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too like the lightning
We’re publishing two book seminars in the very near future. The first is on Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders. That’ll be starting next week, on Seven Surrenders’ launch day. The second is on Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway – that will be happening in April, again when the book is launched. They should both be fun.
As usual, my list of the Hugo eligible books for this year (as well as short story collections), meant less as a form of canvassing (especially given that nominations are about to close) than of solving the commitment problem of getting me off my arse to talk about books that I liked and didn’t like. Necessary qualification – the very best novel that I read last year isn’t available yet – Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning – a book that has the potential to remake the genre. It’ll be out in a couple of months, at which point I’ll have more to say.
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Here are the posts in our seminar on Jo Walton’s books, _The Just City_ and _The Philosopher Kings_ (the third book, _Necessity_, comes out in June). This one has been fun.
If you want to link to the entire seminar, all the posts are available here.
Alternatively, here’s a list by participant (with biographies for non-Crooked Timber regulars).
The participants:
Ruthanna Emrys’s short fiction–featuring Lovecraftian social justice activists, heroic xenopsychologists, and golem librarians (not all at once)–has appeared at Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Analog. Winter Tide, her first novel, will be available from Macmillan’s Tor.com imprint in Spring 2017. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, occasionally attempts to save the world, and blogs sporadically about these things at her Livejournal and Twitter. Under the Lemon Tree, Distracted by Chores.
Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Original Sin.
Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Gods Behaving Badly.
Sumana Harihareswara is a project management consultant and open source expert living in Queens, New York. She co-edited the 2009 speculative fiction anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments and frequently speaks and performs at WisCon and writes about tech and fiction at Geek Feminism. You can follow her on Twitter or on Identi.ca as @brainwane; her personal blog is Cogito, Ergo Sumana. Intertextuality, Feminism, and Reinforced Arguments in Thessaly
John Holbo blogs at Crooked Timber. Walton’s Republic.
Neville Morley is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol and author of such significant works on classical antiquity as ‘Civil War and Succession Crisis in Roman Beekeeping’ and ‘Thucydides, History and Historicism in Wilhelm Roscher’. He blogs at The Sphinx Blog and is on Twitter at @NevilleMorley. We Philhellenists.
Ada Palmer is a historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, Book 1 of the four volume science fiction series Terra Ignota will come out in May. It’ll blow your mind (editorial interjection by HF). Plato vs. Metaphysics, or How Very Hard it Is to Un-Learn Freud.
Leah Schneibach is a staff writer for Tor.com and the Fiction Editor of No Tokens journal. Her story, “Bracelet,“ received an Honorable Mention in Lumina’s 2013 Fiction Contest, judged by George Saunders. Her fiction has been published in Lumina and Anamesa, and her criticism has appeared on Electric Literature. She is currently working on a novel about an unhealthy relationship between a teenage stand-up comedian and a depressed math teacher. Leah is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA Program in Fiction, where she worked with Brian Morton, David Hollander, and Nelly Reifler. She was also Assistant Fiction Editor for Lumina. In previous lives she has worked with the Center for Independent Publishing, Co-Directed the Education Department for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, received an M.A. in Religious Studies from NYU, and wrote serious academic papers on Harry Potter’s place in the literary canon while earning a B.A. from New College of Florida. Thinking Through Violence in The Just City and The Philosopher Kings.
Belle Waring blogs at Crooked Timber. Socrates as Mary-Sue.
Jo Walton is a fantasy and science fiction author. Her books have won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award. Her new novel in the Thessaly sequence, _Necessity_, comes out in June. A Dialogue with a Very Odd Bibliography.
Marc Andreessen’s recent “tech optimist manifesto” is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words “we believe” appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms.
The core precept of this secular religion is faith in technology. From Andreessen’s opening section: “We believe growth is progress … the only perpetual source of growth is technology … this is why we are not still living in mud huts … this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.” [click to continue…]
I have come to the conclusion that the most essential element of the Silicon Valley ideology is its collective faith in technological acceleration. More than the mix of libertarianism and tech determinism that Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described as the “Californian Ideology” in 1995, more than the breakdown of donations between Democratic and Republican candidates, the driving ideological conviction among the denizens of Silicon Valley is that the rate of technological innovation is accelerating.
I discovered recently that my late Aunt Mary, who was in her time PA to the Postmaster General and a crack typist, had transcribed a letter from a distant relative of ours recounting a journey in 1865 from London to Aden (part of a journey to India). The letter seems sufficiently interesting to post here at Crooked Timber. Among the points of interest are the speed of the journey to Marseilles (remember, we are only 35 years into the railway era), seeing de Lesseps in Egypt — who has constructed the “Sweet Water Canal” (the Ismaïlia Canal) and has yet to complete the Suez Canal), impressions of the various places he passed through, and the tragic funeral of a young man who has died of drink. But much else besides. I’ve digitized by using the OCR on my phone and have checked the various oddities and spellings, so this should be an accurate reproduction.
S.S. Mooltan, Red Sea
22 December 1865
My dear Nelly,
I promised Mamma that I would send you all a letter but the old “Ripon” made such bad weather of it that although an old sailor I could not write very comfortably on board her and therefore all the writing that I did on board was either on business or to your dear Mother. We are now in a very fine large ship and as the weather is fine the sea very smooth and I have a cabin to myself, I can write in comfort and without being disturbed. You will I am sure like to have a kind of log or journal of my proceeding since I left you all on Monday and I will try and recollect the places that I have passed through and any little incidents that may be interesting and jot them down on paper to post at Aden, and although addressed to your dear Nelly you must understand that this letter is meant for all my dear children, and as I shall probably not write to your Mother from Aden, why, this will suffice to let her know also that I am in health and as happy as I can be while away from all I love.
The last talk I gave before lockdown (sometime in March 2020) was for the annual Freethought conference held by the Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics of Madison (No, I don’t think they know Alan Partridge). It’s much looser, and more fun, than my usual talks: they asked me because the President of AHA had heard from a small group of my students the way I think about these issues, and, to be honest, I think they bugged him to invite me to force me to write something down. Here it is:
This talk doesn’t really contain an argument, unlike most that I give. It’s more an autobiographical sketch on the topic of its title – which is a sort of tribute to Bertrand Russell’s famous essay, but has a twist to it. I’m not a Christian. Not exactly. I’ll explain why I’m not, but also why it’s a little misleading to say I am not.
I’ll start with two stories about students.
First. About 13 years ago an evangelical Christian student was in my office discussing career options with me (this is one of the many great parts of my job). At one point I asked if she’d considered becoming a pastor. She shot back “No, I couldn’t be a pastor”. After a pause she added: “You should become a pastor”. My reaction was immediate: “Um.… I lack one key qualification”. “Oh, that’s ok”, she retorted, “I’m sure lots of pastors don’t believe in God. And, anyway, if you were a pastor, perhaps you’d come to believe in God”. [1]
Second. A student who just graduated [Dec 2019] is getting married and invited me, and many of her classmates from a class that she took (though didn’t much enjoy) as a freshman. Her spouse-to-be, impressed presumably, that she was inviting a professor not in her major, asked her if Brighouse would be willing to do a reading. She told us all that she replied, “Oh no, I don’t think he’d do that because he is an atheist”.
I’m glad she told us this. Because I said “Oh, I’d be happy to do a reading. I’m not that kind of atheist” and, to be honest, I was a bit surprised that she didn’t already know that. [Sadly, COVID prevented me and her classmates from attending the wedding, but I am glad to say it did go ahead without us]
Maybe you can tell something about the kind of atheist I am through this story, from the 1980s shortly after I moved to the US, and was still quite bemused by the culture. I heard a news story about a lawsuit. Football players at a public high school had been praying in the end zone during a game. And someone was suing the school district to try and get it to prohibit them from doing so. My immediate reaction went something like this:
Corey caught flack for his “Historovox” piece. I have since been intermittently failing to write a useful response. Maybe this one will go better.
There are two thoughts behind the piece.
1) Trump is weak.
2) ‘Historovox’ affords a distorted view.
The connection – the thesis – is that,
3) Because 2, many have been slow to see 1.
If 1 and 2 are true, this is plausible. But 1 and 2 are such distinct thoughts that the link – even if it holds – doesn’t hold the piece together. There are too many angles of pushback and complication. Dealing with 1 and 2 together is too hard. To put it another way: Corey’s piece is framed kind of like a proof of 2, via 1. But since you need 3 for the proof, and 2 for 3, it’s kind of circular. Or is it? In fact it needn’t be viciously so. You know what? I suggest we pocket 3 as interesting, but hard to gauge. Think about 1 and 2 separately. In this post I will talk about just 2. [click to continue…]
My 15-page On Beyond Zarathustra series, over at Hilobrow, has now run its course. I managed – barely! – to usher the rope dancer onstage, as I collapsed from the graphical strain. But on my way down I penned a think-piece on Seuss and philosophy, with special reference to Nietzsche.
What else?
Did you know that Ted Geisel, as a young teen, was traumatized by a sudden, personal attack on him by Teddy Roosevelt? It’s true! Apparently. I quote from Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: [click to continue…]
If this is going to be a useful analogy for sexist behavior at all people need to know what NPCs (that is, non-player-characters in videogames) are! A number of people in the thread below noted that they did not. It’s pretty simple. Let’s say you play a FPS (first person shooter) or even a third-person shooter (you see the character you control as if he were the star of a movie). You generally roam around the game shooting alien monsters or zombies or Nazis or zombie Nazis or whatever. But there will be people on your side, or fellow members of the space marines, or bystander city-dwellers–people with whom you can interact but don’t need to/can’t shoot. These characters may have only one thing to say, or they can say one thing when first approached (or when you say a certain thing) and one or more other things later (or when you say that other thing). Alternately and more generally in all sorts of games an NPC can be someone you share endless experiences with, or are trained by, or you start a romantic relationship with, or you lose your shit over when they die (not tryna spoil the end of Final Fantasy VII here, just saying. Oh dag! Look, they’re making a new FFVII, and they may botch the ending to please a minority of fans (and in order kick up endless promotional rage-dust IMO), so forget I said that, and buy the latest game from “the franchise that doesn’t know the meaning of the word final”). Basically, in a single-player game, you’re the player, and the non-player characters–even if they look just like you–are merely generated by the game, just like the rendered terrain itself or the monsters or the weapons/spoils of war/scrolls, etc.
Our household is a Nintendo one, and in Zelda Windwaker HD you have crucial but limited interactions with others. It is a beautiful game that I have spent over 40 hours watching someone play while being a crucial assistant, looking through the ign.wiki walkthrough to see how the HELL Link can jump while holding a bomb [pro tip: he can’t, but he can step onto a platform]. You are prompted to press A to talk to NPCs and you are given at most two things to choose from to say either in greeting or reply. This is in line with the generally friendly tenor of Nintendo games, something that led them, after much thought, to
totally disable chat during online battles in their new FPS multi-player game Splatoon. FPS stands for FriendlyPersonSquidgun in this case–it has been succinctly described as “squidpeople play paintball” by “Matpat” on the YouTube channel Game Theory (which is very entertaining; I recommend it highly). Game designers could not think of any other way to prevent trash talk that would ruin the Nintendo experience, so you can only say one of two things to your squad-mates: “let’s go!” or “booyah!” This is despite the fact that it would be very helpful to talk for even 20 seconds before any given battle with your new squad-mates, who are chosen at random from available, physically-nearby players. Then you could set up a simple strategy for winning, which in this case means covering the most terrain possible with ink. “I’ll camp on their re-spawn point and snipe and you run around with that giant paint-roller, painting everything teal. Excelsior!”
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My travelogue continues … By the way, check out friend-o-the-blog Sam Bikinoraion‘s blog – he is also going round the world this year, and seems to be visiting a load of my favourite places, which I didn’t fancy taking the kids to. This episode takes me through Greece, and is posted a bit in arrears, as I headed off to the desert after the events described herein …
Earlier this year CB sent me an email alerting me to the fact that Richard Thompson was going to perform, soon, in Madison, and recommending him to me. In fact I already had tickets — I am a huge Richard Thompson fan, and have seen him live about as often as I have seen Belle’s relative Loudon Wainwright, over the past 35 years. I went with my wife (who doesn’t like him much), and two friends, one of whom is a fan but had never seen him before, and the other of whom had no idea who he was. I hadn’t really thought about the dangers of taking someone who doesn’t know him to see him: what the effect of seeing him live before having heard any of his music would be. His son was the support act — lovely voice, ok songs — so that, in a way, made it worse. Because Thompson was, in fact, the best I have ever seen him: haunting, crisp voice, one acoustic guitar sounding like an orchestra, a perfectly designed set (occasionally the sets are slightly off, when he plays all-request shows, or picks an album name out of a hat, to show that he’s ready with every song he’s ever written — though I suspect that he doesn’t include Henry the Human Fly in the mix, since I don’t think I’ve ever heard him play a song from that, my favourite, album live). Simon Mayo, interviewing him on yesterday’s show (around 1 hr 06 mins), recalled seeing him playing solo, and drinking half a glass of water during a song without any apparent effect on the sound coming from the guitar. Anyway, at a certain point, I saw tears running down our friend’s face, and, at the end, she said “Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this?”. Imagine that you’d never heard of Richard Thompson, and the first time you heard 1952 Vincent Black Lightning was live, when he is at the top of his game. You’d weep.
His new album, Acoustic Classics
And here he is talking to Aggers about playing cricket in LA — plus about his songwriting process, which is very interesting. He turns out to be a Geoffrey Boycott fan (would it surprise anyone to know that I am too? — the batting, not the commentating I hasten to add), so Aggers introduces them at the end of the interview, and Boycott manages to open with an insult.
Felix Gilman’s new book, _The Revolutions_ is out (Powells, Amazon) . It’s very, very good. The novel starts from the strange blend of middle-class self improvement, encounter with (and misappropriation of) ideas from Asia and social change that led to an explosion of occultism in the late Victorian period. In Gilman’s fin-de-siecle London, the theosophists’ view of the universe was _actually right_ (or, if not right, at least possessed of a convincing verisimilitude), allowing him to mix astral travel, lordlings of dubious personal character, ruthless newspaper magnate-magicians with a planetary romance involving diaphanous Martians, now exiled from their ruined world to its two moons. But it’s a Gilman book, hence tricky. The title combines the “revolutions of the spheres,” that occultists must calculate to travel outside the boundaries of the Earth, with the revolutions in human understanding, as people really began to understand the nature of cosmological space and geological time.
I thank John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi (hereafter A/L) for their response, “With Fortresses Like These …” to my essay in Democracy, “Fortress Unionism.” I had an odd feeling reading and rereading their essay. I though its bark was far worse than its bite. A/L warn that my strategy is “doomed”, and rests on “dangerous assumptions.” Unions are already doing what I advocate, and they are thus headed down “the drain.” Yet, given their final set of suggestions, it seems as if we really don’t have much to disagree about at all.  When all is said and done, A/L ignore most of my proposals before agreeing with others.
In my last post, I responded to three objections to my article “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.” In this post I respond to a fourth regarding the connection between Friedrich von Hayek and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Though my comments on that connection took up a mere three sentences in my article, they’ve consumed an extraordinary amount of bandwidth among my libertarian critics. [click to continue…]