Anyone need a nice number puzzle these days?
5984 is a factor in an interesting product. If you multiply 5984 by a certain four-digit number, ABCD, the product is BBAADDCC: The same four digits in the second number, but repeated in that pattern. Can you find the number?
Enjoy...
I’m plugging away at a third story, set mostly in a space station hovering over Saturn in the form of a “neo-Gothic” castle. I mean it to have a sense of doom and foreboding, like the first arrival in Dracula’s castle. The story’s mood is different from what I’ve attempted so far. I hope my other commitments will let me finish it this month, but ... time will tell.
Science fiction and fantasy author, published for the first time in 2017. Also into recreational math, chess variants, puzzles, doggerel.
Friday, June 5, 2020
Monday, May 4, 2020
Drama-Junkie Nation
When drama was first invented in Ancient Greece, people consumed perhaps twenty hours of it per year, during annual festivals. Today people typically consume that much in a week or less.
Here’s a disquieting theory: our mass-overdosing on drama is causing widespread psychological harm that weakens our ability to respond to crises like this pandemic.
For instance, people today are reacting quite differently than people did in 1969 to the Hong Kong Flu, which killed 100,000 Americans (in a smaller total population): could this be because we’ve watched so many happy-ending productions that we’re ingrained with a belief that bad outcomes can always be avoided if only we recognize and follow the right advice? I’m a product of the TV age too, but it seems to me that people who spent more time on their own life-problems and pursuits and less time watching idealized, imaginary representations of life, constructed by dramatic formulae, would have more realistic ideas about the human condition and more humility about what sort of misfortunes we can hope to avoid.
Drama uses actors, and actors gain success by conveying passionate emotion: usually not so much by showing calmness, civility, or cool-headed practical common sense. Could it be that our spooning this stuff down every day, hours at a time, has contributed to our becoming largely a touchy-feely nation of useless snowflakes, rather than a greatest-generation nation that could roll up its sleeves, make hard decisions, and do the needful?
The bad part of this rumination is: if we’re a nation of drama junkies now, how do we kick the habit? How do we persuade enough people to want to turn off the flatscreen and go do something real? I haven’t got an answer. But if you’re newly married and starting a family, severely limiting screen time for your own kids sounds to me like a good idea.
Here’s a disquieting theory: our mass-overdosing on drama is causing widespread psychological harm that weakens our ability to respond to crises like this pandemic.
For instance, people today are reacting quite differently than people did in 1969 to the Hong Kong Flu, which killed 100,000 Americans (in a smaller total population): could this be because we’ve watched so many happy-ending productions that we’re ingrained with a belief that bad outcomes can always be avoided if only we recognize and follow the right advice? I’m a product of the TV age too, but it seems to me that people who spent more time on their own life-problems and pursuits and less time watching idealized, imaginary representations of life, constructed by dramatic formulae, would have more realistic ideas about the human condition and more humility about what sort of misfortunes we can hope to avoid.
Drama uses actors, and actors gain success by conveying passionate emotion: usually not so much by showing calmness, civility, or cool-headed practical common sense. Could it be that our spooning this stuff down every day, hours at a time, has contributed to our becoming largely a touchy-feely nation of useless snowflakes, rather than a greatest-generation nation that could roll up its sleeves, make hard decisions, and do the needful?
The bad part of this rumination is: if we’re a nation of drama junkies now, how do we kick the habit? How do we persuade enough people to want to turn off the flatscreen and go do something real? I haven’t got an answer. But if you’re newly married and starting a family, severely limiting screen time for your own kids sounds to me like a good idea.
Friday, April 24, 2020
LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS by John C Wright
John C Wright is one of my favorite contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors. I know, mine and everyone else's, right? And in fact I was late to the party—my interest in SFF had been on hiatus awhile when Wright made his splash debut with his marvelous GOLDEN AGE trilogy at the beginning of the century. In the past five years I've been following his new work while I try to catch up on his early productions, and there seems no danger I'll ever run out of the Wright stuff.
I appreciate about Wright that he brings to his work a broad and deep knowledge of the classics and the ideas that inform western civilization. His intellectual heft is not to be carried away by today's welter of fad ideas, and his stories, full of invention and imagery, deliver the entertainment and wonder that we miss in the dreary Leftist preachments packaged as stories that we get from the Big Five publishers nowadays.
Earlier this year Mr. Wright published a book-length essay that examined a classic of early twentieth century fantasy, one that has received accolades and appreciation in spite of its being particularly difficult to understand—or perhaps because of its very difficulty. I wrote a short review of John C Wright’s long review. Here it is.
I read David Lindsay’s remarkable VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) long ago, on C S Lewis’s recommendation that it was one of the most evocative fantasies ever written. Thought-provoking it was. I kept returning to memorable parts and occasional complete rereads ever since. The odyssey of Lindsay’s protagonist Maskull takes him through a wild progression of philosophies of life, each seeming like a final explanation of the bizarre world of Tormance until the next one upends it; in reading it I felt bewildered and fascinated, but baffled as to what, if anything, Lindsay was getting at. Perhaps, I supposed, the point was that the world we live in comes with no manual of instructions, and that acting without guidance is the human condition. The imagery and adventures were amazing, anyway.
So I left it, a strange and wonderful book but without any deeper discernible plan than a succession of remarkable episodes, until I read John C Wright’s excellent book-length essay on it. Mr. Wright has evidently also been haunted by Lindsay’s fantastic imagination for many years, but has also brought to it deep scholarship and hard work. His LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS lays out a convincing explanation of how VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS does have a specific point of view, and how every part of the book contributes to an organic whole.
This book gave me a new and clearer understanding of a compelling but obscure classic. I recommend it to anyone who, like me before reading Wright’s essay, admires VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS without understanding it.
I appreciate about Wright that he brings to his work a broad and deep knowledge of the classics and the ideas that inform western civilization. His intellectual heft is not to be carried away by today's welter of fad ideas, and his stories, full of invention and imagery, deliver the entertainment and wonder that we miss in the dreary Leftist preachments packaged as stories that we get from the Big Five publishers nowadays.
Earlier this year Mr. Wright published a book-length essay that examined a classic of early twentieth century fantasy, one that has received accolades and appreciation in spite of its being particularly difficult to understand—or perhaps because of its very difficulty. I wrote a short review of John C Wright’s long review. Here it is.
I read David Lindsay’s remarkable VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) long ago, on C S Lewis’s recommendation that it was one of the most evocative fantasies ever written. Thought-provoking it was. I kept returning to memorable parts and occasional complete rereads ever since. The odyssey of Lindsay’s protagonist Maskull takes him through a wild progression of philosophies of life, each seeming like a final explanation of the bizarre world of Tormance until the next one upends it; in reading it I felt bewildered and fascinated, but baffled as to what, if anything, Lindsay was getting at. Perhaps, I supposed, the point was that the world we live in comes with no manual of instructions, and that acting without guidance is the human condition. The imagery and adventures were amazing, anyway.
So I left it, a strange and wonderful book but without any deeper discernible plan than a succession of remarkable episodes, until I read John C Wright’s excellent book-length essay on it. Mr. Wright has evidently also been haunted by Lindsay’s fantastic imagination for many years, but has also brought to it deep scholarship and hard work. His LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS lays out a convincing explanation of how VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS does have a specific point of view, and how every part of the book contributes to an organic whole.
This book gave me a new and clearer understanding of a compelling but obscure classic. I recommend it to anyone who, like me before reading Wright’s essay, admires VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS without understanding it.
My Coronavirus Message
Since January 30, PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA has been supplying your family’s literary needs with almost 700 pages of quality fantasy and science fiction stories.
Stories that explore themes of loneliness and despair, madness and dreams: all the mysterious, mythical significance that people have vested upon the Moon.
Because, in the end, people are what really matter.
Now, we will go on as we always have, offering these tales of wonder and triumph to a world that needs their message more than ever before. A world that seems every day more isolated and uncertain.
Although we must remain physically separated in these difficult, unprecedented times, we can still connect with the 22 authors whose stories are collected in this volume—without leaving the safety of our own homes.
We’re here for you. And we will get through this ... together.
Stories that explore themes of loneliness and despair, madness and dreams: all the mysterious, mythical significance that people have vested upon the Moon.
Because, in the end, people are what really matter.
Now, we will go on as we always have, offering these tales of wonder and triumph to a world that needs their message more than ever before. A world that seems every day more isolated and uncertain.
Although we must remain physically separated in these difficult, unprecedented times, we can still connect with the 22 authors whose stories are collected in this volume—without leaving the safety of our own homes.
We’re here for you. And we will get through this ... together.
Monday, March 9, 2020
Kirk Spock & McCoy Enterprises
(Scene: the board room of Kirk Spock & McCoy Enterprises, an investment firm with offices on the 87th floor of the Empire State Building. Or somewhere like that.)
KIRK: Star date twenty twenty zero three zero nine. The novel corona virus has spread terror through the markets, wiping out in a single morning gains that took (checks notes) months to accumulate. The death toll continues to mount, and every day brings word of new outbreaks, more and more draconian measures to halt the spread of the disease. There is as of yet no cure in sight, and tantalizing hopes of a vaccine remain months away in the most wildly optimistic scenario. I am meeting with my top advisors to plan a strategy for counseling our clients. … Did you get all that, Miss Uhura?
UHURA: Yes, sir. What was that word “star” for at the beginning?
KIRK: “Star”? Did I say “star”? No idea. Strike it out. Well, gentlemen: what is your prognosis.
SPOCK (adjusting his Stefano Ricci tie): The logical strategy for such a situation is indisputable: Buy. The market is now profoundly underpriced. Take advantage of it.
McCOY (staring at SPOCK with wild eyes): I can’t believe this. Are you out of your mind, Spock?! The bottom is dropping out of the market! We have to sell, sell! Sell like there’s no tomorrow! People are dying out there, I tell you!
SPOCK (politely): Will fewer of them die if your clients lose their nest eggs to a bear market?
McCOY: But this virus could crash the world economy! Italy has shut itself down! Practically the whole government of Iran is infected! Schools are making contingency plans to close, factories could shut down to try to contain the contagion!
SPOCK: The most pessimistic forecasts of the pandemic are—if you will pardon the pun—feverish. The mortality estimates we have seen so far are most likely inflated due to our inability to count the total infected population accurately, since many of them develop only mild symptoms. Respiratory illnesses do the most harm in the winter months, and the northern hemisphere is about to enter springtime. The disease appears to be more contagious in less-developed countries with inferior public sanitation infrastructure, and for all these reasons will probably do little harm to the regions responsible for the bulk of the world economy. The epidemic may peak very soon, and when it does the markets will rebound.
McCOY (passionately): And does that do any good for the people in quarantine? Or in the ICU’s?
SPOCK (with heavy irony): McCoy, if I had a cure for the novel corona virus in my vest pocket, I would certainly make use of it to help those people. But, alas (feeling his pocket), I do not have such a thing. Do you?
McCOY: Dammit, man, I’m an investment analyst, not a doctor!
SPOCK (pointedly): So am I. And my analysis is: buy.
McCOY: And mine is SELL, you green-visored Vulcan!
SPOCK: Green-visored what?
KIRK: Never mind. Gentlemen, I think I’ve heard enough. The final decision is mine. And … I know what I’m going to do.
McCOY: And what will that be?
KIRK (turns to the window and gazes for a moment out over the panorama of New York City stretching out before him): We’ll buy.
McCOY: Jim!
KIRK (rounds on him): We have to, Bones! This enterprise has to be guided by the Prime Directive!
SPOCK (quoting): “Buy low, sell high.”
McCOY: To hell with the Prime Directive! (He storms out.)
SPOCK: Jim, may I ask you something?
KIRK (smiling crookedly): What, Spock?
SPOCK: The stock market is essentially an engine for transferring wealth from excitable investors to more phlegmatic ones. McCoy seems temperamentally unsuited to the profession. I have analyzed our respective performances over the past five years and found that, while my advice has proven correct 70% of the time, McCoy’s has proven incorrect 90% of the time. Why do you keep him as a partner?
KIRK (grinning): I would think you could figure that out with your famous logic, Spock. If I follow your advice, I make money seven times out of ten, is that right?
SPOCK: Yes…
KIRK: But you see, if I do the opposite of what McCoy recommends, I make money nine times out of ten.
SPOCK (raises one eyebrow): Fascinating!
Justin Tarquin: Hope you enjoyed this experiment in transposition of characters. I wish I knew Photoshop well enough to make an illustration ...
KIRK: Star date twenty twenty zero three zero nine. The novel corona virus has spread terror through the markets, wiping out in a single morning gains that took (checks notes) months to accumulate. The death toll continues to mount, and every day brings word of new outbreaks, more and more draconian measures to halt the spread of the disease. There is as of yet no cure in sight, and tantalizing hopes of a vaccine remain months away in the most wildly optimistic scenario. I am meeting with my top advisors to plan a strategy for counseling our clients. … Did you get all that, Miss Uhura?
UHURA: Yes, sir. What was that word “star” for at the beginning?
KIRK: “Star”? Did I say “star”? No idea. Strike it out. Well, gentlemen: what is your prognosis.
SPOCK (adjusting his Stefano Ricci tie): The logical strategy for such a situation is indisputable: Buy. The market is now profoundly underpriced. Take advantage of it.
McCOY (staring at SPOCK with wild eyes): I can’t believe this. Are you out of your mind, Spock?! The bottom is dropping out of the market! We have to sell, sell! Sell like there’s no tomorrow! People are dying out there, I tell you!
SPOCK (politely): Will fewer of them die if your clients lose their nest eggs to a bear market?
McCOY: But this virus could crash the world economy! Italy has shut itself down! Practically the whole government of Iran is infected! Schools are making contingency plans to close, factories could shut down to try to contain the contagion!
SPOCK: The most pessimistic forecasts of the pandemic are—if you will pardon the pun—feverish. The mortality estimates we have seen so far are most likely inflated due to our inability to count the total infected population accurately, since many of them develop only mild symptoms. Respiratory illnesses do the most harm in the winter months, and the northern hemisphere is about to enter springtime. The disease appears to be more contagious in less-developed countries with inferior public sanitation infrastructure, and for all these reasons will probably do little harm to the regions responsible for the bulk of the world economy. The epidemic may peak very soon, and when it does the markets will rebound.
McCOY (passionately): And does that do any good for the people in quarantine? Or in the ICU’s?
SPOCK (with heavy irony): McCoy, if I had a cure for the novel corona virus in my vest pocket, I would certainly make use of it to help those people. But, alas (feeling his pocket), I do not have such a thing. Do you?
McCOY: Dammit, man, I’m an investment analyst, not a doctor!
SPOCK (pointedly): So am I. And my analysis is: buy.
McCOY: And mine is SELL, you green-visored Vulcan!
SPOCK: Green-visored what?
KIRK: Never mind. Gentlemen, I think I’ve heard enough. The final decision is mine. And … I know what I’m going to do.
McCOY: And what will that be?
KIRK (turns to the window and gazes for a moment out over the panorama of New York City stretching out before him): We’ll buy.
McCOY: Jim!
KIRK (rounds on him): We have to, Bones! This enterprise has to be guided by the Prime Directive!
SPOCK (quoting): “Buy low, sell high.”
McCOY: To hell with the Prime Directive! (He storms out.)
SPOCK: Jim, may I ask you something?
KIRK (smiling crookedly): What, Spock?
SPOCK: The stock market is essentially an engine for transferring wealth from excitable investors to more phlegmatic ones. McCoy seems temperamentally unsuited to the profession. I have analyzed our respective performances over the past five years and found that, while my advice has proven correct 70% of the time, McCoy’s has proven incorrect 90% of the time. Why do you keep him as a partner?
KIRK (grinning): I would think you could figure that out with your famous logic, Spock. If I follow your advice, I make money seven times out of ten, is that right?
SPOCK: Yes…
KIRK: But you see, if I do the opposite of what McCoy recommends, I make money nine times out of ten.
SPOCK (raises one eyebrow): Fascinating!
Justin Tarquin: Hope you enjoyed this experiment in transposition of characters. I wish I knew Photoshop well enough to make an illustration ...
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Jeff Bezos: fighting the planet's greatest threat
Jeff Bezos made a stir this week, after causing a moment of confusion, with a pledge to donate $10 billion to combat the greatest threat to the planet: socialism.
But he initially misstated the purpose of his grant money as “climate change”, leading to many mistaken reports as journalists hurried to file their stories during the applause between Bezos’s misstatement and the correction.
“Wait, did I say climate change?” said the Amazon billionaire after the hubbub died down, shaking his head and laughing at the obvious blunder. “I’m sorry, how did that come out? I meant to say, to combat socialism, of course. The greatest threat to the planet, du-uh, is socialism. Not—” he made an amused sound like pffft!—“climate change.”
The audience quieted down considerably at the correction, but Bezos went on. “I mean, think about it. Socialism can only exist under an authoritarian government powerful enough to force people to give up their stuff or do whatever the government says to do with it. Obviously, this is a recipe for bad management decisions passing without proper criticism, and hence for irresponsible stewardship of the environment. Which is exactly what we have seen under socialism.
“The greatest environmental disaster on the planet, and it's not even close, has been the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union’s misguided diversion of water for irrigation. All the ecosystems of that erstwhile sea and its area have been destroyed. The plains left behind as it recedes are covered with salt and chemical pollutants, carried off by wind as toxic dust storms. The human cost has been enormous.
“Then you have the Chinese Three Gorges Dam. Landslides, drought, disease, millions of people living in its vicinity put in danger, endangered species and whole ecosystems disrupted—even the Chinese government has admitted it was a huge mistake.
“And of course the Soviet Chernobyl disaster, which by any reckoning was two orders of magnitude worse that the roughly contemporary Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in the United States. Estimated deaths came to thousands, a danger zone stretching 20 miles in radius all around the site more than thirty years later.
“Where does nine-tenths of the plastic waste in the oceans come from? Communist China.
“Climate change has been going on since the world began, and the planet has withstood it just fine. I mean, over the two-billion-year history of life on this planet the Sun’s radiance has varied by more than 10 percent. Ten percent! Kinda dwarfs anything you’ll get from carbon dioxide, huh? But socialism, man, that’s bad news from start to finish.
“So I’m proud to donate this money to combat socialism, the greatest threat to the planet,” concluded the world's richest man, ending his remarks to the assembly, where you could have heard a pin drop.
But he initially misstated the purpose of his grant money as “climate change”, leading to many mistaken reports as journalists hurried to file their stories during the applause between Bezos’s misstatement and the correction.
“Wait, did I say climate change?” said the Amazon billionaire after the hubbub died down, shaking his head and laughing at the obvious blunder. “I’m sorry, how did that come out? I meant to say, to combat socialism, of course. The greatest threat to the planet, du-uh, is socialism. Not—” he made an amused sound like pffft!—“climate change.”
The audience quieted down considerably at the correction, but Bezos went on. “I mean, think about it. Socialism can only exist under an authoritarian government powerful enough to force people to give up their stuff or do whatever the government says to do with it. Obviously, this is a recipe for bad management decisions passing without proper criticism, and hence for irresponsible stewardship of the environment. Which is exactly what we have seen under socialism.
“The greatest environmental disaster on the planet, and it's not even close, has been the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union’s misguided diversion of water for irrigation. All the ecosystems of that erstwhile sea and its area have been destroyed. The plains left behind as it recedes are covered with salt and chemical pollutants, carried off by wind as toxic dust storms. The human cost has been enormous.
“Then you have the Chinese Three Gorges Dam. Landslides, drought, disease, millions of people living in its vicinity put in danger, endangered species and whole ecosystems disrupted—even the Chinese government has admitted it was a huge mistake.
“And of course the Soviet Chernobyl disaster, which by any reckoning was two orders of magnitude worse that the roughly contemporary Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in the United States. Estimated deaths came to thousands, a danger zone stretching 20 miles in radius all around the site more than thirty years later.
“Where does nine-tenths of the plastic waste in the oceans come from? Communist China.
“Climate change has been going on since the world began, and the planet has withstood it just fine. I mean, over the two-billion-year history of life on this planet the Sun’s radiance has varied by more than 10 percent. Ten percent! Kinda dwarfs anything you’ll get from carbon dioxide, huh? But socialism, man, that’s bad news from start to finish.
“So I’m proud to donate this money to combat socialism, the greatest threat to the planet,” concluded the world's richest man, ending his remarks to the assembly, where you could have heard a pin drop.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Number Curiosities
The number 17772 has a property that makes it unique among five-digit numbers: it is the sum of the squares of the five two-digit numbers formed when you read its digits left to right (and cycle back at the end). That is,
17772= 17x17 + 77x77 + 77x77 + 72x72 + 21x21
Although no other five-digit number has this property, it’s also true that there is a unique five-digit number equal to the sum of the two-digit numbers formed by its own digits reading from RIGHT to LEFT. In other words, there is a unique solution to this “ cryptarithm “ (but note that repeated digits are allowed, so different letters can represent the same digit):
ABCDE = BAxBA + AExAE + EDxED + DCxDC + CBxCB
I found the solutions to both these original problems by using a spreadsheet, and the second one particularly surprised me. Perhaps it will surprise you too.
As I mentioned a couple of posts back, my story ”The Hyland Resolution” in the anthology PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, has a main character who likes number puzzles, and this becomes important in an unexpected way. I hope you’ll pick up the book and enjoy my story as well as all the others!
As I mentioned a couple of posts back, my story ”The Hyland Resolution” in the anthology PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, has a main character who likes number puzzles, and this becomes important in an unexpected way. I hope you’ll pick up the book and enjoy my story as well as all the others!
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Clerihews for the Losers
I like to stay hopeful about the future, so it's good to reflect that later this year, someone will lose the election to be the President of the United States. I wrote some clerihews to comemorate the last few losers. Sure, a clerihew is a pretty easy form to write, but what do they want for losing?
1996: Bob Dole
Bob Dole
Lacked a goal.
The Dems would demand what they wanted, and when Bob took the floor,
He'd propose the same thing, but a little less, and cheaper, and slower.
2000: Al Gore
Al Gore
Made 'em snore.
Known for his climate-warming-catastrophe hawking,
Though it unobligingly got cold wherever he was talking.
2004: John Kerry
John Forbes Kerry
Got a great keynote from this other guy, Barry.
Then he 24-7 talked Vietnam,
Till he sounded like a disgruntled-vet version of Miss Havisham.
2008: John McCain
John McCain,
The Times assured us, was broadminded and urbane.
That is, until he got nominated,
Whereafter he was abominated.
2012: Mitt Romney
Governor Mitt Romney
Became his party's nominee.
And campaigned with such chipper politeness,
Even whites were put off by his whiteness.
2016: Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton,
Though marrying a skilled politician was her life's sole noteworthy accomplishment, on
The basis of it, ran for President.
We all know how that went.
Who will be next? No telling. But one thing is certain: you will not find any of my poetry in "The Hyland Resolution", my story in PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA. Enjoy!
The Hyland Resolution
Another story of mine is now published! Whew. Now I have two.
The story is “The Hyland Resolution”, and the anthology that includes it (and lots more) is PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, edited by Declan Finn.
I got the germ of the idea that became the story “The Hyland Resolution” about four years ago next month. I remember because I know what sparked it: it was the episode “For The Girl Who Has Everything” of SUPERGIRL, in which our heroine was attacked by a Kryptonian critter called a Black Mercy (because the Kryptonians used it as a humane method of execution). The Black Mercy’s venom or whatever induces a coma filled with dreams that fulfil the victim’s deepest desires, before ultimately killing him—unless he somehow rejects the happy fantasy.
I only watched the first five or ten minutes, because by the end of its first season I had had my fill of this series and was only tuning in occasionally for long enough to see if the basic idea seemed interesting. Sometime if I only see the beginning of a story, I can abstract out the basic problem that drives the plot and think of a completely different way to present and handle it that might make a good original story. (Perry Mason seems to inspire me that way sometimes.)
I’m probably not the only one who does this: this particular episode’s idea has been around the block many times. I see in Wikipedia that the Supergirl writers cribbed it from a Superman comic (“For The Man Who Has Everything”: even thriftily reusing 83% of the title), and my brother tells me there was an episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER on the same idea. Declan Finn, our worthy PAS LUNA editor, pointed me to an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (a very good series I’d never watched till then) where Bruce Wayne is trapped in a dream in which he had never become Batman, because his parents had never been killed. The Nexus in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS is yet another iteration. How far back does this plot concept go, I wonder? Does it trace back to the scene where Odysseus loses some crewmen to the Lotus Eaters?
I don’t know how the SUPERGIRL writers handled it, though my guess would be that it involved a lot of emoting and sharing of feelings. But as I thought about it myself, I realized two things: first, that I did have an original idea how a person could be snapped out of such a fantasy; and second, that my protagonist would be a mathematician. To say more would be to give spoilers. I drafted a very short piece, set on Earth, about a math professor named Charles Hyland. But my first draft seemed to be lacking vitality; I shelved it without even giving it a title and went on with other things for awhile.
Then Superversive Press called for submissions for its Planetary Anthology series. When Jagi Lamplighter wrote me she was working on Luna, and did I have anything with themes of the Moon, loneliness, madness, dreams, and despair, I remembered my draft and returned to it.
It needed fleshing out, and the themes of the anthology provided direction for how I could proceed. Dreams, check. Madness, well, check. Loneliness and despair? What if my mathematician, Charles N. Hyland (the N is for Norbert, but that never comes up in the story), is a man of many troubles, who uses mathematics as an escape for thinking of things that upset him? The Moon … I moved my setting to a university on the Moon in the early days of its colonization, a university in a Lunar city, established by Christians from Central and South America, fleeing the religious persecution of the increasingly secularized governments on Earth, named El Redentor: Spanish for “The Redeemer”. (None of this comes up in the story, either.) The ubiquitous AI that Hyland consults sometimes, like an advanced web search application, I named Thoth, after the Egyptian god of wisdom, records, and the Moon; and I put in a couple other faint allusions (or Easter eggs) of moony lore.
As for the theme of despair, I pulled in an idea I have about the coming century of colonization of the Solar System, that I think SF writers have short-changed … namely, war. For some reason, as far as I know, everyone seems to imagine that the opening up of vast stretches of new real estate on the Moon and elsewhere will all be handled in as peaceful and orderly a fashion as a session of Congress devoted to voting themselves a raise. On the contrary, to me it seems natural that some spots on the Moon and elsewhere are going to be particularly desirable, and the colonizers will inevitably come into conflict over them and turn to their various governments on Earth to defend their interests. The Moon may be a pretty violent place for its first few decades … plenty of conflict for stories, and excuse for despair.
So how would my absent-minded Professor Hyland deal with wartime emergencies? He’d go through the motions while striving to keep his mind on his mathematics. That could give me a nice opening scene, developing his character in the midst of some intense action. At least for me, the opening scene is good for a chuckle.
By the way, for those who enjoy number puzzles (I can never understand why there aren’t more of us), the story contains one or two, understated and in no way essential to enjoying the story, but solvable. Nothing fancy—rather like figuring out why Spock said there were 1,771,561 tribbles in the grain bin that emptied out over Captain Kirk.
Declan and Jagi liked “The Hyland Resolution”, and then we had a long wait as the production of Superversive Press’s Planetary Anthology series slowed down to a halt, and ultimately the publishing enterprise that had produced a lot of good reading closed its doors. But Tuscany Bay Books picked up the project and has issued Pluto and Luna with a new look. “The Hyland Resolution” is one of 22 stories in this 600+ page volume. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far, and I hope you will too.
The story is “The Hyland Resolution”, and the anthology that includes it (and lots more) is PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, edited by Declan Finn.
I got the germ of the idea that became the story “The Hyland Resolution” about four years ago next month. I remember because I know what sparked it: it was the episode “For The Girl Who Has Everything” of SUPERGIRL, in which our heroine was attacked by a Kryptonian critter called a Black Mercy (because the Kryptonians used it as a humane method of execution). The Black Mercy’s venom or whatever induces a coma filled with dreams that fulfil the victim’s deepest desires, before ultimately killing him—unless he somehow rejects the happy fantasy.
I only watched the first five or ten minutes, because by the end of its first season I had had my fill of this series and was only tuning in occasionally for long enough to see if the basic idea seemed interesting. Sometime if I only see the beginning of a story, I can abstract out the basic problem that drives the plot and think of a completely different way to present and handle it that might make a good original story. (Perry Mason seems to inspire me that way sometimes.)
I’m probably not the only one who does this: this particular episode’s idea has been around the block many times. I see in Wikipedia that the Supergirl writers cribbed it from a Superman comic (“For The Man Who Has Everything”: even thriftily reusing 83% of the title), and my brother tells me there was an episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER on the same idea. Declan Finn, our worthy PAS LUNA editor, pointed me to an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (a very good series I’d never watched till then) where Bruce Wayne is trapped in a dream in which he had never become Batman, because his parents had never been killed. The Nexus in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS is yet another iteration. How far back does this plot concept go, I wonder? Does it trace back to the scene where Odysseus loses some crewmen to the Lotus Eaters?
I don’t know how the SUPERGIRL writers handled it, though my guess would be that it involved a lot of emoting and sharing of feelings. But as I thought about it myself, I realized two things: first, that I did have an original idea how a person could be snapped out of such a fantasy; and second, that my protagonist would be a mathematician. To say more would be to give spoilers. I drafted a very short piece, set on Earth, about a math professor named Charles Hyland. But my first draft seemed to be lacking vitality; I shelved it without even giving it a title and went on with other things for awhile.
Then Superversive Press called for submissions for its Planetary Anthology series. When Jagi Lamplighter wrote me she was working on Luna, and did I have anything with themes of the Moon, loneliness, madness, dreams, and despair, I remembered my draft and returned to it.
It needed fleshing out, and the themes of the anthology provided direction for how I could proceed. Dreams, check. Madness, well, check. Loneliness and despair? What if my mathematician, Charles N. Hyland (the N is for Norbert, but that never comes up in the story), is a man of many troubles, who uses mathematics as an escape for thinking of things that upset him? The Moon … I moved my setting to a university on the Moon in the early days of its colonization, a university in a Lunar city, established by Christians from Central and South America, fleeing the religious persecution of the increasingly secularized governments on Earth, named El Redentor: Spanish for “The Redeemer”. (None of this comes up in the story, either.) The ubiquitous AI that Hyland consults sometimes, like an advanced web search application, I named Thoth, after the Egyptian god of wisdom, records, and the Moon; and I put in a couple other faint allusions (or Easter eggs) of moony lore.
As for the theme of despair, I pulled in an idea I have about the coming century of colonization of the Solar System, that I think SF writers have short-changed … namely, war. For some reason, as far as I know, everyone seems to imagine that the opening up of vast stretches of new real estate on the Moon and elsewhere will all be handled in as peaceful and orderly a fashion as a session of Congress devoted to voting themselves a raise. On the contrary, to me it seems natural that some spots on the Moon and elsewhere are going to be particularly desirable, and the colonizers will inevitably come into conflict over them and turn to their various governments on Earth to defend their interests. The Moon may be a pretty violent place for its first few decades … plenty of conflict for stories, and excuse for despair.
So how would my absent-minded Professor Hyland deal with wartime emergencies? He’d go through the motions while striving to keep his mind on his mathematics. That could give me a nice opening scene, developing his character in the midst of some intense action. At least for me, the opening scene is good for a chuckle.
By the way, for those who enjoy number puzzles (I can never understand why there aren’t more of us), the story contains one or two, understated and in no way essential to enjoying the story, but solvable. Nothing fancy—rather like figuring out why Spock said there were 1,771,561 tribbles in the grain bin that emptied out over Captain Kirk.
Declan and Jagi liked “The Hyland Resolution”, and then we had a long wait as the production of Superversive Press’s Planetary Anthology series slowed down to a halt, and ultimately the publishing enterprise that had produced a lot of good reading closed its doors. But Tuscany Bay Books picked up the project and has issued Pluto and Luna with a new look. “The Hyland Resolution” is one of 22 stories in this 600+ page volume. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far, and I hope you will too.
Monday, May 20, 2019
So many endings disappoint
I'm congratulating myself this morning on never having taken any interest in the whole GAME OF THRONES saga. Apparently all the people who did found the conclusion broadcast last night to be a big disappointment. There will be no spoilers in this post, because I did not watch the conclusion, nor anything that led up to it. I watched a couple episodes one time when other people were watching them and I was there, but I only remember the broad outlines of the thing.
So I don't have anything particular to contribute to GAME OF THRONES discussions in particular, but I do note that it seems to be another entry in the list of fantasy stories where an author succeeds in creating a world, a situation, and a plot-design that readers find fascinating ... but then fails to bring it to a successful conclusion.
I can think of lots of SFF literature that has this problem: the Riverworld books of Philip Jose Farmer, for example. He invents a planet where every human being who has ever lived beyond infancy is resurrected into a perpetually healthy body and with all physical needs met--but with no instructions as to how they got here or what they should do next. So characters from history can meet each other and have adventures, and can try to figure out who built the whole thing and why. But although the reader can happily go along with the adventures trusting the author to provide an answer at the end to "what it all means", the author needs to have a goal in his mind before he writes the first sentence; and, alas, it seems that Farmer did not. I couldn't find any satisfying ending in the Riverworld series, though I thought the first and second books were entertaining.
I think I'm safe in putting Asimov's Foundation series in this list also, though I only read the original three books from the 1940's, not the later installments from the 1980's. Here, again, the broad idea was thought-provoking and fertile ground for adventure stories: a genius at mathematical psychohistory (whatever that is) who can predict the future of the Galactic Empire, foresee its collapse and prepare a one-world colony fated to rebuild a more stable empire after a thousand-year age of darkness.
So I don't have anything particular to contribute to GAME OF THRONES discussions in particular, but I do note that it seems to be another entry in the list of fantasy stories where an author succeeds in creating a world, a situation, and a plot-design that readers find fascinating ... but then fails to bring it to a successful conclusion.
I can think of lots of SFF literature that has this problem: the Riverworld books of Philip Jose Farmer, for example. He invents a planet where every human being who has ever lived beyond infancy is resurrected into a perpetually healthy body and with all physical needs met--but with no instructions as to how they got here or what they should do next. So characters from history can meet each other and have adventures, and can try to figure out who built the whole thing and why. But although the reader can happily go along with the adventures trusting the author to provide an answer at the end to "what it all means", the author needs to have a goal in his mind before he writes the first sentence; and, alas, it seems that Farmer did not. I couldn't find any satisfying ending in the Riverworld series, though I thought the first and second books were entertaining.
I think I'm safe in putting Asimov's Foundation series in this list also, though I only read the original three books from the 1940's, not the later installments from the 1980's. Here, again, the broad idea was thought-provoking and fertile ground for adventure stories: a genius at mathematical psychohistory (whatever that is) who can predict the future of the Galactic Empire, foresee its collapse and prepare a one-world colony fated to rebuild a more stable empire after a thousand-year age of darkness.
Monday, April 22, 2019
Que Digo, Sera!
Que Digo, Sera!
(With apologies to Doris Day)
When I was just a little boy
Scientists told us,
Listen and learn:
Smoke is reflecting
Warmth from the Earth;
Ice ages will return!
(Refrain)
Que digo, sera!
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
When after school I watched the news,
They had Paul Ehrlich,
Here’s what he said:
Too many people!
Asia will starve!
Hundreds of millions dead!
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
All of the movies that I watched
Said anti-commies
Would start a war.
Nuclear fallout
Would leave us scarred,
Mutants forevermore.
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
Then in the magazines I read
Aerosol chlorine
Would be our bane,
Depleting ozone,
Passing UV:
Killing the whole food chain.
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
I went to college where I learned
Resource depletion
Was just ahead!
Standards of living
Had already peaked!
So our professor said.
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
When I grew up and went to work
These are the latest
Warnings I hear:
Carbon dioxide
Traps infrared!
Glaciers will disappear!
Whatever I say, will be!
The future is mine to see!
Que digo, sera!
But now I’m grown, I scratch my head;
All these Cassandras
Can’t catch a break!
Doom from all quarters
Never arrives.
Maybe it's all a fake?
(Final Refrain)
No se que sera.
I do not know what will be.
It beats the hell outa me.
No se que sera.
(Repeat Final Refrain, more raucously)
Thought this appropriate for Earth Day. Thanks for reading! For more of my doggerel, click here.
You can read "The Kings of the Corona", my well-reviewed, first and so-far only published story in TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. Another story of mine has been accepted for one of the Luna anthologies, soon to appear in the Superversive Press Planetary Anthology Series, and I have another couple stories in the works for submission to some of the other installments to that series.
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
You Are Old, Father William: 2019
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)
"You are old, Father William," the boy diagnosed,
"And my hero, Ocasio-Cortez,
Says your SUV's vapors will flood all the coast.
Why didn't you heed what Al Gore says?"
"In my youth," said his uncle, "I listened in fear
To all the enviros' predictions.
But as every calamity failed to appear,
I became more amused at their fictions."
"You are old, Father William," declared the young jerk,
"And your yard isn't easy to keep.
Yet you just have Americans doing the work:
Wouldn't undocumenteds be cheap?"
"In my youth," said his uncle, adjusting his slacks,
"I thought nationalism was wrong.
But the Mexicans took all the jobs from the Blacks,
So I've hired them to help me along."
"You are old, Father William," the young boy said,
"And get Social Security dough.
Yet for privatization you wrote this op-ed.
Say, how can this riddle be so?"
"In my youth," Father William addressed his nephew,
"There were four workers for each retiree.
By the time you retire that will be less than two.
I trust this resolves your inquiry?"
"You are old, Father William, and learned what you know
From the public school systems gone bye.
Yet now you want tuition vouchers to go
To your private-schooled grandchildren. Why?"
"Kid, I look at the memes that have blighted your brain,
And I know where you got every one.
If we don't flush your whole school system down through the drain,
Then our civilization is done."
"You are old, Father William," the boy diagnosed,
"And my hero, Ocasio-Cortez,
Says your SUV's vapors will flood all the coast.
Why didn't you heed what Al Gore says?"
"In my youth," said his uncle, "I listened in fear
To all the enviros' predictions.
But as every calamity failed to appear,
I became more amused at their fictions."
"You are old, Father William," declared the young jerk,
"And your yard isn't easy to keep.
Yet you just have Americans doing the work:
Wouldn't undocumenteds be cheap?"
"In my youth," said his uncle, adjusting his slacks,
"I thought nationalism was wrong.
But the Mexicans took all the jobs from the Blacks,
So I've hired them to help me along."
"You are old, Father William," the young boy said,
"And get Social Security dough.
Yet for privatization you wrote this op-ed.
Say, how can this riddle be so?"
"In my youth," Father William addressed his nephew,
"There were four workers for each retiree.
By the time you retire that will be less than two.
I trust this resolves your inquiry?"
"You are old, Father William, and learned what you know
From the public school systems gone bye.
Yet now you want tuition vouchers to go
To your private-schooled grandchildren. Why?"
"Kid, I look at the memes that have blighted your brain,
And I know where you got every one.
If we don't flush your whole school system down through the drain,
Then our civilization is done."
Your morning metaphysics
The Castalia House blog has an essay by Anthony Marchetta on the objective reality of predicates of value, analyzing primarily the reality of artistic merit. I'm with Anthony here in holding that these qualities have objective reality, which seems to be a minority viewpoint nowadays; it was refreshing to read his thoughts on the matter.
The philosophical issue, as I remember from my days studying such things, is over what is the real nature of a "predicate" (like "is a chair", or "is red", or "is beautiful": anything that can be attributed to an object). Plato advanced the theory that predicates have a real existence of their own (Realism), independent of any observer: hence, it's possible to believe an object to be a chair, for example, and to be simply wrong in that belief, or to believe an object to be beautiful and to be simply wrong (or right). Another school of thought is Nominalism, which holds that predicates are simply names that people are taught to apply to certain objects, or Conceptualism, which declares predicates to be concepts in our minds which we apply to objects.
The arguments I've heard against Realism usually come down to some variation of what Anthony presents (tongue-in-cheek, I think) in the caption in his first illustration: "Quick, think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome." Heh. I decline to try to think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome, but that doesn't mean "is awesome" has no objective existence... But the argument usually runs, especially in dorm rooms late on Friday nights, that if there is disagreement about whether object X has quality Y, and there seems to be no way of resolving the disagreement, why, then quality Y must be a subjective quality: Y is in the eye of the beholder.
I believe this argument is fatally flawed, in that it grossly magnifies the difficulty to Realism of explaining how disagreement about predicates could exist. Suppose we lived before the invention of the telescope, and consider a star whose apparent magnitude is +6, just barely bright enough to be seen with the naked eye (by a person with good eyesight). Some people can see this star and some cannot. Does this make the star's existence doubtful? Would anyone (even in those times) have declared the star's existence to be a matter of opinion? Certainly not: and similarly, a Realist can posit that an object really has a quality, but that not everyone is able to perceive it. Proposing this usually brings the response, "But then how do you know whether it's there?"--which quite misses the point. Our difficulties in resolving arguments are not the issue. Whether we would like the argument to be over so we can move on to ordering our pizza is not the issue. Whether we can resolve the disagreement at all is not the issue. The matter under discussion is not how we are to know whether or not an object is (just to pick a predicate of value that usually leads to disagreements) beautiful; the issue is whether saying an object is beautiful is really saying anything about the object itself, or only something about the mind of the person speaking about the object, or about the language the speaker is using to refer to the object.
The argument against Realism based on the supposed impossibility of explaining disagreement, in fact, ignores the far greater difficulty that the subjectivity-based theories have with explaining consensus.
Consider a thought-experiment. Suppose you place an object, X, on a table in a room with two doors. You get a hundred people, none of whom has ever seen object X before, and parade them one by one through the room, allowing each one to observe X. Then each observer leaves the room by the other door, and is asked whether object X had quality Y. Each observer answers "yes" or "no" without communicating with any of the others. Afterward, we apply statistical tests to determine whether the tabulated result confirms or refutes the hypothesis that their answers were equally likely to be "yes" or "no".
I argue that no one can seriously expect that the result of such an experiment would prove "is beautiful" to be a mere 50-50 chance, for all objects X. Maybe you're thinking you could find some object X where the result would be pretty close to 50-50; and maybe you could, but the fact that you would have to select X carefully to get an ambiguous result, and the fact that you already can think of what kind of object would be a suitable choice, already shows that "is beautiful" is a statement about objective reality.
For consider: the hundred observers have never seen the object in the room before. Sorry, Nominalists: they cannot have been taught to call that particular object by a certain name, because they've never seen it. Or were they taught to call objects like that one by a certain name? That's possible, but you just gave up the game. If we call objects "beautiful" because they are like one another, then "beauty" is that quality that they all share, the quality in respect to which they are alike. Sorry, Conceptualists: did a broad consensus of our observers all decide to apply (or not to apply) the concept of "beauty" to the object in the room, just from the whims of their own separate and non-communicating minds? It won't do. We can continue parading people through the room and collecting results until this explanation is as implausible as saying that smoking is associated with lung cancer by mere coincidence. If you flip a coin a million times and get heads 60% of the time, no reasonable person can maintain that the coin is itself unbiased.
Similarly, an astronomer with mediocre-to-poor eyesight who worked before telescopes had no difficulty believing in the existence of stars too dim for him to see. If one of his colleagues makes a star chart and said there was a faint star at a certain spot, and our myopic stargazer had any reason to doubt it, he could ask another clearsighted buddy to plot the same section of the constellation, and if he also puts a faint star in the same spot, the first report has confirmation. The logic he would be employing is the same as collecting a consensus in our viewing-room experiment, and both arguments are strong.
And that is the cardinal problem with claiming that predicates of value (or any predicates that lead to a broad consensus in this kind of situation, but predicates of value are the ones people usually call subjective--that's why I'm picking on "beauty" here) are subjective: if such predicates are based on a quality of the object itself, then they are by definition objective; but if they have no component that belongs to the object itself, then there should be no consensus between people who independently observe the object. As Anthony points out, this flies in the face not only of common sense, but of the whole mission of the critic of drama, literature, or art: if there is nothing in a work of art itself that will tend to make different people evaluate it in the same way, then why should anyone be interested in a critic's evaluation in the first place?
Anthony Marchetta is the editor of TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, the anthology in which my first story, "The Kings of the Corona", appeared. (By the way, more than one Amazon reviewer has called it pretty good, though I have no way of confirming that they made that evaluation independently...) And without giving any spoilers, my second story, "The Hyland Resolution", happens to touch on the theme of Platonic realism. That story has been accepted to one of the Superversive Press Planetary anthologies, and will probably appear later this year.
The philosophical issue, as I remember from my days studying such things, is over what is the real nature of a "predicate" (like "is a chair", or "is red", or "is beautiful": anything that can be attributed to an object). Plato advanced the theory that predicates have a real existence of their own (Realism), independent of any observer: hence, it's possible to believe an object to be a chair, for example, and to be simply wrong in that belief, or to believe an object to be beautiful and to be simply wrong (or right). Another school of thought is Nominalism, which holds that predicates are simply names that people are taught to apply to certain objects, or Conceptualism, which declares predicates to be concepts in our minds which we apply to objects.
The arguments I've heard against Realism usually come down to some variation of what Anthony presents (tongue-in-cheek, I think) in the caption in his first illustration: "Quick, think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome." Heh. I decline to try to think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome, but that doesn't mean "is awesome" has no objective existence... But the argument usually runs, especially in dorm rooms late on Friday nights, that if there is disagreement about whether object X has quality Y, and there seems to be no way of resolving the disagreement, why, then quality Y must be a subjective quality: Y is in the eye of the beholder.
I believe this argument is fatally flawed, in that it grossly magnifies the difficulty to Realism of explaining how disagreement about predicates could exist. Suppose we lived before the invention of the telescope, and consider a star whose apparent magnitude is +6, just barely bright enough to be seen with the naked eye (by a person with good eyesight). Some people can see this star and some cannot. Does this make the star's existence doubtful? Would anyone (even in those times) have declared the star's existence to be a matter of opinion? Certainly not: and similarly, a Realist can posit that an object really has a quality, but that not everyone is able to perceive it. Proposing this usually brings the response, "But then how do you know whether it's there?"--which quite misses the point. Our difficulties in resolving arguments are not the issue. Whether we would like the argument to be over so we can move on to ordering our pizza is not the issue. Whether we can resolve the disagreement at all is not the issue. The matter under discussion is not how we are to know whether or not an object is (just to pick a predicate of value that usually leads to disagreements) beautiful; the issue is whether saying an object is beautiful is really saying anything about the object itself, or only something about the mind of the person speaking about the object, or about the language the speaker is using to refer to the object.
The argument against Realism based on the supposed impossibility of explaining disagreement, in fact, ignores the far greater difficulty that the subjectivity-based theories have with explaining consensus.
Consider a thought-experiment. Suppose you place an object, X, on a table in a room with two doors. You get a hundred people, none of whom has ever seen object X before, and parade them one by one through the room, allowing each one to observe X. Then each observer leaves the room by the other door, and is asked whether object X had quality Y. Each observer answers "yes" or "no" without communicating with any of the others. Afterward, we apply statistical tests to determine whether the tabulated result confirms or refutes the hypothesis that their answers were equally likely to be "yes" or "no".
I argue that no one can seriously expect that the result of such an experiment would prove "is beautiful" to be a mere 50-50 chance, for all objects X. Maybe you're thinking you could find some object X where the result would be pretty close to 50-50; and maybe you could, but the fact that you would have to select X carefully to get an ambiguous result, and the fact that you already can think of what kind of object would be a suitable choice, already shows that "is beautiful" is a statement about objective reality.
For consider: the hundred observers have never seen the object in the room before. Sorry, Nominalists: they cannot have been taught to call that particular object by a certain name, because they've never seen it. Or were they taught to call objects like that one by a certain name? That's possible, but you just gave up the game. If we call objects "beautiful" because they are like one another, then "beauty" is that quality that they all share, the quality in respect to which they are alike. Sorry, Conceptualists: did a broad consensus of our observers all decide to apply (or not to apply) the concept of "beauty" to the object in the room, just from the whims of their own separate and non-communicating minds? It won't do. We can continue parading people through the room and collecting results until this explanation is as implausible as saying that smoking is associated with lung cancer by mere coincidence. If you flip a coin a million times and get heads 60% of the time, no reasonable person can maintain that the coin is itself unbiased.
Similarly, an astronomer with mediocre-to-poor eyesight who worked before telescopes had no difficulty believing in the existence of stars too dim for him to see. If one of his colleagues makes a star chart and said there was a faint star at a certain spot, and our myopic stargazer had any reason to doubt it, he could ask another clearsighted buddy to plot the same section of the constellation, and if he also puts a faint star in the same spot, the first report has confirmation. The logic he would be employing is the same as collecting a consensus in our viewing-room experiment, and both arguments are strong.
And that is the cardinal problem with claiming that predicates of value (or any predicates that lead to a broad consensus in this kind of situation, but predicates of value are the ones people usually call subjective--that's why I'm picking on "beauty" here) are subjective: if such predicates are based on a quality of the object itself, then they are by definition objective; but if they have no component that belongs to the object itself, then there should be no consensus between people who independently observe the object. As Anthony points out, this flies in the face not only of common sense, but of the whole mission of the critic of drama, literature, or art: if there is nothing in a work of art itself that will tend to make different people evaluate it in the same way, then why should anyone be interested in a critic's evaluation in the first place?
Anthony Marchetta is the editor of TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, the anthology in which my first story, "The Kings of the Corona", appeared. (By the way, more than one Amazon reviewer has called it pretty good, though I have no way of confirming that they made that evaluation independently...) And without giving any spoilers, my second story, "The Hyland Resolution", happens to touch on the theme of Platonic realism. That story has been accepted to one of the Superversive Press Planetary anthologies, and will probably appear later this year.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Mnemonics
I like mnemonics: those easily-memorized sentences that jog your memory so you can recall a hard-to-memorize list, like "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally" to remember the order of operations (parentheses, exponents, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction), or "Oh, be a fine girl: kiss me right now, sweetie" for the stellar classifications O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S.
Mnemonics can be silly, but they're less effective if the words seem so arbitrary that the mnemonic itself is hard to remember. "Make Venus Eat My Jello, Serena’s Up Next" delights me with its topicality, but I'm not sure how well it would help a student remember the order of the planets from the sun. Why should Serena's being up next justify making Venus eat your Jello?
A good one should have a simple, logical, vivid meaning. "God's Eternal Love Never Dies", for the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) is particularly apt, and would have helped the contestants on Jeopardy last week. (None of them could remember the Bible's third book: a sad sign of our times.) I'm told that "Eat all dead gophers before Easter" helps people tune their guitars, and it certainly is a vivid image.
I wonder if other people also compose these things for themselves. I invented one for the nations of Central America: "Beehives give extra-special honey near clover-ridden parks): for Belize (formerly British Honduras), Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. "Good boys don't fake affection" gives the notes of the bass clef, and is less vapid than the "Good boys do fine always" standard. Another original with me, regrettably incomplete and absurd, helps me remember the order of the biggest Canadian provinces from west to east, at least up to Quebec: "Become a slow-moving old Quaker" (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec). I see there are better ones online.
I'd love to be able to remember, for instance, all the nations of Africa, but there are more than fifty of them. That's probably going to take several sentences ...
Mnemonics can be silly, but they're less effective if the words seem so arbitrary that the mnemonic itself is hard to remember. "Make Venus Eat My Jello, Serena’s Up Next" delights me with its topicality, but I'm not sure how well it would help a student remember the order of the planets from the sun. Why should Serena's being up next justify making Venus eat your Jello?
A good one should have a simple, logical, vivid meaning. "God's Eternal Love Never Dies", for the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) is particularly apt, and would have helped the contestants on Jeopardy last week. (None of them could remember the Bible's third book: a sad sign of our times.) I'm told that "Eat all dead gophers before Easter" helps people tune their guitars, and it certainly is a vivid image.
I wonder if other people also compose these things for themselves. I invented one for the nations of Central America: "Beehives give extra-special honey near clover-ridden parks): for Belize (formerly British Honduras), Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. "Good boys don't fake affection" gives the notes of the bass clef, and is less vapid than the "Good boys do fine always" standard. Another original with me, regrettably incomplete and absurd, helps me remember the order of the biggest Canadian provinces from west to east, at least up to Quebec: "Become a slow-moving old Quaker" (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec). I see there are better ones online.
I'd love to be able to remember, for instance, all the nations of Africa, but there are more than fifty of them. That's probably going to take several sentences ...
Monday Morning Media Musings
The Guardian
... in an endearing show of tenderness from the Left toward their political opponents, is deeply concerned about climate change skeptics investing in Florida coastal real estate. If only everyone believed what the Greens tell them, this land would be virtually worthless now, as the Guardian thinks it should be. I suppose that would be hard on any enviros who happen to own some, so I would like to reach back across the political divide and show equal sympathy toward the other side. Here's my offer to anyone owning a Florida coastal mansion now valued at half a million or more, I will pay you $100 CASH for your property, with delivery of the property not until December 31, 2031. That's after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's twelve years are up, so you presumably believe that the property will be under the sea by that time, meaning that you'll be getting a C-note for nothing here. I will have to specify that the property has to be in its current condition UNLESS the oceans rise to submerge it, of course, but such a rider shouldn't cause any concern to a true believer.
The Daily Beast
... would like to know why are we still reading Ernest Hemingway. Beats me, I'm not. That article barely scratches the surface of how deplorable Hemingway was. I just want to point out that no one would ask this about Edgar Rice Burroughs, because his books are fun to read.
WIRED
... is trying to analyze the physics in the scene from the Justice League movie:
I'm not sure what's on the bottom of the building, but I imagine that as Superman pushed up from the bottom he would just break through. It would be awkward. He wants to life the building but would instead fly right through it. It would be like trying to life up a cupcake with a toothpick.When Superman wants to lift something huge, like a building, jet airplane, or a battleship, he uses his super-breath to create a cushion of air on the side he's pushing, so that it's effectively being lifted from the entire underside. Think these things through, people. I mean, I thought everyone knew that.
Thursday, January 3, 2019
12 Lousy Predictions for 2019
Anyone familiar with the record of my ouija board will be interested in my predictions for 2019 so they can bet against them. Here are a dozen:
- The Academy Awards will be held without a host this year. But the bigger surprise will come the next morning, when the ratings reveal they were also without an audience.
- A genetically-modified horse will be foaled with the scientists involved promising that such horses will soon dominate all races that allow them. Several races will hurriedly enact rules barring them.
- Vladimir Putin will make a surprising offer of land grants in Russia to white South Africans willing to relocate there, with their families.
- Congress will not allocate funding for a border wall. Nevertheless, construction will begin, through some dubious workaround.
- Britain will leave the EU in the spring without a deal for an orderly separation, and by the end of the year the effect of the divorce on its economy will be ... notably better than the effect on the rest of the EU. Before 2020, another nation will also elect to exit.
- Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Dark Phoenix, and Star Wars: Episode WHOCARESANYMORE will all disappoint fans. On the other hand, the Memorial Day weekend Brad Pitt science fiction movie Ad Astra will pleasantly surprise.
- A third Trump appointment, female, will be confirmed to the Supreme Court after a circus of protests. Her opponents in Congress will undertake to tie some explosive misogynistic scandal to her.
- Chicago will elect its second female mayor. Soon after she will declare a state of financial crisis, appeal to the federal government for a bailout, and upon being rebuffed, claim that President Trump's hardheartedness is the real problem.
- The House will impeach the president two or three times, and the Senate will dismiss each case more rapidly than the one before. Finally an issue will arise concerning the manner of conducting the 2020 US Census, which will provide the pretext for yet another impeachment vote; it will fail in the House and will be the last such attempt. President Trump's approval rating will rise slightly after each attempt, topping 55% by the year's end.
- There will be regime change in one of the nations on this list: China; Cuba; France; Iran; Venezuela.
- My writing activity will increase significantly in 2019 with the completion of several stories and beginning a novel. Two as-yet unwritten stories of mine will see publication. The total number of posts on this blog will triple.
- Finally, something from this list of totally-surprising events will happen:
-- The Chinese lander on the far side of the Moon will pick up signals that some will say originated with an extraterrestrial civilization.
-- President Trump will receive astonishment, consternation, and approval, each of them crossing party lines, by proposing to forgive an enormous amount of student debt held by the US Treasury.
-- Pope Francis will abdicate, and an African bishop will be chosen as the new Pope.
-- Congressman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will appear in a Super Bowl ad endorsing a popular brand of toothpaste. She will mention her liking for its color (blue),
-- The Chicago Bears will win the Super Bowl.
-- The Hugo Award for Best Novel will go to a straight white male.
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Happy Ramanujan's Birthday
By the way, as I write this it is Srinivasa Ramanujan's birthday (December 22).
Ramanujan, as not-nearly-enough people know, was an amazingly intuitive, brilliant mathematician, whose tragically short life makes a remarkable story. One anecdote that illustrates the kind of observation he would just casually throw off now and then concerns the number 1729, now known as Ramanujan's number, which happened to be the number of a taxicab his friend and fellow mathematician G. H. Hardy took to visit him in the hospital one day. Apparently the pair were fond of working out "interesting" facts about numbers they randomly encountered, because Hardy mentioned 1729 to Ramanujan and added that he hadn't been able to think of anything particularly interesting about it.
Ramanujan at once countered that it was, in fact, a very interesting number, being the smallest number that is the sum of two squares in two different ways.
His insight was correct, as it often was (though not always): 1729 is 10 cubed plus 9 cubed (1000 + 729), and also 12 cubed plus 1 cubed (1728 + 1).
I actually make very brief passing reference to this anecdote in a story of mine that has been accepted into one of the upcoming Superversive Planetary anthologies, which I'll be writing more about later.
Meanwhile, here is a slightly curious fact relating Ramanujan's number to the coming new year, 2019, that AFAIK no one in the world is aware of, except me, and now you (if you're the first one to read this post, and to get this far... which is pretty likely). If you take the 14th root of 1729, and add 5, and raise the result to the 4th power, you get VERY close to 2019. Within about one-one hundredth, as I recall from when I worked it out. Plugging 1729 into this works better than either 1728 or 1730, too.
It also happens that 1729 to the power 6/7 (that is, raised to the sixth power and then extracting the seventh root) is quite close to the whole number 596.
Another original-with-me curiosity of modest interest: If you raise 12 to the 3rd power and add one, then of course you get 1729. But if you add one to 12 and then raise to the 3rd power (that is, take the cube of 13), you get 2197, which is a palindrome of 1729. There's another number smaller than 12 that has this property, that if you cube-and-add-one or add-one-and-cube you get two numbers that are palindromes: can you find it? As I recall there are several more such numbers, at least one of them below 100, and a few more below 2000.
Ah, well. Enjoy Ramanujan's Birthday!
Ramanujan, as not-nearly-enough people know, was an amazingly intuitive, brilliant mathematician, whose tragically short life makes a remarkable story. One anecdote that illustrates the kind of observation he would just casually throw off now and then concerns the number 1729, now known as Ramanujan's number, which happened to be the number of a taxicab his friend and fellow mathematician G. H. Hardy took to visit him in the hospital one day. Apparently the pair were fond of working out "interesting" facts about numbers they randomly encountered, because Hardy mentioned 1729 to Ramanujan and added that he hadn't been able to think of anything particularly interesting about it.
Ramanujan at once countered that it was, in fact, a very interesting number, being the smallest number that is the sum of two squares in two different ways.
His insight was correct, as it often was (though not always): 1729 is 10 cubed plus 9 cubed (1000 + 729), and also 12 cubed plus 1 cubed (1728 + 1).
I actually make very brief passing reference to this anecdote in a story of mine that has been accepted into one of the upcoming Superversive Planetary anthologies, which I'll be writing more about later.
Meanwhile, here is a slightly curious fact relating Ramanujan's number to the coming new year, 2019, that AFAIK no one in the world is aware of, except me, and now you (if you're the first one to read this post, and to get this far... which is pretty likely). If you take the 14th root of 1729, and add 5, and raise the result to the 4th power, you get VERY close to 2019. Within about one-one hundredth, as I recall from when I worked it out. Plugging 1729 into this works better than either 1728 or 1730, too.
It also happens that 1729 to the power 6/7 (that is, raised to the sixth power and then extracting the seventh root) is quite close to the whole number 596.
Another original-with-me curiosity of modest interest: If you raise 12 to the 3rd power and add one, then of course you get 1729. But if you add one to 12 and then raise to the 3rd power (that is, take the cube of 13), you get 2197, which is a palindrome of 1729. There's another number smaller than 12 that has this property, that if you cube-and-add-one or add-one-and-cube you get two numbers that are palindromes: can you find it? As I recall there are several more such numbers, at least one of them below 100, and a few more below 2000.
Ah, well. Enjoy Ramanujan's Birthday!
What's new in our corner of SFF
I want to start doing more blogging going forward, and less wasting time on media like Twitter (where I've recently joined the growing throng who have deleted their accounts). So after a long hiatus from Tarquin the Humble, it seems good to return with a quick roundup of some of what's new in "our" corner of the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre, whatever we're calling ourselves these days--the readers and writers who hope to enjoy speculative fiction as it used to be, focused on fun, inspiration, imagination, and the celebration of humanity, human achievement, human potential, and all that. You know, like the Sad Puppies, or PulpRev, or NobleBright. The Inklings, Chesterton, Dunsany, Merritt, John C. Wright, etc.
John C Wright has had a successful funder for a new series, STARQUEST, to be published by Superversive Press, and aimed at being a space opera of the sort that would not have disappointed Star Wars fans. AFAIK there's no projected publication date yet; if you know better, there's a comment section.
Out already are the first two books of Declan Finn's new Saint Tommy, NYPD series. Declan, of course, is the author of the Honor at Stake series, the Pius Man series, and wrote a terrific story in the underappreciated Tales of the Once and Future King , the anthology where (ahem) you can find one of my stories. Declan is also an editor in an upcoming Superversive Press anthology where another of my stories is slated to appear, which I'll be blogging more about later. So far I've only read the first Saint Tommy book, and I would recommend it heartily, as I did in my Amazon review.
If we really want to influence the course of SFF, how would we go about it? I recall reading in Frederick Pohl's autobiography that someone asked him a question around 1950 about how to get more or better writers for one of the pulp magazines, or something like that--sorry, my copy is in a box someplace--but what struck me was less the question than his answer, which for a leftist like Pohl was quite astute. He said simply, "Pay more." If I had a fortune at my fingers, that would be my strategy: I'd start about 20 monthly fiction magazines, priced low, that would each publish about 70,000 words each issue of fun, uplifting, religion-positive (or at least religion-neutral) SFF, mysteries, westerns, romances ... and I would pay the authors 15 cents a word.
That would do it, I think. Authors would look at that market, and instead of trying to get into Asimov's or Analog or F&SF would aim first at this market. The whole writing market would change as a result. Granted, I'd have to be ready to lose millions while the reading public shifts; but for those millions I'd get a wholesome change in the whole culture.
Could a market support fiction magazines paying that much? Actually, as a fascinating post at Emperor's Notepad reveals, the market once did. If you think the pulps underpaid the authors, go read that post. Actually go read it if you're interested in the history of SFF at all.
Misha Burnett, author of the Book of Lost Doors series, has been turning his attention to shorter fiction this year, and has a good blog post on his experiences also. I'm personally interested in short fiction markets because I have several ideas for short stories I want to get written in the near future; a few more short stories and then start adding some work on novels to the mix. Burnett also has a good story in the just-released (good bargain!) Utopia Pending anthology.
I'm going to have to do another roundup soon because there's so much going on in "our corner of SFF" (we really need to come up with a name).
John C Wright has had a successful funder for a new series, STARQUEST, to be published by Superversive Press, and aimed at being a space opera of the sort that would not have disappointed Star Wars fans. AFAIK there's no projected publication date yet; if you know better, there's a comment section.
Out already are the first two books of Declan Finn's new Saint Tommy, NYPD series. Declan, of course, is the author of the Honor at Stake series, the Pius Man series, and wrote a terrific story in the underappreciated Tales of the Once and Future King , the anthology where (ahem) you can find one of my stories. Declan is also an editor in an upcoming Superversive Press anthology where another of my stories is slated to appear, which I'll be blogging more about later. So far I've only read the first Saint Tommy book, and I would recommend it heartily, as I did in my Amazon review.
If we really want to influence the course of SFF, how would we go about it? I recall reading in Frederick Pohl's autobiography that someone asked him a question around 1950 about how to get more or better writers for one of the pulp magazines, or something like that--sorry, my copy is in a box someplace--but what struck me was less the question than his answer, which for a leftist like Pohl was quite astute. He said simply, "Pay more." If I had a fortune at my fingers, that would be my strategy: I'd start about 20 monthly fiction magazines, priced low, that would each publish about 70,000 words each issue of fun, uplifting, religion-positive (or at least religion-neutral) SFF, mysteries, westerns, romances ... and I would pay the authors 15 cents a word.
That would do it, I think. Authors would look at that market, and instead of trying to get into Asimov's or Analog or F&SF would aim first at this market. The whole writing market would change as a result. Granted, I'd have to be ready to lose millions while the reading public shifts; but for those millions I'd get a wholesome change in the whole culture.
Could a market support fiction magazines paying that much? Actually, as a fascinating post at Emperor's Notepad reveals, the market once did. If you think the pulps underpaid the authors, go read that post. Actually go read it if you're interested in the history of SFF at all.
Misha Burnett, author of the Book of Lost Doors series, has been turning his attention to shorter fiction this year, and has a good blog post on his experiences also. I'm personally interested in short fiction markets because I have several ideas for short stories I want to get written in the near future; a few more short stories and then start adding some work on novels to the mix. Burnett also has a good story in the just-released (good bargain!) Utopia Pending anthology.
I'm going to have to do another roundup soon because there's so much going on in "our corner of SFF" (we really need to come up with a name).
Friday, September 28, 2018
Spelling mnemonic
I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded as A
As in “neighbor” and “weigh”;
Or in “counterfeit”, or in
A word such as “foreign”;
Or when rhyming with “iced tea”
In words such as “feisty”;
Or things found in a bean
Like “protein” and “caffeine”;
Or in names from Westmeath
Such as “Deirdre” and “Keith”;
Or in “leisure”, to keep us from taking a breather,
And lest we forget about “either” and “neither”;
Or in words that describe something that might be feared,
Such as “kaleidoscopic”, “heinous” and “weird”;
Or borrowings got from the land of the Rhine,
Like “gesundheit” and “leitmotif”, “zeitgeist” and “stein”;
Or in “sheik”, “vein”, “reveille”, “heifer”, or “seize”;
But, apart from these few, put your I’s before E’s.
Except after C,
Or when sounded as A
As in “neighbor” and “weigh”;
Or in “counterfeit”, or in
A word such as “foreign”;
Or when rhyming with “iced tea”
In words such as “feisty”;
Or things found in a bean
Like “protein” and “caffeine”;
Or in names from Westmeath
Such as “Deirdre” and “Keith”;
Or in “leisure”, to keep us from taking a breather,
And lest we forget about “either” and “neither”;
Or in words that describe something that might be feared,
Such as “kaleidoscopic”, “heinous” and “weird”;
Or borrowings got from the land of the Rhine,
Like “gesundheit” and “leitmotif”, “zeitgeist” and “stein”;
Or in “sheik”, “vein”, “reveille”, “heifer”, or “seize”;
But, apart from these few, put your I’s before E’s.
Saturday, September 8, 2018
HEROES FALL by Morgon Newquist
Silver Empire, the rising small publisher of some fine SFF titles (see my mini-reviews here and here), is embarking on an exciting new project in the superhero fiction arena: Heroes Unleashed, a series of superhero novels by various authors all set in a common universe. (The link goes to a Kickstarter campaign that runs to Tuesday, so you can still get in on the ground floor.) So far there are five authors with novels in the pipeline, nearly ready for press, and I had the privilege of seeing a draft of the first of them—SERENITY CITY: HEROES FALL, by Morgon Newquist, a fast-paced, enthralling novel that fills in the reader on some of the tantalizing hints from her previous Serenity City stories (“Blackout”, which you can read in PARAGONS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SUPERHEROES, and “The Gala”, which appears in HA! HA! HA: A SUPERVILLAIN ANTHOLOGY), while leaving plenty to look forward to in future installments.
Amatopia has an excellent review of HEROES FALL here, on which my meager reviewing powers cannot improve. I’ll just add a couple points of appreciation for this book: I loved how Serenity City itself gets more and more fleshed out as a backdrop for the action. The run-down Greycoast where amateur superheroine Victoria Westerdale (no supername for this unpretentious young lady) defends the underdogs with whom she sympathizes and identifies, and also the location of the abandoned Silver Coast Laboratories, where the mysterious Event that turned so many ordinary people into Primes with superpowers took place decades ago. Rhiannon Park, with its 20-foot-tall statues of two of the city’s great superheroes, dedicated by the still rather mysterious Riley Hirsch: who had erected no statue to her own father, the third superhero of the legendary Triumvirate. Northmill Heights Penitentiary, where Achilles, that third, is now incarcerated, following his Rampage of twenty years ago. The Argall Manor house where Riley, heiress to Rhiannon Argall’s fortune, began her life. The Fina Hill Cemetery, which—like so much in this book—turns out to have rather more in it than appears at first glance. As I got to know Serenity City I found myself wanting to see more of it, and more of the spots I know and like already. Seems like this bodes well for the series.
One of the circumstances that make Serenity City seem more real, and more intriguing, is there’s a lot about the superheroes that is not public knowledge: and not only points connected with their secret identities. Twenty years after Achilles’s Rampage, no one knows what really happened to trigger it. No one really understands what Pendragon’s superpower is, or how the supervillain Blackout was killed, or whence came Thanatos (his successor in supervillainy, who seems to have appeared about the time Blackout exited… hmmm, I wonder…), or what really motivates him to induce superheroes to their own destruction. Some of these things we find out in the course of the book, some may remain forever unclear; in a way it’s like real life, where we never get the answers to questions like what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times this past week, or how Harry Reid got so rich as a U.S. Senator. Why would we expect superheroes to make detailed information about their own challenges or limitation common knowledge?
Victoria Westerdale herself is an awesome character. She’s superstrong but not supertough, so superheroics carry serious risk for her. But she carries on in the most thankless job that Serenity City offers for a superhero, protecting the people least able to repay her, sacrificing the rewards of a normal life merely from her own sense of personal responsibility as the steward of her powers. The choice she makes at the climax of the book is both surprising and natural for her, and marks her transition to a new life as a mature superheroine. I’m eager to read more of her adventures.
Did I mention that this series has a Kickstarter campaign going? It still has a couple days left as I write this. It's fully funded (since about 11 hours into the campaign!), and as you can guess, I think it's highly worthwhile.
I’ve heard talk that someone may be working with Silver Empire on some kind of comic book version of these novels: I’m mainly a novel reader, but I’d be interested in those.
Amatopia has an excellent review of HEROES FALL here, on which my meager reviewing powers cannot improve. I’ll just add a couple points of appreciation for this book: I loved how Serenity City itself gets more and more fleshed out as a backdrop for the action. The run-down Greycoast where amateur superheroine Victoria Westerdale (no supername for this unpretentious young lady) defends the underdogs with whom she sympathizes and identifies, and also the location of the abandoned Silver Coast Laboratories, where the mysterious Event that turned so many ordinary people into Primes with superpowers took place decades ago. Rhiannon Park, with its 20-foot-tall statues of two of the city’s great superheroes, dedicated by the still rather mysterious Riley Hirsch: who had erected no statue to her own father, the third superhero of the legendary Triumvirate. Northmill Heights Penitentiary, where Achilles, that third, is now incarcerated, following his Rampage of twenty years ago. The Argall Manor house where Riley, heiress to Rhiannon Argall’s fortune, began her life. The Fina Hill Cemetery, which—like so much in this book—turns out to have rather more in it than appears at first glance. As I got to know Serenity City I found myself wanting to see more of it, and more of the spots I know and like already. Seems like this bodes well for the series.
One of the circumstances that make Serenity City seem more real, and more intriguing, is there’s a lot about the superheroes that is not public knowledge: and not only points connected with their secret identities. Twenty years after Achilles’s Rampage, no one knows what really happened to trigger it. No one really understands what Pendragon’s superpower is, or how the supervillain Blackout was killed, or whence came Thanatos (his successor in supervillainy, who seems to have appeared about the time Blackout exited… hmmm, I wonder…), or what really motivates him to induce superheroes to their own destruction. Some of these things we find out in the course of the book, some may remain forever unclear; in a way it’s like real life, where we never get the answers to questions like what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times this past week, or how Harry Reid got so rich as a U.S. Senator. Why would we expect superheroes to make detailed information about their own challenges or limitation common knowledge?
Victoria Westerdale herself is an awesome character. She’s superstrong but not supertough, so superheroics carry serious risk for her. But she carries on in the most thankless job that Serenity City offers for a superhero, protecting the people least able to repay her, sacrificing the rewards of a normal life merely from her own sense of personal responsibility as the steward of her powers. The choice she makes at the climax of the book is both surprising and natural for her, and marks her transition to a new life as a mature superheroine. I’m eager to read more of her adventures.
Did I mention that this series has a Kickstarter campaign going? It still has a couple days left as I write this. It's fully funded (since about 11 hours into the campaign!), and as you can guess, I think it's highly worthwhile.
I’ve heard talk that someone may be working with Silver Empire on some kind of comic book version of these novels: I’m mainly a novel reader, but I’d be interested in those.
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