Why Dune is Unique: Three Reasons, and Some Questions

(Contains novel spoilers, Lynch movie spoilers, but not Villeneuve movie spoilers.)

Dune has a lot of very loyal readers who rightly understand its specialness. Both its contents and its place in science fiction as a tradition are unique. I somehow had gone my entire life without reading the novel, or even seeing the David Lynch movie all the way through, and committed to correcting this prior to the release of the Villeneuve version (which as I write I have not seen.) Coming to it late - much like I did as a metal fan with Led Zeppelin - provided me a unique perspective that might escape those encountering it in late adolescence or early adulthood, though you can see the warts a bit more clearly as well.

In short, there are three core features that make Dune stand apart, in order of increasing uniqueness.

• The setting echoes early modern Europe or the age of discovery, unlike standard "star empire" stories.
• In Dune, religion is real. It's not just that religion is central to the identify of many of its characters; in many ways, its worldview is not a rationalist one.
• Above all, Dune is a projection and exploration of human potential, in extension into the far future. It is therefore a hard SF of social sciences.

The Setting

Interstellar empires abound in science fiction, but they typically evoke either strong associations with a re-born Roman empire, or a not-so-subtle thirst for the hegemony of a modern-day state (almost invariably the U.S.) expanded out into the wild black yonder. Dune doesn't fall into either category. The setting is politically reminiscent of Europe with a Holy Roman Empire balancing power against multiple other states.[1] Many of the other elements have obvious parallels, e.g. the Sardaukar as Ottoman Janissaries. Note this was also the age of discovery, which at first was for spices and gold, though melange is a lot more like oil. The Fremen are often compared to Bedouins or Tuaregs, and Paul Atreides to a Lawrence of Arabia figure. The mixture of elements from different periods is a strength of Dune, since Herbert is not merely retelling history but on another planet with lasers - rather, it opens up discussion of how these forces interacted to produce history, like the best alternate histories. (Even Asimov wrote a humorous song about himself referring to "cribbin' from Gibbon" for Foundation.)


Religion Is Real

It's not just Herbert's focus on concepts from psychology and religion - it's that these things are taken as real and literal in the world that he is showing us. As in most science fiction until thew New Wave (and probably most since then), Fondation's future is depicted as secular, and though Hari Seldon is revered, people have the good sense not to turn it into a religion. But most telling is that both Foundation and Dune have "distractor" religions – the Dark Things spread by the Bene Geserit, and the superstitions spread by the Foundation to keep surrounding worlds in check. But in Foundation, the people on Terminus understand that these beliefs, and indeed superstitions in general, can only be nonsense used to keep the rubes in check - and more important, Asimov assumes that you the reader understand this as well. As he conquers the Imperium Muad'dib speaks of God in what seems a very literal and unironic sense, and his destiny and powers seem to confirm this. Herbert's approach to religion in Dune is not merely to recognize in the manner of a detached anthropologist the importance of religious belief (in the abstract) to humans, but rather to suggest its literal reality, and in so doing paint a picture of a dualist, human-shaped, not fully rational universe where our nature can reach its fullest projection. This is true of very few works of science fiction. Attanasio's Radix has many echoes of Dune but, again tellingly, ultimately the language is that of a comprehensible monism.


A Hard SF of Social Sciences

Comparisons with Foundation and Star Wars are obvious and appropriate, but a superficial examination risks missing what is unique about Dune. All three have heroes that struggle against empires which are in some way fraudulent, deceptively unstable, or unjust. The argument has been made that Dune is Foundation, told from the standpoint of the Mule, but to me this isn't so clear; certainly Paul has aspects of both Hari Seldon as prophet, and the Mule as out-of-context conqueror. Both Dune and Star Wars have a hero who is "the one", imbued by his ancestry with special powers that are developed through training.

The comparison with Star Wars is ultimately not fruitful, because Star Wars is actually a fantasy work that happens to occur in space, and Dune is science fiction - interested as it is with concepts from ecology, politics, religion, and psychology. Hard sf classically speculates about physical sciences - what if you could manipulate the internal structure of a proton to make it an AI? What if you could build a habitable ring-shaped megastructure? - and in its best moments, gets us to put down the book and think about the speculative ideas presented, or argue about their plausibility with other readers. In Dune, Herbert takes the same approach, making concepts from these fields central to his world-building. George R.R. Martin borrows heavily from history, but he drops these episodes in for dramatic benefit (wedding massacre, the battle of Cannae, barbarian hordes from interior grasslands) but for Martin these are all stand-alone set pieces, they aren't meshing gears in a machine as in Dune.[2]

While the proximate trigger for a novel about a desert planet was research Herbert did for an article on sand dunes in coastal Oregon, he spent time as a journalist at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California where he kept company with two psychoanalysts[3] whose influence can certainly be felt in the world he built here. Until Dune, there was really nothing like this in science fiction.

The Fremen in particular were unique in science fiction up to that point (Martin's wildlings are a later example of the same type.) If science fiction taking place after an expansion away from Earth includes stateless people at all, they tend to be small groups of bandits or criminals - rather than an entire civilization that is not also a state. The Fremen are very much like James Scott’s Zomians: a people who are never absorbed into a state because their terrain is not "legible" (note how the Imperial census on their numbers was unreliable.)

The following observation deserves its own paragraph: I'm writing this a few weeks after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. If ever life imitated art, it's now. I don't like comparing my country to the Imperium or Harkonnens, but if a Taliban fighter watches Dune, you can be certain he will enthusiastically see himself as a Fremen. I think this is a major scotoma on both the part of Herbert and readers in the West. The Fremen are explicitly called jihadis. They are religious fanatics. They do not have a rationalist, monist view of the universe - fitting with the themes of Dune, but nonetheless, not people who I imagine would think about equality, between the sexes or anything else, the way you or I do.

I think the absence of both intelligent aliens and thinking machines was a deliberate choice on Herbert's part, to be able to create a universe that was "humanized", where only human consciousness is projected onto and shaping the cosmos. The Buterlian Jihad and consequent absence of AIs is the more important of the two, and serves twin purposes. First, Herbert might have thought that a world where humans co-existed with thinking machines for thousands of years would be either too hard to build, and/or too disorienting for readers to be interested. Second, a world without thinking machines forces us to develop human potential - and we see how physical and mental disciplines have grown over the centuries. This gives us the mentats, and Bene Geserit, and navigators, and the weight of practices and aphorisms that are probably the most specific identifying feature of the book. It should also be noted that as technology is retarded by the absence of computers, the human race recedes to its base-state of feudalism,[4] predictably in a world of stagnant economic growth. You could even argue that the entire Imperium suffers from the resource curse. The Holtzmann Shield is the final trick to build this stage, removing large scale missile weapons from the picture, returning us to an age where physical, martial prowess means something.

You might correctly point out the Foundation series was about an empire's collapse and the natural laws that govern civilizations - an idea that has influenced readers for decades - and object that Herbert's hard social sf was new or unique. But Asimov did spend a fair bit of text on positronic brains, hyperspace, and logic puzzles. The world he built was a tidy, rational and comprehensible one, and the fundamental approach of Hari Seldon was that of a physicist, studying humans as particles - an analogy his characters make frequently.[5]

The linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter wrote Doing Our Own Thing about the transition in American culture from formality (in music, in film, in speaking and fashion in culture in general) to informality. He provides countless examples, even pointing to specific performers whose output changed during this period - and points to a specific year when the transition occurred in earnest: 1965.[6] He gives examples of performances which were stylistically "mid-transition", referring to these as cultural archaeopteryxes. Before I looked up the year of Dune's publication I guessed it would be 1965. It is. My argument is not that Dune's tone is somehow more informal, but rather that it's the archaeopteryx for science fiction. The tone change in science fiction in the U.S. was in some cases a stylistic move toward less formality, but moreso a migration in topics toward social science. In the U.S. the changes were clear enough that it was being discussed by 1967. Dune still uses science, but has transitioned partway to a post-rationalist, post-scientific worldview - that, more than the concern with social science concepts, is what makes it an archaeopteryx.


Problems with the Novel

There are difficulties with science fiction that are not unique to Dune. When you create a world from scratch, you have to choose between "info dumps", or confusing (or boring) the reader. To me, novels with entries from a Galactic Dictionary, or "italics sections" at the start of chapters, are actually enjoyable. But it's the geopolitics of the Landsraad as revealed through grinding dialogue that lose me. My own bias is that if I'm going to invest time reading about complicated politics, I'd rather read about the real world. The level of detail in these discussions frustrated me in the extreme, even more than the infamous long-winded tree descriptions in Lord of the Rings. My reasoning is partly that an economy or a civilization are such complex entities that, when you make one up, you will always leave holes or commit contradictions no matter how great your effort. So just give us a sketch and fill us in as need be. Related to this, the random and inconsistent insertions of various characters' internal thoughts was really irritating, and did not add anything that could not have been done in a different way (just state it - it doesn't have to be dialogue.) It is here that I will confess that I did not actually finish the novel - but I did read lots of secondary sources, and the Appendix. (If one of my points here is actually answered in the novel or in a later book, please comment.) The two main reasons I couldn't continue were the dialogues about politics, and the internal monologues in italics (see below.)

That said, the Dune universe is overly simplistic and monothematic. There's too much reliance on the spice's miraculous powers; and if the spice really is that important, it seems that something as critical as the transfer of control over spice production would be a bit better attended to by other Houses, and in fact there would be a lot more presence on or around Arrakis by other Houses. It makes the Dune universe, for its otherwise rich canvas of invented social structures, in this respect feel a little one-dimensional. Though it's briefly addressed, characters seem remarkably incurious about the inability to manufacture spice, or its connection to Dune’s ecosystem i.e. the worms. It's also hard to understand how certain things like the stillsuits can be manufactured by Fremen who are essentially hunter-gatherers.

Maguffins like spice are not uncommon in fiction, but it's worth pointing out that Herbert wrote multiple other stories with a maguffin with these characteristics:

• It can only be obtained in one place
• You can't make it, you have to harvest or extract it
• It is involved in mental activity - the substance results from it, or stimulates it (often but not always)

While I haven't surveyed his entire output, here are some examples:

• The psychoactive compound Jaspers in The Santaroga Barrier
• The glandular secretions mined by aliens (important enough to have to hypnotize the human race) in his first published short story "Looking for Something"
• Oil in The Dragon in the Sea, his first published novel.[7]

For a novel that supposedly emphasizes ecology, there's very little actual discussion of the native flora and fauna of Arrakis besides sandworms and sandtrout. Only later do we even learn why Arrakis has an oxygen atmosphere (worm metabolism produces oxygen.) (Compare to the richness of LeGuin's The Dispossessed.) I do like the observation that Earth's desert plants from all deserts became naturalized there, but this is not discussed as a tragedy of invasives displacing natives; rather the description takes the tone of Arrakis as a (good) desert preserve for Earth's desert organisms.[8] Related to this, worms attack rhythmic motion because they're defending their territory – from what? Other worms?

Herbert is not alone in having his characters speak in the stiff and unnatural manner that can be called "mythic-speak", the first rule of which is that contractions are not allowed. Fantasy novels often adhere to this convention as well. We know they're not speaking English; therefore, you might consider just having the characters talk like your audience. Even Hemingway made this mistake in For Whom the Bell Tolls with his whole thou and thee convention to reflect use of tú instead of the formal second person, and it is similarly jarring.

If faster-than-light travel is possible without spice (if a bit slower than space-folding), and there are working non-spice-dependent FTL ships, why the stranglehold by the Spice Guild? Why don't the Houses build their own? If the Guild does control space travel so tightly, how have the Fremen migrated? If non-spice-based FTL travel is possible, what stopped renegade houses from expanding on their own to a new habitable planet?

I'm quite confident that in a hundred centuries, no names now familiar to us will still be in existence. There will be no Duncans or Pauls or Jessicas. I see what Herbert may have been trying for with the surname Idaho - many people in the New World carry a surname of a faraway land that they may not even know is a real place - but no one has a surname of a place from a hundred centuries ago.

Why don't the other types of spice users also have blue eyes like the Fremen (ie the navigators?)

Why do people have to go into space to get folded by a navigator? Why not just sit in a warehouse on one planet, then get folded to another?


Criticisms of the Lynch Movie

Most people don't care for the Lynch movie, so I'm hardly taking a risk panning it. The choice of Lynch as director is actually the first mystery: he wasn't a science fiction director, and didn't particularly like science fiction, and it showed. (In the same vein, I'm a fan of much of John Updike's work but his attempt at science fiction Toward the End of Time fell quite flat.) Amazingly, Lynch was apparently considered to direct Return of the Jedi, and even as someone who doesn't love the original episodes as much as most, I think that would have been a mistake. He also wasn't able to make the movie he wanted to. Even so, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not much of a Lynch fan to begin with, and even his fans mostly concede that Dune wasn't strong work.

A positive: given the limitations on travel between planets, I would expect massive genetic drift. I actually liked the physical differences between the imperial family, the Harkonnens and the Atreides and hope the Villeneuve movie expands this.

I also liked the costumes, at least for the emperor and nobles and higher ups in House Atreides, who have a definite 1800s European imperialist flair.[9]

I did not recognize Sean Young until late in the movie, despite Blade Runner being one of my favorite movies.

I am somehow always surprised by Patrick Stewart being in this movie. Since Max von Sydow was in Episode VII of Star Wars, that makes actors in both franchises. In the Villeneuve movie there is a DC franchise actor (Jason Momoa) along with no less than five MCU actors (Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgård, Oscar Isaac,[10] David Dastmalchian, and Dave Bautista, the latter two having also been in Blade Runner 2049.)

The most inexplicable decision to me was keeping one of the worst features of the novel - the voice over - which are just the movie version of the italicized internal monologue we're occasionally forced to read in the novel. Princess Irulan's narrations were okay if a bit jarring in places, but the random whispered "paroxysmal third person omniscient" moments are just horrendous. (South Park's treatment was just about right.) And they thought the added voiceover in the U.S. theatrical release of the original Blade Runner was irritating?

The special effects are one of the few aspects of the movie that are regarded positively, but I don't understand why. Even comparing to contemporaries - they mostly seem inferior to Return of the Jedi, which came out the prior year.

A lot of the Lynch movie feels very claustrophobic, which is the opposite of "epic". It seems like Lynch built big sets, and barely used them, and we're up close to the characters in small corners half the time.

The battle scenes were disorganized messes and the fighting itself often seemed like people flailing randomly.

The directorial decision on how to portray Vladimir Harkonnen was unfortunate. He's not scary, so much as gross. I would be afraid to be in a room with Darth Vader, but with the Baron, I just don't want him to touch me. Being charitable, his homosexuality as a sign of decadence is an unfortunate hallmark of 80s big studio movies trying to be edgy (see also, Bright Lights, Big City.)

All that said, Dune is a long and difficult novel to film. Then again, Ted Chiang stories are tough to film, and Blade Runner fans (like me) were ready to hate 2049 - and both were outstanding. If there's anyone who can make a good Dune movie, it's Denis Villeneuve.


FOOTNOTES

[1] A major difference from the Dune universe and 17th-19th century Europe is the existence of a religious authority separate from political ones - the Holy Roman Empire was not the Vatican, and though the two were closely connected, one was a moral authority and the other a secular authority. This may have been one of the major differences in the history of Europe in the second millennium as compared to the Middle East, and while Herbert is clearly interested in the relationship of politics and religion, he does not seem to have been considering this problem specifically. It is also worth noting that religion in Dune is syncretic - there are Bene Geserit both living among the Zensunni Fremen and marrying into the Orange Catholic noble families.

[2] Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is science fiction, and does take place in early modern Europe. In this case, the stories are like gears in a machine, not standalone single-act plays, and not surprisingly, Stephenson strongly agrees that despite the era of its setting the Baroque Cycle is science fiction, not fantasy. These two characteristics are related.

[3] No doubt his virtue was corrupted by the ordeal of keeping company with such unsavory characters.

[4] A standby plot fix for any movie with a "historically familiar, but unlikely to occur in the future" scenario, is that it is taking place in a simulation or curated theme park run by AIs, unknown to the human characters. In other words, the Butlerian Jihad was actually theater produced by the machines for the benefit of humans, and they have kept a section of the galaxy for humans to play their little political games in the ways most comfortable and familiar to them, while the machines colonize the rest of the outside universe. I don't think this is what Herbert intended but it does seem a good match here, given that the computers magically gave up and said, "Okay humans, you win! Now go impose a strikingly antiquated social system on an alien universe with remarkable ease!" In-universe cryptohistory I guess.

[5] I would also argue that when Asimov wrote the first three Foundation novels it was also too early to be talking about subgenres, and it had not fragmented yet. Similarly - was Elvis country or rock and roll?

[6] I would argue that this transition will happen in any post-scarcity consumer society as farmer norms revert back to hunter-gatherer norms (see Robin Hanson), and in fact even further, as beyond a nuclear family we can pick and choose who we associate with without impact on our survival, and therefore we have little need to be even momentarily uncomfortable for the sake of observing common norms.

[7] In Dragon in the Sea he described an idea which actually inspired a type of real-world carrier called a Draconis.

[8] This is an interesting question - over time on Earth, most likely even widely separated areas with the same climate e.g. Mediterranean will end up with the same flora and fauna - California has ice plant from South Africa, eucalyptus from Australia, and grasses and other plants from Eurasia and North Africa, which have badly displaced native organisms.

[9] Another interesting design decision in the Lynch movie is the almost steam-punk look of the technology. The translation device used by the Spice Guild "stewards" looked like a 1930s radio microphone. It raises the question of an alternate history (and present) without our thinking machines. Consider freezing "computing" technology at World War I levels – what would history look like without the Enigma machine, or vacuum tubes, or microchips?

[10] Oscar Isaac was in an X-Men movie and will now be in Moon Knight; this may be the crossover Disney uses to save Star Wars with the MCU.

Review of Three Body Problem

Warning: spoilers.

The Good

Western readers will inevitably learn a lot about the Cultural Revolution period and the attitudes about it people are comfortable expressing in print today. During this interview and in his postscript to the American edition, Liu distances himself from any reading of his work as cultural critique, maybe a bit too strenuously. Whether he should be credited as pointing us to a Straussian reading or this is just pragmatic avoidance of political attention is not clear to me.

Related to this, Western readers in particular are keen to find parallels between Trisolaris and Earth to China and America. Again Liu himself states this isn't what he's doing, and in any event it's not clear which planet would stand for which country. Trisolaris goes through cycles of death and rebirth not unlike China's dynasties (in fact, in the in-novel video game, represented literally as China's dynasties) and Ye is even explicitly described at one point as emerging from the chaotic winter of the Cultural Revolution. The regimented, autocratic aliens of Trisolaris are coming to dominate the naive Earth - the easy-going, beautiful Earth that fluorished in ignorance, as a Chinese author might imagine America. But this doesn't really fit. For one thing, Liu certainly doesn't come across as having any romantic fantasies about America; and Trisolaran sabotage of Earth's rapid advance also smacks of Chinese resentment at perceived Western interference in its rise. If two opposing narratives can fit so well, then I think we're probably crowbarring them into a story where they don't belong. Then again, a symbolic scheme need not be entirely consistent. Case in point, in District 9, are the aliens Soweto residents, or clueless interlopers like the Afrikaaners? Likely both, at various points.

The single best feature of this novel is its explosion of this idea that any technologically advanced civilization must necessarily be a moral one; that humans are inherently and uniquely bad; and that therefore, contact with starfaring aliens can only improve our lot. (This idea of humans being uniquely evil is actually grossly anthropocentric, morally pre-Copernican, invariably casting the rest of humanity as evil, except of course for the enlightened individuals lecturing the rest of us. It smacks of teenagers claiming to be Satanists. Why not just reject Christian symbolism entirely? Because that doesn't make your parents as mad.) Things did not work out well for the natives of the New World, and that was contact between the same species. And Cortez and Pizarro were surely more technologically advanced than the Aztecs and Incas, so why were they not also morally superior? Hence the moment when the police officer almost can't wait to show Ye the content of the messages they found on the Adventists' secret ship and destroy her "beautiful fantasies." It's worth pointing out that almost every cosmologist or astronomer who has a position regarding sending messages to other stars says that if the space-phone rings, we should not answer. And yet in the real world, many such attempts to advertise our presence have already been made, on at least one occasion frivolously as an art project.

The constant frustrated attempts to understand Trisolaran seasons raises a genuinely frightening implication of the problem of induction as it relates to life on Earth. Once the Age of Enlightenment arrived, the idea that we did not understand our world (or could not understand it) in some very relevant way became terrifying. Early strange fiction like Hodgson began to explore this horror of the irrational, of a universe which at its base could not be understood. Philosophically speaking, there are two categories of incomprehensible universes:

• Type 1: We don't understand the universe merely because we have not had the chance to observe a full cycle or the full domain, but ultimately, the universe is still lawful. Asimov's Nightfall is an example.
• Type 2: We don't understand the universe because we cannot. The universe is fundamentally irrational, or at least unknowable to narrow human intellects. Lovecraft's Cthulhu novels are an example; also, frequently, Dying Earth stories.

In both cases, encountering the fundamentally irrational can bring about the collapse of civilization, insanity upon directly observing the unknowable, and sometimes even the dissolution of physical reality. However, the problem of induction and horror of the irrational were not ultimately examined here - on this count the novel ended up being disappointingly mundane for reasons detailed below. Still, in the real world, at the very least Type 1 encounters with the irrational asteroid impacts, Carrington events, and gamma ray bursts are scary enough - at this writing, there is an Oort Cloud object possibly hundreds of kilometers across moving toward the orbit of Saturn that had until now escaped notice.

Ye is the tragic character, obviously, and she is the best-drawn. This woman suffers so much trauma, but the worst is that she realizes possibly the worst thing that anyone has ever done in history is her own action - she sacrificed her husband and accepted the loss of her daughter, then found that what she thought was the one meaningful achievement of her life, turned out to likely to mean the end of the entire human race at the hands of equally immoral beings.

The frustrations introduced by the sophon particle is reminiscent of the Sisyphean problems plaguing CERN and keeping it from finding the Higgs boson (which we know eventually was found.) But it's worth pointing out that in 2009 there was an apparently serious proposal that time travelers (or the Higgs boson itself) were interfering from the future with CERN to prevent some catastrophe that the Higgs boson, if created, would foment. Alas, we still exist.

I usually enjoy unexpected pacing and structure if I'm being surprised rather than bored or confused, and in this case, I was more often surprised. For one thing, this is a two-protagonist novel (Ye and Wang.)


The Bad

You will note the novel shares a number of the following weaknesses with the genre in general. First is characterization. Outside Ye and to some extent Shi, we barely know who these people are. In Wang's case, we only find out he has a family when he goes home, then he doesn't think about them again, even as he travels around the world, or in the face of mortal danger to himself, or even a threat to the entire human race. He finds out that we're dealing with aliens, and he barely reacts at all. Even a Dan Brown protagonist at least wanders around a novel imbuing the revelations with a sense of wonder and profundity. Wang isn't even a mouthpiece for ideas.

Liu offers very few sensory descriptions of anything, except the village outside Red Coast. Ye's experiences there are described in conspicuous sensory terms that stand out. It should not be a surprise then that Liu grew up in a poor rural village.

For any reader familiar with near-Earth stars, it wasn't a surprise that Trisolaris turned out to be Alpha Centauri.

If we're applying hard science fiction rules, then it's too great a coincidence that the aliens are within a few millennia of our own technological level. Aliens are much more likely to be either trilobites, or "phyla beyond [human] knowing" to use Benford's term, than something at all cognitively similar to humans that comes here on metal ships. This is a point that many readers of science fiction will not mind, but will bother anyone familiar with current academic thinking regarding the Fermi paradox. The fact that they even feel the need to insult us - "YOU ARE BUGS" projected on our retinas - makes them seem a bit too human-like. In fact the entire description of the "real" internal behavior of the Trisolarans is far too anthropomoprhic. There was some mention of the "living computer" having been a real thing there, and their movements being much faster than humans', so I hope I'm missing some slight of hand like the one Vinge used in Deepness in the Sky (the spider-aliens were in fact much more alien than they were portrayed earlier, with some internal narrative-style sleight of hand justifying this.)

Plot problem - if the goal is to disable scientists, then the sophons could do a lot better than create a spooky countdown in someone's visual field. You could blind them, or cause them to hallucinate. In the real world, hallucinations and even tinnitus alone can effectively disable people. Sensory disruption is much more effective than some higher order cognitive interference introduced by undermining ideas in a lawful universe. Furthermore this suggests a shockingly detailed knowledge of human psychology on the Trisolarans' part.

In the end I did not find that there were really new ideas developed in the novel; what looked like it would be an interesting exploration of the problem of induction or the rational nature of reality (see above) turned out to be industrial sabotage done by aliens instead of human enemies. The use of entangled programmed fundamental particles is interesting but so far beyond anything we think might be real that it's effectively fantasy. China Mieville has advanced the idea that the authorial voice of science fiction is one of radical authority - effectively, "here is how reality itself works. Accept it as possible in order to continue reading." (You might argue that limiting the ideas to known physics either elevates hard sf to the "correct" genre, and/or that it can only produce fictional worlds of straight line extrapolation that people in the future will regard as the early twenty-first century's answer to steampunk. But science and actual speculations thereon rather than just word play is what we know is real, and sticking to the rules of the real world is what keeps a story from being fantasy. This is why Star Wars is a a fantasy movie, masquerading as science fiction by giving its wizards and barbarians spaceships.)

A wild idea couched in the language of science even if the work is really fantasy, or even comedy (see: infinite improbability drives) can still be a good vehicle for thought, but unless you're showing us how to actually in real life unfold and program a proton, you don't need to devote so much space to it. This isn't a screed against exposition, which I think is unfairly devalued in science fiction. If you're introducing a new idea, you either have to stop and unpack it, either in the characters' voices, or through direct description. But the sophon programming section is unnecessarily long and actually became quite boring, the science fiction version of John Galt's sixty page monologue, and had nothing to do with actual science. Maybe this is a tendency of modern Asian fiction - Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland has a curiously long-winded description of skull-tapping and at the time I gave the author credit for doing something that I just wasn't getting, but I'm much less sure this is the case in a less literary novel.

I have a personal distaste for fantasy worlds inside science fiction novels. Spacetime folds that take characters back to their childhoods, neural interfaces that make their subconscious a real place, or in this case, a VR video game. It removes constraints from what the writer wants to do and becomes literary expressionism, which in novels (particularly those low on sensory description) seems watery and uncompelling.


In the end, after the hype, I was a bit disappointed. I'm glad I read it but the novel's strengths were really its different setting on Earth and historical perspective of the author. If this were an American science fiction novel it would be clearly mediocre.

We Are Definitely in a Simulation; Also the Simulation Argument is Poorly-Defined With Many Unjustified Assumptions

Periodically I re-write an argument about both the relevance of the simulation argument, as well as its poorly defined nature. This leads to people overextending its meaningfulness and smuggling in other assertions.

First, here's why it's irrelevant - because we're all already in a simulation, with high certainty, just not the one you think. People who lived in the middle ages believed the world was flat and there were dragons and trolls. This is a form of simulation. If you're outraged at this assertion, then tell your definition of a simulation. Full sensory immersion like in the Matrix? Why a sensory-only simulation? While we're using science fiction for our thought experiment - are the robots in Westworld not in simulations? On witnessing any potential epistemological disturbance to their world (e.g. being shown a picture of the late twenty-first century cities) they don't register it, instead saying "it doesn't look like anything to me".

This means that all of us - all of whom have some false beliefs - are in a simulation. An extremist position would be that to have any beliefs at all, even if they are accurately based on prior observation, is to be deluded, because your perception of here-and-now is polluted by past experience. Leaving that aside, pain, pleasure and emotions are entirely contained within nervous systems and do not represent anything in the external world - meta tags at best - and yet they are inextricably part of our experience of the world.

Even assuming we are living in a Matrix-like sensory immersion simulation, and we find some way to detect this and pierce the veil as it were - we would still be in a single, unitary material universe, albeit one with more complicated rules than we realized that led us previously to a distorted understanding. Isn't this what science has already been doing for centuries? The Egyptians thought the sky was a ceiling with holes letting in light from heaven, then we built lenses to pierce the veil of the inadequate model our naked senses had given us.

Second, these arguments often smuggle in simulators with agency. (Here is where we can more clearly see the clear parallels between theology and simulation arguments – always suspicious when familiar outlines re-emerge in high-status, low-data discussions, probably revealing more about the shape of the human mind than the universe that mind inhabits.) Why must there be simulators? Certainly there were no demons actively hiding the Milky Way from us. What we now call a simulation might be a natural feature of the wider universe that has so far tricked our senses.

Third, even assuming simulators - how can you know their nature and intentions? Often an argument is made that if we ever did figure out one way or the other that we're in a simulation, the simulators would adjust things so we forgot. So why are we bothering to talk about this then? (Boy does the discussion start to sound like religion at this point.) It also doesn't follow, at all, that the simulators would not want us to know we are being simulated. Maybe that's the point of the experiment!

And fourth, assuming we can know the nature of the simulators, why assume that they would be palatable to us, or relevant to our choices? There's an obvious track to monotheism's goal to learn and glorify the desires of the one true god, which are assumed to be (curiously) similar to the morals of the worshippers. But we're still arguing whether human morality is generalizeable between humans, much less to hyperintelligent 13th-dimensional squid aliens. They might not care, any more than a human scientist cares about the E. coli in a petri dish. Their sense of morality, if such a concept even applies to them, might be (it seems mostly likely) completely inscrutable to us. It might be grotesque. And again, should the E. coli (or one of your video game NPCs) suddenly figure out your morality, so what? What can they really do for you; what can we do for squid-god? If I had to pick, I would want a simulator that doesn't care, because their desires are likely to be repugnant or incomprehensible to us. Living in a universe created by a simulator that cared, and actually wanted us to do something, would be the same as every being in the universe being kidnapped by sadistic terrorists and turned into brains in a vat, utterly at their mercy.

It should not be missed that these are exactly the same questions an atheist asks a believer. I ask my many fellow atheists who are proponents of poorly-defined versions of the simulation hypothesis why they miss asking these questions; I also ask religious believers who may have accepted these arguments regarding the simulation hypothesis, why they don't turn them on their own beliefs. After all, don't you want to know the truth about whether there's a supreme being, and what they're like, and what we should do as a result? Isn't that the point of many religions?

Expanding on the fourth point, here's a problem not unique to the simulation argument, but to any "super" being. If you're a utilitarian (greatest good for greatest number), there's a familiar problem put forth by Robert Nozick, the utility monster, a being who experiences sublime pleasure (and suffering) that "swamps the signal" of the collective happiness and suffering, so that you spend all your time pleasing and avoiding hurting the utility monster and neglecting everyone else. A simulator who cares could be such a utility monster, and on learning of their existence, you must give up caring about anything or anyone else, and bring glory to their name (or whatever it is they want you to do.) You could waste your time on improving the pale blunt emotions of the primitive beings in your family, or the sublime simulator squid-god. Indeed this is what aesthetics do.

Fortunately, based on the best empirical evidence, our present preferences do not appear to influence the type of universe we're already in. We are definitely in some kind of simulation, owing to the way our nervous systems work; in fact it’s not clear how it could be otherwise. If we find this is true more than we knew beyond even the functioning of our brains, it could well be a revolution in science, but would not overturn the brute fact of monist reality.

Unfit to Rest, No Haven (2020)

Rejoice, We Conquer!

Metellus Celer recalls the following: when he was Proconsul in Gaul, he was given people from India by the king of the Sueves; upon requesting why they were in this land, he learnt that they were caught in a storm away from India, that they became castaways, and finally landed on the coast of Germany. They thus resisted the sea, but suffered from the cold for the rest of their travel, and that is the reason why they left.

Pomponius Mella, A.D. 43
* * *

Standing at harborside in Toltecatlan, Diving Eagle was shouting himself hoarse at the sailors loading his new flagship. He was clearly a very hands-on Sea-Prince, and not because he was trying to impress anyone. Early in the day he had thrown off his cape and shell collar and stood in only his robe, yelling and pointing and running between ships. The sailors were all very green, and if the way they'd just loaded that war-animal was any indication, not many of them knew what they were doing. The deep blue-green of the tropical harbor extended from the wharf to the horizon, where the Carib Sea met the sky, and it did nothing to calm Diving Eagle. A single island jutted from the warm sea, just big enough for two palms and a black-stone fort. Another new warship moored to the small fort-island dwarfed it as the ship sat high in the water, waiting to be loaded. As Eagle sprinted back and forth on the wharf dodging crewmen, he dripped with sweat and impatience. The humidity was not like Tenochtitlan's weather, and Diving Eagle wanted to be underway.

Eight-Grass appeared out of the stone-and- wood sprawl of the harbor town behind them. Eagle saw him out of the corner of his eye. Eight-Grass was clearly aware of the contrast between his own bony frame and feather headdress against Eagle's squat muscularity and Grass approached the military man awkwardly as he hurried along the old jetty. He asked: "Can I re-check something?"

"Yes, what." Eagle's eyes didn't leave the load that was being hoisted up onto the deck of his flagship Sabertooth.

"Is my second load of books on board?" Eight-Grass said.

"Yes."

"The second load."

"Yes. I personally made sure it was on the ship and in your quarters."

"They're important," Eight-Grass said nervously.

"I know," Eagle said.

"I don't mean to question you."

"No worries. This may be a very long voyage and we can't afford to damage or lose anything now." For the duration of their exchange, Eagle's eyes hadn't left the load being hoisted up onto the deck. Now Eight-Grass looked up at it too. The object was wrapped in cloth and it was relatively small.

"What's that?" Eight-Grass said.

"My table." Eagle added, "It's the same one that was in my quarters on the Sea Snake during the war. I planned all our invasions on it and ate many bad meals on it. If I can't have the Sea Snake as my flagship at least I can have my table."

"Superstition?" Eight-Grass tried to ask amicably.

"No. It's a good table." Grass said nothing, and turned to count the warships out on the bay, still waiting to be loaded. Diving Eagle saved him the effort. He said, "These are the final sixty-eight."
* * *

When we hominids were still exclusively an East African animal, the playing field between us was level. Everyone lived in the same few thousand square kilometers. No flooded land bridges or spreading deserts had yet isolated our genes and cultures to ferment in isolation, to accumulate chance discoveries, to develop resistance to some germ or a new trick of warfare or metal-working so we could conquer our neighbors. If the human story to date had unfolded only within the small realm of our first biome, history might have been much more even-handed, and things might have gone differently.

But things did not go differently. Like colonies of primates growing in test tubes, we unknowingly quarantined ourselves in jungles and steppes and forests and tundras, and in each isolated corner of the Earth the historical accidents began to pile on top of one another, and the unfair odds piled up along with them. Of course, in reality Earth has no corners; and inevitably, soon there was nowhere new to go. Inevitably, every new horizon across an ocean or mountain range was an old one to someone else, already filled with other faces. In this way the quarantines ended. In the ensuing collisions, millennia of these accumulated accidents would come crashing down, like current through a suddenly closed circuit.

Today, we're fascinated with accounts of early encounters between those breeds of primates – like Lewis and Clarke in the Northwest, or Captain Cook in the Pacific. These supposedly true stories are interesting enough that we can't help embellishing them or outright making some up. We scour history for the tiniest scraps of evidence. We squint at supposed Norse rune stones found in a field in Minnesota, or we read claims of medieval Japanese ships landing in Hawaii, or stretch the words of Roman historians until we think they were writing about Native Americans blown off course to ancient Europe. Occasionally, we even indulge the historical conceit of imagining new chains of events differing from the one we're actually standing in. What would an Enlightenment Africa have looked like without three centuries of globalized slavery? What would Persia have become if it hadn't been broken by Alexander? What if Europeans didn't discover America until the industrial age? These exercises typically ignore the massive suffering of the people whose cultures were on the wrong side of the circuit, in favor of more high-minded academic questions. History reads very differently depending on the color of the skin you live in, and how history has treated that color.
* * *

It was a strange time in Mexico then. The end of the Carib War had brought both glory and poverty to all of Nahuatlan. In Tenochtitlan, for the first time in decades, there was real hunger, and no work for all the young men returning from their island-hopping campaigns across the Carib Sea. Everywhere there were heroic murals of the celebrated Second Navy Sea-Prince Diving Eagle being presented with flowers and roasted hearts by High Speaker Angry-Coyote, with the ceremonial First Navy stretching away behind them in colorful rows on Lake Texcoco. The figures on the murals were giant, and they were everywhere. And they were everywhere looming over huddles of small, hungry people in tlaxcala-lines.

Diving Eagle had been back from the war scarcely a year when a messenger had rowed through the floating gardens to his estate in Xochimilco to tell him that "something had been found". Eagle's impatience turned to understanding the following day when he stood before Angry-Coyote once again, in a torch-lit lower meeting room underneath the Palace, the walls crawling with painted snakes. The Speaker's minister Eight-Grass was there, and Diving Eagle had intently examined the small thing Eight-Grass handed him, the thing which had washed up on Farthest Carib Island.

Eagle had held the thing in one hand, squinting. It was a rectangular board, thin like bark, firm and light. A maze of green and gold lines was minutely etched on its surface, almost as if printed. There were small chips of black embedded in the surface of the board. The decorative gold lines were curiously asymmetric, and the pattern didn't repeat.

"What is it?"

Eight-Grass responded, "The only theory so far is some kind of pottery shard. And that's unlikely." Eagle had continued to examine it and Grass had said, "The point is, we have no goods like it from any nation we know of. And whoever made that has wealth and well-developed art." Eight-Grass added, "Based on the sea currents near Farthest Carib Island, I have deduced the area it must have come from."

Eagle had quickly seen where this was heading, and how he may profit. "If great Angry-Coyote wishes it," he said with full deference, "the Second Navy will sail again."

"Ah. Angry-Coyote wishes a Third Navy," the Speaker had said, tapping a prepared scroll on the table. "We go in strength. If this new nation's strength is equal to the Nahuatlan, we leave Eight-Grass and some other men as an embassy. If not, we don't." He let the two-way implication speak for itself.

"It's done, your highness." Angry-Coyote unrolled the scroll on the dark wood table and smacked it with his bone butterfly stamp. It was done.
* * *

If I ask you whether our world, our history, is the best of all possible worlds, you would probably be hard-pressed to say yes, and harder-pressed to tell me coherently why, whatever your answer. But I bet you’re still secretly, circularly relieved that things turned out as they did. For all the remorse expressed over the conquest of indigenous Americans, few white Americans have advocated giving the land back, at least outside of the reservation system. And if you visit a reservation, you’ll find that modern native life does not resemble any romantic vision you may have. Then again, for my part, I like living in California, and I don’t want to move to Europe where my ancestors came from three centuries ago, and I don’t want to start paying tribute to the Ohlone or Kumeyaay either.

Unfortunately, today it’s hard to imagine how the specific times and places and players in these initial collisions could have mattered to how things ended. The tides of whole civilizations were driving these events, and they’re driving us right now. Perhaps the world would look different if some of the primate breeds had collided after more quarantine, or less. But that’s not what happened. Exactly which man met which man, and in what city, and on what date, could have made no difference in the long run. The flood would still have come, and the circuit would still have closed. History is as it is, and the remaining red people have little choice but to get over it. The players are just the foam on the waves, and their famous quotes are in reality inconsequential. But because they announced the floods, their words still ring in the heart of the world.
* * *

Eleven days out of Toltecatlan they sighted the arc of islands that extended southwest from the Swamp-Peninsula, and the lone fort built during the war on the farthest. Diving Eagle came up on deck under blue skies and full white clouds to watch it go by, and nodded to Eight-Grass, who was even skinnier after days of losing his meals over the side. The local building material was poor so the fort was all sand-mud and wood, not black-stone. The building looked lonely and brave sitting there, a speck at the edge of the flat sandy island when the fleet sailed past. Though he didn’t announce this to Eight-Grass or any of the crew of his own vessel, Diving Eagle had never been past the tip of the Swamp-Peninsula and out of the Carib Sea, into the Great Sea. As far as they knew, no one had.

Eagle shouted a few things to the oar slaves and the men were suddenly busier with the sails as the Sabertooth moved into new currents, and then without saying another word to anyone, he went back below to take his supper at his old table.
* * *

Ten days later, the breezes died, and they had their first real weather, a windless mild rain that frayed tempers despite its softness. When it cleared, the ships were dragging through a zone of massive seaweed tangles. The countless great warships suddenly looked very heavy and slow, and up on deck Diving Eagle found himself stealing glimpses at the supply ships, trying to gauge how high they sat in the water, calculating how much food the war-animals took and when they should start slaughtering or throwing them overboard. He said nothing of this to Three-Bat or any of his officers. Shadowy things splashed and swam in the tangles they passed through the ocean-forest, and the Sea-Prince overheard rumors from the crew about monsters hanging onto the ship from beneath, slowing them down; about poisonous fish and visions of ancestors warning them off. He ate supper up on deck with the crew to calm them, and made a point of eating a fish in front of them that had been caught out of this strange and alien sea, showing that it did not poison him. He also locked away in the hold the most excitable crew member, a lazy rumor-mongering Zapotec who Eagle thought probably just wanted to convince the fleet to go back to Mexico. Eagle observed that this Zapotec became taciturn after an extended beating. Zapotecs usually did.

In the evening as Diving Eagle studied charts in private, Eight-Grass came to his quarters. Grass’s scrollish chestnut-brown paleness had become noticeably darker from the sun.

“You look good!” Diving Eagle said. “You’re a bit thin, but I told you the fresh air is good for you after all.”

“Still no land,” Eight-Grass said simply.

“Yes, and?” Diving Eagle was impatient with Grass’s worrying, as he was with everyone, and looked back down at the chart. He had spread a sabertooth pelt over the old table to protect the worn old bark scrolls from wearing against the pitted, splintered wood.

“Maybe the land bends to the north here. It does at least along the Swamp-Peninsula.”

“Yes, it does bend to the north here, even north of the Swamp, but not that much. Weren’t you the one who said the object came from this direction?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how far.”

“The Great Sea is just another enclosed sea like the Carib Sea, surrounded by land. Just bigger.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Grass said.

“You know a lot from your maps and books, but things feel a lot different when you’re in the map, don’t they?”

“Or off it, in this case.”

“Try to generalize,” Eagle said. “Doesn’t this seaweed remind you of the Carib Sea’s southern edge, when you’re approaching the coastal marshes? On the Warao Coast? I’m telling you, we’re approaching land.”

“I’ve never been there. To the Warao Coast.”

“I have. It looks just like this.”

“But there are strange things going on.”

“Like what,” Diving Eagle muttered.

Eight-Grass said haltingly, “The seaweed and the creatures – we’re coming to the edge of the real world. After this we’ll be in another reality. In – in some alien version of nature. Where maybe we can’t survive.”

“Look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Eight-Grass said.

“Into my eyes.”

“I’m looking.”

Diving Eagle leaned toward Eight-Grass. “There is no evidence to suggest anything of the sort, you old woman. None. We’re going through seaweed and it’s slowing us down. That’s all.” Eagle sighed. “Grass. I appreciate your knowledge.” His voice lowered and his eyes darkened. “But ships require discipline. That’s difficult to maintain, and with the ambassador-to-be expressing these kinds of doubts, it’s impossible. If you are saying these kinds of things to anyone but me, there will be consequences.” He didn’t like having to take the hard line with officers so soon in the voyage. It was a bad sign.

Grass quickly genuflected and left. Eagle had thought he recognized in Grass the expertise to know when his leader said he wanted to hear conflicting opinions, but didn’t actually want to hear conflicting opinions. Eagle never bothered to pretend he wanted to hear conflicting opinions.

In two more days, the patches of seaweed ended, and still they didn’t see any land.
* * *

Their days of decent weather ended when a frightening purple storm blew up to their west. Diving Eagle had no choice but to order the fleet north and further east to be away from it. The oar slaves rowed tirelessly to escape the tempest, until a strong current caught the fleet and propelled them away from the storm and further out over the endless water. In his quietest of hearts, Eagle began to doubt the closed-sea theory.

Another evening Eight-Grass came into Eagle’s quarters. Grass’s visits had become much less frequent, but no less blunt. Eagle was eating at his old pine table and reading in Mayan from a faded scroll of star positions. It pleased Eagle to wonder if it surprised Grass that he could read Mayan.

“We’re lost. There’s no way we’ll ever get back,” Grass said.

“I see you’ve been appointed Fleet Optimist,” Diving Eagle said around a mouthful of boiled dog. He added, “There must be land eventually.”

“You don’t know that. The sea could go on forever.”

“Fine then,” Eagle said. “We’re being pushed east. Fast. What would you do?” Grass was silent. Absently Eagle reached into a pouch and produced the green-and-gold board that had launched the fleet, tracing its thicker etched pathways with his finger. “That’s right. There’s nothing else to do. Either we give up and jump into the sea, or we keep on until we come to land.” He paused for effect. “We will come to land soon.” He hoped his voice didn’t ring so falsely in Grass’s ears too.
* * *

Three-Bat had been Diving Eagle’s head land-fight-leader during the war. Although they’d served together for years, they had never talked much. They never had to. Three-Bat was from a high family, higher than Eagle’s, but Eagle knew that Three-Bat’s rank wasn’t owing to his blood. Bat really was a good land-fight-leader; his unscarred face was testament to skill, not inexperience.

It was for that reason that Eagle gave more mind to Three-Bat’s concerns than Eight-Grass’s. Three-Bat came to see him when they were still in the endless open sea, gray-streaked hair braided simply behind him.

“It’s the animals,” Three-Bat said. “The keepers are having trouble with them. There were two maulings yesterday. We’ve never had them at sea for this long. During the war the longest was two weeks.”

“Restrain them.” Eagle knew almost nothing about the keeping of war-animals.

“This is why I wanted better trained men for this. It’s a hard job. They can step on you.”

“We’ll be there soon, Three-Bat.”

“How long?”

“Days, Three-Bat. Days.”
* * *

Although Diving Eagle had encouraged his men to fish for food and he tightly rationed the freshwater in the rain-tanks, their supplies were getting low, and little things began to make the Sea-Prince snap at his men. It wasn’t until the fifty-ninth day past the Swamp-Peninsula fort that they saw driftwood – then two days later, birds. Two days after that, Eagle was disturbed from his breakfast by a wild cheer. Hurrying to the deck, he saw that sunrise had revealed rugged ridges distant on the horizon. The Sea-Prince commanded the riggers and oar slaves to make for it, and ordered his obsidian throne brought up to the deck.

On closer approach, Eagle saw that there were two high promontories growing out of the quiet water, brown sandstone dusted with green, and a wide strait that lay between them. There were no forts, no smoke trails, no roads cut into the side of any of the rock. The first warships cautiously entered the strait, and when the Sabertooth entered Eagle saw that the water was calm as glass. Dolphins stirred the water to their north.

Eagle ordered that half the fleet anchor on the north side and half the south side of the strait. The Sea-Dukes commanding the other ships had their men land and the parties on the north side reported that they’d found freshwater creeks, taken some game, and pastured the war-animals. The land reminded some of the men of the northern part of Nahuatlan, along the Great Western Sea. There was no sign of men, but plenty of deer, and good wood. There were some other strange animals, ugly with flat noses, but the men found that their roasted flesh tasted good. Diving Eagle tried some that they brought on board and found it pissy and disagreeable, spitting it out, to the good-natured jeers of his ship’s crew. Despite their protests, as a precaution Eagle insisted the men return to the ships and the great fleet anchor for the night off the coast.

“See?” he said later to Grass. “Virgin forest. Perfect.” Only later did he wonder where the pot-makers were if there was no one cutting down forests or burning wood, but no one else seemed to wonder. In the absence of anyone to ask what the north-side land was called – frankly, in the absence of any interest to know what any natives might call it – Eagle named it New Mexico. The scouts mapped the land and coastline, but they found no cities. Diving Eagle began daily briefings with his land-fight-leaders.

The next afternoon as Diving Eagle readied for supper, a land-fighter, trembling, was brought to Eagle by his personal guards. In private the fighter told Eagle that in some coastal scrub he’d found an old fire-ring. The man insisted he had told nobody, in a way that Diving Eagle knew meant he had told somebody. The next day it didn’t matter, because while Eagle was eating with his men on the long boards set up on deck, two small sailboats appeared on the horizon. They approached, then turned and slowly moved off. Eight-Grass, eating in his quarters, came up on deck at hearing the commotion and came to Eagle’s side while they watched. Eagle noticed Grass’s pouting silence as they watched the boat disappear on the horizon, over the crew’s murmuring. Armored rowers on patrol in long canoes came up alongside Diving Eagle’s flagship asking whether they should pursue, but he said no – the little boats were too far away. It could be a trap, Eagle thought, and based on what he’d seen so far, he wasn’t too worried what the locals could do to him, even with advance knowledge.

His face purple, Eight-Grass retired to his quarters. Eagle pretended not to notice.
* * *

The next day, they sailed further east, and the strait quickly opened wide. Naming it the Far Eastern Sea, Eagle ordered the riggers and rowers to keep to the northern coastline from now on.

That evening Eight-Grass came to Diving Eagle’s quarters. Eagle was meeting with the land-fight-leaders. “We’re almost done,” Eagle said to him when the guard brought him, and turned back to the officers.

“To re-emphasize, we’re doing something different from the way we did it in Guanahani. Yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry. Go it?” Murmured assent. Eagle risked annoying them with apparent condescension. “Not good enough. Repeat: yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry.”

The land-fight-leaders chanted: “Yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry.” They finished their meeting and the landers glanced at Grass as they filed out, like they were looking at the younger kid they had to pick for their Ollama team. Eagle noticed the body language but didn’t need to address it.

“Quickly,” Eagle said to him. Though busy, Eagle knew was anticipating the campaign and could see in himself a jovial mood; that is to say, an abusive one. “I don’t have much time, and I got a splinter from my table during the meeting. Please tell me, what mysterious catastrophes await us now, wise one.”

“This is completely unknown land,” Grass immediately burst out. “We could be walking into suicide. It shows supreme arrogance and naïveté to see a ship and say ‘they’re barbarians’ and let them go. It shows arrogance to assume you’ll be able to march in and dispatch the natives so easily.”

“Every time I’ve marched in before I’ve dispatched the natives so easily.” Eagle bit at the splinter on his thumb. Eagle saw Grass’s eyes go to the strange green-and-gold board sitting on the pine table in front of him.

“Look at that,” Grass said, pointing at the object. “We have no idea what that is or what it does. It may be some kind of machine or weapon. For all we know there may be massive cities of ghosts, men with machines and magic that we can’t understand at all.”

“I’m glad I won’t have to listen to your shit for much longer.”

“What do we do if we land and there in front of us there are huge castles and metal-plated armies? What if these plates were finding are parts to a machine we can’t even understand?” Diving Eagle rolled his eyes and waited for Eight-Grass to finish. “We won’t just be backing away politely and getting back in our ships, that’s for certain.”

“You’re worried about meeting gods, is that it? Gods with weapons like potted thunder that can strike you down in mid-stride from across the battlefield?” Eight-Grass said nothing, annoyed that his objections were being cast into such a ridiculous light when they were controlled by someone else’s mouth. “Listen up, Taino-woman. In the real world there’s no magic. There are no ghosts. We’ve seen no evidence of cities or real civilization. These are just more dog-people, like they always are outside of Mexico, and in the end we’ll be amazed they can make even these trinkets.” Eagle waved at the board on the table before him. “And anyway it’s a little late to indulge these worries unless you’re going to swim back.”

“All I know is charging in like this, trouble is what we’ll get.”

“Fine. We’re not going to get in very much trouble if we don’t know where anyone is and we can’t talk to them. That’s why the first thing we talked about in our meeting before you came was catching us one of those sailboats.”
* * *

Only twice after entering through the straits did they see more ships. Small things, relying on puny sails, they became less impressive the closer they got. The small vessels kept well clear of the Mexican warships. So far, there was no indication, from the scouts or anywhere, that Eight-Grass’s fears of thunder-gods would be realized; the ships that had visited the southern coast of the Eastern Sea found it even more deserted and primitive than this one, more desert-like and devoid of any civilization. The third time they saw one of the little sailboats, very close to them as they emerged from a strait between an island and the eastern shore of the Eastern Sea, the Sea-Duke Three-Bat led them in their efforts to pick one up, running it down with one of the smaller faster eagle-ships.

It was over quickly. The strange-looking men on the boat didn’t give it up without a fight, if the blood on the men who came back to the Sabertooth was any indication. Eight-Grass had seen sacrifice but never real fighting and he was horrified at the aftermath when the dog-people were brought aboard. The men in the boat appeared to have been fishing. There had been four of them, and now there was only one. They were pale, sick-looking, like the underbelly of fish, and Eagle ordered the bodies and the living one be handled with blankets since they looked so ill. They smelled terrific, that much was certain.

Diving Eagle came down to one of the dank cells in the ship’s belly, flanked by two jaguar-knights, and played the game he liked to play with the people on the islands of the Carib Sea. Grass watched through a knot in the wood. In the torchlight, the frightened dog man’s eyes were a bizarre blue color. As Eagle and his guards sat in the cell inspecting the dog-man, another of the knights entered with a small wooden chest, from which he produced a gourd.

“Water,” Eagle enunciated to the frightened man, poking him with a tepozmacuahuitl. “Water.” The knight poured water out of the gourd onto the boards. The man made some noise. “Water!” Eagle shouted, and a knight slapped the dog-man’s face. The dog-man looked up again and painfully, gutturally sounded out “water”.

“Heart.” Eagle pointed at his own chest. Again the man stammered the word. Eagle laughed. The grunting native was obviously having had trouble with the –tl’s at the ends of words.

Diving Eagle smiled, and pointed to his bracelets. “Gold,” he said. The fish-bellies would learn the connection between those last two.
* * *

They caught a few more boats-worth of the pale dog-men along the coast of this cool forested land, and a whole tribe of them along the Eastern Sea’s edge, learning their first local place name: “Itlia”. Soon they ran out of room for more captives. Most of the natives cooperated after a bit of poking; some of the more intractable ones were dispatched to Quetzalcoatl in quick ceremonies. The Mexicans soon learned that they had not come to the eastern edge of the sea but they were actually rounding a peninsula, and their captives were making decent maps which showed the locations of villages, including one that they’d just missed. One of the returning eagle-ship crew, a kid named Tonatiuh who Diving Eagle had made one of his official messengers, ran excitedly to tell the Sea-Prince that on one of the boats they pried open a box filled with the green-and-gold boards, but the Mexicans still couldn’t figure out what they were for, and the fish-belly couldn’t or wouldn’t explain it. Eight-Grass overheard this exchange and asked Diving Eagle to speak to him in private.

“On deck will be fine,” Eagle said.

“Fine,” Eight-Grass aid. “On deck, in front of your men. I defy you to explain the things your men are reporting.”

“Like what?”

“Soldiers flying like birds. Chariots that can go up or down hills by themselves, talking treasure chests, even half-man half-beast soldiers. That’s just the beginning. You–”

“Where are they?” Eagle demanded. His voice rose to a shout and he gestured grandly at the coast. “Where are they?! All these ridiculous hallucinations you’re having!”

“Then explain the function of any of the artifacts that were confiscated from the tribe on the peninsula! It won’t seem so academic a question in the middle of a battle!”

“Tell you what, Grass,” Eagle said. “I’ll command my fleet, and you spend your day trying to learn what ridiculous spirits the fish-bellies pray to. That’s the last time I tolerate your disrespect. Now go talk to more dog-people.”
* * *

Diving Eagle was finally satisfied that their “interviews” with the pale men were producing consistent maps. When finally he’d learned of a place where two of these fish-belly tribes were busy fighting each other, he sent messages out to all the lander-boats. At noon the next day he took a canoe across to the closest lander boat, where his land-fight-leaders were to line up for the ceremonial inspection. The Sabertooth shrank behind him as the rowers took him across toward the creaking hulks of the lander boats, their strong animal-smell coming across the water. Eagle climbed the rope ladder to board one of the squarish wooden landers, careful not to lose his red cape and feathers and shell collar into the water in the maritime breeze. As he climbed onto the deck all the Sea-Dukes and the dozen land-fight-leaders were all at attention in full armor.

Diving Eagle asked Three-Bat, “Are the yaoyotlcalli ready?” The exchange was purely ceremonial; the real inspection had passed in the morning.

Three-Bat said, “They’ve been ready.” One of the massive things stood in its bay behind Three-Bat, rude bronze angles and planes glowing dully in the sun.

“The war-animals are fed and dressed?” Before Bat answered, something heavy rumbled against the stall behind Eagle and stomped. He turned to crane his head upward to the top of the stall behind him and despite themselves his men laughed.

“Yes, and impatient,” Three-Bat said.

“I can see that. Me too.” Eagle had planned and rehearsed for every contingency, every mistake, but now was not the time for such thoughts. He breathed deeply. He thought about Mexico, and he pictured the upflung obsidian-streaked skyscrapers of glorious Tenochtitlan, the tallest in the world, and he thought about the glory that would be his.

“Two days, men.”
* * *

It was a clear early afternoon. The black line of the rocky coast was to their north, and from where Diving Eagle stood on deck with Three-Bat he could see the now-detached lander-boats spread out in lines, oars twitching to keep them in formation. The warships were lined up facing east and moving toward the land, where their village would be damaged by the tribal skirmish they’d found out about. The locals were already fighting. The smaller, slower ships their informants had told them about were there in front of them, but they were far off and sailing southeast. There was smoke swirling on the surface of the water around them, under the blue sky.

“Where are those ships going?” Diving Eagle said.

“I don’t know,” Three-Bat said. “We expected them either to stay or to attack us.”

“Maybe they lost,” Eagle said.

“The fish-bellies seemed pretty sure that the ones coming by sea would win.” Bat paused to count. “There are a lot of them,” he said cautiously.

“Look at these ships.” Diving Eagle gestured to their own fleet. “Now look at those.” He tossed his head toward the numerous but small and tattered canoes they were watching drift out of the steep-sided harbor. He paused for effect. “I don’t think it will be a fair fight either way.”

“We’re proceeding as planned.”
* * *

Suppose that maybe ten thousand years ago, things did go differently than you and I learned they went. Maybe there was a meteor impact; after all, it’s happened often enough. Maybe it was the biggest one since the end of the Eocene. Maybe what would have been Arabia and Syria ended up at the bottom of a crater, along with most of Turkey, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.

For months you could have looked south from the Caucasus and seen the cooling crater rim glowing red at night if you’d survived the shockwave and onrush of burning air after the impact; you would have heard hissing where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and the Caspian rushed together and boiled above the huge wound in the Earth. There’s a new sea at the crossroads of the Old World, but no Fertile Crescent, and no Silk Road. This new sea is encircled with high mountains, keeping the few surviving neolithics in the surrounding continents from crossing the crater, or even the singed wastelands of shocked quartz and melted glass that surround it. The dust and steam block the sun, the Earth cools, and most of what’s left of Eurasia is glaciated within a few years. The ice sheets finally roll back maybe a dozen centuries ago, leaving mammoths and lions still wandering around landscapes you might even recognize. Unless of course you’re in the Middle East.

Of course, had this happened, you also wouldn’t exist to read this story. And I wouldn’t exist to tell it. The impact, both literal and historical, would be enough to render the subsequent passage of history unrecognizable. For millennia after such an impact, if you listened, whether from the tortured remnants of the Peloponnesus or within the upflung obsidian skyscrapers of the great metropolis Tenochtitlan, tallest in the world, you would not even hear the sound of the floodwaters hissing as they boiled away. Whatever immortal lines the pre-literate bards of Eurasia had written about it would be inconsequential. You would hear only the sound the impact had made in the heart of the world, still ringing.
* * *

A thin, short man crested a meadowed hill and ran down through the pines on the other side, sweat-salt crusted on his tanned face. He slackly stared into the distance as he pounded down the narrow dirt path. An hour ago his mind had wandered, imagining that he was pushing himself up the slope of the distant curving rim of mountains that encircled the deep Central Sea that separated Greece and Persia. But now, he pushed so hard that there was no life to spare to fuel his mind, and he was only nothing. He knew only the distant goal of Athens toward which he ran, twenty-five miles from the battle, and he knew his legs, which churned automatically underneath him to get him up and down these dusty pine-strewn hills. He had become an empty vessel that moved over the Earth toward the city, carrying the good news of two words. The sounds cycled in his mind until like a mantra they were sense-impressions only, like an animal call or another language, without meaning, distant echoes:

Chairete! Nikomen!

He ran and ran and ran, past more trees and wooden fences and small farms and over hills now safe from crushing foreign feet. He ran so far that he couldn’t possibly remember the whole route. When finally he looked upon the hazy white figure of the distant Acropolis, the bridge in front of him into the city almost surprised him. It snapped him back to the reality of his body; his chest hurt and his throat was swelling shut. There was a taste in his throat like blood and bad shellfish. He was dizzy; his chest felt like a bull was sitting on him. He wondered if this was what it felt like when your heart fails.

Feet still pounding, he called with precious breath to the boys guarding the bridge into Athens:

“Rejoice! We–”

“Philippides! Haven’t you seen them?”

His blurry mind didn’t follow what the boy was saying. Philippides realized dimly that he knew the boys, that he had paid them to break horses for his family. The boy was pointing past the pines and the rocks and the breakers on the rocky beach, out into the sea past the mouth of the small river. Philippides ground to a stop and painfully turned toward the bay, squinting, and finally he saw pointed clouds over the water – no, he saw that the bay of Athens was filled with massive, high-sided ships with monstrous sails. They seemed to spread to the horizon, and they were definitely not Greek. The Persians must have had a second navy.

Philippides’s eyes rolled in his head and he collapsed. The boys rushed to his side, and in their arms his heart ceased its labors.
* * *

Eight-Grass appeared on deck behind Eagle and Three-Bat, who were watching the first landing-boats approaching the shore. Eagle had almost forgotten Grass was still on the ship. Eagle said nothing to him.

Unable to contain himself, Eight-Grass finally said to them, “Your arrogance is about to pay off. I think we’re about to see our war-animals cut to pieces by this village’s weapons.” Grass pointed to the village, where they could already see the roofs spread out from the coastline, and high on a hill behind them, hazy with distance, a monument of snowy white stone, sitting on gray cliffs.

Eagle didn’t look at him. “Shut up.” Then to his personal guards, “Take this idiot down and lock him up with the surly Zapotecs. We won’t be needing an ambassador, I think.”
* * *

The boy Lysimachos cradled Philippides in his arms, talking softly to him, trying to revive him. He called despairingly to Nikostratos for the good Punic vase that he’d taken from his mother to carry water, the one with the tiny, intricate green and gold engraving, and dripped cool water on Philippides’s lips. It was no use.

As the minutes passed, the wet skin and lean muscles against Lysimachos turned ashen, cooled, and stiffened. With tears in his eyes, he set the runner’s light body gently down. He imagined it seemed lighter now that the soul had left it. Numbly, he closed the man’s eyes.

“He did well,” Nikostratos said, trying to ease his friend’s tears. Lysimachos’s robe was stained with the sweat and dust of the fallen messenger. “Philippides died in service to Athens.” Lysimachos looked down at Philippides and wept.

The sound of shouting broke through their mourning. It was the men posted on top of the great rock jutting from the beach, calling up to the hills to the west for more men. The strange Persian ships were moving. They were coming for the land. The wide-eyed adolescents turned to see dust rising from the inland hills. The tired army had been called by messengers from the coastal forts, and they were forced-marching to the landing sites.

“We should get swords,” Nikostratos said earnestly.

“How could the Persians have brought another fleet here so quickly?” Lysimachos said.

“I don’t know, but we should get swords. We have to fight.”

“There aren’t any swords left,” Lysimachos said quietly. “They have them all,” he said gesturing to the sun-streaked dust-cloud rising from the hills. In fours and fives small groups of shouting men were running past them through the meadows down onto the beach and drawing their bows.

“If we can’t fight here then we go to the hills,” Nikostratos said. “We can drop rocks on them. Anything.”

Scrambling up the hill toward a jumble of rocks, they watched over their shoulders as the boats came toward the beach, large square things with oars coming out like beetles’ legs, and the first ones were entering the breakers. Arrows fired from the thin line of men assembled on the beach, sticking into the wooden sides of the great squares like men’s whiskers. Then the square boats were aground, and they opened like the mouths of horses. Things thundered forward from the boats, things like squat bronze elephants of metal surrounded by swirling pointed blades, lumbering up onto the sand, cutting the charging Greek defenders into red flying meat. Then behind those there were other elephants, mounted, shaggy, huge, bigger than the Persians’. Then there were dark men wreathed in bright armor and feathered hats coming in another wave, leaping from the boats into the water and forging forward out of the breakers and onto the sand. Arrows bounced from their shields. There was the sound of splashing and alien screaming. The invaders cut into the line of Greeks, and through it.

“The Persians must have brought an army from India,” Nikostratos said. “Look at their skin.”

“Look at those elephants,” Lysimachos said. “Look at those bronze land-ships. These aren’t men. These can only be gods. They’ve come down from Olympus to punish our hubris.”

Nikostratos told him to be silent, and clutched a rock in his sweating palm.
* * *

The Elenatecs, though their whole nation was already prepared for war, didn’t fight in any disciplined formation, and their tepozmacuahuitl (if they even deserved the name) were simple and straight and not serrated, and far too heavy to be fast. The battle was over quickly. Negotiations with the other chiefs in the “civilized” parts of New Eight-Grassland, including the already-defeated Parsatecs, were almost ceremonial, especially as the diseases we brought began to decimate the continent.

It should seem stranger to us now, living in Elenatlan or Itlia five centuries later – not all that long on the scale of all human history – that we see so few white faces in all of North Grassland, notwithstanding the Set-Aside Districts in northern New Michoacan. For that matter, even the Goteca of that region don’t quite live like kings, unless it’s as kings of coca powder. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine how history could have turned out differently for the soft and naïve cultures we found. There were no sacrifices to maintain community, indeed no discernible social order at all – insanely, Elenatlan was a place where any landowner could speak to a king as an equal. This seems to us today a frightening and unsustainable social mess. The Yurotecs frequently governed themselves in “council” form, making group decisions, and the Elenatecs were only one example. It’s still debated how they ever managed to fight off the Parsatecs, and in fairness we probably treated them better than the Inca would have. But much of our concern is the result of our own cultural myopia. Of course, we’re reflexively most comfortable in the world as it actually happened.

Looking back, even in the hardships that they encountered post-contact, the Yurotecs managed to rally behind heroes. Two significant rebel leaders have been studied to death. Of course there’s Aleksatl – the White Moctezuma – whose tactical brilliance has only recently come to be appreciated – and of course Annipal, mostly taught by his native white mother. Annipal is more recent and captivates us more, not only because of his clever use of our war-animals, but because he set in motion the events that would break colonial Cartago free from the imperial rule of faraway Mexico. Despite their brilliance, both men were doomed. They were like foam on the waves of the ocean. History is inevitable; yaoyotlcalli, disease, and obsidian can’t be resisted for long.

Today, there’s a new consciousness of the culture which passed before us, the ruins of which in the case of Elenatlan City are literally under our feet. The recent popularity of the plays of Esctli are testament to this, and suddenly we’re scolded if we call them fish-bellies, as we did in a less enlightened time. Would Aleksatl care about our new manners? But it’s always easy to be respectful to a safely vanquished foe. The fact is, Yurotec culture in general is a museum piece, and what we have today are the trappings of the moribund civilization – its bas relief carvings, its metalwork, and its haunting marble temples. It’s often pointed out that their blood survives in us – and it’s likely that you and I are both part Yurotec, though we don’t usually discuss it in polite company – but this is a meaningless observation. The surviving purebloods play by our rules, allowed to express themselves only within closely proscribed, largely academic boundaries. That’s why we still use third person to refer to the Yurotecs, centuries after we overran their land and absorbed their genes. We can spend our days trying to imprint the past with modern morality, but we still have to live in the present. I don’t know about you, but I like Elenatlan and I’m not moving back to Mexico anytime soon.

For the Yurotecs, unfortunately, the only choice is to get over it, because this year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the distance-rowing race that commemorates the canoe-messenger Tonatiuh. After the Battle of Elenatlan, he raced 36 xicatetli to carry the news back out to the Sabertooth, with the words that still ring in the heart of the world: Xiahahuiacan, tipehuah!