Review of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History

Spoilers included.

I had heard of this book years ago: a not quite alternate history of late medieval Europe. Its strong points come down to the originality of the ideas - where other alternate histories propose a branch with an alternate future, this novel gives us an alternate past. Many of its weak points, to my tastes, relate to its claim to be the longest fantasy novel ever written. Consequently, I directly confess that I got about a quarter of the way through the book, then started skimming and searching (on reader device) to find the sections that I wanted to read.



The Good

Gentle paints us a fifteenth century Europe that is familiar, but subtly different. In many alternate histories, the characters are mere mouthpieces for the branchpoint, and wander around effectively saying "Woe is us, if only War X had gone differently, then Y and Z would be so much better but all is lost!" The changes are presented more subtly, and they accrete around the characters (who have their own lives and motivations) until you know you're somewhen else. Lions and leopards were not driven to extinction. Christ was not a Jew, but a Mithraist centurion, and he was executed by being nailed to a tree, hence the epithet "Green Christ!" being cast about by the mercenaries in the book. And of course, Carthage still exists, an Arianist civilization of Visigoths that persisted through medieval times. She takes pains to immerse us in this age's sights and sounds and smells (to a fault, as discussed below.)

So much alternate history is about a war ending differently, but the best ones concern a technology arriving early or late, or a cultural commitment changing. In Barnes's Lion's Blood series, Socrates goes to Egypt instead of drinking the hemlock concoction, tipping history in favor of Africa over Europe. In Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice, the discovery of antimatter effectively initiates the nuclear age a century early during the Crimean War. In this novel, we have remote communication, tactical computers, and robots five centuries early.

The originality of the ideas is what sets this book apart. It's not just the elements of alternate history noted above. The underlying plot is that Wild Machines - a sort of mineral Boltzmann brain, pyramids of electromagnetic stone in North Africa that achieved sentience under mysterious conditions - are using the Visigoths to drive humanity to extinction. Their motive is that they can simulate the future, and that some humans have an ability to bend reality itself (make actual miracles) and that in the future, this ability will become more and more common, and eventually will be used in warfare, thus destroying the universe. The military leader of the Visigoths was bred to be able to communicate mentally over long distances with a machine of the pyramids' design, and the main character Ash discovers she is a product of the same breeding program. Most of the children in the program do not have the ability and are executed, but Ash was smuggled out as a child and later ended up still developing the ability to some degree. The machines absorb sunlight for energy so night falls over any lands they conquer.

The book is much better for the framing device of correspondence from a historian, who is watching the modern world inexplicably change around her as the secret history re-emerges. When library books start recategorizing themselves in defiance of the correspondents' memories, this definitely propelled me forward. I wanted to solve the problem, and know - was there a network of people trying to discredit the discoveries by categorizing the books as fantasy? Or as it turned out, some more fundamental causal process? Without the framing device there would have been no way to express the idea of how the alternative past changed in its relation to us. I also found myself thinking a lot about conspiracy theorist historians like Anatoly Fomenko. The concept of there being a secret history different than the one familiar to us, obviously opens up space to discuss how we know what we know, and who wrote the history, and why they included the things they did. There are hints of this, but never a full exploration. But the novel isn't about that - it's about a kind of "ideal" medieval history that vanished with Burgundy. I think Neal Stephenson's Anathem had a similar idea, with the world Arbre being in some ways the ideal of history and even geography that Earth is reaching toward.

I thought I knew something about medieval European history, but like many with no formal education in this area I knew basically nothing about Burgundy - a point that seems to have inspired the novel in large part.


The Neutral, and Questions

During the chaos of the fourth and fifth centuries, Germanic tribes really did occupy Spain and parts of North Africa. The Vandals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and sacked Hippo shortly after Augustine's death. The Visigoths conquered Spain, and Rome effectively let them keep it in exchange for fighting Rome's enemies when the time came. As noted above, the Visigoths were Arianist, a now-dead branch of Christianity practiced mostly among the German tribes, which considered Christ a prophet rather than the son of the Christian God (like modern Islam does with Mohammed.) In real life, Visigoth Arianism survived the fall of Rome, but the Visigoths were converted to the Church of Rome in the sixth century by Saint Leander, and then were conquered by the Moors in the eighth century. Their four-century reign in Spain did not leave a massive imprint on Spanish civilization, arguably even less than that of the Mongols in Russia: besides royal court rules that survived even the Muslim conquest, the main echo of Visigoth culture we see today is the -ez suffix on Spanish names, which was the genitive marker in the Visigoth language, essentially their version of apostrophe-s in English. That is to say, Martinez means "Martin's", as in Martin's son. To summarize, there really was a land ruled by the Visigoths, but they didn't survive the Muslim conquests. While admittedly it's an interesting thought, had the Visigoths taken Carthage, it's hard to see how they would have had any more impact, or still be seen as a distinct force, as long as Islam and the Moors and Ottomans still arise. This is also similar to books imagining a Europe conquered by the Mongols: the continent is often pictured as an oppressed and desolate ruin under a kind of Mongol thousand-year reich, when back in the real world, China was conquered by the Mongols, who held it for two centuries like a typical Chinese dynasty. Today the Middle Kingdom appears to have recovered nicely, and I don't know many Chinese today who sit around crying about how things would be better if the Mongols never came.



I also enjoyed learning about Burgundy, which seems like some Platonic ideal of a medieval kingdom, and exactly as Gentle said, seems to have vanished from history. At a guess, I'd wager that her interest in Burgundy (and lament at its disappearance) was the core inspiration, and the other interesting ideas (Visigoth Carthage, the Wild Machines, and alternate pasts) accumulated around it. Next time I'm in France I absolutely will be visiting Dijon (above) with its polychrome roofs.

I also wondered if she was influenced by Joan of Arc's schizophrenia, since there is a sub-sub-genre of alternate history where historical figures who had supernatural experiences or heard voices was actually talking to aliens or people from the future, for example Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (Columbus might have been a merchant to newly-Turkish Constantinople, not even a footnote to Marco Polo, without his vision on a beach telling him to do something different.)

I did like how well she thought through the effects of prolonged darkness over Europe - the frost, the anticipated famines, the itchy feelings of wanting things to return to normal while having to get on with life. Since it was ultimately the sentient pyramids draining the light, it would have been interesting to hear speculation from the characters (or direct admission from the Wild Machines) about how they could have accounted for the three days of darkness during the Ten Deadly Plagues of Egypt (a place with no shortage of pyramids.) When darkness suddenly fell, I actually found this unsettling. At first I thought it was an eclipse that the Visigoths were capable of anticipating but the Europeans were not; then when it did not relent, possibly the sun going out (no, the moon is still visible) or something in space over Europe blocking it (no, they can see the stars.) But it was the Wild Machines. I did wonder why the Machines don't slurp down even the last bit of energy from the moon and starlight as well.

In the end, the "secret" history starts re-emerging into our own, with the discovery of golems at Carthage. The Wild Machines' motivation was to keep humans from redeveloping their miracle-working talent. Could it be said that the scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presaged this? But I don't think so - the miracle-working is a much more direct ability to bend reality.

As a curiosity, the god-king of blogging Andrew Sullivan once pointed out how movie scripts and novels today tend to avoid showing or discussing communication technology. There are lots of movies up until the 1990s where the plot hinges on not being able to get to a phone to talk to somebody, and of course these are all now dated; possibly writers are consciously avoiding this. It's not plot-critical, but reading this 1999 book in 2024, it sticks out that the characters in the framing device portion of the novel are having trouble finding a computer to send email.


The Bad

The book is long. As you can see in the first image above, it's actually four books merged into one, when it could have been one book merged into one. While I liked the sensory descriptions, and appreciated the occasional explanation of characters' roles, the repeated description of the camp, of mercenary life and weapons and equipment and the overemphasis on certain assumptions about life medieval people made differently from us, became laborious very quickly. In particular, I was very tired of hearing about how dirty the surgeon was - yes, you've established it, we know, you don't have to describe it yet again. There can be no doubt that Gentle is an expert in these things, and there would still have been no doubt if she included just ten percent of the amount she did. This is the main reason why I began skimming and term-searching about twenty-five percent of the way through. There's also far too much space toward the end of the novel given to describing how the quantum wave-function collapsing works. Difficult to wade through, not coherent, not interesting, not useful for thinking about anything. There is a similar resistance to editing a made-up technical process in other novels, for example the bone-reading in Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or intelligent proton-printing in Liu's Three Body Problem.

The second reason I stopped when I did is that there was a shift in Ash's character around the time she met the Faris, her nemesis-twin. Up until then, I quite liked her - she had come from horrible beginnings and suffered life's unfair slings and arrows, and did the best she could for herself and the people around her with her resilience and her sharp mind. She even had her ways of standing against the gross sexism all around her, for example by choosing to actually enjoy sex with her politically expedient husband (a fact he was obviously uncomfortable with.) Then she meets the Faris, and becames this new shouting, split-minded character often just wandering among events as a passenger rather than driving them. Could this kind of destabilization not be the effect of meeting a more successful, attractive (physically un-scarred in this case) version of yourself? Fair enough, and it's true that the more I thought about this change in her character, the less I disliked it - in the abstract. But that's the benefit of distance from it - while you're reading, it's not abstract, and it quickly became irritating.

The novel suffers from a difficulty shared by any novel purporting to be a historical text: the style of modern English fiction isn't even two centuries old. You're therefore either left with the choice of writing something basically unreadable to a modern audience but that's similar to what might have been produced at the time, or something readable and anachronistic. It's hard to suspend disbelief for this reason. To her credit, Gentle does mention that medieval artists and writers did not think it was strange to put characters from ancient Greece into modern clothing or situations, because they did not have the same idea of progress that we've developed during the industrial age - to them, they assumed everyone would have thought and acted and dressed the same a thousand years ago. I think she was winking at the reader that she knows by putting it into this style she's doing the same thing. That said, I submit that most anachronisms are not intentional on the writer or artist's part, but merely out of ignorance. It just didn't occur to Da Vinci that the clothes the apostles wore were different than Italian merchants during the Renaissance. It just didn't occur to Shakespeare as he was writing Julius Caesar that there were no paper books or pockets in Rome. It's simply a mistake, understandable given the knowledge available to them at the time.


This is possibly the most imaginative alternate history novel I've ever read, so much so that I'm not even sure that's the right genre. In the end, I'm glad I read it but also glad I skimmed it.

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 sleight 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.)

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.

Excerpt from The Cleveland Wrecking Yard (Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan, 1967)

Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who’d bought things there. One of them bought a huge window: the frame, glass and everything for just a few dollars. It was a fine-looking window.

Then he chopped a hole in the side of his house up on Potrero Hill and put the window in. Now he has a panoramic view of the San Francisco County Hospital.

He can practically look right down into the wards and see old magazines eroded like the Grand Canyon from endless readings. He can practically hear the patients thinking about breakfast: I hate milk, and thinking about dinner: I hate peas, and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night, hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed.

He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard.

My other friend bought an iron roof at the Cleveland Wreck­ing Yard and took the roof down to Big Sur in an old station wagon and then he carried the iron roof on his back up the side of a mountain. He carried up half the roof on his back. It was no picnic. Then he bought a mule, George, from Pleasanton. George carried up the other half of the roof.

The mule didn’t like what was happening at all. He lost a lot of weight because of the ticks, and the smell of the wild­cats up on the plateau made him too nervous to graze there. My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun­dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in the Livermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to George than the wild side of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

For the rest of it, see here. For context, see here.

Reaction: Gun, With Occasional Music (Lethem)

Highly recommended; spoilers follow.

Science fiction which only recycles the surface trappings of the genre without using them as a vehicle - i.e., that doesn't take advantage of the freedom allowed by world-creation to get at something - is a hollow failure. Using a novel to investigate the function of language itself, as this one does, seems an abstract and sterile endeavor and in lesser hands probably would be, and might be impossible if you couldn't invent a counterfactual world that better exposes the uneasy conflicts inherent in such a question. Gene Wolfe's New Sunnovels are about the limitations of language - the Ascians who can only speak in stock phrases and communicate meaning by how out-of-tune the uttered phrase is with the current situation; or the degeneration of imagination as moves from direct experience to more and more iterations of mere telling, like people breeding in a prison who thought bees were a foot across because they'd only heard about but never seen them; or the silo-ing of genres into guilds. Gun, With Occasional Music is a meditation on language using the medium of detective fiction, and properly using the freedom that science fiction allows to explore its core concerns - language's richness and its relationship to truth, authority, and action.

As a point of comparison, the influence of Philip K. Dick on this novel is obvious, in the same way that Black Sabbath's influence on Metallica is obvious - Lethem takes what's good about PKD and makes it better, with much better writing. Gun is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, more fully developed and better-written. Androids is a manatee and Gun is a dolphin. If you need this novel put in terms of other novels, it's about half Androids, a quarter Scanner Darkly, and a quarter auster's City of Glass, the latter of which is the only work of anti- or meta-detective fiction I've read that does that particular "genre" justice. (Again, by properly using it, and not leaving the genre's tricks un-fired on the mantelpiece.)



At its core, this is a detective novel about a half-washed-up private eye trying to get a guy off for a crime he didn't commit. It's the world that they inhabit The plot really serves only as a medium for you to notice the author's investigations of language, and if the book has a flaw, it's that the plot is overly complicated and distracts from the central value of the novel. The world this detective finds himself in is one where questions are illegal, metaphors are misunderstood, jokes are taken literally, and by the end, even too many simple statements become suspect. There are also evolved animals and developmentally-accelerated children, though (key to my criticism here) none of this is really essential to the plot. There is a recognition of class, though this seems more a necessary part of a detective novel, and less an actual exploration. In a nutshell, the animals and babyheads (more on them below) are clearly lower class. So?

Questions are an obvious threat to authority ("The number one enemy of progress is questions!" - Jello Biafra) and in this world there is an Inquisitors Office, which contains the only people allowed to ask questions, and then only in the course of their investigations (them, and the occasional private investigator - but they need a license to ask.) There are several references to psychoanalysts - the most instrusive question-askers of all - but they're illegal, replaced by Inquisitors. In fact the only psychoanalysts encountered in the novel are a hollowed-out degenerate incarnation thereof, going door-to-door like Jehovah's Witnesses, and they're evangelizing - that is, telling, not asking.

But the threat from language to authority comes not just from questions, but from metaphor. Dictatorships are famous for their difficulty understanding, and (therefore) their intolerance of, parody and ambiguity. Consequently this is a world where authorities either cannot understand metaphors, or have forced them to become literal. Criminals are put in actual freezers. Everyone is using an officially issued drug ("make") and one of them is described thusly: "Think of it as the opposite of deja vu - nothing reminds you of anything, not even of itself." A more certain death for metaphor could not be described! Evolved animals jump from figures of speech into real life - Metcalf has a monkey on his back at one point, a sheep is afraid to disobey the man she lives with, and just as he was emasculated in leaving the Inquisitors Office to become merely a "private dick", his manhood was taken by the woman who broke his heart and left him after what he thought was a temporary trade in genital sensation, made possible by future neuro-programming. The character who turns out to be his arch-nemesis is an evolved kangaroo. This one I couldn't process other than to realize that since Joey is common young gangster name, it would make sense in this world for that gangster to be an actual young kangaroo. Every now and then the prose snaps out of gumshoe-rhythm but it's typically associated with certain characters; Testafer is the closest Lethem comes to exposition, and to a lesser extent the antagonist Phoneblum. But these sections don't expose the central theme, and the closest Lethem comes to just giving away the come occurs when the protagonist, in frustration with the babyheads, asks "What if I told you I thought Truth and Justice were two completely different things?" This narrator seems to actually think in clever metaphors (as is common in detective fiction) but the Inquisitors Office goons often flatly don't understand his constant wordplay. Late in the book, when the character wakes after six years in the freezer to an even worse world, people don't even understand jokes without the help of computers they carry with them to tell them they just heard a joke. (They still don't understand the jokes, but they know the appropriate response is to laugh.) TV shows and even the news are abstract and non-representative. The news is delivered with music, which, as an abstract art-form, is un-threateningly indirect and un-revelatory (This is how the USSR announced Premier Konstantin Chernyenko's death, though it's certainly not the only dictatorship which has been less than eager to explicitly communicate bad news.) But even TV shows are abstract in this world, seemingly serving as animated Kandinsky paintings, like visual muzak.

Then there are the babyheads, the accelerated infants, deliberately drawn as the most disturbing and creepy entity in the novel. There's an implication that the babyheads are the future, spouting pseudo-profound nonsense (which is therefore harmless); I can't help but think he's picking on the post-modernists here. In the babyhead bar, they make clear their contempt for the prohibition on question-asking, but you don't get a feeling of liberation that you're in some inner sanctum where linguistic freedom has been protected. Rather, you're clearly in a cognitive and linguistic ghetto.

A final thought on the predictions that Lethem got right. Everyone in this world has "karma", a system of points which, when the Inquisitor's Office has penalized you so much it reaches zero, you're shipped off to the literal freezer. Reading this in 2019, you can't help but think of China's social credit system, which is amazingly under-discussed in the West. There is no discussion of how the world got to be this way - it's not really what the novel is about - but as the fire chief described in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, I can imagine a populist uprising driven by grass roots intolerance of question-askers in an increasingly complicated and difficult to negotiate world. There's no mention of a top-down central state here.

At the time of its publication the term "slipstream" was thrown around a lot as a category for this book, equal parts science fiction, litfic and post-modernism. But like most attempts at artistic hybridization, it looks more like one than the other, and Lethem falls more on the literary side. The critical question: is the novel about the technology? That is, do you and the writer care about the details of how things work, or are they a literary conceit that's serving another narrative purpose? This is why this novel, Fahrenheit 451, and Star Wars are not really science fiction. They create a setting that serves a purpose in the themes they're exploring, but Lethem and the reader do not care how the babyhead technology works (same for a light saber or the mechanical hound.) For that matter, in modern writing and film, many other genres have incorporated the superficial trappings of science fiction - thrillers especially, but increasingly romance as well. Another example is John Updike's not-really-successful science fiction experiment Toward the End of Time. It's literary fiction (fair enough) with some genuinely interesting science fiction ideas, unfortunately shoe-horned in. Updike wasn't fooling anybody into thinking this is what he usually writes about.

If I have a complaint, it's that the first few pages I was put off by the annoying intensity of the detective novel style. It's far beyond what would be needed to tell us this is a detective novel, and I appreciate that a debut author wants to showboat a little in terms of demonstrating his mastery of the idiom - although, for example, David Mitchell manages this better and less self-consciously in Cloud Atlas.

Review of Journey to Fusang, and Some Problems with Alternate History

This is cross-posted at the Late Enlightenment.

I'd had William Sanders's Journey to Fusang on my to-read list for years, and I finally got around to it. As much as I enjoyed the book, it exposes some of the problems common to the alternate history genre and even those specific to what-if-the-Mongols-invaded-Europe stories. It also made me wonder which historical branchpoints are most valued by "the academy". Each of these is covered herein.


Part I: Review of Journey to Fusang

After five centuries of European cultural domination of the world, it's difficult not to be fascinated by the now almost fantastic idea of non-Christian non-Europeans conquering parts of Europe. Of course this did happen in three corners of Europe - the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans, and of course the Mongols. And if there were an award for depth of impression per years occupying European territory, the Mongols would win hands-down. Their advance beyond Russia lasted just a few years. And in the territory they actually held onto, modern Russia, they were there for a scant two centuries. Even in the East the dynasty they established (the Yuan) fell apart in about the same length of time, despite some useful innovations - among them, the world's first adoption of paper money, not to mention an honest attempt to change the Chinese writing system to a sensible phonetic one.

The Mongols' western high water mark was Poland and the Balkans, where they achieved several characteristically cunning and blitzkrieg-like victories before making winter camp. In the spring of 1242 they decamped just as suddenly and faded back into Central Asia. The reason typically cited for their withdrawal is the death of Ogedei Khan; in the Mongol institution of selecting a new khan, the kuriltai, you get a vote only if you're physically present at the succession talks, and the sub-Khans leading the European campaign did not want to be left out of the decision. As with most things in history, the reality is probably more multicausal and complicated. For example, Europe was littered with well fortified castles and their sieges were making for frustratingly slow going.  What's more, Mongols were not all-weather super-men, and they didn't do well in cold, wet, marshy areas, e.g. Europe.

But simplifying history for the sake of a good story (this is after all a novel, not a textbook), in Journey to Fusang, Ogedei's sickness does not lead to his death, and the spring of 1242 sees the Mongols conquer Europe from the Vistula to the North Sea and the Mediterranean. England and Ireland are spared the ravages of the grim horsemen, as there is apparently no western Khan ("khan of all the Germanies") as enterprising as Kublai (or there is, but England is protected by the same divine winds that defend Japan.) In the late 1600s when the action takes place, England and Ireland both call themselves Catholic though each has its own Pope. Milton is a gambler in London, and Shakespeare escaped to Ireland and wrote light comedy. Though, as a result of the conquest, nothing like the Renaissance happens in Europe, nor any Reformation, and there is certainly no European discovery of America. The European continent remains a cultural backwater stuck in a Malthusian trap of subsistence agriculture and ignorance, leading the protagonist at one point to make a comment about French women rearing litters of children named Pierre and Temujin. The East Coast of North America is being colonized by Moors and various other Islamic people, and the West Coast by the Chinese - the crown jewel of whose possessions is sunny Fusang and its colonial capital, a hilly metropolis by a bay. Somehow amidst all this the Aztecs not only survived but prospered, accumulating guns from Muslim traders, and they're a constant concern along the colonists' borders.

The protagonist is Finn, an Irishman, and a trickster and con-man extraordinaire, who finds himself captured by a Moorish slaving ship, which he escapes with a similarly-minded Hebrew indentured crew member. They find themselves in the great city of Dar Al Islam (New Orleans). The book does rely on incredible turns of fortune (in one moment the protagonist is in deep, the next he's on top of the world) and the plot is rarely predictable. Eventually our hero makes his way to the interior where we meet Comanches with names like Muhammad Ten-Bears. The large, dull English slave whose dumb luck brings him along for the adventure is a clear parallel to Lewis and Clarke's black slave York (the natives are amazed at his size and complexiion and, as York did, the fellow takes advantage of their fascination by fornicating with scores of their women.) Eventually the group of Islamic frontiersmen end up in Taos, where they encounter Chinese colonists for the first time. I particularly liked the description of the strange energy of Taos - I'm about as un-spiritual as they come but I find the place oddly unsettling. They also hole up in Acoma for a siege, which would be as good a place as any. In the real world, Acoma Pueblo, which is a cliff dwelling that's been continuously occupied since well before Columbus. I should point out that the breathless description of the ninja they encounter is one of the few things in the book which marks it as a work of the eighties.

Tension builds as both the Chinese and Muslims discuss nameless troubles in the north, which turns out to be a Russian Khan and his horde that crossed the North Pacific and invaded from - not the soft underbelly, but the undefended top half of North America. What results is very much a recapitulation of Mongol sieges and brutality, but in the American heartland. (Among other towns, Taos is completely destroyed.) The Russian khan's ultimate goal is the conquest of the Aztec empire from which he can invade the settled parts of the continent, which would precipitate a kind of world war. Of course through a combination of cunning and luck, our hero is able to stop the invasion, and after recovering from the injuries he sustains in doing so, he migrates to Fusang.

For me, what really sets this apart from other alternate histories was the scoundrel protagonist's cynicism, insulting descriptions and occasional misleading narration. For instance, as he and his Hebrew companion are traveling up the Mississippi to their frontier outpost (and not helping with the work at all - remember, these are escaped slaves that people are tolerating!) the manager of the expedition has finally had it with their shiftlessness:

Ibrahim had discovered Yusuf and myself standing in the shade of a cypress tree, overseeing the work and occasionally calling out useful suggestions, and had delivered a lengthy and surprisingly emotional speech in which he listed various discrepancies and points of dissatisfaction with our general performance to date. It worried me to see a man his age and weight get so worked up in that hot climate.

The Irishman abounds with politically incorrect observations of the many people he meets, although usually not without self deprecation. Even the people in whose colony he finds himself are not safe:

Arabs, on the whole, are an amazingly mendacious people; they will lie even when the truth would serve their purposes better, and show no shame even when caught at it. Among themselves this does no harm, since they never believe each other anyway; but it can be annoying for a man brought up in a scrupulously truthful country such as Ireland.

And near the end of the novel in Fusang, the protagonist and his sidekick, having made the acquaintance of a member of a shady Fusang organization, are recommended to one of the city's underground bosses, who deals with them thus:

He said, "Lu Hsu says you wish to work for us. He says," he said, rattling the letter, "that you are a pair of liars, cheats, seducers, and thieves, and cold-blooded killers if need be. He says that one of you would steal a hot stove and the other would sell it to a man dying of sunstroke. He says only a fool would trust either of you within a thousand li of his cash box, his stable, or his wife, and that even for Europeans you have set new marks in treachery, fraud, and deceit. Gentlemen," he cried warmly, "I have never seen a finer letter of reference. I am prepared to offer you immediate employment, early promotion, and full benefits."

In short, the book works as a historical thought experiment about the impact of Europe on North American cultures, the protagonist is hilarious, and it's a solid adventure novel to boot. Highly recommended.


Part II: Problems of Alternate History, and of Mongols-Conquered-Europe Stories Specifically

There are really three main problems (or assumptions) that alternate history novels have to address to succeed, and this novel is an excellent vehicle for exploring them. But it's useful to compare to three other alternate history novels, because you'll see some repeated motifs.

Book, Author	Branchpoint and Changes
Lion's Blood, Stephen Barnes	Hannibal defeats Rome; North America colonized by Egypt in north and Ethiopia in south using European slaves, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing
Conquistador, S.M. Stirling	Alexander the Great does not die young; Europe and Middle East merge into millennia-long superstate, scientific progress retarded
Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson	Black Plague kills all Europeans; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, history becomes a struggle between the two
Journey to Fusang	Mongols conquer Europe , leaving it a backwater; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing

Alternate History Problem #1: What is the point? Why would you read a book about a history that never happened? Do you just want to be shocked by strange people in familiar places (mosques in frontier-era Arkansas, and Native Americans named Muhammad Ten-Bears), or are you trying to isolate historical cause and effect (did Chinese and African colonization of North America only fail to occur because of European domination?) I couldn't shake the feeling that Sanders wanted a Mongol-like horde in the American plains just for the sake of it. Granted, a Mongol horde on the American prairie is kind of cool, but that could not have carried a whole novel. At the same time, even the shocking reversal of oppressors and slaves here or in Lion's Blood was clearly written in the service of a thought experiment. Was there something about various human cultures that predisposed one people to enslave, or be enslaved by, another? Or is this something we would've all done to each other given the chance, and it's all just random, and history really is just one damn thing after another? (These days we get very uncomfortable saying that one culture might somehow be "better" than another, but here's a fact: either culture has some impact on human flourishing, or it's meaningless background noise. There's no middle ground; we have to pick one of those, and being uncomfortable with the choice doesn't make it go away.)

Alternate History Problem #2: Is warfare really the only thing that makes a difference in history? Most alternate history is about what would have happened if some episode of mass violence had transpired differently. Is everything else we do really so meaningless? In the four novels cited here, the branchpoints for two out of four is a war, one out of four is a change in the life of someone who's famous because of war, and one is from a plague. What if the steam engine were developed earlier? What about antibiotics, or intensive agriculture, or monotheism, or electricity? (For example: why no Byzantine industrial revolution? People have asked the same question of China but it should count for something that China developed intensive agriculture, centralized state bureaucracy, literacy, paper money, and gunpowder, some of which happened after getting sacked by the Mongols.)

These questions are far from useless. Economists are constantly asking questions of how developing nations can improve themselves, which invariably become questions about why certain advances occurred certain places, and not elsewhere. You might argue that it's not the wars themselves where the future is set; that Sun Tzu was right, and the outcomes of battles are determined long before they begin, by the culture and technology of the countries that produce the armies. Case in point: a normally clear-thinking friend once asked me seriously about the possibility of Mexico having won the Mexican-American War. Once the American military of the day was fully engaged with its Mexican counterpart, there was no question of the outcome. One question at least implied by many alternate histories is the impact of culture and political situation on the advance of science. Conquistador assumes that a unified Greece-Egypt-Persia would have halted progress, where Robinson assumes it would have advanced essentially the same in the absence of Europeans, merely with name substitutions (qi for electricity for example.) (I would argue the contrary in both cases.)

And here we come to some of the problems specific to Mongols-conquering-Europe stories. It's assumed that a Mongol sack of Europe would have flattened the West and removed it from the world stage. No doubt it would have been an unpleasant time to live in Paris or Rome. But in China, a Mongol conquest is not alternate history. The town of Yamen, a coastal town two hours' driving time from the metropolis of Guangzhou, was the site of the last surrender (or suicide) of Song officials to Kublai Khan. In case you haven't noticed, China did not collapse into a permanent dark age. You could argue that without the Mongol conquest, China might today be even further ahead (maybe it's time for an alternate history where the Great Wall was a little higher and kept the Mongols out, and by 2017 China has colonized the solar system.) A further problem in Mongol conquest-related alternate histories is that in two novels with Europe eliminated as a serious contender for founder of global civilization (whether due to Mongols or plague), why is it that automatically China and the Arab world (both also sacked by the Mongols!) who colonize the Americas? (In two books out of four on this list!) Even in real history, there was nothing stopping the Chinese or Arabs from such voyages, and in fact the famous Chinese treasure fleet was sailing before Columbus, and less than two centuries after Kublai's conquest. It was not because of European oppression or Mongol depradations that they were brought home, but rather due to domestic Chinese politics. (Arguments for an age of discovery driven by the Islamic world are even more obscure; despite this, three of the four novels cited feature Arabs colonizing North America's Atlantic coast, with only two novels showing Chinese colonization from the Pacific.)

Finally, there seems a strange urge to describe an armed modern Aztec nation-state, flourishing unmolested by non-European colonial powers who give them guns. In both novels cited above that contain an armed modern Aztec nation-state, their colonizing neighbors came from the Islamic world. The Spanish were not famous for their tolerance of Aztecs or their culture, but it's absurd to argue that Islamic conquistadors would have been more progressive. On the other hand, I freely admit that Barnes's Aztec knights were extremely cool, almost like an alternate history answer to Niven's kzin. In Journey to Fusang, Yusuf describes Tenochtitlan thusly:

He sat down on a coil of rope. "How can I describe it to you? What's the biggest, finest city you've ever seen?"

"Tangier," I confessed. "By a great margin."

"Tanger?" He made a scornful snorting sound. "Tangier wouldn't make a minor suburb of Tenochtitlan. It's bigger than Rome or Constantinople or even Baghdad - why, there are independent kingdoms in Europe and Africa that cover less area than Tenochtitlan alone. And all of it laid out carefully with long straight streets, even canals in some parts like those of Venice, and market squares bigger than most European towns. Flowers growing everywhere, and the people looking so clean and well-fed, even the poor...and in the center, dominating the whole city from wherever you stand, that great pyramid, with its two temples on top - the blue one for Tlaloc the rain god, the red one for Huizilopochtli, he's the really nasty one - with a whole city-within-a-city of lesser temples and palaces clustered at its base. Finn, I've seen the ancient buildings of Greece and Rome and Egypt, and I'd put these people's work up against any of it.

"And then," he said, still in that quiet, almost toneless voice, "while you stand there trying to take it all in, trying to grasp the wonder and the beauty of it all, like St. John seeing the New Jerusalem - just then you glance across the street and see a priest striding along in his black cloak, face painted black, hair hanging to his knees and matted solid with years of accumulated dried blood, and the stink of rotting blood coming off him like a walking slaughterhouse - and then you remember, and you can't believe it, and yet there it is. The same people. How can it be?"

Note again: in the real world Baghdad was sacked quite badly by Hulagu Khan; while not today the center of global learning that it once was, it was hardly reduced to an irrelevant backwater.

A summary of the motifs across these novels:

Book, Author	Blacks Enslave Whites	Muslims Colonize Eastern N.Am.	China Colonizes Western N.Am.	Modern Aztecs w/ Guns	Back-ward Europe
Lion's Blood	X	X		X	X
Conquistador					X
Years of Rice and Salt		X	X		X
Journey to Fusang	X	X	X	X	X

Alternate History Problem #3: Balancing realism with entertainment. This is fiction. It can usefully explore ideas, but ultimately it has to be carried by a narrative, and if that is lost, the medium fails. If Hannibal had won the Second Punic War, the map of Europe (or whatever it would be called) would look completely different and be populated by people who looked and spoke and worshiped completely differently from how they do today. If a branchpoint is set long ago and still faithfully followed through, it would result in a world so bewildering and unfamiliar to us that its people would be uninteresting. Conquistador's branchpoint was Alexander's surviving his fever in Babylon, but Stirling mostly used that as a way to produce a mostly-empty North America to be settled from our timeline. Of the four novels here, Lion's Blood is the worst offender in terms of a long-ago branchpoint magically still producing a familiar world, but neither is Fusang innocent. In the case of Lion's Blood, there's a fourth century B.C. branchpoint, but Christ - the same Christ - is still born 250 years later, and founds the same religion? And Mohammed more than 800 years later? Of course, a modern world without Christianity or Islam would essentially be invented out of a whole cloth - so such a degree of honesty is inadvisable, unless it's directly relevant to your thought experiment; e.g., whether evangelical monotheism would still inevitably have appeared. Sanders peripherally mentions Shakespeare and Milton but has the good form at least to make their output different.

There is also the problem that people with a different viewpoint would not use the same names for the same places (obviously) or imbue them with the same significance. By putting cities in recognizable locales (the mouth of the Great River, or the hilly city by the bay) you can cheat to some degree. Rice and Salt opens with a Central Asian horseman riding alone through an oppressively silent city of white bone-like monuments under the moonlight, and ascends a hill to inspect the most prominent. Ignorant of European history as you would expect such a person to be, he can only describe it in terms of pure sense experience, and it takes a few pages before the reader realizes he is plodding through the Acropolis in a decimated Athens emptied by the plague. I respect Robinson for this opening, because it risks the unobservant reader's missing the symbolism, but there's a substantial reward to the reader who recognizes the landmarks. (Many writers would have succumbed to the temptation of exposition, with the rider mumbling to himself "Well you know, these structures symbolize the foundational philosophy of this continent...")


Part III: Branchpoints Favored By the Academy

I compiled some stats for the Sidewise Awards. Uchronia's overall list would be a more accurate measure of what people are writing, but this is a better approximation to what people value. Order is by number of entries in category in the novel awards.




The distribution between short- and long-form is clearly different. Possibly, people are more likely to explore new territory in shorter form. Interestingly, from the novels, the post-WWII awards all went to stories set in the Kennedy or early Johnson administration - two of which are about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which terrifyingly could easily have gone differently, and not nearly as well. Also note that the short form pieces were more likely not about war or tragedy, with 5 of 21 titles being about some form of science or technology that developed differently (as opposed to 0 out of 21 of the novels.) Notably, of the ~42 titles I went through, there was a one triple winner author (Ian MacLeod), then two each for Stephen Baxter, Harry Turtledove, Chris Roberson, and William Sanders.

Also notable - the closest any of the branchpoints was to the release of a novel was about 50 years; for short stories, 38 years. Is that because if we don't wait a generation to write our alternate history - until all the stakeholders are dead or out of power - it's mere polemic?

Themes in Bradbury

Bradbury remains the only writer whose works I've read and enjoyed more than twice. It's a shame that many people encounter him only as kids; I know when I first read Fahrenheit 451 I was twelve years old, and as far as I was concerned it was a slightly odd story of a guy who set stuff on fire for a living, which ended with a scary robo-dog and a nuclear war. Two readings since then have expanded my appreciation of it. The richness that bears repeated readings in any work is found in the shadings of human experience, and these suffuse his work, like myths which constantly yield new insights in each new age. In fact a character in Fahrenheit 451 points out this very richness as one of the characteristics of true literature. As I was re-reading some of his stories in the past few months I was struck by the following themes.


1) Human beings can't help but bend the world around us into a reflection of ourselves. This is tempting, but ultimately smothering and toxic. This occurs most obviously in "Mars is Heaven" and "Here There Be Tygers", but most of the stories in the Chronicles features some aspect of people hurting or killing themselves through this comforting blanket of self-deception. I'm always struck by how the telepathic Martians who facilitate the deception seem to need to help us do this, and need us to need their deception, though I'm not quite sure what to make of it. (The Martians are surely in part a symbol of Native Americans in our history - something onto which we project our fantasies of self and other - and Bradbury even tells us it was our diseases that wiped them out - but that's not all they are.) The most prominent demonstration of the Martians' need for us can be found in "Mars is Heaven", where Martians kill the Earthmen to prevent them from piercing the veil of the dream they'd all allowed the Martians to erect around them. Still, even after the Earthmen are dead and there is no use to further deception, the Martians appear to mourn them, or at least the comforting illusions the Earthmen brought with them and that was now slipping away. The Martians just can't help but receive and amplify the fantasies and memories of the humans.

2) There is a subtle deathwish theme that runs through Bradbury's stories, expressed most nakedly in "The Blue Bottle", but also present in "The Earthmen".

3) Bradbury was able to avoid the more distasteful mid-20th century American literary themes, the badly-aged ones of decrying commercialism through chains of made-up Brandnames(tm), or baldly Freudian character explorations. As for the former, he does certainly register his frustration at 1950s America's Detoquevillean conformity (Fahrenheit 451, "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Earthmen"). As for the latter, the excellent "The Veldt" may be the closest he comes (after all, there's a psychiatrist in the story) but many of his stories have characters with a moral and psychological simplicity that, if you pay attention, you'll notice being compared unfavorably to one or more other characters (most of his astronauts, or the country folk in "The Burning Man".)

4) It's difficult writing about his stories because Bradbury doesn't place hard little gems inside his stories - you can't point to the page and say "this is my favorite part" - but rather you slurp it down and enjoy it afterward like a warm meal on a cold day. "Kaleidoscope" and "There Will Come Soft Rains" are especially poignant examples. Interestingly I've never once heard a hard scifi geek (and I proudly count myself one) complain that Bradbury's science is unrealistic. You don't stick around long reading Bradbury if you want to know about Martian biochemistry or how his rockets work. But his writing is most certainly speculative fiction, in that Bradbury is playing with the element of setting so that he can tell a story. It is not science fiction, in that he clearly doesn't care about the real atmosphere of Mars, or if there are jungles on Venus, or anything else other than our imaginings of these things. And neither do we, when we start reading the stories he put in these places. Possibly related to this, Larry Niven once made a comment to the effect that young writers would break their hearts trying to imitate Bradbury, because his stories somehow just happen without any respect for action or structure.

Asimov's Most Brilliant Prediction

I'm not the only person who pointed out that Isaac Asimov, and science fiction generally, doesn't have such a great prediction track record when you resist cherry-picking. But in my previous article on Asimov's predictions for the year 2014, I missed his 100% exactly right prediction: "I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014."

Science Fiction Universes That Become Historically Incorrect Are Not Alternative History

First, let's all agree that science fiction is awesome (how many tech entrepreneurs today can't rattle off a list of their favorite novels based on the ideas within?) but the predictions are not all that astonishingly accurate. A currently circulating article of Isaac Asimov's 1964 predictions for the 2014 World's Fair has been combed its accurate predictions - but these have to be considered in light of the total denominator of all predictions he made. There are a lot of clunkers in there. (Glowing wall panels? Polarized touch-sensitive windows?) Yes, there are some good ones. But we need a science fiction version of Bonferroni correction; i.e., a broken clock is right twice a day.

People have been writing science fiction as a self-conscious genre unto itself for close to a century now, which means a lot of the basic political and technological realities of the world have changed in the meantime. Ender's Game referred to the Soviet Union dominating Europe in the novel's past; in Card's defense, he does later (after the Cold War ended) explain that actually it's the New Soviet Union. Old Isaac himself more than once in his robot novels has a scientist, in the midst of artificial intelligences and domed cities, whipping out a slide rule to do calculations. It seems an easy solution to this is that these are science fiction writers, and they're not perfect, and they don't have crystal balls. Even the climate around how certain topics could be addressed in respectable prose changed during Asimov's lifetime, i.e. sex, and he (quite honestly, I think!) justifies his characters' differing treatment of the subject within the novel has his characters address this within the story. But critics insist on inventing ways of interpreting what are clearly missed targets as having some literary meaning.



Outside of science fiction, an egregious example is the insistence by some of the literati that Shakespeare's use of anachronism was deliberate. For example, in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Rome has chimneys and books and toga pockets. But these things just did not exist in Caesar's Rome. And Occam's razor applies here as well: there's no meaning, no point Shakespeare is making; he wasn't even consciously trying to make his audience more comfortable. He's a sixteenth century English writer, and he made a mistake, relative to historical fact, and that's fine - because he wasn't a Near East anthropologist, and he wasn't writing historical textbooks. Maybe it's more interesting to believe he had some purpose, but only rarely do the imaginations of critics of any genre match up with the conscious designs of the art's producers. Listen to any popular musician being interviewed about the deep meanings in their lyrics and this becomes obvious and uncomfortable.

I've seen critics living in the same region of fairy-land claim that we can think of science fiction universes with an ascendant Soviet Union, or future scientists with slide rules, as alternative histories. As much of a devotee of that sub-genre as I am personally, that's foolish, and here's why. Alternative history is explicitly about the importance of specific events in history to the real, based on the implications of their having occurred differently. There's a control and an experimental condition. The intent of the author matters, because it is the basis of what the work is for. David Wingrove's Chung Kuo is about a China-dominated world of the future, but it's not explicitly in contrast to any other world we expect, even if (like 1984) it's not one most of us would want to live in. On the other hand, Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series stands in contrast to the world the writer and authors know to be real, and the author and the text clearly know that, and she or he makes points on that basis. Turtledove knows what's actually relevant to us in 2014 and how that might have been different, and he uses the book to tell us. Wingrove doesn't know what will be relevant in 2200, so the back can't be consumed that way.

My favorite incorrect future (unintentional alternate history) that I've read recently is Better Days: Or, a Millionaire of To-Morrow by Thomas Fitch, written in late Belle Epoque San Diego (although the epoque might not have been so belle here) which anticipates world peace breaking out with the invention of weapons of mass destruction, out of fear of terrorists. (If only.) Kim Stanley Robinson has darkly opined that anyone writing today about a near-future Earth without climate change must know that they are writing alternative history. It's clear what he's saying here, but they're not writing alternative history: they're human, and they're just not able to see the whole future clearly, even when parts of it are already set in stone.

Another trick is explaining didn't-come-true science fiction written in the past as crypto-history - this is what really happened, but it's been kept from us. Again, this is an interesting way to think about the text, but it still doesn't tell us anything about the author's intentions or indeed how best to enjoy the work. This is how (for hardcore fans who cared) Star Trek explained the apparent absence of the Eugenics Wars in the real 1990s, which the original show mentioned. (You know who I haven't noticed leading legions of genetically superior followers to conquer Asia? KHAAAAAN!) It's also the basis of the narrative in All Nightmare Long, the second-best Metallica video ever. Come on, it has the Tunguska blast!