Fantasy in Film

To begin with, I haven't the seen either of the installments of this bloated new Hobbit trilogy. I have nothing against them or people who like such things – well, perhaps just a little bit – but to me they and the LOTR movies are a mere mockery of the works closest to my heart. The spinning-out of subplots in the interests of making millions upon millions of dollars I pass over in silence. Same goes for the utter tone-deafness of the screenplays (or what I know of them, at least). No, right now I just want to focus on the visuals, which many would say is their strong point. For they certainly represent a superbly realized vision (and I use "vision" in the literal sense) but such overabundance of eye-candy is somehow inimical – indeed, diametrically opposed – to Tolkien's own vision.

In his "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien says that one purpose of fantasy is to open our jaded, cynical eyes to the beauty of the common everyday world and its inhabitants. It ennobles grass and trees, bread and wine, sun and moon. This he calls Recovery. In his works, most of the narrative takes place in the unadorned, silent forests, plains, mountains, and deserts of Middle Earth, or else in such homely settings as the Shire. These elements combine their various strands into a wordless litany. Tolkien pays attention to mundane detail (food, plant species, topography) while refusing to constantly bombard the reader with the strange, the wonderful, and the terrifying. Because that, ultimately, is what really does jade the reader, and Tolkien's aim is to make us really see the strangeness, the wonder, and the terror in all that we take for granted.

Alas, this is something that has little chance of making it to the big screen in this sad era of bloated, multimillion-dollar CGI epics.

This isn't to say it couldn't be done. It is possible, I think, to use the art of film to fulfill the functions of fantasy. But film adaptations of fantastic fiction rarely achieve this. Generally they serve as vehicles for special effects instead. The eighties was the heyday of such films, e.g., the Star Wars trilogy, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Dune, and so on. I have more than a little affection for several of these. A few of them occasionally come close to what I call fantasy. I think, for instance, of the last part of Excalibur, from the search for the Grail through the departure of Arthur, though the movie as a whole is something of a mess. But in general these films are content to remain action movies. They simply aren't contemplative enough to be fantasy.

Indeed, it isn't every director who can construct the silent cathedral spaces needed to effect Recovery. Fritz Lang was one. He was aided by the fact that his great works were made during the silent era, of course, but his Die Nibelungen and Metropolis will never be equaled in the genre categories of fantasy and science fiction. Both, of course, are fantasies in the sense that I often use the word.

Andrei Tarkovsky was another. His Andrei Rublev and Solaris are two of my favorite films. The Carver quote on my sidebar says: "At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement." Tarkovsky does this with film, and, miraculously, bears the viewer along with him. His movies aren't necessarily "fantasies" in the genre sense, of course, but perhaps the translation of the formal definition from written fiction to film involves a loosening of the matter.

Actually, the film that probably most successfully achieves Recovery – time and space, man and nature – isn't even fiction, but a documentary. I speak of Into Great Silence (2005), an intimate three-hour exploration of life in a Carthusian monastery (the Grand Chartreuse) without background music or a single word of spoken commentary. I went to see it in the theater and have since watched it many times at home; my children, who are four and five, often ask to see it. One of its most beautiful images is of the stars wheeling over the nighted monastery while the monks chant the divine office in a pitch-black church where the tiny red sanctuary candle throbs silently, perpetually. But it also bestows loving attention on mundane details, like ice crystals on green leaves, and jars full of buttons, and the placid surface of holy water in a font, and vegetables ready to be chopped. Its "interviews" consist of the prolonged gaze of the monks themselves.

And perhaps this gives away the extremely high expectations I have of fantasy fiction. I want it to replace, in a small way, the need that in a previous age would have been satisfied by making a retreat at a monastery or visiting a rustic shrine. I'm not speaking of any particular religion here, you understand, but of the universal human need to affirm life's goodness, to open one's eyes to that which is and see one's place in the universe.

I began this post with the intent of writing about a movie I received as a Christmas present, a movie that achieves the goals of fantasy in a distinctively American way, though lying well without the genre. It's gotten away from me now, though, so I'll continue in a second post.

NOTE: Just to show that I'm not just a curmudgeon who doesn't like anything new, I happen to greatly admire Peter Jackson's King Kong. In my humble opinion, he did a service to humanity in making this grand homage to the original film.

An Observation

There is something terrifying and depressing about putting your art out there for people to see.

As long as you're holding something back, you can always say to yourself, I have this in reserve, and can pull it out when I really need to impress. But once it's out there in the cold, clear light of day, you can at last see it from every side, and realize how very small and inadequate it is, and how flawed. Every person who views the work is a curved mirror, and in them you scrutinize your naked self from a million different angles, and are petrified as by the gorgon's head.

It takes a certain humility to strive for any type of greatness, for if you fail then people will see it. It calls for magnanimity, for strict attention to the work itself, for forgetfulness of self. Pusillanimity is secretly tied to pride, the pride that would say to God, I went and buried my talent for I know that you are a hard master, thus flinging his gifts in his teeth.

That is all.

Getting There

I posted recently about my chosen vein of speculative fiction, namely, planetary romance, or the sword-and-planet novel. One peculiarity of early practitioners of this high and lonely art is the variety of means they employed in getting their protagonists to the Other Side.

Among the earliest we have Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), both of whom use mechanical means. Verne, who was obsessed with gadgets and "realism," has his travelers fired out of a cannon (and, truth be told, they never actually land on the moon), while Wells, who was more interested in ideas and settings, uses a rather absurd physical artifice, giving mere lip-service to theoretical constraints, much as he does in The Time-Machine. Verne, I believe, took him to task for this, but wrongly, to my mind – I find that I can forgive the author any amount of ridiculousness as to means of transport, so long as his style is sufficient to bear it along, and he attends to realism once we get there. Chandler wrote that plausibility is mostly a matter of style, and I agree with him.

And anyway, look at the historical antecedents, such as they are. Ariosto has his hero drawn by hippogriffs to the moon, and Dante is conducted by celestial spirits. Perseus – the archetypal voyager to the Other Side and slayer of fearsome alien foes – flies on winged sandals lent him by the gods, while St. Brendan executes his wonder-voyage through the North Atlantic in a flimsy leather coracle. The whole point is to get there, never mind how.

David Lindsay follows Wells rather than Verne in the absurdity of his conveyance in A Voyage to Arcturus, but the account is mysterious and quite compelling. Once again, I find it easy to suspend my disbelief in the hands of a competent storyteller. And, once we're there, we're caught up in the protagonist's physical and spiritual reactions to the alien landscape of Tormance, and Earth is all but forgotten.

Other writers didn't trouble themselves to employ even the most superficial of mechanical means. In The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison has Lessingham borne to Mercury in a hippogriff-drawn chariot conducted by a wise martlet (after which he was promptly forgotten). On the other side of the Atlantic we have Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter has only to look upon the Red Planet with a certain measure of longing to find himself there, though stark naked and seemingly in a different body. Otis Adelbert Kline, a Burroughs imitator from the thirties, uses telepathic body-exchange to get his down-and-out character to Mars. His artifice is less successful, in that we're apparently expected to forget about the fate of the Martian prince trapped in the dispossessed, jilted hero's body back on earth.

Most of the examples we've cited so far have the device of a framing story that involves the principals but is quickly forgotten, which (to me) adds a certain charm not to be found in other veins of literature. Here, then, are the keynotes of classic planetary romance:

1. The main structure of the tale is that of an everyman observer in an alien milieu.
2. The observer must be someone with whom we share rapport, hence must originate from Earth or an Earth-based society in something close to our own day and age.
3. The observer must be immersed in the alien milieu, hence must effectively be cut off from mundane society – marooned, as it were. The milieu must be a closed environment, like a desert island.
4. Because it's the immersion that matters, the mode of conveyance is of little import. The simpler and quicker, the better.

Some time after the "classic" period, C. S. Lewis wrote two planetary romances, consciously using both mechanical and spiritual means. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is kidnapped by a rogue professor and his gentleman accomplice and taken to Mars in a spaceship. The ship is just as absurd as anything in Wells or Lindsay, but much more artfully introduced and described. The interplanetary voyage itself is starkly beautiful; I can't think of any other description of space that compares with it. In Perelandra Lewis doesn't bother with technology at all, and has his hero conveyed to Venus in a stone sarcophagus carried by angels. By his own account, this was inspired by a reading of A Voyage to Arcturus. Again, the point is to get there, never mind how.

Later writers were apparently uncomfortable with such flights of fancy, I suppose because the growing canon of science fiction and the advances in rocketry were daily making this scientifictional license less acceptable and less necessary. The protagonists in works like Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, and Frank Herbert's Dune get there by means that are purely mechanical and (within the genre) plausible. So, sadly, we have no more hippogriffs, astral projection, angelic sarcophagi, telepathic mind-exchanges, or backyard rocketships. They've lost something essential, though, because a keynote of the subgenre is that travel to the Other Side has to be exceptional. Otherwise we just have space opera or some other form of science fiction.

Some "planetary romances," instead of taking place elsewhere, take place elsewhen, in the very far future. Examples include H. G. Wells' The Time-Machine, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath (a.k.a. Two Hundred Million A.D.), Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The keynotes are much the same. There is usually some kind of framing story and a fanciful mode of conveyance, or at least (as in Wolfe's case) some playful description of how the account was obtained.

For me personally, what really defines the subgenre is the sense of remoteness, of otherness. I like an observer I can identify with, or at least some kind of reference point with what I'm familiar with, however tenuous, but equally important is my total immersion in the other sphere. These two factors go hand in hand. A novel taking place in some other planet not linked to our own in any way would be out-and-out fantasy (like The Dark Crystal, say); a novel taking place in a planet linked to our own but not utterly severed in time or space is science fiction or alternate history.

Planetary romance: it's its own thing.

Upcoming Fiction

I'm pleased to report that my story "At the Edge of the Sea" is scheduled to appear on Beneath Ceaseless Skies in April, in both print and podcast form. This is my third story to appear in BCS. It's a slightly fractured, fantastic love story with metaphysical flourishes. When I was a kid my dad taught high school marine biology, and sometimes took me on fossil-collecting expeditions in the Hill Country as well as specimen-collecting expeditions to the coast. I loved poring over his copy of the Beachcomber's Guide to Gulf Coast Marine Life. My story is inspired by those memories, and also by Adolf Portmann's Animal Forms and Patterns.

To see (or hear) my previous stories at BCS, click here for Misbegotten and here for The Goblin King's Concubine.

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