any other life form. You have no more value or worth than anything else, but you do have gigantic egos and a twisted perspective.

When you die or Homo sapiens goes extinct, it won’t mean anything and will have no more cosmic significance than the extinction of the Dodo Bird. In fact, the persons who are offended by this article are the least rational among us, and therefore the most animalistic, the most degraded, and the least “superior” to other life forms. Ooga Booga!

What irony! Did you know that you’re walking cartoons?

Hahahahahah!

Let me see if I got this straight, Johnny Swift. We’re all yahoos, so it does not matter if we live or die, and only the most rational people know that life means nothing, and that my young child, beautiful beyond words, is of no more value than the egg of a digger-wasp.

And you are claiming that I am the one who is irrational for holding human life to be of value? Me?

If the life of a man means no more than the life of a pig, than the comments of a man, including yours, sir, mean no more than the squealing of a swine.

Now, if that sounds like I just insulted you, then you do not, deep down, really believe your own thesis. No one is offended when told his words are no more significant than his brother’s. The offence comes if and only if you are told something lower than you is a brother to you.

Likewise, the act of valuation is a rational act: only a rational creature can change the value he places on things. Ergo to place a low value on rationality, or on a rational species, is a manifest self-contradiction, since the reasoning faculty must be valued in order to be used, and must be used in order to make the valuation.

Let us try another bit of logic:

If rocks could talk, they might have a right to scoff at the egotism of animate matter; if pigs could reason, they could argue that human life was no more valuable than swine-life; but only in Fairytale-land can rocks and pigs talk. Here is a man who has adopted the case of Fairytale-land, explaining how and why he knows God made the world for worms and not for us; or perhaps he means that blind Nature made it. But unless he knows the mind and intention of God, we have no reason to believe him. And if he pretends to know the mind and intention of blind nature, which by definition has neither mind nor intention, they he is merely indulging in a droll paradox.

There is either an objective chain of valuation or there is not. If there is, then humans do not lack the capacity to perceive it and discover their place in it, which, from the testimony of all the sages of all the ages, from the evident throne of our victory, is high. If there is not, then the question of valuation is simply moot, and we may assign what value to human life we will, high or low, as suits our self-interest rightly understood. But the pursuit of self-interest governed by the understanding is itself a rational act, and cannot be served by undervaluation. In neither case can our value be equal or below that of a worm. Either the value of human life is above that of brute beasts, or the question of valuation itself is meaningless.

Mongo from FLASH GORDON. Not friendly to strangers. If you are a girl, you end up in the Imperial harem; a scientist, in the Imperial labs, and maybe getting brain-controlled unless you like the Beatles or something; if you’re a guy, you’re in the Imperial Arena fighting a space-dinosaur. There are winged space-Vikings and tree-swinging space-Merry Men, who seem picturesque, but all these guys are soldiers at war. On the positive side, the emperor’s evil but beautiful daughter might fall madly in love with you.

Dune from DUNE. On the positive side, the Spice extends life and expands consciousness. On the negative side, if you are not a member of the aristocratic houses, the Spacing Guild, or a Bene Gesserit, being addicted to Spice means you will be longer-lived as a serf with an expanded consciousness, so you will notice how your life sucks more.

Tellus from GALACTIC PATROL. Oh my, no. Merely stepping on any planet involved in the Civilization-Boskone war is a risk. Those bad boys throw planets and negaspheres and extra-dimensional suns around like marbles. Since all their space-opera weapons are inconceivably powerful, and unthinkably long-range, your chance of surviving is low, even supposing your solar system is not one of those swept into a hyperspatial tube.

Any planet in the same sidereal universe or nearby fourth-dimensional spaces from SKYLARK OF SPACE. I am not going into no universe with Blackie DuQuense, nossir, no thank you, no way. He would teleport my sun through the fourth dimension with sixth-order rays in order to wipe out a galaxy full of chlorine breathers, and then where would I be?

Earth from Larry Niven’s KNOWN SPACE. Crowded. Weapons illegal, as is knowing martial arts. They license having babies.

STAR WARS. War, and more war. Also, planets get blown up a la GALACTIC PATROL. If you are not a Jedi, fugeddaboutit.

Terminus or Trantor of FOUNDATION. If you like living under Imperial bureaucracy, living in a galactic Dark Ages, or living under the rule of psionic cliocrats (what DO you call rule by means of Psycho-history, anyway?), at least it might be peaceful. If you want your freedom, though, maybe not so nice.

Any world invented by Jack Vance. If you are not eaten by a Dirdir, you will probably end up getting cluthe-poisoned by Howard Alan Treesong the Demon Prince who explains in elegant language that you have caused his nerves an exquisite thrill of displeasure, and therefore the Rule of Equipoise requires your excruciation. And you will never get the girl. No one in a Jack Vance book ever gets the girl. On the other hand, if you want to lean on the taffrail of your ketch and regard the magnificent melancholy sunset of Sirius from the Draschade Ocean, with the rose, cerise and gamboge light playing across the waters, while sipping a Rum Toddy, any world of his would be just the place to do it.

Any world invented by Robert Heinlein. You’ll get a lot of liberated, good-looking women willing to hop in the sack, but most of his planets, come to think of it, are not that nice. RAH was worried about the future, and his worlds are worrisome: STARSHIP TROOPERS, war. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, police-state. TUNNEL IN THE SKY, overpopulation. CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, slavery. MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, war, overpopulation, police-state and penal servitude.

The Mars of Ray Bradbury. No thanks. Killed by Martians who shoot you with a bee-gun because your brain waves make him look like Jesus Christ or something.

Anarres of Ursula K. LeGuin. At last! A utopia! Unfortunately, it is not a nice place to visit. You can neither buy mementoes nor own them, or even rent a hotel room. And it is not a nice place to raise kids, since you are not allowed to raise children; they are all raised by the non-state in communes. There names are assigned by computer.

There is no idea that cannot be made absurd when taken to an absurd extreme. Love itself, an idea so potent that angels hide their invulnerable eyes behind their dappled wings when Love appears, in the extreme turns into a mealy-mouthed feel-good platitude: hippies on hillsides singing about Coke. Justice becomes inhuman severity, the cruelty of Sparta. Truth becomes rudeness. Honor becomes violent and touchy self-regard. Religion becomes fanaticism. Logic becomes hair-splitting. Charity to the poor becomes Communism, a philosophy that has tortured and killed more poor people than can be numbered. Capitalism, a good idea by any account, becomes Objectivism, a philosophy which, while logical in the abstract, in practice would create a nation where no decent person would want to raise his kids. The day McDonald’s starts selling hard liquor in their Happy Meals, even I, lover of freedom that I am, become a prohibitionist, despite all the drawbacks such laws entail.

Even in the Golden Age that perfect libertarianism promises us, you would need something like the Hortators to impose social controls on unacceptable-but-physically-harmless behavior. The reason for this is that the libertarian utopia itself rests on ideas, on a certain sense of morality and decency, on honesty in contracts and faithfulness in marriage, ideas that can be destroyed without doing anyone any physical harm.

And, yes, even John Galt himself, the prelapsarian man, born (so he says of himself) without original sin, when the time came to chose between self-regard and self-sacrifice, was willing to kill himself in an epitome of Russian high emotion, rather than expose his True Love to danger. This indicates to me that Ayn Rand’s instincts as a writer were more sound than her speculations as a philosopher.

If any idea can be corrupted, what is the solution? To be moderate in all things, a way of life of which the pagan philosophers approved, seems bland by contrast, and may not be so helpful. Socrates moderately drank hemlock when so ordered by the State: Aristotle, facing the same danger, ran away to Boetia. We must assume that Socrates drank hemlock in moderation and that Aristotle ran at a stately and moderate pace, as befits a great-souled man.

GK Chesterton, the one man on Earth who never took himself seriously, and never took the Earth all that seriously either, was the opposite of the humorless Ayn Rand. His idea was that opposite, and even antithetical passions could be let free to run riot if constrained by the wisdom of Christian tradition. Ayn Rand condemns both the sin and the sinner, and her hell of condemnation does not seem to have grades or graduations. Chesterton hates the sin and loves the sinner, and his hatred is a more pure black and his love is a more pure argent, than even a purist like Ayn Rand could muster.

Despite all this, her view of man as an heroic being has a romance and a greatness to it, that, for me, makes most of her drawbacks forgivable. There are particular spiritualdangers to the Randian philosophy, but communism, reverse-racism, multiculturalism and political correctness are not numbered among them. Those things which are the main dangers of the current age, are ones to which the Objectivists are not prone. We are not likely to suffer from under-regulation and anarchy in the near future.

I would welcome any Objectivist into the trenches beside me in the culture wars for the same reason I would welcome a valiant Norse pagan: our common enemy is a swamp of nihilistic not-quite nothingness, illogical and addicted to moral vanity. The bold Viking or the passionately dispassionate Objectivist and I may have minor disagreements about the nature of the universe, but none of us are enamored of a life without truth, without reason, without honor, without shame.

And when they came to take away the guns of the Norse Asatru, he would die rather than die the straw death, lest he be unarmed and thus denied entry to Valhalla, the hall of the slain. And when they came to take the gold of the Objectivist, he would blow up his own house rather than compromise, and see his wealth wasted by the looters and moochers. Now, I do not worship either iron or gold, but these two would stand for principles which, taken in balance with other Christian doctrines they abhor, peacefulness and charity, are necessary redoubts against the creeping miasma of gun-grabbing and tax-eating to which the soulless machine of modern collectivist secularism would reduce us. Both these men, in their own way, are as mystical and otherworldly as I am, since the bold pagan believes in the Gods of Asgard, and the wrathful Randian believes in Man as an Heroic and Rational creature.

I am tempted to say that the one is just as mythical as the other, Rational Men as rare as heroic Aesir, but I have not seen every cranny of space and time, so I will not vow I know what might or might not be.  The Creator does not lack for imagination. For all I know, the angels who did not fall so far as Lucifer celebrate with endless ale in Vilmead and in Ydalir, while their one-eyed king broods on his throne, foreseeing the downfall of his little world; and Adam in the garden might have been as rational and productive as John Galt, and as unashamed.  So I will not say these idols do not exist, I merely say that they do not merit the devotion paid to them by my friends.

Both make for good stories. For myself, their stories are not complete, and neither Rangnarok nor Galt’s Gulch express my notion of a satisfactory ending. But I would be proud to call the pagan and the Randian allies, despite our differences. For our enemy is vast and shapeless and terrible like a shadow, formless as a clinging swamp, and will not soon pass from this world.

Man and a cat drift into a seedy bar, and the man is Daniel Boone Davis, robotics engineer, who has just been cheated out of his life’s work by a Femme Fatale. She Done Him Wrong. As far as I can recall, this is the only truly villainous villainess in Heinlein’s whole body of work: Belle Schultz. Curvaceous and covetous, Belle maneuvers her lovesick fiance DB Davis into a financial bind, seduces his partner, steals his best friend, his company, his cat and his robot. Before the evening is out, she will also turn out to be a master forger (mistress?) and hypnotist, and she kidnaps DB into taking a cryogenic suspension nap for 30 years. So, adieu to the near future year of 1970, and hail to the far future year of 2001, Great Los Angeles.

He wakes, he adjusts to the far-future year of 2001, and he spends some time tracking down his lost life, trying to piece together the crime of 30 years ago. He is looking for his cat and the girl, eleven years old when last he saw her, whom he is destined to marry. In that sense it is a mystery story: because the clues never quite add up. Who actually took the robot Frank out of the garage? Where is Petronius the tom-cat? Why does the keyboard-controlled drafting board look so much like DB’s own personal type of engineering design? 

The clues never add up, that is, until we find out we are in a time paradox story. DB tracks down the browbeats the one mad scientists in 2001 who happens to have a working time machine: he chronoports back to 1970, happens to land in the lap of a trusting and trustworthy lawyer, sets up a rival corporation to his old engineering firm, unfinagles the finagled finances, and arranges things with his eleven-year-old True Love, to have her grow up, cold sleep a few years, and gain vast wealth based on his inventions. She cold sleeps her way into the future, and wakes to find him waiting for her. All live in the lap of futuristic luxury happily ever after in the nice, clean future.

There are many things to like about this book. It is a quick read, it hangs together well, and it has that distinctive Heinlein touch of humor and realism. The scene where a still-young DB goes to confront the now-old-and-fat Belle is well done, and not lacking a certain sense of pity for the boozy criminal dame. The humor of the scene where the time traveler, who does not know if he is in the future or the past, lands in the middle of a nudist colony is also well done. All nudists in a Heinlein books, by the bye, are automatically as trustworthy as boyscouts, as polite as the Queen of England.

Heinlein is the quintessential SF writer. The quintessence if speculative fiction is speculation: a practical concern with how the impractical or impossible would work if it could work.  In a fantasy story, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back thirty years to review his life. But in an SF story, Dan the Engineer tells his buddy he is planning a dangerous one-way time trip back thirty years, the friend asks: “What are you going to use for money?”

Because the look of the banknotes is different, the serial numbers are wrong.

Well, an SF author is one who takes the time to tell you what the time traveler uses for money: dental gold alloy drawn into wire, legal to own in 2001 which is not legal in 1970, but can be sold on the sly by a friendly lawyer, who semi-truthfully can claim the gold was found no later than 1970.

The descriptions of the near-future of 1970 (the book was published in 1957) now come across as quaint, descriptions of the far-future of 2001 as rather wide of the mark: but, come now, friends, science fiction is in the business of telling yarns, not predicting trends. That is what the stock market is for, and they are paid much more handsomely than SF writers, believe you me. 

But the automatically-driven cars of 1970 have not eventuated, albeit I hear that the army has a working model even now. On the other hand, the radio-actively tagged checkbook which allows you to drawn out money instantly against your account, because all banks are computerized and telegraphically systematized, sounds like a fair-to-middling description of an ATM card, something as unheard-of as a moonshot in 1957.

He also mentions an automatic telephone answering machine,  which people could rent from Ma Bell,  and an automatic guest-welcoming door opener: neither of these were bad guesses.

As best I recall, the way robots are handled in this book was unique for its time. Even Asimov did not depersonalize his robots to this degree. Here, instead of Frankenstein, the “Flexible Frank” is simply and merely an appliance, labor-saving devices built mostly with off-the-shelf technology. The goofiness of Space Opera engineering, where a Sir Austin Carndyne invents a negasphere or Blackie DuQuesne a fourth-dimensional gizmo,  and has it work right the first time, is entirely absent here.

But we do not have ‘grabbies’ and stick-tight fastenings and window-washing robots, manned ships to Mars or scientific colonies on Venus. All those things were easily in the realm of possibility, indeed, a little conservative as guesses go, considering that the gap between ’57 and ’01 is the same as between ’57 and the first flight of the Wright Brothers’ Flying Machine. This gap spans the beginning of the Space Age and the Atomic Age. Science fiction readers of my age are uncomfortably aware that the human race could have and should have accomplished more than we have in the time we wasted.

But let us not be too ungrateful for the history we missed. The atomic war which pasted New York and DC did not happen, thank God, nor was the federal capital moved to Denver. Here one must pause to admire the economy and artistry of Heinlein’s journalistic writing style. In the first paragraph of this book, he casually refers to, without describing, the atom-bombing of New York, immediately giving the reader a sense of future wonder (or horror) and a sense of realism: realism, because real people casually refer to things, without describing. Heinlein is the past master of his particular gimmick, and he does it better than anyone else I know. Jules Verne would have spent three paragraphs telling you how the automatic door of the future worked. Robert Heinlein says, “the door dilated” and leaves it at that. Your imagination fills in the Star Trek foosh-swoosh sound effect of a door dilating.

Any drawbacks to this book? No, not really. I can imagine a sensative soul being slightly creeped-out by the time traveler looking with the eyes of romance and love on the eleven-year-old girlscout who is destined to turn into his future bride, but, of course, when you meet your wife as a pixie-cute little girl or your mom as a hot-looking teenager, time travel is supposed to creep you out. That is the point.

Any author’s hobbyhorses? Again, no. There is a one-paragraph Heinleinesque speech at the end about the glories of progress and the folly of nostalgia: but this speech is perfectly in keeping with the character of the speaker, and flows smoothly, imperceptibly, into the plot logic. You don’t write a time travel story, or even a Rip Van Winkle story, without contrasting the present and the past. Again, that is the point.

The author, or, should I say rather, the character DB Davis, quite surprised me at the end of the book by introducing a note of religion in his puzzled mediation on the logic of time travel: paradoxes are apparently accounted for by the sound engineering principles of the Great Draftsman in the Sky, who does not permit His engine of cause and effect to go awry, nor to impose on the free will of His created beings. This surprised me in the same way that, for example, Captain Kirk smirking to the Great God Apollo that “the One God is enough for us” surprises me: religion was not perceived as the enemy of progress and enlightenment back in the early Boomer days, before John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. The sick, sad, doomed war of the Peacock Generation against religion had not yet been declared. It was invisible, merely part of the culture, to assume everyone was a Protestant.