Links and Comments: This Week’s American Politics; … Heinlein

Posted on Friday 30 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This has been a bizarre week, what with the third debate among Republican presidential candidates, and the reactions from the red-meat base and, on the other side, the intelligentsia who rolled their eyes about all the lies and distortion those candidates get away with — to the approval of the crowd.

I’ll echo, without being able to provide a link, a characterization of Ben Carson: he is single-handedly destroying the world’s ability to use “brain surgeon” as shorthand for “smart person”.

Among many of his remarks: Holy Crap: Ben Carson thinks our tax system should be based on the Bible. He clearly hasn’t read it very closely.

The events this week demonstrate this premise: For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken. The conservative, Republican, base seems to like simple solutions to complex problems — cut taxes! reduce the deficit! deport the immigrants! — despite the analyses from patient experts (e.g. Paul Krugman) who again and again keep explaining why these simple solutions are wrong, will backfire if implemented, and provide evidence — e.g. about the austerity policies of Greece, and Kansas, to take just one example.

As always in this blog, I don’t mean to make this simply about politics; my interest is about general principles. What is it about conservative vs liberal politics, that reflects general perceptions of human beings of the world? How is it that variant perceptions of reality reach such different conclusions? Is it because (as I suspect in some circumstances) mass delusions actually promote cohesion and survival of large groups, and understanding of the reality behind the delusions is irrelevant?

Yet for now, some links and comments from this past week.

Slate: Reality Sucks: Leading GOP candidates aren’t at war with the press. They just have a problem with the truth.

What happened in this debate wasn’t an attack by the press on the candidates. It was an attack by the candidates on the press. Harwood, Quick, and the other CNBC panelists were no harsher to the Republicans on Wednesday than CNN’s Anderson Cooper was to Clinton and other Democrats in their debate two weeks ago. What was different this time was the reaction. Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit.

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Slate: Scary Politics: Americans are scared about a lot of things—especially the government itself.

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Salon: Their lips are moving. They’re lying: Ben Carson, Rand Paul and the right-wing’s truthiness problem

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A general theme is that conservative politicians play to their base by denying any kind of science that would offend religious sensibilities (i.e. evolution) or business priorities… because they are playing to their base, and because they are financed by billionaires who deny any science that would threaten their profits. (That is, obviously, anyone who is invested in drilling for oil, or natural gas, or fracking.)

Slate: Neil deGrasse Tyson identifies this problem in which political candidates pander to voters — and says the voters themselves are the problem; without them the candidates would not need to pander to them.

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And part of all this, perhaps a more significant part than I’d thought, is, at Salon: The GOP primary’s theocratic X-factor: Inside the twisted worldview and junk history of David Barton.

Barton’s “history” has been repeatedly rebutted by academics and even conservative Christian scholars. His publisher withdrew his book on Jefferson when it was revealed to be made up from whole cloth. But none of that matters to the right wing true believers. His founding myth is much more comfortable for them than all that crazy Enlightenment stuff about reason and progress and rational inquisition that informed the real American revolution.

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There is no doubt that Mike Huckabee admires him greatly, that Glenn Beck promotes him constantly, that he is the source of much of Ben Carson’s wild misinformation (whether directly or though Beck and other sources), and that he is very intimately involved with Ted Cruz’s campaign. If you wonder where these presidential candidates, and a good number of GOP politicians at all levels, have come up with this surreal alternative history that bears no relationship to reality, look no further than David Barton. He is the most influential right wing crackpot in American politics today. And that’s saying something.

Again: His founding myth is much more comfortable for them than all that crazy Enlightenment stuff about reason and progress and rational inquisition that informed the real American revolution. My latest provisional conclusion, not quite captured in my posted list, is that human culture is mostly about tribes, and allegiance to tribes. It’s not about perception or acceptance of reality. But allegiance to tribes is, ironically, what keeps the race going.

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Bottom line: Jeffrey Tayler at Salon: They really want a theocracy: The GOP candidates who want to make you bow to their lord.

Carson, Cruz, Huckabee. Scary.

And, almost incidentally, given my recent reading, this is where current American politics echo the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, who fully *75 years ago* wrote stories about a theological revolution that took over the US — reflected in his early short novel “If This Goes On–” — with the implication that this tendency in American culture toward religious fundamentalism has been here all along. I’ll have another post about Heinlein in particular, shortly.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Heinlein, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: This Week’s American Politics; … Heinlein

Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

Posted on Monday 26 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I reread three early Heinlein volumes in the past few weeks, and as with my Asimov rereads, these were revisits to stories I first read some 30 or 40 years ago, and mostly have not read since. Both Asimov’s and Heinlein’s stories had implicit “future history” over-arching narratives, which greatly influenced or at least informed later SF, as Donald A. Wollheim explained about Asimov in his book The Universe Makers, which I summarized here.

I was triggered to explore Heinlein again because of his early story “Universe”. (Asimov’s robot stories => Harlan Ellison’s “I, Robot” script => Harlan Ellison’s other scripts, including “Phoenix without Ashes” => other stories about the idea of a “generation ship” in which its inhabitants do not realize they are living in an isolated world => the daddy of all such stories, Heinlein’s “Universe”.) And its theme’s relevance to my current thinking.

I reread the volume The Man Who Sold the Moon about 3 years ago — but before I had formulated my “Provisional Conclusions”, which are now channeling and informing my thinking, providing perspectives about what older stories mean today and might have meant then — and just reread volumes Orphans in the Sky, The Green Hills of Earth, and Revolt in 2011 in recent weeks. (I do not own first editions of those volumes; my collection consists of a set of a full dozen Heinlein titles published by Signet in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with very cool, abstract, cover paintings by Gene Szafran, as shown here.)

First of all, it’s extraordinary to look back at the bibliographic history of Heinlein’s and Asimov’s early stories. They both began publishing in 1939, as did other writers who became associated with John W. Campbell’s Astounding magazine, and they are principle reasons why in retrospect 1939 is identified as the beginning of the “Golden Age” of science fiction, when standards were raised in the field as it moved beyond its pulpish past. Asimov published a couple stories elsewhere before he cracked Astounding in July 1939 with “Trends”; Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line”, appeared there in August 1939.

I think it’s fair to say that Heinlein was by far the more mature writer, from the very beginning. As I’ve said, Asimov’s were often simply puzzle stories. Heinlein’s stories, in contrast, exhibited a familiarity with the real world, an understanding of politics and psychology, that surpassed Asimov’s perception.

Heinlein struck swiftly, producing some two dozen stories from 1939 to 1942, including many eventual classics, from “The Roads Must Roll” and “And He Built a Crooked House” to “Universe” and “By His Bootstraps” and “Waldo” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”, before he was distracted by service in World War II and published nothing for the subsequent five years. While there have been similar blazing debut streaks by authors over succeeding decades – Larry Niven in the late 1960s, John Varley in the mid-1970s, William Gibson in the mid-1980s – I doubt that anyone’s record has matched Heinlein’s for quality and scope in so short a time.

Orphans of the Sky is the book form of two novellas from that early period, “Universe” and “Common Sense”, published five months apart, in May and October 1941; they weren’t published as installments of a serial, though they might as well have been. The book version wasn’t published until 1963! In contrast, among Heinlein’s earliest book publications were three from Shasta Press, a fan outfit: The Man Who Sold the Moon in 1950, The Green Hills of Earth in 1951, and Revolt in 2011 in 1953. (It’s odd how this last title is left out of some bibliographies, including the list of Books and Stories at the Heinlein Concordance (!), as if it were somehow illegitimate, while the central big story in that book, which was published as a serial in the February and March issues of Astounding, “If This Goes On—“, *is* included, though as far as I can tell that short novel has never been published in a separate book form.) These three books were compiled as forming the core of Heinlein’s “Future History”, diagrammed on a chart in the second and third volumes, which ranged from the earliest exploration of space, to a reactionary period dominated by religious zealots, to a revolution that led to the first colonization ships to the stars.

The novella “Universe” and its book completion Orphans of the Sky was the first major canonical story about what has become known as the enclosed universe version of the generation starship. That is, a way to send human colonists to other stars, without magical warp drives. The trip takes so long that you build an enormous starships with a livable environments inside, and the trip takes so long that generations pass aboard ship before it reaches its destination. (A durable theme – this year’s Kim Stanley Robinson novel, Aurora, is the latest consideration.) The consequence that Heinlein, and later SF writers, perceived was that after so much time, the inhabitants of the ship might forget their original mission, or even the idea that they’re on a ship, and instead, as each new generation is raised, assume that the reality of the shipboard life consists of the entire known universe.

(This is one prominent example of my Provisional Conclusion #2 — that for any of a number of reasons, you can’t count on ordinary human perception of reality, e.g. “common sense”, to be an accurate take on what is real.)

Heinlein’s “Universe” concerns inhabitants of such a starship. The story is crafty in that it indicates early on to the reader that the characters are in some kind of environment that is unlike ordinary planetary life – in the first couple pages, our hero Hugh “settles slowly” to the deck, and as he and his pals descend decks, they get heavier. They think nothing of it; but we understand what this means – that they are in a ship that is spinning to produce an artificial gravity.

The plot of “Universe” involves our hero Hugh climbing to the upper decks to contact the “muties” (a term we come to understand is short for both mutants and mutineers) who live near the center of the ship where artificial gravity drops to nothing; being shown the reality of the outside universe, outside the ship; and then returning to the lower decks to try to convince others that the conventional wisdom of their culture is a lie. The sequel, “Common Sense”, ironically employs that phrase to defend the common assumptions about what people on the lower decks assume is real, until a small band of rebels, including Hugh, escape the ship in order to complete its original mission: to colonize the planet that the ship was intended to reach.

There are two striking parallels between this story and a couple stories by Isaac Asimov: “Nightfall”, published in Astounding in September 1941, and “Reason”, the early robot story, published in Astounding in April 1941 – both so contemporaneous with Heinlein’s two stories, given lead times between submission and publications for any stories in that era (or even now), that it can’t be anything but coincidence… or perhaps, the influence of earlier forgotten stories that are lost to time.

First, both stories employ the idea that ancient truths, lost to the current generation, have been preserved in religious texts. Both stories, in fact, quote large passages of such texts! Asimov and Heinlein portray this situation differently. In Asimov’s story, the religious zealot strongly objects to any new evidence that might provide substantiation to the ancient narratives – because to provide evidence would be to remove the need for faith! In Heinlein’s story, an elder to Hugh calmly explains that the ancient texts [physics textbooks!] can’t be understood in any literal sense, but only metaphorically – in a bizarre passage about how the idea of “gravity” is only a poetic metaphor about romantic love (!).

Second, the passage in Heinlein’s “Common Sense”, in which Narby dismisses his vision of pinpoints of light visible outside the ship, is almost identical to the explanation by the creationist robot ‘Cutie’ in Asimov’s “Reason” (which I blogged about in detail here). Mere illusions, pinpoints of light on a black velvet background.

Will continue on next post. The stories in The Green Hills of Earth, and how “If This Goes On—“ (in Revolt in 2100) eerily presages current American politics.

Posted in Heinlein, Provisional Conclusions, science fiction | Comments Off on Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

Links and Comments from Today’s New York Times: 25 Oct 2015

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

You can’t escape human nature: Norway Has a New Passion: Ghost Hunting.

As traditional religion has faded in many northern European nations, it’s being replaced in Norway by an increased tendency to perceive ghosts at every corner.

Ghosts, or at least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found a particularly strong following in highly secular modern countries like Norway, places that are otherwise in the vanguard of what was once seen as Europe’s inexorable, science-led march away from superstition and religion.

While churches here may be largely empty and belief in God, according to opinion polls, in steady decline, belief in, or at least fascination with, ghosts and spirits is surging. Even Norway’s royal family, which is required by law to belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, has flirted with ghosts, with a princess coaching people on how to reach out to spirits.

And

Arild Romarheim, a Lutheran priest and recently retired theology lecturer, described the conviction of well-educated atheists and agnostics that ghosts exist as “the paradox of modernity” — a revival of old beliefs to slake an innate human thirst for a spiritual life left unsatisfied by the decline of the church.

This “thirst for a spiritual life” is, I think, an artifact for the way the human mind has evolved to perceive the universe in its own terms, not necessarily favoring reality of the actual universe: see the Jesse Bering book linked at Provisional Conclusions: Resources & Bibliography. And this is why I suppose religion and/or superstition, in one fashion or another, will never be completely overcome (despite Arthur C. Clarke, alas).

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Frank Bruni on What Family Really Means. He addresses recent debates within the Catholic Church, which like most faiths, is mostly behoven to standards set in holy books written by ancient tribes in eras when life was relatively short and savage, and tribal. If you think about it and twist your mind a bit, you can come to understand the motivations behind all those Old Testament rules about killing brides who were not virgins and men marrying their brother’s widows and masturbation and not wearing certain kinds of clothes as well as, by the way, condemning men who slept with men. Because in those days, it was all about doing everything to maintain the viability of the tribe, which would be endangered by any activity that threatened individual survival or did not promote the expansion of the tribe. (These motives are all understood as very basic evolutionary strategies, given those circumstances, though of course this understanding would be ironically and stoutly denied by the adherents to those religions who think human beings as special creations of a god and not subject to the natural selection forces that inevitably affect everything else in the universe.)

And yet, here is natural selection at work in one of the largest religions on Earth: if the Catholic Church does not change and adapt to modern times (when human life is not so short and savage, if perhaps just as tribal, as it was three thousand years ago), it will continue to fade, and eventually die. Natural selection will choose a modified version of that church to survive, and not the one that has condemned so many (to an imaginary Hell) according to those ancient proscriptions.

And so the current Pope is floating some changes, about divorce and cohabitation and single parenting. Many in the church, especially in Africa (the region of the world most radically opposed to gay rights), resist.

Bruni’s column is a poignant description of ‘families’ he’s know that do not fit the parameters of the traditional Catholic church. As he says,

I’m more impressed by families who are bound by choice rather than blood. For all that I’ve learned about family around my own Thanksgiving table, I’ve learned as much by watching people without dependable parents, caring siblings or nurturing spouses forge clans of a different kind.

I saw this happen time and again in the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS ravaged gay America and many sufferers found themselves abandoned by relatives, whose religions prodded them toward judgment instead of compassion. Friends filled that gap, rushing in as saviors, stepping up as providers, signing on as protectors. Where families were absent, families were born.

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The latest assault against reason is the resistance to GMOs, genetically modified organisms, which, perhaps ironically, is even more prevalent in Europe than in the US.

With G.M.O. Policies, Europe Turns Against Science

Without a trace of embarrassment, a spokeswoman for Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, admitted that the first minister’s science adviser had not been consulted because the decision “wasn’t based on scientific evidence.” Instead, the priority was to protect the “clean green image” of the country’s produce, according to the secretary for rural affairs, food and environment.

“The worldwide scientific consensus on the safety of genetic engineering is as solid as that which underpins human-caused global warming. Yet this inconvenient truth on G.M.O.s — that they’re as safe as conventionally cultivated food — is ignored when ideological interests are threatened.” (My bold.)

(As an aside, not discussed here, is the issue about bananas, which some religious morons claim as evidence of God, for the banana’s supposed ideal design for human consumption; in fact, bananas have been modified over millennia by human beings into what we recognize today; here’s a link that displays what wild bananas were like before human selection intervened.)

Back to the article, which discusses, again, Africa, which promotes wild conspiracy theories about the dangers of GMOs: a crony to Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe claims that “sexual dysfunction is a huge problem in the U.S.A., where males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life” and this is due to GMO foods; and an incident in which the author talked with someone in Tanzania who claims biotech crops would turn his children homosexual [which of course would be a *bad* *thing*].

I think that this is evidence for my general conclusion that science denial is not about consideration of evidence and reaching conclusions that challenge some orthodoxy — it’s about adherence to tribal allegiances. Anything can be denied, at least in public, in order to be straight with your neighbors and social groups, those whom you depend on for day to day life. It’s human nature, and how that differs from the understanding of scientific reality.

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Finally, fascinated by ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves. Ira Glass, the whole All Things Considered and Morning Edition staff, Terri Gross (whom these days I listen to almost every weekday).

So different from the tone of anger and outrage that typifies the right-wing media.

And brought to mind classic narrators. Rod Serling, mentioned here. And maybe my favorite: Vic Perrin’s “Control Voice” from the early ’60s anthology show The Outer Limits.

You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — The Outer Limits.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments from Today’s New York Times: 25 Oct 2015

Philip Glass: Naqoyqatsi: Religion

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Best, most thrilling track from the 2002 score by Philip Glass of Godfrey Reggio’s film Naqoyqatsi, with cello by Yo-Yo Ma. Keep listening. It really kicks in around 5:00 — the contrast between those rising arpeggios, rhythmically erratic — one two three, one two three, one two three four one two three four — and then repeating, in contrast to the casual thump thump of the brass.

Something ineffable yet uplifting. For all that Glass is described as ‘minimalist’ for his repetitive structures, his over-arching themes are as gorgeous and compelling as anything by Puccini, say. His music is the combination of contrasts: the ‘minimalist’ arpeggios (which are really just torn apart chords) in service of relatively basic, traditional, melodic progressions.

Somehow, via Locus Online status, I got an invite to a prescreening of this film back in 2002, at the Hollywood Egyptian Theater, and Yeong and I attended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqoyqatsi

http://egyptiantheatre.com/egyptian/egypt.htm

Posted in Movies, Music | Comments Off on Philip Glass: Naqoyqatsi: Religion

Sfadb progress

Posted on Thursday 22 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

On an entirely different note from the past couple posts — I am back into production on SFADB.com to add additional Citations and Anthology reprints, as has been planned for years. Most of the citation records from various sources were compiled a full 10 years ago, and have been awaiting the transition of the site from SF Awards on locusmag.com to the newer site sfadb.com, and more recently the tedious task of verifying publication data about all the titles implicated by all those sources, i.e. at a minimum the year of first publication, and whenever possible the country and publisher of first publication. I’ve ameliorated this latter task by posting citation records in phases — for half a dozen of the largest sources, only the highest ranked citations first (Clute, Barron, Gunn) deferring the lower ranked citations for later, since they entail additional work to track down publication data.

Still, I do think I will have most of the contemplated content of the site, at least a minimal set, posted by the end of this year, as promised on the sfadb.com homepage. And that will include populating the two blank menu tabs at the top.

Posted in Website Issues | Comments Off on Sfadb progress

Contemplating a Lost in Space Rewatch

Posted on Thursday 22 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

So I’m contemplated a “Lost in Space” rewatch – at least as much a rewatch as I can bear. The show greatly affected me when I first saw it at age 10 (it debuted in 1965, a year before Star Trek), but the show changed greatly in its second and third seasons, given to the camp nature of popular shows like “Batman” in its second, and then erratically trying to reclaim an action/adventure format in its third (in reaction to Star Trek, perhaps).

As I mentioned in my Jonny Quest post, I likely did not see many of these episodes when first broadcast on network TV, but only later, in syndication, and so only in abridged versions that were cut to allow additional commercial time. In fact, I didn’t discover the series in the first place, back in the Fall of 1965, until nearly half-way through that first season – so I never saw the origin story of the Jupiter 2 and how they got ‘lost in space’ in the earliest episodes until years later, in the early ‘70s, when I saw reruns on one of the local TV stations. Later in the ‘80s, once I had a VCR, I recorded late-late-night broadcasts of LIS episodes from another local LA station, though if I understand my checklist from that era, there were four or five episodes never included in those broadcasts…

More recently, a few years ago, I bought a DVD set of the first season of LIS, but have never watched more than the first half dozen episodes before now. So it’s fair to conclude that many, if not most, of the episodes following those early ones, I’ve never seen in their entirety.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’ll care to, once I begin. The first season, though in black and white, was mostly a serious sci-fi [I’m using that otherwise detestable abbreviation advisedly] action/adventure show, roughly as plausible and serious as most sci fi [again] movies of the 1950s – which is to say, not all that plausible at all, to anyone who knew science and the reality of our place in the universe, but possessing a certain charm and often providing touches of genuine weirdness, of sense of wonder – just the mind-expanding thing to impress a 10-year-old. I think some of that survives the adult perspective, which is what I want to explore. The second season of LIS grew unbearably silly, and I doubt I’ll have the patience to sit through all of those episodes. The show recovered somewhat in the third season (again, feeling its rival Star Trek, I think), but only intermittently. Perhaps I’ll jump around and rewatch only certain episodes.

Before I’ve even rewatched the first episode, I have two themes to keep in mind as I look at this show again.

First, to recognize how the story and its many incidents are absurd and implausible – to this point: what do these assumptions, so often in error, imply about how telling a story about exploring space reveals the biases of the human mind about how it perceives the universe?

Second, to identify, as alluded above, those occasional incidents in the show that truly suggest weirdness, or sense of wonder, even if only what would impress a 10-year-old. They were there, and it’s those moments I want to revisit again, and try to understand from an adult perspective.

In a sense which I have yet to explain, this is all about Apple Valley.

Posted in Personal history, TV Sci Fi | Comments Off on Contemplating a Lost in Space Rewatch

Sundry Links and Comments

Posted on Thursday 22 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

» A Publishers Weekly review of a book about expanding human perception: We Have the Technology: How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time, Kara Platoni, Author

This is a superb account of human perception and the first, clunky but potentially breathtaking efforts to expand it.

PvC #2: there is almost certainly more to the universe than what people commonly perceive. But not in any way that appeals to human nature.

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A nice Jerry Coyne quote in this post

The world I want is one in which the strength of one’s beliefs about matters of fact is proportional to the evidence. It is a world where it is okay to reserve judgment if one doesn’t know the answer, and where it’s not seen as offensive to doubt the claims of others.

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Brain researchers show that using “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” to tweak the posterior medial frontal cortex of subjects’ brains, the result is to reduce “both belief in God and prejudice towards immigrants.”. In other words, belief and prejudice are things going on in certain minds, not something about the real universe.

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The term “politically incorrect” is way overused – as an excuse for any kind of bad behavior.
Herb Silverman in Huffington Post:

Some Republican presidential candidates have generalized “politically incorrect” to justify any bad behavior, which includes stereotyping, offensive comments, scientific ignorance, and refusal to answer difficult questions. Some proudly consider themselves politically incorrect because they would not vote for a Muslim, or because they don’t believe in scientific theories like evolution and climate change. Since when did rejecting the overwhelming consensus of scientists around the globe become a proud politically incorrect position? I suppose I’m politically correct because I like to make evidence-based and reality-based decisions.

Posted in MInd, Provisional Conclusions, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Sundry Links and Comments

Rereading Isaac Asimov, part 4

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Comments about “Nightfall”, “The Dead Past”, “The Last Question”, “The Bicentennial Man”, and “The Ugly Little Boy”.

To finish up commenting on my rereading (or in a few cases, reading for the first time) some 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas by Isaac Asimov, over the past couple months. In part 2 I mentioned some general conclusions: Asimov’s stories are often puzzle stories; they are almost always very methodical, in that they proceed from a premise to a conclusion in step-wise fashion; and his best stories either excel along those lines, or confound that pattern. So.

“Nightfall” is still, I would guess, Asimov’s most popular story, though it was one of his earliest stories, and one which Asimov came to resent — he felt that he must have improved as a writer over the subsequent decades (the story was published in 1941, just two years after his first-published story) — and was perplexed by how fans kept gravitating to this early story.

My take is that the impact of “Nightfall” is a combination of its striking premise, which almost everyone since its first publication in 1941 has gleaned even before reading the story — that a civilization that has never seen all of its multiple suns set, until when the suns do and they see darkness and stars in the sky, it triggers mass insanity — and Asimov’s very methodical build-up to describe how that could happen.

When I reread this story a few weeks ago, I of course remembered the conclusion, and wondered, as I picked up the book, how it took Asimov nearly 40 pages to reach that conclusion. The answer is: Asimov’s characteristic method. He establishes the astronomical situation: a planet in a system of six suns, with a complex pattern of orbits that currently is leaving just one sun in the sky, and that one sun is about to be eclipsed; he establishes a history (via a religious cult!, whose records are a contorted history of what has actually happened [an idea echoed in Heinlein’s “Universe”, which I’ve also just reread recently]; he establishes ideas about what people of this world have suffered while experiencing total darkness. The story is initially dramatized as a reporter challenges the astronomers who are making the prediction of complete darkness. We are given to understand how, on this world, complete darkness, via an amusement park ‘ride’, does in fact drive some people mad. (They call the effect “claustrophobia”!) The religious angle appears as a Cultist breaks into the observatory, angry that the astronomers have ‘explained’ the passages from their “Book of Revelations”, because such explanations would remove the necessity for absolute faith. (!) And by the time Asimov invokes all these themes, and describes how the light goes out in the sky, you are convinced that the darkness — and those tiny “stars” in the sky, so inexplicable — might drive social chaos into a convulsion that destroys their entire society. Again.

The story aligns to a couple basic themes: about the end of the world, and how, despite all planning, it can’t be rebuilt; and of course science vs. religion, with the irony that the cult was right after all, but only in a vague superstitious way, that resents the details of what actually happened, or what will happen.

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“The Dead Past”, on the other hand, is exceptional because it is so different from the standard Asimov story. In this story something called Chronoscopy has been discovered, a way of viewing the past, but which is tightly controlled by the government. An historian, Arnold Potterly, with a passion for validating ancient Carthage [Asimov, you might recall, was a history buff, and published several books of timelines about history (and about Shakespeare and the Bible)], applies for permission to use the device, and is summarily refused.

He pursues his passion and , with the help of a physics instructor at his university, he sets about building his own time viewer. Potterly is also obsessed by the thought of viewing his own recent past, a house fire in which his young daughter was killed. They discover that the time viewer works only to about 150 years back, which means the government’s story is a fraud. Why?

The finale involves the physics instructor releasing to public view the plan for building a time viewer — and a government official confronting them, and making them understand the implication of what a time viewer means: (–spoiler!–) that looking back in time includes looking back a minute or an hour ago, which means privacy is utterly destroyed. It’s not a “dead” past — it’s the minute-ago past. The story ends as the government official, having explained this, consigns the historian and the physics instructor to hell.

Again, Asimov’s style is still rather pulpish—his characters are so impassioned, histrionic. However this is the rare Asimov story that has elements of emotional involvement, and moral complexity. As well as the cleverness that is his most common characteristic, as he follows the arguments on both sides step by step, and finds implications that lesser sf authors would not.

(I also recall a very different take on this premise: the 1976 Damon Knight story, “I See You”, which involved a similar device (in which you could view everyone’s personal space at any time in the immediate or distant past — *everyone’s* space, including all those daily activities one usually conducts in private — and decides the consequences would ultimately be benign.)

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One of Asimov’s most famous stories, and his own personal favorite, was “The Last Question”, which is effective in its narrative but bizarre and perhaps repulsive in its conclusion, from a modern perspective. The story is one of Asimov’s stories about Multivac, the computer (miles and miles across) that runs the world. It has succeeded in harnessing the power of the sun. Two of its operators speculate about how long that power will last, and they query it. The whole universe will run down in 20 billion years, says Multivac. They ask, is there any way around that? Can entropy be decreased? Multivac answers that there is “insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”

Subsequent episodes advance the timeline with similar requests: to a shipboard ‘microvac’ [the ‘ac’ is for ‘automatic computer’, we’re told; it’s not that ‘vac’ is short for vacuum tube]; to Galactic AC in a time when humanity has expanded (largely due to immortality) to fill the galaxy within five more years, with the prospect of filling a new galaxy in another 15,000 years; to a Universal AC, in a time when minds float free of bodies left back on physical planets; and finally to a Cosmic AC, in which the ethereal minds of Man have become one. At all of these stages, the answer is: “insufficient data” or “still working on it”.

In the final passage, the cosmic minds of Man have fused with the Cosmic AC, which thinks even more, and finds the answer: “Let there be light.”

Final line: “And there was light–”

What’s impressive about this story is about how Asimov keeps upping the stakes in each episode, to imagine higher and higher states of human existence. At the same time — for humanity to inhabit every available planet in our galaxy, and then fill up every adjacent galaxy in just another 15,000 years, ad infinitum — is that creepy, or what?

It’s true that mid-20th century science fiction presumed a sort of manifest destiny about humanity’s expansion into the universe. But I think in recent decades this presumption has been severely moderated. We are on the verge of expanding to such an extent on our own planet, that we are threatening its climate and our own viability. And recent science fiction has been moderating its assumptions about the presumed ease of our species’ expansion into interstellar and intergalactic space. (E.g. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora.)

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And then there’s “The Bicentennial Man”, a late robot story, a very sentimental one, and an example of how the many robot stories Asimov wrote in latter decades discovered conclusions different from those established in his canonical collection I, Robot. In this one, a robot wants to become human, at least in a legal sense. In a number of other late robot stories, different conclusions are reached, about the relationship between robots and humanity. This is such a well-known story — it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards — that I’m not taking the time just now to detail it. (And ignore the film version!) Details in a future post, maybe.

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Finally, “The Ugly Little Boy”, an uncharacteristically emotional and non-puzzle story, with a heartbreaking conclusion. The set-up is about a woman, Edith Fellowes, who takes a job at Stasis, Inc., a government installation that employs a time travel “stasis” field to retrieve objects or people from the past into chambers inside their facility. Fellowes is brought in to care for a Neanderthal boy who’s been retrieved from 40,000 years ago, to care for him as best she can within the confines of the stasis chamber. Over several months she bonds with the boy, whom she names Timmie, in spite of interference from psychologists. She comes to understand the limitations of the stasis fields, but then is told that the previous limitation of retrievals limited to more than 10,000 years ago has been overcome, meaning that her Timmie will be given up, returned to the past, in favor of more recent subjects of interest to historians. And then what she does.

As always, the premise and its consequences are explored in methodical detail. What’s different here is that Asimov isn’t trying to justify some clever conclusion. Instead he’s following the consequences of the situation in terms of its human emotional impact.

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Of the stories discussed here, there are a couple whose conclusions I remember after 30 or 50 years — “Nightfall” and “The Ugly Little Boy” especially — and others, like “The Dead Past”, which I did not remember as such, but upon rereading respect them more intellectually.

I have notes on all the other nearly 100 stories by Asimov I read or reread over the past couple months, and may comment about some of them eventually, but for now this is my last Asimov post.

Posted in Isaac Asimov, science fiction | Comments Off on Rereading Isaac Asimov, part 4

My Father’s Books: and Cambridge, Illinois

Posted on Monday 19 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the weekend I spent some time glancing through one of the dozen or so books I kept from my father’s small library. He was an architect, an idealistic and eventually disillusioned architect, who had great ideas but became relegated to routine corporate industrial projects. (The reason my family moved — or one reason I should say — from Southern California to Illinois, in the suburbs west of Chicago, for three years, from 1968-1971, was for his work on the Batavia Accelerator, what’s become known as Fermilab.) (And he told me more than once — never become an architect.)

The book I’m looking at, published in 1946 (a $3.95 hardcover, with many b&w pics!) is called TOMORROW’S HOUSE, and is addresssed to families of that era planning to buy or build a new home. What’s remarkable is that the ideas and photos in this book look only slightly dated; I think this book was at the foretrend of the ‘modernist’ thinking of the mid-20th century, when ‘traditional’ values (in terms of architectural styles, at least), were being re-thought. The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright are mentioned throughout, and they are in no ways dated; if anything, they are today rare and valued, and subjects of efforts by preservationists to keep homes designed by him, and other mid-century architects, from being torn-down (as ‘tear-downs’) by rich people who have no appreciation for the original designs and only want a property to build something much larger on… This has been a theme in news stories in LA and Palm Springs. (In fact, Ray Bradbury’s house was victim to the similar trend of ignoring culturally valuable sites in favor of the newer and bigger.)

I had thought to do some scans and post some photos, but it turns out (everything is on the internet!) Google Images on this title has a fair number of images of the cover and interior illustrations: Google Images: Tomorrow’s House George Nelson. Well, several images.

I’ll record one family incident, for the sake of my own siblings and their descendants. My father’s father lived in a small house at the corner of a small town, Cambridge, Illinois, having spent his career as a farm-hand; his house had two floors and a basement, but not a fireplace. My father had a brother, Bruce, who moved to some Chicago suburb and worked as a high school shop-teacher his whole life, and had three sons who, last I heard, became missioniaries (I don’t know in what sense). My father’s sister, Betty, never left Cambridge; she married Stanley, who worked his life as the butcher in the one market in town. She was fat, he was thin, just like in that nursery rhyme. They had five kids, the second of whom, Christine, was almost exactly my age; and while they rented a house in town for many years, eventually they built their own house… right next door to my grandfather, Betty’s father. My father, the architect, volunteered to design a custom home for them. I even remember seeing the floorplans — what we would today call an ‘open floor plan’, with a large center room, the kitchen and dining off to one side, and a partial wall separating the main area from the row of bedrooms at the back. Betty and family rejected it and built two-story house from generic plans instead. And Christine, years later, built another home with her husband, on the far side of her parents’ home. They’re all visible through Google Maps, in this day and age. I haven’t been to Cambridge since 1992, to attend my grandfather’s funeral.

That small town of Cambridge, where I lived for a summer in 1968 and visited many times over the subsequent three years, made a deep impression on me. It was an idealistic small middle American town. In particular, among other things: as I discovered and read Ray Bradbury books at that age, I identified his “Greentown” with Cambridge. It fit perfectly.

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Links and Comments from Sunday’s New York Times

Posted on Monday 19 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Front page article: Indian Writers Return Awards to Protest Government Silence on Violence

File this under Conservative [religious] Resistance:

…growing activism from conservative Hindu nationalists who seek to suppress forms of expression they view as offensive to their religion. They have pressured publishers to withdraw books, pushed universities to remove texts from syllabuses and filed criminal complaints against those they deem to have insulted Hinduism.

Few writers have drawn more criticism than M.M. Kalburgi, a noted rationalist scholar who enraged far-right Hindu nationalists through his criticism of idol worship and superstition. Mr. Kalburgi said he received multiple death threats, and on Aug. 30 was shot dead at point-blank range in his home in Karnataka, a state in southern India. No arrests have been made.

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And in NYT’s Sunday Review, an essay by the venerable science writer Geroge Johnson: Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand.

This concerns new studies about the “gambler’s fallacy”, the idea that if you detect several coin toss heads in a row, a tail is somehow more likely than usual to come up on the next toss. Even scientists who study this can be tricked into detecting illusory patterns, as the essay explores. Bottom line, final lines:

We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.

I have Johnson’s book Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order, still on my to-read shelf.

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And in the NYT Book Review, a “By the Book” Q&A with science writer Matt Ridley.

What are the best books ever written about science?

“The Double Helix,” by James Watson, and “The Selfish Gene,” by Richard Dawkins. Both books gave me the important message — which my teachers had somehow mostly missed telling me — that science is not a catalog of facts, but the search for new and bigger mysteries.

And this (!):

The last book that made you furious?

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” It uses all the tricks of a fire-and-brimstone preacher to sell a message of despair and pessimism based on a really shaky, selective and biased understanding of the science of climate change.

And then this:

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

Easy. The Bible. Not even the fine translations of William Tyndale, largely adopted by King James’s committee without sufficient acknowledgment, can conceal the grim tedium of this messy compilation of second-rate tribal legends and outrageous bigotry.

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Among the reviews themselves, this by Leonard Mlodinow of two books about “making sense of the world and trying to predict the future”: Richard E. Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking and Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Mlodinow reacts with a

reinforced conviction that books on how to think should be required reading in high schools across the country.

(I agree: see The One Book I’d Have Every College Student Read.) He likes the former book, but says,

My verdict is mixed. If you are looking for a survey of the topics covered in the book’s six sections, this is a good one. You’ll learn about our overzealousness to see patterns, our hindsight bias, our loss aversion, the illusions of randomness and the importance of the scientific method, all in under 300 pages of text. But there isn’t much in “Mindware” that is new, and if you’ve read some of the many recent books on the unconscious, randomness, decision making and pop economics, then the material covered here will be familiar to you.

These are all topics of interest to me, as reflected in one of my Provisional Conclusions…

The second book is somewhat different, but the themes are similar in that they involve drawing conclusions by trying to overcome the biases discussed in the first book. His summary:

The central lessons of “Superforecasting” can be distilled into a handful of directives. Base predictions on data and logic, and try to eliminate personal bias. Keep track of records so that you know how accurate you (and others) are. Think in terms of probabilities and recognize that everything is uncertain. Unpack a question into its component parts, distinguishing between what is known and unknown, and scrutinizing your assumptions.

Of course, astoundingly few people have the discipline to do this, including most of the electorates in, I imagine, every country on earth.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, MInd, Provisional Conclusions, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments from Sunday’s New York Times