Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures

edited by Brian W. Aldiss
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1974

This is one of the best anthologies I've ever read. Editor Brian Aldiss's is intelligent and thoughtful in his selections, organization, and commentary. The pieces fit into a coherent, overarching whole with unifying themes other than 'these writers are young and pushing the envelope of printed decency and are predicted to make a whole lot of money' (ok, that's a bit harsh, but definitely a 'they don't make em like they used to' moment).

So Space Opera. Before this I thought of space opera as being something like the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie - sprawling, epic, graceful, and literally grand operatic in theme and scope. But it turns out space opera is 'opera' more in the sense of 'soap opera':

Science Fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and propioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera. This volume is dedicated to her.
Science fiction is for real. Space opera is for fun. Generally.

- from Aldiss's introduction. And here he writes of the common themes found in the subgenre:

Ideally, the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to match the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring dark. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than a Black Hole. And all must come right in the end.

There were some extraordinary stories here, all categorized into four sections, each devoted to a different fundamental element/theme of space opera. The first section, "Is Everything an Illusion," is all about escapism. The highlight here is Daniel Galouye's Tonight the Sky Will Fall - a masterful, masterful, spiritual and philosophical epic of a work. It begins with the everyday, and a slight case of paranoia, which balloons to include strange and clandestine scientists and organizations, solipsistic revelations (the entirety of existence is actually just imagined in a single individual's mind), the origin of the universe and nature of God, the end of the world, an awakening to god-like powers, and finally, a full circle back to the everyday. The first, crescendo portion of this arc was repeated in the first (and best, yes?) Matrix movie. The entire dramatic circle is also encapsulated in Algernon Blackwood's The Adventure of Tornado Smith, which is not surprisingly also one of my favorite short stories.

The second section, "Precipices of Light That Went Forever Up..." deals with immensity, of space and otherwise. Jeff Sutton's After Ixmal has a superintelligent computer dominating the post-apocalypse Earth... only, it is surprisingly human in its behavior when it discovers another computer entity in the solar system and feels threatened, leading eventually to mutual destruction. A parable.

Section 3, "Exile Is Our Lot," opens with the biting Colony by Philip K Dick. A slight jab of an ending which can be seen from a mile away, but still a great little gem.

4, "The Godlike Machines," opens with the mini-epic The Storm, by A E Van Vogt. Amazing and beautiful. The majestic starcruiser splitting into a thousand pieces in the belly of a magnetic storm; a couple lost at sea, marooned for the rest of their lives on a foreign planet; a wedding between woman and machine man; it's just filled with far-reaching and grand sights. After this, Randall Garrett's Time Fuze is a short cautionary tale about the accidental end of the world, and finally The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov, is the perfect closer: man invents a computer to answer the question of how to reverse entropy and thereby avoid the death of the universe. The computer evolves into larger and larger forms, occupying first a warehouse-size space, then a continent, later a moon, a planet, then hyperspace, becoming galactic, and finally a cosmic computer, which manages to solve the question, but only after all the universe is dead and dark. Then it starts over with "Let There Be Light!" A clever, thoughtful adventure - a brighter companion to the fatalistic After Ixmal.

All in all a terrific compendium. Thought-provoking, fun, romantic, tragic! Hopefully it exists in print somewhere, because it certainly deserves a place among and perhaps above all of our modern anthologies....

On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson (1978), Ch. 2: Heredity

A few gems and interesting trains of thought from this chapter:

1) Robert Nozicks argues thusly in favor of vegetarianism:

Human beings justify the eating of meat on the grounds that the animals we kill are too far below us in sensitivity and intelligence to bear comparison. It follows that if representatives of a truly superior extraterrestrial species were to visit Earth and apply the same criterion, they could proceed to eat us in good conscience.

Could we apply the same reasoning to plants as well? What about jellyfish, or sea anemones, or other plant-like animals? There's a large gray area here....

2) Now follow this. The anthropologist George P. Murdock compiled a list of characteristics which seem to be present in every human culture that has been recorded by history and ethnography:

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology (theological ideas related to death and the afterlife), ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, firemaking, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.

Now, how many of these characteristics would you say are unique to humankind? How many are the outcome of advanced social lives and high intelligence? In a related question, how many of these characteristics are inevitable within an intelligent and complexly organized society?

Wilson observes that if ANTS were endowed with the capacity for rationalization while maintaining their current societal framework, then their societies would exhibit the following characteristics:

Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste determination, cast laws, colony-foundation rules, colony organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, firemaking, food taboos, gift giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care, law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, soldier castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, tool making, trade, visiting, and weather control.

...An observation which brings us down a notch on the totem pole, though not without its questionable areas (cosmology and firemaking?).

3) Closer to us now, Wilson writes how chimps are similar to humans anatomically and physiologically. They are extremely social, with complex social behavior; they learn and use tools, and they have distinct culture. They can learn vocabularies of two hundred English words and basic syntax and invent new expressions. They can be taught self-awareness. An interesting thing to consider, which at this point still separates them from humans, is the unawareness of mortality, the concept of personal death. Premack writes: "What if, like man, the ape dreads death and will deal with this knowledge as bizzarely as we have? [...] Until I can suggest concrete steps in teaching the concept of death without fear, I have no intention of imparting the knowledge of mortality to the ape."

Certainly a chimp is made aware of death when a fellow chimp dies, but he appears to have no awareness, as of yet, of the inevitability of his own death. Isn't that a strange idea? - to think that all of us, as children, pass through a stage when we become aware of our own mortality, and that chimps never reach this stage (for now). Are they like a collective proto-Adam, who has not been tainted by the fruit of the tree of knowledge?

4) A central point to Wilson's book, and to sociobiology in general, is that much of human nature is genetically determined; and, furthermore, that "the traits of humans nature were adaptive during the time that the human species evolved and that genes consequently spread through the population that predisposed their carriers to develop those traits."

A specific case he examines is the incest taboo, which is universal throughout human cultures. Everywhere it is forbidden and punished by cultural sanctions, and yet, at the same time, there is a deeper, psychological sanction in the case of sibling incest: the fact that "a sexual aversion automatically develops between persons who have lived together when one or all grew to the age of six." That this psychological phenomenon has evolved within human nature may be explained by the fact that it is to our evolutionary advantage to avoid inbreeding; inbreeding, of course, leads to severe genetic abnormalities and other pathologies including physical deformity and mental defects. This is because, on estimate,

each person carries an average of four lethal gene equivalents: either four genes that cause death outright when in the homozygous state, eight genes that cause death in fifty percent of homozygotes, or other, arithmetically equivalent combinations of lethal and debilitating effects.

So, in the bizarre situation in which you were able to produce both sperm and eggs, and somehow impregnated yourself, your child would die, statistically speaking, 100% of the time (1/4 chance of homozygosity for each of 4 genes). If, instead, you were to inbreed with a close relative, results are unsurprisingly similar.

(to be continued...)

Shostakovich - Symphony No. 14

Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, conductor Alexander Lazarev

This is bleak, dark music. The majority of movements sound despairing and hopeless... my favorite of which was the opening theme from "De Profundis," repeated in "The Death of a Poet." It is this genius statement which James Horner apparently ripped off to write the string quartet for the closing credits of Aliens - one of my favorite movie soundtracks, so no surprise that I like the original... well, not better, but similarly. (That was graceful.)

Backing up, this work is a collection of poems set for two voices and symphony, modeled after Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. He meant it "as a protest against death, and, by extension, against tyranny and persecution in any form" (not Shostakovich himself, but the liner note author Eric Roseberry). The texts are from poets writing during times of war and revolt, with a large variety of depressing subjects including - yes - war casualties, suicide, solitary confinement in prison, and a dying poet, but also several with different subject matter, including a medieval witch, tavern, and a letter cursing the Sultan of Constantinople. Some of these latter are the exceptions to the dark and bleak music - especially, queerly, the final "Conclusion," whose text by Rainer Maria Rilke is:

Death is immense.
We belong to him
of the laughing mouth.
When we think we are in the midst of life
he dares to weep
in our midst.

The accompaniment for this poem is rhythmic and sparse hits from strings and percussion, which, if you didn't guess, is slightly incongruous.

Other favorite moments of mine included some 12-tone rows on the celeste in "Loreley," and dissonant, suffering string passages in "The Death of a Poet."

Dark dark dark. A good palate-cleanser after pop music.

Wall-E

Only somewhat surprisingly, one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Pixar has hit the right balance of many elements, including humor, cynicism, adventure, love story, post-apocalypse, utopia/dystopia, satire, and any number of other themes you might care to add. I enjoyed it because of the grand sci-fi epic-type story arch - the ruined Earth / survival in space / Great Return to Earth just has a great romantic shape.

The facial and vocal expressions of the robots were well done - this was probably the key to making the entire movie work. The Pixar animators must have learned so much by now about the symbolic representation of emotions that they are probably in a position to inform modern psychology a bit. By this point they should be able to animate a happy pencil, a disgruntled banana, a nervous tractor, or any other wholly weird combination of emotion and typically-inanimate object.

The cautionary-tale aspect is timely yet hopeful: we may ruin our planet and render it uninhabitable for centuries, but perhaps not forever. Actually, the reality may be more like: we may render the planet uninhabitable for ourselves - yet other life on Earth will be fine and continue long after we perish. Alright, so that wouldn't have been as upbeat and Disney an ending.... It could have been the plant was one of a new species that had adapted to the toxic, perhaps radioactive atmosphere, and when humans returned they found that only these new superplants, along with cockroaches, were the only things which could live on Earth.... Happy happy.

Satirical aspects were interesting as well. I can imagine a young child in the theater: Mommy, why does everyone look like Uncle Tod? Similarly, the BnF (was that it?) mega-corporation was a different take on Resident Evil's Umbrella Corporation, or Alien's Weyland-Yutani or The Company or so on and so forth.... You know, a few years back, the number one target of megacompany / mass-produced / anti-mom-and-pop angst was probably Wal-Mart. This was perhaps when the storyline for this film was being written... by any chance was Wall-E meant to be Wal-Mart's robot?? And how will we feel when Best Buy and Price Club and Wal-Mart carry this DVD later on in the year, and most likely promote it to sickening excess, maybe around the holiday season? For that matter, would this movie rub a fat audience member the wrong way? Does it make people feel guilty, or at least self-conscious, about being stationary for two hours while gorging on popcorn and high-fructose corn syrup? Hmmm....

All in all, what a well-done film... a unique cross-genre story that would be a good companion movie to I Am Legend, Final Fantasy, the Short Circuit series, etc.

...Yes, too bad they couldn't have inserted a favorite recurring image/theme of mine: life on Earth has adapted, and has taken our ruined cities, littered with husks of skyscrapers, and covered them all in green and buried all memories of us away (imagery from many stories of mine - one here)... and our descendent survivors lament the folly of their ancestors in making the Earth pass us by... But no film can be perfect.

On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson (1978), Ch. 1: Dilemma

This illuminating volume is the third is a loose trilogy by naturalist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. The first work was a study of the social nature of ants; the second, a proposition to establish sociobiology as a field of study (and detailing the sociology of many animal species); and finally, this volume looks at human nature in the sociobiological perspective.

In short, this perspective views all living creatures as products of evolution, and hence of all of their past environments. Every trait they embody is either something with a distinct evolutionary function or is an outgrowth of something that once had such a function.

Here I present [dum-dum-dum] summaries, re-formulations, and responses to this work, starting oddly enough with Chapter 1: Dilemma.

Wilson begins by observing that if humans evolved through natural selection, then we have two great spiritual dilemmas: 

1. We have no purpose beyond the imperatives created by our genetic history. There is no goal outside of our biological nature.

Expanding on this, he writes "It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and material crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But what then? Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized?"

One of the ramifications of this is that, if this were widely known, certain societies which organize themselves around transcendental goals (such as propagation of a master race, religious reasons, etc.) would dissolve.

On a related note, Wilson notes the inescapable nature of our biology: "The reflective person knows that his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through a biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. He senses that with all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope and anxiety that characterize the species he will in the end be sure only of helping to perpetuate the same cycle."

2. Innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. [...] Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?"

In other words, how should we apply our capacity for judgment to guiding our behavior?

On another note, Wilson makes the interesting point that fields of study concerned with a adjacent levels of organization often influence each other in fundamental ways - usually with the lower (more detailed / smaller focus) discipline reformulating the higher. For example quantum physics informed nuclear physics which informed chemistry, molecular biology, cytology, physiology, medicine, and so on up the chain. An expert scientist must know about his field as well as each adjacent field. In the same way he predicts that evolutionary biology is now in a position to influence the social sciences.

(to be continued...)