A Jackass Retrospective

With the release of Jackass 5, it's time for a look back. I don't even remember why, in that distant early age of 2002, I even went to see the first Jackass movie in the theater. I had never even seen the MTV show - only years later did I go back and watch it, along with Wildboyz, and Viva La Bam. But I got my popcorn, and sat down, and I realized: This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Somehow better than Blade Runner and 2001 put together - although it does share features with those films, namely, hooting apes hitting each other, and indestructible humanoids. So I immediately got a group of friends together and watched it in the theater again. (I *never* watch things more than once in theaters.) Over the years my obsession has deepened - to the point of inviting friends, neighbors and colleagues to watch Jackass 1 through 4 projected on the side of my house, and worse (as you'll see.)

I won't belabor why Jackass works, although obviously it's authenticity, vulnerability and actual chemistry - when I discovered Jackass I was still in my 20s, missing being surrounded by the nonsense of my friends at college and beginning to experience the loneliness that men descend into without realizing it (or talking about it); it's also why shows like Ridiculousness suck, because it's one guy, he's just not that bright or interesting, and there are no relationships. It doesn't hurt that like me, they're all second-half Gen X guys, and I identify with them. (During an interview with Chris and Wee Man someone asked them what they listened to, and Wee Man answered "I only listen to about five bands. Slayer, Black Sabbath, Metallica...I only listen to about three bands.")

I just saw Jackass 5 and it's clear to me that Knoxville really does mean it to be the last one, so it's time for a look back - and some fan theories about this subtle and many-layered franchise.


The Structure of the Cast

Here's how I picture the relationships (for the classic era of Jackass 1-3, not including Loomis or CKY members who didn't cross the rainbow bridge into full casthood, and not including the new cast members of what I call the Mannerist period):



My justification: In the first movie, Steve-O was the most famous at first Knoxville (more on this later.) Bam had his own group, and later got big and had his own show and endorsements (you can hear the sarcastic "he's famous!" during the Terror Taxi skit in Jackass 2.) I can see how there would've been an initial rivalry between Steve-O and Bam, and though he would probably hate to admit it, there's a vulnerable narcissism in Steve-O that comes out easily, though he's smart and introspective enough to know this and tries to address it explicitly (he's discussed this with Chris on the show - how he was a little jealous of Chris at first.) Dave brought in Ehren, and I put them on the other side because Dave has said Bam didn't like him (and Bam called the cops on Ehren as a prank although I don't know if you can include that as evidence.) Wee Man and Preston made at least one trip to Pennsylvania (see Jackass 3), although Wee Man in particular seems up for anything - those two also filmed a little trip with Dave and Chris, and Wee Man appeared on Wildboyz. I always think of Pontius as the most Californian, but Wee Man has the strongest California accent I've ever heard on a human being (witnesseth: here, and here; probably unrelated, he also speaks German.)

I've always been interested in both Chris's and Steve-O's background and the connection they made - the kids of a cardiologist, and an international executive. Both high IQ, high achieving kinds of parents who may not have chosen this particular path for their sons, but it means they both inherited those genes, and had a lot in common in the abstract.

I'm not sure what sorts of things produce a Johnny Knoxville except being possibly descended from border reivers; and also, I had a friend who was a handsome and (at least in brief conversations) normal-seeming guy from Tennessee, and occasionally would casually mention that before moving to California he liked to do things like jump off trestles onto moving trains just for fun, so maybe it's the whole state. I'm surprised to notice Knoxville doesn't talk a lot about his attempts to break into acting before Jackass (I recently learned he was Keanu Reeves's body double in Dracula and actually took direction from Coppola); despite how we might all see him as incredibly successful, if his career didn't go as he hoped it would, that can stay with you in terms of core beliefs operating below the surface.

I've always argued that there's a correspondence between some Marvel and DC superheroes: Thor and Superman (both superstrong flying aliens who commit to guarding another planet, especially after their home planet is destroyed), Ironman and Batman (wealthy industrialists reliant on technology whose parents were killed, affecting their future psychology.) And finally this sort of thinking becomes useful, because I think there's a similar correspondence between some old and new cast members. Zach is the new Preston. Poopies is clearly the new Steve-O. Jasper is the new Bam - has parental involvement, had his own show before merging into the Jackass cast (Loiter Squad, watch it!), and I predict is most likely to bankroll his Jackass membership into future deals. I won't spend time here on the Jackass origin story, although I think there is a parallel to how Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus started (by assembling freaks from pre-existing groups - Big Brother and CKY.)

When someone has never heard of Jackass, after the first one I sometimes described it as the sequel to Animal House, in which the fraternity no longer has a home, but the institution continues, traveling around to hotels and random fields, countries, and companies, and its new recruits are Three Stooges, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Waters. And then they get a budget which they use to travel and film what they were doing anyway. (A friend of mine was an EMT in Westchester and said he was often at Bam's house, and they were not always filming.)


Notes on Jackass 1
Part of why I imprinted on it was the moment the referee announced in his thick Japanese accent, "From Wesuchestaa, Pensevaniaa, Lai-ann Dunn!" I had no idea they were from Pennsylvania. I grew up about 45 minutes up the road and the last place I lived was about 15 minutes from Westchester. I now live in the Bay Area, but I get back frequently.



Because I'm definitely not an obsessed stalker, here's a picture of me in Bam's driveway, September 2025. I blur my face because I'm a respected physician-philosopher, family man, and pillar of the community and I can't be seen having any association with ruffians, deviants or miscreants of this sort. You'll just have to believe it's me.

Dave shitting himself in the van is, for me, the moment when Jackass really became Jackass - when it morphed from a stupid little show on MTV to a stupid big movie franchise. It had all the elements: a prank, the prank going wrong because they couldn't resist torturing one of the cast, shit, the cameramen being shown and then being shown puking, the rest of the cast and crew fleeing in disgust and the hilarious humiliation of it all. Carrying out the actual prank later on was almost second after the setup. (Taken at Hippo Hardware in Portland, conceived by Whitey McConnaughy who was also behind a lot of Red Fang videos.)


Me at Hippo Hardware, with a parasite on my back. Zoom in and you can see the instruction not to sit on the toilet, sadly necessary because of this movie.

There is also a standout cast member in each one. In Jackass V, Steve-O claims he was never the MVP but I disagree. In the first one, it was clearly him. He was the one people were talking about after they saw the movie. And I have no photographic proof of the following, but my next door neighbor claims that she got backstage at a Steve-O live show in Michigan back in the day and he offered her cocaine; always very special milestone in a young girl's life. However, she claims she did not partake of said booger sugar.


Observations on Jackass 2

Joining a very short list of franchises, the second one is arguably better than the first (Godfather and arguably Terminator are the only two others.) Tremaine said they cast was "ready to die." My two favorite stunts, the Fart Mask and the Toro Totter, are also in this one. As Tremaine, Steve-O, and Pontius had been filming Wildboyz (which is a totally underrated series, you should watch it), there was some more exotic traveling in this one, including India and Argentina. There were pranks in the first one but this one had better ones: the first one was just the razor, but here it was the wind tunnel (really the cobra) and the Terror Taxi. They also started learning about, and capitalizing on, the cast members' phobias. If you were in this group, why would you EVER let people know your phobia? Part of the authenticity is hearing the second thoughts during the stunts - during Toro Totter, Pontius (it sounds like him, it's off camera) says "Why did I agree to do this one?" This is also where the x.5 versions of the movies began with the extra stunts, it's also not always clear to me why stunts end up in x.5 vs the main film. For example, I think Cajun Obstacle Course, Bed of Nails (with the cobra on Ehren) and golfing off of Ryan's ass are all solid and in fact, better than Terror Taxi! (The more you hate Ehren, the more you like Terror Taxi I guess.)

To put it mildly, these movies are interesting as a psychiatrist and physician. DSM is often criticized for "too many versions" of antisocial PD, based on symptom combinations, and these fellows aren't about to rob a bank as they're clearly enriched mostly for the poor-impulse-control, factor 2 psychopathy. To wit: I can't find it now but I once saw an interview with Dave where he said even if he got really rich he would spend all the money right away on "little pieces of shit". Classic! I will also add here that, were I ever in such a position, my willingness to do stunts is influenced by my medical training (and if you also don't sit there and think of which ones you'd do, then why are you watching these.) For example, when Dave eats the cow/horse shit in the field, that worries me. It's not just gross. That would be a great way to end up with neurocysticercosis. I might even take my chance with a bull before that one. The only way I would eat livestock shit, for any amount of money (and it would have to be a lot more than $200) would be if I had time to pre-load with prophylactic praziquantel (an anti-worm agent) which I would also continue well after the event.


Above: you don't want your brain to look like this. Each of those holes is where a worm is eating them. You get those worms by orally ingesting them, usually by not adequately washing your hands after encountering livestock feces. Or, intentionally eating it to get $200 from the 3-6 Mafia in a field in the South Central United States. Below: for your consideration. Note the "getting knocked out" point.



The anaconda bit wouldn't be so bad although I did wonder why of all people Wee Man was chosen for that one, because an anaconda actually has a shot at swallowing him! (More testament to the forethought that clearly goes into planning their stunts; as Dave once said in an interview, "No. No. It doesn't work like that.") Knoxville was obviously and intentionally grabbing it not on the head so it would bite him (but hey, it's Hollywood; Steve-O later noted he got chewed out for not reacting enough during Beehive Limo.) I also like where you can see effects earlier in the movie (edited together out of real-time chronological order) from things that happen later in the movie - during the "hotel hallway love note" bit, you can see the blood on Knoxville's shirt from the anaconda bites. In the first movie you can see a shaved bald spot in his hair during the "less lethal ammunition" bit. I was amazed that in the fourth movie they were worried about Knoxville's Jamie Lee Curtis hair showing up out of order. Tremaine, did you actually ever think that continuity would be a problem for your audience?

An outstanding question: where was the Big Red Rocket filmed? I think Pyramid Lake along the Grapevine portion of the 5, but I've never been able to confirm. I once asked an AI about it, and it offered to compare scenes in the movie to the shoreline on various maps, and I started to feel bad for taking up processing power with this and desisted.

The MVP of this movie was Ryan. Besides that this is intuitively correct (In the shopping cart launch his comment "You're an ass-hole" alone would win the title) I should note here that after Jackass 3, I did an analysis of what makes Jackass bits funny: I made a spreadsheet of all the bits, I rated them, and then annotated each bit for who was in it, was there an animal, was there emission of body fluids and if so which one(s), unexpected pranks, etc. And what I found was that, of the first three movies, the best predictor of a stunt being funny was Ryan being in it. I did not perform a Bonferroni correction calculation for multiple comparisons; my statistical argument for this is fuck you.


Thoughts on Jackass 3

This is the first one I didn't see in a theater. It came out while I was in medical school doing Serious Things and I didn't even realize it was out until clips starting showing up on Youtube. This one has the only stunt that I can't watch, the sweatsuit. I can't do spit or sweat.

There's a stunt in this one that people like to pick on which is Beehive Tetherball, because apparently bees were added digitally in post, since you couldn't see them. So what? Were the bees actually there, stinging Dave and Steve-O? Then who cares? If not, then Dave England has to be the best actor of his generation. (Dave's near-complete dissociation under stress, as he demonstrates here, is one of my favorite things about Jackass, also evident here or here or here; I was not surprised to learn of his alter ego Darf who appeared while he was intoxicated.)

Sober Steve-O is so much more compelling as a cast member. Before he was just like an android or a talking crash test dummy - you couldn't identify with him at all. Imagine old not-sober Steve-O in the Poo Cocktail Supreme - not a tenth as funny. (I like that it's in the third movie we see the cast members starting to speculate that maybe they're irrational - see the exchange between Johnny and Steve-O about Steve-O's fear of roller coasters and similar rides. I find this fascinating - for him as (early in his career) an acrobat/stilt-walker, proprioception and control are key to his security.

For me the MVP of Jackass 3 was clearly Wee Man. That parachute stunt is gnarly, but also Super Mighty Glue, and without him as the setup-man in the High Five I think it wouldn't been half as funny. And the yoga ball should have been in the main movie.



Me and Wee Man, December 2011. I went with my girlfriend to Wee Man's Chronic Tacos in Redondo (sadly now closed)and he was there. Despite that he was interviewing someone for a job and I interrupted them, he was extremely cool and showed me the tattoo of Ryan he got.

It was the year following Jackass 3 that Ryan died driving drunk. He could've still been with us, making the Jackass movies better (as I showed mathematically that he did). There were ominous signs, some explictly discussed on screen by Jackass personalities, others that fans can shake their heads at ironically. The first was a rollover accident that Ryan had in Pennsylvania in the 90s, discussed by Bam's mom in the piece made in Ryan's memory after he died. This one struck home because I remember the accident, since I remember being stuck in the traffic jam near King of Prussia that day! The ironic one was the golf cart accident in the first movie, containing a wince-inducing comment by someone off-camera: "Dunn can't drive for shit." It's worth saying that I personally know two people that have been killed by drunk drivers, and I personally know two people who have been picked up for DUI multiple times and continue to refuse to take responsibility (and who I have lost all patience and sympathy for.) Don't do this to yourself, and don't do it to people that love you.


Jackass 4

That did something to Bam for sure. I thought it would be hard to make another Jackass movie after Ryan because it would be sad - the myth of immortality had been punctured and the special connection that Bam and Ryan had was gone. And I think completely unsurprisingly, Bam took a turn for the worse. It was clear that he was trying to bring in Novak as his new best buddy, but it was completely different and kind of gross, going well over the line from brotherly slapstick into the physical abuse of a pathetic addict. (Yes I know it's from earlier but the dynamic is so different than with Ryan or any other CKY person. He's just a helpless victim and it's not funny.)

And that's why I was worried about Jackass 4. I didn't expect that they would do anything but lean into Ryan's memory, but it still crossed my mind that maybe Knoxville didn't need extra convincing to leave Bam out. To be sure, Bam gave him all the reasons he needed. My understanding is that one of the hardest parts of making these movies is, unsurprisingly, getting insurance, and psychiatrists and actuaries will tell you that a substance problem makes the chance of accident, or intentional harm to self or others, much higher. In another bizarre connection, he showed up at Christmas tree lighting one year in my city in Northern California where he has a kid with someone. This was interesting because I've said if he were to show up intoxicated to one of my showings I actually would call the police on him to get him away from my house and family (not that I'm holding my breath about this.) Wait, didn't I figure out where his house was and stalk him? NO WAY MAN HE'S THE STALKER, HE MADE ME DO IT. (In all seriousness, I was less worried that security would come out, and more worried that HE would.)

I'm obsessed enough with the franchise that I've had dreams where I'm on set, and I look around and think, this is awesome! And then I think, wait, this is terrifying, I'm about to get bitten by snakes or set on fire or have some kind of animal fluids dumped on me or something, I gotta get out of here! Indeed, Eric Andre made the comment that he grew up idolizing Jackass (his show, which you should watch, shows the influence) and that it was a dream to become part of it, and then that he realized it was actually a nightmare. (Stockholm syndrome is a strange thing.)

The question of authenticity does bring up: are there things you still don't talk about? Money is kind of a buzzkill for most people I think, and it was unfortunate to hear how much Steve O had to fight to get what he was worth to make it on Jackass 4, but Bam not being there probably made it easier for him to negotiate. Then again, it's showBUSINESS, regardless how bizarre your act is. (Similar conversation on Conan with Eric Idle about the debates with other Python members; I was always bummed when I heard about how Cleese and Jones disliked each other.)

There is no serious disagreement that the MVP of Jackass 4 is Ehren McGhehey.


Jackass 5: A Retrospective

No spoilers. Go see it. Yes it's a lot of repeat footage and stories about the previous movies, but there's stuff you've never seen before (there was stuff I didn't even know about.) Some of the cast were nervous that people would feel shortchanged since a lot of the movie is stunts from previous ones. There are new ones and they're great, but if you go knowing you're mostly seeing a farewell, you'll be happy. This is the first I've seen in a theater since 2006, and I sure was.


Berkeley, California, July 2015

My bachelor party was laid back: I got a couple hotel suites and we drank and watched Jackass 1 and 2. It was pretty great. As we were walking out of the hotel about 1am, I looked over at the check-in desk and there was this guy checking in. There was Knoxville, checking into my bachelor party hotel. It was like a bad sitcom where I was bidding farewell to my singlehood and being ferried across the Styx by the about the best symbol of childish, untamed male ridiculousness there is. Before I approached him, I checked to make sure no one had put LSD in my beer and that's why I was seeing Johnny Knoxville. (I would be more embarrassed as a psychiatrist getting caught talking to a hallucination in public, than slurring my words talking to the real Johnny Knoxville while I was intoxicated.) Fortunately, it turned out he was intoxicated as well and had just been out with people from one Pixar. (I've tried to figure out which movie it would've been.) I told him "a bunch of doctors and engineers were just killing our brain cells watching Jackass, you're making the world a worse place" and he said "Yeah I get that a lot." Which of course is a total lie. There is no other movie franchise that I have enjoyed as much and continue to. I hope you guys see this, because you've all participated in creating something really special and hilarious and made my life, and many people's lives, and the world, a much better place, and the love you all continue to get is deserved. Thank you.

More On Mars, and the Great Filter Being Behind Us

The closer the Great Filter is to us (in terms of developmental stage) the more nervous we should be. If it's past us, we're doomed.

I argued previously that the Mars clay findings were good news, because it moves the needle toward the Filter being behind us. And, it's becoming harder and harder to explain organics on Mars as abiotic. This data isn't a smoking gun but each discovery inches the best explanation toward life (even if now extinct.)

Here's a model for evolution of life on other planets: on terrestrial planets with water, evolution of unicellular life is overwhelmingly likely, given how fast it appeared. ("Thermodynamic" argument: fast = likely.) What's unlikely is the leaps that have allowed the evolution of complex and therefore intelligent life. Most of Earth's history was just oceans filled with single-celled organisms that at times went through build-ups and die-backs (this always reminds me of simple blinker states in Conway's game of life.) The Cambrian explosion happened *85%* of the way through the history of life on Earth.

Conclusion: we are unlikely to be "alone" per se, but the universe is filled with blue-green algae worlds, without rabbits, T. rexes or civilizations.

Crysknife, Mesozoic (2026)

(Full disclosure: I know these guys and have sent reviews directly to them previously. This time I told them I'd post it on my blog, so that my overwhelming readership will all listen to them. If a turn of phrase doesn't seem to make sense, you may safely assume it's an in-joke.)

This is the cover of a previous album, Mythos. I'm putting it here so a Megadeth album cover isn't the first thing that comes up.

This is the fifth release for Crysknife, which consists of brothers Steve and Tom Campitelli, and features a drum session from Bullet for my Valentine's Jason Bowld.

How would I describe Crysknife in the context of metal? Due to the keyboard instruments and sense of melody beyond power chords and dissonant intervals, it sometimes feels prog adjacent, but doesn't have the weird meters or modes to fully cross into that genre. It's hard to call it thrash - it has heavy, crunchy moments but these aren't the majority. It's never been death because it lacks the blast beats and growls. The lyrics are generally not dark or angry; in fact it struck me this time around how visual the lyrics are.

1. Hardpan - This one starts off sounding like a mid-tempo Bad Religion song. Bridge riff synths are nice but more atmospheric than a solo and I could use them higher in the mix. There's a true solo at the end of the song.
   
   
2. Red Lodge - The piano intro is nice - in point of fact Steve is a classical pianist so I always feel a bit cheated that there isn't more. One of my favorite Crysknife songs opens this way.
   
   
3. Last Echo - The first time I listened to it the intro was a little too quirky for me, but when the guitars in it kicks ass. I dig the stops after the second refrain.
   
   
4. Stand as One - I don't think I've heard keys with this style of guitar (or type of riff) before. My favorite part is the bass and piano bridge section. Also this is the refrain I catch myself humming during the day.
   
   
5. Zen and Murder - Predictably my favorite, because it's the heaviest. The second riff (the main vocal riff) reminds me of Helmet, in fact much of the song does. This is also the one that makes me most want to see the lyrics.
   
   
6. Worlds End - A down-tempo one with a more open main riff, problematic only because the title sets you up to think you're about to have your face melted
   

A Note on the Value of "Albums"

This album was a long time in the making - 10 years I think, the Chinese Democracy of Crysknife as it were. A non-metal fan once said that the metal fan's focus on albums seemed to detract from the value or quality of individual songs. Incorrect (you can't have a good album without good songs), but now it's worth asking: what even is an album, or was it, back in the album's golden era? That I'm still worrying about this is far into the era of streaming and accessible home or local recording suggests that I'm old, which is in fact the case; my examples clearly betray me as a Gen X metalhead, raised on the single-less media of cassettes and CDs. Fight me. As I listened to these songs, I realized how arbitrary it could be to call a collection of songs an "album", even in an era when that was more relevant for reasons of industry structure. I am told there might be two more songs coming from Crysknife - associated with this, batch, I guess? (Searching for a way to describe it besides an album.)

Among other things, the inherent value of an album, outside of constraints forced by production and marketing structure, consists in the following:

1. Consistency across the album. The guitar tone for example (sometime play the game of hearing one second of a metal song, and guess not only the band but the album.) This creates a coherent overall listening experience. It's not just the instruments and production. Tool's Undertow carries a consistent emotional tone throughout the record that's a big part of its value.
2. Lyrical themes - both intentional and otherwise. Part of this is references and callbacks within the album - think of the opening and closing of Maiden's Seventh Son, which in isolation would offer very little of value.
3. A snapshot of where the band is at that moment. To me, the oft-savaged St. Anger's principal value is as a historical document of the dynamics in the band. Early 90s metal suddenly had old men everywhere in their imagery, possibly subconsciously presaging one of metal's interregna.
   
   
   

Mars Clay Findings Are GOOD: The Great Filter Could Be Behind Us

NASA has announced that Curiosity and Perseverance have found the strongest-yet evidence of life on Mars: vivianite and greigite. On Earth these minerals are found in sediments associated with microbial life.

Great Filter-Doomers will find this alarming. If life evolves easily (and quickly - in thermodynamics that's the same thing) then it should be everywhere. And yet, where is everyone? The galaxy appears to be dead. There must be a Great Filter between the appearance of life, and technological civilization leaving its solar system of origin.


It's worth pointing out that until about 700 MA ago, Earth was a boring microbial planet. There was basic multicellular life but until the Ediacaran, nothing that you could actually see with the naked eye, or that had complex organization. In fact for over a billion years it was stuck in a simple oscillation of build up oxygen, die back, build up oxygen, die back, encoded in the banded iron formations (in different redox mixes) visible in extremely old rocks like the ones above in Australia. An alien visitor would have sampled the boring microbial soup and moved on. Visiting a hundred million years later, it would have observed exactly the same situation. Life on Earth was very much like a "blinker" in Conway's Game of Life, with little sign it would ever break out of it. Based on our N of 1, thermodynamically, the appearance of life is likely (it was almost immediately after the Earth cooled!) - and similarly, the appearance of multicellular life is UNlikely.


For that reason, if there is a filter, there's a big question is whether the Filter is behind humanity, or in front of it. The discovery of microbial life on Mars, especially extinct microbial life, would be good news, in the same way that discovering an extinct civilization would be bad news. A thought experiment may help illustrate.

Imagine you send out a fleet of near lightspeed von Neumann probes. As they cover the galaxy, the reports come back to Earth: thousand then millions of planets with oceans of bacteria and/or blue-green algae, some living, some extinct, embedded in clay like the ones on Mars. But absolutely nothing multicellular, anywhere, besides our freakish Earth. Everywhere, simple one-dimensional ecosystems, some "blinking" forever like Earth almost did, but no dusty ruined cities, or eerily silent half-built Dyson spheres, or even alien cockroaches. Nothing beyond a Kardashev 0.001![1] Time to uncorck the champagne! The Great Filter is behind us! We're the first!

Now imagine the opposite case: ghost planet after ghost planet, civilizations that blossomed and then burnt out. Some of them had even sent out their own probes and learned their fate. We would be looking at our own future.

If we assume this Mars finding really is extinct microbes, we now have N=2 for the denominator of how frequently life evolves, and N=1 - where it never got past the microbe stage - a 50% rate of the Great Filter being behind us.[2] Assuming the principal of mediocrity, 50% of the aliens we're not seeing are microbes embedded in clay. 50% is hardly a guarantee of our eternal future among the stars but it moves the needle in the optimistic direction. You might think it would be boring to explore the Solar System and find only microbes on Mars, Venus, under the ice of Europa and Enceladus - but such discoveries should make you happy for humanity's future, especially if they're extinct.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Recently there have been efforts to establish a continuous Kardashev scale (rather than having only discrete classifiers for civilizations which surpassed certain benchmarks, "1" being the power output of a star); one paper assigns 2023 Earth a 0.7276 (Zhang et al 2023.) For very low Kardashev numbers, we could relate the SQ (sentience quotient) for intelligence to the Kardashev scale. Calculating a simple upper bound for the Kardashev number of "algal Earth" - assume a number of cells per meter of seawater equal to that during an algal bloom, times the surface area of Earth's ocean, times the energy budget of an algal cell, divided by the power of the Sun:

5.1x10^14 m^3 x 0.7 x 10^11 algal cells/m^3 x 10^-11 Watts/algal cell
divided by 3.84x10^26 Watts = 10^-12 Kardashev

-70 is the lower bound for SQ, to single-celled organisms, so we can say that -70 SQ converts to 10^-12 Kardashev. Humans have an SQ about +13. However human civilization cooperates to control more energy than a single human, so +13 does not correspond to 0.7276, but whatever the SQ of the human race as a whole, does. You can't get the Kardashev of a single human just by dividing 0.7276 by 8 billion because of the non-zero-sum effects of civilized cooperation.


[2] As written before, Venus had oceans until about a billion years ago. I would have liked to include it here as another microbial blinker planet that ran out of time before its own Ediacaran, with the evidence of both phosphine and microbe-sized UV absorbers in its upper atmospheres, as the remnant of its ecosystem. This would give us a denominator of 3, and even more confidence that the Great Filter is behind us. However, the famous phosphine paper failed multiple attempts at replication and two papers (Jiang et al 2024 and Egan et al 2025) have advanced good candidate abiotic explanations for what the absorbers could be.

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.

Achieving The Impossible: Making Golf Cool

My friend (the one with the metal golf cart) is a son of a bitch and meets more certified metal gods while golfing than I ever have backstage, like the one posting this video.

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The Dispossessed by Le Guin

In fiction, people write about things that interest them. This is a trivial observation, but there's more to it than that. Why make up false stories about the things we enjoy? Because by rearranging puzzle pieces to make different but still coherent images, you might learn more. In fact, this is one theory for why we dream. If that's true, then fiction is a kind of deliberate dreaming in print. Somehow I've never gotten around to reading The Dispossessed until now. For me, it invites obvious comparisons to four other novels: Dune, Atlas Shrugged, Stephenson's Anathem, and Asimov's Foundation.


I'll focus frequently on a comparison to Dune (that kept recurring to me as I read), but it's worth noting that Atlas Shrugged, Anathem, and Foundation all share with The Dispossessed intentional societies that deliberately separate themselves from their civilization of origin. The tone of the protagonist in Anathem is one of puzzlement at the outside ("saecular") world. In Foundation, the attitude is one of anxiety as to whether the experiment will work and gratitude that, through the founder's guile, the new society has avoided becoming entangled in the rest of the galaxy's collapse. Atlas Shrugged comes closest to the tone of the protagonist and his society in The Dispossessed - a strongly moral, judgmental one. Despite being polar opposites in many ways, Rand and Le Guin also share an interest in the interaction of psychology and social systems, which somewhat betrays the mid-twentieth century careers of each writer.[1]

The Dispossessed is one of LeGuin's Hainish Cycle novels, the setting for which is a universe where every human world including Earth originated with the Hainish people, a million-year-old civilization that lost touch with its colonies thousands of years ago. Science fiction purists may complain that a) the trope of "humans are actually the descendants of alien colonists" is well-worn, and b) in any event no longer plausible given modern DNA ancestry and phylogeny work, unless Earth is the homeworld; then you have to explain where all the evidence of our previous technology was (either, more advanced aliens seeded us, or it was made of something quickly degradable, like ice as in Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Trigon Disunity series.) That aside, having multiple human worlds, each with their own unique cultural (and even biological) paths, gave Le Guin a nifty vehicle for "interacting alternate histories", in the best sense of that subgenre as an experiment in the impact of historical commitments. The twin planets of Urras and Anarres ask - what if Earth had a habitable moon, and a social/religious movement with echoes of Mormons, Mennonites, the Greek philosophy schools that often had their own islands (eg the Epicureans) and a leader who died before reaching the Holy Land - and that movement started their utopia from scratch on said moon. (I quite like that each world refers to the other as their moon.) There are also nations on Urras that make clear parallels to Earth's, more obvious to the geopolitical and cultural milieu in the 1960s - A-Io as an America with an overgrown military-industrial complex and a decidedly Victorian bent, and Thu as a communist dictatorship. Consequently, while it's easy to see the novel was written with mid-to-late twentieth century political concerns, this does not detract from its overall themes and it has mostly aged quite well.

The use of a science fiction setting to explore the intersection between politics, philosophy, and ecology is so obviously parallel to Dune that I was surprised there is not already literature (or even any extensive online discussion I could find) comparing the two. It's been said that Dune is Foundation told from the standpoint of the Mule, or that Dune is Star Wars for grown-ups. I find myself feeling less kind to Dune after reading The Dispossessed. Arrakis could be one 75% imagined planet in Le Guin's universe, and The Dispossessed is Dune for better-read grown-ups. Sand worms, spice, and sand trout - that's your ecosystem? On Anarres we learn about the taxonomy of the planet's native life and how it was influenced to evolve in such a way by the physical environment, from lichen, to the fragile plants of the desert landscape with only three land phyla, and how the people adapted the available organisms. The Dispossessed is the better novel, and there's no serious discussion to be had about the point. It would be hard to be surprised when you learn that the novel won the Hugo, Locus and Nebula.

And, whatever you might think of her politics, The Dispossessed is worthy of our respect because it more clearly grew out of Le Guin's reading in trying to do something in the real world - as someone protesting the Vietnam War, she began reading about real-world pacifist movements that directly inspired the philosophy in the book.[2] My main objections to Odonian philosophy are that it does not respect human nature enough - given how children are quickly moved out of their family units and raised institutionally, in Anarres would be a planet of people with borderline personality disorder. Also, while "shunning" (the Anarresti Amish- or Hopi-like method of dealing with most criminals and parasites) is adequate punishment in small scale societies, it absolutely breaks down beyond the level of a village, where we're above the Dunbar number and everybody no longer knows everybody. Interestingly, outside of the suppression of dissent, I mostly found myself identifying with the politics of the A-Ioti, and outside of the apparent phobia of emotional bonds (even in parenthood), with the personal morality of the Anarresti. Such a divide would likely have seemed strange to Le Guin or her original audience, and it's interesting how in the intervening half-century, some things have changed, particularly the acceptance of open minority sexuality and the agreement by many Americans on both left and even right that the state should not be part of the institituion of marriage.

Le Guin does an outstanding job of structuring the novel to serve the narrative and planting seeds throughout that bear fruit later. And some authors give us unreliable narrators, others - restrictive or omitting narrators. Example: in Wolfe's New Sun novels, the reader is (meant to be) startled when Severian casually mentions three novels into the series, that due to the Sun's dimness, people on Earth can now see stars in the daytime. I took this, as so many things in those novels, as a comment on the limitations of narrative. Perhaps similarly - perhaps not - the humans on the various worlds of the Hainish cycle universe have been separated long enough to be noticeably physically different. Urrasti (and the biologically identical Anarresti) are covered in fur. To be fair this is mentioned several times, but always (I suspect) intentionally in such a way as to be dismissible as metaphor - e.g., Shevek describes his young daughter as "furry" at one point, and I took that to mean her disheveled hair (on her head.) It's not until he meets the ambassador from Earth that he explicitly notes the difference - that Terrans only have hair on their heads! - and made me page back to some of the other comments about furriness. Assuming Le Guin was doing this deliberately, it's much more clever than Wolfe - there's no way to know you can see the stars during the day until Severian tells you, but you have to be complicit in your own deception to miss the Urrasti's furriness. (It also nicely simulates the vertiginous experience of suddenly recognizing the previously un-considered, un-noticed marks of one's own nation or religion or other in-group, when suddenly contrasted against a foreigner in front of you.)

Le Guin doesn't try to paint her ambiguous utopia as perfect. The feeling that humans are hard to organize in big groups, and that any political commitments we make will fall short or make us chafe somewhere, is communicated clearly. She seems comfortable recognizing that even in intentional social systems designed to maximize utility, the terms of the utility equation - wealth, justice, and leisure among them - cannot all be given equal priority. As noted in interviews elsewhere, she is comfortable admitting that the people of Anarres are poorer as a result of their system, but more moral. This is a tradeoff that every socioeconomic ordering has had to make in every civilization and her directness here is refreshing. Furthermore, she recognizes that human nature is not a blank slate and it comes up against the Anarresti "system" throughout the novel, and George Carlin's principle that among humans, "eventually, everything becomes a racket" is illustrated nicely by how the syndicates gradually become a bureaucracy, and social norms become laws. That said, Le Guin is brave enough not to denigrate the anarcho-syndicalism she explores with false equivalence. She is describing a system that she thinks would be an improvement over the various Urrasti nations, as well as our own; not just for the narrative motive of creating the conflict necessary in a novel but for genuine intellectual honesty, she does not conceal its expected shortcomings.

Returning to Dune: it's not clear that Herbert was a fan of the idea of feudalism and I took his use of it in Dune as a statement about the unfortunate natural tendencies of humans, that given half a chance, we'll revert to it. But he also doesn't exactly seem disgusted by feudalism either, and doesn't offer any serious improvement on it, other than just to submit to a messiah. And if we can take it as any indication, certainly the fandom of Dune is not filled with people decrying the dystopian injustice of the feudal system, but rather cheering for a different person to control it. In contrast, as an "honest utopian", Le Guin also writes better, more human characters, whose interactions with the system and each other naturally demonstrate how it works, rather than the repetitive ungainly thought-italics of Dune.

Finally - if I'm comparing The Dispossessed to Dune - the treatment of women in both novels could not be more opposite. In The Dispossessed, they're human, unrestricted in their emotional and social roles and experiences. In Dune they're either the Messiah's mother, or the woman he seizes as property with violence (Irulan), or (possibly most revealing of the author's psychology) weird older ladies whose rituals contain more than a hint of BDSM, who make the boy-protagonist crawl to them on his knees to be tortured.[3] Le Guin also treats sexual minorities as human, whereas Herbert, in real life, disowned his gay son. That seems as good a note as any to close on.


FOOTNOTES

[1] It should be noted that like the linguistic parallel of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there is little evidence for a strong effect of social structure on psychology, and writers lost interest in the question. (But if mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic theories of society are your bag, you could do worse than reading Erikson's Childhood and Society, where he investigated and contrasted the relationship between the environment, social structure, and psychology of the Lakota of the high plains, and the Yurok of coastal northern California. Of note - he studied the Yurok with the famous Berkeley linguist Alfred Kroeber, who happens to be Le Guin's father - the K. is for her maiden name Kroeber.)

[2] The title of The Dispossessed was inspired by Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. As I haven't read it, my summary of the summaries I've scanned is that The Possessed is about nineteenth century Russian anarchists who've been "infected" with Western ideas; the Anarresti here could be thought of as their descendants, not exorcised of anarchist demons but rather exiled from their homeland. The Russian novel may be of interest to Slate Star Codex types interested in consciousness "software" a la Julian Jaynes spreading through a population, as in this one interesting though highly dubious account of it happening before an observer's eyes in the Andaman Islands. It also seems like it would be popular with modern Russian chauvinists in terms of their ideas of being "Eurasian" and being unique and separate from the West.

[3] Also of note is that Paul's mother is one of the BDSM nuns. Many male narcissists have difficult relationships with their mothers. And, not unrelated - similar fantasies about older women.


More discussion:

Essay on The Dispossessed at Law & Liberty, focusing more on the political arguments
Public conversation between Le Guin and Margaret Atwood
Genre classification and Le Guin's work

Why Are UAPs Associated With Naval Aviation?

We're more likely to find artifacts from technology-using aliens - self-reproducing (von Neumann) probes - rather than the aliens themselves, or even to recognize and understand their signals against background, if any. Indeed, humans may be just at the technological threshold of building such probes right now, but we're far from any serious discussion of manned interstellar travel, and in fact it may never be biologically feasible. Such objects are likely to be found associated with lower gravity objects, ie the asteroid belt, where they can obtain materials and build more of themselves. The further they are from home, the less likely they are to adhere to some "mission", and the more likely they are to have mutated and been selected merely for fecundity (reproductive ability.) Therefore it's not obvious that they would be particularly interested in finding other examples of intelligence. They could very well be much more interested in finding other von Neumann probes, and humans might therefore not be the most interesting thing in the solar system to them. If this is the situation that obtains, this resolves a contradiction: other technology-using species have indeed appeared before us, but there's little evidence of them here.

If the von Neumann probes are built from metal, and one planet over the last few centuries suddenly has large metal objects moving around its surface (ships) and smaller metal objects moving much faster through the atmosphere - then THOSE might be interesting. You might expect the probes to be especially interested in locations with lots of ship and air traffic, and especially the ones with the fastest air-objects, especially if the fast air-objects come and go from the large metal objects on the surface. It's been observed separately by other writers that, from the standpoint of an off-world but in-solar-system alien observer of Earth's behavior in terms of natural processes, the appearance of metal objects in the atmosphere and then suddenly in orbit is the most interesting phenomenon that has appeared here for many millions of years at least.

The fact that it's US Navy aviators who have reported many of the UAP sightings is obviously relevant. Given that the reported observations are made by multiple modalities (naked eye, radar, thermal) and official US agency reports describe as likely mostly physical objects, it's unlikely these are glitches: that is to say, either they're real, or they're made up, possible as sort of intelligence or misinformation operation that we civilians are caught in. But if it's real, two questions are important to the hypothesis.

First: is there really a higher rate of UAP sightings around US Navy aviation areas (as there seems to be so far, with sightings concentrated around San Diego and Virginia Beach) or is this just bias because there are more instruments and observers there? Such is the frequency of these events according to the reports that a relatively low-budget operation with some weather balloons over a low-traffic area could move the needle on whether naval air stations are "enriched" for these objects. (If it does not make any such observations, it would suggest either it's a misinformation campaign, or they're real but concentrated around naval air stations.) Related: do JFK or LAX have similar sightings? Or Heathrow? Narita?

Second: is it really an American (or mostly American) problem? Is the pattern repeated around the world at other countries' naval air stations? China or Russia might not be interested in sharing this kind of information, but NATO allies might be. That said, if an unfriendly country discloses it is seeing the same thing, and it has no explanation, then it's much more likely that these objects are real, and at least are not human-created phenomena.

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.