Genre and Subgenre

Sometimes I like to try to classify my writing. Perhaps this isn't seemly. But I find that it helps me figure out what I'm trying to do, what I like and what I don't like, what I want to cleave to and what I want to break away from.

So. I've often expressed dissatisfaction with the fantasy/sci-fi dichotomy. It's useful and necessary, I know, but these are basically commercial categories. They do reflect a real division in the literature, but the boundaries don't everywhere coincide. The same holds true to a lesser degree for all the various subgenres. My main problem, I think, is that the classification concerns material elements only. If you have an elf, it's a high fantasy, or maybe an epic fantasy. Unless he hangs out in coffee shops and tattoo parlors, in which case it's an urban fantasy. But I don't read books because of the matter. I read them because of the form. Reading Tolkien was a life-changing experience. Terry Brooks never appealed to me. What was the difference? Certainly not the matter!

Take Perelandra. The pedants usually classify it as a fantasy because it has angels and concerns original sin. But they're wrong; from their point of view, it's science fiction. C. S. Lewis happened to believe in angels and sin, and wrote compelling speculative fiction about them. If we accept the characterization that sci-fi makes the improbable possible while fantasy makes the impossible probable, then Perelandra falls into the first category. How many science fiction writers, I wonder, believe in the immateriality of the human soul? Do we classify all their works as fantasy because of they contain elements of the supernatural? But this underscores the problem. The classification of a story shouldn't change when we uncover some new datum in the author's biography. So, if the pedants were consistent, they would call Perelandra science fiction, but I would still call it a fantasy, not because of its supernatural elements, but because of its structure and aims.

Everyone's heard the canard about how advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to primitive peoples. What this ignores is that magic is technology. There's no difference. Let me repeat. There is no difference between magic and technology, except in the eyes of conceited modern observers. Just because I've rejected some hypothesis in my systematic attempts to control my environment doesn't somehow render the  hypothesis a member of a different category from the ones I accept. A savage practicing homeopathic magic or whatever it is they do nowadays is merely exhibiting a certain belief regarding cause-and-effect. A medical professional does the same. The latter presumably has better results. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind. A belief in a supernatural world subject to testable and consistent rules and limitations is no less "scientific" than phlogiston theory or M-theory, whatever we may think of the truth of the thesis.

So, when people go on about how a fantasy needs to have a well-defined magic system that's adhered to consistently, they're not talking about fantasy at all. They're talking about science fiction, or, at any rate, technology fiction. Galadriel the queen of Lothlórien gently mocks Samwise for wanting to see "elf magic," confessing that she isn't entirely certain what is meant by the word. Thus does she smile at dragon dice, Magic cards, and other systems. Did Merlinus Ambrosius adhere to a magic system? No. He simply went places, and things happened. Do you get the feeling that the plot is contrived or arbitrary because of that? No. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, et al., knew what it was to write a romance. It's these systems that allow for contrived, unreal plots. In the end it's no different from Scotty saving the day by rerouting the secondary reactor drive through the main power converters. You know. Just difficult enough to add the right amount of tension.

Anyway, my writing is in the same boat as Perelandra. The pedants would call it fantasy because of various material elements. But really, from their point of view, they should call it science fiction. It is fantasy, just not for the reasons they cite. Its "macrobial" agents are rigorously conceived. It has not an iota of magic, though it might seem otherwise to primitive readers. But it's supposed to hit the fantasy spot. And what is that? I admit that I'm not certain. It's something I've struggled with. Speaking broadly, we might say that fantasy has an ecological, holistic outlook. It integrates. Science fiction is about doing; fantasy is about being.

So let's call my writing fantasy, despite the fact that it features space elevators, prehistoric biota, topological puzzles, etc. What subgenre shall we place it in? There's a jumble of tags to choose from, but they can't be regarded as concrete, mutually exclusive genuses, so we'll just have to pick what seems most appropriate. Let's see, let's see. Much of my fiction features warriors who wear sandals, carry swords, and battle dread Elder Gods and beasts from the Outside, but it isn't sword and sorcery, which is lusty, amoral, action-oriented, and narrow in scope, lacking the ecological sensibility I spoke of before. It displays a global consciousness and is centered around a battle for the soul of the world between forces of order and chaos (as I conceive of them), but isn't high fantasy or epic fantasy, as these connote a nostalgic restriction of technology and a certain elevation of manners alien to my mind. A lot of the action takes place in cities (or, rather, a City) powered by steam engines and decorated with Art Nouveau motifs, but it most certainly is not steampunk, which I leave to those who like such things. It isn't dark fantasy because it's not, well, dark (not that most things marketed as such really are), and it isn't urban fantasy because it isn't contemporary and sparkly.

No, none of these tags really apply. What remains left to us is, I think, the category we're looking for: sword and planet, occasionally (but not interchangeably) referred to as planetary romance. Think of the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They couple high technology (mechanical fliers, radium pistols, air plants) with Bronze Age culture. There's a certain focus on action, but an ecological awareness runs right through them as well. A Princess of Mars, with its towering green warriors, haughty oviparous princesses, thoats and zitidars, gladiator pits, fleets of airships, long-range rifles, and age-empty ruined cities, is the epitome of the sword-and-planet subgenre. Planetary romance, on the other hand, is exemplified more by novels like Dune or The Left Hand of Darkness. My own novel and assorted stories are definitely closer to Barsoom than Arrakis. They take place in a counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes inhabited by paleozoic biota and antediluvian races.

Sword-and-planet novels are a threatened breed these days. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the great forerunner, but his descendants have been sadly lacking. The sixties and seventies saw a glut of nostalgiac homages and pastiches, like those awful Green Star books of Lin Carter that you're always seeing in used bookstores, and the Gor books of John Norman, which I haven't read for obvious reasons. I'm always looking for Leigh Brackett's Mars books but they must be good since no one wants to sell their used copies.

Yes, I find the writing of sword-and-planet novels a high and lonely art. I don't mean to imply that my work can be pigeonholed, though. My hope is that it embodies a certain literary flair. The models I adulate (and fall far short of) include Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, and Willa Cather. But I'm also inspired by the great exemplars of pre-Tolkien fantasy, from "high" British works like The Well at the World's End, The Night-Land, the short stories of Lord Dunsany, and The Worm Ouroboros, to the "low" works of American pulp writers like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore.

There, that helps. Now back to work on the sequel of that novel I'm still trying to sell…

Ender's Game

I went and saw Ender's Game tonight. The verdict: it was okay as a synopsis.

I'm a math/science geek who's into changing coordinate systems to suit different problems and things like that. I first read Ender's Game when I was an undergraduate (in a single night, no less; and actually, I haven't read it since), and what really impressed me were the three-dimensional battle tactics.

Well, they just about cut all that out of the movie! There aren't even any real battle-room games. How can you make a movie of Ender's Game without some detailed games? They kind of mention the psychology of choosing your own coordinates once or twice, but the battles are all horizontal. I guess the production team just didn't get it, or assumed we wouldn't get it.

Also, as I rather suspected, Hollywood's lust for special effects gave the plot twist away. Or at least I suppose it did. Hard to say, since I knew it was coming. The movie completely ignores relativity and its effects on the storyline in the interests of getting Ender somewhere CGI-worthy. I did hear an ansible mentioned in there somewhere. Maybe they don't realize what an ansible is supposed to be a fig leaf for.

Anyway, it strikes me that, on the whole, Ender's Game would have come out better as a movie, though with worse special effects, in the eighties. In many ways the plot kind of goes more with War Games and Real Genius (yes, I loved that movie) and things of that sort than with Star Wars.

Since I just reviewed Soylent Green, I suppose I should mention that a character referred to the bugs' population growth as "unsustainable, just like ours." Still, twenty-whateverth Planet Earth looks pretty neat and green to me.

The surprising and deeply empathetic postlude was what really stayed with me after I read the book, and I was glad to see that the movie retained this. I wasn't emotionally invested enough at that point to really care much, however. Overall, the movie was as faithful to the book as it could have been, with the exception that Ender's sister should have accompanied him at the end. It just had a rushed, cursory feel.

So, it was okay. It had its moments. But could have been better. On the other hand, the town theater only charges $6.00 a ticket, and that on a Saturday night, so I can't really complain. Room was almost empty. The midnight showing of Bad Grandpa seemed to be pretty popular, though.

Sigh.

Soylent Green

I just watched Soylent Green for the first time. This is a review, forty years late.

Let me begin by saying that I gravitate toward classic film noir. Of course, no one seems to be able to say what exactly film noir is; it's a fuzzy set, I suppose, defined by proximity to certain central films. Stylistically, it recalls German Expressionism, with low-key lighting, night-for-night shooting, sharp chiaroscuro, asymmetrical picture formats, unusual angles, an emphasis on stark lines and patterns, an equation of actors with objects, etc. Thematically it varies, but always carries a sense of emotional detachment; this is tied to its style.

This isn't to say that the stories are less than engrossing. On the contrary. But emotional involvement in minimal. The protagonists are frequently annoying or despicable, and even when they're not, you're not so much afraid of what's going to happen to them as interested to see what form their own particular doom is going to take. This appeals to me; being autistic, I'm generally unresponsive on an emotional level, but once my emotions do get stirred they flare up almost uncontrollably, and I get really agitated and lose a lot of sleep. So, in general, I avoid movies that try to stimulate empathy and that kind of thing. Which means that noir films are perfect for me.

What ever happened to film noir, really? Did it die, or just morph into other forms? At the time, of course, no one really knew they were making noir films. That would have ruined it. And that's part of the answer right there. It's hard to make a self-conscious noir film that isn't really stupid. A voiceover and a trench coat do not a film noir make. It's not a genre! More than that, though, I think movies with that much detachment are just a hard sell. Theater-goers, God bless them, want to care about the characters, or at least want to feel like the movie wants them to care about the characters.

Which brings us to future noir or tech noir or whatever you want to call it. My personal theory is that the reason so many noir elements get reincarnated in science fiction films nowadays is that people will go see a sci-fi film simply because it's sci-fi. The futuristic elements add an extra level of interest that makes up for the lack of emotional investment. Plus, dystopian visions — which are inherently attractive for various reasons (what a chimera is man!) — naturally go hand in hand with doom and predestination. There was always something dystopian or post-apocalyptic about film noir and the hard-boiled genre.

The difference is that, in future noir, instead of Robert Mitchum or Fred MacMurray chain-smoking cigarettes while narrating his fall, it's the whole ruined world doing a voiceover. You could even argue that the careful attention to set design in future noir (which sometimes comes at the expense of acting and plot, as in Blade Runner) reflects the visual equation of persons with objects and the sense of alienation so prevalent in film noir. Unfortunately future noir has become a Thing now, so that big directors try to make big-budget future-noir films and botch it.

At any rate, I have to regard Soylent Green as one of the first true future noirs. It features two of the great noir stars — Edward G. Robinson (who steals every scene in every movie he's in, and who died a mere twelve days after making SG) and Joseph Cotten — and thus links true film noir with its bastard offspring. Charlton Heston, the lead actor, also starred in the last of the great noirs, Touch of Evil, a film in which Cotten had a cameo role.

Further, SG leaves the viewer emotionally detached. The citizens of the horribly overcrowded New York of the future evoke fear and disgust rather than sympathy. We aren't particularly concerned with the protagonist's ultimate fate, either, but with his actions as he goes about a murder case and the generally brutal life of a police officer in 2022. And the sequence in which Robinson's character flees the horror of the world by going "Home" (checking in at a euthanasia clinic) is more full of dark irony than pathos.

I have to admit that I found the part where Heston's character sneaks through the Soylent Green factory genuinely horrifying, despite knowing (as I suppose everyone does) the precise ingredients of that nutritious little wafer. On that note, it's interesting, isn't it, that several scenes, including the final one, take place in a Catholic church crowded with homeless people, a church in which Mass is no longer said because there's no room for it? Soylent Green is thus the antitype of the transubstantiated Host. The cooked meal shared by the detective and his partner has strongly Eucharistic overtones as well.

I also admire the production design. The flat where Cotten's character is murdered and where the protagonist subsequently romances the house "furniture" (apartment concubine) is a beautiful retro picture of its time; it reminds me of a futuristic hotel I once stayed at in Amsterdam. The crowded streets and slums are quite effective as well, and the soothing, hospitable euthanasia clinic is exactly how I've always imagined such places.

We all know how the movie ends. What I never realized was that the horror comes, not from realizing the ingredients of Soylent Green, but from the sense of utter despair that man has been driven to feed on himself in his uttermost extremity, and that this is a dead end from which there will be no emergence. The last shot of the protagonist being borne out of the cathedral focuses on his his blood-drenched, raised hand, and fades beautifully into a field of red flowers and green grass, providing the perfect denouement to this bleak and paranoiac 70's film.

All that said, I do have a slight issue with the film's premise. It never states the world population, but Wikipedia tells me that in Make Room! Make Room! (the novel on which the film is based) the world population is 7 billion. Which is…about what it is right now. Less, actually. And, well, things aren't that bad, you know, globally speaking, and certainly not in the United States. Yes, I know that there's hunger in the world, but to me this seems due less to overcrowding than to social problems resulting from mass industrialization, exploitation, and the disruption of traditional norms and structures. Yes, we have to be prudent and look to our resources, but we also need to remember that people are people, deserving of dignity, and that for every new mouth to feed there are two hands, a brain, and a beating heart to make the world a better place.

When I was a kid I went to this week-long environmental training workshop. This was the early nineties, when everyone was talking about CFCs and acid rain; I recall that I was the only one there with a notebook made from recycled paper, and that my friends made fun of me for it. A very intense, angry man ran the session on population, and the image he painted of our future, unless drastic steps were taken right now, was Soylent Green on steroids, so bleak and horrifying and misanthropic that it literally took years to get it out of my system. Because I wholeheartedly believed it.

He was, I suppose, a disciple of Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation by the 1980s and other terrifying things that, disappointingly, did not come to pass. It's interesting to me that The Late, Great Planet Earth came out around the same time and continued to be popular long after its expiration date. I've always thought it would be interesting to do a parallel analysis of the two sets of readers.

Anyway, there's a disturbing scene in Soylent Green where "scoopers" (dump trucks with big buckets like front-end loaders) come in to quell a riot by scooping the people up in heaps and dumping them like garbage into the receptacles in back. Well, that's exactly where this alarmism about overpopulation gets you if you're not careful: into viewing human beings as garbage to be cleared out of the way or vermin to be exterminated or strays to be sterilized. What's more, when it comes to predicting the future, Ehrlich, et al., seem about as accurate with statistics as Tim LaHaye is with the Book of Revelation, and as apt to reinterpret things after the fact. So the model we're using to justify whatever control measures the leaders of the moment are telling us we need might very well be total crap. Frightening.

Welp, this is getting a little political, and I don't really care to go there on my blog, so I'll stop. I don't mean to fault the movie. Not in the least. It made me think, which is what sci-fi is supposed to do, right? If we extrapolate this trend, what will happen? Here's one possible answer. Actually, I think Soylent Green is a terrific movie, and vastly underrated for reasons that I don't entirely understand. So, if you haven't seen it, and you like future noir and dystopian sci-fi, please do yourself a favor and watch Soylent Green.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Viewpoint

I've been struggling with viewpoint. These are my musings.

Second person is rejected out of hand. It makes me think of Zork. So we're down to first person and third person.

When it comes to third person, I incline toward a limited point of view restricted to a single character, with very few of even that character's thoughts and feelings. Basically, the very opposite of Dune and its sequels, which I find unreadable now because of their constant viewpoint-switching and expression-of-thoughts-through-italics.

The Lord of the Rings is less restrictive than I like to be, but I think it's successful. It employs a limited third-person point of view but switches between characters periodically, generally from one hobbit to another. Thoughts are revealed chiefly through actions, conversations, and interior locutions. When a hobbit isn't involved, as when Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli pursue the orcs across Rohan, the narration is more remote. It's interesting that, as Frodo comes more and more under the power of the One Ring, the viewpoint transfers from him to Sam. We thus almost always have a humble, down-to-earth hobbit witness.

Limited third person is probably the best for epic fantasies and sword-and-sorcery tales. Restriction to a single character at a time and reticence to jump into minds gives it an immediacy that Dune somehow lacks, coming off as immature and artificial instead. It also gives the author freedom to include a paragraph or two that an ordinary first-person narrator would never say of himself. For instance, if the narrator were an excellent organist or pit-fighter (or both!), he could hardly say so without sounding like an ass. First person is usually only adopted in action stories when the narrator isn't the real hero; Moby-Dick comes to mind, as do A. Merrit's The Moon Pool, Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and various other things, both good and not so good.

There are exceptions, of course. Two that come to mind are the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, both particularly beloved by me. It's hard to write a book in which the narrator is the main protagonist without making him sound like a boastful jerk. Burroughs avoids it through making John Carter, Warlord of Mars, something of a doofus; and he abandons the first-person point of view in the fourth installation, Thuvia, Maid of Mars (my personal favorite), in which the protagonist is the serious-minded Carthoris. A felicitous change! It was the first I read of the series, and my fancy would never have been caught by a narrator's ruminations as it was by the tapping of Thuvia's shapely foot as she sat on the bench of polished ersite beneath the gorgeous blooms of the pimalia. As for BOTNS, the narrator, Severian, has in fact been frequently charged with being a jerk. I don't find this to be so myself, but, as I said, it's hard to avoid giving the impression.

Raymond Chandler completely sidesteps the problem. How, exactly? I suppose through having a narrator who cracks wise all the time and doesn't mind seeming ridiculous, but partly also through narrating actions rather than thoughts and a habitual attention to seemingly trivial details. Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, another favorite of mine, is also first-person, and operates much the same way. For the record, I find Chandler's later novels, like The Long Goodbye, much less enjoyable because the narrator has grown dour and self-righteous.

I'm in the process of chronicling the adventures of a youth who's just come of age. He's sanguine, in the sense of the theory of humors. I originally wrote the first novel in limited third person, but it just seemed too distant to me, so I rewrote it in first person. Of course I had to expunge some passages I rather liked, etc., etc. The benefit, from a practical point of view, is that I can address the reader to some extent without breaking the spell of the story. The first-person narrator can say things the omniscient narrator never could. He can say, "The real reason, of course, was that I…" whereas saying something like "The real reason, of course, was that he…" makes me think of The House of Seven Gables. Certain things, such as fight and sex scenes, require great delicacy, to which I hope I am equal. But, as I've mentioned in this space before, Chandler is my great exemplar here.

It might seem that having a first-person point of view can restrict the outcome of the story — the narrator must make it out alive, right? — but I don't feel that this is so. To be pedestrian about it, the novel could always be a posthumous "manuscript," as in C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, or entries from a "diary," as in Dracula. The narrator could also simply be dead, like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, with no explanation as to how he could be narrating the story. This is fantasy, right? The poet-scribe could have received his story from the world of the dead through being impaled on an ash tree for nine days and nine nights, which is how I generally get my own ideas.

Maybe, though, it isn't necessary to be strictly first- or third-person. Plenty of novels get creative with switching viewpoints. Some, such as Dracula or Carrie, attempt verisimilitude through presenting themselves as documents. Others — the works people call "experimental" and "modern," although in speculative fiction these are apparently synonyms for "derivative" and "quickly dated" — are even more unclassifiable. After all, anything is possible.

Personally, I can't stand Ulysses and always skip the social movement parts of The Grapes of Wrath. For me, The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick are more useful examples of voice-variation; The Book of the New Sun seems to take the latter as a model in this respect. But this kind of writing calls for great skill on the part of the writer, and, more importantly, great trust on the part of the reader, trust that I have yet to earn.

So for now I think I'll stick to a colorful, action-oriented first-person point of view.

El Libro de Arena

Let's discuss Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Book of Sand" ("El Libro de Arena"). First, a synopsis. (You can also find an English translation here.)

The story opens with a few sentences about points, lines, and planes. More on this later. A man (the narrator — Borges?) receives a visit from a traveling Bible salesman. He expresses disinterest in buying a Bible, as he owns a Wycliff Bible, a copy of Cypriano de Valera's translation, Luther's translation, and the Latin Vulgate. The salesman — a man of indistinct features, dressed in gray, with a gray valise — then shows him the Book of Sand (so-named because sand has neither beginning nor end).

The narrator opens it. Each page is numbered with an Arabic numeral; the left-hand page might be numbered, say, 40514, or some eight-digit number, the left, 999, or a number raised to the ninth power. There are crude illustrations as well. "Study the page well," the salesman says, "for you'll never see it again." The narrator notes the page number, closes the book, then tries to find it again. He is unable to. He also discovers that he can't reach the beginning of the book. No matter how close he tries to open it to the cover, there are always pages between his thumb and the board.

In the end he purchases the book in exchange for his retirement fund and his Wycliff Bible. He hides it behind his volumes of the Arabian Nights. As he investigates the book over the coming months he concludes it to be monstrous. Rather than burning it — he's afraid that the smoke from an infinite book would suffocate the whole earth — he hides it on a shelf at the National Library.

A strange, enigmatic tale in its basic outline. Possibly I've left out some of the most significant details, but I've included those that strike me. Though a writer by night and a painter on Sundays, I'm a mathematician by day, and it's the mathematical aspects that I wish to speak about.

The opening seems to me to be the key to the whole thing, for in many ways the Book of Sand might be likened to a line segment of finite length, e.g., the segment from zero to one on the number line. I mean the segment between these two points, excluding zero and one themselves. For such a segment has neither beginning nor end. No matter how close to zero you choose a point to be, there will always be infinitely many numbers between zero and your point. Notable, too, is the fact that the narrator can never again find a page he's visited. This is true of any infinite set. Choose an element at random, then choose a second. The probability that the choices will be the same is precisely nil.

So, the book resembles the line segment to some extent. But there are many infinite sets within the line segment. We could, for instance, take all the points that correspond to fractions. For a number between zero and one to be a fraction we have to be able to write it as a/b, where a and b and whole numbers and a is smaller than b. Though infinite, it is possible to denumerate this set by taking them in the order

1/2    1/3    2/3    1/4    3/4    1/5    2/5    3/5    4/5    1/6    5/6    1/7

so that 1/2 is the first, 1/3 the second, 2/3 the third, and so on. We're skipping the fractions that can be reduced and thus have already appeared in the list. Because this set of rational numbers (so-called because they are ratios of whole numbers) is denumerable (can be numbered off without leaving any out), it seems to me to resemble the pages of the book. The page numbers would correspond to the labels affixed to the rational numbers. For instance, the page that occurs exactly two-fifths of the way through the book would be labeled as page 7, because 2/5 appears seventh in our list. Going against this interpretation is the fact that facing pages have different numbers, and that the narrator can turn the pages one at a time; for between each pair of rational numbers are infinitely many rational numbers. It isn't possible to find two that are right next to each other, so to speak. For the book to be exactly like the rationals, recto and verso would need to bear the same number (and thus be identified), and the pages would have to stick when the narrator turned them, much as the "first" pages cling to the front board, so that he can never quite turn a single one.

Another possibility is that the pages correspond to the points in the entire continuum from zero to one; but this seems to be ruled out by the pagination, because the continuum, as Georg Cantor showed, is not denumerable. It is "more infinite" than the infinite set of rational numbers. (Incidentally, Cantor's proof made use of the decimal system, which originated in India; the Bible salesman had bought the Book of Sand from an Indian untouchable.) What we noted about page-turning above also goes against this interpretation.

There are of course many other infinite sets on this line segment that could be considered.

It's interesting, by the bye, that the book is called the Book of Sand; for the number of grains of sand is in fact finite. Though counterintuitive to some, the fact was demonstrated by Archimedes in a little book called The Sand-Reckoner, to which I feel almost certain Borges must have referred in at least one of his stories.

In this book, Archimedes obtains an estimate for the size of the material universe, which was very, very large (it is a myth that the ancients believed in a small cosmos and a flat earth), and, using another estimate for the density of packed sand in terms of grains per unit volume, computes an upper bound for the number of grains that could possibly be contained in the cosmos, were it packed solid with sand. He arrives at the number 10⁶³, which is very large, but still, of course, finite. The square of this number would be larger than a googol, if that puts it in perspective for you.

The fact that the narrator fears polluting the whole earth with the smoke of his book makes me think of a certain nineteenth-century mathematical controversy, of which Cantor, mentioned above, was at the center. Cantor showed that the points on the line segment could be paired in a one-to-one fashion with the points on a unit square and, thus, with the set of points in any such space of any dimension. This pairing, though not continuous, scandalized the mathematical community, for it seemed contrary to reason that a one-dimensional space could be equally as infinite as a two-dimensional space.

Later on, Guiseppe Peano and David Hilbert devised continuous mappings from the segment onto the square; these were no longer one-to-one. The first several steps in the construction of Hilbert's mapping are shown above; the "squiggle" eventually fills the square, with no points left out. There is a three-dimensional analogue of this mapping, which fills the cube, and could, in principle, fill all of space.

So, if we imagine the pages of Borges' book to correspond to (say) the rational numbers, then the particles of its burning might not fill all the atmosphere, but, since the rationals are dense on the segment (infinitely many lie between any two points, no matter how close), we could easily imagine that its smoke might be so dense as to entirely pervade the atmosphere, with infinitely many particles in every space, no matter how small.

Cantor, as I noted, was a figure of controversy; he was denounced as a "scientific charlatan" and "corrupter of youth" by other mathematicians, and the strange curves and mappings he and others of his "school" described were shunned by many as monstrous or pathological. His investigation into the infinite also had a bearing on metaphysics and theology, for medievals like Thomas Aquinas had held that there could be no such thing as an actual existent infinity, only a potential infinity. Cantor's research seemed to some to indicate the existence of actual infinities, and thus, for various reasons, to tend toward pantheism. Cantor believed that further distinctions had to be made, and that Thomas wouldn't have objected to his ideas, had he been able to explain them; he corresponded with philosophers, theologians, and cardinals of the church, and even addressed a pamphlet to Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Aeterni Patris had advocated a renewed interest in scholastic philosophy.

But to return to the "monstrous" Book of Sand, whose serial infinity inspires in the narrator the same horror Cantor's theories had struck in his contemporaries. The narrator traded for it a copy of scripture that was a historical and literary treasure in itself as well as his savings for retirement. Might not this be a statement about modern man, who has traded his patrimony and future for a kind of gorgon's head of infinity? How fitting, too, that the narrator hides the book in a library, making it one page in the monstrous Book of Sand that is the modern glut of information, our "Library of Babel."

Tell it Slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

— Emily Dickinson

Nightspore Forest of Ir

My most recently published story, "The Goblin King's Concubine," has now appeared in podcast form in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Journey through Nightspore Forest of Ir on your commute!

Lois Tilton of Locus Online reviewed the story, and had this to say:

Maugreth is on an expedition to find the lost princess of the house of Adul, there being a reward for her return. After a perilous journey of murder and betrayal, much of it on his part, he discovers her living comfortably in a village of the goblins, here called helborim. She agrees to be rescued but insists on bringing along her half-breed offspring.

"I know what you're thinking," said Minuë. "It's true, we're hideous to them. But to Cheirod I was a peerless prize. He brooks no dissent and consummates his every desire. Several of his wise men objected when he chose to adopt the fruit of my womb as heir. They were promptly impaled."

A dark, cruel fantasy, where the unlucky are devoured by spiders or suffer other gruesome fates. There is a strong retro tone to the tale, as the central image is that of a naked white woman held as a sex slave by a monster – or a creature that most humans would consider a monster. But this princess is a match for human or goblin. There is also a sense here of a larger world beyond the backwater where the story finds itself, nations and races and languages yet unseen. A maugreth, for example, is a term of disgust and we don't know why our character has chosen to call himself by such a name, although it certainly seems fitting, given his actions.

Which I suppose about sums it up. I wrote a bit about the story's inspiration in a previous post. I should probably also mention Heart of Darkness as a rather obvious source of inspiration. As to the sense of a larger world, I appreciate that insight; this is an episode in a cycle of stories centered on Zilla and his fate in Enoch, explored in a number of yet-to-be-published short stories and a complete full-length novel.

UPDATE: Thanks also to Fletcher Vredenburgh for his kind review over at Black Gate. I aim to please!

Tom Cruise and Tech-Noir

I've now advanced to the point where, instead of watching only movies that come out in the $5.00 bin at Wal-Mart, I actually rent them online, through a company that shall remain nameless, because I haven't been paid for an advertisement, although it isn't one whose CEO publicly insults the intelligence of its American patrons. Now, generally these movies consist of either sci-fi action flicks from the eighties — preferably with my favorite actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (no, really) — or else Japanese kaiju films, because what I really like is film noir, and it isn't easy to find obscure noir titles available for streaming. But last night I got out of my rut by renting a more recent sci-fi action flick, and that despite its having my least favorite actor, Tom Cruise; the reason being that the flick in question has frequently been described as neo-noir or tech-noir, and was based on a Philip K. Dick story.

I speak, of course, of The Minority Report. Alas, it disappointed in the film noir department. Before I get to that, though, let me discuss…product placement.

Off the top of my head, I saw ads — not just products, but overt ads — for Lexus, Guinness, The Gap, Aquafina, Pepsi… The neat thing about advertisements in the dystopian future is that they scan your eyes so as to tailor their annoying, intrusive, soul-crushing distractions specifically to you, in public places. Now, think about this. We all know what it's like to have Google or Facebook or whatnot try to guess what we're into and adapt their ads accordingly, with sometimes rather mortifying results. Can you imagine a giant animated billboard shouting at you—using your own first name—while you're drifting along with a crowd of strangers, blasting something like: "HEY JOHN WE KNOW YOU SUFFER FROM INCONTINENCE WHY NOT TRY DEPENDS FOR A CHANGE?" Yeah. I mean, would there be an Adblocker for that? And, if that future Adblocker began working so well that it threatened to burst the public advertising bubble, would it begin admitting certain ads so that the world as we know it wouldn't come crashing down around our ears in a case of the parasite killing the host and, thus, itself? But I digress. What I really want to know is why these mega-corporations thought such product placement was a good idea. Do they want to be seen as intrusive, soul-crushing mega-corporations that stalk you every waking moment of every day? Apparently!

This might all seem like a quibble, but I think it says something about the sold-out nature of the movie and of Hollywood in general. The ads obviously aren't intended as dystopian satire, although Spielberg does leave that escape route open to himself, despite having taken whatever money he took to place them in the movie in the first place. How much more cynical can you get? Placing soul-crushing advertisements under cover of satirizing soul-crushing advertisements! Compare it with the true tech-noir, Blade Runner. We do see obtrusive advertisement in Blade Runner, but it's presented as dreary, frightening, and/or weird. Yes, there are some actual brands here and there, but they stay where they're supposed to: in the story.

The comparison with Blade Runner is an apt one. It is, as I said, the true tech-noir. It maintains emotional detachment. It follows an unsympathetic protagonist through a dirty job and a twisted romance with one of the replicants he's assigned to destroy. It closes without closure, bringing the plot to a logical conclusion while leaving you in the air regarding the protagonist's destiny (or identity). It definitely stands in the line of Kiss Me Deadly and The Maltese Falcon.

This is the kind of picture Hollywood is afraid to present us with now, on a large budget at any rate. It can't give us a seemingly unsympathetic character without making sure we know it's only skin deep and stems from some awful tragedy that the character will get over by the end of the film. Another movie that masquerades as noir — L. A. Confidential — shows the same squeamishness. The two movies — L. A. Confidential and The Minority Report — actually have a lot in common, including pivotal scenes and plot elements. That's neither here nor there, perhaps, but at any rate they share this merely superficial resemblance to film noir. The Minority Report borrows classical music from Kiss Me Deadly, makes a variety of nods to various noir motifs, uses a desaturated palette, etc. But just as it takes more than bleached-out filmstrips to approach the stylistic marks of film noir, so does it take a lot more than an emotionally justified substance-abuse problem to make a true noir protagonist.

As an aside, I find it remarkable that, under the restrictions of the Hays Code, Hollywood could plumb the very depths of human depravity — sure, sometimes you have to read between the lines, but it's definitely there — while in our more liberal time it can show you a lot more, but to little effect, because it's evidently lost its sense of good and evil and their dirty mixture in a man's soul. Characters like Orson Welles' Hank Quinlan can't exist anymore. Everyone is a white hat or a black hat, and writers think they're being profound when they reveal a white hat to have secretly been a black hat all along.

More generally, The Minority Report doesn't take up the challenge it sets itself. It has the potential to ask profound questions about time and free will, but is content with letting the protagonist run around trying to clear his name. The philosophical difficulties with using precogs to prevent crimes and incarcerate the would-be offenders are raised but left more or less to the side; in the end the program is shut down because it happened to screw up. This is Philip K. Dick turned it into a Mission Impossible adventure story with a happy ending; indeed, the specific questions Dick raises are lost in the shuffle. And yes, I've heard the argument that the protagonist is hallucinating the last scenes while in deep freeze or whatever, but I don't buy it. If you ask me, it's just another way the movie compromises its principles while leaving an out for the cultists.

All that said, it's not a bad movie. I don't understand the praise lavished upon it, but I enjoyed watching it. The plot holes, though numerous, aren't that obvious, and the backdrops are quite memorable. The technology really does seem prescient at some points. There are a lot of nice little touches, like the dancing figures on the cereal box that won't turn off like they're supposed to. So, if you're reading this (!), and hanging on my very words (!!), I would say, watch it if you haven't. Just don't expect Blade Runner.

And if you're really wanting to see a great Spielberg movie, go watch Duel. That's where it's at.

The Goblin King's Concubine

I'm pleased to report that my story "The Goblin King's Concubine" has just appeared in Issue 129 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. BCS is an excellent venue for literary adventure fantasy, and I'm honored to have my work appear there for the second time.

The story itself is in part a subversive tribute to Robert E. Howard. It's inspired by the "rescue" of Cynthia Ann Parker (mother of Quanah Parker) from the Comanches by Sul Ross and the Texas Rangers, an event also echoed in Howard's tale "The Vale of Lost Women." Howard's latent racism, which unfortunately mars several of his stories, is in evidence here, and my story explores chauvinism and otherness (and goblin villages and lycopod forests). But I also admire Howard as a small-town Texan who inhabited his locality through speculative fiction; as a writer, he stands head and shoulders above his various imitators and posthumous collaborators.

The character of Zilla, by the bye, is inspired by certain (to me, chilling) passages of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, e.g.:

Meanwhile there grew up in his son that much more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism—who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest… This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart…

They say that you shouldn't reveal the "bones" that went into making the soup of a story, but I presume that people clicking the link to this blog are interested in such things. Anyway, all of this concerns the matter; the form is something else entirely.

America's Great Epic

Last weekend I drove in a single day from the torrid depths of my place in the Texas hinterlands amid prickly pears and palm trees to the airy heights of the Colorado Rockies, then drove all the way back two days later, again in a single day. But it was no wearisome journey, for I had as companion and copilot an unabridged audiobook of Moby-Dick, read by the peerless Frank Muller, who (by gum) did an Ahab that seemed almost enfleshed beside me in the cab of my pickup truck. After twenty-one hours of listening I reached from hell's heart I stab at thee in a town called Eden set upon the rolling uplands of central Texas, with sunset thunderheads flashing in the distance before me.

I recently wrote a post comparing Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun to Moby-Dick. But, oh, while it may be argued that BOTNS is the Moby-Dick of science fiction, being the "Moby-Dick of" something and actually being Moby-Dick are quite different propositions. O sublimity, O profundity, O humor and vivacity of that greatest of American epics!

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.