Books | A Fistful of Photons

More Than Human

I’d never heard of this book, though the title itself seemed familiar (probably from the similar phrase from Blade Runner). I’d also heard of Theodore Sturgeon as one of the big names of the Silver Age, but knew nothing of his writing, and nothing of him beyond Heinlein famously helping him out of a spell of writer’s block. When I saw this book, I took the opportunity to expand my classic SF reading.

Well. It was weird. I’ll give him that.

The story concerns a group of children with seemingly random psychic gifts: a young man with telepathy, a young girl with telekinesis, young twin girls with teleportation, and a…baby…thing…with partial telepathy and “superintellect” (not sure what an appropriate psychic term for this gift would be).

It’s a short book that covers a lot of ground. The first section concerns how they are drawn together to form a cooperative psychic ‘entity’ they call the “gestalt” – they remain distinct individuals, but their abilities link them into a greater, integrated whole. The second section addresses what happens when one part of the gestalt is lost and must be replaced – by the non-ideal replacement available at the time – and how it changes as a result. The third section concerns a normal person affected by crossing paths with the gestalt, and how what happens to him threatens to pull the entity apart.

As I said, it was weird. Not good-weird, like a Twilight Zone episode or a Lovecraft story, nor bad-weird, as in consciously trying to be outré or cutting edge or ‘experimental’. It was weird in a very similar way to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from around the same time (1953 vs. 1946) – an unusual subject handled in an unusual way.

Sturgeon’s use of language is actually quite good, and he manages to successfully wrangle a number of details of the action, the nature of the various gifts, and in-story history, while showing believable character changes over time – all in, again, what is a fairly short novel.

Besides the resemblance to Bester, one thing that stuck out to me was the occasional pandering on racial issues. Like Heinlein, Sturgeon created non-white characters at a time (circa 1950) when that was not commonly done. But unlike Heinlein, Sturgeon wasn’t always as adept at smoothly weaving this ahead-of-the-times element into the story. There are moments when he presents the reader with a clumsy “racism bad, m’kay?” message of the type common to broadcast television of the Seventies, in what felt like the same manner: We interrupt the dramatic flow of this program to shoehorn in a Very Special Moral Lecture against __-ism.

Overall, I can’t say that there was a much in it that stuck with me in terms of ideas. After reading it, it was like I’d…read it. That’s it. Entertaining in the moment but lean on lasting impressions, especially compared to Earth Abides, which I purchased at the same time and with which I read it back-to-back.

Earth Abides

This book caught my eye when I mistook it for the source of The Quiet Earth. (It’s plain from the jacket blurb that they’re not the same story at all.) It’s one of those books whose title I’d heard a number of times, enough to be at least aware that it was a post-apocalypse story, but surprisingly had never read.

My opinion is…mixed.

The story starts with the protagonist, Ish Williams, receiving a rattlesnake bite that happens to save his life. When he recovers and returns from his remote cabin, he discovers that nearly every human on Earth has died from “super measles”, an contagion of unknown origin and extreme lethality. The book then follows Ish through the next 50 years, focusing on three different periods, as he finds other survivors and builds a…er…tribe.

And “tribe” is a big, big part of the problem.

On first reading, the story was entertaining and interesting. Stewart thought through a number of details well, such as the lingering of hydropower, the rapid failure of the roads, and the rewilding (or extinction) of domesticated plants and animals. There are a number of really good emotionally-charged scenes (dealing with Charlie, the Joey scene, and much of “The Last American”, for example).

It takes a little while to get used to his writing style, which I guess you could call “post-war experimental” (it was first published in 1949). The dialogue is sterile in some places, academic in others, rarely naturalistic. The ongoing effects of the near-disappearance of Man are described by italicized narrative dumps, whose perspective isn’t consistent (much of the time these read like excerpts from a far-future historical overview of the Great Disaster, but sometimes like a narration of ongoing events, and at other times like conventional omniscient perspective). It quickly takes on that “period” feel of other books from that era, e.g. Alas, Babylon (1959), and you just go with it.

It was compelling enough to read straight through over the course of a weekend. But the more I’ve thought of it over the past week, the more problems I’ve found with it.

The repeated malthusian elements, which seem common to the point of obsession with SF authors from the end of WWII through perhaps the mid-1980s. Okay, we get it. There are a lot of humans. Fine. But it gets really tiresome when (like global warming, which took its place as favored hobby-horse) it has to be repeatedly, compulsively, reflexively inserted into every story.
The nihilism. There is a thread throughout that, hey, you know, maybe it’s a good thing, after all, that human civilization is nearly dead. Maybe it’s overrated, and even a mistake, and we should let it die. Which they do, albeit passively.
The passivity – the characters’ unwillingness or lack of motivation to do anything active to preserve civilization for the following generations. This is demonstrated intentionally through the running “joke” about getting a gas-powered refrigerator working, the single, desultory instance after two decades of scouting for other long-term survivors, and the lack of interest in restoring electricity or repairing the water supply. Ish himself comments repeatedly on how he feels himself to be an observer, which appears to restrain him from taking meaningful action when necessary.
The most significant instance is Ish’s petulant and impotent complaints about lack of support from the other parents regarding teaching their kids to read. The abundance of long-shelf-life food is blamed (nobody has to work to eat, so the kids are allowed to play all the time, there’s no sense of urgency in learning or preserving knowledge, etc.), but this abundance could have had exactly the opposite outcome had Ish put any effort at all into actually being a leader: having no need to hunt, forage, or farm, the kids had all the time in the world to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to restart human civilization. But he didn’t plan for that when the kids were still infants, and he didn’t put his foot down when the parents didn’t support him, in spite of being the obvious and unquestioned leader of the Tribe.
When he discovered that his failure to push their education had resulted in a growing superstitiousness among the children, Ish could have harnessed it to ensure a longer-term recovery of civilization by creating a “priesthood” to serve (and preserve) the university library. But nah. Better to let the kids continue goofing off and remain illiterate and innumerate, and complain impotently about it, than to try.
After Joey meets his blatantly telegraphed doom (you didn’t see that coming fifty pages away?), Ish performs one last act of teaching: showing the kids how to make a bow and arrow – as a toy. After that, he gives in and gives up, and does nothing more to rekindle civilization, letting the Tribe degenerate into a primitive, superstitious, and ignorant band of savages.

Ish is a pathetic coward. Kinda ruins the book.

The only other apocalypse fiction where I’ve encountered this “giving up on civilization” element is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. But there, a clear reason for doing so – the cycle of growth and collapse – had been established from the beginning (“All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”). The active choice at the end of the series to abandon technological civilization and merge with the early homo sapiens of our Earth is portrayed as a measure to break this cycle. The characters accept its necessity yet are hopeful that something better might emerge in time – they’re not passive in the moment and ambivalent about whether regains civilization or even survives as a species.

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.

Even Less Impressed With Our Technocratic Overlords

Sapiens just gets worse the more I read.

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

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

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

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

Busywork as Social Order Maintenance

I found this passage from Two Years Before the Mast interesting for several reasons (emphasis mine):

Before I end my explanations, it may be well to define a day’s work, and to correct a mistake prevalent among landsmen about a sailor’s life. Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “Are not sailors very idle at sea? What can they find to do?” This is a natural mistake, and, being frequently made, is one which every sailor feels interested in having corrected. In the first place, then, the discipline of the ship requires every man to be at work upon something when he is on deck, except at night and on Sundays. At all other times you will never see a man, on board a well-ordered vessel, standing idle on deck, sitting down, or leaning over the side. It is the officers’ duty to keep every one at work, even if there is nothing to be done but to scrape the rust from the chain cables. In no state prison are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched. No conversation is allowed among the crew at their duty, and though they frequently do talk when aloft, or when near one another, yet they stop when an officer is nigh.

…This is the usual resource upon a rainy day, for then it will not do to work upon rigging; and when it is pouring down in floods, instead of letting the sailors stand about in sheltered places, and talk, and keep themselves comfortable, they are separated to different parts of the ship and kept at work picking oakum. I have seen oakum stuff placed about in different parts of the ship, so that the sailors might not be idle in the snatches between the frequent squalls upon crossing the equator. Some officers have been so driven to find work for the crew in a ship ready for sea, that they have set them to pounding the anchors (often done) and scraping the chain cables.

In the full passage, Dana explains that there is more than enough necessary work aboard ship to keep the crew continually busy. But he implies here and elsewhere (and may at some point come out and say it explicitly) that the continuous employment at all times is a means of maintaining discipline and order among the crew. When every waking moment is taken up with some task (necessary or make-work), there is little opportunity or energy left for the kind of talk or actions that could lead to conflict or disobedience.

Which, when you think about it, is a lot like modern life: work, commuting, childrens’ enrichment activities, the DMV, tax prep, home maintenance, car maintenance, doctor or dentist appointments, walking the dog, bathing the cat, etc. And what time is not consumed in these tasks (some of which are the consequences of personal choices, and some of which seem consciously structured to maximize the waste of your time), omnipresent distractions like sportsball, addictive social media, banal entertainment, controversy-stoking “news”, shifting trends, etc. are there to absorb.

I can easily imagine this shipboard practice being implemented on ships traveling between Earth/Luna and Mars – and at least in the early days, in settlements themselves – for exactly the reasons thus far implied by Dana.

The Moulding of Communists

Frank S. Meyer’s book was a bit of a slog (as noted previously), but it paid off in the end.

In a nutshell, the book describes how Communists are recruited, selected, trained, and ultimately shaped into “cadre men” – true Communists. Unsurprisingly, the process follows how certain cults operate, with the same sorts of isolation from outsiders, brainwashing, jargon, consumption of free time and initiative, self-serving morality and ethics, totalizing worldview, and focus on the promotion of the interests of the organization.

While somewhat dated nowadays (my copy was published in 1961), the book nonetheless offered useful insights as to how we got to where we are today. One can read his description of how real, card-carrying Communists in the 1920s-1950s thought and behaved and find directly analogous thought and behavior patterns among the broader modern left. Modern cancel culture and political correctness are the direct descendants of practices common in Party operations in those years, but one can easily see the roots of wokeism, scienceism, climatism, and other lefty and left-adjacent ideological cults of Current Year in Meyer’s account of how the Party worked.

While they stand on similar foundations of a totalizing worldview, simplistic lenses for interpreting the entirety of reality, moral and ethical flexibility in the promotion of the Cause, rabid intolerance to dissent, etc. (things James Lindsay described in his essay Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism), these modern ideological cults look like cargo cults by comparison to the old Party – trying to apply the recruitment, propagandization, training, etc. of the old Communist movements without understanding how those things work or why the Communists did them.

Still with some degree of success, true, but without the remarkable degree of organization and competence Meyer describes – remarkable in no small part for having evolved in such a short time following the Russian Revolution.

Not Impressed With Our Technocrat Overlords

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Litmus Test of the “Scientifically Minded”

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has been making the rounds over the past year or so (despite originally having been published in 1976 – I blame Westworld.)

I read it last summer, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was wholly skeptical of the premise as I had encountered it prior to reading the book, in particular the shift from bicamerality to unicamerality/consciousness happening in such a brief period over such a wide area. (Spoiler: a good part of it is driven by the advent and diffusion of literacy.)

The book was not at all what I was expecting. It’s a deep dive into the anthropology and history of archaic cultures and early civilizations, particularly those of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and what our knowledge (as of the mid-1970s) tells us about their conception of knowledge and its origins, what that reveals about the structure and operation of their minds, and how these things evolved over thousands of years – first glacially and then all at once.

There are plenty of summaries and analyses of the book and Jaynes’ ideas, however, so I’ll focus instead on an aspect that I find particularly interesting: the reaction to it all.

My take is pretty common, and I would say properly scientific: the book is a flood of interesting ideas and conjectures, some of which are argued more convincingly than others, but which overall are very thought-provoking and point in a potentially useful and informative direction. One can and should read it (as all science books) with open-minded skepticism, and tease out the useful threads of inquiry. As I’ve seen it put by several readers, Jaynes may not have hit a home run, but he’s definitely on the field – however flawed or limited, there is a “there” there that merits consideration and further exploration.

And then there are the reactions from the “scientifically-minded”.

Because it’s not wholly-accepted and Expert-Approved Science™, or employs some evidence which has been overturned in subsequent decades, or engages in conjecture which is (of necessity given the antiquity of the examples) unfalsifiable, they write the whole thing off as pseudoscience.

Which is itself an unscientific attitude to take, but one which is all-too-common among those who fucking love Science™ but are utterly bereft of the curiosity and ability to think independently which are essential to true science. If science is supposed to be about the discovery of knowledge and the development of understanding about reality, closing one’s mind to new ideas and dismissing potential insights in this manner is plainly counterproductive.