James L. Cambias's Blog, page 16

Thoughts on That Christmas Movie

A lot of people think they've watched the movie It's A Wonderful Life but either haven't actually seen it, or have forgotten most of it. This leads to a lot of misunderstanding. When my family watched it this past Christmas my son was astonished to discover that a good two-thirds of the film's run time is simply a biographical study of George Bailey, leading up to the moment of his suicide attempt.

It's also a lot less saccharine and feel-good than most people imagine. George Bailey's life is full of disappointments and hardships, and the people of Bedford Falls are realistically flawed and three-dimensional. George himself is not especially saintly, either. He's got some selfish impulses and when his frustration finally boils over he's pretty harsh with those around him. That's kind of the point, after all: he's not some paragon of moral perfection, just a generally decent fellow, yet he has a good effect on the world.

Business Matters

The story contrasts George Bailey's charitable, humane approach to Potter's ruthless devotion to business. But if you pay attention to the movie it's pretty obvious that Mr. Potter is actually a terrible businessman.

Specifically, Potter invariably chooses short-term over long-term gains. He owns rental property and apparently skimps on maintenance. He does little or nothing to promote development in Bedford Falls. And in the alternate-historical Potterville, he's apparently willing to let the town be run by gangsters (but see below) ��� again, not good for the long term, and possibly not even good for Potter himself.

By contrast George Bailey encourages business formation, and thus economic growth. His client Martini owns a restaurant and buys a house, but in the alternate universe the bar is run (but probably not owned) by Nick, and Martini is nowhere to be seen. Bailey encourages his childhood friend Sam Wainwright to open a plastics plant in Bedford Falls, making the whole town more prosperous.

And wait until the post-WWII boom gets underway! Bailey's already begun developing the "Bailey Park" subdivision. He's going to make an absolute killing in the postwar housing market as newly-prosperous residents demand homes of their own ��� and have the money to pay for them. By 1960 Bailey's going to be a big-time real-estate developer, in the same league as the Levitt Brothers (the builders of Levittown, the archetypical postwar suburb). He'll be able to buy Potter with pocket change.

Although . . . one does hope that after the missing-cash incident George eases his uncle Billy into a comfortable retirement. Seriously, a man who can lose track of $8000 (in 1940s dollars ��� that's about $100,000 in 2021 play money) does not belong in charge of a business. Keeping him on goes beyond decency and kindness to the verge of irresponsibility. Promote Cousin Tilly to his job; she's been around for thirty years and probably knows more about how the Building & Loan works than anyone.

Potterville

This is a period detail modern viewers may not recognize: the depiction of "Potterville" encodes the place as a "wide-open town" along the lines of Phenix City, Alabama; Butte, Montana (which Dashiell Hammett transmogrified into "Poisonville" in Red Harvest); and Galveston, Texas. All three were notorious "sin cities" of the 1930s and 1940s, completely mobbed-up and corrupt. Audiences of the era would have understood that immediately. The most famous and successful "wide-open town" of all ��� Las Vegas ��� came along after It's A Wonderful Life was made.

Nowadays gambling, drugs, and prostitution are legal or tolerated pretty much all over the country. Every town is Potterville now, so of course we mock Bedford Falls for its lack of sophistication.

Interesting note about Potterville: Mr. Potter himself is not in evidence. Is he running the town ��� or has he been pushed out by the gambling and vice operators he allowed in? Maybe while George was poking around the cemetery in the alternate timeline he could have run across Potter's elaborate tomb, erected after he accidentally rolled down a flight of stairs onto some bullets.

Religious Matters

The depiction of Christianity in It's A Wonderful Life is pretty weird. Its vision of mid-Twentieth Century American Protestant Christianity looks oddly like traditional Chinese belief in its depiction of the afterlife ��� with the spirits of the dead acting as guides and guardians of the living, and a bureaucratic and hierarchical Heaven. None of that's in the Bible.

To modern eyes the movie is very "religious," with characters praying, thanking God, and a plot driven by literally Divine intervention. But since Frank Capra was trying to downplay the story's religious elements, he avoided the doctrines of any real-world faith, giving it that odd "pseudo-Christian-but-not-really" feel.

For plot reasons, I suppose it would cause problems if the angel was a real Biblical-style angel rather than a sweetly bumbling old gentleman with a copy of Tom Sawyer. Having a being of eyes and flaming wings appear to George on the bridge would definitely undercut his skepticism.

Clarence the "angel" gives his age as "293 next May" in 1946, indicating he was born in 1654. If we assume that he appears as he did at the end of his life, that puts his death date in the early 18th Century, circa 1710-1720. Which means that if Clarence is reading Tom Sawyer he's been keeping up with developments in the mortal world (if somewhat delayed, given that the book was published in 1876 and he's only just getting around to it).  

Summing Up

It's a really good movie ��� better than the simplistic strawman version that hipsters like to disparage. It's also a fascinating look at another time, and at another time's depiction of other times. You get an idea of how 1946 saw 1919 and 1929. Highly recommended.

Happy Boxing Day!

The perfect day for a strong Yuletide Punch!

Hanson on Fermi

I've posted at great length on the Fermi Paradox ��� the simple question "Where are they?" in regard to extraterrestrial civilizations. One element of that paradox is simply that the time it would take for an expanding civilization to spread across the Galaxy is relatively short in geological terms. Or so we assume.

Now Robin Hanson has actually tackled the question in a pair of posts on his own blog, analyzing how long it would take for civilizations to bump into each other. It's not an easy read ��� the math is pretty rigorous, and Hanson uses graphics to show his results which aren't easy for non-specialists to understand. But it's worth the effort.

His analysis does seem to support the idea that we are a very early civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is why we don't see any others. It doesn't really explain why we don't detect any traces of civilizations in other galaxies, unless life on Earth is so unlikely that we're not only the first intelligent species in the Milky Way but the first one in all the nearby galaxies. Which doesn't fit with what we know.

It's a paradox . . .  

My First Story

Back in the 1990s I wrote some adventures and sourcebook material for the legendary Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by West End Games. Some of the worlds and plot elements I put in those pieces actually worked their way into the "canon" of the Star Wars universe, and I got paid, so I was happy.

But sadly, West End's Star Wars license got snarled in some legal traps and eventually yanked. This caught everyone by surprise, and an issue of the Star Wars Adventure Journal in production had to be scrapped just before release. I was particularly disappointed because that issue was to contain an original Star Wars short story I'd written. If the issue had actually gotten out, that would have been my first published fiction. 

However, fandom never forgets. Some West End fans have put the lost issues of Star Wars Adventure Journal on the web, including my never-published story "A Servant of the Empire." You can read it here.

Looking over the story, I'm not disappointed. I was still learning the art, and I was aiming for the pulpy, action-packed style of the Star Wars stories, and what I wrote was a competent pulp story. But I think it works, and I'm not ashamed of it.

 

  

The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the First

Historians and students of literature were tremendously excited by the recent announcement by Oxford University that several volumes of unpublished notes by Lemuel Gulliver had been found in the Bodleian Library. 

Dr. Gulliver was a little-known 18th-century explorer, the first European to visit Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and other lands of the Pacific. His accounts of those voyages were edited and published by the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, and for many years were considered to be purely fictional, until those islands became important battlegrounds during the Second World War.

The notebooks discovered in the Bodelian Library contain much material which Swift elected to leave out of the popular edition of Gulliver's works. Evidently Swift, no scientist himself, thought the public would be bored by Dr. Gulliver's observations and theories on the biology of the peoples he encountered. These new discoveries restore Dr. Lemuel Gulliver to his proper place as a naturalist and early investigator of the field of biomechanics.

Here's the first deleted section, from his manuscript on Lilliput:

During my stay in Lilliput, I was continually astonished by a singular feature of the Architecture in that Kingdom, namely the utter Absence of stairs  or other means of climbing from one floor to another within a dwelling. Remarkably, this Absence did not discommode the Lilliputians in the slightest degree. To ascend, they simply leapt from one story to the next, without any sign of undue Exertion or loss of dignity. I even witnessed an elderly Lilliputian, his hair whitened and his back bent with age, vault up to his Chamber on the third floor of his house in a single bound!

In a like manner, the Lilliputians I observed did not trouble to climb downstairs ��� indeed, there were none to climb ��� but simply flung themselves out the nearest Window if they wished to alight upon the Ground.  Several times I witnessed Lilliputians in the Towns leaping across the Streets from one upper-storey window to another, showing no fear of falling, and if they did chance to miss their Aim and tumble to the ground, they showed no ill Effect of their misadventure.

Several Learned Gentlemen among the Lilliputians and Blefuscudians reported to me that none of their Race has any fear of a fall, as they can alight safely, no matter the height from which they have fallen. Indeed, they thought my natural Caution in going up and down to be unmanly, and I was occasionally the object of Ridicule for it.

Upon my return to England, I had the occasion to mention this remarkable Circumstance to my neighbor Dr. Erasmus Darwin.  He informed me that this Conduct of the Lilliputians is perfectly natural, and is a necessary Consequence of their extraordinary Diminution.

"Consider, Dr. Gulliver," (said Dr. Darwin to me) "that the weight of a man is in proportion to his volume,  if we assume that there be no material difference between the Lilliputians and ourselves but only one of scale. Therefore a Gentleman of Lilliput, proportioned like yourself but having a height of only six inches, would weigh but 1/1728 of what you do, or slightly less than two Ounces, that being the cubic power of 1/12."

I replied that this Weight was precisely that of such Gentlemen of Lilliput as I had occasion to place upon the Scales.

"But consider, Dr. Gulliver: the active Power of the Muscles is in proportion to their Area in cross-section. Our Lilliputian Gentleman's leg muscles would be 1/144th the size of yours in Area, and thus in Strength, as that is the square of 1/12." As he spoke he made some rapid calculations with a lead pencil upon a sheet of foolscap.

"Surely that cannot be right," I interjected.  "For that would mean he would be twelve times as strong as I, in proportion to his size."

"That is exactly right, Dr. Gulliver. He would indeed be stronger ��� in proportion. If you yourself are able to leap to a height of (let us say) three feet, that is, a height equal to one-half your own, then a Lilliputian would be capable of leaping twelve times as far in proportion, or six times his own height. In fact, the proportions cancel themselves out, so we are faced with the startling conclusion that a Lilliputian can leap as high as you yourself, Dr. Gulliver! The people of Lilliput have no need of stairs, for to jump up a Storey requires no greater effort for them than for you to ascend a single step."

Son of Great Filters

Robin Hanson, who invented the term "Great Filter" in the first place, comes back to the topic in his own blog for a look at a couple of neglected aspects of the topic. You can read his whole post here.

One of the key issues he raises is whether or not a given planet (for some reason he uses the term "oasis" in his post) gets more than one try at passing through a given filter, or whether it's all or nothing. This matters because, obviously, if you have enough time and can make enough attempts, eventually you succeed. So, most relevantly, if a planet has the right conditions for life to evolve, complex molecules in its oceans (or on shoreline clay beds, or wherever) can keep bumping into each other and reforming until finally something becomes self-replicating and we're off to the races. That's what he calls a "Try-Try" filter. Failure doesn't prevent you from trying again.

Whereas if a star system doesn't have enough metals to form rocky planets, it doesn't matter how long one waits, it still won't have rocky planets. That one's all or nothing.

The question of trying again until you succeed relates to his second major point, which is that for any given world there is a certain window of time during which life might form. There was a time when Earth was getting pounded by large impacts, when liquid water on the surface was scarce and life impossible. There will be a time when the Sun is too hot and Earth's oceans will boil away. The time between those points is the window during which life can evolve on Earth. So even though life evolving is a "Try-Try" filter, no world gets unlimited tries.

A note on teleology: needless to say, no star system is "trying" to form planets, no planet is "trying" to spawn life, and no life forms are "trying" to become intelligent tool users. Conversational English is a terrible medium for discussing scientific concepts some times.

Safety Last

I was recently reading about the legendary silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, and learned the interesting fact that he did his famous comedy stunts despite having lost the index finger and thumb of his right hand (he used a glove with prosthetic digits to hide the injury).

Here is Wikipedia's account of how Lloyd lost those fingers:

"On Sunday, August 24, 1919, while posing for some promotional still photographs in the Los Angeles Witzel Photography Studio, he picked up what he thought was a prop bomb and lit it with a cigarette. It exploded and mangled his right hand, causing him to lose a thumb and forefinger."

What is not explained ��� and what really should be explained ��� is why did the photo studio have a real bomb lying around in the first place?

This is going to keep me up at nights.

Movie Review: The King

On Thanksgiving, after a huge midday dinner, we all sat down on the couch to watch a movie. We eventually decided to watch David Michod's 2019 movie The King, featuring Timoth��e Chalamet* as Henry V of England.

The three of us gave it a solid B+ ��� good acting, good filming, nice locations and costumes, bonus points for no flaming arrows. A decent piece of work.

But I'm left with a feeling of utter bafflement about why this movie was made. It seems to deliberately miss some key opportunities.

I can understand making another film of Shakespeare's plays about Henry IV and Henry V. They're great plays and have plenty of scope for cool stuff on the big screen. Orson Welles, Lawrence Olivier, and Kenneth Branagh have all taken a stab at the Henriad.

I can understand wanting to make a historically accurate biopic of Henry V, paring away the Shakespearian inventions to depict something close to the real man in his real times. That would be a fascinating film.

What I can't make myself understand is why one would make a heavily fictionalized version of Henry's accession to the throne and his campaigns in France, yet turn down the opportunity to use the language of the greatest playwright in the English language.

So we have drunken party-boy Hal slumming it in Eastcheap with his drunken pal old Sir John Falstaff. We have Hal fighting Hotspur in single combat. We have the Dauphin acting like Ming of Mongo ��� all from Shakespeare. The moviemakers even add some departures from reality of their own that Shakespeare never thought of. So we're not being rigorously accurate here.

But on the morning of the battle of Agincourt, when King Henry V has to make a speech to inspire his men, instead of using the "Saint Crispin's Day" speech from Shakespeare's play, instead the screenwriters have him holler at his men about how they're all about to die in order to unite England or some damned nonsense like that. You can almost see their morale dropping.

"Saint Crispin's Day" is a speech which would make even the most dyed-in-the-wool pacifist's heart race with patriotic fervor and a desire to thrash the nearest Frenchman. You can believe that Henry was a great leader if he could toss that off at his men and lead them to an incredibly lopsided victory over a powerful foe. Why not use it?

Once again I'm convinced that the tiny cog people have saved a misguided film from itself. The moviemakers made their incomprehensible choice, and made a movie which didn't need to be made. What saves it is the effort of the invisible multitude of costumers, set designers, historical advisors, armorers, and prop makers, who made it interesting to look at and reasonably authentic. They deserve all the credit.

*"Timothy Chalmette? Is he related to Harvey Marrero?"

Post-PhilCon Report: Oceans of Space

Last weekend's Virtual PhilCon went very well, and gave me a couple of 'blog post ideas. This is the first.

On Saturday the 21st, I moderated the panel on "The Oceans of Space." Moderating was easy because there was only one other panelist, the brilliant and charming Kelli Fitzpatrick. We had a pretty good audience, too. 

The topic of that panel was aquatic science fiction, and I guess I got tapped because I wrote A Darkling Sea. Both Ms. Fitzpatrick and I made up lists of ocean-themed SF for the discussion*, and both of us were struck by how short our respective lists were. There simply isn't as much oceanic science fiction out there. Which is odd, given that one of the taproot texts for the whole science fiction genre is Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 

So: why is there so little underwater science fiction? I can think of three main reasons.

Number One: It's not science fiction. If you write a story of undersea adventure aboard a submarine, that's a sea story, or a "technothriller," not a science fiction story. Even if your tale has a madman with a futuristic undersea base, and super-tech undersea vehicles, that's still technothriller territory. Consider the works of Clive Cussler, who wrote undersea adventures for thirty years. His books included such things as unknown elements with fantastic properties, sonic weapons, a secret moonbase, and a vast array of apocalyptic plots. But Cussler's books aren't in the science fiction section of the bookstore. They're thrillers, ostensibly set in the contemporary world. Apparently weird goings-on in the ocean are normal.

Number Two: It's limited. Oceans on Earth are fascinating places ��� but they don't have strange new worlds and new civilizations. Quite simply, you can't really hang a novel on a newly-discovered species of cephalopod. You can put the story into an ocean on another planet (as I did) but that's a lot of work. Trust me on that.

Number Three: Symbolism. When you fly up into space you are literally ascending into the heavens. You are leaving Earth and Earthly cares behind. In SF you are soaring among the stars. But underwater? It's dark. It's cold. You're both literally and metaphorically under pressure. If space travel is a metaphor for liberation and transcendance; going deep underwater is a metaphor for confinement, blindness, and death.

So if you want to write a swashbuckling futuristic sea story, you can do it ��� but send the pitch to a publisher of technothrillers, not science fiction. If you want to write stories about alien contact underwater you can do it ��� but you'll have to create an entire alien world. And if you want to write a story with a big honking metaphor for death in it, there's your topic.

*Here's my list:

The Man Who Counts/War of the Wing-Men, by Poul Anderson

The Godwhale, T.J. Bass

Startide Rising, David Brin

A Darkling Sea, James L. Cambias

The Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke

"The Maracot Deep," Arthur Conan Doyle

Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure, Frank Herbert

Half the Day is Night, Maureen McHugh

The Face of the Waters, Robert Silverberg

A Door Into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski

OceanSpace, Allen Steele

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," Roger Zelazny

 

 

Godel Operation Now Up at Amazon!

My first Tale of the Billion Worlds, The Godel Operation, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The official publication date is May 4 of 2021, but it's always a good idea to get at the head of the line. 

If you want a sneak preview of The Godel Operation, tune in to my reading session on the virtual PhilCon convention, at 4:00 p.m. this coming Sunday, November 22. I'll be reading the first chapter. Come meet Daslakh, Zee, the Penguin, Zee's Imaginary Girlfriend, and the other quadrillion inhabitants of the Billion Worlds.