Astrogator’s Logs

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, video clips of which may be seen here.

Hawking thinks that if biological life evolved elsewhere in the Cosmos as it has here on Earth, then there is a good chance it will have a territorial and predatory nature similar to most creatures on this planet. These behaviors would persist even in species that achieve sentience and technologies that exceed ours.

Sounding very much like the alien invaders from the 1996 science fiction film Independence Day, Hawking’s advanced ETI would roam the galaxy in massive starships that serve as both transportation and home. Having used up the resources of their home world (and presumably the rest of their solar system), Hawking’s ETI would search for suitable worlds to “conquer and colonize,” using them up as well (subduing and/or removing any living native competition in the process) and then moving on to the next set of viable targets.

There are numerous issues with Hawking’s scenario, which even a modest student of science fiction knows goes back over a century, with the invading Martians of H. G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds being the most notable of the premise that alien intelligences might treat us the way most human cultures have treated others on Earth for millennia, right up to the present day. The numbers of novels, books, films, television series, and articles that have been made about this subject since Wells’ day would fill a decent size library. So why are Stephen Hawking’s views on this matter receiving so much attention from the media and public?

The most obvious reason is that Hawking is a famous and brilliant scientist, one of the few whom the general populace recognizes with ease, like Albert Einstein, even if they don’t always know or understand his work and ideas. These factors combine to make the public and media think that professionals like Hawking are therefore experts on virtually every subject in existence, including the nature and behavior of hypothetical ETI.

While few would dispute the high intelligence and knowledge of Hawking when it comes to his chosen career fields, the truth is that on the matter of extraterrestrial life he has no deeper insights than any other human on Earth, past or present. Hawking is still subject to his culture, era, and species when it comes to ETI. Even Einstein, to whom Hawking has often been compared, followed the trends of his place and time when it came to aliens. Einstein assumed there were intelligent beings living on Mars and even wrote about an optical method of communicating with the imagined Martians in 1937. Einstein did this despite the fact that by that time most professional astronomers seriously doubted that the Red Planet either had or could support complex, intelligent life forms.

This is not intended to be a putdown of these great thinkers. Instead, it shows that when it comes to predicting the forms and motivations of ETI, after two millennia of contemplation on the subject and just a few decades of actually searching for them, all we really have to go on for solid evidence are the inhabitants of a single planet called Earth and the tantalizing clues slowly popping up across the rest of the Universe.

So why do Hawking and so many others assume a Universe full of predatory life forms, be they amoebae or beings of superior intelligence and technology? Going along the theme that even great scientists are subject to the knowledge limits of their time, culture, and profession, life on this planet has long been viewed and portrayed as one which is in a constant struggle for survival against both the environment and other creatures, including and especially one’s own species. There is of course a great deal of truth to this, as virtually every terrestrial organism spends much of its life fighting for food, living areas, and mates, through either physical force or more stealthy manipulations.

However, in recent decades, it has been recognized that life forms across the board, especially those that exist in societies, are far more altruistic and cooperative than it may seem on the surface. Even humanity, despite its abilities to make war on a globally destructive scale and despoil entire ecosystems, is much more cooperative and conscientious of ourselves and our surroundings than we tend to give ourselves credit for. We have finally begun to recognize and act upon the fact that Earth is not some limitless playground that will tolerate our ancient instinctual needs and behaviors indefinitely. This has brought about our efforts to preserve and protect the remaining resources and biota of Earth – imperfectly, of course, but at least a global response is underway – and we have so far succeeded in avoiding a nuclear war or other similar form of drastic artificial catastrophe, something our military and political leaders considered both survivable and winnable not so very long ago.

With this being the case, would future humanity extend its current instinctual drives in an uncontrolled manner into the rest of the galaxy once we begin expanding our species beyond the boundaries of its home world? Would our children become what Hawking fears about ETI?

While no one can guarantee absolute certainties in either direction with our limited knowledge and experiences in these areas, I will say that I think living in space and on the other worlds of our Sol system, none of which are presently survivable upon without either dwelling inside protective enclosures or being heavily modified (which could take centuries if not millennia to work for the latter case), will force our space-residing descendants to work together for their mutual existence and evolution. The very harsh nature of reality beyond Earth will not tolerate the excesses and foolishness our species has been largely able to get away with for most of its existence.

Of course it is possible that future science could create a form of humanity genetically tailored to occupy just about any corner of the Sol system, on-worlds and off, or they could abandon biology altogether and place the human mind in a mechanical form and/or create a new kind of mind-being called an Artilect.

Granted, these scenarios are not something that will happen next week to be sure, plus they have numerous hurdles to overcome even if they are possible. However, they do illuminate the point that the best kinds of beings to survive and thrive on a cosmic scale are not necessarily the type of humanity that exists on Earth now, or any other form of life suited for one world only. Add to this fact that a spacefaring society would find vast amounts of resources among the planetoids and comet which we know exist throughout the stars and perhaps a species that spends its time marauding inhabited planets makes a bit less sense, if not as enthralling for the entertainment of our species.

Perhaps what Hawking and others fail to completely grasp is that any alien intelligences which do emerge in our galaxy will come from a world that is not a carbon copy of Earth and may in many cases evolve on a Jovian type moon, or a Jovian type world itself, or perhaps in some other kind of environment that current science would not consider to be a place for any kind of life. There is no certainty that even the behaviors or organisms everywhere are literally universal, including the kind that devour their home worlds and then have the ability and will to pack up and do the same thing again and again across the heavens. To be even more specific, the kind of actions and goals that may work for a creature confined to its home world may not be feasible beyond their domain of origin.

The fact that even someone as educated and intelligent as Stephen Hawking should view other societies in the Milky Way galaxy with fear under the presumption that all intelligences evolved in similar ways and will continue to behave in an instinctive manner even if they achieve interstellar travel shows how much of humanity still thinks and lives as if the whole of existence revolves and focuses around our one planet.

Accepting the fact that the vast majority of us have remained Earthbound and will continue to do so for at least a few more generations, our species nevertheless has been intellectually aware for centuries now that we dwell on a rocky planet circling one of hundreds of billions of suns in a vast celestial island. Just as the elements which make up this world are also found throughout the Universe, it is equally possible that biological organisms do universally behave just as Hawking predicts. The question remains, however: do they evolve into beings of higher intelligence who still retain certain instincts or do they eventually move away from them? Or does something completely different happen and is it unique for every species? That will be the focus in Part 2, along with a look at how events might go and why if an ETI ever did attack us and our world.

Images: Top, two archetypal hostile aliens — the xenomorph of the Alien tetralogy and the hunter of the Predator series; middle, the truly terrifying Kang and Kodos of Rigel VII and The Simpsons; bottom, the alien fleet approaches Earth’s moon in the V remake.

I recently had an exchange with a progressive friend. He had just announced that he had become a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a prominent transhumanist venue. Since I had trod that path before him, we inevitably came to the part where I pointed out that transhumanism is composed almost exclusively of white American men — and its upper echelon entirely so (H+ devotees invariably counter that most of their gofers are female and/or ethnic, so there!). Whereupon my friend replied: “Yes, it’s a white boys’ club. As far as I know that’s not because of a policy of exclusion. It’s because primarily white boys think about this stuff.” Which puts him in the same group (and class) as Larry Summers, who declared that women aren’t in the sciences because their brains just aren’t wired for numbiz.

Now, I’d been thinking and talking about issues colonized by transhumanists ever since I became a biologist: genetic engineering, prostheses, organ replacement and regeneration, longevity, brain function – for the simple reason that they are core domains in biology (to say nothing of medicine, society, etc). And ain’t I a woman? A dark ethnic one, at that? So no, Virginia, thinking Bik Thotz is not limited to white boys. But I guess that a thought doesn’t count as big (or even as a thought) until/unless a white boy utters it. Or, as a reviewer for one of my research manuscripts once opined, “If what you report were true, someone would have discovered it.”

The exchange made me realize the fatal error I committed about two decades ago: I neglected to call my thoughts a movement, give it a sonorous name and the glitzy rhetoric to match and register it as a non-profit with me as CEO – or President of the Board, I’m not picky. I could have become the Madame Blavatsky of transhumorism… er, transhumanism.  After all, given what passes as biology in the movement, I could do it half-asleep: I would recycle my Biochem 101 primer decked out in shiny costume jewelry with futuristic terms sprinkled liberally on the word salad. If qualified biologists objected to my prophesications, I would call them bioluddites and sic my devoted groupies on them. And like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, I would attach a beard to my chin and stroke it thoughtfully for more gravitas (and to illustrate postgenderism in action).

Alas, I did not avail myself of the golden opportunity. Instead, I opted to do basic research in the neurobiology of mental retardation and dementia. Not for me the mindmelds of the Humanity Plus Summits (where, this year, a satellite workshop will discuss “whole brain emulation, mind transfer, digital personalities, gradual replacement techniques…” – perhaps with hefty participation by the Syfy channel). Not for me the acolytes who would swoon from interacting with my Second Life babelicious bod. This lack of prescience will preclude me from being a Rupturee. No frolicking in the Matrix Hereafter in a clingy black patent leather outfit.

But I know myself too well. I’d be bored stiff in any place where charlatanism passes for provocative thinking or cutting edge science. Cults are very similar in that you have to actively suppress your brain processes to play along. I told my friend that we should revisit this conversation when his stint at the IEET is done. Unless the Singularity happens first, of course.

Images: Top, Agent Smith and his homogeneous whitebread associates (The Matrix); bottom, Erin Dollar, maker and modeler of sophisticated philosophical accessories.

More references for those thirsting for enlightenment:

Girl Cooties Menace the Singularity!
Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!

Chirality (handedness) is intrinsic to life across scales yet surprisingly absent from speculative fiction. The single time I recall a plot point hinging on it is during Mal’s battle with the Operative in Serenity. I have decided to explore this attribute in a series, which I will cross-post here and at Science in My Fiction.

The first article, Southpaws: The Hops in Humanity’s Beer, is up at SiMF today. Versions of it appeared very early on this blog with the title The Left Hand of Light and at HuffPo. I will follow with articles on carbon compounds (aka organic chemistry), biomolecules, brain lateralization… in short, whatever falls under the broad rubric of handedness and pleases my left-handed, left-leaning sensibilities!

Image: Southpaw by RobtheSentinel.

About twenty years ago, I was going through the gauntlet of becoming a US citizen. The immigration interviewer put her hand on top of the thick stack that contained copies of the Harvard B.A., the MIT Ph.D., the assistant professor appointment from Harvard Medical, the research papers, the Harvard Review articles and asked: “Have you ever been a whore? Are you one now?”

None of my credentials mattered. And given the specifics of the situation, she could humiliate and mistreat me with impunity. People who want to cut others down to their own size consistently employ this technique.

I had reason to recall this incident yesterday. A friend sent me a link to a magazine soliciting literary criticism and non-fiction of interest to the SF/F community. I e-mailed them asking if they would consider reprints. When told that they wouldn’t do reprints, I gave a link to an published example to showcase my work and proposed a brand-new unpublished review.

The editor — who prides herself in her progressiveness — didn’t deign to read through my message. Instead, she accused me of trying to “sell” used goods (for the astronomical amount of $100, one third of my hourly consulting fee). The last sentence of her e-mail, which is representative of her overall tone, reads: “I appreciate your chutzpah but you are wasting my time”.

The exchange was so fast that she clearly didn’t bother to even Google me. Maybe the non-Anglosaxon name was sufficient to disqualify me from consideration as either a writer or a human of sufficiently high caste. And obviously I did not register as someone who could affect her wallet or reputation – if I had, the refusal would at least have been polite.

As with the immigration officer, it made no difference that I’ve written a popular stealth science book, that some of my essays won awards, that I must turn down requests for reviews and articles for lack of time, that several SF authors consult me and send me their novel drafts for critique, that I’m one of the few people in the domain who is also a working scientist. The crucial point was to establish superiority by acting as if I were a sleazy impostor attempting to weasel my way into her gated community.

My words won’t change anything, because this person is deemed to be one of the industry Names who Must be Appeased (if only because “editors talk to each other”). And I’m sure I will hear the argument that her brilliance as a critic and editor excuses her behavior. The reality is that she represents the increasing mistreatment of writers by self-appointed gatekeepers who fancy themselves feudal lords and the rest serfs because it’s a buyer’s market.

This kind of behavior does nothing to enrich the stock of contributors or the quality of the contributions. When the overriding factor is massaging a primadonna’s ego, craft and imagination become distant second requirements. It does encourage other things, however: bootlicking and similar ghetto habits. And it may explain why speculative fiction increasingly cannot have nice things.

Image: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), the epitome of rudeness to “inferiors” and obsequiousness to “superiors”.

by Alex Jacobs

This is the conclusion of Alex’s insightful rant about remakes of superhero films. In Part 2, he turns his jaundiced but discerning eye to the treatment of the other half of humanity in Hollywood reboots. I added a comment of my own at the end.

When I sent “No More Gritty Reboots,” it was intended as a stand-alone piece, but Athena did something rather irritating: she made me think. She pointed out that my examples only included male superheroes and asked if I’d care to see reboots of female superheroes.

I hadn’t realized I’d left such a gaping hole in my rant, but there it was. I had originally written it in a very stream-of-consciousness manner, which meant that female superheroes hadn’t even entered my train of thought. Why was that? It took me some time to figure it out, but the answers I came up with disturbed me a great deal.

I’ve no interest in seeing remakes of female superhero movies because the few that have been made have been so atrociously bad that I’d rather they scrap everything and start over completely. Most female superheroes work within groups (i.e. X-Men, Fantastic 4). While they may occasionally be given a worthwhile scene or two in films, such as Anna Paquin’s wonderful portrayal of Rogue’s fear at her growing mutant abilities in X-Men, the stories are still about the male characters. The only time a female hero has really been given equality within a group has been Elastigirl in The Incredibles.

To date, the overwhelming majority of female action heroes fall into two categories: ridiculously sexualized male fantasies (Catwoman) and male action heroes who happen to have breasts (Elektra). In very few instances are female heroes given the opportunity to explore what it means to be a female hero.

Catwoman had the potential to be a phenomenal character, as the comic books and the excellent animated series have shown.  Yet I have little confidence that Hollywood will move beyond the BDSM trappings and explore the reasons Selina Kyle has remained so compelling for over fifty years. While I would dearly love to be proven wrong, I suspect that Hollywood will see Catwoman only as a lithe young woman who wears a tight-fitting costume and carries a whip. While Tim Burton’s Batman Returns did much to explore the effects of trying to live a morally neutral life, even Burton failed to show Kyle as anything more than a freak avenger. Halle Berry did not improve matters and I see little purpose in rehashing that travesty.

I have even less confidence in Elektra. Her character was interesting in Daredevil because she was trying to balance her love for her family, a relationship, the risk of exposing herself emotionally, physically, and sexually, the danger of betrayal, and a drive for justice, all set against a world that systematically attempted to deny her agency in either a legal venue or as a vigilante. Is it any wonder she got a spin-off while Daredevil was quietly forgotten? However, Elektra completely ignored the character’s identity in order to prance her out in a ridiculously revealing costume to overly-sexualized, violent choreography (see these articles on the impracticalities of female superhero costumes). Not even the fifteen year-old fanboy target audience was interested.

Jean Grey and Mystique do better in the first two X-Men movies, but the best female superhero in film remains Elastigirl from The Incredibles. As far as power and screen time goes, she is on par with the male characters. Her character integrates classically feminine roles (the caregiver) with classically masculine ones (the protector). Most importantly, she does not let herself be defined by either the superhero group or her family but chooses her own relation to both roles. To me, that is the ideal embodiment of feminism and gender equality: not a rejection of any given role because it is associated with one’s gender, but the power to choose one’s role. Our place in the world should not be defined by our birth, whether that means race, sexual orientation, class, or gender. In superhero movies, only Elastigirl truly gets it right.

Rather than remake these movies, I’d like to see completely different female superheroes get the full Hollywood treatment. I would hope that this would avoid female knock-offs (Superwoman, Batgirl, She-Hulk, etc). Rather, I’d love to see:

- Wonder Woman: Forget the powers. I’m interested in this movie because Wonder Woman isn’t just a powerhouse, like Superman, but a leader; not a soldier but a general. A Wonder Woman movie could not only serve as a positive feminist tale, but also expand our definition of heroism.

- Scarlet Witch: While lesser known than many other heroes, Scarlet Witch is one of the most fascinating. Her legacy is that of villainy but she often strives to be a hero. If we define feminism not as the championing of femininity against masculinity but as the attempt to rise above prescribed roles, I can think of no greater champion than Scarlet Witch. A Scarlet Witch movie would have more to say about individuality, family, and freedom than near anything else I can think of. That she’s a woman is part of her character, but not her defining trait.

- Stephanie Brown: If you’re not familiar with Stephanie Brown, please see Project Girl Wonder. Brown was the daughter of a super villain and, for a time, served as Robin, eventually dying in service in an incredibly disturbing and sexualized manner. The lack of acknowledgment of her death is a source of controversy within the comics community. I would love to see a Robin movie that featured Stephanie Brown rather than any of the rotating boys. Such a movie would include Batman but would focus on what it means to voluntarily work with such a disturbed individual for a choice you believe in. Whether Brown lives or dies in the film – and I believe the latter could be included in a respectful and appropriately literary manner – either conclusion would make it a tale well worth telling.

What are the chances of these movies being made? Pretty high, actually. Hollywood is motivated by money, and right now a super hero’s name in the title is the most overwhelming factor in whether a movie makes money. Will they be made well? That’s more debatable. Hollywood has shown that it can do superheroes well — even that it can do female superheroes well — but consistency is the big problem. Joss Whedon has shown he can deliver most consistently. He’s currently doing Captain America and The Avengers, which despite its historical lineup has no female heroes in the rumored cast, but maybe afterward?

I choose to hope.

Athena’s coda: Catwoman has been an incredible missed opportunity indeed, given the allure of Trickster figures. Additionally, she illustrates how differently women and men are judged for identical behavior. Both Catwoman and Batman are trauma-driven vigilantes; yet whereas he’s viewed as a hero and has the Establishment’s resources at his disposal, she’s often portrayed as a villain and operates without any external support. As for Elastigirl (girl?!), my take is less optimistic. Although she gets to exercise her powers, they are still strictly in service of her family — protecting her kids, cleaning up her husband’s messes — rather than the “larger” goals vouchsafed to male superheroes.

Superheroes who crack moulds: Xena Warrior Princess (Lucy Lawless); Catwoman (Eartha Kitt); Hiyao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime; Aeon and Sithandra (Charlize Theron, Sophie Okonedo).

Related posts:
Le Plus Ça Change…
The String Cuts Deeper than the Blade
Set Transporter Coordinates to… (the Star Trek reboot)
And Ain’t I a Human?

by Alex Jacobs

Today I have the pleasure of hosting the first part of an insightful rant by pen-friend Alex Jacobs. Alex graduated from Beloit College in 2005 with a degree in creative writing, literary studies, and rhetoric and discourse. In addition to amateur literary criticism, he currently teaches ballroom in Philadelphia, PA. Alex’s personal writings reside at Suburbaknght and his professional dance writing can be found at Dancing Through the Recession.

I’m sick of gritty reboots.

I was going to make a joke here about gritty reboots being the new black, but that doesn’t work. A gritty reboot just takes something and puts black on it. Don’t get me wrong, a gritty reboot can be fantastic (Batman Begins) but it can also be atrocious (Daredevil) or pointless (The Hulk, Star Trek).

I have to lay most of the problem at the feet of Batman Begins. Batman Begins was a fantastic movie, the reasons for which Hollywood seems to have missed entirely. Batman Begins took a superhero who’s always had a problem with camp and whose latest films had spiraled into self-parody and got rid of all the extraneous bullshit. Instead of ridiculous bat-themed gadgets we had tools that were actually useful and based on real technology. Instead of Gotham as a bright neon Blade Runner knock-off we got a shadow-shrouded city that was as much of a character as any of the actors. Instead of Three Stooges-esque comedy fight sequences we got commando-style combat encounters that truly felt threatening due to their violence.

These were great, but they weren’t what made Batman Begins a great movie. Batman Begins was great because it was populated by real characters. Bruce Wayne wasn’t interesting because he angsted but because his angst was a realistic and sympathetic reaction to what he’d gone through. Christopher Nolan and David Goyer wrote someone who was crazy enough that we all believed he could become Batman and but was still sympathetic enough that we wanted to observe the process. Batman Begins was about character.

Unfortunately, Hollywood didn’t pay attention to that. They saw sets with low illumination and characters with tragic pasts and said, “Aha! Keep everything dark! That’s what makes a great movie!”

No, no, no, no, no!

To paraphrase Aristotle, if characters in a drama behave in a believable manner and experience logical consequences because of that behavior, at the conclusion of the story the audience will experience “a useful fear.” It doesn’t matter if the circumstances aren’t realistic so long as the characters act in a believable fashion given the circumstances, because we will continue to identify with the characters and take something away from their experiences. That requires real characters.

Spiderman 3 was a fairly dark movie but the characters were morons. People don’t hate it because of the dance sequence and emo hair – they hate it because the dance sequence and emo hair are out of character, coming completely out of left field. Don’t believe me? Check out Doug “That Guy With the Glasses” Walker’s five-second movie. The first season of Heroes was amazing because it was filled with fascinating characters who behaved like real people despite the absurdity of dormant superhero genes, because we believed them when they reacted to such genes. The subsequent seasons fell apart because the story began to dominate the characters, and once that happens you realize how insipid the story really is.

I’m truly worried about Spiderman’s gritty reboot. I’m worried it’s going to be all grit and the producers are going to forget what made the first two movies so wonderful in the first place.

Then there’s the issue of rebooting origin stories. The origin story is the easiest to portray because it’s easier to sympathize with a normal person going through changes than a superhero dealing with being a superhero, but we need stories that go beyond puberty and mid-life crisis metaphors (X-Men and Iron Man respectively). We need stories about what it means to live in the new life you’ve created for yourself. Batman Begins was a great film but it was The Dark Knight that truly had something to say, and it was a message our society needs very badly.

Hollywood, don’t keep being gritty for the sake of being gritty and don’t keep rebooting because it’s easier to start over than to go forward. I want to see:

- A Superman movie that makes use of the “alien among us” concept to deal with 21st century loneliness.

- A Spiderman movie that uses choosing between two dreams as a theme and not a cheap way to raise the stakes.

- An X-Men movie that contrasts the team’s bemoaning their outsider status with the Brotherhood’s celebration of it (though one scene in X-2 did this very well).

I want stories that matter and characters I care about, not just endless dark-framed long shots followed by closeups of the heroes’ faces.

Images that linger, characters and connections that matter: Bruce brainstorms with Alfred in Batman Begins (Christian Bale, Michael Caine); Wolverine risks his life to heal Rogue in X-Men (Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin); Theo and Marichka risk theirs to take Kee and her newborn daughter to safety in Children of Men (Clive Owen, Oanna Pellea, Claire-Hope Ashitey).

Related posts:
The String Cuts Deeper than the Blade
Set Transporter Coordinates to… (the Star Trek reboot)
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Reptile Brain

Five and twenty years ago, far back in the mists of time, a cyber-aficionado friend invited me to see her new game. Despite the primitive graphics, I liked the game’s feel, the sense of adventure and story, the witty allusions and non-linear play. The game was King’s Quest I. At about the same time, Rogue showed up. Since then, the major reason that I haven’t become a quest game addict is that developers stopped bringing them out for the Apple OS. Among my favorites I count Gabriel Knight, Syberia, Myst, King’s Quest, Circle of Blood, The Journeyman Project, the sui generis System’s Twilight, Christminster and its fellow interactive fictions – and of course that labor of love, Nethack.

The list will tell you something about my gaming tastes. I detest open-ended, multi-player, shooting and arcade games. If given a choice, I play a wizard or rogue and advance many skills rather than specialize. What captivates me is worldbuilding: story, atmospherics and the quality of the quests. That’s why the only Zork game I liked was Nemesis. It had a coherent storyline and context, and you became invested in the fates of its protagonists. And I don’t mind sparse graphics, as long as they’re evocative (System’s Twilight is a prime example).

Fast forward to 2007. Having decided not to buy any playstation, I was glumly contemplating the slim pickings for Mac users when I stumbled on Basilisk Games. They (well, he – it’s a single person who “followed his bliss”) had just launched Eschalon 1, a retro RPG game and the first of a projected trilogy for all major platforms. I looked at screen caps, downloaded the demo… and three years later, here I am in Eschalon 2, Grand Magus hat and Scout sandals on, Warmoth bow and Abyssal Freeze spell readied, facing rift harpies in the windy crags of Mistfell.

Like most games of this kind, Eschalon (henceforth EB) is based on the Dungeons and Dragons concept and is vaguely Tolkienesque. In a devastated world, a champion undertakes a quest upon which the fate of that universe depends. S/he starts with very little, acquiring knowledge, skills and ever more powerful accessories as s/he explores the world, completes quests, solves puzzles and dispatches enemies.

In EB 1, the future champion also starts with the too-common total retrograde declarative amnesia.  In Anglosaxon: she doesn’t even recall her name, let alone past deeds, though she still wields a mean blade. The handicap allows bystanders and texts to fill in the background story in carefully apportioned snippets, but at least here it fits into the story arc.

EB 2 starts where its predecessor ended but is reasonably self-contained. So the two games can be played independently, although playing both makes for a far more satisfying sense of story. Unusually for such a game, at the end of EB 2 what was up till that point solid fantasy veers into science fiction. The twist becomes intriguing after the disorientation of the shift dissipates, and it literally embodies the Clarke precept that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

EB has the usual player classes, “races” and alignments. Quests can be completed in any relative order until the story funnels into the endgame. Unlike Nethack and its many clones, it unfolds both above and below ground. It’s turn-based, which means you can relax and enjoy its ambience instead of frantically pushing buttons in an adrenaline haze. And though you cannot advance in levels without a good deal of slaughter, Eschalon also requires strategy – especially if you play warlocks, as I do.

The Eschalon games are not perfect. Names are the usual pseudo-epic hodgepodge. Unlike the clever, vital exchanges in Gabriel Knight, interactions with non-player characters are limited and underflavored. The dialogue is by-the-numbers (“Do you want this quest?” Choice 1: “Yes, I will undertake it and gain umpteen experience points!” Choice 2: “No, I’ll just go eat some worms!”). Entire squares of the map are featureless waste through which you must literally trudge. Worse yet, if you meet enemies in such regions you have no recourse but brute-force bashing coupled with fleeing to regroup. In some parts, the enemy throngs are numbingly monotonous. You cannot attain the highest levels unless you resort to the cheat of reloading a previous character into a new game. And unlike Nethack, Eschalon has no class-specific quests.

At the same time, the game has truly wonderful touches. Non-player characters fight enemies if you maneuver them within each other’s range. You can kill enemies by luring them under portcullises or near gunpowder kegs (which you can even place strategically in EB 2, though they’re damnably heavy). There is no respawning of hostiles and containers generate random loot that can be literally marvelous. In EB 2 you also have weather, which affects skill and equipment efficacy; and foraging ability, that gifts you with sacks of alchemy ingredients every time you camp.

The EB universe has beautifully rendered and logically varied environments – mountains, plains and coasts; tundras, forests, prairies, deserts.  Also, this is a water world, like Le Guin’s Earthsea. Rivers, lakes, seas are never too far away and play an active role in the game. During the day, birds sing or frogs peep.  At night, crickets trill and fireflies twinkle.  Then there is the music. It warns you if enemies are nearby, even if you can’t see them. It swells to a paean when you’re engaged in combat. And in EB 2 it has become a beguiling, elegiac Lydian background that is integral to the game’s mood, although it is not linked to quest context as it is in Myst.

Despite its quotidian larger concept, Eschalon is immensely appealing to me because it has a coherent story with context – and because it demands and rewards exploration. Lagniappes abound in the game: a hidden chest in this rocky cove, a skills trainer in that secluded glen. And the fragmentary texts and conversation snippets that you encounter or trigger (especially in EB 2) have echoes, as if there are indeed layers to this world beyond its surface, itself riddled with abandoned buildings and half-completed works that add to the haunting effect.

Given that the Eschalon games are essentially the work of a single person, they are a real achievement, especially in evoking the sense of a rich, lived-in, immersive universe. It comes as no surprise that EB 1 won an indie award and created a devoted word-of-mouth following that awaited the advent of EB 2 with baited breath. It will be a real loss to RPG stalwarts if this devotion does not translate to enough income for Thomas Riegsecker to complete his own quest: finish Eschalon as he dreams – and as we do, along with him.

Images: Benoit Sokal’s Syberia; Nethack, tile version (partial level); Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight; Eschalon Book 2 trailer.

Glimpses of my immersive universe (more in the Stories section):

Contra Mundum
Dry Rivers
Planetfall

Note: The article is now also at Huffington Post.

Last week, bio-entrepreneur icon Craig Venter burst yet again into the limelight.  He announced that a team under his direction inserted a chemically synthesized genome into Mycoplasma and succeeded in getting the resulting bacterium to propagate. The work duly appeared in Science and the predictable shouting ensued, from fears that humans are “playing God” to hails of “artificial life”.

Several important issues got lost in the din. Let’s leave the obvious potential objections aside – after all, humans started futzing the moment their frontal cortex became prominent and the consequences of this, intended and not, have decisively affected earth and all life on it.  Instead, let’s examine the clothes of this emperor closer up. To stick with the metaphor, Venter’s latest is like exactly reproducing a large cloak onto a new piece of fabric identical to that of the original. It’s not like creating a new garment or even cutting and pasting from previous garments to make a quilt, crazy or otherwise.

The Venter work is not a discovery, let alone a paradigm shift. It’s a technological advance and even then not of technique but only of scale. The experiment is merely an extension of a well-known principle that every biology lab uses routinely: namely, that bacterial genomes can be modified almost at will (barring a few indispensable regions) and in such ways as to turn the bacteria into potent mini-factories for specific proteins. The Venter bacterium is actually pedestrian because it carries an exact duplicate of a naturally occurring genome. Its only artificial aspects are the molecular “flags” that its makers included in the synthesis to mark the artificial genome for further tracking – standard operating procedure in all such modifications.

Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them). To propagate the synthesized chromosome, the Venter team used a bacterium whose endogenous DNA had been removed but was otherwise intact. This means that they used existing natural components to do the real task of propagation – the entire structure and machinery of the host cell. This makes the endeavor even less groundbreaking than injecting genetic material into a mammalian egg or stem cell (as was done to produce Dolly the sheep with far less advanced technology).

Lastly, this does not bring us a single step closer to engineering customized functions, from vacuuming up oil spills, excess CO2 or methane to producing chlorophyll or unique drugs. Creating a synthetic cell totally de novo is theoretically doable but far below the event horizon. Altering existing genes and/or creating ones for novel functions is more distant still, because making the coding part is only a small part of the task — if we figure out how to get them to encode it, for starters. Persuading them to express at the right place and time is equally crucial. So is coaxing them to work in eukaryotic cells which, unlike easy-going bacteria, have carefully guarded compartments – the nucleus in particular.

In short, the Venter endeavor was expensive, glitzy – and banal. My advice to bioethicists is to save their energy for truly fearsome items, such as recombinant bacteria or viruses that may arise from species pushed together by abrupt dislocations of habitats (and for the inevitable push for a broad research-suffocating patent from this work). I’ve done far more “dangerous” work in my near-constant cloning than this sheep attempting to pass as a wolf… nay, a lion.

Note 1: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

Note 2: The article has also been reprinted at io9.

by Larry Klaes, space enthusiast and science journalist

A slightly different version of this article appeared on The Tompkins Weekly on May 10, 2010.

Not since 2000 has an impending year so intrigued and concerned the general public like 2012. Many people have a vague idea that the world is heading towards some kind of doom because of a calendar created by an ancient and mysterious race. They see every new natural and artificial disaster as one more bit of proof that everything will come to a crashing end – on December 21, 2012 to be exact.

What are the real facts behind all the stories, hype, and concern about 2012? Ithaca’s Science Cabaret devoted its last program of the spring to this very year and topic. Titled “2012: Truths and Fictions”, the subject was tackled from two key angles by Ann Martin, a Ph.D astronomy candidate at Cornell and Wendy Bacon, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bacon began with a very brief background on the Maya, the Mesoamerican culture which supposedly started all this fuss. Settled primarily in what is now southern Mexico and the bordering nations of Belize and Honduras, the Maya society (the letter n is added to the end of their name only when speaking about their language) existed from roughly 1500 BCE to 1500 CE when the Spanish conquistadors began settling their region. The Maya did not die out, however: Today between 4 and 9 million descendants of this once great society still live in the area, speaking twelve diverse languages and nestled among the rainforests and the remnants of the magnificent temples built by their ancestors.

Martin then took the stage to explain that a Cornell Web site titled “Ask an Astronomer” which started in 1997 and currently has over 800 answers to commonly asked questions about the heavens, began showing a noticeable increase in questions pertaining to 2012.

Martin examined some of the recent 2012 documentaries from The History Channel and the recent film with the year as its title. She noted that for the cable programs, sensationalism was prevalent. “Our days are numbered! Prepare for doomsday!” were some of the themes from the programs on The History Channel. As for what exactly is supposed to happen in December of 2012, Martin explained that we have been given three choices: A New Age style time of renewal, the actual end of the worlds, and a major astronomical event.

Bacon took the microphone from Martin to describe the Long Count calendar of the Maya which started our society’s focus on 2012. The Long Count began on August 11, 3114 BCE, a date chosen more out of numerical symmetry than anything else. The calendar’s choice of 2012 as its time to recycle is due to matching the number of days from its ancient origin. When Maya society began to collapse from the top down in our tenth century CE, the Long Count of measuring days went with it.  “2012 is based on something that hasn’t been used in a very long time,” stated Bacon.

Responding to the question of why our modern society has focused on a calendar system that has not been used by the people who originated it in centuries, Martin suggested that one reason is that 2012 will come about sooner than, say, the calendar of the Maya’s neighbors – the Aztecs – which will not see the end of its current cycle until 2027.

The Cornell astronomer then addressed the various celestial fictions that have arisen regarding 2012. As one example, some claim that Earth will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy on December 21 of two years hence and this will somehow bring about a terrible disaster. Using a simple diagram, Martin showed that our world aligns with the center of our galaxy twice a year as Earth orbits the Sun, and has done so for roughly the last five billion years.

Martin dismissed claims that our globe will be destroyed when it plunges into the galactic core, which is over 26,000 light years away. She also explained that Earth and humanity will not be affected by plunging through the plane of the Milky Way or if the planets in our Solar System line up (which they will not do on any day in 2012). She noted further that Earth will not be struck by the mythical planet Nibiru, or be fried by the Sun if Earth’s magnetic field should suddenly reverse itself.

“The public should be excited about the Maya and astronomy,” said Martin. “But instead, people are freaking out about 2012 for false reasons. This is a real shame.” Martin and Bacon both expressed concern about how uncertain and frightened many people (in North America at least) are about the year 2012 due to these unsubstantiated rumors. The scientists foresee a backlash against science from these events, which Martin calls a “loss of cosmophiles” or people who might otherwise love learning about the Cosmos.

Images: Chichén Itzá temple/Maya glyph composite, Aaron Logan; glyphs from La Mojarra Stela 1, Veracruz, Mexico — the left column gives a Long Count date of 8.5.16.9.7, or June 23, 156 CE; Maya calendar cartoon, Dan Piraro.

There have been many branches on the hominid tree, but now a lone species walks the earth. We had company once, though, at least in Europe and West Asia – the Neanderthals.

Until recently, the scientific consensus was that they were sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that no interbreeding took place. We knew that they controlled fire; constructed tools, shelters and garments; took care of their weak, injured and elderly; and buried their dead with grave goods. But until two decades ago it was widely believed that they had attributes which disadvantaged them to such an extent that competition with modern humans led to their extinction (for example, lack of capacity for complex language, almost exclusive dependence on hunting for sustenance… to say nothing of the Tarzanist view that their doom came about because — horrors! — they allowed women to join the hunt).

This idea of Neanderthals as grunting, shuffling dead-end cavemen began to change as our techniques allowed us to examine Neanderthal fossils with more precision and depth. In the mid-eighties, bone and genetic analysis proved that their ability to hear and produce sounds was almost identical to ours (including a human-like FOXP2 gene, whose function is critical for language). Sequencing of their melanocortin gene indicated that some might have red hair and light skin.

Finally, the just-published draft sequence of their genome (headed by Svante Pääbo’s team from the Max Planck Institute) showed that up to 4% of the genes of non-Africans may come from them. If confirmed, this means that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons indeed interbred when the latter first came out of Africa – most likely in the Middle East, before further migration.

The two branches of humanity share 99.7% genetic identity. They show differences in genes involved in cognitive development, skeleton structure, energy metabolism, skin physiology. They also differ in regulatory regions and microRNAs. This information will eventually help us answer the question of what makes us uniquely “human” – perhaps even what has made us so adaptable that we now threaten to overwhelm the earth.

When I read about the conclusions from the draft sequence analysis, tears sprang to my eyes, just as they do at spaceship and planetary probe launches. It moved me inexpressibly to think that they haven’t vanished but are with us still, a thread in our fabric, a whisper in our song.

Note 1: The best fictional depiction of the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons is Dance of the Tiger by Björn Kurtén, a distinguished vertebrate paleontologist who was Swedish — as is Pääbo.

Note 2: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

After my second article about Cameron’s Avatar, a young British media critic who occasionally visited my blog accused me of snobbery.  He stated that my points about entertainment like Avatar went past aesthetics and “devolved into” political and moral pronouncements about people who like what he considers lowbrow art (he assumes I share his definition of lowbrow, of which more anon).  He further opined that classes of artful brows are just peer pressure.  Hence Cameron is as good as Ozu unless you “drip with disdain” for the hoi polloi.

In the article that started this discussion I primarily discussed biological drives.  I posited that certain types of entertainment arouse the fight-or-flight response and repeated immersion in them can lead to PTSD pathology, including mob-like behavior.  The argument that art is ever devoid of politics and (at least implicit) moral judgments is either naïve or disingenuous and my critic doesn’t strike me as the former. I suspect that his cultural background, awash in class distinctions and reverberations of colonialism, may partly explain his viewpoint.  Even more fundamentally, however, I think his definition of lowbrow art differs so much from mine that we are really discussing orthogonal concepts.

So I’m taking this opportunity to articulate my art classification scheme.  To give you the punchline first, my definitions have to do with the artist’s attitude towards her/his medium and audience and with the complexity and layering of the artwork’s content, rather than its accessibility.  In my book, lazy shallow art is low, whether it’s in barns or galleries.  What makes Avatar low art is not its popularity, but its conceptual crudity and its contempt for its sources and its viewers’ intelligence.

A common if usually implicit assumption is that quality and popularity are mutually exclusive.  Hence, “lowbrow” is often considered synonymous with mass appeal: bestsellers, platinum albums, blockbuster films.  Yet you can have wildly popular art that is light years away from least common denominations.  Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose comes immediately to mind; so do Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and flamenco; Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits (including their groundbreaking MTV videos); RPG games like Gabriel Knight, Myst and Syberia; and shows about nature or archaeological findings (as accessible “reality TV” as you can get) – or, for that matter, the cordon bleu-quality food you can buy cheaply in corner stores of any French or Italian provincial town.

My admittedly idiosyncratic definition comes from a cultural upbringing that makes no rigid high/low distinctions.  Hellenes still read Homer and watch Eurypides and Aristophanes for entertainment.  To use a parallel from my critic’s culture, Shakespeare and Dickens were not highbrow in their eras.  People of all classes watched Elizabethan plays in open-air theaters and Dickens’ serialized novels were the Victorian equivalents of soap operas.  Too, a lot of poetry, including that of Nobel-prize winners, has been set to compulsively singable music by Hellene popular composers – and the songs are sung across Hellas independently of social stratum.

Along similar (lack of) demarcations, there are no bestsellers or blockbusters in Hellas.  Books are printed in small runs and are not warehoused or pulped.  As a result, editors take chances on unknown authors but spend nothing on PR, and people aren’t trained to restrict their reading to genres.  Nor are films split between hothouse esoterics distributed solely to hoity-toity boutique venues versus “crowd-pleasers” shown in every mall (besides, Hellas doesn’t have malls – it has small shopping courtyards).  Finally, we live literally on top of several breathtaking, radically different past cultures, from Minoan to Byzantine. So our sensibilities tend to the syncretic.

Most cultures, if not terminally debased, have art woven integrally into the lives of their people. Folk art and craft are often extraordinarily sophisticated both in style and content: clothing, jewelry, utensils, instruments, furniture, dwellings, gardens, cooking, painting, dance, music can all be high art – yet they are part of daily life, not exhibited on museum walls or opulent stagings for the few.  This is important not only in itself, but also because such art was/is created disproportionately by women.  In such settings, artists/artisans are often political and moral forces to be reckoned with: builders and smiths, storytellers and bards.  In some nations they are honored as living monuments that preserve and transmit cultural knowledge.

A perfect example of my definition of high art is the Oscar-nominated The Secret of Kells.  It uses traditional 2-D techniques and is completely accessible – what my critic would call solidly bourgeois middlebrow.  Yet it engages and stimulates many levels of thought and emotion at once.  You can focus on enjoying individual aspects: the story teaches real history, since it’s based closely on what we know about the journey of the Kells manuscript from Iona; the conflict is not the usual tussle between monochromatic good and bad guys, but instead highlights the struggle between two versions of good (like Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime – or Sophocles’ Antigone); the nuanced interactions explore the interplay between Paganism and Christianity, myth and history, imagination and discipline, nature and culture; the style incorporates both Celtic curvilinear forms (in the style of the Book of Kells as well as its Jugendstil descendants) and the tense, jagged shapes used in such graphic novels as The Crow or Sin City.

Put together, the film becomes Gesamtkunstwerk at the level of Wagner’s Nibelungen cycle or Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: a total, totally absorbing work of art that delights and also exercises the senses, the cortical emotions, the intellect – and achieves this feat without loudly advertising its intent or, for that matter, its artsiness.  Unlike the incessant trumpetings about the groundbreaking technique or “socially relevant” content of Avatar, The Secret of Kells came and left quietly.  Then again, art of this caliber doesn’t need to shriek for recognition or classification.  Its quiet but sure voice is potent enough:

Images and links: kilim rug (Konya, late 19th century); kohiki tokuri sake flask and guinomi sake cup by Kondo Seiko (Niigata, contemporary); poster for Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells; Aisling sings magic into Pangur Bán (who has her own lovely story) in The Secret of Kells.

Note: If you visit the comments section, you will find that this review drew the attention of the Kells screenwriter Fabrice Ziolkowski and its US distributor Eric Beckman. Additionally, its principal director, Tomm Moore, linked to the HuffPo version of the review from his blog.

The articles prompted by Avatar:
Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Reptile Brain

Related article:
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture: Appropriate Away
The Hyacinth among the Roses: The Minoan Civilization

Lest anyone is worried that I’m slacking off, the reason for the (comparative) silence is that I’ve been toiling on three almost simultaneous articles.

– An expanded version of You Only Find What You’re Looking For appeared in Science in My Fiction. Opening paragraph:

“Extraterrestrial life is a staple of SF and the focus of astrobiology and SETI. Yet whereas SF has populated countless worlds with varying success, from Tiptree’s haunting Flenni (Your Haploid Heart) to Lucas’ annoying Ewoks, real ETs remain stubbornly elusive: nobody has received a transmission demanding more Chuck Berry, and the planetary probe data are maddeningly inconclusive. Equally controversial are the shadowy forms on Martian asteroid ALH84001, though the pendulum has swung toward wary favoring of the biological possibility after scientists discovered nanobacteria on earth and water on Mars.”

– I was invited to be part of a Mind Meld at SF Signal. The question was “What are some of the coolest robots in science fiction? Why?” I won’t put excerpts of this here, to avoid spoilers! Here’s a hint, though: my answer partly aligns with what I said in The Souls in Our Machines.

– My article Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome, which discusses naive views of genetic engineering, appeared on H+ Magazine. Opening paragraph:

“When the sequence of the human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003, all biologists (except perhaps Craig Venter) heaved a sigh of gladness that the data were all on one website, publicly available, well-annotated and carefully cross-linked. Some may have hoisted a glass of champagne. Then they went back to their benches. They knew, if nobody else did, that the work was just beginning. Having the sequence was the equivalent of sounding out the text of an alphabet whose meaning was still undeciphered. For the linguistically inclined, think of Etruscan.”

Revel in the bounty while it lasts! May will be grant-writing time again.  After that, I’ll concentrate on fewer, larger writing chunks.  In particular, my stories are banging urgently within my head.

Images:  top, T’uupieh of Titan, assassin, singer (Joan Vinge, Eyes of Amber); bottom, cartoon by Polyp.

My readers probably know that I’m one of those who think there is intelligent life in the universe besides humanity, although I also think that the timespace constraints for meeting (even by signaling) and the biological and cultural hurdles for mutual comprehension are formidable.

We have sent information about ourselves to the universe: in addition to the unavoidable EM transmissions, we put plaques and voice recordings in the Pioneers and Voyagers. These qualify as METI, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences.  The probes by themselves are messages, tiny bottles flung into the vast ocean of space.

Dr. Tibor Pacher, a Hungarian physicist working in Germany and a space enthusiast, has started a program called Faces from Earth to continue and expand these efforts, in the hopes of inspiring more people about space exploration — especially the young. Mr. Larry Klaes, a US journalist and also a space enthusiast (and a long-time friend and contributor to this blog) just wrote about Tibor’s work at Seti League: Facing the Galaxy.

Please visit both links and consider whether you might like to join. There’s a 6-minute video at Tibor’s site, with several faces and statements about why people think this is an important endeavor. Halfway into the video, you will see a face you may recognize… and catch a glimpse of my lab.

Image: One of the posters for Faces from Earth.

Note: The music for Tibor’s video is For Arnhem Land by Aalborg World Soundtracks.

“Ich bin ein Berliner,” John F. Kennedy announced to West Berlin in 1963. No doubt, Kennedy’s handlers, hearing the roars from the assembled throng, thought the young president had charmed the Germans. Had they listened closely, they might have heard guffaws escaping the crowd. After all, they had just heard the leader of the Free World proclaim that he was a jelly donut.

Fast forward to 2010. An up-and-coming fantasy author has written the customary trilogy and his world-building has been hailed as “meticulous, yet fresh”. A caste in his books names its male members after precious stones. One of the two main heroes is called Nephron.

Nephron means Kidney.

I gamely pointed this out in an online magazine that featured a worshipful review of the trilogy. In response, the author descended upon the forum and spake thus:

1. He was perfectly aware that nephron means kidney but those who possess deep learning and intellectual subtlety would be aware that nephrite is the Greek name for jade.
2. Despite point 1, surely he cannot be expected to consider every possible silly nuance. After all – and here I quote him verbatim – Lord of Wind might be construed to refer to farts.
3. And despite point 2, he researched everything in his trilogy within an inch of its life and he doth challenge me to prove otherwise. I’m surprised he didn’t say he would grade me.

The fact that I’m a native Hellenic speaker does not automatically make me an authority on etymology or connotations. However, I went to one of those bloody elite schools where they forced us to learn all the flavors of our language, from Homeric to demotic. I also became fluent or competent in a few more languages through the years and I love exploring patterns, links and shifts. So I know that in most Indo-European tongues the word for jade means “kidney(-like) or flank stone” because it was thought to help kidney colic: nephritis lithos (Hellenic), lapis nephriticus (Latin), Beilstein (German), piedra de ijada (Spanish). Nephrite is one of the two distinct silicates bundled into the term jade, nephritis is medicalese for kidney inflammation, nephritic means of the kidney.

Bottom line: Nephron, unmodified and standalone, still means Kidney and no amount of sophistry or posturing can change that.

To give you a parallel example from the same work, the other main hero is called Carnelian – derived from the Latin carnis, flesh or meat, because of that gemstone’s most common color. Nevertheless, the author did not name him Carne. The sensibility of the author’s own Romance natal language led him to avoid such a lethal blow to his work’s intended Wagnerian gravitas.

While the author was holding forth, I headed over to his site and read his synopses of the first two volumes of the trilogy. His naming system is a mishmash: for example, name endings aren’t linguistically congruent even within each stratum of each culture. So I suspect that his vaunted research into the suitability of Nephron probably went like this:

Author to the corner Greek or Cypriot grocer: Hey Spiro, does Nephron sound heroic to you?

Grocer (snickering discreetly, like the Berlin residents at Kennedy): Sounds fantabulous, mate!

Author (putting check mark next to the name): One more item deeply researched.

Tin ears and leaden tongues are not exclusive to Anglophone SF/F authors or directors with Hindenburg-sized egos. Most Japanese manga and animé blithely serve Name Mangle Royale. This actually goes down very well in satire, parody or light-hearted pastiches (think Xena or Samurai Champloo). However, it’s as enticing as thrice-thawed carne in wannabe epics that take themselves deadly seriously (Star Wars, Bleach, the Tolkien clones). In a secondary universe, character names invariably peg the creator’s ability to bring that world into life and make readers yearn to inhabit it.

Invented names and terms need to reflect the fictional culture they represent at several levels, because they serve as extra conduits into the created universe. This means they must have a fundamental integrity, and be more than half-digested scraps from shallow meta-sources. Their inventors have to be aware of the languages they base them on – their structure, rhythm, tonality, inflections. Being multilingual helps and so does research, but a good ear is even more crucial. Too little foundation, and you have cardboard; too little integration, and you have soupy cement. Poul Anderson knew this. So did Tolkien, though he got slightly carried away. So do Ursula Le Guin and Jacqueline Carey, adept at creating layered secondary worlds with names/terms that make you sigh happily and say “that’s it exactly – I couldn’t imagine this being called anything else.”

Which brings us back to Kidney and his world. As its names go, so does the rest of it. I was sorely tempted to take up the author’s challenge and write a detailed review of his doorstops. I read as much of the three novels as I could find on the Internet and found the excerpts predictable and pedestrian (and no, I don’t need to read the entire Twilight series to form an opinion of it). Besides its toe-fracturing heft, the trilogy also sounds like a fantasy version of the TV series 24: even its devotees mention that torture is graphic and constant, the action unfolds …in …real …time and the author is so enamored of world-building that the edifice creaks like Hollywood plywood town fronts. In other words, this is Robert Jordan or Storm Constantine for the kidneyed… er, jaded.

Even if I had the time and stamina to slog through such an opus, I cannot read violence porn for jollies or to prove my edgy sophistication. Torture shadowed my people till the mid-seventies and was used on my immediate family. It’s also worth reflecting that an equivalent amount of sex in the book (even the vanilla kind, let alone BDSM) would have consigned it to a very different category and we would not be having this sardonyx… excuse me, sardonic conversation.

Images: Kuzco in his llama incarnation, from The Emperor’s New Groove; cartoon, Baloocartoonblog, 2009; Ekaterina Shemyak, Therem ir Stokven – a beautifully named character in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness whose equally haunting tale can be read here.

Related posts:

On Being Bitten to Death by Ducks
Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

Women nominated for Best Director Oscars:

Lina Wertmüller, Seven Beauties, 1976.
Jane Campion, The Piano, 1993.
Sophia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, 2010.

Winner, 2010:
Kathryn Bigelow
Best Director, Best Picture.

Four nominations, one lone winner — out of 164 awards in the two categories since 1928. The award is long overdue, meager, and encouraging only if this tiny step is the first of many.

As for Bigelow’s major 500-pound gorilla competitor: sometimes bows and arrows do prevail over nuclear warheads, after all. Look at the bright side, fanbois. The price of Avatar lunchboxes should go through the floor.

Image: Angela Bassett as the formidable Lornette “Mace” Mason in Bigelow’s unfairly overlooked Strange Days.

Some people walk on water //
Some just keep falling down.

– from Ramon, by Laurie Anderson

Whenever the imminent death of SF from lack of scientific knowledge and/or mindset comes up, some people wring hands and point fingers at YA fantasy or the “feminization” of the domain, some spring to action:  Kay Holt and Bart Leib, the founders/editors of Crossed Genres, just launched a blog titled Science in My Fiction.  As Kay says, both in words and in the playful image she created to celebrate the launch (right):

“The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them. // This is a fight for survival of the fiction. It’s time to seize culture and do science to it!”

Visitors to Astrogator’s Logs will recognize some SiMF contributors: Peggy Kolm, Calvin Johnson and yours truly.  The first post is Extrapolative Fiction for Sapient Earthlings by Kay Holt.  Posts will initially appear twice weekly and may increase to thrice weekly once the contributors find their rhythm.

Go take a look!

In the last few weeks, I’ve been reading stories nominated for the Hugo awards. One of them, the first choice of an SF/F author whose judgment I trust, gave me pause. The concepts were interesting, although the story was a variation on Total Recall. But the characters tasted like cheap cardboard and the style was equally flat. This led me to ponder yet again the much-discussed decline of SF. And from there, with the help of yet another Dr. B. (not the Dr. B. I discussed in Camels, Gnats and Shallow Graves, though they’d fall into a bromance at first sight), my thoughts segued to empathy.

Empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, neatly falls into the “feminine” virtues. Certainly, it is a requirement for successfully rearing children. It is also is a survival tactic for the powerless. So it’s not surprising that it’s a cultivated and praised attribute in women and slaves.

Three kinds of adult humans lack empathy. The first group cannot help it: they are the people with autism spectrum disorders who find it difficult to understand or interpret the emotions and motivations of others. The second group consists of fundamentalists of all stripes who are convinced they verily possess the stone tablets of Truth and are ready to smash dissenters’ heads with them.

Finally, we have the obnoxiously smug. Invariably these are comfortably off white men who feel free to smirk and sneer about Other’s issues, but when called on it insist that they are misunderstood free spirits persecuted by the humorless PC police. Which brings us to Dr. B.

A few months ago, a pingback showed that someone had referred to my essay The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction. Being a curious cat, I followed the link. It led to the blog of Dr. B., an academic astronomer who also writes hard SF. He advocates science literacy, calls himself progressive… so, ever hopeful, I started visiting, happily prepared to join the conversation.

Yet almost immediately, I couldn’t help but notice that several of Dr. B.’s stances “ain’t evolved” (to paraphrase Clarence Thomas). Among them was gratuitous, strident misogyny skulking under the “fairness” veneer. The trend culminated in a recent post in which Dr. B. commented approvingly on an anonymous screed from the National Post, the Canadian equivalent of Fox News:

Women’s Studies programs removed from Canadian universities: “These courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.” I guess I don’t shed a tear if these are gone. Where are the Men’s Studies? I guess some would say every other course and department out there, but that’s not exactly fair. // Well, that should be provocative enough for some comments.

The Post article itself is the usual venomous tripe about the horrific harm feminism hath wrought, though it missed one obvious talking point – that them dastardly feminazis caused 9/11. It’s the sort of thing Marc Lépine might have written before he murdered fourteen women students of engineering in the Montréal École Polytechnique.

Being a believer in giving people a long rope, I went through four rounds of exchanges with Dr. B. In his responses, he covered every single square of the misogynist bingo board, from the demand to “educate him” to the opinion that women bring down standards in the hard sciences, to whining about the humorlessness of feminists. The gist of his replies was: Enough about women and their imaginary problems. What about oppressed tenured white male ME???

People of this ilk infest self-labeled “progressive” groups – SF authors, transhumanists, “futurists”. Their mindsets are so similar that I wonder if pod-style human cloning isn’t already with us. Their sense of entitlement is as vast as that of any three-year old. They sulk and throw furniture when they’re thwarted in any way, consider their monoculture experience to be universal truth, and believe that their muddled self-serving ideas should be accepted without question because… well, because they are “liberal, leaning libertarian” (translation: it’s fine to bully Others, as long as it’s not state-imposed).

At this point, my readers will justifiably say: “Yet one more obscure navel-watcher is dragging his knuckles on the Internet. Maybe he had a messy divorce, maybe the Diversity Office in his campus took a corner office he was eyeing. Why are you wasting your time and ours on him?”

The answer is, because this man has assumed the role of thought leader and storyteller. A person with a mindset like his is highly unlikely to write absorbing fiction or convincing characters. The empathy that would make the works anything beyond a mirror of the author’s blinkered self-involvement is absent. I found one of Dr. B.’s novels on the Internet. I gave up after slogging through sixty painful pages. Bear in mind that I like hard SF, from Egan to Mixon, and I’ll endure infodumps, shallow characters and tin-ear dialogue if a story’s elements captivate me.

To write well (let alone live well), people need to have open, informed minds. What constitutes such a worldview goes beyond just imaginative extrapolations of concepts and objects. Curiosity and empathy toward others are equally crucial components. If an author can’t (won’t) do that, s/he won’t be able to create credible elves or andromedans either. By encouraging and rewarding lopsided parochialism, SF/F contributes to its own ghettoization and puts a stamp of approval on being junk-food escapism by/for the emotionally stunted.

When people in relatively privileged circumstances live as Others even briefly (John Howard Griffin comes to mind), their outlook changes radically. If I ever became Supreme Dictator, one of my edicts would be that everyone spend at least one year in another culture during their adolescence. Even a brief stay in a different environment peels away the complacency that arises from being embedded in a single context. The double vision that results from such exposure forever alters people’s perceptions. Layered, nuanced storytelling, free of navel-watching and whiny angst, can arise from these jolts.

Most fiction works are slated for oblivion. “Cool” concepts date fast, genre fashions even faster. But storytellers who see into others’ minds create characters that haunt and compel us, whose actions and fates matter to us. Through them, they burst past genre confines to make great literature that is long remembered, retold and sung.

Passed-out-cold bookworm: Gutenberg Project.
“Tantrum” bronze sculpture: Gustav Vigeland, Oslo.
Tales from Earthsea cover: David Wyatt

Nine years ago I met someone in a convention about science fiction and society.  Let’s call him Dr. B.  Because of our mutual interests, we moved in overlapping circles.  Dr. B. used to write  tie-ins to SF movies and is now a professional philosopher.  He’s white, middle class and lives in a Western democracy.  He is vocal about atheism, individual rights and censorship.

Recently, he stated that he cannot bring himself to sign a manifesto by Iranian women.   Why?  Because the manifesto calls for abolition of polygyny.  As Dr. B. loftily explained, that’s (horrors!) a slippery slope that could lead to state scrutiny of all polyamorous connections.  Never mind the fact that most polygynous marriages are contracted under coercion; never mind the fact that sharia law is state law in Iran and sharia law does not make a distinction between private and public, between religion and government.

In the meantime, Afghani girls have acid thrown on their faces because they are attending school.  Saudi girls are locked inside their burning school, because they might run out of the flames “not properly” veiled.  Somali girls are stoned to death because they were raped.  Sudanese girls have their genitals shredded.  Indian girls get set alight for having “inadequate” dowries.  And then we have stories like this, from yesterday’s news (composite from several sources):

Sixteen-year old Medine Memi was discovered bound and lifeless in sitting position in a hole dug beneath a chicken coop outside the family’s house in the town of Kahta in Southeastern Turkey, 40 days after she had disappeared. The hole had been cemented over.   According to a post-mortem examination the large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach showed that she had been buried while fully conscious and suffered a slow and agonizing death.

The execution was an honor killing carried out as a punishment for talking to boys.  Medine had repeatedly tried to report to police that she had been beaten by her father and grandfather days before she was killed. “She tried to take refuge at the police station three times, and she was sent home three times,” her mother, Immihan, said after the body was discovered in December.   Medine’s father is reported as saying at the time: “She has male friends. We are uneasy about that.”

In Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish region, the practice of honor killing has become a well-known ritual that is chilling in its precision: when a young woman is suspected of “dishonoring” the family by wearing tight clothes, having unauthorized contact with young men, or falling victim to rape, a family council is called, and a family member appointed as an executioner.  Afterwards, the family will try to pretend she never existed.

Official figures have indicated that more than 200 such killings take place each year, accounting for half of all murders in Turkey. Community workers say the figures are likely higher, as many go unreported.  After the 2005 reform, passed to help Turkey join the European Union, a new practice of forced suicide sprang up.  According to media reports, victims would be locked in their rooms for days with rat poison, a pistol or rope, and ordered to spare their families the legal retribution by killing themselves.

Dr. B. got huffy when I called his quibbles about the Iranian manifesto risk-free privileged nitpicking.  This, friends, is the epitome of swallowing camels and dissecting gnats.  The Greeks have a more vivid, if profane, saying: The world is burning, and some people are combing their pubic hair.  Perhaps Dr. B.’s olympian armchair philosophizing would benefit if he lived for a month or two in Afghanistan — in a burqa.

Images: Top, Medine Memi’s place of execution; bottom, Shamsia Husseini, who’s still going to school, even after she and her sister Atifa were almost killed by acid attacks.

– Friedrich Schiller

Scott Brown; Cosmopolitan magazine, June 1982

Now the rest of the Cosmo centerfolds know they can be elected to the US Senate. If they’re reactionary rich white men, that is, who march to orders like Caligula’s Senate-nominated horse.

The Democrats should never have forgotten the tale of the scorpion and the frog. Appeasing the now-lunatic fringe Republican party is the equivalent of trying to befriend the creature from Alien.

Welcome to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. When is the next starship for Tau Ceti??

“And the madness of the crowd is an epileptic fit.”

Tom Waits, In the Colosseum

Like anyone who didn’t greet Cameron’s Avatar as The Second Coming, I received predictable responses to my review. Some brave souls were relieved to hear they were not alone in perceiving that the Emperor wore slinky glittery togs but was nevertheless drooling. The percentage of these was higher than I expected, which made me hopeful that humanity may achieve long-term survival without regressing to a resemblance of the Flintstone cartoons.

Some insisted that I didn’t get Avatar’s subtle environment- and native culture-friendly message because I’m a jaded cynic out of touch with cosmic harmonies. These are probably the same people who think that positive thinking cures cancer (addressed sharply – in both senses – by Barbara Ehrenreich in her recent book Bright-Sided). I’ll believe the authenticity of their starry-eyedness when they sell their iPods and SUVs and give the proceeds to the residents of the Pine Ridge reservation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a few called Avatar traitorous liberal propaganda, demonstrating their terminal lack of grasp on concepts. But then, what can one expect of people who voluntarily called themselves teabaggers?

Several exhorted me to “lighten up, it’s only a movie, can’t you stop thinking and just have fun?” This demand is the traditional ploy when someone can’t marshal a real argument – which is one reason why it’s routinely used on inconveniently uppity Others (see Me Tarzan, You Ape for a longer explanation). Them I will leave to the tender ministrations of Moff’s Law, with the added footnote that it’s actually impossible to turn a brain off, short of irreversible coma or death.

Finally, which brings me to this article’s subject, the fanboys shrieked “Die, heretic scum!” Those were hilarious, particularly the ones that pointed out my total ignorance of biology and referred me to the Pandorapedia (no link to this, since I won’t promote brain softening). I was tempted to leave them to their wet fantasies in their parents’ basements. However, inchoate rage of the Incredible Hulk variety is becoming increasingly prevalent in this culture and it extends far beyond the multiplex. I’ve dubbed it the Waterworld Syndrome, because I first articulated it after watching that horrible mess – a movie only in name, but in fact a relentless audiovisual battering.

The unmistakable sign of a well-wrought book or film is that it puts us in a light trance, emphasis on “light”. We suspend disbelief, immerse ourselves in the universe unfolding before us. Yet we don’t become passive vessels. Large parts of our brain stay busy evaluating the originality and quality of the worldbuilding, the consistency of the plot, the authenticity of the dialogue and characters. If anything jolts us out of this trance, the work immediately becomes as enticing as a flaccid balloon.

Hollywood directors have decided they don’t want to work on any of these aspects. They go through perfunctory motions, relying on lazy shorthand and recycled clichés, while they put their real effort in milking profits from the lunch boxes and video games based on their movies. This is not surprising: many started and/or double as directors for television commercials. Straightforward product placement has become ever more prominent in movies, especially those aimed at younger viewers – which at this point means almost all of them. Focus groups that now routinely “pre-test” movies have removed any pretense that film making is the craft of illuminating narratives that must be told. It’s all about marketing the franchises.

But movies still need to achieve that trance, because viewers are not so zombified as to stop thinking altogether (see note about coma above). Also, directors want a movie to leave enough of an impression that people will buy the associated tchotchkes. So they resort to the Waterworld technique, which consists of arousing the fight-or-flight reflex by sensory overload. In short, they use assaultive special effects. Today’s blockbuster movies, numbingly sequelized, are members of the Doom or Wolfenstein gang, except that they enforce even more passivity than the minimal act of frantically pushing the buttons of an XBox.

The fight-or-flight reflex is an ancient survival mechanism we share with other organisms that have a complex nervous system. Once the reflex is triggered, adrenaline and cortisol spike, the heart rate goes up, the blood supply gets diverted from the viscera and brain to the muscles, glucose floods the body, thinking is suppressed and we tremble and sweat like a beaten horse. On the behavioral side, the result is anger and fear that bypass our cortex, eluding conscious control. This makes perfect sense as a prelude to action when the trigger is legitimate: if we spend too much time analyzing the possible outcomes of a tiger’s appearance, we may end up in its stomach.

Sudden loud noises, abrupt luminosity changes, rapid irregular motion and objects fast growing in your visual field are among the triggers of fight-or-flight. Sound familiar? 3-D effects that force us to constantly flinch away from looming fronds or asteroids; car chases at a speed that our eyes can barely track; explosions, in-your-face gunshots and loud percussive soundtracks that make us jump – these are the common, blunt weapons in today’s blockbuster movie arsenal, aimed to jangle and pummel our brain into reflex mode.

When fight-or-flight is triggered while someone is in a theater seat, the resulting anger and fear are not expended because there’s no action possible beyond chewing one’s popcorn faster. The stress hormones linger, and so do the emotions they arouse – displaced, unfocused, free-floating, ready for use by demagogues and charlatans. Objectively, it’s a terrific use of the misnamed reptile brain, much better than the subliminal messages they used to flash between frames in older movies. The behavioral conditioning is now integrated into the experience. And moviegoers, stunned into sullen docility, their brain chemistry cleverly subverted, increasingly expect visceral punches instead of stories, willingly collaborating in their own mental and emotional debasement.

People who crave such entertainment turn into mobs far more readily than those who demand less crude fare and will not abandon the prerogative of critical thought. The primitive worldview fostered by such abusive spectacle diverts people from trying to solve problems rationally, making it easier to belittle knowledge and expertise, cede rights and liberties and scapegoat marginalized groups and the unlucky – which by now include much of what was once the middle class.

If you think this is hyperbole, consider that Antonin Scalia used the TV show 24 as an authority for legitimizing the use of torture. The excuse that mindless entertainment relieves pressure at times of individual and collective stress is dangerous. It’s crucial to act as full humans not when times are easy, but when times are hard; when circumstances are best served by reflection, not reflex.

Images: 1st, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, South Park; 2nd, Louis Leterrier, The Incredible Hulk; 3rd, Stanley Kubrick, Clockwork Orange; 4th, John LeFrançois, Furious George.

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