Whale ropes to the sky [Adam Roberts]

So, after doing a bit of work this morning, I checked Facebook and saw that my buddy Adam Roberts had posted this:

Off dream: I had an unfamiliar laptop, and couldn't get the power cord to fit into its socket. I knew the device was almost out of power, and fumbled around with this wire. Eventually I gave up, opened the laptop and saw what I'd been writing: a poem. The only line of the poem I can remember from the dream is:

"The bombed city threw whale-ropes to the sky"

Then the screen went blank, and I knew I had lost whatever it was I had been writing. Particular type of anxiety dream.

I thought a bit and posted this reply:

Sounds like you're channeling STC. How's your laudanum supply holding out?

In Xanadu did Adam R
A sacred city rebuild.
Where mad cetaceans swam
Beneath the bombed walls
Tossing whale-ropes to the sky.

I thought some more, Shazaam! ChatGPT! I added this to my reply, courtesy of the good old Chatster:

When I asked Adam whether or not I could post his note along with my reply, he said:

Please do! I could say that, in the dream (so far as I remember it: the memory is already fading away) my understanding of "whale" was less cetecean and more an index of thickness: bombs resulting in fat, ascending pillars of smoke. But I accept that's not necessarily what the line itself suggests.

The most beautiful-sounding poem in English: "Kubla Khan"

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and honestly it's not even close. https://t.co/VBMv8KcQSC

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) September 16, 2024

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1.1, What do you mean, literary critic?

Back in October of this year, the 23rd to be exact, Tyler Cowen posted a link to a book he’d just written and put on the web, along with connections to current LLMs (large language models) one could use to explore it. The book: GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? I decided that reading it might help me fill a major gap in my education, economics. So I downloaded it, took a look at the end to see who wins (I’m not saying) and then put it aside ‘till next year, for I figured much of my time this year would be consumed with making sense of my work with ChatGPT – over 100 posts so far, not to mention the raw records of all my sessions with the Chatster.

Then, yesterday, when I was coming down the homestretch on my current essay for 3 Quarks Daily, on the current state of AI, I decided, of all things, to think about answering his book with a post on the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) literary critics. So I jotted down some quick notes, and set them aside to complete my essay. Once I’d uploaded the essay I came back to the GOAT critics – a very Girardian notion, BTW, as one could give “GOAT” a Straussian reading as the sacrificial goat, the pharmakos, of ancient ritual, see also (from my dictionary) Greek tragōidia, apparently from tragos ‘goat’. To that end I put the question to ChatGPT – my gesture, one of them, toward the use of modern technology in this essay. I looked at its initial answer, prodded it some, and decided that I had enough for my purposes.

Here's the plan. First I’m going to present those initial thoughts, just as I jotted them down. Then I’m going to discuss those thoughts in relationship to ChatGPT’s response to my probing. I’ve attached that response as an appendix. That’s enough for this post. I may or may not get around to writing further posts. If I do here’s my most likely title: GOAT Literary Critics: Part 2: Frye, Penn Warren, and Coleridge. If I get that far, then maybe I’ll write this: GOAT Literary Critics: Part 3: Digital Humanists Map the Territory.

We’ll see.

Initial thoughts

The fact is that Tyler is obsessed with the question, Who’s on first? in a way that I am not, and that, to be honest, I find a bit suspect, if not foolish. I’m pretty sure he would understand my reservations about this kind of activity, even if he emphatically does not share them.

With that, why not? Whatever else it is, it’s an interesting exercise.

I really shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not qualified. The man who should do it is my teacher, Richard Macksey. But he died a few years ago.

And then there’s Adam Roberts.

Which is to say, whereas economists are clearly separate from the economy itself as a social structure and mechanism, the separation between literary criticism and literature itself is not so clear.

But if you asked me to set up a committee to look into the matter, here’s a list of people I’d ask them to consider.

Coleridge
I. A. Richards
Russian Formalists?
Bakhtin
Robert Penn Warren
George Lukacs
Leo Spitzer, Kemp Malone?
William Empson?
Trilling?
Dare I put Harold Bloom on the list?
Northrop Frye
Wayne Booth
Jacques Derrida
Lévi-Strauss
Rene Girard?

Finally, take a look at the Wikipedia article on literary criticism. The article itself isn’t much, but it has a long list of literary critics from ancient times through the present. 160 total, 79 in the twentieth century. That’s worth looking at. Take my small list, that large list, and begin connecting the dots: Who’s read who? Who’s been influenced by who? Perhaps as well, who met who, talked with them, or at least corresponded with them? That last will require you to add many names to the list, and perhaps hypothesize the existences of individuals who are lost to history. The result will be a large web. Somewhere in there you’re likely to find your literary GOATS.

And we’ve now got the computing technology to help us locate them.

Hopkins Handbook of Lit Crit will help you flesh out the list.

What do I think of what ChatGPT ‘thinks’?

As I was looking through ChatGPT’s responses it occurred to me that Cowen made a big deal out of specifying criteria by which he would be judging economists. I’d given some thought to that in making my notes, but hadn’t really listed any criteria in those notes, save for this sentence: “Which is to say, whereas economists are clearly separate from the economy itself as a social structure and mechanism, the separation between literary criticism and literature itself is not so clear.” That’s an issue, and I’m not sure just how it works out. I suppose that’s one of the things this exercise might reveal.

Let me say just a word by way of indicating why that’s an issue. I put Coleridge at the top of my list. He’s best known as a poet, for two poems when it comes down to that (“Kubla Khan,” and “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”), but he was a prodigious essayist and he wrote some excellent and influential books and essays about the nature of literature and literary experience and about specific works (Shakespeare in particular). There are others who straddle the line between criticism and writing as well.

That’s why I suggested Adam Roberts as someone who could make an interesting job of nominating GOAT literary critics. While he’s best known for his speculative fiction, he’s a PhD-trained literary scholar, a romanticist I believe, and has made a wider range of contributions to literary culture than just about anyone I can think of. While’s he’s a creative writer, he’s also done that most fundamental of critical tasks, prepared editions of texts (e.g. Coleridge’s Biographa Literaria), written literary biography (of H.G. Wells), literary history (of science fiction), written who knows what standard-issue academic literary criticism, written reviews and other pieces for venues like The Guardian, and, of all the crazy-ass things, collaborated with Google Translate to translate Finnegans Wake into Latin. Imagine that. You take a book many have claimed to read, but haven’t, and translate it into a language hardly anyone bothers to read. Finally, I know from our tenure together at the now-defunct group blog, The Valve, that he’s a congenial and helpful colleague. He’s far more qualified as lit crit GOAT whisperer than I am.

But I digress. This is about GOAT criteria. What are they? I don’t know, perhaps I’ll figure out. Anyhow, here’s the criteria Cowen set out for his economics (p. 8):

To qualify as “GOAT the greatest economist of all time,” I expect the following from a candidate. The economist must be original, of great historical import, serve as a creator and carrier of important ideas, have a hand in both theory and empirics, have a hand in both macro and micro, and be “not too wrong” on the substance of issues. Furthermore, the person also must be a pretty good economist! That is, if you sat down with the person and discussed economic issues, you would be in some way impressed.

It could be debated how much weight should be assigned to each category, but that is better considered through concrete comparisons than in the abstract. My inclination is to take each category as a kind of absolute requirement.

You see, there’s that idea that the economists have to score well on each category of judgment. What are the categories we’re to use in judging literary critics? In particular, what are the categories of activity? In economics we’re got “theory and empirics” and “macro and micro.” In what little I skimmed through in the last chapter he also talked about policy recommendations, which doesn’t seem to appear on that list. Should our GOAT literary critics be both creative writers and commentators. How do we weigh academic criticism against journalist criticism? What about the high-class and absolutely necessary scut-work of editing literary texts (known as textual criticism)? These are real issues, and I don’t know how to deal with them.

Having said that, let’s get on with it.

Why, in the first place, would I even consult ChatGPT on the matter? Pretty much for the same reason I consult it after I’ve watched a movie I’ve liked: calibration and provocation. I don’t consider myself qualified to list the GOAT literary critics. Yes, I’ve got a degree in literature, but long ago I went off the rails into cognitive science and literature and whatnot, so I just don’t have a good knowledge of a wide enough range of literary critics to make those calls. On the other hand, ChatGPT has “read” everything. I’m willing to rely on it to produce a kind of “least common denominator” answer to the question. Between the two of us we should be able to come up with some kind of interesting list to present to the GOAT Committee.

Let’s look at what ChatGPT did. It gave me ten critics: Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling. I recognize every one of them and have read at least something by every one of them except Cleanth Brooks and Lionel Trilling.

But there’s only one critic that’s on both ChatGPT’s list and my quick and dirty list: Northrop Frye. And Chat’s listed the crucial book: Anatomy of Criticism. That’s very interesting, in part because, as far as I can tell, hardly any academics read Frye anymore. I’ll return to Frye in a later essay.

Two of its suggestions, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, are known primarily as creative writers not critics. As far as I know Susan Sontag didn’t produce any academic writing at all (she didn’t have a PhD). I’m not sure that Foucault has done any literary criticism at all, or only in passing; but he certainly has influenced a lot of post-structuralist critics. Harold Bloom is controversial within the academy, which is perhaps neither here nor there, and his contribution to academic literary criticism will likely rest of the fate of The Anxiety of Influence (I read it years ago). But he’s written a lot for the general public, including big fat books on Shakespeare and on The Western Canon, and he’s done a lot of editing. I believe Lionel Trilling is best known as an essayist and though he didn’t have a degree, he had a post at Columbia. Roland Barthes, a wide-ranging philosopher and semiotician, who wrote some very important work specifically about literature. Edward Said, an important critic for sure, but also an important public intellectual who was very active on behalf of Palestinians (he’s Palestinian himself). Cleanth Brooks, why not?

There’s the issue, though, what kind of intellectual production should we take into consideration when assessing literary critics for GOAThood? We might settle on academic literary criticism. That eliminates Sontag, Eliot, Woolf, and Trilling, though he held an academic post. Do we really want to do that? Bloom’s extra academic output may be more important that his academic output. It’s an issue.

What’s Up? Jeeves and Wooster [and now Uncle Fred]

I'm republishing this from The Valve, where it appeared on Oct. 19, 2009 (and still abides on the WayBack Machine), and occasioned a fair amount of debate over a queer reading, proposed by Adam Roberts, and a bit of consternation over fact that I had not actually read Wodehouse on Jeeves and Wooster, but only seen Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie play them on TV. However, looking over that debate, I notice that, during the course of it, I'd taken myself over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded Right Ho, Jeeves. Anyhow, I am now embarked on Uncle Fred in the Springtime, from 1939, where I found this rather tasty sentence, "And we had scarcely sat down to lunch, when up popped a soufflé looking like a diseased custard." 

Anyhow, read this post as you wish, and take a look at Adam Roberts' queer reading as well. But above all else, read some Wodehouse. Some have said he's the funniest writer in the English language.

* * * * *

Sometime in my early teens I discovered the boxes of old paperbacks my father kept in the basement. That’s where I found 1984, Brave New World, some miscellaneous Freud, and this that and the other. The other included some books by P. G. Wodehouse, which I didn’t read but which, for whatever reason, I took note of. Since then I’d bump into references to Wodehouse here and there, often taking the form of praise for his language, and finally, just last week, I found a cache of YouTube videos devoted to Jeeves and Wooster, a 1990s British TV series based on Wodehouse stores and starring Stephen Fry and Hugh “Dr. House” Laurie. So I watched a bunch of them.

What are these stories about?

Sure, they’re about a young gentleman of means, Bertie Wooster, and his valet (a gentleman’s personal gentleman), Reginald Wooster. Wooster is a good sort of chap, personable, not terribly well educated, who is constantly getting into scrapes helping his chums, or his aunts, out of this or that dicy situation. Jeeves is well-read – Spinoza is a favorite – highly competent in a wide variety of tasks, somewhat of a stickler for appropriate style, and most ingenious. He’s the one who comes up with stratagems for rescuing Bertie & Co. from their troubles.

That’s the premise of these stories, but what’s their cultural appeal? Bertie Wooster is of the idle rich, with a good nature that leavens his idleness. He doesn’t have to work and so he doesn’t. Jeeves does have to work, but he works as a servant to the affable Wooster, who is a Good Boss; there is, in fact, something of a comradeship between the two, though proprieties are maintained at all times. The net economic output of the pair is zero. Wooster’s wealth allows them to live in the world, but they need not be fully of it.

The premise is thus rather utopian. And the relationship between the two protagonists is one of balance. In some ways, Wooster, the aristocrat, is more of an Everyman than Jeeves, the valet. Jeeves, like most of us, has to work for a living, but his superior mien and education are at odds with his Everyman economic status. Taken together, the two add up to (some version of) an ideal middle-class male living in an economic utopia.

Or so it seems, on first take.

Coleridge's "Limbo" – Another ring composition?

This is from July 31, 2016. I'm bumping it to the top because we need a reminder of poetry.

While wandering in cyberspace, as I am sometimes wont to do, I came across a most curious, and thus alluring, blog: Samuel Taylor Bloggeridge. What a peculiar name, thought I, not realizing that this particular locus solus belonged to my old buddy from The Valve, Adam Roberts. Really though, thinking in retrospect, who else could it be? "Bloggeridge" indeed!

But then, Ted Nelson coined the term and birthed the concept of hypertext as an antidote to the (drug-induced) memory loss that (supposedly) gave us "Kubla Khan", did he not? He even called it Project Xanadu, long before Olivia Newton-John sang the song and did the movie (which has Gene Kelley's last film performance). One can only imagine how STC would tear-ass about cyberspace were he alive today.

In any event, and getting back on track, I'd come across a post Adam had written about "Limbo", one of STC's many poems that I have not studied. He wrote about it in a most tempting way. Thus:

The first thing to say about 'Limbo' is that its 28 lines divide into a central 12-lines section flanked by two paired 8-line sections, the first a kind of introduction, the second a sort of summary. What the two outer passages frame is a central image of 'human Time' as an old, blind man staring at the moon.

You can bet my ears pricked up when I read that. Like a hound on point I was. A bit later: “The circle in the centre of this circling poem has become a 'circumambience' prison-wall that imprisons ('immures', 'enthrals').” Be still my heart! "Circle", "circling"!? Could it be? Is this another ring-composition? What about the chiasmatic line 20 (which Adam fingers as consisting of monosyllables): "He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!" 

I've reset the poem to bring out the ring-form possibility. Give it a read and see what you think.

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—
   Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
   Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
   Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
   As moonlight on the dial of the day!
      But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
      An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
      That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
      But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—
         Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
         Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
         With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
         He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—
      As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
      His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
      Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
      He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!
   No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
   Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
   By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
   Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

Alternatively:

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—

Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!

But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—

Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—

As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.

A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

The first setting implies a nested structure:

       ( 1 ( 2 (3 ( X ) 3 ) 2 ) 1 )

The second implies a travel structure:

       1 > 2 > 3 > X > 3 > 2 > 1

This, obviously, requires some explanation. But not now.

High Castle and Inner Truth

Another bump. This one on general principle. The link to The Valve takes you to the Wayback Machine as The Valve is no longer on the web.

 * * * * *

With The Man in the High Castle streaming on Amazon Prime I figure it’s time to repost another piece from The Valve. This one appeared on March 6, 2008, and generated an interesting discussion. I recommend it to you.

I've just finished reading Philip K. Dick's 1962 The Man in the High Castle and find it pretty interesting – and sophisticated as well. It seems to be a meditation on the nature of history and of fiction, but without the self-conscious hijinks one finds in, say, John Barth. As you may know, it's set in an alternative history of the mid-20th century in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The eastern seaboard of the USA becomes German territory while the western seaboard becomes Japanese territory. The central area remains more-or-less independent.

One Hawthorne Abendsen lives in that central area, near Cheyenne. He's the man in the high castle, though he does not, in fact, live in a high castle. Nor is he a central character in the novel, though he's quite important. He's written a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that is quite popular in what remains of the USA, but is banned from the German and Japanese sections. Why? Because it is an alternative history in which the Germans and Japanese have lost the war, that's why. We see this history only in little bits here and there, as characters in the book either read or discuss Grasshopper. Those fragments are enough, however, to tell us that that history is not of our world, the history known to Dick's readers. Rather, it is a second alternative alternative history.

Grasshopper is not the only book within the book. We also have the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text often used for divination. One character in each of the books loosely linked plots consults the I Ching regularly. Beyond that, Abendsen, whom we meet at the very end of the book, made constant use of the I Ching in plotting Grasshopper. According to the Wikipedia article, Dick himself used the I Ching while plotting The Man in the High Castle.

* * * * *

Most of the story takes place in San Francisco. Much of the action centers on Nobusuke Tagomi, a Japanese trade representative. He's the focal point of an attempt by a Nazi faction to contact the Japanese government about a secret Nazi plan, Operation Dandelion, that involves the nuclear destruction of the Japanese homeland. Tagomi consults the I Ching and is in the process of reading Grasshopper. 

 

He also buys antiquities from one Robert Childan, who links to another plotline involving one Frank Frink (a Jew, and thereby in mortal danger), who goes into the jewelry business with a colleague. Frink consults the oracle and has read Grasshopper. And then there is Frink's wife, Juliana, a judo teacher somewhere in Colorado. Like Frank, from whom she is separated, she is a devotee of the I Ching and is in the process of reading Grasshopper, prompted by her paramour, a truck driver named Joe.

She's the one who, at the end of the book, meets Abendsen. At that meeting she casts an oracle:

“Do you know what hexagram that is?” she said. “Without using the chart?”

“Yes,” Hawthorne said.

“It's Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.”

Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?”

“Yes,” she said.

With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war.”

“Yes.”

And, more or less, is the end of the book. We don't know what happened with Operation Dandelion, a plan to destroy the Japanese homeland with nuclear weapons. So much is up in the air.

And yet we are to believe that the Japanese and the Germans lost the war when, in very obvious terms, they won it. By what Inner Truth can we consider them to have lost? That, I suppose, is one of the questions posed by The Man in the High Castle. There are certainly others. As our own Adam Roberts [who used to post to The Valve] observes:

Readings of The Man in the High Castle have tended to concentrate on the relativist philosophy of History the novels embodies, for what are doubtless obvious reasons. But in fact this is a much more sophisticated, and consciously artistic, tale than this. This is a book about the inter-relations of history, truth, and creativity: indeed, one of Dick's most brilliant touches is to advance the idea that there is a connection between these three terms, that they need to be understood in relation to one another.

Yes. And yet what most impresses me is that Dick manages this exploration with apparent ease and casualness. This is not a pyrotechnic performance. It does not draw its attention to its artistry. It simply goes about its business.

* * * * *

Some links:

Laura's Addiction, Philip K. dick from A to Z (site loading may be a bit wonky):
http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/tmithcindex.html

An interesting article: “Dickian Time in The Man in the High Castle”:
http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/article.html

Plotline diagram that goes with the preceding article:
http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/plotlines.html

What the diagram shows is that the Juliana-to-Abendsen plotline ends well before the Tagomi-Baynes plotline, despite the fact that its conclusion is also the conclusion of the book.

Here’s a nice Philip K. Dick website:
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/main.htm

R. Crumb on Dick's religious experience:
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo.htm

A bunch of covers for the book:
http://www.pkdickbooks.com/SFnovels/Man_high_castle.php

Adam Roberts on the future as imaginative territory

In a piece that is otherwise about Dickens's ghost stories, Adam Roberts writes:

The frame here is that the nineteenth-century saw a new kind of future-imagining. It’s Paul Alkon’s argument, advanced in The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (University of Georgia Press 1987) — that, basically, there was no such thing as a future-set fiction until the end of the eighteenth-century. He discusses a few, scattered earlier titles notionally set in the future, before expanding upon the success of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (‘The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One’ 1771) as the book that really instituted the mode of ‘futuristic fiction’ as such. Mercier’s book is a utopian reimagining of France set in the titular year, and it was in its day extremely popular. Indeed, its popularity led to a large number of imitators. Broadly: before Mercier utopias tended to be set today, but in some distant place; after Mercier utopias tended to be set in the future.

Through the early nineteenth-century loads of books were set in ‘the future’, many of them utopian works in exactly this Mercerian mode, such as Vladimir Odoyevsky’s The Year 4338 (1835) and Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836). But alongside this ‘new’ version of futuristic fiction was a vogue for a second kind of futuristic fiction, secularised (to some extent) versions of the old religious-apocalyptic future-imagining. The big hit in this idiom was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s prose-poem Le Dernier Homme (1805) — the whole of humanity bar one dies out, leaving Omegarus alone, to wander the earth solus, meditating upon mortality and finitude. Eventually Old Adam himself makes an appearance, and the novel ends with the graves giving up their dead and various other elements from St John’s revelation.

There were a great many of these ‘last man’ fictions, some reworkings of Grainville’s text, others ringing changes upon his theme — Auguste Creuzé de Lesser poeticised and expanded Grainville’s novel as Le Dernier Homme, poème imité de Grainville (1832), adding-in various materialist SFnalities (those flying cities and projects to explore other planets I mentioned). And husband-and-wife team Etienne-Paulin Gagne (L’Unitéide ou la Femme messie 1858) and Élise Gagne (Omégar ou le Dernier Homme 1859) reworked and expanded the Grainvillean original in respectively more spiritual and more materialised ways. In Britain, Byron’s striking and gloomy blank verse ‘Darkness’ (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) both engage the theme. Shelley’s novel is interesting, though pretty turgid it: a tale of political intrigue, war, a deadly pandemic set in AD 2100 that details the extinction of the entire human race, save only the titular ‘last man’, Lionel Verney, who wanders the depopulated landscapes and muses on nature, mortality and the universe.

We might style these two modes of imagining the future as spinning ‘positive’ (utopian) and ‘negative’ (apocalyptic) valences out of their futurism, but let’s not do that, actually. It would be clumsily over-simplistic of us. I’m more interested in the way the two modes feed into one another. Grainville’s novel ends with a more-or-less straight retelling of the Revelation of St John. Creuzé de Lesser’s poetic rewriting of Le Dernier Homme follows Grainville’s lead, but adds in a number of materialist and secular ‘futuristic’ details: a flying city, a plan to build craft and explore the solar system. Shelley’s Last Man jettisons the religious element altogether. We’re deep into the tradition that, through Verne and Wells and the US Pulps and Golden Age, broadens into science fictional futurism — a mode that remains, I suggest, broadly secularised but in ways that retain a significant, latent religious component.

Why does the Mercier-ist style of ‘futuristic fiction’ come so late? Why does it arrive, specifically, at the end of the 18th-century? Darko Suvin argues that it is to do with the American and French Revolutions — revolutionary thinking requires a secularised sense of a future that can be planned, and which improves on the present — as opposed to the apocalyptic sense of a future that wraps-up and ends this mortal world so common in the older religious traditions. Novels like Mercier’s map that secularised future fictively.

There may be something in this.

But it’s also worth noting that the futurism of L’An 2440 and Shelley’s Last Man is, qua futurism, pretty weak-beer. You can see from this frontispiece to a later edition of Mercier’s novel that France in the 25th-century is, in all respects save its more utopian social organisation, basically the France of the 18th-century.

Later:

But it is not until later in the nineteenth-century that secular future-fiction began styling its imagined worlds as, in multiple key ways, different to the world out of which they were written — differently furnished, technology-wise, its characters differently dressed, its social and personal weltanschauung differently construed. Perhaps the first book to do this was Edward Bellamy’s prodigiously successful Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the ‘bestselling American novel of the 19th-century’ stakes. The point here is that Bellamy takes an 1880s individual, ‘Julian West’, into his AD 2000 such that West’s contemporary preconceptions can be repeatedly startled by the technological and social-justice alterations that the future has effected. [...]

By the end of the century, most notably with the variegated futuristic fictions of H G Wells, the notion that the future would be in substantive ways different to the present had bedded itself into the emergent genre, such that it is — now — a core aspect of science fiction’s many futures. Nowadays ‘futuristic fiction’ simply comes with the sense, more or less axiomatically, that the future will be different to the present, not just in the old utopian-writing sense that a notional 1776, or 1789, will usher in a new form of social justice and harmony (according to whichever utopian crotchet or social-reform king-charles-head happens to be yours), but rather that change will happen across multiple fronts, have intricate and widespread ramifications. That the future will be a different country, and that they, that we, will do things differently there.

Still later:

For most of human history, that distinctive mental capacity we possess to project ourselves imaginatively into the to-come has been put at the service of a set of limited and particular things, a realm of possibility and planning conceived along, basically, one axis. The original futurists were the first farmers — a development from the timeless intensity of the hunt, in which humans no more have need for elaborate futurological skills than do lions and eagles, cats and dogs. Farmers, though, must plan. We cannot farm unless we know that the seasons will change and that we must plan for that change. We plan, though, on the basis that the future will be, essentially, the same as the past — that spring will follow winter, that next year will be basically like this year.

And still later, skipping most of the Dickens argument, we have:

What Dickens is saying (what Dickens is innovating) is the capacity of the future to haunt us in both a material and a spiritual sense — a new kind of futurity, captured here via the mode of the ghost story.

There's more at the link.

See this post from last year ago, When did the future become a site for human habitation like, say, crossing the ocean to colonize the New World? See also Tim Morton's notion of futurality ("...the possibility that things could be different") in, Reading Spacecraft 4: The future.

When did the future become a site for human habitation like, say, crossing the ocean to colonize the New World?

We’ve always thought about the future: Where’s the next meal coming from? How do we prepare for the festival? Will the harvest be good this year? What’ll I leave the grand kids? I have something different in mind. When did we start thinking about the future as a time and place when things would be different from they are now, when they would be better, and made so by effort we can undertake now? When did the future become that (kind of) place?

So I put the question to the Twitterverse:

Paul Alkon argued: late 18th century, run-up to the French Revolution (which was of its nature an exercise in futurity)

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) July 28, 2021

Yeeaah, sorta, depending on how you read late 18c industrialization. In England the circle around Godwin overlapped with industrial entrepreneurs; in France I'm not as sure, but the Revolution did quickly lead to the first engineering schools. There's a shared class basis.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) July 28, 2021

I'm thinking of the current Progress Studies movement, which seems to be huffing the fumes of Disney style techno-utopianism, amplifying them with the latest tech, and cutting with libertarianism and managerialism. As for perfecting humankind, that's AI.

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) July 28, 2021

That’s interesting. Very.

I’ve been pushing the Disney line for awhile now, maybe two years. He had boundless enthusiasm for the capacity of technology and industry to create a new an better world. But as far as I can tell he’d pretty much decided that the human world was fixed in its arrangements. Of course, when I talk of Walt Disney I don’t mean merely or only Walt Disney. I’m using him as a proxy for mid-20th century America. That’s the world he spoke to and spoke for.

And that world had begun falling apart by the time Disney died in 1966: the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, the counter culture (“turn on, tune in, and drop out”), the OPEC oil embargo, it just gets worse and worse. And the future, what’s that? The future is “when are we going to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, what’s Elon up to, more wild fires?”

I note that while a lot of science fiction is set in the future, not all of it is. Star Trek is, Star Wars is not. Sometimes science fiction is set in a world that’s just another fantasy space, like Narnia or Hogwarts, but sometimes it’s set in a world that’s (supposed to be) continuous with our world, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2150, or The Ministry of the Future. Take H. G. Wells. Is War of the Worlds set in another fantasy space, that happens to look a lot like the contemporary world, or is it in a world that’s continuous with, a potential extension of, the contemporary world? And The Time Machine? I’m not sure how to answer those questions.

I do know, however, that the Progress Studies movement seems to be much more interested in the question of “What happened to flying cars?” than in “What happened to the 15-hour workweek?” Why? I suppose the movement for Basic Universal Income is a bit like a push for the 15-hour workweek, but the emphasis is different.

And then there is Godwinian “perfectibility,” which Ted Underwood mentioned in a tweet. From Wikipedia:

Believing in the perfectibility of the race, that there are no innate principles, and therefore no original propensity to evil, he considered that “our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world.” All control of man by man was more or less intolerable, and the day would come when each man, doing what seems right in his own eyes, would also be doing what is in fact best for the community, because all will be guided by principles of pure reason.

Such optimism was combined with a strong empiricism to support Godwin’s belief that the evil actions of men are solely reliant on the corrupting influence of social conditions, and that changing these conditions could remove the evil in man. This is similar to the ideas of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, concerning the shortcomings of women as due to discouragement during their upbringing.

I don’t think the Progress Studies folks have a clue about that sort of thing. The tech-way to human perfection is obviously through technology: the Internet, virtual reality, augmented reality, something called the Metaverse, and above all, artificial intelligence. We’re to become one with our machines, if they’ll let us. Otherwise, they'll replace us. The horror! The horror!

But does anyone else have a vision of human perfectibility?

* * * * *

Let’s look at some passages from Keynes’s famous “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930).

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes today in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard-those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me-those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties-to solve the problem which has been set them.

I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.

Is anyone proposing to “map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs”? I don’t think so. Whenever I think about that my thoughts immediately lock on to the 60s & 70s counter-culture with its vague dreams of a coming Age of Aquarius (“let the sunshine in”). What happened to that? Gweneth Paltrow and Goop, that’s what happened, and of course Oprah Winfrey.

Keynes goes on:

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

Where are we now? Billionaires in space, that’s where. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” that’s where.

But who knows, maybe there’s hope of progress lurking beneath the surface. For inequality is an issue that’s been festering in the civic sphere ever since Occupy Wall Street went live in September of 2011, proclaiming “We are the 99%.” Meanwhile, who’s going to help us figure out how to “use the new-found bounty of nature” that will come our way when we finally come to our senses? Who’s thinking about that? For without that there can be no progress.

More later.

Adam Roberts reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry of the Future" – Reimagining how we think about the future

He’s ambivalent:

It’s a righteous novel, and I’m a KSR fan of longstanding, so I expected to like Ministry of the Future. And I did, if only up to a point. Beyond that point I ... didn't, really. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, or I would if it didn’t just look perversely contradictory, that the very reason I didn’t much like The Ministry of the Future is actually an index of its success: its ambition, its throughline and above all its—well, it’s ministry.

He goes on, “fat book…thin on plot,” which is hardly surprising. The plot is strung between two poles, one located in the Ministry based in Zurich and the other in a clinic in Northern India. Lots of leaden dialog, lots of information dumps, plenty of future tech, some gee-whiz, some not so much. This is all standard book-review stuff and Roberts handles it very well. Where he shines, though, is in his final two paragraphs:

The negative way of spinning all this would be to say that this novel can be a dry read, sometimes positively drought-dry. There are stretches here which are, baldly stated, an effort for the reader to push through. But the positive way to spin it would be to see it as a novel not just about climate change, but about the kind of stories we tell ourselves about disasters like climate change. Those stories are, clearly, not helping. Take ‘eucatastrophe’, Tolkien’s term for a thrilling story in which disaster impends, becomes more and more inevitable and then is averted at the very last moment. It’s a real workhorse of storytelling nowadays, the eucatastrophe, especially in cinema. There is a threat to the whole world! Let’s imagine that as a singular, external thing: an asteroid on collision course, a huge invading alien spaceship. Then let’s draw out the approaching disaster and make it seem like it could never be overcome. Finally, bam: rabbit from hat, the hero saves the day at the last minute.

The Ministry for the Future is, in effect, saying: that’s a bad story—not bad in entertainment terms but bad in verisimilitude terms. It is saying: we are actually, right now, indeed facing a threat to the whole world, but it’s not a single thing it’s a complex and deeply-embedded function of human interrelation and social praxis. It’s not exterior to us, it is us. And it won’t be solved by a single heroic flourish in the nick of time. It will be solved by a congeries of difficult, drawn-out, collective labour, much of which is so inimical to ‘popular narrative’ that we dismiss it as boring. It’s not boring, though: it’s literally life-and-death. And so one part of our large, human task will be: to reconfigure the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves about disaster and how to avert it.

Notice that word, “verisimilitude”, used about a work of fiction pitched in the future, albeit the near-enough future, a future at least some of the readers of the book will live into.

* * * * *

Check out KSR’s recent interview in The Jacobin:

I’ve steeped myself in the utopian tradition. It’s not a big body of literature, it’s easy to read the best hits of the utopian tradition. You could make a list, I mean roughly twenty or twenty-five books would be the highlights of the entire four hundred years, which is a little shocking. And maybe there’s more out there that hasn’t stayed in the canon. But if you talk about the utopian canon, it’s quite small — it’s interesting, it has its habits, its problems, its gaps.

Famously, from Thomas More (Utopia) on, there’s been a gap in the history — the utopia is separated by space or time, by a disjunction. They call it the Great Trench. In Utopia, they dug a great trench across the peninsula so that their peninsula became an island. And the Great Trench is endemic in utopian literature. There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. I’ve never liked that because one connotation of the word “utopian” is unreality, in the sense that it’s “never going to happen.”

So we have to fill in this trench. When Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, I think what he was talking about is that missing bridge from here to there. It’s hard to imagine a positive history, but it’s not impossible. And now, yes, it’s easy to imagine the end of the world because we are at the start of a mass extinction event. But he’s talking about hegemony, and a kind of Marxist reading of history, and the kind of Gramscian notion that everybody’s in the mindset that capitalism is reality itself and that there can never be any other way — so it’s hard to imagine the end of capitalism. But I would just flip it and say, it’s hard to imagine how we get to a better system. Imagining the better system isn’t that hard; you just make up some rules about how things should work. You could even say socialism is that kind of utopian imaginary. Let’s just do it this way, a kind of society of mutual aid. And I would agree with anyone who says, “Well, that’s a good system.”

The interesting thing, and also the new stories to tell if you’re a science fiction novelist, if you’re any kind of novelist — almost every story’s been told a few times — but the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt. It’s hard, but it’s interesting.

On reciting "Kubla Khan" from memory, a Twitter conversation

Adam Roberts was discussing his trials with the poems of Geoffrey Hill. He tweeted:

There are poems from "For The Unfallen" I can recite whole from memory, something not true for me of many postwar poets (Dylan excepted & not counting song lyrics).

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) November 28, 2019

To which I replied:

Do you deliberately set out to memorize is do you just read them and, ZIP!, they're in the memory vault?

Adam:

Some I just read and reread until they stick in my head. Sometimes I do set out to memorise a poem deliberately.

Me:

I've been working on "Kubla Khan" off and on for years, but couldn't recite the whole thing, only 54 lines. Big chunks of it, yes, but not the whole. If I worked just a bit, I'd have it. But then in time it would fall apart (you know, surface of a pond, etc.).

Adam, who is a Coleridge expert:

KK is four poems bolted together; each verse paragraph is a separate thing. Hard to hold all three. I can recite the first and the last, but lose my way in the middle.

Me:

Interesting remark, Adam, very interesting.

I've seen it set in type as 2 stanzas (1-36, 37-54), 3 (1-11, 12-36, 37-54), and of course 4 (1-11, 12-30, 31-36, 37-54). I believe the Crewe ms. goes for two.

But, yes, each of the 4 is its own little universe.

At that point I broke it off and went to take my morning shower. And then back to Twitter:

So, I was getting out of the shower and I tried a little experiment. I started with l. 37, "A damsel with..." and made it through to the end with no problem. Then I went to the beginning, got through l. 12, and failed at 13. That's the first stanza in the 4 stanza version.

So I skipped over to l. 31, "The shadow of ...", and made it through to 36. That's the third stanza. It's the 2nd stanza that's problematic, the one with the woman, demon lover, and the thrusting fountain.

So we fail at the same point, Adam. You know what they say, great minds fail alike, or is it flail alike?

Adam:

... or that part of the extraordinary genius of the opening & close of the poem inheres in its memorability, where the middle, with its sinuous subterranean river, is, appropriately enough, less so.

The King, Part III: Mano-a-mano, for the Trump era [Media Notes 15]

I'd say the latter.

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) November 3, 2019

Once more unto the breach!

As it were.

As I pointed out in the first post in this series, The King: Netflix does Falstaff, Hal, and Henry V, the most obvious difference between this film and Shakespeare’s plays is the transformation of Falstaff from a good-hearted and enthusiastic carouser into a cynical warrior so that Harry/Hal/Henry could make him his chief warrior in the campaign against France. That of necessity deprives of us the famous rejection scene at the end of Henry IV, Part II. The point of that scene is to emphasize the difference between Harry as a private individual, which he was when gadding about with Falstaff, and Harry as the King, which he became upon his coronation. It was the King, a public person(a) who rejected Falstaff, not the private individual. That is, Shakespeare has laid before us the distinction between the state as a legal and organizational entity.

That distinction disappears in The King. Of, of course, it’s implicit, but only that. Michôd doesn’t want us to conceptualize it, to think about it, to ponder it. And that (mis)conception has effects that ripple throughout the play. Consider the first battle, the one that didn’t happen. The dying King Henry has decided that Harry is not fit to inherit the throne and has told him that his younger brother Thomas will inherit the throne. Thomas is appointed to lead the battle against the rebels. Before the battle can be joined, however, Harry steps forward, challenges Hotspur to one-on-one combat, and wins. The rebellion is over.

Was he acting in his own capacity or in his capacity as, as what, no-longer-heir-apparent? At that point Harry had no official capacity; he was simply a high-born knight. And yet he could not have settled the matter in one-on-one unless Hotspur took him as a representative of the king, and hence of the state. The distinction between private individual and head of state is thus thoroughly muddied and confused.

That’s not how it happened in Henry IV, Part I. Harry reconciles with his father before the battle and, in consequence, is given command. Thomas is nowhere to be seen. The battle is a tight one and in the end Harry does Kill Hotspur in one-on-one combat. But this is only and the end of a full battle, not instead of one. Moreover, upon seeing Hotspur’s corpse, Falstaff stabs it and claims the victory for himself. Harry lets him get away with it. That’s a very different turn of events, one worth more attention than I can give it here.

Let’s now fast-forward to the Battle of Agincourt. In Shakespeare (Henry V) it is a straight-up battle, English long bows against French armor, and hard fought. It goes rather differently in The King. Before the battle begins, Harry travels to the French camp and challenges the Dauphin to one-on-one combat, as he had earlier challenged Hotspur. The Dauphin refuses. And so the battle commences, with the English adopting a high-risk plan proposed by Falstaff. Falstaff is killed. Then, and only after the battle had been raging most of the day, does the Dauphin decide to take Harry up on his offer. He offers to fight Henry one-on-one. Exhausted though he must have been, he accepts the challenge, knowing that the Dauphin had not seen combat that day and so was rested. What happens? The Dauphin slips and gets mired in the mud. Harry stabs him to death.

As Harry is now Henry V, we can no longer score this as a merely personal victory. But that, nonetheless, is how Michôd has set it up. The Dauphin treated Henry with utter contempt in the pre-battle meeting. So when he challenged Harry it was a personal challenge in which he intended to squash this contemptible English man like the vermin he was. He wasn’t fighting as the embodiment of the French crown; he was fight out of personal pique. The state barely exists in The King, which seems merely to be about rich and powerful men testing their mettle against one another.

And then we get to the end. Harry had decided that he had to wage war only after an assassin had come forward and revealed himself. Why would the assassin do this? Who knows? But it was enough to tip Harry’s mind in favor of the urgings of his Chief Justice, William Gascoigne, and go to war. When it was all over he the King was talking with his new bride, he learns from her that no assassin had been sent from France. Harry confronts Gascoigne about this and Gascoigne admits, yes, it was a ruse, and he goes on to point out that, as a result, the country is now united and at peace. Nonetheless the king stabs him. End of story.

None of that, of course, was in Shakespeare. Shakespeare gave us a clear distinction between statecraft, on the one hand, and personal interaction and loyalty on the other. The Henriad allows for national triumph and reconciliation. The King recognizes no such distinction and has no room for triumph or reconciliation. Battles are won, but there is no triumph, only the weary slog of mighty men fighting. Donald Trump recognizes no distinction between his personal interests and those of the nation he heads. The King is thus a story for the Trump era.

* * * * *

Jeb has called my attention to these:

• Netflix's 'The King' is anti-French nonsense that flatters a war criminal, says director of Agincourt museum
• Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law

In the first we find:

When asked about his interpretation of events at its London launch, Mr Michôd said: "Our version is very different to Shakespeare's and it is very much about a young man being consumed by the institutions of power. There are various version of Henry V basically about a heroic king invading a country. To us, this story needed to be more complicated than that one."

Ah, well yes, that explains a lot, doesn't it?

The King, Part II: Don’t mess with the Bard [Media Notes 14]

As you can see, I’ve been exchanging note with Adam Roberts on Twitter. For example:

"adds nothing" – Yes!

Shakespeare's Falstaff does (at least) 2 things: 1) He provides a critique of war, and 2) He opens the dramatic space so Henry V can be triumphal. To be sure, those are somewhat at odds, but then that's Falstaff.

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) November 3, 2019

We did indeed see the head come right off.

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) November 3, 2019

And so forth.

Adam is more critical than I was, and I wasn’t exactly effusive with praise. Puzzled is more like it. In first place, says, Adam, they tossed the language, some of the very best in English literature. I’m OK with that. It means they’d decided they weren’t going to do Shakespeare, just do a story he’s very well known for, and present it to an audience more familiar with Game of Thrones (which I’ve never seen) than the Bard. And then, secondly, they decided to revise Falstaff, substantially. That’s a more serious criticism, and I spent most of my previous post talking about that.

If I’d gone on I’d have talked about how, for all the grim visual razzle dazzle and special FX, the story wasn’t epic in scope. It was strained and constipated. Those royals and aristos at the top, just slogging it out in the mud like the rest of us. A bit of over-amplified sound and fury signifying zilch, nada, zip, 0. So what if one of his own courtiers tricked Henry into fighting a battle he didn’t want to fight. The country’s united, amirite? Ours is not an epic age. Ours is, well, um, err....

Right.

And Shakespeare is a bit of a problem. As I’ve pointed out in several recent posts – What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? [founder effect], Just how good is Shakespeare anyhow?,  and, I was right Shakespeare isn’t real (Lit Lab 17) – Shakespeare has long since ceased being a real person, a real writer, and ascended into the stratosphere of myth and symbol. He’s a cultural icon, the Author of Us All.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s no longer Shakespeare’s world. That is, perhaps we would do well to stop clinging to the hope/belief that we’re his children. Perhaps it is time to step out into our own brave new world.

How do we do that? I can imagine that Michôd and his team were quite clear in thinking that most of their audience didn’t really know Shakespeare and so wouldn’t care about fidelity to his early modern texts. But Game of Thrones, and any number of grimy medieval sagas we’ve seen in the last decade or two, that’s what their audience knows. So, why not? play to them. Shakespeare played to HIS audience, did he not? Can we do better than the Bard?

And so they played to their audience. And, no, they didn’t do better than the Bard. Do better? Not possible. As I’ve pointed out, the Bard isn’t real. He’s a myth. You can’t compete with, can’t top myth.

So why even try? We do THIS story at all? Why not make one up, you know, an original story.

[Easier said than done.]

Michôd is stuck. He wants to please, perhaps educate, even elevate? a post-Shakespeare audience. But alas he DOES know Shakespeare, can’t get him out of his mind. And so he’s stuck between two worlds, no longer believing in the old, not knowing how to walk in the new.

Two-faced Janus, facing backward and forward. Stuck.

Hoist on his own...you know the word, don’t you?

Forget it.

What’s foreign about SF from another culture? Is SF inherently cosmopolitan? [Media Notes 11]

I’m an American so by another culture I mean, well... I wouldn’t consider Adam Roberts foreign, though he’s British. I know there are some (relatively minor) cultural differences despite the fact that we speak and write pretty much the same language. Would I think of Jules Verne as foreign? Probably not. Perhaps for me foreign means non-Western.

I’ve got two recent examples in mind: Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2006), Tade Thompson, Rosewater (2016). If you changed obvious non-English and non-Western elements, such as names of people and places, would I have recognized either of these books as coming from a non-Western author? I don’t know. It’s not in the least obvious to me that I would. Oh, if pressed I might be able to make up something that makes one book Nigerian and the other Chinese, but I’d have no confidence in that. They’re both science fiction, and very different kinds of science fiction at that – Three-Body centers on computers and ranges over vast reaches of space and time while Rosewater is set in a two decade span later in this century and reads like a detective story – but it's the SF dominates my sense of either.

Does participation in the culture(s) of science fiction over-ride ethnocentric thematics and resonance? Not necessarily universal, not at all, but cosmopolitan perhaps? Is science fiction an inherently cosmopolitan literary form? Or is it becoming, has become, so?

* * * * *

And, yes, Thompson is an interesting case. He is a Yoruba who was born in London and his family moved to Nigeria while he was young. He is a native speaker of English. But then Nigeria is like that. Nigerian English is the official language in a country where some 250 peoples live.

* * * * *

Addendum, October 13, 2019: See this piece, Reading China in a Sci-Fi Novel, published by Robert Fay in 3 Quarks Daily. It discusses The Three-Body Problem. Here's a passage:

Ye Wenjei is an astrophysicist who is exiled to rural China during the madness of the 1960s Cultural Revolution. She witnesses state-sponsored destruction of the forests and in a moment of despair is given a clandestine copy of Silent Spring (1962), the seminal environmental book by Rachel Carson on the consequence of pesticides. Ye is amazed that a book with such a frank indictment of an institutionalized practice can exist.

Fast forward to the “near future,” and we meet a group of environmentalists who belong to a movement known as “Pastoral China.” The group advocates a policy of de-urbanization: dismantling cities, and returning to an older Chinese model of villages and towns. They are essentially neo-Luddites and their founder believes: “The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body.”

War and political chaos has always been features of human society, but climate change and environmental destruction are true existential threats, and they call for collective effort and sacrifice.

Yet what if the western, liberal order—with its focus on materialism, consumption, individual rights and the pursuit of happiness—is an obstacle to addressing climate change? What if the individual must now, more than ever, begin to wave its rights in favor of collective survival? What if the Chinese model is the one best suited to the climatic, demographic and resource challenges of the 21st Century?

Yet as the protests in Hong Kong demonstrate, even people who possess deep cultural and linguistic ties with China, have deep reservations about living under the Chinese political system.

Black to the future: Tade Thompson wins the Arthur C. Clarke for Rosewater

Adam Roberts, From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi, The Guardian, July 26, 2019.

Last week Tade Thompson, a British-born Yoruba writer, became only the second writer of black African heritage to win the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction. Three out of this year’s six shortlisted titles were by writers of colour, a reflection of the fact that some of today’s most exciting SF and fantasy writing comes from non-white authors. Recent high-profile examples include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2017, as well as that year’s Arthur C Clarke award and is being made into a TV series by Barry Jenkins; and NK Jemisin, who last year won a third consecutive Hugo award for best science fiction novel with the final part of her Broken Earth trilogy. Yet as Tom Hunter, award administrator for the Arthur C Clarke prize, points out, of the 124 submissions from 46 different publishers and imprints, only 7% were by writers of colour. He is unambiguous about what this means: “Diversity in science fiction needs action now.”

Thompson’s Rosewater was a worthy winner: a complex and fast-moving novel that expertly balances weird alien incursion against thriller action, zombie scares and a vividly rendered future Nigeria. He joins Whitehead and Jemisin as leading proponents of contemporary Afrofuturism, at a time when that movement is going mainstream – the film Black Panther took more than $1bn at the box office last year, and some of the world’s biggest recording artists have adopted Afrofuturist stylings, from Rihanna and Beyoncé to Janelle Monáe.

In fact the movement, and black engagement with sci-fi, go back a long way. Samuel Delany has been writing sci-fi from the black experience since the 1960s (he’s still going), Funkadelic were hymning their outer-space mothership in the 1970s, and the much missed Octavia Butler wrote some of the most powerful sci-fi of the 1980s and 90s. What’s happening today is a shift in focus: a black African rather than African American sci-fi phenomenon. Writer Geoff Ryman, a former Clarke winner himself, points out that Thompson’s success marks “the first time an African not living in the US has won a major sci-fi/fantasy award”.

Rosewater is a distinctively African example of Afrofuturism: a portrait of Nigeria in 2066, extrapolated from the bustling and expanding society of today, but with its own distinctive flavour – intricate, sometimes hectic, spacious. Where white western cyberpunk tends to isolate its characters, gloomily alienated individuals moving through hi-tech future cities, Thompson’s characters exist in vivid networks of kinship and friendship groups. The novel is as interested in protagonist Kaaro’s love life (he is believably gauche in relation to his various objects of desire) as in his superhero skills. The far-fetched and the mundane rub shoulders in a distinctive and agreeable manner. Kaaro has employment as a kind of telepathic James Bond, but he also has a dull job in a bank. The alien incursion, around which the novel’s titular city has been constructed, combines magic and science: healing the sick and bringing the dead back to zombie-life, but also provoking a hi-tech evolution in science.

A Rare African Flower, Saved

Here's another post about Rider Haggard, also from The Valve, from 28 May 2009. Like She (1986) it too centers on a exotic white race at the heart of Africa (though this post is not about that aspect of the story).

When flowers are not being flowers, they are sometimes put to use as symbols. I’m interested in one such usage, in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, though I don’t think it’s quite symbolic. Or rather, yes, it is easy to read it as symbolic, but to say so would be to paper over the fact that I don’t really understand how this usage works.

Regardless of exactly how the flower imagery works, it is being recruited to sexual service as suggested by the word “deflower,” but the potential victim is a 10-year old girl. While the girl escapes unharmed, Haggard has her in jeopardy for three chapters, three chapters where the reader doesn’t know what has happened or what might happen to her. Why does Haggard put the reader through this?

First I tell this girl’s story absent almost all of the flower imagery. Then I go back and present that imagery, not to analyze it in detail, but just to lay it out, to show how much of it there is and how specifically it is connected to the girl and her plight. Finally, I confront the question: Why?

Flossie Saved from the Masai

Allan Quatermain (1887) is a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines (1885), with the same three men – Allan Quatermain, Capt. John Good, and Sir Henry Curtis – traveling to a lost world deep inside Africa. The story opens in England three years after the trio had returned from the mines with a small pouch of diamonds and a large stash of adventuresome memories. They’re bored with civilization and itching for adventure. As Quatermain told himself:

And so in my trouble, as I walked up and down the oak-paneled vestibule of my house there in Yorkshire, I longed once more to throw myself into the arms of Nature. Not the Nature which you know, the Nature that waves in well-kept woods and smiles out in corn-fields, but Nature as she was in the age when creation was complete, undefiled as yet by any human sinks of sweltering humanity. I would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy.

And so, acting on a vague tale about a lost white race, the trio returns to East Africa, heading toward Mt. Kenya by way of the Tana River. Their immediate goal is a mission station run by a Scotsman, Mr. Mackenzie, whom they believe may have more specific information about this lost race.

They arrive at the mission after the usual dangers, which included a bunch of Masai warriors who had been set upon them to settle a score. They escape the Masai – which means that the score has not been settled. The Masai will return.

Let's Have an Adventure! – King Soloman's Mines

Bumping this to the top of the queue because, I've been thinking about it in relation to Heart of Darkness. I'm also thinking about She, and expect to post about it in a day or three.

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Another reprint from The Valve, this one from May of 2009. I've taken the liberty of appending a comment by Adam Roberts, and my reply to that comment.

Taking a bet from his brother that he couldn’t write a book as good as Treasure Island, H. Rider Haggard wrote and published King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. Such a strange book it was that publisher after publisher rejected it. It became a smash hit. 

As for that strangeness, King Solomon's Mines is of a genre that is strange no more, an adventure into a Lost World. 

The story follows three Brits as they trek deep into East African in search of the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon. The journey is initiated by Sir Henry Curtis, who is accompanied by Capt. John Good, recently retired from the Royal Navy. Sir Henry is looking for his younger brother, George, who had disappeared while searching for the mines. While on a steamer from Cape Town to Durban Curtis and Good meet Allan Quartermain, a well-known big-game hunter. Upon learning of their mission, Quartermain reveals that he has an old hand-drawn map to the mines that he’d acquired years ago from a Portuguese “at a place called Sitanda’s Kraal, and a miserable place it was, for one could get nothing to eat there, and there was but little game about.” This man, José Silvestre, told a story about an ancestor’s struggle and misfortune in a search for Solomon’s fabulous wealth. That ancestor made the map that Silvestre gave to Quartermain just before he expired. 

That is the map, or rather a copy of it, that Quartermain used to guide Curtis and Good deep into the African interior. But not before a bargain had been struck. Curtis agreed 1) to an up-front fee of £500, 2)to pay all expedition expenses and 3) that “any ivory or other valuables” they got would be split between Good and Quartermain. He further agreed (4) to provide for Quartermain’s son, Henry, should Quartermain die or be disabled. Having struck the bargain, Quartermain arranged an expedition, and off they went adventuring deep into the heart of the African continent.

The details of those adventures – an elephant hunt, desert treks, mountain climbing, a big battle, underground scrambling – are remarkable enough. But that’s not what I’m writing about. For one thing adventures lose all their fun and vigor in summary. More particularly, the adventures are a setting for something else.

What is that something else? Social relations. I want to focus on the relations among the central trio of characters and between those characters and the Kukuana, a fictional people who inhabit the region where Solomon’s mines are located.