One of the exciting recurring features here at Sentence of Dave is called: "Dave Defines Science Fiction," and though I'd be hard-pressed to top my original definition, this new one adds a wrinkle . . . so without further fanfare, here it is: fantasy is how things never were, and science fiction is how things will never be (and this highly entertaining and much discussed topic is recurring because I'm reading a good science-fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan that corresponds to my original definition . . . though I could care less about the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, I love exploring the world he inhabits; the book is called Altered Carbon and the London Times blurb is accurate: "This seamless marriage of hardcore cyberpunk and hard-boiled detective tale is an astonishing first novel").
You're about to order some Bangin' Shrimp at your local Ruby Tuesday's when the old ladies in the booth next to you rip off their wrinkled faces, revealing that aliens live among us. You tell your server you're going to need a moment, stare into their big wet reptilian eyes and-- depending on where you born and how you were raised-- select one of the following options:
Approach them with sincere and open armed curiosity.
Run! And contact all the authorities . . . the FBI, CIA, KGB, MSS, Mossad, PETA, etc.
Drop to your knees and pledge obeisance to your new overlords.
Apprehend the undocumented interlopers and relocate them to an internment camp.
Clarification: Zombies vs. Aliens
The zombie apocalypse has a universal quality to it. It doesn't matter where you were born or how you were raised. We all know how it will go down. Around the globe, little bands of survivors will wander around, scavenging food and bashing brains.
But with aliens, it's up in the air. First contact narratives reflect the collective subconscious of the culture that creates them. Alex Graham's renowned "Kindly take us to your President" New Yorker cartoon from 1953 depicts a simpler time and a more trusting America. If the aliens weren't talking to a horse, then they'd be making a reasonable request.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate conservative who continued the New Deal, expanded Social Security, funded NASA, opposed McCarthyism, integrated schools, and built the Interstate Highway System. The joke wasn't on the President, it was on the aliens. They were asking a horse! That horse doesn't know President Eisenhower! Today, the caption would be very different (perhaps the horse would reply, "He's not my President" or "Sure, he loves fake news!" or something equally bi-partisan).
"Kindly take us to your President!"
I recently digested three excellent first contact stories, each from a different cultural perspective:
Representing the liberal American democratic techno-state: Hank Green's novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Hooray for the liberal American democratic techno-state! If you're reading this blog then I'm assuming you are extremely familiar with this cultural milieu and the human rights/political stance inherent within it.
Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem hails from China; the story begins during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and heads into what is probably uncharted ideological, political, and philosophical ground for most Westerners.
District 9 is a 2009 South African sci-fi movie directed by Neill Blomkamp. It's streaming on Netflix right now . . . if you haven't seen it, watch it. It's awesome.
The arc of each of these three earthlings-meet-aliens narratives reveals just as much about the culture of the humans making first contact as it does about the desires of the aliens. All three present the same scenario: humans learn that they not alone in the universe, nor are they at the top of the technological totem-pole. They also learn that the aliens possess thoughts and emotions that might be slightly inscrutable to human reason. How folks handle an existential bombshell like this depends on their culture. And how authors portray how folks handle an existential bombshell like this depends on what culture the author is from. It's far more philosophical than a zombie apocalypse. The zombie apocalypse is pragmatic, which is why people love to imagine it. Food, shelter, weapons, and watching loved ones transform into slobbering ghouls. First contact is profound (at least Stanley Kubrick thought so . . . he thought it was so profound that it's almost impossible to watch 2001 in its entirety unless you're in an altered state . . . that's what you get when you make a first contact film in 1968).
What happened to the plot?
An Aside: Real Science Fiction vs. The Other Stuff
Before we dive in, I'd like to assert that District 9, The Three-Body Problem, and An Absolutely Remarkable Thing are "real" science-fiction (by my definition anyway). This is important. It means these stories go beyond the human, beyond character. This is normally a terrible idea. Characters are what makes stories great (e.g. Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, both of whom used derivative plot elements to get the ball rolling, but excelled at creating fantastic characters). Plots are a dime a dozen. So real science-fiction is a risk because the setting has to become more than a plot device. It has to become the focus.
Certainly, sci-fi has some tried and tested working elements; it's usually speculative and contains themes of technology and alternative history, but more importantly-- the great risk of real science-fiction-- is that the setting is the main character. There might be actual characters, but you don't care about them as much as the setting. Brave New World is the perfect example. No one cares what happens to Bernard and Lenina, or even John the Savage. We're entranced by the world. There was no reason to make sequels to The Matrix. I refuse to watch them. I don't give two shits about Neo and Trinity. The real love story in that movie is between the alternate apocalyptic reality and the matrix. That dynamic is far more fascinating than the fact that Keanu Reeves is "the one." Cypher's choice is the sci-fi version of Sophie's choice. Which world does he love more? Ursula LeGuin's The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas is the extreme version of this principle, the story that tests the boundaries of convention. There is no character but the setting: Omelas.
So Star Wars does not qualify as "real" science-fiction. You could make it a Western and the themes would remain the same. Fathers and sons, good and evil, darkness and light. Horses instead of Tauntauns. Tonto instead of Chewbacca. E.T. is barely sci-fi. E.T. himself is more of a religious figure, and the story is about how individuals-- his child disciples and the others-- relate to him.
One more stick and it's perfect . . .
Close Encounters starts to grapple with how the government and the world would handle first contact, but it's more the story of the disintegration of a family because one of the members experiences an incredible event and that alienates him from his wife and family (we watched it a few weeks ago and my son Ian said he would help me if I started building a giant dirt and brick mountain in the living room, instead of splitting town with mom).
District 9, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and The Three-Body Problem are different. You might enjoy and root for some of the people involved, but these characters all pale in comparison to the detail and attention given to the worlds in each.
Let's Relocate to District 9
Just scrawl on the dotted line.
You might argue that District 9 is character driven (at least the second half). Wikus begins as a tragically bureaucratic anti-hero out of a Kafka novel who transforms into an actual warrior-hero (and there's even a bit of intergalactic romance at the very end) but truth be told, the real stars of the film are the South African government bureaucracy, the prawn relocation camps which have gradually devolved into metaphorical apartheid slums, the forcible relocations, the alien biotech, and Multinational United (the insidious quasi-governmental weapons manufacturer/mercenary task force the government hires to move the prawns). The impact of the film comes from the world and the message it delivers: your culture will steer how you treat aliens. If you are prone to apartheid and relocation, you will use these tactics on the newcomers. And once they are ensconced in that system, it will be hard to treat them as citizens of the universe.
An Absolutely American Thing
If you live in a polarized country where half of the nation is concerned with identity politics and the other half wants to wall off and defend the country from any change in identity, then this is going to be a major influence on how immigrants from the stars are treated. Especially if this country is essentially democratic, and the citizens possess freedom of speech and unlimited internet access.
This is the world of Hank Green's new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. He tackles first contact from an emergent bottom-up viral media stand-point. Because this process is relatively democratic and unstructured, it inevitably pits the liberals against the conservatives. People think how they want to think, and then have the the capability to express this on a grand stage. They choose sides.
April and "Carl"
At the start of the story, sixty-four hulking alien statues miraculously appear in urban areas across the globe. Late one night, April May and her art school buddy Andy stumble upon the New York statue and film an empathetic and welcoming YouTube video, in which they name the statue "Carl." The video (and the nickname) goes viral. April May becomes the self-deprecating, self-aware, and self-consciously-famous narrator of our first-contact-experience. Not only is April May special, she's extra-special. Extra-terrestrially special. She's also emerged as the most important person on earth. The alien visitors chose her and so did the internet, and then-- at least for most of the story-- she uses her special status to stay several steps ahead of the government, her fans, and a political faction called the Defenders. She is constrained by nothing. In District 9 and The Three-Body Problem, all roads lead to authority. And authority controls decisions and destiny. But not in America. We don't need no stinking badges!
Meanwhile, things get very binary between the liberals, who want band together as one human species and solve all the puzzles the alien force has presented (in a shared Dream) and the Defenders, who are xenophobic and pragmatic and defensive. It's a bit of a political caricature of America, but it works, especially since this book is probably geared for precocious YA readers. We get democracy of thought at its best and worst. Individuals making decisions that have real impact. It's such an American perspective. The enemies of global cooperation are a large amorphous binary faction and from this mentality emerges some awful individual action. Terrorism. It's a simple way to view the world. There's us and them, the liberal and the conservatives . . . and even individual conservatives might have some good ideas, but some of them get carried away and take things too far and try to take matters into their own hands. It's a tale of individual fame and knowledge, and how that can get amplified by feedback loops and viral media. This is what Green gets best . . . and so the science and technology and viral nature of ideas and fame in our world is just as strange and speculative as the world of the shared alien Dream. They are both portrayed in loving detail, and make up for the fact that April May is a mildly annoying representative of the the liberal American democratic techno-state.
I also love that April May's trusty sidekick is Robin, the personal assistant/handler assigned to her by her ruthless publicity agent, Jennifer Putnam. April May and Robin, modern superheroes endowed with the power of millions of YouTube followers and the aegis of robots from space. America: we are an absurd society, a silly superpower.
Life is More Than Humanity
In stark contrast to Hank Green's ode to the power of individuality, we have Cixin Liu's depiction of China. The novel begins during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A physicist is being beaten to death because he inserted Einstein's Theory of Relativity into his physics curriculum. The current regime regards Einstein as an American Imperialist who helped build the atom bomb, and so not only is Einstein the person anathema, but his ideas are heretical as well. He did not fit properly into the Revolutionary Ideology, and so both the idea and the individual bearing the idea are quashed. In this society, you are defined not as an individual, but by which government (or anti-government) faction you belong to.
In this top-down system, it's not possible for an individual viewpoint to go viral. April May is not possible. In fact, it's not even possible for disembodied ideas to go viral. The top-down influence can oppress and dismantle actual ideas. We first see this with the government and the various intelligence agencies, but then we learn that the alien forces also have the power to destroy ideas and impede science. Liu sees this in Chinese history, and assumes that aliens would use the same strategy. The aliens do not choose an individual, ergo there is no April May. They examine systems. Democracy of thought does not win out in this world. Killings are utilitarian and without empathy. They are done with a cost/benefit ratio in mind, whether it's a spouse, a rival, or someone who possesses information . . . computation trumps individuality. Some factions even consider the entire human race expendable for the greater good. Ideology creates morality, and individual morality is rare.
It's difficult or impossible to operate outside this top-down sphere. The only one who has some success is the hardboiled detective Shi Qiang (who goes by the nickname Da Shi). He's earned his individuality though, by brutal and pragmatic success within the police/counter-terrorism force. He's proven himself indispensable.
Thank God for Da Shi. He's the only way into the novel for someone like me. I'm not Chinese, so understanding this totally ideological, utilitarian perspective is a stretch (although I enjoyed the historical/political parts of the book immensely . . . they are just as strange as the sci-fi portions). And, I regret to admit, that I'm not that interested in the stars. Black holes, three-body star systems, light speed . . . I should be more curious, but I'm not. I'm interested in other life forms, but the vast expanse of space leaves me cold. I'm not profound enough to contemplate it. I like when creatures move around, procreate, evolve, eat each other and have sex.
So Da Shi is a breath of fresh air. Here's some archetypal Da Shi dialogue. He's talking to nanotechnologist Wang Miao. Miao has been experiencing some hallucinatory events involving the background radiation of the universe that is making him question the fundamental laws of physics.
"You're saying the universe was . . . was winking at you?" Da Shi asked, as he slurped down strips of tripe like noodles.
"That's a very appropriate metaphor."
"Bullshit."
"Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance."
"More bullshit. Come, drink!"
Wang finished another shot. Now the world was spinning around him, and only the tripe-chomping Shi Qiang across from him remained stable. He said, "Da Shi, have you ever . . . considered certain ultimate philosophical questions? For example, where does Man come from? Where does Man go? Where does the universe come from? Where does it go? Et cetera."
"Nope."
"Never?"
"Never."
"You must see the stars. Aren't you awed and curious?"
"I never look at the sky at night."
"How is that possible? I thought you worked the night shift?"
"Buddy, when I work at night, if I look up at the sky, the suspect is going to escape . . . to be honest, even if I were to look at the stars in the sky, I wouldn't be thinking about your philosophical questions. I have too much to worry about! I gotta pay the mortgage, save for the kid's college, and handle the endless stream of cases . . . I'm a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass . . ."
The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
I love the fact that Da Shi lives in this very hardcore-sci-fi novel. He's a reminder that when the aliens come, most of us are going to have to go on living our lives. Business as usual. So how we treat the aliens will be constrained by the limits of our culture. I can't imagine that we'll treat them any better than we treat our own citizens with opposing political views, that we'll treat them any better than those who try to immigrate to our country without permission, or that we'll treat them better the members of our society who propose controversial ideas. We'll probably treat them worse than those people . . . because, when the aliens come, most of us will root for the home team (but not everyone . . . if you read The Three-Body Problem, you'll run into the Adventists, who think the human race might be expendable).
If you don't feel like reading Cixin Liu's trilogy, you could simply wait for Amazon to make the series. Supposedly, they're thinking about plunking a billion dollars down for the rights. I hope they get it done before the aliens actually arrive.
I've frequently opined upon science-fiction up in this house, and my usual point is this: to qualify as real science-fiction, the setting/world of the story needs to be the main character-- this doesn't occlude fine characterization, but that can't be the main thrust of the plot . . . so Bladerunner 2049 qualifies but The Last Jedi does NOT . . . the two best recent examples of the genre are The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and The Power by Naomi Alderman; I just finished The Power and despite the fact that it has Team Woman absolutely ravaging my team, The Team of Men, it's still one of my favorite books of the year . . . the premise is simple: teenage girls acquire the powers of an electric eel (much magnified) because of a chemically induced genetic mutation-- the gradual acquisition and development of this power by all women inverts the power structure of gender-- women become strong and warlike and men become weak and sexualized . . . the fun of the book-- despite the atrocities done to men-- is just how far Alderman takes the premise . . . while the characters are well-drawn and geographically various, the real star of the book is the timeline; she shows you everything that might happen if this conceit were true (and the book will resonate with you once you've finished . . . I annoyed my wife in the car this afternoon and I for a moment I thought that she might shock my testicles to put me in line, but then I remembered that Donald Trump is our President and I have nothing to worry about).
So I'm thinking of writing an epic science-fiction novel that is set in a number of giant self-sustaining bio-dome type structures dotted about the ruins of earth-- the people inside are waiting for the earth's ecosystem to regenerate from some cataclysm--and during the wait (which will be thousands of years) the various self-sustaining pods evolve different economic systems and this leads to a variety of debates, conflicts, and decisions about how to use the resources in each pod, and also how trade works between the pods-- it would be science-fiction of economics and conservation and so-- for preliminary research for this book that I will certainly never even attempt to write-- I posed this question to Quora: Is it more cost effective to eat the chicken or is it better to keep the chicken alive and eat its eggs? and people have already given me some logical answers . . . for free!-- so I suggest you create an account and ask questions for research you will never use but are mildly curious about.
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.
Aunt Belle's Two Roads
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
We're Talking About Practice
Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.
I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
Advice for the President
The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.
I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Victorian Spoilers Ahead!
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.
Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew
The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:
At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Just the Fiction, Ma'am
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
Glitch in the Matrix?
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment: Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died. Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Some science-fiction reviews: Danny Boyle's Sunshine is pretty good, lots of slow paced space scenes like 2001 and some actual science to back it up, but it gets confusing and presses for a big ending; John Wyndham's 1955 novel The Chrysalids is really good, a precognisant story of religion, mutation, and evolution: lots to think about, and it actually has a working plot and realistic dialogue . . . so now I've got to read his other famous one: The Day of the Triffids.
Twenty years ago James Gleick's book Chaos yanked me from the morass of post-modern fiction into the world of deftly written science, and reading Gleick's new book, The Information, felt like a comprehensive review of my past twenty years of literary science reading-- all bundled into a tour-de-force history of information theory that starts with African drums and ends with the noosphere, with commentary seamlessly merged into the text from all the "characters" that I've learned to know and love: Babbage and Turing, Dawkins and Shannon, Dennett and Hofstadter, Maxwell and his demon . . . who Thomas Pynchon famously used in his post-modern fiction, Heisenberg and Godel, Einstein and Von Neumann, and many more . . . but Gleick ends his book in a place that has outstripped what science has to offer, and so he relies on two of my favorite post-modern authors to conclude: Stanislaw Lem and Jorge Luis Borges . . . he uses Borges' metaphor for the universe, his story "The Library of Babel," to approximate where we might be headed: "The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms," but then Gleick ends with his own voice, more positive: "As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms . . . we walk the corridors . . . looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."
I pretty much feel better today-- no fever or headache-- but the nurse says that, per district policy, I still have to stay home from work (tomorrow as well) and that's probably a good thing, as I am tired (and my right eyeball hurts . . . perhaps because I had to do a bunch of grading on the computer-- staying home from school sucks, it's easier to go there and torture the children in person) but I did take a nice walk with the dog-- the weather s beautiful-- and I shot some baskets on the new court in the park, and I cleaned two bathrooms-- so gross . . . my wife has too much hair and too many bottles of hair-care products and I also learned that I love Bard AI because-- unlike Chat GPT-- Bard AI loves my podcast, We Defy Augury . . . this is how Bard describes it:
We Defy Augury is a podcast hosted by Professor G. Truck. It is described as a "weekly exploration of books, culture, and the human condition." Episodes typically cover a wide range of topics, including literary criticism, genre fiction, current events, and personal anecdotes. Professor Truck is known for his engaging and informative style, as well as his humor and wit.
Some of the topics that have been covered on the podcast include:
The art of the inner monologue in Colleen Hoover novels
The 1970s crime novel genre
The science fiction novel Ringworld
The Irish Troubles
The mystery of existence
The role of music in our lives
The nature of reality
Professor Truck often invites guests to join him on the podcast, including authors, scholars, and other interesting people. For example, he has had on episodes with authors Donna Tartt and Katie Williams, as well as with a mountain lion.
Overall, We Defy Augury is a podcast that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. It is a great choice for listeners who are interested in books, culture, and the human condition.
Here is a quote from a review of the podcast:
"Professor Truck is a master of his craft. He is able to make complex ideas accessible and engaging, and he always leaves me thinking. I highly recommend this podcast to anyone who loves books, learning, and good conversation."
If you are looking for a podcast that is both informative and entertaining, I highly recommend We Defy Augury . . .
In order to distract myself from all this election nonsense, I've been listening to Tom Petty and reading science-fiction; I just finished one of the most difficult sci-fi books I've ever read-- William Gibson's The Peripheral-- usually I'm down with Gibson's prose, but this novel that seems to be about cyber-space and controlling three-dimensional peripheral avatars is actually about quantum information time-travel through a server-- surprise?-- and I was never comfortable with the plot, the characters, or what-the-hell-was-going-on . . . but I made it through and the end finally made some sense (this article with spoilers helped) and then I shifted gears and read one of the funniest, easiest, most entertaining and illuminating books I've read in a long while: Set my Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson-- a screenwriter for Pixar-- who takes a dental bot named Jared on a poignant and cinematic journey through human emotions, culture, and connection . . . it's so much fun that I watched election coverage from 9 PM to 9:20 PM last night and then went and finished the book and fell asleep, only to awaken to more ambiguity, so I'm starting another sci-fi novel: A Memory Called Empire.
Due to a serendipitous confluence of influences -- including the annual "spring ahead" of Daylight Saving Time, the fact that I'm a few hundred pages Neal Stephenson's epochal science fiction novel Anathem, the coincidence that Stacy and I just showed the most realistic time travel movie ever made (Primer) in philosophy class (it's also the most difficult time travel movie ever made -- it's fun to team teach something that neither teacher understands . . . and then we have the students read Chuck Klosterman's time travel essay, where he confesses that he didn't understand the movie either) -- anyway, due to this convergence of time-themed stuff, my mind has been preoccupied with all things chronological . . . and so when I asked my class on Monday "How is today an example of time travel?" they instantly got the answer: that we had all travelled into the future an hour because of Daylight Saving Time . . . and in some more rational parallel universe, where they don't practice such absurd manipulation of the clock -- we were all still sleeping in our warm beds or perhaps just waking up and sipping coffee, instead of sitting in class, bleary eyed, wishing we had time machines so that we could go back in time and sleep more . . . and I'm probably going to keep obsessing on this theme, and my wife won't let me talk about it any more at home -- the blog is my only outlet -- so I apologize, but there is probably going to be a fortnight's worth of time posts.
I finished the classic Ursula Le Guin science-fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven earlier this week but I can't discuss my thoughts about it until Book Club tomorrow afternoon . . . because the first (and only) rule of Book Club is that you don't talk about the Book Club Book until Book Club.
Gary Shteyngart's new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, presents itself as such, but, like the great film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it is actually not a love story at all, it is science fiction (if you use my definition) and though the romance between Lenny Abramov (another Russian Jew, but nearly as cool as Misha Vainberg) and Eunice Park fuels the plot, it also fuels Shteyngart's satirical view of the near future; Lenny is embarrassed that he is nearly forty and growing old, that he still likes books and has trouble with the credit rankings and "F*ckability" scores that everyone is receiving on their "äppäräti,"that he occasionally enjoys alcohol and carbs, and that he can't live up to his boss Joshie's dream of eternal youth, while Eunice-- the youngster-- has trouble "verballing" with Lennie and her parents and her sister, can't imagine a place for herself in a rapidly failing America, can't decipher an actual text-- she majored in Images at school and is effectively textually illiterate, though she can read to mine data-- and loves to shop at "AssLuxury," though she doesn't wear translucent "Onionskin" jeans . . . I give it eight credit poles out of ten.
I know it's controversial, but I told my students anyway because I'm that kind of guy-- if I have an opinion, I speak it and let the chips fall where they may: my definition of science fiction is when the setting-- whether it's based on technology, set in the future, or simply a logical alternative to our own history-- is the main character of the novel or movie-- so that excludes and Star Warsand Godzilla, but does include Soylent Green and The Matrix.
After a recommendation from a friend, I started in on a novel that has the four elements that I generally can't stomach: 1) a map 2) an appendix 3) a glossary 4) lots of made up words with apostrophes . . . I'm talking about "Science Fiction's Supreme Masterpiece" . . . yes, that's what it says on the cover, and like everything else in this book, it is said without irony . . . this is the blurb for Frank Herbert's Dune and, surprisingly, I made it through 400 pages of sand, the highly addictive life lengthening spice-drug melange, imperial plots for the aforementioned spice drug, wild religious prophesy among the Fremen, water reclaiming stillsuits, Sardaukaur, the coming of Muad'Dib, a ride on the maker (a sand worm), crys-knife fights, treachery, desert ecology, and all the rest . . . but I finally skimmed the last hundred pages or so, because-- despite the complexity of the world, the fantastic development of the characters . . . both in mind and lineage . . . and the well-paced and multifarious plot-- after four hundred pages of reading you deserve a joke or two, something funny or at least ironic, but like in the Bible and Lord of the Rings, the tone of Dune is epic, and during this epic and very dry time on Arrakis, nothing remotely humorous happens, nor should it I guess . . . this is a place so desiccated that when you die, they render your body for its water, and the pages and pages of sand finally wore me out (and from what I've heard, the movie is not so much fun to watch either).
In my new, very special episode of We Defy Augury . . . which is based on my experiences teaching high school English in the age of AI (with bonus thoughts-- loosely--based on three classic science-fiction novels: Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels and They Walked Like Men by Clifford D. Simak) I attempt to answer this question: "Is AI Cheating Our Students Out of an Education?" and while I may not come to a definitive conclusion, somebody needs to address this issue . . .
Special Guests include: Gary Gasparov, Jimmy Kimmel, The Beach Boys, Alan Turing, The Matrix, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, ChatGPT, Bard AI, and Mark "Imprint" Zuckerberg.
A few weeks ago, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer book at my local library-- and because I really like Dyer's writing, I wasn't disconcerted by the fact that the book claimed to be about unlocking the mysteries of a Russian science-fiction film called Stalker, which I had never seen-- nor even heard of-- because I assumed that Dyer would simply be using the film as a springboard for his trademark digressions (as he did in his "biography" of D.H. Lawrence-- Out of Sheer Rage-- which you can find in the BIO section of the library, but the book never actually becomes a biography of Lawrence, and instead is a treatise on procrastination) but this recent book, which is called Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room, is actually about what it is billed as being about, the film Stalker, directed by the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky . . . so I took the book back to the library and spoke to a friend of mine, a film buff, and he told me I had to watch Stalker before I read the book, but that it wasn't going to be easy . . . and he was right, it wasn't an easy viewing, and this may be because I am certainly no film buff . . . I came to movies rather late in life and I have a limited attention span . . . and so it took me days to watch Stalker, which is nearly three hours and famous for its interminably long shots where relatively little happens-- and while I am glad I watched it, as it is compelling, ambiguous, profound, and beautifully filmed story-- and the journey of Stalker, Writer, and Professor is both archetypal and unforgettable-- especially the last scene-- while I admit all this is true, I think I came to this film too late in my life to really appreciate it, and Dyer explains this phenomena in the book: he explains that he saw Stalker when he was twenty-four and in a phase when he was doing a lot of LSD, and he became obsessed with the film, in a way that doesn't happen once you hit thirty or forty . . . he explains the sad fact that you probably won't see the film you consider to be the "greatest" after the age of thirty, and definitely not after the age of forty-- your ability to have your perceptions altered, your ability to respond to art with maximum focus and obsession, this declines with age . . . and so I am stuck with the films of the '90's as my benchmark movies: Goodfellas and The Big Lebowski and Fargo and Reservoir Dogs and the documentaries of Erroll Morris . . . not that a few films from my early thirties haven't snuck into my pantheon . . . Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation . . . but most of my films are light-weights compared to the greats-- fast-paced post-modern fun, as opposed to profound aesthetic journeys, and there is probably not much I can do about it . . . and funny thing, I actually readingabout Stalker more than I enjoyed watching it . . . so I am guessing I will never become a cinephile.
I watched Dark City on Blu-Ray the other night . . . possibly for the second time . . . it's a science-fiction film directed by Alex Proyas that is strangely similar to The Matrix (though it was released a year before in 1998) but more interesting than this comparison is the fact that I felt as if I was living parallel with the movie while watching it-- the movie begins with a naked man in a room (Rufus Sewell) with a murdered call-girl, and he has no memory of what happened to the girl or of the last three weeks of his life and he has only very dim memories of his past, and he slowly realizes-- as he makes his way through his very dark city, that aliens are manipulating not only his memories but the actual world he is living in; the movie is excellent and really looks spectacular on Blu-Ray, but I could only vaguely remember watching it in the past, and not when or where, and then Catherine came home and she couldn't remember watching it with me, and I rarely watch movies alone and it's not on my Netflix history nor have I rated it and there were only certain things that I remembered . . . like Shell Beach . . . and so I am wondering if I never really saw the movie at all, and if Kiefer Sutherland inserted it into my brain with one of his steam-punk memory injections, but now that I've got it recorded here on this blog, I'll be able to refer back to this post and foil the aliens that have been manipulating my brain (and there are the usual internet theories about how The Matrix stole from Dark City, but I find this highly unlikely, since the script for The Matrix was finished when they were shooting Dark City, and as one nut pointed out, all these ideas originated with the movie Tron . . . but at that point you might as well say that all of these type films-- ranging from The Game and The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense all the way to Bladerunner-- are an allegory for Plato's cave and forget who stole what from whom and just enjoy the special effects).
I'm sure I've been radicalized and brainwashed by a leftist-socialist-environmentalist media sphere, but Leah Sottile's sequel to Bundyville-- this "season" of podcasts and articles is subtitled The Remnant-- is once again an exceptional and compelling portrait of religious/anti-government/apocalypse/white-supremacist/conspiracy-theorist/hyper-patriotic/gun-toting militia folks that is so outside my purview it seems like science-fiction; this fits right into Tara Boyle's world of Educated . . . a much wilder West than most of us liberal Easterners can imagine-- and while the piece starts with an explosion in Panaca, Nevada and eventually finds itself in the "American Redoubt— the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming"-- the real home of this piece is the internet, where fact-free-fringe-theories and conspiracies persuade and propagate . . . a place that our President panders to . . . and while Sottile finally meditates on the intractable paradox: how much tolerance do you afford the intolerant?
she also hears from rational people who believe that the government does have too much power, that after 9/11 the fear of terrorism allowed federal and local law enforcement to ramp up violence and surveillance on suspects and that this is a cycle that will only be met with more violence-- Sottile and I both think the answer may be sunlight, we have to just keep shining a bright logical light on all these fringe-apocalypse-fundamentalist-religious-conspiratorial extremists and their words and logic until they shrivel and decay, we've got to talk it out and keep talking, the government needs to be up front about what it's doing and what is happening, and we have to understand that there's going to be some explosions along the way and some radical extremism, which is part of the cost of having a country with a strong First Amendment, checks and balances in the government, and a sometimes too-powerful federal presence . . . that presence can drive people, especially people ready to be radicalized, out to the fringe-- events like Waco, and the shooting of LaVoy Finnicum and the Ruby Ridge siege; for me, it was absolutely shocking to hear folks proposing an all-white, all-Christian 51st state where the chosen could live out their days training and praying, waiting for the end-of-times . . . but maybe I'm too sheltered, living here in a tame, intellectual, multi-cultural town in central New Jersey, and I need a dose of the real American West, which is wilder than ever; Sottile brings up the fact that, of late, right-wing extremists have accounted for the bulk of the terrorism in the United States, and The Atlantic breaks it down:
"From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists . . . in other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists . . . but they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms."
A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead's new album, is an easy-listening-electronica-opera, and it manages to sound like a missive from the future, without sounding like sci-fi . . . I love stuff that actually sounds like science-fiction-- The Crystal Method's Vegas and everything by Underworld and The Future Sounds of London and, of course, OK Computer-- but this album is beyond that: it doesn't sound like the present reflecting on how music in the future will sound, and it isn't didactic-- it isn't music that reflects the direction the future is (hypothetically) headed . . . in other words, it doesn't sound anything like Kid A . . . the sounds decay, the lyrics repeat, and every note has some extra production subtly attached to it . . . and if you don't believe me, check out the Pitchfork review . . . I don't know how they come up with the decimal, but they gave it a 9.1 out of a possible 10.
Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, "The future is already here-- it's just unevenly distributed," and the characters in his new novel zero history definitely live in the positive agglomeration of the futuristic present . . . rhenium darts, penguin shaped floating surveillance drones, and ekranoplans are all de rigueur in this universe; in fact, things, especially fashionable things linked to the military, play a more important role than people in the book, which makes the novel hard to follow . . . the people are bystanders to the fashion, technology, intrigue, and marketing that surrounds them . . . and, appropriately, people in the book are constantly "Googling" things because they are beyond their ken, and they are worried that their knowledge of these secret, obscure, often technological things might be ersatz, and meanwhile, in my less futuristic present, I was Googling things in the book as well, to see if they were real or not: I'm glad I finished the book, I've read everything William Gibson has written and I don't want to stop now, but this is the weakest effort in the "present-future" trilogy (the other two are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).
