Reading | A Fistful of Photons

“Two Years Before the Mast”

There was an element of R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast that seemed very familiar to me: the feel of an isolated, even empty world that permeates Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Endurance, and Home of the Blizzard.

Sure, it’s clear at the beginning that there is in fact a bustling, settled civilization in the background (specifically 1830s Boston), but once Dana’s ship dropped “below the hill, below the kirk, below the lighthouse top”, as it were, it’s as if the outer world no longer exists, and he is sailing on the endless seas of an empty planet.

Even after arriving in California, this sense of emptiness is barely relieved by the presence of Mexicans, Indians, and the occasional crews of other ships. There are so few people, so sparsely settled, that if anything it makes the emptiness of the world seem more rather than less acute.

It struck me that this element is actually missing from the SF I have read.

Which is strange, as you’d think it’d be a pretty obvious detail to weave into the worldbuilding of (say) the first mission to Mars, or a newly-settled planet: the characters are alone, far from civilization and from help should it be needed. They wouldn’t have it in their head that someone is watching over them, because there isn’t anyone. They wouldn’t assume that someone can be summoned to rescue them at a moment’s notice, because there is no one to call. They would know they couldn’t simply “return to civilization” should they tire of their adventures, because they are what passes for civilization.

It’s not a sense of danger or threat, though. It simply is the way the world is around them. The conditioned sense of immersion in civilization wherever one goes is simply absent, because actual civilization itself is so distant as to be wholly absent.

I think the thorough rewrite of the former project’s “The Olympian Race” already captures some of this sense of isolation and emptiness in the climactic chapters, so this is timely.

One “character” detail that stood out for me was Dana’s personal reaction at his return to Boston. He’d dreamt for two years of finishing his contract and returning home, imagining what he would do and where he would go and who he would see. But when his ship at last reached the pier in Boston Harbor, he was instead overcome with a sense of inertia: “There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort. It was a good deal so with me.”

The account was fairly short, but no less powerful for that. And the book is peppered with such character observations of his crewmates and himself, fascinating little details that SF rarely seem to capture. In fairness, it’s easier to amass a collection of such observations to draw on when you spend two years immersed in the relevant environment, something rarely possible (even in analogue form) for SF writers.

I repeatedly had the same reaction I had while reading The Anabasis and Mawson’s account of his return to the hut in Home of the Blizzard: “This is such an amazing account – it would form the basis of a fantastic SF story.”

Alas, several SF versions of The Anabasis have been done. However, the story I’m currently working on, “Beneath a Silent Sky”, originated as an homage to Mawson’s account (albeit infused with paranoid mystery…).

One final item that struck me was the section written in 1860, documenting his observations from a return trip to California. In 24 years, everything that he had encountered had changed dramatically, in particular San Francisco Bay and the surrounding areas. In 1835, he described a smallish settlement around the Presidio, dwarfed by the main Mexican settlement at Monterey. When he returned, he found a city of 100,000-plus people, smaller but significant settlements scattered all around the bay, Alcatraz turned into a fortress, and a booming economy.

I always wondered if 15-20 years would be sufficient to settle Mars to the point that it could demand autonomy or sovereignty. Could enough settlers arrive and build a sufficiently large and diverse economy to support such a move? Well, here is one real-world example to draw on…

I Absolutely Loathed “Sapiens”

I finally finished the slog through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

Perhaps I should say thankfully, as it was easily one of the worst books I have ever subjected myself to in fifty-odd years of being able to read.

Why is this? Let me recount some of the ways (some of which I have already touched on here and here):

Harari is among the smartest of Very Smart Boys – and as happens with Very Smart Boys, he has to demonstrate frequently how clever he is. Again and again, he will state something that appears to be either factually incorrect or an unwarranted extrapolation or conclusion, and then set it aside – until a paragraph or three later when he will come back to it and explain he was right on some specious technicality or very special interpretation. “Oh, you didn’t think I would akshully say something so wrong, did you?” It’s a gimmick that gets old very quickly.
Similarly, he goes off on tangents – almost rants, at times – on some subject, using language which in context implies that these are his actual personal opinions. These digressions are typically controversial or outré, and often presented with the passion of a true believer…before being casually attributed to someone else or passed off as mere noodling: ‘That’s what some people think, anyway’, ‘That’s a depressing line of thought, if true‘, ‘Imagine if people really believed that’, etc. The funny thing is, these digressions seem like his own opinions because they are in almost every case congruent with what you’d expect his own opinions to be, based on his reputation. Where the habit in the first bullet is apparently meant to show how clever he is, this habit can be read as a contrived edginess – a cowardly edginess dulled by plausible deniability.
A running theme throughout the book, and especially in the last two chapters, is that humans are nothing special, have nothing to be proud of (and a great deal to be ashamed of), and in fact live in a world of delusion about their abilities, importance, value, and the very nature of their existence. Everything we think we know is delusion, in fact, and everything we value is imaginary and arbitrary. All of which would grate on its own, but it’s especially repulsive when presented in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone – nihilism with a smile, or maybe just a puerile smirk. Which made me wonder why, when he thinks so little of humanity (or rather, “Sapiens”, since in making it clear we’re nothing special, he repeatedly makes the point that we’re not the only “humans”), that he chose to write “The” book about us?
The answer may lie in one of the later chapters, where he goes off on a long tangent about Buddhism, one which is unsurprisingly uncritical given his own personal experience with elements of it (Vipassana). If one accepts the premise that nothing in the human world – indeed the world as a whole – is real, or meaningful, or important, or known, indeed is just an impediment to happiness and a fuller understanding of reality, then consistent application of this premise would produce exactly this kind of nihilism. (The answer might also just be a naughty schoolboy glee in stomping on the beliefs and certainties and values of others, the way capital-A Atheists do, with no more purpose than that.)
The book’s structure and organization are terrible. His chapters seem to follow a corrupted “five paragraph essay” format, in this case: “Follow an oh-so-clever ‘hook’ with a thesis statement kinda related to the oh-so-clever chapter heading in some way, proceed to ramble through a bunch of anecdotes or stories or study findings somewhat related to this thesis statement without really connecting them to it or each other, and conclude with assertions about the thesis that all the rambling didn’t really set up or support”. Whatever their other flaws, the professors at JMC would never have accepted such shoddy work on a bluebook test.
Did I mention he’s an especially obnoxious Very Smart Boy?

I could go on, and probably will at some point in the future. But…bleh. Suffice to say it was a terrible read, and not even close to being worth the time spent on the chore.

Even Less Impressed With Our Technocratic Overlords

Sapiens just gets worse the more I read.

The theme of the most recent section can be summarized as: “Unless you can prove a moral principle or element of civilizational organization is a direct expression of some unquestioned aspect of human biology, it has no basis in reality, and is therefore arbitrary, and therefore cannot be justified.”

Which is a fun bit of nihilism, and further confirms my read that Harari has a fundamental hatred for humanity: everything humanity has done as a species from the point we started to express traits unique (or unique in degree) to humans has been a mistake, and a tragedy – not only for all other species, not only for the planet as a whole, but for humanity itself. Agriculture, industry, complex social organization, property, specialization, technology as a whole, culture as a whole, civilization as a whole: all bad ideas, any cherry-picked “benefits” far overshadowed by their pervasive negative consequences.

I know I’ve criticized Sagan here, but Harari is his philosophical inverse. Sagan may have smugly dismissed what he considered unscientific or irrational views and those who hold them, but he didn’t breezily discredit everything that makes us human and the entire legacy of human history.

Which makes me wonder if “technocratic” is really a suitable adjective for Harari…

Not Impressed With Our Technocrat Overlords

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

My reaction so far has amounted to, “This is what so much conspiratorial hubbub is about?” I’m about 50 pages or so in, and finding the writing style insufferable – such that every time I put it down, I swear I’m done with it.

The prime offense is that it reads like it was intended for an audience with an eighth-grade reading level – if that. Harari uses short, simple sentences. He waters down complex concepts. He uses some big words, but not too big. And a lot of repetition. Did I mention the simple sentence structure?

Yeah. He’s no Carl Sagan, let alone a Silas Hudson.

What probably ought to be the prime offense, however, is his extensive use of unsupported (because unsupportable) conjecture, presented as fact. Sure, I understand where he’s ultimately going with his assertion that prehistoric foragers led more rewarding or satisfying lives than we moderns (they owned nothing and were happy, you might say), but he can’t possibly know this as fact. It’s not something that can be known as fact when comparing two different extant cultures, where those who make up those cultures can be interrogated extensively about how contented they are – there are simply too many ways to look at the question to establish who is in fact happier.

I’m disappointed. I was expecting a more noodly piece of writing, with much to chew on with regards to technocracy and transhumanism and the like – so much so that I bought Sapiens bundled with Homo Deus and 21 Lessons. Now I’m going to have to decide whether to waste my time reading them or waste my money by not.

It’s a Zoo

Obligatory excuse-making: I’ve been finishing up a project at work (now completed) and trying to get done the Tile Job From Hell (not completed).

In the meantime, I’ve finished Parallel Lives, The Aeneid, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, like Dante’s trilogy, I couldn’t make myself do the rest), and am halfway through Arabian Nights, and most of the way through The Moulding of Communists.

Parallel Lives was interesting, in part for the history it covers. I thought I knew a good bit about Roman history in the transition period from Republic to Empire, but nope – there was way more to it than I had previously learned, and Plutarch crams a whole lot of it into a short piece. The other interesting part was how obviously it was a primary source for several of Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, specifically).

The Aeneid was slow going, and as I’ve discovered is typical for classic epics and dramas, was poorly structured and edited by modern standards. It was like a story told by a five-year-old: this happened then this happened then this happened for ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. But like Parallel Lives, it was an engaging overview of Roman pre-history (albeit heavily mythologized and not exactly reliable), or at least how Romans of the early Empire wished to see their history.

It also portrayed the Trojans as the heroes of the Trojan War and the Achaeans as the bad guys, which amused me at first and which I attributed to the pro-Roman slant of the poem. Then I looked it up. Yeah. Even by Homer’s pro-Greek account, the Greeks were dicks.

Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t bad, but it was overly-long and by the end seemed like a treacly Anglican reduction of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Arabian Nights is not what I expected at all. I knew it was a series of stories, but the framing device and its nesting/recursion of stories is handled quite well (in contrast to the chaotic structurelessness of The Aeneid), with the stories fairly short and to the point. They remind me very strongly of the stories in Idries Shah’s books, although it’s not entirely clear that they’re intended that way (some do appear have an obvious moral or underlying meaning, but that could simply be me reading things into the story out of habit from reading Shah).

Finally, The Moulding of Communists has been somewhat of a slog up to the current chapter, but it’s turning into an insightful look at how communists were recruited into the Party back in the day, and after recruitment, selected and formed into “cadre” members. The resemblances to cult practices are remarkable, so much so that I repeatedly wonder whether the cults of the 1960s-1980s weren’t actually following the same playbook (and in turn, it makes me wonder how Soviet communists managed to figure all that out, systematize it, and successfully spread it globally such that it was already commonplace by the mid-1930s in the US).

Managerialism: Where the MDA is Headed

In a nutshell, a managerial state, implemented (enforced) via MAs: The China Convergence.

I haven’t finished the article yet, but the first several pages neatly summarize my thinking on where the MDA is headed in the second and third books, based on my reading of Burnham, Reimann, Orwell, Wells, Scott, and others.

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of nonmanagerial elements.

Interesting that art is imitating life here for a change.

My own imagined version of this based on reading Burnham is a managerial system so integrated that the sectors defined by Lyons are indistinguishable, having been systematically dismantled and rebuilt as a seamless whole.

The catch in implementing any totalitarian state has always been achieving the total part: total control requires total legibility and total ‘actionability’. If you are obliged to carry an electronic communications device in your pocket at all times, and you use it in some capacity (even just its passive presence) in every interaction with another human, it’s trivial for the state in question to harvest all the data about your thoughts and actions they could ever need. And with a machine simulacrum of intelligence to analyze it, to find subtle actions and interventions it can take to achieve its goals and eliminate dissent before it can become a problem – indeed, before the dissenters even become aware of their dissent.

Of what use are crude tools of surveillance and control like the gulag, Gestapo, Stasi, Pitešti, Room 101, struggle sessions, brainwashing, social credit, etc. when you have technology through which you can precisely spot the patterns and trends in an individual’s thoughts early, even before he does, and nudge him in a safer (for you) and more productive (for your interests) direction without his awareness?

A system of this kind, implemented objectively and with the right overall goals, could indeed be a utopia – all discontent headed off by the right incentives and disincentives applied automatically at the right moment, all personal potential optimized with targeted opportunities and constructive interferences appearing at the right moments, etc. Each subject might see himself as the luckiest man in the world as he reflects on his unbroken string of good fortune and near-misses…as if there is someone watching out for him.

But, humans being humans, we all know a system of this kind could not and would not be implemented in such a way. As we see with things like the Google algorithm, biases, pettiness, misanthropy, ideology, etc. would prevent an objective implementation. It would be impossible for anyone capable of implementing such a system to allow it to apply positive nudges to people they see as undeserving, e.g. giving a frustrated young antisemite an art-school scholarship so as to focus his energies on something rewarding and constructive – and equally impossible to avoid programming it to sadistically apply negative nudges to those they feel deserve them.

Endurance Wreck Discovered

This has been sitting in my drafts box for a couple of weeks, so I’m a little late to the party with the news: Wreck of Shackelton’s Endurance Found

The state of preservation is remarkable, not only given its century-long submersion but compared to the crew’s descriptions and film of what happened to the ship as and after they were forced to abandon it. I would have expected a pile of rotted lumber scattered across the seafloor.

We have a Dispatch story outlined and partially written (yes, I know I say that a lot) based in part on the Endurance expedition, which I would like to get to if we can ever get Ghosts of Tharsis completed. It’s The Anabasis performed by members of the Shackelton, Mawson, and Scott crews, led (unfortunately) by someone who makes Fauci look like Oppenheimer.

2020 Reading List

A probably-incomplete list of books and short stories I read in 2020. I’d have expected a longer list, given COVID lockdowns, but then I’ve also been working a lot more than usual over the past several months. Most of the fiction was re-reads, as I haven’t seen much lately that appeals to me. There are also several books not listed that I grew bored with and gave up on – something I normally don’t do, but in each case the reading was a slog and was keeping me from reading something more interesting and useful.

“Endurance”
“Alone on the Ice”
“Persuasion”
Giants Series: “Inherit the Stars”
Giants Series: “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede”
Giants Series: “Giants’ Star”
Frank Herbert, “Dune”
Walter Tevis, “Mockingbird”
Isaac Asimov, “Foundation”
Niven and Pournelle, “The Mote in God’s Eye”
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”
H.G. Wells, “Anticipations”
Herodotus, “The Histories”
Lawrence A. Rubin, “Bridging the Straits”
“There Will Be War”, vol. 5
“There Will Be War”, vol. 7
“20 Master Plots and How to Build Them”
Nassim Taleb, “Antifragile”
“How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, How to Listen So Your Kids Will Talk”
“Miss Manners Minds Your Business”
Harvard Classics: “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”
Harvard Classics: “Journal of John Woolman”
Harvard Classics: “William Penn: Fruits of Solitude”
Harvard Classics: Plato’s “The Apology,” “Crito,” “Phaedo”
Dumitru Bacu, “The Anti-Humans”
Clark Ashton Smith, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”
“Collected Works of Robert E. Howard”, vol. 4:21
Balmer and Wylie, “When Worlds Collide”/”After Worlds Collide”

“Look How Smart I Am!”

Thinking back on what I read in Analog over a twenty year span (as I’ve done a few times here recently), another all-too-common tropes that comes to mind is the use of some obscure scientific idea in a manner contrived to show off just how smart the author thinks he is.

There’s obviously going to be some element of science in science fiction (otherwise it’s space romance or space opera or fantasy or some other “soft” genre). It may be pseudoscientific, it may be totally fabricated but handled consistently as established knowledge for purposes of the plot, but central to the plot will be some element of systematic inquiry into natural phenomena or speculative technology or the like. The problem is not science in science fiction, it’s what science is used and how it’s handled.

What differentiates this kind of science fiction from others is the author’s selection of an obscure concept or theory which they then elaborate on to excess. The tell is that the story is more about this concept than its effects on the characters involved, more a demonstration of the author’s brilliance or cleverness in finding and relating the concept than an exploration of its consequences or potential.

I don’t have the time to delve into the 50-year collection and pick out specific illustrative examples, but in general any story involving obscure concepts from cosmology or quantum mechanics will fall into this category. The more jargon-laden and compulsively detailed the presentation of the concept, and the more tortured or cringe-inducing the effort to make it relevant to the plot, the more certain the reader can be that this is what is going on.

Like so many bad aspects of modern science fiction, this quirk seems driven by the need to demonstrate a superior intellect to others rather than the desire to explore ideas. It’s the class nerd shouting: Look at me! Look how smart I am! My brains make me special and superior! In short, it’s both a product of and a product aimed at the brand of socially-inept but delusionally self-important outcasts observed in the recent Hugo Award controversies and “pink SF” generally.

It’s also, I suspect, what turns a lot of mainstream readers off with regards to science fiction. They might like a popular science fiction movie and decide to give written science fiction a try. But when they encounter one of these stories, they are reminded of the gamma losers they knew in school, and it sours them on the genre as a whole. Whether that association is made consciously or not, I think plays a large role (along with the creepy sexual perversions and taint of pedophilia that stained the genre in the 1960s and 1970s) in why despite the success of science fiction in film and television, reading and writing science fiction are still looked down on.

Shaver Mysteries – Fin

I read about as much as I could tolerate, which was not quite to the end of Zigor Mephisto’s Collection of Mentalities. I may tough it out through the last few pages, but that’s enough.

I still think there’s a lot of interesting potential in the Shaver Mythos, some interesting ideas, situations, and settings. Unfortunately, that potential is wasted with writing so bad as to be unreadable: long narrative dumps, stilted dialogue, corny and inconsistent descriptions of the imagined technology, goofy recycling of elements from other mythologies, poor story mechanics, etc.

Then there are simple writing mechanics and stylistic errors that any minimally-competent editor would have caught. For example: multiple instances of the same significant word in the same sentence or paragraph. It was a little thing to notice, something that happened that I might not have noticed had it happened only once or twice, but in one 5-6 page stretch I noticed that it happened so many times that, as it happens, I couldn’t not notice when it happened. Just as awful is Shaver’s frequent description of events or places as in some way “beyond mere words to portray” or “exceeding human ability to understand”, a cheap gimmick whose overuse fills me with a weary loathing I struggle to adequately convey.

I’ve read a lot of mediocre SF (I subscribed to Analog for 25 years), but I didn’t fully appreciate the term “hack writer” until I experienced Richard Shaver. I think if I taught English or creative writing classes at the high-school level or above, I would be tempted to teach my students editing by assigning small groups one story apiece. Go, and make this readable. Even government-school students couldn’t make it any worse.