De Romanicorum Theoriarum III

Speculative fiction thoughts.

• My brother and I are following, with great interest, the "Forward Unto Dawn" miniseries that was made to advertise Halo 4. Interestingly, it's filmed in Battlestar Galactica vision (drab colors and shaky cams), but you don't actually mind, because the story in question is not crap. (Though, I'm sorry, they only have one antifreeze they can inject you with for cryosleep? I'd come up with more than one, if the first was an allergen.)
  
  The third episode rocked. Out. Loud. Amusingly, my brother, who saw it before I did, said "They finally see a Spartan." What he forgot to mention was they also finally see, and hear, an Elite.
• It had occurred to me that any statement contrasting dark fantasy with Tolkien to Tolkien's disadvantage can be adequately shown in its true nature by a simple process. Namely, converting it from a statement about fantasy to one about comic books.
  
  The way it works is, you replace the name of George Martin, or whoever, with that of...Mark Millar. Then you replace "Tolkien" with "Jack Kirby". I trust we all know how to treat someone who would prefer Millar to Kirby? (It will be objected Millar is a writer and Kirby an artist. But creating the New Gods took writing, and that was all Kirby.)
  
  The analogy is perfect—any time Millar does anything with superhero comics, he basically tries to write the most unpleasant thing he can, either to punish people for reading a superhero comic, or else to pretend he's better than superhero comics. Maybe both. That is pretty much what "dark fantasy" is, in a nutshell, just read "fantasy" for "superhero comics".
• So here's this quote from Lovecraft:

  To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the real essence of externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good or evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. ... the exact degree of alienage depending, of course, on the scene of the tale; whether laid in the solar system, or in the utterly unplumbed gulfs still further out—the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves may be unthinkably metamorphosized or totally wanting.

  And then these two, from the first Father Brown story:

  "Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'"

  The denouement of that story is as follows:

  "But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest."
  
  "What?" asked the thief, almost gaping.
  
  "You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. "It's bad theology."

  Lovecraft, amusingly, for all his pretensions, is the one contradicting science here. We now know quite well—they weren't actually sure there were any other galaxies when Lovecraft was writing—that "form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves" are no different no matter how far out you go. He's basically paraphrasing problem-play hack-writer noted physicist Henrik Ibsen, "Maybe two plus two equals five in the fixed stars." As in so many things, Chesterton anticipated things we would discover long after him, that his contemporaries were claiming were in doubt.
• In my SF books, colonials use the radio names of the letters, mainly because of the need to be clear over radio. I have mentioned that they call, e.g., ξ Boötis B (which the main planet in the first book orbits) "Xerxes Boötis Bravo". There is, of course, a Greek radio alphabet.
  
  I had despaired of finding the Russian one, but lo! Wikipedia's "wiki magic" has saved me yet again. The one issue is, in the 24th century, the unofficial variant for Э, Emma, has become the official one—because the current official one is Ekho, the NATO name for E.
• I think the puerile intellectual vacuity involved in Libertarianism is perfectly illustrated by a line in Serenity, during the flashbacks to the Orwellian schooling (which is either River's memory or her hallucination). Specifically, "We don't teach people what to think, only how to think." This line—the quintessence of the "intellectual freedom" to which all academics pay lip-service, however hypocritically—is presented not as hypocritical, but as totalitarian in itself. How dare you teach people how to think! The original operation of the unspoiled Noble Savage mind is sufficient!
  
  Ironically, Tim Minear, the other Firefly head writer who supplies the halfwit Libertarian sermons (Whedon supplies the halfwit Women's Studies ones), would probably claim that his problem with statism is that it would only work "if people were basically good". Only, "we teach people how to think" is only bad if people are, intellectually at least, already "basically good". Or, as I have sometimes put it, Libertarianism not only assumes almost as much basic goodness on the part of people as such as Socialism does (e.g., they seem to think legalizing drugs won't mean a spike in crimes by addicts), it also assumes far more intelligence than Socialism. People may or may not be basically good: YouTube and Facebook exist, if you still labor under the illusion that they're basically smart.
  
  Personally, while acknowledging (as all philosophers who do not believe in a priori ideas must acknowledge) that people do, in fact, need to be taught how to think, I also think something more basic must be taught, first. Namely, they must be taught to think, period. How to do it well comes after that; you have to get in the water before you can do the Australian crawl.
• I was just reading a thing by some guy, whining about fantasy books at the library being labeled with a unicorn. Admittedly a dragon would be just as good, but the point of symbols is that they are obvious. They can't be too subtle, especially not in a place like a book-spine, and especially not a library book, that's going to see more handling, much of it less than gentle, than pretty much any book in private hands.
  
  Also, unicorns are badass. Have you read the actual legends? Being subdued by virgins is not just an incidental thing about the critters, it's the only way they can be subdued. Hell, the original Greek version of the critter, the monoceros, gives its name to the Indian rhino, for a very good reason—namely, it's a version of the Indo-Aryan legendary rhinoceros, the karkadann. Hell, the thing might be an oral-tradition memory of the giant wooly rhino Elasmotherium. Many giant legendary monsters are explained as garbled versions of extinct megafauna—given the extant megafauna are pretty much monsters without any garbling. E.g., elephants: an animal as smart as a chimpanzee whose males have "homicidal mania" as a standard stage of their life-cycle.
• In one of Michael McCollum's articles on SF writing, he says something about keeping the precise meaning of interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic clear in your head. No argument here, but then he went on to say that the line in the Christopher Reeves "Superman" movie about "the seven known galaxies" must've meant "solar systems".
  
  Only, no, Jor-El does in fact mean "galaxies". The Kryptonians may have practiced Asian-style isolationism (at the time of their downfall they only had two colonies, one of which, Daxam, is still crazy isolationist), but they were, in fact, entirely capable of having a galaxy-spanning civilization, if they had wanted one. And by DC Comics standards they were pikers; "seven known galaxies" is quite quaint, compared to the 3600 sectors of the Green Lantern Corps (they form a sphere around Oa, and each contains multiple galaxies). The Guardians (or for that matter the New Gods), in turn, are nothing on the Monitors, each of whom oversees one whole universe of the multiverse.
  
  Comic book space opera is not hard science fiction, and one of the differences is the scale of the thing.