Ian McEwan is patronisingly ill-read (and maybe should watch a film or two?)

Ian McEwan has written a new novel - Machines Like Me - that looks at the ethics around artificial intelligence. I haven't read the book and it might be utterly brilliant. What can't be left festering there, however, is McEwan dismissing 200 years of science fiction writing in one sentence:

McEwan has an abiding faith that novels are the best place to examine such ethical dilemmas, though he has little time for conventional science fiction. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”

Seriously? What on earth does McEwan think Frankenstein - the seminal science fiction novel - is about if it isn't about "being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you"? This is the problem with literary novelists who discover SF and then pretend that nobody ever in the whole history of literature has ever considered those issues the oh-so-fucking-smartass-literary novelist wants to explore.

The contempt in McEwans' dismissal - "not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots" - shows a pathetic ignorance of science fiction. McEwan doesn't even seem to have got around to watching blockbuster SF movies - if he had, he'd have noticed that the whole premise of 'Bladerunner' was that it's hard to tell the difference between humans and humanity's machines. You'd have thought that, maybe - just maybe, McEwan might have run into the writing of Iain Banks at some point in his reading. Especially when he was planning to explore the ethics around artificial intelligence - something that's right bang in the middle of Banks' 'The Culture' series of novels.

I could go on, talk about Olof Stapledon, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner and new wave science fiction. Maybe mention the cyberpunk movement or cite Paolo Bacigalupi's 'Windup Girl'. But it is a fruitless task because I know that, at some point in the next year or so, some grand literary novelist will turn his or her hand to spec fiction and, in doing so, claim that what they're doing is finding some sort of new direction for novel writing rather than joining hundreds of other great writers who chose to create SF - not "conventional" SF (although some space opera is great) but thoughtful, intelligent examinations of the dilemmas given to humanity by the growth of technology and the pushed boundaries of science.

And the saddest thing is that, rather than acting to break down the chasm between SF and literary fiction, the work of a grandee like McEwan will be feted while commenters chitter around him agreeing - because they've never read any and SF is just Star Trek and Star Wars - that its good that real writers are looking at the ethics of AI.

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"It's pretty much Game of Thones..." :SF, fantasy and English literature's Shakespearian creation myth

An entirely gratuitous picture of a dragon

For a very long time I played, along with other former members of Hull University Wargames Society, a postal game based on the Wars of the Roses. These days, I'm guessing that such a game would be conducted via email and social media but back them we only had post and telephone. For the game, each player controlled one noble family (I was, since you are curious, the de la Pole family led by the Duke of Suffolk - 'twas nice to keep the link to Hull) and issued instructions to the man running the game regarding alliances, marriages, battle orders and so forth. In the manner of these things, the game ended - not with a Tudor victory but with a new dynasty under the Bourchier Dukes of Essex.

So when you start reading A Song of Ice and Fire - or set out watching the marvellous TV adaptation, Game of Thrones - it is quickly clear that part of George R R Martin's inspiration came from that tangled and bloody period of history we call the Wars of the Roses. Indeed this is true and Martin has said as much -although he makes clear there's no direct 'character-to-character' correlation merely that the period cried out for reinterpretation.

So it is not a surprise that Dan Hannan finds a connection with Shakespeare in Game of Thrones - indeed that's where the quotation in my headline comes from:

During the interval of one of the performances, I overheard some Americans discussing the play in the bar. “It’s pretty much Game of Thrones,” was one man’s summary. Indeed it is.

 The chaos that comes after a usurpation, the dynastic ambitions, the moral ambiguity, the sudden betrayals, the unexpected turns of plot – all recall the drama of Westeros.

Hannan is describing the second tetralogy of history plays - Richard II, Henry IV (parts one and two), and Henry V - a period that sits right before those Wars of the Roses that inspired Game of Thrones. The problem is that Hannan, in his love for Shakespeare's matchless words, ascribes too great a power to the Bard's works. And falls into the trap that English Literature sets for us all.

What happens is that Shakespeare's characters become part of a creation myth for English Literature - Hannan says:

...he could hardly avoid echoing Shakespeare’s archetypal characters and plots. Shakespeare’s are, so to speak, the true forms. Everything else is a shadow on the cave wall. I realise that that’s a large claim but, if you’re familiar with the plays, you’ll know what I mean.

Shakespeare really isn't about the plots - he borrowed most of them, as we know - or indeed about the characters as characters. What Shakespeare did was put in the mouths of those characters wonderful, insightful, memorable and incisive words. Words that have not just changed our language but have changed the world too.

Like most SF and fantasy writers, Martin has an audience that wants to know everything. An audience that will fill on-line forums, attend conventions, write blogs and sit in serious huddles discussing the uttermost minutiae of Martin's work. And, as a result, Martin has been asked again and again what his influences are - he says stuff like:

Well, I've already named several in this chat. Jack Vance, JRR Tolkien, Maurice Druon... I think the authors who influence you most are probably the authors that you read and love when you're young, and in my case those would include Robert A Heinlein, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber. In historical fiction, Thomas B Costaine, Frank Yerby...I love Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but really I could go on listing names for an hour. There are a lot of great writers out there in all genres that I enjoy and appreciate.

The author who Martin doesn't mention is Shakespeare. And, while Martin has (thanks to a TV adaptation of his series of novels) stepped beyond his genre of fantasy and SF, that is the starting point to understanding his writing. Look at that list above and you'll see the characters that echo in Westeros - Aragorn, Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Liane. These are characters that marry the comic book to ancient legend. Tolkein did not craft his characters from Shakespearian archetypes but from the Kalevala, the poetic and prose Edda and the old legends of England and Wales, from Beowulf and the legend of the Green Knight.

 In the end though, I always think a recommendation tells a lot about where something like Game of Thones starts - here's Martin giving one:

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth. It's not a series in the same sense that mine is. it's four books, largely made up of short stories, and share only a setting with each other, and a character in the case of the middle two; the wonderfully amoral and unscrupulous Kugel the Clever, whose schemes and plots always come back to bite him in the butt. But Vance is the great stylist of sci fi and fantasy, no one writes like him, and The Dying Earth is his finest work. With my friend, I edited a tribute anthology a couple of years ago, when writers wrote stories set in the world of The Dying Earth, including myself, Neil Gaiman, Melissa Shepherd, and on and on...

George R R Martin is a fantasy and SF writer and that is where we must look for the ideas, influences and origins of A Song of Ice and Fire.  Not that Shakespeare isn't important but Martin's nod to the bard isn't about character, plot or even language but is a justification for killing off leading characters!

However, in one important respect Dan Hannan is right. If we can cope with the complexity, depth of character and involvement of Game of Thrones then we can deal with Shakespeare's plays. And if someone's journey takes them from comics through to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett then to A Song of Ice and Fire before their eyes open to Shakespeare - then making the connection that Hannan makes is brilliant. But it's a two way street - people like me who hated English Literature yet read every SF and fantasy book going arrive at Shakespeare by working backwards.

What doesn't do is to suggest that Shakespeare is the acme of literature - as if everything else by comparison is but a pot-boiler, the doodlings of lesser men. When faced with that argument, us fans of fantasy are wont to throw 'On Fairy Stories' at you or to point at the ancient English story-telling tradition that was the basis for what Shakespeare was doing. And then to stomp off muttering - as Tolkien did - that 'English literature ended with Chaucer'.

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The Spectator parades its SF ignorance (again)

Apparently Douglas Adams is the only ever comedy science fiction writer:

Had he not died 12 years ago, Douglas Adams would have been recovering today from celebrating his 61st birthday. Yesterday, Google produced a doodle in his memory. And the Guardian published an interesting piece which declared that Adams remains the king of comedy SF, before going on to argue that he was unique, pretty much the only writer in that genre. Take a bow Mr Adams; you’re top of a league of one.

Funny that the Guardian article didn't say anything of the sort - it even cites some other SF comic writers! The point was rather that Adams broke through to a much wider audience, something that other SF comedians largely failed to do. As ever The Spectator parades its SF ignorance.

And the grandpa of SF comic writers - and writer of "And then there were none" - Eric Frank Russell needs a bit more of a hearing:

“You seem to fit the part all right. Your technical record is first-class. Your disciplinary record stinks to high heaven.' He eyed his listener blank faced. 'Two charges of refusing to obey a lawful order. Four for insolence and insubordination. One for parading with your cap on back to front. What on earth made you do that?'

I had a bad attack of what-the-hell, sir,' explained Leeming.” 

That's from 'Next of Kin" (originally published as "The Space Willies" - which I could explain but that would be too much of a spoiler) - a real laugh out loud book. Go read!

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The stress, pain and anger of a crowded world - thoughts about the future from the past

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“The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzie-wuzzies fused him, and another is still at large in Evsanston, Ill. Across the sea in London a woman mucker took out four including her own three-month baby before a mind-present standerby clobbered. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland notch up the day’s total to 69.”

So goes part of the first ‘Happening World’ in John Brunner’s wonderful, new wave SF novel, ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. And it’s odd that the events in Cumbria took my mind straight to this matter-of-fact piece of fictional reportage. The banal manner in which Brunner introduces the ‘mucker’ to the reader is really quite frightening – we’re talking precisely about the sort of event that still today causes us such shock.

In part, Brunner was trying to describe how dehumanising mass population becomes – crowdedness breeds more stress, more risk, more chance of someone running amok. And from this event, a feature of the crowded world, comes the idea of the ‘mucker’, a person – young, old, male, female, white, black, yellow – who snaps and runs riot. Brunner does not explain or analyse, he just presents the ‘fact’ dispassionately. We don’t get to explore the details of the individual cases – we just get the event in stripped down form: “…accounted for 21 victims…”

Stand on Zanzibar is intended as a warning that with numbers come more of these (and other) events – partly a simple response to there being more people and partly a greater incidence descending from the impact of those numbers on our psyches. I’m not sure I agree with Brunner’s analysis but his presentation of the dehumanising effect of crowds is both depressing and revelatory.

Crazed incidents of murder have been a feature of human society for a long while – anyone who meander the by-ways of folk music will be struck by just how many songs there are about murder. So when we look at the events of yesterday – shocked, stunned, perhaps angry – we need to ask two questions: firstly, is this just another tragic, horrible murderous rampage or something else – something preventable; and secondly, does the event speak of a human condition stretching back through history – thankfully a rare condition?

For what its worth – and I’ve made no study of these matters – I feel the answer lies somewhere between. Blaming the gun is a fruitless diversion but trying to appreciate – and maybe on occasion notice – how the stresses, the agonies of everyday life can unhinge someone might prove a more purposeful response. Supporting scientific enquiry (and I don’t mean the ‘crackeresque’, pseudo-psychiatry beloved of the media) into the motives, reason and proximate causes of the rampages – these ‘muckers’ – might prove of some value. Although, I guess the chances of preventing some future incident in some other unfortunate place are pretty slim – if not non-existent.

Right now, the best we can do is to give a thought to others suffering – to pray if that’s your thing. And to hope that those damaged by the event can gather themselves and come to terms with what has happened. And, at some point, get on with the ordinary lives that cause such stress, pain and anger.



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On the pricking of pomposity!

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This tickled me. How to prick authority’s pomposity in one simple dialogue!

“Bidworthy found himself afflicted with a moment of confusion. Recovering, he informed hurriedly, ‘His Excellency the Earth Ambassador wishes to speak with you at once.’

‘Is that so?’ The other eyed him speculatively, had another pick at his teeth. ‘And what makes him excellent?’

‘He is a person of considerable importance,’ said Bidworthy, unable to decide whether the other was trying to be funny at this expense or alternatively was what is known as a character. A lot of these long-isolated pioneering types liked to think of themselves as characters.

‘Of considerable importance,’ echoed the farmer, narrowing his eyes at the horizon. He appeared to be trying to grasp a completely alien concept. After a while, he inquired, ‘What will happen to your home world when this person dies?’

‘Nothing,’ Bidworthy admitted.

‘It will roll on as before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Round and round the sun?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then,’ declared the farmer flatly, ‘if his existence or nonexistence makes no difference he cannot be important.’ with that, his little engine went chuff-chuff and the cultivator rolled forward.”

From “And Then There Were None” by Eric Frank Russell

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