Art & Criticism – Page 16

The Cold Equations

Published on February 27, 2012Leave a comment

Existence required order, and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them, but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter, and no science of man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation, and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature, and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth.

That’s the message that “The Cold Equations“, Tom Godwin’s best known story (to be honest, the only story he really is known for) wants you to take away from it. It’s the melodramatic story of an emergency dispatch ship (EDS) pilot who discovers a stowaway on board and knows he has to immediately shove him out of the airlock, or otherwise he won’t have enough fuel to reach the colony he’s on his way to, his ship having just enough fuel to reach that. But then it turns out the stowaway is not some swarthy space bandit but *gasp* a young, innocent girl wanting to visit her brother in the colony. Our hero now has a moral dilemma, but the cold equations of space leave no other room than for the girl to sacrifice herself to save the ship.

For all its melodrama it’s an incredible effective story, if you don’t think too much about it, pitting a certain science fiction reader’s desire to be the kind of hard man who knows some sacrifices are unavoidable against the very same fan’s belief that there always is a solution. Even now, almost sixty years after its first publication it’s still a subject for debate as so many people want to deny its central message, that the laws of nature have no place for human values, that some deaths are unavoidable.

I’m one of them. Because the situation that “The Cold Equations” sketches is avoidable and as a result the story ends up not to be so much a parable for the cold, uncaring cruel laws of space as it is a demonstration of the necessity of good health and safety laws.

Lets start with basics: you have these huge space cruisers that fly between colonies which have a couple of EDS ships on board in case a colony not on the itenary needs urgent help. These EDS shuttles are sent out with the bare minimum of fuel needed to reach the colony. Even without the problem of stowaways, there are other situations in which a ship might need more fuel than the bare minimum to reach its goal; why skimp on this safety margin? But worse is that the story makes clear that there are no real safety measures to keep passengers on the cruiser to reach an EDS, or any real attempt to discover stowaways before the EDS leaves the cruiser. Sure, there’s a sign saying that the EDS is off limits to unauthorised personnel, but that’s hardly a real safety measure…

And this is not because the (fictional) company running these spaceships is sloppy and negligent, but because Tom Godwin, the author, needs this to setup the situation he wants of the innocent girl stowaway doomed to die because at that point the harsh laws of space permit no other outcome. But before this situation can be set up he therefore has to omit a lot of common sense safety measures that would’ve prevented it from arising in the first place.

And if you’re trying to prove a political point by arguing that the laws of physics make certain measures necessary, that killing some people is sadly necessary for the greater good, it behooves you to make sure that the situation you’ve chosen to illustrate this harsh fact is in fact not completely avoidable with some common sense precautions.

Damien G. Walter works hard to annoy me

Published on January 30, 2012Leave a comment

Damien G. Walter’s post about 7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels you must read annoyed me from the start, with its misspelling of science fiction as “sci-fi” and its demand I must read these books; no I don’t. I hate that sort of hucksterism. Good books you don’t have to read, good books you want to read.

Those are just minor irritations though, the real problems start with the introduction:

At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irrate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have plucked some bluebells in the forest. (Unless you happen to own an entire forest. Do you? Well OK then.) SF and Fantasy are common ground that any writer can build their house upon, but pretending to own them just makes you look silly.

I’m sure there are fantasy and sf fans who are annoyed just by the ide of socalled literary writers poaching on their terrain, but they are in the minority. Reasonable fans have no problem with non-genre science fiction or fantasy, what they have a problem with is with:

— Mainstream writers who deny they’re writing science fiction when they clearly are writing science ficion, aka the Atwood syndrome.
— Mainstream writers who write science fiction that’s outdated, turgid and using well established sf tropes genre writers have long mined out, in a way that makes it clear said writers have never read any science fiction themselves and are unaware they’ve reinvented the wheel yet who still get lauded for their cleverness in doing so — Ishiguro disease.

The latter is something that’s luckily gotten rarer as science fiction itself became more mainstream, but the first still happens more often than it should. Neither is a concern you can wave away with an analogy about plucking bluebells. It’s not fannish defensiveness to be annoyed by this. Writers like Atwood who deny writing science fiction help reinforce the idea that science fiction is something you need to be ashamed off, something dirty, while writers who just regurgitate stale old ideas do science fiction no good either.

Walter goes on:

And it’s doubly silly if you’re an aspiring writer of the fantastic, because you may be hurling away the best chance to learn you will ever get. If as a writer you are only as good as what you read, then how good can you expect to be if your book diet is filled with derivative works of pulp fiction? A fast food diet may please the taste buds, but you wouldn’t expect to dine out on Big Macs every day and become an olympic athlete. So why expect to write even a good book without reading them first?

If I see one more pulp fiction/junk food metaphor I’ll scream and scream until I get sick. I can you know. Why equate fantasy and science fiction with “derivative works of pulp fiction”? Is Walter really saying there are no science fiction books, no fantasy writers that can equal literary novels, mainstream writers? Delany, Russ, Aldiss, Lem, LeGuin, Dunsany, Wolfe, Moorcock, Harrison, Jones, McHugh, Gentle, all these and many more cannot hold themselves with the best literary novelists, these are no writers you have to work for to get their writing, that offer as much intellectual stimulation? If you truly think that, you’re not likely to convince me your opinion on the “7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels I must read” is going to be worth much; if not, why say it?

What make’s these novels distinctly ‘literary’ as opposed to the genre novels they resemble? Put simply, they are better. More ambitious, deeper in meaning, both intellectual and poetic. They might be harder work for readers trained to the easily digested conventions of commercial fiction. But if you make the effort to read these books on their own terms, there are incredible feats of imagination to discover in their pages. They feature many of the tropes of genre SF & Fantasy, but in the hands of writers who understand what those fantastic metaphors are really all about. But most of all these are books which reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world. If genre novels create fantasy worlds to escape in to, these books show the fantastic reality of the world we all live in.

Again, there are no science fiction or fantasy writers who do that for you? You can only think of these genres as escapism, pulp fiction, not something that can ever “reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world”? Why bother reading it then?

Now the actual list is …not bad, to be honest, if a bit dated, with The Road (2006) being the most modern work on it, but the introduction just ruffles all my feathers. It seems needlessly dismissive of science fiction and fantasy, approaching its readers as junk food devouring slobs who have to be insulted into reading the right books. Had Walter just stuck to listing these books and not gone for the hard sell, this would’ve been an interesting post. Now it’s just annoying and snobbish. At a time when there are quite a few literary writers who dabble in science fiction without being traumatised if somebody calls their works that and sf writers crossing over with few problems, even if they have to lose an initial here or there, it seems particularly silly to revoke this supposed division under the guise of getting these sf slobs to read some proper books.

Da Vinci Code not completely worthless shocker

Published on December 27, 20112 Comments

Adam Roberts has set himself the task to review the world’s top ten best selling books for some reason best known to himself. At number nine is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Adam manages to find some positive in the book:

No, I’m talking about two broader ideas. And here’s the first: that the world is not as it seems, and that — particularly where high culture, established religion, wealth and power are concerned — you need to dig down beneath the surface appearance of things to get at the truth. Now this is an idea both powerful and dangerous, for applied with too much force to a receptive consciousness it can easily lead to conspiracy-theorising, batshittery and all manner of ‘lizards secretly rule the world’, ‘the moon landings never happened’ and ‘9-11 was an inside job’ idiocy. But it is an important idea nonetheless; and insofar as a large constituency of people on the planet are in the habit of taking things, particularly Established Things like church and government, precisely at face value, it is a progressive one. Of course, this idea is shrouded around in the book with a great deal of chaff and bollocks; but that matters less, I think, than people think it does.

What the second idea is you’ll have to read the rest of his post.

Suspension of disbelief

Published on December 12, 20112 Comments

John Scalzi is being a bit silly about suspension of disbelief:

“When my daughter was much younger, my wife was reading to her from a picture book about a snowman who came to life and befriended a young boy, and on each page they would do a particular activity: build a snow fort, slide down a hill, enjoy a bowl of soup and so on. The last three pages had the snowman walking, then running, and then flying. At which point my wife got an unhappy look on her face and said ‘A flying snowman? That’s just ridiculous!’

[…]

“So, yeah: In a film with impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud (not to mention legions of ghost warriors and battle elephants larger than tanks), are we really going to complain about insufficiently dense lava? Because if you’re going to demand that be accurate in a physical sense, I want to know why you’re giving the rest of that stuff a pass. If you’re going to complain that the snowman flies, you should also be able to explain why it’s okay to have it eat hot soup.”

No, no, you don’t.

Suspension of disbelief is a private thing and like all matters of taste cannot be discussed. If you don’t believe in flying snowmen nothing will get you to take them seriously. And while that’s a deliberately silly example, we do this all the time, whether or not it’s drawing the line at vampires that sparkle in the sunshine or at having the Force explained as being caused by socalled midichlorians. Especially when these sort of developments go against the earlier established “rules” of an universe or don’t fit the traditional tone of a (sub)genre, they can be hard to swallow. This also explains why some adaptations of e.g. Sherlock Holmes work and some don’t. The recent modern BBC updating of Holmes worked because it kept the cores of Holmes and Watson intact, but for some people it just won’t work without the Victorian fogs.

But that’s not really what Scalzi was talking about, because his original ire was awoken by a discussion about the realism of the lava at the end of the last Lord of the Rings movie. This is entirely different from not believing in flying snowmen, as this is about something that actually exists in the real world and you therefore can get wrong. Just like there was no reason for sound in space in Star Wars, there was no real reason for the lava to behave wrongly in the LotR movie, save for dramatic reasons. It’s therefore sort of acceptable in this example, but usually this sort of thing is either an error or just pure sloppiness on the part of the writer.

It’s the writer’s job to make their worlds as believable as possible — unless it’s not of course — and these sort of mistakes drop people right out. Even in a fantasy world you need to keep everyday reality straight. One commenter at James Nicolls’ place, quoting C. K. Chesterton, put it best:

“It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr. Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr. Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawingroom and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible, it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.”

Shakespeare: not that special after all

Published on October 26, 2011Leave a comment

This bit in Stephen Fry’s excellent series on language, Planet Word piqued my interest, as he goes into the standard spiel about the marvels of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It continues with Stephen Fry making the case for him as not just the greatest writer in English, but arguably in any language, a not uncommon view. It annoyed me a bit, this unquestioned image of Shakespeare as a towering genius no other writer can be compared to.

And it turns out I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by this myth making. As Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme argues, this sort of inflated view of Shakespeare plays right in the hands of those who would deny the very existence of him but as a mask for someone they’d think more suited for the role of world’s best writer:

The tendency to discuss Shakespeare in isolation from other dramatists (if not in isolation from his cultural surrounds) is one feature of mainstream scholarship that mirrors a similarly exclusive focus on the part of the self-proclaimed skeptics. This parallel is partly what I had in mind when I called Bardolatry anti-Stratfordianism’s twin in my last post. It’s no coincidence that historically, the authorship controversy only came into being once Shakespeare had been elevated to the status of unparalleled genius, and it certainly seems to me that people writing in praise of Shakespeare have done almost as much damage as those out to undermine his authorial identity.

Because the standard view of Shakespeare sees him as standing apart and above his contemporaries, it becomes more plausible to assume that therefore he cannot have been the simple actor-poet he appeared to be, ergo somebody more elevated must’ve written his plays for him, be it Francis Bacon or the17th earl of Oxford. But once you do put him back into the context in which he lived and worked, it turns out that actually, Shakespeare was not that special and his achievements become more understandable:

Two things stand out to me in Craig’s analysis. The obvious one is how directly his arguments contradict the notion that Shakespeare was exceptionally knowledgeable. As Craig and others suggest, Shakespeare’s artistry lies in the inventive ways he uses his words — his knack for putting simple words in the service of a complex thought, or for arranging usual terms in an unusual way; his ability to connect images and ideas, to use words to bring thought, things, and people to an imaginary life. That, however, seems to me much closer to a talent than to a skill.

[…]

In other words, there appears to be no direct connection between levels of formal education and verbal prodigiousness: Fletcher, as a bishop’s son surely the most culturally elevated of the thirteen, barely ranks above obscure Robert Wilson in vocabulary. It may seem predictable that university wits like Greene, Marlowe, or Peele should be fonder of verbal variety than Shakespeare, but that Dekker uses over 100 more distinct words per play than him may come as a surprise. Webster and his more Baroque register, Jonson and his ambition to display his autodidactically acquired learning — it makes sense that such writers made use of more words than the man who supposedly had a larger vocabulary than anyone, ever, once one steps outside the echo-chamber of Bardolatry. And of course not a single person on Craig’s list can boast an aristocratic background. The most prodigious of them all, John Webster, may even have continued to run his father’s coach-making business at the same time as he was writing the most verbally rich plays of his age.

Crudely summarised: because we know more of Shakespeare’s work, as he wrote more and/or more of his work survived, not to mention because we pay more attention to it, he seems to be much more extraordinary than he actually is. Once restored to his proper context, his achievements are still spectacular but not inhumanly so.