A Few Thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey (2026)

The most interesting thing to ponder is the Odysseus and Antinous dichtomy and how it applies to modern organizational psychology. There are the people like Odysseus and his men doing the honest, hard, dangerous work that the kingdom requires to function - and then there are the suitors like Antinous who spend their time scheming, undistracted by duty in their shortcut to power. It's going out into the field, versus hanging around the throne. We see this all the time in bureaucracy. There are the engineers, or physicians, or teachers, or whoever is actually producing the thing that the organization is for. Then there are the people who spend their time in meetings around the higher-ups. This is part of the process of how eventually, everything becomes a racket. (Nolan also made Antinous the first draft dodger.)

My main complaint about this adaptation is that the Bronze Age Collapse in the background is a bit shoe-horned in. I forgive the lack of complete historical accuracy, but it takes me out of the moment as Penelope and Odysseus and Telemachus are clutching their pearls over their "civilization" collapsing. That said, I do like that the Myceneans are identified as the Sea Peoples (Goliath and the Philistines were probably Greeks.) There is also an interesting echo of the fall of man, as if the sack of Troy is the secular classical answer to tasting the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden - which does bring to mind speculation that Christopher Nolan talked with his brother Jonathan about the book the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which was named explicitly in Westworld. Also discussed explicitly in that book was the Bronze Age Collapse, as being caused by the spread of consciousness as a sort of curse of knowledge.

There are no fewer than four superheroes in this movie: Batman, Spiderman, Catwoman, and the Punisher (and one more if you count Jason Bourne.) There is a through line from ancient Greece until now: Greek hero worship cults got converted to Christian saints which got secularized to modern superheroes. This is not to draw lines between specific heroes, saints and superheroes (although one of the Avengers is actually a god), but rather it's the institution of, effectively, demigods - with origin stories, powers and weaknesses, iconography and infamous archnemeses, whether it's Lex Luthor, a pagan king, or a minotaur.



My favorite performances in decreasing order were Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, then Spiderman. The bizarre enmity I so often see for Anne Hathaway can only be explained by what an amazing performer she is. And given that we hear the siren theme at one point after Odysseus returns home, if this were a Marvel movie: plot twist, Penelope is a siren!

At first I thought Nolan had whiffed on the depiction of the Scylla vs Charybdis scene, a classic lesson in leadership where one has to choose the least bad option among many, all of which will harm someone you're responsible for. But it's saved with a theme that appears several times elsewhere - the troubled relationship between truth and authority, an early casualty in the greater war between virtue and authority.

Although Nolan kept Achilles out of the Hades scene, it's worth contrasting his line against Lucifer in Paradise Lost. Both have been vanquished from their home realms and landed in the underworld. Achilles is mournful: "I'd rather slave on earth for another man, than rule down here over all the breathless dead." The contrast with Lucifer is nearly diametric: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Is this an indomitable rebellious spirit? The ultimate sour grapes? Or knowing he has lost and wouldn't have preferred this, he's rallying himself as he rallies his men?

Nolan's avoidance of CGI means he goes to awesome places to shoot. This helps him show man with his bravery tested against the backdrop of a strange, beautiful, capricious and hostile universe. It means in his movies he lets the world be itself.

The use of poison is a strong marker for antisocial traits and psychopathy. Interesting that it appears again in a Nolan film; I say "again" loosely, because in Oppenheimer it was offstage. Robert Oppenheimer is suspected to have poisoned a tutor at whom he was angry.

The Odyssey was the Empire Strikes Back of the Iliad. To a Greek in 400BC, stories about the Trojan War in 1200BC were like fantasy fiction to us (8 centuries ago is AD 1200.) This makes me want to see a new Part 3. An attempt at reconstructing the Telegony, or something brand new. (I don't count the Aenaeid, that's Augustan propaganda.) What are you waiting for Nolan?

Space Colonies Will Be Run By Dictators; Or, Why Science Fiction Is About Government Space Travel

Settling colonies in the age of exploration was easy. Jamestown in particular seemed like a breeze. There was air, water, food, and even people who would sometimes help you if you were nice to them. Even still, it wasn't until the third ship arrived from England that the colony became self-sustaining. The Norse were unable to hold onto Greenland at all, and we still in 2018 have not put a self-sustaining colony on Antarctica . That the land does not provide basic life-sustaining commodities for free - that there is no indestructible commons where air and water is concerned - has led some political scientists to speculate that the natural state of any off-Earth colony would be that of "Oriental despotism", which earlier historians associated with the culture of the Middle East. Another way of looking at this is that there's a predisposition to strong central authority anywhere that central coordination is required for survival. This might mean political rent-seekers who control the water by force, as in parts of the Middle East, or the coordination of crops that are massively productive when huge teams of people harvest it, as with rice in East Asia. This also solves the mystery of why states emerged initially in places that were actually quite marginal for agriculture - the dry high altitude Mexican Plateau, the Nile Valley, and the Fertile Crescent (with the exception of China - still explained by a benefit of central authority's ability to coordinate labor.) On the other hand, places where berries and game almost jump into your mouth are not famous for producing large states - though they do often produce impressive cultures, like the Pacific Northwest. When you get angry at some tribal council decision, it's too easy to storm off and take your family into the next valley and start hunting and gathering there. Not so when your life depends on predicting and collectively exploiting, say, the flooding of the Nile.

But there is still another reason to think that space colonies (planet-bound or not) will resemble the walled fortress of a desert, or the absolute authority of an Eastern monarch, more than a democracy. (Yes, it gets worse.) How do you get your family to your new valley? You can walk - even if it takes a while. If you got sick of Ohio and wanted to head west, you might have to pool your funds with other families but it didn't take that many families before you could put a small wagon train together. Leaving a gravity well and building a habitat are massively complicated and expensive undertakings. This is why space launches are the province (so far) of wealthy states and so far, just one corporation. For economic reasons of massive capital requirements, space travel will therefore be performed in a way that advances the interests of wealthy states and/or corporations. (This is similar to the reason movies are more constrained, i.e. less imaginative, risk-taking, and creative than writing or visual art - they're very capital-intensive and it's much more important in this medium to make back your investment!) Science fiction typically continues to imagine it this way, likely correctly - but rarely explores the pitfalls of large organizations having a stranglehold over the means of transportation in this brave new world - or the impact of, say, aliens appearing and handing out technology that allows individual humans to cheaply travel between planets. (Libertarians - if you think having private corporations do it, you not only have to explain how they will obtain such a position in the company of a cartel of violence-monopolizing organizations called states, you have to explain why it's better to be oppressed by a privately held rather than public organization. Left-leaners, if you think states are the ideal organizations to undertake such ventures, keep in mind that the first country with a real rocketry program was Nazi Germany, and the fastest growing one today is free-speech-crushing, putting-Muslims-in-concentration-camps China.)

It's also worth pointing out that, for related reasons, such colonies will be dependent on Earth for a long, long time, much longer than Jamestown was dependent on England. Why? First off, people are much more comfortable now. Second, when the first settlers arrived in Jamestown, they were able more or less to build on their own the technology that they were accustomed to in England. Yes, in the case of iron production, English colonists actually reverted to a medieval version for a while, but they were still making the nails and blades and gun barrels and plows that they needed. What about the first settlers on Mars? Will they be able to make a smartphone? Will they be able to make another spaceship, or habitat, or geodesic farming equipment, or satellite dishes? Even assuming zero surplus mortality from the harsh Martian environment, how many ships and people are necessary before the Martian Jamestown is self-sustaining? The Martian despot will likely be interested in not just controlling the oxygen and water, but the shipments coming from Earth.

Late 1800s Political Science Fiction

Cross-posted to the Late Enlightenment.

Here's an interesting old science fiction book: Better Days: Or, a Millionaire of To-morrow, by Thomas and Anna Fitch. This should rank with Bellamy's Looking Backward. Set in the authors' near future of the 1890s, in it a wealthy industrialist develops bombs powerful enough to level cities, that can be launched accurately from zeppelins or boats. To be clear, this is a utopian work - although it involves an early prediction of the nuclear age, the authors assume it would necessitate a global detente. The authors correctly understood some of the political ramifications: that these weapons would have to be regarded in a special category and their manufacture restricted by international agreement so that they did not proliferate; and so he also predicts a version of the League of Nations. What he failed to predict was how this would be accomplished; by a cartel of countries who openly have such weapons, and a secondary cartel of those who everyone knows has them but don't openly declare them. The book features various heads of state realizing and announcing that they must cease prosecuting wars and allow all their territories to return to home rule to avoid their own capitals being destroyed by other states or even small groups of revolutionaries who make the explosive agent ("potentite"). If it's that easy, it would seem his international non-proliferation police wouldn't be able to do their jobs. U-235 is harder to make than potentite and we still seem to be nervous about Iran. We should be glad it was nuclear weapons and not potentite! (Or microwaved sand as Nick Bostrom speculated.)


Above: Coronado is the north-pointing peninsula at top, and the islands are to the south.

Of local San Diego interest: the initial tests for the various heads of state are carried out from Coronado, long before it was selected as a naval airfield. Unfortunately the Coronado Islands are destroyed in the demonstration. (Although last time I looked out the window of Hillcrest Hospital I could see them just fine; so for this and other reasons, this is alternate history now I guess.) The authors were possibly more interesting than the book; the husband seems himself like a character made up for historical fiction. Thomas Fitch was an attorney and politician who served in the legislatures of no less than four of the states and territories of the time (California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona), which explains why his knowledge of the Western U.S. of the time was more than the caricature we often see from contemporary writers on the East Coast. In his legal career he also represented Brigham Young and Wyatt Earp. He proofread Mark Twain's manuscripts and hung out with Leland Stanford. Finally and most significantly, as an orator, he was credited with keeping California in the Union. Even if you can't forgive his book's inconsistencies and failed predictions, I think he did okay.

Metal Scholarship, and the Evolution of Distortion

From this Wall Street Journal article. See, I knew there were other people out there who thought deeply about metal! I'm hurt that I wasn't invited as a speaker, but I'll look past this slight for now. (See also the International Society for Metal Music Studies, and the Metal Travel Guide.)

The article and associated resources yielded a few interesting insights. First of all, I confess I'd never heard of Link Wray, the claimed originator of distortion, in his song Rumble (1958), but on reading further I disagree with this claim. Previously I'd assumed that the Kinks invented distortion in 1964, and there may have been independent discoveries. Wray was a reverse Lars Ulrich (or Ulrich is the reverse Wray) in the sense that Wray moved from San Francisco to Denmark and he's early enough that, like Elvis, his work clearly pre-dates the split between rock and southern/country music. Like a kind of musical cynodont, representing the last common ancestor between reptiles and mammals.


Elvis in the Late Permian. Note he was already putting on weight.

But to claim that Wray originated distortion when there is no direct line of inheritance is meaningless. By this same argument, Plato's Timaeus (where he discusses fictional Atlantis) is science fiction, and the people who lived in Minnesota in 5000 BC and made metal tools, then forgot about it until Europeans arrived (yes, really) founded metalworking in the Americas. If there's no continuous activity and no knowledge at all of the earlier tradition, they weren't the originators; they were ahead of their time but without them, that part of history would be the same. So that's why you can call B.S. on (for example) the claim that rock and roll was invented by Roosevelt Graves in 1929 at the Hattiesburg, Mississippi train station (even if I did actually visit that train station at one point to pay my respects.)

What's still interesting, beyond any arguments of who we can call the inventor of distortion, is that the guitar as an instrument has this tension of constantly wanting to become a percussion instrument, and in the mid-20th century technology finally allowed it to achieve this. I would argue strenuously that the nature of the instrument and the way it interacts with our nervous systems justifies such unapologetic teleology. (And note too that you don't see people doing the opposite, i.e. bowing instruments which are normally plucked, for anything but a gimmick.) String instruments started as plucked instruments and only later, probably in the Eurasian steppes of the mid first millennium, did someone think to create a sustained tone by bowing them with horsehair. While plucking gives string instruments a unique sound, it limits their volume, since the decay is so rapid. Consequently when electricity came to music, a method of increasing the punch and sustain of the guitar simultaneously was necessarily close behind. Hence three decades after the first electrically amplified guitar, Wray and the Kinks were the Wallace and Darwin of distortion, and from there in a mere two more decades, it was not an accident that a former drummer (one James Hetfield) was one of the principal architects of essentially the final percussive sound of the instrument that we know today.

Soviet Pressure Suits in 1939: Before Kittinger and Baumgartner

"As he was about to touch down, he realized he had only a few seconds' supply of air before suffocating; the suit had indeed proved to be hermetically closed. Steering clear of treetops, Yakov made his landing in the countryside, at the edge of a village. A woman carrying two buckets of water from the well saw what must have been the scariest thing in her life: a man in a bright-red fur suit — the color was to make Yakov easier to spot for the rescue team — with a glass cylinder on his head falling from the sky...Yakov touched down. He rushed to a tree and beat his head against the trunk to crack the helmet loose."

More here on this early jump from what we now call cruising altitude.  In some ways he seemed closer to Newton than NASA.

The suit description makes me think of Max Ernst. As a loyal J.G. Ballard fan that's never difficult for me. Here is 1940's Robing of the Bride (from http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/).

Larry Niven, Luck and Grisly Parallels

The science fiction writer Larry Niven supposed (at least in his fiction) that if luck were heritable, you could breed for it. And in his universe, that's exactly what happened: the Pierson's Puppeteers, a race of paranoid manipulators, distantly pulled the strings of Earth's politics. When Earth had become overpopulated, the world government instituted a lottery. You couldn't have kids unless you won. So if luck was heritable, the human race would become luckier. They did, eventually serving as a counterbalance to (luckily) win wars against the kzin, who have been described as Klingons that look like bipedal tigers. In fairness the kzin are cooler.

Of course in one sense this is a silly idea, even beyond the idea of there being a "gene" for luck. All of evolution is a game of chance, with a few adaptations that skew the odds. No living thing would be here today if its ancestors hadn't been lucky.

But there's a far grislier frame in which the idea has been explored. The Spanish film Intacto is about people with supernatural luckiness; they're even able to steal others' luck. Max von Sydow is always good but the film spends too much time on European cinematography tricks and not enough developing the idea (nb, if you like cinematography, don't write this film off on that basis - I like the ideas and don't care what it looks like. To auditory-learning bastards like myself the book is always better.) It's eventually revealed that von Sydow's character learned of his extraordinary luck when he was living in a German prison camp, and the people around him were executed one by one. He was the last - and of course, that's when the Germans abandoned the camp and the Allies came.

Art imitates life even without trying. Der Spiegel tells the story of a still-living Auschwitz inmate: "When they had no more use for [Yitzhak Ganon], the Nazis sent him to the gas chamber. He survived only by chance: The gas chamber held only 200 people. Ganon was number 201. On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops." Read more about Ganon's story here.

It's an odd feeling to be one person away from (in)famous people. A physician who came to talk to my med school class was imprisoned at Auschwitz when she was a little girl, and while she was there she met a doctor who gave her candy. The following sentence may seem frivolous but it doesn't feel that way to me. If we can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon with the people we meet in our lives - and that seems a more meaningful version than movies - this means that I'm only one person removed from Josef Mengele. If reading a blog counts, you're only two.