Dreams
Sean_Q_
Troels Forchhammer scribed this message on the prow of an Elven dory
and set it drifting down the Anduin:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_B_BaV2yyRno/RakjfC705hI/AAAAAAAAACA/9t_b1Xq_ocU/s1600-h/dory+%282%29resize.jpg
>> I was a book purist at the age of 5, when I was horrified at what
>> the movie did to "The Wizard of Oz". The absolutely worst betrayal
>> was to make it "all a dream"!!
>
> I don't know if Tolkien ever knew the Wizard of Oz, but I'm sure that
> he'd agree that this was a grave betrayal. When speaking about what
> fairy-story is _not_, Tolkien said:
>
> Next, after travellers' tales, I would also exclude, or
> rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of
> Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the
> apparent occurrence of its marvels.
And yet Lewis Carroll's two classics, Wonderland & Looking Glass
are dreams.
However, it could be argued that the two Alice stories aren't,
strictly speaking, fairy tales. But then again, why shouldn't they be?
Aside from political satire and brilliant ridicule of the moralizing
literature of the era (such as "Father William"), perhaps Alice's
dreams, where characters from real life appear in altered forms
are an attempt by her subconscious mind to resolve some of
the uncertainties and contradictions of her social environment.
But it could also be argued that this is precisely what fairy tales
are.
Anyway, I didn't feel betrayed in the least by the Judy Garland
version of Oz. She does wake up in bed, but also knows that it all
wasn't a dream. I've never been to Kansas, but if I ever visit I'll
see for myself if everything is gray (except for Cairn Terriers).
BTW JRRT himself uses dreams as a sort of deus ex machina, especially
the "Seek for the broken sword" dream.
SQ
Stan Brown
> Anyway, I didn't feel betrayed in the least by the Judy Garland
> version of Oz. She does wake up in bed, but also knows that it all
> wasn't a dream.
Better watch it again.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
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Paul S. Person
<snippo>
>Anyway, I didn't feel betrayed in the least by the Judy Garland
>version of Oz. She does wake up in bed, but also knows that it all
>wasn't a dream. I've never been to Kansas, but if I ever visit I'll
>see for myself if everything is gray (except for Cairn Terriers).
No, it's not gray. Lot's of bugs in the summer. Lot's of heat and
humidity and thunderstorms in the summer too. Lot's of cold, nasty
weather the rest of the year.
And the pioneers settled it without air conditioning or bug repellent.
Talk about tough!
When I was stationed at Ft Riley, KS, in the early 1980's, one of the
things I was told was this:
If you've never been to Kansas, then clicking your heels and saying
"there's no place like home" may take you back home; but, once you
have set foot in Kansas, it will only take you to Kansas, which is not
(for most people) at all the same thing.
So you may not want to go there.
--
Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, "I never knew him."
John W Kennedy
> Anyway, I didn't feel betrayed in the least by the Judy Garland
> version of Oz. She does wake up in bed, but also knows that it all
> wasn't a dream. I've never been to Kansas, but if I ever visit I'll
> see for myself if everything is gray (except for Cairn Terriers).
It isn't really. Baum based his version of Kansas, where he had never
been, on the area of Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he lived for several
years, during a drought.
Sean_Q_
> Better watch it again.
Ok -- here's the screenplay of Dorothy's return, from
http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=wizard_of_oz_1939
In our reality, Dorothy bumps her head in the storm; the house
isn't carried away, otherwise there'd be no home for her
to wake up in. But she says it was real and no dream and when
I first saw the movie as a kid I believed her, rather than being
offended at the dream mechanism -- because by that time I'd read
and seen enough science fiction to accept the concept
of alternate realities.
Something similar happens in _The Weirdstone of Brisingamen_ where
the travelers are magically rescued by the Lady of the Mere and
given refuge for a night of Fimbulwinter that would otherwise have
frozen them. It's seemingly a dream that they later awaken from,
and yet it was also real.
Btw Weirdstone was one of the few fantasy/sci-fi stories that
truly scared me. The Mara troll-women still give me the shivers.
SQ
DOROTHY
Yes, I'm ready now.
GLINDA
Then close your eyes, and tap your heels
together three times.
MCU -- Dorothy's heels as she clicks them together three times --
MCU -- Dorothy and Glinda -- Glinda instructs her -- waves her wand --
Dorothy closes her eyes -- CAMERA TRUCKS in to a big CU of Dorothy --
she speaks -- the scene darkens behind her --
GLINDA
And think to yourself -- "There's no place
like home; there's no place like home;
there's no place like home."
DOROTHY
There's no place like home. There's no
place like home. There's no place like
home. There's no place like home.
LAP DISSOLVE TO:
ELS - The Munchkins waving goodbye from the gates of the Munchkin
Village -
DOROTHY o.s.
There's no place like...
CS - The Witch laughing -
DOROTHY o.s.
...home. There's no place....
MCS - The Wizard at the control panel in the Throne Room - he turns,
looks o.s. to f.g. - reacts - pulls the curtain -
DOROTHY o.s.
...like home. There's no place like home.
MS - Glinda leading the Munchkins in a dance - Munchkins in the b.g. -
DOROTHY o.s.
There's no place like home.
MCU - Lion growling -
MS - The Tin Man breaking in the door of the Witch's Tower Room -
DOROTHY o.s.
There's no place like home.
MS - Hickory's Wind Machine on the Gale farm -
DOROTHY o.s.
There's no place like home.
CS - Horse looking out from stall -
CS - Cow - CAMERA PANS slightly -
MCS - Chickens moving about -
CS - Auntie Em offers forward a plate of crullers -
LAP DISSOLVE TO:
CU -- Dorothy lying on pillow -- she mumbles -- Aunt Em's hands enter --
put cloth on Dorothy's head --
DOROTHY
(mumbling)
-- there's no place like home -- there's no
place like home --
AUNT EM o.s.
Dorothy - Dorothy! It's me -- Aunt Em.
CS -- Dorothy lying on bed -- mumbling -- she opens her eyes -- looks
around room -- CAMERA TRUCKS back showing Aunt Em seated on edge of bed
-- Uncle Henry standing by -- Professor Marvel enters at window --
speaks -- Dorothy reacts -- looks at him --
AUNT EM o.s.
Wake up, honey.
DOROTHY
-- no place like home -- there's no place
like home -- no place --
AUNT EM
Dorothy. Dorothy, dear. It's Aunt Em, darling.
DOROTHY
Oh, Auntie Em -- it's you!
AUNT EM
Yes, darling.
PROFESSOR MARVEL
Hello, there! Anybody home? I -- I just
dropped by because I heard the little girl
got caught in the big -- Well....
MCU -- Dorothy -- Camera shooting down past Aunt Em at right --
PROFESSOR MARVEL o.s.
...she seems all right now.
UNCLE HENRY o.s.
Yeah.
MS -- Dorothy lying in bed -- Aunt Em seated by her -- Uncle Henry
standing by -- Professor at window -- Dorothy raises up on her elbow --
speaks -- Aunt Em puts her back on pillow -- then rises and exits --
Hunk -- Hickory and Zeke enter -- kneel beside bed -- CAMERA TRUCKS
forward -- they speak to Dorothy -- CAMERA PULLS back as Zeke and others
exit right -- Aunt Em re-enters -- sits by Dorothy -- holds her
head(hand) -- CAMERA TRUCKS back -- Zeke and others standing at right --
UNCLE HENRY
She got quite a bump on the head -- we kinda
thought there for a minute she was going to
leave us.
PROFESSOR
Oh --
DOROTHY
But I did leave you, Uncle Henry -- that's
just the trouble. And I tried to get back
for days and days.
AUNT EM
There, there, lie quiet now. You just had
a bad dream.
DOROTHY
No --
HUNK
Sure -- remember me -- your old pal, Hunk?
HICKORY
And me -- Hickory?
ZEKE
You couldn't forget my face, could you?
DOROTHY
No. But it wasn't a dream -- it was a place.
And you -- and you -- and you -- and you were
there.
PROFESSOR
Oh --
(others laugh)
DOROTHY
But you couldn't have been, could you?
AUNT EM
Oh, we dream lots of silly things when we --
DOROTHY
No, Aunt Em -- this was a real, truly live
place. And I remember that some of it
wasn't very nice....
MCU -- Dorothy -- Camera shooting down past Aunt Em --
DOROTHY
...but most of it was beautiful. But just
the same, all I kept saying to everybody
was, I want to go home. And they sent me
home.
MLS -- Dorothy lying in bed -- Aunt Em sitting by her -- Professor at
window -- Uncle Henry -- Zeke -- Hunk and Hickory standing by -- they
laugh -- Toto jumps up on to bed -- Dorothy takes Toto in her arms --
DOROTHY
Doesn't anybody believe me?
UNCLE HENRY
Of course we believe you, Dorothy.
DOROTHY
Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home!
MCU -- Dorothy holding Toto in her arms -- Camera shooting past Aunt Em
at right f.g. -- Dorothy looks around room -- speaks -- tears come
to her eyes -- Aunt Em rises -- puts her arm around Dorothy -
DOROTHY
Home! And this is my room -- and you're
all here! And I'm not going to leave here
ever, ever again, because I love you all!
And -- Oh, Auntie Em -- there's no place
like home!
Steve Hayes
>BTW JRRT himself uses dreams as a sort of deus ex machina, especially
>the "Seek for the broken sword" dream.
Not to mention that 20th-century morality play "Dallas", which, a generation
ago, appeared on the nation's television screens every Tuesday.
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/litmain.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
Steve Hayes
>Btw Weirdstone was one of the few fantasy/sci-fi stories that
>truly scared me. The Mara troll-women still give me the shivers.
And though the underground tunnel sequence is almost a cliche of the genre,
the one in "The weirdstone of Brisingamen" was, and is, the scariest I've ever
read.
Tolkien uses it twice in "The Hobbit" (Bilbo's encounter with Gollum, and
Smaug's lair), and at least three times in "Lord of the rings" (Moria, the
paths of the dead, and Shelob's lair). The actual disposal of the ring could
count as a fourth, I suppose. But not even Shelob was as scary as the one in
"Weirdstone".
Sean_Q_
> Tolkien uses it twice in "The Hobbit" (Bilbo's encounter with Gollum, and
> Smaug's lair)
You left out "In the Halls of the Elven King" (Peer Gynt music, please).
SQ
Troels Forchhammer
spoke these staves:
> In article "Re: Tolkien spoofs, satires and parodies"
> Troels Forchhammer scribed this message on the prow of an Elven
> dory and set it drifting down the Anduin:
> http://4.bp.blogspot.com/
_B_BaV2yyRno/RakjfC705hI/AAAAAAAAACA/9t_b1Xq_ocU/s1600-h/dory+%282%
29resize.jpg
>>
And scribing on the prow of an Elven dory is no mean task, I can add
. . . ;-)
>> When speaking about what fairy-story is _not_, Tolkien said:
>>
>> Next, after travellers' tales, I would also exclude, or
>> rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of
>> Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the
>> apparent occurrence of its marvels.
>
> And yet Lewis Carroll's two classics, Wonderland & Looking Glass
> are dreams.
>
> However, it could be argued that the two Alice stories aren't,
> strictly speaking, fairy tales. But then again, why shouldn't they
> be?
Tolkien explicitly disqualified them in 'On Fairy-Stories' (OFS):
The tale itself may, of course, be so good that one can
ignore the frame. Or it may be successful and amusing as a
dream-story. So are Lewis Carroll's _Alice_ stories, with
their dream-frame and dream-transitions. For this (and
other reasons) they are not fairy-stories.
(Tolkien, 'On Fairy-Stories' section 'Fairy Story')
Tolkien also speaks of Carroll's _Alice_ stories in end-note A:
The very root (not only the use) of their 'marvels' is
satiric, a mockery of unreason; and the 'dream' element is
not a mere machinery of introduction and ending, but
inherent in the action and transitions. These things
children can perceive and appreciate, if left to
themselves. But to many, as it was to me, _Alice_ is
presented as a fairy-story and while this misunderstanding
lasts, the distaste for the dream-machinery is felt. There
is no suggestion of dream in _The Wind in the Willows_.
'The Mole had been working very hard all the morning,
spring-cleaning his little house.' So it begins, and that
correct tone is maintained.
(Tolkien, 'On Fairy-Stories' Author's end-note A)
All this, of course, was (for me) not about whether the _Alice_
stories (or the Oz stories) should be considered fairy stories or not
-- that is a discussion that I'd leave to 'the literati' who're more
concerned with genres than I am -- but rather the point here is
whether Tolkien considered them fairy-stories. Not because it is
particularly interesting as such how Tolkien viewed Carroll's
stories, but because the OFS essay is often seen as Tolkien's
manifesto and the guiding principles behind LotR and other of
Tolkien's later work (I guess my original point was just my guess
that Tolkien would sympathize with the OP's sense of disappointment
over the changing of a story that had been presented as 'true' to a
dream-story).
Personally I tend to lump various kinds of sub-creative literature
together because I believe that the sub-creation, whether the
Galactic Empire, Middle-earth, Pern, or Urth, serves very much the
same function in such literature -- that of a model 'reality' that
isn't burdened with quite the same complexity as the primary reality,
so that interesting phenomema can be more easily isolated and
explored (in much the same way as I'd do when I was teaching physics
-- I'd create a model where I'd ignore all sorts of irrelevant
complexities such as friction, elasticity of strings etc. when
presenting a phenomenon to my students). So I would probably lump
together both what Tolkien would accept as fairy-stories as well as
much that he wouldn't.
<snip>
> But it could also be argued that this is precisely what fairy
> tales are.
My main problem is probably that we have no word in Danish
corresponding to the English 'fairy-tale.' The word we use,
"eventyr," appears to be etymologically connected to English
'adventure' (does anyone know if this is correct?) but has a far
wider applicability. So far the only useful (by which I mean
operative) definitions of 'fairy-story' that I've come across is
Tolkien's own in OFS, and his quotations there from the OED.
> Anyway, I didn't feel betrayed in the least by the Judy Garland
> version of Oz. She does wake up in bed, but also knows that it all
> wasn't a dream. I've never been to Kansas, but if I ever visit
> I'll see for myself if everything is gray (except for Cairn
> Terriers).
To be honest it's been many years since I saw the film, and I don't
recall how I interpreted the end, but I think the reactions here
indicate that it can be interpreted both ways.
> BTW JRRT himself uses dreams as a sort of deus ex machina,
> especially the "Seek for the broken sword" dream.
Quite a different thing that claiming that 'it was all just a
dream,' but yes ;-)
There's an interesting discussion to be had in investigating
Tolkien's use of dreams -- not only the dream that Faramir and
Boromir had, but certainly also Frodo's dreams (and I think Tuor also
had a dream at some point). Most of these are prophetic in nature
(raising the question of why Tolkien thought that people would be
more receptive of prophetic visions in dreams?) -- does anyone recall
anyone having a non-prophetic dream in Tolkien?
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows
how to read.
- /Guards! Guards!/ (Terry Pratchett)
Sean_Q_
> So are Lewis Carroll's _Alice_ stories, with
> their dream-frame and dream-transitions. For this (and
> other reasons) they are not fairy-stories.
> (Tolkien, 'On Fairy-Stories' section 'Fairy Story')
Well, just because the Great One said so, doesn't make it true (at least
not for all readers at all times).
> Tolkien also speaks of Carroll's _Alice_ stories in end-note A:
>
> But to many, as it was to me, _Alice_ is
> presented as a fairy-story and while this misunderstanding
> lasts, the distaste for the dream-machinery is felt.
I'm kind of puzzled at this... what does he mean, "presented as
a fairy-story"? I think Tolkien's distaste had something to do with
his being a demanding reader/listener and a purist. Of course, I'm
*glad* he was a purist, so I can safely ignore some of his purisms.
> There is no suggestion of dream in _The Wind in the Willows_.
In Wayfarers All, Rat goes into a dream-like trance. However, the real
dream is in Chapter 7, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn. And it's a deeply
Pagan dream, at that.
I could say more (and probably will) but I have to rush off and see
a man about a basilisk.
SQ - It's hot here today. I could use a Tuborg!
Jeff Urs
wrote:
> Most of these are prophetic in nature
> (raising the question of why Tolkien thought that people would be
> more receptive of prophetic visions in dreams?) -- does anyone recall
> anyone having a non-prophetic dream in Tolkien?
Well, when Frodo was dreaming prophetic dreams in Bombadil's house,
weren't Merry and Pippin busy with non-prophetic ones?
--
Jeff
Steve Hayes
I think I must re-read C.S. Lewis's essay on the topic.
One question that occurs to me is that we now speak of "fantasy" as a literary
genre, which includes some of Lewis's and Tolkien's writings. Is it the same
as what they meany by "fairy-stories", or is it wider?
Are the "Alice" stories within the fantasy genre, though not fairy stories?
dary...@aol.com
>
> - Show quoted text -
The fantasy genre seems to include a pretty broad range, sometimes
crossing over into science fiction (as in the Pern stories) any
fiction that posits a change in "De rerum natura" is pretty much
included. I would guess a rule of thumb would be that sci fi extends
the natural order while fantasy alters it, no? I couldn't think of
"The Well at the World's End" nor "Titus Groan" as fairy stories,
though perhaps in a Spencerian sense.
Daryl
Troels Forchhammer
<93965173-0b06-48dc...@n2g2000vba.googlegroups.com>
Jeff Urs <Jeff...@gmail.com> spoke these staves:
So they were, thank you!
I don't know why I remembered Frodo's dream (I suppose one could
actually also debate whether Frodo's dream there was really
'prophetic' -- at least it had, as Gandalf pointed out, 'late in
coming') and forgot Merry and Pippin, but there you are ;-)
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not
imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They
laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed
at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the
Clown.
- Carl Sagan
Troels Forchhammer
<8f4c02ca-f6c9-400a...@o13g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
"dary...@aol.com" <dary...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
> On Aug 6, 7:59�pm, Steve Hayes <hayesm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:12:28 +0200, Troels Forchhammer
>>
On genres in general and fairy-stories in particular, specifically
Tolkien's view on these, as expounded in the _On Fairy-Stories_
essay:
>> I think I must re-read C.S. Lewis's essay on the topic.
<Glances at my reading-list>
If you could post a summary, that would be great :-)
>> One question that occurs to me is that we now speak of "fantasy"
>> as a lit erary genre, which includes some of Lewis's and
>> Tolkien's writings. Is it the same as what they meany by
>> "fairy-stories", or is it wider?
My _impression_ has been that fairy-stories, both in Tolkien's
definition and in the sense of 'tales about fairies' constitute a
subset of the modern fantasy genre. But I have to reiterate both that
I am not certain about what constitutes a 'fairy-story' in other
definitions, nor am I terribly concerned with genres in general -- I
tend to use a simple two-dimensional system: one 'fiction vs. non-
fiction' axis (which should be seen as a scale, I think, not a binary
system) and one axis 'measuring' how well I like the book ;-)
Tolkien's work generally scores very, _very_, high on 'like' and
rather high on 'fiction' (though that of course fails to consider
applicability, but that's an alltogether different story).
>> Are the "Alice" stories within the fantasy genre, though not
>> fairy stories?
>
> The fantasy genre seems to include a pretty broad range, sometimes
> crossing over into science fiction (as in the Pern stories)
I think McCaffrey's _Pern_ books are a very useful example, clearly
showing the bluriness of the distinction between science fiction and
fantasy. But even in Middle-earth 'Magic' is considered a natural
thing -- a part of the natural order and, in many ways, a part of the
science of Middle-earth. Not that I think anyone would call Tolkien's
work 'science fiction', but to show that sometimes any attempt to
distinguish between bad science and magic is going to be arbitrary
and subjective (which of course evokes Clarke's third law right
there).
In many ways I think the distinction is artificial and tends to cloud
over some important similarities -- it is a distinction that is
wholly related to the type of the setting (and which, as mentioned
above, cannot always give a satisfying answer), and which, IMNSHO,
does more to hinder and obscure the issues than to help an attempt to
analyze this kind of literature.
> any fiction that posits a change in "De rerum natura" is pretty
> much included.
I think it has also to do with the nature of that change -- if the
author does the handwave and doesn't explain, or explains it
explicitly as 'magic' (or something equivalent), then it _definitely_
becomes fantasy, but there are cases that cannot be easily decided.
> I would guess a rule of thumb would be that sci fi extends the
> natural order while fantasy alters it, no?
But that would, IMO, place LotR in the realm of science fiction ;-)
I've often said, and I maintain that there is no basic alteration of
'rerum natura' in LotR, and that the 'magic' is an extension of the
natural order (when one includes the Silmarillion, one has also to
deal with supernatural beings, but these, too, can be seen as an
extension to the nature of Arda rather than a violation the natural
order, or a change of the nature of other things that are within
Arda). Physics is a very thankful science, and given enough energy
and the ability to control it, there are very few limits to what you
can do ;-)
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much
more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant
of ordinary things.
- Discworld scientists at work, /Equal Rites/ (Terry Pratchett)
Öjevind Lång
news:h5fsql$g6l$1...@aioe.org...
[snip]
>> There is no suggestion of dream in _The Wind in the Willows_.
>
> In Wayfarers All, Rat goes into a dream-like trance. However, the real
> dream is in Chapter 7, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn. And it's a deeply
> Pagan dream, at that.
I've never perceived that episode as a dream but as something that actually
happens to Rat, Mole and little Portly.
�jevind
Derek Broughton
What? The ones involving Goldberry, bathing in a secluded forest pool?
Weren't they prophetic?
--
derek
Derek Broughton
> On Aug 6, 7:59 pm, Steve Hayes <hayesm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> One question that occurs to me is that we now speak of "fantasy" as a
>> literary genre, which includes some of Lewis's and Tolkien's writings. Is
>> it the same as what they meany by "fairy-stories", or is it wider?
>>
>> Are the "Alice" stories within the fantasy genre, though not fairy
>> stories?
>
> The fantasy genre seems to include a pretty broad range, sometimes
> crossing over into science fiction (as in the Pern stories) any
> fiction that posits a change in "De rerum natura" is pretty much
> included. I would guess a rule of thumb would be that sci fi extends
> the natural order while fantasy alters it, no? I couldn't think of
> "The Well at the World's End" nor "Titus Groan" as fairy stories,
> though perhaps in a Spencerian sense.
One definition I've seen is that "Fantasy" involves exactly one element that
is "impossible". By that definition, any SF involving faster-than-light
space travel is probably a fantasy. I rather suspect that Tolkien would
approve of such definitions, though.
--
derek
Derek Broughton
> In message
> <8f4c02ca-f6c9-400a...@o13g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
> "dary...@aol.com" <dary...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
>
>> I would guess a rule of thumb would be that sci fi extends the
>> natural order while fantasy alters it, no?
>
> But that would, IMO, place LotR in the realm of science fiction ;-)
Much as I hate to use the term "speculative fiction" (I hate it, because
writers like Margaret Atwood use it to weasel out of the fact that they
really do write Science Fiction), and I doubt Tolkien would have much
trouble with that. His story is supposed to be set in our own past.
--
derek
Troels Forchhammer
Derek Broughton <de...@pointerstop.ca> spoke these staves:
>
<snip>
> One definition I've seen is that "Fantasy" involves exactly one
> element that is "impossible". By that definition, any SF
> involving faster-than-light space travel is probably a fantasy. I
> rather suspect that Tolkien would approve of such definitions,
> though.
Did you mean to say 'approve' here? I ask because the rest of the
sentence made me read it, at first, as 'disapprove' until I realized
what it actually said ;-)
For my own part, I am not sure how I think Tolkien would have reacted
-- I can see arguements either way (and I can even see how one could
argue that he was uninterested in the 'fantasy' genre as such and thus
wouldn't care either way), so I'd also be interested in your arguments
regardless which way you lean.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no
basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power
derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some
farcical aquatic ceremony.
- /Monty Python and the Holy Grail/
Derek Broughton
> In message <news:kqjtk6-...@morgen.pointerstop.ca>
> Derek Broughton <de...@pointerstop.ca> spoke these staves:
>>
>
> <snip>
>
>> One definition I've seen is that "Fantasy" involves exactly one
>> element that is "impossible". By that definition, any SF
>> involving faster-than-light space travel is probably a fantasy. I
>> rather suspect that Tolkien would approve of such definitions,
>> though.
>
> Did you mean to say 'approve' here?
Yes.
> I ask because the rest of the
> sentence made me read it, at first, as 'disapprove' until I realized
> what it actually said ;-)
>
> For my own part, I am not sure how I think Tolkien would have reacted
> -- I can see arguements either way (and I can even see how one could
> argue that he was uninterested in the 'fantasy' genre as such and thus
> wouldn't care either way), so I'd also be interested in your arguments
> regardless which way you lean.
I think he liked to categorize precisely. He didn't like to think of his
works as fantasy in the sense that the term tends to be used, but would
accept that they were fantasy by the definition I gave. Of course, he'd
then subdivide the genre much further before getting to LOTR.
--
derek
Paul S. Person
>Troels Forchhammer chiseled in runes:
<snippo>
>> Tolkien also speaks of Carroll's _Alice_ stories in end-note A:
>>
>> But to many, as it was to me, _Alice_ is
>> presented as a fairy-story and while this misunderstanding
>> lasts, the distaste for the dream-machinery is felt.
>
>I'm kind of puzzled at this... what does he mean, "presented as
>a fairy-story"? I think Tolkien's distaste had something to do with
>his being a demanding reader/listener and a purist. Of course, I'm
>*glad* he was a purist, so I can safely ignore some of his purisms.
He was given the book to read.
The person who gave him the book to read told him it was a
"fairy-story".
It isn't.
>
>> There is no suggestion of dream in _The Wind in the Willows_.
>
>In Wayfarers All, Rat goes into a dream-like trance. However, the real
>dream is in Chapter 7, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn. And it's a deeply
>Pagan dream, at that.
I don't think the problem is with dreams /within/ the story; the
problem is with stories which are /all a dream/, especially (I would
think) those that appear to be rousing and exciting stories which, at
the very end, turn out to be "just a dream".
So saying "[t]here is no suggestion of dream in _The Wind in the
Willows_" does not mean that there are no dreams within it; it means
that the story itself is not a dream.
Paul S. Person
<snippo>
>There's an interesting discussion to be had in investigating
>Tolkien's use of dreams -- not only the dream that Faramir and
>Boromir had, but certainly also Frodo's dreams (and I think Tuor also
>had a dream at some point). Most of these are prophetic in nature
>(raising the question of why Tolkien thought that people would be
>more receptive of prophetic visions in dreams?) -- does anyone recall
>anyone having a non-prophetic dream in Tolkien?
Dreams have traditionally been regarded as a source of prophecy, that
is, a means used by God (or one or another of the gods) to communicate
with Man, not just in literature, but in real life as well. I can't
claim that this was the case in /all/ cultures, because I do not know
if it was or not; but it certainly was the case in /many/ cultures.
dary...@aol.com
wrote:
> In message
> <8f4c02ca-f6c9-400a-87e4-3cea48577...@o13g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
> "darylg...@aol.com" <darylg...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
>
>
>
> > On Aug 6, 7:59 pm, Steve Hayes <hayesm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:12:28 +0200, Troels Forchhammer
>
>
> > much included.
>
> I think it has also to do with the nature of that change -- if the
> author does the handwave and doesn't explain, or explains it
> explicitly as 'magic' (or something equivalent), then it _definitely_
> becomes fantasy, but there are cases that cannot be easily decided.
>
> > I would guess a rule of thumb would be that sci fi extends the
> > natural order while fantasy alters it, no?
>
> But that would, IMO, place LotR in the realm of science fiction ;-)
> I've often said, and I maintain that there is no basic alteration of
> 'rerum natura' in LotR, and that the 'magic' is an extension of the
> natural order (when one includes the Silmarillion, one has also to
> deal with supernatural beings, but these, too, can be seen as an
> extension to the nature of Arda rather than a violation the natural
> order, or a change of the nature of other things that are within
> Arda). Physics is a very thankful science, and given enough energy
> and the ability to control it, there are very few limits to what you
> can do ;-)
> Troels Forchhammer
> Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
> Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
>
> They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much
> more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant
> of ordinary things.
> - Discworld scientists at work, /Equal Rites/ (Terry Pratchett)
Ah but I was speaking of a change in the "natural order" as we
understand it, here, now. Any good work of fiction, fantasy or
otherwise should be internally consistant, the impossible (given the
circumstances) shouldn't happen, but I was speaking about things
concievable, given what we understand of the universe now. We cannot
produce Gandalf's blast of power from a wooden staff, nor converse
with the dead, nothing leads us to believe that such things will ever
be possible. Faster than light is at least concievable in some
theories though I have my doubts it is actually doable. BTW your
"enough" in "given enough energy" assumes that there can be enough,
perhaps that isn't the case, eg. I could say given enough energy I
could survive with my skin inside out, well, if I couldn't, I just
didn't have enough.
Daryl
Troels Forchhammer
<f4be9ae9-5ad1-454e...@g6g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>
"dary...@aol.com" <dary...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
> On Aug 7, 2:08�am, Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid>
> wrote:
>>
<snip>
>> But that would, IMO, place LotR in the realm of science fiction
>> ;-) � I've often said, and I maintain that there is no basic
>> alteration of 'rerum natura' in LotR, and that the 'magic' is an
>> extension of the natural order (when one includes the
>> Silmarillion, one has also to deal with supernatural beings, but
>> these, too, can be seen as an extension to the nature of Arda
>> rather than a violation the natural order, or a change of the
>> nature of other things that are within Arda). Physics is a very
>> thankful science, and given enough energy and the ability to
>> control it, there are very few limits to what you can do ;-) �
>
> Ah but I was speaking of a change in the "natural order" as we
> understand it, here, now.
So was I, but even then there is no inherent difference between
Tolkien's 'magic' and Isaac Asimov's 'hyperspace'. Like so many other
inventions of science fiction, Asimov's 'hyperspace' or his
'positronic brain' are no more imaginable than the Master Ring --
let's not be fooled by Asimov's excellent technical lingo or his
great knowledge of science (when he first produced these ideas they
were, perhaps, not quite as impossible as they are today, but that's
another story).
> Any good work of fiction, fantasy or otherwise should be internally
> consistant, the impossible (given the circumstances) shouldn't
> happen,
Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more sub-creative;
but at any rate it is found in practice that 'the inner
consistency of reality' is more difficult to produce, the
more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of
primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary
World. It is easier to produce this kind of 'reality' with
more 'sober' material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains
undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only
half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely
'fanciful.' Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human
language can say _the green sun_. Many can then imagine or
picture it. But that is not enough -- though it may already
be a more potent thing than many a 'thumbnail sketch' or
'transcript of life' that receives literary praise.
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will
be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably
require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a
special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such
difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any
degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art:
indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most
potent mode.
[Tolkien, _On Fairy-Stories_ section on 'Fantasy']
> but I was speaking about things concievable, given what we
> understand of the universe now.
So was I.
The curious point is that there really isn't anything in LotR that
truly _violates_ the 'laws of nature' as we understand them today.
Tolkien never attempts to explain how things work in his world (it is
generally conveniently brushed of as 'magic' by uncomprehending
hobbits), so all we have to go by are the phenomena themselves, but
they don't violate the laws of physics or any other natural science:
they extend them, add to them etc. General relativity even allows
information to travel backwards in time, so the various prophetic
visions aren't in violation of what is _known_ about causality
(though they may conflict with what is popularly _believed_ about
causality, but I'm not talking about common misconceptions about
science here -- I talk about actual science).
> We cannot produce Gandalf's blast of power from a wooden staff,
> nor converse with the dead, nothing leads us to believe that such
> things will ever be possible.
Why not?
I don't think they are any more 'far out' than Asimov's hyperspace
etc. A technology to 'download' the memories and consciousness of a
dead person before the cells die, another technological doodad to
allow you to concentrate heat just outside the end of your wooden
staff, other doodads to allow either voice-control or even direct
mind-control etc. It is all no less (and no more) conceivable than
most of the tomfoolery we encounter in standard science fiction.
True, Tolkien doesn't try to explain it away as technological
doodads, but while that might be a workable distinction in most
cases, it fails to cover a number of borderline cases satisfyingly.
Are McCaffrey's _Pern_ stories fantasy or science fiction? Does the
explanations given in the later books change their classification?
And why on earth should it?
> Faster than light is at least concievable in some theories though I
> have my doubts it is actually doable.
Faster than light transport is concievable, yes, but not in the
majority of the ways it is presented in science fiction. If we ignore
the 'how', then it doesn't matter if Tolkien describes it as
technological doodads either, but if that makes a difference, then
the 'how' does matter, and e.g. Asimov's 'hyperspace' goes the same
way as Tolkien's 'straight path'.
> BTW your "enough" in "given enough energy" assumes that there can
> be enough,
Of course -- faster than light travel may require infinite energy as
well, so that hardly makes a difference.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded
gold, it would be a merrier world.
- Thorin Oakenshield, /The Hobbit/ (J.R.R. Tolkien)
hen...@swirve.com
Frodo to pour varnish on his hairy feet, wait until it had dried and
hardened and then click his varnished feet together and say: "Mordor".
Of course, there is an early draft where Tolkien lets Gandalf do this
but thoughtlessly instructs Frodo to say: "Mount Doom", with the
result that Frodo is transported to the Crack of Doom and is burned to
a crisp while the Ring is being consumed. Possibly, this distasteful
ending horrified Tolkien so much that he abandoned the entire idea,
which if implemented with more skill would have saved his readers the
trouble of reading so very many chapters. Three would have done the
job.
Horus Engels
Paul S. Person
<Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid> wrote:
<snippo>
>True, Tolkien doesn't try to explain it away as technological
>doodads, but while that might be a workable distinction in most
>cases, it fails to cover a number of borderline cases satisfyingly.
>Are McCaffrey's _Pern_ stories fantasy or science fiction? Does the
>explanations given in the later books change their classification?
>And why on earth should it?
That depends on what you mean by "the later books". As others have
pointed, the technological nature of the fighting Queen Dragons at the
end of the first "novel" (that is, the last short story used to form
the first "novel") is a dead giveaway that Pern once had a higher
level of technology than seen so far.
And the stories were published in Analog (motto: "Science Fiction is
analogous to Science Fact), which was not only a Science Fiction
magazine, but a /hard/ Science Fiction magazine. That, all by itself,
is enough to show that they were all and always Science Fiction,
however strongly the presence of flying dragons may appear to argue
otherwise.
dary...@aol.com
wrote:
> In message
> <f4be9ae9-5ad1-454e-a403-f8cc52903...@g6g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>
> "darylg...@aol.com" <darylg...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
>
>
>
> > On Aug 7, 2:08 am, Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid>
> > wrote:
>
>
> > Ah but I was speaking of a change in the "natural order" as we
> > understand it, here, now.
>
> So was I, but even then there is no inherent difference between
> Tolkien's 'magic' and Isaac Asimov's 'hyperspace'. Like so many other
> inventions of science fiction, Asimov's 'hyperspace' or his
> 'positronic brain' are no more imaginable than the Master Ring --
>
OK, I give, but there certainly is a different feel to Asimov and
Clark then Tolkien and say most of Tantith Lee's work.
And as to the Pern stories, I have to admit being really saddened by
the introduction of technology into a perfectly delightful fantasy
series.
Daryl
Noel Q. von Schneiffel
The truth is, there was an even worse version when Frodo clicked his
feet together before the varnish had properly hardened. With the
result that his feet were stuck together for the rest of his life. He
had to hop to mordor, the poor little guy. Without any doubt, this is
the origin of the misconception that hobbits were actually rabbits, a
misconception Tolkien had to correct a couple of times later (see
Letter 27).
PS: I'm back from a little pilgrimage. I rowed to Tonga on a hollowed-
out giant zucchini. I hope you behaved in my absence.
Noel
Derek Broughton
> PS: I'm back from a little pilgrimage. I rowed to Tonga on a hollowed-
> out giant zucchini.
Which is unfortunately safer than using their ferries.
--
derek
Öjevind Lång
news:Xns9C61A87...@130.133.1.4...
[snip]
> So was I, but even then there is no inherent difference between
> Tolkien's 'magic' and Isaac Asimov's 'hyperspace'. Like so many other
> inventions of science fiction, Asimov's 'hyperspace' or his
> 'positronic brain' are no more imaginable than the Master Ring --
> let's not be fooled by Asimov's excellent technical lingo or his
> great knowledge of science (when he first produced these ideas they
> were, perhaps, not quite as impossible as they are today, but that's
> another story).
True, but Asimov would probably have become very annoyed if you had said
that to him. He loved thinking of himself as completely scientific or
rational, although of course he wasn't. His worship of robots who would
become surrogate gods and solve our problems was defintiely not rational.
All the same, he did enjoy LotR, but he was careful to point out that he
only enjoyed them "as fairy-stories", as if he was afraid of otherwise
cominf under suspicron of beliveling in wizards, elves, hobbist and so on.
�jevind
Troels Forchhammer
<9e28441d-807b-4172...@z34g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
"dary...@aol.com" <dary...@aol.com> spoke these staves:
> On Aug 7, 3:03�pm, Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid>
> wrote:
>>
>> there is no inherent difference between Tolkien's 'magic' and
>> Isaac Asimov's 'hyperspace'. Like so many other inventions of
>> science fiction, Asimov's 'hyperspace' or his 'positronic brain'
>> are no more imaginable than the Master Ring --
>
> OK, I give, but there certainly is a different feel to Asimov and
> Clark then Tolkien and say most of Tantith Lee's work.
I'm afraid that I haven't read Tantith Lee's work, but there is
certainly a difference between Asimov and Clarke and then Tolkien and
e.g. Le Guin. It is not difficult to distinguish the clear-cut cases
-- on one hand Asimov and Clarke both deal with an imaginary future
for mankind where we (or those we meet) have access to technology
that is far advanced relative to what we know today (in fact far
enough advanced to, usually, invoke Clarke's third law, which Asimov
actually utilizes in the _Foundation_ series); on the other hand
Tolkien explicitly deals with an imaginary past where the general
level of technology is far lower than what we know today, just as the
technology level in Le Guin's _Earthsea_ books, and both use magic as
an explanation for the extraordinary abilities their characters
possess. I may invoke Clarke's third law when it comes to the mere
symptoms, but we, the readers, are never left in doubt as to whether
the effect is accomplished by magic or technology.
All this, however, is, IMO, a minor thing -- we substitute one kind
of sub-creation with another kind, and in many cases the differences
in feeling between two sub-creations are, IMO, just as big between
sub-creations of the same kind as between those of different kinds.
I acknowledge that there seems to be an element of authorial
preference involved: very few authors successfully create worlds of
both kinds (both the technological and the magical); and many readers
may prefer one kind of sub-creation to another.
However, I feel that the distinction, while possibly useful for a
reader who prefers one kind and dislikes the other, is less useful
when it comes to literary critique -- in my experience this kind of
sub-creations, when viewed as a literary device, are used in the same
manners in both fantasy and science fiction, and I think it would be
interesting to ask to, and investigate, the reasons for the huge
success of sub-creative fiction in the twentieth century --
especially as it has generally happened in spite of a clear antipathy
from the majority of the literary elite.
> And as to the Pern stories, I have to admit being really saddened
> by the introduction of technology into a perfectly delightful
> fantasy series.
As Paul points out, they were, of course, always intended as SF by
McCaffrey, but I'll have to admit that I didn't catch it either ;-)
(their initial publication in a SF magazine is perhaps a bit too
obscure for most readers to know -- judging them only on the books
themselves, I had them down as a rather unusual kind of fantasy). I'm
not sure that I'd go as far as to say I was disappointed by the
introduction of advanced technology, but it was certainly a surprise
to me, and one that changed the way the stories feel to me (I'm not
prepared to say they feel either better or worse -- just that they
feel different).
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.
- Aragorn "Strider", /Two Towers/ (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Troels Forchhammer
�jevind L�ng <bredba...@ojevind.lang> spoke these staves:
> "Troels Forchhammer" <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid> skrev i
> meddelandet news:Xns9C61A87...@130.133.1.4...
>>
>> 'hyperspace' or his 'positronic brain' are no more imaginable
>> than the Master Ring -- let's not be fooled by Asimov's excellent
>> technical lingo or his great knowledge of science (when he first
>> produced these ideas they were, perhaps, not quite as impossible
>> as they are today, but that's another story).
>
> True, but Asimov would probably have become very annoyed if you
> had said that to him.
Quite likely ;-)
I'd like to think that he would acknowledge that I am right, though.
Science has moved on since he wrote his first _Robot_ stories, or his
first _Galactic Empire_ stories etc. and what might then have been at
least remotely concievable has since been refuted. I'm not sure that
his idea of hyperspace with reciprocal distances was actually
concievable even when he first wrote about it; at least I think it was
not considered a part of a theory in the same way as wormholes are
considered a part of general relativity today (the question is whether
they can be physically realized, not whether they are theoretically
possible).
> He loved thinking of himself as completely scientific or rational,
> although of course he wasn't.
None of us are, really. Asimov _was_ an excellent science writer and
had a very good grasp of science, but there are certainly elements in
his stories that must be seen as unscientific and irrational. In the
_Foundation_ books there's the whole matter of the emotion-control and
the planet-wide collective consciousness -- despite any of his attempts
to rationalize these, they both, IMO, approach an element of magic
rather than science.
> His worship of robots who would become surrogate gods and solve
> our problems was defintiely not rational.
;-)
Harsh, but true. The irony is that his robots are so entirely rational,
and so they come to represent an irrational belief in the power for
salvation of the rational.
> All the same, he did enjoy LotR,
And Tolkien enjoyed his stories.
> but he was careful to point out that he only enjoyed them "as
> fairy-stories",
Well -- that's quite appropriate, isn't it ;-) At least I don't think
Tolkien would have the least offended (unless he did put an 'only' or
'just' in front of it).
> as if he was afraid of otherwise cominf under suspicron of
> beliveling in wizards, elves, hobbist and so on.
Don't everybody?
And of course we all believe in Tyope :)
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
- Niels Bohr, to a young physicist
Dirk Thierbach
> I acknowledge that there seems to be an element of authorial
> preference involved: very few authors successfully create worlds of
> both kinds (both the technological and the magical);
But I don't think that is really the problem: Quite a few authors
can, and very successfully. Eg. McMaster Bujold. And mixing technology
and magic isn't so difficult, either. Anne McCaffrey has already
been mentioned, LeGuin did it very explicitely in /Rocannon's World/
(and came up with a nice marriage of relativity and a fairy-tale
motif), Vernor Vinge did, and lots of others I can't remember in
the moment. Especially in the "golden age" there really wasn't
a sharp distinction between SF and F, one gets princesses in space
everywhere, from Edgar Rice Burroughs on. And /Star Wars/ and even
/Babylon 5/ still take that up.
So it's really only props and setting. Which can be easily
exchanged, if necessary. To convert, say, /The Tempest/ to /Forbidden
Planet/.
And even "hard science" isn't restricted to SF, Tolkien e.g. used a lot
of his knowledge of philology and history (which is also science,
just not physics in LotR. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
Unfortunately, many modern authors of Fantasy don't do that, and it shows.
So I completely agree with what you wrote earlier:
> In many ways I think the distinction is artificial and tends to cloud
> over some important similarities -- it is a distinction that is
> wholly related to the type of the setting (and which, as mentioned
> above, cannot always give a satisfying answer), and which, IMNSHO,
> does more to hinder and obscure the issues than to help an attempt to
> analyze this kind of literature.
And moreover, I also think that
> However, I feel that the distinction, while possibly useful for a
> reader who prefers one kind and dislikes the other, is less useful
> when it comes to literary critique -- in my experience this kind of
> sub-creations, when viewed as a literary device, are used in the same
> manners in both fantasy and science fiction,
*this* is the important point: the sub-creative process, the literary
work that uses the "what-if" game to tell an interesting story.
> I think it would be interesting to ask to, and investigate, the
> reasons for the huge success of sub-creative fiction in the
> twentieth century -- especially as it has generally happened in
> spite of a clear antipathy from the majority of the literary elite.
I guess Tolkien would have some answers to that :-)
- Dirk
Taemon
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
>> I acknowledge that there seems to be an element of authorial
>> preference involved: very few authors successfully create worlds of
>> both kinds (both the technological and the magical);
> But I don't think that is really the problem: Quite a few authors
> can, and very successfully. Eg. McMaster Bujold. And mixing technology
> and magic isn't so difficult, either. Anne McCaffrey has already
> been mentioned, LeGuin did it very explicitely in /Rocannon's World/
> (and came up with a nice marriage of relativity and a fairy-tale
> motif), Vernor Vinge did, and lots of others I can't remember in
> the moment.
Julian May. I just finished rereading the Saga of the Exiles. It's my
favourite series by far, even if it is almost as old as I am. Granted, it's
not "magic" per se, it's "metafunctions" - but they work just the same :-)
I really don't like Anne McCaffrey's work. I didn't even finish that
dragon-stuff. I thought it slow and unconvincing.
> And even "hard science" isn't restricted to SF, Tolkien e.g. used a
> lot of his knowledge of philology and history (which is also science,
> just not physics in LotR. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
> Unfortunately, many modern authors of Fantasy don't do that, and it
> shows.
Oh, boy. I review fantasy for the public library and it really makes one
wonder if all genres suffer from such a high amount of waste of paper. It's
unbelievable what makes it into print. The latest gem is "Elven fire" by
Monika Felten and never before have I seen such a blundering collection of
deus ex machinas, coincidences, portents, prophecies, magical spells that
somehow only work once... it's the worst storytelling I have seen in some
time. It seems the thing even won a price. Is it me? Did I overlook some
greatness? Gods, grant me a fantasy book with a prophecy that doesn't come
true.
T.
Dirk Thierbach
> Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>> And mixing technology and magic isn't so difficult, either. Anne
>> McCaffrey has already been mentioned, LeGuin did it very
>> explicitely in /Rocannon's World/ (and came up with a nice marriage
>> of relativity and a fairy-tale motif), Vernor Vinge did, and lots
>> of others I can't remember in the moment.
> Julian May. I just finished rereading the Saga of the Exiles.
Yes, for example. (Don't remember it so well, has been long ago).
Or Andre Norton (also successful with both SF and F). Or Jack Vance,
Fred Saberhagen, George R.R. Martin, Poul Anderson, Walter M. Miller,
and so on... Or the "protagonist discovers ancient technology that does
magical things" motif. Or the "magic that is really psi-abilities" motif.
> Oh, boy. I review fantasy for the public library
Anything you can recommend? :-)
> and it really makes one
> wonder if all genres suffer from such a high amount of waste of paper.
According to Sturgeon's Law, I don't think it's restricted to Fantasy.
"Pulp SF" was called "pulp" for a reason.
> Gods, grant me a fantasy book with a prophecy that doesn't come
> true.
Having a prophecy which doesn't come true probably makes no sense in a
story, unless you base the story on it ("we've got lots of prophecies,
and just have to pick the right one..."). But I think the traditional
way is to make the prophecy ambigous (and, if possible, not obviously
ambigous), so when it comes true, the outcome is not quite what is
expected...
- Dirk
Öjevind Lång
[snip]
> I'm afraid that I haven't read Tantith Lee's work, but there is
> certainly a difference between Asimov and Clarke and then Tolkien and
> e.g. Le Guin. It is not difficult to distinguish the clear-cut cases
> -- on one hand Asimov and Clarke both deal with an imaginary future
> for mankind where we (or those we meet) have access to technology
> that is far advanced relative to what we know today (in fact far
> enough advanced to, usually, invoke Clarke's third law, which Asimov
> actually utilizes in the _Foundation_ series);
Remind me - what is Clarke's third law?
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
news:20090810083912...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
>> I acknowledge that there seems to be an element of authorial
>> preference involved: very few authors successfully create worlds of
>> both kinds (both the technological and the magical);
>
> But I don't think that is really the problem: Quite a few authors
> can, and very successfully. Eg. McMaster Bujold. And mixing technology
> and magic isn't so difficult, either.
A really fascinating example is Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows", where one
half of the Earth is ruled by magic and the other one by laws of nature. And
then there is Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth" trilogy, where magic
comes into being as an unforeseen result of an American government programme
meant to nullify the destructtion of a nuclear war. Almost all machinery
except the most primitive ones (windmills and the like) simply stops
working, and its powers turn into other powers of a supernatural nature.
�jevind
Dirk Thierbach
> Remind me - what is Clarke's third law?
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
- Dirk
Öjevind Lång
> In message <news:7e8vg8F...@mid.individual.net>
> �jevind L�ng <bredba...@ojevind.lang> spoke these staves:
> I'd like to think that he would acknowledge that I am right, though.
> Science has moved on since he wrote his first _Robot_ stories, or his
> first _Galactic Empire_ stories etc. and what might then have been at
> least remotely concievable has since been refuted. I'm not sure that
> his idea of hyperspace with reciprocal distances was actually
> concievable even when he first wrote about it; at least I think it was
> not considered a part of a theory in the same way as wormholes are
> considered a part of general relativity today (the question is whether
> they can be physically realized, not whether they are theoretically
> possible).
One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that one
could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
("psychohistory"). That is utter rubbish, of course. How does one decide
which facts are relevant, and how are they to be processed? And when you
have assembled and analysed the data from one single planet, they would
already be obsolete or proved to be incorrect.
>> He loved thinking of himself as completely scientific or rational,
>> although of course he wasn't.
>
> None of us are, really. Asimov _was_ an excellent science writer and
> had a very good grasp of science, but there are certainly elements in
> his stories that must be seen as unscientific and irrational. In the
> _Foundation_ books there's the whole matter of the emotion-control and
> the planet-wide collective consciousness -- despite any of his attempts
> to rationalize these, they both, IMO, approach an element of magic
> rather than science.
Yes, the emotion control is a rather stupid, simplistic conception of
hypnotism - almost reminiscent of Mandrake. As for planet-wide
consciousness, he rather obviously fell victim to James Lovelock's Gaia
theory, which had quite a following at one point. Of course, Lovelock
himself was appalled by what his more extreme fans did to his theory; he
didn't mean to actually imply that a planetary "consciousness" was a sort of
person who thought and made decisions based on the conclusions arrived at.
Anyway, as I have said before, I think all Asimov's Foundation novels suck
except the first three.
As to his excellent grasp of science, I largely agree with you, but there
are some glaring exceptions from it. In the Foundation trilogy, he mentions
(with obvious approval) the capital planet of Trantor, which is completely
covered by metal buildings except for the huge park (several square miles)
surrounding the emperor's palace. How the devil would such a planet produce
oxygen for everyone? He could have introduced some contrived (not to say
unscientific) deus ex machina such as areas of huge oxygen-producin
machines, but clearly, it never even occurred to him that the Trantor he
describes is ludicrous. And then, of course, one can also wonder how they
managed to bring so much metal to Trantor and why they couldn't have used
some ordinary cement and the like for most buildings.
>> His worship of robots who would become surrogate gods and solve
>> our problems was defintiely not rational.
>
> ;-)
>
> Harsh, but true. The irony is that his robots are so entirely rational,
> and so they come to represent an irrational belief in the power for
> salvation of the rational.
Exactly. A vicious circle. He even wrote a short story about a thinking
machine which is all alone after entropy has done its work, and which (or
who) after carefully planning things out creates the universe anew by
saying: "Let there be light."
>> All the same, he did enjoy LotR,
>
> And Tolkien enjoyed his stories.
Yes, it's nice to know it was reciprocal.
[snip]
>> as if he was afraid of otherwise cominf under suspicron of
>> beliveling in wizards, elves, hobbist and so on.
>
> Don't everybody?
I'm very afraid of cominf under suspicron of beliveling. ;-)
> And of course we all believe in Tyope :)
All hail to Tyope, our Muse!
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
Oh, of course. Thank you! I have always regarded that "law" as a rather
feeble excuse for introducing "science" one needs for one's story.
Öjevind
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>A really fascinating example is Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows", where one
>half of the Earth is ruled by magic and the other one by laws of nature. And
>then there is Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth" trilogy, where magic
>comes into being as an unforeseen result of an American government programme
>meant to nullify the destructtion of a nuclear war. Almost all machinery
>except the most primitive ones (windmills and the like) simply stops
>working, and its powers turn into other powers of a supernatural nature.
That's reminiscent of Peter Dickinson's "Changes" series, where the British
people as a whole reject modern technology as evil magic.
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/litmain.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
Derek Broughton
> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>> Remind me - what is Clarke's third law?
>
> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Darn, I thought it was: "There is no Law # 2"
--
derek
Derek Broughton
Oh! _I_ always thought it was a rather good excuse for introducing "magic"
:-)
--
derek
Derek Broughton
> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:18:40 +0200, Öjevind Lång
> <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>
>>A really fascinating example is Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows", where
>>one half of the Earth is ruled by magic and the other one by laws of
>>nature. And then there is Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth" trilogy,
>>where magic comes into being as an unforeseen result of an American
>>government programme meant to nullify the destructtion of a nuclear war.
>>Almost all machinery except the most primitive ones (windmills and the
>>like) simply stops working, and its powers turn into other powers of a
>>supernatural nature.
>
> That's reminiscent of Peter Dickinson's "Changes" series, where the
> British people as a whole reject modern technology as evil magic.
That's fiction?
--
derek
Sean_Q_
> PS: I'm back from a little pilgrimage. I rowed to Tonga on a hollowed-
> out giant zucchini.
You wouldn't have made it without some help from your Tickle-Me-Ulmo.
SQ
Christopher Henrich
Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid> wrote:
>
> However, I feel that the distinction, while possibly useful for a
> reader who prefers one kind and dislikes the other, is less useful
> when it comes to literary critique -- in my experience this kind of
> sub-creations, when viewed as a literary device, are used in the same
> manners in both fantasy and science fiction, and I think it would be
> interesting to ask to, and investigate, the reasons for the huge
> success of sub-creative fiction in the twentieth century --
> especially as it has generally happened in spite of a clear antipathy
> from the majority of the literary elite.
>
This goes to show how much power the literary elite really have.
"elite" means "elected." But who elected them? I don't remember voting...
And who are the literary elite today? F. R. Leavis is dead. Edmund
Wilson is dead. Lionel Trilling is dead. Sheesh! In Iran, at least they
know who the current ayatollahs *are*.
--
Christopher J. Henrich
chen...@monmouth.com
http://www.mathinteract.com
"A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver." -- Boon
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090810083912...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
Dirk Thierbach <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> spoke these staves:
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> I acknowledge that there seems to be an element of authorial
>> preference involved: very few authors successfully create worlds
>> of both kinds (both the technological and the magical);
>
> But I don't think that is really the problem: Quite a few authors
> can, and very successfully.
<snip examples>
I stand corrected, thank you :-)
> So it's really only props and setting. Which can be easily
> exchanged, if necessary. To convert, say, /The Tempest/ to
> /Forbidden Planet/.
And evidently even more so than I thought.
> And even "hard science" isn't restricted to SF, Tolkien e.g. used
> a lot of his knowledge of philology and history (which is also
> science, just not physics
Let's take the discussion of whether 'science' should be restricted to
the natural sciences some other time, shall we ;-)
(And, ignoring my own request <GG>,) I am, of course, not particularly
willing to allow anything but 'naturvidenskab' ('naturwissenschaft') as
science -- I much prefer 'wissenschaft' (Danish 'videnskab') as the
generic term (the term means 'an activity that generates knowledge' --
how ) -- my university diploma, after all, does say 'Candidatem
Scientiarum' and that title is not available to those with degrees in
the humanities, medicine, theology, law etc. ;-) (isn't, by the way,
the same true of the English M.Sc.?)
> in LotR. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
> Unfortunately, many modern authors of Fantasy don't do that, and
> it shows.
Agreed.
<snip more agreement>
>> I think it would be interesting to ask to, and investigate, the
>> reasons for the huge success of sub-creative fiction in the
>> twentieth century -- especially as it has generally happened in
>> spite of a clear antipathy from the majority of the literary
>> elite.
>
> I guess Tolkien would have some answers to that :-)
He might, and then again, perhaps not. Both in _On Fairy-Stories_ and
in his letters Tolkien speaks, as I recall it, more about what he likes
(and he is quite precise about that) than about why he likes it. There
is some good things in OFS in the section on 'Recovery, Escape,
Consolation,' but I am not entirely convinced that Tolkien captures the
reasons for the great appeal of this kind of literature. There is
certainly something in what he says about escapism as a legitimate
pursuit: 'the escape of the prisoner' rather than 'the flight of the
deserter' -- but is that sufficient? Has the twentieth century been the
century of escapist narrative art? And even if so, you can find escape
in other ways as well (dare I mention Barbara Cartland), and I'd just
have to ask 'why this particular form of escapist narrative art?
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Scientific reasoning works only with measurements: only
when we have a number and a unit. Thus, topics for which
we have no measurements, scientific investigation is not
useful. No math, no science. When we do have
measurements, scientific reasoning cannot be ignored.
- Dr Nancy's Sweetie on usenet
Message-ID: <ds159c$p45$1...@pcls4.std.com>
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090810132038...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>>
<snip
>> Gods, grant me a fantasy book with a prophecy that doesn't come
>> true.
Actually the approach to prophecy was one of the things that I quite
liked about the Harry Potter series. The 'not all prophecies are
fulfilled' is sufficiently ambiguous to allow the author to use a non-
fulfilled prophecy as a motive force in the book, and to discard even a
fulfilled one as a causal force in its own right.
> Having a prophecy which doesn't come true probably makes no sense
> in a story, unless you base the story on it ("we've got lots of
> prophecies, and just have to pick the right one...").
I think you can use prophecies in many ways, not all of which require
that they be fulfilled. One way could be to have the main opponent
believe in the prophecy and base her actions on it, while the proponent
doesn't believe it. But I agree that if you put a prophecy in a book,
you should use it either as a motive force or a causal force, otherwise
it becomes pointless (it's that business with Checkov's Gun again --
though I am not sure it should always be applied literally in
literature, I do think it applies here).
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Knowing what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience
- Piet Hein, /Omniscience/
Dirk Thierbach
> Dirk Thierbach <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> spoke these staves:
>> And even "hard science" isn't restricted to SF, Tolkien e.g. used
>> a lot of his knowledge of philology and history (which is also
>> science, just not physics
> Let's take the discussion of whether 'science' should be restricted to
> the natural sciences some other time, shall we ;-)
The point of contention wasn't "science", but "hard" :-)
> (And, ignoring my own request <GG>,) I am, of course, not particularly
> willing to allow anything but 'naturvidenskab' ('naturwissenschaft') as
> science -- I much prefer 'wissenschaft' (Danish 'videnskab') as the
> generic term (the term means 'an activity that generates knowledge' --
> how )
And /scientia/, /wissenschaft/, /videnskab/ are all based on words that
mean "to know", so I agree "science" should be "any activity that
generates knowledge". Which is of course not restricted to natural
science. :-)
>>> I think it would be interesting to ask to, and investigate, the
>>> reasons for the huge success of sub-creative fiction in the
>>> twentieth century -- especially as it has generally happened in
>>> spite of a clear antipathy from the majority of the literary
>>> elite.
>> I guess Tolkien would have some answers to that :-)
> He might, and then again, perhaps not. Both in _On Fairy-Stories_ and
> in his letters Tolkien speaks, as I recall it, more about what he likes
> (and he is quite precise about that) than about why he likes it.
It's been some time since I read OFS, but isn't Tolkien basically
saying (there, or in Letters, or elsewhere) that people have enjoyed
story-telling in the sub-creative way in all times? So it's no
surprise they still enjoy it. No matter what "ingredients" the
author takes, magic, technology, or both.
> There is certainly something in what he says about escapism as a
> legitimate pursuit:
Which, I guess, is mainly there to address this argument of literary
critics.
> 'the escape of the prisoner' rather than 'the flight of the
> deserter' -- but is that sufficient?
IIRC I found Tolkien's arguments here rather weak. And, if
well-written, SF&F isn't merely escapism IMHO.
- Dirk
Dirk Thierbach
> "Troels Forchhammer" <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid> skrev i meddelandet
> One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that
> one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
> ("psychohistory").
I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of
particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign
properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which
obey rather strict laws.
> That is utter rubbish, of course. How does one decide
> which facts are relevant, and how are they to be processed?
> And when you have assembled and analysed the data from one single
> planet, they would already be obsolete or proved to be incorrect.
How do you decide which "facts" about gas molecules are relevant if
you want to measure the pressure? :-) And just when you've measured
the velocity of this or that molecule, it bounces and the measurement
becomes obsolete...
BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long
run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough
influence to let the course of events take a different turn.
Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
In the same way, most of his robots stories are actually about
situations where the three laws *fail* to make a robot behave properly.
- Dirk
Dirk Thierbach
Hm. I've always regarded that law as an insight: A person brought from
the past to our times would think our means of seeing what happens
elsewhere, of talking to people not present, or of various things that
help with chores quite "magical".
- Dirk
Noel Q. von Schneiffel
Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately, a typhoon occurs every time he is
tickled, so I try to use him as sparingly as possible.
Noel
Öjevind Lång
> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
[snip]
>>> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
>
>>> More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
>
>> Oh, of course. Thank you! I have always regarded that "law" as a rather
>> feeble excuse for introducing "science" one needs for one's story.
>
> Hm. I've always regarded that law as an insight: A person brought from
> the past to our times would think our means of seeing what happens
> elsewhere, of talking to people not present, or of various things that
> help with chores quite "magical".
But that wasn't quite what Clarke was talking about, was it? I take it to
mean that from our point of view, sufficiently advanced science could just
as well be magic.
Öjevind
Dirk Thierbach
> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
> news:20090811104405...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>>>> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
>>> Oh, of course. Thank you! I have always regarded that "law" as a rather
>>> feeble excuse for introducing "science" one needs for one's story.
>>
>> Hm. I've always regarded that law as an insight: A person brought from
>> the past to our times would think our means of seeing what happens
>> elsewhere, of talking to people not present, or of various things that
>> help with chores quite "magical".
>
> But that wasn't quite what Clarke was talking about, was it? I take it to
> mean that from our point of view, sufficiently advanced science could just
> as well be magic.
Well, that follows by analogy: If we were brought from our present into
the future, then the stuff people had in the future would likely look like
magic to us. Even if based on science.
So for "sufficiently advanced science", it really makes no difference.
Which means for a story, where the main purpose is to explore the
"what-if", it doesn't really matter if you explain it by magic or by
science, since both look the same, anyway.
- Dirk
Öjevind Lång
[snip]
>> One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that
>> one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
>> ("psychohistory").
>
> I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of
> particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign
> properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which
> obey rather strict laws.
Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
economical facts and forecasts and action programmes, bullish or bearish
stock markets (including crashes), branches of manufacture becoming obsolete
or going bust, political developments, migrations, unforeseen wars, mad
political leaders, religion, meteorology, possible outbreaks of new
diseases, the impact of new life styles, entertainment, employment issues,
the environment, the impact of new inventions which by their very nature
must be unknown to the analyst, and so on. There is no way one could
assemble, let alone analyse and correctly collate all those things. As you
know, meteorology by itself remains largely a matter of guesswork.
Arnold Toynbee and other historians claimed to see "historical cycles" and
"laws of history"; few if any modern historians subscribe to any such
theory, which very much smacks of the 19th century with its belief in
"laws".
[snip]
> BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long
> run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough
> influence to let the course of events take a different turn.
> Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow of the
planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by John W.
Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction". And if I have been
correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this irrational
anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo part of
the Plan. Of course, this ambiton to make everything fit neatly into one
master plan/future history, which also took in all his other major works, is
one reason why his late production is so boring.
However, I suspect not so boring as his idea of a perfect society would be
if it somehow ever comes into existence.
> In the same way, most of his robots stories are actually about
> situations where the three laws *fail* to make a robot behave properly.
I know. That's what makes them fun to read. At the same time, it is hard not
to feel that manufacturing robots with too much authority would be a crappy
and dangerous idea. Economically inefficient too, I suspect.
Öjevind
Dirk Thierbach
> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
> news:20090811105555...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>>> one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
>>> ("psychohistory").
>> I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of
>> particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign
>> properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which
>> obey rather strict laws.
> Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
> phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
> economical facts and forecasts [etc.]
Yes, of course. I didn't say that psychohistory is easy, or actually
possible. (IMHO the system is probably too close to chaotic behaviour
to make any realiable forecast). The point was that in principle, the
idea is sound, and it's not a question of the inability to measure
single facts, which become quickly outdated.
>> BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long
>> run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough
>> influence to let the course of events take a different turn.
>> Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
> True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow of the
> planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by John W.
> Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction".
Ah, I didn't know that.
> And if I have been
> correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this irrational
> anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo part of
> the Plan.
Didn't know that either. Do you remember the name of the story? Though
I prefer early Asimov to late Asimov :-)
> Of course, this ambiton to make everything fit neatly into one
> master plan/future history, which also took in all his other major works, is
> one reason why his late production is so boring.
Yes, exactly.
>> In the same way, most of his robots stories are actually about
>> situations where the three laws *fail* to make a robot behave properly.
> I know. That's what makes them fun to read. At the same time, it is hard not
> to feel that manufacturing robots with too much authority would be a crappy
> and dangerous idea.
I think it gets more interesting if one doesn't concentrate so much on the
actual feasibility of such robots ("Positronic brains" are of course just
handwaving. "Magic", if you want).
But it's a very interesting idea philosophically. The three laws
really describe a perfectly altruistic human being. And that's still
not enough to make everything work as it should.
Who said again that SF/F is mere escapism? :-)
- Dirk
Dirk Thierbach
> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
>>>> One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that
>>>> one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
>>>> ("psychohistory").
>>> I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of
>>> particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign
>>> properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which
>>> obey rather strict laws.
>> Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
>> phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
>> economical facts and forecasts [etc.]
> Yes, of course. I didn't say that psychohistory is easy, or actually
> possible.
BTW, these TED talks
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
have a nice visualization that shows that even with very simple data
(child mortality and GPD per capita) one can make predictions about
the speed of development of "Third World" countries. Of course that's not
the same as a complete working theory of psychohistory, but I think it
gives a taste of what it could look like.
Worth watching not only for this reason, Hand Rosling is a very
entertaining speaker.
- Dirk
Taemon
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>> Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>>> And mixing technology and magic isn't so difficult, either.
>> Julian May. I just finished rereading the Saga of the Exiles.
> Yes, for example. (Don't remember it so well, has been long ago).
Reread it. NOW! Hurry!
>> Oh, boy. I review fantasy for the public library
> Anything you can recommend? :-)
My heart bleeds for the current German fantasy. It's what I mainly get these
days (translated to Dutch). Nah... I haven't gotten a good book in months.
Fortunately, I am not restricted to reading what's sent to me so I have
found Abercrombie to recommend :-) Another series called "First Law", and
the best of them.
>> and it really makes one
>> wonder if all genres suffer from such a high amount of waste of
>> paper.
> According to Sturgeon's Law, I don't think it's restricted to Fantasy.
> "Pulp SF" was called "pulp" for a reason.
I hope so. I feel like I have to explain myself because of the genre that
has my preference.
>> Gods, grant me a fantasy book with a prophecy that doesn't come
>> true.
> Having a prophecy which doesn't come true probably makes no sense in a
> story, unless you base the story on it ("we've got lots of prophecies,
> and just have to pick the right one..."). But I think the traditional
> way is to make the prophecy ambigous (and, if possible, not obviously
> ambigous), so when it comes true, the outcome is not quite what is
> expected...
Or, let's get convincing and not use prophecies at all. It's such a lame
cop-out of a plot device, I'm sick of it.
Now to write the latest book in the ground using 1100 characters :-)
T.
Derek Broughton
No, I'm pretty sure Dirk has it exactly right. aiui, he was commenting on
things like Cargo cults.
--
derek
Derek Broughton
> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
> news:20090811105555...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>
> [snip]
>
>>> One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that
>>> one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
>>> ("psychohistory").
>>
>> I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of
>> particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign
>> properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which
>> obey rather strict laws.
>
> Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
> phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
> economical facts and ...
OK, I don't have to repeat the whole list. That's fantasy for you. Of
course, it's impossible (or maybe only "Magic" :-)) but theoretically if you
_could_ get all that data, it doesn't seem unreasonable that psychohistory
could work.
You're right, that the best analogy at the current time is meteorology.
Climate prediction is fairly good (even if there are many nay-sayers), but
actually predicting weather more than a couple of days ahead is poor and
more than a few weeks is nearly impossible. We _know_ we could do it with
sufficient information, but getting that much data is currently not
possible.
--
derek
Steve Morrison
> �jevind L�ng wrote:
>
>> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
>> news:20090811104405...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>> [snip]
>>
>>>>> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
>>>>> More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
>>>> Oh, of course. Thank you! I have always regarded that "law" as a rather
>>>> feeble excuse for introducing "science" one needs for one's story.
>>> Hm. I've always regarded that law as an insight: A person brought from
>>> the past to our times would think our means of seeing what happens
>>> elsewhere, of talking to people not present, or of various things that
>>> help with chores quite "magical".
>> But that wasn't quite what Clarke was talking about, was it? I take it to
>> mean that from our point of view, sufficiently advanced science could just
>> as well be magic.
>
> No, I'm pretty sure Dirk has it exactly right. aiui, he was commenting on
> things like Cargo cults.
"Clarke's Laws" are from his nonfiction book /Profiles of the Future: An
Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible/. He was mainly talking about
the future.
Dirk Thierbach
>>> Oh, boy. I review fantasy for the public library
>> Anything you can recommend? :-)
> My heart bleeds for the current German fantasy.
Ah, the *good* German fantasy authors (e.g. Michael Ende, Cornelia Funke)
are usually marketed as children's books :-) If you can get your hand
on "Der Spiegel im Spiegel" ("The mirror in the mirror") by Michael Ende,
read it. Definitely not children's fiction...
Though there's not a lot of good German fantasy authors, and probably
few could be classified as "current". And we don't have to talk about
Hohlbein and Co.
> It's what I mainly get these days (translated to Dutch). Nah... I
> haven't gotten a good book in months.
I don't mind if it's not current. :-)
> Fortunately, I am not restricted to reading what's sent to me so I have
> found Abercrombie to recommend :-) Another series called "First Law", and
> the best of them.
I have "The Blade Itself" here, but haven't read it yet. The beginning
was not so promising, so I got distracted... but maybe that was just
a first impression.
BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
German, despite the name). A really good read.
- Dirk
Paul S. Person
<bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
<snippo>
>One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that one
>could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts
>("psychohistory"). That is utter rubbish, of course. How does one decide
>which facts are relevant, and how are they to be processed? And when you
>have assembled and analysed the data from one single planet, they would
>already be obsolete or proved to be incorrect.
/Robots of Dawn/ and /Robots and Empire/ have the robots Giskard and
R. Daneel Olivaw inventing the concept of psychohistory -- and the
Zeroth Law of Robotics.
/Forward the Foundation/ and /Prelude to Foundation/ deal with the
practical difficulties. Well, they try to, anyway; if it were possible
to actually deal with the practical difficulties, then Asimov would
have invented psychohistory!
<snippo -- robots as gods>
>Exactly. A vicious circle. He even wrote a short story about a thinking
>machine which is all alone after entropy has done its work, and which (or
>who) after carefully planning things out creates the universe anew by
>saying: "Let there be light."
I've always regarded that sort of thing as a very smart form of
anti-religious propaganda -- the sort of thing people like Dawkins
would not even recognize, never mind see the point of.
I actually enjoy reading really well-done anti-religious propaganda.
Particularly when it is by a great Science Fiction writer.
--
Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, "I never knew him."
Paul S. Person
<bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
"Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
>news:20090811105555...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
<snippo>
>> BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long
>> run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough
>> influence to let the course of events take a different turn.
>> Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
>
>True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow of the
>planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by John W.
>Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction". And if I have been
>correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this irrational
>anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo part of
>the Plan. Of course, this ambiton to make everything fit neatly into one
>master plan/future history, which also took in all his other major works, is
>one reason why his late production is so boring.
Yes. A silly and pointless slip, IMHO.
Öjevind Lång
> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
[snip]
>> Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
>> phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
>> economical facts and forecasts [etc.]
>
> Yes, of course. I didn't say that psychohistory is easy, or actually
> possible. (IMHO the system is probably too close to chaotic behaviour
> to make any realiable forecast). The point was that in principle, the
> idea is sound, and it's not a question of the inability to measure
> single facts, which become quickly outdated.
I agree that the system is too close to chaotic behaviour for any reliable
forecasts. Furthermore, all observers view things through ideological
spectacles. I rather dislike having to trot out the hackneyed term
"paradigm", but paradigms do exist and tend to distort what one perceives.
How does one identify all relevant data? Of course, Asimov, with his almost
religious belief in the absolute objectivity of science (a belief which is
in itself a paradigm) would probably have disagreed, and not just for the
purpose of defending a work of fiction.
The original Foundation trilogy depicts the Galactic Empire (and later on
the Foundation) as some sort of mid-20th century USA minus religion. Almost
everybody has very cursorily disguised Anglo-American names (Hober Mallow,
Salvor Hardin, Homir Munn, Hari Seldon, Jord Fara, Arcadia Darell, even Jan
Smite); female emancipation has not happened and almost all women are
housewives (the exception being a handful of novelists, academics and
teachers and, I imagine, the occasional sour middle-aged spinster scientist
of the Susan Calvin type, and, at the other end of the social spectrum,
housekeepers and waitresses); the sexual emancipation has not taken place;
the schools are American 1940's schools; the economical system is outdated
even by early 20th century standards; everybody speaks and thinks like
Americans of the time (except some stereotyped, even parodical, British
aristocrats, Roman generals, barbarian chiefs, olde worlde kings and country
yokels), and so on.
About the thinly disguised names: when Asimov reaches for diversity, it
often (rather bizarrely) takes the form of Latin or Greek names: Pelleas
Anthor, Publis Manlio, Olynthus Dam. One does find a Professor Klein and a
Miss Erlking (a school teacher who is of course unmarried), thus providing a
little German flavour to the WASP mix - as in the USA of the 1940's. There
is one single little hint that perhaps not everybody who settled space was
of white, predominantly Anglo-American stock: the name Linge Chen, which
looks more or less Chinese. (I believe there is also a brief mention of a
black man somewhere.) That is to say, Asimov did not foresee the increasing
racial and ethnic diversity in the US either. How could he? To my knowledge,
nobody did. The fact that one can't foresee the future is exactly the point.
(On which we agree; I just enjoy picking at the details.)
>>> BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long
>>> run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough
>>> influence to let the course of events take a different turn.
>>> Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
>
>> True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow of
>> the
>> planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by John
>> W.
>> Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction".
>
> Ah, I didn't know that.
Asimov himself generously mentions it somewhere. He seems to have been an
arrogant person in some ways, but he did like to give credit where credit
was due.
>> And if I have been
>> correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this irrational
>> anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo part
>> of
>> the Plan.
>
> Didn't know that either. Do you remember the name of the story? Though
> I prefer early Asimov to late Asimov :-)
I most emphatically agree. :-) As a matter of fact, I haven't read the
story in question myself; someone posted the information in aft or rabt.
[snip]
>>> In the same way, most of his robots stories are actually about
>>> situations where the three laws *fail* to make a robot behave properly.
>
>> I know. That's what makes them fun to read. At the same time, it is hard
>> not
>> to feel that manufacturing robots with too much authority would be a
>> crappy
>> and dangerous idea.
>
> I think it gets more interesting if one doesn't concentrate so much on the
> actual feasibility of such robots ("Positronic brains" are of course just
> handwaving. "Magic", if you want).
They are almost as bizarre as the laminated mouse brain used in Cordwainer
Smith's wonderful short story "Think Blue, Count Two", about a
psycho-mehanical safety device installed on board a starship carrying
passengers (most of them in cryonic sleep) in order to ensure that the few
crew members who will be awakened by the machines in an emergency won't be
able to go on a murderous spree or the like if they turn out to be unhinged.
I'm not saying anything more; there were other bizarre ingrendients in the
safety device, including all the episodes of a popular TV series called
"Marcia and the Moon Men"... I'm not saying anything more.
> But it's a very interesting idea philosophically. The three laws
> really describe a perfectly altruistic human being. And that's still
> not enough to make everything work as it should.
>
> Who said again that SF/F is mere escapism? :-)
No, it's fun! :-)
Öjevind
Öjevind Lång
news:290685dolmr4cqc23...@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:47:02 +0200, �jevind L�ng
> <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
[snip]
> /Robots of Dawn/ and /Robots and Empire/ have the robots Giskard and
> R. Daneel Olivaw inventing the concept of psychohistory -- and the
> Zeroth Law of Robotics.
Ack! The more Asimov intruded his robots into his Foundation, the more
boring and ultimately pointless it all became. IMHO, of course. In the end,
all human history after the invention of space flight has been laid out by
the robots. And I must say that they seem to make a rather messy job of it.
Must be because of the existenceof those pesky, irrational humans who keep
disturbing their circles.
> /Forward the Foundation/ and /Prelude to Foundation/ deal with the
> practical difficulties. Well, they try to, anyway; if it were possible
> to actually deal with the practical difficulties, then Asimov would
> have invented psychohistory!
I bet he would have.
> <snippo -- robots as gods>
>
>>Exactly. A vicious circle. He even wrote a short story about a thinking
>>machine which is all alone after entropy has done its work, and which (or
>>who) after carefully planning things out creates the universe anew by
>>saying: "Let there be light."
>
> I've always regarded that sort of thing as a very smart form of
> anti-religious propaganda -- the sort of thing people like Dawkins
> would not even recognize, never mind see the point of.
Really? I found that story rather pathetic. As if he couldn't endure life
without some kind of cosmic daddy after all. Mind you, I'm not an atheist,
but Asimov claimed to be one.
> I actually enjoy reading really well-done anti-religious propaganda.
> Particularly when it is by a great Science Fiction writer.
Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but I think his anti-religious
propaganda was very crude. In one standalone novel ("Worlds at War?" Im not
sure about the title, but the hero was called Biron Farill), most of Earth
is radioactive - by implication, because of nuclear war. Later on, the
thought of human beings actually using nuclear weapons apparently became
unendurable to Asimov. So he turned it into one of the robots (Giscard?)
deliberately poisoning most of Earth in order to force most of the
population to emigrate and leave superstitious things such as religion
behind. I found that unspeakable, for more than one reason.
As is evidenced from that episode, Asimov clearly didn't care much about
environmental issues either; in one place, somebody remarks that no one
exported tigers to other planets because "Why would anyone do that?" Why,
because they might be fun to study? Because they might enrich the
environment? It seems domesticated animals was about all Asimov cared for.
Perhaps seeding seas on other planets with fish and that kind of thing too.
And we know that Vega (or was it some other star system?) produced wonderful
cigars, so obviously mankind brought tobacco plants to the stars, and not
because of their flowers.
�jevind
Steve Morrison
> Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but I think his
> anti-religious propaganda was very crude. In one standalone novel
> ("Worlds at War?" Im not sure about the title, but the hero was called
> Biron Farill), most of Earth is radioactive - by implication, because of
> nuclear war.
/The Stars, Like Dust/.
Steve Morrison
> news:20090812074005...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
(snip)
> The original Foundation trilogy depicts the Galactic Empire (and later
> on the Foundation) as some sort of mid-20th century USA minus religion.
> Almost everybody has very cursorily disguised Anglo-American names
> (Hober Mallow, Salvor Hardin, Homir Munn, Hari Seldon, Jord Fara,
> Arcadia Darell, even Jan Smite); female emancipation has not happened
> and almost all women are housewives (the exception being a handful of
> novelists, academics and teachers and, I imagine, the occasional sour
> middle-aged spinster scientist of the Susan Calvin type, and, at the
> other end of the social spectrum, housekeepers and waitresses); the
> sexual emancipation has not taken place; the schools are American 1940's
> schools; the economical system is outdated even by early 20th century
> standards; everybody speaks and thinks like Americans of the time
> (except some stereotyped, even parodical, British aristocrats, Roman
> generals, barbarian chiefs, olde worlde kings and country yokels), and
> so on.
He made worse slips toward the end; in one scene, Arcadia Darell claims
she keeps a *baseball bat* under her bed! What's more, there was a
reference near it to the cost of something or other in *dollars*, not
Foundation credits.
(snip)
>>> True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow
>>> of the
>>> planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by
>>> John W.
>>> Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction".
>>
>> Ah, I didn't know that.
>
> Asimov himself generously mentions it somewhere. He seems to have been
> an arrogant person in some ways, but he did like to give credit where
> credit was due.
He mentions it in his autobiography, He and Campbell had a prolonged
tussle over it, which Campbell won, of course. Asimov admitted (in his
autobiography) that Campbell had been right.
>>> And if I have been
>>> correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this irrational
>>> anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo
>>> part of
>>> the Plan.
Not part of the Seldon Plan, but a native of Gaia who somehow escaped
into the wider galaxy.
>> Didn't know that either. Do you remember the name of the story? Though
>> I prefer early Asimov to late Asimov :-)
>
> I most emphatically agree. :-) As a matter of fact, I haven't read the
> story in question myself; someone posted the information in aft or rabt.
I agree as well, with a few exceptions: /The Gods Themselves/ and /The
Bicentennial Man/ in particular.
Dirk Thierbach
> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i meddelandet
> news:20090812074005...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>> Öjevind Lång <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>>> Yes, but a lot of particles moving at random are only one category of
>>> phenomena; in psyhohistory, you'd have to process population statistics,
>>> economical facts and forecasts [etc.]
>>
>> Yes, of course. I didn't say that psychohistory is easy, or actually
>> possible. (IMHO the system is probably too close to chaotic behaviour
>> to make any realiable forecast). The point was that in principle, the
>> idea is sound, and it's not a question of the inability to measure
>> single facts, which become quickly outdated.
> I agree that the system is too close to chaotic behaviour for any reliable
> forecasts.
I said "probably" on purpose -- since we don't have a workable description,
we can't actually measure how close the system is to chaotic behaviour
(yes, one can measure that). So it's just my hunch. And nothing we
could say anything definitive about.
> Furthermore, all observers view things through ideological
> spectacles.
But that doesn't matter -- empiric verifiability doesn't depend on
ideology. Either the theory works, or it doesn't. When it works, it
doesn't matter which ideological spectacles the inventor was wearing.
Or which ideology the observer is influenced by. You measure, you
plug in the numbers, you get a result. No matter which ideology you
currently believe in, the result will be the same. Now *interpreting*
the result can be easily influence by ideology, but that's a completely
different thing.
> I rather dislike having to trot out the hackneyed term "paradigm",
> but paradigms do exist and tend to distort what one perceives. How
> does one identify all relevant data?
That doesn't matter for the story. Just *assume* one could identify the
relevant data. It's a "what-if" scenario: What if we had a working
science of psycho-history? Can we do anything interesting with that?
As long as such a science is not obviously *impossible* (which it
isn't, the principle is sound, the question is just if the details
can be actually made to work) it's not important to actually identify
"all relevant data". If Asimov could, he wouldn't write SF stories,
but get a Noble Prize for this theory :-)
> The original Foundation trilogy depicts the Galactic Empire (and later on
> the Foundation) as some sort of mid-20th century USA minus religion.
Hm. Not necessarily.
> Almost everybody has very cursorily disguised Anglo-American names
> (Hober Mallow, Salvor Hardin, Homir Munn, Hari Seldon, Jord Fara,
> Arcadia Darell, even Jan Smite);
Yes, but that doesn't mean the Empire is identical to the USA. Of course
he'd choose names that are familiar for the reader. Every author is
biased by the culture he lives in. And part of that of course reflects
into this work. But that doesn't mean that all his work is meant
to represent the culture he lives in.
> female emancipation has not happened and almost all women are
> housewives
As in most SF (and probably other literature as well) from this era.
> (the exception being a handful of novelists, academics and
> teachers
So he's actually quite progressive :-) And I think in picking
Arkady as the heroine he was far ahead of his contemporaries.
> and, I imagine, the occasional sour middle-aged spinster scientist
> of the Susan Calvin type,
Susan Calvin is really a very interesting character. IMHO, she's
not so much "sour middle-aged spinster", but instead has some rather
pronounced straits of Asberger's syndrome. Together with a wry
humour.
[snip]
> everybody speaks and thinks like Americans of the time (except some
> stereotyped, even parodical, British aristocrats, Roman generals,
> barbarian chiefs, olde worlde kings and country yokels),
Which is exactly what would happen if an author tries to go beyond
the culture he is used to. So you make actually a very good case that
the Empire is *not* meant to be like the USA :-)
> That is to say, Asimov did not foresee the increasing racial and
> ethnic diversity in the US either. How could he? To my knowledge,
> nobody did.
Exactly. Cultural bias, not an intention to make the Empire like the USA.
> The fact that one can't foresee the future is exactly the point.
> (On which we agree; I just enjoy picking at the details.)
But SF is never about foreseeing the future. To quote LeGuin's
introduction to /The Left Hand of Darkness/ again:
: Science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive.
: Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by
: clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more
: honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists
: (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants,
: and futurologist. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's
: business is lying.
: The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and
: the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century
: will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of
: fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All
: they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're
: like -- what's going on -- what the weather is now, today, this
: moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen,
: listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what
: you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen
: and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep
: and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
[...]
: This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that
: it's set in the "Ekumenical Year 1490-97," but surely you don't
: *believe* that?
: Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't mean
: that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be
: androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be
: androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and
: thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you
: look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we
: already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing.
: I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the
: novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial
: lies...
And "let's assume there exist a science of psycho-history" is just
another such lie.
[snip]
> They are almost as bizarre as the laminated mouse brain used in
> Cordwainer Smith's wonderful short story "Think Blue, Count Two",
> about a psycho-mehanical safety device
Yeah, that was an interesting idea. Cordwainer Smith seems to always
come up with bizarre stuff like this :-)
- Dirk
Taemon
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>> Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>>> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>>>> Oh, boy. I review fantasy for the public library
>>> Anything you can recommend? :-)
>> My heart bleeds for the current German fantasy.
> Ah, the *good* German fantasy authors (e.g. Michael Ende, Cornelia
> Funke) are usually marketed as children's books :-) If you can get
> your hand on "Der Spiegel im Spiegel" ("The mirror in the mirror") by
> Michael
> Ende, read it. Definitely not children's fiction...
Oh, I'll keep that in mind. I do, of course, get my own books, but I'm
limited to what the library has (and its English fiction department is
rather small) or what I can get from Mobipocket.com. This all apart from
what I get to review, of course. But that isn't that many. One or two a
month. I also do cognitive science, animal caretaking and casual games, but
the fantasy market is much, much bigger :-)
> Though there's not a lot of good German fantasy authors, and probably
> few could be classified as "current". And we don't have to talk about
> Hohlbein and Co.
This - this monstrous *thing* I described before, from Felten? It won a
PRIZE. A prize! Well - I don't think it will appear in many Dutch libraries
<evil grin>. (I managed twice to keep a release from being offered to the
libraries at all - sometimes I think I'm too harsh for this job.)
>> It's what I mainly get these days (translated to Dutch). Nah... I
>> haven't gotten a good book in months.
> I don't mind if it's not current. :-)
Ah. You have heard from George R. R. Martin? :-) Best current fantasy if
you ask me, but he seems to have hit a writer's block. I think I already
recommended Neal Asher to you. And K.J. Parker, if you think cruelty is
funny. And everything from Sheri Tepper. And that first Julian May series...
Oh! But that is sf... let me look it up... hard to google something called
"The Golden Age"... <five minutes later> John C. Wright. I've only read part
one, and I loved it (it's one of those inevitable trilogies). Took me a
while to realise that I could safely ignore everything about names like
"Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed,
Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043"
that I didn't understand and just go with "Phaethon, that guy". It's not
relevant. The book is full of that kind of phrases and it gets funnier all
the time. Very original. But hard sf. And Walter Jon William's Dread Empire
series. On the surface quite standard heroic sf, but the heroics are so
understated... I really liked it. And it grows on you.
But fantasy... Robin Hobb is very good. Somewhat less famous is Chris
Wooding, The Braided Path. Part three slows down, but before that, woooh.
Quite a trip.
>> Fortunately, I am not restricted to reading what's sent to me so I
>> have found Abercrombie to recommend :-) Another series called
>> "First Law", and the best of them.
> I have "The Blade Itself" here, but haven't read it yet. The beginning
> was not so promising, so I got distracted... but maybe that was just
> a first impression.
Go on and give it a try. If you don't like it, don't bother with Parker.
He's more so.
> BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
> German, despite the name). A really good read.
Ah, got that to review... let me dig that up... I wrote:
==========================================
Eerste deel van een fantasyserie en een verdienstelijk debuut. Het boek
vertelt het (eerste deel van) het levensverhaal van de charismatische en
begaafde Khotve, uit zijn eigen mond. Tragisch, afwisselend en spannend weet
het lot van de verder weinig sympathieke Kvothe te blijven boeien. Een
enkele stoorzender is het veelvuldige gebruik van omineuze slotzinnetjes in
de trant van �toen wist ik nog niet dat onze tijd bijna om was�, die de
lezer enigszins op afstand houden.
Bevat overbodige kaart. Vakkundige vertaling, behalve in de frequente
rijmpjes (��t is waar/onomkeerbaar�).
==========================================
Rough translation:
First part of a fantasy series and a pretty good debute. The book tells of
the (first part of the) life's story of the charismatic and gifted Kvothe,
from his own mouth. Tragic, varied and exciting, the fate of the less than
sympathetic Kvothe keeps entertaining. A disturbing aspect is the
often-applied use of ominous sentences like "at the time I didn't realise
our time was almost up" that keep the reader at a distance.
Contains superfluous map. Expert translation, except in the frequent little
rhymes (example of horrible rhyme).
===========================================
Hm. I must have been in a hurry :-) I have 1100 characters to use. I
remember afterwards regretting not adding something about the other
characters being very flat, especially the love interest. Kvothe himself was
rounded enough, but the token pretty woman did nothing for me.
I never got the subsequent parts in the series, though. Are they any good?
T.
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090811212908...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
>>
>> "Dirk Thierbach" <dthie...@usenet.arcornews.de> skrev i
>> meddelandet
>> news:20090811104405...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de...
>>>
Clarke's Third Law -- the one about sufficiently advanced technology
being indistinguishable from magic
>>> Hm. I've always regarded that law as an insight: A person
>>> brought from the past to our times would think our means of
>>> seeing what happens elsewhere, of talking to people not present,
>>> or of various things that help with chores quite "magical".
>>
>> But that wasn't quite what Clarke was talking about, was it? I
>> take it to mean that from our point of view, sufficiently
>> advanced science could just as well be magic.
>
> Well, that follows by analogy:
Yes. Regardless of original context, it does extend to all
viewpoints.
My original point in invoking it was to say that if you only observe
the effect, the two _are_ indistinguishable. This means that it is
perfectly possible to write a story in which things happen that
cannot be explained by our science, but if the author makes an effort
not to explain how this is done, we will be unable to say whether it
is fantasy or science-fiction (Anne McCaffrey's early _Pern_ books
come very close to doing just that).
> So for "sufficiently advanced science", it really makes no
> difference.
And often the science required to duplicate the magic of much fantasy
is far less advanced (relative to present-day science) than must of
us normally realize (which was
> Which means for a story, where the main purpose is to explore the
> "what-if", it doesn't really matter if you explain it by magic or
> by science, since both look the same, anyway.
I think that Tolkien has a good point when he compares 'magic' and
'the machine' -- that the basis is the desire for 'making the will
more quickly effective.' (_Letters_ #131) Within the story, the
author needs devices that can make the will and the desires of the
characters clearer -- more obvious, if you will. This kind of
fiction, when it is good, deals with the inner sides of the human
condition, and it uses these devices to show more clearly to the
reader what is going on inside the character.
As mentioned earlier, I believe that sub-creative fiction of the
better kind (OK, so that is not an impressive way to distinguish, but
the idea is that you can find lots and lots of pulp fiction of any
kind that is not concerned with human nature at all -- fiction that
only aims at and only achieves brief, quickly forgotten escape and/or
entertainment, and I wish to preclude that from my discussion) uses
the sub-creation itself to set up a model in which human nature can
be 'studied' in a controlled, noise-free environment. These devices,
what Tolkien calles 'the Machine' (whether magical or technological)
is, IMO, a part of that: they're used, if you will, to amplify the
signal -- the inner desires of the characters.
This also takes me to, what I believe is (possibly a rather small)
part of the explanation for the success of sub-creative fiction in
the twentieth century. The complexity of human life has always been
growing, but the rate at which our life has become more complex has
been growing rapidly over the past 150 - 200 years. We see all kinds
of reactions to this, such as regression into religious fanaticism
that rejects the complexity (I know that evolution is far more
difficult to understand than 'God made it so', but it _is_ evolution
that is correct), pathetic attempts to close the doors on the world
(current Danish politics come very easily to mind here), and many
other reactions including attempts to build models that can help
overview some few aspects without the complexity of 'real reality.'
The usefulness of sub-creative fiction in achieving the latter is, I
believe, part of the explanation for its increased success over the
last hundred years or so (please don't take me up on the exact
timeframes involved -- there's a lot of elastic in my estimates).
This may also have been helped along by the advance of science
education, including introductions to the scientific method, which
has taught a wider use of models to help isolate, investigate and
understand single phenomena without the noise of the full complexity
of reality.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does
knowledge.
- Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
Dirk Thierbach
> Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>> Though there's not a lot of good German fantasy authors, and probably
>> few could be classified as "current". And we don't have to talk about
>> Hohlbein and Co.
> This - this monstrous *thing* I described before, from Felten? It won a
> PRIZE. A prize!
The German SF/F Awards are pretty much a joke. Because there are so few
authors, and for some reason the organizers feel they need to have
many categories for prizes, sooner or later everyone gets one.
Just ignore the awards, it doesn't really say anything about the quality.
BTW, another German author who writes halfway decent Fantasy is
Gesa Helm: I'm in the middle of "Der Spiegel von Kajx" ("The Mirror
of Kajx"). Some passages are not very well written, but overall the
plot is interesting, and she does pay attention to invented languages.
Not top class IMHO, but better than many others. Though it does contain
a prophecy (a rather ambigous one, and I'm not sure yet what it will
actually turn out to mean in the end), so you probably won't like it. :-)
> Ah. You have heard from George R. R. Martin? :-)
Yes, but I prefer his older short stories (with mostly SF ingredients) to
the Ice & Fire saga. I read the first books, and was not really impressed.
Not enough substance for the size. Though people kept telling me
that "Martin is the saviour of contemporary Fantasy". Oh well.
> I think I already recommended Neal Asher to you.
I think you didn't, but I do like Neal Asher a lot. Though I like his
short stories better. I have the impression that after that, he mostly
converted his ideas from the short stories into novel form, and often
the results are not as good as the original version.
> And K.J. Parker, if you think cruelty is funny.
Hasn't been on my radar yet. And I don't think cruelty is funny.
I don't really mind cruelty, but if it's the only interesting feature,
I'm probably not interested. Given that, would you still recommend it?
Which book first?
> And everything from Sheri Tepper.
The name looks vaguely familiar, but I can't remember anything concrete.
Which book should I start with?
> "The Golden Age"... <five minutes later> John C. Wright. I've only read part
> one, and I loved it (it's one of those inevitable trilogies). Took me a
> while to realise that I could safely ignore everything about names like
> "Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed,
> Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043"
> that I didn't understand and just go with "Phaethon, that guy".
You mean like "Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim"?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus)
> It's not relevant. The book is full of that kind of phrases and it
> gets funnier all the time. Very original. But hard sf.
Interesting. I'll have a look.
> And Walter Jon William's Dread Empire series. On the surface quite
> standard heroic sf, but the heroics are so understated... I really
> liked it. And it grows on you.
I vaguely remember Walter Jon Williams as Cyperpunk author, though
I can't remember if it was the interesting Cyperpunk or the boring
Cyberpunk. Anyway, I'll have a look.
> But fantasy... Robin Hobb is very good.
Yes, though sometimes the writing isn't. The plot makes up for it, though.
> Somewhat less famous is Chris Wooding, The Braided Path. Part three
> slows down, but before that, woooh. Quite a trip.
Will also have a look.
>>> Fortunately, I am not restricted to reading what's sent to me so I
>>> have found Abercrombie to recommend :-) Another series called
>>> "First Law", and the best of them.
>> I have "The Blade Itself" here, but haven't read it yet. The beginning
>> was not so promising, so I got distracted... but maybe that was just
>> a first impression.
> Go on and give it a try. If you don't like it, don't bother with Parker.
> He's more so.
Ok.
Thanks for all the info.
>> BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
>> German, despite the name). A really good read.
>
> Ah, got that to review... let me dig that up... I wrote:
>
> ==========================================
> Eerste deel van een fantasyserie en een verdienstelijk debuut. Het boek
> vertelt het (eerste deel van) het levensverhaal van de charismatische en
> begaafde Khotve, uit zijn eigen mond. Tragisch, afwisselend en spannend weet
> het lot van de verder weinig sympathieke Kvothe te blijven boeien. Een
> enkele stoorzender is het veelvuldige gebruik van omineuze slotzinnetjes in
> de trant van ?toen wist ik nog niet dat onze tijd bijna om was?, die de
> lezer enigszins op afstand houden.
> Bevat overbodige kaart. Vakkundige vertaling, behalve in de frequente
> rijmpjes (??t is waar/onomkeerbaar?).
>
> ==========================================
>
> Rough translation:
>
> First part of a fantasy series and a pretty good debute.
"verdienstelijk" is a nice word. :-)
> The book tells of
> the (first part of the) life's story of the charismatic and gifted Kvothe,
> from his own mouth. Tragic, varied and exciting, the fate of the less than
> sympathetic Kvothe keeps entertaining. A disturbing aspect is the
> often-applied use of ominous sentences like "at the time I didn't realise
> our time was almost up" that keep the reader at a distance.
Didn't really notice those. :-)
> Hm. I must have been in a hurry :-) I have 1100 characters to use. I
> remember afterwards regretting not adding something about the other
> characters being very flat, especially the love interest. Kvothe himself was
> rounded enough, but the token pretty woman did nothing for me.
But it's obvious that she's got some secret to hide, and we will learn
more about that in the later parts. And of course the author can't
tell us everything right now, can he? So I think it's ok that she stays
enigmatic. For now.
And the other supporting characters were alright, IMO. Enough personality
for their roles.
> I never got the subsequent parts in the series, though. Are they any good?
Haven't read them yet. I think the second one is out, but not as paperback.
So I'll wait a bit.
- Dirk
Troels Forchhammer
<news:chenrich-1E6A5C...@feeder.eternal-september.org>
Christopher Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> spoke these staves:
>
> In article <Xns9C63525B...@130.133.1.4>,
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@ThisIsFake.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> the huge success of sub-creative fiction in the twentieth century
>> antipathy from the majority of the literary elite.
>
Fortunately no-one can decide which books catch on (marketing can
only do so much -- the Harry Potter books are a wonderful example of
just that).
> "elite" means "elected." But who elected them? I don't remember
> voting...
As with many other elitist 'societies' they elect their own members
:-) (I could also mention that Frodo, too, was elected to carry the
Ring, though there was only the One voter).
> And who are the literary elite today? F. R. Leavis is dead. Edmund
> Wilson is dead. Lionel Trilling is dead.
Harold Bloom?
Unfortunately it is so much easier to just do a vague hand-gesture
waving at some undefined 'literary elite' or group of 'literati,' as
I did in the previous post. I know that Tom Shippey mentioned a
number of them in, IIRC, _J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century_, but
I don't recall any of their names right now.
I don't think the concept is at all very well defined. Sometimes it
refers to a group of academics (and their proselytes) who make some
claim to 'know _about_ good literature' and sometimes it refers to
the group of authors who get the right prizes (i.e. not just prizes
for selling many books . . .).
But perhaps it isn't even necessary to give specific names or to
point at well-defined groups -- as I recall Shippey's argument, he
claims that some views have become established as elitist to the
point where, if you have any desire to be considered a part of the
'real' (another meaningless word in context) literary elite, you must
assume these views -- which, again as I recall Shippey (and possibly
loosely interpret his text), include a condescending attitude towards
science fiction and fantasy.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
Elen s�la l�menn' omentielvo
- /The Fellowship of the Ring/ (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090811105555...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
>>
>> that one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough
>> facts ("psychohistory").
>
> I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics:
Yes, that's how I've seen it also.
Of course that is not how it is treated througout the books
(occasionally it is used on single persons), but that's another
matter. It was one of the things I liked in late-ish Foundation
prequel he wrote -- the original mathematical result that brough
Seldon to Trantor was to show only that you could reduce the
complexity: that the future state of the ensemble could be calculated
by a system less complex than the ensemble itself. With the advances
in computing power over the past 50 years -- and the advent of
quantum computing -- one should probably be cautious not to make too
bombastic proclamations about what will be possible in 50 years, but
even if we allow some huge advances in computing power still to be
realized, I rather suspect that the data collection will be a
bottleneck.
<snip>
>> That is utter rubbish, of course. How does one decide which facts
>> are relevant, and how are they to be processed?
How did they decide which facts were relevant when starting out on
statistical thermodynamics? That aspect of the problem is not
necessarily inherently more problematic (albeit undoubtedly more
complex) than actual thermodynamics. Of course, we cannot know -- it
may be that 'Hari Seldon' was wrong -- that we cannot reduce the
complexity.
>> And when you have assembled and analysed the data from one single
>> planet, they would already be obsolete or proved to be incorrect.
>
> How do you decide which "facts" about gas molecules are relevant
> if you want to measure the pressure? :-) And just when you've
> measured the velocity of this or that molecule, it bounces and the
> measurement becomes obsolete...
Precisely.
There is a philosophical discussion in this as well -- one on whether
the universe is deterministic (though chaotic) or random. If we
believe that human behaviour is fundamentally deterministic, then it
is much easier to accept psychohistory as a viable idea. But at least
I think that we cannot, at this point, rule it out as impossible the
way we can with his positronic brains or his particular idea of
hyperspace.
> BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the
> long run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have
> enough influence to let the course of events take a different
> turn. Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.
Yes, there are at least two examples of that. And of course the
predictions of psychohistory are, IIRC, always couched in suitably
probabilistic terms.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom
of thought which they avoid.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090811104044...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
>>
<snip>
> It's been some time since I read OFS, but isn't Tolkien basically
> saying (there, or in Letters, or elsewhere) that people have
> enjoyed story-telling in the sub-creative way in all times? So
> it's no surprise they still enjoy it. No matter what "ingredients"
> the author takes, magic, technology, or both.
There's some of that, yes, but even then there are degrees, and as
far as I know sub-creative fiction has been relatively more popular
in the last century or so than it was previously. I don't have any
numbers to back that up, and my impression might be wrong, but of
course I don't believe it is ;-)
>> There is certainly something in what he says about escapism as a
>> legitimate pursuit:
>
> Which, I guess, is mainly there to address this argument of
> literary critics.
Both yes and no. I don't doubt that the only reason why Tolkien
speaks of escape at all is because fairy-tales had been accused by
critics and others of being merely escapism -- escapism in the bad
sense (trying to hide from reality). On the other hand, I don't doubt
either that Tolkien is sincere in his discussion here. He ackowledges
that there is an element of escape in fairy-stories (notably he also
points out that there is so much more than that), but he finds that
this is a healthy kind of escape.
>> 'the escape of the prisoner' rather than 'the flight of the
>> deserter' -- but is that sufficient?
>
> IIRC I found Tolkien's arguments here rather weak. And, if
> well-written, SF&F isn't merely escapism IMHO.
I rather think he is right. There _is_, IMO, an element of escape in
not only fairy-stories or in SF&F, but in much art.
The point is, however, that in the better kinds of art, there is also
so much more than escape -- it is never 'merely escapism', but the
element of escapism may help us to endure a bit better (and it may
even relax our defenses a bit so that enjoying art that has this
element, among others, can leave us more open to what else the art
has to offer: leave us more open to what Tolkien describe as 'a
sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.')
Tolkien never approaches the claim that escapism is all there is, but
neither does he deny that escapism is one among the many elements of
fairy-stories.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your
feeling of what reality "ought to be".
- Richard Feynman
Öjevind Lång
news:h5vn1k$s86$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
[snip]
> Oh, I'll keep that in mind. I do, of course, get my own books, but I'm
> limited to what the library has (and its English fiction department is
> rather small) or what I can get from Mobipocket.com. This all apart from
> what I get to review, of course. But that isn't that many. One or two a
> month. I also do cognitive science, animal caretaking and casual games,
> but the fantasy market is much, much bigger :-)
In past years, I borrowed several excellent fantasy stories at the public
library . The annoying thing is that now I can't rememebr the titles, and
the books seem to have disappeared from the shelves... Now I would make a
point of noting down the name of any truly good fantasy writer. They aren't
all that common, as we know.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
[snip]
>> And everything from Sheri Tepper.
>
> The name looks vaguely familiar, but I can't remember anything concrete.
> Which book should I start with?
"Jinian Footseer" and "North Shore" are both good starting points.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
news:Xns9C667B11...@147.243.252.16...
[snip]
> But perhaps it isn't even necessary to give specific names or to
> point at well-defined groups -- as I recall Shippey's argument, he
> claims that some views have become established as elitist to the
> point where, if you have any desire to be considered a part of the
> 'real' (another meaningless word in context) literary elite, you must
> assume these views -- which, again as I recall Shippey (and possibly
> loosely interpret his text), include a condescending attitude towards
> science fiction and fantasy.
Unfortunately, that attitude still exists. However, it was undermined by
Peter Jackson's films, which many wannabe elite critics clearly saw and
enjoyed. Now it is fashionable among younger critics to claim that PJ has
"trimmed and shaped up" Tolkien's "clunky writing". Which is another way of
saying that younger literati on the make don't really enjoy reading books
that put any kind of demand on the reader, except when there's some kind of
reward for it. Those who manage to wade through Proust would probably brag
about it.
Though of course, I should add that there are many people who genuinely
appreciate Proust. And there *are* conscientious, honest critics whose
assessments one can respect.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
news:0oSdnWyCV859hx7X...@posted.toastnet...
> �jevind L�ng wrote:
[snip]
>> The original Foundation trilogy depicts the Galactic Empire (and later
>> on the Foundation) as some sort of mid-20th century USA minus religion.
>> Almost everybody has very cursorily disguised Anglo-American names (Hober
>> Mallow, Salvor Hardin, Homir Munn, Hari Seldon, Jord Fara, Arcadia
>> Darell, even Jan Smite); female emancipation has not happened and almost
>> all women are housewives (the exception being a handful of novelists,
>> academics and teachers and, I imagine, the occasional sour middle-aged
>> spinster scientist of the Susan Calvin type, and, at the other end of the
>> social spectrum, housekeepers and waitresses); the sexual emancipation
>> has not taken place; the schools are American 1940's schools; the
>> economical system is outdated even by early 20th century standards;
>> everybody speaks and thinks like Americans of the time (except some
>> stereotyped, even parodical, British aristocrats, Roman generals,
>> barbarian chiefs, olde worlde kings and country yokels), and so on.
>
> He made worse slips toward the end; in one scene, Arcadia Darell claims
> she keeps a *baseball bat* under her bed! What's more, there was a
> reference near it to the cost of something or other in *dollars*, not
> Foundation credits.
I suppose one could somehow excuse the first slip by saying that they still
play baseball in the distant future, but if so, he should at least have
spelled it "basbul bat" or something like that to maintain the sense of
distance. The second slip is clearly irredeemable.
>>>> True, but the idea of introducing a rogue factor which upset the flow
>>>> of the
>>>> planned future, in the shape of the Mule, was actually suggested by
>>>> John W.
>>>> Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction".
>>>
>>> Ah, I didn't know that.
>>
>> Asimov himself generously mentions it somewhere. He seems to have been an
>> arrogant person in some ways, but he did like to give credit where credit
>> was due.
>
> He mentions it in his autobiography, He and Campbell had a prolonged
> tussle over it, which Campbell won, of course. Asimov admitted (in his
> autobiography) that Campbell had been right.
Yes, after two or three books, how interesting can a tale of historical
development be if the development always proceeds according to the
blueprint? It's a pity that Asimov later on sort of went back to his
original Plan.
>>>> And if I have been
>>>> correctly informed, Asimov later on became nervous about this
>>>> irrational
>>>> anomaly and made up a story showing that the Mule was actually aslo
>>>> part of
>>>> the Plan.
>
> Not part of the Seldon Plan, but a native of Gaia who somehow escaped
> into the wider galaxy.
Oh, I see. I still think it's a crappy idea, though.
>>> Didn't know that either. Do you remember the name of the story? Though
>>> I prefer early Asimov to late Asimov :-)
>>
>> I most emphatically agree. :-) As a matter of fact, I haven't read the
>> story in question myself; someone posted the information in aft or rabt.
>
> I agree as well, with a few exceptions: /The Gods Themselves/ and /The
> Bicentennial Man/ in particular.
I agree about "The Gods Themselves"; I don't believe I have read "The
Bicentennial Man".
In "The Gods Themselves", Asimov, unusually for him, gives three very
convincing psychological portraits; he's very seldom good at psychological
portraits. Of course (heh), the portraits in question are of three aliens...
Still, he has a couple of heart-wrenching psychological portraits of human
(or nearly human) beings in his short story "The Ugly Little Boy". An early
story.
�jevind
Derek Broughton
>
>> BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
>> German, despite the name). A really good read.
>
> Ah, got that to review... let me dig that up... I wrote:
> Rough translation:
...
> Contains superfluous map.
Define "superfluous map"? I hate books that involve any traveling that
don't make some attempt to provide a map...
--
derek
Derek Broughton
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>> I think I already recommended Neal Asher to you.
>
> I think you didn't, but I do like Neal Asher a lot.
That was me. On Taemon's recommendation I got all the Asher & K.J. Parker
books I could get my hands on.
>> And K.J. Parker, if you think cruelty is funny.
>
> Hasn't been on my radar yet. And I don't think cruelty is funny.
There wasn't any cruelty in the one series (The Engineer trilogy, /Devices
and Desires/, etc) I could get. Oppression, yes, and lots of blood; not to
mention a character who'd stop at absolutely nothing for revenge; but
nothing I'd consider cruel. I did find the character's monomania tedious by
the third book.
> I don't really mind cruelty, but if it's the only interesting feature,
> I'm probably not interested. Given that, would you still recommend it?
> Which book first?
>
>> And everything from Sheri Tepper.
Skip the books of /The True Game/ (I think that's what she called it). Very
juvenile. Everything else is excellent. SF or Fantasy is just her setting
for investigations of social dynamics, and they could be set pretty well
anywhere. I think if I must choose one, go for /The Family Tree/.
I just finished /Heart of Gold/ by Sharon Shinn, who I'd never previously
heard of. Very Tepperish, and very good.
>
> The name looks vaguely familiar, but I can't remember anything concrete.
> Which book should I start with?
>
>> "The Golden Age"... <five minutes later> John C. Wright. I've only read
>> part one, and I loved it (it's one of those inevitable trilogies). Took
>> me a while to realise that I could safely ignore everything about names
>> like "Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed,
>> Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era
>> 7043" that I didn't understand and just go with "Phaethon, that guy".
Ugh. Sounds like Iain Banks. He has the absolute worst names for people,
but the names of his interstellar vessels are _brilliant_. I gave him up
after one book, but my wife - the non-SF person - enjoys him.
> You mean like "Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim"?
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus)
Hmmm. It might not seem quite so awful to someone with German as a first
language :-)
> I vaguely remember Walter Jon Williams as Cyperpunk author, though
> I can't remember if it was the interesting Cyperpunk or the boring
> Cyberpunk. Anyway, I'll have a look.
LOL. There's no boring cyberpunk. There's good cyberpunk and ... stuff
that isn't real cyberpunk :-)
>>>> Fortunately, I am not restricted to reading what's sent to me so I
>>>> have found Abercrombie to recommend :-)
Don't be such a tease! Which "Abercrombie"? There are eight different
Abercrombie's in my library.
>>>> Another series called "First Law",
Ah. Joe Abercrombie. Once again, I see some lurker on this group is
placing holds at my library based on your recommendations :-) I'll have to
wait. I'm also in the queue for /The Braided Path/ - we should establish a
Taemon's Recommendations Book Club here in Halifax, NS. As usual, our
library only has one book of the trilogy. At least it's book one...
>>> BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
>>> German, despite the name). A really good read.
Again, all we have is the first book.
--
derek
Dirk Thierbach
> My original point in invoking it was to say that if you only observe
> the effect, the two _are_ indistinguishable.
Yes, that too.
> This means that it is perfectly possible to write a story in which
> things happen that cannot be explained by our science, but if the
> author makes an effort not to explain how this is done, we will be
> unable to say whether it is fantasy or science-fiction
And it's often better to not explain them in detail in the first place.
Otherwise one gets dreadful technobabble. Much too often.
[snip]
> I think that Tolkien has a good point when he compares 'magic' and
> 'the machine' -- that the basis is the desire for 'making the will
> more quickly effective.' (_Letters_ #131) Within the story, the
> author needs devices that can make the will and the desires of the
> characters clearer -- more obvious, if you will.
Did Tolkien mean this with respect to story-writing? I understood
that he wanted to point out that "Magic" and "Technology" are similar
in that they both try to let humankind manipulate nature, or other
humans (though in our world, the latter works and the former doesn't :-).
> [some] fiction [...] uses the sub-creation itself to set up a model
> in which human nature can be 'studied' in a controlled, noise-free
> environment. These devices, what Tolkien calles 'the Machine'
> (whether magical or technological) is, IMO, a part of that:
I think these two are quite different: Technology/Magic as a symbol
for Man trying to conquer Nature OTOH, and OTOH a subcreative setting
where one can study human nature. Of course the latter can make use
of the former, but most SF/F doesn't.
> This also takes me to, what I believe is (possibly a rather small)
> part of the explanation for the success of sub-creative fiction in
> the twentieth century. The complexity of human life has always been
> growing, [...] and many other reactions including attempts to build
> models that can help overview some few aspects without the
> complexity of 'real reality.' The usefulness of sub-creative
> fiction in achieving the latter is,
Again, I don't think so. People have been telling "fantastic" stories
(fairy-tales, sagas, myths) for thousands of years. If the complexity
of human life is different now from what it was then, and the main
reason of success of SF/F is to cope with that complexity, why hasn't
story-telling changed a lot (new ingredients like spaceships aside)?
- Dirk
Derek Broughton
>> He made worse slips toward the end; in one scene, Arcadia Darell claims
>> she keeps a *baseball bat* under her bed! What's more, there was a
>> reference near it to the cost of something or other in *dollars*, not
>> Foundation credits.
>
> I suppose one could somehow excuse the first slip by saying that they
> still play baseball in the distant future, but if so, he should at least
> have spelled it "basbul bat" or something like that to maintain the sense
> of distance.
Of course they'll still be playing baseball. And it will _still_ be spelled
"baseball". And, in no more than 25 centuries, I'm pretty sure we'll be
able to eliminate the Designated Hitter rule...
Baseball is America's one great contribution to culture.
--
derek
Öjevind Lång
[snip]
>>> Yes, of course. I didn't say that psychohistory is easy, or actually
>>> possible. (IMHO the system is probably too close to chaotic behaviour
>>> to make any realiable forecast). The point was that in principle, the
>>> idea is sound, and it's not a question of the inability to measure
>>> single facts, which become quickly outdated.
>
>> I agree that the system is too close to chaotic behaviour for any
>> reliable
>> forecasts.
>
> I said "probably" on purpose -- since we don't have a workable
> description,
> we can't actually measure how close the system is to chaotic behaviour
> (yes, one can measure that). So it's just my hunch. And nothing we
> could say anything definitive about.
We agree about that. Still, that's a bit like saying: "Maybe
faster-than-light travel might turn out to be feasible sometime in the
future." That sort of thing is OK for the purposes of writing science
fiction, but it is, to put it mildly, highly improbable to ever become
reality. Perhaps people in the future might discover some way of travelling
between the stars, but if so, faster-than-light travel is unlikely to be
involved. As you say, we can't say anything definite about it, but that
doesn't mean it needs to be taken seriously as a future possibility. And the
same applies to psychohistory.
I don't remember who wrote that most science fiction is based on assuming
that one impossible or unlikely thing is reality and then developing one's
story from there, strictly observing logic and scientific knowledge apart
from the grand exception made at the outset. Well, words to that effect.
Anyway, the Foundation books make several scientifically untenable
assumptions: faster-than-light travel, galactic empires (see below),
psychohistory and robots with a consciousness who can make intricate grand
plans for the proper evolution of human history. Granted, the last
impossibility was tacked onto the structure later, and in my opinion it made
the whole edifice topple down.
When it comes to chaos theory, as you know, one can only make rather
limited predictions using it, and there really isn't much to indicate that
that will change, is there? Anyway, there is a huge difference between
making accurate weather forecasts (which still remains a distant dream) or
predicting earthquakes to foreseeing the social, economical, historical and
whatnot development of a planet, let alone a galactic empire. I suspect some
of the more exorbitant claims for the future possibilities of chaos theory
will go the way of cybernetics.
In passing, let me say that I take it we both know that the concept of
galactic empires is absurd. It makes for good stories, but in real life, I
find it even more absurd than psychohistory. :-)
>> Furthermore, all observers view things through ideological
>> spectacles.
>
> But that doesn't matter -- empiric verifiability doesn't depend on
> ideology. Either the theory works, or it doesn't. When it works, it
> doesn't matter which ideological spectacles the inventor was wearing.
> Or which ideology the observer is influenced by. You measure, you
> plug in the numbers, you get a result. No matter which ideology you
> currently believe in, the result will be the same. Now *interpreting*
> the result can be easily influence by ideology, but that's a completely
> different thing.
How can one be sure that all one's "observations" and interpretations of
society are correct? And that one has included all relevant data and
excluded all the irrelevant ones? IMO, that could only be possible in an
extremely closed-circuit society of the ant heap kind. That is to say, a
society where humans aren't involved. Or hmunsa, as a certain other poster
here would say.
Making value neutral observations in the field of natural science can be
difficult, but making such observations where human beings and human
societies are involved is infinitely much harder.
>> I rather dislike having to trot out the hackneyed term "paradigm",
>> but paradigms do exist and tend to distort what one perceives. How
>> does one identify all relevant data?
>
> That doesn't matter for the story. Just *assume* one could identify the
> relevant data. It's a "what-if" scenario: What if we had a working
> science of psycho-history? Can we do anything interesting with that?
Of course. I accept the premise as a device for a story. I just don't think
it is possible in real life. I thought we were agreed about that.
[snip]
>> The original Foundation trilogy depicts the Galactic Empire (and later
>> on
>> the Foundation) as some sort of mid-20th century USA minus religion.
>
> Hm. Not necessarily.
You surprise me. Both are very much patterned on the United States of the
1940's. I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding here. I don't claim
that Asimov consciously envisaged space as being almost exclusively settled
by white Anglo-Saxon Americans; I suspect he just didn't give the matter a
thought. That is to say, he was interested in working out the details of his
tale of a galactic empire on the way down and the salvation of human
civilization through psychohistory. As you point out below, assuming that
space civilizations would look rather like mid-20th century America (with
the exception of the cultures of bug-eyed monsters, of course) was very
general at the time among science fiction writers. The only ones who rather
visibly chafed at those constraints were Robert A. Heinlein and Poul
Anderson.
(Insert cheer for Heinlein's "Citizen of the Galaxy" and "The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress", and for the Flandry books.)
>> Almost everybody has very cursorily disguised Anglo-American names
>> (Hober Mallow, Salvor Hardin, Homir Munn, Hari Seldon, Jord Fara,
>> Arcadia Darell, even Jan Smite);
>
> Yes, but that doesn't mean the Empire is identical to the USA. Of course
> he'd choose names that are familiar for the reader. Every author is
> biased by the culture he lives in. And part of that of course reflects
> into this work. But that doesn't mean that all his work is meant
> to represent the culture he lives in.
See above. Actually, in his later Foundation books, he tries to make up for
his earlier myopia by introducing names from other cultures. There's one
book where he mentions a person with a Hindu name and remarks that names of
that kind were rather common in that particular neck o' the galaxy. He also
features some rather uninteresting female protagonists, including a Mayor of
the Foundation who is a copy of Margaret Thatcher; that indicates to me that
he found it too much of a challenge to work out a credible female character
on his own. (But then, he never was much good at creating vivid characters;
that's not what one reads his stories for, is it?)
>> female emancipation has not happened and almost all women are
>> housewives
>
> As in most SF (and probably other literature as well) from this era.
Sure. I was not attacking Asimov. I simply mentioned that he wasn't really
good at predicting even the most elementary social or economic changes, and
I added that no one was. And I did that in order to indicate that if Asimov,
with his undoubted intelligence, couldn't even envisage the changes within
his own lifetime, how likely is it that even people who dedicate their
entire lives to it could predict the future? And there have been people who
have tried to do exactly that.If anything, they are less confident now than
they used to be. Auguste Comte is receding into the past rather swiftly by
now, to express time in relative terms. (Forgive the pun; I couldn't resist
it.)
>> (the exception being a handful of novelists, academics and
>> teachers
>
> So he's actually quite progressive :-) And I think in picking
> Arkady as the heroine he was far ahead of his contemporaries.
Its' true that female protagonists were unusual in sf at the time, but
Asimov was not the only one to feature them. Everybody knows about
Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, and there were also James H. Schmitz's
heroines: Telzey Amberdon, Trigger, Goth and the rest.
I'm not willing to give Asimov a high score for progressiveness because he
included a female novelist. It's not as if female novelists were regarded as
exotic in Asimov's youth. Even if one ignores various female writers from
Sappho to Christine de Pisanie to Margaret of Navarre to Aphra Behn, female
novelists and poets became a regular feature from Jane Austen onwards.
Furthermore, Arcadia Darell is not really a mover and doer. She is an
intelligent but rather clueless teenager who is used as a tool by the Second
Foundation. The point here is that Asimov, for the purpose of his story,
needed a young person whose mind had been tampered with at such an early
date that the tampering was impossible to detect. The story becomes more
poignant because the child tampered with is a girl, not a boy.
[snip]
>> everybody speaks and thinks like Americans of the time (except some
>> stereotyped, even parodical, British aristocrats, Roman generals,
>> barbarian chiefs, olde worlde kings and country yokels),
>
> Which is exactly what would happen if an author tries to go beyond
> the culture he is used to. So you make actually a very good case that
> the Empire is *not* meant to be like the USA :-)
I have addressed this above. Asimov's social and cultural scope was clearly
very limited; it became a bit wider later on in life, but I wouldn't say it
ever became truly eclectic. Without thinking it over, he simply transposed
the US of the 1940's into the distant future. This is in glaring contrast to
what, for example, Poul Anderson achieved when it came to imagining future
civilizations and the flowering and withering of cultures. Neither did
Asimov think of introducing even the most miniscule indications of changes
in mores and mentality, even though such changes are inevitable in any
historical context.
The only observation that remains for me to add is that Asimov's crumbling
empire is rather clearly modelled on the one depicted in Edward Gibbon's
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Not that I am by any means the
first one to point that out.
[snip]
> And "let's assume there exist a science of psycho-history" is just
> another such lie.
Yes, agree completely. I did not accuse Asimov of trying to launch
psychohistory as a subject that should be studied and taught at higher
institutions of learning. I just pointed out how fundamentally absurd the
concept is. As you say, that doesn't detract too much from the enjoyment of
the original Foundation trilogy.
>> They are almost as bizarre as the laminated mouse brain used in
>> Cordwainer Smith's wonderful short story "Think Blue, Count Two",
>> about a psycho-mehanical safety device
>
> Yeah, that was an interesting idea. Cordwainer Smith seems to always
> come up with bizarre stuff like this :-)
Sometimes he tilts over into decadence, but most of the time his stories are
fantastic. There really is nothing else like them. It's reflected in the
titles: "Drunkboat", "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", "The Ballad of Lost C'mell",
"Under Old Earth", "No, No, Not Rogov!", "The Day the People Fell", "The
Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal", "The Lady Who Sailed the *Soul*", "A
Planet Named Shayol", "The Game of Rat and Dragon", "Scanners Live in
Vain" - I could go on listing them to the end.
Öjevind
Mark Sieving
>
> Of course they'll still be playing baseball. And it will _still_ be spelled
> "baseball". And, in no more than 25 centuries, I'm pretty sure we'll be
> able to eliminate the Designated Hitter rule...
It's even possible that in 25 centuries, the Cubs might win a World
Series.
Öjevind Lång
news:28fdl6-...@morgen.pointerstop.ca...
[snip]
>> And everything from Sheri Tepper.
>
> Skip the books of /The True Game/ (I think that's what she called it).
> Very
> juvenile. Everything else is excellent. SF or Fantasy is just her
> setting
> for investigations of social dynamics, and they could be set pretty well
> anywhere. I think if I must choose one, go for /The Family Tree/.
Oops! You don't seem to like the Jinian series. I rather enjoyed it.
OTOH, I think I can safely warn people against the (IMO) awful writings of
Katherine Kurtz and Catherine Kerr.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
[snip]
> There is a philosophical discussion in this as well -- one on whether
> the universe is deterministic (though chaotic) or random. If we
> believe that human behaviour is fundamentally deterministic, then it
> is much easier to accept psychohistory as a viable idea. But at least
> I think that we cannot, at this point, rule it out as impossible the
> way we can with his positronic brains or his particular idea of
> hyperspace.
I rule it out as impossible in the same way that I say that the pyramids in
Egypt and South America were not built by aliens. I can't prove it, but I
don't need to. Anyway, Asimov wrote three enjoyable novels based on his
idea. I just wish he had left it at that, just the way I wish Ursula K. Le
Guin would have refrained from writing sequels to her Earthsea trilogy.
I do think, however, that Asimov believed rather too intensely that
society could be shaped in a "rational" way by using "scientific" thinking
and exterminating religion. That positivist belief, very much a product of
the 19th century and Auguste Comte, still enjoyed some supprt in Asimov's
youth (John Wyndham was another adherent), but it's pretty much superseded
by now. Rationality isn't what it used to be.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
That's right. Thank you! Wonderful title, by the way. Is it a quotatuion
from some poem?
�jevind
Steve Morrison
It is, but from a poem within the novel itself. In chapter 3, we're told
that Biron had once written this:
The stars, like dust, encircle me
In living mists of light;
And all of space I seem to see
In one vast burst of sight.
on the occasion of his first space voyage.
Paul S. Person
<bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>"Paul S. Person" <pspe...@ix.netscom.com.invalid> skrev i meddelandet
>news:290685dolmr4cqc23...@4ax.com...
>> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:47:02 +0200, �jevind L�ng
>> <bredba...@ojevind.lang> wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> /Robots of Dawn/ and /Robots and Empire/ have the robots Giskard and
>> R. Daneel Olivaw inventing the concept of psychohistory -- and the
>> Zeroth Law of Robotics.
>
>Ack! The more Asimov intruded his robots into his Foundation, the more
>boring and ultimately pointless it all became. IMHO, of course. In the end,
>all human history after the invention of space flight has been laid out by
>the robots. And I must say that they seem to make a rather messy job of it.
>Must be because of the existenceof those pesky, irrational humans who keep
>disturbing their circles.
Oh, and Giskard (and, after his deactivation, R. Daneel Olivaw) was
telepathic and able to influence humans through that power.
I enjoyed the novels, but still ...
And then there is /The End of Eternity/, which takes a rather
different slant on who is responsible for the path that led to the
Empire.
>> /Forward the Foundation/ and /Prelude to Foundation/ deal with the
>> practical difficulties. Well, they try to, anyway; if it were possible
>> to actually deal with the practical difficulties, then Asimov would
>> have invented psychohistory!
>
>I bet he would have.
>
>> <snippo -- robots as gods>
>>
>>>Exactly. A vicious circle. He even wrote a short story about a thinking
>>>machine which is all alone after entropy has done its work, and which (or
>>>who) after carefully planning things out creates the universe anew by
>>>saying: "Let there be light."
>>
>> I've always regarded that sort of thing as a very smart form of
>> anti-religious propaganda -- the sort of thing people like Dawkins
>> would not even recognize, never mind see the point of.
>
>Really? I found that story rather pathetic. As if he couldn't endure life
>without some kind of cosmic daddy after all. Mind you, I'm not an atheist,
>but Asimov claimed to be one.
I read that during the Great Asimov Readfest about a year ago, but I
can't remember the title. Isn't it the one where all of humanity gets
stored into a computer and then that computer moves into hyperspace?
I don't know that inferring what Asimov believed from what he wrote is
necessarily a valid process. He may simply have started the story with
another goal, and found that the ending wrote itself, a phenomenon
several authors have reported having occurred to them.
>> I actually enjoy reading really well-done anti-religious propaganda.
>> Particularly when it is by a great Science Fiction writer.
>
>Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but I think his anti-religious
>propaganda was very crude. In one standalone novel ("Worlds at War?" Im not
>sure about the title, but the hero was called Biron Farill), most of Earth
>is radioactive - by implication, because of nuclear war. Later on, the
>thought of human beings actually using nuclear weapons apparently became
>unendurable to Asimov. So he turned it into one of the robots (Giscard?)
>deliberately poisoning most of Earth in order to force most of the
>population to emigrate and leave superstitious things such as religion
>behind. I found that unspeakable, for more than one reason.
In /Foundation's Edge/ or /Foundation and Earth/, Asimov propounds two
theories:
1) That all solar systems look like ours (rocky planets inward,
gaseous planets outward). This, of course, reflects the state of solar
system theory before any extra-Solar planets were discovered. (The
theory developed to explain why this "always" happened may still apply
to some subset of star systems, of which we happen to be one, of
course.)
2) That intelligent life evolved only on Earth because only Earth had
a discernable level of background radiation. Asimov's universe, of
course, is notable for the absence of any other intelligent species
than Man (Robots are not a species and Gaia is composed of Men and
Robots) and, in fact, he states that Man never found life very far
advanced on any planet other than Earth.
So the nuclear war presumed in the /very/ early novel (the protagonist
is a 20th-century man transported into the far future, and the Empire
in this novel knows darn well where Earth is) is replaced by Giskard
enhancing the one unique feature of Earth, acting under his
understanding of the Zeroth Law, and self-destructing because of his
doubts about having acted correctly. The forced evacuation would,
IIRC, take about 200 years, making it difficult but not impossible.
> As is evidenced from that episode, Asimov clearly didn't care much about
>environmental issues either; in one place, somebody remarks that no one
>exported tigers to other planets because "Why would anyone do that?" Why,
>because they might be fun to study? Because they might enrich the
>environment? It seems domesticated animals was about all Asimov cared for.
>Perhaps seeding seas on other planets with fish and that kind of thing too.
>And we know that Vega (or was it some other star system?) produced wonderful
>cigars, so obviously mankind brought tobacco plants to the stars, and not
>because of their flowers.
Almost anything that was found on any planet was, ultimately, derived
from Earth. Certainly any plants or animals (including fish and birds)
useful to man. Although evolution, no doubt, had its effects!
--
Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, "I never knew him."
Steve Morrison
> I read that during the Great Asimov Readfest about a year ago, but I
> can't remember the title. Isn't it the one where all of humanity gets
> stored into a computer and then that computer moves into hyperspace?
"The Last Question", see http://preview.tinyurl.com/p4wk84
Jeff Urs
> Öjevind Lång wrote:
>> I suppose one could somehow excuse the first slip by saying that they
>> still play baseball in the distant future, but if so, he should at least
>> have spelled it "basbul bat" or something like that to maintain the sense
>> of distance.
>
> Of course they'll still be playing baseball. And it will _still_ be spelled
> "baseball".
Of course, we already know that the spelling of what it's called when
the ball is hit out of the park will be "homir".
(You just have to travel a few posts downwhen.)
--
Jeff
Öjevind Lång
news:8028ea57-2f24-40d3...@k19g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>>> I suppose one could somehow excuse the first slip by saying that they
>>> still play baseball in the distant future, but if so, he should at least
>>> have spelled it "basbul bat" or something like that to maintain the
>>> sense
>>> of distance.
>>
>> Of course they'll still be playing baseball. And it will _still_ be
>> spelled
>> "baseball".
>
> Of course, we already know that the spelling of what it's called when
> the ball is hit out of the park will be "homir".
>
> (You just have to travel a few posts downwhen.)
LOLOL
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
> �jevind L�ng wrote:
[snip]
>>>> Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but I think his
>>>> anti-religious propaganda was very crude. In one standalone novel
>>>> ("Worlds at War?" Im not sure about the title, but the hero was called
>>>> Biron Farill), most of Earth is radioactive - by implication, because
>>>> of nuclear war.
>>>
>>> /The Stars, Like Dust/.
>>
>> That's right. Thank you! Wonderful title, by the way. Is it a quotatuion
>> from some poem?
>>
>> �jevind
>
> It is, but from a poem within the novel itself. In chapter 3, we're told
> that Biron had once written this:
>
> The stars, like dust, encircle me
> In living mists of light;
> And all of space I seem to see
> In one vast burst of sight.
>
> on the occasion of his first space voyage.
That's pretty good. It must have been composed by Asimov himself.
�jevind
Öjevind Lång
[snip]
> And then there is /The End of Eternity/, which takes a rather
> different slant on who is responsible for the path that led to the
> Empire.
The one about the agency monitoring time travel against aberrations and
discovering that it was a self-defeating purpose?
[snip]
> I don't know that inferring what Asimov believed from what he wrote is
> necessarily a valid process. He may simply have started the story with
> another goal, and found that the ending wrote itself, a phenomenon
> several authors have reported having occurred to them.
In a collection of his best early stories issued in, I think, the '80s, he
wrote a short introduction before each story, relating something about the
circumstances surrounding its composition. He said about "In a Good
Cause..." that most of the time, but not always, a writer expresses his own
opinions in a story, adding that when he wrote that one, he was so busy
organizing the story that it was only after he had finished it that he
noticed that he disliked its moral, which was that interhuman warfare was a
necessary developmental stage so they could evolve the skills necessary to
defeat humanity's inevitable enemy, the alien Diaboli. He said that another
sf writer (I forget who) told him he liked the story but disliked its moral
and added that he had to admit that that was how he felt about it too.
I agree with both Asimov and his colleague; "In a Good cause..." is a good
story, but the moral is terrible.
[snip]
> In /Foundation's Edge/ or /Foundation and Earth/, Asimov propounds two
> theories:
> 1) That all solar systems look like ours (rocky planets inward,
> gaseous planets outward). This, of course, reflects the state of solar
> system theory before any extra-Solar planets were discovered. (The
> theory developed to explain why this "always" happened may still apply
> to some subset of star systems, of which we happen to be one, of
> course.)
> 2) That intelligent life evolved only on Earth because only Earth had
> a discernable level of background radiation. Asimov's universe, of
> course, is notable for the absence of any other intelligent species
> than Man (Robots are not a species and Gaia is composed of Men and
> Robots) and, in fact, he states that Man never found life very far
> advanced on any planet other than Earth.
I think Asimov lacked the empathy (or whatever one should call it) necessary
to deal with other thinking species in space. Again, I feel a need to
contrast him with Poul Anderson, who glorified in depiciting variegated
human and non-human cultures in space.
> So the nuclear war presumed in the /very/ early novel (the protagonist
> is a 20th-century man transported into the far future, and the Empire
> in this novel knows darn well where Earth is) is replaced by Giskard
> enhancing the one unique feature of Earth, acting under his
> understanding of the Zeroth Law, and self-destructing because of his
> doubts about having acted correctly. The forced evacuation would,
> IIRC, take about 200 years, making it difficult but not impossible.
A nuclear war is also rather clearly assumed to have taken in place on Earth
in "The Stars, Like Dust".
[snip]
> Almost anything that was found on any planet was, ultimately, derived
> from Earth. Certainly any plants or animals (including fish and birds)
> useful to man. Although evolution, no doubt, had its effects!
To me, it feels rather bleak. I'd like to think that there is some other
life in the universe in addition to us.
�jevind
Troels Forchhammer
<news:20090813131829...@dthierbach.news.arcor.de>
> Troels Forchhammer <Tro...@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
>>
<snip>
>> This means that it is perfectly possible to write a story in
>> which things happen that cannot be explained by our science, but
>> if the author makes an effort not to explain how this is done, we
>> will be unable to say whether it is fantasy or science-fiction
>
> And it's often better to not explain them in detail in the first
> place. Otherwise one gets dreadful technobabble. Much too often.
Indeed.
We get a lot of 'L�mendil swished his wand a pointed at the box while
whispering the spell under his breath. Slowly the box began to
lift,' or 'L�mendil switched on his levitator, pointed the red search
beam at the box and pressed the trigger. Slowly the box began to
lift.'
The two sentences above are firmly entrenched in either a fantasy and
a science fiction world-view respectively, but if we had just been
told that "L�mendil pointed, and with a minimum of effort he caused
the box to slowly begin to lift" we would have been without any clue
to the genre. It was explanations at this level (wand & spell vs.
levitator gadget) that I was thinking of.
>> I think that Tolkien has a good point when he compares 'magic'
>> and 'the machine' -- that the basis is the desire for 'making the
>> will more quickly effective.' (_Letters_ #131) Within the story,
>> the author needs devices that can make the will and the desires
>> of the characters clearer -- more obvious, if you will.
>
> Did Tolkien mean this with respect to story-writing? I understood
> that he wanted to point out that "Magic" and "Technology" are
> similar in that they both try to let humankind manipulate nature,
> or other humans (though in our world, the latter works and the
> former doesn't :-).
Yes. That is, of course, also story-writing, but I agree that Tolkien
didn't intend it in the sense that I use it. My thoughts, however,
were inspired by Tolkien's descriptions, so I thought it appropriate
to include it anyway.
In effect Tolkien says that the Machine, both in the technological
and the magical sense, is an expression of a desire for a power to
affect the world around you -- to shape it and dominate it. This, he
says, is equivalent to 'making the will more quickly effective'.
Tolkien used this in his books because he was concerned with the
desire for power in itself -- this desire, and the associated lure of
anything that may provide that power, is a major theme in LotR in
particular. I think, however, that his association with the will is
very astute, and I think it serves another purpose, that Tolkien
didn't speak of: that of making the will more directly observable --
when your will is more quickly effective, it also becomes more
obvious. This, IMO, is not a major thing, but a small part of what I
think of when I say that using a sub-creation allows the author to
set up a model system in which the interesting 'signal' can be
isolated and amplified.
>> [some] fiction [...] uses the sub-creation itself to set up a
>> model in which human nature can be 'studied' in a controlled,
>> noise-free environment. These devices, what Tolkien calles 'the
>> Machine' (whether magical or technological) is, IMO, a part of
>> that:
>
> I think these two are quite different: Technology/Magic as a
> symbol for Man trying to conquer Nature OTOH, and OTOH a
> subcreative setting where one can study human nature. Of course
> the latter can make use of the former, but most SF/F doesn't.
Both yes and no. In most SF/F the former is not a theme as such, but
even then it does employ devices that make 'the will more quickly
effective' -- that ease the tasks the characters face, and which, in
a Tolkienian view, would come under this heading, the Machine. Is it
necessary for science fiction or fantasy to employ such devices in
order to stay in genre? Hardly, I'd say, and certainly not for
successful sub-creative fiction in the broader sense.
There is undoubtedly an element of convention involved -- after all
the magic and the technological gadgets almost define the two genres
(or at least the archtypal SF&F), but then it is, IMO, still possible
to ask oneself what role it plays in the stories and how the author
utilizes these devices in telling the story.
When one has an idea, there's a tendency to both emphasize its
importance and to take it just a bit further than is really viable --
all in the excitement of the moment. I think there's hints of this
even in the work of some of the best Tolkien scholars -- Flieger (I
think, for instance, that she takes her thesis just a bit too far in
_Splintered Light_), Shippey (not everything is based on philology
<GG>) and Garth, and I have certainly no doubt that I am no more
immune to this that they are (and most likely less immune). So it is
quite likely that I have overstated the importance of these ideas --
even relative to what I would, in more sober moments, be ready to
admit, and that I take the idea further than what should, strictly
speaking, be the logical conclusion. I am no more fond of criticism
than anyone else, and I may not always take it very well, but I'd
still appreciate comments trying to set the bounds for my ideas (even
though it may be a while before such appreciation becomes apparent
<GG).
>> This also takes me to, what I believe is (possibly a rather
>> small) part of the explanation for the success of sub-creative
>> fiction in the twentieth century. The complexity of human life
>> has always been growing, [...] and many other reactions including
>> attempts to build models that can help overview some few aspects
>> without the complexity of 'real reality.' The usefulness of
>> sub-creative fiction in achieving the latter is,
>
> Again, I don't think so. People have been telling "fantastic"
> stories (fairy-tales, sagas, myths) for thousands of years. If the
> complexity of human life is different now from what it was then,
> and the main reason of success of SF/F is to cope with that
> complexity, why hasn't story-telling changed a lot (new
> ingredients like spaceships aside)?
I never claimed it a 'main reason' -- what I said was that I believe
it is '(possibly a rather small) part of the explanation, which is
quite a different thing.
And I don't think it matters if people have been telling myths etc.
for millennia -- I am speaking about a relative increase of
popularity, not the emergence of sub-creative fiction.
There's two claims in this:
1: That sub-creative fiction, mostly in the form of science fiction
and fantasy, has seen an increased relative popularity over the past
hundred years or so (I'd accept any number between 50 years and about
200 years -- the duration is not important to me). This impression
covers only the Christian cultures of Europe and, to a lesser extent,
North America.
2: That he ability of sub-creative fiction to provide a useful model
for an investigation of aspects of human nature is one element, and
possibly a small element, among many others that explain the
popularity of sub-creative fiction.
2b: I think my previous post contained an addition to this claim,
being that at the very least the relative importance of this aspect
as an explanation for the popularity of sub-creative fiction has
increased with increasing complexity of human life.
2c: Which of course relies on the further claim that the complexity
of human life has been increasing.
1 can possibly be refuted (depending on what data that is available),
though that will require data I don't have access to myself. Mine is,
of course, merely an unsupported claim, and I'd be interested to hear
arguments both for or against.
2 is probably not refutable (it doesn't even necessarily rely on 1),
though of course that doesn't mean that it should be accepted or, for
that matter, rejected (it only means that it is, ultimately, an
unscientific claim).
Thinking it over, I am even less sure about 2b than about 2 in itself
(even if I think 2c is widely accepted), so feel free to ignore that
part.
My main hypothesis is 2 -- the historical development is probably
more in the kind of an afterthought.
I hope this makes it a bit clearer what there is to disagree about
;-) (as usual I welcome arguments against my idea, even if I seem to
argue till Hell freezes over -- usually it takes too long for
arguments to really sink in, but if we take up the argument again in
a year, my position is more likely to have been affected by good
arguments.)
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Please put [AFT], [RABT] or 'Tolkien' in subject.
"He deserves death."
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve
death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to
them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in
judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
- Frodo and Gandalf, /The Fellowship of the Ring/ (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Taemon
> Taemon <Tae...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>> This - this monstrous *thing* I described before, from Felten? It
>> won a PRIZE. A prize!
> The German SF/F Awards are pretty much a joke.
I'd say so! <spitting with indignation>
> Just ignore the awards, it doesn't really say anything about the
> quality.
She won it TWICE!
> BTW, another German author who writes halfway decent Fantasy is
> Gesa Helm: I'm in the middle of "Der Spiegel von Kajx" ("The Mirror
> of Kajx").
You don't have to translate basic German for me :-) I got a couple of years
of German at school, being Dutch. Admittedly, I forgot nearly all of it, but
I can read simple German. (Especially since the Dutch word for mirror is
spiegel.)
> Some passages are not very well written, but overall the
> plot is interesting, and she does pay attention to invented languages.
> Not top class IMHO, but better than many others. Though it does
> contain a prophecy (a rather ambigous one, and I'm not sure yet what it
> will
> actually turn out to mean in the end), so you probably won't like it. :-)
Ugh! Spit! Spit!
>> Ah. You have heard from George R. R. Martin? :-)
> Yes, but I prefer his older short stories (with mostly SF
> ingredients) to the Ice & Fire saga. I read the first books, and was
> not really impressed. Not enough substance for the size. Though
> people kept telling me that "Martin is the saviour of contemporary
> Fantasy". Oh well.
I don't care about saviours, but I very much enjoyed and admired Ice & Fire.
My brother, who has the same taste in literature as I have, can name all the
characters by heart, which is mighty impressive, since he's almost as bad at
names as I am.
>> I think I already recommended Neal Asher to you.
> I think you didn't, but I do like Neal Asher a lot.
That was Derek. See the earlier remark as to names :-)
> Though I like his
> short stories better. I have the impression that after that, he mostly
> converted his ideas from the short stories into novel form, and often
> the results are not as good as the original version.
Hm, you might have a point there. I'm currently reading Prador Moon but not
enjoying it overmuch, since it's all about war (couldn't we eat them, too?).
I read Voyage of the Sabel Keech open-mouthed, though. Must find the one
that goes before it one day.
>> And K.J. Parker, if you think cruelty is funny.
> Hasn't been on my radar yet. And I don't think cruelty is funny.
> I don't really mind cruelty, but if it's the only interesting feature,
> I'm probably not interested. Given that, would you still recommend it?
> Which book first?
Well... I was swept away by the Scavenger series, even on reread. But it's
hard reading, it's about a guy who has lost his memory, and sometimes the
point of view changes and you only realise that later. But it's very good -
the guy might or might not be actually a god and he surely ends up killing
people randomly wherever he goes. I like that sort of thing :-) Fluffy
elves and wizards... grumble... not Tolkien elves and wizards, of course.
Then there's the Fencer trilogy, which is... ah... cruel?
Start with The Engineer :-)
>> And everything from Sheri Tepper.
> The name looks vaguely familiar, but I can't remember anything
> concrete. Which book should I start with?
I'd say The Family Tree... she has a pendant for moralizing and deus ex
machina's, and it's less obvious in that one. I think it's her best. Six
Moon Dance is great, too.
�jevind likes The True Game series and I think it's very good but I wouldn't
start on it.
>> "The Golden Age"... <five minutes later> John C. Wright. I've only
>> read part one, and I loved it (it's one of those inevitable
>> trilogies). Took me a while to realise that I could safely ignore
>> everything about names like "Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified
>> (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed,
>> Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043" that I didn't understand and
>> just go with "Phaethon, that guy".
> You mean like "Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von
> Hohenheim"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus)
No, actually not like that :-) That's just a name, albeit a ridiculous
name. But the "Base Neuroformed" etcetera is actually supposed to mean
something :-) There are all kinds of half-AI-hive mind construct thingies
that sort of play a role and maybe on a reread those things start to make
sense. But just considering them "characters" works well enough.
> I vaguely remember Walter Jon Williams as Cyperpunk author, though
> I can't remember if it was the interesting Cyperpunk or the boring
> Cyberpunk. Anyway, I'll have a look.
I don't like cyberpunk. I haven't read that many of him. Dread Empire is
hard SF.
Oh! John Varley! Both Steel Beach and Ophiuchi Hotline are very good. Varley
goes all ways, though. You never know what to expect, quality-wise. Strata,
though. That's a classic. One of my favourite books of all time.
>> But fantasy... Robin Hobb is very good.
> Yes, though sometimes the writing isn't. The plot makes up for it,
> though.
Yes, I agree.
> Thanks for all the info.
My pleasure!
>>> BTW, I can recommend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (not
>>> German, despite the name). A really good read.
>>
>> Ah, got that to review... let me dig that up... I wrote:
>>
>> ==========================================
>> Eerste deel van een fantasyserie en een verdienstelijk debuut. Het
>> boek vertelt het (eerste deel van) het levensverhaal van de
>> charismatische en begaafde Khotve, uit zijn eigen mond. Tragisch,
>> afwisselend en spannend weet het lot van de verder weinig
>> sympathieke Kvothe te blijven boeien. Een enkele stoorzender is het
>> veelvuldige gebruik van omineuze slotzinnetjes in de trant van ?toen
>> wist ik nog niet dat onze tijd bijna om was?, die de lezer enigszins
>> op afstand houden.
>> Bevat overbodige kaart. Vakkundige vertaling, behalve in de frequente
>> rijmpjes (??t is waar/onomkeerbaar?).
>>
>> ==========================================
>>
>> Rough translation:
>>
>> First part of a fantasy series and a pretty good debute.
>
> "verdienstelijk" is a nice word. :-)
Isn't it, now? :-) I always try to choke my reviews with that kind of words
:-) "Omineus", too. No review is complete without the word "omineus".
>> The book tells of
>> the (first part of the) life's story of the charismatic and gifted
>> Kvothe, from his own mouth. Tragic, varied and exciting, the fate of
>> the less than sympathetic Kvothe keeps entertaining. A disturbing
>> aspect is the often-applied use of ominous sentences like "at the
>> time I didn't realise our time was almost up" that keep the reader
>> at a distance.
> Didn't really notice those. :-)
This might be a personal dislike, it's always hard to be sure about that.
>> Hm. I must have been in a hurry :-) I have 1100 characters to use. I
>> remember afterwards regretting not adding something about the other
>> characters being very flat, especially the love interest. Kvothe
>> himself was rounded enough, but the token pretty woman did nothing
>> for me.
> But it's obvious that she's got some secret to hide, and we will learn
> more about that in the later parts. And of course the author can't
> tell us everything right now, can he? So I think it's ok that she
> stays enigmatic. For now.
Well, I didn't consider her enigmatic. I just considered her flat.
> And the other supporting characters were alright, IMO. Enough
> personality for their roles.
That one teacher was pretty funny...
T.
Taemon
> In past years, I borrowed several excellent fantasy stories at the
> public library . The annoying thing is that now I can't rememebr the
> titles, and the books seem to have disappeared from the shelves...
Huh.
> Now I would make a point of noting down the name of any truly good
> fantasy writer. They aren't all that common, as we know.
Do we! I have made so many of such lists... maybe I should try again. The
English library section is small enough to just browse everything. Sometimes
I feel like I've read everything good... but now, of course, we've got
online stores. An online library would be good. With an e-book application.
Hmm...
T.
Taemon
> Taemon wrote:
>> Contains superfluous map.
> Define "superfluous map"? I hate books that involve any traveling
> that don't make some attempt to provide a map...
Well, it wasn't really traveling. He went to a university. Next to the
university there's a village. That's it. That map was just frillery. But I
feel like I have to mention all the extras, like maps and lists of words and
places and such, so I did :-) I like having maps too but sometimes they
make things worse, only confusing things. This one didn't. It just was
superfluous.
Hm, it suddenly occurs to me that in subsequent installments it gets more
useful. I'll make a note of that :-)
T.