Review: Architect of Aeons

Quick review: buy and read it, already! Lots of fun, full of cool sci-fi speculation, and another cliff-hanger or two. Trends are extrapolated, worlds built and moral quandaries examined.

The 4th novel in John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion hexology, The Architect of Aeons takes up the story of Menelaus Montrose and Ximen del Azarchel after they were exiled from earth at the end of The Judge of Ages by the very post-humans Montrose had engineered to defeat del Azarchel’s schemes. Meany wants people to be free; Blackie wants to bioengineer people to be better slaves to the soon to arrive super-intelligences from Hyades. And they are both in love with the same woman – who took a little trip to M3 and won’t be back for millennia.

Meany and Blackie wake from stasis after the Hyades, having won an epic battle, swept the earth of most of its inhabitants and shipped them off to various nearby (sidereally speaking) planets. It seems that the economics of the Hyades and their masters indicate that the only value people have in the big scheme of things is to work to ‘wake up’ various planets and stars by converting the bulk of their masses to logic crystal. That the people of earth in their present state are fatally unfit for this work doesn’t matter – the Hyades seed many planets with people by simply dumping them there, whether or not those worlds are suitable for (post) human life.

The people of earth must adapt or die. Further, the Hyades will be back in a few millennia for another sweep. Much of the first part of the book is concerned with what Montrose does to try to defend earth against this second attack. Meanwhile, del Azarchel heads off the the Sagittarius Arm with a bunch of his heavily modified minions to check out another contraterrene star and monument. The second sweep and Montrose’s planned war against it take place while Blackie is gone.

It does not go as planned. It does not go well. The theme of these books might be: the best laid plans of mice and cliometricians…

Montrose, a man who insists on freedom, who is a bit put out that some poxy Yankee state got the motto that rightfully belongs to his Texas – Live Free or Die – is a cliometric singularity. Funny things happen, mathematically speaking, wherever he treads. So the Hyades give him a choice.

The last bit of this book was my favorite by far, one of my favorite sections in the whole series. Wright channels Cordwainer Smith (specifically, Alpha Ralpha Boulevard and The Ballad of Lost C-mell sprang to mind) and Jack Vance. After Montrose cut his deal with the Hyades, the various creatures of earth origin develop elaborate cultures – no more elaborate than, say, Italian Renaissance courtly culture, but, needing to incorporate the social implications of space-faring, as well as all sorts of biotech and nanotech and what have you. The story achieves the sort of bizarre yet believable formality that Vance trafficked in, as well as his penchant for detective stories and gasping reveals. Totally fun.

This book gives the reader more insight into del Azarchel’s character. Wright walks the fine line between making him sympathetic, but not too sympathetic – you feel sorry for the guy, for sure, but still want him to lose big.The book ends with choice, where a creature with (to us) godlike powers lays them down for something she knows is better. Del Azarchel cannot believe it – and that’s the point.

Architects of Aeons is one of, if not the, best book in the series. I’ll readily admit that this assessment is partly the result of Wright’s deft echos of Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance (and probably other writers I don’t know as well – that’s for someone else to comment on). But the thinking is deepening, too. The philosophical speculations that are the backbone of the hexology are coming into sharper focus, and the longer term implication of what man decides to do are laid out across eons. We are all cliometric singularities, after all – that’s what Free Will means. Ultimately, vast historical calculus is not the work of men, nor angels. We don’t throw the switch and KNOW that the trolley will kill the man in the alley (or that that is the best outcome if it were to happen); we don’t KNOW that if we just kill enough of the right people, the worker’s paradise will spontaneously arise. We only know that it is good to love, good to be loved, and that life and this universe are achingly beautiful – and we should be on the side of that life and beauty, even if, especially if it costs us.

Go read the book! I’m ready for Volumes 5 and 6.

In the Queue for This Week…

1. Several people made good comments on my review of Age of Ultron. If I get a minute, I’ll do a bit of a round-up and response.

2. Book reviews of John C. Wright’s Architect of Aeons and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International (which, by no coincidence, is currently available as a free download on Amazon at the link above – the publisher seems to think that if you read one for free, you may read them all for money. He may be right.)  These are very different books, it would have gone without saying had it not just said it, but are both excellent after the manner of their kind. Mind-bending universe- and eon-spanning epic that pays homage to Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith (and probably a lot of other guys I’m not smart enough to catch) spread out over thousands of pages in 6 novels? Wright’s got you covered. A fast-paced love story between a beefy ex-accountant with a thing for guns and Marilyn Monster, if Marilyn were dark haired and killed vampires for a living, where hardly a page goes by without being spattered with the ichor of eldritch fiends of one flavor or another as a result of the fairly indiscriminate use of military-grade ordinance and heavy weapons? Correia’s your man.

Hey, what’s not to like?

One the update front, we’re heading into graduation season at the Casa de Moore, with lovely daughter #2 getting the boot this year; end of year parties and shows (a tradition at Diablo Valley School); the confirmation of the our young German student (he asked me to be his sponsor – I’m flattered). We’ll be setting up for the graduation and end of the year party at DVS, as well as throwing a graduation party, and, a week later, a confirmation party, at our house – and then seeing our newly-confirmed off on a jaunt around the country with his mom before he heads off to college, too. Aaaand, we just finished the annual school camping trip and the Concord KidFest, in which the school has had a booth for pushing 20 years.

Busy.

Also, after a hiatus of a couple months, back to writing in my copious spare time. Weee! Got a couple stories almost done – just like you heard months back. No, really! This time, for sure!

Finally, if you have any prayers to fire up, my oldest sister has been back and forth from the hospital to a nursing home for the past several months, and recently had a seizure of some sort that left her delusional for several days, and she’s still not totally lucid. It’s a combination of a lifetime of rheumatoid arthritis, cancer and a series of strokes (and all the drugs they give you with all those things.) She’s 75, alienated from the Church, and probably won’t last a year (but of course nobody’s saying – just my gut feeling). So prayers that she will be comforted and reconciled to Jesus in his Church would be appreciated.

On a similar note, my boss’s youngest daughter, age 24 and married one year, has leukemia. Prayers for her and her family would also be appreciated.

Sorry for the downers – weirdly, things are actually picking up, emotion and energy-wise. Next couple posts will be fun, I promise.

Book Review: Firestar

Quick Take: Buy this book and read it. It will make you wonder why we haven’t already gotten back into space in a big way, and cause you to dream dreams and see visions. And it’s a lot of fun.

Michael Flynn’s 1996 novel Firestar, first in a series, is the story of Elon Musk with some of the names and dates changed. Only kidding a little.(1) Musk is played by billionaire heiress Mariesa Van Huyten (and, boy, does spell check not like that name), who, despite family and social expectations, throws herself wholeheartedly into running the family business. She’s good at it, too.

But augmenting the family billions is just a step toward her real goals. Only a small group of very close friends know what she is about – reigniting space exploration, and finding some way to allay her deepest fears.

Flynn leaves few stones unturned in imagining how this would work out in real life. Politics local, national and family; business both internal and external; activists pure and malevolent with plenty of clueless thrown in; and, perhaps most surprisingly, schooling. This approach introduces a cast of dozens, but I didn’t have too much trouble following who was who, because of Flynn’s deft touch at characterization. You feel like you know somebody like that. Well, except maybe the super-rich – I know some people kind of like that.

The story weaves and bobs around the main threads: Mariesa’s obsession with space, her team of Prometheans, her infighting with her mother, her slowly growing relationship with a schoolteacher far below her station, and the engineers and pilots building and testing and eventually flying her spaceships. Another major thread is the work of Mentor Academies – the privately-run schools that Mariesa has taken over in order to solve one giant problem with her dreams of space: the overall lack of practical dreamers. Flynn is addressing here one aspect of the US space program that is often missed: after the moon landing, only geeks gave a damn about it. Everybody (well, everybody older than maybe 50) knows who John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are. But how many people can name 3 other astronauts, or describe what it is that the ISS is for? Even the spectacular pictures taken by the Hubble (which are the wallpaper for every computer I use at home or work) don’t seem to inspire more than a moment’s wonder in most people.

We follow the stories of a number of desultory students at a newly-acquired Mentor school who showed promise, and became ‘Mariesa’a Kids’. Their progress is nudged along and opportunities for them to expand their worlds given. They are even invited out for parties at the Van Huyten mansion. Plot complications and surprises abound.

The managers, engineers, pilots, teachers and students each have their crises to overcome, as Mariesa nudges and pushes the project forward. The financial, engineering, family and political challenges must be dealt with. Flynn jumps from thread to thread and crisis to crisis with great dexterity – the forward motion of the book is pretty constant.

One of the things I appreciated about this book is that business people were presented in 3 dimensions, like real people with warts and virtues. After reading stuff like William Gibson, in which money is nothing but a gradient of grey miasma that encompasses criminals and businessmen without distinction, it’s refreshing to see something more based in reality. Business people are just people, after all.

One caution: if you’re expecting escapist nonsense (and I love good escapist nonsense) this is not your book. There’s more political intrigue and interpersonal drama than gee-whiz sci-fi moments. The science is diamond-hard and the setting right now. No invading aliens or warp drive.

Firestar is more myth than blueprint. The story is meant to inspire our imagination, yes, but also the virtues and honor it will take to make dreams a reality. It tells us of our proper place in the world, a place we have not reached but can reach and are honor bound to try to reach. That is the realm of mythology.

As technology becomes more like magic, we fall more into magical thinking about it. Like the weather, technology just happens. Rather than striving for mastery, we deign to be entertained by our gadgets. The engineer who designed our toys was a manly-man back in the 50’s and early 60s, making rockets and reshaping the world – now, he’s just a geek, what he does is of no interest as long as the computer games don’t crash.

So, good book. Go read it. I’m heading for Rogue Star, the next in the series, as soon as I finish John C. Wright’s Archirtect of Eons

1. I googled “Firestar Elon Musk” because the idea that Musk had read this book, gotten inspired and decided to do it just will not go away. Unfortunately, if so, the interwebs are not aware of it.

Quick Book Reviews & Update

Took most of the month off, evidently, judging by the scarcity of posts. However, did read some books:

The Ballad of the White Horse, G K Chesterton. Excellent. It’s the first epic poem I think I’ve read since Virgil or Milton, maybe. Chesterton takes an historic event – the defeat of the Danes under Giuthram by King Alfred of Wessex in 878 – and makes it into a tale of the Christian soldier’s endless battles against paganism, even going so far as to have Alfred relate a vision of times where the pagans do not wage physical war, but rather seek by subterfuge and stealth to steal the land from Christians. In hands other than Chesterton’s, this could get silly, but GKC pulls it off with his iusual aplomb.

Read it out loud, to the kids if you have any handy. This really should be the official poem of the Sad Puppies.

The Time Machine, by H G Wells. Classic. Wells has a predictably grim view of humanity. He’s one of those odd charming Englishmen who behaves himself out of culture and habit, even if his philosophy provides no reason to do so. And he doesn’t lose sight of his audience, and writes in a way that a turn of the last century English reader will like. Only one comment on the story itself: Morlocks are almost charming as Wells paints them – weird, oddly gentle cannibals. Several times, they had the opportunity to just kill him, but instead they seem to more or less grope him so that he escapes when outnumbered a hundred to one. As bad guys, the barely work. I’m guessing this is because Wells’ sympathies really are with them rather than the Eloi – they are, upon his protagonist’s theory, the descendents of the noble working classes, while the Eloi are degenerate bourgeois of some sort.  Eat the rich, after all.

The War of the Worlds, by H G Wells. Another classic. Wells again portrays most people as being basically animals hiding behind a thin veneer of civilization, The parson he gets stuck with is particularly spineless and mindless. Go figure. I was surprised later in the book when a navy ship took a daring and ultimately suicidal run at the Martians – that was what I, and I’d bet all his readers, would expect from British military. But mostly it’s just people hunted like rabbits and about as daring.

The imagination and imagery of the story are striking and very good, and would no doubt have been even better were I more familiar with the English countryside around London. The book ends on an almost upbeat note, introducing the ideas that humanity would become united by the notion of alien intelligences, and that technology would take a huge leap forward by just examining the Martian wreckage (that was the first thing that went through my mind at the end of Independence Day – what glorious wreckage to reverse engineer!) Yet earth cannot be assured that the Martians will not try it again, so there is a bit of a pall on things. Well, that and thousands dead and London destroyed…

Almost done with Firestar by Michael Flynn, and just used a birthday present Amazon card to order the sequel Roguestar and to order Architect of Eons by John C Wright.  Soooo, got my reading for the next couple weeks all lined up.

And Hegel and all those education history and biography books are calling me right there from the shelf….

Reading Update: Myth, Sci Fi & Fantasy. And Hegel.

Bumbling around on several things at once – let’s just say ‘multitasking’ in a tone of voice neither judgmental nor ironic – and so have more books going at once than usual:

1. Fun reading: 15% or so into Firestar, first novel in a trilogy by Michael Flynn. So far, it is about spaceships and meaningful school reform – it’s Sci Fi and Fantasy!  Nyuck. We’re still at the getting to know the characters part, who, in Flynn tradition, number in the thousands. More or less.

For whatever reason, even though I’v ended up enjoying them a lot, it seems to take a while for Flynn’s books to hook me – this one only took about 100 pages, which is pretty quick. I’m hooked now, so I’ll get through this in a few days.

2. Research reading: As mentioned earlier, trying to learn a little about various mythologies, since myth plays a key role in the novel I’m pretending to write. So, in addition to Googling stuff and dumping paragraphs from here and there in a Google doc, I’m reading:

a. Polynesian Mythology, Vol I. A fairly slight book, but adequate to my needs. About 30% through.

b. An old paperback I picked up somewhere in the misty past (that is sitting by my bed where I am not now – will update later with exact info), put out many years ago by Oxford, that has too much detail on sources and variations on the actual stories, but is nonetheless useful – it lays out guess and theories about how the Greeks came to synthesize the gods and stories of the peoples they conquered or otherwise encountered, so that, in the end, they ended up with the archetypal Pantheon. I’ll need to think about that sort of process.

c. Our copy of Bullfinch is lying around someplace in the house – I was reading from it to the kids a couple years back. Must find it and reread.

d. Will probably, with a bit of trepidation, reread Man and His Symbols. I don’t like to be reminded of that time in my youth when I took Jung way too seriously. But I recall his classification of mythological types to be good or at least interesting. In particular, I’ll need my Tricksters to be convincing.

Surfing around, touched on Hindu mythology – I’m going to need a bunch of names, figured I’d go with Sanskrit roots for one of my cultures. Wow – that’s a LOT of mythology, there. But, outside some creation myth stuff, not sure what I’d want to know – I fear ‘everything’ is the answer, which leads to the question: how many more decades, really, am I expecting to live?

The final (for now) piece – I need some Mongol mythology. One of my cultures is a steppe-dwelling horse culture, so I’d want to look into that. I have only the vaguest notions, gleaned from the often risible Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which is that weird kind of revisionist history wherein the author thinks he’s revising your views, when every story he tells just confirms them. Put it this way: you really really didn’t want to be conquered by the Mongols – it did not go well for the victims. The (brief) glory that was the Mongol Empire consisted in their ability to accumulate a huge collection of other people’s stuff – their own contributions are objectively pretty negligible.

How my physical books look at me from the shelf or night stand. Kindle books don’t pull that kind of crap.

3. Spiritual reading: the reading group down at a local parish is reading Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales. Good book. We’re about 1/3 into it.

4. By design, giving Hegel a rest for now – will pick up with Phenomenology of Spirit after Easter. I’m into the Introduction after surviving the Preface. I trust it gets less grueling.

And I never finished and reviewed that Orestes Brownson book the American Republic, which I should because it is good. It’s easier to forget about books on your Kindle than books physically confronting you with big, sad eyes.

Book Review: The Book of Feasts and Seasons

The Book of Feasts and Seasons is a collection of short stories by John C. Wright. Many of these stories first appeared on his blog, and so I had already read them there; one (The Ideal Machine) appeared in the first issue of  the Sci Phi Journal. A couple I had not seen before.

Short & Sweet: 10 great stories for under $0.50 each? Are you kidding me? Where do you get that kind of bang for the entertainment buck these days? Go buy this now!

All the stories are very good, several are tear-jerkers in the best sense. They are organized according to the feasts and seasons of the Catholic liturgical calendar, and invite contemplation on how they relate to these. Let’s run through them:

1. New Years: The Meaning of Life as Told to Me by an Inebriated Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey. This story reminded me of that genre of pop song that tries to see how many pop references it can make in under 4 minutes – we have the author and a famous Sci Fi writer discussing the ultimate meaning of life via references and allusions to dozens of different classic stories. It’s funny and fun, even for me, who maybe generously got 25% of the references.

2. Epiphany: The Queen of the Tyrant Lizards. Mr Wright’s ‘let me show you how this is done’ rewrite of the very slight and frankly adolescent Hugo-Award winning If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.There’s nothing exactly terrible about the original story, except, perhaps the laughable characterization of the Bad Guys in the Southern bar – gin? – and it’s hard to see what in it makes it speculative fiction – mentioning dinosaurs? – but holding this bit of indulgent fluff up as the finest example of speculative fiction in a short story produced over a entire year strains credulity past the breaking point.

Mr. Wright’s story is everything If You Were a Dinosaur isn’t – mind-bending speculative fiction, deft, startling, true to life where it should be (readers of a more historically grounded mind will appreciate the portrayal of the 1950s) and, in the end, emotionally complicated. The only emotional bang in the original story comes from having your prejudices against ignorant Southerners confirmed, if you lean that way. (I imagine Mr. Wright, as a Virginian gentleman himself, took a little umbrage.) Really, the original story expects you to emotionally identify with a woman standing over her dying and comatose fiance and telling him about her dinosaur-based revenge fantasy.  That doesn’t exactly fly, emotionally, for an adult.

Book Review: Awake in the Night Land, and Why I Was Late for Work This Morning

John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land consists of 4 stories set in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land universe. Short and sweet: I am awestruck. I have wept at the end of stories exactly twice in my life –  I wept at the end of this book. Beautiful, wonderful stuff.

A few months ago, I read separately the third story in the set, Silence of the Night, and that was enough for me to track down Hodgson’s ponderous masterpiece, in order to better understand the universe in which Wright’s stories take place. I reviewed Night Land here. Briefly, millions of years from now, the sun has died and the earth has been plunged into darkness. Mankind has retreated into two (or more) gigantic fortress cities, surrounded by force fields called ‘air clogs’. The Great Redoubt is a pyramid over seven miles tall and extending miles down into the earth; in it live millions of people, with each floor of the pyramid its own city. There is a Lesser Redoubt somewhere to the north; in Wright’s stories, a third Redoubt far south is mentioned. Mankind has lived thus for millions of years. The Redoubts are powered by the Earth Current, which is like electricity in some respects, but has certain positive spiritual powers as well. The Earth Current is found by mining deep into the earth. Without it, the Redoubts are defenseless.

Outside the Redoubts is the Night Land, inhabited by many horrors, some flesh and blood but also other, far worse terrors. Few venture into the Night Land, and the ancient laws permit only those Prepared to do so. Preparation is both physical and spiritual, and includes the insertion of a Capsule under the skin of the arm, designed to be bitten when an adventurer encounters a Greater Power – no man can resist, and it is believed it is better to die pure than to have one’s soul Destroyed by the Power.

Chief among these Greater Powers is the House of Silence, sitting on a hill within view of the Great Redoubt. No sound ever comes from it; its open doors and windows are eerily lit, and those who fall under its influence walk in and are never seen again. But there are also Watching Things, mountain-sized Sphinx-like forms that watch the Great Redoubt and approach so slowly that no man can see movement in a human lifetime; The Country Whence Comes the Great Laughter, which mocks and torments man; and eldritch mists and flames which can consume and destroy men. These Powers are completely malevolent – they hate Man for no reason, and destroy him without remorse. They are not of this world. A caste of Monstrawacans watch these monsters from the highest spire of the Pyramid.

Men have developed Night Hearing, a sort of telepathy with which they can speak with people near and far. This talent varies in acuity. Wright expands on hints in Hodgson, and has some men with a talent for seeing the past and the future. This is tied in some sense to reincarnation, which occurs only among souls that have not been Destroyed. By it, the people of the Great Redoubt know that they are doomed, and when and how.

All people know the Master Word, which can only be spoken by the truly human. The evil Powers often interfere with the Night Hearing or otherwise attempt to trick humans – the Master Word is a defense against such trickery. Also, among all the horrors, there are sometimes Good Powers, who preserve some adventurer from an evil. These Good Powers are unpredictable, inscrutable and rare.

Those who venture forth are clad in grey armor and armed with a Diskos, a spinning disk on a shaft powered by the Earth Current. Against the flesh and blood enemies – the Night Hounds, the degenerate Abhumans and various reptilian and insect-like evils – it is fell; it is useless against the Greater Powers. Thus the strategy of all who enter the Night Land Prepared is to sneak from place to place, hoping to avoid the Powers and using the Diskos only when absolutely unavoidable.

Hodgson lays out layers of evil and horror, against which very noble humans must contend. First, we have the darkness, broken only by the red glow of volcanic fire pits, occasional lightning, the weird glow of a deadly blue fire and other tokens of the Great Powers. Next, in that darkness, the immediate horror of the Night Hounds, giant slugs, and murderous ape-like Abhumans who can rip a man apart; they are less horrible than the Silent Ones, who can kill a man with a glance, and these again are less horrible than the Greater Powers, who Destroy a man’s soul. All these are less horrible than Despair, a doom that must be fought off in each age, as all people know that, once the Earth Current fails, any human left will be destroyed.

No spoilers ahead. Read on.  

Plans, Backlog, Reality: The Blogging Life

Yesterday, took a few minutes to look over my Drafts file for this blog. 50 items. Took a literary weed-whacker to it, and ended up with – 40.

Sheesh.

And, I often start stuff in Word as well, to be copied over when finished. Haven’t looked at those – at least another half dozen, I’d guess. Got to do that sometimes.

Some of the purged items were stuff I must have had some ideas for, had typed a couple sentences, no doubt thinking they were sufficient to capture the essence, to remind me of what I was thinking – but, didn’t work. Had no idea upon reading the sentence or two what it was that I thought was important enough to blog about that those sentences were meant to suggest. Oh, well, out they went.

A couple items were ideas I’d changed my mind on – I’d written far enough to realize I’m wrong (amazing, isn’t is? but it happens once in a while) or that there was no way to say what I was thinking that would come off as non-stupid – perhaps because what I was trying to say was stupid, but I’ll entertain other options, if any.

A couple were just titles, or just a single phrase – nope, no hope of recalling what those were about, out they went.

What’s left is largely Part II, or 3 or something of series I’ve started. I get these dander-upping ideas, usually around Wrong Thinking that has appeared on the internet that Needs Correction, and I can’t possibly say it in a single blog post, so I start and call it Part 1, then maybe get to part 2 or so, then maybe a shiny object moves into view, or my dander self-settles somewhat, and – well, that’s how you end up with 40+ drafts.

We will here conclude this fascinating – fascinating, I tell you! – post with a little update:

Set Hegel aside (a little goes a long way – it’s like *work* to read that stuff!) to read Awake in the Night Land by John C Wright, because that’s fun. Will have a review shortly.

If the Dismal Science is your cup of tea, there are a couple posts on economics, in a couple different series I’ve started, that are close, that I hope (ha!) to finish up soon.

I’ve got this Population Math thing that’s been rattling around in my head for a couple years now that needs to be written. Was recently motivated to work on it when a relative, with one of those ‘this should shut him up!’ deliveries, stated that the fact that the population had doubled in less than 30 years is something we should be worried about. While there are a couple good answers to that, the one to start with is just math and logic: unless you want to start gassing millions, it will take 3 or 4 generations for changes in birth rate to work their way through the gross population totals – because people now days commonly live 70 – 80 years, long enough for their replacement-rate children to produce replacement-rate children of their own, and maybe even for those replacement-rate grandchildren to produce their replacements as well. So, if everybody simultaneously decided that, as a whole, they would produce at replacement rate, it would be about 60 – 80 years before the total population would peak, during which time the total population might well quadruple – because people keep insisting on living. So, we’re heading for the peak in around 40 years, because around 40 years ago the idea that 0, 1 or 2 children is the most desirable number became very widespread worldwide. After which the most likely thing is for the population to start falling, because, as Tacitus put it, the appeal of childlessness is great.

Anyway, got charts and graphs in mind. Don’t know if any people are interested in being convinced. Will take – wait for it – several posts to cover.

Aaaaand – working on another essay and a couple short stories for publication, for all values of ‘working on’ that equal ‘thinking I should maybe write some more’.

In short, I’m never emptying the queue, I need to wake up and smell the hot brewed beverage.

Phenomenology of Spirit: Prelinminaries

Just started reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, not past Hegel’s preface. A couple preliminary comments, sort of set the stage.

Caveat 1: these are very preliminary impressions, subject to change as I finish this up;

Caveat 2: much of what I’m about to say comes from other Hegel I’ve read (Logic; Lectures on Aesthetics) and some are even based on the forward to Phenom of S by Hegel fanboy J. N. Findlay. While I habitually read forwards, translator’s notes, introductions, prefaces and the like, I also try to make it a practice to ignore anything they say  by way of explanation about the work itself, as I try to take my impressions directly from what the author has to say, and not through the filter of a critic or apologist. (I’m stuck with the translator’s decisions and biases, which is a major thing that separates me from the real scholars. Oh well.) In this case, Findlay confirms or reinforces impressions I’ve gotten from other works, so I’m bending my own rules to include his thoughts in this analysis. A little. Subject to revision.

1. Hegel & the Galileo Trap. Readers may recall a little essay on what I’m calling the Galileo Trap, the tendency to think that a theory that contradicts all common experience and appearances is more likely to be true, rather than facing a problem that needs to be very carefully overcome. This trap exists because, according to the modern world’s foundation mythology of Galileo, he was persecuted by those who refused to look at the evidence, evidence that supported a theory of reality that contradicted every common experience – the world sure looks to be motionless; the stars sure look like they move around the earth. But Galileo’s triumph (nearly 100 years after he died is when the Newton’s theory and the available evidence caught up to the theory) is seen as a template: find a theory that contradicts everything everybody thinks – that will be the true one. At the very least, the simple fact that common experience contradicts every aspect of your theory is no reason to abandon it – just look at Galileo!

So, we have Hegel, via Findlay, proposing that there is something called a Phenomenologist. A phenomonologist notices that, despite what they think they are doing – looking at individual observable things and learning what they can through them – observers (I think this is directed at scientists and perhaps technicians of all sorts) are really only observing different aspects of the same thing, which is ultimately identified as the Understanding. The world is a mirror, we are the world, etc.

Now, I’m expecting this to be heavily nuanced if not out and out contradicted in the hundreds of pages Hegel devotes to it, but for now I’m calling Galileo Trap on it – that certainly doesn’t seem to be what we commoners are doing. We’d need fairly overwhelming evidence to replace our common understanding with this sort of weird pantheist/we-theist mishmash. Hey, maybe it’s in there. I sort of doubt it.

2. I’ve written elsewhere also on the divide between Philosophy and Science. Here, I’m having a twinge of sympathy for our Analytic Philosopher brethren – if I thought Hegel representative of philosophy in general (and how could a person educated at a modern university not?) I would be repulsed by these claims that what a scientist is doing amounts to high-falutin’ navel gazing. I might, in a fit of intellectual integrity blended with a need for revenge, reject anything in Philosophy that can’t be derived from the scientific endeavor. It’s not an unreasonable reaction, and, if I had to choose between Science on the one hand and Hegel and his spawn on the other, I’d go science every time.

3. Finally, Hegel is more restrained than his followers, mostly I suspect because he was a devout Lutheran, and therefore had to square his thinking with his religious beliefs on some level at least. Once you cast aside that restraint, it’s open season. Combine that lack of restraint with the rejection of logic and the Galileo Trap, and you get things like Marxism and Freudianism. No amount of evidence or logic is allowed to be brought to bear on the fundamental claims of Marx or Freud. Common experience and common understanding are to to dismissed not despite, but because of their commonness.

Years ago, I read a ton of Freud, and was most struck by how he on occasion answered his critics with “because I am Sigmund Freud!” In general, he and his followers contented themselves with ad hominem attacks, wherein they slathered on the Bulverisms: for example, I am just the sort of sexually repressed person whose mommy issues prevent me from grasping the TRVTH of Freud’s claims. This has a wonderfully universal applicability to ALL objections. But once or twice, when confronted by a challenge to one his arguments, where he was hanging an entire psychic universe off a single dubious interpretation of an observation,  Freud would respond to the “but how can you know that’s true?” challenge by simply asserting his personal authority – Because I am Sigmund Freud. No, really.

Hegel makes a lot of outrageous claims, but at least he doesn’t claim to know the future or to know in every case what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

Much more later. I’m switching off between Hegel and John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, to keep my sanity. So I’ll be interspersing reviews of each as I go. I hope.

 

Review: Sci Phi Journal, Issue #2, pt 1 – Fiction

The second issue of the Sci Phi journal, wherein philosophy and science fiction meet, have a beer and argue into the wee hours about such conundrums as the ethics of creating wildly implausible backstories to explain various flavors of Klingon brow ridges*, features another fine set of stories and essays and is available now for your reading and musing pleasure, here and here.

Here I’ll look at a couple of the stories, Later, I’ll review an essay or 2.**

Ghosts, by Peter Sean Bradley, is the kind of twisted and darkly humorous story that’s right up my alley. To tell much of it would be to give away the punchline, as it were. The story starts by describing a scene wherein certain people are doing their best to enjoy the ambient social and moral chaos: the narrator is attending the wedding of a dear aunt of his, and runs through a brief history of their relationship which is depressingly realistic:

After my mother and her father had split up, Jennie and I remained good friends throughout the nightmare years of Junior and Senior high school.

And they had been nightmare years as both of our fathers and mothers moved in and out of relationships and marriages and our custody schedules and homes were constantly changing.

Yea, this is reality for many of the kids I know. The determination and force used by the putative adults involved to deny the emotional reality of their behaviors on their children knows few bounds.

Anyway, this is a happy time, despite his son showing up with a foot growing out of his forehead: Jennie is getting married – to a strip mall. It’s all downhill, uphill and all around from there. Good, well-written story.

Another couple stories address the possible downsides of submitting to our AI overlords once the Singularity has come to pass. In the First Step, Emmanuel A. Mateo-Morales tells of a transhuman who has created heaven on earth – all that remains is to hand it over to the AI and ‘people’ it. There are some narrow minded primitives that object – imagine! And a friend, after a fashion, who would warn him. The chief philosophical issue here is gravity: do ideas tend to play themselves out over time, despite how our temperament might irrationally oppose them? We may not feel like being hopeless mass murderers for reasons of taste – but are we inexorably driven there by our nihilism?

The Quantum Process by David Hallquist tackles a different question – when we obtain immortality by duplicating our consciousness, what does that look like from the now-redundant backup’s point of view?

All in all, a fun read and a noble project. I’m even now putting together a list of friends who might be interested in a little mental exercise that’s none-the-less fun. Go, make disciples!

* I just made that up. I think.

** In case any of my three regular readers are wondering: the implicitly promised second half of the review of issue #1 turned into an interminable and stiffly-worded essay full of excruciating detail on what the Matrix trilogy is really trying to tell us that I submitted for publication in a moment of foolishness. I’ll post it here once it’s clear whatever tiny chance it may have had is most sincerely dead.