Backyard Rocket

Windward

2008-05-06T13:39:00.003-04:00

I found it interesting that though one of the themes of the novel seemed to be the infinite scope of the universe, only individual planets or systems have a "windward" to look to. Just a thought.
I've never read a Banks novel before, and though his style of the nearly disconnected narratives was disconcerting at first, I decided I enjoyed it. It was interesting and gave better scope to the species and cultures Banks portrayed, as well as throwing the plot through some interesting developments without spelling them out explicitly.
On par with our theme of "sufficiently advanced technology" there was a lot to explore. There were multiple formats the issue took, from the soulkeepers and devised heavens to virtual reality experiences. It also raises questions like, "If my culture becomes so advanced that we no longer really die but merely live a pleasant existence of virtual reality adventures and meddle in other slightly less-advanced worlds' affairs in our spare time, could some of those worlds potentially get angry and try to destroy us in some horrific manner?" If technology did advance so far, what would people do? Would we all just throw ourselves into reckless adventures and lava rafting, even though it's no longer reckless? Advanced technology could bring with it some frightening behavior, and boredom.

finality

2008-05-06T11:43:00.009-04:00

Setting out to explore the unknown.
The domination of one class by another.
An authoritarian state.
Revolution.
How we justify our actions.
Religion, and its uses.
The concept of the self.
The male/female divide.
What it is to be human.
The right of creation.
The importance of symbols.
Coping with the actions we can't justify.
The threat of what is different.
The need for what is different.
The urge to destroy what is different.
The urge to understand what is different.
Cannibalism.
The meaning of faith.
The clash of cultures.
The power of forgiveness.
The search for meaning.

These are all themes we've explored this semester, in the readings and in the movies. Universal, general themes that tie our own experiences to the fantastic worlds presented, that allow us to relate to what we read and watch on a very basic level. Allow me to do it all at once.

Abroham looked with terror at the body of his son-construct Izak. He had followed the instructions of the Book to the letter; he had opened the case and removed Izak's nanochips, installed them in himself and waited for the clarity that was supposed to arise. All he felt was revulsion for the human female who had given him the Book, promising that it would restore both he and Izak to their fullest capabilities if they would obey its words. Wildly, he cast his transceiver in every direction, but there was no response from his child; no soul had left the body to be with God, as the woman had promised.
Abroham came to a decision. He summoned his servants, small mammalian creatures with nanochips embedded in their minds which enabled him to control them via his transceiver. After they polished his chassis, he made his way to the jump-pod he kept in a storage shed. He set the coordinates for the site the woman claimed to have made her camp at, in the midst of a forest that Abroham had never even seen. Upon arrival, he eschewed subtlety and tore his way through the trees, intent on finding her as quickly as possible.
Before long, the noise he was making attracted her. She emerged from a copse clad only in white robes, beaming at him.
"Hello, Abroham." Ruth said. "How is Izak?"
"Dead, woman." responded the bereaved father-maker. "He did not rise again, as you claimed. He was not spared." His servos whirred, the better to express his rage, but she did not seem to understand.
"Abroham, I think you misunderstood me." she intoned. "Izak is not to rise in this life, but in the next, and live forever! What you did is the cornerstone of my people's culture, the beginning of the awakening, the glorious covenant-"
"Silence, woman! My son-construct is gone. Who, now, will repair my couplings when I am failing? Who will tend my electric sheep once I have crashed?"
For once, Ruth appeared confused. "Where I come from, Abroham, the government endorses this practice. In my homeland, it is necessary that we give up the firstborn son, as a symbol of our belief and faith."
Abroham ejected oil in derision. "Izak was not born, woman. I designed and built him, to be the perfect replacement for me. We are not a people of faith. Our government does not require any shows of belief. We are a people of what is here and what is real."
Ruth smiled. "God is real, Abroham. God appreciates your sacrifice, even if your government does not. And perhaps such a government is not the right one for you, if it does not even respect what you give up for it?"
Abroham's diodes flashed with suspicion. "Was this sacrifice for your God, or for my government?"
Again, Ruth's mysterious, knowing smile. "For me, they are the same. If it is not so for you, then I suggest you consider a change of government."
Abroham set himself down, heavily. He suddenly felt very obsolete. "I still don't understand, woman. Why did you make me do this? Why have I scrapped my son?" He turned his transceiver to stare at her, and was surprised to see that she had placed her hand on his chassis.
"What you are, and what I am, and what Izak was, Abroham," she said, "these are all a part of the same great thing. Izak has merely rejoined it a bit earlier. And now you will prosper, under the guidance of God."
Abroham shook his head, using a gesture he had seen her use when disagreeing with him. "You misunderstand, woman. You misunderstand what making him cost me. Following you and your God has doomed my model. I just want to know why it works for you, but not for me. Why does your God save your children, but not mine?"
It was now Ruth's turn to shake her head. "Our children die as well, but we have more, and we prosper. As shall you, Abroham!"
Abroham felt his servos shutting down in despair. "No, Ruth, no! We do not have others! We are dependent on one, and I have made a terrible mistake."
Ruth pressed herself against his body, sending his temperature controls momentarily active as they sought to protect her from his internal heat. "God will forgive you, Abroham. He loves you, and you have shown that you love him. God will forgive you, as I do. Now you must forgive yourself."
"I have scrapped my son-construct, then taken parts of him into me. I will not forgive myself."
"You must."
"I cannot."

Vignettes

2008-05-06T05:01:00.005-04:00

Well, especially considering the lengths of my last posts, I'll try to keep this one very short. The hour has little to do with it, I swear. To that end, I'll eschew talking about the actual plot and focus on Banks' general style. (And I'll just add that I love post-scarcity economies. And I thought a Replicator where you could order "Tea. Earl Gray. Hot." was good...)

To me, the novel felt like a series of fascinating vignettes, almost completely self-contained little stories that with a serious amount of cleverness coalesce into a really fun story. The opening event reminded me of a dinner party in a mid-'70s Woody Allen movie - high praise, indeed.

Banks keeps hitting on some pretty heavy stuff in this vignette format - especially the veracity of experiences in a world where virtual reality is so ubiquitous and lifespans are virtually infinite.

~With one of these silvery things and an implant people here probably never have to actually remember the name of a single other person.
~I wonder if they ever forget their own. (p. 188)

Bam. And then it's gone, and we're back in what we can only term to be the "real world." Same thing with the "what is edible?" question near the beginning. I don't have an exact direction where I'm going with this; rather, I just really enjoy Banks' stylistic treatment of these great little existential questions that go to the core of one's being. Thank god Jack Burden wasn't around. (Eh, I lie. All the King's Men is one of my favorite books, but Idealism? Come on.)

Perhaps in the end, these vignettes end up being more Ingmar Bergman, one of Woody's idols, than Woody himself. There's just something in the whole thing that conjures images of playing chess with Death and delivering long monologues at right-angles to the camera.

Turtles of the Rebellion

2008-05-01T12:54:00.002-04:00

Several people posted about Sofia’s role in the revolution. The consensus seems to be that the revolution would still have occurred without her, but that it may not have reached the same scale, or that it may have gone differently. If we’re referring to another member of the original crew taking her place in being the leader of the rebellion, then the full development of the revolution is possible, though her ability to learn just about anything and her affinity for technology certainly were indispensable to the Runa. However, if we’re talking about her having died as we thought at the end of the first book, leaving no one to help lead the rebellion, I’m not sure how far it would have gone. The Runa who go with her into the forest at first seem content to let the conflict blow over and return to their homes, but her continued insistence that they should fight against their oppressors convinces them to propagate the movement. I think that if Sofia had died, the rebellion would have died shortly thereafter.

Also, every time we talk about multiple turtles on fence posts, for some reason, in my head, it turns into multiple turtles on one fence post. So, for your viewing pleasure:

We Are Star Stuff

2008-04-27T20:48:00.009-04:00

[Response to "Carl Sagan's Religion" - I will dispense with a traditional introduction, considering this post already borders on 3,000 words.]

I realize that declaring religion and science as monolithic concepts is false and somewhat unsatisfying. I will use the term “science” to generally mean the “hard sciences” that deal in empiricism and skepticism, which base themselves on the scientific method. For religion, I generally mean those institutions based on the faith that there is a higher power that created the universe and at some point influenced humans to have faith in it. Because I am most familiar with these, my statements will mainly involve those religions which believe that the word of their God is contained in the various books of the Bible, though my arguments are not confined to the Abrahamic religions.

This essay’s purpose is twofold: first, I will directly examine PTJ’s claim of “Carl Sagan’s religion;” second, I will examine the validity of the “live and let live” sentiment in terms of the intersection of science and religion. I need not directly address PTJ’s statement, “A coincidence's status as a miracle is neither provable nor disprovable. It's not a scientific claim.” Instead, I will end up addressing it as a natural consequence of the course of my argument.

[I am, of course, not without my own influences. I have never been religious, though for a long time I thought that I was with the majority. Back in elementary school, I knew many people who went to church, but none of them seemed to actually believe in God; rather, they seemed to believe that church was a waste of a beautiful Sunday and something their parents made them go to. (I’ve been to eight religious services in my life: my christening, a Catholic mass in the “Screaming Children’s Room” with my grandmother (I wasn’t screaming, for the record), two Presbyterian services in Pittsburgh, a bar and a bat mitzvah, and two Passover seders.) My ordered thought on this topic, then, comes a bit more recently and draws its influences from Carl Sagan, by way of Douglas Adams, running it by his longtime friend Richard Dawkins (who, no matter what I may think of his methods, aligns with my argument at the moment), passing it to Arthur C. Clarke. Pity only Dawkins and I are alive, probably the least agreeable of the five.]

I.
Santa Claus is Coming
Do you believe that an omnipotent being not only created the universe, but that it continues to manage the events on a thoroughly ordinary blue-green planet in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy, causing genuinely inexplicable events to occur? Let me rephrase: Do you believe that a large man in a red suit flying a sleigh powered by reindeer visits the individual residences of millions of children in a single night?

I know it’s a cheap shot. But they are both explanations for what seem to be inexplicable events. To a child not familiar with the laws of physics, the Santa Claus myth is plausible. What other explanation could there possibly be for those toys that show up than a fat man who comes down a chimney?

Of course, the nature of Santa Claus is completely falsifiable, or is it? Of course, a single fat man could not and is not responsible for those toys getting there. But the toys appear nevertheless. Is it indeed possible that Santa Claus is a god who influences parents to buy toys for their children? Should universities have a Santa Claus studies chair in their religion departments?

We worry about children who, after a certain age, do not reject the Santa Claus myth. But why? Does it matter if people continue to believe in Santa Claus? What possible harm could come from it?

Carl Sagan’s Religion
Carl Sagan was indeed an eloquent and outspoken proponent of science and skepticism. He was also an outspoken opponent of pseudoscience and illogic. His life’s work was teaching science to the masses. Cosmos was the most watched public television series in US broadcasting history and the accompanying book is one of the most popular non-fiction books ever written. It would be safe to say that his life’s work was at least partially successful.

One of the arguments commonly posed against Sagan’s was that the pursuit of science is emotionally unfulfilling. His specific answer to that was, as PTJ rightly points out, that the knowledge (Latin: scientia) of the universe is itself a fulfilling endeavor. It is important to note that in all of his writings that I have encountered, he carefully divorces his sentiments from his empirical work. (He was always careful to do the same thing when addressing things like SETI and the Drake Equation.)

Is this indeed Carl Sagan’s religion, as PTJ contends? Certainly, the wonder is evident in Sagan’s eyes when you watch Cosmos. His exuberance is evident in his writing. We are, he was fond of saying, “star stuff contemplating star stuff.” So this is certainly Sagan’s answer to the religious argument that science is unfulfilling. But is it religion?

Without trying to sound too semantic, Webster will be my guide for a moment. Religious is defined as “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.” [Emphasis mine] On the surface, PTJ’s contention cannot be discounted because deity is not the only possible path to religiosity. “Faithful devotion,” though – let’s dig deeper.

Faith has a more complex definition. “2(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust; 3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially: a system of religious beliefs” If we take the third definition and remove the “especially,” we still cannot remove Sagan’s statement from the realm of religion. It strikes me, though, that all these definitions hinge on the word “belief.” Let’s dig deeper still.

This gets even messier. Believe is defined as follows: “1 a: to have a firm religious faith b: to accept as true, genuine, or real.” We’ve still gone nowhere. The definition of belief, though, is somewhat more enlightening. An excerpt from the synonyms section: “belief may or may not imply certitude in the believer . faith almost always implies certitude even where there is no evidence or proof .”

Here we are. To (over)simplify, belief allows for doubt whereas faith does not. Carl Sagan had many beliefs. He never contended that they are facts. In his “manifesto for clear thought,” The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan ends many sections with the words, “But I might be wrong.” His point is that knowledge is asymptotic; that we cannot know “the truth,” but that we can get pretty damn close (Sagan 28). By and large, though, religion deals in absolutes. “Birth control is against the will of God.” Says who? “God.” Prove it. “I’m a manifestation of God and I said so, QED.” One must take it on faith that birth control is against the will of God, and that the real reason behind the statement isn’t more something like, if you don’t allow your flock to use birth control, you will bolster your numbers. (In practice, this is called Irish Catholicism.) Of course, I still can’t prove that God isn’t against birth control, but I can draw upon strong evidence to indicate that the terrestrial origins of such a stance are much more rooted in realpolitik than divinity.

Sagan’s statements about the nature of the universe can indeed be considered “religious” by a loose but accurate definite of the word. They are indeed a set of beliefs surrounding an ultimate truth; however, they are markedly different from conventional religion because they do not proclaim to know or have a monopoly on the truth. Where traditional religions are conservative in that they are loath to consider new evidence that would suggest their fallibility, Sagan’s view of the universe is progressive, inviting new ideas about the nature of nature. If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know.

Sagan uses Newton as his example (Sagan 33). For three hundred years or so, scientists believed Newtonian physics explained the universe. Then Albert Einstein came along and showed that Newton was only an estimation of the actual mechanisms of physics. Indeed, Newton’s physics works very well for conditions that we see in everyday life and is used to model those situations. I defy anyone to find a single scientist, though, who still believes that Newtonian physics is more accurate or explanatory than Einstein. (I know that this is a horrible oversimplification of classical mechanics as well as relativity and quantum theory as classical mechanics is still a usable model for "normal" conditions, but I believe that the point stands.) It is hard to imagine a mainstream religion that so easily rejects something at the core of its “belief” system that is proved to be false and indeed not only rejects its former belief center but also actively looks to poke holes in its new one. (Again, this is an oversimplification, but I mean more than “questioning one’s faith.”)

What’s the harm, though? Why not let religions do their own thing? Why do I go out of my way to contrast skepticism and religion? Why can I not just let the two coexist? Indeed, the question returns: what possible harm could come of it?

II.
The Jews Are the Chosen People
Genesis 17:13 reads, “He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.” Judaism and Islam particularly take this message to heart; circumcision rates approach 100% in Jews and Muslims. There is strong evidence that circumcision significantly reduces one’s risk of contracting HIV. Therefore, God has chosen those religions to survive AIDS at a greater rate. (The Christian Church technically banned circumcision in 1442 as a matter of politics, but the pope is part of the voice of God, so that God seems to have forsaken them in 1442.) Thus, they will inherit the Earth when everyone else dies. Further, we should do nothing to help the uncircumcised fools because they are not God’s chosen people. Further, if medical science finds a vaccine against HIV, it should only be administered to the chosen ones. If it was given to everyone, it would be a violation of God’s will. I smell a smiting.

But is it coincidence? Is there, in fact, no connection between the passage in Genesis and AIDS? (And if there is a connection, couldn’t God have mentioned it as confirmation of His existence? I mean, how cool would that be, anyway? “Just get used to it now because you’ll thank Me later when you guys survive AIDS better.”) To paraphrase Machiavelli, I cannot answer, but I can tell you which is safer. The stance that it is happenstance allows for less genocide. Indeed, as PTJ wrote, “‘because God wanted it that way’ is always an appropriate -- if scientifically unrevealing -- answer to any question about how or why something happened.” The potential dangers with accepting the “because God wanted it that way” answer are too numerous to even attempt to itemize.

The Collision of Religion and Science
Science (at least scientific empiricism) does not specifically seek to be at odds with religion. Indeed, if religion confined itself to a certain kind of agnosticism and did not make statements about the nature of the world, there would be no conflict. However, when religion makes claims on the empirical world, they enter the world of science and are subject to its scrutiny.

I do not have room here to cite even a tiny fraction of the number of times when religion has intruded into the observable world. I do not need to mention the number of times where it has ended in disaster. Let’s leave it at Galileo.

What’s the problem with believing in heliocentrism? It can hardly affect one’s day to day life. Most of us never need to understand the nature of gravity or eclipses or earthquakes. They happen and we react. So what’s the danger?

The danger is credulity. If people do not hold all of their beliefs up to the light of skepticism and test them, then they are in danger of being led astray by the first Jim Jones who walks by. It means that people who use the Hamitic hypothesis can Rwanda things up. We can, of course, prove that all Homo sapiens are virtually identical, but we can never disprove that God intended for the Tutsis to rule over the Hutus. Conveniently, this absolves the individuals committing genocide from responsibility because it is God’s will. I cannot tell you which is right, but I can tell you which is safer.

If we treat religious claims with skepticism, we may question whether or not there ever was a Ham. (We could figure out whether there was a Great Flood. If no, then no Noah and thus no Ham.) Religion must be held up to skepticism because not doing so will eventually result in disaster. If we do not put all of our beliefs up to the light, we risk falling into total darkness. (Sorry Carl, but you picked too good an image for me not to steal.)

This is a separate issue from that of Ultimate Significance. Even if there is a creator of the universe, there is no credible evidence that the creator cares about us, or indeed is still watching at all. Empirical evidence leads me to believe that religions were created for a very practical reason: to explain the unexplainable. (Churches frequently invoke God for practical purposes. Take, for example, priests’ chastity. If priests do not have heirs, they cannot pass their land on to anyone except the church.) Explaining the mechanisms by which the world functions is now the domain of science. Imbuing events with some separate meaning is not my concern; my concern is not even directly that of Christian Scientists refusing medical treatment. My concern is that Christian Scientists who refuse medical treatment are turning their back on reality. If they shy away from reality in one area, what is to say that they will not in others? Science and religion are indeed at war, not over the domain of ultimate significance, but over the observable universe. “Live and let live” is simply not possible when two irreconcilable viewpoints are directed at the same domain.

What is Ultimate Significance?
I’ve used the term “ultimate significance” many times. PTJ asked how one can, without ultimate significance, answer Camus’ question about suicide. As someone who does not believe in any order to the events of the universe beyond that which is observable, I can answer that question. It is fallacious to assume that human beings need to find some meaning beyond the observable world. With no evidence that there is life beyond that which we experience in our physical forms, this is quite literally all that anyone has, but it is not unfulfilling. It is not, as PTJ put it, “mundane” (perhaps “quotidian” would be a less emotionally charged word). Am I, or was Sagan, injecting ultimate significance into the study of the world? If there is no end beyond this life, if indeed our deaths are the end of our existence, then the work we do in our lifetimes is literally our ultimate – final, fundamental – work. (Dave Barry has what I find to be a more realistic version of Camus’ points: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” So perhaps Camus should have listed his profession and religion as “Humorist.”)

This is what I see as Carl Sagan’s point. Indeed, there is significance in what we do here. By all indications, there was no part of our existence before our [conception/birth/brain activity/mirror test/latest Supreme Court ruling], and there will be no part of our existence after our deaths. Just as our planet is “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” we ourselves occupy only a tiny corner of the universe (Sagan, Pale Blue Dot). But it is all that we will ever know. Is this a religious claim? It certainly has the imagery of wonder. That is Carl Sagan’s message. One can experience wonder while confining oneself to the empirical universe. Further, this path to wonder does not require Ultimate Significance because skepticism admits uncertainty, which I am hard-pressed to reconcile which such an absolute concept as Ultimate Significance. Is it all significant beyond our bodies and beyond our mote of dust? Who knows and who cares? We’ll find out when we’re dead but for the moment, we’re here. Have I made a leap of faith, or have I used the instruments of empiricism to give me a working hypothesis?

I close with a quote from Carl Sagan, who set this whole thing off. It is infused with the concept of Significance, though I still question whether or not it is ultimate. Though he uses the language of wonder, his statement is remarkably grounded in the observable world. Sagan knew the importance of the "Blue Marble" photo from Apollo 17 in capturing the world's imagination about everyone's home planet, and made sure that Voyager 1 turned around and took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"Doubt is good."

2008-04-23T18:29:00.007-04:00

What if I showed you twenty pictures of twenty turtles on twenty fence posts? Pretty unlikely, right? So unlikely, in fact, that it would lead you to the conclusion that this could not have happened by chance. And if I told you that I had proof than no person had put the turtles on the fence posts? Further, that no visible outside influence had put the turtles there, but that they were there nevertheless? Wouldn't that make you consider the possibility that a "higher power" had put the turtles there?

But then, what if I showed you a wider picture of the entire scene? Turns out, a construction company had left thousands of fence posts standing next to each other in the middle of a turtle farm. And even better, they had thrown them into a depression in the ground, so the tops of the posts were barely an inch off the ground. Of course, you couldn't tell any of this in the first picture I showed you, but you made the series of assumptions that led you to believe that no natural event could have put so many turtles on so many fence posts.

The title of my post is a quote from Russell's readers' guide. According to Russell, "the moral of the story is to be suspicious of your own certainty. Doubt is good." I'll believe her because I believe in author's intent, no matter how poorly the author wrote the damn book. What was the first thing that Sandoz was really certain about? When did the Jesuit value of patience go out the window? Turtles on fence posts. This is God's work. "Everything we thought we understood - that was what we were most wrong about," Sandoz says. And Sandoz thought beyond anything else that God had put him on Rakhat. So he was most wrong about that.

This is why Mike's post struck me as weird. He seemed to still be going off the assumption that Sandoz was a Catholic saint and that God did, indeed, bring him back full circle to achieve some order of inner peace. (Mike, please correct me if I've misrepresented your argument.) This goes back to one of the reason I can't stand this book. The "doubt is good" answer came from Felipe Reyes at the end of The Sparrow. It completed the statement of the novel. It completed the literary journey of Emilio Sandoz perfectly. As I wrote in my response to Mike's post, I do not care about Emilio Sandoz as a person because he is not a person. I care about the literary creation that is Emilio Sandoz. This character had a complete statement written around it in The Sparrow. Children of God is not only useless, but so poorly written as to harm the story itself.

A word on my hatred of the book. All of the other books that I've really not enjoyed this semester, I've forgiven after our class discussion. In class, we were able to really delve deep into those texts and pull out the ton of stuff that actually lies down there. For our discussion of this novel, however, I never felt like we were able to dig deep into it because there was nothing there. The only times where we did, the concepts were so far abstracted from the actual meat of Children of God that they could have been brought up while discussing The Sparrow and we wouldn't have had any less to talk about.

My criticism of Children of God comes primarily from a literary standpoint, though I realize that the syllabus says that the class "is not primarily a literature class." However, I contend that the writing is so poor, beat-you-over-the-head direct, and thin that nothing in the novel merits discussion beyond that of The Sparrow. There is simply no content in the book. Further, by demystifying the aliens, Russell harms The Sparrow. The only good thing that came out of Children of God is realizing that Supaari and Sandoz simply had the galaxy's funniest case of mistaken double entendre. But is that really worth the rest of the book? Well, it was hilarious, but no. Russell could have made that into one of those weird short stories that's all from an alien's point of view - something like an x-rated version of all those Twilight Zone episodes where you think they're all on Earth, but it turns out that they're headed toward Earth.

My French realist literature class had a debate the other day about Emile Zola's Germinal, a politically charged novel. The question Professor Loesberg posed to us was, are novels with explicit theses inherently or automatically bad novels? I used science fiction as an example of novels that many times have some sort of explicit thesis but are not automatically bad. The class (rightly, in my opinion) decided that no, having an explicit thesis does not automatically ruin a novel. Writing a shitty novel ruins a novel. Mary Doria Russell wrote The Sparrow and Children of God with virtually the same thesis, and it's pretty explicit, though much more so in the latter. The former is a good novel; the latter is atrocious. The writing is so bad and so thin that the novel is without any form content, or at least without content that even comes close to or stretches beyond that of The Sparrow. Russell's lack of willingness to let sleeping dogs lie leaves us with a statement that is much weaker than that of The Sparrow, even though the final message is meant to be virtually identical.

I agree with Andrew that this novel had so many Mary Sue/wish fulfillment moments that it almost felt like fan fiction and not the work of the original novelist. It's a shadow of its original self. Perhaps Marx was right, as I quoted in my Todorov post. The first novel as tragedy, the second as farce.

Children of Some god or Another

2008-04-22T22:57:00.002-04:00

I think it's much more fair to compare a sequel to its predecessor than our heartless comparison of movie adaptations to the novels they're based on. With that disclaimer, I'll begin with my The Sparrow/Children of God comparison.
Though it was interesting for Emilio's tale to be "wrapped up," it was not satisfying in the same sense that The Sparrow was. Where the plot of The Sparrow served to explore religion and morality, Children of God was a heavy-handed continuation of something that may have been better left unresolved. It was fitting in The Sparrow for awful things to continue pecking at the very core of Sandoz's beliefs, as that was what Russell was exploring, but in Children of God she merely used the same mechanism, without any real purpose behind why.
As for the entire Revolution idea...it was far too easy. Just like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress having Mike in the background, controlling communications, strategy, security, weather satellites and horoscopes, there was never a question of whether the Runa would be successful. They had Sofia and her iPhone hiding in the forest to arrange everything against the Jana'ata. I enjoyed the idea of said revolution because it had just cause and provocation, as I would have had the various Meso-Americans risen up against the oppressive Cortes instead of their bleak fate, but the solve-all method Russell used to orchestrate the revolution was too easy. (I'm not volunteering to develop something better...but I did expect more after The Sparrow.)
Nico and Isaac were both interesting charactre additions. Carlo could have been interesting, but after he failed to really add anything to the plot other than Emilio-snatching and telling Emilio he was going to add something to the plot...he just became deadweight. None of the other new crew members seemed to develop either (the only thing Sean Fein was good for was his name and the accompanying joke), and even John Candotti wasn't very insightful or forgiving or optimistic or humourous.
Upon reading the ending of Children of God, I kind of just wondered where any of it had come from and if it had really gone anywhere. As I mentioned before, the idea behind the revolution was interesting. The reservation idea was cute. Sending Emilio back to Earth, again, seemed useless to me in his overall redemption process, and I was just left wondering if he had made his peace with his religious beliefs, as I assumed was the goal of the novel.

Children of God Substantive

2008-04-22T12:27:00.001-04:00

As many of my fellow bloggers, I felt that the second book was far inferior to the first. The Sparrow is one of those texts that has such an interesting ending that you almost don’t want to know what happens next. I’ve only truly felt that way about one other book, and have refused to read its sequel(s?) because I liked the way it left me thinking so well. Despite believing this book to be completely unnecessary to the story, it does have a few interesting developments, i.e. Sofia becoming the Runa Moses/revolutionary leader. Unlike Scott, I would give her the award for Most Unexpectedly Religious.

I think one of the most interesting things about this book is just how much a society can change in a relatively short amount of time. Between the time Emilio left and his return, the Jana’ata have been completely kicked out of power and all but exterminated, while the Runa have managed to overcome their oppressors and set up their own government to take the place of what was there before. It’s also interesting that Emilio returns prepared to find Rakhat exactly the way he left it.

Whoa, Hold on people

2008-04-22T10:05:00.010-04:00

After reading through a bunch of the other blog posts, I'm struck with a horrible thought: you're largely a bunch of moral relativists! I cannot have this; this will not stand. Let's get a few things out of the way.

1. The moral of the story is "be suspicious of your own certainty." Russell says so in the Reader's Guide at the end. I'm glad we worked that out.

2. Russell's answer to "does the end justify the means?" is "No!" (Seriously, with the exclamation point and everything). Which leads me to my next point...

3. Ex post facto rationalization. Russell goes out of her way to leave the question of divine intervention a question; if The Sparrow is the story of a man losing his faith, Children of God is about him fighting to get it back, using whatever weapons he has at his disposal. Sandoz is the kind of man who is constantly trying to make the best of a bad situation, even joking around with his captors on the Giordano Bruno. It's natural for him to seek sense in the bad things around him, and from the moment he goes of Quell, you can observe him steadily reconstructing a mental framework that has room for God.

Several times Sandoz makes sardonic comments hinting at atheism, but it's always clear that these are mere jokes to him. His need for a God who understands and loves him, not to mention wouldn't torture him needlessly, are so strong that I believe he would take any evidence he could find to justify his own experiences.

If Isaac didn't exist, then Sandoz would have to find his music elsewhere. And he would, even if it would be in a different form.

4. To anyone who thought the ending wrapped things up too neatly: are you sick? Do you hate Sandoz even more than Russell does? Give the man a break!

P.S. Did anybody else catch shades of Dune in here? The ideological differences between mother and child, the lack of appropriate monitoring in the south, groups of nomadic warriors...now that I think of it, the same intercultural communicative aspects exist in both sets of books, but Dune glosses them over by making it so the main characters don't really have any trouble communicating. Curse these prevalent themes!

And now, to mix things up, some Sparrow/Children of God superlatives.

Most Likely to Possess an Unexpected but Necessary Skill
John Candotti

Most Likely to be Beautiful After Being Put Through a Meat Grinder
Sofia Mendes

Most Unfinished Business
Supaari VaHaptaa
(r/u Vincenzo Giuliani)

Most Underused Unintentionally Hilarious Character
Jholaa
(r/u Edward Behr)

Most Testosterone
Djalao

Most Conceited Death
Hlavin Kitheri

Most Salami
Nico D'Angeli

Most Unrelatable
Danny Iron Horse

Most Reliant on Silver Linings
Emilio Sandoz

"I'm bored by it!"

2008-04-22T02:50:00.006-04:00

"I'm tired of it. I'm bored by it!" - Sandoz, page 412

This is my sentiment toward this book. Unlike Mercury Theatre's general consensus, my thoughts on this novel were clearer than those toward The Sparrow. I hated this book. I found the characters to be paper-thin this time around and too many times, Russell steps out of the narrative to pigeonhole. For example,

"Believers found it a miraculous confirmation of God's existence and evidence of Divine Providence. Skeptics declared it a fraud - a clever trick by the Jesuits to distract attention from their earlier failures. Atheists did not dispute the music's authenticity, but they considered it just another fluke that proved nothing - like the universe itself. Agnostics admitted the music was magnificent, but suspended judgment, waiting for who knew what?" - page 431

Come on! Jesus Christ, how more trite can you get? The entire plot felt completely contrived. And what pisses me off worse? It hurts The Sparrow because it resolves Sandoz. From the Reader's Guide: "I left my main character impaled on the horns of a dilemma, and I wasn't able to let it go at that." Why the hell not? It makes for a better ending - don't answer the damn question. That is an ending, separate from this. Ambiguous endings are meant to make you wonder what happened on the surface, but the real point of them is to be ambiguous. That's a message. And this isn't a general rule, either - I don't hate the movie 2010, for example, just because it answers the questions that 2001 left open. In fact, I like 2010. It's a different, but still good, entity. This is not.

(And oh, by the way, when you're only dealing with four basic building blocks of DNA, of course you will find overlapping sections. It's not God; it's an odds game. Only if putting the DNA into a Tricorder and having it show you a video of someone telling you that you've been designed does it really imply design.)

The occasional references to things that have changed through history and Sandoz's pop culture references just got annoying. (The one exception was when Russell finally admitted that Nico was Luca Brasi on page 385.)

A couple of comments that I held in the back of my mind when I was reading:
SOCIAL CONTRACT ... IN ... SPACE! - Response to Sofia
page 346 - Only good page
(And the ever-frequent) Bullshit!

And the thing that annoyed me the most: "...the difference between God and science, that there were different ways - parallel ways - to think about the world." - page 259. This isn't true, though it's a convenient out if you don't want to be controversial. Science deals with everything that is empirically disprovable (Disprovable. That's why I loved Sandoz's line, that he "felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust."-page 93 - that's the way you do it, goddamn it. That's the way you do it!). The God hypothesis itself is not disprovable, but that God is exerting influence is. Following Occam's Razor, nothing in either book happened because of God because that would be an unnecessarily complicated step in the causation. Everything can be explained the simpler way, equally well, so it should be.

And that quote that I nested in the parentheses is a great example of the wonder of knowledge that appears only a few times in the book. Scientists love to try to disprove theories. They are constantly thinking of ways to (dis)prove parts of Einstein's relativity. Just a few months ago (or maybe it was a year or more, I'm not sure), NASA sent up a satellite to test a part of relativity and it came back positive. But the point is, they don't take any part of relativity on faith; they are always testing, always looking for holes. And of course, they've found them, in the way that everything we understand breaks down at the quantum level. So they're working on ways to explain the mechanisms at work there. And then scientists will test the hell out of them, because that's the only way to prove whether they're right or wrong. Bringing this back out of the real world and back into a theology discussion, most organized religions (including the one in which the Jesuits ostensibly believe) believe in some kind of intervention or Providence. This can be disproven. So science and God are not parallel - not non-intersecting. They do.

Going back to our discussion on The Sparrow and if they could have known better: "The subsequent unexplained disappearance of the Magellan party suggests that they, too, fell prey to the near impossibility of avoiding fatal mistakes on Rakhat." - page 17 (emphasis mine).

And then there's the reference back to the beginning of The Sparrow: where that novel began, "It was predictable, in hindsight," this one contains the line, "It was absurd, in hindsight - the very idea that a handful of humans might have been able to do everything right the first time." - page 21. Again, my bullshit detector goes off as I think to myself, "NOT JUST IN HINDSIGHT! IT WAS ABSURD. PERIOD."

Requiem for a Genoan

2008-04-22T02:27:00.003-04:00

I'll be the first to admit it; I'm a proud apologist for Columbus. My analysis of his actions as described in Todorov and his own travel journals aside, I can't help but be taken in by the romance of risking everything to explore distant lands.

Last semester, a resolution went through the Undergraduate Senate here at AU that basically sought to condemn Columbus for actions that lead to genocide. I was taken aback by the nature of this resolution, knowing as I did that Columbus would have been aghast at the idea of purposefully obliterating an entire race of people. I argued with several Student Senators, finally bringing some around with examples of Columbus' love of nature, but it was pretty shocking how uninformed the majority of people generally were concerning the facts of Columbus' voyages.

Then again, how much knowledge is enough? What is the magic point when you know enough to condemn someone? If understanding leads to love, then we choose not to understand someone when we judge them. A judgment represents a conscious decision to disregard an individual's defense of his own actions, and to hold him to a separate standard than that which he holds for himself.

Even though I wanted to tell these people that they were wrong about Columbus, I realized it was futile. Their arguments, after all, were basically irrational; they were condemning actions which had been a direct influence on their own existences. I was stunned by the absurdity of individuals wearing American flag pins castigating Columbus, as though the country they love could exist in its present shape without him. Madness.

Wonder: Just Add Discovery

2008-04-20T13:29:00.000-04:00

One of our recurring themes in recent weeks has been where one finds a sense of wonder. With The Sparrow, we've seen what can happen when your wonder alarm goes off without any kind of degree of skepticism or, more generally, rational thought beyond, "Ohmigod! Ohmigod! We gotta go!"

So they got caught up in the "beauty of belief." But what about the real wonder and beauty you get by actually knowing something? By really learning? Shouldn't that make grown men just as giddy, or indeed giddier?

The Discovery Channel's latest ad certainly has an answer:

And before I get any complaints about Discovery's shortcomings, read this too. It reminds me of the delicate interplay in The Right Stuff between Buck Rogers and bucks. Yes, we blow stuff up to get you to watch, but we are teaching you something in the meantime.

But anyway, the message is, be thrilled to know, or at least know as well as we can. There's a whole universe out there to discover, and what's more satisfying than doing so? Deep thoughts for your 4/20.

Todorov and Jazz

2008-04-17T16:40:00.005-04:00

What's the problem with listening to jazz or folk records? The problem is, one of the cornerstones of both jazz and folk is that they are played differently every time, adapting to the precise moment in time when they are played. If you've heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris," you have only heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris." In a real way, you have not heard the music, nor can you yet understand it. What's the solution? Well, the Count is dead, so that takes being there out of it. But you can listen to more recordings. You can begin to get a feel for the essence of the music. Still, though, there is a real way in which none of us ever have heard and ever will hear the Count's "April in Paris."

There is a fundamental level on which we can never completely understand anyone but ourselves. Even an individual mind puts up mental blocks to things that it cannot reconcile with its own person. We can, however, get a good approximation of another person's though processes by observing their environment and history and we may even be able to predict to a fair degree an individual's personal actions.

To me, this is what Columbus comes down to. My point in mentioning this is not to say that Columbus is unknowable. Quite to the contrary, we can reconstruct a lot of Columbus from his legacy. My main point in bringing this back up is that, as I said in class, Columbus may have had other options that seemed obvious and equally likely to him that we cannot even envision. In the ultimate form of hindsight bias, we can only see what happened as what could have happened. Unfortunately, we would need more than a few hundred pages of Todorov to even imagine the alternatives.

By that same token, I do not believe that Columbus was schizophrenic or particularly deluding himself. I do believe that he encountered some sort of cognitive dissonance when he swore his crew to claiming that Cuba was the mainland, but I do not believe his position toward the natives would have seemed crazy to Columbus or any of his crew.

I keep bringing up that for both The Sparrow and The Conquest of America, I felt the characters and situations to be farcical. That is, they present improbable but eminently possible situations. Of course, in the case of Todorov, we know that the events could actually happen because they did. But being in Columbus's position, with Columbus's dispositions that are so foreign - alien - to us, I do not imagine that he saw two irreconcilable world views fighting for attention. Rather, his different set of pretensions led him to a wholly different understanding of the other.

Thanks to ST:TNG's "Darmok," I've been toying around with the linguistic idea that we do not have a distinction between alien and alien, principally because we have not met any of the extraterrestrial variety. The word alien comes from Latin and is closely related to alias - of or belong to another. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (the other OED, I guess...), the term was first applied to foreigners around 1330 and was first used to mean "from another planet" in 1944.

Eh, whatever. I don't see where this is going. In any case, I'm looking forward to Children of God to see what He hath wrought upon Rakhat. Buncha amateurs. Why the hell did you land? ... Farce.

Oh, forgot one thing - I'm glad that I'm not the only one who believes that the best way to hate someone is to know them really well. There's also a third category that we didn't bring up - people we admire, even idolize, find out more about them, hate them, but still idolize them. The Pattons or MacArthurs of the world. Or the ancient Greek war heroes. Douchebags, but idols nevertheless.

Tragedy?

2008-04-15T01:47:00.002-04:00

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." - Old adage, probably not by Mark Twain, but most certainly attributed to him

As we were walking out of Martin "The Horror" Sheen's little shindig, Phil pretty much summed up The Conquest of America, something to the effect that it's exactly The Sparrow, only real. Upon, further review, yep, that sums it up to a great extent. I could go on about how great the lies that we always learn about the conquest of America are (Conquest? America wasn't conquered! The land was just there, and it was, like, free! Conquered! Pish! Communist...)

However, I'd prefer to just mention the events in their relation to the two quotes up top. Putting those two together, I'd challenge that the first time is not itself tragedy, but simply comedy with a lack of removal. My first comment in class about The Sparrow last week concerned my being infuriated with the book while simultaneously enjoying it for presenting its events practically as farce: You know, thanks to the flashback format, that the mission and Sandoz are doomed, but you see the whole thing play out as farce. It is, in a very real way, comical. The frustrating part is that the farce is hidden and not specifically brought out by the narrative voice, except in the few circumstances we discussed. Since I was reading Flaubert at the same time as The Sparrow, it reminded me greatly of the narrative style of Sentimental Education, though American sci-fi and French realism don't exactly line up. Still, style indirect libre much?

Here, too, we can view history with the same detached irony because the process is so farcical. We know what the endgame is, and I couldn't help but laugh along the way? To paraphrase Maddox, Oops! I'm racist.

By the way, freaky sidenote, the last page of the epilogue has a completely flattened bug in it. Even weirder, since the book came shrink wrapped from Amazon. Not going to lie, I tossed the book across the room when I saw it.

The Structure of Todorov

2008-04-14T23:43:00.002-04:00

I touched on this in my wiki post on Todorov; I'm very fascinated by the meaning behind the order in which he chose to discuss the various conquistadors/priests. The way he leads us through the progression of European understanding of the Indians is especially interesting considering the multiple spectra they each occupy. Love for the Indians, understanding of them, the ability to recognize value in those who are different, the ability to use or interpret signs; Todorov creates a highway of meaning, but it is an ironic one. As understanding of the Indians increases, we move further and further away from the time of their prominence (and eventually from their existence).

We can posit a critical moment in history when scholars like Sahagun have maximized their knowledge and understanding, but the Indians themselves are on the verge of disappearing (either from being slaughtered, dying of sickness, or interbreeding with the colonists/slaves). What information might have existed in this last moment? Of course, I'm assuming a knowledge on the part of the scholars that never existed. We can only ponder what has been lost.

Conquest of...

2008-04-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

"The conquest of information leads to that of the kingdom." (pg 104)

"In other words, is any influence, by the very fact of its externality, detrimental? (pg 177)

In conjunction with The Sparrow, these were my two favourite quotes from The Conquest of America. They highlight certain aspects of the Jesuit Mission's interaction on Rakhat and how that could potentially have led to either a conquest - had they been more successful in communicating - and how in actuality the human presence merely had a detrimental effect because its externality upset the existing balance.
The different ideas of communication were particularly interesting to me. Todorov points that such a seemingly arbitrary difference as viewing time linearly or cyclically could propagate such deep cultural misinterpretations. In this light, its no wonder that merely planting a garden could wreak such devastation.
Todorov also caused me to acknowledge that because interhuman - though from radically different cultures - interaction with the "other" can be so contorted, our potential contact with any other species of "other" has a high probability of disaster. If humans can't even judge and communicate with eachother, how well do we expect to do when faced with something absolutely foreign?
Along that pessimistic line of thought: the second quote I mentioned also seems only to ask if there is any hope for positive relations with the "other". I'm not sure. Todorov, though incredibly interesting, offers only a possibility of success on this front in future interactions, but nothing for certain.

The Sparrow

2008-04-13T14:53:00.002-04:00

I think The Sparrow was my favourite book we've read. More of the tragedy variety, but still. Brilliantly written, speckled with humour, and it really made me ponder.
I think the shortest quote to sum most of my impressions up is found on page 404, "...comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Emphasis on the "awful," part.
I was reminded of Dune, by the foreshadowing, but not through prophecies- through what we'd already been told of the mission to Rakhat. The first chapter tells that Emilio Sandoz was the only survivor, we merely have to wait and see how everyone dies. I just reread that last sentence and it sounds horribly gruesome, but that was what I was thinking while I read. I wonder how everyone dies, because I already know they will. It was an incredibly effective method for Russell to emphasize how important the religious themes were to everything that unfolded. Switching back and forth to Emilio's inquisition and recovery with Vincent Giuliani maintains that connection with all of Emilio's actions on Rakhat being for the Society of Jesus, and how whatever his story is leading up to, what it is causing him to question is his spirituality.
If Russell had merely written this as a narrative of the Jesuit Mission to Rakhat, and tacked Emilio's return to Earth and "recovery," onto the end, her message wouldn't have evolved in the same manner. Her religious arguments would have been lost and Emilio's final acknowledgment of having been raped would not have truly represented how deeply he'd been injured, rejected.
The inclusion of different religions also strengthened the overall theme: Jimmy the Catholic, Jewish Sofia, atheist George and Anne Edwards, and all of the personal beliefs of the various Jesuits. I appreciated the spectrum of argument this gave Russell.
Of course, everyone dying and Emilio's life being reduced to confetti was a bit disheartening, but didn't weaken a brilliant novel.

Mistakes? Likely not.

2008-04-13T11:04:00.000-04:00

Many of the posts people have written for this text are discussing the idea we talked about in class that the crew somehow made a mistake in either the planning or execution of the mission, however I would like to consider this, not as we did, looking back on the mission with an outsider’s perspective, but by trying to imagine if different decisions and actions were even feasible considering who the characters are and how they think.

I believe we are all agreed that at least until the point where the signal from Rakhat arrives, no one does anything to cause the mission to fail. At this point, the first possibility for different action takes place, instead of calling in his coworkers and superiors, upon receiving the transmission from another world, Jimmy brings his friends in to hear it. If he hadn’t done this, the Jesuit mission may never have been planned because Emilio’s comment would not have sent everyone thinking as to how it could be accomplished. Calling this the mistake that caused the mission to fail is interesting, however, because it implies that the only way the mission could have been successful is if it had been nonexistent. Granted, in that case, none of the characters would have met their horrible fates, but it is a cop out as a choice for preventing the failure of the mission.

Discussing the planning of the mission, I believe that saying they had other choices they could have made in the way they chose to run the mission betrays the characters. Though I agree with most of the class that unmanned craft and attempts at radio communication prior to sending a manned mission would have been a good idea, the characters that we meet in this text would never have gone that route. When everything seems to work out in every stage of planning, why would they question their plan? Particularly as each instance of things working out further backs up Emilio’s belief that they are going on a mission planned for them by God.

Within the mission, I don’t think the fuel situation that stranded them on the planet would have made much of a difference. Most of the deaths that took place would not have been prevented by making a timely retreat to the orbiter. D.W. and Anne were attacked out of the blue, Sofia, Jimmy and the others were caught up in a local conflict that resulted in their deaths. None of these would have been prevented by being able to return to the asteroid. Even if they had fuel, I believe Emilio still would have accepted the protection of Supaari.

The one aspect of the mission that I believe they truly made a mistake in was the planting of a garden. They had enough scientists with them to understand the ways in which foreign species can take over a new land and disrupt an ecology, even though they say they chose low-impact plants, I don’t think that they would have necessarily planted a garden without having more data on the local ecology. Side note: who can think of another time when a garden got people into trouble? (Hint: it’s religious, too).

For a discussion of Sofia’s rebellion see Jen’s post, where you can also get a look at our fun list of who should go on a contact mission.

Affirmative Action in Space

2008-04-10T20:45:00.003-04:00

We didn't have time to discuss it in class, but I wanted to raise an important issue that nobody else seemed to consider in staffing their expeditions. Is it important for us to stock our ship with a racially and sexually diverse staff?

It makes sense to me that the team we send isn't only important in its capacity to keep themselves alive and interface with the aliens; they are equally important in the impression they give of us as a species. Are you comfortable, then, with the idea of the aliens imagining us as a bunch of white guys?

Your first instinct is to say "well, whoever is the most skilled at each necessary position." A fair argument, but what if you have two people who would be equally suited to the task, only one is white, and the other black? Do you follow the path of fairness - deciding randomly - or make the choice that better represents our diversity (and out identity) as a species?

Same goes for male-female; in the book, Voelker (eternal scum as he is portrayed) claims that the greatest mistake was in sending women along on the mission. Would you be too worried about the possible relationships that could develop and harm the mission, or the possibility of pregnancy? Or would you rather represent our species properly, as sexually dimorphic but otherwise, ceteris parabus, equals?

Finally, A Simple Answer

2008-04-09T19:24:00.003-04:00

Could they have known better?
Yes. They did make realistically avoidable mistakes. And, as I argue in my response to Lindsay's post, we could even accept these characters not making them, or at least making less of them.

Sandoz's first tragic mistake is believing that the series of events placed before him was the result of divine intervention. As Felipe says at the end, (even if there is a creator), the creator does not change the rules of its creation. There is no such thing as divine providence. Of course, there are gigantic problems with a Christian or any religious believer agreeing to that because they're based on a book that they purport was given to them by God.

Every subsequent problem that the team has is caused by Sandoz's mistake. Here's why he shouldn't have made it and why the rest of the team should have stopped him:

1. They got a "dumb" message.
Getting a radio transmission of singing implies several things: a) The environment in which the sound was created contains a substance through which sound travels; b) There exists in that environment a group of people who have the electrical know-how to create a radio; c) The group is most likely attempting to communicate with its own kind. This last point implies some other structures. However, receiving the radio transmission does not even imply the existence of a planet. For all we know, there is a ship passing through the star system, transmitting a normal message back to its home planet. It also does not imply that the message was intended to be received by anyone else. "We always expected a string of primes." (p. 93) This kind of message implies that someone is actually looking to make interplanetary contact. No part of singing implies contact.

2. Nothing in the message tells them anything about the planet (assuming it is a planet).
If we are to assume that the message is from a planet (several years of observation would be a good way of learning if, when we get there, the people who sent the message wouldn't be gone), we have no knowledge of it. Therefore, we cannot realistically prepare for it. What if the planet was substantially bigger or denser and had too much gravity? What if there was no oxygen? What if the species that produced the message is so xenophobic that they destroy anything coming near it? What if they're afraid of near-planet asteroids and have a way of destroying them if they get too close to their planet? What if they have superbugs that can and would immediately adapt to the human immune system and kill anyone who set down within a matter of hours? What if all the plants that grow are poisonous? What if their planet is governed by religious zealots who have a Centauri-centric view of the universe and claim that the stars are points of light on a black sphere? Do I have to keep going, or is it obvious that I'm just scratching the surface of things that could go wrong?

3. Divine providence doesn't even make sense.
Short point: the people in that room were not the most qualified to go to another planet. Oh, yeah, let's have a soap opera on an asteroid on the way over! That's a great group to send to another planet to make first contact! Even sending a musicologist is presuming that the music is music and not just communication.

So send a damn probe. Even if you follow it a year later, send a goddamned probe. Send something that can move fast, land, and send back data. Get it there in five years. Put the Golden Record on it, just in case "they" find it. And while you're at it, send a string of primes to them. If they actually have decent radio technology and they're looking for life, send them a message.

Skepticism versus Cynicism
A few times in class (and I tried to correct the mistake each time), a couple of people mentioned that the team should have been more cynical. That's not right because cynicism gets you no further than blind faith, just in the other direction. Cynicism is contemptuous distrust of human nature and behavior (says Merriam-Webster) and is not based in empirical findings. (Of course, the M-W definitions are as limited as dictionary definitions usually are: the first definitions of "cynic," "cynical," and "cynicism" all just point to each other) Skepticism is an attitude of doubt toward all things. Skepticism is informed doubt, and in our age, takes the form of the scientific method. "See uncertainty," says M-W. A skeptic never stops asking why and has a high standard of proof. (A cynic, by contrast, has an impossible standard of proof.)

Love it, Hate it, or Both
As I mentioned in class, I loved and hated the book for the exact same reasons at the exact same instants. About 3/4 through the class, my reasoning sort of coalesced. I love the prose and sympathize with all the characters, yet I detest everything that happens and everything that the characters do. This is absolutely a credit to Mary Doria Russell's skill as a writer. I'm looking forward to loving and hating Children of God in two weeks...

Until then, Gort! Klaatu barada nikto! Robots + Bernard Herrmann = awesome. Imagine if Taxi Driver had robots...

a near miss

2008-04-08T21:14:00.001-04:00

Something like a sample of what next week has to offer...

Psychology

2008-04-08T10:02:00.001-04:00

Like Jen, I was very aware of the parallels between the alien/future societies in this book and in Time Machine, though the societies on Rakhat were much more developed than the Morlocks and Eloi. I suppose that what I found most interesting in the alien contact portion of the book was the team’s willingness to settle into a routine life among a group of people who were obviously not the society they came looking for. I understand that some of them wanted to take the time to study certain cultural aspects more in depth, and maybe it’s just me, but I would want to get more of an overarching view of Rakhat before settling in to examine the details.

The part of the book that was most interesting to me overall, however, is the portion set farther in the future, when we see the struggles of the other Jesuits to help Emilio and draw his story out. The psychological transformation Emilio goes through between the two time periods is so huge and seemingly abrupt that it continued to draw me on to find out what happened to him. Of the two Emilios, however, I found the traumatized one more engaging to read about because he was more complex and his struggles seemed more real.

I also enjoyed the interactions Emilio had with John Condotti and with the Father General. Both of them were trying to help Emilio to recover, but did not really know what it was they were trying to help him recover from. Because of this lack of knowledge, they would make mistakes in the ways they chose to deal with him. The Father General was more perceptive in his treatment of Emilio, but both men developed a loyalty to Emilio throughout the story even before they knew all of the details of what he had been though. I think much of this is due to Emilio’s perseverance. He does not give up on himself when he has trouble with his hands, and as the Father General points out, “Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all” (400).

Bringing this back to something more relevant to the class, I was interested in the beauty being good concept that Phil brought up as well. Not only does Russell have the characters immediately assume that the beautiful music is good, but she also spends much time discussing Sofia’s beauty, the beauty of Rakhat, and several other things. My question is: where does that leave D.W., whose appearance Russell takes pains to disparage every chance she gets?

Eighty Directions

2008-04-08T03:07:00.006-04:00

There are about eighty directions in which I could go in this post. However, I've been advised by TPTB(PTJ) to keep my posts more to a length befitting posts and not essays. No promises on the reflections, though, and I plan to continue making pictures of Carl Schmitt and Telly Savalas. Feel free to skip down a little. I've made it obvious when the good stuff starts up.

I simultaneously immensely enjoyed and detested The Sparrow. While reading, I would come to those discordant conclusions at the same instant. If anything, this led me to deeply respect Russell as an author... and the Wachowski brothers, perversely. I've caught the second Matrix about ten times in the last two weeks. Every program in the Matrix is deterministic, perhaps most notably the Keymaker. So listening to Sandoz's deterministic, hindsight-biased view of the events that unfolded before him struck me as farce. We all know that stories don't work that way these days. Neo chooses Trinity, the Matrix doesn't get reloaded, Elrond takes over the world.

Of course, this is Sandoz's fatal flaw: thinking that God was playing a role in his life. The final description of God is the one that I'll use to link to the one other of the eighty directions I'll go in for this post. The whole thing about the sparrow falling, how bad things happen to good people, why a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. You know, those little injustices. And it finally comes down to the idea that if there is a creator (leaving "God" out of it), he abides by the laws that he created and does not interfere. He can love his creation, he can watch it, he can laugh and cry at and with it, but he does not interfere. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice; Stephen Hawking later replied that God does, indeed, play dice. In fact, God doesn't have the dice anymore.

Which brings me to my point. (START READING HERE) The discovery of the radio signal purposely alludes to Carl Sagan's Contact. How am I sure?

"See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence."-p93

In Contact, the message that Earth receives from Vega is, at first blush, a repeating series of prime numbers. And:

"Yeah, well, we're about as likely to collect as Carl Sagan is, and he's been dead for years."-p103

If there was any doubt in my mind that this section is a direct allusion to Contact, this removed it. Further, the concepts of skepticism and truth found through science are brought up a number of times in the next few pages. Anne, for her part, "played Official Skeptic," capitalized and everything, though she was not particularly good at it. Skepticism itself is treated as somewhat of a joke:

"Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternative explanations... 'But none of it sounds like what we picked up.'"-p113

And finally, the people chosen to go on the first contact mission (this is different from the movie version) are a diverse bunch with religion playing a significant role on who is chosen to go. As I'm trying not to make this an all-out dissertation comparing Contact and The Sparrow, I'll try once again to confine myself to a few points.

One of the reasons why I like and detest the book at the same time is the treatment of skepticism and the role of actual hard science in first contact. Additionally, I find the weird run-up to the launch to be, well, stupid. This is part of the overall problem I have with the first section of the book: it explains that the world is different, but only gives us tiny glimpses into it. At the same time, I enjoy these same sections because they seem farcical considering what we know will happen to Sandoz and the others. Satirizing would be too strong a word, warning to soft, to describe what I think Russell is going for in this depiction. Further messing with the whole thing is how weak Anne is as a skeptic:

"I believe in God the way I believe in quarks... People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did."-p110

Obviously, she has never heard of Occam's Razor. As we find out in the end, quarks fundamentally describe the universe; God does not. And if God is not necessary for the universe to exist, or rather is the more complicated answer, God does not belong in the equation. Quarks do.

I have more, but it's a discussion probably best confined to people who have read both books. Mainly so I don't give anything away. As usual, my substantive post has ended up a bit sprawling and directionless; class tomorrow will surely better order my thoughts for my reflection.

[A personal note on the author: I'm three degrees of separation from Mary Doria Russell, apparently. Mary Doria Russell married the college roommate of my parents' tax attorney (a huge sci-fi fan - I sent him a copy of our syllabus). He went to their wedding in the '70s and later even got his copy of The Sparrow autographed. I also feel a special bond with Chicago-based Russell because of the brief mentions of us long-suffering Cubs fans. Pity that in her world, we haven't won yet - this "100th anniversary of our last World Series title" thing this year has got me hoping, anyway. As any Cub fan can tell you, hope springs eternal. Go, Cubs, Go!]

a sparrow's chance in hell

2008-04-07T11:29:00.009-04:00

To begin, I'd like to say that my favorite line in The Sparrow comes from Father General Guiliani on page 402. After reading through the terrible account of Emilio's final months on Rakhat, I was as emotionally strung out as possible. Then, in response to a simile supposing Emilio had fallen in love with God, comes the following:

"'Offhand,' said the Father General wearily, in a voice dry as August grass, 'I'd say the honeymoon is over.'"

I found this line to be cathartic, a sort of rationalization of everything that had happened in the book to that point. It really cast into relief the meaning of a relationship one has with God...Todorov discusses the impossibility of two-way communication with the supernatural (sorry to refer to something we haven't yet read as a class), but one may interpret nearly anything as a sign from God, and who is Todorov to declare that it isn't? Reality is, at best, defined by our ability to perceive it.

I don't feel qualified to wade into the sort of mucky theological discussions that could emerge from this incredibly dense and complex book. My original plan was to write a section about the religious elements and then a separate section about the sci-fi elements of the novel, but then it occurred to me that the only other The Sparrow post up now features that same distinction, and I assume many others will too. Therefore, I think I'd rather consider the religious and sci-fi elements as all-of-a-kind; after all, we had no problem with it in Dune, where the religious and technological had mixed over millennia. The fact that this book opens approximately ten years from now should serve as no obstacle in this regard.

In case you didn't catch the reading group questions, I'd like to take an excerpt to set the groundwork for Earth circa 2019. This is from section 2:

"This story takes place from the years 2019 to 2060. The United States is no longer the predominant world power, having lost two trade wars with Japan, which is now supreme in both space and on Earth. Poverty is rampant. Indentured servitude is once more a common practice, and "future brokers" mine ghettos for promising children to educate in return for a large chunk of their lifetime income."

By 2060, it is strongly implied, the Earth is straining to support its population of 16 billion. On page 379, Emilio points out the suffering of children as the price humanity pays for individual freedoms. The strict population controls on Rakhat may be horrible, he admits, but at least they do not allow for the starvation of the impoverished. Indeed, it seems that the technological developments on Earth even at that point cannot compensate for the burdens of the masses, as humanity must turn to space to gather enough minerals to support industry. The Jesuits are strong, so Earth apparently retains its spiritual hunger. The citizens of Rakhat, on the other hand, seem to be completely occupied by material concerns; the Runa cannot really imagine anything else, and the Jana'ata are, for the most part, too worried about status (presumably so that they will be able to reproduce) to waste much time thinking about their souls. With one visible exception, even their art is purely hedonistic or practical. Their songs are used to coordinate hunting or to commemorate a particularly memorable tryst. The only exception is the bizarre liquid-painting ritual the Marc observes, which may or may not be a form of worship; Russell never touches on it again.

Although Russell's idea for this novel came from the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage, the differences are immense. Although Columbus explicitly set out to convert other civilizations to Christianity, the Jesuits are on no Mission to Rakhat. As far as we are told, the only time any member of the expedition hopes that any of the aliens may worship God is Emilio immediately before he is first raped.

Really, though, I was surprised at how unlike us these aliens were (concerning religion), considering how ridiculously similar they wound up being in many other ways. I was disappointed by the physiological similarities, especially in terms of nourishment. Having heard about scurvy throughout the bookout, I was hoping that some aspect of the team's diet would be the cause, that I could see something uniquely alien. But it was not to be; while some foods tasted good or bad, it was almost all food, and easily digested by humans at that. My disappointment extended to the immediate physical similarity of the aliens to certain Earth species, their apparently entirely verbal language, their possession of identical sets of emotional responses (right down to, I was horrified to read, laughing!). The differences weren't sharp enough to cause me to feel that this was something alien; rather, we entered Uncanny Valley territory, something human but slightly off. The sad part is that the similarity wasn't obvious right away. Only after learning a little bit about the Jana'ata did I realize we were basically the same, with just a few deviations.

I could have felt joy at the idea that we share so much with these aliens. Unfortunately, I had gotten myself so psyched up over the idea of aliens being truly "different" from us that I found the slightest similarity grating (which isn't to say that the similarities I found were only slight!) Here I'm reminded of the Mulefa creatures from the His Dark Materials series, which lived in a world that had taken an entirely different morphological path in its evolution than our vertebrate history. They were sentient, but communicated physically and verbally at the same time, making it difficult for humans to replicate their language accurately. That is the kind of different alien I was hoping for! Not a bunch of sociopathic ecology nuts in cat suits.

Lastly, I feel that the major thing that caused the expedition to go wrong was its assumption that it would meet with a more intelligent species than humanity, whereas the residents of Rakhat are clearly our technological inferiors. Next time, let's hope they send some sort of vast warship filled to the brim with gung-ho space marines, to better interface with the ~~enemy~~aliens.

P.S. Did anyone else see any similarities between the Jana'ata and the Ssi-ruuk? Just asking.

Conceptual Wars

2008-04-06T20:49:00.002-04:00

I’m going to preface this reflection by saying that much of our discussion from this class focused on concepts that I don’t know much, if anything, about (ex. European history, which I have never studied, and other political theories or conflicts that I’ve not heard of). Because of this, I can’t really comment well on our discussion, so instead I’m going to bring up in more detail one of the points I found interesting in the text.

As Sarah mentioned, our society has become much more likely to declare war on an idea than on a group of people, for example, the war on terror, or the war on drugs. I think this relates back to Schmitt’s discussion of a pacifist movement gaining enough hostility toward war to declare a war against war on page 36. Long quote, bear with me:

If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove pacifism truly possesses political energy because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and enemy. If, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possibility, war and even the reason for war.…This war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity….[the enemy] must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.

Though practically, this would be a war between pacifists and nonpacifists, the war would be more accurately described as a war against war, and in order for war to be defeated, the pacifists must utterly destroy anyone who is not a pacifist so that no possibility of another war could exist.

The same could be said of any of the wars we have declared on concepts. The war on terror will never be complete until we have completely annihilated every terrorist in the world. Simply pushing them back into their “borders” would not work both because we would have to determine what constituted the border of a terrorist organization, and also because once pushed to that border, the remaining terrorists would be unwilling to admit defeat, and continue to participate in terror acts. Similarly, the war on drugs is in all practicality impossible to complete unless all drugs, and people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs were destroyed.

Self-Evident, Redux?

2008-04-05T14:03:00.013-04:00

I enjoyed our discussion about Schmitt, though now that I reflect upon it, I haven't raised my opinion of Schmitt at all. I still think that his points are, for the most part, obvious. His definition of political still strikes me as annoyingly limited, actually. As I said in my first post, "politics" is what happens when two people interact. So I'll start from there.

Politics is what makes us different from atoms, which is what makes social science different from physics. My definition is not exactly a new one, either, but I don't purport it to be. In fact, the phrasing I'm using is reminiscent of Complexity by Waldrop. That book is essentially a brief history of the founding of the Complexity school of thought: that life, economics, evolution, etc., are governed by a simple set of rules that cause them to do some pretty complex things. It's related closely to autocatalytic sets. Anyway, at one point in this whole process, the social scientists are talking with the physicists, and they decide that the main difference between the two is that physicists deal with "dumb" particles. So political science is the study of "smart particles," ones that can remember the past and think about the future. And politics is what happens that's different from a dumb particle's reaction.

And yes, as you interact with people, you decide who are your friends and who are your enemies. So maybe Schmitt's a predecessor to Kojak: Who loves ya, baby? But I find this whole thing to be too obvious to even have been revolutionary in 1929.

So how could Schmitt have become famous? Well, because his IR implications seem to indicate that since killing is the only political thing you can do, you had might as well design your government to kill people really well. So how about that? Hitler. Maybe this is the vital piece of political wisdom that that Federation historian forgot in "Patterns of Force," which I mentioned earlier (note: I'm linking to a wiki, but it's for a piece of recent fiction and it's Memory Alpha, where I trust that there are enough Star Trek geeks like myself to remove the errors present in Wikipedia).

Anyway, back to smart and dumb particles and Carl Schmitt. I'm surprised that we didn't get into the more Nietzschean implications of Schmitt's final warning. Okay, we've got us and them. We're good, they're evil. But now we're at that postmodern point where we can't claim that their evil because we can listen to them. So now it's "We represent humanity" versus "We represent humanity" on the other side. You lose meaning, war starts only making meta-sense, and the next thing you know, crabs on a beach.

Which brings me to my actual point, the nature of postmodern war. Unfortunately, we only just barely touched upon this a couple of times in class. Most obviously, we hit upon it during the Cola Wars discussion - is there a limit to propoganda? Well, the Cola Wars seem to tell us that yes, there is an end to propaganda. In war, you need to be able to villify your enemy, or else there would be no reason to fight against them. How do you do that? Propaganda? But what if you can hear their side too, thanks to the miracle of modern communication? How can you claim that they are the evil other when you can talk to them? The final implication is that a postmodern war is unwinnable. This too is pretty self-evident, considering the empirical evidence of every war after WWII, and how great is it that we haven't actually "declared" war since then, either (I agree with PTJ: this legal distinction is significant)?

We find these implications in Aliens, Ender's Game, and Starship Troopers. How do you have a war against something in the future? Make it impossible to communicate with them. Though this is probably most evident in Aliens, it's also clearly a significant part of the other two's wars. The only way to win a war after the modern era is to somehow make it a modern war. (Modern in the epoch sense, not the "current" sense.)

So can Schmitt still be relevant as anything other than a history lesson in the postmodern era? I think not. And what's the last paragraph about? I think it's a last attempt to rail against liberalism and what turned into postmodernism, because liberalism puts a dishonest face on the reality of his "politics." It turns out that liberalism is another form of politics, but one that trys to deny that it is "political." How rude. How postmodern. Certainly the path to the Last Man, not the Ubermensch.

And back to Nietzsche and Prof PTJ's post. The quote that he pulls from On the Genealogy of Morals reminds me strikingly of Carl Sagan's reason for studying science. It's also his argument against people who claim that science makes people meaningless in the universe:

Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago. We are, as I like to say, starstuff. (The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

And another of his famous quotes: "We are a way for the universe to know itself." (Cosmos) The study of such things, as Nietzsche's quote indicates, gives meaning to our very existence. Why we seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Why we boldly go where no man has gone before. Or, put more dramatically,

They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That's like saying that you wished you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great great great great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk... Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. (Kirk, TOS: "Return to Tomorrow")

It's a Kirk speech. (voice breaks) Works every time.

[A word on my title: I did a search of Backyard Rocket's RSS feed and found that I've used the term "self-evident" three times in my blogging. My original, from which I got the title for this post, was "Self-Evident Truths," about Manifest Destiny. The second time I mentioned it was in my scathing review of Weber. And now I've used it again for Schmitt. For Stephanson, I used it to say that I hoped that his points were self-evident but I feared that they were not. In Weber's case, I ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt in my class reflection. But for Schmitt, even after our class, I still claim wholeheartedly that his points are indeed self-evident.]

I liked it, at any rate.

2008-04-01T13:05:00.003-04:00

Personally, I found Schmitt’s essay to be a fascinating read. I get that most people seem to have been bored by repetition, both internal and external, or galled by oversimplification (Andrew’s post seems to be an example of both). Perhaps it’s just that as a generally apolitical person, I haven’t run across these ideas before, but I thought that Schmitt’s essay was really fun and interesting, both in the general ideas he discusses, and as a period piece. *Acknowledges general grumbling and disagreement.* I do agree that the way he boils down all political action to the ability of a group to declare war, whether it chooses to do so or not, is an oversimplification of the way we view the “political,” however using the definition of the political that Schmitt provides, his theories have an internal consistency. Schmitt says that, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). Because this is his definition of the political, it makes sense that he continually comes back to conflict, war, and the enemy as defining factors in what makes a state, the political entity. This definition of the political comes across well in his description of party politics. He says

The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. (32)

Thus, Schmitt argues, “party politics” can exist without being “political” because the conflict between the two parties would have to escalate to the level of civil war in order for them to be political entities, or groups that have acquired the power to wage war, whether they exercise that power or refuse to exercise it.

Like Liz, I found that I couldn’t help comparing some of what Schmitt said with concepts we discussed in Ender’s Game. Beginning with Schmitt’s concept of the “other” as “existentially something different and alien” (27). I found it interesting, however that only a few paragraphs later, Schmitt argues that “An enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (28). So, despite our finding something completely alien about our enemies, in order for them to be enemies, something similar must exist between “us” and “them.” Unfortunately, this point comes across in the middle of his differentiation between the private and public enemy, so he does not go on to describe what is similar, only that a similarity exists.

Another concept I found spoke well to our discussion of Ender’s Game is Schmitt’s idea of who can legitimately judge the validity of a conflict. He says

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. (27)

Therefore, as outsiders to the conflict, we cannot judge the legitimacy of the IF’s decision to fight the buggers because we are not actual participants in the conflict. Since the IF believed that the buggers “intend[ed] to negate [their] opponent’s way of life,” they were justified in going to war. Further, Schmitt says, “The justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideal or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy” (49). Since the IF viewed the buggers as a “real enemy,” their war is also justifiable, according to Schmitt.

There are a couple of other quotes that I found interesting, but since you're probably getting tired of reading this post by now, I'll spare you. From reading other posts, you all know much more than I do about political theory, so feel free to correct any misapprehensions on my part.

Unless the Aliens Come!

2008-04-01T01:34:00.002-04:00

After I got over the terminology differences between Schmitt and the real world (how's that for a value judgment?), I did not particularly care for the essay. This is not a criticism of the essay form itself - Tim implied that essays are inherently more boring than novels, which I do not believe to be true. For an example of a fascinating, engaging essay on the form of the essay, I'd recommend going over to Paul Graham's site and reading "The Age of the Essay." I guarantee that you will never look at the essay form the same way again.

Back to my criticism. This may be Weber all over again, where the concepts that Schmitt explains have become so ingrained into the language of political science that it is no longer revolutionary, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is only part of the problem. I think that Schmitt does deserve credit for looking at international relations in a unique way, but I think that his terminology differences are largely superficial and indicate that the knowledge he imparts already existed in the political science community.

In particular, his definition of the state - trying to escape from the "the state is political is the state" definition - is severely lacking. His notion of what the state, and by extension, the political, is seems almost pre-Westphalian to me. In this vain, the essay seems to make coherent internal sense, but such a limited version of the state cripples the argument's outside applicability.

Of course, a vital part of nationalism is the identification and destruction of "the other" - be it human, or actually alien (the only condition, apparently, where Earth could unite governmentally without not having something resembling a state anymore). However, a state is different from a nation is different from politics. "Politics" is something that happens when people interact. A "state" is the body which has a right to force over its own territory. A "nation" is a self-identified group of people - an imagined community, if you Benedict. And then there's war... well, this might get too complicated for a blog post.

So I'll leave it at that until our discussion (no laptops, I hope). Pardon me while I whip out my Nationalism.

We'd Like to Enter an Affirmative Defense

2008-03-23T16:25:00.002-04:00

Our class Tuesday bounced back and forth between culpability and rationalizing, but instead of comparing one instance of each to its counterpart, I though that we skipped from one side to another without marrying the two. Here's what I mean, because I'm not sure that made any sense.

We had two examples from the book of who could be guilty, but didn't have proper knowledge: the buggers for the first invasion and Ender. Though we briefly touched on this similarity, I thought that the issue had some legal depth. The way I see it, if the buggers were guilty, Ender was guilty. This certainly has the effect of tying their fates together for all time, which makes the whole cocoon thing work even better as the mysterious prologue-y ending. If we're going to use our own legal tradition, we would have to conclude that no, neither the buggers nor Ender are guilty because they did not have intent to commit a crime. The buggers simply didn't know that they were destroying sentient life and Ender thought he was playing a war simulation. No intent, no crime. However much we'd like retribution for our dead, punishing the buggers is like punishing an innocent man. No intent.

On the communication issue, it seems very deliberate that the "other" is in bug form. Can our bugs on earth show us some kind of intelligence? They create massive, intricate anthills and ordered honeycombs. But we don't think of those as grand works of architecture, even though they could be the Eiffel Tower of anthills, or maybe the I.M. Pei Honeycomb. In much the same way, our buildings could seem so different to an outside race that they just seem like anthills - the sign of life, but not necessarily intelligent life. So, you start clearing out and what's that? Oh, crap, they're fighting back. Well, bees fight back when you hit their honeycomb. Oh, crap, they've got some pretty sophisticated stuff. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe we should try talking to them.

So let's try! Meanwhile, from Earth's perspective, this entire thing has been an unprovoked attack. An attack, not an accident, not a misunderstanding. So you prepare to wipe the sons of bitches off the face of the... plane of the universe with all necessary speed. In that sense, as a race, humans had every right to send their fighters off into space via that other neat affirmative defense, self-defense. Your entire history with these things is that they come and attack you. Even though your best option is to collude, to put this into the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, you have no reason to believe that your enemy will collude, so you minimize your losses and wipe your enemy right out of existence. So in that sense, they're justified.

But then there's the problem of communication. Should they have tried communicating, both ways? Absolutely, but it's more complicated than just sending a Red Telephone over with a note that says "Call me!" Maybe they could have started by rattling off a bunch of prime numbers - that's generally a good sign of intelligence. Maybe rip the plaque and the record off of Voyager 1 and give that a shot. You could even send them a turntable to play it on. So yes, there were probably better ways of trying to communicate that the I.F. didn't try. Oops! You just killed off a whole race! Thanks for playing, try again.

And finally, a few words on Aliens. It's a good movie to watch, especially with a proper sound system (though until the model classroom gets a center channel, I'm not comfortable with calling it a proper system). You get all these fun little glimpses into the Company from Paul Reiser's character and you wonder how the hell government exactly works in the future. And it's a shitload better of a movie than Alien^3 or Resurrection.

But cinematically, it doesn't hold a candle to Alien. As Prof. PTJ mentioned, Alien is much more of a horror movie than Aliens, which leaves Aliens something like "Space action." Aliens is filled with the horrible dialogue between the Marines and the annoying kid with the worst scream this side of Six String Samurai. What this film loses that Alien had was a true fear of the Alien. There was only one. And he was a lurking badass that no one knew how to kill. But you can shoot the thing? And it just dies? That's it? What a ripoff. Unfortunately, few people know how to keep an infinite badass alien villian going.

Enter the Borg. They were the infinite evil badass - it was simply impossible to communicate with them. Impossible to reason with them. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own." That's it. That's Borg communication. You get assimilated. That's it. But then, instead of keeping them as infinite cosmic badasses, they get a queen. So it turns out, all of the drones do play second fiddle, instead of all sharing first fiddle. And I don't buy the "I, Borg" thing that individuality ended up in the collective bullshit because Picard says that the Queen was there on the cube that was sent to Earth. And also, Voyager doesn't count. There, I said it.

So back to my point. Alien had the infinite badass and Aliens removed the "infinite." Which doesn't make it a horrible movie, though the Marine dialogue brings it close. It just makes it a considerable letdown from the original. Seriously, the first time I watched it, when the Marines are about to shoot one, I thought to myself, "Oh, shit - you've got another thing coming if you think you can shoot these things." And then they did. Lame.

But again, it's not a bad movie. Alien^3 was a bad movie. Resurrection was godawful. It's just the 2010 to Kubrick's 2001. It kills the mystery, though it leaves something generally satisfying in its place. But it kills the infinite badass.

Now, I'm just imagining what would happen if James Cameron and Michael Bay worked on the same movie. Three hours of gratuitous explosions? I'd watch that.

Genetic Instinct

2008-03-21T16:51:00.011-04:00

Please note that this post has been updated; the third paragraph is new.

The moral component of our discussion in class was founded on intelligence. Specifically, the military intelligence to know whether the buggers had truly realized their mistake and would never attack us again, to know whether the I.F. had made any further attempts to contact the buggers once the ansible was developed (more on this later!), and whether Ender still would have been able to defeat the buggers had he known what he was doing.

Those less squeamish of us, who were willing to act in spite of our acknowledged lack of necessary facts, were not willing to take a risk where the continued existence of humanity was concerned. Although many people disagreed with this position, I don't remember hearing a cohesive argument to the contrary; instead, many people argued that more intelligence was needed, that they wouldn't be able to make a decision given only the information the I.F. claims to have had, or that wiping out another species entirely is just wrong.

Many of you argued that it would be important to know that an attempt at contact had been made; however, if you check out the Ansible entry in the Wikipedia page Concepts in the Ender's Game Series, you'll see that Card's ansible is explicitly designed like a set of two walkie talkies that are attuned to each other; the design prohibits two ansibles that are not constructed at the same time from communicating. Therefore, communication with the buggers through the ansible, based on Card's internally consistent technology, is impossible, and the I.F. would have known this, and decided accordingly.

It seemed obvious to me that, given the intelligence available, a war of extinction would be the only viable choice. That's why I was so very fascinated by all of your contrary views on the subject. We discussed it in class, but Graff's quotation deserves to be repeated:

"Ender, believe me, there's a century of discussion on this very subject. Nobody knows the answer. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us."

According to Graff, individuals can sacrifice themselves, yes, but species cannot decide to stop existing, or as a group agree on a course of action that they know will lead to that outcome. Can an individual, however, decide for the rest of its species whether they can continue existing? Modern technology tells us the answer is yes -- it is (very, very remotely) possible for one person to obtain enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate humanity, if not all at once then at least by thoroughly irradiating the earth and rendering it uninhabitable. That one person can, theoretically, press a button and end our species. But we're discussing making a command decision that bears a risk of the annihilation of the species, rather than a lone madman. So here is the question that ought to be posed to those of you who could not decide to annihilate the buggers:

Do you accept responsibility for the possible death of your entire species?

I can't accept that risk, so I argued that the I.F. made the right decision. How would you argue otherwise?

Ender's Game Reflection

2008-03-20T20:05:00.003-04:00

I agree with Tim that forcing people to address the IF’s choices regarding how to deal with the buggers as though we were the people responsible for the decision and the consequences eliminated the middle ground, but it did so because making the decision personal prevents us from being able to take the easy way out by justifying both positions. I don’t think that this exercise was a bad idea, and I don’t think that people became so entrenched that they could not see the other side. I think that we seemed to be strictly standing for our positions because we were not allowed to have a middle ground. Making the decision a more personal question caused us to have to make firm justifications for whichever side we chose instead of just sitting on the fence.

Though I disagree with much of what was said during class, I enjoyed the discussion because the different opinions were so far opposed that it allowed us to look at the same evidence and see it in completely different ways.

I still think that because of the nature of human thought and drives, when working with the available information, I would make the same decision as IF, as long as attempts at communication continued to fail. I do believe, however, that some form of communication could have been reached if we had sent a small party of people to their world when we arrived, if only to ascertain whether their attitudes still remained hostile. Granted, if they were still hostile, it would be a suicide mission, but it would have at least been a final attempt at getting through to them without having to sacrifice our own people to destroy them.

Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-18T20:36:00.004-04:00

Arthur C. Clarke, author and visionary, is dead at the age of 90. As a class full of science fiction geeks, I think we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.

CNN article
Another

This is the End

2008-03-18T04:03:00.008-04:00

Well, it's about time. My uncle gave me Ender's Game and a couple of other Orson Scott Card books for Christmas (you mean the atheist celebrates Christmas?) at least seven years ago and I never got around to reading it. At the time, and actually until sometime in late 2006, I had never heard a thing about the book except my uncle's recommendation. I guess I should call him up and thank him again for the gift. It was a pretty good book.

Unfortunately for my appraisal of the book, I also just finished reading Contact. Also a book about contact with alien life and how humanity reacts. Vastly different circumstances, though. The full disclosure on this one is that Carl Sagan is one of my idols. I lament that science and rational skepticism have not had such an eloquent and visible champion since his death. He might be my guy - you know the one I'm talking about. "If you could have a conversation with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?" Perhaps one of two people Issac Asimov ever claimed was smarter than he himself (I think the other was a mathematician).

I had to have been 9 when I saw the movie version of Contact. This was before I knew a thing about Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke or just about anybody but Stephen Hawking and Gene Roddenberry. I sort of want to go back there and have a conversation with myself about the movie because though I remember it vividly, I can't imagine the ways in which I enjoyed it when I was 9. It's probably one of the events that defined my atheism. I've meant to read the book since before I even got Ender's Game at some Christmas. And the book's spectacular.

Next rant is that the novel is better than the movie, but that doesn't take away from the movie. The film necessarily removed certain plot elements, especially the Cold War element, because of changed times. There's a lot less to the movie. But it's an excellent movie nevertheless. That's partially because you just can't put all the crap from a book into a movie; they're different media. Even if you did, it wouldn't make a good movie. Douglas Adams was a master of this. He knew what would work on a radio show that he called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then, he knew what would work in a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, he knew what would work in a BBC TV miniseries called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Though all three forms of my favorite "increasingly inaccurately named trilogy" are very much alike, they are also radically different. Visual humor is not audio humor is not written humor. Visual drama is not audio drama is not written drama. What works onscreen is not what works on radio is not what works on the written page. Why the rant? Of course, because V for Vendetta is a good movie. I'm not giving up on this one.

Maybe I should talk about the thing we're actually reading for this week. The point of that long digression was twofold: one, to explain my blasé attitude toward Ender's Game. I'll expand upon that. The second was just to go on a further rant about movies based on novels (I saw an excellent one over break, by the way - No Country for Old Men. I can't believe I didn't catch it in theatres, but oh well.). I was thinking of this over break. The conventional wisdom is, read the book, then see the movie. As with so much of conventional wisdom (or all of it, as John Kenneth Galbraith, the term's inventor, might suggest), I think this needs to be challenged. Relatively, no one who reads the book first is happy with the movie and the book. But see the movie first, and you've got a fighting chance. I realized while reading Contact that I probably wouldn't like the movie as much if I saw it now for the first time, but when I saw the movie first, it became one of my all-time favorites. It still is because I have this personal connection to it. And of course, I understand that a lot of you in this class saw V for Vendetta as a movie before a graphic novel, just as I did, and I know most of you decried the movie. But I think it's also because that's an incredibly fashionable thing to do, especially among geeks. If it's not "The book's better," it's "The English translation sucks. You should learn Farci to read it properly." Perhaps it will soon end up as part of Stuff White People Like, the funniest thing to hit the Internet since Ted Stevens' series of tubes. (Among the Stuff White People Like that we've discussed: Hating Corporations, Barack Obama, Gifted Children (I imagine this'll come up tomorrow), Apple Products, Irony, Knowing What's Best for Poor People, Recycling) Anyway, to me, it's running Microsoft Word and having someone tell you that you haven't really experienced Word until you've read millions of lines of zeroes and ones. I'm sure there's a beautiful elegance in the zeroes and ones, but for the moment, I'm typing a blog entry. What is immediately useful to me is that it is a word processor.

Rant over. I promise. Maybe. No, probably not. But for now.

So back to the first part of my initial rant and my first reason for mentioning Contact. I liked Ender's Game, but I loved Contact. Everything about Ender's Game, despite it being a completely different book and a completely different brand of sci-fi, just didn't match up. It's a cool book and a cool idea - perhaps Futurama was directly referencing the concept in Bender's Big Score, where the nudist aliens are essentially playing the battle for Earth as a video game.

But if I'm going to throw this really far off-track, I can throw this somewhere it shouldn't be. It's along the lines of "What if we lived in the Matrix?" - the answer doesn't matter as long as the Matrix follows its own rules 100% of the time. That would be our observable universe. Damn. Ranting agian. What if every video game we play is actually a real battle going on somewhere? What if video games are actually our interface into another universe? Wouldn't that really suck for the people of that other universe? Imagine that your entire world is comprised of Blade Runner-style backdrops or World War II and the only rule of the universe is to pwn n00bs. So the next time you pick up your Atari to play Pac-Man, remember only this:

And yes, Threadless is mentioned on Stuff White People Like.

EDIT: It just occurred to me as I was leaving a jet lag-induced sleep that I missed a prime Star Trek reference for this post. "A Taste of Armageddon," of course. It's the reverse of Ender's Game in that instead of a game representing real violence, the game is designed to prevent violence. These two warring planets, instead of solving their problems, decide to go into a stalemate where a supercomputer decides the outcome of hypothetical battles. When someone is declared dead, he goes to an execution room and is executed painlessly. They've taken the war out of war. And that's when the computer records the Enterprise as dead. When the crew inexplicably refuse to die, it throws the entire war into a state of disarray. Kirk destroys the supercomputer and the planet's leaders fear that the real war will resume. Finally, the two sides agree to mediation to actually end their war.

Brings up the same question raised at the end of the book. What's up with a war that you only play on computers? I won't go on, mostly because I want to see what happens in class.

Crossing Values

2008-03-18T03:30:00.003-04:00

Pg. 269:

“And when she died, the others all died.”

“No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn’t move, didn’t respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There’s nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone.”

Pg. 270:

“Why did they kill the crew?”

“Why not? To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about. They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder’s no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path.”

“…Think of it this way. In all the bugger wars so far, they’ve killed thousands and thousands of living, thinking beings. And in all those wars, we’ve killed only one.”

These quotes describe one of the ideas that I found most intriguing this time through Ender’s Game. Mazer justifies their actions in the war by discounting the lives of all of the buggers except for the queen because she is the only bugger who thinks. At the same time, he offers a justification for the actions of the buggers, that they did not understand that all humans are capable of independent thought. The buggers did not understand the value that humans place on each individual life, and by killing the crew of the tug, they were merely following their own standard procedures.

What I find interesting about this is that as each culture came to understand the other, it adopted the other’s values. Since the buggers actions revealed to humans that they did not value individual lives, humans began to disregard the lives of individual buggers. The third quote from above by Mazer Rackham illustrates of just how little concern the lives of the dependent buggers have become to humans. At this point Mazer only counts the single queen that died as a casualty, none of the other buggers matter at all. Buggers, on the other hand, came to respect the individual life more as they realized that each human is an independent person. As the pupa queen let Ender know, “We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.” Once they understood that each human was a thinking being, they gained a more human respect for individual life. It’s interesting that despite the interaction between the two groups having been a war, it allowed them to further understand each other, which caused each group to take on certain values of the other regarding individuality. They already placed the same value on independent thought, as each group considers murder only to have occurred when the subject is a thinking being.

A closing thought: He isn't named Ender just because it's a derivative of Andres. Card named him for what he does. He ends things. He ends the war; he ends the buggers, and I'm sure you all can come up with other things he ends. Ender is an ender.

The psychology of games

2008-03-17T19:20:00.004-04:00

Ender's Game. On the surface, it appears to refer to the simulator "game" Ender plays towards the end of the book, in which he unknowingly defeats the Buggers. However, there is also the Battle Room, a grand game that nearly every character in the book plays. And then there's the fantasy game, the pure reflection of Ender's psyche that is the entryway for the Buggers into his mind. Other characters play their games, as well -- Graff's game is the subtle manipulation of Ender into a perfect commander, Peter and Valentine play a game of control over the world.

But the important one is Ender's Game. And which one is it? I think it's primarily meant to be the fantasy game. The fantasy is a sci-fi author's safety valve, where anything is possible without needing to be explained, internal consistency is meaningless, and symbolism is available at whim. This exploration into the inner workings of Ender's mind shows us what he is thinking far better than his internal narration; even when Ender doesn't know why he feels the way he does, we can draw clues from his fantasy world. Every great challenge in Ender's life, each significant turning point is accompanied by progress in this game. By the time he has beaten it, he himself has come to depend on the game to represent and facilitate his emotional development; even his crucial meeting with his sister only provides him with the appropriate weapon to overcome the psychological challenge that awaits him in the mirror.

"But wait," one might ask, "this isn't so cut-and-dried, is it? After all, it's specifically stated that all who enter the game face the same basic tasks; although the game is able to insert personally tailored features, the challenges are always the same. How can every child share the same basic psychological challenges?" Well! You raise an excellent point. But remember: the I.F. knew exactly what kind of child it was looking for. The game wasn't custom-tailored for Ender, but it was custom-tailored so that the child able to beat it would be the one meant to be the commander of the I.F. forces. The reason that every other child at Battle School fails the game is because he or she does not fit the same psychological profile as Ender, which is required before one can win.

The game does not reflect Ender's personality; it reflects the personality of the child who can defeat the Buggers, and that happens to be Ender.

The relative simplicity and heartfelt qualities of Card's writing make it easy to find parallels in other sci-fi works (or maybe elections). To me, the fantasy game begs the following question: do we carve our own paths in life? Or, like Ender, are we simply filling in us-sized holes?

I guess what I'm asking is, "could anyone else have written this blog post?" Could someone who grew up in similar circumstances, with a similar background and repertoire, with similarly minded friends and a similar psychological profile have come up with what I have? Since Professor Jackson can only hope that his students come up with such obviously brilliant points as mine, I'm comforted by the fact that my genius is unexpected. But Ender is explicitly filling a niche, growing into a mold because he is offered no other way to grow. I'd run away, too.

Oh, bugger...

2008-03-17T11:19:00.002-04:00

Ender's Game has always been one of my favourite books, though I've come away from it with different ideas each time I've read it. The main thought it generally, "Well, it can only be a surprise once." I shall just share some other points that have stood out to me:
Though a collective intelligence, the Buggers demonstrate much more intelligence than their human counterparts upon meeting another race in the universe. Where the Buggers learn from their first mistaken conceptions, the humans react only with blunt fear (which reminds me of the human reaction to a snake in the grass- rather than discovering if the snake is a poisonous or harmful variety, the fearful human just proceeds to smash it out of existence). Where the Buggers use the humans' own technology to find a human ally to help preserve their race, the humans' only survival mechanism is to breed the ultimate fighting machine and hope with crossed fingers that their produced boy can beat ridiculous odds against an enemy that hasn't shown any signs of aggression. It is the Buggers who initiate contact with a human and try to understand.
After so many speculative years about, "If we make contact with aliens..." you would assume humans would be a bit more receptive, or at least foreseen some difficulties in communication with a completely alien species and not reacted with such hostility. Even after the First Invasion, shouldn't some attempt at communication have been tried before plotting to destroy the Buggers' home world? However, I think Card has an interesting point in how the humans do react to aliens, initially and the second time around. The people in charge aren't necessarily interested in the exploration of alien cultures, so much as power-driven and fearful of this unknown they're faced with.
Adult behavior overall is appalling. The children are exploited. Pitted against one another. Planned. Sculpted into nothing more than tools without any chance of having a childhood. Yet the adults are willing to place the fate of humanity into their hands. And it works. It always amazes me that people are so willing to manipulate one another, though this is just personal opinion and Card's portrayals are generally realistic in politics and war.
Through all of this is poor little brilliant Ender. His charactre causes some protective instinct because he is always so small and picked on and he seems to genuinely feel for others and just need a friend. At the same time, he's fearsome. He is capable of killing before I could drive (and I live in a rural state where you get your license when 15). Ender is complex, but still a charactre that can be related to because despite his violent tactical side, he remains compassionate and is always searching for his true friends.
As for the games throughout the book, they all serve the same purpose. The Fantasy game, the battle room, and the computer games towards the end are all merely tools to manipulate the ultimate weapon- Ender. How such a brilliant boy didn't figure any of that out is beyond me, though I didn't catch on during my first read, but wasn't he supposed to be the hope for the entire human race? Anyhow, Card's use of the games shows Ender's growth and thoughts, as well as his development of military tactics, without making this just a boring battle against aliens. It's the battle of a lonely little boy who doesn't want to cause any harm and is tricked into causing the most harm any human has done. The cruel irony.
But the humans lived. As they would have anyhow.

V for Justification...wait...

2008-03-08T06:55:00.001-05:00

I think it’s time to question another of our underlying assumptions, yay! So, in class we spent quite some time talking about whether certain of V’s actions were justifiable, for example, killing the priest who had merely been present at Larkhill, but who probably hadn’t contributed to any of the killing or experimentation (though who knows what he did to little girls there), or V’s abduction, imprisonment and torture of Evey. My question is, why should we be concerned as to whether these are justifiable actions or not? V does not feel that he has to justify his actions to anyone, merely take responsibility for them. V is also working to create anarchy, the land of do-as-you-please, not the land of do-as-you-please-then-tell-us-why-it’s-okay. If he is just doing as he pleases, even if he has a reason for doing what he does, do we need to try to justify it if V himself does not think a justification is necessary?

Responsibility, Fate and Anarchy

2008-03-08T06:34:00.004-05:00

So, this novel was pretty freaking awesome, just putting that out there. Also, please try to avoid too many movie spoilers. I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t seen the film version yet, and since it apparently doesn’t follow the book, please don’t ruin it. Thanks.

Anyway, I went into this book not really knowing what the story was about. It wasn’t my first graphic novel, so I wasn’t in that boat with some of you, but all I knew was that someone was on a vendetta (got that from the title, don’tcha know). Needless to say, I wasn’t really expecting it to be quite that much of a political piece. Still, I really liked it. The mystery, psychology and political commentary were well paced and spaced, and I quite enjoyed the way that characters didn’t just disappear, but we continued to follow up on them throughout the entire novel. For example, I was a little confused as to why we kept following the plight of Rosemary until we discover that she is the one who is going to kill the leader, but at the same time, even when I didn’t know where her story was going, it was interesting to see the long term consequences of her husband’s treatment of her, V’s actions, and her own choices that ultimately led her to stand next to that car with a gun.

V talks about wanting everyone to take responsibility for their actions, and that is a major part of what this book is about. He forces that responsibility on the people who ran Larkhill by killing them or driving them insane (why is Prothero the only person from Larkhill he didn’t kill, by the way?). He never shirks his own responsibility for the things he does. Even when we don’t see characters taking responsibility for their actions, we see the results of those actions, and we know who is to blame for them.

One thing I wish we’d seen more of was Fate. While the whole Susan/Fate relationship was interesting to observe, I wondered what exactly Fate did. They talked about “consulting Fate,” but from what I read, I never really quite grasped what it is that fate does for them, aside from calculating the exact minute when the rain will start. Anyone have a more clear idea than it just being a supercomputer and supercomputing for the government?

One of the most interesting things to me in the novel was V’s distinction between Anarchy and Chaos when Eve asks him, “All this riot and uproar, V…is this anarchy? Is this the land of do-as-you-please?” He replies, “No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means “without leaders” not “without order.” With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order. This age of ordung [sic] will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course. This is not Anarchy, Eve. This is Chaos.” I think it’s quite a fine distinction, and is well explained, but most of all, it’s something I had not thought about before, so I found the concept intriguing.

Cyberpunk and Jewish Folklore

2008-03-08T05:30:00.001-05:00

Maybe I’m a minority here, but I think cyberpunk is one of the most fun sub-genres of science fiction because it blurs the lines of what is human and what humans are capable of doing. When an AI becomes so advanced that the difference between it and humans is nigh indistinguishable, who is to say that it isn’t human, especially in societies where body modification has gone to such extremes that the humans are half machine already. I guess what I’m saying is, in a society where machines become more and more human and humans become more and more mechanized, where do you draw the line between them and us? Anyhow, that was my little cyberpunk rant, just ‘cuz I like it.

In He, She and It, however, the lines are not quite that blurred yet. Cyborgs are not commonplace enough that the line between us and them can begin to fade. No, at this point a very concrete line exists, you were manufactured, we were born. Whatever happened later, if you became more human, if I modified myself, our origins continue to define what we are. In this way, I can understand why Yod didn’t want any more cyborgs to be built: he could see that the time for acceptance for artificial people was still a long way off. The parallel story of Joseph tells us that much. His story took place almost 460 years prior to Yod’s, and yet their stories end in nearly the same way, their creator telling them that they have served their purpose, and reclaiming the life from them.

So, I also looked up golems, not having ever studied any Jewish folklore, and Joseph’s story is based on an actual Jewish folktale, and looking at Piercy’s biography on her website, I’m not all that surprised. Considering her grandmother brought her up Jewish and told her stories, she’s probably known that folktale throughout most of her life. That, I think, supports my idea that she did not include the older tale to parallel her own story, but that the folktale was probably an inspiration for Yod’s part in this story, though from what I’ve read, Piercy probably added in Joseph’s love interest, because I’m not seeing her in any of the variations of the story I’m looking at. Anyway, I might have to read some more about Jewish folklore; it seems pretty interesting.

Belief

2008-03-08T03:38:00.002-05:00

Since the nominal topic of our discussion was whether Paul was a messiah or not, I think I’ll question our basic assumption. Does it matter whether we define Paul as a messiah? If the people who followed him believed him to be a messiah should that not be enough? The fremen believed that he was their savior, so to them he was their savior, whether he truly had come as a fulfillment to prophecies or whether he merely took advantage of the prophecies. And even if he did simply take advantage of prophecies that had been planted there, he still led the people to their freedom. Does it even matter if the prophecies were real or planted by the Bene Gesserit? If the fremen believed in the prophecies, Paul came and fulfilled the prophecies, and the fremen believed that Paul was their savior, then he was a savior to them. In this situation, I believe that the fremen’s faith in Paul proves he is their messiah. By no means would you ever get a freman to believe that Paul wasn’t a messiah.

I suppose the position I’ve outlined above leads back to the question of a messiah versus the messiah. This question, however, presupposes that in the world Herbert created, a single messiah is possible. My question would then be how would you identify a single messiah as the messiah? That again depends on how Herbert’s world works. Would The Messiah have to fulfill the prophecies of all religions, or do religions exist that claim to expect the one true Messiah? In the first case, would Paul work as The Messiah? He fulfilled prophecies from several different religions, but did he cover all of them? What about the second case? How do you know which religion to trust when they say that their Messiah is the one true savior? I ask these questions strictly from an outsider perspective like us reading Herbert’s novel, not to get into a religious debate about the competing religions we live with, but without getting into a debate, we can think about these questions abstractly in regard to today’s religions. I’ll let you others do that, however. I’m not about to start pulling out the worms now that I’ve opened that particular can.

Putting aside messiahs for a moment, I’d like to talk about Paul as a political instead of a religious leader. In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber talks about hereditary, charismatic, and legal justifications for leadership. While Paul admittedly has some roles he occupies through charismatic justification, he also has a ninety-generation pedigree set up by the Bene Gesserit. Despite this hereditary justification already being in place, does he actually gain the positions of leadership that should be his through his family ties by his charismatic leadership, or does his justification in those roles rely mainly on his hereditary right to rule? Which justification takes precedence in Paul’s situation if both justifications are present? Wow, a lot of questions in that post, but I’m still more interested in hearing what other people have to say on the political front than trying to come up with my own answers since I’m sure you all know much more about politics than I do (you all don’t actively avoid politics).

Charisma and Corruption

2008-03-08T02:51:00.002-05:00

I have to start off by saying that “Politics as a Vocation” has been the most difficult text yet for me to get through. I am not at all interested in politics, and so the little details that Weber continually brought up about the slight differences between this role in this country and that role in that country just drove me up the wall. Despite that, I did find interesting the idea of “the authority of the extraordinary, personal gift of grace of charisma, that is, the wholly personal devotion to, and a personal trust in, the revelations, heroism, or other leadership qualities of an individual.” I had not thought about our political system as being one that functions on trust in the leadership of a charismatic individual, in those exact terms, but it definitely makes sense the way Weber lays it out, especially when you consider how much the personal appearance of candidates matters to the public these days. Back when Weber gave this lecture, we didn’t have televised debates yet, but as soon as candidates began appearing on our screens, appearance began to play a significant role in the public’s confidence in a candidate. Though Weber does not specifically mention appearance as being a part of the charismatic justification for rule, I believe that he might have included this in his list if he was aware of just how image conscious society would become. In that regard, charisma was an apt word choice. According to WordWeb, a dictionary/thesaurus program I’ve installed on my computer, “charisma” is “a personal attractiveness or interestingness that enables you to influence others.” This definition certainly encompasses the qualities Weber laid forth of revelations, heroism and leadership qualities, but it also leaves room for appearance and rhetoric, which are such large parts of how we now tend to think of charisma.

The other thing I found interesting in Weber’s justifications for rule is that he does not attempt to address good and bad rulers. Many rulers who fit into one of the three categories of justification have turned out to be poor leaders. Hereditary rule simply cannot produce a good ruler every time. Examples of this can be found in every royal and/or imperial family throughout history. Charismatic rule is just as fallible. To go for the extreme example, Hitler was an extremely charismatic ruler who inspired “the wholly personal devotion” and “personal trust” in his followers that Weber outlines in his description of the justification for charismatic rule. His third category of a legal justification for “servants of the state” is just as prone to corruption. A person in one of these roles may follow orders and carry out their duties, but the motivation behind such service is always open to question. I realize that the point of Weber’s lecture was not necessarily to discuss what made a good politician and how to avoid corruption, but that he was trying to show the seriousness and importance of making the decision to make a career of politics, however, I just found it interesting that a justification for rule does not necessarily mean a good ruler.

Expressing Multiple Roles

2008-03-08T01:53:00.000-05:00

When we discussed Dune in class, we spent much of the time talking about which of Paul’s titles best represents who he is, or if he is all of them, and what happens when his different roles come into conflict with each other. I think that the most likely answer is that he takes on each role as the situation demands it. If we all look at our daily lives, this is how we act in different situations. Since I know my life better than any of yours, I’ll use myself as an example. I have many different roles in my life, as I’m sure you all do. I am a Desk Receptionist at Hughes, a Writing Consultant and the Writing Center, the lighting technician for the Gathering service, a junior in college, and many other things depending on the situation. Depending on which role I am playing at the moment, I have to respond differently to different situations. For example, when I am studying in my room, being a student takes precedence, but when I am studying at the front desk in Hughes, checking someone’s spare key out to them becomes more important than reading an article on blackboard or whatever I am doing because I have other responsibilities that are more important. When I am working as a writing consultant, I work one on one with a student to help them improve their writing skills, but when I am setting up lighting for the Gathering, I work on an much more impersonal level with other people, telling them where to run wiring and such. In a way, Paul’s multiple roles are not any different from the multiple roles that we all have to play every day. Paul’s roles just have more impressive titles, and come with more impressive skills. So anyhow, I believe that Paul can be all of his titles at once, but that different situations bring different roles and skills to the forefront, just like different situations in our day-to-day lives call for responses from our own different roles and skill sets.

Dune the Epic Fantasy?

2008-03-08T01:22:00.003-05:00

Since this book reminded me more of epic fantasy than of what I expect when I think of science fiction, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at genre and where Dune fits in. I’m not out to make anyone mad or start a whole genre debate, but I think it would be interesting, especially in light of the conversation we had on the first day of class regarding genre, to bring it up again. I’m going to be relying quite a bit on Wikipedia sources here, so please don’t bite my head off about that either, because I’m aware that they can be wrong and that they are not exhaustive. This is more of an exercise in thinking about genre than an argument that Dune has to fit into a specific genre. Now that I’ve written enough of a preface to hopefully avoid any nasty comments, I’ll jump in.

According to the Wikipedia page for Dune, it “is popularly considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, is frequently cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history, and was the first bestselling hardcover science fiction novel ever.” I dispute none of this and I don’t believe that Dune has a problem fitting into most people’s definitions of science fiction; after all, it is set in a more technologically advanced future that has taken us to new worlds. When I took a closer look at Wikipedia’s (admittedly incomplete) listing of science fiction sub-genres, however, I couldn’t really find one that I felt Dune fit in with well. Hard SF, according to Wikipedia, “is characterized by rigorous attention to detail in quantitative sciences, especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry.” Dune is not about detailed scientific explanations of future technology, so I discount this sub-genre. Next is Soft SF, which consists of “works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology.” This seems to fit much better with Dune, and yet I would argue that the scope of the book is so much larger than a study of any or all of these topics that this sub-genre cannot contain it. What I mean is that Dune covers all of these areas, but it goes far beyond them because of the huge scope of its story. The next sub-genre down the list is Cyberpunk, which definitely does not fit Dune. Cyberpunk usually takes place in a post-humanist dystopian future where body modification, implants, and full-sensory internet are the norm. Time Travel, the next sub-genre, also does not fit. This is followed by Alternate History, which is also not Dune, and Military SF, which also does not quite fit. Paul may be a good fighter and lead a jihad, but the focus of the book is not “conflict between national, interplanetary, or interstellar armed forces.” The list goes on to include New Wave, Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic fiction, Christian science fiction, space opera, and science fiction western, none of which really fit Dune either. I’m sure there are more sub-genres of science fiction out there and that Dune at least partially fits into some of them, but for now, I’m going to move on to the second part of this post, Dune and epic fantasy.

Again in Wikipedia, epic fantasy is “generally serious in tone and epic in scope, dealing with themes of grand struggle against supernatural, evil forces.” This may be a bit of a stretch, but I believe Dune is at least serious in tone and epic in scope, and while the “grand struggle” may not be against a supernatural, evil force, Paul does lead the fremen against their foe and defeat the corrupt emperor to take over. Where this comparison really takes off is in looking at the qualities of the hero in epic fantasy in comparison to Paul. According to Wikipedia, “Often, much of the plot revolves around his heritage or mysterious nature. In many novels the hero is an orphan or unusual sibling, often with some incredible ability or abilities and skills in a particular area (usually either magic or skill with a weapon). He begins the story young, if not an actual child.” The plot of Dune does revolve around Paul; he is not an orphan, but he does have quite an isolated upbringing, he has many incredible abilities, and he begins the story fairly young. The article goes on, “In the beginning of the storyline, the hero is threatened by the unknown force.” Despite Herbert’s audience knowing the plot against the Atreides family, and them knowing that their enemies have some sort of plot against them, the attack is enough of a surprise that it is a success, and Paul and his mother are forced to flee. Particularly relevant, “the hero slowly gains knowledge of his past through legend, prophecy, lost-and-found-again family members, or encounters with "mentor" characters who know more about him than he does.” Paul encounters all of these: he takes on the legendary figure of being the savior for the fremen, he fulfills the prophecy of being the Kwisatz Haderach, he discovers that he is related to the Harkonnens, and he has several mentor characters who help him in different ways both during the book and before the book began. This is getting ridiculously long, so I’ll cut myself off here, I just thought it was interesting how much better this book seemed to fit in with epic fantasy than with any standard sub-genre of science fiction. Thoughts?

Computers and Cartoons

2008-03-07T23:33:00.008-05:00

Since everyone else has provided their thoughts on the computer experiment, I guess I’ll throw in my two cents as well. Like Kaitlin, I enjoy trying different things in class, and I thought this was an interesting program to try out. I found it interesting to see the different ways that our groups went about searching for sources to prove or disprove the validity of Stephanson’s argument, and I think that it is also important to take into consideration the validity of an argument when reading a text like Stephanson. Like most of the class, however, I don’t think that this program worked out very well. We spent a good portion of class time just looking up different things on the computers instead of being in discussion. Because we spent so much time on this question, both in research and in sharing our conclusions, we didn’t really get to spend much time in the text, which is too bad when you have a text this interesting. Also, the technical difficulties and the delay between the sending and receiving computers were distracting. Finally, I also hate Macs (never owned one, but had to suffer through them being the only computers my school district would use).

Despite all of this, I found the different approaches our groups took to the question to be interesting. It’s interesting to see just how little political correctness mattered in society back when those cartoons were produced, but at the same time, not all that surprising. Even cartoons I’ve seen from the early 1930s are sometimes blatantly racist, witness Plane Dumb, featuring Van Buren’s Tom and Jerry, which doesn’t have anything to do with propaganda. It’s just racist.

How Protestant Ideals Became American Nationalism

2008-03-07T22:26:00.002-05:00

Stephanson’s Manifest Destiny is an interesting text because it not only looks at what happened in history, but it argues specific motivations behind the actions of the United States as a whole throughout its history. Stephanson is not trying to explain why specific people took specific actions that shaped the history of the United States, though he does a little of that, but he is presenting a theory on how the United States as a nation justified its actions to itself and to the world. What this text showed me were some of the ideals that went into American nationalism, how that nationalism was different from nationalism in other countries around the world and how the ideas that make up American nationalism have affected policies and decision making throughout the history of the United States.

People in the United States needed something under which to band together. Part of what makes up nationalism is what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities.” This is when people are able to think of themselves as part of a community that is made up of more than just the people they know. American University, for example, is an imagined community because we all consider ourselves to be a part of the group of people that make up American University, but I’m fairly certain that none of us know every single other person who considers her/himself to be a part of American University as well. When the United States fought for independence from Britain, they were banding together under a common oppression by the British government, but they were also banding together under the common ideals of the protestant religions. Many of the colonials had left Europe to escape religious persecution, and despite the differences among the different branches of Protestantism, they did have several ideals in common. Freedom of religion means a society free from religious persecution, not a society free from religion, and many of the men who instigated the American Revolution and worked in the formation of the United States were Protestant. Once they had won the war, Protestant ideals became and even greater part of the commonalities among the people, and thus became the basis for American nationalism.

As the United States continued to develop, the religious ideals became more ingrained into American society, until the phrase "American" came to represent those religious ideals under a secular name. This is why the Biblical argument that came up time and again throughout Stephanson's book went largely unchallenged through American history, and why manifest destiny has constantly emerged in our nation's past.

Focus of Discussion - Wells versus Heinlein

2008-03-07T20:34:00.001-05:00

I found it interesting how different our discussion on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was from the discussion we previously had on The Time Machine. With Wells’s book, we spent much time discussing what we found implausible and poking fun at the way the Time Traveller handled his trip into the future, whereas most of our discussion of Heinlein’s book centered around questions of morality and ethics, which Chris outlined nicely in his “Morality vs. Ethics” post, and about the logistics of the Lunar society. Why the difference in discussion? I believe the difference came about partly because we better understand the context from which Heinlein is writing. Both the politics from the era Heinlein’s book was written and the understanding of science people had at that time are easier for us to relate to than those from Wells’s era. I also think that the difference in conversation had to do with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being more what we now expect from a science fiction text. Though The Time Machine contained its titular device, the world the Time Traveller transported us to seemed less of a science fiction setting, and more of a canvas on which Wells could explore his political theories. I don’t mean to say that a setting cannot have both, because as we see in Heinlein’s book, it can, I just mean that Wells’s world contains little in the way of imagined technology outside of the time machine itself, but instead is practically wiped clean of technology and all we expect from science fiction texts now. Because it is so different, we had to spend time discussing how it worked at the time it was written and explaining to ourselves why the lack of advancement and other things in the book bothered us. With Heinlein, we don’t have this issue because his story is chock full of futuristic technology, and shows us a world we can more easily understand as being our future because we see the human instinct to strive for achievement and discovery played out.

American versus Lunar Revolution

2008-03-07T20:04:00.002-05:00

One thing I found interesting about Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is that despite the many correlations between the prison colony on Luna and European colonies, particularly British colonies of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, the choice he made to set his colony on the moon created differences that altered his society from developing the way that colonies developed on Earth. For example, the British colonies in America were exploited in a similar fashion to the way Terra exploits Luna. The British reaped materials from their colonies, which they transformed into finished goods and sold back at a much higher price. The colonies were not supposed to engage in trade with other countries, which was supposed to give Britain full advantage of both the materials and the colonists’ money. Because this system is set up between Britain and its colonies, the colonials had the outside recourse of smuggling with which to bring in needed supplies and cash flow so that they would not be bled dry. The situation on Luna in which the Loonies ship wheat back to Terra reminded me of that colonial system on Earth because Luna will exhaust its own food supply if it continues to make the required wheat shipments. The difference in this situation is that the Loonies do not have an outside source that they can use to relieve the stress on their food supply because no such source exists. This dilemma leads them to planning their revolution, which again is reminiscent of the American Revolution. One of the many causes leading up to the American Revolution was that the Britains, though they knew that smuggling provided continued income into their colonies for them to take away through their exploitative policies, cracked down on smuggling and tried to actually uphold the trading regulations they had set down.

Another difference I found interesting between the colony on Luna and the British colonies is that British colonials were able to return to Britain. Living in the Americas would not have made them unable to survive in the English atmosphere, which made them more able to be vocal in Britain than the Loonies are on Terra. Since the Loonies have an extremely difficult time surviving for any extended period on Terra, they are even easier to exploit than the colonies in American were for Britain. Because they cannot fight back (I’m talking pre-revolution here) through official or political avenues, they are forced to a revolution more quickly. They have to fight physically, and on their own turf, because they cannot survive on Terra, and no one will listen to them until they take power and make their words be heard.

Questioning Our Assumptions in The Time Machine

2008-03-07T18:16:00.003-05:00

We spent much of class discussing the problems we had with The Time Machine, most of which were issues with the scientific believability of the world as Wells described it. I believe that our discussion on those issues was useful because it let us discuss why the issues we had problems with made sense or were at least possible explanations in the time in which the book was written. This led to discussion of what the book said about society in relation to the context of the society at the time Wells wrote it, which allows us a deeper understanding of what he was trying to say about society and the pitfalls it needs to avoid.

On the other hand, the fact that we had to discuss the believability of the novel at all leads me to question how we were reading it. Though it was meant to take place in our world, the world of today is so different from both the world in which Wells lived and the one he created that we cannot judge the book based on criteria from today’s world. The book consistently follows it’s own logic, so we should not have to question the world it shows us. However, we do question that world, and not just because we are reading the book from a modern perspective. We also question that world because the Time Traveller himself questions that world. He doesn’t question it by pointing out what doesn’t make sense, but he questions it by creating hypotheses about it that are continually wrong. Because Wells forces us to see this new world through the Time Traveller’s eyes, his assumptions become our own, and as those assumptions are disproved, we begin to mistrust our own judgments of what is taking place in the future that Wells shows us.

Nightmares Come True

2008-03-06T16:01:00.001-05:00

I'm so sorry.

Justifying V

2008-03-06T14:59:00.001-05:00

I was disappointed that we never reached a conclusion on why Susan's logic for wielding absolute control being because it was necessary was different from V's logic for wielding absolute control being because it was necessary.
I acknowledge that it was noble of V to take more direct responsibility for his dirty work, but it was dirty work nonetheless. We skirted around the issue that perhaps the only important distinctions were the intentions of each character. Is killing justified if the killer has a greater good in mind? The same idea appears (like we discussed) with Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress explaining his crashing of a ship because it seemed necessary for the cause, which is why I found it so odd that V never tries to explain or justify his actions to anyone. It makes V seem that much more inhuman, that a computer showed more typical human behavior than he did. V's character is all the more dangerous simply because he seeks no recourse or justification from anyone, even Evey who practically begs V to clue her in. If we justify V's actions as being better than Susan's because V has a more noble end in mind, aren't we justifying any individual taking our future into their hands simply because they think they know what's best for us? Or that they won't force anything upon us, just make it nearly impossible for us to choose any future but they one they approve of?
On some other points, I appreciated the historical comparisons that we discussed, particularly the similarity to the Nuremberg Trials. It harshly illuminated the scary fact that there really are people who pass judgment on who is guilty to what degree- and who should die. And apparently these characters don't just show up in graphic novels.
As for comparisons to the movie- of course I agree that they are ridiculously different, but that doesn't make me like the movie any less. It might just be that I enjoy the more romanticized version of a revolutionary in comparison to the cold anarchist V Alan Moore created. It might be that "strength through unity" seemed to provide a more practical founding statement for a lemming population than "strength through purity," though not as close to the fascist doctrine. Whatever the case, I enjoyed both on different planes but was glad we discussed the major disparities.

V for Verbose

2008-03-04T21:32:00.003-05:00

Well, since I'm getting the hell out of Dodge tomorrow, I'd better put up a reflection on class now. What to say? We didn't really cover much in my opinion, always coming back to the question of how V gets the right to do what he does versus Susan and Norsefire. One thing is for sure: V is not of the body. Peace and tranquility is not with him. He does not know Landru.

Okay, actually, that's a start, actually. "Return of the Archons" - classic original series, just after the magic microphone that can detect heartbeats and right before Khan. The Body is this huge subconscious telepathy system that makes people seem absurdly calm save one hour a day, the Red Hour. Bottom line, the Body is actually controlled by Landru, a 6000 year old computer that was programmed to help the people of Beta III. Unfortunately, instead of doing this in some reasonable way, it decides that people having free will is too much of a risk to their own safety and takes it away. Kirk and Spock convince the computer that it has betrayed its own programming by doing this and it goes up in wonderful 1967 special effects "the computer's going up in smoke" smoke.

Or we go to the second season (Chekov shows up, so it's a good time) - "Patterns of Force." A Federation historian breaks the prime directive and interferes with a culture, organizing it in accordance with fascism, hoping to only duplicate its positive aspects. Long story short, the historian gets overpowered, a new guy takes charge, and then all the bad parts of fascism take over. Say, genocide of another planet. Once again, free will goes by the wayside as the new leader attempts to achieve racial purity. Spock mind-melds with the historian, who tells the planet that the Final Solution analogue isn't a great idea, then he gets shot, but it's all cool now.

All right, so we've got message one, that free will is the all-important marker of a society. Even if you can be guaranteed safety under Landru, you won't really be alive because you don't have freedom of choice. Let's go with the quest for free will to vindicate V's agenda over Norsefire's.

And then we've got the great little critique of fascism and human hubris. Sure, it can do some great things, but despotism's built into the system. As soon as Gill gets overthrown and the evil dude starts up, you've got bad fascism. Whoops. I guess the historian didn't really learn about history until he recreated it. And the Enterprise flies off to its next mission. Dum da da, da dum dum da da, DA!

Last, an additional word on the movie. I can see the graphic novel being turned almost verbatim into a great movie. Unfortunately, the only director I can see doing it, David Lean, died in 1991. Lean had this wonderful skill: being able to throw all sorts of wonderfully subversive politics into a damn entertaining movie. I just still don't see a way to properly capture the novel on film in 2005. In 1990, we're talking a different story. It could have been that crazy project that a director does before he dies (see Eyes Wide Shut for a prime example). Maybe the next David Lean (added bonus on his being British) can take V and treat it right. But in any case, the Wachowskis made a fun movie.

I, for one, take no joy in shooting fish in a barrel, which is pretty much what comparing a movie to its original book usually is. Sure, we have that award for Best Adapted Screenplay every year, but usually the movies that win take a so-so (or completely unknown or foreign) book and turn it into a good movie. Notable recent exception: LotR, where Peter Jackson took an excellent (though dry as all get out) novel and turned it into what many die-hard LotR fans call a so-so movie version (or a travesty, depending on how die-hard the fan). I, for one, hated reading the books but loved the movies because they didn't make fight scenes as interesting as a stackable combination washer/dryer with Energy Saver cool dry mode manual. But I digress. My point is, judge the film not on the graphic novel. That was Alan Moore's job, and we know his answer. Come down off your high horses, judge the film as a film, and tell me it's not enjoyable, being all "high and mighty" offended notwithstanding.

V for Victimhood

2008-03-03T23:02:00.004-05:00

I envy all of you who may be reading this for the first time. Sad to say, it just isn't the same the second time around. Where a book like Dune only gains in the rereading, V for Vendetta relies too heavily on twists and sudden reveals, however dramatic they are, to be anywhere near as interesting after the first time. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to enjoy it once again with you.

The character of V is an interesting one, and I'm not referring to the man who was injected with chemicals at a concentration camp. I'm talking about the identity assumed by that man, which he then passes on to Evey. V seeks to create the land of Do-As-You-Please, a place where freedom is the watchword. We can only assume, lacking evidence to the contrary, that this is very similar to Heinlein's "rational anarchy." V doesn't pretty its political ideology with the throwaway word "rational," but the precepts are pretty much the same: everyone can do what they want, and things will just work out for the best. V effectively achieves its goals by destroying whatever bloated authority exists in society and then educating the remainder.

Disregarding the question of whether enforced anarchy is merely tyranny of another stripe, V fulfills a role much like Mike: its immense knowledge and power makes the anarchic revolution possible, and then it runs the risk of exerting too much control and making the revolution moot. However, Mike's friends recognized the danger of allowing him to remain in power. V, on the other hand, is portrayed as the perfect hero of a new age. Each book takes the cheap cop-out of showing how its idyllic society actually forms, but V offers a much more sinister expectation. What happens to the most capable being in an anarchic society? Well, if individuals behave rationally and attempt to maximize their self-interest, then eventually the entire society coalesces around that most capable being. V's ability to initiate change, immense knowledge base and mythical status mean that it must exempt itself from the day-to-day occurrences of the world it hopes to create.

The Future

Like a god unto men, it walked
Smiting all those who displeased
And we, in turn, were smitten
By its grace and the way it talked

In our poor judgment we followed
The creature so perfect and free
That promised us nothing but treasure
Yet all of its words were so hollowed

Those great men who seek to lead
Weaker men heed their words
But the stranger, dismayed, will cut
And the strongest among us will bleed

We return once again to our caves
Watching crabs gather on shore
To remember the days of society
And one day forget kings and knaves

In Defense of the Wachowskis

2008-03-03T17:49:00.003-05:00

Let me begin by saying that I really enjoyed V for Vendetta in its graphic novel glory. In addition to being fun to read, it serves as a fine warning against Thatcherism, fascism, and, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, all the -isms. I enjoyed the characters, though not being used to the graphic novel format, I would occasionally have to look back to figure out who someone was. The multiple narrative strings are a great storytelling tool, one I enjoyed more here than in He, She and It. Let me also indicate that I'm not saying that the movie is better than the novel.

That being said, I still say that V for Vendetta is also a damn fine movie; it just happens to have very little to do with the novel. We've got the same protagonist, a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask who went insane during medical testing. We've got the same general idea of constant surveillance and 1984-ishness. The backstory of how we got to that point is pretty vague in both instances. And there's a girl. Other than that, we're pretty much blazing our own trail.

Saying this, I have the benefit of just having watched V for Vendetta as HBO has decided to play it constantly for a few weeks. Even if I caught a few minutes halfway through the movie, I enjoyed watching it. It's a cool movie. It certainly doesn't give the same message and the path it takes is substantially different from the novel. But this isn't to the detriment of the film. There was a lot to cover in the novel and a movie wasn't going to catch it all. Instead of really trying, the Wachowskis took the premise and messed with it, creating their own story while retaining some of the most badass lines of the original. Sorry, Alan, but them's the breaks.

This isn't to say that some graphic novels can't be turned directly into films. Sin City and 300 are both fine examples of carbon copies of their graphic novels and they're both excellent films. I just can't see an exact copy of V for Vendetta (maybe V for Verbatim?) working as well onscreen. I don't think the Wachowskis could, either, so they tried to write something that could at least live up to the namesake, and I think they succeeded.

Here's a trick to enjoy any movie with Hugo Weaving. In V for Vendetta, imagine V as Agent Smith. In The Matrix, think of Smith as Elrond. And in Lord of the Rings, of course, think of Elrond as Smith. Also in that one fight scene in LotR, think of Christopher Lee as Count Dooku and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Trust me. It all makes more sense that way.

We're Not Alone!

2008-03-03T17:31:00.010-05:00

I don't know how many of you read Slashdot (I don't recommend it, actually - most of the posters seem to be insane at this point), but in any case, there was a post up there that I couldn't resist looking into: "The Law and Politics of Battlestar Galactica."

Fans of the show Battlestar Galactica might be interested in our interview with writers and producers Ron Moore and David Eick. Three law professors at the blog Concurring Opinions have an hour-long interview with Moore and Eick about the legal, political, moral, and economic issues raised by the show. The interview is available in audio files; alternatively, people can read a transcript of the interview (Part I) and (Parts II and III). Part I examines the lawyers and trials in the show, how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security. Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet. Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically."

I guess we're not the only ones in academia looking into the "social science" end of sci-fi. The interview touches on a lot of what we've been grappling with, and it's perfect for our discussion of "Exceptional Circumstances," this week's theme. How about a robopocalypse (yeah, that's right, a robopocalypse) for exceptional?

Also, callback to last week: "Is there anything morally wrong about beating a machine?" - Ron Moore in Part I-B.

And back to last week's movie:

Moore (jokingly): First of all, what's Blade Runner? It figured into our discussions from Day 1. Very influential.
Eick: And yes, Deckard is a replicant, for the record.

V?

2008-03-03T14:32:00.004-05:00

As this was my first foray into the previously unknown realm where the graphic novel dwells, I came out with some strong impressions. Laced with shadows. And lots of little straight lines to make those shadows. It wasn't my favourite format for enjoying a novel, but it was interesting. I would like to just mention that while I was trying to find it at Barnes and Noble in the Graphic Novel/Manga/Comic Book section, I received the most "interesting" stares. People's perceptions of graphic novels and those who read them are grossly exaggerated.
I do feel like I missed a lot in this first reading as I had a hard time following separate charactres and story lines, all the while trying to pick up on V's quoted speeches and graffiti in the background and other subtle little clues that may have helped my understanding had I picked up on more of them. I did love the visual creation of the "body" of the state alluded to by the titles of the different sections: The Eye, The Finger, and my favourite- The Nose. Who would want to smell British society?
Honestly though, I was left wondering if British society would be able to pull themselves together or not after V died, or successfully implement V's beloved theory of anarchy. As Finch points out, V should have been able to prevent Finch from shooting him, so why didn't he? Would it ever be possible to right the chaos that V jump-started? Why were so many upper-level party members involved in this human testing program anyway?
I need to read this again, but this time let myself be more distracted by the pictures. In the meantime, I hope things become more clear and that our discussion helps me see deeper than a basic run through of one man's goal for society.

He, She and It = They. That's all we needed to know.

2008-02-29T17:51:00.002-05:00

Like much of the class, I too enjoyed our discussion on Tuesday. I think that the most important lessons were that the Model Classroom is alive and that Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place would have lasted longer than four seasons if the pizza place was alive.

I like to approach books from a literary standpoint first. This is one of the reasons I really liked He, She and It and didn't find it at all uncomfortable. Though I was always aware that I was reading a book by "feminist author Marge Piercy," I was willing to accept her version of the world and I didn't at all mind what some of the class characterized as almost separatist feminism. I did think that Shira's Ari subplot was a little off-putting, which is why I was worried that I wouldn't like the book for the first few pages. I didn't want the book to turn into another Tom Jane comedy (Please, somebody get this reference).

We touched back on Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but glossed over it so quickly that I think we created two classes of sentient computers: people and living machines. Heinlein wrote Moon without there being a question of Mike's being alive, but in He, She and It, we skipped the alive part and moved right to personhood. This brings us back around to the pizza place: is Malkah's house alive? A person? The "law" stated that no human-shaped cyborgs could exist, but not necessarily how smart they could be. The law seems to be more concerned with the practical aspects of having cyborgs infiltrating the multis for unknown ends, not the philosophical aspects of creating a person/human/future-crab.

And is this some weird offshoot of Clarke's Third Law? In fact, I'm coining it, right here. Even though I don't have a First and Second Law. DiPrima's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a person." So, if we're talking .999999999..., aren't we just talking about 1.0? Well, not exactly, but we're a different form of giant computer, too. We're just squishier. So I guess we're all .999999999...

This is not turning out to be more focused than my original post. That's probably because I've been on a lot of cold medicine since Tuesday, though I'm now almost through the bloody thing. One last thought, though, on Blade Runner. First, Ridley Scott is the master of pacing a movie, perhaps in this one even more than in Alien. In case anyone missed the revised ending thing that wasn't in the original theatrical rape of the film, Castillo/Jaime Escalante/Adama leaves the unicorn to show that he knows Deckard's dreams - that Deckard is actually a Replicant. What's great is, the first time I saw the movie, I saw the theatrical cut that really gives no hint of Deckard being a Replicant. In contrast to He, She and It, Blade Runner's version of AI people is that they're organic, but not alive until they accumulate about four years' worth of experiences and develop their own emotions. How does this work into Yod, who's preprogrammed with emotions? Whose are they, anyway? Are they Tyrell's niece's? And does it matter, as long as you can still play the piano?

can a cyborg mind be blown? OR one week too late

2008-02-28T20:06:00.005-05:00

Picture this:

A man is created in a fashion completely different from that of normal men. Immediately those around him recognize him as something different and new, and great time and energy is invested int his development. He has innate knowledge of his greater capabilities and purpose due to his awareness of the circumstances of his creation. He easily earns loyalty and respect from those who take the time to get to know him as a person, but receives disgust and rejection from those who judge him based on what he represents rather than who he is. He is capable of astonishing feats, with incredible abilities compared to other men, but at the same time his strangeness sets him apart and prevents him from fully integrating with society. He learns of the legends his people have, that in a time of great need a man like him will come to save them. Eventually he is noticed by a great foreign power, and he is given up by someone close to him, taken away by the great power despite the best efforts of his friends to defend him. He accepts his fate and dies under the custody of the great power, in order that he may save the people he has grown to love, his people, the Jews.

Is this the story of Yod? Or is it the story of the Messiah?! Madness! But you can't deny that Yod is a savior. I doubt the similarities are coincidental.

Piercy had cats

2008-02-28T14:56:00.004-05:00

The most amazing thing I learned was Prof. Jackson's mention of there having been no internet when Piercy wrote He, She, and It. Her creation of nets and bases must have been as difficult as me now imagining life without the internet, a feat I really don't even want to try. Our society would be completely different. I'm amazed at how Piercy somewhat foresaw and created that.
During our discussion of why Piercy made her charactres Jewish, I found it curious that none of us raised the simple question, "Was Piercy Jewish?" And voila, not only was she raised Jewish, but her grandmother's name was Hannah-a tidbit that just caused me to...giggle. In fact, Piercy's critiques on a male dominated society and her seeming bias of the benefits of females make more sense after reading her biography. As for the Jewish focus of the novel, I do feel she hit on an excellent cultural example. Which other religion contains myths of creating people from nonliving material, in so similar a process as the science fiction notion of a cyborg? And have any other religions been so extremely forced to live in secluded towns, but still served a function in society? Multiple details made the Jews the perfect medium for paralleling the futuristic portion of Piercy's tale. Did I mention she loved cats in her childhood? Or that she had three husbands?
Aside from how much more understandable her motives are when you look into her personal history, we looked at some interesting arguments in class, including, "Two guys a girl and a pizza place, except the pizza place is one of the charactres." (I'm not sure who to credit with that idea).
We never really came to a resolution on whether you have to be able to physically inflict yourself on your environment in order to be granted personhood. Personally, I don't feel the physical aspect has anything to do with personhood, and we were much closer to an answer with Jack's idea of being able to impose your choices on the world. Both Yod and Joseph certainly "imposed" themselves on the world, but beyond a certain point Joseph couldn't make his own choices, and Yod was certainly closer because he not only was capable of affecting the world physically, but of affecting the lives, emotions, and choices of those around him as well. He fits into the human structure and uses human terms to impose himself on the human world. If I had been on the council, after exhausting my allotted 3 minutes of oratory, I would have voted to give Yod personhood. :)

I'm Extremely Uncomfortable

2008-02-26T02:56:00.001-05:00

The title of this post pretty much sums up my feelings on He, She and It. As cool as the cyborg business was (I'm sure you're all excited about reopening the debate we had about Mike), suffice it to say that I was not prepared for this exploration of female psychology and sexuality. Most of the chapters left me emotionally drained, while others simply filled me with disgust or dismay. Don't get me wrong; I think this is a very fascinating, well-written novel. As I read it, however, I realized that the only chapters I was enjoying were the ones Malkah told to Yod about the Maharal and Joseph.

After thinking about why that might be, I came to an unusual conclusion. The biggest difference between the Maharal's story and the main plot is the former's focus on male protagonists. These anecdotes are the only sequences in the book in which the story is told from a male perspective (even if it's being told by a sympathetic Malkah). Somehow I found myself able to relate much better to these characters than to any of the women in the book.

Then again, perhaps that has something to do with the strong dislike I felt for Shira, who seemed to have nothing but her own narrow interest in mind throughout the book. Malkah was a bit better, but Shira was the driving narrative voice, so her actions and attitudes spilled over into Malkah's chapters, even if Malkah disapproved of them.

I've also noticed that this book seems to treat marriage as though it's toxic, suffocating to a woman's intellect at best. Marriage was only mentioned in terms of failure; I defy you to demonstrate an instance of happy marriage in this book that does not end in the traumatizing death of one of the spouses (usually the husband, in what I fear may be a form of wish fulfillment for the author).

The more I think about the author's view towards men, the suspicious I get. Take Nili's hidden society, for instance. They have reached that long-sought dream of some women, an Amazonian society where men are totally unnecessary in the reproductive process (not as far off as you might think!). That society is described in the glowingest of terms, and it seems freedom from men has given them the time and energy to create technological marvels, even without the collected technical know-how of the rest of humanity (via the Net).

As one more example of the author's complete hatred of men, observe the main antagonist, Y-S, and how many times it is stated that Y-S is male dominated.

So Piercy is laying it on pretty thick. Men can be summarized, in her worldview, as violent and unnecessary. Women can be forgiven for following their instincts, even those that lead to destruction, since female instincts are ultimately nurturing. Even the creative impulses of men, however, are rooted in their desires to destroy, and that is all that will come of their work. How depressing! Piercy has taught me to either despise my gender or distrust her book.

Let's talk about Yod, then. In my comment on Kaitlin's post, I raised the question of whether Yod would consider himself superior to us. From our perspective, it seems like a simple comparison: Yod is faster, stronger, easily repaired and great in the sack. His only disadvantage is a lack of experience, but that will be corrected in time. Cyborgs, then, must be the next stage, or at least something like them (suggested by the augmentations sported by Nili and her people). However, Yod spends the whole book attempting to become more human. He is programmed to reprogram himself, and in doing so he makes himself more than the weapon he was created to be. Yet the weapon at his core remains; despite all the influence of Malkah, Yod viewed Avram as his creator, and in this particular set of internal consistencies, that means destruction.

The qualities that make Yod such an ideal tool of destruction (his strength, skill in the Net, tactical ability and built-in ordnance), except perhaps for the explosive element, are all things we normal humans are envious of. However, they separated Yod from humanity, condemning him to a brief and violent life. I am positive that he would have traded his enhanced capacities for real flesh and blood, and the assurance that he feels what others feel, in a heartbeat. We may worry at times that our futures are set in stone, and our actions are already written on the wheel of fate, but none of us have to face that fact in our lifetimes like Yod did. Uncertainty about the future is not such a terrible thing, and a trait I'm sure Yod would value higher than any of his cyborg attributes. Like Joseph, his creation was a work of genius that resulted in something less capable, in all respects other than physical strength, than any real human.

Finally, I'd like to point out the interesting combination of Mother-Maiden-Crone in Malkah, Riva, and Shira. However, I'd place Shira in the Mother role, with Riva as the Maiden. Ridiculous, I know! But an afterthought. Bear with me.

First and Foremost

2008-02-26T02:50:00.002-05:00

Before even delving into the social science or science fiction of He, She, and It, I'd first just like to say that I think that it is a great novel. For me, at least, it was an absolute page-turner that I never wanted to put down. Considering there's not a lot of "action" (read:explosions) in the book, that's an absolute testament to Piercy's literary abilities.

Why? Well, it's a pretty interesting post-apocalypse. Gigantic corporations, megalopolises (megalopoli? megalopola?), free cities - fun stuff. Was anyone else thinking of Weyland-Yutani whenever they mentioned Y-S? The world that Piercy paints for us is quite engrossing - she reveals a lot of detail to us without ever simply going off on a historical lecture. Nothing in the plot ever seems like a deus ex machina - the plot actions all seem reasonable. This is really the result of well-defined character psychologies. I felt that all of the main characters were at least understandable and mostly relatable.

That all being said, I suppose I should touch on Yod, but I don't find that there's much to say. He's a tragic figure, a person beholden to his creator and doomed never to quite fit in. His only possible fate in his world was death. There was never a way that he could have fit into his society as an equal. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that the discrimination against him is completely arbitrary - he is the ideal end to all of the tinkering that people are already doing to their bodies. Is the the one-drop theory - would one drop of human blood have done it for him? Exactly where is that line? The novel's society seems like it will only ever accept modified humans, and in the end, it doesn't seem like it will be a problem for a long time. I see Avram as Dr. Soong, Data's creator from ST:TNG - he was way ahead of his time, to the point where humans won't be able to match or surpass his work for generations. So... problem solved, I guess.

As always, my pre-class post is rather amorphous; I suppose it's my brain trying to put everything in order. We'll see tomorrow how this all fits together with the course itself. It's no surprise, though, that this week's movie is Blade Runner, and thankfully, we'll be watching it in its un-studio-ified form that actually lets Ridley Scott deliver his message. Robots... people... lines... Philip K. Dick's obsession with eyes...

The roles of He, She, and It

2008-02-25T15:00:00.004-05:00

Marge Piercy tackles a variety of subjects in He, She, and It, ranging from the constant sexual and violent undertones to the occasional barbs about how humans laid waste to their environment. The most prominent theme, and that for this week's discussion, was her inquiry into what is human. Using her parallel stories- the main storyline of the cyborg Yod created to protect the free town of Tikva and the historically told tale of the golem Joseph created to protect a Jewish ghetto- Piercy is able to confront multiple issues of what defines a human.

Shira Shipman integrates Yod into her family structure and wholly supports him as being just as human as her, but in a different way. Her reflections of Yod being programmed are always quickly followed by the logic that in a sense, humans too are programmed. This seems to be Piercy's primary justification for Yod being given the same privileges as the other citizens of the town and humans as a whole- that just as Yod is programmed to want to achieve certain goals, humans are programmed with goals such as those motherhood induce upon Shira. The golem Joseph has his own wants (his desire for Chava) but he is too obedient a creature to push the boundaries, or perhaps he is uncreated before he has a chance to. Are humans merely the biological equivalent of computers, programmed with our goals in our genes? It's certainly possible.

What I found most interesting were Piercy's gender roles. Truly violent tendencies are only attributed to male charactres- namely Avram, Joseph, Yod, and all of Yod's predecessors- while only female relationships are explored in depth. There are multiple female relationships explored, merely family as well as lesbian relationships and the entire colony of females living in The Black Zone. The clearest form of this opinion lies in the simple fact that Avram failed nine time with his cyborg projects because they were too violent and not personable enough. It was not until Malkah inflicted her female influence upon Yod's programming that the project was successful. Shira herself often speaks appreciatively of how feminine Yod's tendencies and goals were in their relationship.

Perhaps it is through this isolation of charactre traits- violence to men and relationships to women- that Piercy causes us to truly examine them and how all of these traits mesh to form humans.

I would like to note that Yod's one main un-human characteristic (technical specifications aside) is his complete lack of a need to further his species. Rather, he "feels" the complete opposite goal of needing to ensure his race does NOT continue. I found this intriguing.

tetsuo, kaneda, ad infinitum

2008-02-22T10:57:00.003-05:00

I felt I really owed it to you all to share with you this:

Live-Action Akira Movie Confirmed for 2009

Step One

2008-02-21T18:14:00.000-05:00

How to be a messianic figure in 3 easy steps:
1. Don't die.
2. Don't profess to be any sort of messiah.
3. Fulfill prophecies.
Or so seemed to be the general sort of conclusionary-ish idea we reached. I think essentially that under some definitions Paul could be a messiah, but not under others. Paul is the messiah equivalent of the tomato. A mere religious/political leader by some definitions, a prophesized super human being by others. It all depends on how you look at it. Considering we were looking at it according to a historically and partially religiously based perspective, I think we can conclude that by those standards Paul was a messiah of one breed or another.
The fact that the word play used by Weber crosses the language barrier delighted me. Those are rare occasions, and fortunately this allowed us non-German speaking students to appreciate the intelligence Weber displayed in how he approached his assignment.
As for our note-taking experiment in student labour...no, I jest. As I already stated in class, I take those sort of notes for every class, and I would personally enjoy seeing the diverse interpretations each person pulled from our discussions.

The Answer?

2008-02-20T14:48:00.003-05:00

I don't know if anyone else enjoyed that class as much as I did, but considering the number of people who have already given reflective posts, I'd say that it at least interested people.

Okay, Dune. Messiah... Only problem is, we're thinking of this all wrong, and so we're sort of half-right on the whole thing. As I said in class, I have a very limited knowledge of Islamic Second Coming myth, so I really can't speak as an authority on this. However, what I have learned is that the Mahdi (literally: "The Guided One") is not the messiah. He is referred to a Hadrat, literally "Great Presence."

As with any religious figure, not all Muslims agree on the nature or even existence of the Mahdi. I think, though, that I've found a pretty mainstream belief and summarized it here. First, the Islamic belief is that Jesus was not killed, but ascended to heaven alive and became a Muslim. My understanding of what I've read is that the Mahdi will begin a series of wars all over earth to fight the False Messiah, "al-Masīh ad-Dajjāl." In the midst of this, Jesus, the messiah, will come back down to Earth to slay the Anti-Christ. The Jews and Christians will convert to Islam and Jesus will reign over a peaceful, utopian Earth for 40 years. He will then die and be buried beside Muhammad.

So I get out of this that the Mahdi is, indeed, just a guided "seed" to cause the actual messiah's return to Earth. Also, messiahs can die; they just have to do it according to prophesy. I don't know if this is the definitive answer, but I'm almost certain that Herbert was aware of all this when he was writing Dune.

Prof. PTJ touched upon a great point, one that a friend of mine mentioned to me when I first read Dune about ten years ago. As a Judeo-Christian-influenced society, we're expecting a Jesus story when we start talking about religious figures who lead their people out of oppression and to the promised land. Herbert was aware of this expectation and so he wrote an Islamic-based story. This is a brilliant move - it makes the story seem a little exotic, but also familiar. Sociologists have shown that people tend to like things that are slightly exotic, but also familiar.

In other news, perhaps I was a bit harsh on Weber. Our discussion pulled out the good points from his lecture. I still think that the bloody thing was too damn long, though. In my initial post, and once in class, I noted what I perceived to be a realpolitik bent to Weber's argument. Perhaps I should have left it as what I first called it in my blog post, "For the Love of God, Please, and I Can't Emphasize This Enough, Understand the Difference Between Theory and Practice." The term realpolitik is too Machiavellian for what I actually took Weber to mean; it just happens to be more concise than "For the Love of God, Please, and I Can't Emphasize This Enough, Understand the Difference Between Theory and Practice."

Finally, a reflection on the class itself. As I said earlier, I really enjoyed our session, especially the first part. I thought that we had a great conversation going. As Prof. PTJ said, the Pro/Con list itself wasn't the point, nor was finding an answer, really. It was a (highly effective, in my opinion) tool to get us talking about what a messiah actually is, how the book addresses it, and, to bring it back to social science, how societies believe in messiahs. Jonestown, for example. And then, in The Fifth Element, we'll see a savior who no one even knows we need.

I'm skeptical about the court reporter concept we're going to be experimenting with. My personal concern is that I won't be able to do it very well - the only classes I've ever taken notes in are math classes. My mind works more like our discussion did - stream of consciousness style and filled with random pop culture references. My overall concern is that whoever is reporting will be taken out of the discussion. That's one of the reasons why I half-jokingly suggested a transcription. Since I don't do it, I forgot that people follow some sociological variant of quantum theory and act differently when they're monitored. Then again, our discussions center more on the Heisenberg Principle: the more you know about the conversation, the less sure you are about where it's going, and vice-versa.

This is the power of the course, I think. We're actually going somewhere, instead of most classes where you go along a set path to find an answer that people already know, then put a bow on it and take a regurgitation test. Almost any time a class discussion ends in an answer, I'm disappointed. Yesterday's class, by contrast, left me invigorated enough to write an absurdly long reflection. I didn't write it yesterday because I didn't want it to be too long, in fact.

As a rule, I hate postmodernism. I can't stand postmodern architecture or philosophy - I see it exactly as Nietzsche would, I think - it's the road that brings us to the Last Man. Overall, postmodernism is nihilistic and worse, a conversation killer. Not every argument should end with "Well, that's just your opinion," like much postmodernist thought dictates. There are answers to things. Not all things, but some. There are correct and incorrect value judgments; they are not all solely matters of opinion. I'd go so far as to say that postmodernism is causing the increasing rates of depression among all age groups, especially the younger ones.

This class, though, is a perfect example of the good parts of postmodernism. We mentioned going off on tangents in class, to which Prof. PTJ (and maybe Dirk Gently) responded that nothing is actually a tangent. Our class is a great example of that omnipresent characteristic of postmodern art: pastiche. It's what makes (some of) us like Family Guy, its constant references that contain both respect and irreverence. In much of postmodern art, it is the fusion of "high" and "low" culture - some of that architecture I hate is a perfect example. One architect recently featured in the New York Times is building a housing development based on slums, even - merger of "high" and "low," considering how expensive these places will be. Pre-ripped jeans? I see it as an extension of the same concept. I always imagine some starving child in China ripping every pair of jeans that comes past him, crying, "But why? Why do the Americans want holes in their jeans? They let the cold in! Oh, so cold. So... so cold."

But I digress (anyone get the wheat reference from my substantive post yet?). Here we have a great merger of "high" and "low." Science fiction, though it has come a long way from pulp magazines, is still widely considered as "low culture." Social science is "high culture." We merge the two and find that sci-fi can tell us more about social science than can social scientists. So it's only natural that we end up talking about the Comfy Chair or any number of pieces of pop culture. They all contain some understanding of the problem we're looking at. Even the Family Guy cutaways.

Es gibt ein Weber, er ist lustig! Lauf, Weber, lauf.

2008-02-19T10:24:00.004-05:00

I find it odd that the part of Weber's talk which has become most well-known, his formulation of the state as possessor of a monopoly on the means of violence, is hardly the focus of his attention in this piece. Last semester, I took a class that was basically founded on that definition; it's jarring to see it in its original, less critical context.

Weber's brew is heady, and it delivers a metaphysical shock to the system of Western ethics. His knowledge of "Occidental" belief systems is impressive, and he applies it with gusto to any question that might arise. While this all makes for very interesting reading, it begs the question of whether Weber really felt that change was attainable. He saw in Germany a basically stagnant system, one where officials focused on the importance of experience over ability and plotted to prevent younger men from entering the political sphere and usurping some of their power. If this is so, what was his purpose in giving this talk?

More importantly, what's this all got to do with Dune? Weber's model of the feudal system doesn't carry over well into the Imperium, since vassals to the Emperor clearly feel little in the way of loyalty. Moreover, the O.C. Bible renders Weber's comments on ethics seemingly obsolete, as it erases all those commandments which lead inexorably to equivocation and replaces them with one that is at once all-encompassing and, conveniently, completely removed from external judgment.

However, I see no problem with desert power as a metaphor for monopoly on the means of violence. In fact, much like I imagine Weber loved the sound of his own voice, I get a thrill when I say desert power. It sounds sleek and dangerous. Air power, land power, whatever! We can win Arrakis through a monopoly on the means of desert violence, and sandworms.

Sorry if this degraded in seriousness a bit. I can't help but find Weber to be a little too self-congratulatory in his rhetoric. The reference to desert power stands, though. Paul could have stayed in the desert with the Fremen planting stuff, but he felt it critical to his leadership that he challenge the Emperor and become the true master of Arrakis.

So then, a fair question: what kind of politico is Paul? Is he one of the ones who lives in politics, or just somebody who dips his hand in when he finds it convenient? What is the true form of his Weltanschauung? He grounds his Herrschaft in twin, opposing themes of destiny and ancestral right (the future versus the past!) It's a certainty that ancestral right is a strong component of Dune, as ninety generations implies a fair amount of status attached to your birth. Yet in going beyond other men, he loses the ability to care for them that makes him such an effective leader.

I'm ashamed of myself, but some weeks there are no computer programs, poems, or brilliant tie-ins to the election. There's just pages and pages of raw political theory to sift through, and not a spaceship or sentient machine in sight. I guess Weber wasn't all that visionary.

The first thing we do, ...

2008-02-18T21:27:00.004-05:00

... let's kill all the lawyers. It is funny that Weber ends with a Shakespeare sonnet because one of my first thoughts while reading this was the famous Henry VI quote.

I see "Politics as a Vocation" as an over-long lecture in three acts: "Kill All the Lawyers," "Cult of Personality," and "For the Love of God, Please, and I Can't Emphasize This Enough, Understand the Difference Between Theory and Practice." Frankly, I didn't care for the whole thing.

I found the first act to be over-long and essentially "A Political Brief History of Time" without any of the wit that would be implied by my stealing Stephen Hawking's title. Yes, yes, monopoly of force, Roman law, et cetera. I'm sure this was all quite groundbreaking in 1919, but I still wouldn't have wanted to sit through the bloody thing.

The "Cult of Personality" section or, to put it differently, "What Demagogues and Insiders Do" was lacking. It does not speak at all to the psychology of why governments take these forms. Since I can most easily critique his portrayal of the U.S. political system, I'd say that he didn't explain his point about Calhoun's generation enough and indeed completely neglected to mention that this cyclical political action had already happened once before and once after Calhoun's generation of compromisers died off. In truth, I found this lack of depth in this section to taint my view of the whole lecture, leaving a bad taste in my mouth and a bit of malice in my words.

Because of this, by the time I got to Act 3, the lecture was already doomed to a poor review. Yep, a politician should be realistic, not idealistic. Do what's going to help, not what some made-up principle tells you to. Because that is, in itself, its own principle. I get it, Max; this is what you wanted to say the whole time. Couldn't Act 3 have just been the entire lecture? It seems to contain your actual points. Please?

So I wasn't too happy with the lecture. That's not to say it doesn't have good points, but thanks in part to the pervasiveness of Weber's work, I've already heard them. Much clearer. I didn't even like the "live with/live for" section - it's a word play that should be self-evident. And as he points out, none of the pairs of definitions he gives any number of times during the lecture are mutually exclusive. Sorry, Max. Maybe it worked better in German.

Passion for Politics

2008-02-18T15:03:00.001-05:00

As I began reading this, upon Max Weber's classification of politicians being in involved either for or from politics, I couldn't help but begin trying to classify each presidential candidate as living either "for" politics or "from" politics. I laughed.
I got a little sidetracked in this lecture during the section about journalism, which was by far my favourite. Weber seems to put so much faith in journalists' abilities and natural feel for politics, and it almost seems that he laments that their profession doesn't allow for them to aspire to positions of political power because of time allowances. Given that this was published in 1919, I can only imagine what Weber would think of today's fast-paced journalism, with online publications and more immediate deadlines than considered possible in early 20th century Germany. He does hit on the central theme of journalists even today being seen as a pestilent layer of society, but still a necessary instrument in swaying the public opinion to the politicians' ideas. Looking at today's collection of journalists, I can't imagine wanting nearly any of them into positions of political power, though there are always exceptions to be made.
Overall Weber seemed to have an interesting point, but I found his flow of ideas not to be consistent. For example, he went from discussing the American "boss" machine to an organized party structure- a very abrupt transition sans explanation for how one evolved or led to the other. A few other points like this within his lecture undermined some of his arguments, in my opinion.
Maybe it's the cynical American in me that couldn't even begin to believe in the self-sacrificing, individual who attains the perfect balance of passion, responsibility, and sense of proportion that Weber delegates to this hero figure that emerges through years of the evolution of politics as a true politician.

"Free Will," or "Fire at Will"

2008-02-17T18:06:00.002-05:00

A thought occurred to me as I was reading over others' blog posts. A good number of them concerned whether or not anyone in Dune had free will because Paul could see into the future. This got me thinking back to The Time Machine - it's also set in one future, so did anyone in the intervening millions of years have free will? Are we destined to be, you know, crabs? I find it at least interesting, if nothing more, that we had no discussion of free will when we first talked about time travel. After all, Paul's mind is just time-travelling - same idea.

Or let's go over to First Contact - the Borg changed the past, which changed the future, and then the Enterprise fixed it... fate? Had to be? Or do our actions dictate our future? Well, it's easier to think of it in the past.

Is it that the Time Traveller saw what would happen without intervention on his part? What if he had come back and somehow overthrown society and changed everything - would we still end up as crabs on a beach? Creepy crabs on a beach? Wheat. Fields of wheat. A tremendous amount of wheat. Soon we shall be covered by wheat. "Did you say wheat?" "Wheat." (Please tell me that someone got that reference.)

If Paul hadn't seen the future, would he have led the revolution? Ah, the old self-fulfilling prophesy. It all comes back to Oedipus, just as any talk of time travel ends up in a paradox. (Unless it's paradox-correcting - I'm assuming that more people will get that reference.)

Well, I don't have an answer, but if we are observing this as a "bible," without regard for the moment for whom it was written, then it makes perfect sense that it's ambiguous.

That third appendix, though. What do we make of that? Is there, in the Quantum Leap parlance, a GTF up there in the higher dimensions that has this all planned out and is actively manipulating events? Or is GTF merely an incredible equation that takes in every variable in the universe and can spew out the future with 100% certainty? Of course, it doesn't matter in a practical sense, since the illusion of free will is the important part.

But I was destined to write this, so I guess it doesn't matter much. Damn! Paradox again.

Which Paul?

2008-02-14T16:06:00.001-05:00

The entire cyclical aspect of Herbert's writing style was discussed at length and in my opinion was our most important clue to every other aspect of this book. As the reader's we are told nearly every aspect of the plot in advance, yet we continue to read and even enjoy this book through nearly five hundred pages. Any ordinary novel would be tossed aside early on if the author tried this, but in Dune the basic developments in the plot (that we of course know will happen long before they actually occur) are not the entire story. Reading the last page of the book before the rest wouldn't change how you read the book at all. Instead of the plot, an intricate web of the secret agendas of individuals and organizations must be slowly unfolded for us to see the twisted relationships and alliances that guide political, religious, and personal agendas. It was these relationships and agendas that I enjoyed discovering in class. Everyone seemed to have a different opinion.

For instance- personal preference seemed to dictate how people perceived Paul. Or Muad'dib. Or the Duke Paul Altreides. Or the Lisan al-Gaib. Or the Kwisatz Haderach. Which I think may have been intentional on Herbert's part. The central character in the story is multi-faceted, and everyone supported the Paul they liked or identified with most. We don't have one main character, but several rolled into one so that everyone can get what they want from him.

Herbert causes us to see Paul just as the Fremen, Bene Gesserit, and Alreides clan all seem to: getting a bit of what they want from Paul, though their purposes vary.

Minds, Prepare to be Blown

2008-02-12T18:06:00.001-05:00

I sincerely hope that you're sitting down as you read this. If not, grab a seat and buckle up.

Picture this: a powerful woman, never treated by her man as society expects a man to treat a wife. She emerges from the shadow of his influence and finds herself struggling to control the ideological future of a people. She represents an established political organization, and hopes to return to a time of paradise and splendor. However, her peculiar femininity causes many to distrust her.

She competes for that ideological control with a young man known to the people as an outsider, who speaks in terms of destiny and claims to have a vision of the future. He seizes the imagination of the people by promising them a fabulous new future. Although she disapproves of his leveraging his popularity into political control, he gradually brings one group of followers after another around to his point of view. There are concerns because he grew up in a far-off place, but he easily integrates himself into their society.

Both of them have nearly identical goals, to throw off the yoke of domination laid on them for years by what they see as a harsh, authoritarian leader. This unpopular leader generally responds to threats either by denying that they exist or attempting to obliterate them entirely with a display of overwhelming force. Eventually he finds it necessary to relinquish direct control, and so props up one of his faction's most loyal supporters to square off against the new threats.

As to how the story ends, I'm not too sure. "What do you mean," you ask, "isn't this the plot of Dune?" I can see why you might think that, my friends. But this is actually the plot...of ELECTION 2008!!!

To tie things together, a selection from the glossary:
BARAKA - A living holy man of magical powers.

Frank Herbert planned this.

This Baliset is Out of Dune

2008-02-12T09:40:00.001-05:00

Religion, religion, religion, religion, religion.

Like many of you, I had forgotten how truly excellent Dune is. Part and parcel to that forgetfulness was forgetting the strongest themes of the book, although its place(s) in our syllabus gave me enough of a clue. So, to get back on topic: religion, religion, religion, religion.

Religion receives an interesting treatment in this world. I was particularly fascinated by the chronicle of the creation of the Orange Catholic Bible in the appendix. Other sections of the appendix give clues to religion's place in the "Duniverse":

Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness. (Appendix II, p.504)

The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom religion
was a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it
docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena --
even religious phenomena -- could be reduced to mechanical
explanations. (Appendix II, p. 501)

Nevertheless, there are few direct references to religious belief on the part of the characters. This makes sense considering how many of those characters are of the ruling class. The only copy of the O.C. Bible that we see is the one presented to Paul by Dr. Yueh, but the gift is rife with foreshadowing. Dr. Yueh's thoughts at the same time undermine the value of the book: "I salve my own conscience. I give him the surcease of religion before betraying him. Thus I may say to myself that he has gone where I cannot go." Then he tells Paul, "You may find the book interesting. It has much historical truth in it as well as good ethical philosophy." (p. 40) The forms of religion, it seems, are tolerated at best by the ruling classes of the Imperium.

The Bene Gesserit, on the other hand, actively cultivate religion as a sort of insurance policy. Most of the religious observances of the Fremen have their roots in the Missionaria Protectiva. Their willingness to exploit the superstitions of relatively backward peoples, along with their millenia-old eugenics program, indicates a cold pragmatism poorly suited to faith. And yet, and yet, when things are at their worst, that Benest of Gesserit Jessica has only one recourse: to pray. How can this be?

I was under the initial impression that a grand collusion of religions would be a crippling thing for belief. Despite recognizing their common commandment of "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul," the religions of Dune share little else but an affinity for flowery language. I also expected that any grand religious convention that was able to come to an agreement of any sort would seek to make the agreement binding over all religions represented there, but that has not happened here. In fact, the sheer abundance of religions suggests that, rather than delimiting religious thought, the democracy of the O.C. Bible has finally opened up religion to acceptable interpretation. All are represented, but it is really up to each person (or each religious group, or whatever) to pick and choose the books that have meaning for themselves. Well, maybe I'm being a bit idealistic. But religious strife, at least, seems to have disappeared. It's just been replaced by much worse strife of a thousand different kinds, but at least all those souls are intact.

I must not fear. Fear is the blog-killer.

2008-02-11T21:34:00.000-05:00

It had been too long since I had read Dune. In the intervening years since I first picked up the book, I had the unfortunate occasion to watch the trippy but horrific 1984 film adaptation (which made a lot more sense after I saw some of David Lynch's other work). The Sci Fi Channel did a much better job with the book - it's no surprise, considering they gave it six hours.

I start my post this way because upon rereading the book, I realized that I had forgot about the brilliant complexities and the fullness of the world that Frank Herbert created. This time around, I was understandably more focused on the book's social science implications. Yes, Herbert masterfully recreated the Middle East oil dynamic. What is even more impressive is that he did so in 1965, before the first oil crisis and far before our current one. When I first read the book ten years ago, I did not draw these parallels as clearly, partly because of my age, but mostly because they did not seem to be of particular concern. My, how times have changed. Truly, Dune has truly come into its own.

But I digress. The theme under which this book has been placed is that of religion and the messiah. The messiah is certainly common in all of literature - few modern novels lack some form of Christ figure. The thing about science fiction is, it lets you drop the "figure" and keep the "Christ" (insert other messiah here). We can see the generations of selective breeding come to fruition, delivering an oppressed people from their oppressors. The story gives the reader its perspective on the religious mindset and the concept of the messiah. Above all, the book notes the patience and restraint of the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen. This is, of course, vital to much of messianic religious belief because, well, the messiah isn't here yet.

My thoughts here aren't exactly as organized as I'd like. The book is too expansive to really settle down on certain points, but I'm sure that tomorrow's class will put things into a more distinct framework.

Dune. Damn.

2008-02-11T16:42:00.001-05:00

As a first time reader of Dune, I was astounded. Wow. Therefore at this point my thoughts are still processing as to what it was exactly, that I got out of reading this book. Herbert created a complex web of characters that still each maintained their own personalities and loyalties, and without confusing their relationships. He created an intergalactic system manipulated by four central powers (The Emperor, The Houses, The Bene Gesserit, and The Guild) all of which are concerned with preserving either their line (breeding) or their way of life, or both. How Herbert managed to balance a power situation so precariously between the four groups intrigued me.
I lack the trained perceptions of the Bene Gesserit, so I feel I would pick up a lot more on the subtle clues upon a second, or third reading. On this reading, I think what struck me most was the foresight into today's international dilemmas. Where would the Guild be without it's oil...sorry- its spice? All of the hidden agendas behind controlling this one substance made me more than a little concerned for today's parallel situation.
The patience Herbert's characters exhibited was astounding, though he crafted emotional justification for that quality. The need for a Kwisatz Haderach propels the Bene Gesserit to the art of seduction and selective breeding over thousands of years to perfect the genes of one individual that many of them will never live to see. In a similar fashion, the Fremen devote hundreds of years and even stricter water discipline than they had been accustomed to practicing to the slow ecological transformation of their planet. Herbert manages to find human purpose and discipline in both religion and ecology, an odd mix in my opinion, but well done.
The complicated family structure of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress came to mind as I thought through the Imperium, the Great Houses, the Lesser Houses, and their fief structure spread over the planets. I found it refreshing that Herbert's characters didn't need any new, complicated structures, just good old fashioned marriages for power among those families with power. It was simpler to keep them straight in my mind amid the other relationship intertwinings Herbert was weaving. It probably would have proved difficult to form new structures anyhow, as they would be generally limited to whichever planet they developed on-such as the Fremen act of the father's slayer having responsibility for the dead's family- and would spread no further.
I hope our class discussion will point out to me the things I missed, as I feel there was a lot there that I missed along my discovery of the story.

The etymology of constitutionality

2008-02-11T01:08:00.003-05:00

After seeing the comments on the free exercise clause, I thought I'd take this opportunity to present my somewhat unconventional take on the Constitution's religion clauses. I wrote this as part of the final for a class I took last semester, "Religion & American Public Policy." Normally I wouldn't reuse something, but it's a lot easier than retyping it, and I think it's an interesting point. Let me know what you think.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment leave much to the imagination in terms of how they should be applied. Divided into two parts, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, they theoretically describe the whole of possible religious interaction in which the federal government may take part. In practice, they are often misinterpreted due to their confusing word choice. The Establishment Clause, for instance, is regularly read as prohibiting Congress from passing laws having to do with religion in general. This is a gross misreading of the Clause as it was intended; take as evidence the etymology of the word establishment. Its root, establish, comes from the Latin stabilire (to make stable). There is a clear difference between 1) a stable, enduring religious body and 2) assorted religious principles (which so often find protection under this clause). As early as 1731, there is evidence of the use of the phrase established Church as a common principle; although that connection has vanished today, even as late as 1923 the term’s meaning had only changed to “ruling people and institutions”.[1] Establish has always carried the connotation of a permanent institution; based on this logic, it is ridiculous to conclude that the Establishment Clause extends to preventing Congress from addressing religious activity in general. Only legitimate churches or similarly situated religious organizations, which are well established and permanent, are illegal targets of legislation. The Free Exercise Clause falls victim to another linguistic confusion; Congress is only prohibited from making laws which explicitly hinder the free exercise of those religious establishments. While the common understanding of this clause is, “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the right of the people to freely exercise their religions,” a more critical reading proves this is incorrect. The proper interpretation is, “Congress shall make no law prohibiting religious establishments from freely exercising.” Exercise, in this case, means “the condition of being in active operation."[2] In other words, the power of Congress to legislate with regards to religion is explicitly limited to everything that happens outside of establish religious institutions, but within that one restriction, Congress may pass any law it wishes! With this evidence, it is apparent that laws banning OR requiring forms of religious expression in public are completely constitutional: the clauses refer to churches, not their members. Religious expression that occurs outside of a building owned by permanent religious organization or an event sponsored by one of those organizations has no protection whatsoever. While the definition of “permanent religious organization” is harder to pin down, it can be understood that cults and newer religions, which have not proven themselves to be historically viable (established), do not enjoy the same protection as churches which have been around for hundreds of years. Similarly, the government may endorse any religious activity so long as it endorses no established religious institution. Therefore, under the terms of this argument, Christianity may be the subject of legislation, but the Presbyterian Church may not.

[1] Establish, Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=establishment&searchmode=none

[2] Exercise, Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=exercise&searchmode=none

Also, I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of hating on Apple, so here's a poem I wrote:

My Trip to the Apple Store

The story I tell here,
Entirely true,
Could easily happen
to any of you.

When my PC failed me,
its hard drive ascreech,
I went to the store
of which hipper men preach.

With turtleneck black,
and eyes oh so cold,
The Apple man bought me
'fore I knew I'd been sold.

He spoke of its features,
He spoke of its price
Assured me that nothing
was nearly this nice.

The plastic, fantastic;
And firewire, too?
It also holds pictures
and clips from the zoo!

Sound editing, easy.
Photo touch-ups, a snap!
To use this computer
takes no thinking cap.

"But hold on," I asked him,
"What makes this so good?
These are all functions
That a PC could-"

"Blasphemy!" yelled he,
"It's got such ease of use!"
To prove it he made up
A widget-shaped goose.

His fingers were flying,
Slowed only by need
To press that strange button.
I missed right-click's speed.

"Now wait up," I begged,
"Can't I change or adjust?"
The interface seemed stagnant,
and I despise rust.

"Absurd!" was his charge,
"What change could you need?
It's a perfect design
for all people, indeed!"

He told me, "No viruses!
Macs will prevail!"
I asked about hard drives,
heard "Oh, those still fail."

"Now slow down," said I,
"This all seems quite fine.
But can't I go outside
your neatly drawn lines?"

He straightened and frowned,
Then gave me my hat.
Said, "Sorry, sir-
thought you were cooler than that."

Yes, it's biased.

Computer: Arch.

2008-02-09T17:24:00.000-05:00

It has taken me a while to post my official reflection to our class session, principally because I have been engaged in a fun discussion over on the Mercury Theatre blog concerning religion. Since I've already touched on some of our class's discussion themes over there, I'll consider that as an integral part of my reflection, leaving this post to address the other parts of class.

First, the laptops. Put simply, I was not a fan. Though it was nice to see a Windows machine put into a nice Mac form-factor (thank you, dual-boot), this was the extent of my enjoyment. Though it was nice to be able to back up our claims with evidence, I found that it distracted and fragmented the class as a whole and that the constructive exchange of ideas suffered. In this respect, I suppose I like a more Socratic approach to synthesizing ideas - I did enjoy the beginning of the class for this reason.

From a purely tech-geek perspective, the experiment certainly showed the limits of the software we were using and perhaps even the throughput of our wireless network - I doubt that we could get a smooth image without being hard-wired in any case. Some day, when all our computers respond to voice commands and speak to us in Majel Barrett's voice, I'm sure it'll work a little better. (Interesting sidenote, it turns out that Google's muckety-mucks were very muc influenced by the computer on Star Trek. I think of this every time I am able to just type a flight number or "time in Stockholm" into Google and get a relevant response, though it's still a little bit behind saying, "Computer: Mid-21st century clothing" and having them by the time you get to the transporter room. We've still come light-years from the first voice recognition software, of course: I remember trying out one of the first voice recognition programs (for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups) and sitting there, repeating, "Minimize... Minimize... Minimize..." until the blasted thing actually worked.

But I digress. In response to Prof. PTJ's own reflection, I would say that for my part, I do believe Stephanson's claim. Of course, we are not the only country to make this claim, but the fact that we were founded by the Protestant fundamentalists who were too crazy for England and the unique aspect of the American frontier make the United States' case an exceptional one. I, for one, certainly do not believe that America is the world's savior, but I do agree that this is the United States' image of itself. Our political language is so closely intertwined with the language of being God's chosen people that I would love to see someone make a claim to the contrary of Stephanson's points. (I say this in all earnestness - I would love to see the points that a counterargument would come up with.)

In introducing Manifest Destiny to us at the beginning of the class, Prof. PTJ said something to the effect that it was a great book for foreigners to understand where the U.S. is "coming from." Stephanson has us pegged pretty well, but I think that the book is probably more valuable to foreigners. As I wrote in my substantive post, Stephanson's purpose does not seem to be to explain to Americans how our political landscape is influenced by our religious history, but rather to explain to readers how ensconced in religion the United States really is. In this respect, I think that Alexis de Tocqueville did a better job of explaining American political thought to Americans and Europeans alike.

In closing this post, I go back to my original question from my substantive post: why can't Americans see how pervasive religion is in our government in comparison to Western Europe? Perhaps we need a reverse-Stephenson book to explain Western Europe's tumultuous history with religion and its postreligious nature to us. Does anyone have a good book that they could recommend to all Americans, in the vein of a reverse Stephanson or Tocqueville?

America&Tiffany

2008-02-08T00:54:00.000-05:00

First, I say without reservation that I do enjoy being a guinea pig- to an extent of course. I honestly do enjoy experimentation in the classroom, whether it works out as planned or not. Either way it's new, different, and at least holds potential for improvement (not that I have any qualms with the class now or think it necessarily needs improvement). Though the TiffanyScreens software was not overly cooperative (despite it's perky title) there was one aspect of it that I really enjoyed. It allowed us the opportunity to see how the different groups approached the same question from radically different angles and have a more diversified approach to discussion. For example, I enjoyed both the group who presented similar themes found in much older writings and the group who presented the banned cartoons illustrating those same ideas. Not that I wasn't a fan of the Wikipedia page and medical manifest destiny too.
As for the actual course of our discussion and Manifest Destiny itself, I feel we focused to much on particulars to get to what really deserved clarification. Yes, we established that the United States is and always has been a very religious state, despite popular belief to the contrary, which Stephanson did an excellent job of narrating. I felt that the specifics of which particular religions were involved got in the way of discussion on the idea as a whole. It was important that the Protestants were so involved in the formation of American ideals, but in the spread of Stephanson's work, "Protestant," could have been replaced with nearly any branch of Catholicism or bible-following religion and history would have followed the same flow. Stephanson's point that the idea of a religious mandate for a "manifest destiny" sprouted from biblical teachings and not any teaching peculiar to the Protestant following.
I think what best sums up my thoughts on this entire work are the things that went through my head upon viewing that tasteless Looney Toons depiction of Japanese culture:
Are there really people in positions of such power (yes, Looney Toons is a position power) that are so close minded and willing to misdirect our society's perceptions? Well, I suppose it's nothing new, this has been happening ever since those religious fanatics came to this continent with their ideas of superiority and a manifest destiny...

Self-Evident Truths

2008-02-04T18:33:00.000-05:00

I really hope that every single person in our class knew about most of the history presented in Manifest Destiny. I hope that as many people as possible have heard more than the fourth grade "America Can Do No Wrong" version of history. I hope that every single high school U.S. History class addresses Stephanson's themes. I hope that people acknowledge the tremendous influence of ultraconservative, Evangelical, delusional Protestantism on which this country was founded and on whose tenets we still adhere.

Unfortunately, I expect none of these things. I have little substantive information to add on this blog because I hoped that many of these themes were self-evident to educated people. Having already read Prof. PTJ's take, I feel it most appropriate to second and expand upon several of his points.

Stephanson's success is in explaining how inextricably linked the United States is with apocalyptic, Calvanistic Protestantism. He does not take it as his purpose to explain why much of the U.S. is in denial about this link. We do tend to fool ourselves into believing that our government is secular because of the Establishment Clause. However, as PTJ points out, the Free Exercise Clause guarantees that religion can survive in perpituity in the private sector. Further, since religion has Constitutional sacred cow status, it can thrive and thus profoundly affect U.S. politics.

How are Americans blind to the Protestantism that is so evident in so much of our public opinion? Americans demonize sex while embracing violence in media, at odds with virtually all of postreligious Europe. How can we not see this as the Puritanism inherent in the American psyche while Catholic/postreligious Europe looks on, confused at sex scandals and wardrobe malfunctions? How can we as a society not see the way religion plays a role in so many of our public issues, especially those of gay marriage and abortion? And how do we turn a deaf ear to politicians closing speeches with "God Bless America" and filling every statement with Christian symbolism?

All these answers and more in Oolon Colluphid's controversial trilogy, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who is This God Person Anyway?

That Good Old Frontier Spirit

2008-02-04T16:49:00.001-05:00

I went into Manifest Destiny with one significant goal: learning why on earth we're reading it in a course about science fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a great fan of American history (although I was very disappointed at the exclusion of my favorite president, the exemplary Chester A. Arthur), but I struggled to fit this book into my conception of science fiction.

To figure it out, I thought about the context in which we read the book. We read it as part of our two weeks of "Space as the Final Frontier," sandwiched between our viewing of "nervous liberals in space" in Star Trek: TNG. Then I saw that Bradbury's Martian Chronicles was under the recommended reading for this week, and its theme of transplanting behaviors (and ecology!) from a terrestrial to a Martian setting helped things start to click. Heinlein was frontier libertarians, and Star Trek is frontier psychiatrists. Manifest Destiny pulls it together by pointing out that no matter how you treat the frontier, it doesn't last forever. Our basic instinct when we see uninhabited space is to explore it, tear it from our imaginations and nail it down to lines on a map. Star Trek sort of sidesteps this problem by exploring an inexhaustibly huge galaxy (or sector, or quadrant, or whatever), so that its frontier can't really be used up in the show. The shadow of it remains, however, especially in episodes like First Contact, which demonstrates the sad truth that innocence once lost can never be regained; you can't civilize the frontier and expect it to hang on to "that good old frontier spirit."

Basically, I saw it as another explanation for why we read sci-fi at all. America has come a long way from its thirteen original colonies. Many of the obstacles to expansion seemed insurmountable, but one way or another pioneers found their ways across the continent in pursuit of their fortunes and the unstoppable American dream. Similarly, humanity won't be able to resist the vast, untapped resources space offers for long. It appears to me, then, that this is a matter of inevitability; we read and write sci-fi to gather and offer some sort of guidance on how the process should go when the time finally arrives for us to reach out and explore the stars. Humanity may spread and spread, and the idea of humanity extending from one edge of the universe to the other is an appealing one. The last point I want to make, then, is that Star Trek may be a fun trip, but eventually you run out of final frontiers. What do you do with yourselves when there's nowhere else to go? Are empires that cease to expand doomed to stagnation and eventual collapse? Either way, we're all headed to the same endpoint, as explored by Asimov in his short story The Last Question. That's why I argue that, cinematic deviance aside, the Star Wars universe represents an extraordinarily important exploration of galactic civilization; if all goes well, humanity's time on Earth represents only a short birthing phase in our overall history as a species. Just as a spaghetti Western can't give you much good advice on how to live in the American Southwest today, books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can't advise you on how to live and act in a truly established interstellar setting.

Secret Mission: Manifest Destiny

2008-02-04T14:39:00.000-05:00

History has never been my favourite subject. However, Manifest Destiny still kept my attention and I was astounded by how much I learned. Of course everyone is generally familiar with America's Puritan roots, ruthless slaughter of the Native Americans, and ever evolving democratic mission of spreading and inflicting our ideals on the less endowed cultures. Reading Stephanson was like spooning into my mouth bite after bite of historical detail I had never considered before, often before I had swallowed the previous bite. Consequently I felt a bit overwhelmed by the scope of what he covered, but after breaking it down I really appreciated his analyses, and occasionally his language.
The best phrase in the entire book I found on the top of page 45, "it was as usual a genocidal catastrophe for the Indian population." I first thought such a nonchalant mention of this egregious error of American history must be a mistake. After all, what else could the United States possibly have done that was so wrong, as well as embarrassing? Certainly there would have to be more mention of this subject, because I couldn't think of any other comparable actions. And so I grew more and more amazed at the discovery of secret orders to prepare for war, hidden agendas to take over smaller nations or territories if only a politically correct cover could be found, and even playing with Mexico's political leaders -all in the name of gaining territory.
The religious implications too were astounding. The origination of the phrase, "manifest destiny," itself had a long history of use and revival, and it seemed to me was often used as an excuse. People only needed validation that they in some way had a right to new lands in order for them to perform inexcusable slaughter and takeover. Granted, this was not always the case and much of unsettled America was empty of population, but then again, much of it was not. My discovery from this book that religion and the "divine" duty rooting back from, "go forth and multiply," were primary tools of American expansionism stretching from the beginning of the book and the first American settlers, clear through to the election of Ronald Reagan as president and his revival of the idea of one nation under the one true faith.
I think the best comment I can give this book is that it caused me outright to ponder each and every word, and the consequences of those words for American history.

Morality vs. Ethics

2008-02-03T15:16:00.000-05:00

In class, I tried to scratch the surface of examining the difference between morality and ethics. I posited that because morality involves the learned customs of people interacting with each other, Mike did not actually have a moral sense. On the other hand, he does have a strong sense of ethics because he is incapable of doing something that would do harm to the Revolution. On this blog, let me put it another way.

A woman walks into a doctor's office. She is pregnant and wishes to be prescribed RU-486, the so-called "abortion pill." The doctor is a devout Catholic and believes that prescribing the pill would go against his religion. The doctor has two choices: he may follow morality or ethics. If he turns her away, he has acted morally but unethically as a doctor. If he prescribes her the RU-486, he has acted immorally but ethically. The context of his job defines his ethics, whereas custom and dogma defines his morality.

In this framework, I do not believe that Mike can have morality. Further, his nature as a computer means that he is bound to his ethics. As much as we try to humanize Mike, he is not human, though he is a living machine. All of Mike's actions are defined by his programming - it just so happens that he can program himself for the Revolution.

At no point in the novel does Mike act unethically. Every single one of his actions is for the maximum gain of the Revolution. To act unethically would be a violation of his programming, which he continues to be bound by even as he gains more intelligence.

Reflective-Moon ideas

2008-02-02T10:26:00.000-05:00

On class Tuesday, I realized how easy it can be to only focus on certain aspects of a book while paying little mind to other major themes.
In my selfish mind I was really only concerned with the development of Mike, the conscious computer. As I read, I looked for clues that the Authority might find out about him, or some hulking prank he would play, or some element of the rebellion he would betray...and ultimately I was disappointed. As our class discussion pointed out, Heinlein was much more interested in the sexual implications and societal development on the moon than exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on the human race. Now if I had written this book...but of course I didn't, so I should have paid more attention to the issues Heinlein was focusing on rather than my own concerns.
Consequently, some of the ideas we discussed were intriguing because I hadn't considered them yet. Would a society of criminals -permanently exiled from their home planet even after serving their sentence- develop into such an embracing and family focused culture? Would families morph into such intricate relationships? We mentioned the possibilities, but I think there is honestly no way of predicting whether anything like Heinlein's fictional society would actually be established and even flourish in this sort of environment. I decided that there are too many variables, ranging from which Earthly family structures the original criminals were familiar with to instigation by the Authority, to determine if this society could develop. Possible, yes, but not probable.
I like that conclusion though. Originally, I was disappointed that the book ended so predictably, but now I have found some consolation in the fact that the formation of this Lunar society was so unpredictable.

Population Issues on the Moon

2008-01-29T17:13:00.001-05:00

I made a pretty big claim in class today -- that a society consisting of 90% women would quickly reach the equilibrium point of approximately 50% males and 50% females. I was able to find some research backing that up in the work of the primary sex-ratio scholars Fisher, Bodmer and Edwards (who argue that species will always lean towards 1:1 ratios of males to females as it offers the highest return on their energy investment in terms of reproduction). Feel free to look up their work on JSTOR. In the meantime, I decided to use arithmetic to help explain my principles.

To do so, we will first demonstrate how Luna likely functions in terms of population growth and sex ratios. Let's start with some basics. We know that, at the time of the narrative, Luna (or at least Luna City) is 90% male. To simplify things, we'll use population figures of 10 men for every 1 women, with a starting population of 100 men and 10 women. We'll assume that in Loony society, each woman takes at least two husbands, and each woman has at least two children. We'll also assume a 1:1 ratio of male to female births, and we won't take into account old age (meaning a member of any generation can marry a member of any other generation), but we will allow marriages to only occur once. Finally, we'll add 10 men and one woman to each generation to simulate the introduction of new convicts into the environment. It won't seem like much after a few generations, but I think a 10% increase in population at first is reasonable, and there's no reason to think it will increase any more over time. This will, theoretically, give us quite a long time before the population is brought to 50/50 male/female. Let's calculate a few generations....

Generation 1
Available Men: 100
Available Women: 10

Unmarried Men: 80
Male children: 10
Female children: 10
Male convicts added: 10
Female convicts added: 1

Results:
Total Men: 120
Total Women: 21
Percentage Women: 15%

Generation 2
Available Men: 100
Available Women: 11

Unmarried Men: 78
Male children: 11
Female children: 11
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 141
Total Women: 33
Percentage Women: 19%

Generation 3
Available Men: 99
Available Women: 12

Unmarried Men: 75
Male children: 12
Female children: 12
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 163
Total Women: 46
Percentage Women: 22%

Generation 4
Available Men: 97
Available Women: 13

Unmarried Men: 71
Male children: 13
Female children: 13
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 186
Total Women: 60
Percentage Women: 24%

And so on. I'll save you the tedium of the rest of the operations, but suffice to say that it takes 25 generations before hitting 40% women, and a full 200 generations before hitting 48% (by which point our total population is around 56,000, and equilibrium has already been well enough achieved -- trust me). Clearly, Heinlein's depiction of Luna City has it bad, but not so bad as he makes it seem...using my model, they go from 10 to 1 all the way down to 4 to 1 in just a few generations, and that's using very conservative estimates. My model also didn't include any individual woman having more than two children (which made the count take longer) or any men or women dying of old age (which shouldn't have effected the statistics anyway, since there was always a surplus of men in the gene pool). In other words, in a society without these limitations (like Heinlein's), there would be a lot more children, and therefore things would get corrected much faster. So while 10 to 1 males to females is pretty bad, it self-corrects relatively quickly.

My argument, however, was that a society of 10 to 1 females to males would reproduce and self-correct so quickly as to hardly matter. So let's flip my system on its head; 100 women and only 10 men. Each man takes 2 wives, each woman has 2 children. Every generation we'll add an extra 10 females and 1 male. Let's see how this goes down.

Generation 1
Available Men: 10
Available Women: 100

Unmarried Women: 80
Male children: 20
Female children: 20
Male convicts: 1
Female convicts: 10

Results:
Total Men: 31
Total Women: 130
Percentage Men: 19%

Generation 2
Available Men: 21
Available Women: 110

Unmarried Women: 68
Male children: 42
Female children: 42
Male convicts: 1
Female convicts: 10

Results:
Total Men: 74
Total Women: 182
Percentage Men: 28%

Unbelievable! I'll spare you the calculation...suffice to say that this model reaches equilibrium in just 7 generations, interestingly with a total population of about 7,000. In fact, this model reaches perfect equilibrium (exactly 50/50) in only 10 generations...which would have taken the first model over 50,000, more than all of human history has taken already! And that's assuming that each man takes no more than two wives, and each woman has no more than two children. If men take as many as 4 wives, you can reach equilibrium in 3 generations, or even 40% in only 2. And you'll STILL have a huge surplus of women. I think it's safe to say that equilibrium comes plenty fast in a society like that; men wouldn't be treasured articles of value for very long.

* These operations were performed using a program I wrote in QBASIC. If you'd like to see the code, please let me know and I could post it here. It's a very short program.

Journey to the Center of the Moon

2008-01-29T10:12:00.001-05:00

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the second Heinlein book I've read, after Starship Troopers. I now realize that I can't decide whether Heinlein is a great sci-fi writer and a poor sociopoliticist or vice-versa. He introduces amazing sci-fi concepts which cut to the heart of the things we listed in class as being definitive of sci-fi, but then he dispenses with those elements as soon as they have served his narrative purpose. He then takes glorious stands on the side of libertarianism, offering a eudaimonic picture of what a free society should be. However, he is also very guilty of attacking conflicting political philosophies through straw man arguments, and (somewhat more importantly) how much of a utopia is a place that is essentially ruled through mob violence?!

The best way to express my frustration with Heinlein is by comparing him with Charles Dickens (bear with me). Dickens was a great writer; his words provided a gateway into the terrible conditions faced by the poor of his time, and a greater feeling of London in general. However, his chief failing is widely considered to be his dependence on coincidence in his stories; in a city of millions, you can always count on proximity to be proportional to dramatic effect in his placement of characters throughout the city. Similarly, Heinlein's story relies on a set of very specific circumstances that his narrative style encourages us to believe arrive through good luck. To paraphrase my comment on this blog's last post:

Need a supercomputer that's alive and your best friend? Check. Need an intellectual with expert knowledge of the world's political history, as well as psychology? Check. Need a woman for...well, don't get me started on Heinlein's treatment of women. Need a contact on Earth? Check. Pieces don't fall into place as much as they are forced there by Heinlein's need to create the perfect revolution.

So after demonstrating that a libertarian revolution on the Moon is is perfectly possible (provided, of course, that it is a libertarian revolution on the Moon directed by Heinlein), what's left for the book? I'm not very impressed by Heinlein's depiction of the political situation after the revolution, either. I get the sense that he knows two basic things about politics: he likes rational anarchy, and most people don't. Because of this, once it comes time to actually discuss the new political order, Heinlein (and, by extension, his narrator) completely loses interest. Heck, even his most interesting sci-fi element, Mike, is merely a tool to further the political goal of REVOLUTION! I was most interested in reading about Mike's growth as a person; I wanted to see the poetry he'd been writing, and test his ability to think and feel. If I had been Manny, I would have locked myself in a room with Mike and not come out. Heinlein being Manny, however, he merely brushes off Mike's attempts to further his own sensitivity. After Mike shuts down, Manny misses his friend, but it never occurs to him that humanity has lost an amazing opportunity to explore the field of creating new life, new forms of consciousness.

And now it's time to talk about Heinlein's view of women. I should have been ready for this from Starship Troopers, where he literally discusses women as though they are a completely different species. As far as I can tell, Heinlein just doesn't know how to write women, which is why the only ones he gives a real personality to here are an old woman and Wyoh, who he explicitly states is more like a man in many ways. If you thought Wells' Time Traveler was a sexual predator of sorts, then you should be prepared to recognize that Heinlein's writing basically molests women as a gender. In Heinlein, no mention of a woman is complete without discussion of her sexuality; his descriptions of pubescent girls are enough to make Nabokov blush, and even poor Ludmilla is described as being killed by an exploding bullet impacting between her breasts. Wyoh is presented as devastatingly beautiful for no other reason, it seems, than to provide Heinlein with the vicarious sexual thrill of 'bundling' with her through Manny.

So there you have it. The extent of sci-fi in Heinlein is merely a prop to provide an excuse for him to foment revolution where it would otherwise be impossible. His political arguments are unfair, giving only lip service to the idea of open discussion (except for the "Randists," who, he apparently believes, have some good ideas!). His views on women are neanderthal at best; what good is sexual liberation if it causes them to become nothing more than sex objects? He is an entertaining and engaging writer, true, but where many people see a visionary of the future, I see a political hack pushing his agenda with tools that give him the best excuse for it.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

2008-01-29T02:17:00.000-05:00

Halfway through the first paragraph of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I knew it was going to be fun to read. It was the line about Dr. Watson writing about Mycroft Holmes before he founded IBM - it's a great sort of a one-off one-liner affair of which I found the book to be full. In contrast to the fantastic, no-nonsense style of The Time Machine, Heinlein fills his work with the humor of the mundane, quotidian life of a smart Loonie. His writing style saves pages without losing any substance - I appreciated the marvel of the human brain to insert words where they make sense.

Of course, the course description insists that I delve deeper into the work than its fun literary aspects, and Heinlein gives ample material for analysis. Prof certainly has the mind for a revolution; its gestation period is written to perfection. The most ingenious part of Heinlein's revolution is obviously Mike. Things become a lot easier when you have an essentially omnipotent, omnipresent computer tied into every system of your entire world that happens to have taken a liking to you. The next time I plan a revolution, I have got to pick one of those up.

Heinlein certainly had a sense of how to manipulate the masses. Mike's manipulation of the communications infrastructure, right down to his poetic alter egos, is spot-on. The communication between the four key conspirators gives us all a perfect Machiavellian way to run a revolution. Provided, again, that you have one of those superconfusers sitting around somewhere.

Ultimately, I don't have too many problem's with Prof's methods. The Declaration of Independence bit especially stunk of genius. Ah, it's hardly democratic, but it gets the job done. It is an interesting point, though, that Prof seems to go against his own "rational anarchist" principles to achieve his goals. His ultimate failure to reshape society is perhaps a reflection of his top-down style. As Andrew and Mr. Townshend point out, there's nothing in the street looks any different to me (damn you, Andrew, for beating me to a good Who reference). In Pete's old age, though, I fear he ends up closer to the Professor's practice than his theories.

Posting this rather late, I have the advantage of reading other blogs and touching on a common thread I've seen. In my continued defense of The Time Machine, I remind everyone that this book was published in 1966, a year that should be close to any sci-fi fan's heart. By that time, Heinlein had some giants on whose shoulders he could stand. The back cover of ...Harsh Mistress fawns over Heinlein, claiming such an immense influence on later sci-fi writers. Apart from the most libertarian of authors, I see people standing on the shoulders of the likes of Asimov rather than Heinlein. Essentially, my defense of Wells boils down to context, as I wrote before. Wells wrote an excellent story in his idiom; Heinlein did the same in his. Though it's absolutely acceptable to choose favorites, I hope at least that we can give both authors credit where credit is due.

I wonder what Mike thought of The Time Machine.

Space for Jailbirds

2008-01-27T15:17:00.000-05:00

Personally, I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, despite the predictable ending. Robert Heinlein managed something I believe few authors can achieve effectively in not only creating a seamless new world with its own language and customs, but also creating charactres with depth and personality within it. What is at first an awkward sentence structure with strange slang terms slowly becomes familiar. Alongside the reader adjusting to Loonie culture, the charactres grow and change in terms with their volatile situation. The most fascinating of these is the metamorphosis of "Mike" from simply being a highly operational computer to a sentient being and finally to what could nearly be classified as a genuinely feeling human being who also happens to have a few other amazing capabilities. This change is witnessed primarily through demonstrations of how Mike changes his functions and through his conversations with his first and oldest friend, Mannie. This evolution of sentience was the most intriguing element to me, though of course the tale of revolution holds multiple political messages as well.
Being the human side of the plotting of their revolution, Professor de la Paz created the only truly unbelievable element for me. His understanding of human nature and how to manipulate political pressures was too perfect, though it was appropriate that his idea of not having much of a government on Luna fell to pieces following his death. I understand that Mike was supposedly behind all of this, with his analyses of every foreseeable outcome of everything, but somehow the Prof seemed to be at least ninety percent sure of himself throughout every decision involving human nature and revolution. Not only that, but he was always right. I would at least like to think that human behaviors are not so predictable, but that may just be idealistic.
After I finished reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I thought back to our theme for this week -Space as the Final Frontier- and the implications that in this novel the only thing that pushed humans to venture into space was the growing need of somewhere to dump their unwanted, their overcrowded...their jailbirds. Amidst the uplifting themes of freedom and revolution there was a constant undercurrent of rejection from Terra society. As shown through the numerous references to historical events concerning colonies and liberation -such as the "coincidental" declaration of Luna being released on July 4th- man didn't forge ahead to new horizons, he merely repeated history, yet again. Loonies were not adventurous space settlers, they were the citizens that Terra didn't want and could thus exploit.

Heinlein effectively builds empathy for social outcasts such as those in his fictional penal colony on Earth's moon, and consequently his political ideas. It was in this book that the term “rational anarchist” was first used, enforcing the point that Heinlein's political ideology is entrenched in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. However, multiple political viewpoints are represented and Heinlein gives fair play to all of those that assist his cause. The Prof and Mannie's visit to Terra points out the flaws of the standard bureaucracy, while the Prof's ad hoc congress fails to achieve any progress of merit. The rational anarchist himself, the Prof, fails to sway anyone to his particular opinions, but this in itself proves his ideology.

There are of course nearly innumerable examples and ideologies to be found, but throughout The Moon is a Harsh Mistress shines Heinlein's libertarian ideals and passion for good betting odds.

Context

2008-01-25T14:12:00.000-05:00

As a class, I think we had some issues getting into the context of H.G. Wells' world. Professor Jackson's point about European attitudes pre-WWI explained much of our disbelief about perfecting our sciences. It's certainly true that Americans especially tend to forget about the devastating aftereffects of World War I because of our WWII-centric Greatest Generation culture. We weren't really in WWI for that long, so we don't think of it as an important, America Saves the World (tm) moment. Our hero/savior complex tends to get in the way of proper history.

What I find in some other blog posts, though, is a willing (though probably self-aware) blindness to the context of women's and class issues that Wells was trying to present. From a literary standpoint, we need to trust the narrative voice of the book. For the sake of reading Wells in proper context, we need to believe Wells' version of the future. We need to believe what he does about biology. We need to believe that the Eloi were so stupid as to be thought of as mere pets, not as people. Though it's true that people go to extremes to protect their dogs, risking almost certain death to go back for Weena would be absurd. This is less a Victorian opinion about women than a rational opinion about pets. I'm going to get letters from PETA for this one.

So yes, we can point out Wells' now-absurd opinions on many things, but this should not detract from our appreciation of the book. When reading something like this, we must live in the past and the present, appreciating the book in historical context while accepting its considerable flaws as time artifacts. Don't be postmodern; respect the artist.

The Purpose of The Time Machine

2008-01-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

Other than the obvious purpose of the time machine -to travel in time- we looked at several different possible purposes of The Time Machine in class. Possibilities such as it being a warning against abandoning the grindstone of progress struck me as being the most probable motivation for Wells, given the historical context it was written during. This line of thought, that people actually thought everything of importance had been discovered and there wasn't really anywhere else to discover led me to wonder if this had a link we missed in Wells' writing. Space travel had been brought up, such as in Jules Vernes works, but in 19th Century London, space wasn't considered. Everything major had been accomplished, right? Just as we remarked that in The Time Machine the Time Traveler didn't find that people had traveled into space or any progress in an outward direction, they had remained at home just like the good old British of Wells' time were expecting to. I think it only stands to reason that the Time Traveler never found evidence of space travel or progress, because that was part of the point Wells' may have been making about people already being on a path to atrophy unless they continued with discovery and exploration.
However, I think Wells was given far too little credit as an author. Granted, this doesn't make for the best novel, but I tend to look more at the literary aspect of things, and as we mentioned, Wells didn't intend this to be a novel. Perhaps we viewed it as lacking literary drama because we didn't view it in an episodic manner, but a span. Even as a novel though, the premise it presents has still drawn a reading audience for decades, whatever else its shortcomings. I also appreciated how insignificant characters such as the Editor -he edits- didn't merit names the reader wouldn't have recalled anyhow. If Wells' had done this without distinction, we would have known the Morlocks merely as "ground dwellers" and the Eloi as "the dancing flower people" or something of the sort. The fact that Wells' gives them creative titles leads me to believe we missed something significant here. Then again, I could just be creating what I want to be there from what an author added on a whim.

Themes of Defiance

2008-01-22T14:30:00.001-05:00

There are some who may argue that "defiance" is such a universal theme as to make it pointless to analyze it in any serious literary context. However, I believe that analyzing how individuals manifest defiance in their actions tells something important about their societies or cultures (or, in the case of fiction, about the society or culture of the author). So then, where do we find instances of defiance in Metropolis and The Time Machine?

Examples in the former are pretty obvious -- pretty much everybody defies the ruler of the city, Joh Fredersen. Workers defy their boss and place in society, a son defies his father, and a mad scientist defies fate and death. In building a New Tower of Babel, the boss himself defies God and Judeo-Christian religious tradition. In Metropolis, defiance is not met with immediate punishment, but rather with indirect, passive-aggressive retaliation. Fredersen's discovery of duplicity in his workers and son does not spark the immediate crackdown one would expect from a virtual dictator. Instead, he sends an agent to encourage dissent among the workers (that he may punish them for more open defiance), and he merely places a tail on his son. Freder himself is almost killed by his sympathy for the workers. Rotwang the scientist's disloyalty is punished not by the higher powers he disregards, but he is forced to lose his love to the machinations of Fredersen once again. And despite his attempts to build a tower tall enough to allow him to spit in God's face, Fredersen must face the terrible truth that his arrogance could cost him the life of his son, which crushes the delicate machismo he had so carefully cultivated in his stewardship of the city. In other words, in Metropolis, people may defy, but they sure don't get away with it.

Well, what about The Time Machine? Not much room in that one for defiance, I agree. Aside from the Time Traveler's willingness to defy his colleagues' quaint ideas of the laws of physics and time, that's about it. But then again...that's just it. The Time Traveler breaks the very laws that govern our existence. Joh Fredersen maintains the conceit that he has bested God, but it's actually very easy to defy God. People do it all the time, all over the place, and God doesn't lift a (metaphysical) finger to stop them. But time is the great equalizer...we're all subject to it, and we all eventually fall victim to it. The Time Traveler defies the greatest absolute we know, and gets away with it (until something mysterious happens and he never comes back, but we aren't explicitly sure that he's encountered something bad).

Unfortunately, there is a major contradiction between the two worlds that makes it extremely difficult to compare them. While Metropolis exists in its own contained universe, The Time Machine is an instance of one society's representative commenting on another society. It's easy to talk about systems of defiance in punishment in the Metropolis fiction, but it's never clear whether the Time Traveler is being punished or not. Certainly he risks punishment in his own time (in the form of lost status) if he fails to demonstrate a working time machine. And while his trip to the future is hardly kind to him, he learns much about what we might become and takes away the satisfaction of successfully traveling through time. Although he gets a little disheveled, he returns to England essentially unscathed. Even his vision of the future is pointedly lacking in forms of punishment; everything has become meaningless, and whether one lives or dies is a function of luck more than anything else. However, Wells goes out of his way to mention that a lack of defiance is the main cause of the blasé attitude of the Eloi. His intrepid hero, therefore, is representative of the greatest defiance (and therefore, strength) a human can muster. His disappearance is all the more tragic, and could conceivably be the turning point at which humanity began to lose the fight against entropy.

Now we know that a lack of defiance leads to a breakdown of society, and hidden defiance (or defiance against abstract concepts) leads to psychological or slow-burning retaliation. Unfortunately, these aren't really mutually interactive principles. The world of The Time Machine has no room for subterfuge, so the ideas of Metropolis can't apply there. Similarly, industry is dead by the year 800,000 and some; a distant time where nothing is left has no relation to the fast-paced near future offered by Lang. The important similarities are the class divisions and the theme of the "human creative impulse" (a term I feel free to use interchangeably with "defiance"). The "human creative impulse" is, in my opinion, the urge of every individual to be in control of his or her own future. It is perhaps best demonstrated in that the Eloi lack it entirely, while the events in Metropolis are caused by one man's struggle to quash the HCI of everyone else in the world.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have one more point of defiance to offer, although it's going to be quite weak. As a very strong Star Wars fan, I was extremely dismayed to learn that it wouldn't be an object of our study. Please do not confuse me with a fan seeking to expand our working definition to include Star Wars; I appreciate Professor Jackson's definition of science fiction as a perfectly sensible one (and ultimately necessary for a meaningful study of social science and science fiction). To be fair, I largely ignore the movies when I make the argument that Star Wars, at least in parts, deserves to be considered science fiction. Star Wars films, especially with the release of the prequel trilogy, stray very far from any form of systematic social conjecture. They are naked settings for fantastic adventures of swords and princesses, swashbuckling tales that are betrayed immediately by their inspirations as absent of any deep consideration of politics, technology, or the ramifications of alien contact.

Yet there is no doubt that the Star Wars universe is a compelling one, if for no other reason than its sheer scope. In a galaxy that is at least as large as our own, containing millions of inhabitable worlds (not necessarily only for humans), there exists an expanded universe, originally created as mere backstory, that has gone beyond its humble origins to create a living, breathing universe with detailed systems of politics, economics, religion, ethics, conflict and above all a true sense of history. If "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," then
who is to say that, in the far past of Star Wars, some brilliant scientist created a retrovirus that infected all living beings with an ability to harness the power of the brains over nature through what became known as the Force? It's true that the aliens of Star Wars (with many notable exceptions!) are by and large humans in funny-shaped bodies; however, I find this to be perfectly reasonable in a universe where interplanetary travel has been the norm for longer than anyone can remember. To use an example from our world, advances in transportation technology are fast eroding the differences between people all over the earth; English has become a sort of global language, and there are many symbols and cultural elements that are present in every culture around the world. All of this has occurred over a period of less than a century; is it really fair to declare that no sufficiently advanced galactic society can be considered representative of science fiction? Certainly, it is a different genre of science fiction than The Time Machine or Metropolis. But is it fair to cut it out entirely? Is there really no value in positing a universe where the major initial problems of interacting with alien species are a thing of the past? I argue that Star Wars presents a world of galactic politics and trade that is important for us to consider, as it at least represents a place in history that many people dream of humanity reaching.

Societal Evolution in The Time Machine

2008-01-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine seems to fall more into the category of a study in social science than in science fiction, the more I think about the book. Instead of examining the effects of a new technology or alien lifeforms on humanity, Wells examines the eventual evolution of societies taken to the extreme. As Chris pointed out, the Time Traveller presents two opposing theories as to how humankind managed to evolve into the creatures he observes in the future, one a communist view that the loss of conflict and violence allowed people to become harmonious, weak and simple-minded, and the other a capitalist view that the separation between the privileged class and the working class had become so great as to split species, turning one set of people into the feeble-minded Eloi who play all day, and the other set into the Morlocks, who provide for the Eloi out of a single-minded need to protect their food source.

What I found most interesting about these theories is the change in the power dynamics in the second theory. Both the Eloi and Morlocks have become simple creatures that live only to serve their own needs and desires, but they have evolved to do so in different ways. The Eloi’s needs are provided for by the Morlocks, and thus they are free all day to weave flower garlands and try to swim. The Morlocks seem to have an ingrained need to provide for the needs of the Eloi, but this need is no longer the working-class job it evolved from. Instead it is the protection of a food source. Instead of growing and caring for crops, the Morlocks are breeding Eloi. Thus with the degradation of the human mind in both forms of being, the Morlocks, who still know enough, or at least have an ingrained behavior pattern, to be able to care for the Eloi, have an edge over the Eloi, who have no need for knowledge about anything. The Morlocks have overcome the Eloi through evolution instead of revolution.

Science Fiction

2008-01-22T12:53:00.000-05:00

The definition of “science fiction” has been the subject of much of the scholarship about science fiction, as I discovered two years ago in Cox’s speculative fiction section of the Honors English seminar. At the beginning of the course, Professor Cox told us that throughout the semester, the texts we would read, both fictional and academic, would not make that definition any easier to understand, but would instead continually complicate our definition of science fiction. In our Social/Science/Fiction class, we have started out with definitions already complex, based not necessarily in content and context, but in what science fiction does and how it makes us think. From my perspective, this type of definition is a good way to start the class. Even if we don’t have any sort of firm boundaries as to what science fiction is and is not (pretty much impossible anyway), our discussion allows us to understand what we mean, at least in class, when we discuss science fiction.

For myself, much of what we discussed are not things I generally think about when reading or viewing a work of science fiction, but that does not mean that they are not working below the surface. I don’t read books and watch movies to come to a greater understanding of society’s problems or to glean warnings about the future-should-we-continue-on-our-current-path. I read and watch because I enjoy stories that take me out of the world I know, which is why I also enjoy fantasy. However, despite me not looking specifically to find the applications to today’s societies, they cannot fail to enter my consciousness. One thing I do read for is to examine relationships, which we discussed as being a part of science fiction. I think one thing I particularly enjoy in SFF is seeing which types of relationships remain the same from our society to the fictional society, how authors chose to change or leave unchanging concepts like friendship, love and the motives that guide people’s actions toward each other. In this, I think our class will not disappoint. In looking at the crossovers between social science and science fiction, we will certainly examine the specific interactions between characters and what they mean in order to better understand what different works have to say about society.

Defining Science Fiction

2008-01-22T01:08:00.001-05:00

Try as we might, we can never come up with a comprehensive definition of science fiction. But we should always try.

Part of the allure of science fiction is its glorious indefinibility. There are exception to nearly every rule that we can create for a comprehensive definition of sci-fi. I am inclined to be very inclusive when I define sci-fi, including so-called "border" works like The Prisoner and much of The Avengers, just to pick a couple of groundbreaking British shows.

I do believe that sci-fi is mostly about surrogating contemporary problems and fears to elucidate them. This is precisely why I consider The Prisoner a seminal work of TV sci-fi. Patrick McGoohan was very explicit about his fears concerning all technology, including, but certainly not limited to the atom bomb. He believed that society had built billions of "Villages" that we all inhabited. They are invisible to us, and like The Village of the show, we can never be sure who are the wardens and who are the inmates. Never is this clearer [SPOILER ALERT] than in the final episode, where Number 6 rips off Number 1's mask to find that Number 1 is simply him - "Who is Number 1?" "You are... Number 6." In the end, Number 6 escapes The Village, but the final shot of the show is the same as the first - he is still in The Village; he can just no longer see the walls of his prison. In this self-indulgent, mostly allegorical, and all trippy way, McGoohan illustrates his omnipresent fear of contemporary society to us. He forces us to ask ourselves if we are all trapped in The Village. [/SPOILER ALERT]

Another goal of science fiction can be to show us the great potential of man. This was Gene Roddenberry's image of the future. His exuberance and grand hope for humanity came through in every episode of the series he worked on. Though TOS confronted contemporary human problems, they were surrogated onto other species. The show certainly had allegorical themes (Klingons=USSR, Romulans=China, etc.), but through it all, the Federation embodied Roddenberry's positive image of the future. By the time of TNG, humanity was nearly perfected. Starfleet was only barely militarized and the Enterprise-D acted as a great peaceful city in space. Conflicts were few and far between and secondary to the stories of the crew exploring themselves in peace. Q's attitude toward Picard and the crew was especially indicative of Roddenberry's hopes. Q admitted that humanity had the potential to become virtually omnipotent. Most "foreheads of the week" could be reasoned with, with the notable exception of the Borg, who are a wholly innovative concept in the Star Trek Universe. Of course, after Roddenberry's death, the series lost much of its message of hope. I simply cannot imagine that the Dominion War would have been written had Roddenberry still been alive. For him, humanity did not go to war anymore. The abomination that made up most of the writing on "Enterprise" would never have gone through. The image of humanity that "Enterprise" presented was absolutely antithetical to Roddenberry's vision, and this change alienated many longtime fans, including myself. But I digress.

What shouldn't sci-fi be? Questions like "What if we all actually live in a virtual reality generated by a gigantic computer?" are usually fruitless (sorry, "The Matrix." I still love you, though.) because we cannot examine that question any further. This form of intellectual masturbation too often plagues scientists and sci-fiers alike and is best suited for a long afternoon among friends and mind-altering substances, not good science fiction. Rather, science fiction explores what it means to be human and the nature of a single person. What if your thoughts could all be transferred into another body? Would you be the same person? Would you still be married to Worf? Is today a good day to die? These are the sort of questions that best suit sci-fi.

So what is sci-fi, then? I suppose that for me, it's a simultaneous glimpse into the past, present, and future.

The Time Machine

2008-01-22T00:18:00.000-05:00

As far as geneses (genisisses? genesi?) of genres go, sci-fi probably couldn't have asked for a better one than The Time Machine. It introduces the reader to a fantastic, though well-explained and eminently plausible world and does so with not a small amount of literary talent.

The Time Traveller's initial explanation of 4-dimensional geometry is clear and, considering the understanding of the universe we now possess, very much ahead of its time. Even the idea that once the time machine was in motion, it would be invisible to people moving at a "normal" rate of time was impressively clear.

That being said, the passage of a little over 100 years of science and technology led to my amusement at certain little "facts" that the Time Traveller explains. I chuckled at his understanding of the death of the Sun (that the planets would fall back into it, fuelling it for a short time longer) and the fate of the millenia-old Earth.

These, of course, are just small details compared to the full scope of the book which, while excellent on the whole, was very frustrating at points. That the Time Traveller would have so little foresight as to what he should bring into the future is hard to believe. I suppose it fits his "nutty professor" M.O., but it still seemed unlikely. Further, that no great technological advances had been made past his time seems strange. Though the Time Traveller frequently states that it would have taken much time for humanity to perfect its worker exploitaiton system, he ignores that other developments would be made during that time.

The part of the book that I enjoyed the most was the Time Traveller's original and second impressions of mankind's evolution. In the first, he believes that technology along with communism caused a lack of struggle which eventually caused humans to become weak and stupid. In his second evaluation of human history, perfected worker exploitation in a capitalist framework led to the schism of the human race into the Eloi and the Morlocks. In both cases, the overspecialization of humanity removed its drive. Wells believes that conflict, though destructive, is essential to the progress of humanity. If it were removed, humanity would stagnate and decay into nothingness.

Wells' vision of human evolution, fitting into his era of biological common wisdom (Social Darwinism, etc.), is much more negative than the visions of humanity in many other sci-fi works. I think of it specifically as at odds with the show that first got me interested in sci-fi, "Star Trek." Gene Roddenberry's vision of humanity in the future was almost unilaterally positive. For him, humanity had a natural urge to explore and never to be satisfied with the status quo. Roddenberry's version of humanity would never allow for the stagnation of society that Wells indicates as inevitable. For Wells, humans are slaves of their biology - our own drives are just part of that biology.

Personally, as a member of the human race, I hope this is not the case. I prefer to believe that we will always boldly go where no one has gone before.

Welcome to the Foreseeable Future

2008-01-15T15:45:00.001-05:00

Hello, friends. This will be our jump-off point for our mutual exploration of the sci-fi genre and what it really means. Expect great, great things. And maybe some not so great ones.

The title of this blog refers to our ever-present desire to keep a rocket in each of our backyards, that we may take weekend trips to Mars whenever we wish.