Coming across his work in the 1960s and 1970s, amid those decades’ absolute disconnect from the recent past and outright suspicion of junk culture, was a specific revelation for their being so very little out there like it. Frazetta’s work was one of the few consistent, visually accomplished gateways to somewhere else, a way of escape available to a generation of kids that was psychologically preparing to die when someone set the skies on fire. Frazetta’s were potent images, strange, of obvious skill and stuffed with conflicting messages. There were the soft women and the more dread, powerful ones. Men faced off against monsters but also nature, and in some cases their own savage impulses. There was light like the light we were used to but also strange colors, light like no one had seen but that Frazetta somehow understood. They weren’t inviting fantasies, but formidable ones, foreboding, aspirational rather than something that coddled or flattered you. If you went through the wardrobe into Narnia, events would likely fall into place, and you were pretty sure you could’ve handled that ring, but if you went to one of the worlds Frazetta painted something was going to eat you or stab you or have your soul. These were fantasies you steeled yourself towards rather than fell into. And so it was with Frank Frazetta’s art: it frequently impressed, it almost always inspired.
From The Comics Reporter excellent obituary of Frazetta, I think this paragraph captures the appeal of his art quite well. It was lush, exciting, exotic, but also a bit scary. Frazetta is of course often dismissed as no more than a panderer to the worst kind of adolescent wishfulfilment, but to do so is to miss both his obvious craft chops, as well as yes, his artistic talent.
An early contender for the worst sex scene in literature 2010 award (Literature is used here in its widest possible meaning.):
She towered over him, aggressive, powerful, dominant, totally in charge, her jewelled hands on naked, swaying, circling hips, the smile of the jailer etched on her face as she eyed him like a cat eyes a cornered mouse. Saark’s gaze slowly strayed, from the sexual cunt-honey dripping from her quivering vulva, to the large rubies on the rings that circled her fingers.
Crooked Timber is going through one of its periodic spats about philosophy and especially about the use of socalled trolley problems to tease out universal principles of morality. A trolley problem is a classic philosophical thought experiment which goes something like this: “A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?” Over time these sorts of experiments have gotten more complicated and less real, which is why every so often there will be yet another 100+ comment thread on Crooked Timber on them. Now this isn’t something I’d normally would pay much attention to, but Christ Bertram’s comment as to why these examples have to be extreme struck me:
There’s a perfectly good reason why the examples we use are “far fetched”, “ludicrous” etc. It is because we are often trying to test our commitment to some principle or other which is alleged to hold universally. A principle wouldn’t even be a prima facie candidate for such universal status if it failed to deliver the right answer in the central cases, so we are bound to seek out more exotic examples – it is the way of the dialectic.
The problem with that approach is that you end up spending a lot of time and effort into constructing an extreme enough edge case to satisfy the need for universality and yet more time and effort into defending your construct against critics pointing out its flaws, leaving the consideration of the principle in question as at best a secondary activity [1]. What’s more, by forcing yourself into creating such an extreme case there’s always the danger that you’re building it towards a preferred outcome—either to prove or disprove universality.
It’s like software testing. For any moderately complex piece of software it’s easy to spent a lot of time and money creating test cases that try the limits of the system, but which are rarely or never encountered “in the wild” and which say little about the more mainstream circumstances with which the software needs to work. [2]
[1] Classic science fiction example: The Cold Equations
[2] Like the financial/payment system at a Big Government Facility I know that has provisions for combinations of benefit payouts and such that are throroughly tested with each new release but have never been used in production…
Steve Poole blogs about Publishers Weekly‘s oddly womenless top ten best books of 2009 to note a particular phrase of speech, as is his wont. What niggled at me was his last paragraph:
If you make a list of your favourite books of the year and then notice that they are all written by men, should you remove some of the books and insert some written by women? If you don’t do so, are you “ignoring gender” or “excluding women”?
Then it struck me. What this paragraph does is to create a contrast between the spontaneous act of listing your favourite books of the years and the artificial act of genderbalancing it. It presupposes both that the original list would be the “real” one, reflecting the genuine tastes of the PW editors and unsullied by other concerns, while the adjusted list would have phonies on it, books only chosen because they written by women. Not that Steve meant it that way of course, but it is the sort of assumption that’s always in the background of this kind of gender (or any other kind of) equality discussions. It both ignores the reality of how a list like this is created and denigrates gender balancing such a list as inauthentic.
However simple the central conceit, “Uncommon Sense” nicely demonstrates the central idea of Clement’s fiction: investigating the world will enable you to make sense of it and, very often, benefit in the process. Cunningham may look, superficially, like a Heinleinesque Competent Man, but he differs in having the kind of detailed curiosity I’ve described. Heinlein’s heroes tend to win out because of the strength of their belief, because they’re right but the world doesn’t know it (quite) yet. Clement’s heroes tend to win out because their faith in empiricism is ultimately rewarded. (The unspoken axiom there, of course, is that empiricisim is sufficient to solve any problems that may come along. It’s no surprise, then, that Clement’s stories tend to be arranged so that this indeed is the case. The question of how often a situation like the one in “Uncommon Sense” might arise in everyday life is not addressed.) There are a couple more arguments that might be made against Clement’s worldview. First is that empiricism tends to trump all other values — contemporary readers might balk a little at the scene in “Uncommon Sense” where he kills the crab-creatures just on the off-chance that he might find out things about them. The second is that he’s not particularly interested in character. Characters have traits, to be sure — Cunningham is determined, the two men who have highjacked his ship are “villains.” But any idea of a more rounded selfhood is very rare in Clement.
Other science fiction writers that fit this description are Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Forward, amongst others (yes, they tend to be male). That’s the sort of science fiction I grew up with, somewhat lacking perhaps in the characterisation or literary departments, but as Graham says, promoting a worldview in which experimentation and rational thought are key to understanding the universe, where it didn’t matter what your shape was, as long as you could talk the language of Science (even if most of the heroes of these stories were of solid Anglosaxon stock). It’s a kind of science fiction that can’t really be written anymore today, as we expect more than just clever puzzles in our stories. Nevertheless there is value in them; the best of them show you how scientific reasoning works, that the universe can be understood and reasoned with. Hal Clement was a master at this and you could do worse than to check out his best story, Mission of Gravity, in which the planet Mesklin, with its oblong shape and gravity varying from 3g at the equator to 275 or so g at the poles is the star, a great example of worldbuilding grounded in science as well as how to make a didactic story worth reading.
Moving on, this series of photographs of dead albatross chicks stuffed full with plastic is, as Paul McAuley says, very Ballardian, but also upsetting. These albatrosses nest at Midway in the middle of the Pacific and when the parent birds set out to find food for their chicks, they instead return home with plastic garbage, from the huge floating plastic trash fields that collect in the North Pacific, trapped by the North Pacific Gyre. This is actually a problem that afflicts every ocean, with no easy solution in sight.
Ballardian was also a word used on the BBC4’s synthpop weekend, as more than one early eighties synth pioneers explained the inspiration they got from Ballard, something I was sure Owen would’ve mentioned. Instead he concentrated on the dept post-punk owned to modernist and brutalist architecture, something also mentioned by more than one artist on the documentary. It’s kind of obvious when you look at it, the clear, stark lines of the fifties and sixties architecture these bands grew up in echoed in the cold, “inhuman” sounds of their music, both fascinated and repulsed by the dehumanisation inherent in high modernist technology, just as this was about to disappear from the cities and towns they grew up in. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of these bands came from dying industrial towns, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, all later to be transformed into post-modern shopping ‘n art wastelands in the eighties and nineties).
What struck me personally, both in the interviews and the clips, was the lack of computers. The whole micro computer revolution, already taking shape in California at the same time completely passed these bands by, using synthesisers, drum computers and tape recorders as purely mechanical instruments. (The musical soundtrack to the pc revolution was always more likely to be progrock than synthpop anyway.) In some ways you could call this the last music from the industrial age, the last truly modern, future looking genre. After that post-modernism and the end of history comes in and there’s no longer room for linear ideas of progress and such.
