De Romanicorum Physicalium 6

Scientifiction. Some reading in John C. Wright's more recent blog posts—where he is less simplistic than I had come to consider his norm—leads me to suspect I should be a little nicer to him, although I reserve the right to refer to him as "Took-A-Miracle" whenever I disagree with him.

• People are complaining about Aliens: Colonial Marines nerfing the Xenomorphs. My only response is to say, "Hey, why weren't the Flood nerfed for the level 'Cortana', in Halo 3?" Because seriously, the Flood is how you do Xenomorphs in a game. Hell, those guys are the Xenomorphs, only they make sense. Not least because they were pretty much a weapon from the beginning (there are hints about the Precursors all the way back in Halo 2—the Gravemind out and says the Flood are nemesis for the Forerunners' sins).
  
  I still say Xenomorphs make no sense, and wouldn't be able to infect humans. The only counter-argument is to say that the Engineers from Prometheus made them to destroy humans. Which requires treating Prometheus as canon, something I should hope no Aliens fan wants. (In other words, just admit they make no sense, and enjoy the only two movies that were ever made about them—don't cheapen yourself by having to invoke the authority of that thing.)
  
  Put another way? "So, how are Xenomorphs able to infect humans?"
  
  
  Yeah. I went there, Prometheus.
• Which is not to say that I forgive Halo for having two different species called "Forerunners" and "Precursors". Just because you said one in English and one in Latin doesn't mean they have two different names. It'd be like if the Jackals were called Pousses-caillous, as if that weren't just calling them "grunts" in a different language.
• I think I've said before that Lovecraftian "cosmic horrors" are mere comforting anthropomorphisms? It perhaps requires unpacking. Fundamentally, although the writers of such things delight in the pose of denying any ultimate significance to mankind, that isn't actually what they're doing. In reality, they are still claiming that humans create all their own values. Seen in that light, they are no more challenging their audience's comfortable anthropocentrism than a vampire story where presenting a crucifix fails because the presenter lacks faith challenges lukewarm Christian fideistic sensibilities. In both cases, they merely pose as challenging their audience's preconceptions, while actually reinforcing them.
  
  Think about it. Aren't they actually saying that everything their audience thinks is true, is true? How much scarier would the stories be if, for instance, transcendent laws were real, and did have power—and the assumptions the protagonists share with the audience actually served merely to aggravate their predicament? I don't actually have to speculate whether that'd be more frightening, Maurice Baring already wrote a story like that, and it stands up to the best Lovecraft ever wrote. See also this, without having read which one is unfit to portray the enchantment of terror.
• Here's a question. Why do people who bitch about military science fiction having human soldiers instead of drone warfare not complain when characters in science fiction play poker? For that matter, why is science fiction, like horror, still trying to live in a world where cellphones don't exist? You think people will have computers installed in their brains, but people won't carry mobile communications like they do now? (Admittedly, if you had people exploring a new planet have to contend with issues relating to range, magnetic fields, and sheer mass of rock—e.g. be very explicit that they put comm-satellites in orbit before a single boot touches space-dirt—I, for one, would be eternally grateful.)
  
  Again: handhelds. I had a scene recently in my SF book's third installment with people agitating against permanent employment, in a sort of tent-city. And people are not playing cards, they're playing a game something like Pokemon (I don't go into much detail, but the loser addresses the winner as "fireball whore"). If people are waiting for someone in a science fiction story, why don't they take out their handheld and start reading the digital equivalent of a magazine, namely a website related to their interests? I can see if you're still gonna have physical chess sets, because chess (also all its relatives like shôgi, as well as things like go) has a prestige and an aesthetic experience related to moving the pieces on the board. But cards? The fact the deck is a physical object is considered a weakness in all card-games, physical objects can be marked and their order can only be partially randomized.
  
  Mahjong can go either way, depending on how attached you are to the sound the tiles make when you shuffle them.
• I wonder, has anybody ever bothered to point out there is a fundamental flaw in the title of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Namely, Clarke is once again doing his Gnostic street-preacher bit, and talking about transcending our Earthly origins. Well and good; no Anti-Spiral me, I desire that man should spread to the stars as he spread to every corner of his globe. But why in the name of every spirit in the Pleroma does the idiot name the thing an Odyssey? The Odyssey is all about going home, dumbass!
  
  Let us, yet again, quote Chesterton:

  The greatest tribute to Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's "Ulysses." The poet reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that is a Christian product.

  More and more one begins to wonder precisely how Clarke went all those years without eating from a bottle with a skull on it.
• An interesting thing in cultural setting is the arbitrary forms that courtesy can take. The obvious one is hats—Jews, Muslims, and some Christians show reverence by covering their heads; Latin Christians by uncovering them. Similarly in places as diverse as Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Mediterranean, one shows respect not only for sacred ground but merely for others' homes by taking off shoes, while the Zuñi do not enter sacred ground without shoes (or, more usually, painted-on socks). (I blame spiders, carrying out blood-vendetta—when a Navajo kills a spider, he draws a circle around it, tells it it has no family...and then tells it he's a Zuñi).
  
  As Chesterton said somewhere, in a society where a gentleman doffs his waistcoat to a lady, you doff your waistcoat to a lady. I was thinking a similar touch could be a society where a woman greets guests by briefly baring her breasts, as the token of motherliness and even of absolute hospitality (the host being primarily the one who feeds guests), but if you actually wrote that it'd be very hard to avoid looking like a perv. Though, if you wanted to write about culture-shock, that could be interesting.
• This is allowed here because feminist science fiction, but in one of her many, many bizarre diatribes, Marija Gimbutas says that Indo-European patriarchy is responsible for Stalin and the Holocaust. There are two problems with that. First off, Stalin was a Georgian, and though Georgian culture is semi-Indo-Europeanized (like those of the Basques or Dravidians), they still aren't Indo-Europeans. Similarly Nazism is fundamentally at variance with Indo-European mores as observable in sources as diverse as Roman law, the Norse sagas, and the Hindu Vedas. For instance, when Hitler said that Stalin could be betrayed because he was (as a Georgian!) "non-Aryan", he was displaying an attitude far more typical (ironically) of ancient Semitic cultures than of "Aryan" ones, an attitude the Romans called "punica fides" and that's probably the origin of the "teqiyyeh" that comes up so often in terrorism-debates—"we only have obligations to our fellows, not to barbarians".
  
  Second off, though, speaking of Semitic cultures—you think Indo-Europeans invented patriarchy, cupcake? It's present in Sumer, which had no known contact with Indo-Europeans for its first millennium or so, and was also a major feature of Semitic civilization, as well as Egypt. It's found in China and among the Bantu and the Maya and Aztecs (and also the Olmecs, their successor cultures, and whoever-the-hell were the people of Teotihuacan) and the Incas, pretty much as far back as we can make head or tail of their social arrangements. Newsflash, humans are mammals, and aren't lemurs or spotted hyenas: we are male-dominated. The question is not, "How do we put an end to male domination?", but "How do we ensure that our universally-dominant males are alpha wolves, not flanged orangs—or unflanged orangs, with their 'roam and rape'?"
• Am I perhaps alone in thinking that people who think therapeutic cloning less bad than reproductive are out of their motherlovin' minds? Therapeutic cloning is where we grow people for parts; reproductive cloning is basically no different from what everyone's precious fertility industry already does. What is you people's moral calculus—and in what nighted gulf of non-Euclidean mathematics, from what cackling, cavorting demon flautists, did you learn it?