The Celestial Mythos

We’ve probably all imagined a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire in the night, looking up at the stars and telling stories about them. Some of these stories crop up all over the planet in cultures which seem to have no connection. For instance, the Pleiades are very often called the Seven Sisters all over the world, and there are countless interpretations of Cynthia/the Moon either having a face or some kind of quadrupedal animal with long hind legs and a pair of projections on the head. I personally see a rabbit but many other people say it’s a face, which I can’t see. Given the uneventful nature of the lunar surface, presumably the earliest four-footed beasts crawled out of the water to see the same pattern as we see. The Seven Sisters, on the other hand, are younger than the non-avian dinosaurs and in any case the stars move around too much for them to be visible for more than a short period of time, geologically speaking, in a recognisable form, except for the Sun of course. In any case, it doesn’t stretch credulity particularly far to imagine Palaeolithic humans calling them the Seven Sisters too, or “Septm Swesores” many millennia later.

It seems clear, then, that we’ve long looked up into the night sky and made up stories about what we see there. We’ve put a ship up there in the form of the Argo, now broken down into the Poop Deck, Sails, Pyx and Keel (not sure about the Pyx). There’s a River, various monsters and various heroes, such as Eridanus, Hydra, Hydrus, Draco, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Perseus and Hercules. Stories also connect these to each other, for example with the Crow and the Cup being on opposite sides of the sky so that the former is always thirstily croaking for the contents of the latter. We imagined tales of heroes, rescue missions, voyages and fights with monsters, and we’ve done this for millennia. This is just Western sky lore of course, but you get the idea.

Now, there is a very broad genre referred to as science fiction. I’ve defined it in the past as “fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting”, and another way I look at it is fiction whose characters are ideas rather than protagonists. The reason I used the former was to exclude ‘Star Wars’. When I say ‘Star Wars’, I’m not talking about whatever happened to it after ‘Return Of The Jedi’ but the original trilogy of films, ‘Splinter In The Mind’s Eye’, the various comic strips and radio series, and I suppose the holiday Xmas special or whatever it’s called. I’m like Freddy Mercury in that “I don’t like ‘Star Wars'”. It’s possible, likely in fact, that it’s dramatically changed since I saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in about 1980 CE, and possibly even improved, but the reason I can’t stand it as I conceive of it is that it’s all about the spectacle and possibly a kind of mythic approach set in space, and also in a time and place, if that’s not too focussed a word, not able to be mapped upon our current time and place, meaning that it can be neither a warning nor an aspiration. It’s basically sword and sorcery dressed up in a sci-fi costume, and the whole thing just really winds me up. The heaps of scientific implausibility don’t help, but that kind of thing can occur in a much more engaging way, as for example it does in Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. Because it attempts to communicate some kind of “message”, which is potentially a fairly crass thing to do in itself, to do with the idea that certain truths are timeless, and universalism is fine by the way, there’s no need for the setting. It could be in Middle Earth and it would make no difference. But what ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly is, is space opera.

I’ll come back to slagging it off later, while taking a break to define various opera. The term “space opera” was coined as a pejorative term for a particular genre, or perhaps sub-genre, in about 1940, connected to “soap opera” and further back to “horse opera”, a possibly disparaging term for the Western, i.e. Wild West, genre of cinema. The last of these has long since fallen out of use, probably before Westerns faded from view, but soaps are still going strong as is the term. This is, I suspect widely known, but I’ll say it anyway: soap opera get their name from the fact that they were originally extended commercials for I think washing powder in the 1930s, and as “opera” seems to be a disparaging word, it’s clearly meant to classify these three types of cultural product as intellectually undemanding psychic chewing gum. I’ve followed three soaps in recent years: ‘Casualty’, ‘The Archers’ and ‘Ros na Rún’. Of these, the last is probably the most soapy, and I have to admit very enjoyable for just that reason. I have the RTE Player on this laptop solely so I can watch it, although I haven’t in a while because I’ve lost track of where I left off. ‘Casualty’ I preferred when it was like a kind of detective story of finding out what was going on in someone’s life, so for example an old woman with no medical experience manages to diagnose another patient waiting for treatment with myasthenia gravis or a blind woman is hit by a careless cyclist and finds her sight has been restored. I am, however, still able to enjoy it in differently than how I used to. ‘Casualty’ is a useful case in point here since it’s linked with the defunct ‘Holby City’. I maintain that ‘Holby City’ is science fiction whereas ‘Casualty’ is not, and the whole cluster of elements between the various series involved is quite revealing in this respect. ‘Casualty’ used to be drama whose plot depended on the setting to a greater extent than it does now, and the scientific and technological aspects of the storylines used to be more central to the drama, whereas now they are much more human interest oriented. ‘Holby City’, which, and I have to say this, ought to be an abstract noun, was science fiction because there was actual medical research going on in it such as drug discovery, the use of gold nanoparticles for cardiac therapy and whatever it was Marwood (John Gaskell) was doing before he immersed himself in the loch. So it was literally science fiction some of the time. The characters would pursue fictional scientific endeavours which were based on established real-world theories but had not been undertaken in that direction in real life, and that literally is science fiction. The plot did depend on the setting too, because, well, here’s a case study. Gaskell manages to reverse motor neurone disease for a patient in Portugal through stem cell therapy, then attempts to do the same for a patient with multiple sclerosis by removing a nerve from her ankle and “gluing” it into her spinal column with stem cells. Even though this leads to an infection, he refuses either to remove the graft or admit that he inadvertently caused it. My recollection is that this storyline ends with him drowning himself but I can’t see that on the summary I’ve just read. The Motor Neurone Disease Association complained about this story line as holding out false hope for sufferers, and this is I’m sure accurate but only one possible take on the issue. As I understand it, olfactory nerves have been experimentally implanted in spinal cords to bridge injuries caused by trauma, and this doesn’t seem that dissimilar, although it is dissimilar, and that’s the point: it’s a scientifically-based story which includes elements of the character’s arrogance and medical objectification of his patients, and it’s more likely to be perceived as holding out false hope if the series is seen as a mainstream medical drama. If it’s seen as science fiction, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” on which so much of that genre is based carries the audience through by framing it as an escapist fantasy: wouldn’t it be nice if my motor neurone disease could be cured? Hence ‘Holby City’ could’ve been better received in various ways if it had been understood as science fiction and not mainstream medical drama.

That willing suspension of disbelief operates elsewhere in story-telling, including of course magical realism and fantasy, but also space opera. It’s something that actually brackets space opera and science fiction together. However, science fiction is not space opera. SF is often seen as originating with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, although that also has elements of gothic horror. It does, however, date further back than that. Kepler’s ‘Somnium’ is to my mind very clearly science fiction and also very clearly not space opera. The novel was published in 1634, and unsurprisingly recounts a dream whose protagonist travels to the lunar surface and witnesses the Earth seen from space, the captured rotation of a month-long day, the extreme contrast in temperatures experienced on that body between its day and night, describes Lagrangian points, and rather oddly has the location changed to be closer to Earth even though Kepler himself discovered the laws of planetary motion which placed it incontrovertibly where it is. It was written as fiction to avoid unwanted attention from the Church, as I understand it. It actually started as a dissertation and was published posthumously. Obviously the events described are imaginary, but the scientific principles are real and as far as I know there is no earlier example of this kind of literature known. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ dates from 1726, and focusses on satire although it does have some science fictional features.

To someone who knows about the generally reported history of science fiction, my placement of ‘Somnium’ as the first example of the genre might seem to be mistaken, because it looks like I’m ignoring something else which is a lot older and more significant. There’s a reason for this, which is probably quite evident from the distinction I made earlier, but for now I want to return to the idea of space opera.

So: space opera was described by Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a “hacky, grinding, stinking outworn spaceship yarn”. The referent was soon extended and altered from this, as it could easily refer to something on a relatively small scale, and applied to lively adventure stories involving often violent conflict in space. The canvas got a lot larger. The original phrase was meant to be insulting, and from the perspective of the more cerebral science fiction it feels justified. Just to be clear, space opera is a genre apart. It isn’t science fiction and it’s none the worse for not being it. The same, in my opinion, applies to ‘Doctor Who’, although that can occasionally dip into SF territory and it definitely isn’t space opera. It isn’t a bad thing that these are not science fiction, although they can be bad or good and they don’t particularly appeal to me on the whole. Space opera, crucially, has a grand scope, heroic protagonists, action-driven plots, romantic and emotionally evocative themes, melodrama, sharp moral distinctions and spectacular technology. It often also has aliens, but not always. ‘Star Wars’ as I know it is a good example of the genre. It is not, and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, science fiction, even though many SF fans would disagree.

You may have picked up a note of disdain for the genre in this, and I’m not going to lie: I dislike space opera quite intensely. It thrives on spectacle, portrays conservative values and politics as permanent and is scientifically hugely implausible. These are, though, possible clues as to its nature and here, something interesting is going on. I intend to illustrate this with the question: what was the first space opera? “The answer may surprise you.”

First of all, ‘Star Wars’ is probably the most prominent space opera and shows the influence of predecessors, but it was easy to do that because the genre had already been well-established. The battle scenes are very obviously taken from war films. Other aspects are taken from the Saturday children’s matinée serials, particularly ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’. The melée battles are akin to Robin Hood and Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and are one of the more obviously absurd aspects. As well as all that, there’s a more continuous space opera and sci-fi lineage, whose most obvious work is Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series. It just brazenly steals huge portions of ‘Dune’ without any hint of shame. The evil empire, a desert planet, the centrality of water management on Tatooine, a Messiah-like figure, a secret fraternity with psychic powers, and apparently ‘Star Wars’ even has Spice! It is of course said that good writers borrow and great writers steal, but because I don’t generally feel well-disposed towards space opera generally and loathe ‘Star Wars’, this bothers me more than it should, because I think George Lucas is an unoriginal writer who managed to pass the franchise off as something groundbreaking because the people it was aimed at didn’t read those sorts of books. And that’s forgivable given the doorstep-like nature of ‘Dune’, which must be offputting to many, but it’s not like even that was the first.

‘Dune’ is a reaction to the Foundation Trilogy. In ‘Dune’, feudalism is portrayed as the default form of human society. It encapsulates my nightmare that progressive politics might be a brief aberration in human history. It’s kind of like the Foundation Trilogy turned upside-down. Whereas the Mule is seen as a threat because he’s an influential individual with psychic powers who can disrupt the Seldon Plan, Muad’Dib is a flawed hero who can save the Galaxy through them. It’s very much about individuals mattering. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert’s approach, even the fact that Asimov was a major influence on him, though as a way of showing how things shouldn’t be done in his view. ‘Dune’ also shares with Asimov the idea of a human-only Galaxy.

Going back to the Foundation Trilogy, this is a bit of an anomaly as the genre goes. A lot of Asimov’s writing consists of people having conversations in rooms far away from the action, and the Trilogy has a lot of this, although it does have space battles. Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning at this point that I’m talking about all of this as if nothing happened after about 1981, so I’m not interested in the TV series, in the ‘Dune’ films, later works in the Foundation series or its later links with the Robot stories, or whatever happened to ‘Star Wars’ after ‘Return Of The Jedi’. This is an historical perspective I’m trying to construct here. The Foundation Trilogy is Gibbon’s ‘Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire’ in space. Asimov admits as much. It differs from Gibbon in that at the start of the whole series, someone develops a branch of mathematics which can predict the broad future of history provided the scale is large enough and the populace as a whole are unaware of the predictions. ‘Dune’ was published in 1965. Asimov started the Foundation Trilogy in 1941. It’s a very dull read, I think, but it contains the essential features of space opera and also other very widespread tropes seen in it: a galactic empire, very large scale, space battles, innumerable settled and habitable planets and, crucially, faster-than-light (FTL) travel. I’m not aware of any space opera written in modern times which doesn’t have FTL starships in it.

Going further back again, there’s what looks like the beginning of the genre in the works of E E ‘Doc’ Smith: the later Lensman series and the earlier Skylark of Space. I’ve noticed that more recent editions of his novels now show them fairly as co-authored by Lee Hawkins Garby. This is a woman Smith went to school with who went uncredited for decades after his death, over to whom he handed all the “squishy, human, emotional bits” of his stories while he got on with the supposèdly meatier parts of the plot with all the starships and rayguns and stuff. I have read a couple of his short stories, but find his novels hard to get anywhere with, in a similar way to how intolerable I find ‘Return Of The Jedi’ which I can watch about ten minutes of with gritted teeth before I succumb to the urge to turn it off and go and do something less boring instead. Consequently, it’s a bit difficult for me to comment meaningfully on either Lensman or Skylark. It’s definitely worthwhile looking at the plot of the Lensman series because of what it reveals about space opera.

The basic idea behind the series is that there are two races of aliens who are manipulating the development of intelligent life in the Galaxy from behind the scenes: the Arisians, peaceful enlightened beings, and Eddorians, slug-like selfish and basically evil blob aliens from another dimension. The Arisians want to guide life towards enlightenment and the Eddorians just want to rule like mafiosi. In a secret breeding program mediated by subtle psychic manipulation, the Arisians gently nudge life on Earth and elsewhere in the direction of wisdom and heroism to counteract the plans of the Eddorians. The breeding program culminates in the emergence of the “Lensmen”, whom I assume to be universally male given the cultural setting of the time and place of writing. These are heroic and morally impeccable men who can bear a crystalline device called the Lens, which can only be worn by people of such character and functions as a telepathy device, universal translator, lie detector, protects against psychic attacks, destroys the minds of the enemy and verifies the status of the Lensman. That all seems highly convenient, I must say. The scope of the series is literally aeons.

The Lensman series began publication in 1934 in serialised form, as was the usual arrangement at the time. Several of its aspects are interesting in view of – well, something I’ll come to in a bit. It was preceded by the ‘Skylark’ series, whose first part was written in 1915, which to my mind makes it quite startlingly old, and the little I’ve read of it comes across as very old-fashioned in style. It begins with a scientist accidentally inventing a space drive, the idea being immediately copied by his enemy and the two of them using the principle to build starships and engage in a cosmic battle involving multiple star systems and planets. It seems to be far more primitive and sketchily written than the later series, but it’s also crucial in setting the pre-conditions for the space opera written afterwards, because of one major aspect: the date it was written. In 1905, Albert Einstein, acting on the Michelson-Morley Experiment, began to wrestle with the issue that the speed of light was constant in all directions regardless of the speed of the observer, and of course the ultimate solution to this problem is special relativity and the conclusion that it’s impossible to travel faster than light. Special relativity was generally accepted by physicists by the 1920s. However, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s PhD was on bleaching flour with nitrogen oxides and its effect on baking qualities, because he was a food chemist, and at the time it may also have seemed that the speed of light being a hard limit was highly provisional and subject to refutation relatively (groan) easily. Over a century later, it seems very much baked-in. In fact it might even have been that he wasn’t even aware of Einstein’s theory when he started writing the series, and this has the interesting consequence that his version of space travel is kind of Newtonian, except that he also thinks inertia can be cancelled out without too much difficulty.

This one principle, that Smith started writing before special relativity was well-established, constitutes a sine qua non of space opera. Without some means of moving faster than light, or perhaps travelling without moving as with ‘Dune’, it just becomes completely implausible for scientific as well as other reasons. Later writers have had to come up with some kind of workaround for this, but it wouldn’t be there in the first place were it not for the highly specific timing of ‘Skylark Of Space’. It’s quite remarkable.

E E Smith was also writing at a time when H G Wells still had more than three decades ahead of him and even Jules Verne had only died recently. If his writing is to be considered SF, it still shows a remarkably inventive departure and spatial “zooming out” compared to his contemporary and near-contemporary. H G Wells does in fact make, so far as I can tell, a single mention of humans settling on an exoplanet, circling Sirius, but it’s after the Day of Judgement and God does it. There’s no technological method through which this happens and it isn’t part of a concerted, human-led expansion into space by their own devices in any way. This was in 1899. Compared to science fiction, space opera just seemed to have come along and plonked itself down unceremoniously in the middle of everything without any regard for plausibility or even being particularly pensive. It’s a very different beast than sci-fi. Another aspect of this is that Smith was able to write about this unknown realm over all our heads with the possible prospect of humans entering it one day in the very distant future. Olaf Stapledon, writing in 1930, envisaged human spaceflight not beginning for several hundred million years after the twentieth century. It’s hard to cast one’s mind far enough back to realise how completely fantastic the idea of going into space used to be, and yet this is well within living memory. It gives us a different perspective on space opera entirely.

Now for the elephant in the room. People who know the history of science fiction fairly well will have noticed that there’s one particular major work of literature which up until now I’ve completely ignored. There’s a reason for this. Far from disrupting my thesis, it really goes some way towards proving the point I will eventually be making. Before I get to it, though, I should point out that its context surprised me, as I’d always thought of the novel as an invention of something like the fifteenth century with works like ‘Le Mort D’Arthur’ and ‘Tirant lo Blanch’, then eventually ‘Don Quixote’. Apparently not. It seems to be seen as central to the nature of the novel that it’s written in prose rather than verse, which apparently started to happen in the early thirteenth century. Also, apparently it was independently developed in China. It needs a widespread readership, which is helped by literacy and the invention of the printing press, so it’s all the more surprising, to me anyway, that there is actually a total of five novels which survive in complete form from Ancient Greece: ‘Daphnis And Chloe’, ‘Aethiopica’, ‘The Ephesian Tale’, ‘Leucippe and Clitophon’ and ‘Callirhoe’. There are also fragments of others and a further complete novel survives in Persian translation. It’s extended prose fiction with a coherent narrative, plot and characters. I mean, I don’t know what more you want from me: these are novels. I know it seems anachronistic, but they existed and some of them survive. On the whole, they form a genre. They’re usually about two lovers whose love is tested by various difficulties, threats and temptations. Pirates are often involved and they tend to travel around the Mediterranean a lot, can be tempted by riches to break up. They might be compared to Mills And Boon, but with more gods. In fact, the existence of these novels, and the fact that they were written in the Koiné register rather than Katharevousa or whatever passed for it at the time, puts the New Testament into context for me. I feel that the Bible was completed as a text intended to speak to the common person and not the highly-educated. It seems to have the same audience, and in one case even a similar plot line.

Right: here we go then, the moment someone might’ve been waiting for: Lucian of Samosata!

Lucian of Samosata was a second century Syrian satirist writing in Greek who authored a satirical novel called ‘A True Story’. This was, as has been noted on YouTube, basically a space opera! I’m not kidding and this isn’t hyperbole. It’s a parody of travel writing and of the Odyssey. Lucian writes of a ship which, voyaging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is captured by a whirlwind and blown all the way up to the lunar surface, where the Emperor of the Moon, in a world populated by strange creatures, is happy to meet fellow humans and turns out to be involved in a major space war with the Emperor of the Sun for ownership of Venus. This war is fought by giant vultures and warriors on the backs of giant ants and fleas the size of horses, and there are also spiders involved, spinning webs as part of the defence network. This last detail, incidentally, also crops up in ‘Blake’s 7’ and Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. On leaving this conflagration, they go to live in a city inside a whale and travel to the Islands of the Blessèd, where he discusses with Homer whether he really wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. It breaks off abruptly with intimations of a sequel.

First of all, it’s clearly satire. The reason it has a narrative in outer space is to make it seem over-the-top, and it also reminds me of Baron Munchausen. Nevertheless, it does contain many space opera tropes, and the scale is part of that. It has outlandish alien beings, battle in space over another planet as territory, travel to other worlds and a “space ship”. The main difference, apart from being satire, is that it’s interplanetary rather than interstellar or intergalactic, but the scale is still very large. What it definitely isn’t, though, is science fiction. In fact it more or less couldn’t be SF because there wasn’t really any science at the time for it to be fictional about. However, whereas Lucian was writing in a situation where science was basically absent, Smith was also writing without complete information and on the cusp of a moment which would have placed major constraints on what he could convincingly write about. Both could project fanciful tales up into the unknown darkness of the night sky, as it were, and wallow in that freedom from constraint. I also suspect that Smith was entirely ignorant of Lucian’s writing or even existence. Both of them gave the atmosphere a lot of welly. Smith was melodramatic, Lucian comedic.

Taking a different stance again is a third author, Doris Lessing. I am very slightly familiar with Lessing’s writing, having read ‘The Grass Is Singing’. I probably should’ve read ‘The Golden Notebook’ and ‘The Good Terrorist’ but I haven’t. I think of Lessing as a thoroughly literary author and therefore beyond my understanding or ability to empathise with her writing, and also regard her, as I do many other such authors, with some suspicion as an insidious legislator of how one is supposed to be human. Some people with ADHD report the experience of running their eyes along lines of writing with nothing going in. This is not something I get with most writing but I’m pretty sure it would happen if I tried to read her. Also, calling a novel ‘The Good Terrorist’ doesn’t bode well for me as I think the concept of terrorism is only useful to the powerful, so it suggests a conservative outlook. Not to go off on too much of a tangent, this isn’t about the morality of terrorism so much as the idea that violence openly committed by a state is somehow more legitimate. Maybe she meant something else. It might be thought that it was right up my street, and maybe it is, but I doubt I’ll be reading it. I think she might show contempt for people who feel powerless and don’t know what to do to engage with making a difference to the world, which is of course me and many friends through my adult life. Regarding ‘The Golden Notebook’, one thing that might be relevant is an incident early in my relationship with Sarada. I have generally tended to keep at least two different sets of notebooks, one as my diary in a journalling sort of sense and the other for other stuff, for instance if I were doing that right now I’d probably write a lot about graph theory as applied to social media, but also other more personal stuff. Sarada suggested I combine the two, so I did that and it almost immediately gave me writer’s block, which I never experience, in both types of notebook for something like three years. Maybe that could be relevant, I don’t know. I’m almost wilfully ignorant of this kind of writing. I wonder if the separation into different notebooks represents a kind of fragmentation of her identity in a more negative way, probably in connection with the contradictions of women’s roles under patriarchy, but as I say that’s just a guess and I know nothing.

Just as I’m wilfully ignorant of Lessing’s writing, I strongly suspect that she was wilfully ignorant of science fiction and space opera. Nonetheless, she’s called herself a storyteller who feels the same push to write and tell stories as I experience, and going back to that Stone Age camp fire, she would’ve been sitting around it telling stories, perhaps about Canopus and Sirius. And she would’ve been, because it was before the patriarchy even existed. She might have been breastfeeding or kiss-feeding at the same time, but this wouldn’t have interfered with her story-telling urge.

Anyway, as is well-known, Doris Lessing wrote a five-novel series ‘Canopus In Argos’ whose first novel, published in 1979, covers the history of Earth as seen from the perspective of Canopus, an advanced civilisation observing accelerated evolution on this planet, known to them as Shikasta, translated as “stricken”. Earth is initially nurtured by Canopus but a misalignment of the stars leads to an interruption of the flow of the “substance of we-feeling”, and breaks the telepathic lock between Canopus and Shikasta. Consequently, Shammat, the rival empire to Canopus, is then able to seed Earth with discord, environmental destruction, violence and selfishness, hence the name “stricken”, having changed from Rohanda, meaning “fruitful”. Johor, the narrator, whose documents are scattered through the first novel, manifests himself as a human man to guide and enlighten a small group of humans and rescue the planet from turmoil.

The next novel, ‘The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four And Five’, is allegorical and depicts a planet divided into six zones, each at a different stage of spiritual development. Canopus appears to order a marriage between two individuals, the queen of the harmonious, egalitarian and feminine zone three and the king of the militaristic, patriarchy of zone four, to bridge their differences and learn from each other. Later, the king of zone four is ordered to marry the queen of zone five, a chaotic and primitive realm.

Then comes ‘The Sirian Experiments’, which concern a Sirian attempt to guide human development towards technological advancement and bureaucracy which tend to lead to catastrophe on other planets. There are two other novels but I haven’t read any of them and I don’t want to lose focus. But look at the first. Does it not sound to you, broadly speaking because I’m sure the style is very different, like the general idea of Smith’s ‘Lensman’ series? There are two rival cosmic agencies directing the history of humanity, one towards enlightenment, the other with more malign motives, and the more enlightened force leads to a hero being incarnated among the humans. It seems uncannily similar, and the thing is, I don’t think it’s “stolen”. I think Lessing knew practically nothing of space opera. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she would be well-informed about or value. And yet she apparently reproduced a novel whose general outline, though doubtless not tone or detail, is basically the same as E E Smith’s ‘Triplanetary’ so far as I can tell. Moreover, ‘Triplanetary’ began to be serialised in 1934 whereas ‘Shikasta’ was published forty-five years later in 1979. Smith’s series as a whole was a runner-up in the Hugo awards for all-time best series in 1966, losing out to the Foundation Trilogy, so it was also phenomenally well-known and celebrated. That’s like being a runner-up to the Booker Prize, so Lessing’s ignorance, and probably that of her readers and reviewers, is absolutely breathtaking. Just to get this off my chest, and bearing in mind that I don’t actually care for space opera generally, Smith had done all that four and a half decades previously, it was considered old hat by about 1940, although still admired in a retro kind of way, and then along comes Lessing and apparently it’s all wonderful and ground-breaking rather than a heap of tired old rubbish. This is really galling.

All that said though, I honestly don’t believe Lessing ripped him off. I think she was simply writing in ignorance, and in an environment that was equally ignorant, and apparently even proud of that ignorance, considering that genre fiction could not possibly have anything to teach them. These rather annoying preconditions, though, did create a situation where space opera could once again be reinvented, though doubtless in a very different and rather arcane form rather than as popular culture.

So then, there are three separate instances of the genre being created, each isolated from the others and in different circumstances. Lessing’s background was in politics, and incidentally she ought to be very much one of my kind of people, being active in CND, an ex-communist and so on. I know the kind of person she is and many such people have been my friends. Smith, by contrast, was a food chemist, like Margaret Thatcher in a way, and his work was the most influential as he basically created the genre we now call space opera. Lucian seems to have been primarily a literary person writing in the ancient world. All of them, though, seem to have stumbled upon the same genre, even in very different historical circumstances. To me this suggests that space opera was just “out there” waiting to be discovered, actually did get discovered independently at least three times, by people who had nothing in common with each other apart from all being part of Western civilisation.

How does this happen? Has it happened with anything else? And what are the essential features of the genre which define it? I can see an attempt at grandeur and scope, accompanied by a kind of operatic approach to emotion which maybe Lessing didn’t include. I’m just not sure. But I hope you agree that this is remarkable, and once something happens thrice it’s no longer a coincidence.

Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

First of all, my understanding of mainstream literary fiction is that it can’t be “spoilt” because although the plot is there for a reason, it isn’t the main point, so there just will be “spoilers” here. Not that it matters.

Han Kang is a South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who also won a big prize of some kind, possibly the Man Booker. You see, this is how ignorant I am in this field. She’s written quite a few novels, one of which, ‘Greek Lessons’, I’m currently reading. ‘The Vegetarian’ (채식주의자) seems to be her best known. It’s quite short. In it, a previously apparently conventional woman, Yung-Hye (romanised differently by the way – her name’s 영혜 I think) who has a series of gruesome nightmares which persuade her to go veggie. Although it’s described as vegetarian, she is in fact vegan. She throws out all the meat in the kitchen and refuses also to wear animal products. Her family problematise all of this and regard her as harming herself and being unnecessarily defiant. She loses a fair bit of weight and eventually her father hits her and attempts to force feed her a piece of pork violently. She then slashes her wrist and is admitted to hospital where she’s psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, then leaves and after she’s found, she’s sitting at a fountain apparently having taken a bite out of a song bird. That’s the first of three sections, called ‘The Vegetarian’ and told from her husband’s viewpoint. In the second section, ‘Mongolian Mark’, her brother-in-law, the new narrator, becomes erotically preoccupied with her and the idea of painting her with flowers because of her Mongolian blue spot, which he thinks of as a petal. She wants to retain the floral body painting. He hires a young man to do the same to, videos it and tries to get them to have sex. When he refuses and leaves, they have sex themselves and fall asleep. In the morning, his wife, that is, her sister, discovers them. The final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, is from her sister’s viewpoint. Yung-Hye is in decline in the mental hospital refusing to eat and insists on standing on her head most of the time. In-Hye, her sister, is aware that she’s wasting away, takes her into her care and leaves the hospital with her, knowing that she’s wasting away and apparently wishing to become a plant.

For me, reading mainstream literature is pearls before swine. I won’t appreciate it or understand it because I’m overcome by stress and a sense of inferiority when I attempt to read it, even if I have an aptitude for following it in the first place, which I probably lack. Also, before I read it, absolutely will not listen to or read anyone else’s take on a novel because I want my reaction to be my own rather than being informed by someone else’s personality. Therefore, what I’m about to say is purely my own reaction. Here we go then.

The novel is unusually structured, being divided into three sections, each expressing a different character’s perception of Yung-Hye. The only time she speaks for herself is through the nightmares she has at the start of the novel. I think it’s clear that this is to deny her agency and illustrate how her perspective and therefore she as a woman in South Korean society is not respected. This theme permeates the whole story. Even initially, her husband finds it embarrassing that she doesn’t wear a bra, making everyone aware of her nipples in his unfortunately probably accurate view. At no point is her decision taken seriously and it’s generally seen as wilfully causing a problem for everyone else. It would be easy to say that the mere fact of her going vegan is one possible symbolisable act among many and is fairly arbitrary, but it isn’t quite that. It’s a reaction against perceived violence, which is not only stereotypically masculine but is shown as such in the story. And to be honest, I am well aware that dietary veganism is often seen as a nuisance by carnists, and I don’t want to go into too much depth here but there is a tendency for carnists to see their own dietary choices as, dare I say, “normal”. This brings about a second theme, that of conformity and the stigmatisation of non-conformity, where the latter is seen as obstreperous and disrespected. There’s no distinction here between rational and irrational decision-making. Yung-Hye can certainly be seen as anorexic but the real point is that no attempt is made at any point to empathise with her and what of her dietary choice means to her is entirely ignored by her family and the psychiatrists.

In the second section, she’s clearly strongly sexually objectified by her brother-in-law. Concern is expressed by others that he’s taking advantage of her but it’s also ambiguous because she does seem to want to become a plant and the sex may be akin to pollination, so he’s fulfilling her desires in one sense and she could be seen as having consented, though very passively. Her brother-in-law is only very distant from his wife and I didn’t get a feeling of outrage from her about his infidelity.

In the final section, Yung-Hye’s sister comes to perceive her as having done something with her life, unlike herself, because all she’s done is conform and not really lived her life at all compared to her sister’s own decision, or perhaps natural drift, into becoming a plant. Even her psychosis is an achievement compared to her own life. At this point, I began to worry that the novel was going to turn out to be magically realist, but thankfully it didn’t. I think magical realism is the kind of thing which needs to be present throughout a story rather than introduced most of the way through, and I half-expected Yung-Hye to turn literally into a plant, which I think would’ve been silly.Okay, so there’s all of that, but I do still have a problem. A fairly unimportant part of this is that I probably missed the significance of almost everything in the story, but there’s a bigger issue, which is that of universalism. I’m aware that South Korea is a distant country on the other side of Eurasia and not much of what goes on there filters through to the Western media, so I know about a few things and as usual a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it may lead to a mental caricature of the country. I know, for example, that it’s a young democracy where there was recently an attempted coup which was defeated by parliamentary representatives themselves, that it’s rather surprisingly mainly Christian, the origin of the Unification Church, and more relevantly that there’s a “4B” movement among women which seeks to avoid sex with men, childbirth, marriage and heterosexual dating — 비섹스, 비출산, 비연애, 비혼 — which is also prejudiced against queer men. Moreover, I’m aware of Chip Chan, a woman who appears to be mentally ill and not receiving much help who has confined herself to her flat and streams everything 24/7 because she wants the world to monitor what’s going on for her personal safety. I have also heard, and this may be incorrect, that they’re highly conformist and anti-vegetarian for that reason. There are other things, like K-pop, which are largely irrelevant to this story, and also the sublime and inspired invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is perhaps a little more so. And this is what gets me, because from those few features I could easily construct a largely inaccurate image of the culture, but at the same time I have to say that this novel does seem to confirm this. I’ve written about Korea before of course. But this is what bothers me. There’s an attitude referred to as Orientalism, which fetishises the specialness of Eurasian cultures outside our peninsula and can be seen, for example, in certain attitudes towards Yoga and the suicide forest in Japan, or even something as simple as taking your shoes off when you go in the house, where utterly routine and prosaic things are othered, so I don’t want a Korean author’s writing to be pigeonholed in this way. All the same, the question of universalism arises. I already find it surprising and disquieting that, for example, Greek drama seems to speak to us today over two thousand years later, because it makes me feel that I’m not letting the work itself speak on its own terms and not hearing the playwright owing to projecting my own preconceptions on it. I tend to find – look, I’ll try to define universalism first as that might help.

This might not be the right phrase, but by literary universalism I mean the way that works separated considerably in space and time, i.e. culturally, still seem to speak to an audience which is very different to the creators. Due to my own background as a Northwestern European, I experience this particularly with the works of William Shakespeare. That said, many people do benefit from reading the notes which often accompany his plays. We may need a study guide, and that makes a lot of sense because of the drastic differences in cultural mores between then and now. I’m sceptical that we’re really able to make a connection and wonder if we’re just hallucinating. It seems to me that there cannot be any kind of phenomenon which facilitates that. At the same time, the Good Samaritan is a relatable parable and if we really could not understand another culture, passing by on the other side would be entirely feasible. I want to give an example of this from my own life. Many years ago I was walking down the street on a windy day and a woman had her umbrella blow inside out and she was struggling with it. I decided it would be an insult to her independence to “help” and walked on by, at which point she irately and sarcastically said “thank you!” to me. This is probably an example of failing to meet expectations of some kind, and it’s also an example of trying to pass by on the other side in a supportive way. There was presumably some kind of script I was expected to follow in these circumstances which I didn’t. Likewise, the tale of the Good Samaritan, among other things, attempts to indicate that one can transcend cultural differences and marginalisation by “being human”, i.e. it does seem to recognise or assert that there is a universal human nature. I imagine that she had a kind of idea of the “done thing” in this situation against which I consciously rebelled in a manner which was supposed to be passively supportive, or rather, because that’s quite patronising, not assuming that she’d want or need any intervention from someone else to deal with her problem. Some years after when I told someone about this incident, they imagined it as a “meet-cute”, which struck me as utterly bizarre but indicates how we might try to cram incidents into particular cultural narratives which have no real significance.

This in a more general sense is what bothers me about ‘The Vegetarian’, or perhaps I should actually be writing ‘채식주의자’ to emphasise its foreignness. I generally try to avoid reading works in translation, partly because I’d then have to trust the translator but also, and mainly, because they’ve then been ripped out of their cultural context and plonked unceremoniously into mine, at which point I will fail to understand them completely while having the illusion that I have. So, looking at ‘채식주의자’, I see it as including themes of women’s oppression, conformity, cruelty and failure of empathy, and I realise that good literature has to try to leave room for ambiguity and not close off the narrative, but I don’t know how what I call veganism and what I call anorexia nervosa maps onto Han Kang’s world view. I am aware that some people, particularly teenage girls, describe themselves as going vegetarian or vegan as a way of masking eating disorders, but I also find it a little irksome that this decision is pathologised in this way. It shouldn’t be associated with what seems to be self-destructiveness because to me that’s a lazy equation which makes concessions to carnism. The trouble is that in a wider setting, Yung-Hye’s vegetarianism and what’s constructed as an eating disorder does actually work very well as a kind of quiet rebellion, shorn of the question of whether it’s primarily a conscious decision, because of its contrast with the inherent violence of Korean, and in fact most, societies. She has nightmares and this provokes her to behave in a manner her peers find unacceptable. Her husband and sister in particular then take her current behaviour and use it to reinterpret her past, as if everything was inevitably going to lead to this. Her behaviour, perhaps, feels like an accusation. She does in fact seem to impose it on her husband by throwing out all the meat and dairy and refusing to prepare animal products, but it may be more out of obliviousness than a conscious attempt to assert herself, and this is probably in fact a theme of the story.

One thing I completely failed to understand is why she seems to have bitten a living song bird, to the extent that I wonder if I got that scene wrong. This indicates a bigger issue: I lack lived experience as a South Korean woman. I don’t know how I can be expected to appreciate any of this, and more broadly how any reader can be expected to appreciate any novel. It seems like an illusion or a form of trickery to me that this seems to be possible.

I don’t know. I just find these things very hard and quite traumatising, and not because of any trauma or conflict portrayed in the pages so much as that I seem to be expected to hear this communication when I don’t know how I possibly could, and it’s quite depressing. I can’t step out of myself far enough to do that, and have doubts that anyone really can.

Owning Nothing And Being Sad

“You will own nothing and be happy” went viral a few years ago and also spawned a conspiracy theory. I’m going to start by outlining where that phrase came from and what it means, then move on to refuting the claim that communism involves owning nothing, before I finish off by talking about ebooks.

The phrase is used to sum up Ida Aukens 2016 CE presentation to the World Economic Forum concerning a shift to a subscription-based economy. Its original title was “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better”, and it can be found on the WEF’s Medium blog here, which may be behind a paywall depending on how much you’ve tried to look at Medium. Just on that subject, yes there is a major issue with us providing content for free and maybe Medium is a fair response to that but that doesn’t stop it from being difficult to access if you haven’t got much money. I don’t know what the answer is, but somehow it seems appropriate that Aukens piece uses that model of accessibility. She describes a situation at the start of the next decade where transportation, accommodation, energy, communication and food all becomes free to the average citizen in, I dunno, Århus or the Other Holby in Scandinavia, since this is largely a speculative and provocative article. Her argument is that since energy, accommodation, transport and food have become free in this city, everything else becomes available as a service rather than a good. Hence she talks about summoning driverless cars, her living room being used for business meetings while she’s out and even temporarily ordering kitchen utensils when she wants to cook rather than owning them outright, meaning that no-one has an interest in things with a short lifespan: no more disposability or built-in obsolescence. Moreover, the almighty algorithm chooses what you want in advance and knows you better than you know yourself. This was supposed to be a utopian vision.

A while back, a certain reader of this blog might recall that I described a potential situation where driverless cars were summoned by the passenger rather than owned by them, and he mistakenly concluded that this idea was supposed to be utopian. In fact, I meant the opposite. The reason this had been suggested was that driverless cars were expected to have such expensive insurance that the average person wouldn’t be able to afford to own one, so they would have no choice but to rent. Nevertheless it’s interesting that this was understood in that way. In terms of transport, my general vision, for what it’s worth, is for cities to be pedestrian-friendly, for there to be widespread affordable or free public transport, particularly trams and trains but also buses, and for people to use taxis when the other forms are not practical. Also airships, but that’s going to need some explanation which would take me off-topic. But there’s a significant misunderstanding here. Aukens view involves a great deal of trust in authority, which seems to be a feature of Scandinavian mindsets, and being a social democrat she seems to be used to placing faith in government rather than expecting it to be corrupt, and also in the scope of government as opposed to things being run by monopoly capitalism, which at least in Britain has tended to be how things have gone from Thatcher on. It’s easy to imagine that if you just order your kitchen utensils from a service, you’re not going to think about the next person down the line and will probably be careless with them, but that all depends on the general culture of conscientiousness in the location concerned. Maybe the English (I keep wondering about what to say about the Scots here and whether it’s fair to say “English” or “Brits”) have been educated out of this conscientious role. That said, I do remember an exchange with someone where I recounted how I wanted to work for British Rail but backed off because of privatisation, and her response was that they were a really good employer because “you can turn up whenever you want and they don’t mind”. I hope this wasn’t true, but if it was, I don’t know, I’d feel less motivated to give a good service if I was working for a large private company than a nationalised industry because in the latter case one has a direct obligation to be more efficient and work to “earn” the money the taxpayer is providing you with. Maybe other people don’t think that way. To me, it matters where the money goes, and if it goes to profit it’s very demotivating.

The World Economic Forum (WEF – I’m probably never going to need to refer to that again now I’ve typed those fateful three letters) came up with a plan, the “Great Reset”, in connection with the pandemic whose claimed purpose was to reorganise the world economic system more fairly. Whether or not this would’ve been a good thing, this ended up being engulfed by the giant “plandemic” conspiracy theory which made it difficult to talk about sensibly. One consequence of this was that “you will own nothing and be happy” became a slogan associated with the idea of a shadow world government promoting communism. In fact, on the whole communism is not about abolishing private property but abolishing private ownership of the means of production. What Auken wants is not that. She’s talking about actually abolishing private ownership. Again, for now I don’t want to go off on a tangent because this is simply an issue I want to clear up due to the association with the conspiracy theory and I’m not talking about misconceptions of what communism and socialism are.

In fact, the situation she’s describing is indeed coming true, but not in the utopian way she suggests. What is in fact happening is a transition to a subscription-based economy. In a way, this is nothing new. Old-school examples are people renting television sets, and if Radio Rentals is an accurate name apparently also radios, and also telephones from the Post Office and, as they have for centuries, their accommodation. In fact, even having a mortgage is effectively a subscription because when you finally default on it, you’re evicted, and because of how loans work it ultimately costs more than if you’d bought the house outright, although of course there are inflation and tracking mortgages but I hope you take my point. However, in recent years ever more items are now being subscribed to rather than owned. Here are some examples:

Another example is the disappearance of physical media. We’ve gone from the occasional private ownership of ciné reels, through video cassettes, DVDs, Blu-Ray and 4K Blu-Ray to a situation where all our films and box sets are online in some form and we accept unread terms and conditions to view them for a monthly fee. Again, this is news to nobody, but there is a process. Just as no human can set foot on the lunar surface any longer, the skills, plant and components required to make a proper VCR are now gone. The same will inevitably happen with optical discs, and incidentally I’m no fan of those because the drives go out of alignment due to the force of gravity after a few years, but a solid state stored copy is completely straightforward. The same applies to audio. There is now only one manufacturer of cassette tape playback mechanisms and although new cassette recorders are still being made, all of them rely on that not particularly high-end component, which is also not built for life. Spotify and Amazon music still exist of course, but the terms and conditions don’t allow ownership. And this is the problem. Disney + episodes of ‘Futurama’ are heavily edited, for example, including one scene where a female newsreader asks a male one why he’s paid more than her. Interesting that that in particular should go on the digital cutting room floor, eh? Looking at it from the streaming service’s perspective, they need to maintain the firmware, hardware, software and infrastructure to enable this to be streamed, so whatever else happens, the consumer has to keep paying an organisation whose policies they may not agree with at all.

Regarding video games, even if the gamer has the media, they may rely on codes for downloading extra content and there are digital-only games and games which require the platform to be online while playing because of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and even physical games often have an immediate online upgrade on day one. I’ve never been massively into gaming, so I’m fairly ignorant of this and I may have got it wrong. In fact according to our son, the early updates are often bug fixes, so there is that although it does also open up a second concern: are the public being used as beta testers for incomplete products?

Other forms of software are the same.

And this, at long last, leads me to the question of ebooks and Amazon’s recent activity regarding the Kindle. Before I get into this, though, I want to talk about the history of ebooks as a concept. You may or may not remember a 1979 TV series and book by Chris Evans called ‘The Mighty Micro’, covering the IT revolution and projecting future trends. The ebook reader concept dates back to at least 1968 and of course Douglas Adams’s Guide is very obviously an ebook, although he initially conceived the content as fixed. Going back to Evans, his concept of an ebook reader and ebooks was quite recognisable from a twenty-first century perspective, but here it is: in chapter eight, ‘The Death Of The Printed Word’, he described a digital solution to the ever-mounting pile of information. He makes the point that in real terms, printed books are far cheaper than handwritten ones used to be, and envisaged that this fall in price would continue into the digital age. I’m just going to copy-paste a scan of the paper book a relevant passage appeared in:

I can’t recall ebook readers existing in 1989 although Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, so back then such a “device” would’ve been one of these kind of things connected to a mainframe:

The original serial terminal from Digital Equipment Corporation, the VT05.

Evans also envisaged ebook readers being bound in leather and secured with gold clasps with elegantly framed screens, and from my recollection of the TV series his idea of the display was pretty close to what it turned out to be. All of this is fairly accurate. He also correctly predicted that the font size and style would be under the reader’s control and pointed out that this would make them more accessible to the visually impaired. There are cases, they can be closed with magnetic clasps and the screens are indeed framed. As to how the content was delivered, one of his ideas was charmingly quaint and the other pretty much correct. The former was that they could be “delivered by the dozen” on memory chips “in small envelopes” and would cost about ten pence each, and the latter that they could be “transmitted instantaneously by cable or microwave”. Another interesting forecast, given the current situation, was that bricks and mortar bookshops would cease to exist and the primary relationship would be directly between the reader and the publisher. This is not precisely what happened, but the imposition of an extra online stage in the form, usually, of Amazon indicates that whereas it’s convenient and useful, it isn’t actually necessary at all, and money is being taken by them to provide a largely dispensable service. Moreover, where does the money we pay to access their ebooks go? Ten pence in 1979 terms is around ten bob today, and that assumes that he didn’t take the forthcoming decade into consideration. A cursory search reveals that a 32 Gb Micro-SD card costs just under seven quid today and that’s supposed to be enough for around twelve thousand books, making each book cost just over half a farthing, so in fact Evans’s estimate, while possibly correct for 1989, vastly overshoots today’s prices. Of course it stands to reason that we’re also paying for publicity and the remuneration of the author, but questions do arise about where all the money goes. Looking, for example, at ‘Great Expectations’ because it’s well out of copyright, the cheapest Kindle price for that is currently thirty-two pence or around 6/6 (I should probably explain why I use “old money” if you don’t already know but I’m trying to keep on-topic) and then it goes up to over three quid. All easily within most people’s grasp of course but it’s also a little puzzling when it’s also available for free in other digital formats. Of course it probably goes without saying that it’s all about market value, so it’s what people are prepared to pay for and part of that is the convenience of knowing that it’s easily and instantly available from this famous online outlet, but to get back to my original point, not only are you paying through the nose to buy it in terms of resources, but also, You Are Not Actually Buying It. You don’t own it after you’ve paid for it. All you’re doing is paying for access. I mean, you know this. Does it not bother you? It bothers me.

Consider this though. People get paid for their work, which then goes on subscriptions in various forms and the money which would ideally circulate through the economy actually disappears into the pockets of the rich, slowly but steadily. This is a fairly naïve way to look at it, because that money will then be sitting in some kind of investment-based system rather than just being in gold bars under someone’s bed, but that system itself is unlikely to be paying the workers who contribute to the value particularly fairly and those workers will also increasingly be paying for subscriptions rather than owning things outright. It just isn’t healthy for economic equality for people to be doing this. Just in straightforward economic terms it isn’t good.

But it’s actually worse than that, and this is where I come to Kindle. Something like eight years ago, I replaced my Nexus 7 tablet with an advertising-supported version of a Kindle Fire. Unfortunately, due to some cock-up which was my fault, in swapping the app version of Kindle for the tablet, I lost all my previous ebooks, but fortunately I didn’t have very many at that point. It isn’t ideal that it’s ad-supported either, but it only cost me £150 rather than £200 as a result and I also got an actual tablet, more versatile than something like a Kindle Paperwhite would’ve been. Over that period, I’ve obtained access to a total of a hundred and eighty-five ebooks, although some of those were free samples.

Just to bring anyone who didn’t hear about this already up to speed, as is their legal right, Amazon recently changed their terms and conditions on the Kindleto stop permitting the reader to download to another device via USB. This was previously done for piracy purposes of course, but there are also legitimate reasons for doing so. Unfortunately, it didn’t appear to be an option for me because I have a Kindle Fire rather than a Paperwhite or whatever the other ones are called, so instead I downloaded all the content I hadn’t already and switched it permanently into airplane mode, so that I am no longer going to access the internet on it. This is not ideal because at some point my Kindle is going to die, and in the meantime I’m looking at three hundred odd books of mine, a small section of my physical library, much of which I acquired in the 1970s or date from earlier than that, possibly back to the eighteenth century, and I don’t believe my Kindle Fire is going to last 250 years. It’s also annoying because it means I’ve lost the use of a tablet.

I made a number of points on Sarada’s blog which were not particularly well-supported and are difficult to verify, and I thank Beetleypete for pointing this out. However, I hope he does agree with me on the following. Bearing in mind that Disney Plus have carried out dodgy edits on ‘Futurama’, and also bearing in mind that the new régime in the States is no longer even pretending to be anything but a dictatorship run for the sole benefit of the super-rich, one of whom is Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, my current Kindle ebook collection, which includes titles on anti-racism, queer issues, spiritual abuse from religious fundamentalists, alterative economics, Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’ and others – and I note that one of them as I look through this list just now on my offline Kindle having downloaded them all a few days ago has actually been edited recently, obviously before I took the tablet offline – and given the recent issue over Julian Moore’s ‘Freckleface Strawberry’, I don’t think I’m paranoid to do that.

And now I get to talk about my shiny new toy, but without illusions. I’ve just got a Rakuten Kobo Libra Colour. Up to this point, I’ve had a Kobo account with three books on it which I accessed via my mobile ‘phone and this laptop. I am aware that there’s a risk that Rakuten will end up doing the same thing as Amazon have just done, and are also likely to go further, just as I expect Amazon to do as well, but for now I’m not locked into the prison with Kobo provided I regularly back it up. I’m going to indulge myself a bit here.

We bought our daughter a Kindle Paperwhite for Xmas a few years ago, so I’m familiar with electronic paper. Kobo uses a similar technology, unlike the Kindle Fire which has the usual backlit LCD full-colour screen which I suspect is like a bauble to attract the consumer like a shiny new car (and we’ve also got one of those – well, second hand but still). I may have gotten this wrong, but as I understand it the display works by coloured (in this case) grains being moved up and down electrically or magnetically in a white fluid. Its more persistent than today’s LCDs, meaning that it changes more slowly than would be required to show video at a frame rate such as we’d be accustomed to nowadays, but it is in rather washed out colour, and that’s all fine with me and in fact I’d like that display to be used for ‘phones, laptops and tablets because we rely too much on images and insufficiently on text now and this would encourage it, as well as being extremely energy efficient. Apparently, although I haven’t had it for a fortnight yet, that’s how long it’ll run on a fully charged battery with typical use. The backlight can be completely turned off without making it illegible because the pixels reflect ambient light. Unfortunately one thing it doesn’t do, and I understand Kindles do, is stay on the last page you read when you turn it off, which would be a nice touch but you can’t have everything. I currently have eighty-one books on it although most of those are PDFs – insert my usual PDF-hating rant here. Sixteen of those are EPUBs, i.e. the usual format for ebooks, the important distinction being that unlike PDFs, proper modern ebooks “reflow”, meaning that text can be enlarged or reduced in size and font and still be organised into pages which fit on the screen. The alternative, as experienced with PDFs, is that you can magnify the text but it doesn’t change the font and you then have to scroll around an only partly visible page to read it. Most of my “ebooks”, if that’s the right name, are in fact PDFs. A facility also available for Kindle Paperwhite is that notes can be made on the screen using an electronic stylus, and I do have such a stylus for an old graphics tablet but I probably won’t bother because I have notebooks and pens. If you buy an official Kobo stylus it’s unreasonably expensive but much cheaper styli are available. This, though, seems to be marketed as their main selling point.

Kobos are apparently repairable, unlike Kindles, and are substantially made of recycled plastic, substantially from ocean plastic. I think all of this is a lot better than Kindle. It cost me £209, but considering I would’ve paid £200 for the ad-free version of my Kindle Fire maybe six years ago or however long ago it was, and that it’s usually cheaper to get an ebook version of a text than a paper one, which is, moreover, paper, weighs something, has to be transported and all the other environmental issues, I’m currently happy with my purchase. I also bought it directly from Rakuten.

Of course it goes without saying that all this is only relatively good, as in better than Kindle, and that due to Amazon’s agreements with various self-publishing authors and publishing companies, I am fully aware that many of the ebooks I bought for the Kindle are not available for the Kobo, including my own published novel. In fact, nothing I’ve ever written, including stories which have been read by hundreds of thousands of people, are available for the Kobo, so in a way it’s a bit weird that I’ve bothered to get one, but I have good reason not to trust Amazon and ample moral reasons to boycott them now, so that’s what I’m doing.

Finally, getting back to the model, it certainly looks like we are on track to owning nothing, but not to being happy. It’s a bastard combination of the social democratic idea, but run by megacorps and billionaires. Once again, it makes a solution into a problem. Nonetheless, for now I’m happy with the Kobo, and it’s precisely what I was led to believe would exist in 1979, so for once something in my life has actually worked out the way I expected it to. For now.

Goths – Human Pachyderms?

Not exactly a hook that.

You kind of have to sell your soul to make AI art, what with its mass theft and enormous carbon footprint, but there it is. A better picture would’ve stolen from more artists and produced an even greater carbon dioxide crater, so I’m not going to hold out for one.

My previous post was about a forgotten order of early Cenozoic herbivores living just after the K-T Event which nowadays can be seen as a footnote in the history of life, but like anything else used to be a whole group of mammals whose lives meant something for millions of years. However, they didn’t fit into people’s narratives and they were in a way a failure, so nobody thinks about them. That was an example from prehistory. Although the reconstructions I posted were all furry, they might also be seen as pachyderms. The idea of pachyderms is not reflected in genetic reality – elephants, hippos and rhinos are not closely related at all – the possible “natural kind” which is described by the word could include the pantodonts. This brings up the issue of cladism not being the only way to think of organisms. Right now, the idea of genetic relationships has become very important in biology with unexpected conglomerations of species being lumped together as related, which they are, and others rendered asunder despite their remarkable similarities, and this is all fine but it fails to take into account a different, er, kind of natural kind. In a very real sense, numbats, echidnas, anteaters, aardvarks and pangolins are similar to each other despite the fact that they are only very distantly related to each other, and there is clearly another universe of similarities between organisms which has little to do with genetics but is nevertheless as real in a different way. In this respect, pantodonts have significant similarities with hippos and rhinos despite not being at all closely related. They’re pachyderms.

Is it going too far to find an analogous similarity with all the different Goths? The original Goths were an East Germanic tribe of late antiquity instrumental in the fall of Rome who went on to found a kingdom in what would become Spain and to be absorbed by Byzantium. Later on, because they were associated with the supplanting of Roman culture, certain cultural tendencies in mediaeval Europe became labelled as Gothic, such as perpendicular-like architecture and the oddly similar style of calligraphy in Latin script found today in the occasional newspaper banner. This was later adapted again to refer to a genre of literature set in such environments, and later still to a subculture which seemed to copy those elements in turn. Thus today a goth is someone who stereotypically dresses in black and silver and wears very pale makeup with black hair and this seems very far indeed from the original Goths. It’s remarkable how extreme the semantic drift is here.

My focus, though, is on the “original” Goths, and here I have a personal story which I’ll come to. The Germanic tribes in general developed in southern peninsular Scandinavia and proceeded to move into the rest of Europe and beyond in waves. The first of these led to the tribes of Germania, as the Romans called it. This was followed by the East Germanic tribes, including the Goths, Burgundians and Vandals, towards the end of the Imperial era, and of course it was Alaric the Goth who led the sack of Rome. It’s been commented that by that point, the horde outside the gates of Rome spoke a more highly inflected language than those inside it. It’s tempting to think that the rot set in when Latin abandoned the ablative case and the inflected pluperfect, but that’s not only silly but has almost Nazi overtones, so I won’t go there.

I actually know remarkably little about the Goths. I think of them partly as terrestrial Vikings, as it were. Their material culture reminds me of the kind of grave goods and jewellery found among the Norse people and the West Germanic tribes as in the Sutton Hoo burial site, and they’re clearly of the same ilk as the English before the Norman Conquest. They are the same kind of people as we are. Although this has potentially racist connotations and is all the more so because they were sort of Nordic, in one particular respect this has particular value to me, and this is where I recount the personal story.

I usually say the Lord’s Prayer in church in Gothic. This sounds like pretentious and ostentatious, but I have good reason for doing it. We were asked to say the Lord’s Prayer “in whatever language lies closest to your heart”, and for me that language is Gothic. As you may know, I almost immediately, in 21st century parlance, “deconstructed” my faith after conversion on 23rd October 1985. The fact that I can pinpoint a date tells you something about what kind of Christian I am, or at least was at that time. Ironically, my later experience of postgraduate philosophy and introduction to postmodernity was years away at the time, and when I wrestled with the general concept later I found it annoying. Nonetheless, that’s how what I did would be described today. I reacted rather violently against my faith, among other things, due to its homophobia, sexism, intolerance of other expressions of religious faith and the fact that it was often used as a substitute for morality and a way of avoiding accountability.

However, we’re all more than our faith and I myself am particularly interested in language. To make a possibly annoyingly Christian comment about my life as reinterpreted by someone who did come back to the faith after twelve years, God didn’t leave me alone. I belonged to God and God pursued me. This is of course post hoc rationalisation to some extent. Anyway, Gothic is a particularly interesting language to me because it’s both ancient and closely related to English. There are two sizeable documents in the Gothic language along with some traces in modern languages, notably the Castilian “tapas”, cognate with the word “top”, and “Catalonia”, which may be derived from “Gothland” or something similar. These are the Codex Argenteus, which is a translation of the Bible, and the Skeireins, which is a commentary on the Gospel of John and may be written by a non-native speaker. I haven’t read a single word of the latter, but the former is another matter.

I’ve always been interested in languages. I think I can say that honestly because as a member of a language-oriented species, I’ve been receptive to language since probably shortly after I developed the ability to hear. As such, this makes me unremarkable, so it’s worth rewording this as something like “I seem to be more interested in language than most people”. Anyway, Gothic particularly interests me because it’s an almost unique example of a well-attested language which is both Germanic and therefore related to English, and ancient. The other example of this consists of what I call “Runic”, i.e. the language written in the Elder Futhark before Germanic separated into West and North Germanic, but that consists of short inscriptions, even single words, on objects such as bones and swords, mainly curses and evocations. It doesn’t have the extensive corpus of the Gothic language. Since the only real texts from Gothic are Biblical, when I became interested in it I only had that to read. I took a copy of the Codex Argenteus from the university library down to the photocopier and went through the whole lot, ending up with a massive wodge of papers with the whole text on it. This was in the days before the internet became widely available to the general public and I had no money except to feed the photocopier, so it was the only option really.

You might now expect some story of a miraculous return to “the Lord” to happen at this point, but that isn’t exactly what happened. No, in fact I just read a familiar text in an unfamiliar language and gradually picked it up. That said, the more familiar texts from the gospels were easily recognisable and I began to notice how Gothic provided a much firmer bridge between English and the early Church than modern translations of the Bible into English. The classic King James Version dates from 1611. From previous studies, I picked up some Old English passages such as the story of Abraham and Isaac, the parable of the wise and foolish men and the Lord’s Prayer, and actually I’m still puzzled by those because I thought the Church didn’t allow translations into the vernacular in the early Middle Ages, so even now I don’t know why those exist, but the Gothic translation is special because it provides a particularly clear window into the early manuscripts without the barrier of a particularly foreign language like New Testament Greek. That said, it’s a gloss more than a translation, being an almost word for word oversetting of the Greek rather than an attempt to be more idiomatic, although it also isn’t clear that that’s what it is because so little Gothic text survives in any other form. Gothic itself also seems to have borrowed a lot from Greek, including the rather similar alphabet, which is therefore quite easy to read. Even today I find that certain passages from the Bible, particularly the Sermon On The Mount, come to me first in Gothic rather than English. I’m not being pretentious here: it’s just a quirk of my brain and a fact of my life.

Hence when I was exhorted to say the Lord’s Prayer in the language closest to my heart, I opted to say it in Gothic. Gothic was, in a sense, the language God used to speak to me when I was still on the run from the Christian faith. It was the language God called out to me in when I didn’t want to hear, and though nobody has spoken it as a first language for centuries, for me it’s a living language.

The Goths were the first Christianised Germanic tribe, although “Christianised” might be used loosely here. In the fourth Christian century, Arian Christians in the Roman Empire proselytised to the Goths and this led quickly to conversion and the bishop I refer to as Wulfila but whom is more often called Ulfilas made his translation. It’s on bright red vellum, and remarkably for an ancient document is actually printed! This was achieved by using stamps for each letter and something like silver leaf to emboss the text onto the page. There were doubtless many other versions of the Bible in Gothic but this, the Codex Argenteus, is the best preserved and most complete and well-known. “Wulfila” means “wolf-cub”: “wulfs” plus the diminutive “-ila” as found in the English “-let” and “little”. I don’t know why he was called that but it does somehow seem very stereotypically Germanic.

The Goths, then, were Christian at a time when all other Germanic tribes were still heathen, including the precursors of the English. This was two centuries before Queen Bertha of Kent had a Romano-British building renovated to become the first church in the English speaking world, about twenty years before Augustine reached here. There are apparently older Celtic churches. Wulfila omitted both books of Kings from his translation because he thought the Goths were already belligerent enough and shouldn’t be encouraged to be more so by a sacred text. I find this odd because there’s so much war and fighting elsewhere in the Tanakh, and it’s also interesting because it suggests that the idea of the canon was more flexible at the time than I would’ve expected nowadays.

I’ve said that the Goths were Arian Christians. Like “Arminian”, this is a rather unfortunate word, particularly when applied to a Germanic people because of the later association between the Nazis and the so-called “Aryans”. It’s nothing to do with that. No mainstream Christian denomination believes in Arianism today although the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been described as such. Arianism is, as I understand it, the belief that Christ is made as well as begotten. If you’re familiar with the Nicene Creed, you’ll be aware that one of the things we say we believe in it is that Christ is “begotten, not made”. This is because of that controversy in the early Church. It’s more complicated than that though, because apparently there’s also an issue with time which I don’t really get but it’s something like God begetting Christ before creation but still in time or something. The problem is that it would mean there is no ontological Trinity. So the question with the Gothic Bible in this respect is, is there anything in that translation which either leads to that perception or motivated Wulfila in the first place when he translated it? Beyond that, there’s also the fact that it is actually in a vernacular language, and I don’t know much about Church history but this appears to mean that there was at least some variety of the faith which was perfectly willing to allow the literate portion of the population to read the Bible in their own language. There are other examples of course, notably New Testament Greek itself and also Syriac and Coptic. So far as I can tell though, there seems to be no Arian leaning in the translation. I imagine this is because Arianism emerges in the exegesis (“skeireins”!) of the text rather than it being specifically present in the text itself. It’s open to interpretation and that’s where they went with it.

My approach to the Bible is that God speaks to me most clearly through it because of its history in our culture leading to it being held in reverence rather than it necessarily being a particularly protected text. A note to the “milkman” could speak to us if that’s what God chooses to do and we’re receptive to that. As such, the resonance of the Gothic version is particularly strong to me because it’s so close to both the foundation of the faith and the English language. I do also believe that each language, and probably each translation in each language, brings different things out and this applies to this version too. Incidentally, this isn’t always a good thing: the way the KJV is translated seems to focus excessively on witchcraft and the Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation attempts to portray the Holy Spirit as non-existent. In the case of the Codex Argenteus, one notable feature of the Gothic language in particular comes to mind. Gothic, along with other older Germanic languages, retains the reduplicative class of strong verbs. Strong verbs are those Germanic verbs whose stem vowel tends to change with conjugation, as with the English words “come” and “drive”. Although only the word “hight” does it in Modern English, there is a class of strong verbs which also repeats the root syllable in the past tense. Old English had a couple but even back then they were marginal. Old Norse has a couple more, including the words for “row” and “sow”, although these were obscured by that tongue’s trend to change “S” and “Z” to “R”, meaning that “sow” simply looks like a verb with an unusual R in the past tense because it rhymes with “row”. By contrast, Gothic has a whole load of proper reduplicative verbs used properly in the Codex Argenteus.

It’s easy to perceive patterns where there are none, but in Gothic’s case I really do think there’s a pattern in the case of the Gothic reduplicative verbs. These include the verbs corresponding to “call” (as in English “hey” becoming “hight”), “sleep”, “let”, “sew” and “sow”. Although these verbs are preserved to some extent, even in Gothic they were starting to break down, replacing the reduplication with a prefix. However, they include the verbs cognate with “blend”, “fold”, “hold”, “pray”, “salt”, “wield”, “fang”, “hang”, “hey”, “lake” (meaning “play” in English but “jump” in Gothic), “sleep”, “let”, “sow”, “sew”, “blast”, “leap”, “greet” (as in “weep”) and “touch”. It’s easy to read things into this but there seems to be a kind of repetitive element to each of these verbs, so for example sleeping can feature repeating snoring or sighing, folding results in a series of layers, greeting is akin to the repetitive act of sobbing and so on. Similarly, salting involves a single act of sprinkling many grains of salt onto something, each falling grain representing a small and similar event, and akin to this, sowing seeds involves the repeated broadcasting of grains onto soil.

Here’s an illustration of how I think reduplicative verbs shed light on Scripture.

The Parable of the Sower is generally understood to concern the reception of the gospel by potential Christians. There is a doctrine in some versions of Protestantism called the Perseverance of the Saints, which is the idea that once you are saved, you can never lose your salvation. This tends to be used against apostates (people who’ve lost their faith) to say that they can’t really have been Christian in the first place, thereby, as in many other situations, purporting to be telepathic. This doctrine can be used against fundamentalism in a way which it seldom is: it effectively means that “ex-Christians” who have lost their faith are still Christian and saved from the perspective of Christians who still believe this doctrine. My own experience of conversion, as I understood it at the time, was that it was a one time thing. However, considering the emphatically repetitive nature of hearing the Good News as expressed in the Gothic translation of the Parable of the Sower, although it’s slightly different in apparent intent, to me at least it brings to mind another common idea which in many Christians’ minds has superceded the idea of the Perseverance of the Saints, that salvation is an ongoing and repetitive process which isn’t just finished in one go with repentance and commitment to Christ.

This is one example.

Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic:

𐌰𐍄𐍄𐌰 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂, 𐌸𐌿 𐌹𐌽 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌼,𐍅𐌴𐌹𐌷𐌽𐌰𐌹 𐌽𐌰𐌼𐍉 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽,𐌵𐌹𐌼𐌰𐌹 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌹𐌽𐌰𐍃𐍃𐌿𐍃 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐍃,𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸𐌰𐌹 𐍅𐌹𐌻𐌾𐌰 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐍃,𐍃𐍅𐌴 𐌹𐌽 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐌰 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸𐌰𐌹.𐌷𐌻𐌰𐌹𐍆 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐌸𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐍃𐌹𐌽𐍄𐌴𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌽 𐌲𐌹𐍆 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌼𐌰 𐌳𐌰𐌲𐌰,𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌸𐌰𐍄𐌴𐌹 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐌻𐌰𐌽𐍃 𐍃𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌹𐌼𐌰,𐍃𐍅𐌰𐍃𐍅𐌴 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐍅𐌴𐌹𐍃 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌼 𐌸𐌰𐌹𐌼 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐌻𐌰𐌼 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌹𐌼,𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌽𐌹 𐌱𐍂𐌹𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌹𐍃 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌹𐌽 𐍆𐍂𐌰𐌹𐍃𐍄𐌿𐌱𐌽𐌾𐌰𐌹,𐌰𐌺 𐌻𐌰𐌿𐍃𐌴𐌹 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌰𐍆 𐌸𐌰𐌼𐌼𐌰 𐌿𐌱𐌹𐌻𐌹𐌽; 𐌿𐌽𐍄𐌴 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐌰 𐌹𐍃𐍄 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌰𐌽𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌳𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌼𐌰𐌷𐍄𐍃 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐍅𐌿𐌻𐌸𐌿𐍃 𐌹𐌽 𐌰𐌹𐍅𐌹𐌽𐍃. 𐌰𐌼𐌴𐌽.

And transliterated into Latin script:

Atta unsar, þu in himinam,weihnai namo þein,qimai þiudinassus þeins,wairþai wilja þeins,swe in himina jah ana airþai.Hlaif unsarana þana sinteinan gif uns himma daga,jah aflet uns þatei skulans sijaima,swaswe jah weis afletam þaim skulam unsaraim,jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai,ak lausei uns af þamma ubilin; unte þeina ist þiudangardijah mahts jah wulþus in aiwins. Amen.

It isn’t hugely divergent from the KJV, but there are a few notable deviations. For a start, just on a technical note which probably has no significant, it starts with “Our Father, Thou in Heaven”, which translated word-for-word seems a bit odd to English ears. The really divergent bit, which tends to throw me when I say it, comes at “give us this day our daily bread”, because in Gothic the word “sinteinan”, which appears to be redundant, appears out of nowhere. It means “daily” and seems to have no cognate in English. One very different set of words occurs in “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”, which in Gothic reads “jah aflet uns þatei skulans sijaima, swaswe jah weis afletam þaim skulam unsaraim.” This has strayed somewhat from the Greek and reads something like “and let off those of us who engage in skullduggery we be as also we let off them our skullduggery-doers”. One alternate translation of that line into English reads something like “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”, but it seems that the Goths, being an initially nomadic people, wouldn’t have been able to grasp the analogy with being monetarily in debt and instead understood it in terms of simply suffering wrong from and doing wrong to others. The general idea works absolutely fine even in an apparently moneyless society, or at least one where money is less important than it was for the Greeks and Romans at the time, which sadly means that money is not the root of all evil – people can still behave badly even though it doesn’t exist in their society.

I don’t want to pretend that Gothic gives me personally a special insight into the Bible. It isn’t special at all in some senses. For a start, thousands of people used Gothic as a first language. I also presume that most of them were illiterate and that they were at most having it read to them. Several of the letters in the alphabet were adapted runes though, so literacy in some form had already come to be before the Bible was first written down in the language. Another question I don’t know the answer to is whether the common people would’ve heard the Bible read to them, in Gothic or otherwise. It may not be the same as in the traditions leading to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and the position of the Gothic church with respect to mainstream Christianity may be analogous to the Coptic church. Even so, many people must’ve read the Bible in Gothic and gleaned certain insights from it slanted by the use of that particular language, and I have no idea if what I’ve mentioned above forms part of that, but it may have done and if that’s so, this is just stuff that’s re-occurring to me. The Goths are an entirely extinct, dead people, and most of the insights and probably prejudices they acquired are completely lost. The Skeireins itself may be of some help here, but as I’ve said I haven’t actually read it.

The fact that today’s world is devoid of Gothery of that kind means that all we really have is absence and mystery. The same is, incidentally, true of the etymologically related Jutes who settled in Kent after the fall of Rome, and appear to have suffered a genocide. All that seems to be left of that today is the division between Maids Of Kent and Kentish Maids, one referring to the Jutish part of the Kentish kingdom and the other to the, well, English part I suppose is one way of putting it. Once again I find myself thinking of Regina Spektor’s ‘Samson’ – “the history books forgot about us and the Bible didn’t mention us, not even once”. This applies to the Goths as much as it does the pantodonts.

However, we do feel the absence of the Goths quite keenly in a way, as shown by the wandering of the concept all over our culture right up to the present day. I’m not sure when this started, but it’s worth mentioning that they didn’t just vanish without trace. There was a Visigothic kingdom in Spain for a start, so they seem to have stopped being nomadic. They also saw themselves as the heirs of Rome in the sense that they were entitled to continue on formerly imperial territory as if they were the actual Romans themselves, and since they did this it might be a little clearer why we ended up calling the culture that followed the Romans “Gothic”.

The Visigothic kingdom in Iberia (Spain’s peninsula) gave its name to Catalonia, in Catalan “Catalunya”, an altered version of something like “Gothlandia”. I find it surprising that it developed in that direction. I also imagine that Catalan itself is more strongly influenced by Gothic than Castilian Spanish is. The Visigothics originally settled in an area extending along the Loire, in a southeast-northwest direction. An informative map is available (and yes, I found it on Wikipedia!):

The lighter orange area was lost in the Battle of Vouillé with the Franks, who were to occupy Gaul, in spring 507. This date indicates how early Gothic culture and power went into decline, as this was soon after the fall of Rome. However, they did later take over the area of the Suevi. The Burgundians are another East Germanic people about whom even less is known. In fact, even the Vandals, seen here as occupying the southern Mediterranean coast and hinterland in Afrika, were Germanic. It’s also notable that the Goths didn’t get anywhere with either the Celts in Brittany or the Basques. By 589, the Gothic language had become merely liturgical and because they abandoned Arianism at that point, it even lost that role. The capital was Toledo and I presume they were speaking something intermediate between Vulgar Latin and Spanish at the time. Burgos may be from the Gothic “baurgs” – “walled city”, very obviously cognate with “borough” and “burgh”. Their last king was Roderick, a name which interests me because it’s also my father’s and is distinctively Scottish to me, though apparently adapted from Ruari. In 711, he was fighting the Basques in the north when Tariq ibn Ziyad invaded the south with Berber soldiers, leading to the establishment of Al-Andaluz, but it’s notable that even now Rodrigo is a popular Spanish name. Incidentally, “Al-Andaluz” itself developed from the name of the Vandals although nobody has explained where the V went.

I’ve said that “tapas” is a Gothic word. There are other Gothic words in Castilian, including quite a few personal names such as Gomez and Alfonso. Other words include “ropa” – cognate with “robe” but meaning “clothes”; “esquina”, from “skina” – “rim”, “corner” or “plate”; “sacar” – “sack” as in “sack of Rome” but nowadays “issue” or “release”; “tacha” – “blemish”, from “taikns”, meaning “mark” and cognate with “token”; and “gafe” – “jinx”, from “gafah” – “clasp”. There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to these, unlike other loan words which tend to be of a particular tone or from a particular aspect of life. Portuguese also borrowed from Gothic, including “broa” – “corn and rye bread”, from “brauth”, which obviously brings “broth” to mind, and “gravura”, “engraving” in Portuguese and from “graba”, meaning “graft”. As for Catalan, there’s “brot” – “shoot” of a plant, from “brut” – “sprig”; “brossa” – “leaf litter”, “brush” (as in undergrowth) – possibly from “brukja” – “breech”, to which the Castilian “brocha”, meaning “paintbrush”, may also be connected; and remarkably “murgola” – “morel”, the fungus, from “murhwalus” – “carrot on a stick”! In this case there does seem to be a theme, specifically botany, although why is another question. These words, though often not found in the Bible, can however be traced to Gothic, so this is another source for the language.

Then there were the Ostrogoths. These settled in the former eastern Roman Empire, including Italy itself, and, like the Visigoths, founded a kingdom under Theodoric The Great, based in Ravenna. After his death, the Byzantine emperor Justinian declared war on them in 535 in an attempt to claim back formerly Roman territory. It’s also worth pointing out that Attila The Hun has a Gothic name – Attila means “daddy”, from “atta”, “father”, and the diminutive “-ila”, as found also in “Wulfila”. It seems a bit strange that an apparently non-Gothic ruler ended up being called “daddy”, but it does also show a similar tendency to use diminutives as found in some German dialects and in Dutch, though not in English. On the other hand, the way Scots uses “wee” is rather similar on occasion. I have to be honest – I don’t really understand who the Huns were except that they were an apparently Turkic nomadic tribe from central Eurasia, and given that, I don’t know why Attila’s name is Gothic, but although I’m aware of other ways in which his name has been explained, they all seem way more far-fetched than the Gothic explanation. This shows the movements of the Goths in general:

Judging by this, it is actually quite apparent that they really did replace the Romans, eventually, after spending some time in the area now called Ukraine, but they’d also had a history before that which if I remember it correctly led to them resenting the Romans and this festering grudge ended in them sacking Rome itself. It’s also evident that the former lands of the Goths have now become utterly Slavic (or Magyar) and that there is no Gothic homeland left. Nor is there any other land which can remotely be said to be Gothic.

By 476, Europe looked like this:

This was a far from stable situation, but then again Europe seems to have been basically unstable right up to the end of WWII and even beyond that when one considers the Balkan situation in the 1990s. This is all definitely worth remembering.

Everywhere the Goths lived in the former Roman Empire, even where they ruled, they were in a minority. This seems to have been a factor in their extinction. I’m guessing that many Europeans today have Gothic DNA but it’s a bit like the Neanderthals, though obviously much more recent. Many of us do have Neanderthal ancestors but there are no specific Neanderthals or even Neanderthal groups to which we can trace our ancestry even though some of us have the equivalent of having a single ancestor about six generations back. Regarding the Goths, if we regard the cutoff point of their civilisation in around 552, that’s still so long ago that nobody with Gothic ancestry can have a greater claim to a specific Gothic ancestor than anyone else. Humans have about thirty thousand genes which obviously halve on average per generation, meaning that by sixteen generations they may be completely absent in a descendant, and even a very generous estimate of forty years as a generation time gets us to six and a half centuries ago. The Goths were two and a half times as long ago and even then they were a minority.

Perhaps surprisingly though, their language did survive in some form in the Crimea right up until the late eighteenth century CE, within a lifetime of the Crimean War. It was still written into the ninth century and came to the light of the West again when a sixteenth century Flemish diplomat noticed that the language spoken there had vocabulary in common with Dutch. However, the source was not a native Gothic speaker and there are typographical errors which further distance the evidence from accuracy. There is ninth century Gothic graffiti in a church in a place called Mangup. By the sixteenth century, the Crimean Goths were using Greek and Tatar to communicate with outsiders and tended to adopt those languages themselves. Words include “ies” (“he”), “iel” (“health” (as in “hale and hearty”), “schnos” (“fiancée”), “menus” (“meat”), “ael” (“stone”, maybe cognate with “hail”?), “mycha” (“sword”) and “hrinck” (“ring”). Oddly, the word “broe” means “bread” whereas the Biblical Gothic word was “hlaifs” (as in “loaf”), and less surprisingly the numerals had been lost and “sada” from an Iranian source was used for “hundred”. Biblical Gothic had just three vowels which were however somewhat differently pronounced in different places, A, I and U, and this feature it has in common with Arabic and Quechua. This is not so for Crimean Gothic, which had a similar vowel distribution to West Germanic languages. Hence the word “schuuester” means “sister” and “goltz” is “gold”. These words, however, may be filtered through the mind of the Flemish diplomat and his assumptions. There isn’t a lot can be done about that. Nonetheless, the fact remains that a clearly Germanic language was spoken in the Crimea at the time and it had East Germanic features.

I was going to put this in just after the section on verbs but can’t find it easily, so I’ll put it here: Gothic is as far as I know the only language with just one type of demonstrative adjective and pronoun. Whereas other languages at least distinguish between “this” and “that”, as English does, and often go further to express differences between “this by me”, “that by you” and “that over there”, Gothic doesn’t do this at all. It has one demonstrative adjective and pronoun, “thata” in the nominative singular neuter (not written that way in Gothic – 𐌸𐌰𐍄𐌰 is the word in Gothic script), meaning both “that” and “this”. On the whole, one might think a language can’t get away with just one word here, but somehow it does. It seems to reflect this by using certain verbs differently. English and many other languages have pairs of verbs with inward and outward connotations, such as “come” and “go”, and “get” and “put”. Gothic does have “qiman”, cognate with “come”, and it has “gaggan”, or rather 𐌲𐌰𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌽, meaning “go”, but it more often uses the verb “atgaggan” or 𐌰𐍄𐌲𐌰𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌽 to mean “come”, apparently emphasising the similarity between coming and going but needing to make a distinction between them. “Qiman” also means “arrive”, whose sense is more often expressed by a more complex verb with, for example, a prefix in many other languages. I think this is linked to the dearth of demonstrative pronouns, as this then means “move to this place”.

Another peculiar feature of Gothic vocabulary is that the word cognate with “child”, “kilthei”, actually means “womb”. The usual word for child is “barn”, obviously cognate with the Scots “bairn”. You can vaguely see how this happened but it’s hard to work the process out exactly. Other words are easier, such as “handus”, meaning “hand”, and “land”. Sometimes an ancient link with Italic languages can be discerned, as with “ahwa” for “river”. This is clearly the same word as “aqua” and also existed in Old English as “æ”, which later became “a”, then /ə/, after which it needed replacing with words such as “bourne”, “stream”, “beck” and of course “river”. I once made a list of words in Gothic, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek and probably some other early examples of particular branches of our language family and it was generally closest to Latin, although had I done that with Celtic, that would’ve been closer.

It isn’t really possible to think of Gothic as more like any particular surviving Germanic language, but to me it does kind of feel like it has closer affinities to Old English than other relatives. This may simply be my familiarity. However, German itself has been through the mill due to the High German consonant shift and the Nordic languages may be tonal and append the definite article to the end of the word. Gothic doesn’t use definite articles as such, but its demonstrative adjectives, often the same in form as definite articles in the Western Germanic languages including Old English, precede the noun and, like English, it also lacks an indefinite article. One thing Gothic did which no other recorded Germanic language has is change “fl-” to “thl-“.

I probably should say something about the semantic drift of the word “Gothic” and the script. This is the Gothic alphabet:

𐌰𐌱𐌲𐌳𐌴𐌵𐌶𐌷𐌸𐌹𐌺𐌻𐌼𐌽𐌾𐌿𐍀𐍁𐍂𐍃𐍄𐍅𐍆𐍇𐍉𐍊

This is clearly adapted mainly from Greek and I don’t know because I’m very familiar with it but to me it almost feels like it’s only technically different from Latin. However, it does have a few different features. It’s unicameral – no upper or lower case – and like some other languages it uses letters as numbers, beginning with 1 and working up to 900. In the case of Gothic, there are two characters with no phonetic value at all, namely 𐍁 for 90 and 𐍊 for 900. I’m not aware of any other language that does this although Greek used obsolete letters as well as its usual alphabet. Some of the letters are adapted runes, and Gothic did used to be written in runes, but unusually rather than using “þ” or rather its runic equivalent, Gothic borrows the Greek “ψ” for the “th” sound. It does have the voiced equivalent but only as an allophone of /d/ between vowels rather than a phoneme in its own right. Uniquely, there’s a single letter for the voiceless labialised velar fricative, which marginally still exists in English and Scots and used to be present in other Germanic languages but never had a letter or even a rune of its own. It also has 𐌵 for “kw”, which in many Indo-European languages is a simultaneous sound. This still occasionally occurs in English, as with the words “quick” and “queen”, but mostly only in loan words from Romance languages such as “question”. Because Gothic was written in an adapted Greek alphabet, it uses the repeated “GG” to represent the “NG” sound, although it did use Ing when written in runes.

Gothic did use runes, the common Elder Futhark rather than its own version, but because they converted to Christianity early, they didn’t use them for very long and there are few surviving artifacts with them inscribed.

That, then, is the Gothic script. However, the term is most often used to mean this kind of thing:

This is not Gothic. It’s more accurately called Blackletter and there are subcategories of it such as Fraktur. Fraktur in particular was used for German and various other languages up to the middle of the last century, when surprisingly it was discontinued by Hitler in 1941. I think he said it looked too much like Hebrew. This “Gothic” is an attempt to speed up the production of manuscripts due to Carolingian minuscule, its predecessor, being too labour-intensive. It has an association with various central European languages in a very similar way to Gaelic script being associated with Q-Celtic and formerly English as insular half-uncial. It was also the basis of a style of cursive handwriting still used today by some people. There’s also a completely different-looking set of typefaces called Gothic, which are apparently simply sans serif fonts.

Gothic architecture in its first wave was of course what we see in mediaeval churches and lasted from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. There are rib vaults, tracery, pointed arches, flying buttresses and a growing emphasis on verticality, which actually reflects the Blackletter calligraphic style. The Gothic revival occurred shortly after but peaked in Georgian and early Victorian times, and was also found in the design of smaller objects such as clocks, vases and furniture. If one were to use Gothic elements in design or architecture in the original sense of the word, things would look very different, being more like the grave goods of Sutton Hoo.

The next step away from the original meaning occurs in Gothic literature. This involves gloom, horror, mystery, fear and haunting. It’s part of the Gothic revival. Gothic architecture was sometimes applied to castles and the presence of flying buttresses leads to dark shadows and gloom. Novels are often set in castles. Storms, torrential rain and ice are also part of it, such as on the moors of ‘Wuthering Heights’. The supernatural tends to be involved too, for example vampires. It’s also a subgenre of Romanticism, involving a rebellion against rationalism and the idea that everything worthwhile can be quantified. Dark moods are reflected by the weather, such as fog or rain at a funeral. I came very close to reading ‘Wuthering Heights’ as a child because Emily Brontë shares my birthday, as does Kate Bush, but it didn’t happen. It would probably have taken me in quite a different direction as an angst-ridden teenager. It’s quite intense and histrionic, which describes me then quite well. It’s an attempt to explore the darker side of human experience. The past hangs heavily upon the story, and there’s a claustrophobic feel to things.

We tend to associate linguistic features of certain languages with where they’re spoken. For instance, Romance languages, particularly Castilian, Italian and Portuguese, are infused with a Mediterranean air, whereas Norwegian, Swedish and Danish call a dingier and grimmer atmosphere to mind. In this respect, Gothic would work well due to its closeness to Old Norse, but the Goths actually lived in much warmer and sunnier climes, meaning that Gothic literature doesn’t really fit well with it. If the Goths had survived, we’d now associate their languages with the Med, and perhaps make a subtler distinction between that and the likes of Icelandic, despite the stubborn insistence of the mind that Icelandic is spoken in cold, dingy and maybe snowy places. Therefore these two Gothic images are very disparate.

This general tone was most recently transferred into Gothic “youth” culture, which attempts to capture some of the vibe associated with Gothic literature. It’s yet another branch, whose development I actually witnessed. If I’d been anything as a teen and young adult, I probably would’ve been a Goth myself, but I never was. This probably surprises people because they think of me as a hippie. I feel particularly attached to Goth subculture today because of the death of Sophie Lancaster, who was murdered for being a Goth on 11th August 2007. Her boyfriend Robert Maltby was also seriously injured. She was murdered more generally for being different and the Sophie Lancaster Foundation was set up in response to oppose hate crime, bullying and victimisation.

On a lighter note, during the peak of Gothic music and fashion in the late 1980s I attempted to translate the lyrics of some well-known Goth records into Gothic. They tend to lend themselves quite easily to this because of their content being quite similar in some ways to Biblical language. This may in fact have been what provoked me to look at the Gothic Bible in the first place, so my route back into Christianity is via a group which turned out to be seriously marginalised, and since Christ came substantially for such people there’s a whole other way in which it can be understood as speaking to Goths in the modern sense of the word. Another possible approach to Gothic lyrics today would be to seek out those songs strongly based on Biblical passages such as Christopher Tin’s ‘Baba Yetu’, potential adaptations of the Magnificat and possibly the likes of Boney M’s ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’, although much of the Gothic Bible has not survived.

So to finish then, one of my favourite lines in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is O’Brien’s “we shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness”, because it sounds hopeful but in fact it refers to a torture cell where continuous blazing light prevents sleep. This is of course a typical inversion for the novel, and the darkness of Gothic literature, Blackletter and the ultimate death of the whole Gothic people combined with the focus on darkness among today’s Gothic subculture is perhaps healthier and more positive than keeping the sunny side up, and the idea of the evil of the bright side, and of course whiteness, is inadequately explored and thought about. Perhaps the Gothic language would even be a good medium for doing this.

DNA – Douglas Noel Adams and Deoxyribonucleic Acid

I’ve recently had a kind of brainworm I had to get down on paper, or rather on screen as it is nowadays, though it needn’t be. It focusses on ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and I have of course spent way too much time concentrating on this to the detriment of the work itself, but I can’t resist it. On this occasion though, it yielded fruit, almost literally in fact, and turned out to culminate in something which was a lot less ridiculous than I initially thought. The problem was that despite it not being particularly pointful, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

The ultimate question, so to speak, is this:

How many species of organism could be rescued from Earth after it gets demolished by the Vogons?

This thought originated from the scene in Fit The First where Ford and Arthur are hiding on the Vogon spaceship, having just beamed aboard, and after a suitable pause, Ford tells Arthur, “I brought some peanuts.” When I heard this line, I felt a sense of poignancy that not only had the world just ended, but apparently the only other species of Earth life than humans which persisted, the peanut, would shortly itself be destroyed by Arthur’s digestive juices, and then that would be it: nothing would remain other than Arthur, as far as the listener knows at the time. Further consideration, and further listening, would demonstrate that this was not in fact so. And so begins the highly elaborate glass bead game.

There are, considering the entire trilogy of five books, several categories of life originating on this planet involved. It breaks down thus, and I am going to number the categories because they are quite enlightening:

1. Trillian and Arthur themselves. Humans survived the destruction of the planet.
2. Organisms whose DNA or other biological traces are on or in Arthur, or stand a chance of being associated with him.
3. The same issue considering Trillian. It may seem arbitrary to cleave the two humans in this way, but it turns out to be anything but. I’ll come back to this.
4. Other organisms who left Earth before or during its destruction, either canonically or plausibly without evoking the canon.
5. Earth organisms who canonically sprung into being due to the operation of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
6. Organisms accidentally removed in other ways.
7. Organisms mentioned which appear to be from Earth but in fact are not.

I’m going to consider these in reverse order.

Organisms Only Apparently From Earth

Items are mentioned here and there whose origin appears to be terrestrial but is apparently not. For instance, Ford asks the Vogon guard whether the appeal of his job is wearing rubber. Rubber could be considered as originating only from a specific tree originating in Brazil, Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree. However, two facts argue against this. One is that latex from other plants can and has been used to make rubber, for instance dandelions. The other is that synthetic rubbers exist and the word could be used less strictly, and may well be. For instance, there is silicone rubber. Hence rubber itself probably shouldn’t be taken to indicate that there are rubber trees of that species elsewhere in the Universe.

This is in fact kind of acknowledged in the books, with the existence of jynnan tonix and ouisghiansodas. Many civilisations throughout the Galaxy have a drink called something like “gin and tonic”, although beyond the name they don’t resemble each other, and it also turns out that there’s another similar coincidence, undiscovered and unacknowledged, in the form of “whisky and soda”. Given this, it’s possible that the various items referred to are not identical to an Earth reader’s concept of those things. They may in fact be almost but not entirely like them. The obvious answer here is tea, as produced by the Nutrimat Machine. It isn’t clear where this originates. Tea is available from the local megamart in a variety of easy to swallow capsules, and the initial creation of the Infinite Improbability Drive required a cup of really hot tea. It isn’t clear why, because hot water might be thought to suffice. Arthur is also made the best tea he’s ever tasted at one point on the Heart Of Gold. Hence for some reason, tea appears to exist, or to have existed in the past, elsewhere in the Universe. However, like rubber the word “tea” has a more generic meaning, referring to any vegetable matter infused in hot water, such as chamomile tea or rooibosch. Even so, Arthur clearly perceives the tea as tea. Two things may have happened here. Either literal Camellia sinensis exists on other worlds or it was obtained from Earth. There is a third possibility which will be considered later.

One fruit is mentioned at least thrice. The Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster is described as having one’s brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. When Ford and Arthur arrive on the ‘B’ Ark, the security guard offers them a lemon with their jynnan tonix. Finally, on Brontitall, the starship is delayed nine hundred years while waiting for lemon-soaked paper napkins. This is quite a striking recurrence. It’s possible that the lemon arrived with the Golgafrinchams on the ‘B’ Ark, but perhaps interestingly the scent of lemon is quite widely distributed through plants on this planet, such as lemon grass and lemon verbena. It’s one of two enantiomers of limonene, the other being the scent of oranges. There are also other lemon-flavoured organisms, such as black ants. The presence of citric acid in an organic life form would probably not be unusual. For whatever reason, something lemony is out there among the stars. Perhaps even a lemon.

Potatoes seem to be another such organism. These are very ancient. The Silastic Armourfiends were ordered to punch bags of potatoes to vent their aggression many millions of years before the manufacture of Earth and therefore the appearance of potatoes as we know them. Again, this could be a generic reference to tuberous root vegetables. Even on Earth we have starchy root crops similar to potatoes, such as sweet potatoes.

A further species, possibly several, crops up in Deep Thought’s original deduction of a recipe for rice pudding. This includes rice, milk, cream and cinnamon in the TV version. The existence of rice is not controversial. It means that rice pudding existed at that point in time. To digress slightly, it’s difficult to know how to refer to deep time in H2G2 because in its universe Earth didn’t exist before a few million years ago, so it’s not sensible to use the conjectured geological time periods such as “Jurassic” before the planet was built. The only real epochs are the Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, the only real era is the Cenozoic, and not all of that. The question regarding Deep Thought here, though, is whether it anticipated the existence of rice pudding or deduced its current presence in the Universe. If it did the former, there’s an issue with why it couldn’t simply use its anticipation of the future course of Earth history to give the mice the Ultimate Question, so it makes more sense to see it as already in existence. The existence of milk in this recipe is pretty unproblematic, as milk is just what we call opaque white potable liquids such as coconut milk, and sometimes even impotable ones such as dandelion milk. Cinnamon, however, is highly specific.

It’s possible to extract a principle from this: there are generic items in the wider Universe which have surprisingly specific resemblances to familiar terrestrial ones. Out there in the Galaxy there is milk and rubber, perhaps unsurprisingly, but also tea, potatoes, lemon and even cinnamon. Incidentally, I have to get this out of my head: the spice Melange from Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series has similarities to cinnamon according to the now-banned Dune Encyclopedia, so it isn’t just H2G2 which anticipates the existence of interstellar cinnamon (brand new sentence there). There are two other aspects to this. In an infinite Universe, everything is possible according to the Guide, so for example the Babel fish and ratchet screwdriver trees exist, as do sentient mattresses. Just on the last issue, it is kind of true even on Earth that living mattresses and lilos are possible as they did before the evolution of life as we know it since the Cambrian. This means that every species found on Earth does in fact exist somewhere else in the Universe, and in fact that a carbon copy of Earth exists which was not built by the Magratheans. Maybe we’re on that Earth and Arthur Dent’s an alien. The other aspect is that Deep Thought could have designed Earth as a microcosm of the wider Galaxy with organisms resembling those from elsewhere, so it isn’t that there are coincidentally or by convergence life forms elsewhere so much as that they were deliberately put here.

Organisms Accidentally Removed in Various Ways

The main mechanism here is teasers, or as we call them, little green men. These are occupants of interstellar craft who visit Earth and other planets and pretend to be stereotypical aliens. They are presumably also abductors, creators of crop circles, and interfere with cattle. I’m going to assume that the most contact they have with organisms on Earth is in the form of trampling on crop circles, which I also assume they make in the same way as the hoaxers do. Incidentally, although crop circles and UFOs were not widely associated by the public until something like 1990, the association did exist back in the ’70s but was only made in flying saucer enthusiast circles, so to speak. This is of course leading up to the “fact” that teasers take wheat pollen with them when they leave – Triticum aestivum. There’s another aspect to their visit which I will consider under another heading as it’s best considered with Trillian and particularly Arthur.

When the Earth explodes, various particularly tough organisms such as extremophiles might survive in the ensuing cloud of débris. Tardigrades are the obvious example, as they can survive dormant in space, possibly for years. There may even be tardigrades on Mars, and there definitely are on Cynthia (“the Moon”). Another category of organisms this clearly applies to is certain archaeans. Archaeans are microörganisms once confused with bacteria, many of which can survive in extreme conditions such as hot springs. These could possibly survive too, again perhaps in a dormant state.

Zaphod Beeblebrox also visited Earth and took one organism, Trillian, with him deliberately, but probably also took others accidentally. I’ll go into this in greater depth when I consider Trillian.

Finally, Arthur finds an unexpected bottle of retsina:

Vitis vinifera – grape. Used in the retsina Arthur finds on Agrajag’s planet.

Pinus halepensis – Aleppo pine, whose resin is an ingredient of retsina.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae – Brewer’s yeast, found in the retsina.

Infinite Improbability Drive Creations

Several organisms are created when the Infinite Improbability Drive is operated. There are very obvious examples, but I’ll deal with them in order of the timelike curve described by the Heart Of Gold.

The first time the drive is operated, it causes two hundred and thirty-nine thousand fried eggs to appear on the planet Poghril, where all but one person had just died of starvation. This seems at first to imply that it brought Gallus domesticus into existence, but actually it doesn’t. Eggs are a common means of reproduction found throughout the metazoan clade, such as with slugs, spiders and birds. These particular eggs must resemble hen’s to some extent because they seem to contain albumen and yolks and are altered by frying in a familiar way. At no point did they have shells, incidentally, as they were yanked into being without them. They are also high in cholesterol. Even so, I don’t believe these have to be hen’s eggs.

Now for the two most prominent incidents. When Ford and Arthur are rescued, they meet several species of animal on the Heart Of Gold and Ford turns into a penguin. I’m not sure whether to count that because he’s only temporarily transformed. There’s also a five-headed person crawling up a wall, but there are no such organisms on Earth. What there is, however, is an infinite number of monkeys, apparently capuchins. It isn’t clear what happens to any of these species but they don’t seem to be in evidence once normality is restored. That’s not true, though, of the sperm whale and the bowl of petunias. This next bit, therefore, is easy: Petunia and Physeter catadon. There’s even flesh strewn around on Magrathea afterwards. Although it’s straightforward that these species are brought into existence, it’s not so clear that they were alone. The sperm whale could, for all we know, be encrusted with barnacles and contain typical gut flora for a sperm whale along with parasites such as a tapeworm, but the simplest assumption is that the sperm whale is isolated. It’s also fair to question which organisms if any co-occurred with the Petunia, since it is in a bowl and therefore potted in some material. However, again we don’t know that this is so.

Just a side-issue on this: there was at one point going to be a goat on the Heart of Gold after Arthur rescued everyone from the missiles, but this was not pursued. On other occasions, there was a fossilised towel, but nothing is recorded to have happened in that respect when it was operated to escape from the Vogons or visit the Man In The Shack.

There is a flaw in how I’ve considered this. In fact, any terrestrial species could be conjured into existence by the Infinite Improbability Drive, but not in the narrative of the actual stories.

Trillian

Trillian is the most interesting aspect of this entire issue, and in fact she’s why I decided this wasn’t just a frivolous mind game. There is a markèd contrast between Arthur’s and Trillian’s biomes due to the circumstances of their departure and gender, which could in any case be linked.

Trillian was at a party six months before Earth’s destruction. She was surrounded by various alcoholic beverages and snacks. This contributes to her status as a goldmine of genomes, as does her gender presentation. Unlike Arthur she’s likely to have cosmetics, scent and jewellery, as well as residues of toiletries. She was being chatted up by Arthur, then Zaphod, as “Phil”, came along and, well, abducted her right out of that environment, which was not the moribund ecosystem surrounding Arthur as it was being destroyed, but a still-thriving habitat. Many organisms are likely to be held in common between them such as Candida albicans, which is found in the human gut, and in fact many of the microörganisms in their digestive tracts, lungs and body surfaces. Both have, for example, follicle mites – Demodex follicularum. They may also have pathogens, such as rhinovirus, and at a pinch even the likes of fleas and head lice, though probably not. Both have Mentha x piperita – peppermint – in their mouths, or possibly spearmint, from toothpaste.

Here’s a breakdown of what she might distinctively have on her and why:

From cocktails:

Cinchona pubescens – quinine, in bitter lemon.

Juniperus communis – juniper, in gin.

Olea europaea – olive, on cocktail sticks. This is, however, also mentioned in connection with Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, so it doesn’t count as distinctively terrestrial.

Prunus avium – cherry, also on cocktail stick.

Curcuma longa – cucumber. This is a long shot but not only might this occur in a cocktail but also in a cucumber sandwich. That also means:

Lepidum sativum – cress.

Sinapis alba – white mustard.

(Mustard and cress sandwiches)

Possibly an Abies species for the cocktail stick, but more likely to be Pinus, which was already in the retsina.

Artemisia absinthium – wormwood, if they had absinthe.

Gallus domesticus – hen, if there was advocaat (eggs).

Vanilla planifolia – vanilla orchid, same source.

Citrus aurantium – orange.

Pyrus malus – apple.

Angostura trifoliata – if they had genuine angostura bitters.

Solanum lycopersicum – tomato.

There would also have been snacks, which might allow various nut species to be recovered, such as Anacardium officinale (cashews), Prunus amygdalus (almond) and others. There could also be other things such as trail mix, pork scratchings or Bombay mix, but it would rely on Trillian actually eating it, and having the drinks.

Canapes might contain:

Salmo salar – salmon

Thunnus tynnus – Atlantic bluefin tuna

Allium sativa – garlic

Again, she’d have to eat or at least touch these. Both these categories are very uncertain, and in fact I can add a couple of quite likely ones:

Ananas comosus – pineapple. There are pretty sure to be pineapple cubes on sticks at this party.

Prawn cocktail – it isn’t clear to me which species of decapod is most popular as food.

Much of the above is culturally and historically specific. Wealthier people would have different food available. Trillian is not wealthy, but on the dole, although she may have had social capital from university days or others. Later on, something like sambuca might have become available, meaning licorice, possibly elder (Sambucus nigra). There is a positive wealth of possible organisms here, but also a high degree of uncertainty.

Cosmetics: Many cosmetics are mineral-based. Their ingredients also change over time, trending at the moment towards plant sources.

Lipstick:

Ricinus communis – Castor oil plant.

Theobroma cacao – cacao. Cocoa butter.

Simmondsia chinensis – Jojoba (also possibly in shampoo and conditioner).

Copernica conifera – Carnauba wax. Could also be on lemon rind.

Dactylopius coccus – cochineal insect. Could also be present in food.

Kerria lacca – lac bug. Possibly in makeup or on lemon rind, might also be on nail varnish.

These last two are likely to be less common today.

Eye shadow: exclusively mineral ingredients.

Mascara: big overlap with lipstick.

Foundation: palmitic acid, which remarkably at this stage (1978) could have been from sperm whale again!

Various glycerol-based lipids from a variety of different sources.

Primer: again remarkably, this could in theory be a source of Thea sinensis or Vitis, but I reckon that’s too sophisticated for the ’70s. Another change.

Blusher:

Cetorhinus maximus – basking shark, source of squalene. Could be a couple of other species. Nowadays this is not from animals, but back then it was. There are other species of shark this could be from.

Shampoo:

Cocos nucifera – coconut palm. TBH, this is probably going to be in something on the above lists anyway.

Elaeis guineensis – oil palm. This doesn’t really belong here but there will be palm oil in something.

Conditioner:

Sorbitol occurs naturally in various fruits.

Perfume and scent ingredients derived from various plants, e.g.

Lavandula angustifolia – lavender

Rosmarinus officinalis – rosemary

Rosa sp – there are so many species of rose it’s ridiculous, so I’m not going to narrow it down further than that.

Jasminum officinale – jasmine.

Pogostemon cablin – patchouli (less likely).

It’s uncertain whether these are just various compounds from the relevant organisms or if their actual genomes would be available. It’s also notable that Trillian has a less detailed back story than Arthur, and some of the uncertainty may result from that. This, sadly, probably arises from Douglas Adams’s sexism. His female characters generally seem to be less filled-out than his male ones. Most of his cybernetic characters are also male, with the exception of the Nutrimatic machine. The type of character Trillian has been made to become is, to be fair, not enormously stereotypical because she’s an astrophysicist, but her presentation is typically feminine, hence the massive biological accoutrements. This could be flipped: why isn’t Arthur expected to make this effort? It’s still interesting that if you remove an average woman from 1970s Islington from Earth, you sample a lot more of the planet’s biosphere with her than if you remove an average man from the rural West Country, even though she’s in an urban environment and he’s in a rural one.

Arthur’s turn. Arthur is a six-foot tall ape descendant (nowadays he’s seen as an ape) who works in local radio, and is of course a man. Here’s a list of what he has on or in him at the end of the world:

Felis cattus – domestic cat. When Arthur arrives back on Earth, there is a dead cat in his house, so he may have had a cat. Some fur may exist on his dressing gown. In fact it almost certainly does, and also aerosols from the cat licking her fur. 

At this point I should probably mention an organism of ‘Trainspotting’ fame: Toxoplasma gondii. Arthur may well actually be subclinically infected by Toxoplasma, as many people associated with cats are.

Canis familiaris – dog. As Arthur is about to be thrown off the Vogon spaceship, he says he was planning to “brush the dog”, so there may also be dog hairs on his dressing gown. Also, possibly Know-Nothing may have done the same, though this is less likely. In case you don’t know, Know-Nothing is the pub dog in Cottington, Arthur’s village.

Right at the start of the narrative portion of the story, Arthur’s morning routine is described.

Bos taurus – cattle. Arthur makes himself a cup of coffee just before he notices the bulldozers outside. The milk he puts in it probably has cow DNA in it.

Coffea robusta – coffee. Since it’s the ’80s, Arthur probably uses instant coffee, hence robusta rather than arabica.

Toothpaste occurs around this stage. There’s also shaving foam, which may contain Gossypium among other ingredients, and there might even be aftershave although this isn’t mentioned.

Humulus lupulus – hops in the six pints of beer Ford buys Arthur at lunchtime.

Hordeum vulgare – barley used to make the beer.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae – the yeast fermenting the beer and the retsina on Agrajag’s planet, which I’ve mentioned.

Arachis hypogaea – peanuts. “I brought some peanuts” – Ford’s comment which started this whole futile enterprise.

Musca domestica – house fly. Arthur swats flies on prehistoric Earth, possibly not that species but at least one species of fly. This is also Agrajag.

Oryctolagus cuniculus – the rabbit Arthur killed to make his bag out of. Also Agrajag.

Ovis aries – sheep. Wool in dressing gown.

Tineola bisselliella – clothes moth. Possible but unlikely.

Gossypium arboreum – cotton, probably present somewhere on Arthur’s person.

Morus alba – again, possible but unlikely. The white mulberry on which the silk worms making any silk Arthur might be wearing fed.

Bombyx mori – silk worm/moth. Could be present in Arthur’s clothing

Hevea brasiliensis – rubber tree. Might be present in Arthur’s slippers.

Saccharum sp – sugar cane. Unlikely, but he might’ve had sugar in his coffee and that might not have been refined.

Beta vulgaria – sugar beet. Mutually exclusive with the previous species. Also, I’m not convinced white sugar still contains any trace of DNA.

Commensal organisms:

Demodex folliculorum – follicle mite in Arthur’s eyelashes.

Candida albicans – thrush yeast. Present in the gastrointestinal tract of about half of human adults.

Gut flora – a large number of species.

Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus – house dust mite. According to the Infocom game, Arthur has fluff in his pocket, which probably contains this animal. Incidentally, this is the European dust mite. The American dust mite would not have survived in all probability.

Hence Trillian could be associated with thirty-seven named species whereas Arthur, despite the fact that we know a lot more about his circumstances as he left Earth, only has twenty-five. Two of them result from his personal violence against animals.

Arthur may not be wearing make up, but he is wearing mud. He lay down in front of the bulldozer. This means he’s likely to be covered in it, leading to such soil organisms as Caenorhabditis elegans and Colpoda, as well as various fungi.

Ford and Arthur are also covered in pollen. This would vary according to the time of year. Perhaps surprisingly, there are only two short date ranges during which the destruction of the Earth could have occurred. We know from the TV series that the Sun rose at 6:30 am on that day. Due to leap years, the date when this happens moves around slightly and due to BST it might be an hour earlier. We also know it’s a Thursday, although this has been disputed because of the football reference. Assuming it’s 1978, the relevant dates are 6th August (Hiroshima Day, rather appropriately), 3rd May and 4th April, none of which are on Thursday. Considering it’s the Vogons, I like the idea that it’s the last day of the tax year, 5th April. If this is so, likely pollens include alder, elm, willow, birch, ash, and, perhaps surprisingly, rather few herbs. Hence the rather obvious privet hedge buffeted by the wind just before Ford activates the electronic thumb is not shedding pollen and hence would only survive if one of its leaves got lodged in Arthur’s dressing gown or PJ’s. Some other plants would already be shedding but not at their peak, including plane, oak and canola.

Other Organisms Leaving Earth Voluntarily

There are two other types of animal who left Earth or were unaffected by its destruction. One of these was the dolphin. It isn’t clear whether this means all dolphins or a limited or unique species. I’ve assumed it was Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin. They left Earth shortly before the Vogons arrived, having failed to be communicate the warning although I’m not sure what we could’ve done to prevent it really. They may have taken a food supply with them or simply had half-digested fish in their digestive systems, so that would include herring, mackerel and possibly krill. Other species include mullet, cephalopods, conger eels, hake, bandfish (in this case I didn’t know those existed in the first place) and porgies. Regarding internal parasites, there’s Cryptosporidium, a protist, Ascaris, a nematode, Giardia, another protist and Nasitrema, a trematode, but the question arises of whether the dolphins would use the opportunity to rid themselves of these or perhaps recognise their role in their health, as they might reduce the prevalence of autoimmune conditions. Whale lice would also be present if they chose to keep them. Just as humans are covered in pollen, dolphins and their prey are covered in phytoplankton, such as diatoms. Hence various single-celled algae can be expected to be salvageable.

The final category appears to be mice and the organisms associated with them. Again, it isn’t clear whether it’s just Mus musculus or several species of mice involved. I’m going to assume the former, but note also that whatever the original mouse was, they had time to evolve. What we think of as mice are of course merely the three-dimensional projections of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings, and being mice is just the day job.  Nonetheless, Trillian took her mice with her and can therefore be presumed to have taken their food. Mice are of course omnivorous, like most or all rodents, but are sometimes assumed to be herbivorous. In 1978, mice were fed a mixture of seeds and pellets of some kind which I couldn’t identify but may have been minced up insects or something. The seeds included sunflower, split peas, lentils and presumably peanuts. Mice get parasites like dolphins and humans but it’s unlikely Trillian’s would have any. It’s hard to know whether to count mice as native to Earth in the H2G2 universe, as they aren’t what we think they are.

Several issues remain. One is that Earth being only ten million years ago, all the fossils and evolution presumed to happen up until that point are fake, but after that point are probably real. I say fake evolution because DNA analysis would still show an apparent genetic relationship between, for example, humans and chimps even though chimps are native to this planet and humans are not, or between undoubtedly native organisms which were in fact separate creations or not even from the same planet or even dimension in one case. And this is the really weird thing about this whole constructed Earth scenario: Douglas Adams was clearly “a great fan of science” but his version of Earth is almost creationist, though not exactly young Earth creationist. The arrival of the Golgafrinchams led to the replacement of hominins by alien humans, since humans are aliens, and also possibly the introduction of novel species such as grapes, olives and lemons, and maybe also various other species which also replaced their native counterparts or successfully competed with species in similar ecological niches. Despite all this, all known life on Earth is now established to be related. Is this perhaps because it isn’t just life here which is related, but across the Galaxy? Did panspermia happen? Is it happening all the time? Or did the computer program which ran the Earth have to simulate the wider Universe in order to provide the right data on which to base its calculations? This could mean that Earth simply encapsulates the biomes of the wider Galaxy. Maybe life is just constantly diffusing in and out of Earth’s biosphere and linked genetically to the rest of the Universe.

To conclude, I think this is a good way of illustrating the intentional fallacy. Arthur’s and Trillian’s biomes are quite different from each other, although they overlap. Although Douglas Adams is unlikely to have any conscious intention of writing Arthur as a fuller character than Trillian, if he had written them more equally, Trillian’s biome would have been as certain as Arthur’s. This is in spite of the fact that Arthur is supposed to be “Everyman”, i.e. a close to blank slate, though quintessentially English, in whose position the reader is supposed to place herself. Trillian absconded from Earth in its prime, and because her gender stereotype is more clearly constructed than Arthur’s, she takes more of the planet with her when she goes. It’s expensive being a “girl”, meaning that whereas it’s alleged to be optional to present oneself as feminine as a woman, in many contexts this will place one at a disadvantage or put one in danger. Adams is also sketchier about Trillian’s background because he’s writing about what he knows, and he doesn’t know women in the same way as women know women. Moreover, Trillian leaves Earth willingly whereas Arthur has to be prised away from it even though he’ll die otherwise, which somehow reminds me of “women get sick but men die”. On the other hand, Trillian may be too compliant for comfort.

A few more things can be drawn out of this:

• H2G2 is oddly “creationist”, but “middle-aged Earth Creationist” rather than young or old Earth, despite Douglas Adams being proselytisingly atheist. This is also similar to Terry Pratchett’s ‘Strata’.
• Recent developments in DNA sequencing would be expected to have revealed that there was more than one line of evolution leading to organisms on this planet. Larry Niven did something similar with the Protectors.
• Terms used for certain items in the H2G2 universe are known to have wider references than they are usually used. This is acknowledged in the case of jynnan tonix and implied with ouisgiansoda, but may be much wider than is at first apparent. For instance, it may include “rubber”, “lemon” and “milk”.
• As the H2G2 universe is infinite, there are countably infinitely many identical species to those found on Earth in any case. This too is suggested in the text with the ratchet screwdriver trees, mattresses and the Babel fish.
• What would a gender-swapped version of H2G2 be like? What would this version be like told from Trillian’s perspective? Would gender-swapping include Marvin, Eddie and the Nutrimatic Machine?

Two Forthcoming Projects

Shamelessly nicked from here, and will be removed on request, but I regard this as an ad for the OU course this is taken from

I generally resist medicalisation, and I’ve previously written on ADHD, so this isn’t primarily going to be about that issue in spite of the illustration. Nonetheless it’s there, and it means that like many other people, perhaps even everyone, the cog that represents me doesn’t fit well into the social machine, which is a problem for both society and myself. I would also say that my ADHD is just something which came to the attention of educational psychologists and medical professionals in the ’70s, when it was called hyperactivity, and is an aspect of my personality among several which entails a poor fit with society. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a problematic work per se but maybe somewhat salvageable, there’s often a category at the end of each set of disorders labelled “not otherwise specified”, which is the wastebasket taxon as it were, a “diagnosis of elimination”. As a healthcare professional, I’m aware that the textbook cases are the exception, and most of the time people have an array of signs and symptoms which can’t be easily pigeonholed, and the real puzzle is why anyone at all actually has the same condition. Leaving that aside, it’s also unclear if it’s appropriate to view mental health analogously to physical health at all, and there’s the social model of disability. Hence I will assert myself, controversially, as being “neurodiverse, not otherwise specified” and leave it at that. Strictly speaking this is a neurodevelopmental condition rather than a mental health one, but let’s not get even more bogged down.

All that notwithstanding, a few days ago someone asked me what my plans were. I misunderstood the question, thinking I was being asked about how I planned to generate an income in the long term while it was really about our relationship, which of course I won’t go into here, except to say that a plan to generate an income can be very important to a relationship because it’s nice to be in a position to take care of someone well and have enough money to help others, and there is of course the psychological benefit of being gainfully employed, such as it is, and also occupied in something which connects to the common good in some way. It’s partly about good mental health and social obligation. That said, I completely reject the work ethic because most paid work is probably harmful in the long run to society and the person doing it, and the problem is finding work that doesn’t do more harm than good, and that’s rare. Even so, I do sometimes succeed in getting people to give me money for what I do. In particular, I currently have a couple of ideas for medium-term projects, which I’m going to outline here. In doing so, I’m going to yank this blog post in the direction of another blog of mine (which I hardly ever write), but these things happen.

I’ll use headings again, I think. At some point I might even work out how to do hyperlinks within the post, but that’ll probably involve tinkering with the HTML. I don’t think it can be done with the WordPress block editor (grr).

1. The Ethical Periodic Table

Right now I’m not sure what form this will take, but it seems to lend itself much more to something online, or perhaps an app, than a physical book. Like my second idea, this has been kicking around a while, and this is the thing. I’m pathologically procrastinative. In case you’re wondering about the wording of that last sentence, I’m trying to avoid using a noun to describe myself because I think that fixes one’s identity mentally in an unhelpful way. Anyway, it goes like this. The Periodic Table may be the most iconic symbol of science. Right now I’m hard pressed to think of another one, although the spurious “evolution” parade purporting to show constant progress and the chart of the “nine” planets come to mind, these however being very much popularisations. As well as having chemical and physical profiles, each element also has an ethical, social and political profile connected to how it interacts with human society. For instance, arsenic is very high in drinking water in Bangladesh, tantalum has been associated with civil war in the Congo and there is an issue with phosphorus and algal blooms, among many other things per element. My “vision” is to provide a clickable periodic table with links to information, which I hope will be regularly updated, to balanced social profiles of each element, and I’m also curious as to whether there’s a pattern here: do some groups of elements present bigger problems than others and are there possible substitutions? This clearly lends itself much more to a computer device treatment than a book of pages, although one of those books with tabs might work. This suggests it could be an app as well as a website.

2. Corner Shop Herbalism

I detest the tendency for certain exotic herbs to become pushed and regarded as miracle cures and the answer to everything. I think this distorts research and is often environmentally unsustainable. I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping in my profession which does not serve the public interest, but at the same time I’m aware that many people lack the necessary knowledge to deal with their own health problems easily, particularly in the realm of diagnosis. Consequently, for decades now I’ve had the idea of producing a book called ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using herbal remedies which can easily be obtained over the counter or as invasive weeds or other common species in a foraging style, while maintaining their sustainable use. I’ve already planned this book to some extent and it covers a surprisingly large number of species, probably totalling more than a gross. This would be accompanied by various other chapters about when to seek professional help and details of why herbal medicine is a rational, vegan and useful approach to health. This could also be a website, but it lends itself also to being a physical book because that makes it a field guide useable with no electronic adjunct, and who knows when that might become necessary? We all know of the Carrington Event, after all.

Publicity And Marketing

This is the difficult, possibly insurmountable, obstacle. Self-publishing nowadays is easy. You just organise your manuscript into printable form, get a cover together and have people order it. People have different sets of skills, and the ability to publish without approaching a publisher replaces the problem of getting yourself published with the problem of publicity and marketing. This works fine for some people if they also have an aptitude in those areas, but it usually fails. I have a Kindle Fire, and I do recognise the considerable ethical issues with Amazon of course, but one thing I see a lot is a very large number of ebook adverts and recommendations. I have never followed up on any of these. Although I’ve advertised my business profusely myself, my usual response to an advert is to wonder what’s wrong with the product that it needs to be pushed. You don’t see ads for potatoes or petrol because people recognise the importance of those in their lives and they sell themselves.

Advertising is ethically and practically complicated. The German “Anzeige” translates both as “advertisement” and “announcement”, and I find this enlightening as to the nature of advertising. At its best, if you believe in the fruits of your labour as enhancing to potential customers’ quality of life, you still need to make them known to the public, and this is absolutely fine. However, the quality of goods and services often seems to be in inverse proportion of how heavily something is advertised, which supports my tendency to become suspicious of a product. There was a fairly prominent advert for the British Oxygen Corporation in the 1980s CE which depicted a lake full of flamingos which they claimed had previously been lifeless and that they had managed to restore to a healthy state. This immediately provoked the question in me whether they had done something dodgy more generally and were trying to boost their image. It isn’t relevant whether they actually did this, but if this kind of suspicion is often raised, it can make publicity counter-productive. On the other hand, maybe few people think like this. Regardless, there’s a tension between the contrariness of people generally and getting your product out there, and I don’t know how to resolve this.

I never pay for advertising now because of my history with it. The only advertising which ever worked was the Yellow Pages and by that I mean that no other form of paid advertising got me a single client. With the Yellow Pages, it worked to a limited extent and then, oddly, about half way through one year of advertising it suddenly cut off completely and I never got another customer (for want of a better word). I am still mystified by this. It’s clear that online advertising and other such activity killed the Yellow Pages, but there was no gradual decline in my case. It just stopped dead with no period of tapering off. After that, I cancelled the advertising and relied on word of mouth, which is of course very useful.

How to apply this to books though? Is the kind of marketing and publicity applicable to a herbal practice, and apparently not very, comparable to that of a book? It would seem to involve other aspects of publicity such as talks, walks, courses and signings, the first two of which I’ve done often and fairly successfully in terms of raising the general profile of herbalism but not clients. Would this work for a book? Is it possible to put together a course based on the ethical periodic table idea?

Many people worry about their image on the internet, and their data being used for nefarious purposes. Whereas these are legitimate concerns, mine are not in this area. From the start, I’ve thought of behaviour online as consisting of postcards. Everyone can see what you’re doing, but there are so many of them the chances of being noticed are minute. It’s like the lottery – the odds of winning are insignificant. In some places the odds are stacked against you, as for example with YouTube. As far as reading is concerned, there’s the issue of what might compete with the time which could be spent reading your own writing, and it’s notable that many people don’t even venture forth from social media to bother reading the content. I am guilty of that to some extent myself, but also watch myself so that I do it as little as possible. There’s much to be said about social media and personal data, but I won’t say it here because most of it is only relevant to my writing in terms of constituting a distraction from it. Consequently, I will do some promotion of the work on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t anticipate much response. How one would actually succeed in getting a response is another question, and I have no answers. I do know that my own efforts at search engine optimisation haven’t yielded much.

It’s easy to imagine a conspiracy or malice here, but in fact the answer is far more likely to be the impersonality and volume of the internet which causes this. Therefore, anything one does in this respect needs to be done for its own sake, and not to get an income or make a living. What one actually does to make a living is unknown, and as far as I can tell impossible. I’m always overawed by people who manage to have a full-time paid job because it is so far beyond my capabilities and I have no insight into how people do it. Consequently, I just do things which I consider worthwhile, and I definitely consider these two projects to be valuable, so I’ll be doing them with no expectation of a significant response. This is galling, but I’m used to it. I still don’t know how I’m going to survive though.

That’s all for today.