Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Category: science fiction

Sunday Papers at Mythmoot

A lot of Mythmoot V was recorded on video and will be posted to the Signum University channels on Twitch or YouTube, so I’m not going to do a full recapitulation this year.  I’m just going to mention some talks where I have something to say.  The Sunday morning paper session is one such.

Luke Shelton – Young Readers’ Receptions

Luke walked us through one of the survey methods he’s using in his dissertation research.  He’s studying how young readers respond to The Lord of the Rings. One example of his methods is called “diamond-ranking”. You can see a diagram in the video, but essentially it’s a way of measuring readers’ reactions that takes account of the fact that people are generally pretty clear about the best and worst of a group, but don’t make such big differentiation in the middle.  His example question was “Which members of the Fellowship do you feel positive about, and which negative?”

He passed out cards with the names of the Fellowship of the Ring on them, and split us into two groups to do the ranking. Interesting debates ensued, where “interesting” is defined as in the apocryphal Chinese curse. Judging from the decibel level, I suspect these groups were rather more opinionated than average.  Both put Sam at the top.  Luke noted that children never put Sam at the top. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions come out of this.

Arthur Harrow – Isaac Asimov and the rise of the Nerd Hero

Arthur began by surveying the dismal landscape of his childhood. Tom Swift books were just about the only good books for boys before Asimov came along. Then the Nerd became the target for science fiction. Not only are the heroes of Foundation mathematicians, psychologists, and disruptive students who are too smart for their teachers, but the whole trilogy assumes that the reader is widely read in history, math, physics, and psychology. Which is to say, us.

Then the talk veered away from nerdhood to talk about the role of women in SF. As far back as the 1930’s, Doc Smith’s Lensman series took tantalizing steps toward making women real characters, but they fall short – the only woman who could become a Lensman was “some kind of freak”. But mostly, space-opera sopranos spend their time screaming and being rescued. Doc Smith elevated them a bit.

Then came Asimov to the portrayal of women as heroes, just as he did for male nerds.  In I, Robot, the hero is Dr. Susan Calvin, inventor of the positronic brain. She drives the plots of the stories, in the mid-1940s, ahead of the rest of SF, and far ahead of less forward-thinking genres.

Dom Nardi – How game theory solves the paradox of foreknowledge in Dune

If a writer is going to put knowledge of the future into a book, it’s going to be necessary to take a stand on the question of free will vs determinism.  Frank Herbert put the sentence “Dreams are predictions” right up front in Dune.  Do the characters still have free will, if someone can predict the future?

Usually, the author dodges.  The Oracle at Delphi got around this by being incomprehensible.  Hari Seldon resolves the problem by not telling people what he foresaw.  Herbert’s characters grab the bull by the horns.  Dom says this works because of game theory.

Towards the end, Paul sees branching possible futures in some cases, but in others its definite.

Other critics haven’t quite understood this. Lawrence Luton (“The Political Philosophy of Dune.” [1979]) applies a type of Heisenberg principle, saying that seeing the future makes it change.  There’s no such thing as “The” future.  This is only correct in Dune itself. In the sequels, characters can use their foreknowledge.  Sam Gates-Scovelle (Nicholas, J. [2011], Dune and Philosophy: Weirding Way of the Mentat) says there’s a difference between knowledge and prediction. But we don’t see the difference in application.

In Dom’s view, prescience is a form of computation. The paths in the future that Paul sees are the same thing as the outcomes of a game in mathematical game theory.  He gave us an example of a very simple game: Paul vs the Emperor.  If everyone has all the information and both make rational choices, we see the emperor abdicate.  But of course, Herbert was writing an interesting book, not a dull one.  Imperfect information and bounded rationality are at the core of the difference between Dom’s simple model and the actual plot.

In this view, where any actor can make any move with some (unknown) probability, prescience is a power Paul can use to torque the game’s outcome because he has better knowledge of the probabilities than someone who’s not able to see the future.  When Paul sees a single path, it’s because there’s a clear choice for both players.  When he sees branching futures, it’s because the payoff is indifferent among some of the choices.

David Maddock’s comment got at the core of how clever this is. In computer jargon, he noted, prediction is an NP-hard problem.  Translating into human language, that means that if you’re trying to test out possible futures, you do it by building a simulation, changing the inputs according to a model you’ve thought of, and running the simulation to see how it comes out.  For a complicated system, though, the computation gets so big that it takes more time to run the simulation than it does to just wait and see how things come out.  So prediction is impossible, and you can have free will and determinism at the same time, if you’d like.

Here’s the best thing about David’s observation:  it means that the power of the Mentats can be thought of as a way to address NP-hard problems such that they’re solvable in a reasonable time.  I’ve never been comfortable with the Butlerian Jihad, because if a science-fiction story is going to have a high-tech world with no computers, it should explain how a human mind by itself can be faster than a human mind plus a computer.  This is a good way to do that.

(And congratulations on your new degree, David!)

Defining Science Fiction

Have you ever wondered how exactly to define “science fiction”? I’ve seen lots of opinions, none of which sounded right.  In an article in PMLA, though, Eric Rabkin pointed me in an interesting direction.  He said “Carl Freedman wrote that his ‘thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other’.”  Intriguing — they certainly have lots of things in common, since critical theory is constitutionally incapable of staying in one lane, and so wanders from literature to politics to economics to sociology to linguistics and back again.  SF started out that way on purpose.  Maybe there’s something there.

Via inter-library loan, Carl Freedman tells me that Darko Suvin defines science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.”  Whoa!  Assessing the analytical validity of that assertion will take some thought, but my immediate reaction was that it’s a perfect description of science-fiction fans. Suvin has got to be onto something.  SF fans are not only cognitively estranged from the mundane world, they positively embrace that status. (I say “they” as if I’m not one of them, but I doubt anyone will be fooled.) We’re proud of how differently we think, and judge our ways superior.  Somewhere in a box around here is a button that says “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.”  We give non-fans scornful names like “mundanes” or “muggles”.

That last word brought me up short. Though SF fans use it, it’s from fantasy. I’m looking for a way to distinguish SF from fantasy.  Fortunately, Darko Suvin actually said something rather different.

SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

“Estrangement” is easy, and obviously correct.  SF is set in a world that is not our own (though it may look just like ours, at the start).

The word “cognition”, once you work through the jungle of academic prose, isn’t quite right. As Suvin eventually explains, it means that the writer isn’t trying to give authoritative statements about characters, relationships, or phenomena. The writer is trying to pose them as problems to be solved, to expose them to inquiry.

The reader’s response is equally important.  The reader of SF is expected to think about the story in the same way as a scientist approaches an experiment: “How does this work? What processes are happening here? What can I learn from this?”  Fantasy is read completely differently.  “What a wonderful/terrifying world! Can I go there?”  This distinction in reader response is what distinguishes SF from fantasy, and from all other genres of estrangement.  In fact, it may be what gives SF the right to have the word “science” in its name.  Science fiction is not “fiction about science”. When I look at Robert Heinlein, for example, it’s hard to find any science in any book he wrote.  All the characters are engineers, solving engineering problems.  But they are solving problems, and the readers are right there working alongside them.

(As an aside, it’s interesting that when C.S. Lewis invented reader-response criticism, he talked for a whole page about SF [p.110], and said things that make it clear that he knew all this, but he never actually said it explicitly.)

So this is useful, and I shall use it.  But now I’m wondering why the terminology shifted.  The term that grabbed me was “cognitive estrangement”, not “estrangement and cognition”.  And I’m not the only one. Here’s how the two terms have fared so far:

So I conclude that the road to scholarly fame runs through steps:

  1. Think an intriguing and useful thought.
  2. Give it a clunky name that uses the same words as a good bumper-sticker.
  3. Wait for somebody else to slip up and say the bumper-sticker version.
  4. Watch the citations roll in.
Obligatory Quantitative Appendix
  • My citation of Rabkin is at the top of a blog post.
  • Rabkin’s citation to Freedman is on Page 2 of his 18-page paper.
  • Freedman’s citation to Suvin is on page xv of his book.
  • Suvin’s concise statement is on page 7 of his book.

We don’t have to read far into a work of literary criticism to get all the good stuff!


Works Cited

Freedman, Carl. Critical theory and science fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Lewis, Clive Staples. An experiment in criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Rabkin, Eric S. “Science fiction and the future of criticism.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 457-473.

Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition“, in Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

Science Fiction vs. Theater

Mythmoot V is coming up, and the theme is “Fantastic Frontiers”. That’s got me looking at all kinds of boundaries, frontiers, and demarcations in speculative fiction.

Isaac Asimov once wrote this about how to write a science-fiction detective story (which his editor said couldn’t be done):

The writer must carefully explain to the reader all their boundary conditions of the imaginary society. It must be perfectly clear what can be done and what can’t be done and with those boundaries fixed, the reader must then see and hear everything the investigator sees and hears, and he must be aware of every clue the investigator comes across.

From the hundred-or-so Asimov stories I’ve read, I infer that this is a good rule for all SF stories if you replace “investigator” with “protagonist”. Readers are willing to make great leaps of faith to enjoy a story, as long as the boundaries are fixed [1] and we know how far the author wants us to jump.

There is one side, though, on which the boundary is fuzzy and permeable. That’s the side that faces the reader. Anything that’s familiar to us in our mundane world can be in a science fiction story. In fact, it’s almost essential to include a bunch of things from our world to keep from weirding the readers out.Fuzzy boundaries of SF and theater

It amused me to notice that the theater works the exact opposite way. The wall that faces the audience is the only fixed one, there. The other three walls are almost infinitely mutable. From one minute to the next they can be DUKE ORSINO’s palace, The sea-coast, OLIVIA’S house, A street, and Before OLIVIA’s house. The fourth wall can be broken, sure. When it is, the playwright is doing it consciously, in exactly the same way that a science-fiction writer might deliberately minimize the connections between the fictional world and the mundane to build a sense of alienation.

The theatrical version of boundaries seems to apply to television and movies, too. So when the subject of a movie is science-fictional, which one wins? Interestingly, it seems that all the rigid boundaries apply. A science-fiction movie is truly in a box.


[1] This is not to say the boundary is finite. Borrowing from complex analysis [2][3], I consider a boundary at infinity to be fixed.

[2] This concept is also useful in real analysis, but this is a humanities blog where the phrase “real analysis” can easily be misinterpreted, so I bumped it up a level.

[3] I’ve read so many Terry Pratchett stories that nested footnotes don’t look odd to me any more.

The Ultimate Question

Since the Mythgard Academy has just wound up its class on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I think it’s a good time to tell you all what the Question really is. Several characters in the book got themselves all worked up because they know the Answer is 42, and there’s no way that such a big question can have such a simple answer. Idiosophy is here to help.

You know that the universe is really just a simulation, right? Well, most computer simulations have a pseudo-random number generator in them. The randomness does two things for us: it lets us account for unpredictable things like wind, and it lets us explore the whole range of things that can happen. For example, I might be trying to figure out how many checkout lines they need at the supermarket, and I might want to know how long the wait would be in the worst-case scenario, even though nobody can describe for me exactly what that is. I can randomize arrival times, number of items purchased, etc., and see which combination causes the worst (or best) result.

We can’t use real random numbers in simulations (assuming that such things aren’t a mere mathematical fiction) because we’d never be able to make sure the software was working correctly. We have to be able to run the program, fix problems, and then run again with all the same inputs to test that our repair job didn’t cause new problems in some other part of the system we’re studying. We use a pseudo-random number generator because it has a “seed” that we can set, which makes the numbers come out the same every time. When the time comes to really learn something, you change the seed to lots of different values.

So here’s the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything: “What seed should we use to start the simulation we live in, to make everything come out all right?

For what it’s worth, I ran this idea past the smartest engineer I know. He told me he never delivers a simulation without testing it with “42” first.

The Physics of Street Signs

There are little jokes about science all over the roads in France. I have no idea whether they’re intentional or not.

Last week I was gallivanting around Provence.  I know; somebody’s got to do the dirty jobs, right? On the departmental routes (like state roads in the USA), there are little rest areas where you can pull off. Like on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’re named in honor of people. They aren’t symmetrical, the way Americans do them. Instead, the northbound rest area ends where the southbound begins.

french rest areas look like sine waves

Rest areas on french country roads

The result is that the areas look like a sine wave.  On the road through the Camargue, one of them, to my delight, was named “de Broglie“. If we consider the rest area as a quantum-mechanical system, estimate its wavelength, and use de Broglie’s formula to calculate its momentum, the number will come out to be unmeasurably tiny.  That’s good; we want civil-engineering projects to stay where we put them.

map to the Parking Lagrange

Parking garage on the Rue Lagrange, Paris Vme

Once a person with a couple of years of physics is sensitized to them, these little landmark jokes appear with suspicious frequency.  The first one I noticed was a parking garage called “Lagrange”.  Makes perfect sense, since it’s on the Rue Lagrange in Paris. But you don’t even have to formally study physics in this case.  Just read enough science-fiction, and you’ll know the Lagrange points by heart.

Also, the Rue Coriolis is a one-way street, running counter-clockwise around a big apartment building.  As it must, since it’s in the northern hemisphere.

Am I just imagining there’s a pattern here? Probably.  But the elves distinguish two things that English calls “hope”.  Amdir is when you express a desire that some event with a calculable probability will come out in your favor. Estel is when you’re expressing faith in the divinely-ordained course of the universe. The modern world doesn’t have much call for estel, usually. But that’s exactly the word for my hope that somewhere there’s a civil engineer doing these on purpose.

Daedalus versus Drone

The latest science-fictional device to hit the press is a swarm of hand-sized autonomous drones that can be dropped from a fighter or bomber.

Image credit: Popular Mechanics Magazine

As they fall, they form themselves into self-organized structures that fly about in ways that are by now familiar from a hundred YouTube videos.. The hardware and software originated at MIT. It’s called “Perdix”.

“Named after a character from Greek mythology,” the Popular Mechanics article says. Perdix is pretty obscure, so I looked him up. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 8.

Perdix was Daedalus’s nephew. Long before the Icarus incident, he showed himself to be an even cleverer engineer than Daedalus. Invented the compass, for example.  (The geometry one, not the navigation one.). Daedalus, jealous of his status, was enraged by the boy’s presumption and threw him off the Acropolis.  Halfway down the cliff, Perdix was saved when Minerva changed him into a partridge and he could fly the rest of the way down.  Partridges never fly more than a few feet off the ground because they still have PTSD from that event.

I have been amusing myself for a while now, speculating about reasons this story never gets mentioned in the press.

Comments on The Dispossessed

As usual, I’m a month or so behind the Mythgard Academy.  Had I been present at the sessions, or had I an ansible that could reach back in time with a text message, these are the things I would have said about The Dispossessed.  No overarching theme, just three disconnected observations.

The Physicist at Work

This book has the best descriptions I’ve read of a theoretical physicist at work. I searched the Web for biographies of Ursula LeGuin to find out if she had any physicists in her family — no. She did this all with imagination, and it’s spectacular. I recognized myself in almost every line of those scenes.  Usually, works of fiction that deal with a subject I know about in real life are excruciating.  The only fictional scientists I can handle are the humorous ones: Dr. Zarkov from Flash Gordon; Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) from Real Genius (I know what you’re thinking, no, Laszlo was my college roommate).  But Shevek’s struggles with his work, and how it affects his relationships with other people, ring true.

Also, the way LeGuin describes Shevek’s original insight isn’t wrong.  There’s nothing there that’s obviously insane; were relativity one day to be falsified, the explanation might well sound like that.  Only exception is the paragraph that talks about “the interval” as the key insight.  Replacing the absolute position of objects in time and space with intervals as the fundamental description of a system is, in fact, the heart of special relativity.  But by that point I was too smitten to care.

Communism

I found myself yelling at my iPod whenever Corey referred to Annares as a communist society.  Anarres is anarchist (see it in the name?); Thu is the communist society.  The people of Anarres refer to citizens of less-evolved societies as “archists”, a collective term for capitalists and communists.  (If you want to hear more about anarchism, here you go.  It’s all Real Genius, all the time, here at Idiosophy.)  Anarres draws heavily from Marxism, but Communism was not much like what Marx had in mind.

Putting myself back in the mindset of the early 1970s, the Cold War is all over this book.  It’s all happening on Urras, though.  There weren’t any neutral observers to the Cold War, because nobody could be far enough from the bombs to be safe.  LeGuin is showing us what the USA (which I can hear inside “Nio Esseia”) would have looked like, if anyone could be neutral.

Vea, Siegfried, and Roy

Corey did a good job getting through the uncomfortable politics of Vea.  All through that disquisition, I found myself thinking of Siegfried and Roy.  Vea is in the same line of work as they:  There’s an awesomely powerful force around, and by making a public show of dominating it, you gain wealth and status.  In Urras, that force is the patriarchy.

Vea didn’t passively accept dominance, she figured out how to manipulate it and turn it to her own ends.  Because she was so good at it, she became wealthy, popular, and influential. However, when you’re playing that game, you have to be perfect.  One mistake, and it all blows up in your face.  When Roy Horn got bitten by a tiger, his career was over.  He was lucky to escape with his life and his fortune mostly intact.  Vea got off easy, by comparison, with just a dry-cleaning bill and (one presumes) a case of the shakes in her room after all the guests had gone.


Update:  Brad DeLong, to whom I have referred readers before, was posting a discussion of “communism and related issues” on his blog as I typed this.  The Dispossessed features prominently.  As does an interesting discussion of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” which TIL comes from the Acts of the Apostles.

Speculative Fiction: SF : MidMoot 3.04

These are my notes from the first panel on Sunday at MidMoot 3.

Neil Ottenstein: Dreams and Prophecy in Babylon 5

I usually think of myself as a science-fiction fan. Compared to Neil, I am not. When I want to quote a work, I type out the words on a screen. When Neil wants to quote from Babylon 5, he comes to the front of the room with a stack of bound quarto volumes of scripts, opens each one in its turn, and reads passages to us with a reverent tone. That’s a true fan.

This was another in his series of talks about prophecy. It was orders of magnitude smaller in focus than his presentation at MidMoot 2. B5 doesn’t have a radical concept of prophecy. “We create the future with our words and our deeds. Prophecies are possible futures, not certainties.”

The Centauri seem to be able to make prophecies and confine them to things that are fixed. Unlike other characters who talk about things that may or may not happen, depending on people’s choices, the Centauri seem to be able to perceive “constants of the motion”, making prophecies that are going to turn out to be true no matter what.

Margaret Ann Mendenhall: The Borg: Is assimilation Fertile?

First question: is Star Trek’s humanism patriarchal? It certainly privileges Western values.

Margaret projected the text of the Prime Directive (non-interference with other cultures) up on the screen, and proceeded to slice it to ribbons. Nearly every phrase in it comes from mid-20th-century American ideology. Our perspective, here and now, isn’t that far removed. We’re in the same country, just 50 years later, but those words no longer look to us like a statement of a principle to live by. We now see terms like “healthy development” or “normal cultural evolution” as bags that carry a lot of prejudice in them.

(I’d point out here that those ideologies are honored more in the breach than the observance. Roddenberry may have been writing them down explicitly to get the US to recognize how far short of them our actions in (e.g.) Vietnam were. Which doesn’t disagree with Margaret’s thesis in any way.)

Of course, this gets taken to extremes in the show. Captain Kirk violates the Prime Directive every chance he gets. As Jon pointed out, the Prime Directive is a plot generator, not an actual law to live under. Life would be very stressful under a code that was designed to maximize the frequency of exciting events.  Possibly recognizing this, newer incarnations of Star Trek have replaced the Prime Directive with an ideology of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”.

On to patriarchy. The presentation of the Borg in “First Contact” shows a feminized twist. The Borg Queen is a Great Goddess figure. (I hadn’t seen this movie – apparently the Borg have been transformed from a mechanical assembly to an insect hive.) It’s a gylany rather than a patriarchy. It works by horizontal linkages, not a command hierarchy.

Now, by assimilating other species into their collective, the Borg is perfecting them.  I got whiplash at this point, because if you say “market” instead of “collective”, it sounds like the attitude of  global capitalism.

Q: Aren’t the Borg and Starfleet both making decisions for other people. What’s the difference? A: They’re both symbolizing the unconscious.  (The subspace network the Borg use to communicate is the Jungian collective unconscious. Fascinating, to coin a phrase.)

Q: (from VF) are the theories you’re working from applicable to western fantasies at all? A: Yes. Her dissertation is about how the Hero’s Journey has been taken over by monotheists to mean pefection of the soul. She’s instead balancing Artemis, Lilith, and Isis in a lemniscate. (MM didn’t say “lemniscate”, but she laid “gylany” on us and I must have revenge.)

Kris Larsen: Mad Scientist Alphabet Soup

Mad scientists aren’t all lone wolves. Kris is talking about three organizations of mad science.  Their common features: obsession with experimental design (she says this like it’s a bad thing); Population-control mission; and complete disregard for informed consent.

First, the DHARMA initiative from “Lost”. Numerology – terms in an equation to predict the number of years left for the human race. The initiative is trying to change one of the parameters and lengthen our existence.

WICKED from The Maze Runner:  plans to eradicate half the population with a virus, because we’ve overloaded the planet. The virus didn’t work as planned. Natural immunity became a valuable commodity. WICKED used immunes to generate a cure.

NICE from That Hideous Strength:  There’s been a decades-long debate about whether this is an attack on science, or just scientism.  Their goal is to “Make man a really efficient animal.” NICE will “take charge of Man”.  Direct manipulation of the brain is their goal. Same as Wicked. Wither and Frost are two definite mad scientists. (How about Glitter and Lost?)

Lewis’s bitter observation: to parents, “Experiment on a child” is a bad thing. But offer them a seat in an “experimental school”, and they’ll sign right up.

Kris ended with an exhortation to science not to forget that we might be working from immoral principles. Fascinating exchange at the end of this talk:

  • Q: Why are there mad scientists, but nobody ever denounces mad theologians or literati? A: We scientists are highly respected.
  • Prof Olsen: do scientists have a proclivity that way? Philostrato isn’t mad, though he’s a dupe. A: Nobody wants to read a novel about normal scientists.
  • CO: it’s a compliment to scientists – in order for them to do evil, they must be insane.
  • Jon: science stripped of humanity leads to these effects.

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