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A Few Good SciFi Books

1/28/2022

Last year, I offered a short list of history books that were thought-provoking and accessible to non-specialists. The only genre of which I have read more (and for a longer time) is science fiction. The two share an important function for me: when done well, they provide a useful perspective on life in the present from some distance (cosmological or temporal) away.

I read a lot as a kid. In high school, a few of us even persuaded a teacher to offer a special course on SciFi as literature. Since then I’ve amassed hundreds of titles. About 10 years ago, I cleared out about half of my collection (those deemed of lower quality); and should probably do another cull today. For the past ten years, I’ve been reading more on my Kindle than in hard copy, but I keep at it. My tastes run more to SciFi than fantasy and to the more cerebral than pulp-ish (although I am not above a good space opera from time to time). For me, SciFi is a literature of ideas and of understanding the nature of humanity.

So, here are a few of the best of what I have read (not in any order), offered (as Rod Serling used to say) “for your consideration”:

* Pretty much anything by Ursula Leguin, a writer of great insight and sensitivity. There are many riches in her shorter works and her fantasy (The Wizard of Earthsea) is also fine. Her novels of the Ekumen and, in particular, The Left Hand of Darkness, still resonate decades later.

* Neal Stephenson is of more recent vintage. His historical novels are great fun, but there are a fair number of flops. Snow Crash created the concept of the metaverse (in 1992) and is a great romp. SevenEves is filled with both action and stunning ideas.

*I cut my teeth on Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke (back when all were still alive). Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (far better than the recent TV adaptation) was a revelation when I read it (for the first time) in the ‘60s and is still so today. Nightfall and other stories are around in multiple anthologies. Bradbury was a lyrical writer, best known for The Martian Chronicles, among dozens of beautiful stories. Arthur Clarke helped develop radar during WWII and came up with the concept of geostationary satellites. 2001 was good, but the movie is better. He wrote dozens of short stories with provocative ideas, mostly technology-based.

* Ian Banks’ “Culture” is depicted in a series of novels (try “Look to Windward,” “Consider Phlebas,” or “Player of Games”) in which humans, AIs, and a few other species fill much of the galaxy. It’s sensitively written with a host of interesting social observations.

* N.K. Jemison is a brilliant recent stylist with genre-busting novels (start with the “Broken Earth Trilogy”) that take on human relationships and societal structures with insight and creativity. Her latest, The City We’ve Become, mixes SciFi and fantasy and twists around a New York City that you will hardly recognize.

* I’ve talked about Malka Older’s Infomacracy previously. I enjoyed the story, the characters, and the tech, but loved the geopolitics.

* In his four-volume set Europe at Midnight, Dave Hutchinson blends some SciFi and some fantasy and some espionage thriller. The story is pretty good, the setting is immensely creative and, as I have noted elsewhere, provocative in its construction of its geopolitical environment.

*Ted Chaing specializes in shorter pieces. His two collections, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life, are diverse, inventive, sensitive, and surprising.

* Orson Scott Card wrote a stunning novel called Ender’s Game in 1985 and since followed it up with a host of sequels (most recently this past year). As is often the case with SciFi books that get continued, it would be best if the author was more tightly edited as they go along. The original and the following two (Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide) are the best. The Ender movie should be skipped.

* Speaking of novels that should not have been carried on too long, Frank Herbert’s Dune is deservedly a classic, despite being extended for another two volumes and having been made into two bad movies and one (the latest) which is pretty good.
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China Mieville’s alternative worlds are immersive and sufficiently weirdly speculative to be not projections of the future. Endlessly inventive in both substance and language, they are filled with different social structures. Start with Perdido Street Station.

* Kim Stanley Robinson writes thoughtful and well-researched books about possible futures, including terraforming Mars, and dealing with climate change, most recently in The Ministry for the Future.

* Paolo Bacigalupi writes about techno-dystopias. The Wind-up Girl and The Waterknife are both highly energetic and vastly more creative than the usual germs/climate/tech run amok stories.

* Qntm – I know, it’s a slightly affected nom de plume, but the author is creative and quirky. Cutting edge SciFi; start with There is No Antimimetics Division.

* Octavia Butler wrote some classic, poetic, and sobering stories, particularly the Parables.

* My friend Trevor, who tends more towards fantasy, will rightly insist that I include Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. Not only is it remarkably inventive and finely satiric (writing in China, he has to be), but it challenges some of the premises of our entire view of space exploration. Liu is part of a surge in foreign language and non-Western SciFi in the last ten years, the best of which add a needed diversity of views, premises, and sensibilities to what has been a predominantly Anglo-American genre.

Almost by definition, the best SciFi (in my view) does not translate well to the screen. Much of what is put up there (theater, TV, or streaming) is the coarsest space opera, superhero nonsense, or superficial mysticism. Fortunately, e-tablets and paper are still available.

It’s a great way to stretch your mind; check some out!

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Nationalism

1/21/2022

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In many of my history classes, I spend a fair amount of time talking about nationalism. From a geopolitical perspective, it is one of the most important developments of the past 250 years; a concept whose history sheds light on how most people think of themselves and on essential choices for the future.

By “nationalism,” historians mean something a bit different from the usual media blather. For us, nationalism is different from patriotism (“I love my country”), chauvinism “(My country, right or wrong”), or a more generic populism; all of which usually get lumped together under the nationalistic rubric. Rather, we define nationalism as the desire on the part of a group of culturally coherent people (usually an ethno-linguistic group) to organize themselves politically as a formal state which encompasses all of that group (e.g., Poles, Tamils, Arabs) and which similarly excludes members of other groups. This is the concept of the “nation-state” which has been the touchstone of political debates across the world since the late 18C. Thus, for example, a group of Arabs have defined themselves as Palestinians and have aspired to a Palestinian state.

Nationalism has often emerged from empires, which are, by definition, multi-national states, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 19-20C, the Soviet Empire of the 20C, and the British Empire of the 16-20C.

Nationalism has an intimate relationship with democracy and both were arguably rooted in the French Revolution of the late 18C. The shift of consciousness and power embodied in the recharacterization of the gathering of notables from the royally-ordained “Estates-General” into a self-defined “National Assembly” in 1789 represented claims by the “people” that “we are the nation” and that political power resides in us, not in the monarchy or aristocracy. Much of the story of Europe in the “long 19C” (i.e., from 1789 to the start of WWI in 1914) is a reflection of the spread of these twinned ideas, including the unification of Italy (1850s-60s) and Germany (1860s-70), and the independence of Christian components of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans (1870s-1910s).

The apogee of nationalism was likely the post-WWI settlements (usually referred to as the Treaty of Versailles) which sorted boundaries out of the carnage of that conflict which led to the destruction of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman Empires and the creation of a bunch of new “national” states in Central Europe. While, initially, the empires of the winners (Britain, France) remained intact, eventually they, too, disintegrated (literally) with the decolonization wave of the mid-20C which was led by leaders in colonial contexts (e.g. India, Vietnam, Kenya) who demanded that Indians, Vietnamese, and Kenyans (respectively) should run their own countries, just as the Poles, Italians, and the French had argued earlier.

Through the course of the rest of the 20C and up to today, the concept of nationalism has served to inspire a variety of independence, separatist, and anti-colonial movements. It is inherent in the “League of Nations” and its scion, the UN.

Here in the US, nationalism is a problematic concept. Huge in size, long characterized as a “melting-pot” of ethnic groups (despite an early and continuing dominance by British culture), and lacking the sharp juxtapositions of others (Canada isn’t very “other” and Mexico has been far away for most of our history), the US certainly isn’t a “nation-state” in the classic sense. This is a large part of the reason why our common discourse conflates “nationalism” with patriotism.

There are other important angles to nationalism and its history, however, which might apply to us as well. In particular, if we look at how people have thought of themselves, the rise of nationalism in the 19C reflects a shift in the geographic scope of personal identity. Most people in traditional societies have identified themselves by kinship groups or clans, perhaps by villages or language/culture groups (largely regional in scope). Industrialization, capitalism, and technologies of communications and transportation made clear by the 19C that such groupings were inadequate to address the challenges of modernity. In other words, political structures had to adapt to the significant economies of scale then available. Nationalism became a means of progress, a mark of leaving behind pre-industrial localism, and a force for coherence and integration.

By the 20C, it was becoming increasingly clear that changes in these scale economies would have structural implications. Issues of trade, finance, peace, transportation, and communications now required at least regional/continental, if not global, management. At the same time, dis-economies of scale—fostered by greater economic efficiency and a sharper sense of local identity and culture—meant that the nation-state faced pressures to disaggregate at least some of its functions. Still, for most folks, the sense of personal identity (as a Scot, Thai, or Chilean) remained resolutely local.

Much of 19/early 20C nationalism was led by local elites, consolidating their economic and cultural hinterlands into political structures. Global elites (aka “cosmopolitans”) don’t yet seem to have the same power to move the mentalities of the masses. Global migration and inter-marriage will help some, but slowly. Perhaps greater awareness of genealogy and historical DNA analyses will convince more people that classifications such as “race” and “nation” are entirely human constructs of the past few hundred years.

Nation-states, particularly the more powerful among them, often resisted the development of global, supra-national, organizations. In this context, nationalism became associated not with progress and integration, as it had in the 19C, but with a discourse of independence and separatism, usually advanced by “populist” politicians who claimed that “essential” national rights (aka “sovereignty”) were being trampled upon. Such claims have usually been disingenuous; although there are plenty of examples of overstepping by (very) distant bureaucracies and expressions of power from foreign capitals). These debates have often arisen in the economic arena (e.g., World Trade Organization, European Union), but also have appeared with regard to human rights (e.g., foreign interventions, International Criminal Court), and will be central to the solution of the climate crisis (e.g., the COP process).

Last year, I addressed the broad sense of fragility and sclerosis in the modern world and it is useful to see the nation-state as an artifact of the 19C whose time is passing, but whose lingering promises to continue to be problematic.

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Age and Time Horizons

1/14/2022

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Does time go faster as we get older? It often seems that way, even without the distortions of the pandemic era. Do children inherently have a short time horizon in how they see the world? (Indeed, isn’t this the demarcation to maturity?)

I suspect that much of what passes for immaturity (among adults) and egotism is, in no small part, the inability to see very far down the road. If you don’t expect to live a long while or can’t even conceive of a life in some future decade, then instant gratification makes a great deal of sense. Ditto for near-term and long-term dangers. It’s probably something we inherited from our hominid/savannah-trained brains many thousands of years ago. Stated differently, it’s hard to hold complex thoughts clearly and modern science gives us lots of these to wrestle with. It can be painful and, so, desirable to avoid. This would explain some of the anti-vax sentiment and climate disaster denial.

Whether there are parallels between personal experience and broader social sensibilities is an interesting issue. I have a long-term interest in the question of whether increased human longevity has begun to affect how we, at the societal or at the species level, see the world: whether our perspective and values change as a result of having a longer runway ahead of us.

Part of this has to do with understanding the age of the Earth and cosmos. It was not until the 19C that science (first geology, then Darwinian evolution) provided a framework in which anything existed outside the biblical or other mythical (e.g. Mayan or Hindu) model. Archbishop Ussher’s famous mid-17C calculation that the world began on October 22, 4004 BC was widely influential in early modern Christian Europe and paired with an undetermined end date of the second coming of Jesus as the bookends of human life on earth. We now have “scientific” understanding that the universe is +/- 13.7 billion years old with some considerable number of billions of years lying ahead.

Another part has to do with human longevity or life expectancy. For the thousands of years of human development until the beginning of the 20C, life expectancy at birth was not more than 40 years. Current global averages are in the range of 72-74 years (with lots of regional and socio-economic variation). Even adjusting for the high rate of infant/child mortality, we're generally living a lot longer now; and we know it.

Finally, the nature of time has changed, too. By this I don’t just mean that we have atomic clocks. There is something different about projecting a life in which little changes or changes in repeated cycles (as was the case for most of the world until the modernity of the 18-19C) as compared with projecting a life marked not only by the normal rites of passage, but also news, technology, and other aspects of visible change. It’s been normal for many people to look at their children (and, increasingly, grandchildren) and see different and often improved standards of living (aka “progress”).

The extension of human longevity looks likely to continue, not only through the continued improvement in public health which has drastically reduced infant/child mortality, but through the inundation of new medical treatments and other aspects of human health. I would bet that the number of people in their 90s that you know is far higher than for your parents or grandparents. Population projections look to a major increase in “older” folks over the rest of the century.

So, the question is whether these broad social changes have led to a different outlook on the world; what we might call “modernity.”. In this regard, there is an interesting parallel to the idea of climate. Now, people have been talking about the weather for many millennia (though not actually doing anything about it). Various ancient Greek and Chinese scholars talked about climate, but usually as a function of planetary influences or basic geography. But awareness of more fundamental shifts in the climate, including temperature and precipitation looks like it dates to the Enlightenment, with a burgeoning of studies in the 19C where climatology as a more-or-less formal branch of science emerged.

In other words, a change in mentality--an awareness of climate change—had to precede the consideration of how climate was changing and what the implications might be. The same is broadly true of demographics; with Thomas Malthus (~1798) as the landmark of that branch of study. Similarly, an awareness of longevity changes has to precede a consideration of how those changes are altering our awareness of living longer and our resulting time horizons.

In the context of climate, it is only in the past fifty years that humans have moved from awareness to reflection to action. In the context of longevity and time horizons we are only beginning to digest the actual changes in human lifespans and figure out what that might mean.

The implications run far beyond the questions of the solvency of pension plans and Social Security or changes in the composition of the labor force. Will greater familiarity with one’s great-grandchildren (a pretty rare phenomenon well into the 20C) encourage longer term thinking about families and the worlds in which they will live (based on historical projections, a child born today will have a pretty good shot at living into the 22C)?

It is certainly arguable, on the other hand, that egocentric human nature (“It’s all about me.”) won’t be much altered by the prospect of future generations (historically, there’s not much evidence of that so far). Still, the prospect of present generations living longer might be more effective. A 35-year-old (born in 1987), aware that they have a good shot at another 50 years might give greater weight to infrastructure (i.e., long-term investment), climate change, and even retirement planning than a 35-year-old born in 1787 who had only a 20-30 year horizon.

One of the few useful “lessons of history” is that social change usually takes a long time and epistemological change takes even longer. The notable extension of human lifespans has only been happening for a hundred years and is still very much in progress. Our adaptation to this new shape of humanity is also evolving. Future historians will get to look for the signs of change in our lives and attitudes.

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Rights and Responsibilities

1/8/2022

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There are many reasons why the discourse of “rights” has become so prevalent over the past several decades. Some is due to the understandable and traceable jurisprudence here in the US around the idea of the protection of the individual. Some is due to the crystallization of the fight for social justice captured in the “civil rights” movement. Some is due to the amorphous concept of “human rights” which gained currency globally following WWII and as a lever to crack open the Russian empire in Central Europe in the ‘70s and ‘80s. More fundamentally, the term “rights” draws on the concept of “right-and-wrong” which has been deeply embedded in most global religious and other ethical systems for centuries and the increasing awareness of the continuing distance between moral standards and social practice.

When framed in this way, it’s hard not to want to be on the side of the angels and champion “right” and “rights.” So, while I aspire to sainthood myself, I won’t denigrate “rights;” but I will express concern with how the term has come to be used and some of the problems that have resulted.

The first point to be made is constitutional: the political philosophy which underlay the Founders’ ideas in Philadelphia in 1787 was to limit the scope and power of the federal government. The flip side of that perspective—the protection of individuals from governmental intrusion—was secondary. We can see this in the fact that the famous Bill of Rights (there is that word again!) was added to the original document as an additional constraint on federal governmental powers. For example, the 1st Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law….” Indeed, it wasn’t until the 14th Amendment (1867) was definitively determined by the Supreme Court to constrain states (Duncan (1968)) that most of the famous litigation of the 20C built the roster of “rights” (ranging from Miranda to Citizens United) with which we are familiar. Starting a revised US Constitution with an Article I centered on citizens would be attractive. Still, historically speaking, the original premise didn’t start with the individual.

Second, “rights” in fact come in all sorts of flavors. There were moral rights and legal rights (e.g. property and contract) long before there were constitutions and the rights they created. The first arise out of human relationships, the second from a set of social norms, and the third from a more formal agreement (i.e., a “social contract”) among a group of people to carry on a society and conduct a politics together.

What is frequently missing from most discussions of rights, especially of the legal/constitutional variety, is something that is logically fundamental and socially problematic: there can be no right without a responsibility; or, to preempt a semantic discussion: there can be no right/privilege/power/immunity without a corresponding duty/responsibility/liability/limitation. In practical terms, if I have a “right” to control my body, then you have a “duty” to avoid hitting me. If I order a burrito and give you $10, you have a duty to give it to me.

These are examples of ordinary legal rights which seem pretty obvious. Things become more complicated when political/constitutional rights are involved or, even more, when “human rights” are invoked.

This is because inherent in the duality of rights and responsibilities is the need for someone to weigh, evaluate, and enforce. Rights and breaches of rights must have consequences or they are just words. In social settings, such as families, clans, villages, communions, and countries, a parent, elders, or other group fulfill this function. In larger groupings, as we are familiar, an essential function of the state is to adjudicate and resolve disputes about rights. Both domestic legal and constitutional rights carry the implicit promise of respect, enforcement, and responsibility on the part of society as a whole. Constitutional rights, in particular, represent a duty on the part of the state (as the functioning crystallization of its society) to ensure such rights are protected by both action and limitation of state action. Even in non-legal settings, a religion or social norm may provide for some judgment and consequences. Indeed, defining characteristic of international society is the absence of a sovereign with enforcement powers over the constituent states.

“Human” rights have to exist logically prior to the establishment of states (which may create their own internal “civil” rights). As a result they are necessarily aspirational, propositions which some (most) endorse, but which don’t actually exist as rights since there is no one with a direct responsibility to fulfill such rights and no one to enforce them. Much of international law in the 20/21C has wrestled with this problem and various mechanisms (e.g., war crimes tribunals, formal international courts) have approximated these functions, at least insofar as there is direct or communal enforcement power behind them.

The problem of rights domestically is different. There are many examples of rights being abridged or trampled upon; and, to that degree, the difference from the international environment is only one of degree. But more fundamentally, the frame of the debate about “civil” rights (by which I mean more than those based on race/gender/etc.) has been about expanding and enforcing them without doing the necessary work of ensuring the broader societal consensus accepting the responsibility. Campaigns for the right to health care or education, for example, usually devolve into debates about governmental budgets and the conversation about the moral nature of society which endorses or elides such rights usually gets cursory treatment. Since the power (money) usually lies with those who thereby have access (e.g., to health and education) without the need for a formal legal claim of “rights,” there is a hole in the moral structure of society that doesn’t get talked about and which impedes the resolution of rights claims.

There are further issues, particularly the question of whether rights reside in the individual or in a group (defined, e.g., by nationality, race, or sex). Historically, it is unsurprising that many of the debates have been sponsored by particular groups and have sought status for that group (claiming a particular “right”), without embracing the larger question of the extent of societal responsibility. The stories of women’s suffrage and the ERA, as well as of the Black “Civil Rights” movement (in both the 1860s and 1960s) are complicated by their struggles to gain their own status and making the political judgments about their stances about similar rights for other groups. The result is a historical hodge-podge.

More focus on the social aspects (i.e., the inclusion and responsibilities for society as a whole) and less on the formal/legal aspects would likely get us to a better place.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

A Few Good SciFi Books

Nationalism

Age and Time Horizons

Rights and Responsibilities

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.