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.

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 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.

San Francisco 2020 With Blade Runner 2049 Score

H/T Mr. Black

The Asimov Library, and the Idea Catalog

Hat tip Marginal Revolution for both of these.

1. the nucleus of it is starting with this man, who as a labor of love is collecting/cataloging all of Asimov's work. Thank you Steven Cooper!
   
   
2. Catalog of science fiction ideas by year appearing - I've linked to the nineteenth century.

Star Wars Episode IX Review (CONTAINS SPOILERS BUT MAY NOT MATTER SINCE I'M THE LAST ONE TO SEE IT)

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these things would be easy to look up but I didn't. In no particular order:

• Overall, a fitting end to the saga. Much better than Episode VIII. Glad JJ Abrams is back; he's the master of playing well in others' universes. You walk out feeling that you saw a good Star Wars movie, much like Episode VII.
  
  
• As a Star Wars movie, at some point there will be: a desert planet, a cantina, a scummy trading city with a motley assortment of criminals, and people rescuing their friends and admitting how zany they are because they’re making it up as they go.
  
  . But it's not dwelt upon, and there were so many types of planets in this one that the desert planet doesn't stick out. Also, I hope I'm not turning into a social justice warrior, but the colorful festival on the planet with "third world" aliens did bug me a little bit, just because it seems so obvious.
  
  
• In that spirit: Star Wars movies are fantasy movies in space: knights, sword-fighting, wizards. A horseback attack on a starcruiser is therefore not only cool and original, it completely fits. Also, it stuck out in Episodes I through III that a) there was no improvement in technology across 30 years and b) that late 90s cell phones were about as good as Obi Wan's communicator. Some of the tech in this one looks positively 1980s - wired headsets, colored wires in C3PO's head that look like a Commodore 64 console - and that's great. It fits Star Wars perfectly. It's a fantasy movie, and these are set pieces to maintain the tone - it's not about technology at all.
  
  
• I noticed in the end credits for animation, there was a group of 8-10 names together that looked Thai or Lao. I tried to look up whether a studio in one of those places was used but couldn't find any mention. Always good to see more talent in the game, it benefits film-goers.
  
  
• I couldn't remember if Carrie Fisher died before they made this (she did), and couldn't tell if she was live, computer-generated, etc., and wasn't particularly worried about it either way. It's that last part that says the most I think.
  
  
• The introduction of matter transmission through force connections (and its continuing use) is quite a good cinematic trick. It's creepy as hell when Ren grabs Rey's necklace, and then this trick is used in the final battle with the Emperor (unlike some inventions in Episode VIII like hyperspace missiles.)
  
  
  
• The action starts immediately at the beginning and doesn't let up for quite a while. It's also full of plot twists. Nothing like the (pointless, non-plot-advancing) dead space in Episode VIII.
  
  
• Plot holes, discontinuities, and other jarring moments must be taken in context with the franchise. I'm a fan of hard science fiction (i.e., real physics) to the core but if I ever directly overhear someone complaining that "it's unrealistic because there's hyperspace" I will punch them. That said, no one came to help in the second one, but Chewie and Lando can magically raise a rebellion in a few hours by flying around in person? Doesn't seem required to advance the plot, though it does feel good and advance a nice moral ("they win by making you feel alone") so it didn't bother me so much. Also, where has Lando been?
  
  
• I'm going to come out and say it. Grown-up Daisy Ridley is much, much more attractive than at the start of this trilogy (and she wasn't bad then either.) She's also come into her own as an actor.
  
  
• Good performances also from Adam Driver (duh) and Oscar Isaac. I always wonder how hard it is for Boyega to stay in-accent when he's working with other English actors. As time goes on, he gets by more on his innate charisma, which is fine because he's just likable anyway (honestly, it's the very rare actor who actually masters another character and doesn't just enhance his innate personality. I like watching Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins, but come on, how different are they on-screen from their actual personalities? Gary Oldman and Christian Bale actually get outside their personalities for their characters, which carries a penalty of not being as "follow-able" as they might otherwise be.)
  
  
• Lots of nice parallelisms in this and tying up of themes. The Empreror as master manipulator tries to rise above the paradox of the Sith by having his death be the key to the rise of the Sith (and if Rey doesn't do it, her friends die and the fleet takes over anyway.) The balance brought back to the Force requires the dyad, with Ren and Rey. Ren, again Ben with the same words he said when he killed his father. Leia's death as she kills her son by distracting him (Ren killed Solo where Vader couldn't bring himself to kill Luke, twice.)
  
  
• Kylo Ren has to announce that Han Solo is a memory so we don't get confused. Luke has sparkly blue outlines so we know the difference between a memory and a Force ghost.
  
  
• There's a little bit of babbling of the sort that annoyed Alec Guinness, which annoys me mostly because you don't know where things are going and you can talk your way (in an unsatisfyingly unpredictable way) out of any plot knot. Then again, the Force is if nothing else a script writer's dream to resolve what would otherwise be massive plot holes by appealing effectively to magic.
  
  
• Much better psychology in this one, thinking about the characters' motivations (e.g., Hux being a spy because he hates Ren.)
  
  
• At the end where there's a crowd watching Palpatine and Rey: where did all these mystery Sith come from? And why have we never seen other Knights of Ren before? What is their connection to the Sith?
  
  
• The creator of Darth Maul said that Lucas came to him and said "I want you to use your worst childhood nightmare as inspiration." He described to Lucas a pale face slowly revealed by flashes of lightning. Sound familiar? I was happy that they used this.
  
  
• I didn't notice any lens flare, but there is a shot of Kylo Ren standing in front of the heaving ocean after Rey leaves, a bit fuzzy and shaky as if shot from far away, that gives it more immediacy. Adam Driver also looked genuinely cold, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he insisted on being cold and wet in reality for these shots.
  
  
• Rey being a Palpatine is somewhat of an obvious plot twist, just because if she IS the daughter of someone significant, the only decent move left is for it to be Palpatine (with intervening parents; why did they turn out so lame?)
  
  
• I was annoyed that a non-Jedi (Leia) could magically continue Rey's training. ("Hey, I'm a surgery resident. My attending just died. His sister is going to come continue to teach me surgery.") But they closed that loophole.
  
  
• Once Rey explained she gave a little bit of the force away to heal the giant snake critter, you could see a self-sacrifice (from someone) coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab. Same with the accidental force lightning, which immediately gave away what I suspected about Rey being a Palpatine. Good on the writers, I actually thought Chewie was dead. I'm sure that there are religious fundies somewhere all bent out of shape that Jedi can heal people.
  
  
  
  Above: Jedi Christ, who can heal the sick; only Sith can raise the dead. I bet Golgotha would have been a whole lot different with a light saber.
  
  
• Good coordination with trailers and writers. They know going in that everyone knows Palpatine is in it. I'm always amazed when trailers give away things in the movie and the film-makers expect you to be surprised (often this is no doubt marketing that's not in their control.)
  
  
• I thought C3PO was added to the list of main character deaths - a robot is its memory in a way that humans are not - but he was saved too.
  
  

Things That Might Bother You About Avengers Movies

I noted before that the "20 Things Wrong With [Amazingly Successful Franchise Film]" articles are sad, then wrote just such an article. This is a very short one for a very few of the things about MCU movies that are most bothersome. To me.

Complete inconsistency in relative strength: the battles are what's actually important here, and even so, there's no rhyme or reason. Yes that keeps the audience interested and serve to advance the plot but come on, most powerful guy in the universe hits a mortal with no special armor or anything and they just get the wind knocked out of them - but he can knock down Thor or the Hulk? And he constantly doesn't take obvious shots?

Zero sum thinking: I get that Thanos is a bad guy, so his message - that there are only so many resources, and more and more mouths to feed - is not the one the good guys agree with. Yet the franchise appears to endorse it. The disappearance of half the life on Earth would be first, economically catastrophic. Guess what? Smartphones and corn don't just grow themselves out of the ground. Plus, the specialized knowledge required means that the disruption in productivity would actually be more than a 50% drop. Imagine your company's level of functioning if 50% of people called in sick tomorrow - it would be much less than 50%. And of course, the disappearance of the Earth's oxygen-producing organisms, plankton, etc. would be much worse.

Profound scientific incuriosity, including by career scientists: "Hey, I'm on Asgard! Should I maybe try to pocket a few pens or take a few pictures, ask people how things work? Nah, I'll just hang out and get all wrapped up in my personal issues." Incontrovertible proof of aliens on Earth by their repeated attacks, but no mention of a second Copernican revolution in decentralizing mankind's image of itself, or trying to get the alien tech for more than for the Avengers to make better guns. No attempts to start trading or at least communicating with aliens. Also, Thanos's snap would answer a bunch of questions - for example, which things are alive or not (did half of prions disappear? Viroids? Kind of weird that no wombats disintegrated, I was always suspicious of those things. However, Galaxy S5 phones disintegrated but not S4's, so that must be the sentience boundary.)


If these things start to bother you, though you can never really return to your previous innocence once you've noticed them, you can over-intellectualize and get partway back. Rather than criticize these gross inconsistencies, you can think of these movies as modern action-expressionism. The original expressionist film movement is often described as portraying the (actually more important to the viewer) inner emotional reality of the narrative, rather than the superficial matter of the characters' physical world. This coincides with the hyper-reality discussed by Umberto Eco (i.e., where for example artificial lemonade is more lemonadish than any real lemonade ever was; the California Adventure section at Disneyland is more like the Sierras because it purifies and concentrates all the salient aspects of the Sierras, etc.) Alternatively, you could think of the MCU movies as magical realism, where the magic is focused on violence rather than relationships. Or, that MCU is modern-world fantasy in the same way that Star Wars is fantasy; though it takes place in space, exploration of the science is absent, and there are wizards and sword-fighting.

Finally: THERE WILL BE A STAR WARS-MCU CROSSOVER BY 31 DECEMBER 2028. Anyone willing to bet? And the way things are going, it will be Disney trying to use MCU to salvage Star Wars rather than the other way around.

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.

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

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

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

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