The Night Lands: An Inner Portrait of Evil

First off: spoilers ahead. I think 97 years is just about enough time for that statute of limitations to run out.

The plot of The Night Land (1912, William Hope Hodgson) is simple: boy meets girl, boy loses girl (in contemporary times). Boy meets girl again, loses girl again (on the Earth long after the sun has gone out). Boy goes questing for girl, with armor and a sword (sorry—”Diskos”). Boy gets girl and guides her all the way home, where after a brief panic they live happily ever after.
Sounds great, right? Very classic, and the far-far-far-future setting makes it unusual for its time . Along with H. G. Wells' Time Traveler and a previous Hodgson novel, House on the Borderland, I believe this may have been an influence on Olaf Stapledon. The first part, where the narrator explains how his world works, makes telepathic contact with his love, and sets off on the quest are all straightforward. Not necessarily well-written, mind you—roughly 90% of the paragraphs begin with “And…”—but not bad. You can tell the narrator views his own story as a knightly quest. Pretty much the only thing he’s missing is a horse.

The problem comes at the halfway point, when he finds his love, Naani. She is the sole survivor of another human outpost where the Earth-force that sustains humanity in this post-solar future has waned. They can still hear others from her settlement being chased and killed by monsters out in the darkness, but she has apparently survived for about a month without any protection. Not bad. As they move forward however, we quickly learn that the protagonist is an obsessive, controlling domestic abuser whose misogyny knows no bounds. Frankly, once he actually interacts with his true love—and their loves transcends the millenia of history!—he is revealed to be, by modern standards, evil.

The amazing thing is that he obviously does not regard his behavior as evil—in fact, he thinks their relationship suffers most when he is too lenient. Neither does the story repudiate his behavior. This is crucial—for a long time I was hoping that the guy was essentially an unreliable narrator and that the story events would prove how wrong/evil he was. Nope! He gets to live happily ever after with his love.

Let me illustrate just how messed up this relationship is. The first hint comes when he realizes that Naani is eating less than he recommends. He ‘shakes’ her for this offense, trying to put some sense into her. That seems like a bit of an overreaction; I can see why she would be trying to conserve limited resources. But to him it is ‘naughty’—his term for anything she does on her own instead of doing exactly what he tells her to.

Next, he decides that he should carry her for six out of every eighteen hours of walking. She doesn’t want to, she’d rather walk, but he forces her to be carried. After several days of this, he realizes that his armor has been bruising her as she’s carried around. His reaction to this: to smack her around some more (more ‘shaking’) for not having alerted him to this harm she’s suffering. OK, WTF? This guy’s got issues.

Next, they find a fairly safe spot and she takes a bath. She’s lingering and joking around (we assume—there’s actually no dialog in the story), and resists when he insists that they leave. So he picks her up and carries her away. After she lets him get a mile or two on, she reminds him slyly that he forgot her shoes. Again, he beats her for his own oversight, angry that she would make him make a mistake like that. After that, she starts acting in a mock-submissive way, not speaking unless spoken to, not snuggling or kissing him, acting like a servant or slave. This is when I had some hope for the story: maybe it’s showing how the abuse is ruining their relationship.

Nope! After a few days of this, he realizes that he’s been too lenient with her, and that’s the problem. He takes off his belt, takes off her shirt, and literally whips her. After that, she tearfully hugs him and their relationship appears to return to an ideal state. Immediately after that, they’re attacked by horrible monsters. He saves her, but almost dies in the process. After running from the monsters a lot (the monsters do no more harm to her than ripping off her clothes—grrrr), she rescues him and gets him to a safe island and nurses him back to health, all snuggles & kisses.

Now, here’s where I was hoping that the narrator was just delusional. I managed to continue reading by imagining that she’s just playing along with him; after all, he’s her only chance to get back to a secure human habitation (the “Last Redoubt”). I kept hoping that maybe, just maybe, they’d get back to security and she’d turn around and smack him.

Not so much.

The darkness attacks her specifically as they near home base, and the narrator carries her for several days—never sleeping, fighting off monsters one-handed as they near their goal. You can see why I was wondering if he were a reliable narrator. Eventually they get close enough that other forces from the Redoubt come out to help them. There, a doctor pronounces her dead and the narrator collapses in a dead faint.

OK, I could deal with that. Maybe he’ll be eaten up with guilt about the beatings he gave her; maybe they weakened her such that she couldn’t fight off the dark powers anymore. Maybe he’ll learn a lesson.

Not so much.

He wakes for her funeral, planning to expire after his final duty to her is done. As they place her on a rolling road at the end of the ceremony (their version of a river funeral, I guess) they see movement! At first he thinks it mere fancy, but no! She’s alive after all! She gets to live with this violent, obsessive domestic abuser for the rest of her life, woohoo! I guess it’s better than being eaten by monsters, but frankly, she’d survived the monsters without him, at least for a time. I might have taken my chances back on that safe, isolated island.

Throughout it all the narrator continually engages in infantalizing language: talking about how small she is (her two hands could fit in his one), her tiny dainty feet (I got to wondering if he had a foot fetish, actually), her childish behavior, child-like innocence, insisting on carrying her, etc. Coming from today’s sensibility, it is incredibly annoying and definitely shocking, especially the unapologetic beatings. And throughout it all he insists, for pages and pages at a time, how very much he loves her and wants only to keep her safe from any harm. He only beats her to keep her from harming herself! She makes him do it! The paradox of injuring someone to keep them from injury never occurs to this guy. It was frankly incredibly disturbing to read and I was very glad to be done with it. It is a textbook example of everything you learn about the psychology of abusers--but from the abuser's perspective. Creepy.

I had previously encountered a terribly misogynistic first-person protagonist in The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel (1908). And it was also pretty disturbing when he, the last man on Earth, started smacking around the last woman on Earth once he finds her. However, the narrative makes it clear that he is almost wholly evil: he also has committed and conspired to murder, was instrumental in (unintentionally) setting off the phenomenon that killed every other person on Earth, and spends some of his post-apocalypse free time in setting explosive charges to blow up entire cities. Even by his own accounts, he’s not right in the head. Night Land however, has no such criticism for its protagonist.


Obviously this book has been very influential: Greg Bear’s recent City at the End of Time (which I haven’t yet read) explicitly takes Night Land as its main influence. Wikipedia also cites Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith as lauding it. There are, I discovered, two anthologies worth of Night Land-inspired short stories out there, both edited by Andy W. Robertson. I’m tempted to pick them up and see if any of the authors engage with the horrible misogyny on display here. None of the people who mentioned the book as one I should read mentioned that feature of the narrative, which I felt dominated the entire second half. They all focused on the amazing setting instead. Likewise, the Wiki page declines to even name Naani, the motivating force/quest object/only named character in the entire book! Apparently the article editors didn’t find her worth mentioning. I’m just really shocked that this novel isn’t up there with the Gor novels as a notorious early example of incredibly f*cked up gender relations.

Full disclosure: I have previously read House on the Borderland and Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson. I was impressed by some bits of Borderland, not much by Ghost Pirates. I’ll never be a fan of Hodgson’s writing style, although I’ll admit that when he wants to he can really pick up the pace. I’ll note that I was also upset by the treatment of the sole female character in Borderland (I think my comment was: “the dog has more agency”) and Ghost Pirates had no female characters at all. As for source, I picked up all of these from Project Gutenberg and read them on my eBook and my PC as circumstances warranted.

Books Received

FTC or no FTC, it's probably a good idea to post 'books received' anyway. I definitely appreciate that Andrew Wheeler and SFSignal do it, and given that I'm not writing as much as I'd like, this seems like an appropriate way to send the authors/publishers some love. So here's the list for this week:



We've got two Glen Cook books here. Curtis and I both enjoy his work quite a bit; I particularly love his Garret Files, and Curtis enjoys both those and his grittier mil-fantasy Black Company books. The Dragon Never Sleeps appears to be one of Cook's rare forays into sf, and I'm hoping to be able to read it someday. Swordbreaker looks like Cook's take on the sentient sword trope of fantasy. The last one of these kinds of stories that I really enjoyed was Lawrence Watt Evans' Misenchanted Sword. I'm definitely curious to see what Cook can make of it.

We've got Neal Asher with another Polity novel. I've read The Skinner and Cowl by Asher. They both had their definite high points, but his style never quite matched up with my tastes. I'm afraid I'll be unlikely to get to this one.

Luckily, I get this one guilt-free. I've already glowingly reviewed Egan's Incandescence for SFSignal.

I'm always looking for good sf/f/h humor novels. However, it's notoriously difficult to do well. I know just enough Cthulhu mythos to be dangerous, so I have hopes that this will be a good funny book to suit my fancy. Maybe over the winter holiday when I'm completely brain-fried but have a bit more time to read?

Last but certainly not least, Finch is likely to jump towards the top of my to-read pile. I've adored both of VanderMeer's Ambergris novels (The City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword). I've had slightly worse luck with VanderMeer outside of Ambergris; Veniss Underground didn't hook me the way I was hoping it would. But Finch is supposed to be set back in the Ambergris universe -- yay!

Meanwhile, I've been playing around with the Barnes & Nobel book reader app for the iPhone. So far, so good, although I haven't had an extended session with it yet. In order to do a full test, I *had* to buy a copy of The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922) and The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesteron (1908). Had to, I tell you! So I started Thursday today, and let me tell you, after months of slogging through William Hope Hodgson's Night Land, reading Chesterton is like flying.

Fast Ships, Black Sails (and stuff)

It would have been great if I'd finished reading this in time for "Talk like a Pirate Day," but alas it was not to be. Since starting this work/school schedule, I've dropped from reading 4-6 books a month to only finishing 2. And I'm writing even less. It appears that for this semester at least, actual writing has been displaced by doing stuff with the fencing community. Then I'm working full-time, plus an extra 6-7 hours a week to make up for time spent in class, then 5-10 hours a week on the homework... anyway, it's a very stressful semester. Next semester should be better--the class I'll be taking will have just as much homework, but it will be offered in the evening instead of the afternoon. I'll be able to work normal instead of extended hours, and I expect life to be quite improved. And someday I'll be finished with my Masters altogether! (ETA Winter 2010) I can hardly conceive of all the free time I'll have then... but I dare to dream.

But what about the book? This anthology is a lot of fun, opening with delightful stories by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, Rhys Huges, and Kage Baker. One thing I found most interesting about this compilation is how it lays out so many tropes associated with the pirate tale sub-genre. "Boojum" by Bear & Monette takes on the ship who cares for her crew (here with a literally sentient ship swimming in the vastness of space). Baker's "I Begyn As I Mean to Go On" takes on tales of hidden treasure, curses of the dead and terrifying islands and islanders. She also focuses on the historical and religious context of the pirate tale--particularly the Catholic faith of the Spanish traders, sailors and missionaries involved in the Atlantic of the time of piracy's romantic peak--themes that other authors in the collection also utilize. Howard Waldrop's "Avast, Abaft!" runs a bunch of stock tropes together in a literal mash-up involving the HMS Pinafore, the Pirates of Penzance and Dick Deadeye, amongst others. Kelly Barnhill's story involves the lure of sea, and people for whom saltwater flows in their veins--such people cannot be kept shorebound. Justin Howe's "Skillet and Saber" aims a ship's boy towards violence and cannibalism. Conrad Williams' "68 07' 15" N, 31 36' 44" W" portrays monomaniacal obsession.

In another sf take on the take, "Pirate Solutions" by Katherine Sparrow looks at piracy, either maritime or cybernetic, as freedom. Also on the sf side, David Freer and Eric Flint's "Pirates of the Suara Sea" shows us how ships that are the prey of pirates can turn the tables, even on alien seas. The final sf offering, Jayme Lynn Blaschke's "The Whale Below" shows how even the most straight-forward plunder can go horribly wrong when the deckhands take things into their own hands.

Brendan Connell's "We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars" deals with colonialist relationships with non-European islanders. Offering an alternate-history twist, "A Cold Day in Hell" by Paul Batteiger gives us the cat-and-mouse game of national navy vs. pirate in a 16th century where the "little ice age" instead froze the very seas. (We'll not inquire as to how any of the surviving population found food.) Naomi Novik, counterintuitively not writing in her Master-and-Commander-with-dragons universe, takes on the kidnapped-aristocrat trope and the woman-going-to-sea-disguised-as-a-man trope all in one go in the enjoyable "Araminta, or, the Wreck of the Amphidrake." Closing the book on a strong note, Garth Nix's creations Mr. Fitz and Sir Hereward plot a course (sorry, couldn't help myself) for the (almost)-impossible-to-reach-bastion and creatures from the abyss in "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe."

And for flat-out over-the-top fun, I will mention my favorite of the anthology, located right near the front: Rhys Hughes' "Castor on Troubled Waters," one of the tallest of tall tales I have ever had the pleasure to read.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention a few stories that didn't work for me. Steve Aylett's "Voyage of the Iguana" seems to be absurdist humor in the vein of W. E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle. That would be fine--I for one love Bowman's comic novel--except that in "Iguana's" case things seems to simply drag on too long. Chalk this up to senses of humor being notoriously individual; I imagine a lot of people will find it hilarious, but I ended up skipping to the next story after a few pages. I also found "Ironface" by Michael Moorcock to be a weak offering, but that is probably because I have not yet found my way into his "Eternal Champion" universe, of which this three page vignette appears to be part. I imagine that people better versed with Moorcock will find it more enlightening.

However, as a whole I found the stories here both fun to read and thought-provoking. I had never before reflected on the richness contained within the microcosm of pirate's tales until the amazing variety of the stories here drew it to my attention. Bravo to the authors and editors!

Fencing Coverage!

OK, this post is a little off-topic for this blog. However, that's going to become something of the norm around here. I've generally tried to keep Spiral Galaxy as a book reviewing blog, but right now that would mean very infrequent posting. I've got very little time to read right now (other commitments include: working, going to school, working more to make up for the time spent in school, 5-10 hours of homework a week, time spent as a fencing referee, slush reading for Strange Horizons, other management tasks for Strange Horizons, family obligations, general housework, and sleeping) so I've been giving priority to reviews written for SH and SFSignal. But I don't want poor little Spiral Galaxy to waste away entirely, so for the next year or so it will morph into something closer to Karen Burnham's personal blog, instead of being 90% books.

Anyway, in that spirit, let me promote something from my fencing side of life:

Fencing is often hard to find televised, but now we can get the world championships streamed live on the Internet! Woohoo! Anyway, if you've ever been curious about fencing, this might be something fun to check out.

New Ink! Now with Extra Geek

I hope that you'll all recognize those equations more-or-less instantly. If not, be educated here. As I put it to the artist last night: "These are probably the most complicated things I'll ever actually understand."

(That same artist pointed out the awesome symmetry of getting the equations that describe electromagnetism tattooed using a electromagnet, which drives the needle.)

Upon getting back to engineering and E&M specifically, I've remembered how much I loved that part of being a physicist. I'm very lucky that my engineering job also deals with those phenomena to some extent. I was reflecting the other day on how aesthetically beautiful these equations are, and a lot of E&M math tends to be that way. That's when my ideas for my next set of tattoos (which I'd been pondering for about three years) finally fell in to place.

So my plans for my upper back have finally crystalized, and I've started the process of getting my ideas for a more complete back panel into the form of actual art instead of just nebulous concepts. That part will take a little longer, but with any luck will be done by the end of the year.

BTW, in my web-surfing meanderings before getting this tattoo done, I tripped across a science tattoo emporium. Hours of entertainment, and the realization that I'm nowhere near the craziest geek out there followed. Also, relatively few people choose these equations for their tattoos. Much more popular is e^(i(pi)) + 1 = 0. Fair enough.

Core Fantasy

As per my last post, I'm starting in on data collection for my research project. It's a nice, more-or-less relaxing way to pretend I'm doing something productive over my long weekend. [1]

For my first sweep of sf/f short stories, I've been going down the award nominee lists, looking for things under 10,000 words that are available online. I've had no problem identifying lots of sf that is clearly sf: "Exhalation," "Evil Robot Monkey," "Little Lost Robot," etc. Some of these fantasy stories are a little trickier, though.

One story that I'm not sure about is James Patrick Kelley's "Don't Stop." It's a modern day ghost story, focused on character, with perhaps some horror. Does it fit my brief of "core fantasy?"

Also worrying because of how it plunges into horror is the modern day supernatural horror story, "The Button Bin" by Mike Allen. Fantasy, horror, slipstream?

And then there's "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson. Nothing actually precludes an sf reading of this--the monkeys could be doing extra-dimensional travel that they simply do not deign to explain to us. It doesn't *have* to be magic.

My knee-jerk reaction to all three of these is to say that a drop of fantasy makes it fantasy, but all of them have enough ambiguity that I'm not sure they should be included in the core cluster. So far I'm leaving them out and marking them as interesting test cases for the post-training phase. Opinions?



[1] It's certainly more productive than planning my next tattoo--which I'm pretty sure will happen sooner rather than later, now that I've finalized my plan for my upper back. The final piece finally fell into place over the last week. BWAHAHAHA!

Bring the Controversy OR, Research Plan Update

Remember that plan I had to use a pattern classification algorithm to distinguish different eras of SF writing? I got some very lovely expressions of interest and support, but I didn't get the one thing that I needed: someone saying, "Why yes, here are one hundred Golden Age sf stories, all scanned in, digitized and proofread." And unfortunately, what with the new job, finishing grad school, and stepping up responsibilities at Strange Horizons, I'm not going to be able to do the scutwork required for this one. So that goes on the back burner.

So I thought about other research plans for next year. This is the second project I've had to scrap for lack of time, unfortunately. I thought about doing an author-overview of Greg Egan's short fiction, but I'm afraid that will actually be too hard, given the year I'm looking at. Unfortunately, writing pattern recognition algorithms is much easier for me than thinking deeply and writing coherently about patterns and themes in an author's work. So I had to go with my fall-back plan, which I hope will be entertaining for you all:

Can I write a pattern recognition algorithm that reliably distinguishes between fantasy and science fiction?

I know I'm asking for trouble, but this is one of the easiest research projects I can do. I'll limit the input data to short fiction from the last 5 years, so that I'll be mostly comparing apples to apples (and it will be relatively easy to find 100 stories of each type already online--that's the most important part). My feature set will be related to grammatical usage, to see if there are significant style differences between sf and fantasy. The initial training and testing sets will consist of 'core' sf and fantasy: pieces where no one would reasonably dispute their categorization. If it looks like a doubtful case, I'll save it for later. I may be tapping the hive mind to confirm my suspicions on occassion, also to see if any reasonable dispute arises. 50 stories of each set will be used to do feature selection and initial training, the other 50 will be the initial testing set.

If the results look promising on the testing set, then I'll start throwing boarderline cases at the algorithm, and see how it classifies some of the trickier stories. How will it classify "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," for instance? That should yield some interesting results.

I want to be VERY clear here: if it is in any way successful in classifying the two (and I don't necessarily think it will be, see below), I will NOT be saying that "Thus X is fantasy and Y is science fiction, absolutely and forever, so mote it be!" This will be purely descriptive, not prescriptive, and will simply be another data point to use in the decades-long categorization debate. I'll be doing it because it's fun and relatively easy.

Why do I have any hope of success? Well, one of the last algorithms I wrote was for a grad school project. I asked it to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction using grammatical frequencies as the features. I was very surprised when it was able to correctly classify the two with 92% accuracy based on only 3 features. That's pretty amazing, frankly. Among the things it mis-classified: Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" initially showed up as non-fiction (it didn't in a revised version of the algorithm), a NY Times article on flooding in North Dakota showed up as fiction, as did a Michael Moore essay, and my reviewing manifesto showed up as fiction as well. It's the cases that break the algorithm that are always the most interesting, and I'm hoping that this little science project can contribute a little to the ongoing discussion. However, I'm totally prepared for there to be no significant difference at all; I have a suspicion that adventure writing is adventure writing, whether it uses swords or blasters. But that will be an interesting result all on its own.

I'll keep you posted as I go along. I plan to present the complete results at the 31st International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in March (assuming they approve my abstract--they may laugh it out of the conference). Feel free to throw suggestions (or short stories that have been previously published) my way! I want to make sure I get as diverse a sample set as possible.

Thoughts on the Canterbury Tales

Well, it took seven months, but I got through the Canterbury Tales. I read the Norton Critical edition (not pictured here), which was marvelous. The text is in Medieval English, but with lots & lots of helpful annotations in the margins and as footnotes. At first it was like learning to read all over again: I actually had to read it out loud to myself. About halfway through I got into the pace and rhythm of it and didn't have much trouble at all.

Let me just say: I can't review Canterbury Tales. Oh Hell No. I enjoyed it, and learned quite a bit from it, and I'm jotting down some tidbits that may amuse. But to review one of the seminal works of written English that has survived over 600 years? Uh-uh.

• I was afraid reading this would be a slog, but as with so many classics I've read recently, it's actually a lot of fun. Especially if you can just go with the comedy instead of trying to analyze it for a class.


• Monty Python comes by it honestly (as does Benny Hill). At one point Chaucer gives himself a Tale, and goes off in high-chivalric style about a shiny knight and his shiny armor and shiny horse (all in perfect aab,ccb rhyme scheme) before the Host shuts him up and makes him tell something else--felt a bit like Holy Grail for a second there. Also, lots & lots of sex farce in here. I think Judd Aptow movies must be accepted as a distinguished part of a long-standing tradition in Western culture, honestly.


• Some interesting translations: luxurie = lechery; whileaway = Woe is me!; lust = desire in a general way, not specifically sexual; wood = mad/crazy; nice = foolish (often). Linguistic drift is fun!
  


• Relationships between the genders have been a matter of cultural negotiation probably as long as there's been culture; here we get every view of women from saints to sluts and everything in between.


• Sometimes you'll really shock the heck out of your audience by having all the characters wrap things up by being kind & intelligent to each other instead of being idiots to the point of tragedy.


• If you're an evil guy wandering about the countryside, and you meet a fellow evil guy, and then you find out he's the Devil, what's the first question you would ask him? Back then, apparently, it's: "Do you always look like that?" (Basically asking if he looks different when he's at home in Hell.) I can just imagine someone today asking "So who does your clothes?"


• The one story that deals with an innocent child is horrifyingly anti-semetic and doesn't fit with any of the other tales here.


• The conflation of Greek myths & fairy that you see in Midsummer Night's Dream also shows up here. Not sure why that is, but it's obviously well established.


• Even back then they talked about the good old days when the people were closer to the fae, before the churchmen came and sort of crowded/shouted them out.


• Televangelists are also part of a long, glorious tradition, represented here by a "Pardoner" who sold indulgences.


• Predictably then, cynicism about religion & religious hucksters is also venerable.

So far one of the most important things I've derived from reading all these classics is this: people should have an opportunity to read these things on their own terms, without having them shoved down their throats at school. That way they can take more time with them, and get different things out of them than the pre-approved interpretations. I'm so glad that I didn't read this in college, and I'm equally glad that I've read it now. It's a great perspective on different traditions of story-telling, which means, as it should, that's it's fun to read.

In Which I Blame George W. Bush for Anathem

Some sf books are novels of power, where fully realized characters move through richly painted landscapes and evoke ideas of stunning originality. I love those books! Anathem is not that book. Other sf books are intricate puzzles for the mind, inviting you to enjoy identifying and solving neat intellectual puzzles. I love those books too! Luckily, Anathem is that kind of book. And when Neal Stephenson writes a puzzle book it's a bit deeper than your typical murder mystery. It leads one to ask the question "Why the heck is he writing this puzzle book?" and then (in further intellectual exercise) you can speculate up some interesting answers.

The biggest game in Anathem is Spot the Smeerp! [1] Except here instead of alien critters we're looking for Western philosophers. Throughout the background, world-building, dialog, encyclopedia excerpts, and appendices, Stephenson recapitulates for us the whole of Western classical philosophy, at least those bits that also include the natural sciences. But instead of discussing Occam's Razor, the characters here talk about Gardan’s Steelyard--Spot the Smeerp! [2]

How can he cram all this infodumping into an sf story? It's easy when your characters are (almost) all philosophers, and your hero is a young philosopher learning his way. The basic set-up of the world is that there are many Maths and Concents (cloisters of a sort) set up around the world, each divided into four parts. The fraas and suurs (smeerp versions of friars and nuns) in the Annual section open their doors to outsiders every year. In the Decade section, they only open their doors every ten years. I'm sure you can extrapolate to the Century and Millenium sections. The system (worked out in exquisite detail) has apparently been working pretty well for almost 3000 years now. They're perfectly capable of pulling up the drawbridges at any time and riding out the political and cultural storms outside their walls. They eschew any technology that may break down during Dark Age periods, trusting mostly large machines of stone and metal. They do not meddle in the affairs of others, dedicating themselves to collecting, preserving, and discovering knowledge. Needless to say, it is perfectly natural that 90% of their conversations revolve around science and philosophy. [3]

However, most stories can't thrive inside walls opened only once every 100 years or so. We need to get our ivory tower theoreticians out into the world. Along comes a handy crisis, upon which the Fate of the World (of course) rests. For some reason the philosophers can't go about openly, so instead we follow our young hero Erasmus as he drives, walks, and sails most of the way around the world, learning as he goes. Obviously he couldn't become the Hero he needs to be if he just caught a plane to the scene of the climactic action. However, rather against my expectations, he doesn't learn about the outside world and its richness and diversity and value--instead he learns more about the importance of abstract philosophy. In fact, it is only those philosophers who can Save the World!

So we have a fun book here (and don't let me fool you -- between the Spot the Smeerp game and the Bildungsroman, [4] it really is a fun book) that leads you through certain branches of philosophy. It will probably teach many of Stephenson's readers quite a bit about the traditions of Western thought. But why bother? And why do it now?

Well, Stephenson must think this is all very important; so important that only the people who know philosophy and live (mostly) pure lives of the mind will be his Heroes. Probably, like most sf readers, he feels the internal, intellectual life is very important and rewarding. OK, so when was he writing it? It came out in 2008, so he probably turned it in sometime in 2007, and he writes all his books in long hand with fountain pens, and it's well over 900 pages in print, it had to have taken a few years... Bush! It's all Dubya's fault!

Bush ran for office, rather famously, by being a "nice" guy and a "tough" guy instead of a smart guy. In fact, he embodied that strain of American culture that finds something rather suspicious about educated people. He was in favor of jocks with guns solving the world's problems. I think we can all see how well that's worked out. There are few jocks and no guns in Anathem--the closest you get are the coolly intellectual Shaolin (smeerp = Ringing Vale) monks. Frankly, Anathem is a paen to intellectualism and elitism--and I say Hurrah! [5]

The dark ages of 2001-2009 may explain certain certain resonances between Anathem and Incandescence, Greg Egan's latest novel. [6] In that book, we play Spot the Smeerp with physics experiments. (What does Foucault's Pendulum look like when conducted with rocks floating at the center of a tumbling asteroid orbiting a black hole?) It's only through sheer brain power (and, like Anathem, without digital computing) that an alien world can be saved. Why no digital computers? Perhaps to prove to ourselves that we don't need any stinkin' shiny AI/Robot/Computer/Logic-Named-Joe to make our science fiction--we can do it with only the power of our brains. [7]

Sure, these authors seem to say--sure, jocks with guns and SFX are fun to read about in Space Operas and Mil SF, but in the long run it's the smart guys who've learned the patterns of history and the system of the world [8] that are going to save us all.





[1] "Calling a Rabbit a Smeerp" being a traditional cheat in sf world-building.

[2] And if you have to look in the glossary, that's cheating!

[3] As opposed to say, gossip about the other fraas and suurs.

[4] No smeerp here, that just means a Coming of Age Story.

[5] With the caveat that he really should have included some philosophy from outside the Western tradition; as it is the book seems unbalanced due to its single minded focus on the West.

[6] Egan is Australian, but definitely aware of the political climate. See his story “Lost Continent” in Jonathan Strahan's Starry Rift anthology, which attacks Australia's own anti-immigrant movement.

[7] And sometimes banging those rocks together. Keep it up guys!

[8] Coincidentally, System of the World is the title of the 3rd book in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy.

Book Haul!

It wouldn't be a WorldCon without a haul of books! Here's what I've got:

• 2 volumes of Clark Ashton Smith, who Ross Lockhart of Nightshade Press described as "the poet" of the Lovecraft era. Ross is a very good salesman, and also a generally awesome person. The Locus & Nightshade tables adjoined, so we got to talk a bit. Just listening to him made me homesick for California. =)
• Also from Nightshade, The Lees of Laughter's End by Steven Erikson. This one Ross sold to Curtis.
• Tachyon press was nice enough to carry a large selection of non-fiction titles, even those they didn't publish. From them I bought Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick and Canary Fever by John Clute.
• Direct from the author(s), and thus signed very nicely, I got Farah Mendlesohn's The Inter-Galactic Playground and Farah & Edward James' A Short History of Fantasy.
• NESFA Press was at the Con, so I picked up Heinlein in Dimension by Alexei Panshin, an older book and one of the early works of 'serious' sf criticism.

That's actually it for the Con; a pretty light haul for me. Honestly I would have bought more (especially Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl--but it sold out!), but I almost never had time to really go through the tables at the dealer's room. Con-going has changed a lot for me since 2006--less free time but higher quality time overall.

But there another delight was delivered when I got home: an ARC of Daryl Gregory's second novel, The Devil's Alphabet (which I will always think of as Oh You Pretty Things--apparently his favored title). I'm definitely looking forward to diving into that one.