Matthew Buscemi's Blog, page 26

Virgule

I recently finished The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. One surprising discovery for me was that character which I have called the "forward slash" all my life, has another name, a dignified one, capable of commanding much more respect. It is the "virgule."

Another interesting tidbit, "virgule" is actually the French word for "comma." This struck me as quite odd, until I learned that, long, long ago, the moment of pause was how the forward slash was actually used. Try to imagine your writing like that for a moment, with virgules at every single minor pause.

Fashion changes. In the past, it took many generations for virgules to get elided down to small little hooks hanging below a text's baseline. Change nowadays is much more rapid. Centuries of tradition have been upended and now largely go ignored. Our culture is a flood of the new and the ephemeral.

But is this good for us?

In some ways, certainly it is. There are privileges and freedoms we all enjoy that were unheard of fifty, twenty, even ten years ago. I myself am the beneficiary of a privilege (marriage equality) that is, at the national level in my country, only two years old.

But in other ways, it seems that liberalism has driven us apart. We are now more private than public. Each person is an island of his own thoughts. The predilection to shut out alternate points of view and create for oneself an intellectual echo chamber is now easier than ever.

In other words, the same liberalism that empowered positive societal transformation now appears to be equally capable of powering extremely negative transformation. Will good always come out ahead in the grand scheme of things? This was certainly the assumption of liberal society for the past two-hundred-odd years. The assertion no longer appears entirely certain.

In pondering over all this, one thing is clear to me. It is time for a pause.

For many reading this, I expect that to call 2016 a traumatic year will not be an exaggeration. As has been evident from the blog post that precedes this one, it has not been without trial for me.

But there is also much for which I am thankful, and much remaining that I have the power to accomplish. If anything good has come out of the last two months, it is the realization that I cannot take for granted a single moment of my freedom. I am a writer. For now, I am free to express myself in words however I choose. I do not know how much longer that will be the case, and so I must make the most of the opportunity that exists now.

Justice, freedom, liberty—these things are never truly safe from evil. The struggle to maintain and renew them must constantly be fought.

Pause. Take a deep breath. Reflect, and consider your next actions. They are very important.

And then, after careful consideration, let us all do what we know to be true and right.

Habent Sua Fata Libelli

It is with deepest regret that I must announce my departure from traditional publishing. Attentive individuals have already noticed the disappearance of the Fuzzy Hedgehog Press website (the term for the web property ended a few weeks ago and I declined to renew it). As of January 1, 2017, Fuzzy Hedgehog Press will cease all business operations. All Fuzzy Hedgehog Press works have been removed from Amazon and other online vendors.

If you are a writer who had a story published with us, full publishing and distribution rights revert to you on January 1. Copyright has always remained with you. If you were to have a story published with us in the new year, I must extend my sincerest apologies. I regret that I am unable to help bring your stories into the world.

What happened is quite simple–in this new world we now find ourselves in after November 8, I am no longer able to support the economic risk represented by my publishing company. In the past, I was able to anticipate an economic upside to my endeavors. That is no longer a future I can envision.

I deeply appreciate all the individuals and organizations who have supported me in my efforts as a publisher. The individuals are too many to enumerate. So many people have been supportive of my publishing endeavors. You know who you are, and I am eternally grateful for all you have done. As far as organizations, both Queen Anne Book Company and Tanstaafl Press deserve special mention. Queen Anne Book Company is easily the best bookstore in Seattle. Their staff is attentive, competent, and have gone out of their way for me both as a publisher and book buyer. Tanstaafl Press made the difficult job of working a convention fun and educational. I have learned much from the owner.

While I am retracting from publishing, I will not (and probably cannot) stop writing. I will make all my writing available from this website in PDF and ePub form. Print editions will no longer be publicly available (though you may print the PDFs for personal use, if you would like). I will continue to publish reviews of science fiction novels and my thoughts on writing, art, and society to this blog.

A final thank you to everyone who has been part of my publishing journey for the last three years. No matter what the next four or eight years bring, let us continue to endeavor for a fairer, more just, more equitable world for all of us, where art can truly thrive.

A Science Fiction Primer

One of the things I regret about my adolescence is not spending nearly enough time with books. A big part of that was lack of resources–and not so much the books themselves (my local library could have provided me anything I'd have asked for), but the knowledge of which books would be the right blend of substantive and topical for an adolescent.

Today, such a dearth of information is scarcely believable, but my formative years were 1988-1998, in which the internet was still in its infancy. It may be hard to imagine, but just two decades ago, the internet was not nearly as information-saturated as it is now, and there were strong social preclusions against internet-based information (you should ask an expert or do meticulous research!). In addition, online shopping was practically non-existent (how can we possibly trust the internet with something like a credit card number?).

Nowadays, there is no excuse. If I could go back in time, I would hand my fourteen-year-old self a science fiction reading list that would introduce him to all the major movements of science fiction, and here's what it would look like:

1. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Scholarly discussion of science fiction tends to agree that the genre begins with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. First published anonymously in 1818, Shelley managed to get her name on the second edition of the book, released in 1831.

Frankenstein is important for the young reader, because of the first mental shift that the serious reader of science fiction must make: underneath all the ephemera of science fiction–aliens, ray guns, space ships, parallel universes, cyborgs, clones, etc.–what science fiction is really about is the effect of technology's advance on our relationship with our environment and our relationships with one another.

When Dr. Frankenstein's scientific discoveries endow him with the ability to create life, what responsibilities does he inherit as a creator? Is society prepared to deal with a rapid increase of human power? The speed of technological development appeared rapid even to people of the early nineteenth century. Today, we race forward ever faster than before. The ideas Mary Shelley explored almost two centuries ago are just as relevant today.

2. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

Jules Verne can be a hard sell for the modern reader. The joy of his prose lies along two vectors: the wonder created by fantastic technological apparatuses, and the discovery associated with adventure. To our modern sensibilities, Verne's fantastical technology (things such as submarines and handheld electric lamps) are mundane, and the areas discovered on his sea voyage around the world are all now clearly delineated territories of world.

Still, I would recommend Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to a young person interested in science fiction, even knowing that these elements will fall flat. Why? Because we need to remember that there was a time before the internet, when a book that wove the genetic classification of sea life into its narrative would have been a treasure in a world where knowledge, which is power, was difficult to access. We need to remember that our technology is fantastic, not mundane. And we need to remind ourselves regularly to find wonder in all the parts of our world we are used to glossing over.

3. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

One of the most important things that science fiction can do is give the reader insight into his own prejudices and preconceptions about the world. In H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, colonial England was given a new view on colonial conquest. What if invaders from outside their country, in this case, Mars, arrived and decided to pillage the countryside in the same way that Britain and other European powers had done to the rest of the world?

Young people especially are prone to assuming that their perceptions of things are The Way Things Are. The War of the Worlds is not only the first step in throwing some cold water on such assumptions, it also happens to be an entertaining and engaging narrative with an interesting protagonist to boot.

4. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Many young people will read George Orwell's 1984 as part of their high school curriculum, and some others will likely be introduced to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Both novels are great recommendations, but for early-twentieth century anticipation of social absolutist horror, I cast my strongest support behind Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.

1984 covers totalitarian dictatorship well, while Brave New World shows how the vices and weaknesses of society's constituents can be used against them to create the kind of dictatorship in which everyone thinks they are happy and free, when in fact they are being controlled by their own desires. We utilizes both models productively, and manages also to address the rampant destruction of the natural world. It is an excellent starting point for the budding young science fiction reader to ask the kinds of questions such as, "how free and fair and equitable is our society, really?"

5. Foundation, Isaac Asimov

As we move into science fiction's so-called "Golden Age," things get a little trickier, as, in my opinion, finding something I can whole-heartedly recommend to a young person (or any person) gets a lot more difficult. It is quite easy, however, for me to recommendation Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

How does society work? How do you get people "on your side" and keep them there? What does mean to wield social power, and is it fair to other people for one to do so? Foundation begins with the assumption that ultimate power over society can be wielded, and proceeds from there, using a far-future galactic empire modeled on Ancient Rome as its setting. The political maneuvering of its many protagonists will draw the young reader in, just as surely as the outcome of said maneuvers will make great fodder for discussions of what is ethically right and wrong on the macro-political level.

6. Dune, Frank Herbert

Dune treads some of the same landscape as Foundation, with its powerful political entities vying for power. However, Dune introduces the young reader to the idea that spiritualism can effectively be blended with science fictional settings. It is also a great candidate for introducing the young reader to ecological themes that are subtler and more nuanced than those expressed in We (while, "we're destroying our environment," is an important message, so is, "here's how we might handle ourselves in an alternate ecology").

As I mention above, it is difficult to find Golden Age science fiction without pitfalls, and Dune has some serious ones, in my opinion. Readers' attention should be drawn to Herbert's problematic choice of perhaps too closely populating the Fremen with real-world Arab cultural details, and also the implicit homophobia inherent in the depiction of the character of Baron Harkonnen.

7. Solaris, Stanisław Lem

Once we get past the Golden Age and into the New Wave, it starts to get easier to find recommendations again, and the first of those on my list for the interested young reader is Stanisław Lem's Solaris. Remember in War of the Worlds how the idea of the book revolved around inverting your perceptions so you could see taken-for-granted behaviors from someone else's perspective? Well, Solaris is like that, except for the entire human experience.

The question at the core of Solaris is whether or not the experience of aliens and humans will ever be even remotely relatable. The novel's name is the name to the planet where all the action takes place, and that planet's surface is entirely covered by an organism with the following properties: it is a liquid ocean, it forms itself into shapes and structures with some regularity, but often seemingly at random, and it is also powerful enough to "steer" its planet's orbit.

The existence of such a creature, capable of perpetually thwarting attempts at communication with human visitors, calls into question the very basis on which each of us perceives the universe, and the bias we give our own perceptions in making sense of our reality. A difficult lesson to learn, but one the interested young person would do well to internalize.

8. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

We now come to another novel that asks us to question our society, with echoes of 1984, Brave New World, and We, but this time around, we will never really be certain whether or not we live in a just society, since our perceptions of right and wrong are, at least to some degree, culturally constructed.

The Man in the High Castle takes place in an alternate reality 1960's in which, having won World War II, Japan controls the Western half of the former United States, and Germany controls the Eastern half, with a neutral zone in the former Rocky Mountain states. Within the world of the novel there is a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The contraband novel depicts a world in which the Allies won World War II, but certain historical details make it clear that it is not our real world that Grasshopper depicts, but another Allies-won-WWII world entirely. The characters, naturally, begin to question the goodness and rightness of their world, which leads in turn for the reader to assess his or her own.

Layered against all of this is yet another productive level. Dick extends the perception metaphor to the artifacts created by artists, showing that aesthetic works operate in much the same way, and by drawing our attention to signals and signifiers, the rationalization of meaning and a creator's intent of a creation is itself similar to the rationalization of comparing one's reality to imagined realities.

Ostensibly, The Man in the High Castle can be read as an action adventure novel with protagonists escaping Nazi persecutors and navigating the rigors of an occupied society controlled by hostile foreign powers. Beneath the surface lie unfathomable depths of productive philosophy.

9. The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin

No New Wave reading list is complete without a novel by Le Guin. Many will probably recommend The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Both are fine choices and should definitely be on one's longer term reading list. My first recommendation to the young person is The Lathe of Heaven.

We return to questions of power and control, somewhat similar to the ground tread by Foundation, but this time with a critical inflection toward change and the expression of one's will upon reality. George Orr has been keeping himself from entering REM sleep for years, because his dreams have the power to change reality. But when he accidentally overdoses, he is sent to counseling before he'll be allowed near medications again. When his psychiatrist discovers that George's power is real, he also happens upon the discovery that while putting George under hypnosis, he can shape the changes George's dreams have.

As with the other two New Wave books listed here, The Lathe of Heaven takes a previously explored theme in science fiction and poses deeper, more probing questions, calling our most basic presuppositions, even our own perceptions themselves, into question.

10. The City and the City, China Miéville

It would have been impossible to introduce my younger self to this novel in the 1990's, since it was published in 2009, however much I might wish it had been available. From the 1980's onward, science fiction branches out to explore many different facets of the human condition, and Miéville more than any other author, in my opinion, proves himself expert at crafting something new from very commonplace components.

On the surface, The City and the City is a noir detective novel. However, the setting of the crime (the two eponymous cities) and the details of the crime itself lead the reader toward questions surrounding nationalism and the arbitrariness of human political boundaries. In Miévillian fashion, the fantastic nature of the cities' geographic layout is itself a critique of nationalism and global trade in the modern world.

The City and the City is also an excellent gateway into other more complex novels in Miéville's oeuvre, such as the Bas-Lag trilogy and Embassytown.

The Teleological Thought

A Review and Analysis of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

This review and analysis contains plot spoilers, but the Introduction and Conclusion contain a minimum of plot details.

Introduction

Some very old philosophical questions: How much of "who we are" is bound up with our perceptions and thought processes? Does language shape thought, or does thought shape language?

Language isn't explored enough in science fiction. Until recently, I knew of only one prominent instance of an SF narrative built around a linguistic concept–China Miéville's Embassytown. I have now discovered a second–Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. And it should be noted that publication of Chiang's story preceded Miéville's novel by almost a decade.

The Sequential and the Holistic

At the core of Story of Your Life lies a subtle kick in the reader's complacent acceptance of the human perspective as The Way Things Are. Aliens have arrived in orbit around Earth and have dispatched over a hundred devices across the planet, which we call "looking-glasses."

The looking-glasses allow us to see and hear the aliens, although the aliens remain physically in orbit. Desiring to know what the aliens' intentions are, the US military brings the story's protagonist, a professional linguist, out to one of the looking-glass sites in order to learn the aliens' language and thereby their intent.

The alien language defies the given parameters of human language at every turn. Their writing system at first appears ideographic, like Chinese, where a single character represents a concept, and pronunciation is divorced from form. It turns out that pronunciation is indeed divorced from form for the aliens, but their writing is inflected in highly complex way. For example, noun declensions are indicated by rotating a noun character a certain number of degrees with relationship to a verb character and then blending the two into one, while an adverb like "clearly" is indicated by altering the curvature of a verb's stroke in a particular way.

Furthermore, once the protagonist gets the alien visitors to start writing their language out, another important discovery is made. Rather than drawing each character of a sentence in the order of pronunciation, the aliens draw strokes through the entire sentence, coordinating elements of each and every glyph from beginning through the end, until the sentence is finally complete.

This discovery occurs simultaneously with a similar discovery made by the physicists working with the aliens, and the scholarly community concludes that the aliens' entire worldview is teleological rather than sequential. Events are interpreted in terms of their purposes and goals rather than their causes and effects.

The narrative's structure further reinforces this theme. The story of the protagonist being hired by the military and studying the aliens' language is told in sequential order in the third person past tense. These segments are interrupted by scenes told in the second person present tense, in which the protagonist addresses her daughter and relates the titular "story of her life." These sections are wildly out of temporal order, and can alternate from adolescence, to childhood, to graduation, then to infancy, with seemingly no cohesion, until the reader glosses that this seeming lack of cohesion is the point, and that the reader is to view these sequences more like the aliens and less like a human. And in keeping with the central theme, the story of mother and daughter that arises from these disparate puzzle pieces succeeds at adding up to more than the sum of its parts.

The story's ending adds an extra layer of structural resonance to the theme. The narrative subtly leads the reader to believe that the protagonist's messages to her daughter describe events that happened prior to the aliens' arrival. One subtle detail at the end of the story makes it clear that those events take place after the aliens departure. By further undermining the temporal cohesion of story events, Chiang directs the reader to question given assumptions about how we perceive of and order our experiences.

Conclusion

I first heard of Ted Chiang during a panel at ICFA 2016, which included a discussion of his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I was intrigued and added his works to my reading list, but as my backlog is very long, I wasn't scheduled to read any of his work for a year or so. The upcoming release of Arrival forced me to move Story of Your Life forward to the present, and I'm very fortunate for that circumstance. I'll be prioritizing the rest of Chiang's works higher in my backlog as well.

I am impressed by how much Chiang accomplished in such a short space. Story of Your Life manages to cogently utilize linguistics and physics to the literary end of exploring human perception and cognition in just over fifty pages. At times humorous, and at others heartbreaking, Story of Your Life is as human as it is scientific. An expertly crafted narrative and a highly recommended read.

Ouroboros

The other thing that has happened is that the houses are much better organized about which books they are “getting behind”. This has the beneficial effect of making sure the books seen to have the biggest potential get full distribution. But it also has the impact of reducing the chances that the “other” books will get full attention from Barnes & Noble (able to deliver more outlets with a single buyer than one would customarily get from the entire indie store network). And, without that, it takes a lot of luck or online discovery to rescue a book from oblivion.

– The reality of publishing economics has changed for the big players, The Passive Voice

I ran into this article on social media. The thread in which it appeared consisted of the usual hemming and hawing about the importance of marketing and being proactive about building a readership, etc. etc.

I recently came to a realization about that kind of thinking, for I am guilty of having just this mindset for the better part of the last four years. The core of such thought patterns is that, as a writer, the goal one must have is to get more readers. It seems self-evident. Of course writers need readers. Why even bother thinking about it? Well, I'm contrarian, so I insist. Why should you, as an author, get more readers? You get more readers in order to prove to a business (like a bookstore) that your books deserve shelf space (or some other form of promotion), which in turn gets you even more readers, so you can get a signing at said bookstore (more promotion), which gets you more readers, which then you can use to convince a convention to give you a booth, which gets you more readers, which you can then use to get in good with an agent, which gets you more exposure, so you can get more readers, in order to... is this pattern familiar yet? It's called a positive feedback loop, and not positive in the sense of "good," but positive in the sense of "increasing" (bad things can increase in amount or potency, too).

This whole situation struck me as terribly mentally unhealthy. It also reminded me of part of a David Foster Wallace speech:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. ... If you worship money and things–if they are where you tap real meaning in life–then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. ... Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. ... Worship power–you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart–you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

– This Is Water, David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2009)

I will be the first person to argue that writing in a vacuum of your own thoughts and experiences (impervious or unwilling to receive feedback) is very quick way to wind up as the kind of writer no one else will want or need to read. However, there is an inverse evil, and our culture encourages writers (or at the very least, speculative fiction writers) to chase it: the maximization of audience size. The axiom to append to David Foster Wallace's list above would be something like: Worship readership, and your writing will never be good enough, for there will always be someone who would like you better if you wrote some other way, and you will forever hate every story you tell, every insight you have, every idea you invent, every word you jot down.

To worship "readership" is to seek a maximization of the attractiveness of your writing, and this requires reducing or minimizing the elements that make writing intellectually stimulating or awareness-raising. Writing becomes a utility for ego-glorification, on both sides of the reader/writer divide, with writers getting good jollies from five-star reviews and readers getting good jollies from having their worldview validated or their fantasies indulged.

And it's eating us. It's eating our culture entirely.

This is the snake in our collective souls that is going to demand more and more of our time and attention until there's nothing genuine or deep or controversial or exceptional left in the world, and even scarier, I can imagine it getting so bad that, one day, people will find that they desperately need literature that has one or all of those properties, but no one will have any idea how to create such writing anymore, nor how to find any of the great writing of old (because it will all be buried under such enormous quantities of saccharine, self-indulgent fluff).

I have stopped caring about readership. I care about readers. As in, specific people.

Yesterday, as I got a haircut, my barber told me something that initially disappointed me: the copy of Transmutations of Fire and Void that I gave him for his store had been stolen. But he then added that one of his customers had commented on its disappearance, and had been upset–that customer had come to enjoy reading a short story or two while waiting for my barber, and was sad not to have been able to finish the collection. That additional detail made me the happiest writer-publisher in the world, and I made sure to let him know that I'd bring in a replacement.

Stories like that, and that's far from my only one, are not comparable in worth to a million sales or a circulation of a hundred thousand copies. I do not need to be widely read. I need to be read by people who care. By readers who trust me to show them something compelling, not a readership looking to get on board with The Next Hot Thing. Brands are fine for products; they're not fine for me as an author.

And every time I go on social media and discover a link to an article like the one on The Passive Voice, and I see the huge list of comments with everyone talking about "taking marketing seriously" and "how to build your brand," I take a deep breath, and I remember that people exist like the one my barber described (not to mention my barber himself, for letting me set my book out at his store).

As a writer, I have to care about what other people think in the form of feedback to my writing, but I'm not beholden to it, and certainly not because I might think that changing my vision to suit another's whims would lead to more sales or a broader "readership."

As demonstrated by the Passive Voice article, our entire culture is in the self-consuming loop of readership-worship. Bookstores increasingly want only those books that they know will sell en masse. Publishers only want to pick up new authors if they have demonstrated the ability to gather a following and command its members' attention (and therefore their credit cards). Writing groups tell novice writers to add more action, and not to deviate from the five-act structure or the hero's journey in the slightest, and to make sure to spell out all plot details for the reader, because readers can't grasp complex things, and you don't want any reader ever not to like you. You have to maximize your readership! Of course!

In the same essay quoted above, David Foster Wallace reminds us that, "the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." Wallace was talking about an attitude toward one's daily life, but I find his words apply quite well to the endeavors of writing and publishing, too. And despite all the forces of my culture trying to pull me down into the abyss of self-consuming destruction, I'm happy, thank you very much, with my writing and publishing philosophy right where it is.

Scholars, Diplomats, Merchants, Kings

A Review and Analysis of Foundation by Isaac Asimov

This review and analysis as a whole contains plot spoilers, but the Introduction and Conclusion contain a minimum of plot details.

Introduction

As a teenager, I played a video game called Final Fantasy Tactics. My assessment of Tactics was that it was a perfectly fine game, but I didn't like its story very much. It wasn't until I was much older that I was able to suss out why. The story's primary focus is on empires, kingdoms, dukedoms, and other political entities in the game, their relative rises and falls, their intrigues, etc. rather than the characters. The characters, to me, felt rather hollow. Rather than people, they were simulacra, conveniently moving into in the right places at the right times to make the plot work.

I got the same kind of feeling from Foundation by Isaac Asimov. However, every small movement of Foundation embodies a coherent attitude toward humanity and cultural change that is fully consistent with its characters being treated in this way, and thus provides a richer context for exploring the human condition.

Like Puppets

The Galactic Empire is millennia old and enormously powerful. Its seat of government is the capital planet Trantor, situated in the galactic core. From there, all the thousands of inhabited worlds in the galaxy are administrated.

Enter Hari Seldon, a mathematician who has developed a science called psychohistory, which enables him to predict the future path of humanity (not individuals, but society as a whole) far into the future with great accuracy. Seldon is currently on the outs with the Imperial administrators because the results of his most recent psychohistorical calculations have leaked, and they predict the utter collapse of the Empire in five hundred years' time.

In Seldon's time, such an outcome seems inconceivable. The Empire is galactically omnipresent and omnipotent. However, Seldon maintains his stance, and asks for permission to start up two colonies, opposite one another at the farthest fringes of the galaxy, where scholars will record into a great encyclopedia all the knowledge of humanity, so that the ensuing dark age after the Empire's fall can be reduced from thirty-thousand years to a mere one thousand.

Seldon's associates head out to the distant planets of Terminus and Star's End, and each begins their great project. The narrative follows those who emigrated to Terminus while the events at Star's End remain a mystery.

Seldon also has built on Terminus a chamber called a Time Vault. At specific intervals, the Time Vault opens, and a recording of Seldon appears. The first of these happens fifty years from Foundation's founding, shortly after the Empire's political control over the outermost provinces has collapsed. Seldon tells his followers, who have been diligently crafting an encyclopedia for nearly two generations, that the encyclopedia writing was a sham, a diversion so that the Empire would not feel threatened by Terminus and Star's End.

The real work, Seldon tells his followers, is now to begin, in the form of navigating the politics of the small kingdoms that are rising up to fill the void left by the recently vacated Empire. But he will not divulge the full scope of his predictions, since that would enable an individual to change it. He has intentionally kept the science of psychohistory from his followers.

This particular movement of the plot is interesting in that it suggests that there is no true "freedom" from dominion. Seldon's followers may have quit their stagnant empire of control and domination, but they find themselves wholesale subject to the thousand-year plan of their leader's creation. Who in this situation is not a pawn? Even rulers are ruled by the very power they wield over others.

The novel's characters exhibit a level of depth commiserate with this role, but the rise and fall of the multitude of political entities remains compelling, mostly because of the tension created between characters' individual political motives and the context that Seldon's looming historical presence creates.

In Final Fantasy Tactics, the characters were portrayed as the liberating, individualistic forces, expressing a singular will on the corrupt political entities surrounding them. Foundation is more interesting because the "liberating" force itself cannot escape coercion and control. Seldon's prophetic maneuvering of his own people creates a more interesting dynamic. Is he even at the top of the Foundation hierarchy, or is he himself also controlled? Can a force that necessarily overrides individual will be called "good"? When Seldon appears at the fifty year mark, his message alters their entire society. In a moment, they change from being research-driven to politics-driven. He is capable of ruling Foundation society decades and centuries after his death.

It is in this tension that Foundation feels most true. At times in our lives, we are all subject to being coerced by forces more powerful than ourselves, whether that's on the scale of our workplace manager or our country's political apparatus. And the results of that coercion are not necessarily bad (despite what extreme individualists might think).

Foundation's characters must navigate a world in which they are certainly being used, but in which the tension between their own desires and what they think would be best, are very much in their control.

How much did Seldon's psychohistory predict? Could they be inadvertently straying from his path without them or him knowing it?

The Logical Man

Of course, underlying the whole concept of a supposed science of psychohistory is the idea that human behavior can be subjected to mathematics and thus accurately predicted. This will undoubtedly strike most modern readers as somewhat ridiculous, and yet it also speaks to the zeitgeist of the 1950's, when it might have been believed that, despite the burgeoning field of quantum mechanics and other discoveries in the physical sciences, that just maybe science would become capable of describing even the most complex phenomena, including human behavior.

In reality, human behavior is far too dynamic to be the subject of a mathematical science. Far from being able to predict thousand-year future political configurations at 98% accuracy, such a science's probabilities would drop to near zero after only a few days or weeks at most. In his introduction to the Folio Society edition of Foundation, Paul Krugman compares this to the phenomenon of predicting weather patterns, which exhibit just this pattern of predictability, and the same sensitivity to minute changes.

My favorite expression of science circumscribing human behavior in Foundation was the depiction of a field called Logical Symbolism. During the period when the Foundation was ruled by a scientific council, the governing scientists at one point find that they must interpret a treatise they have received from a nearby kingdom. However, legal jargon makes no sense to them, and they are all perplexed as to the treatise writer's intent. To discover its intended meaning, they decide to apply the principles of Logical Symbolism to the treatise, and are thus enabled to generate a derivative document that contains only exactly what the treatise's author meant when he wrote it. They apply the same science to recordings of conversations with a visiting politician and discover that everything he said "cancelled itself out." In other words, he said nothing of substance, even though he was ostensibly communicating.

Though anachronistic, the treatment of human social behavior as mathematically circumscribable is very science-fictional in that it forms an internally consistent theory of human nature supported by many elements within the text. The notion itself may not have aged particularly well, but it is interesting from a historical perspective, much as are elements of sf terminology that elicit the 1950's, everything from the prevalence of atomic energy as a signifier of high technology to terms such as "atom blaster" and "force shield."

Conclusion

The attitude of the inevitability of power and control as defining features of human politics is ultimately found deep within the novel's substructure–even after humanity has gone to space and spread out across the galaxy, we find ourselves still reenacting the Roman empire, still very much subject to all the ills of human politics, still victims of ourselves. For this very element, some might call Foundation anti-science fictional, but I would argue that the spotlight Foundation shines on the themes of power and control represents a more nuanced analysis of those themes than such detractors give it credit for. The novel must also be given credit for its recognition of violence as a form of barbarism.

We may not be able to predict humanity's future any more than we can predict next month's weather, but the idea that we could build an empire worth living in through careful thought and planning rings true, most especially if the story depicting such a theme gives its revolutionaries ambiguous motives. Foundation compares favorably in this regard to other works of its time, and even those of today.

We May Expect

A Review and Analysis of The War of the Worlds by H. G. WellsIntroduction

This review and analysis contains plot spoilers.

The unnamed protagonist, a professor of social philosophy, sits in the study of his home, and writes the following words: "In two hundred years, we may expect". He finds he cannot focus his mind on finishing the sentence and so goes to fetch the morning mail. From there, he is drawn into the strange occurrences in the next town over, where a metallic cylinder has fallen from the sky and embedded itself in the dirt.

What follows from that incident is the nothing less than the slow deterioration of human social order into utter chaos as Martians emerge from the the cylinder and begin exterminating anyone unlucky enough to get near them. The military power of the British empire (one of the world's strongest forces at the turn of the twentieth century) poses no threat to them, and amidst the touchdown of many more cylinders, London appears to be theirs for the taking.

But to fixate on the devastation reeked by the Martian heat rays, poison gases, and harvesters, as both the 1953 and 2005 films do, is to miss the real point of the novel. At its core, The War of the Worlds is about the true nature of humanity and what we might expect of the human condition in changed environmental circumstances. In the wake of modern climate change and the uncertain resource reliability of our modern world, the questions raised by this century-old novel seem, to me, resonant and poignant for readers today.

Dominion

In the first lines of Genesis, God grants man dominion over all the other creatures of the Earth. Most of us, as we proceed through are daily lives, are unlikely to give much thought, if any, to the fact that we share our biome with a multitude of other lifeforms. We have taken dominion over other creatures assiduously, and have created for ourselves very safe and sanitary spaces of habitation. As the creation myth demonstrates, we have, somehow in the last forty thousand years, moved seamlessly from self-defense and co-habitation to utter rulership, deciding how and when all other creatures on our planet live and die, and the quality of their existence as well.

Throughout the text, in instances too numerous to recount, the philosophy professor, nearly always on the run from Martian death machines, reflects on how animal-like his and other human's existence has become. When the narrative jumps to the events of his brother (who must escape population-dense downtown London, unlike the philosophy professor, who navigates its countryside fringes), we are given glimpses of the selfishness, stubbornness, and greed exhibited by the average person as resources become scarce and death looms imminent.

Can a human society only advance when resources are abundant and most individuals' Maslow base hierarchies are secure? Perhaps, as the text suggests, social progress is an illusion generated by times of abundance, and our "natural" state is not anything desirous. Certainly not if the novel's Martians rule humans the way humans have ruled the rest of the animal kingdom. Our position of dominance then is called into question: do we deserve dominion over all other species if our behavior can be so easily altered by changed circumstances?

And yet, perhaps the novel is overly rife with futility. We have seen a remarkable expansion of the cultural circle of human empathy over the last century, undoubtedly improving across multiple vectors–race and gender discrimination are lower than at any other time in human history, and individuals enjoy more privileges and freedoms, too. But do these improvements represent permanent alterations to the human condition, or do they merely represent a tenuous and transient social configuration, a thin layer disguising our "real" human nature?

The Curate and the Artilleryman

While the philosopher's brother witnesses the major failings of human character as the entire population of London attempts simultaneously to flee, the philosopher himself witnesses human baseness in the form of two specific individuals, whom he meets at different junctures as he attempts to navigate his familiar countryside now dominated by hostile Martians.

The first individual he spends a significant amount of time with is referred to only as "the curate" (an assistant to a vicar or priest). The opinion of the philosopher towards the curate is very low. The curate is depicted as mentally decrepit in every intellectual and emotional way possible. He is prone to hysterics and ranting about doomsday, judgment, and the sins of mankind as well as his own. He repeatedly gourmandizes upon their meager food and water stores, refuses to engage in any form of rational discourse with the philosopher, and appears utterly ignorant of how the noise he makes has the potential to attract the attention of the Martians. This is eventually his undoing, as his behavior eventually does alert the Martians to his presence, which gets him killed and nearly results in the death of the philosopher as well.

I found the curate's depiction wholly consistent with Enlightenment attitudes toward members of the clergy. Wells depicts organized religion as no salvation from the rigors of a world in which humanity has been debased. Far from it, religion is portrayed as intellectually and emotionally crippling.

The philosopher meets the artilleryman before the curate, but is soon drawn away from him by circumstance. They meet again later in the novel, after the countryside and London have both been occupied and emptied of human inhabitants.

When they meet again, the artilleryman speaks of building up a new society that will thrive in the sewers beneath London, while the Martians remain oblivious to their presence. Of course, the artilleryman will ensure that the weak-minded (like the curate) remain penned and/or slaughtered by the Martians. He will take only the best specimens of humanity for his project, and their underground society (both metaphorically and literally) will eventually learn the secrets of Martian science and stand as their peers, or even overthrow them. The artilleryman additionally desires no literature, art, or philosophy. He wants only the hard sciences for his new society.

Initially, the philosopher is drawn into this rhetoric. However, after the artilleryman and the philosopher spend a night drinking wine and playing cards, the philosopher awakens to the notion that, for all the artilleryman's talk of himself being a superb specimen of humanity, his behavior does not jive with his rhetoric, and the philosopher leaves him.

Both of these characters speak to elements of the human condition. While it may seem unkind to think unwell of our fellow man, we have to admit the loss of mental faculties under the extreme stress of imminent threat to our life are real and possible afflictions that any of us might succumb to. And I likely do not need to cite specific examples of the failed social experiments involving a charismatic leader desirous of creating an empire of supermen possessing traits he finds noble.

In the end, alone in a London roamed by hostile Martians, stripped of the human infrastructure and social companionship that will render his philosophy worthwhile, the philosopher also succumbs mentally, eventually walking himself toward one of the alien machines, ready to meet oblivion rather than subsist, running and hiding alone in the deserted metropolis. His life is saved only by the fact that the aliens have finally succumbed to the Earth's microorganisms.

Conclusion

Wells' prose is clear and eloquent, lending enough description to events to convey the horror of the desolated countryside and the ruthlessness of the Martian attacks without encumbering either characterization or plot. His major themes are expressed both subtly and with an appropriate amount of repetition (enough to be remarked, but not so much as to feel heavy handed).

Are humans better than other animals? Do our abilities to transmit ideas across space through spoken words and time through writing endow us necessarily with the right to be lords of all other creatures on Earth? If the Martians of The War of the Worlds are true science fictional metaphors for humanity's behavior toward other species, then the answer would seem to be a resounding "no."

And what of the philosopher's aborted essay? What might we expect of humanity in the next two hundred years? Will we maintain our ideals, morals, and ethics, as climate change and resource depletion impact us ever more acutely in coming decades?

Most science fiction has proven inadequate to the task of guessing the future, either technologically or socially. Wells, wisely, leaves his philosopher's sentence incomplete.

About Popular Culture

Some years ago, a workplace acquaintance, deciding he'd had enough of my obliviousness to pop culture phenomena, coined a phrase that soon became a team-wide refrain: "Don't worry, Matt. It's just a disco song." Such was the reply anytime I made clear my ignorance of some element of popular culture, whether it be a song, a movie, a TV show, or an internet meme.

I'll admit to a certain level of disgust with large swaths of popular culture, especially concerning books. Two very popular series in particular stand out to me as both stylistically and thematically abhorrent, and yet they are bestsellers.

And I am absolutely guilty of a thing all humans do. If I see a book that is like one of my abhorred series, say Divergent, and if I read the blurb and look at its cover, it's very easy for me to jump to the conclusion, "this is trying to be like Hunger Games." After analyzing a certain number of its attributes, I make inferences about the intent of Divergent's creators based on my experience with other similar media. With enough experience, I can count on these assumptions to be right about any given piece of media and across a large number of aesthetic contexts. The problem with this strategy, which is employed widely by all humans about most all art, is that it only works most of the time.

True diamonds in the rough will often function by drawing you into the familiar (even the trite and the hackneyed) only to upend all your preconceptions by utilizing the familiar elements to unique ends. If I allowed myself to fall blithely into thought patterns such as "all teen post-apocalypses are crap" or "all feudal, fantasy political intrigues are crap," I would miss the gem when it did arrive, having dismissed it out of hand. For example, I read Red Rising in 2014 even though I was pretty certain I would find nothing of value there, and I did not find anything of value there, but there was a small chance that I would. Everyone has to decide how much energy it's worth expending on such endeavors.

I found myself wondering if I was guilty of letting associations override analysis with regard to my recent assessment of Stranger Things. I decided that, in this case, I hadn't. I had indeed watched the entire season, I had paid attention the whole time, and by my personality, I am inclined toward (rather than away from) its subject matter. So, I stand by analysis.

However, I also came away wanting to prove that I am capable of demonstrating my "diamond in the rough" stance by identifying actual diamonds in the rough. I wanted to be able to point to something (or things) and say, "I know you think I hate popular culture, but..."

So, without further ado, I present here for your perusal, all in one single blog post, reviews of three popular animated movies for children, two of them by that mega-corporation of mega-corporations, Disney Entertainment. If I am truly biased against popular culture, I should have no business either searching out or finding sophistication in any such works. And yet...

Ratatouille (Disney, 2007)

I came to this movie very late, just about a week ago. It passed by my radar upon its release because I was in the middle of moving from Japan to Hawaii to start graduate school. However, I read Better Living Through Criticism by A.O. Scott earlier this year, which piqued my curiosity with regards to Ratatouille (there's a protracted discussion of the film toward the book's conclusion).

The film did not in any way disappoint.

We begin with Remy, a rat living with his family in the French countryside. Unlike the rest of his family, who are content to eat garbage, Remy has a sensitive nose and soon develops a very refined palette. Unsurprisingly, country garbage does contain enough variety to satiate his aesthetic tastes, and the only use his family has for his talent is as a rat poison detector.

It is not long before Remy's countryside life is disrupted and he finds himself in Paris. It is there that, one night, he witnesses a culinary disaster take place in the kitchen of the famous restaurant Gusteau's–the garbage boy knocks over a large pot of soup, and in attempting to remake the dish utterly botches it. Remy dives to the rescue and saves the soup, but the garbage boy, Alfredo, gets the credit. It is here that the narrative's fundamental tension is formed: Alfredo is hopelessly incompetent when it comes to culinary art, but Remy, as a rat, will cause customers (not to mention health officials) to revolt were they to discover that vermin had prepared their food.

This speaks droves to the theme with which I began this post. As an audience it is necessary to compare new works to those that we have experienced before. Sharing a historical artistic framework with the work's creator can be a source of great aesthetic joy for the audience (for all its flaws, this is one of Stranger Things great strengths). But the critical audience must remain critical not just of new works, but the assumptions they themselves bring to those works–perhaps it is possible for a rat to cook a delicious meal.

Ratatouille's depth does not begin and end along this single aesthetic vector. I could write a much larger essay concerning: the tension Remy's love of cooking causes between him and his father; Remy's assertion that "nature is change" (a response to his father's assertion that human-rat animosity and revulsion is built into their very nature); the willingness of Gusteau's sous-chef to corrupt his art and cheapen his restaurant's brand hawking a line of frozen foods; the corrupting nature of public attention both on art and on relationships; Anton Ego's lack of self-criticism at the story's inception and his development throughout; and so on.

Not only is Ratatouille a brilliant study of what it means to love an art, it is also entertaining and accessible. This is one of those rare films that is at the same time simple and complex. It is hands down the best Disney movie I have ever seen.

Big Hero 6 (Disney, 2014)

Two years ago I found myself on a twenty-hour plane ride, a situation in which my aesthetic discrimination defers rapidly to my desire to fill time with something other than staring blankly at a seat back and not sleeping.

Suffice it to say, I came to Big Hero 6 with low expectations, but I came away pleasantly surprised.

My biggest critique of popular entertainment these days is that its moral universe seems to have flattened significantly since the 1980's. When I look at the range of complex moral and ethical concerns raised by Star Trek: The Next Generation and then set that alongside the series' most recent incarnations, the magnitude of the moral flattening is astounding.

In my opinion, it is rare to see a work present anything like complex villains and complex heroes nowadays, and for that alone, Big Hero 6 deserves to be called out.

The story begins with the main character, Hiro, a fourteen-year-old programmer and robotics engineer, winning an illegal robot death match. His robot is deceptively small and simplistic, utilizing its ability to disassemble and reassemble itself to its advantage. While that ability presages the metaphor of humans rebuilding their lives in the wake of disaster, the introductory scene gets deeper still. Hiro has the ability to flip his robot from its standard mode, indicated by a yellow smiley face, to a kind of "kill mode" indicated by a red demon face. At this point, it is only mindless robots being destroyed, but the scene effectively foreshadows all the ethical complexity the film will explore, as Hiro demonstrates himself capable of both inspiring awe and wreaking destruction with his creations. (Spoilers ahead.)

Hiro lost his parents as an infant. At the start of the movie, his guardians include his aunt and his older brother, Tadashi, a robotics engineer himself, currently studying at the local Institute of Technology. Tadashi gets Hiro interested in applying to the Institute (Hiro has graduated high school early) only for Tadashi to promptly die in an explosion at the Institute's technology expo.

Hiro is cast into grief and successfully isolates himself from all of his friends and family but one. Baymax, the robot his brother was working on at the Institute, activates and proves socially naive enough to break through Hiro's emotional walls. Baymax is a medical robot, capable of analyzing humans for illnesses and equipped with an array of medical instruments for treatment. Through his literal interpretation of Hiro's requests, Baymax inadvertently draws Hiro into discovering that his invention for the expo, nanobots, have been stolen and are being illegally produced en mass. The explosion and fire begin to look like a cover for stealing Hiro's invention.

Hiro wastes no time upgrading Baymax with defensive and offensive equipment and sets out to apprehend the individual who stole his invention, figuring that, just as the narrative structure has led the audience to conclude, the culprit is Alastair Krei, a businessman who Hiro turned down at the expo. However, when finally unmasked, the nanobot thief indirectly responsible for Tadashi's death turns out to be Professor Callaghan, Tadashi's advisor.

In what is certainly the film's best narrative move, Hiro, overcome with rage, rips the chip containing Tadashi's healthcare protocols out of Baymax and orders him to kill the professor. It would still be a poignant scene if the metaphor consisted only of the human/robot ethics level and the moralizing against revenge. However, since Baymax was programmed by Tadashi, Baymax acts as a stand-in for Tadashi. Removing Tadashi's programming from Baymax has the metaphorical effect of killing Tadashi all over again. The symbolism is further strengthened when Baymax later convinces Hiro not to delete his healthcare protocols, and we see what Baymax has meant by his refrain of "Tadashi is here" throughout the film–Baymax possesses video records of his construction at Tadashi's hands, which he shows Hiro, and once again robotic assemblage is paralleled with Hiro's struggle to assemble an identity for himself in the wake of Tadashi's death.

The Tadashi videos are also remarkable for their depiction of the engineering process. While ostensibly simplistic and more than a bit silly, they do accurately convey for a younger audience the time-consuming trial and error that must be invested in order to arrive at working solutions. In addition, the videos capture the malaise and weariness that accompany repeated failure, in addition to the elation of finding the solution that makes the entire enterprise seem worthwhile.

For all that is superbly executed about Big Hero 6, I also feel that, of the three films discussed in this blog post, it contains the most significant flaws. The narrative does a good job of keeping its action sequences relevant to major themes, and they are certainly not ethically flat, but it is a fight-sequence heavy film all the same. I am not a fan of the visual style of the art, although I will admit it fits the comic book/graphic novel style that the entire film is shooting for.

The biggest aesthetic problem for me is the reversal in which Callaghan rather than Krei turns out to be the villain. Callaghan is a professor at a robotics institute, while Krei is an executive for a private sector business. This is a very troubling reversal. In an age in which the academies of the world are being eroded and perverted by laissez-faire capitalism, I find it extremely problematic to present children with a vision in which the professor is the selfish out-of-control megalomaniac, and the businessman is the harmless bystander. If one were to counter with the supposition that we are to presume that professor and businessman are equal and interchangeable categories (which the film's structure would support), we arrive at other incredibly unhealthy assumptions, such as, are both beholden to capitalism's bottom line? In this writer's opinion, professors should not be. The Callaghan-Krei juxtaposition is inappropriate in the extreme.

Yet, for its flaws, Big Hero 6 was the first Disney movie in a long time that impressed me in any way at all. Its commentary on engineering, and its well-articulated narrative dialogue around revenge, especially in the context of a child losing the last member of his immediate family, is so well done that its other failings appear minor by comparison.

Kubo and the Two Strings (Laika, 2016)

This movie is without a doubt the most visually appealing animated film I have ever beheld. Film studio Laika specializes in stop-motion animation, but enhances the technique with modern computer graphics. The result is nothing short of stunning, and Dario Marianelli's score deftly adds accents and contours to the visual feast.

All of that was readily apparent from the film's trailer. What remained uncertain was whether or not the narrative experience would complete the visual-aural-narrative artistic trifecta.

I'm happy to report that I was not disappointed.

Eleven-year-old Kubo lives with his mother Sariatu in a cliffside cave on the outskirts of a Japanese village. His mother suffers from a memory affliction akin to Alzheimer's, and it is up to Kubo to keep them fed. To make money, he entertains the villagers with stories told using a menagerie of origami creations animated by his magical shamisen (Japanese string instrument).

Kubo's infant years, as related by his mother, provide a complex background. Kubo has only one eye, the other apparently "taken" by Kubo's grandfather shortly after this birth. Grandpa is also responsible for killing Kubo's father, Hanzo, and Kubo only survived because mom stole him away. The two of them remain safe by making sure never to stray out beneath the nighttime sky.

Naturally, before too long Kubo finds himself on the run from forces of evil, who appear in the form of ghostly aunts desirous of stealing Kubo away to his grandfather. What ensues is a fairly typical hero's journey–Kubo must gather up a sword, a helmet, and a suit of armor in order to become capable of standing up to his grandfather. And if that was all there was to the story, there would be nothing more to say here.

But there is so much more.

The most notable thematic quality of the story on first blush is the preponderance of memory and identity. Sariatu is not the only character who suffers memory issues. As Kubo starts his hero's journey, he's joined by a giant, talking monkey guardian and a half-human half-beetle samurai, both of whom possess secret identities, which they are not entirely aware of because of, you guessed it–memory problems. Even the story's conclusion is dependent on memory. The eventual resolution of the conflict between Kubo and his grandfather involves memory and identity reassignment (just how much are other people responsible for our identity formation?). (Spoilers ahead.)

As I noted at the very beginning of this post, successful art often functions by setting you up with the familiar only to subvert all expectations. That is exactly what Kubo and the Two Strings achieves. About halfway through the film, we finally learn how it was that Kubo's parents met. Kubo's father was tasked with the same hero's journey we see his son engage in. At the conclusion of Hanzo's journey, it was Kubo's mother who the grandfather tasked with destroying Hanzo. Hanzo secures her love not with the trite aphorism of "I love you," but with, "You are my quest."

A parallel structure can be found at the film's conclusion, in which Kubo defeats his grandfather, using neither sword, helmet, nor armor, in fact Kubo throws those prizes away. Instead he turns to the strands of hair he retains from his mother and father and uses them to restring his broken shamisen, along with one hair of his own (promised titular metaphor realized: "Kubo and the Two Strings"). Kubo's final and most powerful magic, the ability to render foes into friends, is possible only by metaphorically uniting the family trio that has been either broken or disjuncted by lost memory throughout the story up until that point.

In throwing away the magical artifacts of the hero's journey, the narrative subverts the hero's journey archetype and restructures its value hierarchy to place people and relationships above possessions and power. Just as Hanzo was successful in turning Sariatu away from domination and toward humanity, Kubo is similarly successful with his grandfather.

Any remaining narrative problems haranguing my mind at this point are minuscule when set aside these achievements. Some bits of dialogue struck me as contrived, and Kubo's shamisen magic had a touch of convenience, at times having the effect of doing whatever the plot needed it to. These are minor quibbles.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Kubo and the Two Strings, and although I think it might not quite reach the narrative aesthetic achievement of Ratatouille, it is certainly the most visually appealing of the three films reviewed here with a poignant and philosophically powerful story easily accessible to children and adults both.

Review: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

If my recent inquiry into SF literary theory has taught me anything, it's that the value of science fiction is in its ability to provide a new lens for interpreting reality. In Catherynne M. Valente's Radiance, I found not only an interesting new lens, but lenses within the lenses, each refracting the novel's entire potentiality across numerous characters and storytelling modes.

Fiction of this style is only capable of delivering on interesting themes and well wrought characters if the disparate styles and modes expand into a coherent narrative as the tale unfolds, becoming more than the sum of their parts, and, in my opinion, Valente achieved just this.

On one level, Radiance is the story of a film director Percival Unck, who specializes in pulp Gothic horror films in the 1920's and 30's. However, this is not the 20's and 30's as we know them. Unck occupies an alternate universe where interstellar travel became possible in the 1850's, and the countries of the world occupy the various planets and moons of the solar system: The English own both Luna and Uranus, the Spanish control Mercury, Mars is split between China and Russia, the Ottoman Empire controls Jupiter, the French Neptune, and the Americans Pluto. Venus is a condominium, with installations by all the countries of Earth.

Unck's films are renowned across the solar system, popular with everyone except his daughter, Severin, who, upon coming of age, begins her own directorial career. Unlike her father, Severin composes documentaries. She wants to differentiate herself from her father by showing the world something more real and genuinely visceral than "silly" and "trivial" Gothic fictions.

When a Venusian colony is inexplicably wiped out with only a sole survivor, Severin seizes upon the opportunity to bring to light to the dangers of extraterrestrial colonization. She takes her crew to Venus to film a documentary titled "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew," and it is from here that the narrative of Radiance fractures across many realities that maintain strong thematic correspondence despite being internally self-contradictory.

One level is the story of Anchises St. John, the sole survivor of the Venus calamity, rescued by Severin just before the catastrophe of her filming "Radiant Car." Many decades after her death, he is drawn into a plot that will send him back to Venus to uncover the truth of what happened to Severin during the "Radiant Car" incident.

However, in another narrative line, Percival Unck is writing, and revising, and re-revising a film about Anchises St. John, which he hopes will help him come to terms with his daughter's death and give him the closure reality can never provide. The difference between his screenplay and Anchises's reality is never defined with any certitude.

In other narrative lines, Erasmo St. John, Severin's fiancé, is interrogated by the legal department of the film studio following the "Radiant Car" incident, Severin is interviewed about memories of her childhood, and broadcast-style interludes show us everything from this universe's popular radio entertainments to advertisements that remind us to drink our callowmilk.

The effect is all this is that of being tuned to a radio intermittently being dialed between many different realities of the same story. At one moment we're hearing about the writing of a film, and the next moment that film plot is reality for an individual in the story. More to the novel's central metaphor, the narrative style also recalls the feeling of many disparate bits of film footage gathered up from the editing room floor and cobbled together.

If the novel has any flaw, it is certainly that the solar system as created defies scientific possibility perhaps a bit more than it should with its construction. While I might buy an alternate universe where humanity developed spaceships in the 1850's, the planets themselves are inconceivable as presented. Alternate versions of Venus and Mars that are habitable in some parallel universe? Sure. I can get there. But on account of the others, the author seems unaware of basic astronomy. The gas giants have no surface to inhabit (they're all gas) and are so immensely large that they would crush human inhabitants with their gravitational forces, and draw the smaller planets into their gravity well if the planets were "nearer to one another" as the text suggests. And no planet out as far as Jupiter and beyond receives enough solar radiation for any kind of sustainable biome to emerge. It's a bit difficult to imagine the "surface" of Uranus at a balmy 10 degrees Celsius, as the text suggests.

Still, I will take strong characters and themes over a meticulously coherent alternate science any day of the week, and Radiance delivers on those former promises so well that the science gaffs are easy to overlook. If one considers Radiance a work of fantasy (or speculative fiction, or a genre blender), which I think is entirely plausible, then the scientific concerns can be dismissed entirely.

Radiance's universe (or universes) are populated with compelling characters, who remind us of the triviality of social politics and the importance of humility and compassion toward the loved ones in our lives. At the end, after all, when all that is left of us is a pile of film clippings, or perhaps a pile of words, how will we be remembered? What kind of narratives will we have made of ourselves?

Radiance is a compelling literary experience, and I recommend it highly.

Stranger Things Than Stranger Things

Introduction

After hearing numerous acquaintances bring up the Netflix original series Stranger Things in conversation over the course of many weeks, I decided to try the eight episodes out. Since completing them, I've been put in the awkward position of being asked if I liked it. I cannot answer that question with a "yes" or "no." This finally resulted in a post to Facebook, which garnered mixed responses from readers there, and that brings me to the present essay, in which I will elaborate upon my thoughts in much more detail.

Here is the text I posted to Facebook: "Just finished Stranger Things. My analysis: boring, unimaginatively drawn parallel world; focus on violence and body horror shock effects; heavy reliance on the cliffhanger gimmick at every episode conclusion; relies heavily on overdetermining 'evil' into monsters and fully repulsive human characters; the story's best element, the interaction between the heroic characters, could have been achieved utilizing realism solely (sf is utilized as a gimmick rather than treated as core to the narrative); said characters are not capable of carrying the story by themselves. Needless to say, I will not be watching season two."

Unlike my Facebook post, this essay will contain spoilers. Consider yourself warned.

Validity as a Critical Target

One of the first issues I must address is that of the validity of Stranger Things as a target for criticism. Arguments of two varieties were leveled against my assessment: first, that Stranger Things was meant to be apprehended solely as entertainment, and thus criticism is inappropriate; second, that it is inappropriate to use sf as a lens for criticism since Stranger Things is rightly classified as horror.

As a preface to my refutation of the former argument, consider the article You Are What You Dream by Serdar Yegulalp, the key line being this one:

Nothing is ever just entertainment; even our entertainments are works of art whether or not we like it.

Criticism, it turns out, is just another form of apprehending beauty, which is the self-same process as being entertained. Criticism is just the engagement of reflection and internalization within the entertained mind. A.O. Scott puts this well in Better Living Through Criticism:

Aesthetic experience takes place in a crowd or in ecstatic isolation. It is, in either case, a series of discrete moments of contemplation and surrender. You stand in front of a painting, sit in a theater seat, look at a screen or a dancer or the page of a book and you are moved, tickled, transported, shocked. Or else you aren't. But over time, those moments aggregate into a pattern–unless, that is, they express a pre-existing tendency. You may well know what you like–but do you know why?

(Penguin Press, hardcover, 2016, p. 44)

The point of view of the Facebook acquaintance is an understandable one – "I can't see how you possibly arrived at these conclusions! You must be making all this up!" – but it is wrong-headed. To see why, we only have to imagine the existence of a hypothetical third party who levels the same argument at my acquaintance that he leveled against me. This new individual claims that the only "proper" way to apprehend the work is to not compare it to anything else, or to not consider one's own life experiences, or with the audio off, or in grayscale, or perhaps "properly" to him means eyes, ears, emotions, and intellect shut up completely.

I think we can all agree that this is absurd. Any work of creativity is valid for any level of criticism with which a human mind is capable of engaging it. A criticism may be dismissed, but only through reason, not blanket statements that disavow all interpretations save the one being presented.

The second argument, that of Stranger Things being horror rather than sf, is a stickier issue. Sf is a genre with notoriously fuzzy boundaries. The genesis of sf itself–Mary Shelley's Frankenstein–also happens to be the genesis of the horror genre. The nineteenth century's other major player in the horror genre, Edgar Allen Poe, is, unsurprisingly, also considered to be an sf writer. And on through the twentieth century, from Lovecraft to Wyndham to Alien to Poltergeist, horror has always maintained a strong link to sf (whether science fiction–Alien–or fantasy–Poltergeist), even though it is undeniably also something somewhat separate–horror.

The best example I have seen of a literary theorist drawing a distinction–however contingent–between horror and horrific sf was Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. in his book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. The sixth beauty is called "the grotesque." He defines the "scientific grotesque" as such:

What we might call the scientific grotesque comes with the recognition of an embodied, physical anomaly, a being or an event who existence or behavior cannot be explained by the currently accepted universal system of rationalization.

(Wesleyan University Press, paperback, 2008, p. 191)

I posit that Stranger Things suggests a strong connection to sf on multiple vectors, both science fictional and fantastical. For science fictional, there is the creature from the parallel universe, who is allowed access to the protagonists' universe via illicit scientific experimentation. Eleven herself is bestowed with science fictional powers in line with Csicsery-Ronay's definition. The creature's apparent ability to rend additional tears between the two worlds after the establishment of the initial breach also seems to me very "scientifically grotesque."

Even in terms of fantasy, the numerous allusions to Poltergeist, alongside references to Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy literature, combine to make Stranger Things a remarkably sf work.

On this basis, I posit that Stranger Things can be analyzed both as sf and horror, making an sf critical analysis entirely appropriate.

The Unimaginative Parallel Universe and the Flattening of Morality

Anyone who has read my fiction will know that I hold the plot device of the parallel universe very dearly. I put this up front as a way of acknowledging my own bias on the subject. Nonetheless, it from this perspective that I am uniquely positioned to observe that startling simplicity and problematic nature of Stranger Things' parallel universe.

I will focus on two perceived problems here: the homogeneity of its composition, and the flattening of the narrative's moral and ethical dilemmas caused by that composition in juxtaposition with the primary universe.

Here is the scene in which Mike and his science teacher, Mr. Clarke, discuss the parallel universe.

Mike: So, you know how in Cosmos, Carl Sagan talks about other dimensions? Like, beyond our world?

Mr. Clarke: Yeah, sure. Theoretically.

Mike: Right, theoretically. So, theoretically, how do we travel there?

Mr. Clarke: You guys have been thinking about Hugh Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, haven't you? Well, basically, there are parallel universes. Just like our world, but just infinite variations of it. Which means there's a world out there where none of this tragic stuff ever happened.

Mike: Yeah, that's not what we're talking about.

Mr. Clarke: Oh.

Mike: We were thinking of more of an evil dimension, like the Vale of Shadows. You know the Vale of Shadows?

Mr. Clarke: An echo of the material plane, where necrotic and shadow magic...

Mike: Yeah, exactly. If that did exist, a place like the Vale of Shadows, how would we travel there? Theoretically.

(Stranger Things, Episode 5, "The Flea and the Acrobat")

I will admit that the presentation here aligns well with Csicsery-Ronay's definition of the science fictional grotesque. The familiar powers of modern science have found contact with a fantastical space and allowed it to infiltrate and corrupt human reality. Rather than a rationally sound world, the contact is with a surreality, possessing dynamics more magical than rational.

However, the universe's composition leaves much to be desired. Somehow, all physical structures of the town of Hawkins, Indiana have been duplicated, but are covered in a kind of algae or mold growth, and particulate bio-matter wafts through the air in visible chunks. The reality is devoid of life, save for a malevolent creature resembling a tall man with long arms and legs, and with a flower blossom structure for a head. The creature possesses no faculty that could be called language and fails to present any evidence of higher cognitive functions. Throughout the narrative it is constantly capturing humans, bringing them back to its universe, and subsequently feeding upon them (or, as is demonstrated in the series' closing sequences, perhaps some kind of metamorphosis was begun upon its victims).

The problem with a flat and devoid world presented as solely toxic and solely evil is that it invites the mind, unless on guard, into presuming the reverse is true of the thing it is set parallel to. The presence of a parallel universe of pure evil coerces us into the assumption that the universe of our protagonists embodies pure good. This effect might be mitigated if the narrative presented us with a spectrum of universes, so as we might be allowed to draw the conclusion that a wide range of shades of good and evil are possible, but this narrative presents us with only two: the world of Mike and his friends, and the Vale of Shadows.

One could argue that the presence of evil characters in the protagonists' world counteracts this effect, but in my opinion, the dynamics of those juxtapositions only strengthen my argument.

All human characters associated with the creation of the parallel world, Dr. Brenner and his associates, have no identifiable positive qualities. With the sole exception of the two schoolyard bullies (who exist, in my opinion, solely to manipulate the feelings of Stranger Things' target demographic, a group very likely to have been the victims of 1980's bullying), the antagonists are aligned thematically with the parallel universe. They are its defacto demiurges, being owners of the research facility that birthed the creation of the first and only permanent portal to the parallel universe. I would argue that, thematically, Dr. Brenner and his associates are agents of the parallel universe (even if the monster is decidedly hostile toward them), and their existence only strengthens the inappropriate dynamic of "parallel universe evil/our universe good."

What would a better universe "of necrotic and shadow magic" look like? Such a universe could still be magical, fantastical, toxic to humans and overrun with alien fauna without being the embodiment of pure evil. What would constitute moral complexity in such a universe? Who would its inhabitants be? What would their language and culture be like? How would the good ones behave, and how would the bad ones? How would they interact with humans, and how we would we interact with them? Most importantly, what kinds of things would such a universe help the human audience of our 2016 real world understand about ourselves?

Such a universe would avoid the problem of the moral flattening effect when placed alongside our own.

The Jesus Cop-Out

An ethically flat narrative product of Western culture invariably seems to end up ripping off Christian mythology to some degree, usually stealing some or all of the Jesus story. This trite, hackneyed plot mechanic has a tendency to grate on a person once he or she becomes sensitive to it.

The parallels between Eleven and Jesus are quite strong throughout the show's first seven episodes. She is a social pariah with a level of emotional development unusual for a person her age, and most especially her era. She is enormously kind, forgiving, and level-headed when dealing with other "good" people behaving badly–Mike's two losses of his temper–and enormously malevolent when dealing with unjust social structures–the grocery store employees and Brenner's associates.

However, the metaphor is fully clinched with the narrative's conclusion, in which Eleven must sacrifice herself in order to save not just Mike and his friends, but apparently our entire world. The parallel universe creature has survived fire, a bear trap, multiple gunshot wounds, and being slung with enormous rocks, and it appears no worse for these assaults. It is only Eleven's telekinetic abilities that are its undoing, and Eleven's as well.

The only missing corollary to the Jesus story was for her to rise again after three days' time, and even though a number of months pass before the narrative's conclusion, the ambiguous "Eggo-forest scene" suggests that even resurrection of a sort may have been a possible outcome for Eleven, one which would only cement the metaphor.

Jesus metaphors are not only inappropriate because they are trite. They are problematic when set alongside contexts that encourage the separation of morality into rigid, mutually exclusive buckets. When holiness is viewed as an unachievable property of some other being, rather than a goal to strive for in one's own flawed but improvable interactions with others, then that conception becomes ethically dangerous. The structure of such a narrative encourages the members of its audience to give up on their own morality, to consider moral improvement to be "someone else's problem," when in fact the problem lies within each and every one of us.

Conclusion

Contrary to my initial Facebook post, I will admit that upon further analysis, the elements of the horror genre present, such as body horror and various forms of grotesquery were well placed and gave substance to the "1980's collage" style of the narrative as a whole. My initial assessment of sf being inessential to the narrative did not stand up to much scrutiny either, which I discovered as I wrote this essay. I do still stand by my assessment that the heroic characters are the narrative's best element, and their interactions demonstrate deft personality drawing on the part of the authors of the script.

However, the narrative's gimmicky cliffhangers and incredibly simplistic worldview combine to form a story that feels as though it drew me in only to offer me nothing for my effort. This is what makes the question of whether I liked this show so difficult. It is much like asking me if I liked the last time I ate cotton candy. I enjoyed it very much. My analysis of the confection's nutritional value and its effects on my health are another matter entirely. Stranger Things falls into much the same category.