Author: T.L. James

Pavel Navarro on Technocracy

Technocracy is not explicitly socialist, but like Marxism and Fascism it springs from the same roots. Each ideology claims to order society by scientific principles, with science cited as the basis of both its inevitability and its moral claim to power. In spite of these scientific pretensions, each ignores reality in service to its vision – in particular, the nature of the human material from which each would construct its vision of heaven on earth. But ‘scientific ideology’ is a contradiction: the hallmark of any ideology is the filtering of reality through the lens of political fantasy, the opposite of the pursuit of transcendental reality that defines science.

— Avery Easton

Avery Easton on Scientific Honesty

These ‘priests of science’ are really no different from anyone else: when money, power, and status are on offer, they too will lie, cheat, and steal. Even if the gains are short-lived. Even if they destroy their reputations and credibility. Even if it wrecks the prestige of their profession or field. They’re only human, after all – a fact that they may find even harder to admit to.

— Avery Easton

Avery Easton on Winning Arguments

The desire to win arguments is an intellectually corrupting one. When winning rather than a better apprehension of the truth is the goal, one is inclined to use any manner of sophistry to do so. The truth actually becomes an obstacle to doing what it takes to score points. The lust for demonstrating one’s superior intelligence overcomes any scruples about intellectual integrity.

— Avery Easton

Hadrien Laporte on Open-Mindedness

How do you persuade people who pride themselves on their intelligence to consider any novel idea, when that idea involves a truth they don’t want to hear, don’t want to think about, and will refuse to entertain even provisionally, even in those private moments when no one else can possibly guess what they’re thinking?

— Hadrien Laporte

Avery Easton on Pedants

Pedants are a dime a dozen. It takes little intellectual firepower to memorize the logical fallacies well enough to ‘find’ them everywhere, or to reflexively demand sources and attributions for every claim or conjecture, or to seize on some immaterial discrepancy to ‘win’ an argument whose substance one hasn’t even perceived – let alone attempted to understand well enough to counter. The measure of wisdom is not that one can poke holes in the arguments of others, but that having discovered a hole, one can offer constructive guidance for how they can patch it. Pedantic ‘gotcha games’ don’t prove intellectual superiority, they just demonstrate a shallow intellectual vanity.

— Avery Easton

Tales of Known Space

I’ve been making a lot of progress on the “launch” story for the new fictional universe over the past two weeks, but started to notice that the text was a bit academic. I figured this was due to not reading any fiction for a while, so I set aside The Master and His Emissary (yet again – it’s slow going), and picked up my old, old copy of Larry Niven’s anthology, Tales of Known Space.

Niven was one of the first science fiction authors that I ever read*, and along with Heinlein (who I didn’t discover until I was 17) was long my favorite author in the genre. But after a while, and for very different reasons, both lost their luster – Niven because of his Eternal 1968 Southern California fixation**, Heinlein because I couldn’t un-read his biography.

While there was a bit of that fixation evident in ToKS, I was surprised at how very different some of his early stories were in tone and style to those which came only a few years later. “Becalmed in Hell” and the three Mars stories, “Eye of an Octopus”, “How the Heroes Die”, and “At the Bottom of a Hole” (all published 1965-66) had the feel of Arthur C. Clarke stories. Contrast this with “Cloak of Anarchy” (1972), which displays pretty much all of Niven’s characteristic themes and elements (“A Relic of the Empire” from 1968, which is not in this anthology, shows his distinct style even earlier).

I think Niven was a good choice of an example for tightening up my own fiction, given how much detail he seems to pack into few words. “Eye of an Octopus”, for example, is quite short as short stories go, yet covers a lot of ground: introducing his (ultimately doomed) Martians, partially explaining why Mars is bypassed in the Known Space future history, laying the groundwork for the two sequel stories, etc., mixed in with some plausible xenoarchaeology and a bit of unexpectedly exciting biochemistry.

Writing technique aside, the story that stood out for me the most was “How the Heroes Die”. I don’t remember reading it before, so much so that it felt like an instance of the Mandela Effect. I’ve been immersed in Current Year for so long that I got to the reveal of why John Carter (no, not that one) murdered Lew Harness, and bust up laughing. Not only could I not remember having read that before, I couldn’t believe that I had never once encountered any outrage about it, nor calls for Niven’s cancellation. Sure, it was published in 1966, but when has the passage of time ever stopped presentists from denouncing someone for expressing then-ordinary-now-problematic notions?

* – The first science fiction book I recall reading was Lucifer’s Hammer. In fifth grade. Imagine a Current Year govskool teacher’s scandalized reaction to finding one of her precocious inmates reading a post-apocalypse novel where Black Power militants join forces with Army deserters to pillage the ruins of civilization while eating the survivors – and aren’t the protagonists.

** – “Shall we indulge in yet another tedious narrative dump about overpopulation, strange hair/beard styles, and sexual freedom?“

Elleander Morning

I haven’t read it yet (too much on my plate and too many books on my reading pile), but this looks good based on the originality of the premise alone. Apparently there is something original to be done with the “Kill Hitler Before He Starts” genre.