18396D 12H 12M 34S

I don’t know why I do this, but my diary entries are numbered in days as well as dates, starting with my first dated comment referring to an actual date when my mother suggested starting one, which was “17th July, 1975 ¶ I saw two spaceships docking”, referring to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I choose to date it more precisely to the handshake between Thomas P. Stafford and Alexei Leonov at 2:17 pm, CDT. This was 8:17 pm BST, and I’ve rounded it off to the start of the minute. This numbering system is a little reminiscent of the Julian Date, which is the number of days elapsed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which was the last year the Indiction, Solar and Lunar years coincided. Two of those are self-evident but the first refers to a fifteen-year assessment for taxation in the Roman Empire, and I presume it’s in there because it used to be used as a proxy date. Obviously all three of these are proleptic, i.e. projected back before their real invention, because the year didn’t used to begin in January and the Roman Empire didn’t exist that far back. The point of the Julian Date is to provide a standard for the timing of astronomical events. It’s also used to calculate best before and sell by dates, batch tracking (for instance for product recalls), converting between calendars of different cultures and for dates in databases, since it’s less cumbersome than using the peculiar and fairly irregular numbers for the days of the month. However, in these situations it tends to be cut off and the date is recorded as the number of days since a more recent date, since otherwise the number would be needlessly large. The exact current Julian date is 2461006.828461, or actually it’s moved on since then. It actually begins at noon GMT, presumably because most astronomical events were recorded at night. It also, incidentally, provides decimal time, which makes things easier but is in the wrong base. My own dating system is based on days since a certain date, so in a way it is a real Julian Date. I have changed it several times. It used to be based on what was coincidentally my parents’ sixteenth wedding anniversary but I realised that prevented me from referring to dates before that, so I changed it to the first dated incident I wrote down. There is an earlier date in April 1975 but it just records the measurements of a staircase so it’s not about a temporal event and I ignore it. My sister once pointed out that I was recording historical events which were not appropriate for a personal diary, but in fact more than 99% of them are in fact personal.

It looks a bit odd to me that I’ve written out (18396) above, because I’ve almost always just used it in my diary and it feels like I’m revealing something intimate and personal by writing it out publicly. Another thing about it is that for me the day starts at 7:17 pm GMT, but I ignore that most of the time. If the Julian date had been used for computers there needn’t have been any Y2K problem. Incidentally, that wasn’t a panic about nothing, but I don’t want to get too distracted here. If it had been recorded as a 24-bit value, it wouldn’t have become an issue for tens of millennia. There are quite a few peculiar things about Y2K, not least the fact that software actually does use Julian Dates.

This has been on my mind recently for two reasons. One is that I’m writing an astronomical calendar for a client, so I should probably use Julian Dates for that for simplicity’s sake. That’s what they’re for of course. The other is that I couldn’t resist watching the current Vince Gilligan series ‘Pluribus’, which uses a similar day-based dating system for time before and since the Joining. I should point out that I have subscribed to Apple TV before, and no it isn’t ideal that I’ve had to do this again to watch it. I’m not going to try to defend that decision, but I will say that the quality of Vince Gilligan’s and his associated team’s work is so high that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do this. Just this moment, I’m wondering about whether I should introduce a spoiler warning, and I suppose I should but I’m not sure how important that is. At some point I will talk about the nature of spoilers and when they are and aren’t appropriate, but that’s for another monologue.

So here we go:

SPOILER WARNING

‘Pluribus’, styled as “PLUR1BUS”, has a title which can be analysed as “You Are 1: Be Us”, which makes me wonder if “PL” is also significant. It does constitute the first two letters of “please” I suppose. This sums up the premise of the series. The Very Large Array radio astronomy facility in New Mexico detects a signal repeating every seventy-eight seconds from the direction of the TRAPPIST-1 system around six hundred light years away, consisting of four different codes, and the scientists deduce that it’s an RNA sequence although I’m not sure why because DNA also has four bases. I should probably explain this although I think it may be common knowledge. DNA stores genetic code in most living things and RNA is the medium they use to transcribe that code into proteins. It does make sense that RNA would be used for this purpose, since it is actually being used to transmit information rather than store it. There are also some viruses which use RNA instead of DNA, and also some smaller things which I don’t fully understand which seem to be bare RNA molecules which behave like viruses which are candidates for the smallest life forms of all, assuming they are alive.

At this point it’s worth saying that conceptually the series is worth dividing into the setting and therefore science fictional stuff and the more conventional aspect of the story, which I will get to. Back to the science side then.

There are a number of whiteboards shown throughout the series so far. The first has equations on it referring to signal processing, the second is a plan for creating the virus and the third and fourth, unless I’ve missed some, are Carol’s whiteboards, one for planning her next mass-market romantic fantasy novel and the other detailing of what she’s determined about the Joined in an attempt to repeat them. I have no idea if this is significant or whether it’s just a good way to convey exposition and maybe conceal Easter Eggs. Possibly significant, I don’t know

A defence organisation in Annapolis, MD put together the genome and test it on rats. Unsurprisingly, it’s clear to neither the scientists nor the viewers at this point exactly what the RNA code does, but one interesting detail is that there is a gene in it which encodes for a receptor which responds to the scent of Convallaria majalis or lily of the valley and is also found in sperm cells and attracts them. This is possibly nothing, but it may be a reference to the lily of the valley storyline in ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s probably too obscure to be more than a passing reference. The astronomers also speculate that the dish or other antenna used to send the message must have been the size of Afrika.

One of the rats appears to have died and a scientist, suitably protected, picks them up and tries to feel for a pulse, but since she’s wearing gloves she can’t do so, takes one off and gives the rat cardiac massage, and they then wake up and bite her. Although she tries to wash it out and follow the emergency protocol, it doesn’t work and she’s infected. She then infects everyone else in the facility by kissing them, licking doughnuts on reception and pretty soon there are planes dropping the virus from the sky and infecting every human in the world. The result is that almost the whole human world becomes a single hive mind with the exception of thirteen people, including one in Paraguay who was undiscovered and appears to have avoided being infected. The other twelve are immune. Five of them speak English as a second language and one, Carol, is the focus of the series. She lives in New Mexico and her partner was killed by falling backwards when she, like almost everyone else, has a seizure on being infected.

Now there’s the larger, as it were Galactic, picture in the story and the smaller global one. The former is of course open to interpretation and on a galactic scale six hundred light years is practically next door. A fairly simple explanation for the developing scenario is that the Galaxy has a plague or a process which eliminates threats, like how the immune system eliminates cancer. At some point, civilisation becomes able to carry out genetic modification and decode messages from other star systems. When this happens, it detects a message, interprets it and out of curiosity turns it into a virus, which it is then infected by. This causes it to form a hive mind, build an enormous transmitter and send the genome signal to other star systems, and the cycle repeats. This could be a few things. It could simply be the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, a plague which is spreading through the Galaxy or a galactic defence system that renders potentially harmful species innocuous. Or, it could be pre-emptive action by another civilisation attempting to neutralise humanity, deliberately targetted at us. Scientifically, this makes more sense because the codes involved are RNA bases, suggesting that it’s designed for functioning among life on this planet unless RNA and DNA are the only basis for life.

To nitpick, it isn’t clear why adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine were chosen for which of the four bases. There are presumably four types of signal and it does make sense that humans would interpret these as bases, but how do they know which is which and why did they see one as uracil rather than thymine? There are also other bases, such as flurouracil, used in cancer chemotherapy, and the synthetic pair known as P, Z, S and B, and some viruses use unusual bases to protect themselves from host defences.

All this, though, is about the science and very probably the point of the series is not connected to the wider Universe as such. Many fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ zombie series got very focussed on the idea of a cure or an explanation for the cause when in fact the point of the show was entirely unconnected to that, so far as I know – (<=en-dash – I am a real human) — I stopped watching it after I think the fourth series. It might not matter how it happened.

Possibly, heteronormativity prevented me from realising that Helen and Carol were a romantic item all the way through the first episode. However, I tend to do that with heterosexual couples too, so maybe not, but I don’t think it was very clear. I thought Helen was Carol’s agent who had become a friend. One important aspect of Carol being queer is that she’s estranged from her parents due to them sending her to conversion torture and has no children, which is not inevitable of course but probably is more likely. This puts her in a different position with regard to intimate relationships, particularly because Helen dies in the pilot. However, she becomes one of the joint in the final moments of her life and the hive mind therefore has access to all her experience, memories and personality, to a greater extent in fact than Carol ever had. She feels violated by this and she orders them to close Helen’s memories off and never to refer to them again, though on one occasion so far she’s caved into temptation when she wanted to know what Helen thought of her writing.

More than eight hundred million people died when the Joining took place. I presume this is due to things like people operating heavy machinery, driving passenger vehicles, crossing roads, being in the middle of surgery and so on when the virus hit, but some viewers have suggested that they deliberately killed some of those infected. I don’t think this is what’s happening though. It also emerges that if Helen expresses strong negative emotions towards them, they have seizures and on the one occasion when she did this so far, eleven million people were killed, meaning that she has to tread very carefully.

The hive mind is working towards assimilating all the people who have not been so far and they don’t know how long it’ll take. Most of the other people who are immune are entirely happy with the situation and at least one of the children wants to become part of the hive mind. Some of the others, notably an Indian woman called Laxmi, haven’t accepted that people close to them have had their identities dissolved into the collective. Carol has the Joined arrange a meeting of all the willing English speakers and they travel to Bilbao where she meets with them in Airforce One, which has been commandeered by a Mauritanian immune person called Koumba Diabaté, to whom I shall return. In this meeting, she comes across as a typically American White saviour and also to some extent a Karen, and in fact she has strong Karen energy throughout. She’s the only White person there and everyone else’s English is a second language, but she has insisted on English speakers rather than allowing interpreters. It’s understandable that she might not trust them, but – okay look, this is getting too involved. Right now I have a huge blizzard of thoughts about the show and I’m just going to jot down a few points.

• Event TV used to be something which united people in a particular country and in a sense, very occasionally, globally, as with the lunar landing with Apollo II, and maybe to a very limited extent the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on (1), but with the advance of the internet and the advent of access to non-live video, among other things, there has been fragmentation. ‘Pluribus’ is in a sense a unifying factor although it isn’t easily accessible or on the main streaming services, which is a shame because it would be appropriate if it were.
• There’s a purple and green thing going on, which is interesting because those are the two main colours of aurora. I’m not sure what they mean, but there’s a pattern, as there was in ‘Breaking Bad’, of colour-coding. Purple was associated with Marie, whose clothing stays purple until almost the end of the series, green with Walter White more than anyone else and associated with money, greed and jealousy. Purple is the colour of the emperor, so it may be that purple in this signals those who rule, i.e. the Joined or the virus, which starts off in a purple solution. Green also symbolises growth and change. I don’t know what to do with this. Yellow also seems significant – Carol wears a yellow jacket at the start of the season.
• “Soylent Green Is People”. Right now, and this is why I’m rushing this out on (18402) because the next episode, ‘HDP’, is out on (18404) (again, this feels weird), Carol has found that the Joined are constantly drinking “milk”, which is however a plasma- or serum-like yellow fluid which we are at least led to believe from the final scene is partly made from something shocking, presumably human corpses. The issue, though, is that it probably either isn’t that simple or is misleading. Maybe the yellowness is also significant, I don’t know. My current presumption is that the 800 million deaths led to a surplus of corpses which are rendered down into nutrients or possibly some kind of culture medium for the virus or source of antibodies against a simple and relatively harmless pathogen which would enable them to become individual again.
• Things like serial numbers, licence plates and other sequences of characters may be significant. In ‘Breaking Bad’, these referred to colours as hex triplets. But there’s more going on than colour in this.
• There’s a suggestion that Carol’s unpublished novel ‘Bitter Chrysalis’ is connected to the outcome of the series in some way, for instance that its plot prefigures the arc of the show. There was a large butterfly on the wall of the ice hotel in Norway. It could simply be that Carol has to become the butterfly through the bitterness of her experience.
• Even if the viewers’ sympathy is meant to be with Carol as the product of capitalism against the Joined as communism, and of course my sympathy would be the opposite, it’s still interesting as a study of the American Way. Gilligan is in any event a genius at making us root for the bad guy.
• Speaking of which, maybe this is a mirror image of ‘Breaking Bad’, which is “Mr Chips becomes Scarface”. This is an unsympathetic character whom circumstances force to be a messiah.
• Speaking of which, obviously he gets us onto Team Carol, but actually there’s not a lot wrong with her. It’s more that women are rarely permitted to behave like that in popular culture. In real life it’s not quite so bad. She’s the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Connections have been suggested with a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode. I personally perceive connections with David Brin’s ‘The Giving Plague‘ and possibly even Andy Weir’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the sense of an interstellar plague, which links to Olaf Stapledon too. There’s an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ called ‘Third From The Sun’ with a character in it called Will Sturka, based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. It doesn’t seem to be otherwise connected. In ‘The Giving Plague’ a sociopathic scientist has to deal with a blood-borne virus which causes people to become more altruistic and therefore more likely to give blood, and ends up faking altruism out of necessity. ‘Project Hail Mary’ has an algal plague spreading between yellow dwarf star systems which dims their suns, which is more loosely connected, and Olaf Stapledon has two instances of interstellar plagues, one of which, the “Mad Star”, infects stars and ends up seeming to wipe out the human species in the distant future, and the other of which is spread by apparently very sane, virtuous and balanced civilisations on various planets which gradually, through interaction with beings in other star systems, would conclude that it would be in the other civilisation’s interest to have its culture destroyed or even the species exterminated.

So there’s plenty more, and I realise this has broken down into disorder but I want to get this out now to beat the deadline of ‘HDP’ being released, which incidentally seems to stand for “Human Derived Protein”.

That’s it for now.

233°C

The other night I was lying in bed listening to a radio dramatisation of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ on my Walkman using earphones when Sarada came in, and as usual I couldn’t hear what she was saying properly because of them. Ironically, if it’s true, the very part I was listening to was the scene where Guy Montag enters the bedroom to see his wife Mildred lying comatose on the bed with the “seashells” in her ears “listening” to the radio. This was not only not lost on me but in fact I had wanted it to happen. The invention of wireless earbuds, which these weren’t because I can’t get Bluetooth to work properly and don’t approve of having basically disposable batteries in devices which in any case only last a couple of years, so I’ve heard, but they do nevertheless resemble Bradbury’s “seashells” and their use. However, Ray Bradbury said he was in the business of prevention rather than prediction but it seems someone stepped on a butterfly.

Having looked at ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and a few years ago ‘Brave New World’, it seemed about time I looked at a third classic dystopian science fiction novel. I don’t know if it makes sense to rank these things, but if the first two count as being number one and number two, Bradbury’s novel surely belongs somewhere in the top half-dozen. Were it not for Zamyatkin’s ‘We’ and Kazuo Ishiguro no ‘Never Let Me Go’, it might even deserve an undisputed third place, though it seems quite crass to do that to these works. Nonetheless, I’m sure it often finds itself onto high school reading lists almost as often as the others I’ve mentioned, and in fact probably more often than ‘We’ in fact, which is relatively unknown. Ray Bradbury, though, differs from the other authors in being a genre sci-fi author. Of a kind, anyway. Kazuo Ishiguro ga now has tendencies in that direction but his stories haven’t always been like that. Bradbury also wrote mainstream fiction: ‘The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl’ comes to mind, and is a wonderful study of misplaced guilt which calls Lady Macbeth to mind.

In general, I find Bradbury a slightly odd author and I can’t put my finger on why. As I understand it, he’s usually considered one of the Big Four: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury. The Big Three, however, doesn’t include him. He differs from the others in having a much more mainstream literary approach and despite his successful efforts to produce absolutely classic science fiction works such as ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, which seems to be the origin of the idea of the butterfly effect, he doesn’t really feel like a SF writer at all even when he’s writing absolutely classic stories. He characterises and uses elaborate imagery and turns of phrase, and whereas that’s admirable it also makes his prose feel foreign to the genre. To that extent, it seems inappropriate to think of his inventions as predictive or worth considering in itself. Science fiction is substantially two things: fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting and fiction where ideas play the role of characters. Bradbury’s work is less like this than most SF. New Wave clearly is not like that, but that was still several years off when he was at his peak. It’s been said that he’s more a fantasy and horror writer. He’s also respectable enough for my third year English teacher (the folk singer, not the guy serving time) to have us read his 22-story anthology ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun’, although I’d already read most of them.

The second story in that collection, 1951’s ‘The Pedestrian’, is one of the sources from which ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is taken. Depending on who’s reading this, my introduction to it may be from one of you, who described its plot to me in about ’79, before I read it, although by then I had already seen the Truffaut film, which was apparently his only English language production. The other source is the longer story ‘The Fireman’, which I haven’t read. I can identify quite strongly with the main protagonist in ‘The Pedestrian’, who is in the habit of taking long evening walks about the city. He is stopped by an automated police car and asked to justify his actions, which he does but is assessed as mentally ill by the AI and taken to a mental hospital. This very much accords with the pedestrian-hostile nature of many US cities, many of which are apparently not walkable, and jaywalking had been made an offence from 1925 on. I myself spend a lot of time walking the streets for exercise and mental health, and just to get places, and I can’t imagine how that would go in the States. One thing this story does illustrate, though, is Bradbury’s strong attachment to nostalgia.

Now for the novel itself. Guy Montag, a fireman in a futuristic world which has banned books, has a job whose main activities are tracking down people who own books and burning them, and yes that does sometimes mean the people. He meets a teenager called Clarisse whose experience of the world is more holistic and authentic than he’s accustomed to, which opens his eyes to the possibility that books must hold much of great value in view of the fact that some readers are prepared to die rather than relinquish them. In the meantime, his wife Mildred is an avid TV watcher, televisions having now become wall screens which can even be tiled to cover the entire parlour, and drifts into taking an overdose of sleeping pills which is remedied by a couple of technicians coming over and changing her blood. After he begins questioning the book ban, he begins to surreptitiously collect books himself, notably a copy of the King James Bible, and throws a sicky to stay off work. His boss Beatty then visits him at home, explains why books have been banned and hints that he knows his secret and that other firemen always do it once but surrender the book within twenty-four hours. There’s also a robot dog which hunts down miscreants and kills them, and seems also to “know” something about Montag, either automatically or through having been programmed to suspect him. At some point, Clarisse dies in a car accident and Mildred is completely emotionally detached about it, as opposed to her interest in something on TV called ‘The Family’. Montag recalls an incident when he met someone called Faber in a park who was a retired English professor, makes contact with him and goes to see him. Faber decries his cowardice for not doing more to stop the anti-intellectual drift of society for standing up for literacy and books and reveals to Montag that he has a two-way radio system which he uses with Montag to offer him guidance. Montag returns home to find Mildred has gathered with some of her friends and he tries to have a serious conversation with them which turns out to be futile. He then shows them a book of poetry, which Mildred excuses by making up a story that it’s a ritual firemen perform once a year to show how ridiculous books are. He then goes back to the fire station with a decoy book which Beatty discards and reveals that he was once an avid reader himself. Montag is then called out to a house which turns out to be his own and is ordered to set fire to his own books with a flamethrower. Mildred has reported him, but is distressed by the destruction of the parlour screens and walks out on him. He then burns Beatty alive with the flamethrower and is pursued by the hound, which injects him but he destroys it with the aforesaid flamethrower. He flees another hound and this is publicised on TV as a major spectacle, but escapes by crossing a river so his scent can’t be followed, and escapes to St Louis where there’s a rural community of people each of whom memorise a particular book. In a culmination of the aerial manoeuvres which have been going on in the background throughout the novel, his home city is destroyed by nuclear weapons but the community survives and returns to the city to re-build society.

Right, so what do I have to say about this? Well, it is considerably dated in a somewhat peculiar way and I have the strong impression that Bradbury isn’t that articulate about what he’s trying to defend. The general idea of the novel is that social and technological change have led to a general dumbing down and flatness to society, relationships and personalities because of the inconvenience of individuality and passion, which leads to life not being worth living because people drift zombie-like through it. Mildred seems to take the overdose accidentally, but she doesn’t really value her life as such so it doesn’t matter whether she lives or dies. Instead, she’s mesmerised by her TV soap opera and radio station and nothing else is going on in her life. She’s also treated like a machine, by non-medics, when she takes the overdose. It’s like changing the oil in a car – I should point out here that I have no idea what I’m talking about because I know nothing of internal combustion engines. The technicians are impersonal, callous and accidentally brutal. Mildred is really the Everywoman of that society, and this is where I start to worry and think it shows its age.

Yes, Guy Montags wife is the Everywoman. She doesn’t seem to do any paid work and it seems that whereas men have jobs, her life is vacuous because domestic labour has been rendered obsolete, but instead of it being replaced by a role where she goes out and participates in the labour market she is left without a role. What, then, is she supposed to do? Montag, the firemen and other men have that option but apparently she hasn’t, and Bradbury criticises her for it. It’s like she’s trapped in the stereotypical place of the ’50s housewife and lacks any inherent impetus to break out of it. Then there’s Clarisse. She’s been interpreted as a manic pixie dream girl, i.e. she’s only there to allow Guy Montag’s personal growth. In more detail, the manic pixie dream girl is said to be an eccentric young woman with no internal life, often seen as wish fulfillment by a lonely male writer. The other women protagonists are less significant. I find both significant women in this book problematic and unsatisfactory, which is not surprising as it was published in 1953.

That’s one problem. Another way it dates itself is in the rationalisation for the firemen’s roles. The backstory on their development is that houses are now fireproof and there are simply no more domestic fires. Although this has led to a dystopia, this sounds initially like a positive thing. With hindsight, we are now aware that making a house completely fireproof would have trade-offs. Given that it was written in the 1950s, asbestos would almost certainly be involved. A more recent approach is to use flame-retardant chemicals, which are toxic and environmentally harmful. This is what we’ve actually done, and the consequences are that our homes are still at risk of fire, though less than previously, but are more likely to give us cancer or harm us and our surroundings in other ways. It seems characteristic of the mid-century that problems would be solved with no downside, as expressed in Donald Fagen’s ‘IGY’, a song I used to find very irritating until I got it. All that said, Bradbury does portray the disadvantage very clearly, and this again relates to gender roles.

The firemen lost the purpose of their work. This is a bit peculiar as it seems to suggest that there are no industrial or forest fires or other disasters such as rescuing people from road traffic collisions, and this is too shallow for me. But it also feels like they found a new role substantially because they were underemployed, and rather than simply dispensing with the role of the firefighter, they had to find a new function. It’s almost as if the vacuum of having no station had to be filled. I very much doubt that this is the intention, but it’s productive to read that into it. Whereas the women are left with nothing to do but fill their lives with fatuousness rather than finding other niches, the men for some reason have to be given something else to do, no matter how destructive, which they have to be paid for and which has to have meaning.

There’s also an elusive issue which arises from books themselves and Bradbury’s attitude to them. It feels like he has accepted that there’s value in them without fully understanding what that value is or allowing it to inform his writing. He defends the idea of books as good for the soul and recognises that they do things like deepen thought and improve empathy and emotional intelligence, but he himself doesn’t seem to have undertaken that journey. Even at the end of the novel, the people left behind have undergone something like rote-learning without profoundly internalising the content. The defence is symbolic. We should have a right to emotional complexity and pain even though Bradbury may not recognise all that implies. I hope I’ve captured that.

Beatty’s defence of the society’s position is very clear. His view is that books are contradictory, complex and cause pain and conflict. This is where the most difficult aspect of the entire novel comes to light. Beatty traces the history leading up to all books being banned as originating in anti-racism, and for me this makes for very uncomfortable reading. He outlines a process where the offensiveness of books to certain marginalised groups expanded until it was forbidden even to offend people such as dog-walkers, bird-lovers and cookery writers. Whereas it’s easy and valid to portray this as bigoted, it is true that one may need to be offended from time to time and that hurt is an important part of life. The problem, however, is that Bradbury doesn’t seem to have any sense of either immutable traits being in a special position or of the idea of punching up versus punching down. He seems to have a view of society as it had been as fundamentally equal or merit-based with the marginalised in essentially no worse a position as anyone else for some reason. On the other hand, this view is being expressed by someone in 2025. Perhaps I’m being confronted with something which makes me uncomfortable today but something valuable may have still been lost. However, I simply cannot get on board with the idea that active racism is okay.

Salvaging something from that, though, Beatty seems to be saying that the process got beyond the political realm and started to be about not making anyone uncomfortable, which meant never being provocative. It’s tempting to see a parallel between the trend he describes and the trend towards supposedly being “right on”. This is surely something the Right would agree with nowadays, perhaps disingenuously, and it makes me wonder if Bradbury is essentially conservative. After all, nostalgia is about yearning for things to go back to how they used to be and there’s a strong element of that in his writing. Nevertheless, it still feels like something can be salvaged from this.

Beatty makes a couple of other points. He draws a connection between population growth and the loss of tolerance because people have little choice but to invade each other’s space. The idea of overpopulation being a problem is now thoroughly dead, so whether or not this could be a factor is now moot. Yet again this is a sign of datedness.

Then there’s the question of technological change. There’s plenty of vapidity nowadays in online coverage of books and book reviews, and that’s just about the ink and paper version. The books themselves can also be very much of low quality. Books also compete with videos, web pages, audio books and e-books, whereas Bradbury had only identified radio and linear broadcast television as a problem. For example, he didn’t seem to anticipate video recording. On the other hand, he did anticipate the shortening of attention span and the rise of ever shorter summaries, a tendency I probably find just as horrifying as he.

Viewing Beatty’s exposition alongside the possibility that the firemen are engaging in malignant busywork, it begins to look highly insincere. Beatty has changed from a surreptitiously well-read younger man to a self-justifying thug. Has he maybe been brutalised by his work? I feel this takes things beyond the confines of the story.

But the book is not a lost cause by any means. It still has a lot to say about the dumbing down of culture, mob rule, shortening attention spans and the dangers of veering away from emotionally difficult and troubling themes and explorations. If the reader can look past the awkward social conservatism, it’s still possible to salvage something from this, and it is the case that with the constant use of smartphones and constant shallow entertainment, we are currently seldom left with our own thoughts uninterrupted and undistracted. Finally, in my defence I’ve been doing something like this at night since 1980 and it hasn’t fried my brain yet. And finally finally, it really ought to be 233°C, not Fahrenheit 451!

Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.

There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.

Winston

With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.

Novel-writing machines

Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.

Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.

The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.

The nature of truth

My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.

This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.

Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.

Bad Faith

Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.

‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’

The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.

Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify

A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.

Newspeak

English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.

The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.

Film Adaptations

To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.

A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.

Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.

The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.

To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.

Overthought Mirror Universe Head Canon

It may not be obvious to more recent readers of this blog, but there used to be substantial ‘Star Trek’ content here. I reviewed every episode of TOS and gave a more general overview of the Animated Series and TNG. You can probably find them if you search for episode titles. I think there are around fifty of them. However, I am not a Trekkie or a Trekker. I don’t have a problem with Trekkers. It’s just that I think TV and cinema are not ideal media for science fiction because they rely more on the visual than the cerebral, and often have no choice but to appeal to a wider audience, which can lead to watered down content and in particular scientific implausibility, which I find really grating and distracting.

Spoilers for ‘Star Trek’, The Iliad and ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ follow.

That said, I do have a particular interest in ‘Star Trek”s Mirror Universe concept and have given it considerable thought. Just in case you don’t know, the ‘Star Trek’ “universe” is in fact more of a duoverse, if that’s the word. Whereas it does have various parallel timelines, one of its biggest distinctive contributions to popular culture is the idea of “dark” and “light” versions of its universe, although the emphasis is of course very much on the light one. This idea has been adapted to other franchises, in the case of ‘Buffy’, in at least two different ways.

The idea is introduced in ‘Mirror, Mirror‘. The away team are on the Halkan homeworld having failed to negotiate for dilithium mining rights, and beam up during an ion storm. This leads to them teleporting aboard an Enterprise in a universe very unlike their own in the sense that all the worst parts of human behaviour have come to the fore and the best parts are repressed and the Terran Empire holds sway. Meanwhile, their counterparts from that universe have arrived aboard the Enterprise we know and love. The Terran Empire is basically fascist. “Behaviour and discipline has become brutal, savage” as Kirk puts it in his log in his much-imitated style. This mirror universe concept was later developed in subsequent works, both canonical and non-canonical, such as ‘In A Mirror Darkly’, a number of DS9 episodes and notably in ‘Star Trek Discovery’, which however I haven’t seen because I dislike the general ethos of the series.

People have had various thoughts about the nature of the Mirror Universe which often involve the common idea of a point of divergence (POD), used to explain alternate timelines in general. That is, a particular event in the past turned out differently, leading to a fork in history. This is a common science fiction trope and can be seen in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and ‘SS GB’ for example. One claim, made in non-canonical writing, is that the POD occurred during the Trojan War when Achilles kills Priam rather than showing him mercy, but even accepting that this occurred this could also be seen as symptomatic of the general atmosphere of the universe rather than a specific turning point. I admit to not having read the book in question because, as I’ve said, I’m not really a Trekker.

What looks at first glance to be a very fruitful possibility here is Harlan Ellison’s ‘The City On The Edge Of Forever’, which I reviewed here. Dr McCoy, Kirk and Spock go back to the 1930s CE and rescue a peace campaigner from being killed in a car accident, which leads to the US becoming non-aggressive in the Second World War and the triumph of Nazism. This might be expected to lead to a scenario where there’s a fascist interstellar empire dominated by humans, but in fact there is apparently no Enterprise at all, and quite possibly no interstellar human presence. This would not have happened in the Mirror Universe. Instead we would’ve seen the hostile, aggressive version present in ‘Mirror, Mirror’.

There are a few other suggestions. One is that the Terran Empire is a continuation of the Roman Empire, which I imagine would accord quite well with the Trojan War turning out differently. Another is that it simply represents the triumph of fascism in the mid-twentieth century, and a third suggestion is that it means the Age of Enlightenment emphasised opposition to democracy more strongly. However, the problem with all of these is that if it were as simple as a mere POD, or even several, we wouldn’t see what we do on screen. From a real-world perspective, it isn’t possible to show a completely alternative dramatis personæ from the majority of the episodes in a given series, so instead the same characters exist with different personalities. One impressive thing about ‘Star Trek’ is that it manages to make a virtue out of the necessity of working within the constraints of being a popular TV series and walking a tightrope between being liberal-progressive and still acceptable for mainstream American TV, and of constraints can be very stimulating to creativity. The presence of the same cast and props, scenery and the like is a different kind of restriction, but one which has been used very cleverly in these episodes.

Like some other people, I would go a different way with the idea. One possibility and I think the answer is to be found in a surprising place: phasers.

There is another episode of the original series which I think goes some way towards explaining what’s going on if you choose to accept it. In ‘The Tholian Web‘, the Enterprise discovers a “ghost ship”, the USS Defiant, which Spock establishes is trapped in an “interphase”, and humans affected by it become aggressive and murderous because the fracture in space “damages” the human nervous system. Kirk vanishes but appears in a mirror in Uhura’s quarters. It turns out he’s appearing at regular intervals and is beamed aboard, leading to him becoming permanently physically manifested.

In the mirror universe in 2155 CE (‘In A Mirror Darkly‘) the Tholians detonate a tricobalt warhead inside the gravity well of a dead star, creating an interphasic rift to 2268 in the “Prime” universe. This is retconned as the cause of the deaths of the Defiant’s crew in a mass murderous rampage, and allows the Terran Empire to access twenty-third century technology.

Phasers and disruptors work by producing artificial particles called nadions. They can also be used to close subspace fractures, similar to the fractured space encountered by the Enterprise in ‘The Tholian Web’. In some TNG episode I can’t track down, Geordi La Forge and one other character find themselves on an empty version of the Enterprise while having apparently disappeared from the prime version.

This is what I think nadion particles do. In the real world, and presumably in the Star Trek duoverse, particles manifest as waves of probability. If the likelihood of them being in a particular position in space is plotted on a graph, this will show up as peaks and troughs like a wave form. These waves have a particular phase. When a quantum goes out of phase, if it’s a boson it can cancel out another boson and there can instead just be nothing in that position. Fermions are different due to their spin and cannot cancel each other out. Nadions, in my opinion, change the phase of particles in general, such that they cannot interact with particles in the prime universe. It’s also known from Star Trek canon that there is a void between the prime and mirror universes. When a phaser or disruptor is fired at a life form or object, it doesn’t destroy the object or kill the life form, but shifts its phase so that it is no longer in ordinary space but in the interphase void. This is what happened to Kirk in ‘The Tholian Web’, although in his case the particles making up his body hadn’t been fully shifted out of phase and therefore periodically came back into phase before slipping back out, like an interference pattern. This is nightmare fuel, because it means that when a phaser or disruptor is fired at someone, rather than killing them, it shifts them into a void where they may, depending on how well they’re protected, suffocate or die of thirst slowly over a period of days in black nothingness.

Now back to the mirror universe. The mirror universe is out of phase with the prime universe. People in the mirror universe have the same disruption to their nervous systems as was seen in ‘The Tholian Web’, making them more aggressive and violent. However, their societies and biology have evolved to cope with this. In the meantime, in the prime universe we tend to see people behaving in a much more peaceful and calm manner than they do in our own world, which we generally tend to put down to the fact that they’re living in a post-scarcity utopia. This, in my head canon, is not the case, or rather it is, but there’s a cause for it. I would claim that the prime universe comprises matter in an optimal phase. Hence the mirror and prime universes are not separate timelines but two versions of the same timeline. Moreover, they depend on a third, more fundamental universe which is intermediate. Events in both of them are dragged along by this third universe and don’t follow exact cause and effect, because if they did there would be very rapid and radical divergence between the two other universes. There must be a common controlling factor between them. The “prime” universe is in fact not prime at all, but as divergent as the mirror one.

Finally, I would also claim that this third fundamental universe is our own reality, not literally of course because ‘Star Trek’ is fiction, but in the sense that our future is neither dystopian nor utopian but something in between. We can glean certain things about our future from the nature of both universes, such as the fact that there are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, that the protagonists we encounter in them also exist in our own future and that there is some space-faring organisation involving humans, but it’s a kind of average place.

To conclude, I do think it’s worthwhile as well as entertaining to speculate in this way because applying real world physics to ‘Star Trek’ to see how it would be difficult to make work helps one to understand how the actual Universe works. For instance, if what I’ve just suggested is coherent it would mean that there are no fermions in the ‘Star Trek’ universe, which is true in a sense because it consists only of images on screens and the photons which impinge upon our retinæ. This also connects to the Holodeck, Emergency Medical Hologram and Captain Proton threads, since in ‘Star Trek’ it seems that light does resemble the matter composing the likes of Picard, Janeway and the Enterprise much more closely than it does in reality. Also, it provides two fruitful sources of fan fiction: an intermediate, morally neutral future involving the same characters and setting, and a horrific void into which the victims of phasers are ejected to die slowly and horribly. So it’s all good.

Utopia Is A Necessary Evil

I don’t want to turn this into a mere tit-for-tat argument between the two of us having this discussion on here, but I value the input of people who comment on my blog, so I’m going to address something here which has been bugging me for a long time. It’s to do with the nature of utopia.

Obviously, being left-wing I believe in a socialist utopia, but beyond that I believe it’s an urgent necessity. To clarify that, I should be more precise about what I mean by “believe”. I believe that utopia is desirable. That doesn’t mean I believe it’s realistic. That said, I should also explain what I mean by “realistic”. In fact, I might not even be talking about utopia, depending on how low the bar is set. I believe in a fundamental right to food, clothes and shelter. To me that’s basic good sense, following from the idea that there is a human right to life. If that isn’t self-evident to someone who isn’t psychopathic or sociopathic, I can only imagine that they’ve been conditioned in some way to believe something completely against good sense, and of course that happens a lot because there are such things as religious fundamentalism and believers in a flat Earth. However, that doesn’t mean it can actually happen given our current position.

If you confine your actions to achieving aims you feel completely confident can be reached, you’ll be confined to what the rich and powerful are willing to concede, which isn’t very much. One way to achieve a target is to aim beyond it. Hence utopianism has a role in that respect. However, this isn’t utopianism. It isn’t utopianism to expect people to be fed, clothed and housed in the world’s richest countries where most of the billionaires live. The question also arises of how those people have come to have so much money. If a worker deserves to be paid according to the usefulness of her work, there would appear to be a limit to how much someone can literally speaking earn, and the usefulness of the work done by the people concerned seems to be rather limited. For instance, Bill Gates is a billionaire but most of his software was bought from other people – he last wrote software in 1983. Moreover, there are free equivalents to all of the software I can think of that Microsoft sells. And yet, he is a billionaire. A philanthropist for sure, but this is not about the character of this particular billionaire. Moreover, we have the myth of the self-made “man”. In reality we all rely on each other for our existence and all ideas, including business ideas, are built on other people’s. Someone might have a good and fairly original idea, and it feels like they should get credit, perhaps financial, for that, but on the whole it isn’t the people who have the ideas who profit from them because they’re likely to be working somewhere their intellectual property is claimed by others, and those others may simply be those who inherited enough money to be more adventurous with their entrepreneurship.

Capitalism is basically cancer. When I was training to be a herbalist, I used the idea of capitalism as a mnemonic for the characteristics of tumours. Tumour growth is unregulated, purposeless and not related to the needs of the body. So is capitalism. I would like there to be some kind of mystical link between capitalism and cancer, but sometimes the link is all too real, for instance the exposure of factory workers to industrial chemicals or asbestos. But it hardly needs saying that capitalism has the same effect on the human race and the biosphere as cancer has on the body. It kills you. Capitalism literally kills people by starving them in the midst of plenty and freezing them to death while luxury properties lie empty and are even rendered inaccessible deliberately. It also kills people by poisoning them and so forth. And it’s poisoning the planet by its very nature. Well under 1% of ocean plastic pollution is from plastic straws. Most of it is from trawler nets, which are designed to kill sea life and will go on killing it even when they’re no longer used. Any difference consumers can make in terms of boycotting and trying to use sustainable products, while obligatory, is a drop in the ocean compared to what multinational corporations do. And it isn’t even their fault. They’re economically determined by the capitalist system to continue to function in that manner. They cannot help but be mass murderers and destructive to life as we know it on this planet.

Therefore it is an urgent necessity to overthrow capitalism if we’re to continue to exist. That is, unless those at the top do have a plan, and if they do it’s probably even more worrying as it’s likely to involve the death of billions more people and convincing the rest of us that it’s either a good idea or unavoidable. And maybe it is unavoidable. This is the problem.

I do indeed harp on about the necessity of achieving utopia, and let’s face it, it’s quite a limited utopia because it’s only about people having their basic needs satisfied universally and unconditionally, but there’s one point I can’t emphasise too strongly. The issue is not that I’m utopian but that if this isn’t done, we will all die, and it’s personal because that “we” includes our descendants. Family members. And maybe it is impossible, but if it is, we’re confronted with the certainty that we will all die horribly, or people we care about will. Some of us have already done so. The pandemic is caused by capitalism, and before you say China is a communist country, it has a stock market and millionaires, so it isn’t. It is literally impossible, by definition, for a capitalist society to have a stock market because that just is commodification. This could of course mean that communist societies degenerate into capitalist ones, but a common view is that both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China evolved from primarily agrarian rather than industrial societies. In any case, global capitalism is responsible for the emergence of pandemics in the form of both Covid-19 and HIV, because deforestation and the consequent mixture of wildlife viral reservoirs leads to the evolution of new pathogens, and that takes place due to the various pressures placed on the environment such as the growth of cash crops and the rearing of cattle.

One of the notable things about the discussion of capitalism is that it’s often referred to as “late capitalism” nowadays, which seems to imply that it will be replaced by a different system. Whereas it doesn’t follow that this will happen, it’s true that it’s unsustainable. This will result in something like the extinction of humankind if it doesn’t end, but of course that extinction is practically the same as the end of capitalism. Once again I feel the need to remind you that the Doomsday Argument appears to show that the last human birth will occur early in the 22nd century CE, although the argument has its flaws and doesn’t predict what will cause this even if it’s valid. If it doesn’t happen, good, but if it does, capitalism failing to be replaced is a probable cause, and there is some evidence that this won’t happen, and therefore that this will be the cause of our extinction.

Hence it is indeed entirely feasible that even a limited utopia sufficient to preserve the continued existence of the human species is impossible to achieve from the current state of affairs, or perhaps it’s better to state that it cannot arise from it at any point because it may not be down to human agency. But let’s not shrink from what this means. It means that we’re about to become extinct. Nothing is being done to prevent this because the system is fundamentally incapable of doing so. It’s based, for example, on economic growth and the rapid replacement of products, the inefficient production of necessities and the manufacture of artificial scarcity. The world economy produces enough for everyone and yet people still starve and die in other ways of neglect of existing goods and services which are unavailable to them because of the way money is made to work under capitalism. Not that money necessarily works as a system anyway, but it existed before capitalism so it could possibly have been less dysfunctional in the past, for instance before usury.

One thing I’m not sure about is whether “they” have a plan. It’s undoubtedly inevitable that if capitalism continues it will murder most of the world’s human population as well as continuing the current mass extinction, but it isn’t clear if there are any ideas about how to save the elite. It may simply be that they believe their own propaganda and think there will be some kind of solution, or even that there is no problem. I find that plausible because of the extent of climate change denial that exists, which seems to be genuinely held to be so. There’s also the issue of the complexity of the problem. We’re not just talking about pandemics, but also climate change and its associated disasters and the number of products which rich people also encounter which are too dangerous to be fit for purpose. If you’re a rich CEO being driven down Wall Street and a vehicle’s brakes fail because of the manufacturer skimping on standards and it crashes into your limousine and kills you, you’ve become a victim of capitalism, just as you would if no antibiotics are available to treat a superbug you picked up because of the non-profitability of developing new antibiotics or using phage therapy. You’re still going to be dead either way, and the number of increasing threats is legion. But as I say, maybe they do have their own answer, but it won’t matter to 99% of the world’s population because we’re all still going to die because they’ve destroyed the environment for profit.

This, then, is what I’m trying to drive home. It is absolutely feasible that this limited “utopia” cannot be achieved, and I realise I’m repeating myself at this point but I can’t emphasise this strongly enough. If that is the case, we’re all going to suffer horribly and die, and not just abstract people out there living thousands of miles away but us, our friends, neighbours, relatives and the people we care about who are close to us. So you’d better make damn’ sure utopia is practical and do everything you can to achieve it because otherwise you can kiss goodbye to your great-grandchildren not suffering agonisingly tragic deaths, which could’ve been prevented. And I’m not even blaming you because it’s the system, not the people.

Sorry, this has been a bit of a rant. And yes, extinction may be the plan, but it’s more likely to be the expectation and it won’t be the rich who will die out, at least at first, but even they’re vulnerable.

Vintage Dystopias

Unlike ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ seems practically impossible to adapt well for any size of screen. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve recently endured two and a half episodes of last year’s NBC version of it and whereas the first episode was okay, it rapidly slumped into sheer awfulness which was painful to watch even a minute of. It isn’t even the exception in that respect. There have been earlier TV and cinematic versions which were just as bad in their own way. The one with Leonard Nimoy in it for example was just dire. The only version which I can remember which was any good was the 1980 TV movie, and even that was plagued with low production values and was very stagey.

Just indulge me a moment while I slag off the latest version. This will obviously contain spoilers.

I can’t be comprehensive or incisive in my criticism of the series, but I can pick out a few things which form part of the calamity. One is the depiction of the Savage Reserves. My impression is that the makers of the series got antsy about racist and inaccurate depictions of the Southwestern Native Americans and decided instead to show them as “white trash”. The problem with this is that it isn’t actually any better to stereotype the White working class than any other group, and it seems to me that the motive there is simply to attack an easy target which is unlikely to be watching and therefore unlikely to complain. It also seemed that as soon as we’d got to the Savage Reservations and their very un-“Brave New World”-ly atmosphere, we got stuck there. I don’t think the quality of the writing could ever measure up to that of Huxley’s, and the effect is therefore of an ugly clash. Moreover, the majority of the world needs to be depicted as vapid and it seemed they were rather too keen on showing off the slickness and beauty of the sets and special effects. Also, guns‽ Are you kidding me‽

It isn’t even “so bad it’s good”. I was only driven to continue by disbelief at how awful it was, hoping there would turn out to be some kind of twist which justified what they’d done. But it’s just bad.

What puzzles me about this is that whereas this is often bracketed with ‘1984’ as great mid-twentieth century depictions of dystopia, Orwell’s work seems to lend itself quite well to such treatments. My personal favourite is the John Hurt version. This and Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ have an oddly similar appearance, although the tone is rather different. Pains were taken not to depict anything in the film which didn’t exist in 1948, when the novel was written. The acting is excellent, the sets are too. I find it coming to mind on a regular basis even now, getting on for forty years later. Maybe the difference is that romance in Orwell’s book is not dead, but is persecuted, whereas in Huxley’s work it died centuries before the start of the novel. One problem may be common to much science fiction: ‘Brave New World’ focusses more on ideas than plot or character and suffers if adaptation focusses on special effects because that reproduces the very superficiality it aims to criticise. Science fiction cinema and TV is generally worse for high budgets and good special effects because they distract from the core meaning of the text, and the kind of ideas Huxley’s novel addresses are hard to depict visually. There also isn’t that much action, and there are great slabs of exposition in it, including the climax. A somewhat worrying possibility concerning adaptation is that the world is probably now considerably closer to how it is in the story and therefore it’s harder to see what it’s criticising because we tend to take it for granted.

Huxley and Orwell knew each other and the former wrote to the latter about ‘1984’. One striking observation in his letter was that rather than the kind of brutal physical violence committed to keep the Airstrip One populace down, something more akin to brainwashing would be more likely to be deployed because it would lead the citizenry to “love their servitude”. There’s certainly a lot of overt psychological manipulation in the post-war work, but it’s accompanied by torture and execution and the standard of living for most is very low. One thing the two do share is the colour-coding of the castes, and they also share the feature of being set at specific dates, at least insofar as we know Big Brother isn’t lying about that, but since Winston can remember the immediate post-war period as a child he probably is, for once, being honest. Huxley also said:

I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. 

I want to move on now to something which may or may not constitute a dystopia: the Eloi/Morlock section of H G Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’. The Time Traveller moves downward in time to the year 802 701 CE, where he finds a society where the effete Eloi live above ground in a kind of bucolic setting but are predated upon by the more malevolent and violent subterranean Morlocks. There’s clear satire here, but Wells also attempts to portray human evolution in this respect. The Morlocks are descended from the lower orders and the Eloi are what remains of the middle and upper class, and the two have become different species.

There are other dystopias and depictions of the future from this era, insofar as the fifty-three years separating Wells’s and Orwell’s works can be seen as an era. They include Zamjatkin’s ‘We’ published in 1924 in English translation, which since it preceded the invention of the video camera envisaged an urban environment where all the buildings were made of glass. Olaf Stapledon’s World State is another, which is an Americanised world founded in the twenty-third century and lasts for five thousand years, was devised in 1930 and isn’t exactly a dystopia but reflects a serious lack of fulfilment of the human spirit combined with fairly advanced but stunted technological development. Huxley’s World State is technologically stunted by design, to prevent progress causing instability. Looking closer to the present day, ‘Blake’s 7”s Terran Federation is plainly modelled on a mixture of Huxley’s and Orwell’s worlds, with thought control by the use of drugs, the use of soma, the existence of castes referred to by Greek letters and also a corrupt military dictatorship with torture and summary execution. It’s as if someone who had never read either book but was aware of their influence had tried to imagine what it was like. Another example of a dystopian novel near that time is Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’, where books have been outlawed. This may be unfair, but although I think Bradbury’s book is excellent, I also get the impression that Bradbury is praising quality literature without really knowing much about it. H G Wells also wrote the genuinely dystopic ‘The Sleeper Wakes’ and ‘A Story Of The Days To Come’, which I haven’t read but I think cover his vision of what would happen if socialism wasn’t adopted, so presumably we’re living in that future. Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’, written in 1937, does the opposite, imagining a world where even the first person singular pronoun has been abolished. Incidentally, it’s interesting that Olaf Stapledon was imagining something somewhat similar in the form of a cosmic hive mind in his ‘Star Maker’ of the same year.

In spite of my appreciation of the three works I’ve mentioned, and against the grain of the usual attitude towards respecting literature of this calibre, it has occurred to me that ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Time Machine’ could all be placed on the same timeline. This isn’t an entirely idle exercise.

First, dates. ‘1984’ is set in 1984, although it isn’t entirely clear because of the lies and propaganda woven by Ingsoc. ‘Brave New World’ is set 632 years after the first Model T Ford rolled off the production line in 1908, so that’s 2540 CE, and it also makes 1984 retroactively 76 AF (After Ford). The Time Traveller arrives in 802 701 CE, which is so far in the future that it hardly makes any difference when Huxley’s dating system is used, but it’s 800 793 AF. The chronologically earliest novel is in the most distant future and the latest is in the least distant, which might be significant. It could be linked to an increasing realisation of how social and technological change appear to accelerate, although there are arguments that it doesn’t, which I’ve been into somewhere (can’t remember exactly where). ‘Brave New World’ has a backstory which is again somewhat reminiscent of ‘Blake’s 7’, probably because that’s where the TV series got it from. However, because “history is bunk” according to Ford, the details are a little hazy and Ford and Freud are actually confused for each other, so the question of whether it’s accurate history arises. The same is true in ‘1984’ because of the distortion introduced by Ingsoc, which always reminds me of North Korea. For instance, Big Brother is said to have invented the steam engine. This provides the first link between the two. 1984 represents an early stage where people can still remember a time before Ingsoc and therefore can’t be lied to quite as effectively. Once living memory is gone and Newspeak has succeeded in remoulding thought, a new version of history can be created, and this is of course already underway with the editing of the ‘Times’ and other historical records which is Winston’s job. And as I’ve said, colour-coded uniforms already exist and the Inner Party, Party and proles have become classes with no possibility of social movement between them. Sexual activity is frowned upon and only accepted as a necessary evil, to be eliminated as soon as practicable. But as Huxley pointed out in his letter to Orwell, the ultimate revolution goes beyond politics and amounts to mind control, which he felt reflected the thought of the Marquis de Sade. He saw Orwell’s idea of the “boot on the face forever” as quite labour-intensive and wasteful. As Asimov pointed out, a society operating at Airstrip One’s level of distrust would require the watchers to be watched, and those watchers and so forth ad infinitum, which is of course impossible. However, it’s more efficient to get the populace to oppress itself, and this can be seen in the character of Parsons, who purports to be proud of his daughter for calling the Thought Police on him for allegèdly saying “death to Big Brother” in his sleep. He’s doing Big Brother’s job for him. Huxley’s view is that this is logistically a much better way of oppressing people, and this is why conditioning and soma occupy such a prominent position in his new world. There seems to be a fair bit of sadism in ‘1984’: they don’t like the fact that they have no control over sexual pleasure, so they’re trying to get rid of it.

These can be linked together as follows:

1. Shortly after 1948, coups of some kind took place throughout the world leading to the formation of three power blocks plus a disputed area in Afrika and the southern part of Asia. These are Oceania, consisting of the Americas, Australasia, southern Afrika and the British Isles; Eurasia, comprising continental Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Eastasia, which is mainly China. These are at constant war and their régimes are practically identical, consisting of an inner party which oppresses an outer party and doesn’t bother much with a third prole group because they oppress themselves due to their lack of education. They wear colour-coded uniforms. This is the situation as of 1984 CE.
2. Newspeak becomes all-pervading. The gradual unification of the world which began with the formation of the three power blocks continues until the whole world is part of one state, and history is re-written completely. The disputed areas change location and become savage reserves. The Inner Party decides that sex for reproduction gives the population too much opportunity to subvert the next generation and replaces it with artificial wombs growing fetuses outside the body. This gives it the opportunity to condition babies from before birth. A new drug is developed which causes the people to become placid and coöperative, which renders the constant state of shifting war unnecessary. The three classes, now mass-produced, become completely fixed and are conditioned differently.
3. By 2540 CE, the world is unified and divided into five castes. Reproduction is a function of the state and the people are controlled by drugs and conditioning. The colour-coded uniforms are now applied to each caste and therefore somewhat diversified. Alphas are the old inner party, Betas and Gammas the outer party and Deltas and Epsilons the proles. There is no possibility of rebellion and technological change is deliberately prevented as it leads to instability. There’s a lot of sex.
4. At this point I want to borrow from Stapledon’s First World State, which is contemporaneous with Huxley’s. The ultimate reason for its decline was that fossil fuel reserves became exhausted after five thousand years and there was insufficient flexibility in human behaviour to adapt, so a new dark age began. Similarly, a calamity befalling Huxley’s world state might not be amended due to the rigidity of conditioning and social roles, meaning that the loss of resources (“ending is better than mending”) would mean the end of civilisation as they knew it. Reproduction by means of intercourse could begin again, much to the distaste of the people involved, but the savage reservation people would have been doing it all along anyway, so they would have the upper hand. They would not, however, interact.
5. Finally, the situation H G Wells describes has developed. Humans are now two separate species, the Morlocks and the Eloi, living in a primitive state and in denial about their death, which is a remnant of the conditioning to accept death instilled in the days of the World State. Some evolution has occurred since it’s now getting on for a million years since the events of Brave New World.

In closing, it feels to me that Huxley failed to appreciate that the inner party of ‘1984’ was not merely motivated by efficiency but also by sadism and the need to know that others are worse off in order for them to assert their psychological superiority. This is, sadly, not even slightly fictional in my view. It is not enough to celebrate one’s own success. One must also be conscious of others’ failure. This is one reason the government of today’s Airstrip One needs an underclass.

Only A Fool Would Say That

(c) 1972 Fagen and Becker, ABC – fair use, review purposes.

My practical criticism skills are absolutely appalling.  I have absolutely no talent in that area because I tend to make arbitrary associations whose noise crowds out the signal of significance, and consequently I am incapable of appreciating mainstream quality literature.  This applies even more to poetry and lyrics, and the stress I experience when I try to understand poetry is too much to allow me to concentrate on what might resolve this situation.

Nonetheless it’s sometimes possible to get things under this radar, which can happen in two ways.  One is through song lyrics, which is why I’m fine with Ben Jonson’s ‘Ode To Cynthia’:

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep.

Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to cheer when day did close.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
And thy crystal-shining quiver,
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever.

Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Bless us then with wished sight
Thou that mak’st a day of night.

So much so, in fact, that I’ve even named the Moon after it.  The other area in which I don’t encounter problems is sacred literature, because I have faith that, as Chrysostom said, “God has given man [sic] the capacity to understand Him [sic]”, and therefore that poetry in the Bible and Qur’an must be within the grasp of most people, at least with the right cultural background.  Therefore I take it on faith that most people can understand ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’ for both reasons, and accept that it doesn’t literally condone infanticide.

This brings me to Steely Dan, whose lyrics are often double-edged and sometimes just there to prop up the melody without any intended meaning.  Two songs in particular spring to mind here, the first of which is ‘Only A Fool Would Say That’ from 1972’s ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’:

A world become one
Of salads and sun
Only a fool would say that
A boy with a plan
A natural man
Wearing a white stetson hat
Unhand that gun begone
There’s no one to fire upon
If he’s holding it high
He’s telling a lie

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

The man in the street
Draggin’ his feet
Don’t want to hear the bad news
Imagine your face
There is his place
Standing inside his brown shoes
You do his nine to five
Drag yourself home half alive
And there on the screen
A man with a dream

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

Anybody on the street
Has murder in his eyes
You feel no pain
And you’re younger
Then you realize

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

solamente un tonto diria eso

(c) 1972 Fagen and Becker, fair use (review)

As I said, I make arbitrary associations, and to me this song is ambiguous, as usual.  The mainstream interpretation seems to be something like this.  “You” are imagining a hippy utopia where the sun is always shining, everyone’s vegetarian, nobody has to toil or pay for anything and there’s world peace.  Everyone’s a goody in this world, so everyone wears a white hat, the world has become one and there’s salads and sun.  Unhand that gun, be gone, there’s no-one to fire upon.  And so on.

However, to the contingent of people actually involved in the daily grind, this idea is completely out of touch with reality and reflects a privileged background which those who toil have never had access.  Even the belief that it’s possible reflects the folly of the people holding it, which arises from their cotton wool wrapped lives, possibly reflecting a wealthy background.  Therefore, “only a fool would say that”.  And there is no empathy or mutual understanding here.  “It just couldn’t be”, according to the man in the brown shoes, slaving away for a pittance, lifting sixteen tons to get another day older and deeper in debt.  These ground down people remind me of the ones who voted for Trump, so maybe the reality tunnel is older than we think.

However, there is another take on this.  This world is not doing well.  There is starvation, humdrum or soul destroying work, poverty for the hard-working, war and all the usual woes of the world, no better today than in 1972, and it could be said that this very cynicism contributes to its continued existence.  “It just couldn’t be, and only a fool would say that”.  In other words, it’s foolish to take this attitude because that’s why the problem exists.

The reason I’m able to read the lyrics in this way is that I make arbitrary and unjustifiable connections and interpretations as a matter of course.  Nevertheless, I don’t commit the “intentional fallacy”.  This is the idea that authorial intent is all there is to interpretation – that authors hide meanings in their work which readers are supposed to puzzle out, and that’s what practical criticism is about.  It isn’t of course.  I don’t know what it is about, because of the blizzard of associations which snow my understanding under whenever I read a canonical novel or poem, but whatever it is, it isn’t that.  This can be illustrated quite simply:  Shakespeare didn’t put sexism and conservative attitudes in his plays deliberately so that we could find them four centuries later.  They simply reflect who he is, when he lived, his social surroundings and so forth.  The same applies to any creative artist.

Instead of that, when I read something or listen to a song, I project my own meaning onto the lyrics unintentionally, and I get meaning from it but I don’t do this as a conscious act.  It just happens.  To that extent I am as much the creator of my own private, subjective piece of work, doubtless of inferior quality, as the author.  To quote Al Stewart, “While others talk in secret keys and transpose all I say / And nothing I do or try can get through the spell.”  Presumably it’s quite a common process or he wouldn’t have put it in a song.

All this means that one can still create, and that creation may harmonise with someone reading, seeing or hearing that creation, but what they do with it is not under your control.  It also means that there’s no reason why a creative artist should be any good at interpreting anyone else’s work, or even their own.  Isaac Asimov once wrote a story where William Shakespeare is brought forward in time and enrolled in an evening class about his work, which of course he fails.  There’s no reason why this shouldn’t happen and it’s a criticism neither of literary criticism nor Shakespeare and his works.  It’s just how it is.

Nonetheless, only a fool would say that a world become one, with salads and sun, just couldn’t be, because the world might not be at all unless something like that happens.

A second, solo work by Donald Fagen came along ten years later, entitled I.G.Y.:

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free.

When I first heard this in  1982, it really annoyed me, mainly because my take on it was superficial.  I assumed it was trying to paint a utopian world as described straightforwardly in the lyrics, and since we were in the era of Thatcher, Reagan and the Falklands Factor at the time, that seemed most distasteful because we were so far from this vision and moving away from it at speed.  The title, incidentally, is important, but I’ll come back to that.

What I didn’t realise was the irony and cynicism of the lyrics.  The idea is not that this is how things would be in the future, but how people in 1957 thought things would be in 1976.  The reference to that is clearly to the American Bicentennial.  At the time it puzzled me that there would be a juxtaposition of IGY – International Geophysical Year – and these lyrics.

The International Geophysical Year was a collaborative international scientific project where scientists from the Warsaw Pact and Western developed world nations would work together on a series of earth science research programs over a period of about a year and a half.  Sputnik 1 was launched as part of this project, although looking back on it, that’s been reinterpreted as the start of the Space Race, which is quite a nice illustration of the intentional fallacy.

The song IGY, which makes a lot more sense in the context of the album ‘The Nightfly’ is in fact written from the perspective of someone looking forward two decades from 1957 and imagining what a beautiful world it would be when social problems were solved via technical fixes, and optimistically expecting that to be inevitable.  In fact it was only four years before the start of Reaganomics and machines were definitely not making big decisions by then at all, nor were they programmed by fellows with compassion and vision.  They were actually monitoring for the risk of foreign cruise missiles and regularly mistakenly detected what appeared to be their launch from the other side.  On one occasion in 1983, a nuclear holocaust was only prevented by a Soviet soldier disobeying standing orders, and for a long time, though I’m not sure this is still the case, every year that passed involved a larger number of errors of this kind, which were fortunately all picked up on, explaining why we’re still here.

Nonetheless it’s a seductive vision.  The reason it hasn’t happened, of course, is the same reason it didn’t happen in Ancient Egypt or Babylon – there’s a political power structure which stops it from happening and forces us all to act against our long-term and deeper collective interests and even survival.  It has nothing to do with technological or scientific progress.  In fact, the Egyptian pyramids weren’t built by slaves at all, but by poor workers who were honoured for their sacred work and interred with reverence.  In other words, the idea of progress from slavery to freedom is largely mythical, and it wasn’t necessary for anyone to be enslaved to build the pyramids.  This is not to say that Egypt was by any means a utopia but it does serve to illustrate that technology is not the issue when it comes to oppression.

As I said, I make arbitrary interpretations of creative works and am unable to filter.  This means that I am capable of seeing the positive side in situations which others see negatively.  It often works the other way too, as with the last scene of the film adaptation of ‘The Graduate’.  I won’t spoil that, but my understanding of it is dramatically different from Sarada’s.  However, this does also mean that although I’m cynical, I can also be insulated from cynicism and believe that people are acting in good faith with the best of intentions even if I can’t perceive them.  After all, the alternative is that everyone is malevolent.  And only a fool would say that.