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The Ocean Of Stories Upon Which We Sail

by Mina

This article is woven around a wonderful speech given by Salman Rushdie when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. For him, authors (consciously or subconsciously) borrow from existing stories and add their own twist, so books “…come from other stories, from the ocean of stories upon which we are all sailing. That’s not the only point of origin: there’s also the storyteller’s own experience and opinion of life, and there are also the times he lives in. But most stories have roots in other stories, which combine, conjoin, and change, and so become new stories.”

Authors thus translate their personal mental and emotional universes into stories but also the political, historical, social and cultural currents that flow around them. Their translation of their realities is imperfect and highly subjective; their works are then read by imperfect readers who will interpret what they read to fit into their own realities and a game of “Chinese whispers” begins. As Michael Moynahan SJ tells us in his poem Incarnation:

“If communication is not
what you say but
what people hear,
then what we said
was warped and wrenched…”

No author writes in a vacuum and SF stories reflect not just rockets, moon landings, computers, the internet, smart phones, bionic limbs and other inventions, but also geography, ancient and recent history, changing cultural mores and trends of thought. And, as Rushdie reminds us, they reflect the fiction we read or watch, as many of us spend far more time dipping into fictional worlds than in watching or reading the news. So I thought about what I had read or seen recently to see what narratives I could discern as an imperfect reader/viewer. I’d like to stress here that I made no effort to find obscure narratives: all my examples are taken from my everyday life, for example, from links shared by friends, the ezines I review, Amazon Prime and the good films that go to die on international flights. And I am most definitely not exempt from subjective opinions.

To begin with an important attitude for me when reading: I particularly enjoyed the easy acceptance shown in Once Upon A Time At The Oakmont by P. A. Cornell that people are entrenched in their times (and places), with the narrator telling us at one point: “I smile. You have to accept this kind of thing when you’re a resident of The Oakmont. Times are different, and each one has its own set of values and attitudes that will inevitably become obsolete as the sands of time continue to fall.” The Oakmont is a block of flats built over a time vortex. As the building manager explains to us: “Time is nothing . . . and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up, but if it did exist, it wouldn’t run in a line; it would run in a circle…Time moves differently at The Oakmont. We can touch it at any point in time or at all points at once.” The narrator, Sarah, tells us of residents she knows and the rules (of which there are many) that govern The Oakmont. We learn of her lover, Roger, and her friends, all coming from different eras. I’m not suggesting that the tolerance predicated in this tale should be confused with fatalism, or a laissez-faire attitude, just that it is to be espoused and defended.

Moving on to examine some of the social and cultural currents flowing around us, we find gentle but unapologetic feminism and the blurring of gender identity in Mountain Ways by Ursula K. Le Guin. Although the story is ostensibly about a world where two mixed-couple poly-relationships (a “sedoretu”) are the norm and the lesbian protagonists have to find a way around this stricture, it is much more about couple and group dynamics. What makes it really interesting is its exploration of what navigating family/group dynamics involves. I love Le Guin’s psychologically complex tales and this particular one was originally published in 1996, reminding us that the blurring of genders (and roles) happened well before we invented new labels for it.

“Anti-colonialism” is given a wonderful new twist in the short story Death Is Better by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, which weaves robots and slavery together. The protagonist and his sister are attempting to escape a plantation on another world that is guarded by armed bots, including a behemoth. They are willing to risk their lives because death is better than slavery. In the chaos they unleash, it is unclear whether they manage to escape or simply find freedom in death. A nice detail in this tale is a reference to how albinism can ostracise you in a dark-skinned society (it is considered a sign of bad luck in the West African Mandinka culture, for example).

“Pro-choice” is very much part of Always Personal by Rich Larson, which follows a detective as she investigates murder cases involving “inverse stabbings”. It could be a normal detective story, one that involves DNA and bioprinters that don’t exist (yet), but the victims all fall into a “pro-life” mould stereotyped as hypocrites: victim A, who had anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life; victim B, who had attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days; victim C, who had refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following. The detective clearly empathises with the perpetrator’s “calcified anguish” as she (the detective) lost a friend to a car accident as they drove overnight “to get over the right state line”. This particular topic can turn stories into unreadable diatribes but the author gives us a good yarn whilst making his opinion clear on a divisive issue.

The author of Muna In Barish, Isha Karki, would fall under the “BIPOC” (black, indigenous and people of colour) label. We follow Muna of the Nehiri minority (she has horns and dark umber skin, and legend has it her people once had wings) as she survives in the city of Barish. She has found work and apparent shelter in a bookshop, working for Arethor. But as we witness her working days, we realise that Arethor uses apparent kindness to exploit and bully Muna; behaviour that Muna cannot acknowledge even to herself or she will be left unemployed and homeless. Muna wants to be a word-weaver, just like Lenore Phoenix who has a bestselling series about a Halfborn like her. Her secret joy is her correspondence with her hero. One day, she meets Karabel of the Senai minority (with pointed ears and keen hearing). And she finds friendship, warmth, understanding, companionship and an equal. She eventually learns that Karabel is Lenore’s downtrodden ghost-writer and responsible for the book series and correspondence that have sustained her through the worst. And Karabel has a plan for their future. It is a beautifully written, psychologically complex story by a word-weaver who plays expertly with intertextuality (stories within stories). And it is a hymn to friendship and finding a sense of community. And all this without making the reader feel that they have to be BIPOC to empathise with the characters or enjoy the story. But I do sometimes wonder if authors who are labelled BIPOC, or anything else for that matter, would prefer their tale to stand on its own merits, as this one most definitely does.

The film Vesper (a Lithuanian/French/Belgian collaboration) is set in the aftermath of ecological disaster accelerated by bio-engineering gone wrong. Vesper, the main character (arguably “enby”), is tough yet curiously innocent. The other main character, Camellia, is a bio-engineered, sentient being. The relationship between the two has sexual and incestuous undertones, as they in turn become parent, lover and friend to each other. This biopunk tale creates a bleak future with only seeds of hope at the end. The brightest spark is the main characters’ kindness, loyalty and sense of honour in a world bereft of all three. Such admirable character traits are gender-less, I would argue. And if you park all preconceptions at the door, you can truly enjoy the scene where Camellia, who is generous and kind by nature, reads a children’s book with Vesper and shows her what animals the latter has never seen actually sound like. Vesper finds a moment of shared laughter and freedom, pretending to howl like a wolf.

In Philoctetes in Kabul, Deborah L. Davitt weaves together the life of a modern-day (American, white, male) soldier and that of Philoctetes in the Iliad. An anonymous soldier is discharged from the army on medical grounds, having been betrayed and abandoned by friends. After losing his wife and job, the two old comrades who betrayed him invite him to work with them as military contractors. It is a sad and reflective tale, with hints of a past life. It shows what living with a chronic, invisible disability is like. Whether or not you feel sympathy for the protagonist is probably coloured by geography, but it is a well-written story tackling PTSD with compassion. Point of view is everything, as Rushdie tells us: ”Peace, for Ukraine, means more than a cessation of hostilities. It means, as it must mean, a restoration of seized territory and a guarantee of its sovereignty. Peace, for Ukraine’s enemy, means a Ukrainian surrender. The same word, with two incompatible definitions.”

I liked the film After Yang (based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein) because it subtly shows different points of view. For me, the most interesting thing is not the “techno-sapien” Yang himself, but what Yang meant to each family member (each with different ethnic origins), which we slowly discover as the film gently unfurls. We see how Yang filled gaps in the family, which now has to learn to function again without him. Also, Yang is owned by the family, so he is technically a slave yet, as the film progresses, we see that he had his own motivations and relationships outside the family. Interestingly, I have yet to read a review that tackles the fact that Yang is presented as sentient but lacks freedom, both because he is bought, sold and refurbished like an object, and because he is given very specific programming to suit his host family. The Guardian describes this film as “a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness” – it is that too.

In Negative Theology of the Child from the ‘King of Tars’ by Sonia Sulaiman, the author muses on the nature of being other: “I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven… Through that hole will be born something Other…Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?” This tale shows us that religion and race are not past bones of contention, they remain areas that still lead to (often armed) conflict in today’s world.

Religion, or at least the Christian concepts of good and evil, are tackled with humour in the series Good Omens. The strongest part of the show is the complex relationship between the angel, Aziraphale, and the demon, Crowley. In season 1, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and remaining reasonably faithful to it), they are unlikely friends; season 2 goes beyond the book and starts moving the relationship towards the romantic. I have no problem with that but would have preferred them to remain loyal friends, and I refuse to say “just friends” because that cheapens friendship and reverts to the trope that the main relationship in a story must be romantic. Also, I like how the series blurs the lines between the good and evil characters, with the angels behaving no better than the demons at times. Many of the angels and demons are depicted as having very linear, unquestioning minds. Crowley and, to a lesser extent, Aziraphale are the only ones dealing in shades of grey, with Crowley seeing them as dark grey and Aziraphale as light grey. Sin noticias de Dios (No News from God), an older Spanish/Mexican film, also has a great partnership between an angel and a demon, who speak with each other in Latin, and postulates a heaven that is getting rather empty and a hell that is overcrowded.

To Rushdie, freedom of expression is paramount: “We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom-and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist-is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old.”

The “bien-pensant censorship” is clearly a reference to the (mis)use of “woke-ness”, which has its roots deep in the fight for racial justice in the US (leading to the accusation of the cultural appropriation of the term “woke”). Star Trek Discovery is now bursting with strong female leads and the first gay, “enby” and trans crew members. In season 2 of Picard, Seven is openly bisexual though it doesn’t go beyond chaste kisses in the Star Trek universe (the bickering is fun though). I have no problem with any of this but can’t help feeling that it is sometimes cosmetic or skin deep, delivered because it’s expected by some audiences, rather than a true exploration of diversity. I found more depth in Death Comes for the Sworn Virgins by Abraham Margariti. In its fable-like atmosphere, we follow three lovers – biological women brought up as men and mostly identifying as such – who have fled persecution for openly loving each other to the mountains full of dark spirits. They are mourning a fourth lover and in search of a safe place to settle. They find a clearing that is protected from the spirits and they welcome Death among them in the form of a badger/skeletal human. Death needs their help to appease the “unrested” spirits he angered when he was young and arrogant, before he learned kindness. The lovers call each other “brother” and gentle Death calls them “husbands” at the end. Since death is either skeletal or animal in form, it is clearly not a sexual relationship, which makes a nice change.

In his introduction to Tangent’s recommended reading list for 2023, Dave Truesdale is much more emphatic than Rushdie and talks of a “weaponization of language” that “has the SF field in such a state that its authors are afraid to take the kinds of dangerous or controversial chances in their stories that over previous decades greatly aided in defining the field itself as one of experimenting with bold new ideas.” He considers it a “soft censorship of omission” where “in those stories dealing with cultural or outright political issues… only one side is invariably treated in a positive light.” In his opinion, this is leading to an impoverishment of the SF genre: “purely on a literary level this redundant and unimaginative treatment of issues or themes becomes predictable and quickly boring, boredom leading to no real incentive to turn the page to discover what comes next, and a sure death knell for any regular, intelligent reader of the SF genre.” Truesdale also comments that magazine editors have become cautious: “Under the current political climate where political correctness has been taken to a whole new level, I seriously doubt magazine editors would publish any story professing a viewpoint contrary to what is considered Woke or Progressive, for the backlash would be immediate and enormous.”

Rushdie warns us to beware of the internet, with its indiscriminate content, where “…well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which…” This, for me, includes the Zineverse I explored in my last article., where you need to read with your brain switched on and using your judgment. As Truesdale tells us: “It is a given that anything can be found on the internet, regardless of how devoid of intelligence, and can be used to support the pro or con viewpoint of any topic.” And of course, we absorb a lot of things without being aware of it and it’s a matter of remembering this and regularly questioning your own attitudes and thought processes. That is why I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu where, years after writing her original trilogy, she happily subverts her Wizard of Earthsea universe’s original tropes, in particular with respect to gender roles and power.

Another example of subversion (in my opinion) is the Dr Who episode “The Star Beast”. Having read reviews for this episode, I was wondering if it would be painfully “PC”. However, I’d forgotten how tongue-in-cheek Dr Who can be. It was by no means one of the best episodes in this perennial series, neither was the script poetry in motion, but it was clearly poking gentle fun at the “gender” movement. When the Doctor refers to an alien as “he”, Rose snaps “you’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun”. The Doctor replies “good point” and then asks the alien “are you he or she or they?” The alien’s reply is clearly meant to be funny: “My chosen pronoun is the definitive article. I am always ‘The’ Meep.” At the same time, it’s stress on ‘the’ is made part of the plot when The Meep turns out to be a megalomaniac monster despite its cute appearance. Later, the Doctor and Donna tell us that “the Doctor is male, and female, and neither, and more” but this is an integral part of the preposterous plot. Finally, we get to the part that caused outrage in some reviewers where Donna gleefully pronounces “it’s a shame you’re not a woman any more, ‘cos she’d have understood” and Rose adds “we’ve got all that power. But there is a way to get rid of it. Something that a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand…we choose to let it go.” Surely the person who wrote “male-presenting Time Lord” was having fun with this particular juxtaposition of words? If we can laugh at something, does it not become less deadly serious?

In another Dr Who episode “The Toymaker”, gentle fun is poked at “cancel culture”. The villain has managed to send out a signal that changes brainwaves and makes people aggressively think that they are right. When the Doctor asks why, the Toymaker replies “so that they win…I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel. Now everybody wins.” To which the Doctor replies: “And everybody loses.” At the same time, the Tardis is made wheelchair-friendly and we find out that the next doctor is ”BIPOC” with a hybrid West African/Scottish accent. That said, I didn’t find the incipient PC’ness as prevalent as the self-congratulatory glaze over more recent Dr Who episodes, which can be hard to stomach.

For Rushdie, we must defend true freedom of expression as he has done with his life’s blood (though he does not vaunt himself of this): “We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways.” This article cannot hold a thousand and one voices, alas; it’s more of a chamber choir piece. But each voice has a right to be heard.

To quote this journal’s editors: “Here in continental Europe, the advocacy for freedom of conscience traces its roots back as far as the Age of Enlightenment, and while individuals are as varied and different as anywhere, many still share a general tendency to separate opinions from relationships. To give an example: the Journal’s crew belong to seemingly opposed world-views, yet are bound by friendship and affection… it is not uncommon for us to publish stories or articles that appear ‘ideologically’ contradictory – precisely because we value the freedom to enjoy thought experiments we might not approve of.” We must continue to see each other as separate, multi-faceted people, and not as walking labels, where one label subsumes everything else.

In a world of sometimes radical “PC’ism”, we seem to have forgotten that if we disagree with what someone has said or is saying, we must still listen, and then we must marshal up our own arguments in response – we can do it very well through fiction, too. We seem to have forgotten our own responsibility to argue back. Unless someone is inciting hatred, on racial or any other grounds, they have a right to their opinions, however cock-eyed, skew-whiff, offensive or even simply wrong we find them (or they ours). Freedom of expression is a painful right, and one that requires taking up verbal sparring rather than erasers. If Rushdie’s defence of this right continues unabated after almost being violently erased, how can we do less in our lives and in our narratives?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

The Science Fiction And Philosophy Society: An Introduction

by Anand Vaidya, Ethan Mills, and Manjula Menon

Writers of speculative fiction and philosophers share common attributes. First, there is the process itself. Science-fiction writers may use ‘what if’ scenarios to create their works, while philosophers often use thought experiments to draw out intuitions about philosophical insights. Consider the famous Trolley thought experiment, the first version of which was published as a survey question in 1906 by the American philosopher Frank Chapman Sharp as part of an empirical study. It asked the survey-taker to assume the role of a railway switchman who is faced with a terrible dilemma: he must choose between allowing a runaway train to run over and kill a group of strangers or to switch the train to a different track where it would run over and kill his own daughter. Sharp used the studies’ results to confirm that people are more likely to choose the scenario that adheres to the utilitarian ethical position that advocates for the maximization of well-being for the group, where the ethical solution is to sacrifice a single life to save the many. A modern version asks us to imagine how an artificial intelligence in control of guiding trains from track to track might behave if faced with a similar runaway train scenario: if it does nothing, the train will run over and kill a group of people, if it intervenes and switches tracks, it will kill one person. Would the AI, one that has presumably been trained in the deontological principle of not taking any action that would lead to the death of a human, instead take the consequentialist view that utilitarians like Sharp would advocate for and throw the switch? This is the kind of question a science-fiction writer might take as a ‘what-if’ scenario to build a story around: ‘F80-21a strained through millions of simulations in the split second it had to act, but all returned suboptimal results: one or more humans would have to die.’

The philosopher Hilary Putnam’s Twin-Earth thought experiment aims to draw out our intuitions about ‘meaning’. The thought experiment posits a planet that is exactly like Earth in all respects, except for one: whereas water on Earth is a compound with the chemical formula of H2O, Twin-Earth’s water, which behaves in exactly the same way as on Earth, is a compound with the chemical formula XYZ. The two earths are identical in every other way: every person, blade of grass or building on Earth has a twin on Twin-Earth that talks, behaves, and acts exactly the same. Putnam then asks if what is meant when a person says ‘water’ on Earth is the same as what is meant when the person’s twin on Twin-Earth says ‘water’. Most people answer in the negative, that what is meant by water on Earth is different from what is meant by water on Twin-Earth, since the underlying chemical formulas differ. Putnam used this thought experiment as part of an argument for semantic externalism, the thesis that holds that the meaning of a word is not just in the head but has some basis in factors external to the speaker. Note that since Putnam used water to run his thought experiment, all things comprised in part or in whole of water would also be compositionally different. Yet, humans on both Twin-Earth and Earth would think of themselves as humans whose bodies are composed mostly of water. If these two groups were to meet, then would there be any need to change the words to note the difference, for example, by referring to water on Twin-Earth as twin-water? Arguably, the more likely scenario is that the groups would continue to use the word water to describe the liquids on both earths, with the understanding that the word water refers to a liquid that is water-like. This same reasoning can be applied to the words used in science-fiction to describe aliens. For expediency, science fiction writers might describe an alien as ‘happy to see the color blue’, when what is meant by the words ‘happy’, ‘blue’, or ‘see’, might be more accurately described as happy-like, blue-like, or see-like.

The eminently quotable science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, once said, ‘I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.’ [1] Which points to another commonality between philosophers and science-fiction writers: curiosity.

Although formed under the auspices of the main professional organization for philosophers—the American Philosophical Association, the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society does not take itself too seriously, a fact easily verified with even the most cursory of visits to our website.  As to what the society will be up to, one view is that it will serve as a gathering spot for writers of science fiction and philosophers to cross-pollinate ideas for mutual edification. Another account holds that the society will help to explore the notion that science fiction can be considered ‘doing’ philosophy.

What counts as ‘doing’ philosophy has been debated for millennia. Plato, the fifth century BC Greek philosopher, separated the art of poetics that included dramatic narrative, from philosophy, which for him was a method to arrive at Truth through a process of reasoning and argument. Plato regarded the art of poetics as mimesis or an attempt to imitate the world around us, a world that for Plato was already a poor representation of the truth. For Plato, poetics was not just doomed but even dangerous, so much so that his vision of an ideal society as he laid out in The Republic was one in which not a single poet was allowed. Plato’s star pupil, Aristotle, while agreeing with Plato that it was only through logic that the truth could be discovered, allowed in Rhetoric for the evocation of pathos or emotion in an audience as a means of persuasion.

Plato’s sharp distinction between poetics and philosophy held for thousands of years, even as what counts as ‘doing’ philosophy has changed. For example, when Isaac Newton published his seminal Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, it was considered the product of doing natural philosophy. Science, the glamorous daughter of natural philosophy, has since proved fantastically successful in building theories that explain and accurately predict how the world works. These discoveries have been harnessed to provide a more easeful life for humans, one not as subservient to the vagaries of disease, starvation, or the natural elements. However, unsettling questions remain, including the question of why, after over five decades of dedicated and diligent searching, not one bio or techno-marker has been found that would indicate the presence of technologically advanced aliens. Or the many questions swirling around the nature of consciousness.

Science fiction writers have dived into these gaps. For example, novels like Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhood’s End, explored theories of mind by positing a vast cosmic consciousness, one devoid of any material attributes, that humanity would one day merge with. Iain M. Banks’s 1987 novel, Consider Phlebas, posited ‘Minds’, artificial intelligences whose abilities so surpassed human cognition that they effectively became humanity’s benevolent rulers. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered to be the father of space exploration, wrote the 1928 novel The Will of the Universe: The Unknown Intelligence, in which he makes a case for panpsychism.

Likewise, the battle between the forces of good and evil has inspired countless science-fiction works, perhaps echoing the scripture of the Abrahamic religious traditions. Non-western philosophical traditions also have ‘what if’ scenarios that could interest science-fiction writers. What if the universe really is dualist, where the demarcation line is not where Descartes drew it as between mind and matter, but as the Indian Samkhya tradition has it between Prakriti and Purusha? What would society look like if the Confucian ideals of junzi and dao were encoded into law? What if Jainism is right and the universe really is composed of six eternal substances?

Even if we were to allow that such works of fiction can be ‘doing’ philosophy, is fiction a flexible enough medium to support the rigorous argumentation that is the bedrock of philosophical accounts?

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s biographer, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein once said ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.’[2] Satire, a literary form that uses humorous fiction to argue against some flavor of political philosophy was unlikely to have been what Wittgenstein was referring to. Instead, as an advocate of logical atomism, which is a view that holds that there are logical facts in the world that cannot be broken down further, it is more likely that Wittgenstein had something else in mind. Although the word ‘meme’ was a neologism coined in 1976 by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins almost three decades after Wittgenstein’s death, a ‘meme’ is an analogue of the ‘logical atom’ from logical atomism but applied to the cultural realm: a meme is a basic unit of cultural meaning that cannot be further broken down. Like their biological counterparts, the genes, these basic building blocks of cultural meaning could be strung together to construct complex ideas. Wittgenstein, as a logical atomist, might have been thinking along the lines of a philosophical work constructed entirely of humorous memes.

Typing ‘philosophy memes’ into a search engine brings up thousands of hits. There is one with the golden lab on a sandy beach looking contemplatively at a glorious sunset that is captioned ‘When your dog ate your philosophy homework.’ Or the one that makes use of a scene from the movie Babadook, where a mother driving a car twists back and screams, ‘Why can’t you just be normal?’ and the child in the backseat, whose face has been replaced with that of Socrates, screams in response, ‘Define Normal!’. If one could select and arrange the memes in the form of a thesis, supporting arguments, conclusions, objections to conclusions, and responses to objections, perhaps Wittgenstein could yet be proven correct.

The Society does not need to take a position on what was likely a casual remark of Wittgenstein to find interesting the notion that philosophy can be ‘done’ through fictional narratives, humorous or otherwise. In these explorations, we are grateful to have found fellow seekers: the team at Sci Phi Journal, to whom we are grateful for offering us this space to introduce ourselves to you, dear reader. If you’d like to get in touch, share ideas, or join our mailing list, you can do so here.

~


[1] https://clarkefoundation.org/arthur-c-clarke-biography/

[2] Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. https://archive.org/details/ludwigwittgenste0000unse_g5p0/page/28/mode/2up, 1966, 29

Affinities Between Science Fiction And Music

by Mircea Băduț

Preamble

Auditory concepts such as the “music of the spheres”, which we may nowadays associate with the speculative mode, have deep historical roots reaching back to the works of Pythagoras (6th century BC) and later explored by Plato (4th century BC). Johannes Kepler’s ‘Harmonices Mundi’ (1619) further emphasized this idea, while it was tangentially touched upon in literary works such as Hermann Hesse’s ‘Klein and Wagner’ (1919). The symphonic suite ‘The Planets’, composed by Gustav Holst in 1914-1917, should also be mentioned here.

Yet I would argue that it was the electronic music boom of the 1970s and 1980s which had brought the intersection between music and speculative fiction to the fore, with artists such as Vangelis leading the way. This was made possible by the capabilities of electronic synthesizers to sonically create an atmosphere that human culture (and perhaps human instinct too) assumed to be associated with cosmic space, and this phenomenon occurred during a time when society was experiencing excitement and curiosity about our expanding presence in the cosmos, both physically and intellectually.

I believe electronic music captured the listeners of that era for two main reasons. Firstly, because the exoticism of the sounds emitted by electronic instruments, often characterized by long notes and in vague harmonies, had a profound effect on inducing a unique mental state. Secondly, owing to the radicality of the distinction from pop music (which would not have been evident in a comparison with symphonic/classical music, where the modernist branch had already reached somewhat similar sonorities). In other words, this new music conquered the listeners of those decades (in which I also grew up) through its progressive, renewing character.

 Judged from a musicological perspective, the electronic music of the early decades could often be considered as minimalist, occasionally obsessive (in its repetition or thematic dosage), and at times deliberately psychedelic. (The latter effect is often achieved by relying on an obstinato of melodic theme that foreshadows either an accumulation of dramatic potential, akin to the musical tension build-up used in the symphonic genre, or by a transcendence into oneirism.) And, of course, if it had been compared to the peaks of creation in classical music or in the jazz and rock of that era, it would have proved itself somewhat immature. However, much like the merger of science fiction into mainstream literature, electronic music targeted a different segment of society, and thus, they did not necessarily compete with each other.)

However, this essay does not end at electronic music, and will try also to cover, as significant landmarks, other kinds of musical creation close to the idea of science fiction. So, to set the scene, here is my initial proposal for a list of milestones of the ‘SF – music’ nexus:

» 1964 – Probably the first sci-fi song;

» 1969 – David Bowie releases the single ‘Space Oddity’;

» 1972 – David Bowie releases the album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’;

» 1978 – ‘The War of the Worlds’, as musical version created by Jeff Wayne;

» 1976 – The electronic music album ‘Albedo 0.39’ composed and performed by Vangelis;

» 1977 – The electronic music album ‘Spiral’ composed and performed by Vangelis;

» 1978 – The electronic music album ‘Die Mensch-Maschine’ (‘The Man-Machine’), by Kraftwerk;

» 1982 – The soundtrack of the film ‘Blade Runner’ (Ridley Scott), composed and performed by Vangelis.

1. Probably the first sci-fi song

The reader may be surprised or thrilled to come across a reference from the vibrant era of the hippy movement and its music. It pertains to a pop-rock song titled “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus).” Composed by Rick Evans in 1964, this song achieved the remarkable feat of reaching number 1 on the US ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in 1969, followed by securing the top spot on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ later that year. However, the musical duo known as ‘Zager and Evans’, who created this remarkable hit, faded from the music scene like a passing comet, earning the status of a “one-hit wonder” before disbanding in 1971.

“In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” / Rick Evans / 1964 / ‘Zager and Evans’

“In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535

Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie

Everything you think, do and say

Is in the pill you took today (…)[1]

Even though the song was definitely noted in its time, we probably cannot nominate it as a kind of avant-la-lettre “sci-fi music”. But I consider that it deserves to be recognized as a significant reference both for the concrete science fiction text (including the coordinate of anticipation, of utopia), and for the fact that the band ‘Zager and Evans’ achieves this clear message using ordinary instrumentation (i.e. without resorting to any kind of sound fireworks).

2. The classic ‘music – SF literature’ connection reference

“Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” was originally a studio musical album (in the rock/pop/progressive genre) conceived, created, produced and recorded by musician Jeff Wayne (CBS Records, 1978), which would be followed by many reissues, performances, tours and reinterpretations. As we expect, the album is inspired from the novel ‘The War of the Worlds’ written by H.G. Wells, and is presented as a rock opera, arranged instrumentally with a rock band (guitars, bass, drums/percussion, organ/synthesizer) but also with a considerable addition of a classical/symphonic orchestra (including strings), as well as with narrative inserts (explanatory introduction and interludes, performed by the voice of the actor Richard Burton). The narrative thread of the rock opera is inspired by that of the classic sci-fi story, but it must be emphasized that some of the musical sequences (derived from acts of the story) led to the creation of songs of extraordinary musicality, thanks to both the melodic composition and very successful interpretations. In the years that followed (and to this day) this album was very successful, both in the charts (singles “Forever Autumn” and “The Eve of the War”) and in terms of sales.

By analyzing this musical production from a listener’s perspective, several noteworthy aspects can be observed. Firstly, the orchestration is “architectonic” in nature, featuring monumental sonorities that are impressively paired with melodic dramatization. Secondly, unconventional soundscapes and psychological stimulation are achieved, notably through the use of synthesizers, albeit without excessive exploitation. Additionally, the “voicebox guitar effect” is worth mentioning, although it had already become a recognized technique in rock concerts. A subtler element, yet a personal favorite, is the metal-body electric guitar played by Chris Spedding. This particular guitar, crafted by James Trussart and modeled after the famous Gibson Les Paul but with a hollow body made of steel sheet, creates a unique and intriguing sound.

The original album, subsequent reissues, concerts, tours, reinterpretations, and various editions on formats such as DVD, CD, and even SACD have all achieved tremendous success worldwide. While visionary projects are known to have the potential for great success in theory, the process of starting them is rarely easy. The realization of the 1978 album was indeed a challenging endeavor. Jeff Wayne conceived the idea, developed the concept and acquired the rights to incorporate narrative ideas from H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel. However, he faced significant difficulties in finding financiers for the album’s production expenses and persuading musicians to participate. He had even posed the question to musicians regarding their preferred method of payment: a fixed and immediate amount or a share in the future proceeds from the property rights? Unfortunately, to their detriment, the musicians chose the skeptical option in terms of their financial well-being.

It is worth noting that this remarkable science fiction musical creation was brought to life without overly relying on electronic artifice. That, however, was set to change in subsequent decades…

3. Tangible and consistent landmarks of the ‘music – SF’ connection

The first key date relates to a breakthrough in the material prerequisites for electronic music: in 1964 Robert Arthur Moog (1934–2005) invented the Moog musical synthesizer, and in 1970 he also released a portable model, the Minimoog, which would radically influence the music of the 20th century. (Alongside, of course, other notable manufacturers of synthesizers and electronic organs, such as Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Oberheim, EMS, ARP, Elka and Fairlight.)

Below I present the subsequent milestones in another succinct list (without going into detail where the names have become classics), no longer focusing on the names of musical productions, but rather the individuals (or groups) who made them:

» Vangelis, through the albums from 1975 to 1984;

» Tangerine Dream, through the albums from 1974 to 1987;

» Isao Tomita, esp. the album ‘Electric Samurai’ (Switched on Rock) from 1972;

» Klaus Schulze, through the albums Cyborg (1973), Timewind (1975), Moondawn (1976);

» Kraftwerk, through the albums released between 1977-1981 (The Man-Machine, Computer World);

» Jean Michel Jarre, through the albums Oxygène (1976) and Équinoxe (1978);

» Robert Fripp – renowned both for his compositional style (sometimes exploiting asymmetric rhythms and using classical or folkloric melodic motifs) and for his early innovations in the generation of unconventional sounds (such as the sound-delay system using magnetic tape).[2]

For a wider geographical context, electronic music also appeared in the Soviet Union, such as these examples:

• the band Zodiak, (USSR/Latvia), with the albums ‘Disco Alliance’ (1980) and ‘Music in the Universe’ (1982);

• the album ‘Metamorphoses – Electronic Interpretations Of Classical And Modern Music’ (Melodiya record label, USSR, 1980).

But perhaps the most interesting exemplifying corpus for the ‘music – SF’ nexus derives (although not explicitly) from so-called rock “super-groups” of the years 1965-1980 – Pink Floyd; Genesis; Manfred Mann’s Earth Band; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; The Alan Parsons Project; Supertramp; Marillion; Electric Light Orchestra; Brian Eno/Roxy Music; Mike Oldfield; etc –, which impress both by their sophistication (hence the alternative denomination of ‘art-rock’) and by their progressive function of cultural/spiritual re-toning (hence the denomination of ‘prog-rock’). Furthermore, numerous artists, even those not typically associated with art-rock or progressive-rock genres, have occasionally crafted songs that feature progressive sounds and nuances.

4. A rapprochement between (sub)genres (cultural and musical)

We observe that while the previous discussion began with electronic music, due to its inherent connection to science fiction, this intersection naturally expands to encompass other related musical genres. This tends to be driven by songs and productions that stand out for their unconventional and progressive sounds and messages. Therefore, it is fitting to include or at least explore genres such as art-rock, progressive rock, jazz fusion, and even classical/symphonic music, as they share connections and influences with speculative fiction.

Progressive music offers alternative perspectives and enhances traditional forms, leading to a continuous elevation of artistic standards over the years. It has even influenced pop music, which often fails to appreciate the achievements in quality and compositional complexity of previous generations. Each new generation tends to “reinvent the wheel” with a certain casualness. In contrast, composers in “heavy” music are more inclined to study the classics and acknowledge their influence even if they create in new musical currents or subgenres. Moreover, in addition to the fact that progressive can be understood as a reform or as a detachment from an ordinary/vulgar flow, the dichotomy between progressive rock and pop-rock (intentional in essence, assumed either voluntarily or instinctively) can also be seen in another perspective: with the progressive, music becomes conceptual, i.e. intended rather for actual audition (an audition for audition itself) than for easy entertainment and somatic well-being (we might say, “moving thought/spirit rather than muscle/skeleton” ). In order to build its conceptual (or experimental) character, such music frequently resorts to ‘fusion’, both from the perspective of orchestration/sounds and from a rhythmic/melodic perspective, with inspiration and mixture from jazz, symphonic/classical music, or even from world-music (folk).

Experts in music may argue that these “progressive mechanisms” are naturally experienced in modern jazz. This is not necessarily a negative development, as it allows for the incorporation of multiple genres within the concept of spiritual-cultural regeneration and evolution. And now we promptly return to our cultural parallel, because speculative fiction often embodies similar ideas and proposals, justifying the close affinity with progressive music. Nonetheless, it is important to note that, in the context of the present discussion, musical progressiveness primarily concerns music itself, while science fiction tends to be more focused on stimulating thought rather than solely on the literary craft.

Music connoisseurs could also draw our attention to the fact that during the boom periods of the species concerned here (sci-fi, electronic music, progressive rock) in symphonic music there were already currents and subgenres that used “progressive mechanisms”: neoclassicism, modernism, chromatisme, serialism (dodecaphonic music), post-modernism, (so-called) contemporary music, experimental music, post-tonal music; respectively with the names of composers such as Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ottorino Respighi, Anton Webern, Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez et al. In fact, many progressive rock music productions have been inspired (using themes or approaches) by classical/symphonic music (Jethro Tull; Rush; Procol Harum; Beatles; Moody Blues; The Who; King Crimson; Jeff Beck; Rick Wakeman; John Lord; Deep Purple; Queen; Led Zeppelin; Sting; Peter Gabriel; etc). And if we call to mind the soundtrack of the film ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) – a cinematic touchstone in SF culture – then we will once more recognize the proximity to classical music, but we may also admit that a special sound atmosphere can be created with classical formulas and acoustic musical instruments. (And while on this subject, if we listen to “Also sprach Zarathustra,” the symphonic poem composed by Richard Strauss in 1896 in its entirety, we will notice that it was very modern for its time.)

And we end this section with a reference to ‘Firebird’, a symphonic music concert composed by Igor Stravinsky on a fantastic theme, and which mnemonically leads us to the Japanese animated film ‘Firebird 2772: Love’s Cosmozone’ (director/screenplay: Osamu Tezuka and Taku Sugiyama; music: Yasuo Higuchi; 1980).

5. Music, beauty and the digital future

In order to complement some ideas in this essay, it is worth noting that in its emerging era, electronic music was created with instruments that did not work digitally (with numerical signal encoding) but analogically. These were sound synthesizers (with electronic tubes, then with transistors and later with integrated circuits), audio sequencers (such as ‘CV/gate’) or other more or less artisanal devices (Frippertronics; theremin/termenvox; Fender Rhodes piano; Ondes Martenot; tape loops, tape delay, musique concrète). It was not until the 1980s that the way of digitally recording, processing and generating music would be opened.

But what is the essential difference between analogue and digital sound? (We tacitly accept that music, of whatever genre it may be, means sound. In fact, a multitude of sounds, emitted and succeeded according to harmonic/aesthetic laws.) These two terms, somehow antagonistic, were defined in relation to each other. Initially – in the days of vacuum tubes and transistors – electronics did not have a second name, but only after the advent of signal coding technologies, would the field bifurcate into (1) analog electronics (working with continuous signal) and (2) digital electronics (working with discontinuous/discrete signals). (The digital electronics are also called ‘logic electronics’, because the topology and operation of their circuits correspond to a desired logic.)

The transformation of the natural/analog signal into a digital signal involves two processes: (1) sampling and (2) quantization. Sound sampling means that we read (i.e. take a sample from) the original signal at every fraction of a second (a fraction having, let us say, 2×10-5 seconds, as in the case of CD-Audio), and quantization implies that we will measure the amplitude of each sample and transform it into a number (respectively into a digital code, i.e. a group of bits). This transformation is called analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). Of course, when it is necessary to listen those digitally recorded signals, they must go through a digital-to-analog conversion (DAC), which is somewhat the reverse of the one briefly described above.

Of the two processes applied to the digitization of music, sampling is guilty of the greatest loss when recording the original sound, and this is because in those unread time intervals (intervals of 2×10-5 seconds) the audio signal nonetheless continues, especially if it is a polyphonic signal, as happens in music where several instruments play quasi-simultaneously, and each instrument actually emits many simultaneous sounds. (Even when a single musical note is emitted, the sound having the frequency corresponding to that note is accompanied by a myriad of other sounds – secondary/additional harmonics – that make up the ‘timbre of the instrument’.) In fact, from a Hi-Fi (High-Fidelity) perspective, the beginnings of music digitization were unfortunate because it was not understood then that Nyquist’s Theorem (which defined a minimum for the sampling rate of signals) was not suitable for music sounds.

A similar insufficiency at the small time scale is the reason why digital synthesis sounds (even when embodying traditional musical instruments) are poorer than sounds produced by acoustic instruments (instruments that produce sound by physical vibration: either a parts of their composition, or the air passing through them), an aspect that we can all analyze if we do small experiments by listening carefully to musical instruments or comparing quality music recordings.

Humans, with our analogue ears, have a natural affinity for music. The appreciation and recognition of beauty, including the auditory one, involve two fundamental factors in human beings. The first factor is our biological and innate perception, which is passed down through genetics. The second factor is our cultural perception, shaped by environmental influences, such as imitation, assimilation, and education (i.e. developed through the traditions and customs of the people among, and places where, we have grown up or currently reside). Thus, we have two filters through which our perception of music is shaped: a biological and a psycho-social one.

The influence of the biological filter can be documented by the fact that certain sounds (specific combinations/aggregations of frequencies) can evoke distinct physiological states, either beneficial or adverse, with or without involvement of the psyche. On the other hand, the psycho-social conditioning can be illustrated by the awareness that there were (and still are) peoples in the world who divide the musical octave into intervals other than the twelve we commonly use, and who build the rhythms in other measures than we do. Therefore, if we were to listen to music indigenous to such cultures, we might feel a sense of confusion. Thus, the concepts for musical aesthetics developed by an extraterrestrial civilization, if we were to ever encounter one, might very well leave us utterly baffled.


[1] https://lyrics.lyricfind.com/lyrics/zager-evans-in-the-year-2525-2

[2] The author recommends the ‘Discipline’ album for edification.

~

Bio:

Mircea Băduț is a Romanian writer and engineer. He wrote eleven books on informatics and six books of fictional prose and essays. He also wrote over 500 articles and essays for various magazines and publications in Romania and around the world.

The Power Of The Stone

by David K. Henrickson

I was there when the first aliens landed in Central Park, when the lost tomb of Alexander the Great was discovered, when fabled Atlantis rose again from the waves.

That is the power of the stone. Those four words: “I was there when”, carved into its surface, can take you anywhere or to any time, real or imagined.

I have no knowledge of where the stone came from or anything concerning its origin. In all my searches into its provenance — and my resources these days are considerable — I have found no mention of it anywhere, in any time, in any culture.

I know it is not contemporary. The first time I held the stone, those four words were not in English but in a script unknown to me, then or now. When I looked again, the stone had changed and appeared as it still does today, many years later.

Nor do I know how the stone does what it does. There is no way I could risk an investigation into its nature. I cannot see that it matters. The stone is either magic or a technology of the highest order — far beyond anything humans are currently capable of.

Will ever be capable of. We’re talking about pure creation here. Of fashioning an entire universe in accordance with a single sentence uttered in its presence. Yes, I was there when Oswald failed to assassinate President Kennedy. Yes, I was there when Hannibal overran Rome during the second and final Punic War. Yes, I was there when Superman first appeared in the skies over Metropolis.

Whether the stone fashions these realities whole cloth, or pulls them from an infinite grab bag where such worlds lay waiting, I have no way of knowing. Nor am I always sure how the stone will interpret my words. It seems to possess a puckish sense of humor at times when fulfilling my wishes.

It also ignores requests that are too specific. A simple sentence with a minimum number of qualifiers works best. Something that can be uttered in a single breath. That is enough if one is sufficiently clever. Yes, I was there when Edmond Dantès discovered the lost treasure of Monte Cristo. (Ha! I needed a wheelbarrow for that one.)

I was also there when they developed the cure for cancer. You see, I am not quite the heartless misanthrope people make me out to be.

You might well think all this to be the ramblings of a delusional eccentric. My scars would indicate otherwise—as does the absence of the little finger on my left hand. Using the stone is not without its dangers.

I am old now, even though I do not look it, and have been a recluse for many years. (Yes, I was there when Ponce de León discovered the Fountain of Youth.) Whenever I need an escape, I pick up the stone, speak my desire, and journey into the realm of What Might Have Been.

Our travels together are nearing an end, however. Over the years, I have become attuned to the stone and its moods. I know, even though I do not know how, that it is ready to move on. To find a new owner, whoever and wherever that might be.

Accordingly, I have put my affairs in order. As for the stone, I will send it away when I reach my final destination. Where it will end up, I have no way of knowing, just as I do not know how it came to be where I once found it. Let fate decide—or rather, the stone itself.

As for the many eclectic treasures in my collection, I have bequeathed these to various museums without explanation or annotation. (All but my journal. That, I am taking with me.) Let people make of them what they will—a last, enigmatic note to a singular life.

There remains only my final journey, one from which I do not intend to return. It is one I have thought long and hard on over the years. Where should I go? The far future? The distant past? Or to some place that should have been but never was, like Wonderland or the world of Scheherazade and her One Thousand and One Arabian Nights?

Perhaps I should go to Barsoom. Or to some vast, galactic empire at the height of its power and glory. What about the First Age of Middle Earth? (Wouldn’t that be something?) Wherever I end up, it should be a place where a person can still have an adventure or two.

Where would you go if you could pick only a single destination, one from which you would never return?

Let me see. I was there when…

~

Bio:

Dave Henrickson has a background in engineering, oceanography, and computer science but always wanted to be an artist. Maybe a dancer. He currently lives in Virginia and spends his free time writing, reading, and killing monsters with his wife Abbie. He has also written a number of novels — which he may even publish one of these days.

Philosophy Note:

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? To places that never were or never could be? Where would you go if you could never come back from such a place? The realm of the imagination provides limitless possibilities.

Welcome To The Zineverse!

by Mina

“Gleaming and glittering with gold and wondrous surprises for young and old”

Ladies and gentlemen! Roll up, roll up! Come, my lovelies, and experience everything the Zineverse has to offer. Marvel at those spaceships! Meet the monsters (not all in alien form). Dream of new worlds!

Let’s begin our journey by meeting a publication that reviews the many different creatures you can find in the science-fiction-and-fantasy Zineverse, Tangent. It owes its thirty-year existence to Dave Truesdale, its editor, and the volunteers who review for the pure love of it. Truesdale is proud of the fact that Tangent was the first SF short-fiction review magazine, to quote the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz. As well as reviews, Truesdale asks reviewers to give “recs” for the recommended reading list for that year. In an email exchange, I said my baseline criteria for recs was whether I would read something a second time and whether there was something truly original. Truesdale replied that originality is getting increasingly rare:

“… it’s harder and harder to come across anything even halfway original, because the more you’ve read over time means you’ve had the opportunity to experience “originality” in theme or treatment many times over many years and many stories…The reverse is that, when you first began to read SF/F, everything was pretty much original to you, giving rise to that Sense of Wonder the younger (or newer) reader discovers. But… the originality metric is harder to find. That’s when I go to the other metrics… primary among them how the author executes his/her theme or treats the subject matter. Does the prose level perhaps sparkle above and beyond the norm? Is there an unexpected twist or POV on a tried-and-true theme elevating the story above the norm or cliche?”

These comments will resonate with all editors in the Zineverse. And the feeling of awe I too seek as a reader was also mentioned by Ádám Gerencsér when I asked him why he became co-owner and co-editor of Sci Phi Journal – with Mariano Martín Rodríguez:

“It’s a labour of love… a childhood attraction to SF’s infinite possibilities and [its] innate Sense of Wonder. For Mariano and I, it was really a question of: we want a venue for philosophical SF and if the only such publication is orphaned, we got to revive it [back in 2018].”

Sci Phi Journal happily tells you that it is “a cosy waystation for travellers who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF.” It deals in idea-driven speculative fiction (not character-driven) and is an unapologetically European journal consciously setting itself aside from the “American model”. It embraces “semantic diversity” and all thought experiments, including those they do not agree with. It is itself an experiment in true free expression. I find this quite refreshing, and it is a cause I am willing to espouse. It also offers a platform for literary analysis and philosophical discussion in a genre considered by many as not worthy of such analysis (and it is not the only publication in the Zineverse to do so, for example Hélice, which publishes literary criticism in English and Spanish).

Truesdale has commented to me many times that Tangent reviews stories and not politics or ideologies. I’m not sure, however, that politics or ideologies don’t figure in the Zineverse. For example, Fantasy, at the time of writing this article, was accepting “BIPOC-only” submissions (writers who identify as black, indigenous and people of colour); its sister publication, Lightspeed, however, was concurrently accepting fantasy flash fiction open to all writers. Fantasy provides “entertainment for the intelligent genre reader – we publish stories of the fantastic that make us think, and tell us what it is to be human”. I particularly like its Q&A with authors and the fact that they include poetry, as well as short stories and flash fiction. Lightspeed has a broader focus, including many subgenres of SF and fantasy. Both magazines are available as e-book editions (where you receive everything in one go for payment) or free online (where you wait for a new instalment each week). And I haven’t forgotten the other sibling, Nightmare, that blends horror and dark fantasy (recent submissions were also BIPOC-focused). I must admit that, as a recovering insomniac, I haven’t delved much into this one but please do go and get your spine tingled and chilled by it.

That members of the Zineverse uphold various causes, languages and genres can also be seen in the special issues. The ezine Strange Horizons has brought out special issues, such as where trans/nonbinary (queer authors), Wuxia and Xianxia ( “writers from the Sino diaspora as well as BIPOC creators in various parts of the world”) and Palestine meet SF and fantasy. This year’s June issue included each story in its original language (Bulgarian and Lithuanian) and in translation into English. Strange Horizons tells us it is “of and about speculative fiction” for all “flavours of fantastika”. In reviews of this publication, Tangent always adds a disclaimer about Strange Horizons’ political affiliations:

“On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.”

Aurealis favours SF, fantasy and horror authors from Australia and New Zealand for most of the year; it accepts submissions from anywhere in the multiverse for one month a year.

Talking of authors, I particularly enjoyed this comment from one of the authors published recently by Lightspeed, Sarah Grey:

“There’s no getting rich off short fiction in any genre; you’d be hard-pressed to even pay for groceries with a year’s worth of generous short fiction income. So just write the stories that appeal to you, at the pace your life allows. Read the stories and novels that call to you, not what anyone else says you should read.”

SF and fantasy, more so than many other types of literature, are peopled with fanatics, although I do prefer the terms aficionados or enthusiasts, which have fewer negative connotations. So most SF and fantasy publications are run by small teams of people who are passionate about the genre and reliant on readers who believe in that Sense of Wonder, such as Lightspeed: “There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines – and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show – so the magazines really rely on reader support.” In a publisher’s note, the editor draws attention to the fact that, in September, Amazon will be closing its Kindle Periodicals program: some magazines will be transitioned to Kindle Unlimited; some will be dropped entirely. This will have a severe impact on publications who currently rely on Amazon’s digital subscriptions service for a substantial part of their income. This concern is also raised by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine, who states that most publications in SF and fantasy rely on subscriptions and not on advertising for the bulk of their revenue. Clarkesworld and other journals will be encouraging their readers to transition to new subscription and pledge models, via their own and other platforms, such as Patreon.

Clarkesworld is probably one of the better-known publications in the Zineverse, along with Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF and Apex (Asimov’s and Analog have the same publisher, Penny Publications). Beneath Ceaseless Skies tells us that it is “dedicated to publishing literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters”. Asimov’s is proud of its history: “From its earliest days in 1977 under the editorial direction of Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine has maintained the tradition of publishing the best stories, unsurpassed in modern science fiction, from award-winning authors and first-time writers alike.” It publishes hard SF and SF brimming with nostalgia. Its sister publication, Analog’s Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, “remains the unparalleled literary magazine in the genre, and rewards readers with realistic stories that reflect both the highest standards of scientific accuracy and the far reaches of the imagination”. Another publication to have published well-known authors is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), with authors like Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Walter M. Miller in its quiver of arrows. Asimov’s can boast of authors like George R.R. Martin in its gallery, Analog of Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Poul Anderson and many more. Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex are probably more interested in publishing unknown authors. I love Apex’s mission statement:

“We publish short stories filled with marrow and passion, works that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. Creations where secret places and dreams are put on display.”

I think that should be the mission statement for the entire Zineverse, whether we are talking of flash fiction, short stories, novelettes or novellas. Whether you prefer to read your zines online, as a PDF, in some other digital form or on paper.

As a reviewer for Tangent, I have met some stories that were not very good, many that were competent and a few gems that reawakened my Sense of Wonder, first born when I read John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven (closely followed by Asimov’s robot stories and Bradbury’s Mars tales). I will read all SF genres (other than horror) and here is a taste of the tales I have read that I would read twice:

– “Showdown on Planetoid Pencrux” by Garth Nix, where warborgs meet High Noon: a tale of quiet courage, friendship and responsibility, without being preachy or superficial (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Karawynn Long, where a neurodiverse person learns to talk with genetically-modified crows: a tale about not underestimating others (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon creates a London you can almost smell and touch, a monster born from effluvia and a hero who has his memories stolen, with poetry and rhymes woven through it like golden threads (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 13/07/23).

– “A Dead World Wakens” by Amy Dawn Buchanan, where a lone human wakes up in a distant future in a synthetic Eden: a lyrical coming of age story (Aurealis, 4/23).

“The Ocean Remembers The Wave” by L. Chan, where the hero follows a trail of enhanced bones in his sentient ship and wuxia and xianxia (think, immortal itinerant warriors of ancient China) meet space adventure (Strange Horizons, special issue May 2023).

– “Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee follows the brief and lethal love affair between two quantum cats: pure fun, full of quirky turns of phrase (Fantasy, June 2023).

– “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre imagines life in a refugee shelter in the Andes. Humanity has managed to destroy the Earth’s climate, and many have already left for the space colonies: to stay or leave, that is the question and where does true freedom lie? (Lightspeed, June 2023).

And that is just a slice of the stories out there, not forgetting many smaller online portals to the Zineverse, like tor.com (SF and fantasy), 365tomorrows (SF and speculative flash fiction, a story a day), Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (“otherworldly encounters”) and so on. If you want an overview of what is out there, go to Tangent and look at the publications down the left-hand side, categorised as “print” and “e-market” (although the line between the two is becoming blurred with e-readers and smart phones) and periodicity. There are many excellent magazines to choose from in the Zineverse: follow one or two, or hop around several; you won’t regret it.

I cannot do justice to the whole range of styles, subgenres, plot twists, weird and wonderful characters – it’s a smorgasbord of talent and ideas. To quote another author in Lightspeed, Ashok K. Banker:

“I am absolutely in awe of all the amazing writers, the vast majority of them new or recently published, who fill the pages of the SF zines. The sheer range and depth of craft, skill, imagination is extraordinary. SF has always flourished in the shorter lengths, but I truly think we’re seeing a new golden age of SF short fiction…”

And, echoing Truesdale’s comments at the beginning of this article:

“It’s no longer enough to simply have a great idea well executed. But I do feel that the big ideas, bold use of tropes, breakout storytelling have waned. I’d love to see someone bust the genre wide open, more than once, break the rules, cause outrage among purists and virtue signal police, and still create awesome SF that is inclusive, sensitive, and essentially humane…”

Although Banker goes in a slightly different direction in his musings:

“SF is no longer a genre unto itself, it’s been absorbed by the literary mainstream and now belongs to everyone. I love and embrace that fact and I hope to see more of this beautiful hybrid cross-species fertilisation!”

I beg to differ – yes, there has been a lot of cross-pollination but, as our tour round the Zineverse shows, there are many specialised SF and fantasy publications out there, each with a slightly different focus. I would prefer to see such magazines maintain their individuality, and that they not be subsumed by “the literary mainstream”. The Zineverse should ring with a carillon, not a death knell.

Coda: You will have noticed that I have done two things in this article: given you lots of links to follow for your own exploration of the Zineverse and focused on the people that make the Zineverse work – the authors, editors and reviewers. This is a pæan to their hard work, vision and passion. (And, in case you’re wondering, the quote that opens this article is a circus slogan from 1961.)

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Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Science Fiction And The Shaping Of Belief

by Manjula Menon

The editors most responsible for shaping what we now call the genre of ‘science-fiction’ were, arguably, Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and John W. Campbell, who took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. In this essay, I’ll look at how these influential editors construed the science in the science-fiction stories they published, stories that for legions of fans served as steppingstones to belief in the truths revealed to them by the magazines’ writer-prophets.

Gernsback’s Amazing Stories was subtitled The Magazine of Scientification, and the magazine’s motto ‘Extravagant Fiction Today — Cold Fact Tomorrow’ was emblazoned prominently as a first-page banner. In his very first editorial for Amazing Stories in April 1926, titled A New Sort of Magazine, Gernsback defined ‘scientification’ as ‘the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story— a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.’[i] Gernsback had coined the neologism ‘scientification’ back in 1916, and was already publishing such stories in the other magazines he edited, like Science and Invention and Radio News. In subsequent editorials, Gernsback often vigorously focused on defending the magazine against ‘certain class of Amazing Stories scientification readers … ready to tear and claw at any author who comes along with a new idea which, for the time being, may be contrary to fact, although it may still lie within the realm of science.’[ii]

One of Gernsback’s aims was to better disseminate the work of non-American writers. The very first story that appeared in Amazing Stories was the Frenchman Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet (“Hector Servadac”), in which Captain Servadac experiences a cataclysmic event that appears to have altered the Algerian coast he’d been stationed at. Servadac sets sail on a yacht owned by the Russian Count Timascheff, to explore his new environs, an adventure that has them sailing through storms and ice; jibs are raised, mainsails adjusted, helms righted, yawls ingeniously refitted to skate over ice. They eventually discover that the Algerian coast they’d been on had been picked up apiece, air and water included, by a comet that had suddenly collided with Earth. This fantastic scenario is obviously far from being scientification; Gernsback himself says in his introduction to Off on a Comet, that it belongs ‘in the realm of fairyland’.[iii]

Off on a Comet is, however, meticulous in showing how characters methodically calculate solutions to ongoing problems.  After the cataclysmic event, Servadac observes that it takes longer for water to boil at the same outside temperature and deduces that there is less atmosphere above him. He observes that days are shorter, gravity is weaker, and that it is the star Vega in the constellation Lyra, and not the pole star, that is the fixed point around which constellations revolve. While the stars remain fixed in size and luminosity, he observes that the planet Venus gets larger and brighter, from which he deduces that he was on a collision course with the Cytherean body. When he observes Venus getting smaller and smaller, he deduces that the planes of the two planets’ orbits didn’t meet, and the catastrophic collision had been averted. He deduces from the observation that the magnetic needle of his compass had not deviated in angle from the north pole, that north and south remained the same, but that east and west had apparently changed places given sunrise and sunset position. Smooth and angular land formations jut up from the sea, and when they lower sounding-lines, they discover that the seabed is bereft of any marine life, uniformly deep, and composed of a strange iridescent metallic dust, from which they conclude that a subterranean event has lifted parts of that strange seabed to the surface. Once they understand that they are no longer on Earth but on a celestial body they name Gallia, they deduce that it is in an elliptical orbit, because the planet’s rate of speed diminishes in proportion to the distance receded from the sun. Far away from the sun, the temperature drops, and the Gallian seas begin to freeze. Off on a Comet is not just a thrilling sea adventure, but also a study of how the characters use tools, observations, and calculations to make deductions about the nature of the mystifying world they find themselves in.

In one scene, a solitary point of light observed from the schooner leads the party to a tomb deep within an abandoned mosque. Above the tomb, they discover a large, silver lamp, the source of the light, and on the corner of the tomb, an open French prayer-book. Servadac then has a revelation, that the tomb was that of the Crusader king Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis; ‘The lamp that had been kindled at the memorial shrine of a saint was now in all probability the only beacon that threw a light across the waters of the Mediterranean, and even this ere long must itself expire.’ After making a ‘reverential obeisance to the venerated monument’,[iv] the party continue their exploration. Later, when the schooner appears certain to smash into those strange, smooth Gallian cliffs, Count Timascheff intones, ‘Let us, then, commend ourselves to the providence of Him to Whom nothing is impossible.’[v]

Verne had been raised Catholic, but other than brief nods to the faith of his youth as in the passage referenced above, he makes almost no reference to Christianity, and is commonly claimed by both deists and atheists as one of their own. Indeed, Saint Louis is brought up later in Off on a Comet, when the party encounter a supercilious English major who refers to the tomb as that of a French monarch, only to be vociferously corrected by Servadac that Louis IX was not merely a monarch, but a saint. Thus, the saint’s role in Off on a Comet appears to be to highlight verbal sparring between agents of rival colonial powers, rather than to make any kind of spiritual point. Indeed, none of the nineteenth-century Europeans who find themselves so mysteriously transplanted onto a comet hurling its way through the solar system consider that the event might have been a miracle, the work of God.

Verne similarly dropped non-Christian religious traditions into his stories. For example, in his adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (“Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours”), the enigmatic, exacting, and iron-willed Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his excitable, impressionable, and sentimental French valet, Passepartout set out to traverse the world in eighty days on a wager. They soon arrive in India, where in Bombay, Passepartout encounters a Parsi festival where the ‘descendants of the sect of Zoroaster…were celebrating a sort of religious carnival, with processions and shows, in the midst of which Indian dancing-girls, clothed in rose-coloured gauze, looped up with gold and silver, danced airily, but with perfect modesty, to the sound of viols and the clanging of tambourines.’[vi] Later, when their pre-planned train ride comes to an abrupt end, they hire a Parsi as mahout to a partially trained war-elephant they purchase to complete the journey, they soon find themselves in a little-traveled region ‘inhabited by a fanatical population, hardened in the most horrible practices of the Hindu faith’,[vii] where they encounter a procession carrying the corpse of a dead Rajah, accompanied by his beautiful, young Parsi widow, Aouda, who is to be ritually sacrificed in his funeral pyre. This horrific scene serves as impetus to a rescue mission, replete with daring deeds and suspenseful, last-minute turnarounds. Aouda and Phileas Fogg fall in love over the course of the novel, indeed the final scenes concern a marriage proposal. Once again, Verne uses religious traditions not with spirituality in mind but in the service of story, in the case of India, to serve as backdrop for spectacle, romance and adventure. Also like Off on a Comet, Verne is meticulous in Around the World in Eighty Days as to showing how the characters calculate solutions to ongoing problems, famously detailing how local time changes with changes in latitude, at a time before the international date line had been established. Metaphysical questions about the nature of reality or the existence of a higher power does not play any role in Verne’s stories, but religious traditions make occasional appearances, usually in service of other story elements.

The second story Gernsback picked for Amazing Stories was also a republication: The New Accelerator by the Englishman, H.G.Wells. It is perhaps worth noting here that it is these three men, Wells, Verne, and Gernsback, who are now commonly referred to as ‘the fathers of science fiction’. In The New Accelerator, the unnamed narrator agrees to imbibe an experimental drug concocted by Professor Gibberne, his neighbor and friend, who is world-renowned for making drugs that work on the human nervous system. The professor explains that the drug (named The New Accelerator), ‘is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two — or even three to everybody else’s one.’[viii] Upon drinking the vial of green liquid offered, the narrator discovers to his amazement that he can now move so quickly that ordinary life appears to have come to a standstill. After the novelty of wandering through crowds of motionless people wears off, the narrator finds himself using the drug to achieve somewhat more prosaic aims: ‘I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means. I began at 6:25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated.’[ix]

In addition to fine-tuning The Accelerator so it can work for the masses, Professor Gibberne is also at work on another potion he calls The Retarder, which ‘should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings.’[x] Details as to the science behind the time-altering drugs are scant to non-existent. Instead, Wells is interested in the idea that our experience of time relates to the speed at which our bodily functions work.

These two stories, written by already very successful writers, typify what Gernsback liked to publish. For Gernsback, scientification, or science, appears to be broadly defined, as can be gathered by the implausibility of the underlying scenarios presented. As to what science was, how it differed from what came before, or how it intermingled with religious traditions that it existed alongside with, even as it ‘enters so intimately into all our lives today’[xi] as he put it, he expended almost no ink. Instead, as evinced by his eighty patents and numerous publications, Gernsback was passionate about technology, from the nitty-gritty mechanics of yet-to-be-invented machines to what grand societal changes were possible because of new technology.

While Gernsback appears to take scientification and science itself as ‘I know it when I see it’, the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science has continued to vex philosophers for centuries. Although the word ‘science’ hadn’t been formulated yet, Aristotle in the 4th century BC held that a demarcation line existed between propositions that were ‘apodictically’, or necessarily, self-evidently, or demonstrably true, versus propositions arrived through the dialectic or reasoning process. Millenia later, the 1920s saw logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Hans Hahn, focus on verifiability as the demarcation line, where the distinction is even more strongly drawn as being between meaningful and meaningless statements. Verificationists hold that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or if it expressed as a tautology that is logically true. However, using verifiability as demarcation leads to universally general statements like ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ being rendered meaningless as it cannot be verified, while existential statements like ’ghosts exist’ would be classified as meaningful, as it can be verified. In the 1930s, Karl Popper argued it should be falsifiability that should serve as the demarcation line, where only propositions that can be falsified should be considered scientific. In contrast to verifiability, under falsifiability, the sentence ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ would be considered scientific as it can be falsified, while ‘ghosts exist’ would not be considered scientific as it cannot be falsified. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued against falsifiability by observing that astrologers often provide precise predictions that could be falsified, which according to falsification would then render astrological predictions scientific. Kuhn argues instead that the demarcation line might not be as sharply defined, and that science was to be taken as merely a method of puzzle solving, in which the puzzle-solver works to correlate observation with theory. He pointed to what he called ‘extraordinary’ or ‘revolutionary’ science as the driver of forward scientific progress, rather than ‘ordinary’ science where the extraordinary science solves new problems in addition to the old problems solved by the paradigm it replaced. For Kuhn, these kind of paradigm shifts is what science is really about.

John W. Campbell, who became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, was clearly interested in the question of what science was and how it came to be. For example, in a 1953 editorial for Astounding Science Fiction, titled The Scientist, Campbell observes that scientists believe ‘in the existence of a Supreme Authority in the Universe, an Authority they call “Natural Law.” They hold that that Authority is above and beyond the opinions and beliefs, the will or willfullness, of any human being. That that Authority can, moreover, be directly consulted by any man, at any time—and that every man is, at every time and in every place, directly and specifically obedient to that Authority, to Natural Law, whether he recognizes that fact or not.’[xii] He further posits that the scientist would claim ‘I have proven beyond doubt that there is Universal Law; I am not yet wise enough to know the nature of its source,’[xiii] in contrast to those who claim to know the source of Universal Law.

Later, in the 1954 editorial, Relatively Absolute, Campbell writes that science is ‘that method of learning that involves the equal interaction and cross-checking of philosophical-theoretical thought, and actual physical-reality experiments, done as a conscious process for the consciously stated purpose of increasing knowledge and understanding—that is, increasing data and relationship-of-data.’[xiv] He argues that science was ‘going to be a mighty unpopular philosophy in any culture; it has an absolutism about it that says, it makes no difference who you are, what you are, or what you want. Neither does it matter what your wealth is, or your political power. These are The Laws, obey them or suffer.’[xv] Arguing that religion was ‘by derivation, the study of the “Laws of Things” … or “Cosmology” in modern linguistic terms’[xvi] he concludes that science could therefore only be invented by ‘a culture that had already accepted the idea of an Absolute Power in the Universe’[xvii] and points to their many inventions, including alchemy and algebra, to nominate the Islamic civilization as the sole progenitor of science.

Campbell is, at best, careless with the demarcation line, and whether one agrees with him or not about how and who ‘invented’ science, it seems indisputable that science-fiction, like science, did not wink into existence from out of the void, but rather emerged from a milieu.

For Darwin, it was inevitable that Homo-sapiens evolved to be philosophical. Writing in The Descent of Man Darwin says, ‘As soon as the faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.’[xviii]

Observations of what cause produced which effect was put to use to increase survival rate, while the human aptitude for symbolic behavior gave rise to language and allowed for the social cohesion necessary to form complex societies. When there were gaps in connecting cause with effect, our ancestors spun narratives that often imbued consciousness and agency to everything from stars to storms. These narratives were then often tied to belief structures, allowing for societal coalescence. Religious and sacred storytelling were, perhaps, inevitable outcroppings of the cognitive capacities of the human mind.

William James in his 1897 essay, ‘The Will to Believe’ says he wrote the essay ‘in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’[xix] He argues that a proposed hypothesis will present as either live or dead to the mind: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As a hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.’[xx] To the hypothesis offered being ‘live’,  James adds the perceived prestige of the source of the hypothesis which together make ‘the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith.’[xxi] Given the right imprimatur then, stories of science-fiction could rise to become part of some future canonical belief: Extravagant Fiction Today —— Cold Fact Tomorrow?

Indeed, Campbell later became a proponent of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and wrote approvingly about the existence of psi, or extra-sensory powers and perception, in humans, publishing multiple stories in Astounding based on psi. As James said about our quest for scientific truth, ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?’[xxii]

The editors most influential in shaping science-fiction as we know it today published stories that featured the speculative hypotheses they favored, thereby advancing these hypotheses into James’s ‘live’ category in the minds of their readers. Gernsback and Campbell published stories that not only evoked wonder and awe in their readers, but also provided the imprimatur of science that allowed their readers to shape belief in what might yet be revealed to have been prophetic truth.


[i] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 3

[ii] Gernsback, H. (1926, May). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 2(9), 825

[iii] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 1

[iv] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 24

[v] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 28

[vi] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 49

[vii] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 62

[viii] Wells, H. (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 58

[ix] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 96

[x] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 97

[xi] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 20

[xii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 69

[xiii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 72,73

[xiv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xvi] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xvii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xviii] Darwin, C. Descent of Man, Second Edition, 143

[xix] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xx] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xxi] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

[xxii] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

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Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels. This is her second essay in Sci Phi Journal after her “homecoming of sorts” in our previous issue. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

The Economy Of Words: Differing Philosophies Of Humanism Between Western And Muslim Science Fiction

by Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD

“To search for God with logical proof, is like Searching for the Sun with a lamp.”

Sufi Proverb

Science fiction is an exposition-heavy genre of literature. Everything from the laws of physics to the socio-political system to the way a computer programme works has to be explained to the reader, either through an extended introduction, forced dialogue between characters or a narrative device such as a radio broadcast summarizing the world as it is. Much the same holds true of philosophically-themed science fiction. A perfect illustration of this is a lovely short story by Philip K. Dick, possibly one of the most philosophically inclined SF authors of the 20th century. The story in question, “Human Is” (1955), is about the plight of a housewife married to a phenomenally unpleasant man, a crude scientist who is not interested in family life, romance or anything, not even food. He would prefer to be fed intravenously just so he can focus on work nonstop. He is so literal-minded and mean-spirited, when the kid from next door shows him his kitten – calling it a tiger – he cannot understand why the boy calls it that. He even encourages the boy to bring the animal with him to the laboratory, to perform horrendous experiments on it like they do on rabbits and mice. His wife later confides to a male friend that she will insist on a divorce, but not until after he returns from an expedition – he had been sent to an archaeological dig on the ancient planet of a dying race.

When he gets back, however, he appears to be a whole other man. He speaks in a ridiculously romantic way, as if out of a Mills and Boon novel, wants to have kids and is great with the boy from next door and becomes very inventive when it comes to food, chatting endlessly with the kitchen computer. The housewife tells all this to her friend and he figures out what had happened. That dying race on that ancient world would often snatch a man’s personality from his body and replace it with their own psyche to give their race a new lease on life. Now the housewife has to give her sworn testimony in court, to prosecute this alien and – more importantly – bring back her husband. Something she steadfastly does not want to do. She lies in court, saying that this is her husband, and he has always been this way and that as a wife she knows her man. Afterwards, the alien inhabiting her husband’s body apologies to her and says he should have told her from the start, and they turn over a new leaf and live happily ever after. The lesson is, clearly, that human is ‘kindness’. What makes you human isn’t biology but morality and volition. The title pretty much tells you this, as do other works by Philip K. Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and the original short story that inspired it, “The Little Black Box” (1964), where empathy is explicitly stated as the key to defining what and who is human.

Endless exposition is to be expected as stated above but it is also a shame, when you compare Dick’s story to a similarly themed work from Iran – “Ice Cream Cone” (2014) by Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi. It is very short, almost flash fiction, beginning with a man getting an ice cream on a hot summer’s day in Teheran. The ice cream vendor is complaining to him about the scolding heat, with the customer not replying. Then the customer sits on a bench and allows the ice cream to melt all over his hand. In the meantime, there is a cat rummaging for food among the plastic sacks of garbage while a miserable beggar asks for handouts in the background. Later the man goes home and turns on the TV set to listen to the results of the latest poetry contest and, while watching, plugs himself in. He was an android all along. A translucent recharging figure emerges on his forehead while in the background the announcer reads a 13th century Sufi poem by Saadi Al-Shirazi:

Human beings are members of a whole

In creation of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain

Other members uneasy will remain

If you have no sympathy for human pain

The name of human you cannot retain

Both “Human Is” and “Ice Cream Cone” say the same thing but in completely different ways. Dick’s story is a proper narrative with explanations from the various characters, whereas Iraj’s story is far more compact and open-ended because there’s no exposition at all. It leaves so many questions unanswered. The silence of the android character makes you unsure why he bought the ice cream and also not one hundred percent certain if the story is condemning the inhumanity of man to man. Hence, the starving cat and the miserable beggar. The title is also vague. The closest thing to exposition we get is through the poem, but again these are just hints, with no real explanation for anything.

Great writers and movie directors often leave things open-ended to create an air of mystery and intrigue and to force the audience to think for itself and reach its own conclusions. And in the case of Iraj’s story, he has used these techniques to keep the story compact and maximize the shock appeal.

The question then is how Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi was able to produce such an efficient and sophisticated story given that Muslims are the new kids on the block, so to speak, when it comes to science fiction. SF was invented in the West and for Arabs and Muslims it is an import, and a recent import at that; Iraj isn’t even a professional writer but a geologist and engineer. Many of our authors in the Middle East, whatever genre they write in, have to have a regular job to make ends meet and pursue writing as a pastime and passion. True enough, but Iran nonetheless has a long and proud storytelling tradition, something you can see with the many international awards Iranian filmmakers garner. The obscure and symbolic titles for such movies as Felicity Land, Every Night Loneliness, The Frozen Flower, The Salesman, The Blackboard, The Silence, The Song of Sparrows, A Cube of Sugar, What is the Time in Your World, alone tell you how skilled Iranians are at not giving the game away.

As for the Sufi poem, that is a cultural reference that allows for further compactness since the Iranian or Muslim reader can recognize what the author is trying to get at without an explicit explanation. Reading Iraj’s other stories and novellas, you find his characters predominantly aren’t named. That resonates with the oral tradition of storytelling found in Iran[1] and also Arabia, turning characters into anonymous archetypes – the policeman, the security guard, the doctor, the nurse, the detective, etc. These are archetypes but, critically, not stereotypes. The characters are nuanced and frequently take decisions that surprise you. By contrast “Human Is” is both exposition-heavy and weighed down with clichés and stereotypes. Science, or reason, is being seen as the enemy of emotion and the scientist here is being lampooned and condemned, much like the mad scientist trope so beloved of horror and science fiction.

Even a biopic like A Beautiful Mind (2001) falls into this trap, with John Nash (Russell Crowe) contrasted to his alter ego/figment of his schizophrenic imagination Charles (Paul Bettany). John Nash is egotistical, only has half a helping of heart, unsuccessful with women and downright vulgar and ‘literal’ with them – describing sex as fluid exchange, like in a car engine, and refusing to buy a drink for a girl. Charles, by pure coincidence, is the consummate womanizer and the liberal arts guy – an English literature graduate. He’s everything John Nash aspires to be but cannot be. This setup is almost exactly what you see in “Human Is”, the romantic alien who wants to have kids and enjoys nutritional exercises compared to the crude and literalist scientist husband. Not to forget that the latter’s specialization is toxicology; he is someone who positively enjoys the vivisection of cute little fury animals. Here you see a divorcing of knowledge, science at least, from morality. John Nash likewise talks about his mathematical representation of a mugging, something he witnessed dispassionately without moving a finger to help the victim in question.

Islamic culture is very different when it comes to how scientists are presented. They are seen as wisemen who chose the profession of knowledge to benefit mankind. It is supposed to be a thoroughly moral enterprise. Similarly to the monastic beginnings of Western research, scientists in Islam’s past were often religious scholars as well, and the same holds true of our medical tradition. Hence a common word used for medical doctor in Arabic, hakim, or wiseman. By contrast doctor in English means teacher, like a doctor in philosophy, a reference to cold academia. The proper Arabic word for doctor is tabib, which derives from tabtaba, something like patting someone on the back or consoling him. It is automatically seen in moral and humane terms. When I was a freshman at university, our intro philosophy professor Dr. Ernest Wolf-Gazo actually told us that for the longest time a doctor was a low profession in European history, seen as being no different than a butcher. Then he added that it’s different in Islamic history, seeing the look on our faces. Again for us a doctor is a wiseman who cares for you and comforts you. And surgery was a last resort in Islamic medical tradition, relying instead on medicines and natural herbs and diet first – much like with Chinese medical history, which features acupuncture, herbal remedies, and a clear link to spiritual life.

That is why the scientist is portrayed in such stereotypically negative fashion in “Human Is” on account of the author’s cultural background. And most likely Dick wasn’t even aware of this, as critical and philosophical an author as he was. So, ironically, the Iranian story “Ice Cream Cone” is arguably more modern and up to date.

The 1001 Nights contains fairytales but also stories that count as proto-science fiction[2] but in all cases the tales contain moral lessons and are mostly derived from Persian and Indian heritage. They operate at the same level as Greek myths, most noticeably a story like Icarus which is all about science, arrogance and morality. But, once again, consider how compact Iraj’s story is. This shows tremendous self-discipline, not giving too much away early on, proving how modern Muslim literary traditions can be and how easily they adapt to new genres and an international audience. Ironically it is “Human Is” that has a fairytale feel to it and spoon-feeds the audience information in the manner of juvenile literature.

The message of humanism isn’t just that we should search for common values but to not pigeonhole people into polar opposites and cartoonish characters. Humanism also means humility and appreciating how someone else different than you looks at the world, and how your enemy is just as human as you and driven by the same weaknesses and sentiments. After the film 300 (2006) had come out Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi wrote his novella Guardian Angel (2016) in response. Instead of denigrating the ancient Greeks (or modern Westerners) he extols the virtues of ancient Persia through a time-travel story where criminals in the future travel backwards into the past to murder Cyrus the Great before he can write his famous cylinder which may be considered the first ever universal declaration of human rights. There is an alien plot involved but the ultimate criminals are thoroughly human, and Iranian nationals at that.

Comparing notes across cultures and storytelling traditions, in order to see ourselves more clearly in the mirror of the other, is a facet of humanism, too, and a lesson readers may take away when exploring the differences between Muslim and Western SF.


[1] Zahra Iranmanesh, “Narrative prose and its different types”, Journal of Languages and Culture, Vol.4(8), October 2013, pp. 128-130.

[2] Kawthar Ayed, “Mapping the Maghreb: The History and Prospects of SF in the Arab West”, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha (eds.), Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2022, pp. 22.

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Bio:

Emad El-Din Aysha, an academic researcher, author, journalist and translator, is an Arab of mixed origin born in the United Kingdom in 1974. He attained his PhD in International Studies in 2001, with degrees in Philosophy and Economics all taken at the University of Sheffield, and currently resides in Cairo, Egypt. He has taught at institutions such as the American University in Cairo, and writes regularly on everything from politics and business to movie reviewing for newspapers like The Egyptian Mail, Egypt Oil & Gas and The Liberum. Since 2015 he has become a full-time science fiction author and has two books to his name – an SF anthology in Arabic, and an academic text he co-authored and co-edited, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022).

A Solipsist’s Guide To The Movies

by Larry Gale

We had just left the theatre after sitting through nearly three hours of bombastic superhero action on a large screen with a very loud sound system. This particular movie (I would hesitate to dignify it with the word “film”) had a convoluted plot involving lots of people with extraordinary powers hopping across time and space in order to save the universe, no, the multiverse from certain doom. It was all a bit over the top, rife with computer generated special effects and would probably earn a billion dollars at the box office.

“Do you believe in parallel universes, where we exist in one of many worlds that make up some sort of multiverse?” I asked.

“Parallel universes?” he responded. “I’m not sure I even believe in a single universe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a solipsist. For all I know, there is just me. Everybody else, everything I see, hear, smell, taste or touch is just a product of my imagination. Everything I know exists only in my mind.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, laughing.

“Of course I’m serious. You’re just a product of my imagination. Everybody I’ve ever known, anything I’ve ever seen, every place I’ve ever been to or read about is really just my brain making up stuff for my own amusement.” he continued. “In fact, once I get bored with you, you’ll cease to exist.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m your oldest friend. I’m as real as you are.”

“No, sorry, but you’re not.” he insisted. “I just hate going to the movies alone. And now you’re starting to bore me.”

I began to wonder if he was just joking, or if perhaps he was suffering some sort of mental illness. I opened my mouth to reply, but no sound came out. My peripheral vision started to blur, and colors began bleaching to gray. Finally, everything faded away as he imagined me out of existence.

~

Bio:

Larry Gale is a computer scientist, professional percussionist and fine art photographer. He is a lifelong fan of the science fiction genre and is currently working on a novel. He is an active member of the South Carolina Writers Association. His website is larrygale.com.

Philosophy Note:

I have always believed that science fiction is the literature of big ideas. The universe is a big place, and I like science fiction that reminds me of just how large that may be.

Peaks Of Imagination: Speculative And Fantastic Fiction In Romansh

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Among the super-minority languages of Europe, there is one, Romansh, which may count itself as one of the richest in literary terms on the continent, at least relative to the small number of its speakers. They barely amount to fifty thousand, but looking at their literature, we will be astonished not only by the large number of works published, but also and above all by their quality, as suggested by their translations into other languages, firstly into German, but also into French, Romanian, and even English. One of them is already an undisputed classic of the postmodern fiction of our century, Arno Camenisch’s Sez Ner (The Alp,[1] 2009), just as Gian Fontana’s short novel about rural xenophobia and its totalitarian manifestation, “Il president da Valdei” (The Mayor of Valdei, 1935), is a classic of 20th-century fiction.

Both works belong to the genre of rural realist fiction that predominates in Romansh literature, as would be appropriate for a language spoken in small villages in various valleys of the Swiss canton of Graubünden. However, fantasy and speculative literature (or, rather, literatures) have also been brilliantly cultivated. In fact, to speak of a unified Romansh language or literature is not entirely accurate, as there are several regional linguistic standards with their corresponding literatures. Rumantsch Grischun, which is used by the cantonal and Federal administration, is a recent syncretic linguistic standard which does not correspond to any particular dialect and whose literature is, in any case, limited. Romansh literature is expressed in three main regional variants: Surmiran (surmiran, spoken in the Surmeir area situated in the centre of Graubünden), Ladin (ladin, spoken in the Swiss county by the Inn river called Engadine, a variety sub-divided into two subregional standards, the Southern one, called puter, and the Northern one, called vallader) and Sursilvan (sursilvan, in Surselva, in the valley of the Anterior Rhine, which extends from the source of the river to the vicinity of the cantonal capital Chur).

These main three standards of the Raetho-Romance Swish group have a similar relationship to each other as Gascon, Occitan (which has two concurrent rules, Provençal and Languedocian) and Catalan do in the Southern Gallo-Romance group, with Catalan as the most powerful, orthographically and grammatically stable, and culturally relevant language. In Romansh, mutatis mutandis, Sursilvan, the language of the aforementioned Fontana and Camenisch, would be equivalent to Catalan within the Rhaeto-Romance group, which also includes the Ladin dialects of the Dolomites in South Tyrol, now part of Italy. For this reason, this overview of speculative and fantastic fiction in Romansh focuses on Sursilvan, although it should not be forgotten that there are also works of great interest in the other varieties, including in Dolomitic Ladin. For example, their traditional oral literature is allegedly the origin of the legendary matter of the kingdom of Fanes, which has all the characteristics of high fantasy. Unfortunately, this rich mythological and heroic matter, which could rival that which inspired the Finnish Kalevala (1835/1849), seems to be nothing more than a display of fakelore, and even an example of cultural appropriation. It was first published in 1913 by the folklorist Karl Felix Wolff in German, under the title Das Reich der Fanes (The Kingdom of Fanes), but the compiler omitted to include a single line of it in one or the other of the Ladino dialects in which he claimed it had been orally transmitted. Later, there have been several versions of the legend in German and Italian, but only one in Dolomitic Ladin, Angel Morlang’s tragedy Fanes da Zacan (Fanes from Days Gone, 1951).

There are no legends, genuine or false, resembling those of the Fanes in the proper Romansh Kulturdialekte, which are the Surmiran standard and the two varieties of Engadine Ladin. The local production of fantasy is an artistic and individual endeavour. In Surmeir, there is a portal fantasy novel Sindoria (Sindoria, 2013) by Dominique Dosch, which takes place in parallel in our primary world and in a secondary world designated by the name in the title. In Engadine, one of the modern classics is a humorous and acerbic roman à clef entitled La renaschentscha dals Patagons (The Revival of the Patagons, 1949). The Patagonians of the title are none other than the Romansh exposed to the activism of certain intellectuals who would have wished to import the premises and methods of European ethno-nationalism to the region, following above all the Catalan models. Rather than the narrative itself, the most interesting part of the book is perhaps the series of fictional non-fiction reports on the imaginary country of the Patagonians, its organisation and customs. Years later, Ladin writers from Engadine led the modernisation of fantastic and speculative literature in the Romansh-speaking region thanks to a couple of short-story collections by Clo Duri Bezzola and Ana Pitschna Grob-Ganzoni, respectively. The former, entitled Da l’otra vart da la saiv (On the Other Side of the Edge, 1960), includes a masterful fantastic tale entitled “Tube to Nowhere” (Tube to Nowhere), which is set on a London Underground train that ends up in an undefined and mysterious Kafkaesque space. The second, entitled Ballas de savon (Soap Bubbles, 1970), is composed of three short stories: a high fantasy entitled “La clav dal paradis” (The Key to Paradise), a theological fantasy entitled “Ormas dal diavel” (Devil’s Souls) and a highly original science fiction entitled “Inua vi?” (Where?), which takes place on a spaceship and is narrated in the first person by a woman whose emotions are expressed in a highly poetic style that makes this text an outstanding example of lyrical SF prose narration.

In Sursilvan there is a large amount of genuine oral literature, sometimes of pagan origin, such as the short aetiological myths featuring wild men that Caspar Decurtins collected in 1901, in the same volume in which he published the “Canzun da sontga Margriata” (The Song of Saint Margriata), the best-known Romansh folk narrative poem. Despite her name, the main character seems to be a fertility goddess who passes herself off as a shepherd and, after her true sex is discovered (to speak of gender would be anachronistic here), abandons the fields, which become barren. A similar plot is used by other texts conceived as artistic literature, but which are presented as folk texts, such as the tale “Il nurser da Ranasca e la diala nursera” (The Shepherd from Ranasca and the Fairy Shepherdess, 1941) by Guglielm Gadola, and the poem “La diala” (The Fairy, 1925) by Gian Fontana, the brevity and concision of which make its story of the abuse of a fairy by shepherds in a mythical time all the more atrocious.

Other folktales collected by Decurtins were used in a modern Romansh Decameron, set in the Middle Ages and entitled Historias dil Munt Sogn Gieri (Stories from Mount Saint George, 1916), authored by Flurin Camathias. The stories included are for the most part gracefully versified renditions of local folktales that follow the conventional motifs and plots of the fairy tale. We even encounter the traditional combat between knights and dragons, though told with pleasant humour. An exception is “Il sogn cristal” (The Holy Cristal), which describes a Catholic mystical vision related to the Holy Grail.

Whereas Camathias versified oral tales in prose, Sep Mudest Nay did the opposite by developing in prose a popular song (even in our days) entitled “Il salep e la furmicla” (The Grasshopper and the Ant), which Nay turned into a tragicomic, almost neo-realist tale, despite its fabulous subject matter and insect characters. This is perhaps the best-known example of a whole series of stories featuring animals as allegorical figures of humans, as in Gian Fontana’s story “Corvin e Corvina” (Corvin and Corvina, 1971), or living in a fictional secondary world embedded in nature in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s beast fantasies, as it is the case in Rico Tamburnino’s books entitled Igl uaul grond (The Big Forest, 1988) and Ratuzin (Ratuzin, 1990).

The Sursilvan fantasies mentioned so far are closely related to forms of oral literature, even if their writing is not, since the authors generally strive to offer literary versions, stylistically and structurally much more sophisticated than the folk texts themselves. They are works of literary art, not mere transcribed folklore, as befits a literature that had achieved standardisation by the end of the 19th century, during the so-called Renaschientscha revivalist period, parallel in some ways to that of the Catalan Renaixença. That normalisation, which at first followed (neo)Romantic patterns also in Surselva, became gradually more modernised in its literary outlook. The process was, however, rather slow. Highly original symbolist fantastic prose poems such as “Verdad” (Truth) and “Buntad” (Goodness), were published in 1971, decades after the death of their author, Gian Fontana. A fantastic tale as innovative as Gian Caduff’s “L’uldauna” (The Undine, 1924), which combines psychological fiction, allegory and pagan legend, went virtually unnoticed.

The full alignment of Surselvan literature with modern international trends in speculative fiction was, in fact, something that took place after the Second World War. The main architect of this was Toni Halter. In 1955 he published Culan da Crestaulta (Culan from Crestaulta), a novel set in the Rhaetian Alps in proto-historic times. Its hero, Culan, manages to bring the technology of bronze metallurgy to his village, Crestaulta, which was technologically still in the Neolithic period, after numerous adventures that Halter narrates in a perfectly balanced way between fast-paced action, with hunting and war scenes and even a criminal intrigue, and the detailed recreation of the atmosphere of that time and place. In doing this, he takes full account of both natural and cultural conditioning factors, including power relations among the populations, as well as the way in which customs and beliefs shape mentalities and personal and collective agency. If we add to this the plausibility of the psychological characterisation of its characters, especially the protagonist from adolescence to maturity, and the richness and flexibility of its style, it is perhaps no exaggeration to consider Culan da Crestaulta a world masterpiece of its kind of fiction. In any case, it is an undisputed and repeatedly reprinted classic of Romansh fiction.

Culan da Crestaulta interestingly includes a couple of narrative samples from the invented mythology of the peoples evoked in the novel, so that these examples of mythopoiesis makes the novel all the more appealing as speculative fiction. A later writer, Ursicin G. G. Derungs, did the same in perhaps his most famous story, “Il cavalut verd” (The Little Green Horse), which gives its title to the collection in which it appeared, Il cavalut verd ed auter (The Green Little Horse and Other Things, 1988). That ‘little green horse’ appears one day in an Alpine village to the astonishment and consternation of the adults and the joy and delight of the children, to whom he tells of his origin in an earlier, peaceful, paradisiacal natural world in which everything was permeated by bright colours and music. Its appearance and disappearance are fantastic, but the questioning it implies of the primary reality is not a source of horror, but of wonder. It is also a cause for sadness arising from the conviction that something so beautiful could not remain in our present world. The critique implicit therein is expressed in other speculative stories from the same collection, in which Derungs shows the rhetorical sophistication of his writing. For example, in “Il papa che saveva buca crer en Diu” (The Pope That Could Not Believe in God), a pseudo-historiographical narrative shows the hypocrisy of an official Catholic Church that accepts an atheist Pope, but not his decision to live in the world according to the Gospel. In the short imaginary historiographical text “Ils plats” (The Flat People), a mysterious disease flattening people and its consequences are described using a literary technique that can be considered science-fictional. Other stories by Derungs from the same book are also good examples of speculative fiction of the fantastic kind, such as “La sala de spetga” (The Waiting Room), where that venue is a Kafkaesque symbolic place suggesting an anguishing concept of human existence, and “Niessegner sper il lag dils siemis” (Our Lord by the Lake of Dreams), a masterly Borgesian tale of divine suspension of the flow of time. However, Derungs rarely eschews social criticism in his speculative fiction. This can easily be seen, for example, in a former tale entitled “Correspondenza cul purgatieri” (Letters from Purgatory, published in the 1982 volume Il saltar dils morts (The Dance of the Dead), a highly original vision of the different planes of that theological venue from a rather social perspective, from the hell of selfishness to the utopia that precedes the ineffable space of Heaven.

Other writers of Derungs’s generation adopted similar approaches to speculative fiction, conflating it with social criticism, although not as consistently as he did. Notable works in this vein are, for example, Theo Candinas’ “Descripziun d’in stabiliment” (Description of a Plant, 1974), a piece of fictional non-fiction adopting the highly original form of an architectural and topographical description of the exterior of an industrial slaughterhouse in order to criticise the Swiss party system, and Toni Berther’s “Ils ratuns vegnan” (Rats Are Coming, 1978), which is a kind of historiographical account of a small town’s efforts to attract tourism by organising rat-hunting parties and the catastrophic consequences of the proliferation of these intelligent animals. The black humour of the story and its narrative fluency make of Berther’s parable an effective anti-tourism dystopia.

After this flowering of the speculative and fantastic tale in Surselva, which coincided with the same phenomenon in Engadine, as we saw in the above-mentioned works by Bezzola and Grob-Ganzoni, the following years witnessed the hegemony of postmodernism also in this linguistic area. As a result, realism, albeit sometimes formally innovative as in Arno Camenisch’s case, virtually excluded speculative and fantastic fiction from current Romansh literature. With the exception of the short novel L’umbriva dil temps (The Shadow of Time, 2017) by Paula Casutt-Vinzenz, in which life in a Bronze Age village is recreated with pleasant verisimilitude and from a female perspective, Sursilvan speculative fiction took refuge mainly in young adult literature, especially in the form of high fantasies following global sets of conventions. So do the two novels written by young lady authors entitled Emalio (Emalio, 2015) by Flurina Albin and Stina Hendry and Oranja (Oranja, 2021) by Stella Sennhauser. While the latter reads as a sort of compensatory teenage fantasy, the former shows a surprising maturity in the description of the characters’ motives and actions, as well as a good command of narrative, within the limits of the simple writing style common to the genre of high fantasy in the 21st century.

Novels such as Emalio give hope that Romansh fantastic and speculative fiction could recover at some point from its current postmodern crisis and, after having adopted high fantasy, may undertake the task of filling in its main gap, the science fiction novel. Even without doing so, the Romansh language in general, and Sursilvan in particular, can still boast of having one of the richest literatures in Europe in relative terms to its small number of speakers, also with regard to fantastic and speculative fiction.


[1] Titles in italics are those of translated works in English that I am aware of. In this case, this short novel by Camenish was translated into English from Romansh, but from the German version written by the author himself. All the other translations mentioned in this essay were published in the following book: The Curly-Horned Cow: Anthology of Swiss-Romansh Literature, edited by Reto R. Bezzola, translated from the Ladin by Elizabeth Maxfield Miller and from the Surselvan by W. W. Kibler, London, Peter Owen, 1971.

~

Religious Traditions Considered Through Science Fiction And Fantasy

by Andy Dibble

Strange Religion: Speculative Fiction of Spirituality, Belief, & Practice, which I recently edited—part of the Strange Concepts series put out by TDotSpec—was conceived with the goal of helping readers engage with religion meaningfully through science fiction and fantasy. The reasons for this anthology are diverse. Some editors have reservations about publishing stories that engage with real religious traditions because they worry such content will offend segments of their readership. I and other editors at TDotSpec wanted to give a platform both to stories that dig into ideas that surround and comprise religion and stories that engage with religious traditions as they are actually found in the real world. There have been speculative publications dedicated to particular traditions—Wandering Stars (1974, Harper & Row), an anthology of Jewish science fiction and Mysterion, which publishes Christian speculative fiction, come to mind—but I know of no anthology that aims to cut across religious traditions.

Connecting Religious Traditions With Science Fiction and Fantasy

One of the goals of Strange Religion is to synergize science fiction and religion, to help readers imagine religions of the future. “Al-Muftiyah” by Jibril Stevenson follows a Muslim man, who seeks to undermine an AI capable of settling all disputes involving fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. “The Rebbetzin Speaks” by Daniel M. Kimmel is a series of Dear-Abby-style questions and answers that engage with points of halakhah (Jewish rabbinical law) in a future where humans have populated the solar system. “The Fireflies of Todaji” by Russell Hemmell centers on two women—one Japanese, the other South Indian—whose families have migrated to the Moon as they consider the meaning of a traditional Japanese water festival in a community that has to conserve water to survive. Set further in the future is “Before the Evolution Comes the Smoke” by Terri Bruce, in which an orphaned woman performs rituals to gain access to AI witches in order to bring her parents back to life, and “Bio-Mass” by Mike Adamson, in which a jaded galactic tourist reassesses the value of his long life.

On the other hand, Strange Religion also seeks to immerse readers in the worldview of religious persons of particular traditions, which is primarily the province of fantasy. The characters of “Shattered Vessels” by Robert B. Finegold and Kary English are cut from the ten sefirot of Jewish mysticism (kabbalah). “The Gods Also Duel” by Andrew Majors imagines two conflicts in parallel: a dispute over temple taxation and divine justice on one hand and feuding Daoist gods of sun and rain on the other. My own story “Deep Play” considers how an American college student reassesses his Cambodian Buddhist heritage after the hells of all the world’s religions are thrust upon him during a clinical study. “*lr*d” by Doug Hawley, considers the difficulty of accessing religious worldviews that are far removed from historians in time and space.

Countering Misconceptions About Religion

Strange Religion is a counterpoint to some of the biases and misconceptions about religion found in speculative fiction. There’s a segment of speculative fiction that envisions religion on the model of Christianity or on a particular view of Christianity. This is where the mistaken notion that religions are “belief systems” comes from. Outside of Christianity, and especially Protestant Christianity, it’s much more common for religion to be about what you do or how you identify yourself than what you believe.

To counter this misconception, Strange Religion includes stories that engage with a variety of religious traditions, including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Humanism, Chinese religion, Hinduism, and indigenous traditions. Additionally, the several stories that engage with Christianity help readers understand it from new perspectives. “Dying Rivers and Broken Hearts” by Gabriella Buba centers on a Filipina witch, who identifies as Catholic. A Nigerian-Igbo man, who is also a convert to Protestant Christianity, brings charges of homosexuality against his American friend in an Igbo court of law in “The Man Who Misused His Manhood” by Chukwu Sunday Abel. “The Devil is a Shape in the Brain” by Joachim Glage explores universal Christian salvation, drawing upon the occult, nineteen-century psychology, and cosmic horror. “The Other War on Terror” by Michael H. Hanson is set in an alternative history where the United States is a Muslim nation and the terrorists are Christians. There are stories in Strange Religion with a theological bent—stories focused on clarifying or interrogating orthodoxy—but the bulk of stories are about people acting, using the tools available to them, religious or otherwise, to bring about change in themselves, their communities, and the cosmos.

Also from Christianity and modern secularism, we have the idea that religion is only the vocation of clergy or an activity limited to certain parts of life—what we do when we aren’t “rendering unto Caesar.” But in many cultures and traditions, especially in the developing world, religion is integrated into every aspect of life. About half of all languages don’t even have a word for religion. Religious studies scholars have largely given up trying to define “religion,” and some following J. Z. Smith, believe the term shouldn’t even be used by scholars.

To counter this misconception, we selected several stories that show people solving everyday struggles, that demonstrate religion isn’t just for certain times of the week: A software developer teams up with a rabbi on a metaphysical programming project in “Fate and Other Variables” by Alex Shvartsman—but his goal is to save his brother from addiction and drug dealers. In “Samsara” by J. A. Legg, a Bangladeshi Hindu teen struggles with an absent father and demanding relatives as she grapples with a corporate tycoon seeking to reincarnate as her unborn child. “The Life That Comes After” by Lauren Teffeau follows an overworked hospice nurse trying to protects a secretive organization from oversight by new administration.

Some writers coming at religion from an atheist or secularist perspective, characterize religion as world-denying, oppressive, doctrinal, backward, and the like. These labels fit—some of the time—but when thinking about religion it’s crucial to keep in mind the tremendous diversity that characterizes the world’s religions. Beyond what can be said about humans in general, it’s very difficult to say anything at all about religion in general. We can interrogate our concept of religion, but we should be careful about how and when we apply that concept to real people and communities.

To counter such labels, Strange Religion helps readers think about religion as scholars do. Following each story are discussion questions written by a scholar. These questions aim at wider themes in religious studies—e.g. syncretism (borrowing between and merging of religious traditions), tradition vs. modernity, theodicy (justifying God’s goodness in the face of evil), the afterlife, and others—or the religious tradition(s) the story engages with. Sometimes these questions pry at weaknesses in the story and encourage readers to question a line of argument made by an author or draw in considerations the author may not have addressed. In a similar way, stories in Strange Religion sometimes take a critical or even humorous stance toward particular religious traditions, but criticisms are aimed at specifics and particulars rather than a product of the hasty characterizations we make about traditions before we’ve acquired a depth of understanding. Criticisms of religious traditions—or better yet particular movements, people, or actions within traditions—do not always have to be appreciated by religious insiders, but they have to account for what people are actually saying and doing.

~

Bio:

Andy Dibble is a healthcare IT consultant who believes that play is the highest function of theology. His work also appears in Writers of the Future Volume 36 and Space & Time. He is Articles Editor for Speculative North. You can find him at andydibble.com.

Humanism In SF: A Natural Thing For The Curious To Know And Understand Through Empathy Machines, Or Just Lazy Mysticism?

by Mina

My husband expressed some frustration recently that most articles don’t define humanism properly. So I will begin with as clear a definition as I can, as humanism is a term that has been much (ab)used. In fact, I am only looking at a very narrow use of it that completely ignores its historical roots and usage in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and nineteenth-century Germany. I am focusing on how it is mostly understood in SF today: as summarised by Humanists UK, this version of humanism is “a combination of attitudes”:

“Throughout recorded history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. They have trusted to the scientific method, evidence, and reason to discover truths about the universe and have placed human welfare and happiness at the centre of their ethical decision making.”

Thus, humanists trust science and reason above all else to explain the universe; they have no holy book, deity or spiritual leader (usually considering themselves agnostic or atheist). They make decisions based on reason and empathy and, as they don’t believe in an afterlife or in a divine purpose to the universe, they believe that “human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.”

A criticism often levelled at humanism is that it is a religion, not just a philosophy, only with humans taking the place of gods. In an article in The New Statesman about humanist values, Andrew Copson refutes this, telling us that humanism is not a religion, not even a “creed”:

“Science defeats religion’ – that is what many people assume to be a humanist creed. I use the word creed advisedly, since the people who level this charge are frequently also those who level the bogus charge that humanism is itself just another religion. I am not a scientist – though of course I look to scientists for answers to the questions they are qualified to answer and to which religion gives far less satisfactory answers – and it is not the science in science fiction stories that appeals to me so much as the stories.”

I appreciate Copson restoring the “fiction” to science fiction. We are after all seeking dreams, fantasy and escapism in SF, just like in any other literary genre. There may even be some real science involved, or speculative science, or even bad science, but it is still a stage filled with humans (or aliens) and their stories. Copson gives Star Trek (in particular the original series and The Next Generation) as an example of a humanist utopia:

“… one in which mankind has united around shared human values, joined in a common endeavour to reach the stars, and happily left religion behind on the way… Starship crews explore a cosmos that is full of beauty and wonder and they respond with awe and appreciation. This wonder does not overawe them, because ultimately the universe, and its billions of stars and planets, is a natural thing which the curious can know and understand.”

He stresses that he sees it as a non-extreme (non-dogmatic) form of humanism, where there is room for humanity (as in the quality of kindness and benevolence) and warmth:

“A Starfleet crew values cooperation and liberality. They value the equality of persons and the dignity of life. Although rank is respected, the views of all are given fair airing. When the crew encounter new peoples there is an assumption of peace, but they defend themselves robustly when attacked (no bellicosity, but no turning of the other cheek here either), and although the men and women of this future cultivate an internal life through meditation or the arts, they accept reason and science as the means by which they can know the universe they explore.”

I would agree with Copson’s arguments that humanism is not a religion, but there are grounds for seeing it as a philosophy or way of life. For, although it emphasises that it is an ethical way of life, it doesn’t have a code of ethics like the Christian Ten Commandments (reduced to two by Jesus in the New Testament) or the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path.

Andrew Copson goes on to give Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman as examples of proponents of humanism in SF and fantasy. It is worth spending a moment on Pullman, as he clearly considers himself a humanist crusader against authors like Tolkien and CS Lewis, who he feels are sacrificing the “story” to Christian assumptions, staid thinking and brainwashing. However, I do agree with Tony Watkin’s article that Pullman’s critique of Lewis reads more like a rant (especially against the Narnia books) than a well-thought out literary analysis or philosophical discourse; or like a missed opportunity to engage in a fruitful discussion about humanism and religion (as opposed to humanism versus religion). Watkins states that Pullman seeks to avoid the prejudices he felt Lewis was guilty of, but instead is “monumentally disparaging” and intolerant of religion. Watkins does concede that the work of Lewis has its flaws, but he stresses that the main issue for Pullman is that it “expresses and argues for a worldview completely antithetical to Pullman’s”.

Unlike Watkins, Elizabeth Desimone does not feel that Pullman’s rejection of religion is necessarily a bad thing: “In a roundabout way, Pullman does Christians a service by writing his anti-Christian books. He reminds us, vividly and trenchantly, of what we do not want to be…” And Laura Miller again has a very different view of Pullman’s work:

His Dark Materials may be the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen. Pullman’s heroes are explorers, cowboys, and physicists. The series offers an extended celebration of the marvels of science: discoveries and theories from the outer reaches of cosmology—about dark matter and the possible existence of multiple universes—are threaded into the story.”

I myself first read CS Lewis’ Narnia books when I was ten and I totally missed the Christian symbolism that, as an adult, I do find heavy-handed and simplistic. But the books remain great adventure stories set in a magical universe for me. I read Pullman’s His Dark Materials as an adult and it did sometimes feel that the story was overshadowed by Pullman’s anti-organised-religion-and-God crusade. I find that a shame because it is a wonderfully imaginative and complex story, deeply rooted in Dante and Blake, blending adventure, philosophy, science and magic.

Moving firmly back to SF, Charlie Jane Anders asks the question:

“But is science fiction really humanist? Much of science fiction turns out to be about exploring our vast cosmos, and expanding our being. From this quest, one of two outcomes often arises: 1) We meet something greater than ourselves. 2) We become something greater than our current selves.”

Anders criticises what she considers a lazy answer, that of “transcendence” (or a vague mysticism) in SF using the examples of “Contact” and “2001”. Other uninspired answers in humanist SF are those of false gods and cyborgs. Particularly the latter concept suggests that humanity is lost by progressing to a point where the “Borg” takes over. Anders is also critical of space operas, where humans can only survive in the enormous callousness of space through modifications or enhancements. Again, by becoming not quite human:

“I guess in the end, it depends how you look at it — is our posthuman future the culmination of humanism’s promises? Or is it a transformation into something that’s no longer human, and makes humanism irrelevant? Or both?”

I thoroughly enjoyed Anders’ critique of humanism, which can often be turned into a rather vague or insipid plot device in SF. It is almost fashionable to criticise any plot development based on religion yet to accept large humanist loopholes without question. Surely unthinking dogmatism and intellectual laziness abound in humanist universes too?

Robert Repino takes a different approach by calling humanist films “empathy machines”:

“Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction is connected with humanism, which we can define as an ethical stance that emphasizes the rights, responsibilities, and ultimate value of people within a naturalistic framework—that is, a framework that does not rely on supernatural beliefs. Thus, a humanist film, if one could call it that, would depict people helping each other, or forging their own destiny, mainly through reason and compassion.”

He goes on to list the best nine humanist films in his opinion and not all are strictly speaking SF (e.g. The Truman Show and Groundhog Day). Some are more traditional SF (e.g. Star Trek: First Contact, The Martian and Contact) and some less so (High Life). The Martian is a fun look at one man’s survival against all odds (with the help of science and common sense), but I would add Moon onto Repino’s list, as that is a much more complex film about what it means to be human, as well as looking at identity, sacrifice and survival against all odds, finding hope and meaning in the struggle itself. The Martian is a great story, but Moon goes that step further, turning SF into sci-phi.

I would also add the German film, Ich bin dein Mensch (with the awful English title, I’m Your Man) to Repino’s list. This film investigates the premise – what if you could get an android tailored to be your perfect partner? The female protagonist comes to the conclusion that it is not good for us to get exactly what we want, with absolutely no challenges urging us to question, change or grow, no impetus to seek out the other and have a true dialogue or disagreement with that other. We need more than a reflection of our desires to be human: pleasant as it is to have an android who is there to meet her every whim, she knows it is only an extension of herself. She remains alone. Although the film is clear in its message, there is some ambiguity in that we never know quite how much autonomous thought the android has.

For me, humanism definitely has its place in SF plots and in sci-phi discussions, but I would join Anders in asking that it not be used as a lazy answer to complex questions. Surely the answer to life, the universe and everything cannot just be ourselves? Wouldn’t that be like some cosmic monologue where we never look beyond our human(ist) preconceptions?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

You Can’t Fly To Space In A Corinthian Column

by Taylor Hood

A quick Google Image search for the term “sci-fi” illustrates that our conception of the world of tomorrow is one in which the sleek, unadorned, and mechanical have taken hold as an aesthetic principle. With industrialisation and, more specifically, since the Golden Age of science-fiction, our dreams of a bright and shiny future have deeply altered the ways we express ourselves. I propose that aspiration toward the machine-like has played the largest role in the demise of traditional forms of decoration honouring not only the natural world but a sense of the storied and the sacred. It is therefore unfortunate that the sci-fi genre, largely concerned with what humanity can achieve, has inveigled itself so profoundly with certain stylistic movements—indeed, has perhaps even influenced them—so as to be virtually synonymous with everything that is inhuman. Because what we see around us directly influences our wellbeing, and the spaces in which we live most obviously reflect our values, the focus of this essay will be on the built environment.

The Ministry of Truth (1984) is described as a glittering white pyramid; Metacortex, the building in which Neo worked (The Matrix), stands as a huge concrete-and-glass spine; Bladerunner 2049 showcases an excess of garish signage in a seedy urban underworld. All of these buildings and environments feature in dystopias, indicating that we know what is unpleasant and unbeautiful. Indeed, one function of these types of stories is to engage with a particular critique of the societies which brought them about in the first place. It is curious, then, that this same visual language is present in almost every depiction of the future one can find, as if the very notion of forward movement means more slick metal and glass, imposing concrete slabs, and vibrant neon. There is nothing whatsoever intrinsic to the word “futuristic” to suggest that we ought always to live in such spaces, yet we bring these with us even when we venture into supposedly utopian futures (Tomorrowland). With the portrayal of tech-savvy entrepreneurs living in luxurious modern houses (Ex Machina) and hip hacker-mercenaries roaming the streets (Cyberpunk 2077), there is the creeping suspicion that sci-fi revels in such spaces because they are considered admirable and something to strive toward.

There have been a number of architectural trends which point toward a mechanical appearance. While pure white and rigid Modernism and rough concrete Brutalism could be construed as being closer to a sense of ascetic spirituality and thus far less mechanical than older, ornate styles, it is precisely the lack of ornament that renders it inhuman—and spirituality is a uniquely human feeling. This world is biological, messy, complicated. Moreover, we have the sub-creative gift of mimicking the complexities and variety of nature through art. Where the influence of technology is most blatant is with Futurism’s desire to emulate the speed, energy and power of machines and Structural Expressionism’s emphasis on transparency of construction. In a Globalist skyscraper city, there exists the very tool-like sameness inherent in a machine’s effective operation, not to mention the monolithic scales involved. When homogenisation is not present, we have to contend with idiosyncratic postmodern projects which fit in nowhere. A lot of postmodern buildings are exercises in artless technical proficiency, paralleling sci-fi’s tendency to envisage different futures through the interplay of technology and human ingenuity. Even biomorphic or zoomorphic architecture representing plants and animals lacks warmth in that there is often little surface detail or colour. In a similar vein, depictions of the future that seek nature-technology integration, for example in the “solarpunk” sub-genre with its glasshouse-like structures, are suggestive of our world being turned into one enormous tool for the acquisition of energy. A surprising amount of plain modernist architecture can be found even in these settings, indicating how attached to this aesthetic complex we have become.

In sci-fi cities, just as in modern ones, one has the feeling of having been shrunk down to wander the inside of a computer case. It is as if we are actively trying to forget our fallibility as squishy animals and the roles we play as actors in venerable societies, instead upholding technology as a new kind of all-encompassing ideal. This is where the central problem lies, if not for others, then for this author and his appreciation of the genre. Humanity moves through gears, circuity, oil, and LEDs, but with each step in this direction we risk leaving behind that which we have evolved to find pleasing and meaningful in natural, archetypal, mythical forms. It is indeed strange to consider that, though our development must coincide with bustling cities, nature-flattening infrastructure, and a profusion of instruments unconcerned with beauty, we are often most moved by that which harks back to an earlier age or incites within us some primordial memory.

The people of the past were more obviously concerned with natural forms because of their closeness to their nonhuman animal brethren, the need to work the land, and the primacy of death. Why, for example, would a Paleolithic man paint a horse in ochre on a cave wall, or a Grecian sculptor fashion acanthus leaves at the top of a Corinthian column if not to honour the horse and the plant in some way? These are beautiful creations, but even the darkest imagery could be poignant. Think of the architects of the Middle Ages carving grotesques when a simple waterspout would do. The human figure took pride of place as the Nude in Greco-Roman sculpture and in the Middle Ages, as Nakedness, it was as a reminder of shame and sin, only to be reglorified in the Renaissance. Even geometric designs enlivened our living spaces and brought to mind the florid and eternal, as in Islamic art. What binds these disparate styles together is the understanding of form being the equal of function, but it is the subject matter which pertains most to our discussion. The pre-modern mind was full of mythical beasts, vigorous heroes, holy and aspirational symbols, and these were often given pride of place. Such creations are not merely the province of millennia ago: even into the last few centuries, with the highly ornamental Baroque period, Gothic Revival and Neoclassicism, there was still an emphasis on decoration and use of traditional materials such as wood and stone.

Since we are already dwelling on the past, it may be useful to briefly compare sci-fi with fantasy. Fantasy stories are more often rooted in a distant era or in a secondary world where technological development is limited, and civilisations are separated by great distances. As such, there is an emphasis on the natural, vernacular, and traditional. The protagonists of fantasy tales do not often seek to change the world on a grand scale, but to protect what is already present because it is under threat from some outside, destructive force (The Lord of the Rings). Works in this genre often feature the status quo being upset (Lud-in-the-Mist), or the intermixing of magic and beauty with the mundane (The King of Elfland’s Daughter). Even divorced from the stylistic tropes and trappings of Medieval Europe, there is an inward contemplation of the earthly and the numinous, of wonder and enchantment (Piranesi). Sci-fi on the other hand, while philosophical and ideas-oriented, appears to operate on a more active desire to change, subsume and develop, just as we do in the modern world. Think terraforming (Mars Trilogy) and the erection of megastructures (Star Wars). Sci-fi is often outward looking (Last and First Men) and is propelled by a Humanistic vision of Homo sapiens filtering through the cosmos, making alliances with strange and novel species (Star Trek), or, if staying at home, employing technology for the betterment of the world. And it is technology which is often the true hero of these narratives.

It is telling that the antique aspects of invented sci-fi societies and worlds most readily impart a sense of the sublime, the beautiful and the reverential. Consider the Warhammer 40K universe with its grand Neo-Gothic “knights in space” aesthetic. We root for the Na’vi in Avatar because they hold to higher values of nature, spirit, and community. Dune (2021) may feature Brutalist architecture, but its distinctly Middle Eastern influences grants the setting a sense of potency. Certainly, most sci-fi takes inspiration from the real-world and invents wholly new races and customs, but a more general and stronger point can be elucidated here. It is difficult to imagine any advanced alien civilisation which does not in some way invest into its material culture a sense of origin, e.g., history, ecology, language. Unless, perhaps, the pinnacle of existence is to leave all of this behind.

At the highest level is the idea of transcendence, something upon which sci-fi often dwells. Although the same argument could be levelled at religion’s promise of salvation and an afterlife, hidden in our faith in technology and the hope for a better future is, paradoxically, a world-denying strain which sees this Earth and all its multiplicity of peoples and cultures as nothing more than a steppingstone to some higher, more ascended state of being. If our concerns are with reaching upward (space exploration), escaping the body (augmentation, virtual reality), harnessing the power of the universe itself and learning its secrets (particle acceleration) what need have we to invoke mere beasts and the ideals of ignorant, long-dead people? We no longer feature plants and animals in our designs because they are no longer the focus of our world, nor do we prize time-consuming decoration, because everything is speed, power, efficiency. If in this universe technology can only be as it is due to the laws of physics, everything must tend toward some kind of end state, some form of “culture” which venerates only the purposefulness of machinery and the coldness of the programmable and the synthetic. We cannot, as it were, stay in The Shire forever, but one doubts what value transcendence through technology has if we sever all ties to the Earth and to ourselves.

In light of these considerations, sci-fi may be viewed as anti-traditional in that it favours progress at any cost, thereby exacerbating this disconnect. Equally, it may be said that the oldest tradition of all is the development and application of technology. Logically, our computers, robots and engines should manifest in art and architecture too. It is surely a false dichotomy to compare machinery designed for a specific purpose to art, but if the apotheosis of our species is to be integrated with technology, to the extent that even our architecture seeks to emulate it, why does it all feel so soulless and sterile? Ignoring historical and cultural significance, should we not be moved more by Gropius House than by a Cotswold cottage, or the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral rather than St Peter’s Basilica?

This may appear to have been one long concession to mere aesthetic preference on a subjective matter. In some respects, perhaps it has, but in a future wherein every part of human culture is technologized and mechanised, there will be little room for difference. Even if postmodern architecture reigns and buildings become dynamic and recall the organic, it is difficult to imagine anything except intraspecific variation, i.e., more glass and steel structures but of differing configuration. Those who adore traditional architecture often consider uniqueness to work against visual and community coherence and to be a betrayal of the arduous growth of tradition. They are not wrong, but to suggest that our buildings, even those represented in fictional worlds, follow the specific motifs and guidelines originated by a handful of civilisations thousands of years ago, forever, approaches the absurd. Standards of beauty have always shifted and the fluid, nature-inspired buildings of today are not, one may argue, inherently worse than the rose windows, pagodas, tympanums, and minarets of old because they, at least, have meaning. If anything, the fight must surely be against the soullessness and artificiality of corporate offices, phallic towers of megalomaniacs, drab estate tower blocks, and nauseating neon metropolises plastered over with advertisements.

Although I am a Romantic at heart, such a return is now impossible, and to halt the advancement of our species is to deny whatever destiny lies in store for us. Humanity should be proud of its technological advancements, but we ought not to forget where we came from and who we are. To erase the biological, the cultural and the traditional in our fictional depictions of the future in favour of some sterile technological ideal is to deny all that came before us as worthless. Because Earth is the only home upon which to base our experience, we are necessarily always looking back to it even when we fashion new worlds from our imagination or set out into the cosmos in real spacecraft. On a cold and dark planet newly colonised, will we erect buildings which only glorify the technology that got us there, or will we carve trees, birds, and human faces upon their facades?

#

Further Reading

Website/Online Journal

Why is the Modern World So Ugly? – The School of Life

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture Current Affairs

The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films

Redesigning the aesthetic of the future – Gemic

The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk? | by Rick Liebling | The Adjacent Possible | Medium

Can Science Fiction Predict the Future of Technology? – JSTOR Daily

Science Fiction as a predictive tool for Architectural Trends. by Sanjay Somnath – Issuu

Future Urban Environments in Science Fiction: Initiated Thought Experiments

Books

Matilde Battistini, Symbols and Allegories in Art, 2005

Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classical Art: From Greece to Rome, 2001

Jonathan Glancey, Architecture: A Visual History, 2017

Neil Oliver, Wisdom of the Ancients: Life Lessons From Our Distant Past, 2020

Roger Scruton, Beauty, 2009

Veronica Sekules, Medieval Art, 2001

Tim Stanley, Whatever Happened to Tradition? 2021

Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 2010

~

Bio:

Taylor Hood is a British writer of dark yet largely uplifting fantastical stories about nature, creation and escapism. He is interested in heritage and aesthetics, and has qualifications in wildlife ecology and countryside management. His website is thoodauthor.wordpress.com.

Sci Phi Journal 2022/1 – Alternate History Issue for Download as PDF

Our annual thematic issue, this year dedicated to uchronia (alternate pasts and their futures), is now available for reading on screen as well as trusty old paper.

For your convenience, here you can download the entire spring 2022 edition of Sci Phi Journal in a printer-friendly PDF layout.

We are also looking into more eReader-friendly formats for future releases.

Enjoy,

the SPJ crew

~

Black Mirror As Philosophy

by David Kyle Johnson

Last issue I talked about how Seth MacFarland’s series The Orville (on which I recently edited a book) does philosophy: by cloaking bias to create cognitive dissonance. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (on which I also recently edited a book) initially seems to take a totally different approach. After all, it is a very different kind of series. Both are episodic, in that they lack an overall season long story arc; the episodes in each series are a complete story. But whereas two different episodes of The Orville might involve the crew visiting a different world, episodes of Black Mirror (like The Twilight Zone before it) are set in entirely different universes (with different characters, actors, and situations). The first episode of Black Mirror is about a Prime Minister being blackmailed to have intercourse with a pig live on national television to save a kidnapped princess; the (as of this writing) last episode of Black Mirror stars Miley Cyrus as a disgruntled pop star, languishing under her oppressive aunt’s controlling thumb.

How Black Mirror Does Philosophy

What all Black Mirror episodes have in common is technology. In Metalhead, robotic dogs track down and kill humans in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. In San Junipero, a person can upload a digital copy of their consciousness (called a cookie) into a utopia and live forever. The Entire History of You features a device called a grain, which records and can play back everything you see. Nosedive features a kind of social media ranking technology that controls people’s access to society. The words “Black Mirror” in the title of the show refers to how the screen of your phone or computer monitor looks when you turn it off; it turns it into a black mirror where you see a dark reflection of yourself. Black Mirror is a dark reflection of society, which depicts (as Charlie Brooker puts it) “the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” [1] 

This has caused many to think that the show is anti-technology, a warning about the way that technology is ruining our lives—a call to cut our cellphones out of our life, and to worry about the future developments of technology. As Charlie Brooker put it, “Just as The Twilight Zone would talk about McCarthyism, we’re going to talk about Apple.” [2]  In doing so, Black Mirror does something that good science fiction can do: act, as American science fiction author Ben Bova puts it, “as an interpreter of science to humanity” [3] by showing “what kind of future might result from certain kinds of human actions,” like the development of certain technologies. [4] According to contemporary philosopher Daniel Dinello, this is something that makes Black Mirror not only philosophically useful, but means that it is doing philosophy.

Science fiction serves as social criticism and popular philosophy [when it] tak[es] us a step beyond escapist entertainment [and] imagines the problematic consequences brought about by these new technologies and the ethical, political, and existential questions they raise. [5]  [It’s philosophy when it invites us] to understand the magnitude of the techno-totalitarian threat so we might invent tactics for confronting it.” [6] 

This might make one expect that Charlie Brooker is a technology-hating luddite, but in fact the exact opposite is true. For example, he got the idea for the “screen rooms” in the episode 15 Million Merits (bedrooms where every wall is a giant display screen) when his wife commented that he would be happy “in a box [where] the walls were all screens” while he sat on his sofa with an iPad, laptop, and cell phone, while watching TV. (Charlie admitted she was right.)[7]

Elsewhere, however, Charlie has sung a different tune regarding what Black Mirror is about.

Occasionally it’s irritating when people miss the point of the show and think it’s more po-faced [humorless or disapproving] than I think it is. Or when they characterize it as a show warning about the dangers of technology. That slightly confuses and annoys me, because it’s like saying [Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic] Psycho is a move warning about the danger of silverware. Black Mirror is not really about that… except when it is, just to fuck with people. [8]

So, when it’s not about the dangers of technology, what is it about? The human condition. “[I]t’s not a technological problem [we have],” says Brooker, “it’s a human one.” Our human frailties are “maybe amplified by it,” but in the end technology is just a tool—one that “has allowed us to swipe around like an angry toddler.”[9]

When I teach on the series, that’s how I approach the course. I tell my students to watch the episodes with an eye toward discovering how the technology depicted brings out and magnifies a human foible. The Arkangel device (from Arkangel) magnifies a mother’s tendency to overparent; the (aforementioned) grain from The Entire History of You amplifies a husband’s jealously, and tendency to pry into every aspect of his wife’s life. The MASS device in Men Against Fire makes an “out-group” of people literally look sub-human (like cockroaches) to make them easier for the military to kill, illustrating the way that enemies are dehumanized in war. White Bear depicts how far we would take our impulse to punishing criminals with “an eye for an eye” if we had the technology to do so. Black Mirror is fiction, but to quote Fi from The Entire History of You, “not everything that isn’t true is a lie.”

Every episode of Black Mirror gives you that impression. When you are done watching, you know that it’s telling you something—it has a point—but it’s not always exactly clear what that point is. And that is what motivated me to edit the book Black Mirror and Philosophy. Along with a broad look at the series as a whole, and all the philosophical questions and issues it raises, I wanted a close examination of every episode that really tries to get at what each one is “about.” This is why there is a chapter dedicated to every episode—each with a title that identifies a relevant philosophical issue and question (e.g., “Be Right Back and Rejecting Tragedy: Would You Bring Back Your Deceased Loved One?” by Bradley Richards)—and six chapters dedicated to the series as a whole, on everything from artificial intelligence and personal identity, to love, death, and the dangers of technology.

Of course, it is not always that simple; multiple questions and issues are raised in most episodes. The best example of this is Bandersnatch, a “choose your own adventure” episode that can only be watched/played on the Netflix platform. You make choices for the protagonist Stefan, as he makes an 80s style video game named Bandersnatch, based on a choose-your-own-adventure book of the same name, that is eventually turned into the very episode of Black Mirror you are watching. The issues of fate, freedom, free will, artificial intelligence, the possibility of a multiverse, time travel, alternate realities, moral responsibility, the eternal recurrence, the simulation hypothesis, and even issues of what counts as art, are all raised. This is why Chris Lay and I wrote a “choose your own philosophical adventure” chapter for Bandersnatch to include in the book. You can make a series of choices, related to which philosophical questions you think are most interesting, and get a new experience on practically every reading.

Comparing Black Mirror and The Orville

But this brings us back around to The Orville. I’ve argued that The Orville does philosophy by cloaking bias to create cognitive dissonance, while Black Mirror does it by using fictional (usually advanced) technologies to magnify human foibles. But in a way, the two approaches are not that different. While the world (and technology) of Black Mirror is usually not as far removed from our own as the world of The Orville, upon watching Black Mirror we usually think “we’re not quite there yet.” The realization, however, that the episode is more about us (than it is about the technology) brings the lesson home in a very “Orvillian” way.

When watching Black Mirror, we usually start out thinking, “If that technology were real, I would never do that,” but then end up realizing “I already do that with technology that exists.” When the MASS device in Men Against Fire makes soldiers see other people seem subhuman, we think “I’d never let anything do that to the way I see others.” And then we realize that mass/social media has already done that with the way we see immigrants. Indeed, the episode was inspired by the controversial conservative British columnist Katie Hopkins’ depictions of immigrants as cockroaches.[10]

In fact, an episode of The Orville (“Majority Rule”) is so similar in approach and message to an episode of Black Mirror (Nosedive), that people often think Seth copied off Charlie.[11] In “Majority Rule,” the crew of The Orville comes across a society (on Sargus 4) that is governed by social media; everything—from public policy to public access—is determined by a vote count on the “master feed.” Everyone has a badge that registers how many up and down votes they have; and if they get too many, they are subject to “correction.” Their brains are electrically shocked and their personality is changed. In the Black Mirror episode Nosedive, a person’s access to society is determined by their social ranking score, which is determined by how people react to them both on and offline. Lacy Pound, who seeks to be a 4.5 (out of 5) so she can afford to live in the apartment complex of her dreams, tries to manipulate her score by giving a speech at the wedding of her friend who is a 4.8.

The episodes both involve a “person ranking” system, and bring to mind how people obsess over their online popularity and how popularity can open and close proverbial doors. Thus the accusations of plagiarism. In reality, however, Seth had written “Majority Rule” months before Nosedive was released[12] and it was inspired by something completely different. Charlie was inspired by things like Instagram obsession, TripAdvisor ratings, and Amazon reviews. (It was originally a movie idea about a celebrity that is blackmailed into tanking their social ranking.)[13] Seth, on the other hand, was inspired by Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.[14] So the Black Mirror episode that is most similar to “Majority Rule” is Hated in the Nation, where the use of the #DeathTo hashtag on Twitter actually leads to the death of people who have outraged society.[15] The worry of both episodes is regarding the phenomena of “Trial by Twitter,” where—when someone outrages the public—the public serves as judge, jury, and executioner in a trial that has no presumption of innocence or standards for what counts as good evidence. In the end of “Majority Rule,” the crew of The Orville save the life of a crewman who committed a social faux pas, by planting a bunch of fake news on the master feed that no one will bother to check.

Nosedive more accurately illustrates Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of “The Look” and the idea that “hell is other people.” Others objectify us, and we can be become obsessed with controlling how others see us. Sartre’s play, No Exit, ends with three people in hell, each obsessed with how the other sees them; that is their punishment. In contrast, Nosedive ends with Lacy pound in jail, completely unconcerned with how the man in another cell sees her, because she has been freed from the ranking tech and thus her concerns about The Look of others. This is unlike Lysella in The Orville’s “Majority Rule,” the native of Sargus 4, who in the end decides not to participate in ranking others (but still must be concerned with how others rank her).

Where Black Mirror and The Orville most significantly diverge is in their treatment of technology. As we’ve seen, Black Mirror leaves one with a bleak image of what technology does to us. It’s dangerous; it’s debilitating; it magnifies our foibles. In The Orville, technology is liberating—it allows us to explore the galaxy, make discoveries, and better our lives. When Isaac cuts off Gordon’s leg as a prank, Dr. Finn is able to grow him a new one in about a day. Technology is our savior. It is not technological dystopia; it’s a technological utopia.  (The degree to which this optimistic view of technology, and reason in general, is warranted is the subject of Brooke Rudow’s chapter in Exploring The Orville.)

Another place they diverge is in their comedic approach, which is perhaps ironic since both Seth MacFarland and Charlie Brooker were previously known for their comedy writing. The Orville is known for its humor; Black Mirror is not. But something that is similar about the two series is how both break comedic expectations. With its first trailer set to Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’,” many people assumed that The Orville was just going to be “Spaceballs for Star Trek.” But it turned out to be much more like M*A*S*H, which is a comedy but also engages in serious social commentary. Over time, The Orville has just grown more serious, letting the comedy take a backseat more and more.

Conversely, contrary to initial expectations, Black Mirror started out very serious. Indeed, when the first episode The National Anthem opened with the Prime Minster being blackmailed to have sex with a pig, the press assembled to see the debut thought they were in for another hilarious Charlie Brooker dark comedy. But when the moment in the episode came, the smiles were promptly wiped off the faces; and their reaction exactly mirrored the characters in the episode who had gathered to watch the event, thinking it would be a hoot.[16] The episode reveals something very dark about those watching it, as did most of the episodes that immediately followed. That’s why it’s called Black Mirror!

After Black Mirror was picked up by Netflix, however, it occasionally got lighter. There’s Lacy Pound’s wedding speech in Nosedive. “I mean, fuck the planet, right? Whoo!” There’s USS Callister (which, like The Orville, is also a bit of Star Trek fan fiction), and Natette’s reaction to being cloned into genital-less digital avatar: “Stealing my pussy is a red fucking line!” Black Mirror began to mix in bits of comedy. Miley Cyrus’ performance as an uninhibited “Ashley Too” robot in the last episode is a perfect example. “Get that fucking cable out of my ass!” But don’t think Black Mirror has lost its edge. The episode right before Cyrus’, Smithereens, is about as dark as it gets. 

Which brings us to the final comparison I’d like to make between Black Mirror and The Orville. The Orville deals directly with religion. For example, the episode “Mad Idolatry” highlights the dangers of religion when the crew is horrified to learn that they accidentally created a religion (that worships Ed’s ex-wife Kelly) on a planet that slips in and out of our universe. In contrast, fans struggle to find any religion in Black Mirror at all; and it’s not there … unless you are really paying attention. In Smithereens, the protagonist Chris Gillhaney wants to talk to the founder of Smithereen (i.e., Twitter) Billy Bauer because (we come to find out) Chris caused an accident (which killed his girlfriend) because he got distracted (while driving) by his Smithereen app. We first assume Chris wants to convince Billy to make Smithereen less addictive; but in reality, Chris just wants to confess what he did … to God.  

We meet Billy while he is on a (10 rather than 40 day) desert retreat, wearing a white robe and sporting long hair, that makes him look like Christ. Billy is able to track down Chris because he is able to invoke “God Mode” and knows more about all his users—their habits, their whereabouts—than the police or government. He is practically omnipotent. And yet, he has no control over his own creation anymore.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The whole platform, I swear to God. It was one thing, when I started it, and then it just I don’t know, it just became this whole other fucking thing. It got there by degrees … and there’s nothing I can do to stop it! I started it, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it! I’m like some bullshit front man now.”

Billy might as well be Jesus talking about the modern-day Christian church.

And so, while The Orville and Black Mirror are drastically different in many ways, they are also very much the same. They mix in comedy, they parody Star Trek, they worry about trial by twitter, and (as we just saw) they criticize religion. Most importantly, however, they are sci-fi series that tackle big issues and make us think—which, again, is what sci-fi does best, and Sci-Phi is all about.


[1] Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian, 1 December 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror

[2] Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones with Jason Arnopp, Inside Black Mirror (New York: Crown Archetype, 2018), p. 11.

[3] Ibid, p. 10.

[4] Bova, Ben. “The Role of Science Fiction.” in Reginald Bretnor ed., Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1975), p. 5.

[5] Dinello, Daniel. “Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, p. 5.

[6] Ibid., pp. 5 and 17.

[7] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror.” p. 32.

[8] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror” p. 222.

[9]  Gordon, Bryony. “Charlie Brooker on Black Mirror: ‘It’s not a technological problem we have, it’s a human one’.” The Telegraph, 16 December 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11260768/Charlie-Brooker-Its-not-a-technological-problem-we-have-its-a-human-one.html

[10] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror.” p. 194.

[11] Konda, Kelly. “The Orville’s “Majority Rule” Trots Out the Show’s Best Black Mirror Impression”  We Minored in Film, 27 October 2017. https://weminoredinfilm.com/2017/10/27/the-orvilles-majority-rule-trots-out-the-shows-best-black-mirror-impression/

[12] Seth MacFarlane, San Diego Comic-Con, 2018. The relevant quote can be found here. https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule

[13] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror.” p. 130.

[14]Tomashoff, Craig. “Scribes on ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ ‘Westworld’ and 12 More Shows Reveal Secrets From the Writers Room,” The Hollywood Reporter, 15 June 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/inside-writers-rooms-how-14-hit-shows-get-created-1119139.

[15] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror.” p. 206.

[16] Brooker et al., “Inside Black Mirror.” p. 23,26.

~

Bio:

David Kyle Johnson is a professor of philosophy at King’s College (PA) who specializes in logic, scientific reasoning, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. He also produces lecture series for The Great Courses, and his courses include Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy (2018), The Big Questions of Philosophy (2016), and Exploring Metaphysics (2014). He is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Pop Culture as Philosophy (forthcoming)Black Mirror and Philosophy: Dark Reflections (2019), and Exploring The Orville: Essays on Seth MacFarlane’s Space Adventure (2021). (About the latter, Seth MacFarlane himself said it is “a must read for any Orville fan.”) He also maintains two blogs for Psychology Today (Plato on Pop and A Logical Take) and is currently in talks to do another project for The Great Courses (aka Wondrium).

On Solarpunk

by Eric Hunting

With roots in the niche ecological SF of the late 20th century, such as the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, and Post-Industrial futurist works like Hans Widmer’s Bolo’Bolo, Solarpunk has emerged as one of the latest literary/aesthetic movements to adopt the “–punk” suffix. Its essential premise is the envisioning of a positive, hopeful, environmentally sustainable future as a reaction to the dystopianism endemic to turn-of-the-century science fiction and the Cyberpunk movement in particular. It likewise stands in opposition to the dystopianism of ‘dark green’ environmentalism, with its endemic misanthropy, demonization of science and technology, and nihilistic resignation to environmental collapse and mass death. It asserts the sort of pragmatic optimism that is now a radical, subversive stance in a popular culture that has largely abandoned hope for the future. 

Though often aspiring to utopian ideals, Solarpunk is largely focused on the more near-term transition to a Post-Carbon, Post-Industrial, Post-Scarcity culture across the current century, illustrating a path through contemporary trials and struggles to suggest positive outcomes from the present environmental, economic, and political crisis. It is neither anti-technology nor naively pro-technology (as per techno-utopianism). It sees technology as neither an enemy nor a solution in itself. Rather, it sees the cultivation of an appropriate culture as key to a global transformation. Philosophically, it tends to align with contemporary anarchism, mutualism, and libertarian socialism as well as movements such as Peer-To-Peer, the Cooperative and Commons revivals, Maker, and Open Source/Knowledge.

Solarpunk Themes

The overarching narrative common to Solarpunk is one of transition from an old, decrepit, pathological Industrial Age to a new sustainable one, which can often incur struggle and conflict based on the passive resistance to change in an ignorant and heavily propagandized society and the active, often violent, resistance of the vested interests benefiting from old power structures and economic hegemonies. The most definitive narrative is one devised by futurists/writers Alex Steffan and Cory Doctorow dubbed The Outquisition, which suggests a cultural movement fostered in the ‘cloisters’ of today’s eco-villages, communes, maker/hacker spaces emerging as a nomadic activist community seeking to intervene in crises created by the progressive failure of Industrial Age infrastructures and economics in the face of climate change impacts, seeding technologies of local resilience and the paradigms of a new culture along with them. This is typically imagined in an urban setting as these are the most vulnerable to these failures and because the reinvention of the city as a positive, desirable, and more sustainable habitat is crucial to achieving balance between civilization and the natural environment. Other themes include the struggle to preserve or restore the natural environment in the face of capitalist exploitation and political malfeasance. Far future themes tend to concern the resurgent threats of Industrial Age legacy or unexpected effects of technology to already established, and perhaps somewhat complacent, utopian communities.

Solarpunk Aesthetics

The Solarpunk aesthetic can be summed up in the single word ‘organic’; as reflected in Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of the term for his ‘organic style’ of architecture – with its roots in Asian vernaculars and the Arts & Crafts movement – the ‘free-form organic’ design emerging in architecture of the 1970s, its rediscovery in contemporary ‘parametric design’ deriving from the underlying mathematics of natural forms, the primitivist patterns of ancient cultures and vernacular building techniques such as earth and rough timber, and the more fanciful visual identity of the Art Nouveau movement. Artists/designers such as Luc Schuiten and Friedensreich Hundertwasser offer ready examples. But aside from appearances, how and what things are made from are key aspects of the aesthetic. Solarpunk explores a culture and habitat aspiring to optimum circularity in resource use. Where unsustainable materials like plastic have been largely obsolesced along with the equally unsustainable and pathological practices of the market economy, such as disposability, planned obsolescence, sliding scales of economy, and speculative production. 

Again, we must emphasize that this is not about some return to the hand-made past, even if, in the near-term, we might expect a revival of many old techniques as part of the transition from Industrial Age paradigms. Automation is prominent, even ubiquitous, in the imagined Solarpunk future, but in forms very different from the Industrial Age retrofuturism of corporate techno-utopianism. It is local, non-speculative, demand-driven, highly generalized production enabled by robotization and emerging as a community/municipal utility. The paradigm of centralized mass production has been supplanted by a new paradigm enabled by new technology; cosmolocalization. Design global, make local. The key to freedom and resilience is in the communal and personal ownership of the means of production and the digital globalization of open industrial and design knowledge. Counterintuitively, Solarpunk is very much about anticipating the impacts of robotization and even more advanced nanotechnology.

Solarpunk (or more generally, Post-Industrial) design and artifacts may often have features we might associate with old Modernism, but now pragmatically adapted to the service of environment and social empowerment. Minimalism for the purpose of enabling adaptive reuse and easier recycling. Modularity to allow immediate reuse and empower the end-user to undertake their own design, customization, and repair.

Solarpunk Habitat

The definitive Solarpunk setting is a verdant city or village, often set against an adjacent restored natural landscape, where a new cultural respect for the environment is expressed in the increased use of greenery and symbolic biomimicry throughout the urban habitat – in the practical role of urban farming as well as for aesthetics. There is much visible use of solar and wind power systems with some architecture specifically designed around them. A clear boundary is drawn between the territory of humans and nature. Suburbia has been rendered obsolescent and the future built habitat no longer sprawls cancerously across the landscape. The architecture is humble yet eclectic in nature. Visible cues of class distinction are absent. This is a more egalitarian society that has conquered poverty once and for all.

Such communities may be based largely on the adaptive reuse of the urban buildings of the past, giving it a quirky, makeshift aspect hinting at a transitional era. Or this may be an entirely new city with architecture unique to its cultural sensibilities and novel technologies, often appropriating aspects of the more human-centric, walkable cities of the ancient past. It may show signs of the impacts of a world forever changed by global warming, such as the transformation of streets into canals. Some may be cities of conventional scale, others based on vast urban superstructures, and others small cloistered havens in unusual settings. Hidden forest or mountain refuges, artificial islands at sea. Automobiles have been largely eliminated and what remains are electrified, with much of the cityscape recovered for human use and the creation of social spaces. Human-powered vehicles like bikes and velocipedes are common, along with personal electric mobility devices. Quirky electric aircraft may be common for short-range use, but the airliner is a fading memory, replaced by sophisticated solar-hybrid airships (with the option to safely enter the urban habitat) and a variety of hybrid ocean-sailing vessels. But the primary form of transportation in this future civilization is rail, as the single-most energy-efficient form of transit possible, albeit in new electric forms that better integrate into the urban habitat, sometimes entirely internal or subterranean. Most commercial buildings have been repurposed or eliminated and art replaces the oppressive torrent of urban street advertizing. 

Solarpunk Economics and Society

Simply, if crudely, described the Solarpunk culture aspires to the ideal of the Star Trek Economy, but without the contrivance of magical technology. Rather, it is realized through a culture of fundamentally greater reason and responsibility. Solarpunk futurism anticipates and aspires to a sustainable (sometimes imagined as moneyless and stateless) post-scarcity culture on the premise that scarcity, given the technology of the present, is largely a deliberate construct of market economies intended to engineer dependencies and hegemonies concentrating wealth and power. It imagines these overcome largely through the cultivation of local resilience, with renewables in their many forms, independent production, and regional and global resource commons key tools to this end. And so there is an expectation of the realization of a kind of cosmo-local gift economy built on an essential cultural principle of open reciprocity empowered by the elimination of precarity, anonymity, institutional sociopathy, and their psycho-social effects. With the advance of industrial literacy in society comes an awareness of the great leverage of renewables and automation, the actual scarcity and value of goods, and a realization that a comfortable life is nowhere near as difficult to attain for all as it has long been thought. With a bit more social and environmental responsibility, a sustainable ‘middle-class’ standard of living is universally attainable in some balance with nature and we need nothing more to drive a digital economy than the record of what gets taken off store shelves and sent up the network. So then, why not let it all be free-within-reason? In such a culture it is imagined that crime has been greatly reduced as the products of precarity and anonymity and what remains can be managed and treated as the mental illness it ultimately represents. 

As a post-scarcity culture, the Post-Industrial ethos is imagined as driven chiefly by the true human motivations; purpose, mastery, autonomy, social appreciation or love, and simple pleasure. There are careers and professions, but no ‘jobs’. There are entrepreneurs, but no capitalists. There is capital, but no banks.

Solarpunk Archetypes

Much as Cyberpunk’s archetype was the ‘hacker-hero’ in conflict with corporate and government oppressors, the Solarpunk archetype is a ‘maker-hero’; an eco-tech MacGuyver on a mission of cultural evangelism whose seditious independent technical, industrial, and science knowledge are leveraged on the transformation of the urban/industrial detritus, saving people from the crisis of climate change impacts (represented as “global warming”) and the ravages of late-stage capitalism. Alternatively, their mission may be more focused on the defence of nature; endangered wilderness or species. The Solarpunk protagonist could have many origins and may well be transhuman, employing exotic technology in their own body to the purpose of withstanding the effects of a changing environment or to gain a deeper connection to nature beyond that of the typical human. The typical hacker-hero is often radicalized by revelation or betrayal. The maker-hero perhaps similarly radicalized by the living experience of environmental disaster, the inevitable atrocities of governments and corporations in response, and generational betrayal – the false and broken promise of the Industrial Age’s techno-utopianism resulting in later generations’ endemic cultural nihilism.

Solarpunk Media

At present the Solarpunk movement remains somewhat nascent, largely unknown to mainstream media and still little known to the field of Science Fiction media. Its premise in a pragmatic optimism perhaps difficult for previous generations of writers, building careers on the earlier waves of dark and dreary dystopianism, to grasp. There is, as yet, no event culture akin to that of the Steampunk movement. But in the past few years media in the genre has started to blossom, particularly among younger writers and with the benefit of the convergent Afrofuturism movement. Independent gaming and online culture have proven receptive. There is potential for a new definitive aesthetic for our time and transition to a Post-Industrial future.

~

Bio:

Eric Hunting as a researcher of Post-Industrial Futurism, Peer-to-Peer/Commons advocate, Maker enthusiast, and former president of the First Millennial Foundation/Living Universe Foundation space advocacy organizations.

The Orville As Philosophy

by David Kyle Johnson

The reboot issue of Sci Phi Journal included my essay about what (I think) “Sci Phi” is all about. I argued that philosophers can not only use science fiction to explain philosophy, but that science fiction authors are often doing philosophy by presenting or making philosophical arguments in their works. Since I penned that essay, I have edited two books—one (Exploring The Orville, co-edited with Mike Berry) on Seth MacFarlane’s space adventure The Orville and another (Black Mirror and Philosophy, in William Irwin’s Blackwell series) on Charlie Brooker’s dystopian Black Mirror. Both books try to articulate how these shows are doing philosophy. The following is the first of two articles, one on The Orville and another on Black Mirror that also compares Black Mirror to The Orville. My goal is to give a brief overview of how these two shows do what sci-fi does best.

How The Orville Does Philosophy

The Orville is a space adventure in the same genre of classic/Next Generation Star Trek, where a crew in a ship gets in an adventure every week while exploring the galaxy, learning moral lessons and asking philosophical questions along the way. In fact, The Orville is so similar to Star Trek that the first chapter of my book Exploring The Orville is dedicated to the question of whether or not The Orville “is” Star Trek—and if it is not, what is it? A homage? A rip-off? Fan fiction? Brooke Rudow (the author of that first chapter) argues for the latter, and I agree; regardless, however, it seems that The Orville has filled a gap that was left by Star Trek (and sci-fi in general) as it evolved. As The Orville’s creator Seth MacFarland put it (in the blurb he generously wrote for the back cover of my book),

“I created The Orville because I felt that Hollywood’s science fiction offerings for the 21st century had left a large void when it came to the kind of allegorical, speculative, thoughtful episodic storytelling that I had enjoyed from the genre while growing up. It seemed as though ideas that left the viewer with something to chew on had been replaced by twists, trading intellectual nutrients for quickly burned calories.”

That’s exactly why I fell in love with The Orville, and how the book approaches the series. It recognizes that it is doing philosophy with “allegorical, speculative, thoughtful episodic storytelling,” and then tries to identify and evaluate the arguments it is making or answer the questions it is asking. As, once again, Seth put it:

Exploring The Orville is exactly the kind of response I hoped would emerge from what we were doing. This book identifies and dives deeper into the issues presented in the series, and does so with skill and precision, thanks to a variety of voices offering philosophical analyses and carefully considered takes on the material that in some cases presented a fresh lens even to us, the writers. It’s a fun, invigorating, and inspiring read, providing a better understanding and appreciation of both The Orville and the moral, political, societal, and philosophical issues it addresses. Exploring The Orville is a must read for any Orville fan.

In the book’s introduction, I argue that one of the main ways The Orville does philosophy is by, what I call “cloaking bias to create cognitive dissonance” through what Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement.”[1] It presents us a world seemingly so foreign to ours that we are cognitively estranged from it; we bring no pre-conceived notions or biases to it and evaluate it essentially “as it is.” We judge the situations and actions of the characters for what they are. But then we realize that the fictional world is not that different from our own; what happened in the episode is very much like something happening in the real world. And if we realize that the conclusion we drew about the fictional world is different than what we think about what is going on in the real world, we are confronted with cognitive dissonance. If, when you removed your bias, you concluded that X was bad, but you have been saying that the thing or person analogous to X in the real world was good… well, then, there is a very good chance you only like X because of your bias, and you should change your belief.

In The Orville episode “About a Girl,” Lieutenants LaMarr and Malloy cloak bias to create cognitive dissonance in Commander Bortus. Bortus is part of an all-male race, the Moclans; so when his first offspring turns out to be a girl, he and his partner Klyden ask the ship’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Finn, to perform a sex change operation. Finn refuses, but to them, this would be no different than correcting a cleft palette. But when LaMarr and Malloy show Bortus the “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” Claymation special, and he sees how something that was first thought to be a defect (Rudolph’s red nose) turned out to be an asset, he changes his mind and fights to let his daughter remain female.

But the episode itself employs the “cloak bias to create cognitive dissidence” approach on its audience. The viewer automatically sides with Bortus, against the Moclans, in thinking that surgically imposing a biological sex on the child is wrong. But then one realizes that this is not too dissimilar to how we humans impose cultured gender roles on children, and that the way Moclans treat women in general is not dissimilar to how we humans treat homosexuals and transexuals. Such realizations can be uncomfortable; if reality were a TV show, we would be the “bad guy.”

The list of episodes that employ this method goes on and on. “If the Stars Should Appear,” in which the crew discovers a bioship headed for destruction, is an allegory for climate change denial. The evidence they are doomed is undeniable, but it is ignored because it is considered heresy and would “destabilize a system that has kept [their society in] order.” “Majority Rule,” about a society ruled by the prevailing opinion on “the master feed,” is an allegory about “trial by Twitter” in which public opinion, rather than a fair trial, can essentially end someone’s life. “Krill” is an episode that focuses on the main villains of the series, the Krill: an alien race of spacefaring religious extremists. They think (because their “Bible,” the Anhkana, tells them so) that only they have moral worth (i.e., only they have souls) and that the entire universe is theirs to use and exploit. All of the worst horrors of Earth’s religions are brought to mind: manifest destiny (the idea that Christians were destined by God to conquer the Americas), the 9/11 attacks, Islamic terror attacks in Europe, the Buddhist mass persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya, Boko Haram’s jihad against girls’ education in Nigeria, environmental exploitation worldwide, the past and present justification of slavery and racism. (I talk about all of this in more detail in the introduction to Exploring The Orville, and there is a chapter dedicated to each one of the above mentioned episodes.)

The Orville’s Philosophical Questions

But the show also raises interesting philosophical questions. If Moclans are a biologically all-male society, in which males can reproduce on their own, then what does it even mean for a biological female to be born within it? We can imagine Moclan females as having features that human females have—like breasts—and see that human actresses have been cast to play them. But biologically, “female” is defined in terms of reproductive role. (Queen bees have no human traits, but we call them female.) So, we are left wondering not only what makes Moclan females biologically female, but how it would even be possible (by definition) for two biological males to reproduce? Could it be that Moclans are only all-male artificially? Maybe all females are changed into biological males at birth and reproduction among Moclans only happens thanks to advances in technology. (Catherine Nolan explores these questions in her chapter.)

One of the most memorable relationships in the series is between Dr. Clare Finn and Isaac, the android from Kaylon. Because he is an android, one genuinely wonders whether he can love Dr. Finn—or, even, whether Finn can truly love him. Unlike Data from Star Trek: TNG who only professes to not feel emotions, Isaac professes to have no feeling at all; he says he is not conscious. But just like Data, whose behavior often indicates that he does have emotion, might Isaac be wrong about their own internal states? Might Isaac be conscious in the same way humans are without knowing it?

If not, perhaps we limit too strictly what it means to be conscious. Not to bring bees into it again, but… We often think that humans are the only animal capable of using language, but bees do a dance in their hive that can indicate the location of nectar to their fellow bees far more accurately than any piece of human language. (And this is not the only kind of communicative dance they do.[2]) Might it be more accurate to say humans are the only ones that use our type of language, but that there are also other types of language? In the same way, even if Isaac isn’t conscious in the same way humans are, might we say he has a different type of consciousness? And if so, should we say the same for robots that we have, or at least one day will, develop? (Mimi Marinucci addresses these issues in her chapter.)

The romantic relationship that frames the series is between Capt. Ed Mercer and his first officer, Commander Kelly Greyson. She is his ex-wife because she cheated on him with an alien named Darulio, but she later helps Ed get command of The Orville (by pulling some strings). Later, we find out that she may have only cheated on Ed because members of Darulio’s race sometimes emits a pheromone that makes them sexually irresistible. Ed and Kelly’s relationship fuels a number of great comedic moments, but also another philosophical question addressed in the book; is nepotism—people getting jobs based on connections or relationships instead of qualifications—always bad? Turns out this is common in the world of The Orville, but everyone seems to just look the other way. (Joe Slater addresses these issues in his chapter.)

And what about Darulio’s pheromone? The crew seems to just look the other way when Darulio seduces Kelly (again), and then Ed, and even uses his pheromone to end a war. But isn’t the pheromone a bit like a date rape drug? If so, why was the crew so nonchalant about its use? (My co-editor Mike Berry addresses these questions, along with those the situation raises about what it means to have free will.)

And then there is the “sophomoric” humor that Ed and Kelly’s relationship lends itself to—along with the humor throughout the series. Is there really a difference between highbrow and lowbrow comedy, and should we really favor the former over the latter? And what does that tell us about how we should enjoy The Orville. (Leigh Rich and Christopher Innes tackle the humor of the series in their chapters.)

This is just a sample; I’ve only tried to give a sense of the kinds of ways that The Orville does philosophy and the kinds of things you will find in the book. But another recent book of mine, on an entirely different series—by another comedy writer Charlie Brooker—takes a similar approach. Next issue, I’ll talk about how the dystopian Black Mirror does philosophy and compare it to The Orville.


[1] Nodelman, Perry. “The Cognitive Estrangement of Darko Suvin,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 5, no. 4, January 1981: 24-27, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.1851.

[2] Grad, Phillip “How Do Bees Communicate? They Dance Bee Dances!” Big Island Bees, 19 May 2010. https://bigislandbees.com/blogs/bee-blog/14137357-bee-dances

~

Bio:

David Kyle Johnson is a professor of philosophy at King’s College (PA) who specializes in logic, scientific reasoning, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. He also produces lecture series for The Great Courses, and his courses include Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy (2018), The Big Questions of Philosophy (2016), and Exploring Metaphysics (2014). He is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Pop Culture as Philosophy (forthcoming)Black Mirror and Philosophy: Dark Reflections (2019), and Exploring The Orville: Essays on Seth MacFarlane’s Space Adventure (2021). (About the latter, Seth MacFarlane himself said it is “a must read for any Orville fan.”) He also maintains two blogs for Psychology Today (Plato on Pop and A Logical Take) and is currently in talks to do another project for The Great Courses (aka Wondrium).