A E van Vogt

I have a whole “splodge” of thoughts at the moment about what might constitute an interesting blog post. I’m thinking about Peter Mandelson, the trajectory of Lagash in Asimov’s novelette ‘Nightfall’, a rejoinder to French feminist theory, the principle of hope, connections between Celtic languages and others, the attitude of some Trotskyists towards Yoga, and the writing technique of A E Van Vogt. I’m also aware that threatening and frightening days may be upon us all, which relates to a couple of those possibilities, but when one writes about such things it’s important to take a tone that spurs people into effective action, makes them feel less isolated or does something similar, and there is also a place for escape. I’m a little concerned that while all this stuff is going on, I seem to be a bit away with the fairies, but I’d say that’s a response to the trauma of the outside world. The other subjects I mention will doubtless come up on here but for now, in order to stop my brain turning into an overcrowded airport with ideas circling while their fuel gradually diminishes, I do need to set pen to paper, metaphorically anyway, just to clarify things a bit. And since I’m talking about writing here, the subject may as well be writing, so here it is.

Before you assume that I’m just going to be talking about a science fiction author here, I’m going to ask you to bear with me because this is not about the genre in which the author in question was writing in but the approach taken to creation and writing style, which has a much broader application and in fact was applied more broadly outside that genre. Please don’t just stop reading because you dislike science fiction, although there’s more to be said about genre fiction here, but in the meantime I can assure you this is interesting.

I used to have a friend who was trying to write, substantially for profit. In order to achieve this, he read a number of Mills & Boon romances to analyse them and work out their structure and style. He frankly found the whole process nauseating but it was still a potentially useful exercise. My father used to have a quote from Samuel Johnson on his study wall: “No man but a blockhead wrote, except for money”. Maybe Johnson lived in a time when there were enough people buying books for this to be true, but it doesn’t seem apt for today’s environment and even when it was, I strongly suspect authors took pride in their craft and were emotionally involved in the writing. It also seems to me that Johnson’s dictionary was a labour of love. I don’t know what else he wrote.

I can think of several authors who took a somewhat similar but hybridised approach. There’s a right-wing political theorist whose name escapes me just now – I thought it was Friedrich Hayek but apparently it wasn’t him – who wrote horror stories to help fund his work. Michael Moorcock has two sets of novels, one popular and the other more intellectual, the former for his living expenses to write the latter, which he actually wanted to write and cared about. Finally, J G Ballard claimed that his first novel, ‘The Wind From Nowhere’, was just written to make money, again to fund his career as a serious author. This last case is odd though, since that novel recounts the world ending because of a mysterious destructive wind and is followed by three other apocalyptic novels, ‘The Drowned World’, ‘The Burning World’ and ‘The Crystal World’, which are all accounts of the world ending because of a natural phenomenon, and apparently, though I haven’t checked, these three have protagonists who are basically the same characters with different names placed in the circumstances of each story, meaning that the structure of his first book is similar to the next three even though he claimed the first was written purely for money, so what’s going on there? It seems that the author can only ever be themselves and therefore the idea of excluding a particular set of works from a more cerebral approach may be futile, as their distinctive character will always infuse their writing. This, I think, is evidence that even if a particular way of writing is pursued simply for money, it may end up in any case reflecting the author’s personality, and besides this, it will always tend to reflect their cultural milieu.

But I’m not focussing on these authors here, but on the Canadian author Alfred Vogt, whose name is usually styled as A E van Vogt. Born in Manitoba in 1912, van Vogt is the oldest and first author of the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction”, along with Heinlein, Asimov and several other authors who published in pulp magazines from the 1930s on. His first sale, ‘Black Destroyer’, and to a lesser extent another short story of his, is notorious for having apparently served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1979 cosmic horror film ‘Alien’ without his permission. Although it’s somewhat different, it is in fact quite a bit closer than a lot of film adaptations of various other stories, even excluding the ones which are in name only, and it was also demonstrated to satisfaction in court that this was so. This also means, a little strangely, that there’s an extremely famous and successful work out there which hasn’t been officially credited to him. So much for making money from writing. As well as that, he seems to have been the first SF author to come up with the idea of a starship with a large crew on a multi-year exploratory mission through the Galaxy encountering strange new life and, well, boldy going where no-one has gone before. There are plenty of other stories which show that before ‘Star Trek’, but he seems to have been the first, so basically he also invented ‘Star Trek’. I obviously acknowledge ‘Forbidden Planet’ here too.

He’s a most singular author, most unlike the other Golden Age writers but very influential on later ones, and this is what interests me about him. On the whole I don’t care for his stories in terms of characters, events or ideas but I still find his writing fascinating. He’s not big on plausibility or even world-building really, and he comes across as quite unreconstructed, but that isn’t where the interest lies. Damon Knight famously wrote about him being like a dwarf using a giant typewriter, and said that his work reads like that of a small boy trying to impress someone with big numbers and flashy imagination without much depth. That essay did a lot of damage to his reputation, and here we can loop back to the questions of whether he was just writing for money and if that makes any difference when considering his stories, but clearly he was trying to “wow” his readers and is the origin for many tropes of genre science fiction without which it’s hard to imagine the genre at all in its dominant form.

One way in which he is widely acknowledged to succeed is in creating what’s been called a “sense of wonder”. This, along with “if this goes on. . .” is the foundation of sci-fi as we know it. Sense of wonder, and here I’m paraphrasing the ‘Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’, is notable in being conveyed even in works which are generally regarded as being rather badly written, such as those of E E Smith, which brings into question what does in fact constitute bad writing: if it succeeds on that level, is it really fair to see it as bad just because it doesn’t conform to the received wisdom of what counts as good? Nonetheless both van Vogt and Smith do strike me as pretty awful and I don’t feel like I’m doing myself justice intellectually or emotionally when I read their stuff. Two of his novels at least end in sentences which, so to speak, start the ripples in the reader’s imagination. One of these does so in part by using the word “sevagram”, which occurs nowhere else in the English language, including that novel itself, leading to the reader wondering what a sevagram is, how the plot could’ve led to it and what’s going to happen after the story ends, the sevagram being unquestionably important in the universe of that novel, but then just abandoned, set adrift in the reader’s mind. Sense of wonder has been linked to the sublime, and I’m afraid I can’t follow that further due to my lack of ability in literary criticism. It has a dream-like quality, and this is where van Vogt’s technique becomes relevant because to some extent he did base his writing on dreams. He used to set an alarm to allow himself to sleep in ninety minute blocks and write down his dreams each time he awoke. This is to my mind remarkably similar to Salvador Dalí’s method of using dreams to inspire his painting, and although the painter is generally considered to be more a populist than a great artist he’s still top-rank in many assessments of his work, so if it’s a productive technique for him, why not for van Vogt?

It doesn’t end there though. A very prominent feature of his stories is that they’re written in eight hundred word blocks, each of which contains a “hook” to the next block to keep the reader engaged. This is often not apparent at first glance, which can be expected to some extent from a good writer, which he may not in fact be of course, but it does often become obvious once you know he’s done it. Two examples are found in the form of his short stories (and there’s more to say about that too) ‘Dear Pen Pal’ and ‘Far Centaurus’. The former is epistolatory, which is a particularly clear way of using this method. The latter is told by a single member of a small team of astronauts on their way to Alpha Centauri as he comes out of suspended animation every few decades and becomes aware of the events that have transpired on the ship in the meantime, until they reach their destination, at which point the story pivots into a novel direction, then does so again shortly before the end. One of the disconcerting things about this story is that the intervals are by no means regular, and that’s part of the vertiginous nature of his writing. You never know where it’ll go next, which again keeps you reading, because his plots are illogical and disjointed but he takes the reader with him, presumably through his “hook” approach.

Before the mid-twentieth century CE, many stories later to become novels were published in serialised form in magazines. This is true of his stories, but in his case he used it to the benefit of his novels in a peculiar manner. Instead of serialising a properly connected narrative, van Vogt invented the term “fix up” for a common and already-established technique of compiling several short stories together into a connected novel. His external reasons for doing this are also interesting, which I’ll come to. ‘The Voyage Of The Space Beagle’, for instance, is a compilation of four stories, some of which are somewhat altered in order to fit together, but rather than simply taking stories A, B, C and D, he sometimes intersperses the stories, taking story A, dividing it up and inserting the other stories within it, so it’s more like A1, B, A2, C, A3, D, A4. This, I’m guessing, then spurs him on to write creatively as a way of resolving the initial discrepancies between the stories.

All of these taken together – the hooks between the sections, the larger sections constituting short stories in themselves and the hooks between sentences within the sections – give the whole work a kind of fractal quality to it, being similar on a smaller scale to the entire novel. As I’ve mentioned, there was a reason within his life why he wrote fix-ups, at least in his mid-career. He worked with L. Ron Hubbard to set up the latter’s initial self-help technique referred to as Dianetics and was running a local chapter of the movement, which tied up most of his time and led to him having to repackage his former short stories as novels with connecting passages. Before concluding that his association with Dianetics, and later Scientology as it became when Hubbard turned it into a religion, makes him a dodgy piece of work, it should also be noted that he was later to part company with Hubbard when he didn’t like the direction Hubbard was taking it. Nonetheless, Dianetics are relevant to his writing too, because his heroes are often men whose thinking is based on non-Aristotelian logic. Without introducing spoilers, both ‘The Enchanted Village’ and ‘A Can Of Paint’ involve solutions to seemingly intractable problems when an entity within each realises there’s a completely different way to solve the problem at the end of the stories. His heroes are lateral thinkers. They also tend to be unexpectedly superhuman. Both of these features are integral to his writing, as they’re his way of presenting a different kind of logic to the reader. They’re not just plot twists because they’re supposed to be inspirations to apply the same kind of approach to everyday life, which is what he was trying to do too. His use of dreams and approach to fixing up come across as lateral thinking solutions to problems his life presented him with such as lack of time to write when he was working for Hubbard and the need to come up with plot ideas with terrifyingly short and inflexible deadlines through forcing himself to dream. I have to wonder whether that kind of sleep schedule was good for him in the long run. It should also be said that although I’ve described his protagonists and the flow of his stories as illogical, he doubtless saw them as following their own unconventional and more intuitive logic, superior to the conventional form. He was pioneering lateral thinking in a fairly coherently articulated form several decades before De Bono named it.

For all these reasons, van Vogt is worth studying, my main problem with that being not wanting to sit and count eight hundred words to find the breaks and paperings over in his stories where they’re not obvious. It doesn’t end there though: he’s also very influential. I’ve already mentioned ‘Alien’ and ‘Star Trek’, but there are two other major ways in which he influenced writing, and I’ll also mention the significance of his technique outside SF. One was by being a factor in inspiring New Wave SF. Although his characters, unlike those of the New Wave, are simple and flat, the fault lines apparent in his writing with the sudden twists and turns are also an important part of that sub-genre, and the dream logic he employed, often literally, is also found there. Both he and that movement focus more on the effect of the writing than on seeking a hard, science-like explanation. It made him atypical of the Golden Age already.

The other was Philip K Dick, who openly confessed that he was influenced by him. His first novel, ‘Solar Lottery’, depicts a world where the leader and their potential assassin are both selected at random through a lottery, which for the characters provides the same kind of sudden change of fortune as found in the other author’s stories (and incidentally reminds me more than a little of Asimov’s ‘Franchise’). In other works, Dick portrays similar mental disciplines of which van Vogt was a fan and tried to apply, but is clearly suspicious of them and believes they must ultimately fail. Dick builds the same kinds of worlds but peoples them with more sophisticated characters and tends to give the whole thing a bit of a side-eye compared to the other author’s enthusiasm and trust.

The mainspring of van Vogt’s writing technique is the writing course he did before his career began, although he very much made his own thing of it and developed it well beyond its initial scope. This was based on the books of the Canadian veteran John Gallishaw, ‘The Only Two Ways To Write A Story’, ‘Twenty Problems Of The Fiction Writer’ and ‘Advanced Problems Of The Fiction Writer’. These turned out to be influential on more than just van Vogt. Of all people, F Scott Fitzgerald is said to have used these techniques, also Bradbury, Heinlein and Hubbard. Sometimes his ideas are more floating in the ether or could be discovered by careful analysis of authors directly influenced by him, but outside the realm of SF these seem to include Georgette Heyer, Ellery Queen, the later Agatha Christie, and outside genre fiction entirely John Updike, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty. In some of these cases it’s probably more osmosis than conscious and deliberate study or influence, but it’s there, more strongly and obviously in genre fiction but also in mainstream literary novels.

It won’t have escaped your own attention that although this post isn’t fiction I’ve made an effort to include a couple of van Vogt’s and therefore presumably John Gallishaw’s methods in this, undoubtedly much more clumsily and perhaps inappropriately, and it’s not hard to spot them. It’d be an interesting experiment to try this out in fiction and see what happens.

Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (with a bit of Cixous)

Due to the focus of this blog away from gender identity, this is going to be a difficult post to write. I’m probably not going to say anything edgy or controversial, but it’s hard to know how to word it without impinging on the subject. Nonetheless. . .

I had a dream, and no it was not like the one Martin Luther King had. I’ll slightly fictionalise it, but I find memories of dreams to be very flexible, as if they’re still forming when one awakes. In this dream, I’m back at Warwick University and Christine Battersby says that in order to stay on course for an MA, we all have to write an essay on Julia Kristeva. We have an hour to do it. This is in a way very much like the dream where you find yourself back at school having to do your exams and aren’t ready, but there’s a twist. When I look at the paper I’m planning to write on, all of it has stuff printed on it and with fifteen minutes to spare, I go back to my room to get clean, plain paper. On getting outside, I’m in Bristol. I can literally write anything at all on Julia Kristeva and get through, but even that seems to be beyond me in the dream.

OK, so hearing about other people’s dreams is boring isn’t it? For most people anyway. That said, it’s worth dwelling on this one to some extent and here comes the tightrope walk. There used to be a book with a mirror cover called ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’. It was about assertiveness and I didn’t buy or read it because at the time I definitely didn’t regard myself as a woman in my own right and felt that were I to become assertive it would be at the cost of actual women. I think I was fourteen at the time. There’s a long tale here about whether being assertive or successful occupies someone else’s space which I won’t go into here, but this was the beginning of a general approach towards feminist theory which I continued to pursue well into adulthood. Whether or not it made sense, I still had that attitude when I was doing postgrad at Warwick, that feminist theory was for women to read, not men, and that for a person constructed as male to do so was transgressive, invasive and violating, as well as effectively stealing women’s intellectual work, and that I wouldn’t understand it anyway because my mind was inferior to that of a woman’s due to emotional imbalance and male-socialised fake rationality. Consequently, I had some difficulty when I started my MA because, being in continental philosophy at Warwick, there was a big overlap with the Women’s Studies department. Most of my interaction with the staff there was with Gillian Rose and Christine Battersby. Gillian very sadly died of cancer in 1995, although the view was expressed that people took her work more seriously than it deserved to be because of her illness. I can’t comment because I know nothing. I heard something from her and knew a little of her. I was aware that she wanted to promote women’s work in philosophy, so I ignored her so as not to interfere. Christine Battersby is different. She’s chiefly known for her ‘Gender And Genius’, which analyses the concept of genius in the Romantic tradition and the appropriation of emotion from a feminine to a masculine trait. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I’m guessing there.

And this is the thing: I’ve never read it, whatever “it” is, in this setting. I was aware of Kristeva and Irigaray, but clearly I’m focussed on the former in this dream, and I am kind of honouring this dream by now writing about Kristeva here, and I’ll go on to write about Irigaray: semiotic and post-structuralist thinkers in the French mode.

Both of them were followers of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although I’m no fan of his, simply because they used to be his acolytes, it doesn’t follow that they either slavishly followed his sexist assumptions or built on them, and it’s possible to salvage positive things from an unpromising start. Sometimes, also, you presumably have to make compromises to get where you aim to be in your career. Anyway, Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French polymath working in the area of critical theory, and when I say she’s a polymath I mean she applies her thought to a number of disciplines. She sees them through the same lens. Two important concepts of hers are abjection and the chora, although there are others such as the symbolic vs the semiotic and intertextuality. At this stage, all I have is a dream I experienced a few days ago and a peremptory examination of her work, but I can plonk these two in front of you. Abjection is the idea of what emerges from one which is therefore intermediate between subjective and objective. A really obvious example is excrement, but an interesting observation can be made on another form of the abject. Speaking for myself, if I had a glass of water in front of me I was about to drink and I spat in it, I’d no longer want to drink it. This is of course apparently absurd, as that saliva would have immediately mixed with the water when it was in my mouth. Likewise, what one does in the toilet is expel matter which is already in one’s body, yet most of the time this is not dwelt upon. Probably most people, when asked to reflect on this, would say it’s an instinctive response which protects one against possible danger such as infection or poisoning, but Kristeva’s view is that it’s a psychoanalytical phenomenon which is extended to others, and in fact to the Other, which has a significance beyond instinctive survival. I can get on board with this to some extent because I can see that much of the time we don’t eat to keep ourselves alive, don’t play ball games to practice hunting skills and so on: function and purpose are in different realms, so that’s okay. There’s an important principle here actually, that evolution is effectively blind and produces whatever is good enough from the resources available.

Though somewhat elaborate-seeming, the abject is similar to the disgusting and the abhorrent. Kristeva uses it, as do others, in the analysis of horror and film critics have applied this to horror films. This also blends into the “monstrous feminine”, not so far as I know a specific concept of hers but overtly developed from this concept. In ‘Alien’, for example, the alien lays eggs in humans and hatches out in the abdomen before tearing out of it. The ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’ is about a mother alien killing human miners, and it even applies to ‘Beowulf’. The claim goes further than that to propose that all horror is in fact about the monstrous feminine. I have to say that that seems quite far-fetched but I haven’t read the arguments, which is a general problem with what I’m writing today. I haven’t read her at all.

Abjection is extended to refer to the Other, i.e. those who are “not we”, which often includes other humans whose differences, and even similarities, to oneself, are emphasised. Hence for a White able-bodied heterosexual man that could be women, non-Whites, the disabled and queers, or a combination of those. It could also work the other way but this is seldom done, or at least not enough. The situation is complex because as well as othering the people concerned, one also recognises, and possibly fears, oneself in them. This is clearly similar to the anthropological idea that things which don’t fit neatly into single categories are deemed disgusting, the classic example being a flying squirrel since in terms of the culture concerned it was neither beast nor bird – I don’t know what they thought of bats.

The other big concept is the chora, from the Greek and adopted from Plato’s idea of the inaccessible origin of creation, including the uterus as well as the primal chaos of the abyss from which the cosmos came forth. Kristeva tried to reclaim this concept from its patriarchal setting as Plato conceived it. For her, it’s a nourishing maternal space. It can also be thought of as early infancy, before the Mirror Stage, a significant event in Lacanian psychoanalysis where children first recognise themselves in mirrors. Before that point, the mother’s body is the sole mediator between the chora and the symbolic realm: she’s everything to the chora. Hence another distinction in Kristeva’s thought between the semiotic and the symbolic. The former is not to be confused with semiotics. Instead, it’s emotional and non-linguistic, involving rhythms, music and the poetic. This continues after entering the symbolic phase but is kind of hidden in crevasses. To me, that’s also fine but with both the chora and the semiotic it’s a major assumption, given the importance mothers have for their children, that they would be the sole progenitor of their children much of the time. This to me comes across as a model of development frozen in the past. This is often an issue with psychoanalysis: it feels like it’s frozen in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Even so, to some extent this is still valid and it’s certainly germane to the wider human world even today.

I can’t spend too long on Kristeva, but I will say a couple of other things about her. She was also a novelist, writing detective stories which were linked to her theory, with a journalist character representing her called Stephanie Delacour. I haven’t read them of course. The other thing was that she may have worked as a secret agent for the Bulgarian government and her early writing was published in Maoist journals. I don’t know how much evidence there is for that allegation and I’m just passing it on. It’s quite odd though because she seems quite conservative politically to me.

Now for Luce Irigaray, who wasn’t in my dream. She didn’t explicitly respond to Kristeva although some of her work is clearly a response to hers. The first thing I think of with Irigaray is that when my ex and Sarada were discussing her in a pub once, having read some of her work, they were interrupted by men who seemed to be threatened by the idea of two women talking about something intellectual. I don’t know if they’d noticed it was feminist theory. I wasn’t there, but clearly it was something important to the two of them around the time Sarada and I got together. I don’t know where my ex stands with her now, but Sarada can’t remember much. I could ask my ex I suppose.

Irigaray is a difference feminist. That is, she doesn’t believe women and men are the same and they’re both men, but that women have the potential for their own subjectivity which is inadequately explored, equal to men’s subjectivity and also different. She views Western society as inherently unethical because of the patriarchy. Regarding sexuality, I find her views are really rather strange. She says male sexual satisfaction can only be achieved via an instrument, by which I presume she means the phallus, whereas females are constantly auto-erotic because they are constantly touching themselves, by which she means that the labia are in contact with each other. This enables her to view penis in vagina sex as an interruption of this contact, so I presume that’s where she’s going with that. But the whole thing seems highly metaphorical. Clearly the human body regardless of sex is constantly in contact with itself, and this may be affirming but it doesn’t feel like much can be built on it. It seems to me that if one confines oneself to the metaphorical and poetic, as Irigaray seems to do, it changes philosophy’s role, or perhaps reveals a different role which seems unproductive, which is maybe what she was already either trying to do or already existed in continental philosophy. After all, philosophy is seen by some as literature. But to illustrate what I mean, in the analytical tradition philosophy is used to inform ethical debates, analyse politics and to design digital electronics. All these are thoroughly practical uses, although it’s easy to see the last as fairly irrelevant to social progress. If philosophy is to be replaced by a more metaphorical approach, either it has another function or it needs to proceed in a very unfamiliar way, perhaps in the way literature does, and of course I don’t know what that is but to me it may not be progress because of the peculiar phenomenon of universalism. If we have the ability to appreciate works written in Greek, Roman or Mediaeval settings, that common connection is positive but it also seems to mean it can’t touch social justice or provide a means of improving things, and I would expect a feminist philosopher to want progress.

Irigaray has notoriously been challenged by Sokal in his ‘Fashionable Nonsense’, but it’s unclear whether he simply misunderstands her or is onto something. The issue is that Irigaray states that physics has a masculine bias because it focusses on solid mechanics rather than fluids and also that E=mc² prioritises c as it’s the “fastest” constant. Irigaray also uses mathematical terminology without seeming to understand what it means. Sokal regards all of this as uninformed and unscientific, and as creating illusory profundity. Lacan is sometimes seen as having done the same with his focus on the Borromean Knot.

It has to be said that this feels like some bloke with unearned self-assurance wading into an academic field and explaining things to a woman, whether or not that’s what actually happened. It’s like Richard Dawkins’ fight with Mary Midgley. Irigaray is not trying to do science here but something like psychoanalysis or semiotics, so the question may be about whether what she’s doing is worthwhile compared to what a male scientist might be doing. It’s quite close to being an art vs. science debate. Irigaray has a practice of what’s been called “mimesis”, where she uses scientific terminology to subvert it from within. She may also be trying to show how anti-language is used, and as such it seems to have worked almost too well with Sokal. It is also true that the likes of turbulence and chaos, as reflected for example in how blood flows through the circulatory system in pathological situations and in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change, should be considered more seriously than it has been. Sokal has been accused of scientism, which is the idea that the findings of science are the only important set of views.

One of her aims was to make it clear that scientists and in fact the culture in general was unconsciously perceiving things from a masculine perspective. So for example, many scientific papers and other writing uses the “editorial we”, which is of course gender-neutral in most European languages, but in fact that “we” usually refers either to men or to women who have been induced to adopt a male-centred approach.

‘Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ – is among her most important works. Now this is an interesting title, bringing to mind the idea that the female body is the default from which the male form deviates, which is how things are among most mammals including humans and meaning that the female sex is not a sex but simply the standard, unmarked and straightforward human form. However, strangely, she seems to mean the opposite. It’s a collection of essays including the eponymous one. Her view, and I’d agree with this, is that the patriarchal view of sex has historically been that the male is the unmarked and the female is either denied or seen as a deviation. The essay itself is about the Freudian idea of penis envy, which it deconstructs. The vagina is literally a sheath or a hole rather than a thing in itself and the clitoris is ignored completely. It does make sense that in a male-dominated society these things are made to be so and do assume such significance although she seeks to deconstruct this too. It’s also interesting that it seems to be autoeroticism which is the contrast to heterosexual penetrative sex rather than lesbianism for her, although this does provide some kind of solitary self-sufficiency, but it omits the solidarity of women together needing each other and not needing men, which seems like a missed opportunity. She also posits the idea that heterosexual sex for a man involves a sadistic fantasy into which women can only insert themselves in a masochistic role, which seems to be an unrealistic generalisation about the male psyche, doesn’t allow for the existence of masochistic men and also for masochistic women whose masochism is deeply in accord with their desires. It seems, in other words, to be kink-shaming. This reminds me of Andrea Dworkin’s views as expressed in ‘Intercourse’, where Dworkin seems to describe a willing submissive role as in some sense morally wrong for women, presumably because of failure of solidarity with other women in this respect. Overall, I do actually find what Irigaray says as rather unsatisfactory and unfair on women, regardless of her view of men.

‘Speculum de l’autre femme’ preceded the other work, and I’ve not read it. This is also a collection of essays which as I understand it analyse male thinkers in terms of their phallocentrism. Published in 1974, this seems long overdue for the time and it could suffer from the problem hindsight imposes on some cultural phenomena of making them seem trite and tired simply because their ideas were ground-breaking and then adopted widely, so it may be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary her ideas were at the time. She asserts that female sexuality is like a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis because of its prior focus on males and their sexuality. I’m intensely curious about whether the speculum referred to is not just a metaphorical mirror but a reference to the gynecological instrument. I’m assuming it is, but as I say I haven’t read it.

There is a third prominent author of this kind whom I’ve not read and who seems to be less well-known in the Anglosphere but equally prominent in the French-speaking world, namely Hélène Cixous. Her most famous work is the 1976 ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ – ‘The Medusa’s Laugh’ – which calls for the development of écriture feminine, also referred to as writing with white ink, the metaphor being partly connected to breast milk. I know even less about her than I do the other two, but I do know that Irigaray shared the idea of using female-centred language and I’m guessing this is similar.
In what I’ve written, I may have come across as quite dismissive of the ideas and writing of these thinkers. I feel that I may have missed something in knowing practically nothing about French literature, but it does seem to me that there is an attachment to words and language here which is not about communication and clarity, and therefore not about sharing wisdom and being open to the wisdom of others. There seems to be an arrogance to it which I guess is inherited from Lacan. Another aspect of this is the fairly vapid nature of psychoanalysis itself. I see it as a necessary early stage of depth psychology, i.e. the kind of stuff you talk about in counselling and psychotherapy, but in my own training in psychology and psychiatry it’s notable that other paradigms are much more evidence-based and helpful, and psychoanalytical concepts as applied to non-conforming behaviour and presumably the states of mind associated with those are simply an unnecessarily elaborate mind game.

However, all of that must be placed in context, some of which is sympathetic to feminism and some of which is more to do with intersectionality. I actively avoided reading any feminist texts other than those I was compelled to do as course requirements for two reasons. One was that I regarded those texts as for women and explicitly excluding me, and it was important for them to have their own space. The other is that due to constructing myself as a man, I felt that feminist theory would be beyond me in the same way as mainstream literature is: I lacked the ability to respond to or understand it properly. I suppose this is a little like the chora, in that I wanted there to be a nurturing space for women to find their own authenticity. Obviously I’ve abandoned all that now (and I’m edging into dodgy territory). The intersectional approach is more hostile to this theorising. One of the most peculiar experiences I’ve had with respect to gender politics is when I read ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ by Carol J Adams, where she made the startlingly false assertion that it surprises some people that so many feminists are vegetarian/vegan (“vegn”). My own experience of that was precisely the opposite. It was notable to me that so few feminists were vegn, the reason for that apparently being that they regarded linguistic construction as central to consciousness and therefore rejected the possibility of non-human consciousness. Therefore, the whole time I’m engaged in this, I’m acutely aware of the possibility that these feminist theorists are hostile or apathetic about animal liberation and may also be White supremacists. All of these people are White and European and seem to be oblivious of those facts, and that makes it hard to trust their judgement.

All that said, it probably is worthwhile reading them and I plan to do so.

Feet Of Clay?

We all rewrite our personal history, but due to journal-keeping I can check on early versions of events. Therefore I think I can say with some confidence that I’ve never really had heroes or role-models. The closest identifiable person was one I mentioned in a school essay when I was thirteen, a couple of years before I started writing a detailed diary in earnest and at length, and it was Kate Bush. I can still see that, to be honest. I obviously wouldn’t have a sportsperson as a hero due to my total lack of interest, but I suppose I might have a scientist or an author, or there might be someone in my everyday life such as a friend, relative or teacher, and in fact there probably are two identifiable people who fall into this category. They are one of my English teachers and Isaac Asimov.

I’ll start with my English teacher, whose name I won’t mention. Just to be clear, I had two particularly significant English teachers I have reason to refer to and I don’t want them to be confused. One was the folk singer John Jones of the Oysterband, known under the name Fiddler’s Dram for the one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. This is not the person I’m talking about and I want to emphasise that although my view of him at the time was unfairly negative for some reason I don’t understand, he’s clearly a diamond geezer and I once tried to get his band to sing at a fundraising festival for Greenpeace. Not him, not him, not him! Okay?

So, the guy I’m talking about is my favourite teacher of all, and a significant influence on me, shall as I said remain nameless. At an early stage he opened my eyes to the evils of homophobia, encouraged my creative writing, introduced me to Radio 4 and facilitated my appreciation of literature. He was my English Language and Literature teacher for three years altogether, at twelve and from fourteen to fifteen. I visited him in his home twice. Whenever I begin a sentence with a present participle, that’s his influence. He was also blind, apparently due to albinism, but refused to be registered blind because he regarded it as an unnecessary encumbrance. He had disguised his blindness at his job interview. He was also single the whole time I knew of him, and left the school as a full-time teacher shortly after I did, citing me as the reason, because he felt the school couldn’t cope with my talent and personality and nurture me properly. Yes, he specifically left my school because of me, and this isn’t just something he told me but something which appeared in the local paper when he became a post master. If you want a model of what he was like, watch ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. A minor but interesting detail which came out later was that he had also been Boris Johnson’s teacher a few years previously, at a different school, and in fact the first time I heard Boris Johnson’s name was in 1979 when he mentioned him as a star pupil in passing. I honestly never had a better secondary school teacher and he really believed in me.

I’m sure you know what’s coming because this is how all stories like this end. A few years ago, he was found guilty of serial sexual abuse of children at another school where he taught in the 1960s CE and early ’70s and sentenced to fourteen years. This had been at a previous school, the one where he taught Boris, and it had been conveniently omitted from his reference for my state school, and to me the implication is that the independent school in question decided that it was okay to have him teach at such a school because oiks don’t matter. A book has been written about this whole situation, which incidentally criticises J K Rowling for promoting boarding schools as positive institutions because the author sees them as inextricably rife with abuse and ‘Harry Potter’ as making children want to go to them where he expects them to suffer at their hands. My school friends and I talked about the situation at length shortly after it came out and we agreed that you could see the signs. One frustrating aspect of the book written about him is that the author is not allowed to report on his defence, which he predictably made himself, because it would give insight into how abusers think and operate and therefore that way of thinking went unchallenged when it was in fact entirely spurious and easily refuted, and the insidious nature of his arguments would therefore continue to persuade people otherwise.

Now I don’t know what the argument was, but I’m going to take a stab at two candidates for it. My original thought was that it was based on pederasty, and remember this isn’t just idle speculation: I had extensive contact with him over many years. Pederasty, which you probably know about already, was an openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned institution in the Greco-Roman world where a sexual relationship existed between a fully adult man and an adolescent boy as part of a mentoring situation, which might later be repeated by the boy after he reached maturity. Given his background in independent schools, which in England often emphasise Greco-Roman patrician culture, I can easily believe that this is where he was coming from.

The other candidate I can think of, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is a common line of argument in the ’60s to the ’80s that just as homosexuality and extra-marital sex became accepted, so should active paedophilia. In fact I’m almost certain that he believed this. It was really prevalent at the time. The National Council for Civil Liberties supported paedophilia, as did the German Green Party in the ’80s, and there were also adoption programmes for paedophiles in Germany at the time which encouraged known paedophiles to adopt children in orphanages so that they could abuse them. In Britain there was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It was simply seen as the logical extension of tolerance for homosexual sex at the time, for several decades. We need to acknowledge that this was so and, equally, assert calmly, without panicking, that this is not okay. Nonetheless, I think this may have been how my teacher argued, and ironically by arguing to me that homophobia was no better than active racism and sexism, he persuaded me to adopt the attitude I still have today, and it is correct. But he very probably took it further. What was absent, and I think this applies more widely, was the notion of consent and the ability to do so.

It’s very easy to say that he had a bad and a good side and that people are complex, and that’s true but I don’t think it’s that simple. For him at least, I think these things were part of an organic whole. The very qualities I perceive positively are intimately related to the vices. It isn’t that people can’t function and be, say, anti-homophobic, pro-feminist, anti-racist without also being child abusers, but in his case they were all connected and that made sense to him. So I suspect.

The other example is less personal, although he too has been an influence on me in a way, and this time it applies to many millions of other people. I’m talking, of course, about Isaac Asimov. Asimov goes back a long way for me and I’m not sure exactly how far, but I do know I got his ‘Guide To Science’ for Christmas 1975 and I was already familiar with some of his fiction then. I was also aware of his screenplay for ‘Fantastic Voyage’, although like many other people I didn’t realise he wasn’t the author. Much of his fiction, though not all, consists of men talking to each other in rooms far away from any action, which may not even be happening, and his main genres are science fiction and mystery, but from the ’60s onward he moved away from fiction towards more general writing, initially in science as he was a professor of biochemistry and then famously branching out into every century of the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy. One of his major qualities is writing extremely plain language and he’s a genius at communicating complex concepts clearly to the general reader. Even today, I sometimes go back to his explanations, for instance for the electron configurations of the transition metals and rare earths, because no-one I can recall is as good as he is at clear, explicatory writing. He’s famously responsible for the Three Laws of Robotics and like many other sci-fi authors he successfully predicted the internet and many other 21st century technologies. Going back to his sci-fi, he made a major attempt in his later years to link most of his stories together in a manner which I and many other readers found tiresome, and his second attempt at ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is probably the second most tedious novel I’ve ever read (the most boring is Aldiss’s ‘Report On Probability A’). His most celebrated story is ‘The Last Question’, but actually I don’t think it’s that good. Two of his favourite stories, and here I agree with the consensus that they are indeed brilliant, are ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ and ‘The Dead Past’. The former is about a nurse who is hired by a scientific establishment to care for a Neanderthal child whom she develops a strong caring relationship with and ultimately makes a major sacrifice forced upon her by a heartless decision by her employer. It’s good, brilliant in fact, but to my mind his best story is ‘The Dead Past’, which has a number of things going on but basically recounts a professor of ancient history who strongly suspects he accidentally started a house fire years before which killed his daughter and is attempting to prove that the Phoenicians didn’t sacrifice their children by fire by persuading a physicist to develop a Chronovisor to look into the distant past, but is being investigated by a McCarthyite, CIA-like government body which it turns out is trying to protect the privacy of the general public and is being genuinely benevolent. To my mind, ‘The Dead Past’ is one of the best stories I have ever read, regardless of genre. It should also be said that although the ‘Foundation Trilogy’ can be perceived as a textual sleeping pill, it also presents an interesting parallel to Marxist theory, invented the idea of music videos in the early 1940s, formed the basis of the setting which ‘Dune’ reacted against and ‘Star Wars’ copied and created the concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica, which in turn led to Douglas Adams’s Guide and ultimately Wikipedia. It must also be said that the Apple TV series using the same name is an adaptation in name only and that the film ‘I Robot’ is also very dissimilar to any of the robot stories.

But there’s a complication, of course. It manifests itself in his fictional writing fairly clearly. Asimov is not keen on characterisation and up until fairly late in his career, he tended to avoid portraying sex and relationships. There are some exceptions. For instance, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ is about a woman committing adultery with an android, ‘Feminine Intuition’ is about a gynoid being designed to find the nearest habitable planet because masculine thought processes are getting nowhere. Moreover, the chief robopsychologist in the robot stories is Susan Calvin and she is not in any way a stereotype, being single, child-free and asexual. However, Asimov’s behaviour in real life with women is from a 21st century deeply dodgy. He was known to be “all hands” and was nicknamed “The Octopus” at science fiction conventions. One of the women he worked with complained about his sexual harassment in something like the 1950s or 1960s and was actually listened to, so it must’ve been pretty bad. He also wrote two books, ‘The Sensuous Dirty Old Man’ and ‘Lecherous Limericks’ which celebrated sexual harassment and assault as perceived today. The former is actually an instruction manual for it, although to be fair it is also a parody of a pair of books popular at the time, ‘The Sensuous Woman’ and ‘The Sensuous Man’, so the context for this is missing. Later in his life, the slightly older SF author Alfred Bester, who was incidentally exceedingly monogamously married to a woman for forty-eight years until her death, and also seems to have been a bit of a jock as opposed to Asimov’s nebbischkayt (nerdishness) gave him a bear hug, snogged him and repeatedly pinched his bottom to teach him a lesson, and he was somewhat repentant after that but unfortunately the way he put his response made it sound more like that he was personally hurt because his advances had been constantly unwelcome. Furthermore, although parents can’t be held entirely responsible for their adult children’s actions, David Asimov was found by California police to have the largest collection of images of child sexual exploitation ever found in the area.

But as I said, it isn’t that simple. In the late ’50s or early ’60s, he was at a meeting about scientists and someone made a comment about their wives, to which he chipped in “or their husbands”, scandalising the meeting, including women, because they thought he was talking about gay men when he meant female scientists, and he went on to say that it wouldn’t matter if they were gay either. At another point at a conference about Judaism, and although he was Jewish he wasn’t observant or religious, he objected to another Jewish person saying they didn’t trust scientists or engineers because of their involvement in the Holocaust by saying that the only reason the Jews hadn’t persecuted anyone historically was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to, and that on the one occasion when they had, with the Maccabees, they’d done so, which was not anti-semitic so much as an observation that it’s a general problem with human beings that, if we can, we may well persecute others. This seems quite prophetic in view of recent events.

Okay, so the differences between Asimov and my English teacher are naturally considerable, but the advantage of considering the former is that he’s much more prominent for all sorts of reasons to the English-speaking world. My English teacher has some notoriety nationally, but it’s quite low-key, and this makes him harder to treat as an example. It isn’t enough even to use the excuse that “it was a different time” here, because even at the time Asimov’s behaviour was strongly objected to and it must’ve been quite serious. However, he was also protected by his fame. On one occasion, when he sexually assaulted someone in a lift at a conference, the woman’s partner objected and it was he, not Asimov, who was ejected from the building. I’d be surprised if this was the only time this happened. Women would avoid SF conferences because he was there and this is very likely to have impacted on their careers long term and kept them away from success.

These things tend to come to notice about public figures due to the internet. The question arises of what may have happened in the past which never became widely known about others. It’s said that one should never meet one’s heroes, but it may be even worse than that. Maybe most people’s lives don’t bear scrutiny. Thinking about my own past, I can’t think of much that I’d be unhappy if it were more widely known, but maybe that’s how it works. Maybe people usually justify things to themselves or alter their own memories in their favour. I tend to think that the only difference nowadays is that things are harder to hide.

There is also the question of changing values and attitudes. Jimmy Savile, for example, wasn’t just protected by his fame, but also by the normalisation of sexual assault, objectification and harassment at the time. It isn’t just a question of faulty record-keeping. Rolf Harris is an even harder case to conceptualise, because unlike Savile he was actually very talented and creative. Savile probably was too, but not publicly so much as being good at getting away with his abuse. Even he, though, has his defenders. Some of the people he helped on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ went on to build successful careers on the contacts they made and won’t hear a word against him. There can be a kind of sunk-cost fallacy here, in that having committed oneself to a particular set of opinions about someone, it’s hard to change one’s mind and retract them, even internally.

But why does it happen like this? Is there something about success that breeds this? Is it that success and the atrocities go hand in hand because they result from the same origins? Or, is it more that people who become well-known have their lives more closely scrutinised and that basically everyone’s a bit of a git when it comes down to it?

I’m aware that there’s a long list of men in this post. There are terrible women too, and there’s a bias I’ve seen referred to as the “women are wonderful bias”, which excuses women of more and presumes their good faith. However, it remains the case that men are more successful than women in public life and therefore have more opportunities to do wrong, so even without a gender bias they can be expected to have sinned against more. That said, there are allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley. Although she may be less well-known than the men I’ve mentioned, MZB as she’s often referred to was a sci-fi and fantasy author whose daughter Moira Greyland accused her of sexually abusing her throughout her childhood, exposing her to other people to sexually abuse her and being forced to participate in ritualised sexual abuse. Unfortunately from a queer-tolerant perspective, Greyland sees this as integral to LGBTQIA2S (you can see why I hate that initialism) identity. MZB’s husband was found guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse – this much is not in doubt. As far as I understand it, she also defended his behaviour publicly, and also claimed to be feminist. This is to some extent reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, who is on record as publicly defending active paedophilia.

I don’t know, I haven’t got an answer to this. What do you think?

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!

The Celestial Mythos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pounds, Shillings, Pence – And Airships?

While I was writing yesterday’s post, I didn’t do my usual thing of succumbing to the temptation to go off on tangents, and consequently I ended up commenting only briefly on matters I’d’ve preferred to cover in more depth.  There were several, but a quick skim of the post has brought up two issues, and maybe it’s best just to cover a couple at a time, so that’s what I’ll be doing.

Old Money

At some point in the post, I did what I sometimes do and converted prices to “old money”.  This phrase means a couple of things and might not carry the same connotations outside these isles as it has here, so it’s worth pointing out that I’m not talking about ancient inherited wealth and those who hold it, but about the old system of currency.  For some reason, the UK and Ireland took far longer than most other countries to decimalise our money.  I remember it happening, but my recall is of the actual event rather than the actual exchange of the likes of sixpences and threepenny bits for goods and services because I was only four at the time.  I do remember the gradual switchover and the display of two prices on items, and of course I recall the decades-long lag between that change and the withdrawal of shillings and florins, which were of course replaced by 5p and 10p pieces.  Commemorative crowns were also issued for much longer.  I have seen a total of one single sixpence in my life because my mother kept one in her sewing machine for an unknown purpose.  I’d be interested in knowing what that was if anyone reading this can tell me.  Threepenny bits are much more familiar, and of course the decimal penny resembles the last issue of that coin quite closely.  Maundy money is apparently still in shillings and pence.  I can also remember, incidentally, the Max Bygraves record ‘Decimalisation’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncZihiuztvg

I used to sing along to this.

To a limited extent, I am unsurprisingly a fan of the metric system as opposed to imperial, although with reservations, and this is key to why I sometimes use pounds, shillings and pence instead.  Suppose you have a crown and you want to divide it fairly between various numbers of people.  A crown is five shillings, making it uncomfortably close to a 20p piece, but leaving that aside, that makes it sixty – five dozen – old pence.  Sixty has an unusually large number of factors for its size:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60 itself of course.   A crown is also a 25p piece, although they hardly ever circulate nowadays.  25 has far fewer factors:  1, 5 and 25.  If half pennies are included it can itself be halved but they went out of circulation in 1983 CE.  It also made Austrian currency more relatable when I went there as they were used there over most of the last century and the exchange rate was pretty much the same as a British shilling.  Ireland decimalised on the same day, 15th February 1971.

This is a hiding to nothing, like many of my wishes, but the main reason I sometimes lapse into pounds, shillings and pence is the fact that there are a dozen old pennies in a shilling, and I’m a strong believer in duodecimal, which is also why my enthusiasm for the metric system is only half-hearted.  I strongly believe the decimal system is disabling because the number ten only has three factors, meaning that it leads to recurring decimals much more often than duodecimal would and shows few patterns in multiplication tables.  This probably matters less with calculator apps on ‘phones and the like, but we should try to avoid being too reliant on technology and it’s unnecessarily intimidating for children or dyscalculics trying to learn how to multiply and divide.  It’s just a pointless obstacle.

I’ve covered this before, but some people say ten is more natural because you count on your fingers.  This is not so.  We have twelve finger bones per hand and can count by pointing to them with our thumbs, meaning also that we can count to a gross on our fingers if we use both hands.  Practice doing this also reveals patterns which ease arithmetic.

Another reason for using the old money is that because of inflation, farthings in particular are useful for counting small differences in prices.  I’ve just been to a supermarket which sold one tub of hummus for 49½p per hundred grammes and another for 49.7p for the same mass.  This is a difference of a fifth of a new penny and there are of course no sterling currency units to quantify this sum.  However, in terms of pounds, shillings and pence a close estimate becomes possible.  2.4 x 0.2 is 0.48, or almost half an old penny.  It’s also nearly two farthings.  However, for a brief period in the early Victorian era, quarter farthings were issued in British Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, and in terms of those units a fifth of a new penny is between seven and eight, leading to an error of less than one percent of a new penny.

A third reason is that the real prices of items is obscured by decimalisation.  Going back to the same supermarket I visited this morning, most of the eight hundred gramme loaves of unsliced bread on sale there are £1.40.  That’s a total of twenty-eight bob of course, although it might more usually be quoted as £1/8/-. In the late ‘fifties, loaves cost a shilling each.  The Bank of England inflation calculator says that today’s prices average at almost exactly twenty times 1958 prices, but were that so, that loaf could be expected to cost only a pound today, although it might’ve gone a bit mouldy by now.  I remember Shirley Williams talking about the horrors of the “10p loaf” in a party political broadcast of the early ‘70s, I’m guessing for the first 1974 election.  On the other hand, a bic, or whatever ballpoint pens were available back then, cost two shillings and continued to do so well into the age of decimalisation.  This highlights the problems with calculating inflation:  prices of different items don’t stay the same relative to each other, and may in fact not even be the same item literally over the centuries.  In 2024, I calculated the cost of the nard broken over Christ’s feet and it amounted to £24000 in 2024 money based on the minimum wage at that time and a day’s wage in first century Judaea.  This is immensely more than it’s actually likely to cost today, and also the nard in question probably wasn’t a pure essential oil but more likely to have been infused into a fixed carrier oil, probably olive. Likewise, in the 1950s it’s possible to talk about ballpoint pens but a century previously the usual pen would’ve been either a fountain or dip pen, before that it would’ve been a quill and so forth, and the electric bread slicing machine, which incidentally my ex insisted was considered a kitchen essential in Germany, unlike the kettle, was only invented in 1928.  So it gets complicated, but even so, the re-adoption of the old money gives historical perspective.

Beyond this lies the possibility of adopting a duodecimal-based weights and measures system, some of which already exists in the form of angular measurements, time and nautical miles, and further still into the replacement of our current counting system with a more logical one based on dozens.

Airships

As a child, I was somewhat preoccupied with alternative modes of transport, particularly including hovercraft.  Sadly, hovercraft are largely impractical because they’re probably unavoidably noisy, power-hungry and difficult to turn, but another kind of craft entirely used to fill my thoughts at times:  the airship.  Airships have had a bad press due to certain serious disasters with multiple casualties they have undergone, which is by contrast with hovercraft which are one of the safest forms of transport.  Arthur C Clarke promoted hovercraft enthusiastically, but his affection for them was based on the assumption that they’d be nuclear powered, and it is in fact probably the case that if they ran on nuclear fission reactors they’d work, just as in the 1950s nuclear-powered cars were designed and would’ve run for months without needing any fuel before their reactors were replaced.  The flaw, of course, is that such engines would be dangerous in collisions and would’ve produced a lot of dangerous waste.  This is not a tangent because the push in the ‘60s and ‘70s to revive airships also included the idea that they’d be nuclear-powered.  There are, to be sure, nuclear-powered vehicles today in the form of military submarines and warships but I have to admit to not being keen.  Even so. . .

Airships were invented in response to the difficulty in steering balloons. Inventors tried oars, paddles, flapping wings, clockwork to drive propellers and eventually, in 1852, Henri Giffard tried a steam engine with a hydrogen balloon, the first powered flight in history. In spite of the sparks and floating red hot embers from the engine, he was lucky enough to survive, but the problem, apart from safety, was the sheer weight of the motor. In 1884, the military engineers Renard and Krebs elongated the envelope, constructed of silk and a bamboo frame and succeeded in pushing it about with an electric motor. Given the Gossamer Condor and Albatross, the two human-powered flight undertakings of the late ’70s, which had no lifting gas in them at all, pedal-powered airships are clearly possible although not efficient and probably only suitable for one very fit pilot, and they’d also be very slow, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s possible to make powered flight so efficient that at the entry level, so to speak, even human might is sufficient to propel an airship.

I find it poignant that that early airship was electric. Its range was only twelve kilometres, it just carried the two of them and had a top speed of 20 kph. It was already enormous at 8.4 metres diameter by fifty metres long. The weight of the motor was still too high and one of the lighter Daimler petrol engines exploded while in use, setting back development considerably. Then in 1897 the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont travelled to Paris to realise his dream of global human flight by 1953 and adapted a motor tricycle engine to power his prototype airship. However, after a few years he became more interested in the new aeroplanes and abandoned the development of the airship, developed multiple sclerosis and killed himself in 1922.

By WW1, airships were sufficiently advanced to carry out air raids, of which one notoriously occurred in Loughborough, where we lived until a few months ago – the Rushes got bombed for anyone who knows the town. By this time, Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin had started an airship-based airline taking passengers between the major cities of Germany. However, they were very vulnerable and unreliable, and although the Germans believed they could win the war with them, they tended to drop their bombs off-target, they were incinerated by incendiary bullets and couldn’t survive against British aircraft. The largest number of airships in flight at any one time, sixteen, occurred in 1916, and due to the pressure of the war effort, ships were developed which could carry thirty tons of bombs eight kilometres up at 120 kph, allowing them to hide above the clouds. However, this almost killed many of their crew due to the extremely low temperatures and lack of oxygen.

After the Treaty of Versailles, the French, British and Italians were able to take possession of the airships and the US ordered Germany to manufacture one as part of war reparations. We all know where that led in political terms. After an Italian-American exhibition to the North Pole, luxury passenger airships began to be developed with dining rooms, huge viewing windows and on-board kitchens. In 1924 the British government set up the British Imperial Airship Programme, whose goal was to set up a global transportation network. Rudyard Kipling had imagined such a system in his two stories ‘With The Night Mail’ and ‘As Easy As ABC’, written in 1905 and 1912 respectively. It was expected that over a gross of passengers and ten tons of mail could be taken from Britain to India in three days and to Australia in a fortnight. Two experimental airships were built, larger than any before at 140 megalitres: the private enterprise based R100 and the so-called “Socialist” government-funded R101. The R100 was completed first. Designed by Barnes Wallis, the later inventor of the “Bouncing Bomb”. This was a remarkably economical design, consisting of only fifty-two standard parts and it successfully flew to Canada and back in summer 1930. The problem with the R101 was that it was a lot more complicated, and among other things the gas bags were made from a million oxen intestines – poor oxen, eh? I should point out here, in case you don’t know already, that there are two main designs for airships. One consists of a simple rugby-ball shaped balloon and the other is the same shape but consists of multiple bladders fixed to a frame on the inside of the envelope. Do people know this? I can never tell. The R101 tried to be more innovative, hence its complexity, but many of the concepts used in its design had not been thoroughly tested and it was also weighed down by the large number of components used in its construction. It missed its target lifting weight of sixty tons, only being able to lift thirty-five, and that wouldn’t be enough to get to India. Then the air minister, Lord Thomson, with ambitions to become Viceroy of India, decided he wanted to arrive there by airship. Hence it was launched in October before it was properly finished, into weather conditions it had never flown in, with basically a fake certificate of airworthiness. It crashed in Beauvais in Northern France and exploded, killing forty-eight people and only leaving six survivors. This is actually worse than the Hindenburg, but for some reason the latter is more famous. Thomson was, unsurprisingly, killed and the disaster gave airships in Britain such a bad reputation that the whole programme was cancelled and that was the end of British airships.

I don’t think there’s any point in mentioning the Hindenburg disaster itself as it’s so well-known, and actually overshadowed by that of the R101. One of the reasons for the disaster, which is much discussed and disputed, is that it was filled with the wrong gas. The US had a monopoly on helium and although it was preferred for safety and had 92% as much lifting potential as hydrogen, America refused to supply it and there was therefore little choice but to use hydrogen. The disaster really was not as bad as some of the others. There were ninety-seven people on board and sixty-two survived. I don’t want to play down the tragic loss and I haven’t got a point to make here, but I find it odd that the R101 is not the notorious disaster compared to the Hindenburg. I suppose the difference is that the latter was filmed. Against the wishes of Hugo Eckener, it had been emblazoned with swastikas and carried out a propaganda tour of Germany along with the Graf Zeppelin, so maybe the emphasis on the destruction is connected to anti-Nazi propaganda, which is fine in a way but is still a distortion of reality. It isn’t like the British Empire is exactly devoid of atrocities.

During the Second World War, airships continued to be used for defence purposes, for instance escorting surface warships and subs across oceans and smaller seas. After the War, they were used to deliver supplies to remote scientific expeditions and as NORAD’s RADAR network. Many of their other post-war roles have been taken over by satellites and Google Earth nowadays.

Here is a relatively well-known illustration of a potential use for an airship in the late twentieth century:

I have to admit that looking at that artist’s impression makes me wonder if they really can lift such a weight as an entire two-storey building forty metres long and sixteen metres wide, but maybe this is supposed to be made of lighter materials than concrete. Or, maybe they really can just do that.

Helium is obviously the best choice of lifting gas as although it’s twice as massive as hydrogen, being monatomic, it’s still very buoyant and completely inert. However, it’s also very scarce on Earth because although it’s constantly being produced by radioactive minerals, it constantly escapes into space. It’s also stockpiled by the US. This wouldn’t matter so much were it not for the devastating environmental impact of heavier-than-air travel. Airships do have roles in other areas but the blimp in the room is of course commercial air travel.

There are other possible lifting gases, and there is also the impractical idea of using vacuum itself to construct a lighter-than-air craft, which would require a very heavy, thick envelope. Any gas lighter than nitrogen, whose molar mass is fourteen grammes for the diatomic form, could potentially be used. This includes a fairly small number of compounds and elements: hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, neon, fluorine and, perhaps surprisingly, water vapour. There may be others. Several of these are ruled out immediately. Hydrogen and methane are highly flammable, hydrogen fluoride is a notoriously corrosive gas and fluorine is by far the most reactive stable element and explosive even a couple of hundred degrees below freezing. Neon is fine, but also very rare and hard to extract. Although it’s the fourth most abundant element in the Universe, neon is only 0.0018% of our atmosphere by volume. This seems to leave ammonia. The problem with that is that it’s somewhat flammable, though less so than methane (I didn’t think it was even worth mentioning why that’s unsuitable), and also toxic. Consequently it doesn’t look like the airship is ever coming back.

There were doubtless a few other things I mentioned in the last blog post which have slipped my mind, but I thought I’d cover those for now. Sadly, I can’t see anyone ever using pounds, shillings and pence to buy a ticket for an airship from Prestwick to Mumbai, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could?

DNA – Douglas Noel Adams and Deoxyribonucleic Acid

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

The ultimate question, so to speak, is this:

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

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

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

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

I’m going to consider these in reverse order.

Organisms Only Apparently From Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organisms Accidentally Removed in Various Ways

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

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

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

Finally, Arthur finds an unexpected bottle of retsina:

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

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

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

Infinite Improbability Drive Creations

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

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

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

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

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

Trillian

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

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

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

From cocktails:

Cinchona pubescens – quinine, in bitter lemon.

Juniperus communis – juniper, in gin.

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

Prunus avium – cherry, also on cocktail stick.

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

Lepidum sativum – cress.

Sinapis alba – white mustard.

(Mustard and cress sandwiches)

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

Artemisia absinthium – wormwood, if they had absinthe.

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

Vanilla planifolia – vanilla orchid, same source.

Citrus aurantium – orange.

Pyrus malus – apple.

Angostura trifoliata – if they had genuine angostura bitters.

Solanum lycopersicum – tomato.

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

Canapes might contain:

Salmo salar – salmon

Thunnus tynnus – Atlantic bluefin tuna

Allium sativa – garlic

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

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

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

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

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

Lipstick:

Ricinus communis – Castor oil plant.

Theobroma cacao – cacao. Cocoa butter.

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

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

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

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

These last two are likely to be less common today.

Eye shadow: exclusively mineral ingredients.

Mascara: big overlap with lipstick.

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

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

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

Blusher:

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

Shampoo:

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

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

Conditioner:

Sorbitol occurs naturally in various fruits.

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

Lavandula angustifolia – lavender

Rosmarinus officinalis – rosemary

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

Jasminum officinale – jasmine.

Pogostemon cablin – patchouli (less likely).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hordeum vulgare – barley used to make the beer.

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

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

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

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

Ovis aries – sheep. Wool in dressing gown.

Tineola bisselliella – clothes moth. Possible but unlikely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commensal organisms:

Demodex folliculorum – follicle mite in Arthur’s eyelashes.

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

Gut flora – a large number of species.

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

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

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

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

Other Organisms Leaving Earth Voluntarily

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

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

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

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

A few more things can be drawn out of this:

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

James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’ – A Spoileriffic Review

This review is here rather than on Goodreads because I am rubbish at not revealing spoilers. I was once sitting in the cinema with my brother waiting for a film to start, and just as the lights went down, I blurted out the ending and ruined the whole experience for him. Funnily enough, one way of looking at James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’ is that it’s about what would happen to society if we all just followed our immediate impulses and intrusive thoughts, largely motivated by anger.

BE WARNED, THEREFORE: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN WHAT FOLLOWS.

It’s been said that there are three genres of excess in literature: pornography, melodrama and horror. Of these, melodrama seems to be largely out of fashion, although it’s possible that EastEnders constitutes this. Pursuing this thread, it’s also possible that Jeremy Kyle served a similar function. Viewers of those two programmes sometimes need to have their lives thrown into contrast with other people’s fictional or manipulated lives which are even worse. Even ‘The Simpsons’ has had this rôle in the past. Porn and horror are generally looked down upon and possibly read in secret by people who are ashamed of doing so. They’re considered qualitatively to be the bottom of the barrel in writing, although porn is sometimes relabelled erotica. I could turn this whole post into advice about how to write non-objectifying pornography but I actually wat to focus on horror.

I was twelve when I read James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’. I’d already read ‘The Rats’ and ‘Lair’ by that point, the last being newly published. I never actually owned any of his books up until about a week ago, when I bought the subject of this review. They come out of a time in my life when I was trying to fit in with boys, in the layer of nastiness and bigotry which sits across male childhood just before the onset of puberty. I feel like this layer is self-sustaining and operates like a standing wave in male development, and also that some men never emerge from it. It also seems to be sustained by schooling and it’s pretty damaging to everyone, whether one is inside or outside that demographic. It’s about cruelty, prejudice and in-group identification and is violent and aggressive.

In terms of writing and other creative work, this age corresponds to porn and horror. One thing to say in favour of horror is that it at least distracts from porn, except that there can be pornographic elements to horror. I’ve mentioned Alan Frank’s ‘Galactic Aliens’ before on this blog, which it took me a long time to get until I realised it wasn’t so much supposed to be science fiction as space horror, and was aimed at this age group. ‘The Fog’ is one of those books I attempted to read in order to break out of my science fiction ghetto, only to find that in an odd way it was kind of science fiction itself.

Skill in writing is still required to horrify and disgust the reader without forcing her to put the book down or throw it across the room. It isn’t enough to horrify alone: it needs to be horrifyingly fascinating, so you can’t look away. Stories are sometimes described as “car crashes” or “train wrecks”, but our worse sides are often brought out when we witness disasters such as these and can’t look away. It isn’t good to encourage this tendency, but maybe fulfilling this urge to experience horror outwith rather than within reality helps prevent this. Rather than attempting to defend this, I’ll just dive in and talk about the book.

Here’s the plot. A quiet Wiltshire village’s peace is disrupted by an apparent earthquake which injures and kills a number of residents and also seriously injures our hero John Holman as he drives through the settlement. It also releases a fog which turns out to drive air-breathing vertebrates violently insane, including humans. Unsurprisingly, the story focusses on the last. The story is structured as a series of increasingly deranged vignettes as the fog is blown towards London and climaxes with its arrival and its effects on millions of people, as Holman and the government try desperately to prevent more deaths. It becomes clear that the fog is in fact a pathogen created at Porton Down, though not explicitly blamed, and disposed of irresponsibly, although Porton Down scientists are also trying to neutralise the threat. Towards the end, it’s suggested that the fog might actually be sentient and purposeful. It’s ultimately destroyed when it enters the Blackwall Tunnel and is blown up with explosives and blocked in by concrete.

There are a number of interesting diversions along the way. My favourite is when one member of a lesbian couple who has just separated because her partner has gone “straight” decides to drown herself in the sea off Bournemouth, then changes her mind, only to find that the entire population of the town, 158 000 people if I recall correctly, has decided to do the same. There’s also a scene where the deputy head of a private school who abuses children (and is apparently gay) is massacred by the said children and has his penis chopped off by the caretaker. It’s all pretty graphic, and succeeds in its aim to shock and grab the reader. In the meantime, a pigeon-fancier gets attacked and killed by his birds, a poacher is trampled to death by cows and so forth. Holman’s girlfriend, Casey, is also driven mad by the fog and tries to kill him, then a misunderstanding by the police leads to him being arrested for assaulting her. She later goes on to kill her step-father, who attempts to rape her.

I read a review of the novel which said something like “if you try really hard, you’ll notice all the political incorrectness”. For me reading it in November 2022, it was more a question of trying to suspend my disquiet at the dodginess of quite a lot of it so I could get on with enjoying it. This all went over my head in 1979. I can’t really breeze through the rest of the book without mentioning this, so I’ll put it here to get it out of the way.

The most prominent issue is the relationship between Holman and Casey. Casey is very passive and I got the impression that she’s simply handed over from one paternalistic carer to the other, i.e. from her step-father to her boyfriend. On the other hand, she does stab her father to death with a pair of scissors when he makes sexual advances on her and also tries to kill Holman, both while under the influence of the fog. However, everything she is and does is described with reference to relationships with men and tends to be sexualised. There are maybe three sex scenes in the book which I skipped because I don’t like them and find them boring. I hope they didn’t add to the plot but I’m pretty confident they didn’t. There is, though, another way of thinking about this. There may well have been quite a few women with internalised misogyny in mid-1970s Britain whose character and approach to life were this undeveloped simply by living in such a patriarchal society.

Another issue is homophobia. Herbert conflates the deputy head’s homosexuality with his pædophilia, and in the case of the lesbian relationship, one of the partners is “cured” of her lesbianism by being with a man. This, though, raises some issues. Although these are both unrealistic stereotypes, there isn’t any reason to suppose that there are rare exceptions where these things do apply. I find the homosexuality/pædophilia confusion annoying and defamatory but in the case of the lesbian relationship I can see that one of the partners might turn out to discover her bisexuality, and I actually found that chapter to be quite sympathetically written. I think the problem is of selecting particular situations and portraying them as if they’re the rule. The question of the time it was set in is complex because attitudes and consequently psychology were very different at the time. I am of course overthinking this.

Herbert expends a fair bit of effort justifying the situation through what seems to be more than mere technobabble. ‘The Fog’ is yet another example of a story which I enjoyed and was happy to find myself enjoying a non-science fiction novel, only to find out that it was SF after all. This has happened with Iain Banks in a more general sense and also Kurt Vonnegut, and is a tendency I can’t explain in myself. There seems to be something about the style of certain genres which appeals to me while also suiting itself to sci-fi. This might be to do with shallow characterisation, and on that matter I will defend stories with cardboard cutout characters to the hilt because I’m concerned that a mythos is artificially constructed around the way protagonists behave in mainstream literature which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and forces us all to act inauthentically. This may not always be so of course. Besides this, there is a sense in which ideas replace characters in this kind of writing, and yet the poverty of imagination not directed towards characterisation and relationships in mainstream fiction is rarely addressed.

There is a very real sense in which the fog is the main character in the novel. It’s described as having agency, and Holman suspects that it has a will of its own. However, this is only hinted at. There’s also the question of the disease process leading to the violent behaviour involving the pathogen colonising the human brain and replacing the neurones. It’s better understood, though, as a kind of psychological force bringing out the worst in people, or rather exposing their more aggressive impulses. In a way, the fog can be seen as obscuring presumed subconscious violent urges in us all, or as paradoxically revealing them. Is it partly about not being able to trust ourselves to be good? Intrusive thoughts are like that. We often have the urge to do something appalling and wonder what it says about us, but what if we acted on those impulses? Are there people who have started to walk across bridges and simply thrown themselves off them to their deaths on a whim?

It says something about Herbert’s apparent view of human nature that the aggression and violence often takes the form of wish fulfillment. He seems to see civilisation as a thin veneer under which base impulses seethe and through which they attempt to push. The colonisation of the brain by the pathogens doesn’t seem to add something new so much as remove a shield. Then again, the transformation is reminiscent of zombies and also rabies, and the two are linked. To an extent, Herbert’s book is “our zombies are different”, and it has similarities to, for instance, ’28 Days Later’, particularly after the fog reaches London, but one difference is the maniacal laughter and amusement the infected exhibit. They’re having fun as they kill and rape. In fact, some of them are just having fun, as with the enormous orgy in London. The fog and their behaviour also tempts those who are not directly infected. Holman feels lured towards the nucleus of the fog in a siren-like manner and also wants to join in with the orgy, although it’s only a momentary whim. It’s about people succumbing to temptation as a form of wish-fulfillment.

‘The Fog’ is of course not the only work of fiction to use clouds, mist and fog prominently. There’s also Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’, Fred Hoyle’s ‘The Black Cloud’, John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, Olaf Stapledon’s gas attacks early in ‘Last And First Men’ and the Martian attacks depicted millions of years later in the same work, and the foggy moor in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’. The variants seem to be: fog that is inert but contains supernatural threats, inert fog concealing natural threats, active malevolent natural fog and active malevolent supernatural fog. ‘The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader’ has the Dark Island, both dark and shrouded in mist, where dreams, including nightmares, come true, so in other words a supernatural fog. Sarada has just suggested the Dark Island is the Dark Night Of The Soul, a spiritual crisis on the way to the Divine. Stapledon’s Martians are clouds of microörganisms communicating telepathically to generate a hive mind, and are therefore closest to Herbert’s version, which is interesting because of the similarity between their works ‘Fluke’ and ‘Sirius’. Hoyle’s Black Cloud is linked to his panspermia and Steady State theories and is a vast superintelligent interstellar cloud that blots out the Sun and threatens life on Earth simply because it doesn’t realise there can be planetary life. It sees that one way or another, clouds and fog serve as powerful metaphors for what’s hidden and often what we hide from ourselves, and they are often seen as alive or purposeful.

Herbert followed ‘The Fog’ with the more supernatural ‘The Dark’ but I haven’t read that yet.