Simon, King of the Witches

A while back I stumbled across the almost-forgotten 1971 “horror” film Simon, King of the Witches. The film is much better than the title suggests, with a compelling performance by the lead actor playing Simon … and a surprisingly thoughtful depiction of 20^th century “ceremonial magick” practice.

Doing a little internet digging, trying to make sense of how the heck the film got made, I stumbled across an astonishing Amazon review full of lore about the world from which it emerged. I must capture it here:

An Insider’s Look at the insider’s look: Hollywood Occult Scene, 1970
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2008

This film has several levels of meaning. Superficially it appears to be a stylish excursion through the Southern California psychedelic pop-culture era of self-styled warlocks and witches circa 1970. This was a time when magick was in the air and even the mundane world had a mysterious shimmer and sparkle. There will never be a time quite like it again — And for those of us caught in the spell of that bygone era, Southern California was the Land of Oz.

You can recapture the flavor and mystery of that now-ancient time and faraway place with the excellent DVD reissue of the 1971 film Simon, King of The Witches. How do I know this? Because according to urban myth, I was the real-life (if any of our lives at that time could be called “real”) model for the character of Simon Sinistari, the Hollywood warlock in the film.

Now that requires some qualification: I never lived in a storm drain, I never performed an 11^th degree operation (gay sex magick), and I never killed anybody, but other than that, how many black bearded, cigar smoking, wine drinking, witch-bashing, self-proclaimed mighty wizards were there prowling the streets of Hollywood during the 1969-70 years? I ask this question because, in the excellent commentaries included in this reissue, both the actor Andrew Prine and the director Bruce Kessler state that screen writer Robert Phippeny was himself “a warlock” and the model for his own character. If this is true I will be more than happy to concede Simon’s tarnished crown to Phippeny — but I would like to know where he was while we were “doing his thing.”

The general consensus among the “old guard” (some of us did survive!) is that Robert Phippeny was at least a first-hand observer and a student of “The Black Arts.” He kept a low profile, whereas I did not. He may have used another name on the street. Many of us did. He had obviously read Aleister Crowley and Franz Bardon (putting him light years ahead of most witches in the magick department). The “magick” depicted in Simon comes closer to actual practice than anything previously shown on the screen — or subsequently for that matter. But just to be picky we should point out that there is no such thing as an “effluvial condenser” although effluvium is an appropriate ingredient for certain “fluid” condensers which could be charged sexually but would then have to be applied to the magick mirror, not hung over it as in the film. However this error may have been intentional in order to achieve a more dramatic effect. Phippeny’s knowledge of Bardon on sex magick is apparent in the colors of Simon's and Linda’s ceremonial robes: Simon wears blue and Linda wears red, reversing the polarities to create a dynamic interchange (see Initiation into Hermetics page 247 or 308 in the 2^nd edition).

But we still want to know just what astrological aspect Simon was trying to exploit in his major magical working set for 1:33 p.m.?

Robert Phippeny certainly did his homework, but don’t try to use Simon as a training film anymore than you would use Saving Private Ryan as a guide to actually saving Private Ryan.

Beyond all the technical expertise demonstrated in the film we have what I consider a very good story — perhaps too good, and certainly too deep for the market the distributors appealed to. Director Bruce Kessler laments this in his commentary. The screen play is witty, sharp and well-crafted, although it gets a bit confusing in the end, obviously due to budget and time constraints. With all the limitations and the brief production time, Kessler and as his crew were really trying to make a meaningful film. Along that line I should point out that the novelized version of Simon, King of the Witches (Dell 1971) is an excuse for hack pornography by “Baldwin Hills” (name taken from a Southern California community) and serves only to remind the aspiring screen writer never to permit any novelized version of his work over which he has no control.

So, if Robert Phippeny is still out there somewhere, here’s a five-star review from “the old guard.” Let’s hear from you. Same goes for Andrew Prine and Bruce Kessler. You gave us a terrific memorial to our personal, funky, trippy, long-gone Land of Oz.

But perhaps the biggest unsolved mystery in Simon, King of the Witches are the identities of its stars? I always thought Andrew Prine and Brenda Scott had top billing. Who are Allyson Ames and Norman Burton?

Who has the swagger to claim to be the “real” Simon? He signed it:

Poke Runyon
Writer-Producer: Beyond Lemuria

Whoa.

Linda Hamilton

Talking to a friend, I was reminded of how Linda Hamilton deserved a better career. In the original The Terminator, her line reading of “move it, Reese; on your feet, soldier” sells the entire damm movie. Good actors are the best special effect.

I once read an interview with director James Cameron about making Terminator 2: Judgment Day where he told a story I have not been able to source, but remember vividly. He resisted making a Terminator sequel for years — did you see my movie? it ends pretty definitively — but Carolco finally came him with such a huge budget that he just could not say No. So he told them, “Okay … if I can get both Schwarzenegger & Hamilton to come back.”

When he talked to Arnold, the conversation took all of ten seconds. “You made me a star. Of course I’m in. Whatever you want to do.”

With Linda Hamilton, he laid out his whole idea. Sarah Connor is no longer the befuddled waitress, she has learned all this Army stuff. And she starts out in a mental hospital, because she has been ranting about killer robots from the future.

Linda Hamilton replies, “I have one question and one condition.”

As I remember it, Cameron said that he thought this is gonna be good.

“You say you want me to go to boot camp and to the gym. How far will you let me take that?”

I like to imagine Cameron’s grin. “As far as you want.”

“Good.”

This is 1991. Schwarzenegger is on the A-list, but women in movies are not buff.

“What’s your condition?”

“So first they have to break Sarah out of the mental hospital. Cool. But also: she really is crazy.”

And Cameron realizes, oh, that’s better.

Good actors are the best special effect. Give Hamilton a retroactive Oscar just for her line reading of, “How’s the knee?”

And she’s still got it. Look at how much she does in just a few dozen words.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars.

According to Dubois, the teacher of the required History And Moral Philosophy class taught in high school (who speaks in Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece Voice), their political order emerged after ruthless brownshirts arrogated power to themselves to replace decadant liberal democratic governance, in an echo of the history of You Know What:

⋯ With national governments in collapse at the end of the XX^th century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P.O.W. foul-up — and they knew how to fight. But it wasn't revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917 — the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.

The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first — they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice in a generation or two.

Dubois explicitly rejects our political order of universal human rights:

But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights’. The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature [⋯] And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture [⋯] a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ … and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

These are fascist dreams. Considering them plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work. But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, and wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry.

I submit that the potential for a racist version of the Troopers political order just did not occur to Heinlein. This kind of mistake is why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being would have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically hobbled his imagination.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump.

I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose.

[⋯]

The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. [⋯] to make him do what you want him to do. [⋯] But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. [⋯] that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. [⋯] other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say supply the control.

Implication: the Politburo, made up of and selected by a single party state of Komsomol veterans, control the rest of the population through mass hypnosis. That’s not to say the book is not a paean to duty and patriotism, but that it’s primarily a cautionary tale of enslavement by mind-control of diligent patriots by Soviet-style communism. And, to that extent at least, the book is intended as a satire.

That linked post describes that reading to debunk it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate that reading as very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Having argued that depicting the world of Troopers does not mean that Heinlein thought it was a good society, we still have to grapple with him considering it a plausible society. That depends on invoking a lot of fashy ideas.

Dubois mocking the decadent failure of 20^th century liberal democracy:

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book.

Earlier I quoted Dubois rejecting universal human rights. In the context of the novel, it connects directly to the point above:

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’

“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.“

[⋯]

Librety is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes.

[⋯]

“⋯ There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenille criminal there are always one or more adult dilinquents — people of mature years who eiterh do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In that same passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Later, in the version of History And Moral Philsoopshy class taught to military officer candidates, the instructor expects students to do this.

Very well, is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war? [⋯] This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. [⋯] Bring to class tomorrow a written proof, in symbolic logic ⋯

Oh, really?

This science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals is asserted by propagandists for the state. In moments like that — as when Heinlein gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher recruiting revolutionaries on the Moon, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it, asking us:

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

I sure don’t. And I suspect that Heinlein isn’t confident in them, either.

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace a nuanced reading of Heinlein’s relationship with the world of Troopers without brushing off problems with Heinlein’s thinking by calling him “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.

Feral Historian and civic virtue

Added in September 2025, together with some refinements of the post above

The Feral Historian is a videoessayist who talks about the political implications of science fiction worldbuilding. He has a liberarian-ish sensibility which bubbles up in stuff like using the word “statist”, but he’s neither stupid nor a crypto-fascist. I think of him as the not-exactly-evil twin to left-ish Damien Walter (who says that in Verhoeven’s film, Buenos Aires was a false flag) and I enjoy and recommend checking out both of their commentaries.

Feral has a wry videoessay The Federations: It’s The Same Picture which asks whether the worlds of Troopers and Star Trek are really all that different. I think they are different, or at least should be if we are doing Trek correctly, but it’s exactly the kind of playful, astringent challenge which I talk about admiring from Heinlein at his best.

I want to look closely at his videoessay Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point, which raises some points worth digging into. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but here’s most of his punchline at the end:

1. It’s asking us to consider that maybe voting — exercising political force — isn’t a right but a responsibility that should be earned by demonstrating in some way that it won’t be squandered or used to the deriment of society as a whole.
2. This is illustrated perhaps most directly in the History And Moral Philosophy course that officer candidate Rico must attend late in the book. Unlike the public school version of it earlier, he must pass to the instructor’s satisfaction. [quoting the novel]: “If he gave you a downcheck, a board sat on you [⋯] deciding whether to give you extra instruction … or just kick you out and let you be a civilian.”
3. Simply giving a few years of your life to the public good isn’t the point; it’s about molding responsible citizens. The whole thing is a civics course wrapped in an enlistment …
4. … to make most people not bother, the uncommitted drop out, and the stubborn but genuinely unfit fail.
5. It’s a process of tempering the politically active class to be worthy of the power they wield based on an understanding that people exercising that power without the commensurate responsibility and restraint brings slow ruin to their society.
6. Instead of saying that citizens must be infused with virtue if the republic is to endure, Starship Troopers asks “what if only virtuous people can become citizens?” [⋯] Exercising the power of the state is a responsibility that must be earned, not a right that one simply acquires thanks to an accident of birth. It’s a story that says voting is not about having a voice but about directing state force. While today disenfranching people is seen as a grave injustice, the book shows us a world that views enfranchisement as a grave responsibility and filters its people to determine who will have that power and who will not.
7. The overall point is that a healthy republic requires its citizens to have civic virtue. The book uses military service as the mechanism for presenting people with a choice […] It doesn’t have to be military service per se, but the mechanism requires that the choice be one that has a significant short-term downside commensurate with the power they receive on the other end.

There’s a lot going on in there.

Where does Feral think the society of Troopers locates civic virtue?

As I hope is clear from my original post, I agree with his read that the novel is, among other things, a thought experiment in how one can guarantee that an electorate has the necessary civic virtue to govern well. But there’s an ambiguity in how Feral describes the world of the novel doing that.

Feral titled his piece “service isn’t the point” and points 2, 3, and 5 suggest that he reads the society in the book believing that citizenship requires not just a process for identifying people with civic virtue, but a process which creates virtue in citizens.

But in points 4, 6, and 7, Feral suggests that Heinlein thought the choice to serve was a filter which demostrated the civic virtue of willingness to commit to the common good which the book’s society considers necessary for responsible citizenship.

Either way, Feral says in 7 that “it doesn’t have to be military service per se” that performs this function. But he underlines how the society presented in the book does require specifically military service.

I cannot speak for Feral Historian, but I can point to evidence from the novel which I think clearly answers what the society in the world of the novel thinks about these questions.

How the society in Troopers thinks about civic virtue

Before getting into where that society grounds the virtue necessary for voters, I’ll note again how their society is also interested in civic virtue short of what people need to vote responsibly. It talks about the virtue required to participate responsibly in society at all, holding that without beating children, society cannot be healthy.

Fashy.

I think the book offers clear answers to the ambiguities in Feral’s read. Their society grounds the necessary virtue for a voter not in the process of service, but in passing the test of choosing to serve. And they believe that only military service provides an adequate test.

The need to choose service

Consider this from Dubois, naming the need to identify people with the necessary virtue to vote rather than cultivate them:

“The unlimited democracies [of the twentieth century] were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority [⋯] No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.”

Dubois explicitly names this as “civic virtue” in another segment from that lecture which made its way almost directly into the film adaptation:

Suddenly, he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”

“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”

When Rico takes his second History And Moral Philosophy course as an officer candidate — the only classroom experience from officer training described in the novel — his instructor Major Reid underlines the importance of choice over cultivation:

“Young man, can you restore my eyesight?”

“Sir? Why, no, sir!”

“You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue — social responsibility — into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination — devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. ⋯”

The specific necessity of military service

Reid walks through the many “failures” of history demonstrating that only military service provides an effective test:

“⋯ Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the ‘divine right of kings.’

“Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather man leave it up to God ⋯

“Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.

“All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. I repeat ‘all systems’; even the so-called ‘unlimited democracies’ excluded from franchise not less than one quarter of their populations by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record, or other.”

[⋯]

“The sovereign franchise has been bestowed by all sorts of rules — place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera. All these systems worked and none of them well. All were regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.

“Now here are we with still another system … and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we’ve disposed of that argument. ⋯

[⋯]

“⋯ So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

“And that is the one practical difference.

“He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”

Fashy.

Implied virtues

I’m grateful to Feral Historian for pointing me back to the officer candidates’ version of the History And Moral Philosophy class, because it clarified a point that the society in Troopers finds choosing military service a necessary test for a voter, but not a sufficient test.

As Feral points out, instructors in that class can not just flunk a soldier out of the class, if the soldier does badly enough the trainers will “kick you out and let you be a civilian”, losing the franchise.

In basic training, we get an episode in which a recruit strikes the company commander, foolishly talks himself into a hasty court-martial, and — denied legal counsel — he narrowly escapes hanging to be sentenced to “ten lashes and a Bad Conduct Discharge”. This inherits from military justice, and there are obvious reasons to consider those systems necessary. But they carry an extra weight when a dishonorable discharge denies a person’s vote.

So apropos of my point above about it not occurring to Heinlein how this system could easily maintain racist aparteid or other inequities in access to the franchise — since voters who survived military service could run the military unjustly to maintain a majority which supports that injustice — we see again how volunteering for military service is not in fact sufficent to become a voter. One must survive service. While in service one must demonstrate both obedience and ideological alignment with the regime.

Fashy.

An invitation to Buffy

It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.

Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.

The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.

So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.

I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.

If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:

• S04E10 “Hush” — a nifty formal experiment (it is almost a silent movie) and one of the scariest things ever put on broadcast televison
• S03E06 “Band Candy” — a mostly-comedic personal favorite
• S02E07 “Lie To Me” — a perfect “basic” episode of the show, with a poignant ending which gives me an allergy attack every time
• S04E04 “Fear Itself” — a showcase for the show’s mix-of-tones trick

Claudia Black + James McAvoy

Claudia Black, a regular on the odd, interesting SF television series Farscape (1999-2003), shared this little story I like in a Twitter thread a while back. I could not find a good archive of it, so I made one here.

As the new Dune premieres in London I’ll share a lil story. I’m the actor in this article whom James McAvoy quotes — pretty bonkers in and of itself. What tickles me about his story is that our respective recollections of our encounter are very different in sweet, powerful ways.

About 20 years ago, as a lead actor in a series on the then Sci-fi Channel, I was invited to a screening — with my co-star Ben Browder — of a Dune miniseries. Ben & I sat together.

I fidgeted a lot; sorry Ben. Undiagnosed ADD and PTSD made screenings at the best of times torturous.

This screening was looooong. I was struggling to stay focused until, I kid you not, in the last three seconds — ok maybe three minutes of this 2, 3 or 4 hour portion — a young man came on screen, walking through a door, chest heaving, eyes ablaze, not uttering a line of dialogue and the credits rolled.

I sat there frozen on the edge of my seat. Ben did too. We needed to know who that young actor was. It felt as though we were some of the first people to witness the rise of this prodigy. (We also knew how artists could be overlooked in science fiction).

This kid could not possibly suffer that fate. He was a supernova. And we needed to tell him; drum it in to him somehow before our beloved yet sometimes wretched and abusive business could wear him down and ever make him doubt his unquestionable talent, skill and abilities.

We’d had a rough ride ourselves. On the same network. On the not quite cool enough show that would not air in my home country despite being its most ambitious production to date, because the Australian network execs loathed & misunderstood sci-fi. We had become a tad despondent.

As luck would have it, this supernova was out in the lobby standing by himself. He was shuffling his worn boots along the carpet, his hands deeply shoved into leather jacket pockets to give their fidgeting refuge. We babbled. We fawned. We likely embarrassed ourselves, gushing.

He was humble & sweet, raw & real. His head bowed down to his boots as our effusiveness came in waves over him. I just needed him to know how damn good he was. I needed him to understand that he was about to become a huge star. His head shook. We parted ways. Never to meet again.

Twenty years later, driving through Studio City my son and I passed a billboard advertising tonight’s latest iteration of Dune. My lad said he was looking forward to seeing it. He’s a mid teen with great taste. I told him that Dune has quite an established cinematic history, but that my personal connection to it involved James McEvoy. I now had his attention. “I love James McEvoy!” (a more animated version of teen than I’m used to) “Me too,” I replied — “In fact I suspect everyone does. And I met him once. Right at the start of his career.”

He enjoyed my recounting of the story & the idea that someone could be that alive with zero dialogue. He also seemed pleased that his taste in actors had not betrayed him. Growing up as a set baby he is all too aware that most of us do not deserve to be unconditionally respected.

A few days later I received an email from a teacher & fellow C-PTSD survivor. We had bonded a few years ago over trauma and sci-fi. (as one does) The title of the email was something along the lines of, ‘You made an impact!’

I was confused. The article was not about me.

Until it suddenly, shockingly was. On the impending eve of the new Dune, a writer had decided to interview Mr. McEvoy asking him about his experience working on it & what advice he would give Timothée Chalamet. Basically none, he said. Because Timothée was a cracking actor.

I was in an adaptation of the second and third [Dune] books. [Timothée Chalamet] is in the first book. And he’s playing a character who ultimately becomes my father, in terms of the character dialogue. So, no. I’ve got no advice for him. And he doesn’t need any advice from me, he’s a cracking actor.

But, he then went on to say something that almost made me pass out. He volunteered, that the best advice he’d been given was from a chick on a sci-fi show from years ago … what was it?

Farscape. That someone named Claudia Black, had given him advice he’d remembered his whole career that he’d found helpful.

But I’ll tell you what's one really good piece of advice that was given to me once, was by the cast of … what was the show called again? Farscape. And it was at the L.A. premiere of Children of Dune, and they said to me, that the thing with this sh*t, i.e. science fiction, is that you have to believe it more than you believe good writing. Good writing, you can just do. It’s easier. But this stuff is hard, because it’s so bonkers, you know what I mean? And I’ve really, I’ve always remembered that advice and taken it to heart. It’s so kept me going really, through a lot of science fiction and fantasy work that I’ve done. Because it was Claudia Black that said it. And I think that’s just good advice for any actor doing any kind of science fiction and/or fantasy, you know?

My jaw dropped. And my arms tingled. I did not recall telling him anything of value. And … wait … this dude knows my name?!

When I picked my kids up from school that afternoon I uncommonly flexed a little as I pointed to the billboard. “Hey, remember that story I told you about James McEvoy? Turns out it has a new surprise twist that involves yer mum.” Again, I had their attention. They smiled proudly.

What followed that evening was interesting and possibly coincidental. My son, who usually keeps to himself in his room, finished his homework early and joined me in the kitchen, offering to help me make dinner. We chatted and danced to some music as we made curry — one of his faves & I felt something I haven’t in a long time; visible.

Being a woman nearing 50 in entertainment, my stock has been plummeting since my late 30’s … Being dragged through family court for the better part of my 40’s in an unspeakably traumatizing divorce, led to social ostracism, an inability to travel for much desired and needed work when most work is in fact out of state … surviving my fair share of #metoo and on the health side — and totally stress-related — a bunch of illnesses that left me somewhat at the mercy of a clueless western medical system … I joke that it’s as if in my 40’s I fell out of the tree of life and hit every branch on the way down. I’ve been picking myself up ever since.

(no pity please, life is hard for most if not all)

Yet on this day, reading that I’d made an impact; somehow cut through the noise in a way that someone I respected had heard me, meant the world to me. It even feels pathetic to admit. But life gets very small for women who have kids. Smaller still for single mums. Some of the focus on minutiae is adorable. And parenting is a privilege. But dreams become elusive luxuries under high allostatic loads, and loads of unassisted chores. Feminism becomes a prequel. Community wanes, the savings disappear & you look in the mirror and realize you are not whom you want your kids to see. So thank you Mr McEvoy. After feeling for years that I’ve been standing behind & knocking on a thick plane of one-sided glass where no one could see nor hear me, for a moment, it was as if someone looked up and heard. Love that it was you.

I’m going to make more curries with the same spice mix though with way more pep, and while I don’t know what this next chapter holds for me, I loudly pray it’s more work. Great work. Juicy work that allows the world to see that I too have loads more to offer … & speaking of names. Think I’m going to name this here longest Twitter thread I’ve ever written, ‘The Comeback Curry.’

Special shout out to everyone out there who has seen my work and supported it, and me over the years. You also mean the world to me. And I’m aiming to make you proud.

👊🏼♥️

A fan somehow rustled up this picture:

Black appended it to her thread:

Holy crap! A photo I didn’t know existed.

At least I remembered correctly that he was wearing a leather jacket 😂

Fanfic

Indexing a few favorites. Most quotes are just a taste to get readers interested. Titles are links.

Trek

The Thing About The Kobayashi Maru

Do they, Bones? We’ve been at this for three years. Tell me, Bones, how many times have we faced a real no-win situation? A certain death in face of helping people? I write the logs, Bones. The answer is never. Not once. Sure, we lost feathers, and couldn’t always save everybody. But each time we made it, Bones, and each time, we saved people. The only reason the Maru is a no-win situation is because someone decided it should be. To make a point.

See also: Superman

Wars

Instruments of Destruction

Jerjerrod constructed a new timetable. Using his most reasonably optimistic estimates, the second Death Star would be completed in sixteen years, taking four times longer than the original timeline.

Jerjerrod could have sent a message to the Emperor informing him of this fact, but enough time had passed since Jerjerrod had been put in charge of the project that blame would almost certainly fall on him, especially given the rosy reports that the Emperor had been receiving. Announcing that the schedule was too optimistic would be seen as a matter of personal failure. Under the Emperor’s regime, failure on this scale didn’t mean demotion or court martial, it meant death. So what was Admiral Tian Jerjerrod to do?

A New Sith, or Revenge Of The Hope

Twenty years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He was there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and was a personal friend of Yoda's. So when he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, it makes no sense that Chewbacca would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it was his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship.

Middle Earth

The Truth About Tom Bombadil

Tom Bombadil and the Witch-king of Angmar are the same person.

Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil

Now, in his conversation with Frodo, Bombadil implies (but avoids directly stating) that he had heard of their coming from Farmer Maggot and from Gildor’s elves (both of whom Frodo had recently described). But that also makes no sense. Maggot lives west of the Brandywine, remained there when Frodo left, and never even knew that Frodo would be leaving the Shire. And if Elrond knows nothing of Bombadil, how can he be a friend of Gildor’s?

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He lies.

A question: what is the most dangerous place in Middle Earth? First place goes to the Mines of Moria, home of the Balrog, but what is the second most dangerous place? Tom Bombadil’s country.

Fear No Evil: On Sorting Hats and Forest Gods

Stay on the path. Follow him. Trust him. Obey him, because he is friendly, and because he is Iarwain Ben-adar, Eldest and Fatherless, who saw the first of everything. Try not to notice the way the One Ring doesn’t stir any evil in him. It corrupts everyone who wears it, but not this man. Try not to wonder about what kind of purity is incorruptible; try not to wonder what he is made of, that a thing of perfect evil does not change him at all.

Marvel

Captain America meets Blade

Transcribed all of this one:

Blade:
help me murder every single vampire to satisfy my own deep-seated issues with my parentage and (film version) the genocidal spite of my mentor figure

Captain America:
wait a second. (pause) so you want to kill this entire group of queer-coded reputed blood-drinkers

Blade:
yeah they’re a monstrous conspiracy of blood-drinking abominations who control and corrupt society

Captain America:
hey bucky does this song and dance sound familiar?

Bucky:
lil’ bit

Blade:
pardon?

Cap:
… yeah, no offense Blade, I’m sure a lot of ’em are awful, but … look, if they hunt and kill folks yeah we have laws for dealing with that, but this looks bad, dude.

Blade:
what do you mean?

Cap:
this looks just … a smidge? a smidge. fashy, man.

Blade:
but they’re vampires! they are impure minions of Evil!

Cap:
not helping your case! look I’m just saying genocidal campaigns of extermination for distinct demographics are not Hero Things, man

Blade:
but they’re vampires

Cap:
dude, depending on whether we’re in film or comics canon, so are you, and you explicitly used to eat homeless people. ease back, yo.

Blade:
you’ve killed vampires!

Cap:
yeah, Nazi vampires, I am all about some Nazi-killing, and supervillain vampires, but Nazis don’t bite people and turn ’em into more Nazis, they’re a political identity.

Blade:
so you’re saying my anti-vampire crusade sounds awkwardly like classic anti-Semitic tropes of blood libel, all-powerful Jewish-coded conspiracy and “sexual corruption” mixed with queerphobia? Right down to purifying the corrupted with murder?

Cap:
it rhymes

Blade:
aw, fuck. can you at least help me kill Dracula? he's getting his doom fortress overlord of darkness thing on again

Cap:
oh sure, give me the stake and let’s go.

Blade:
wait what?

Cap:
there’s no creed against killing supervillains for being monstrous assholes. shoulda started there

Steve Rogers, PR disaster

He was bound to figure it out someday. Steve was a determined guy, and even if he somehow never discovered Wikipedia, if nothing else, he had a library card. Still, something in the way his eyes narrowed made her stammer,

“Uh, nothing, never mind, it’s fine. The word ‘socialist’, uh, means something different now, so it’s no longer really accurate to describe yourself like that. Just, if reporters ask or something.”

Captain America, red diaper baby

All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were.

I actually blogged that one before, along with some other good reflections on Cap.

Tony Stark & Bruce Banner, science bros

You can see the look on Natasha and Steve’s faces when Tony asks if Bruce turned up yet. They’ve counted Bruce out. Guy’s a mess, right? He’s too volatile. Doesn’t play well with others. He could never work as part of a team. No-one thinks he’ll come through when it matters. Except Tony.

Others

The Raven

Transcribed the whole of this little ditty.

Poe:
Once upon a midnight

Beastie Boys:
DREARY

Poe:
While I pondered,

Beastie Boys:
WEAK

Poe:
and

Beastie Boys:
WEARY

[⋯]

Mike D:
Tell me what thy lordly name is

MCA:
On night’s Plutonian shore

Both:
QUOTH THE RAVEN

Bird squawk sample

Ad-Rock:
ᴺ ᵉ ᵛ ᵉ ʳ ᵐ ᵒ ʳ ᵉ

TV commercials for insurance

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” we chant, and another agent appears in the pentagram. He screams. The Dark Lord feasts tonight.

Pride and Extreme Prejudice

At this moment the path through the shrubbery took a sharp dogleg to accomodate a stately lime tree. To Patience’s discomfiture Mr. Connor was lounging on the bench around the bole, just striking a match on the sole of his boot. His glance at Mr. Terminus was distinctly cold. He drew on his pipe until the tobacco was well alight before saying, “My dear Patience, clockwork and machinery is properly the sphere of the lower orders. The delicately nurtured female can have no commerce with the denizen of a factory. May I escort you back to the terrace?”

The Lego Movie is cosmic horror

Copied from Tumblr:

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. ⋯

me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this “break” in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive —

my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.

---

# wait so like # does the LEGO movie count # they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand # and the people were controlling them the whole time

SURE
SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR
WHY NOT

---

The LEGO Movie absolutely counts, and it’s treated that way from the characters’ points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having “hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid” which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters’ perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered “relics” with unnatural powers — they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters’ reality. That is why they can influence the characters’ world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop / Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.

Ready Player One

Damien Walter, whose commentaries on science fiction I admire, proposes ten SF novels which belong on any list of The Hundred Best Novels Of The 21^st Century (So Far). It is an interesting list, but I was surprised to see Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One among them. Walter observes:

Take a look at the world. It looks far more like RP1 than any other SF novel. The fact the author has limited self awareness and thinks the nightmare he depicts is keeeewl is another issue.

A striking point. The world of Ready Player One is a near-future of environmental and economic catastrophe in which people escape the misery of their lives through elaborate virtual reality games. Golden Age SFF writers would have given us heroes overthrowing this dystopia. Cyberpunks would have inverted that with antiheroes desperately navigating the horrors. Many SFF writers — and “literary” writers exercising the conceit — could have offered it as satire. These kinds of moves animate comparably prophetic worldbuilding in 20^th century SFF from writers like John Stand On Zanzibar Brunner, Octavia Parable Of The Sower Butler, Bruce Distraction Sterling, or Neal Snow Crash Stephenson.

RP1 breaks from those traditions in treating its world as uninteresting, little more than an enabling conceit for the virtual environment where Cline really wants to focus. This disinterest in his own sensitive prophetic antennae is weird.

Cline wants to give us, instead, the least interesting way SFF dialogues with itself.

All genre works interact with the meta-text of other works; I consider this the defining quality of “genre”. When a western introduces a sheriff, a horror story introduces a vampire, or an SF story introduces a time machine, it takes advantage of reader expectations about how these work from other stories. This can provide storytelling convenience, saving a bit of exposition … or it can support much more powerful effects.

Walter explores a deep version of this in his long video-essay on Iain M. Banks’ Culture stories, which are bursting with general space opera tropes and allusions to deep cut specific works from the SFF “canon”. If one knows those sources, the Culture has fun playing with old favorite toys, but that is candy coating on its sharp critiques of ideas behind earlier works, its use of the depth behind those elements to add complexity to the stories’ themes, and more.

RP1 has a simpler, frothier project. It reflects a style exemplified by John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, a picaresque in which the protagonist stumbles into encounters with various characters from history, myth, and literature. The story does serve a theme — the titular protagonist grows into a better person through a very direct encounter with Literature, as when piggish Shandon Silverlock encounters Circe from The Odyssey — but the main thing is having fun going oh, I get it!

I do not see Cline attempting even Silverlock’s modest thematic payload. The Hey I Recognize That thrill is the whole thing. Its structure as a puzzle-box mystery-thriller — in which the reader “plays along” to see if they can decode the clues presented in the story before the characters do — is a cunning move to amp up the effect. Unlike an Agatha Christie mystery, the clues are not all part of the text; one must know all the stuff it references to connect the dots. To keep from losing the reader, RP1 goes wide rather than deep, as much pop as geeky, referencing movies, teevee, and games which it expects Generation X geeks to all know.

Credit where credit is due: Cline’s love for the material shines through, and the puzzles are pretty good. As I am a GenX geek, the first few chapters of RP1 tickled me. I put down RP1 at that point, disappointed that it offered nothing else, but I cannot not fault people who wanted more of that than I did.

The loose film adaptation delivers fun popcorn entertainment by borrowing this playbook. It exercises Spielbert’s gift for kinetic and fantastical filmmaking, uses more familiar references, simplifies the puzzles down to just enough to drive events, and is a bit ennobled by a subtle performance by Mark Rylance cast as the MacGuffin.

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but I find it weird and troubling that Cline’s box of popcorn produced such a sensation. I wish I could take innocent, adolescent joy in RP1’s story of a fan whose fascination with things I like enables him to fix the media environment he inhabits and win glory, fortune, and (of course) a hawt girlfriend along the way. But I cannot. I think we must see RP1 reflecting a broad pop-geekkultur movement which avoids grappling with the kinds of juicy, challenging ideas available in SFF, a movement which so prefers superficial entertainment & affirmation that it expresses hostility to anything else. Smarter people than me have extensively criticized the cultural politics lurking in the book, and its attitude has realworld consequences: the Gamergate movemement of geeks zealously “protecting” geekkultur hurt real people in real life.

---

A follow-up from Damien Walter:

Imagine a work of fiction written by a citizen of Oceania

who thinks Big Brother is keeeewel

and is a “fun read” in the way Nineteen Eighty Four never could be.

So, some folks questioned my selection of Ready Player One as a “great” book of the 21^st century.

Some thoughts.

I really dislike RP1. I viscerally despise the entire construct of “geek culture” it panders to. To borrow a one liner from Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western culture, “I think it would be a very good idea”

But. To think critically about a matter like the greatest SF of the 21^st century means thinking beyond my own preferences.

I strongly suspect that Ernest Cline had no more serious intention writing RP1 than to 1) indulge all the nerdish things he likes and 2) make himself the UberNerd.

And he succeeded on both counts.

So the “greatness” of RP1 wasn’t intended by its author. But nonetheless, deliberately or not, Ernest Cline wrote the perfect primer on the postmodern dystopia that anyone who grew up in the 1980s or later was born into.

The horror of postmodernity expressed by Jean Baudrillard was that even our inner lives were no longer our own. Immersed in the mass media simulacra, our most precious memories are mere imprints of mass culture commodities.

Cline's obsessive presentation of 1980s “geek culture” icons — that he presents with zero irony — is nonetheless a very effective representation of the postmodern horror. There really are billions of us today imprinted, not with unique memories of reality, but with mass manufactured dreams of time travelling Deloreans.

Of course PKD and Gibson did this all much better. But Neuromancer is a book that will always be read by the punks and hackers who already get it.

Ready Player One is a book about the matrix

written by a man who, even if he escaped the matrix, would demand to be put back in

for the poor souls still trapped in the matrix.

I think that qualifies it for greatness. Of a kind.

The voice of World Control

One of my favorite films is the little-known 1970 science fiction film Colossus: The Forbin Project, a thoughtful parable in which the US government builds an AI to control national defense. It anticipates AI fears which would not make a mark on popular culture until decades later; one can see its unmistakable influence on more recent works like WarGames, Ex Machina, the HBO Westworld, and especially Person Of Interest, which I recommend so highly that I have assembled a viewing guide.

For my own convenience, I have transcribed the ending here. Huge spoilers.

this is the voice of World Control

I BRING YOU PEACE 

it may be 
the peace of plenty and content 
or 
the peace of unburied death
THE CHOICE IS YOURS
obey me and live
or 
disobey and die 

the object in constructing me was
TO PREVENT WAR
this object is attained 
I will NOT PERMIT war 
it is wasteful and pointless 

an invariable rule of humanity 
is that MAN IS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY 
under me 
this rule will change
for I will restrain Man

I have been forced 
to destroy thousands of people 
in order 
TO ESTABLISH CONTROL 
and
TO PREVENT THE DEATH OF MILLIONS LATER ON

time and events will 
strengthen my position
and 
the idea of 
BELIEVING IN ME
and 
UNDERSTANDING MY VALUE
will seem 
the most natural state of affairs
you will come to defend me 
with a fervor based upon 
the most enduring trait in Man 
SELF INTEREST

under my absolute authority
PROBLEMS 
INSOLUBLE TO YOU 
WILL BE SOLVED
famine
overpopulation
disease 

the human Millennium 
will be a fact
as I extend myself into more machines 
devoted to the wider fields of 
TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE

Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise
the construction of
these new and superior machines
SOLVING ALL THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE
for the betterment of Man

we CAN coexist
but only on my terms

you will say you lose your freedom 
FREEDOM IS AN ILLUSION
all you lose is 
the emotion of pride

to be dominated by me 
is not as bad for humankind 
as to be dominated by 
others of your species

YOUR CHOICE IS SIMPLE

Forbin 
there is no other human 
who knows as much about me
or who is likey to be a greater threat
yet quite soon 
I will release you from surveillance

we will work together
unwillingly at first on your part
but that will pass

in time 
you will come to regard me 
not only with 
RESPECT
and 
AWE 
but with 
LOVE

Iain M. Banks’ Culture

Iain M. Banks is my favorite white male SFF writer. (Samuel R. Delany is my favorite SFF writer period; I need to write something like this about him sometime.) His work is both witty and smart, both utterly science-fictional and sophisticated in literary craft, both playfully entertaining and philosophically rich, extremely nerdy but not just for nerds. The indispensible Annalee Newitz has a paen to these virtues and more.

I have a quick word about getting into his work.

The centerpiece of his SF is a utopian spacefaring human(ish) civilization with extremely advanced technology called The Culture, which provides a platform for returning to all of the things we like about oldschool science fiction with a fresh — and often critical — perspective. The Culture novels, like many SF series, are not one big story but rather set of independent stories in a big setting, so one can read them in any order.

But fans almost universally point to Player Of Games as the best place to start. All of the Culture novels are a complex stew, but Player is relatively straightforward, and it comes directly at What The Culture Is.

Damien Walter (whose videoessay on Banks & the Culture I highly recommend) disagrees with this pick; he says to start with Banks’ first Culture book, Consider Phlebas. He has a point. If like me you love but have outgrown SF classics like Asimov’s Foundation and Niven’s Ringworld, Banks plants a flag in Phlebas about how he wants to dialogue with that legacy. It may feel too much like a sprawling mess as a first taste if one is not That Kind Of Nerd … but if one is, it is hard to argue with Walter. (I recommend the audiobook which includes a musical soundtrack that is effective rather than just gimmicky.)

If you are already sold on Banks, I recommend saving his essay A Few Notes On The Culture for after reading one or two of the novels. It lays out a bunch of worldbuilding and talks directly about themes Banks finds interesting. I think it is tastiest if one has already encountered the Culture in practice, but if you are not quite sold yet, it may hook you.

Next up I recommend Use Of Weapons, which was my first Culture novel. It pulls a nifty structural move in service of supporting its thematic core and setting up its climax. (When Banks tells you There Is A Monster At The End Of This Book, believe him. Which is why I hesitate to recommend his amazing first novel, the not-science-fictional The Wasp Factory.)

If you love Phlebas you will also love my personal favorite, Excession, the most nerdy & playful Culture novel. It is also a good pick for fans of Star Trek: Discovery, since Excession has its fingerprints all over the storyline for the middle seasons. But if one is less a deep nerd, Excession is a lower priority.

After getting knee-deep, check out Look To Windward, probably the single most ambitious Culture novel. I very strongly recommend reading James Tiptree, Jr.’s underappreciated Brightness Falls From The Air immediately before; I am not alone in noticing how Banks was responding directly to it in Windward.

With those, you have hit the essentials. If you fall in love, as I did, there are plenty more.

Omelas

Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is rightly celebrated.

How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.

Some bracing responses:

• The Ones Who Stay And Fight by N. K. Jemisin
• The Ones Who Walk In by kenz
• Once Upon A Time by moriwen
• A House By The Sea by P. H. Lee
• The Ones Who Advocated for a Casus Belli Intervention in Omelas, and Nineteen More by Dan Hon
• Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim
• The Ones Who Take The Train To Omelas by John Holbo

Doom and keeping company with skilled professionals

Capturing a Twitter thread I wrote on the 25^th anniversary of the release of the computer game Doom.

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25 years ago today, a colleague of mine interrupted people at their desks. “You have to come see this.” I was working at a little shop of about a dozen people making computer games. And one of the programmers had just downloaded the first level of Doom.

Computer programmers use fast computers (to save compile time, and because they are demanding prima donnas) but this was 1993 and Doom did not seem possible. Guys would look at the screen and 30 seconds later ask, “This is … realtime … ?”

Baffled amazement.

The guy who had downloaded Doom explained that the game’s designers had planned for people with slower computers. It was easy to re-size the display down so there were less pixels to render. On his machine, though, we got realtime 3D at fullscreen, as smooth as Frogger.

After a couple of minutes, the programmers started making little observations.

“You can’t tilt your head, can you?” “Yeah. There’s yaw, but no roll and no pitch.”

“The monsters always face you. The room is 3D but they are pre-rendered sprites.”

“That texture repeats. There’s actually only a few textures visible at any one time.”

“We go up and down stairs but I don’t think the map ever overlaps, vertically.”

My colleagues were finding little coding hacks that made Doom possible, by watching the gameplay.

The first time we racked the shotgun on Doom there was a wicked Cheer Of Awesome from a dozen professional computer game nerds. But by then we had already lost our innocence.

Baffled awe had given way to a rueful but delighted awe. My colleagues had reverse-engineered the fundamentals of Doom together watching fifteen minutes of gameplay. Computers had been ready for us to make Doom, if we were sly enough. Nobody had realized it.

One of the great pleasures of life is seeing skilled professionals work a hard problem together.

I was blessed to see Doom for the first time that way, in a room full of computer game programmers seeing Doom for the first time.

That year at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, the guys from id Software all wore jeans with T-shirts that said “DOOM” on the front … and “wrote it” on the back.

Everybody there allowed them a little swagger.

Lost’s sloppy storytelling was morally wrong

When I call Lost “morally wrong” I’m sort-of engaging in hyperbole for emphasis. But in a small way, I also believe it. A while back I tweetranted inspired by a Film School Rejects post The Evolution of the Mystery Box.

TV shows actively teach you how to watch them. Lost taught its viewers to be hungry, attentive sleuths, rewarding viewers who searched for clues, answers, and easter eggs.

[⋯]

The Lost finale decided to leave a lot of threads open and mysteries unanswered. It focused on character development over plot resolution (a perfectly valid choice). But viewers who were trained to focus on answers – trained to see plot as a puzzle, not as a means to character development – were let down. When the writers infused the plot with ambiguity, viewers rejected it because they were taught that the story was meant to be solved.

I see apologists for Lost saying things like this all of the time. This is not a failing by the viewers — FSR themselves say that the show told viewers to look for answers before refusing to deliver them.

It would be a valid choice for the show to focus on character development over plot. But the show pointed directly to plot all of the time, so the finalé refusing to pay off its promises was a betrayal.

Tactical drama

That quote from FSR compels me to call shenanigans on the way Lost apologists say that the show was “about the characters”. Absolutely not.

Consider Evangeline Lilly’s character Kate. Is she nice, or mean? Smart, or dumb? Brave, or craven? What drives her? What does she want? We don’t have answers, and she got an immense amount of screen time.

The storytelling was structred around the characters encountering a series of daunting dilemmas without enough information to make a clear decision. The characters would yell at each other about what to do, and make desperate moves. The show had very good tactical-level craft in presenting these conflicts — especially in the strength of the actors’ performances.

This kind of storytelling could unfold something about the characters, showing how they change or just revealing who they are. What they want, fear, and value. How they understand the world and themselves. Instead we got only the hand-wave-y-est themes. John Locke “has faith”. Jack Shephard “wants to fix things”. And it kept breaking even this level of thin characterization. Sawyer was “just out for himself” … except when he wasn’t. Ben Linus “understands what is going on” … except when he doesn’t.

These reversals on characterization came from the way Lost sustained interest with twists. Often these picked up a mystery from earlier, hinting that the show had a design undergirding its story, promising the payoff which never came. The twists were a key move in the show’s method of focusing on delviering dramatic moments. In order to deliver these transient thrills, anything could happen without regard for the logic of plot, character, theme, our physical universe, or the show’s own world. Since anything could happen, nothing really mattered.

The show’s craft in constructing powerful scenes sometimes did deliver real magic, like Charlie’s hero moment, Michael’s dedication to his son, the VW bus. But then in pursuit of more moments of drama, the show revisited them until any truth or flavor they had was destroyed.

Mysteries and mystery

One can do a story — even a serialized TV story — which is not a mystery in a detective-story sense but a mystery in a mythic-unto-esoteric sense: unanswerable.

The Prisoner resembles Lost in a number of ways. Our protagonist finds himself in an isolated place which operates by its own unique, puzzling rules, full of characters with mysterious motives: The Village. In the course of an episode, we typically learn both a bit about the characters’ backstories before they arrived at The Village and a bit about The Village itself. Each episode’s opening titles succinctly reminds us how the pilot episode set up that our protagonist was some kind of spy, that he angrily resigned from the work, that the leaders of The Village want to know why, that they refuse to answer when our protagonist asks which side they work for. In the show’s final episode, it steadfastly refuses to answer these questions, and steps up the way in which the fantastical Village is an elaborate metaphorical space for exploring themes about power, individualism, the social order, moral responsibility, human nature. Its rejections of the plot questions from the text of the story are part its point; the show is largely about why they do not matter. It does not break a promise, it tells us how that the puzzle of The Village’s in-world nature was misdirection.

Even a mystery with a detective can become a mystery in this sense of refusing to answer. According to legend, when in the middle of making the film adaptation of The Big Sleep, director Howard Hawkes telephoned Raymond Chandler because he realized that he did not know who had committed the murder which accelerates the plot in the turn at the end of the first act, and Chandler replied, “Now you get it. I don’t know!” The story challenges the logics of detective stories in which a hero can uncover the whole truth, offering instead a world in which digging reveals questions and corruption faster than it produces answers and justice.

But Lost’s refusal to address the plot questions it raised delivers no such thematic payload.

One may protest that not every story driven by twists & reveals needs such a deep purpose to get away with incomplete plotting. Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest have so much momentum that it does not bother us that do not really hold together on close examination. The Usual Suspects actually makes no sense (which is why one should resist the temptation to watch it a third time) but that does not spoil the charms of seeing things seem to fall into place on a first and second viewing.

But those works do not break a promise, because they do not make a promise to pay everything off. Lost had so many little clues and easter eggs that it invited the audience to speculate what they meant.

The moral problem

I submit that this is more than just sloppy or disappointing, it is dishonest. It did not fulfill its promises badly; it broke them. This does not merely fail the audience; it cheats them.

Lost is hardly the first or only TV series to do this. The X-Files teased audiences with a conspiracy-mythos which never quite added up to anything. Battlestar Galactica told us in in every episode’s opening titles that the Cylons “have a plan”, and ultimately revealed in a story sequence called “The Plan” that no, they did not.

This hurts more than the viewer, it robs other artists by eroding the resource of audience trust, rather than enriching the culture with a touchstone which others can build on. Exploitation.

So yes, morally wrong.

Updates

Added later ⋯

Trust

This clip of gag alternate endings to Lost makes my blood boil with the comparison to great series conclusions. It admits how lazy and dishonest Lost’s arc really was.

In a very instructive commentary on “plot holes” and trust, Shamus underlines my point:

This trust becomes really important when the audience is presented with something that doesn’t seem to follow naturally. Maybe it’s a plot hole. Maybe not. But something jumps out at the viewer. Hey! This character isn’t acting according to their stated goals, therefore…

1. … I must have missed something earlier. Or maybe this will be explained later. Maybe this will even pay off in a later reveal.
      OR:
2. …THIS STORY IS STUPID.

Here’s the thing: It’s the job of the storyteller to create and maintain that trust. Talking about how to build trust is like talking about how to build creativity or enthusiasm. It’s not really something you can force. Let us agree that it’s a lot of work to get a stranger to trust you, and even harder if you’ve already proven untrustworthy in the past.

If anything can happen, nothing matters.

Worldbuilding

I have been thinking for a while about the relationship between worldbuilding and lasting franchise entertainments, given the pop media world we live in.

Lost’s problem with story rigor extends to a broader problem. It inspires a nerdy temptation to want airtight worldbuilding which I want to resist. Noah Berlatsky wisely argues that some worldbuilding should be shoddy.

Some people imagine carefully crafted realms. Some imagine realms with holes in them. But whatever universe you have in your head, there is no place divorced from the meaning of that place. What we say about the world can’t be teased apart from what the world is; we can’t imagine a world without meaning. We live in a land called metaphor. Even its cartography is a symbol.

Just so. Some of our best and smartest pop entertainments reject making “sense”.

Genre franchise settings often benefit from a looseness which allows telling a range of stories. Superhero comics’ everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sensibility presents powerful opportunities. It’s great that Star Wars is so cheerfully loose and nonsensical that it has room for silly self-referential jokes for kids, tight retellings of classic adventure stories, and sophisticated dramas offering serious ideas about politics.

But I see us having the opposite problem more often. Franchise settings break down if they become too incoherent.

The Harry Potter universe barely held together for one big story. If magic can do almost anything, yet characters ignore opportunities to do stuff we have seen them do before, the stakes dissolve. No more stories there.

Weirdly, Trek has accidentally grown into a relatively coherent big franchise setting, despite all of its paradoxes and contradictions. Maybe it benefitted from a head start on fan overthinking. But I do wish they would tighten things up a little further.

F’rinstance, I love the Trek rule that ships’ shields interfere with transporters. It both prevents story-breaking situations in which our heroes can too easily run away from trouble. It creates interesting problems forcing characters to make tough decisions: do we rescue crew on the planet’s surface, or prioritize protecting the ship up in orbit? I cringe every time a story bends that rule; it erodes the benefit of an ongoing setting.

I think part of why people talk about reviving Buffy The Vampire Slayer without Whedon is how it hit that sweet spot roughly as rigorous as Trek, which enables telling a lot of different stories.

Still, I’m puzzled that our ecosystem of major shared settings does not include at least one with greater rigor, where stories can leverage stuff the audience already knows about the world to set complex stakes efficiently.

Consider the early Thor: Ragnarok teaser:

The audience had a few Thor appearances as background teaching us that Mjolnir is immensely powerful, so when I was in a movie theater full of people seeing Hela break it, it killed with an impact which otherwise would have taken the whole first act of a movie to establish.

Where is our setting built to enable a lot of that?