Category: ephemera

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So I’m reading this story at Lightspeed, and the following sentence stabs me in the eyeball:

Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: The Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.

The bolding is mine, and I use it to highlight a phrase that bothered me to no end when I read it. (You can tell that I was bothered because I stopped reading to write this blog post.) My problem is what the hell does that mean? It’s an evocative turn of phrase, all right, but it doesn’t do one thing to actually help me see, hear, or feel whatever it is our poor protagonist Lvov is seeing.

Writers: don’t do this. Your metaphors can be awesome and all, but they had better mean something.

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Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They’d have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They’d have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they’d grow old and die
without ever having been there.

From Ursula K. LeGuin’s adaptation of the Tao Te Ching

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Things have been quiet here lately, for a variety of reasons. One big reason is that I’ve been tied up trying to move cross-country, something that’s finally (finally!) going to happen in the middle of March. I’ll update further when the date comes.

In the meantime, there’s been lots of thumping on the intertubes about this article, about which I may have something to say soon.

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I had almost written off Orson Scott Card. Like everyone else, I was blown away by Ender’s Game when I first read it, and I read the rest of that series and the majority of his early works when I was in high school and college. But I had ignored him for the past several years, mostly because he seemed determined to beat the dead horse of the Ender Universe to no good end, and because the quality of his novels seemed to be declining.

But here comes Lightspeed Magazine with an OSC reprint, but one that’s new to me: The Elephants of Poznan. A remarkable, beautiful and disturbing story, as good as anything I’ve read in the past few years. I’d forgotten what a prose stylist OSC can be when he wants to, but the writing in this story is perfect, reaching a level of elegiac craftsmanship that represents the best of the genre. And really, I don’t know why I’m surprised. I remember when I read Maps in a Mirror, OSC’s brick-sized short story collection, that though his novels tend to careen between brilliance and hackery, his short stories were uniformly excellent. This proves to be no exception.

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I hope that all my readers enjoy the Christmas season as much as they do it Catalonia:

Mary, Joseph and the shepherds are all gathered around the baby Jesus in his manger, as loudspeakers emit the occasional animal sound for extra, rustic effect.

But this is Catalonia, and no crib is complete without one additional figure.

He is known in Catalan as the caganer. That translates most politely as ‘the defecator’ – and there he is, squatting under a tree with his trousers down.

At the nearby Christmas market amid the sprigs of holly and Santa hats rows of miniature, crouching country boys are lined up for sale.

Innocuous-looking from the front, their buttocks are bare and each one has a small, brown deposit beneath.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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At Three Toed Sloth, a description of the Singularity we’ve already had:

The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.

I am a skeptic that the nerd rapture, the Singularity, will ever occur in the way imagined by its devotees. I’m also a skeptic of the Singularity we’ve already had–not that I doubt that it occurred, but I doubt whether it was half as inevitable or half as good as its proponents claim.

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The second problem is that naturalism, being a false picture of things, is inevitably destructive of nature, both cosmic and human. I mean not only that the age of technology has, as we all know, given us the power to ruin the world about us with magnificent profligacy. I mean also that it makes it all but impossible for human beings to inhabit the natural world as participants in its gratuity, greatness, and enchantment. And this is rather tragic, because all of civilization—quite literally all of it—springs up in the space between mortals and the mystery of the divine within and beyond the things of earth.

But to find that space—that clearing in the forest—we must first consent to be servants, not simply masters. The works of our hands have to be the way in which we respond to the summons of the ever deeper mystery within things, born out of a primordial human capacity for wonder that never presumes to know more than it can know, and that never tries to determine in advance what may or may not reveal itself. And any deafness to this summons, or any arrogant forgetfulness of this mystery, is the deepest, most barbarous irrationality of all.

…of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves…