John C. Wright's Journal

Short version: Worst. Ending. Ever.

After a strong beginning, this book goes off the rails, crashes and burns, and the dazed reader, like passengers surviving a train wreck, numbly follows as the plot wanders out into the middle of a barren wasteland, where it dies. It is perhaps the most disappointing ending of any science fiction book I have ever read.

This book was nominated for a Hugo. It got a starred review from Publisher’s weekly. I am dumbfounded. There are some things in this book that I did not like for reasons personal to me; but there were other things wrong with the book, violations of the most basic rules of story-telling, that should have disappointed even a reader who shared not one of my personal tastes.

Long version:

 Let me discuss the book’s plot, characterization, its strong points, its weak points, and make a general comment about what is wrong with the whole worldview underpinning the book.

Plot:

In the near future, neurotechnoogy allows for radical restructuring both of damaged and healthy brains. A handful of misfits are sent out on a suicidal mission to make First Contact with an alien race. The aliens have made no overt hostile actions, but the Earthmen are wary.

Aboard the Earth vessel are (1) the artificial intelligence called The Captain, who is incomprehensible and silent. The Captain only speaks once during the whole book. (2) a member of a rediscovered and genetically revived (Jurassic Park style) race of hominids who preyed on mainstream humanity, called vampires. Vampires are nocturnal and have an epileptic fit at the sight of right angles. (3) A linguist with multiple personality disorder, rendered orderly by means of neuro tech. (4) A soldier (5) a biologist with multiple enhanced senses able to interface with an astonishing number of probes and instruments (6) the main character, who is a sociopath, someone not able to feel any human empathy. His role in the mission is to observe and report back to Earth.

The vessel is sent out to the Oort cloud, where it encounters a superjovian planet, a failed star, the center of an immense magnetic field. Orbiting the superjovian planet is an alien artifact like a thorny crown. Some sort of large-scale planetary engineering is going on, and the thorny artifact seems to be growing.

The main character has several flashbacks. In his youth, he suffered a radical hemispherectomy: half his brain was cut out and replaced with neuro-tech wires. The main character either is (or has convinced himself that he is) unable to feel human emotions. He merely notes certain patterns of behavior, hears voices without understanding them, and reacts in whatever way the observed patterns seem to indicate. We see glimpses of his troubled childhood, his parent’s dysfunctional marriage, his cold and petty relationship with a girlfriend.

For example, when his mother downloads herself into a disembodied existence in a mainframe called “Heaven” the main character is bitterly angry about it, repulsed, but does not admit to himself that he has any emotion about it, or any emotions about anything. The future world is one where real life is not that interesting compared to the godlike Nirvana and Elysium of disembodied electronic existence. The author foreshadows that some day very soon there will not be enough people in the outer flesh-and-blood world to “keep the lights on”, that is, to keep the download nirvana running.

My compliments to the author here: this was a brilliant conceit, brilliantly executed.

But to return to the plot:

The team establishes communication with the aliens very early, but the linguist soon decides that the responses from the aliens are a “Chinese Room”, that is, responses dictated by a non-self-aware system, something that repeats back (in a highly sophisticated way) meaningless (to the alien) word-sounds, but so cleverly put together according to the rules of grammar that, to the humans, they seem like intelligent speech. The “Chinese Room” of the alien vocal system warns the humans in no uncertain terms to stay away from the artifact.

(For those of you who have not heard the term before, “Chinese Room” refers to a thought experiment by John Searle. It refers to a system that does not understand communication, but can imitate communication by rote. More on this below. )

The main character has some hallucinations of the aliens before meeting them, but nothing ever comes of this. Apparently he was able unconsciously to deduce what they looked like long before any human saw any of them, but nothing comes of this fact.

The Vampire is the second in command, and the only one allowed to talk to the captain. The vampire is smarter than baseline humans by several orders of magnitude, and so the sons of Adam merely take it on faith that the Vampire is acting in their best interest. The Vampire orders one provocation after another against the aliens: the crewmen break into the artifact, suffer horrific hallucinations (due to the intense magnetic fields passing through the area), accomplish nothing in particular, kidnap one alien, kill a few others, bring two aliens back to the ship for examination. The aliens are starfish like or squidlike beings.

The biologist concludes the aliens are nonselfaware. The linguist tortures them , trying to establish basic communication. When the aliens are asked to number the objects present in the cell, for example, the alien does not number itself among the things present. The vampire concludes that these starfish are merely biological machines, part of the overall alien structure, not their centers of consciousness.

After an astonishing display of superintelligence, the nonselfaware two aliens break out of their holding cells; the artifact attacks the ship. The soldier prepares the ship to ram the artifact, kamekaze style, and blow both human and alien to kingdom come. There is no explanation given for this. It is not clear (to this reader, at least) why the humans continued to escalate their provocations against the aliens.  It was not clear why the aliens struck back or what they wanted.

For no particular reason, the Vampire attacks the main character, and wounds him in the hand. For no particular reason, this attack sends him into curl-up-in-a-ball weeping and feeling sorry for himself for a period of time. (Weeks or months, I was not clear on this point). Then, the Vampire announces that the reason why he attacked the main character was to shock him back into empathy with human beings. So, when the main character reads a letter from his father, he is able to cry. The Vampire says he needs the main character to return to Earth and make them understand what the First Contract team learned.

What the First Contact team learned is that self-awareness is not only not necessary for evolution, it is actually an impediment. There is no such thing as free will. We are all biological machines controlled by our random neurological programming. Consciousness is merely a hindrance. The aliens are a far superior race because they are nonselfaware. They are a ‘Chinese Room’, an empty system with no point of view.

The aliens probed the humans because the human communication, which contains many self-referencing words like “I” and “me” had to be interpreted by the aliens as a form of attack. Or something. That point ws not very clear. For whatever reason, First Contact is impossible with these aliens, because no one can talk to them, since talking is a form (according to them) of aggression. On the other hand, it is also stated  in the same paragraph that the aliens can form alliances and mutually beneficial arrangements.

Main character, for no particular reason, has lost his ability to mimic human understanding by means of copying their formal rules. On the other hand, his newly found human empathy does not really allow him to empathize with the crew either.

The Vampire is killed by the soldier, except maybe not, because the soldier denies it. The ships’ AI speaks through the dead body of the vampire, tells the main character to depart in a side-boat. The ships’ AI says that the reason why the ship gave orders through the vampire was that humans would not have taken orders from a machine. Main character flies back toward earth.

At this point, the ship and the artifact destroy each other. For no reason. The main character announces, again for no reason, that the aliens will not retaliate or take any further warlike action against the humans. The aliens are controlled by a strictly logical “game theory” approach to life (or non-life, in their case) and the game theory says the aliens will not attack humans again.

I can only assume I totally and utterly misunderstood what the author was trying to say here, or maybe I mistook irony for some literal statement. I can only report what my understanding of the book was. Your mileage may vary.

According to my understanding of the book, it is stated (1) that the aliens are innately hostile to the human beings, because the humans talking to each other, when overheard by the aliens, will be interpreted by them as hostile (2) the aliens are not self-aware, possess no consciousnesses, and therefore do not interpret things (3) the aliens can talk, or, at least, play word-games with humans, sort of the same way a “Chinese Room” will react in what seems (to you, but not to it) a rational response to a rational question (4) the aliens, after being attacked in a suicide attack, will not retaliate (5) the main character has to rush home and tell everyone on Earth about this all-important point. Only he, with his human empathy, can make people understand this all-important point. What the all-important point was, or why it was important, was not clear. Maybe he was supposed to tell them that the aliens are unaware of the human beings and are non-self-aware, in which case they are no threat. Maybe he was supposed to tell them that the mere fact of human possessing consciousness provoked the aliens, so they were a threat. Maybe he was supposed to tell them how to approach the aliens, or to keep away, or not to keep away.

If each of these five points mentioned in the last paragraph seems to you to contradict one or more of the other five points, then you have entered the same twilight zone of confusion that I have.

Anyway, just to make sure that this whole pointless plot is even more pointless, while on the trip home, the main character picks up radio messages.

The first is that the “lights have gone out.” For no reason having anything to do with the plot, or the aliens, or anything, it is simply the case that some disaster back on Earth crashed the electronic heaven, killing the main character’s mother, and countless billions of recorded souls. I guess we are supposed to say “too bad” except this was a big so-what moment, because it had nothing to do with anything in the plot.

Second, the radio reports that more and more people are returning to real life and that, for the first time in years, the population is growing rather than declining.  I guess we are supposed to say hurrah, except that this was a big so-what moment for the reader. It was disconnected to anything that happened.

Third, the main character hears reports of spaceships fleeing the earth, as humans are fleeing the vampires, who have finally risen in revolt against their creators, Frankenstein-style. Then, the vampires have won, and the human race is dead, and the main character continues floating in his coffin-ship, in suspended animation, toward earth, the last human alive. At this point, the reader can only yawn, or laugh, or shake his head, depending on how much imaginative effort he wants to put into trying to create, in his own mind, some sort of emotional reaction to a pointless off-stage disaster that overtakes a nameless population of people for no reason. Certainly the author, whose job it is to make the reader able to imagine the fear and power of such apocalyptic scenes, does not stir a finger to help us out. The decline and fall of the human race might have been an interesting book, or even an interesting trilogy: but it cannot possibly be an interesting sentence tacked without craft or passion onto a pointless ending of the plotless book.

And… the end!

Main character does not actually ever land on earth. The book is his diary that he recites in space. We don’t know what becomes of him and we do not care.

So, just to recap: the reason for the mission is hidden from the characters and the reader never finds out either. It must not have been to make first contact, because the humans provoke the aliens for no particular reason and commit kami-kaze for no good reason. The aliens are both said to be a threat and said to be no threat at all. This was not two characters debating the ambiguous evidence, it was just that the author either did not make up his mind or (more likely) the nihilistic world-view of the story would not allow for either possibility, since either peace or war is meaningful, and the author’s theme was meaningless. Nothing is accomplished in the mission, no communication is made with the aliens, but neither is a communicationless solution to the problem (whatever the problem is) found or even discussed. I would have been much more impressed had the humans, or the Ship’s AI  manipulated the “Chinese Room” of the aliens to reach a mutually beneficial trade. You do not have to make a contract with bees, for example, to feed them and get their honey.

Strong Points:

In part the reason why I was so disappointed with this pointless ending was that the beginning held so much promise.

First, all the characters are quirky in the fascinating and repellant fashion that make, say, ax-murderers fascinating. Everyone is either a mass-murderer (the vampire and the soldier) a traitor (the soldier and the vampire) a sociopath (the main character) a schizoid (the translator) or a freak of some sort or another. Any sort of story where the broken members of a suicide mission, the dirty-dozen misfits, learned to get together, heal their broken brains, and over come a problem together, find some sort of redemption could have been a stirring and moving tale. Well, that is not this tale, but the beginning held promise.

The author brilliantly adds little touches to his invented world, touches of realism: for example, most people are “real world virgins”, because they have sex in virtual reality with perfected computer versions of whoever and whatever happens to strike their fancy. The main character is puzzled and peeved with his girlfriend when she finds him cheating on her with a fantasy version of her: a computer version with none of her real-life annoying habits. She also cannot resist asking her boyfriend to undergo minor neuro-chemical tweaks, because she wants to domesticate and improve him, make him happier: a type of meddling interference he both regards as sinister, and regards as inevitably built in to the female nature.

The drollery of a girl being cheated on by a guy with an electronic fantasy version of her is good science fiction.

All budding science fiction would-be writers should read these scenes and study how Peter Watts adds these little touches and executes these effects. It is merely the properly chosen word here, a casual comment there, and the whole world opens up, dizzying and strange, to the reader’s inner eye. The new world is utterly unexpected and perfectly expected. I cannot compliment the artistry strongly enough.

Let me pause to say why this is good, because the craft and care shown by the author in these scenes is about the only thing I can compliment in the whole pointless, nihilistic book. Science Fiction has one unique property. There is one thing SF does that no other genre, not Westerns, not Romances, not even horror, can do. Science Fiction can create in the reader that feeling of wonder and disorientation you remember when you first learned that, despite all the appearances, the world was round, not flat, and that stars were not tiny dots, but distant suns, immense as or own or larger, immeasurably distant in space.

Science Fiction is all about a sensation of losing your bearings, shifting your paradigms. Imagine the disorientation when Darwin first hinted that man was descended, not from Adam and Eve, but from apes and monkeys.  Imagine the disorientation when Copernicus yanked the solid earth out from her place at the center of the universe and sent her spinning off in an orbit around the sun. That sensation of having the earth yanked out from underfoot is the unique Science Fictional sensation. The new paradigm is not just weird, it is also weirdly logical.

In a science fiction story, the reader is asked to accept a new world: what if telepathy were real? What is men could teleport? Then, in the midst of the weirdness, a weird logic. In the world were telepaths could solve crime, Alfred Bester tells us how a criminal could get away with it (THE DEMOLISHED MAN). In a world where criminals can teleport, Alfred Bester tells us how a criminal could be locked up (STARS MY DESTINATION). The true art of the science fiction writer is in the little, telling details. In TO LIVE FOREVER by Jack Vance, sex is not a taboo subject, but among the immortals and mortals who want to be immortal, telling jokes about death and dying is taboo.

When the writer does it well, you hear the little detail, and you go: of course. Of course it would be that way.

Peter Watts also has science fictional brilliance— yes, brilliance, I say — not just in small things but in large. That world-jerked-from-underfoot feeling is hard to accomplish in these jaded modern times. Mr. Watts has a large theme that is just such a paradigm shift. He asks us to accept the science fictional premise that human consciousness is an evolutionary mistake.

His idea goes like this: we notice that we humans are the most skilled at what we do when we think about it the least. An artist flies by inspiration, surprised by his own art. An athlete is “in the zone” his body acting faster and more expertly than his conscious mind could ever tell his hands and feet to move. Intuition gives up complex insights we could never reason our way to see in a step by step fashion. When a man is suffering from “hysterical blindness” he has what is called “blindsight”. He has no conscious awareness of anything he sees, but if you throw something toward his face, he will duck aside or raise a hand to catch it, all by reflex.

So, the next step in the idea is this: consciousness is a make-shift, and evolutionary mistake, a waste of precious brain cells, a waste of resources. The truly advanced and truly efficient alien races would all see by blindsight. They would all talk by rote, not aware of what they were saying. They would all act by instinct, and their instinct would allow them to maintain a level of super intelligence far above the slow, plodding, dull reasoning of creatures crippled by consciousness.

Now, no matter what you think of this position philosophically, we can say two things about it (1) it fulfills, and fulfills brilliantly, the basic requirement of the science fiction writer’s task. The writer has presented us with an astonishing new world, a daring new concept, and challenged the orthodox belief at a fundamental level. SF is about asking “What If?”. Well, the question, “What if self-awareness were an evolutionary dead end?” is a perfectly cromulent SF question. (2) it undermines any possible drama the story might have, leaving the reader cheated.

Now for the weak points:

I cannot speak for other readers. Me personally, I would say that the characters in this book were all people I would like to have a policeman shoot to death, and then I would put a revolver in the dead character’s hand, get his fingerprints on it, to make it look like self-defense. I think I could be persuaded to lie to a jury under oath to help cover up such an act of police brutality, and later invite the bad cop over for a beer and a chicken dinner.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Bad guys are part of literature, and you don’t have to like a character for the character to be interesting. But the flipside of that rule is, that if the bad guy is repellent, he still has to be interesting, and here is where the book falls entirely flat: readers with an intensely negative and nihilist world-view have a particular love of such ugly species of humanity, or of inhumanity, but an ordinary reader will soon grow bored.

Bored to tears. Because there is no character development. None. Nada. Zip. The Vampire is a cipher the whole story. We never find out what his motives are for anything. He does random things, and nothing in particular comes of them. The soldier betrayed her own men and had them killed by an enemy during a torture session in order to get information from the enemy— who was being tortured. Nothing in particular comes of this either. The soldier never seems to learn better, or repent, or grow, or change, or anything. The psycho translator had half a dozen personalities, not a single one of which had any personality worthy of note: I cannot remember a single thing about any of them, not even their names. The biologist tried to befriend the sociopath main character, but to no avail. He dies. Whoop-de-freaking-do.

The most powerful stories are all stories of character development. A man who learns better. A criminal who reforms. A selfish soldier who learns to love his brothers-in-arms and throws himself on a hand-grenade. Anyone who overcomes a flaw. Anyone who redeems his past crimes. There is nothing even remotely like that here. The earth government who sent out this crew of lunatics would have accomplished exactly the same result by sending a missile to shoot down the alien artifact.

So the character development was a cheat. The plot was also a cheat. Here is why: In order for drama to be drama, it must be meaningful. A story is not like jazz music, an impromptu set of sounds soothing to the ear, with emotive but without cognitive content. The cognitive part of story telling involves drama— rising action and falling action. The protagonist is out to accomplish some goal meaningful to him; the antagonist puts obstacles in the way. Conflict. The protagonist (in a comedy) succeeds or (in a tragedy) fails. But if he succeeds, he must succeed for a reason, usually a virtue, if only persistence. If he fails, he must fail for a reason, usually a character flaw, a tragic flaw.

But in order for there to be meaning in the plot, the characters have to inhabit a meaningful universe. Unfortunately, the universe postulated for BLINDSIGHT is a meaningless universe. It is a Chinese Room universe.

Now then, I think any reader, no matter his opinion on such high matters as necessity and free will, materialism or realism, will feel cheated by this book, merely because the basic rules of story telling are violated. There is no plot conflict, no resolution, nothing the main character does means anything, nothing anyone does means anything, the plot points contradict each other blatantly, stupid things happen for no reason, and nothing comes of them.

The basic rule of writing is known as the gunrack rule. If you show the readers that there is a gun in the gunrack in scene one, the gun must be fired by scene three. Otherwise, leave the gun out of the scene. It serves no point; it is distracting.

Peter Watts violates this over and over again.

• Example: in the opening scene one of the character announces that mission control betrayed them: they’ve been suckered. Nothing comes of this. Nothing at all. It is not as if the characters thought the mission was meant for one thing and found out it was another. So why put in the line where the mission crew are told they’ve been “suckered”?
• Example: There is a scene where one character hallucinates seeing a bone in the ship’s wiring. Nothing comes of this.
• Example: there is a scene where an intense magnetic field makes another character think she is dead, even though she is still able to talk and move. Creepy, no? But nothing comes of this.
• Example: the aliens threaten one particular crewmember with violent death. Nothing comes of it. Instead, another crewman dies. Nothing comes of it. Why put in the death-threat? What point did it serve?
• Example: the main character deduces that the soldier is going to mutiny. When the vampire does die, the soldier claims to the innocent of mutiny, and the main character (I think) believes it. So, what was all that false foreshadowing for? Unless the soldier was also unaware of her own decision to commit mutiny? In which case, who cares?

When I say nothing comes of it, I mean specifically that if an Evil Editor had swapped that event with any other event, earlier or later, no reader would be able to tell. Each event was merely there for mood. If the meaningless bone hallucination had come before or after the meaningless death threat, there would have been no difference to the plot.

Now, in addition to these violations of basic rules, that might annoy any reader, there were particular things that will only annoy readers who share my personal tastes and opinions.

For example, I personally find radical materialism, the idea that our brains are empty of self-awareness and free will, an idea not worth dwelling on. It is worth exactly ten seconds of thought. In ten seconds, you can say, “A man who says ‘I have no free will’ if he is telling the truth, was compelled or programmed to say those words, and therefore he is not, in any meaningful sense, telling the truth. On the other hand, if he is lying, he is also not telling the truth. Therefore the statement is false.” In five seconds, you can say, “A man who says ‘I have no awareness’ is not aware of what he is saying. The statement is less than false.”

Now, as a science fiction premise, I don’t hold a grudge against radical materialism. Heck, I do not believe that people can actually read minds, but that does not mean I won’t read SLAN or GALACTIC PATROL or watch Mr. Spock do the Mind Meld; I do not believe in life on Barsoom, but I will still read A PRINCESS OF MARS. But, as a science fiction premise, I do take exception to an author who will not follow through with his premise.

Here is an example of a failure to follow through: if the aliens are defined as being a “Chinese Room” and they tell the humans (even if they don’t understand what they are saying) to stay away, then we have to assume that the meaningless words are connected to equally meaningless actions, but that those words are actually connected!

I mean, a sign that says BEWARE OF DOG is not written by the dog. The dog does not understand the sign. He is a dumb animal. The sign does not understand the words, It is an inanimate object. But the sign is warning you that the dog will bite you, and, if the sign is true, the dog will indeed bite you if and when you ignore the sign. In other words, just because you run across a piece of alien technology that it running on autopilot, and the autopilot has been programmed to warn you away, it simply does not follow, it simply makes no sense, for any characters to conclude that the autopilot is a liar. Whoever programmed the autopilot has done it for a reason.

Even if, in some incomprehensible way, the autopilot programmed itself, or is just operating on instinct, it still would have an incentive to tie its (to it) meaningless words to its operations, in order to operantly condition any intruders to behave as expected. It should shoot intruders when it says “Stop or I’ll shoot” in order to make the energy it took to utter those words be useful–even if it has no idea of what it is saying.

Just because you are talking to a Chinese Room, and the you hear it say, “Stop, or I will shoot” one cannot conclude that the room was not also programmed (at the same time it was programmed to talk) to shoot you if you don’t stop.

Let me explain the Chinese Room reference:

Robert Searle asks the following question: suppose you had a room that could pass the Turing Test. Written questions in Chinese are passed into the mail slot of a room, and, after a while, a written answer comes out, and the Chinese reader is satisfied that the answers are intelligent. Inside the Chinese room, however is nothing but a series of filing cabinets cards on which are written Chinese characters, and a notebook or set of notebooks with a set of rules. In the room is a man who does not read Chinese. The rules tell the man when he sees a note, and the first ideogram is a (to him) meaningless squiggle of a certain shape, to go to a specific cabinet, open a certain file, go to a certain page, copy the character written there, go to another page copy that character, and so on.  The rules can be as complicated as you like. The man sees the second ideogram of such-and-such a squiggle, he is to go not to file A but to file B, open folder 1, copy page 3, and so on.

We can easily imagine the opening of any such a bit of “Chinese Room” dialog. If ideogram A means “How are you?” open file 1, page 1, where is written ideogram B, which means “I am fine; how are you?” To the man in the room, the conversation is without any understanding. Ideogram A provokes reaction B. That is all the dialog means to the man. To the Chinese speaker, however, the Chinese Room seems quite polite. When you ask it “How are you?” the empty room replies “I am fine, how are you?”

Does the man walking from file to file understand Chinese, no matter how intricately the rules are that he follows? The answer is no. Do the filing cabinets understand Chinese? No. Searle argued that a computer that could pass the Turing Test was nothing more or less than a Chinese Room, something that reacted but could not act, something that looked like it understood, but did not understand.

Now, much ink has been spilled over the meaning of the Seale thought-experiment, and, in my humble opinion, all of it wasted ink. Searle (and his supporters) say that the thought experiment proves that the man in the room need not understand Chinese in order to pass the Turing Test. This means that the Turing Test does not actually test for consciousness. Turing (and his supporters) say that the room “as a whole” (whatever that means) “understands” (whatever that means) the Chinese language, and that it means nothing in particular the man himself does not understand Chinese. Does one braincell in the brain of an English speaker understands English? Both are missing an obvious point. Both are arguing about whether a letter understands what is written in the letter. Whoever filled the filing cabinets and wrote the grammar rules for the Chinese Room understands Chinese. The letter-writer understands the letter, not the piece of paper.

Turing and his meditations on whether computers would be aware if they seemed to an observer to be aware never seems to rise above this crudest imaginable materialism: they never seem to contemplate that computers have to be programmed by someone. The Chinese Room is not “polite” if rule one is to answer meaningless squiggle in file A “How are you?” with meaningless squiggle in file B “I am fine; how are you?” : The only person who is polite is the Chinaman, whoever he is, who wrote the ideogram, not meaningless to him, that he placed carefully and deliberately in file B. If the Chinaman, without any notice to John Searle (or whoever the poor boob is trapped in the Chinese Room) had written instead, “I am fine; you are a swine!” then the “Room” would be impolite.

The real question about the Chinese Room is whether or not speech that is not rote speech can be reduced to an algorithm. The real question, in other words, is whether John Searle, trapped in the Chinese Room, merely by following even absurdly complex rules of sentence construction, could coin a new term, or use an old word in a poetical way that showed insight, a new meaning not present before. Now, neologisms can indeed be coined by rote. Children make such coinages, usually in the form of cute mistakes, all the time. There is no reason the Chinese Room could not put “Ize” in file 5, and establish rule 101 “add file five to any word X” where the rules of X include those words we want to turn into verbs from nouns. “Nounize” “Vulcanize” “Paragraphize” are all coined terms that I have here and now Turingized. You might be able to guess their meaning. I have meaningized them.

Poetry is a different question. The whole point of poetic expressions is that a new aspect of meaning has been brought out of an unusual use of a word, or out of a new phrase. If it is something you can reduce to an algorithms, it is not poetry. Indeed, the thing that makes you wince when I use the term “meaningize” is the very lack of poetry in that coinage; it is a mechanical, predictable, soulless.

Which brings us back to the problem of setting your story in a soulless Chinese Room sort of universe.

Having a main character who thinks that he is a Chinese Room is interesting. He is a man with a severe psychological problem, sociopathy, which he wrongly explains away with a delusional belief, the belief that he had no self-understanding and no free will. Making the main character a man who claims to have no self-understanding and no free will is a bold and amusing move. Then the character development rests on when and how the crazy main character breaks out of his delusion and realizes he is a human being, with free will, responsible for his actions, and able to change the plot and bring it to a conclusion.

In this book, this sort of happens, and then we are cheated. Instead of some sensible reason for the main character to snap out of his delusion, the author merely asserts that a vampire attack will snap you out of being sociopathic.  Okay; whatever. Once you are snapped out, something is supposed to happen. Instead, everybody dies, and so who cares? They do not even die for any particular reason.

To add insult to injury, if the author steps out from behind his Wizard-of-Oz curtain and announces (as Peter Watts does in an appendix) that the main character is right, and that there is no such thing as free will (his exact words “free will looks pretty silly”— albeit Watts admits that scientific opinion is divided on this point), then the author, in effect, tells you that his story has no drama.

When the character has a false opinion that the narrative in the story shows is false, we can assume the writer is trying an ‘unreliable narrator’ technique, one which such authors as Gene Wolfe expertly handle. But when the author has a false opinion that the narrative in the story shows is false, we can only wonder whether the author understood the point of his own story.

(In the present case, if the point of the novel is that running your mind on autopilot, seeing with Blindsight, is superior to having free will and human emotion, the logic of the story should demand that the demented main character not only NOT be snapped out of his emotionless detachment, but that he act and operate better in this sociopathic state than he acts when he has emotions.)

I have a second pet peeve with the determinist, fatalist, materialist, ‘Chinese Room’ view of the world.

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that Hobbes, Calvin, Lucretius and Peter Watts are correct, and that there is no free will. In the same way and for the same reason that a robot judge would have to be programmed to find a robot criminal guilty, even if neither of them had free will, so too would robot authors have to tell their robot audiences stories about characters with free will even science proved that free will is an illusion.

The reason: there is no drama, no tension, no human feeling, no story, if there is no free will.

If a nature documentary describes an inanimate natural process with vivid detail, and fascinates the viewer with the magnificence and mathematical intricacy of the inanimate world, no matter how good the documentary is, as a drama, it sucks. We can watch a crystal growing or a volcano forming, but even if the crystal breaks or the volcano erupts, there is no drama because there is nothing at stake. There is nothing to gain or lose.  Where there is no life, there is no pain. Where there is no free will, there are no moral quandaries.

What kind of character can live in a Chinese Room universe? Only someone who accomplishes nothing, whose life means nothing, whose death means nothing. Only a sociopath, a vampire, a traitor, a madwoman, or gibbering alien shapes whose human-sounding words are meaningless.

I submit that an intensely nihilistic world view, a “Blindsight” world, necessitates (1) intensely dislikable characters and (2) no plot and (3) no character development. Why? Because anything else will make a mockery of such a world.

If the characters were likable, that would make their lives meaningful. If there was character development, that would make such themes as sin and redemption or heroism and sacrifice satisfying and meaningful. If there were a plot, that would make such themes as the little tailor who kills a giant, the self-made man who works hard and earns his just rewards, or the cunning detective who solves the crime and brings the wrongdoer to his just rewards, again, satisfying and meaningful.

Suppose you read a scene where a little girl cut her sandwich in half and offered half her lunch to the little black girl that everyone else in the nursery school was picking on. That small act is only meaningful if the little girl is not a meat machine programmed by cell-malfunctions to suffer an epiphenomenon of kindness.

If the girl is a meat robot, then her little act of kindness is not only meaningless (a vending machine that accidentally gives you two candy bars is not being kind, it merely slipped a gear), it is actually pathetic, something to evoke scorn and pity, because the foolish girl performs and meaningless act to which she wrongly ascribes meaning, wrongly gives herself credit, and wrongly learns the meaning of kindness.

Any reader touched by a scene featuring a simple act of kindness will instructively rebel against any nihilistic theme present in the story around. Any artist might be wary of such a jarring note. So, in a nihilistic universe, the writer is better advised to have all his characters be pukes, and all their actions pointless.

Which is exactly what Peter Watts did in BLINDSIGHT.

Whatever goods and services the people would have bought with the money they would have saved had the price of food dropped to its natural rate, where made more expensive, less available–a shortage. Burning crops also produced a crop shortage. Government interference in the price-structure of crops, in order to produce a good, ethanol, that no one wants and no one needs, produces a food shortage. Food shortages produce food riots.

Ethanol is like the clarified butter Hindoos proffer up to their idols: merely a sacred liquid proffered by the Gaia-worshipers to their insatiable industry-hating goddess. The scientific facts are relatively unambiguous: it take more energy to render corn into a gallon of ethanol than burning a gallon of ethanol will produce.

Ludwig van Mises explains the causal link between rationing and  shortages:

The government believes that the price of a definite commodity, e.g., milk, is too high. It wants to make it possible for the poor to give their children more milk. Thus it resorts to a price ceiling and fixes the price of milk at a lower rate than that prevailing on the free market. The result is that the marginal producers of milk, those producing at the highest cost, now incur losses. As no individual farmer or businessman can go on producing at a loss, these marginal producers stop producing and selling milk on the market. They will use their cows and their skill for other more profitable purposes. They will, for example, produce butter, cheese or meat. There will be less milk available for the consumers, not more. This, or course, is contrary to the intentions of the government. It wanted to make it easier for some people to buy more milk. But, as an outcome of its interference, the supply available drops. The measure proves abortive from the very point of view of the government and the groups it was eager to favor. It brings about a state of affairs, which—again from the point of view of the government—is even less desirable than the previous state of affairs which it was designed to improve.

He goes on to explain why rationing in one area necessitates rationing in all areas:

Now, the government is faced with an alternative. It can abrogate its decree and refrain from any further endeavors to control the price of milk. But if it insists upon its intention to keep the price of milk below the rate the unhampered market would have determined and wants nonetheless to avoid a drop in the supply of milk, it must try to eliminate the causes that render the marginal producers’ business unremunerative. It must add to the first decree concerning only the price of milk a second decree fixing the prices of the factors of production necessary for the production of milk at such a low rate that the marginal producers of milk will no longer suffer losses and will therefore abstain from restricting output. But then the same story repeats itself on a remoter plane. The supply of the factors of production required for the production of milk drops, and again the government is back where it started. If it does not want to admit defeat and to abstain from any meddling with prices, it must push further and fix the prices of those factors of production which are needed for the production of the factors necessary for the production of milk. Thus the government is forced to go further and further, fixing step by step the prices of all consumers’ goods and of all factors of production—both human, i.e., labor, and material—and to order every entrepreneur and every worker to continue work at these prices and wages. No branch of industry can be omitted from this all-round fixing of prices and wages and from this obligation to produce those quantities which the government wants to see produced. If some branches were to be left free out of regard for the fact that they produce only goods qualified as non-vital or even as luxuries, capital and labor would tend to flow into them and the result would be a drop in the supply of those goods, the prices of which government has fixed precisely because it considers them as indispensable for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses.

But when this state of all-round control of business is attained, there can no longer be any question of a market economy. No longer do the citizens by their buying and abstention from buying determine what should be produced and how. The power to decide these matters has devolved upon the government. This is no longer capitalism; it is all-round planning by the government, it is socialism.

It is not a biological question. What defines a homo sapiens to a biologist is genetic material, i.e. descent. There is no question that even a single-celled organism is living, and that, if it comes from a bisexual race, it has a mother and a father. The word ’embryo’ refers to the stage of development of an organism of a species: for example, an unborn fox kit passed through an embryo stage of development. No biologist would argue that an unborn fox was not a member of the species “fox”.

It is absurd to classify an unborn homo sapiens and “not a member of any species” on the grounds of a lack of observable phenotype characteristics. No biologist classifies a bald man as ‘not a mammal’ on the grounds that he does not suckle his young, being a male, and is not hairy, being bald.

It is not a moral question. No one makes caring for a diseased or underdeveloped loved one dependent on that loved one’s ability to pass an IQ test or show some form specifically human behavior.  If your husband has a stroke, and loses the human capacity for reasoning in his cortex, he becomes your dependent; he does not become your property or your livestock. When he dies, you still call a mortician, not a butcher.

So what it the question of personhood?

Personhood is an excuse. If one wishes to work one’s will upon the weak and helpless, one first removes their humanity in thought. Call the Jews sons of Pigs. Call the Negroes sub-human. Call the worthless old folk bread gobblers or vegetables. Called the unborn any name by what they are: human offspring. Babies.

Tell me honestly. If I said I had a mare who was carrying a foal in her womb, do you think anyone (anyone not deliberately arguing about abortion) could correct my language, and tell me my mare cannot be carrying a foal, because an embryo is not a member of the species ‘horse’?

Does anyone talk that way? Does anyone say a horse is not a horse just because it is still in the womb?

Let us take this hypothetical one step further. Suppose I were an faithful Hindu, forbidden by my laws to eat beef. Could I eat the veal from an unborn calf on the grounds that he was not a cow, not a member of the species, cattle? Suppose I were an observant Jew, forbidden by my laws to eat pork. Could I eat the bacon from an unborn piglet on the grounds that he was not a swine, not a member of the species, pig?

Would anyone be persuaded by the beef-eating Hindu or the pork-eating Jew if their diet consisted only of animals taken half a second before birth from their mother’s wombs?

Let us take the hypothetical one step further. Suppose I live in a country where unborn homo sapiens are not considered human. Suppose my laws forbid the eating of human flesh, on the ground that it is cannibalism. I go to an abortionist, find a baby who is only halfway out of the womb, coming out feet first. The abortionist drives a pair of scissors into the babies fragile skull, and suctions out this brains. I take the rest of the flesh home and cook it up for a meat sandwich. Michael Valentine Smith and Hannibal Lector come by and eat with me. A little tiny perfectly formed baby hand sticks out of one side of my sandwich as I wolf it down.

Is my action legally not an act of cannibalism, on the grounds that what I ate was not a human?

Sorry. All I meant is that the cover art makes Amelia Windrose looks totally cute in her flier’s cap, with her blond head flung back, soft lips parted, as if in some dissolving rapture, her shirt unbuttoned… um… I mean, good cover art.

Honestly, I am not one of these sad, pathetic weirdoes who is only attracted to multidimensional schoolgirl aviatrixes. My tastes are MUCH healthier and more normal.

I am attracted to evil cartoon space princesses!

No, no, just kidding. Ha, hah! My tastes are MUCH healthier than that. I am attracted to women’s auxiliary naval officers of Star Fleet who have been swept off their feet by evil alien space gods, and forced to dress up like a futuristic version of Io or Europa or something.

And Fembots. But who is not attracted to Fembots? I mean, if I could get a date, I wouldn’t be a science fiction fan, right?

And fembot sex workers. I means, they’re BUILT to be attractive, so it is perfectly, uh, understandable that a red-blooded, um….

Robo-Harlots are not to be confused with Space Harlots, er, Companions! Entirely different sort of thing. Only a Mundane would confuse the two. It will be a perfectly respectable profession in the future.

And there is nothing abnormal about being attracted to Orion Slave Women.

Because, um, they’re so very green, and…

And no man in the galaxy can resist them! It said so in the pilot episode!

Did I mention that there are whole websites devoted to green pleasure-slaves from Orion? So it is not just me who is odd.

(It SHOULD be, but it is not.)

So I am not just some loser who is only attracted to evil cartoon space princesses. (*)

I also like, er, evil live-action space princesses.

And just in case any one doubts for a moment that real life earth princesses do not look as good as imaginary space princesses, I have offer the following as Exhibit A and B

Hubba, as they say, Hubba, Your Grace.

This has absolutely nothing at all to do with my book, does it? Of course, two of my characters are good looking space princesses, or princesses from other dimensions or something, so maybe there is a connection there somewhere.

Anyway, go buy the book, or I will tell you more details of my psyche you just don’t want to know.

(*Footnote: Yes, I know that this is Hal Jordan’s mind-controlled girlfriend Carol Ferris, Earthwoman, but, nonetheless, he was raised to royal dignity by the  Zamarons, she counts as a space princess, the same way Grace Kelly, American, counts as a Princess of Monaco.)

They banned “tag” at school because it is “too aggressive.”

In ten or twelve years, these kiddies will be of age to enter the service. Imagine the next generation of Marines and Navy Seals, if they are drawn from a pool of youths raised to be too delicate for a game of tag. 

When they came for the tag players, I said nothing, because I don’t play tag.  

 Woman “ticketed” for calling her neighbor’s children ‘monkeys’. They were making a ruckus while climbing trees.

They were black, and the comment was politically incorrect. She was found guilty of the crime of Imposing on the Delicate Feelings of a Leftist. She also was (and is not longer) A Barack Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Obama gave Mrs. Ramirez the sack.

When they came for the grown-ups who call their neighbor’s sprats monkeys, I said nothing, because I was taking a nap on the couch then.

Muslims make schoolmarms ban gay kiddie book.

The internal logical contradictions of the Left on display. Apparently, when Christians object to books aimed at teaching preschoolers to idolize a sexual malfunction, we are blackhearted villains, but when Muslims object to sodomy, they must be heeded with grave deliberation. I am not sure how the pious totem pole of victimology goes, but apparently multi-culturalism trumps gay tolerance.

Cowardice encourages violence, I am afraid. Christians and Buddhists and other peaceful religions will start to notice that you can get your way in this world merely by sawing off a few heads on video. You see, total deafness on an issue combined with total unmanly cravenness creates an incentive away from reasonable speech and toward belligerence.

When they came for the gay kiddie books, I said nothing, because, well, damn, those books actually are disgusting, so I am glad the Paynim are on the right side of things for once.

Brigitte Bardot is officially a racist. In France.

There is no real reason to post of photo of Bardot here. No reason at all.

I have heard elsewhere that her objection is to Muslims who slaughter sheep without stunning them first.

Apparently an animal-rights vegetarian afoul of political correctness if the Muslims are cruel to animals. So, Brigit Bardot is now a racist hatecrimer whom the Thought Police will reeducate. I am not sure how the pious totem pole of victimology goes, but apparently multi-culturalism trumps animal rights.

She probably doesn’t want to wear a burkha. Maybe she does not want her country to be given away to foreigners. Whatever she thinks, it is illegal for her in France to speak her mind. You see, for purposes of smothering dissent, Islam is not a religion, it is a race.

When they came for Brigitte Bardot, I said nothing, because I was not a aging French sexbomb.

UPDATE: This just in. More madness.

Killing unborn babies as a form of art.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

Full Article:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513

I did not speak up for the diabolically grotesque narcissistic artist who killed unborn babies for a frivolous reason, because, by Holy God in Heaven, I wanted her to die a painful, sudden, meaningless death as vile as what she planned for her innocent sons and daughters, and to be hurled into the flaming pit of hell thereafter.

It is stories like this that make me believe the old cruel doctrine of eternal fire is simply not unjust a penalty to visit on those who yearn for damnation.

But when they finally came for me, there was no one but this guy named Niemöller, and I knew already he was not going to speak up, the big wimp.

The word comes from one of those STAR WARS movies not written by Leigh Brackett, from the prequels we fans refer to as “the Dark Times.”  

Kemmer is the seasonal rut of the non-sexual hermaphrodites of Gethen (the planet Winter) when they become briefly male or female for reproduction. The race was artificially created by the Hainish as a sociological experiment.

The word comes from LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K.LeGuin.

Rishathra is sexual congress, without the benefit of marriage, between two mutually sterile intelligent hominids, usually for the purpose of solemnizing a treaty or somesuch. So if your girlfriend has left you for a Neanderthal or a Slan, this is the word for it. It is not legal in Virginia, but the Supreme Court of Massachusetts has declared it to be a constitutional right, pending the discovery of extraterrestrial mutually sterile humanoid sub-races. Technically speaking, John Carter, warlord of Mars, finest swordsman of two worlds, did not engage in Rishathra in his nuptial bed with Deja Thoris, because she laid an egg.

The word comes from one of the more oo-la-la sequels to RINGWORLD by Larry Niven. Sciffy fanboys get our jollies from contemplating the sociological ramifications of space travel and technical revolution on sexual relations, or by ogling at pics of Princess Leia in that metal slavegirl bikini.

Deltan: an intelligent homonid from the planet Delta IV. They are a highly sexual species to whom copulation is as casual as a handshake. Along with Star, the space empress from Robert Heinlein’s GLORY ROAD, the Deltans scoff at earth humans for being a sexually immature species. Deltans have to take an oath of celibacy before they can shake hands with a sexually immature species like us. Deltans are bald. Famous Deltans include Persis Khambatta, Sinead O’Connor, Yul Brenner, and sometimes Natalie Portman.

The word comes from Gene Roddenberry when he was in heat, making one of those lame STAR TREK movies that was not WRATH OF KHAN. Or, as we fans like to call its, the WRATH OF KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN.

Nerf-herder: pop-punk band from Santa Barbara formed in 1994 by Parry Gripp, Charlie Dennis and Steve Sherlock. They also herd large swarms of soft children’s toys made of a flexible Styrofoam substance. Not much is known of this pop-punk band, aside from the fact that  Princess Leia would rather kiss one of them than a wookie. Or something like that. It is not known whether or not not the band members have ever engaged in Rishathra with a Deltan.

The word comes from Princess Leia, but not when she is wearing a metallic gold bikini slavegirl outfit. Princess Leia is the freely elected absolute monarch of planet Aldaraan, daughter of Dark Vader and the freely elected princess senator Natalie Portman of planet Naboo, a bald Deltan (q.v. above). Since the secret identity of Darth Vader is Anakin Whinewalker, jedi-squire and ex-slave, he is not of royal blood, and ergo she cannot possibly be a princess unless she hires a crooked space-herald to falsify her pedigree. She is, however, a granddaughter of the Holy Spirit, since her grandma, Schmi, like Hera, can just produce kids by parthenogenesis.  But only when the Midochlorians are in kemmer. Shmi or Shmee or whatever the frell her name was had a kid named Anakin, who built a protocol droid out of spare parts. Because every slave-boy owned by a flying Arab living in a pawn shop needs a robotic protocol master-of-ceremonies in case he has tea with the princess dressed as her own handmaiden who falls in love with him even though he is maybe nine, so the sprat needs a robot to tell him which fork to use when serving soup. Or whatever. If the members of the punk-pop band Nerf-herder are able to explain away the plot holes in the STAR WARS prequels, then they are better men than I am. I just wanted to see jedi-knights kick ass and parry blaster bolts while doing esper wire-fu, and not to have my childhood dreams shattered by a cynical attempt to sell more McDonald’s Action Figures.

Droid: a droid is a robot. Not to be confused with android, which means an artificial person. Just to be clear on this point: the Vision is an android, whereas Machine-Man is a robot. Robotman, on the other hand, is a cyborg. Cyborg is also a cyborg, not to be confused with Deathlok, who is also a cyborg, but more badass. Wonder Man is not a cyborg, but an energy being shaped like a man, whereas Adam Warlock is an artificially created human, therefore an android, but he is not a warlock. Doctor Strange is, however, a warlock, but no longer a doctor, due to a crippling accident. Doctor Druid is not a doctor, but he is a druid, a member of a pagan nature religion, not to be confused with droid. As far as can be determined, there are no droid druids. Superman is a space alien, whereas Brainiac is a space alien robot. In his Fortress of Solitude, Superman often makes robot duplicates of himself, so these are robots of a space alien. Doctor Doom also makes robot duplicates of himself, which are manlike in shape, and therefore can be called andriods, but not droids. Syndrome made a battlerobot called an Omnidriod, but it was shaped like a rollerball with tentacles. There were no robots, droids, androids, or space aliens in Rollerball, but it starred James Cahn, and I think it is an underrated movie. James Cahn is not to be confused with Khan, or, as we fans like to call him KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN.

The Dark Times: this phrase refers to the reaction of bitter fanboys to prequels of our favorite space opera flick, when we just wanted to see jedi-knights kick ass and parry blaster bolts while doing esper wire-fu, and not to have our childhood dreams shattered by a cynical attempt to sell more McDonald’s Action Figures. Anyone who hates Jar-jar Binks or winces at the word Midochlorians understands.

UPDATE: please see an illustrated diagram of the definition of Droid here.

(In the worst cases, all the English nouns and adjectives are left out: “Vesnalorm, Ess’lor of Nyeang, stood in Yerale by the Undh, looking down over Warawe to Soelmwar. ‘Alas,’ thought Vesnalorm; ‘Dukeko will die this day at the hands of Llarod, Ightch, Nudah, and Worler!'” And so on.)

In science fiction, it’s sometimes the names of alien stars, worlds, species, and individuals, or sometimes unfamiliar technobabble (“Quick! Stabilize the dynethro coupling to provide a mekanon field so we can bypass the Vokk generator and keep the mesospace engines from granulating!”).

Either way, it can cause readers’ eyes to glaze over quickly, and erect an impermeable interest-repelling wall between the reader and the story.

But sometimes I read a story that, despite being full of unfamiliar terms, draws me in and keeps me interested.

Of course, the line between interesting and offputting use of unfamiliar terms can be in the eye of the beholder. I think we’ve published a couple of stories that I thought did a great job, but that at least a couple of readers said they couldn’t get past the opening paragraphs of. And certainly Karen and Susan and I have disagreements about this kind of thing in stories we’re considering.

So, a question for y’all writers and readers: what techniques do you feel work best for making use of unfamiliar terms inviting rather than offputting? Or at least for softening the impact of the new words in the opening paragraphs of a story?

(Names courtesy of the Fantasy Name Generator; for a particularly enjoyable set, try the Bad Name Generator on that page. See also the Random Tolkien-Elvish Name Generator (which supplied me with the name “Almarëkilyanna”); an unrelated non-Tolkien Elven Names Generator; another unrelated non-Tolkien Elf Name Generator; the Tamriel Rebuilt name generator; and, while I’m here, the Random Title Generator.)

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My comment:

The art of injecting strangeness into a tale of wonder is like cutting a diamond: a proper stroke will bring out the brilliance, and an awkward stroke will shatter the diamond.

Let me offer two examples, in an opening line, of a single strange word or phrase that tells the reader he is opening a curious door into a world not his own:

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”

or

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Such is when it is done well. Invented words should have invented roots: something that implies the word grew up from the world. The fact that hobbits live to one hundred and eleven years is peculiar, and something of their rustic quaintness is implied by the neologism “elventy-one.” If it is not something country gentry say, it sounds like it should be. Again, the fact that the clocks strike thirteen hints that the future world of 1984 has gone to a decimal dial, with all the unpleasant associations of revolutionaries who revise calendars, making it Thermidor of Year One, and so on. It is done poorly when the newly-coined word has no roots and tells you nothing about the world involved.

It is poorly done when the reader cannot intuit from the surrounding words the meaning of the invented word, or when the invented words does not sound like an authentic word the people of your world might invent. I hate to dispraise one of my favorite books, but when telepathy in WRINKLE IN TIME is called “kything” it sounds phony. There are no roots to that word. It is a meaningless string of letters, not something a modern girl would say. 

When the same ability is called “Night-hearing” in William Hope Hodgson’s monstrous work THE NIGHT LANDS, it sounds authentic, or when it is called “Peeping” in Alfred Bester’s THE DEMOLISHED MAN, or when it is called “our prison-yard whisper” in Robert Heinlein’s TIME FOR THE STARS. In E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series,  telepathy is done with a psychic instrument called a “Lens”, and the verb is “Lensing” (‘he Lensed to her’); Ursula K. LeGuin, in her Hainish novels, calls telepathic contact “Mind-speech”, and the verb is “bespoke.” (‘She bespoke him’). 

These words have a resonance, something that invites the reader to fill in what the author left blank. Hodgson implies the art of mind-reading is a thing of darkness and mystery; Bester implies that it is like a Peeping Tom, an intrusion; Heinlein implies secrecy; Smith uses a word that implies the powers of the mind are being focused, as with a magnifying glass; LeGuin implies a quiet, peaceful art.

Even when the coined terms have no relation to our language, they should have a relation to each other. In Zimiamvia (so the otherworldly poet E.R.Eddison assures us in MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES) the citadel of Zayana is called Acrozayana. We might not know what an Acrozayana is, but to an English-speaker, it echoes words like “Acropolis”, and sounds like something whose walls and towers rise above ancient and unconquered Zayana.

(The title of this journal entry comes from my own THE GOLDEN AGE, which is as thickly-strewn with invented words and concepts Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the books In Vallombrosa, or should I say “as thick as a padawan in kemmer trying Rishathra on a Deltan nerf-herder.”  My word here is perhaps the most outrageous of the invented words in that book, but some readers might be able to puzzle out its meaning: Contraterrene is antimatter, and contraterrenogenesis is the process of making it.) 

THE MATRIX — a success in both categories. An astonishing idea (what if your whole life were an illusion?) combined with a visual style that was jaw-dropping.

MINORITY REPORT – another success in both categories. A taught police-thriller with the mind-blowing concept of punishing crimes before they happen, or the question of when it becomes unsupportable to rest public happiness on private suffering, combined with such eye-candy as a chase scene on jetpacks, or five-lane highways crawling up and down the sides of buildings.

DARK CITY — Alex Proyas’ masterpiece, and my personal favorite SF film. Again, success in both categories. An astonishing idea (what if your memories were tampered with? Who would you be?) combined with a film style not seen since the days of METROPOLIS.

Speaking of which:

METROPOLIS — the special effects were so meticulous that even by modern standards, they still have the power to impress. The visuals of the city, of the robot-woman, of the huge M-Machine turning into Moloch, all define the highpoint of German Expressionism. Again, success in both categories: the science fictional idea, things like vision-phones and mechanical men and aerial highways and superskyscrapers had never been seen before, and they defined (and to this day still define) our visual image of what the future should be. The visual style of METROPOLIS, for example, was reflected in STAR WARS. The futuristic city-planet of Coriscant is merely Metropolis writ large: the same flying vehicles and superskyscrapers are in evidence.

FORBIDDEN PLANET — the eerie homage to Shakespeare’s TEMPEST, combined with impressive visual effects, Robbie the Robot, Anne Francis in a slinky dress, flying sleds, giant Krell Machines, monsters from the ID, culminating in the destruction of the planet Altai IV has at least as much power to astonish as a copy of John W. Campbell Jr’s ASTOUNDING magazine.

DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL — One of the few conservative films with an anti-nuclear-war message. There is no handwriging or moral posturing about nukes in this film, merely a grim warning by a higher power that we will be wiped out if Earth threatens the safety of other worlds. The “Passion story” elements (a man named Carpenter who comes from the stars who dies and is resurrected) also reflects something of the themes and moral tone of 1950’s written SF literature. While the special effects might seem dated to jaded modern eyes, again, there are striking visual images—Michael Renee emerging from the flying saucer—that are seared into the racial unconscious of science fiction fandom.

BLADE RUNNER—Again, a success on both counts, both as a meditation on the meaning of life and death in a world were technology can create artificial life and artificial memories, and a visual style that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ view of the future.

2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY —Perhaps the most memorable visuals in any science fiction film, if we neglect that odd and pointless light-show at the end. The film is a secular meditation on evolution and transcendence. This is Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the universe displayed on the big screen. Kubric’s direction has rarely been equaled.

Let me give honorable mention to films that were good in one category or the other, but did not combine both. First, films that had that sense of wonder visually, but not in the realm of ideas.

STAR WARS – the visual effects were without parallel, and changed the way films are made. And yet, the story was a fairytale, taking place “long long ago and far away” without a single correct scientific idea anywhere to be found, and no speculative thought.

ALIENS – both the visual style and the character of the marines pinned down in a claustrophobic hellhole are striking. But the characters were basically modern men, just like us, and there was no SF speculation, none of that “what if…?” that defines idea-oriented science fiction.

INDEPENDENCE DAY – the visual image of immense flying saucers hovering over the White House is like something from Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END. This movie was a visual wonder, but there were no science fiction ideas here.

THIS ISLAND EARTH – Again, some amazing visuals (which science fiction fan among us does not want an interociter?) but nothing in the idea file.

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW – this film leaped right off the pulp cover of Astounding, but there was nothing else to it. A personal favorite of mine, but it is not really science fiction.

The final category is harder. I don’t think I can think of five films that are great SF idea-films but unimpressive visually.

GATTACA – an under-appreciated gem of a film. As ‘idea SF’ maybe the best on the list. What we saw in this film might well come to pass within my lifetime. But it was not visually a source of wonder.

THE VILLAGE – A Serlingesque tale about an isolated but utopian village oppressed by nameless terror. There were no impressive special effects and no need of any. The central science fictional idea deals with the price to be paid for living in the modern world, or rejecting it. When is a noble lie better than the truth?

BACK TO THE FUTURE – The special effects were good, but not the point of the film. The idea made the film: a bumbling time traveler who must play cupid, and make sure his parents meet and fall in love, lest he be erased from existence, is a prime-cut of science fictional goodness.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS – What if you did not know who to trust? There are no special effects worth mentioning here, but the idea is one resonant throughout the Cold War, and even today we often meet pod people.

FAHRENHEIT 451 – No special effects are all, just Oskar Werner’s excellent acting.

Honorable Mention:

THE THING — I mean the original Howard Hawks, not the unpleasant remake. The special effects are nothing to look at, but the sense of wonder is there. There is a scene where a group of soldiers try to make out the outline of an aircraft buried for a million years in the Antarctic glacier by each man standing on the ice above where he sees part of it. The move to their positions, staring down. Then they look up, and realize that they are standing in a circle. No word is spoken; there is merely the look in the eyes of the men as they realize the ship underfoot is a flying saucer. It is pure wonder, wonder at the unearthly.