More discussion today of what I got done in 2024, and about my ongoing project that will extend into 2025. This is to start consolidating all my writing ideas from the past decade into some overall framework. I’ve been doing that in one way or another in various files for a decade now. More seriously, I began that in a couple ways in 2024.
First, the essay I wrote for Gary Westfahl in 2023, which concerned how evolutionary psychology can be applied to science fiction to explain why SF writers, and readers, prefer some kinds of stories to others, was sent back for revision, with a rather vague statement from the publisher about how the essays did not support the book’s theme. Also, that theme had changed. Originally Gary asked me if I had any ideas for an anthology of essays about new critical approaches to science fiction. This was a few months after Y and I had visited him and his wife in SoCal, at their home in Claremont, when I discussed, just making conversation, some of the issues Locus was going through to keep afloat, how I had written a letter to the entire Locus board with ideas to expand its readership base, and been ignored. Also perhaps about those Mandel and Nagamatsu books. I responded to Gary yes, I did have an idea for a new critical approach to SF, and spent four or five months drafting an essay all about evolutionary psychology and whatnot.
But Gary replied in May 2024 with that publisher’s comment, and that the anthology’s theme had changed from “new critical approaches to science fiction” to “science fiction in the 21st century” or somesuch, with the implication that the focus of the book would be how SF now might have changed from SF in the 20th century. Well, that shift was easy enough for me, in a sense: the diminution of science fiction in preference to fantasy, in the 21st century, can be explained in part by the resistance to the hard work needed to write and absorb honest science fiction that doesn’t, in some way, cheat; or to reverse it, the increasing attraction of fantasy in books and space opera in movies and TV because they appeal to human intuitions about how reality works, that in turn can be explained by evolutionary psychology…
Anyway, the revision took about as long as the original draft, spread out of course over four or five months, and I think it was worth the effort because that forced me to shift the perspective of the essay to a much broader one… Closer to what I’m trying to do on this blog.
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The second thing I did in 2024 was to bring up to date my directory pages for my posts about nonfiction books on this blog. I updated the single page listing of those books by author, and created several thematic pages in a drop-down menu underneath. I did this by creating a database for compiling the book info and descriptions, partially importing text from the original directory page and partially copying details manually. Then adding theme tags to each record, so I can select titles by theme to generate separate pages for each. I still mean to add some text at the top of each of those pages to summarize, very broadly, the ideas from each set of books, what I can conclude from them and how such conclusions fit into my overall thesis.
Having originally ordered those pages by the traditional hierarchies of knowledge, more or less, now I’m having second thoughts. I put physics, along with cosmology and astronomy, at the top, following by biology and evolution, then psychology, and politics in turn, and so on. With math and philosophy ahead of all those, and philosophical topics like religion and morality and meaning.
This is close, but now in the past few days I’m thinking it’s not quite right. Perhaps it’s reading that essay I discussed on 30 Dec, or perhaps the lessons of all the books I’ve read have sunk in to replace my default hierarchy.
Now I’m thinking: everything humanity knows is filtered through our minds. We don’t realize what we might not be able to understand, or perceive, because of the limitations of our minds. Our minds evolved for survival, not for understanding of the real world.
The key phrase is “the proper study of mankind is man,” attributed to Alexander Pope. Which naively can be taken to mean, don’t bother to study irrelevant things like astronomy or mathematics. Or can be taken to mean, as Google’s AI overview says, “It suggests that humans should focus on studying their own nature, psychology, and motivations rather than trying to comprehend divine mysteries.”
Well, yes, the key to our comprehension of divine mysteries is to understand the biases and limitations of the human mind, in ways I’d guess Alexander Pope had no clue about. What we think are divine mysteries are what we suspect are incomprehensible to our minds, but which nevertheless are real, and not supernatural. Gods, demons, monsters, angels, are all manifestations, or projections, of the intuitions and biases of human nature that evolved over millions of years in the ancestral environment. They are the equivalent of children perceiving monsters underneath their beds.
Which is to say — perhaps understanding the human mind is actually first in the hierarchy of nonfiction books. Everything after that, even the things we think we know objectively (like math and physics), are necessarily filtered through the biases and limitations of our minds. In ways we might not even realize.
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The challenge for me is to try to understand the varieties of science fiction, and the power of the best of science fiction, in the context of the modern understandings of — not physics, or biology — the human mind.
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The other ongoing project, for 25 years now, is sfadb.com, where I am some 98% complete I think, and will discuss at another time.
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I don’t generally make ordinary resolutions, because I am old enough, in my 70th year, to have established my goals in life. E.g., I’ve survived a heart transplant, and get 5000 steps in each day, and do some light weightlifting at home with a couple dumbbells, but have no reason to resolve to work out more. My standard resolutions are all about reading more books, and working on my projects, before I die. I don’t want to leave things undone.
So a couple very modest resolutions. I have a few more big nonfiction books to read: David Deutsch’s second, and books by Tegmark, Wilczek, and West. The new Harari. And other books from deep in my library stacks; the issue now is to focus on books to read that will support my long-term project, rather than reading books simply for amusement.
And to finish sfadb.com, which I think, in the terms I’m thinking, will only take another 20 or 40 hours of focused work. I’ve long thought that that’s the only thing people will remember me for.