Acephalous

"This Nicholas Sandworm anon let flee a fart, as gret as it hadde ben a thundir dent."

(x-p-p-p-posted .)

On this day in 1920, Frank Herbert Jr. was born.  Herbert devoted six years to “researching” what would become the most popular science fiction novel of all time. I’ve always wondered what counts as “research” when writing a novel.  I can understand the need for writers of hard science fiction to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of a particular field, but for someone like Herbert, wouldn’t “world-building” more accurately describe his efforts?  I say this because Herbert describes a world in which the mysticism and magic have replaced science and technology.

This time I am lifting from Adam Robert‘s excellent History of Science Fiction, in which he claims “one of the book’s greatest strengths is its detailed and plausible rendering of the political context” (236).  What Herbert spent six years “researching,” then, was the complex political environs of the interplanetary empire he’d invented because Dune‘s reputation as an environmental novel is undeserved.  The overgrown extremophiles who inhabit Arrakis are humans from Earth, but somehow survive on a planet with no viable means to create or sustain an atmosphere.  As Roberts writes:

We may wonder, for instance, how Dune’s atmosphere is oxygenated in the absence of planetary vegetation.  In later books Herbert suggests that the sandworms fart oxygen, which hardly address the problem.

Indeed, without an atmospheric density in the neighborhood of 1.2 kg/m³ it wouldn’t matter what element those sandworms farted--it would’ve drifted up and away.  And where did all that sand come from anyway? The most efficient means of producing sand is wave action, but even if Herbert wanted to be inefficient, a little research would’ve taught him that sand requires big rocks and weathering processes.  The geological history of a planet consisting entirely of sand is--will you let me get my geology geek on, please?  The opportunities to do so are few and very far between.  Fine then.  I’ll be mysterious.*

I don’t mean to diminish Herbert’s accomplishments in Dune. So long as he was alive, the series educated science types about the nuances and niceties of medieval politics.  (The process, if not the history.) That said, I always found Herbert’s forecast of future history more than a little pessimistic.  Like the Terminator and Battlestar Galactica franchises, the Dune sextet pivots on a war between man and formerly enslaved machine, the result of which was a return to a pre-computational society.  The mentats are bred--"Fancy meeting you here, dissertation. Please GO AWAY."--they are bred to be mathematical savants, and spice mystically allows for interstellar travel sans star-charts.  So, no computers needed.  However, Herbert’s novels seem to argue that a rejection of the modern technology entails a rejection of modern political systems--as if dispensing with the convenience of a calculator is the first sign of feudalism’s revival.

Besides the obvious problem with this--somehow those Athenians managed to be quasi-democratic before the Age of Apple--and despite Herbert’s obvious critique of hierarchy and messianic thought, I can’t help but think the novels engender a nostalgia for certainty in their readers.  We might not know how spice works, but Our Dear God-Emperor surely does.  (Despite having personally and purposely evolved into a human-sandworm hybrid--about which plot-point my dissertation rears its head like Giant Putin over unsuspecting Alaska. So I’ll stop now lest I invite insanity in, slap it on the back, and offer it a brew--which is, yes, how a body feels about a dissertation recently completed.  I hear tell this subsides in time, but so far I’ve felt none of it.)

 

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*By which I don’t mean anything like “I sat here trying to think what would have to happen for such a planet to come about--including, but not limited to, a cessation of mountain-building after a period of intense weathering by something other than water, since water poisons the marvelous beasts who produce the spice melange and whose evolution would’ve spanned untold eons.” I don’t mean anything like that.  I know the answer, I’m simply not in the mood to share.

I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket.

(X-punted over the Edge of the American West.)

On this day in 1907, the second greatest proselytizer for the strident, oversimple libertarianism of high school debaters, Robert Heinlein, was born. Second only to The Fountainhead in importance to adolescent males whose genius isn't appreciated by authoritarian parents, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress informs readers How [to] Find Freedom in an Unfree World: chunk definite articles, catapult space rocks at Middle America, and embrace Ho Chi Minh.  As my colleague Adam Roberts argues:

The Style of No Style

A very smart man once wrote:

I think one of [a particular author's] greatest gifts—one that will be enduring—is, paradoxically, the unevenness of his prose. It makes reading him much more disturbing than, say, reading Kafka, who always writes so well, even when he is turning into a giant bug. The fact that he writes well sort of insulates us, whereas in [this author's] case, the madness is evident in the unsteady prose stylings, and so feels more contagious on our fingertips.

I'm currently re-reading one of this author's later novels and am inclined to agree.  There's a lurching quality to his mostly competent, sometimes execrable, occasionally brilliant prose.  Readers remain uncomfortable, never able to predict whether the next sentence will advance the plot; obliterate the illusion of immersion; or force them to pirouette, spot, and re-read.  The prose isn't literary per se, but the effect is.  (Think "Nausikaa.")  To wit:

"Look," the voice said.

He looked—and saw that his control board, which contained all his communications gear, was on fire.  "Jesus Christ," he said, and reached for the wall switch that would turn on the emergency fire extinguisher.  Then he realized something.  Something perplexing.  The control panel was burning, it was not consumed.

Most of you probably know where this is from, but if you didn't—if you encountered a passage like that in the wild—would you be so quick to dismiss it?  The splice is artful.  The comma's beat lulls you into expecting the ordinary, not something you haven't heard since Hebrew school.

The Future of Politics & Advertisements

Little annoys me more than the poor decision-making skills of authors when it comes to branding the future.  The names and ethnicities of politicians strive to shock but elicit nothing but groans. 

There will never be a President Osama bin Reebok, III.  Nor will "Hail to the Chief" ever accompany Madame President Wendy Shorty-Muhammad into the corridors of power.  I understand why science fiction writers want their future to reflect the marginal values of the present, but there will never be a President who sells half his name to a shoe company or spent her formative years in porn. (There might be a Muslim President one day, but years of poorly thought out speculative fiction make the name difficult to consider soberly.)

Similarly, pharmacies of the future will not stock medication with names like "Happitol" or "Blissbutrin."  People will not ask their pharmacist whether "Breathix" is right for them, or what the recommended dosage of "Muscledrine" is.  Medications will not be "cleverly" christened.  Actual people don't need the Head-On Apply-Directly-to-the-Forehead approach to naming medications.  Except apparently they do.

Seems I'm wrong about the future.  The present too, for that matter:

On page 40 of the latest issue of Rolling Stone appears a phrase straight out of bad science fiction: "President Barack Hussein Obama."  A year ago that phrase would've clunked like so much speculative overkill.  ("A President whose name almost rhymes with 'Osama'?  Not likely.  We'll see Little Oral Annie in the Rose Garden first.")

Page 41 of the latest issue of Rolling Stone consists entirely of an ad for Abilify, the latest and most ghastly named entrant into the already crowded field of antidepressants.  (Possible side effects include "an inner sense of restlessness or need to move," but be careful, because Abilify "can affect your judgment and motor skills," so if you need to move avoid cars and heavy machinery.  Don't ask anyone for a ride either, because Abilify may cause permanent abnormal and incontrollable facial movements that send people the wrong signal.)

All of which is only to say that while the future may be now, it lacks imagination.  It could've been so much better, if only we'd applied some Thought-On Directly Where It Reels ... 

Unemployed Clouds of Sentient Ambiplasma and Your Tenure Review

Every other blog I read linked to John Tierney's "Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guy's Couch" today.  The article and the work it describes dutifully scream the strained lyric required of all academic appropriations of popular culture:

SCIENCE FICTION MAY BE SCIENCE FACT! 

Don't get me wrong.  In all probability, we do exist only in the damp basement of some posthuman slob's parent's housicle, orbiting a dilapidated artificial planetoid in a once posh sector of subspace.*  And in all probability, the housicle dangles from an asteroid which only exists on the backup server of a quantum computer floating in the depths of a gas giant orbiting a dying sun, under the care of a shiftless cloud of sentient ambiplasma.**

This is a given.

Much more interesting are the comments of Jonathon Von Post, which appear on all the blogs which link to the Tierney.  Von Post complains that the article's subject, Nick Bostrom, fails to note that he, Von Post, beat him, Bostrom, to the we-are-simulated-by-positron-electron-entities a-googol-years-in-the-future punch.  I'm not able to evalute his claim, since the article in question, ""Human Destiny and the End of Time," published in Quantum Science Fiction in 1991, isn't available online.  But Von Post's crusade for acknowledgment, however superficially narcissistic it may seem, is a compelling reminder of a couple of things:

1. In academia, precedence matters.
2. There's no official means of establishing it.

Given that this is the case, I'm led to these thoughts:

1. If Quantum Science Fiction was online and linkable, Von Post's claims could easily be verified.
2. If all scholarship was available online, our judgments wouldn't be influenced by who turned out to be the better popularizer. 

I admit that Von Post sounds like a crank and behaves like a troll.  Still, there's a chance his embitterment is justified, that he was steamrolled by a duplicitous colleague or ignored by an unethical careerist.  A freely available, easily searchable scholarly database could put such issues to rest.  If establishing precedence were but a Google Toolbar away, how much festering animus could be lanced clean? 

I don't know, but I'd love to.

*When s/he thinks about us on hir thog, hir co-thogger rolls eleven eyes and wonders, not for the first time, whether he should do hir a favor and unplug us already: "S/he slithers around the basement in that hideous sweatpant for 3,971 hours a day and it's not healthy.  S/he'll be dead before s/he's twenty-two centuries if s/he keeps this up." 

**Its psylog (pronounced "slog" by the mouthed) is currently devoted to Lindsay Lohan's recent legal troubles, from which it's two simulated realities removed.  This should come as no surprise.  It really loved Mean Girls, and thinks knows "Linds," as it calls her, will still be the next Glenn Close.

Without Me, He'd Only Be Everything; or, Adam Roberts' Land of the Headless

Way back when, in the Before Time, Adam Roberts didn't write for The Valve and I hadn't read any of his novels.  Then Adam came around, and started writing for The Valve, but what most people don't realize is that I'm the most important person in this story ... at least so long as I'm the one who tells it. 

The way I tell it, Adam was scouring the internet doing research.  One day, long after he had finished thinking through the premise of his novel, he came across Acephalous.  After observing my radiant resplendence waxing effulgent, he contacted me, and so began the chain of events which would lead to him being the much better contributor to The Valve ... by which I mean, only after basking in the intense brilliant glowing of my intensely glowing brilliance did he become the shining star he is.   Without me, he'd be nothing more than a tenured professor who writes award-winning science fiction in his spare time. 

So when I trudged down to campus today, checked my box and found a copy of his new novel, Land of the Headless, I couldn't wait to read it.  Sure, the idea was his, as was its successful execution ... but without my keen editorial advice, the acknowledgments page never would've read:

Thanks to Rachel, my sisters, my parents, and to Simon, my editor.  Scott Eric Kaufman read the whole manuscript and made many helpful suggestions.  His headless realm is at http://acephalous.typepad.com.

You see?  Without my input, the most important part of that acknowledgment would've been lost to history.  To history!  Mark my words: one day when I'm less than half as successful as him, Adam will thank me for deigning to appear in his acknowledgments.*

*All of which is only to say, I feel privileged to have read this fine work of speculative fiction prepublication, and can't wait to reread it, so that I might annoy my wife with every minuscule trace of my possible influence on the finished product.  (I could go all languagehat on her and read a chapter aloud every night before I tuck us in ... but that'd be creepy.  Why isn't it creepy when he does it?) 

The Library of America Presents...

(X-posted to the Valve)

...some “Xtre-heeemely Cheezy Sci-Fi Ga-haaarbage.”  (Credit CR and Dr. Percival Cox for the words and music there.)  The popular canonization of pulp writers—The Library of America doesn’t reflect academic sensibilities as much as one might think—will directly influence the way future generations of scholars view the latter half of the twentieth century, but how accurate will it be?  I ask more as an historicist than a cultural anthropologist, and largely because Daniel Green’s recent post about the relation of literary language to the world represented through it has me thinking about turn-of-the-last-century debates on the verisimilitude of “realist” and “naturalist” works. 

To bandy in some gross overgeneralizations, the naturalist perspective is often shorthanded—via Tennyson—“nature, red in tooth and claw.” Jack London and Frank Norris did not represent the world as it is, but as it would have been were it not for the patina of civilization.  Their work may not reflect or represent society, but it does register the fact that something shook the cultural landscape, and that this something related to the crumbling of anthropocentric conceit.  Daniel invokes another metaphor, that of fiction as a window through which one peers into the past, but my three models—reflection, representation and registering—seem a more useful way to consider the relationship of literature to history.  M.H. Abrams already covered reflection and representation, so I’ll focus on registering here.  To pick a random example:

I consider myself a literary seismologist, scouring the written record for subtle signs of a larger catastrophe.  I sometimes dream of stumbling into the literary equivalent of “a gaping open wound in the earth’s skin,” but mostly I content myself with reading rock face for signs of deformities evolutionary in origin.  The rocks will reveal their secrets, but only if one speaks the language. 

To choose another entirely random example, one cannot identify Silas Weir Mitchell’s influences without being familiar with the conventions of the historical romance; the development of the Darwinian and Lamarckian branches of evolutionary science; American politics, foreign and domestic, &c.  Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lt. Col. of His Excellency General Washington is less a window through which you can spy the nineteenth century prancing around in its unmentionables, and more an Ozarks—deceptively flat, its plateaus are all that remain of a mountain thrust high back when Bermuda waltzed into the Atlantic.  Just as it takes a trained eye to look at flatland and see a mountain island surrounded by vast coral complexes, so too does it take a trained historicist to read a novel about the Revolutionary War and witness competing theories of physical and social evolution attempting to account for McKinley-era American imperialism.

To return to the top now: thinking about the present in historicist terms affords me perspective I would otherwise lack, what with the contemporary moment being so contemporary and momentous.  So, presuming the eyes who scan our outcrops are trained, what will they make of the twentieth century as represented in its pulpier moments.  What evidence of epochal violence will they find?  Will the paranoia of Dick remain superlative, or will it be presumed endemic, his work egregiously symptomatic of a common malaise?