BICEP2 discovers evidence of exponential growth in the universe's first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second

Story. You know what I love about that image? It's the way there's clearly a great big blue question mark in the middle of it.

Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses (2001)

We can thumbnail this famous novel as 'Romeo and Juliet in an alt-reality UK where black people are the ruling caste and white people the oppressed minority'. The story itself concerns the star-crossed love between on the one hand young Sephy Hadley, a dark-skinned 'Cross', (the daughter of a wealthy and influential politician called Kamal Hadley), and on the other Callum McGregor, a pale-skinned nought. Blackman's world used to be a slave owning one; and although slavery has been abolished at the time the book is set, society is structured via a strictly enforced Jim Crow apartheid. It's a novel primarily about the intensities of teenage feeling, and more generally it's a book about the monstrous scale of unfairness that institutional racism entails. The stylistic and narrative strokes are fairly broad, the style occasionally a touch crude, and the characters are given to rather melodramatic posturing; but then again that's what it's like being a teenager, and falling in love, and feeling intensely how unfair everything is. And it can't be denied that Noughts and Crosses generates real affective punch: it sets out to work upon the readerly emotions and it succeeds powerfully.

Concentrating on this, the first novel in the trilogy, we have to say that Blackman's world is not built, exactly. The students on my Children's Literature course were surprised when I described it as 'science fiction' (though they shouldn't have been: basically I view EVERYTHING as science fiction apart from a few French naturalist novels of the later 19th-century). And in a sense they're right: Blackman does not do what many SF writers would, by way of explaining at length how this alternative historical circumstance came about. In later novels it is intimated that this is a world in which Africa conquered Europe rather than the other way around, which if pushed too hard would turn the novel into a fable about colonialism. Blackman's ambition is broader than that, I think: she less interested in the sorts of historical circumstances that give rise racism, and more in the human as-it-were existential wrongness of racism as such. Her novel accordingly reads as a thought-experiment made flesh: imagine the racist society of 1950s America (except imagine it in Britain, because, I suppose, that's the world Blackman knows best), and then swap the skin colours. This does a couple of things that resonate well for YA audiences, although things that may strike older readers as perhaps a tad over-simplifying; and amongst those things are: 'See how arbitrary racist prejudice is!' And, to white readers, complacent in their own privilege: 'see how it could be for you! Imagine if the boot were on the other foot -- you wouldn't like it, would you?' I don't mean to snark: these strike me as both not only dramatically effective but also a worthwhile hermeneutic for younger (and for that matter, older) readers to undertake. The problem is it tends to diminish the novel's capacity to generate a sense of the density and heft of actual lived experience. Of the two prior examples of this conceptual gimmick, both sciencefictional (because, for me—well, see above), it reminded me more of the slightly airless Trek episode, 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' (1969):

And less of Heinlein's closer-in-concept Farnham's Freehold (1964).

(To digress for a moment: The New York Times blurb, there, says: 'Robert Heinlein wears imagination as if it were his private suit of clothes.' I've genuinely no idea what, or even if, that means.)

Anyway, that Heinlein novel is considerably more deplorable, ethically and ideologically speaking, than the Trek treatment; but it does come unforgettably alive on the page. The Trek episode comes across as a good-hearted sermon about the pointless arbitrariness of racism.

I don't mean to make heavy weather of the book's worldbuilding, by the way. It's fine; fit for purpose, narratively speaking. It falls foul of the Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel argument; but there are plenty of people who don't like that book. Me, I do like it, and for one reason above all. Prior to Diamond there were two main theories as to why Europe conquered Africa America and India and not the other way around: one, that it was a mere matter of chance that history shook out that way, which isn't a very satisfying theory; and two, that white Europeans were in themselves 'superior' to the black and brown peoples of the world. The problem with this latter theory is that it is clearly bollocks. Diamond's theory at least explains the historical narrative without stooping to racism.

When race comes up in discussion I generally say that I don't believe in it, much in the same way that I don't believe in Father Christmas. I mean this quite literally: I don't think there's any such thing, and more specifically think it was invented more or less out of whole cloth by a group of 19th-century scientists determined to cloak their hatred and will-to-oppress in pseudo-scientific jargon.

Influential classifications by Georges Buffon, Petrus Camper and Christoph Meiners all classified "Negros" as inferior to Europeans.[44] In the United States the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson were influential. He saw Africans as inferior to Whites especially in regards to their intellect, and imbued with unnatural sexual appetites, but described Native Americans as equals to whites.

There's no biological or scientific basis to this at all; it makes as much sense as the 1735 theory of Carolus Linnaeus (of 'zoological taxonomy' fame), when he divided the human race Homo into four 'sub-species' (Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer) on the basis of the exploded Galenic notion of the four humours, sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic respectively. (Not that Linneaus wasn't racist too; he was actually racist as all get out. 'Homo Sapiens Europaeus' was, he insisted, active, perceptive and adventurous; whereas 'Homo Sapiens Afer' was 'crafty, lazy and careless'. Boo to that.)

People sometimes react badly when I say I don't believe in race, because they think I'm trying to Podsnappishy sweep away behind me the fact of racism. Not at all. I'm with Adam Kotsko on this: the fact that race is a social construct makes it more malign than if it were merely a biological datum:

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

By saying that I don't believe in race I'm very specifically not saying that we should stop talking about race—for example I'm not suggesting that we should replace discussion of race with discussion of 'ethnicity' (something in which I do, as it happens, believe. 'What distinguishes race from ethnicity? Ethnicity tends to emphasise matters of culture, language and religion: part of the legal definition of "malay" in Malaysian law is that one is Muslim. Race, on the other hand, emphasizes easily recognised physical characteristics (such as skin colour) and tends to rely on a folk theory of biological origins' [John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology (OUP 2000), 96]). But we need to keep talking about race precisely as a made-up thing to begin to understand the way the 20th-century was so comprehensively blighted, and the lives of billions of human beings wrecked and ended, in the service of a purely imaginary Cthulu-like entity. Race continues to cast its malign spell.

The history of the way this concept has been constructed is extremely important to understand, too. The word 'racism' was invented by Ruth Benedict in 1943 ('Racial prejudice,' she wrote, 'makes people ruthless'). That date's not a coincidence. The 20th-century was the great epoch of race-inspired massacres. Contrast the tendency of previous centuries (from the Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 through to the Armenian genocides of the 1890s) to focus such mass-murder onto target-groups defined by their religion. But the 1940s saw the increasing influence of 'race'-based ideas come to terrible fruition (UNESCO's issuing of The Race Question, July 1950, can be taken as the beginning of the 'official' global kick-back against racist ideas). That modern Fantasy begins around this time, with the racially conceived (though, I'd say, not therefore necessarily racist in the Nazi sense of the word) Middle Earth setting a kind of genre template is also not a coincidence; although the way Fantasy as a whole picked up the idea that difference should be represented 'racially' and ran with it (via Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and a thousand Tolkien imitation fat fantasy novels) is in itself a fascinating topic for analysis.

***

Analysis for another time, though. The point of this rather meandering digression on race is to lead into a discussion of the way Blackman adapts her Romeo and Juliet source text. Because, of course, that's what Blackman does with Shakespeare's play: she racialises it. We could start by asking, of Romeo and Juliet: why do the Capulets and Montagues hate one another so much? In the play it seems that it's just one of those inter-family squabbles. It's certainly not that they come from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. WS.'s play starts off by specifying ‘two households, both alike in dignity': but the ‘noughts’ and 'crosses' in Blackman's novel are certainly not alike in dignity. The noughts are deprived of social dignity and equality. Presumably the point is to relocate this ‘dignity’ to a human level.

The midway text, I'm thinking, is West Side Story (1957), a text which racialises the familial hostility along Puerto-Rican/Polish lines (casting the icily beautiful but very Russian-American-looking Natalie Wood as the Puerto-Rican Juliet 'Maria' in the 1961 film complicates this racial logic in interestingly, though inadvertently, twisted ways I think). Still, R&J is a significant 'tragic' template to choose. As David Bevington notes, there was something ‘new’ in the play; what he calls ‘a sense of the anomalous’:

The idea of tragedy came with the sources [for Romeo and Juliet], and is not one which either the Fall of Princes or revenge tragedy provided a formula. Nor does the pattern owe anything to classical and neo-classical theories of tragedy … [Bevington, ‘Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Career’, in Claire McEachern (ed), Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge 2002), 50-68; 54]

Both the 'prince's fall' and 'revenge' models of tragedy are problematic in the context of dramatizing ‘race relations’, I think. I suppose the 'fall of princes' relates distantly to the overthrow of blancitude hinted at, in turn, by Blackman's subplot about the old-history terrorist/freedom-fighter rebellion against white rule in the novels. And I suppose 'revenge', or the ethical imperative to avert it, is behind all the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ style stories coming out of the new South Africa. But better to follow the doomed love story logic to its end. Which is what Noughts and Crosses does.

Spawny Dagon (Weird Tales, July 1938)

'Despite only having one arm, I shall yet strive to rescue that damsel from Eric Pickles and Norman Lovett.'

Also, looking more closely: is the big bald feller wearing a nipple tassel on his right boob?

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (1981)

I re-read this recently, and it's much better than I recalled (by 'better' I mean: less narrow and theoretical-doctrinaire). Here's a chunk from later in the book, that I'm currently mulling over.

‘Semantic changes of literary fantasy from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century can been explained by shifts in ideas and beliefs. A gradual displacement of residual supernaturalism and magic, an increasingly secularised mode of thought under capitalism, produces radical changes in interpretation and presentation … these shifts record a move away from orthodox demonology towards psychology, to account for difference and strangeness.

Theology and psychology function in similar ways to explain otherness. They have become substitutes for the sacred, or, as Jameson writes, strategic secular reinventions of it … “the search for secular equivalents of this kind seems to have reached a dead end, and to be replaced by the new and characteristic indirection of modernism, which, what in Kafka to Cortázar is henceforth termed the fantastic seeks to convey the sacred, not as presence, but rather as determinate, marled absence at the heart of the secular world” [Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (1977), 145].

Fantasies express a longing for an absolute meaning, for something other than the limited “known” world. Yet whereas “faery” stories and quasi-religious tales function through nostalgia for the sacred, the modern fantastic refuses a backward looking glance. It is an inverted form of myth. It focuses on the unknown within the present. … Religious or spiritual epiphany becomes inconceivable: matter is merely matter, unredeemed, yet strangely hollowed out, insufficient in itself. Without meaning, without transcendence, modern fantasy still functions as if meaning and transcendence were to be found. It uncovers mere absence and emptiness, yet it continues its quest for an absolute.’ [157-9]

My specific focus is on the big YA Fantasies that (we have enough perspective, I think, to say this) dominated the late 90s and 21st-Century noughties: Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and to a lesser extent: Pullman, Lemony Snicket. It's striking how un-theological these books are, and to how pronounced a degree their 'magic' (or in the case of the Collins and Unfortunate Events, their fantastic elements: the battle royale set-up in the former, the Great Unknown sea monster in the latter) stands in for and externalise the psychological dynamic of our interiority.

Rossgate

Nobody is waiting for my opinion on Rossgate (that link is to  Foz Meadows' roundup of the slapfight; it is worth reading first, and indeed, perhaps -- since I'm about to disagree with her take on it -- instead). I recognise that as a white male writer I have a less worthwhile perspective on the whole brouhaha than many; and I also recognise that too many pixels have been splurged on the topic already. Since I won't link to this post; and since random traffic to this blog is low, I don't feel I'll thereby be thrusting my obnoxious opinions too bullishly on the world. On the other hand, and since my attitude to it all has undergone pretty much a 180-degree about turn, I'll jot down why.

My first awareness of the whole circumstance was Farah Mendlesohn's resignation note. Now Farah is a friend of mine of many years standing, and one of the single most principled and conscience-driven people I know. I applauded her note, both for the stand she was taking and for the scrupulous way she orchestrated her separation from the Loncon committee (with which she found herself in disagreement) so as not to compromise the many worthwhile practical things she has done by way of setting stuff up for the convention. My sense at that time was: SF has been through a particularly intense Sexismfail turmoil over the last several months, and the efforts to make Cons welcoming safe spaces for women is an ongoing, intensely worthwhile activity. I assumed (making an ass of me, I know, I know) that Ross was doing the gig for a fat fee. Since I'm not plugged into comics culture especially closely I was not really aware of his fan credentials, and it seemed to me that Farah had a point. Then, as we all know, Twitter exploded. Ross withdrew. The whole SF community polarised and started shouting.

I've been following the ensuing kerfuffle, off and on; and the longer it has gone on the more I have found myself thinking: Adam you are an ass. Ross offered his services for free. He is, it seems clear now, a genuine geek with a real love for the genre. He would certainly have raised the media profile of the event and so on -- all these questions have been rehearsed many times of course. But the tipping point as far as I was concerned was Kameron Hurley's post on the whole thing. I urge you to read it. She compares the fight to a disagreement she had with a three-year-old. Said three year old went to punch his mother; Kameron Hurley raised her voice; the three year old was outraged since it is rude to shout and such shouting 'hurt his feelings'. Hurley's position is that yelling is justified to prevent a greater evil.

Until she applied her analogy to the situation, I was honestly unsure whether Hurley was troping the three-year-old as Ross or as Fandom. That's the trouble with double-edged allegories. Clearly, nobody was suggesting Jonathan Ross was going to rock up at the Hugos and literally hit the nominated writers. Hurley's point (I take it) is that words can be like blows. But the problem here is that only thing we have in this sorry case is words: the words people imagined Ross would use (based on the precedence of the words he has used in his day-job as a television presenter) and the words people actually used about and to Ross and his family. All hurtful.

For Hurley, Ross is the petulant 3-year-old, and fandom is the 'OK, maybe I could have been a little more cool-headed in the way I reacted, but look: I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings to stop you punching your mother.' Which is to say, since the punching is a metaphor: ' .... but I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings in order to stop you speaking in a way that would hurt feelings.'

The whole force of Hurley's post hinges on the imbalance of power it assumes: relatively powerless massed fandom, super-powerful white male TV celebrity. 'When did the privileged become victims?' she asks.

OK. So: one unintended consequence of reading her post, for me at least, was to wonder how the actual punching conceit might work.

Imagine a world-famous professional boxer who happened to be a massive genre fan -- an alt-reality Muhammed Ali, say. Let's say he was proposed as host, and people objected 'we can't have him as host! He will literally punch all the nominees in the face! That's what he does!' How would you respond? Let's try: no he won't. Punching people is what he does in his day job; he's here not as a boxer but as a fan whose boxing happens to have made him world famous.

Jonathan Ross's day job is: comedian. His style (like it or loathe it) is comically confrontational rather than mild and agreeable, but that's his day job. He agreed to host the Hugos as a fan, not as a television presenter.

His day job involves him interacting not with privileged people (people like me); but with super-privileged people ... folk of staggering wealth and power, movie stars, rock stars at the like. His modus operandi is: not to give these super-privileged people too easy a ride ('when did the privileged become victims?')  These people do not agree to appear on his show out of the kindness of their hearts; they do so because they intend to parlay the media exposure into even greater reserves of wealth and power. To make their blockbuster an even bigger hit, or sell even more copies of their album. Ross could, as some TV interviewers do, treat these entitled megarich celebrities with fawning deference, and thereby get as little in the way of them selling their shit to us as possible. He doesn't do that. Here's the thing: him 'not doing that' is him doing his job. You can of course object to it; but it seems to me you can't object to it on the grounds that by doing so he is picking on the disempowered or underprivileged.

Here's one scenario: Ross comes to the Hugos, makes fun of all the cowering fat boys and fat girls, laughs in their faces and then drives away in his open-topped sports car with a cigar jammed in the corner of his smug, laughing mouth. Thank heavens we have averted that dire possibility.

Here's another scenario: Ross agrees to host the Hugos for free, because he's a big genre fan. He is immediately attacked by many other fans on the grounds that he is a sexist misogynist, and not wanted, and he can take his working class speech-impedimented masculinity and his fat geek wife and their fat geek daughter and fuck off, basically (I paraphrase). He reacts testily online, and soon enough withdraws. His wife deletes her twitter feed because she finds the tweets she is receiving so upsetting. All the stuff that has actually happened.

This, to revert to Hurley's analogy, is two sides raising their voices. One side, though, is raising their voice as a proxy for raising their fists. Which, though?

I'm not suggesting that the metaphorical playing field is level, where power and influence are concerned. But I am suggesting that the victims of Ross's discourtesy, the people who have been the butt of Ross's public jokes -- the people instanced as the reason why he is The Devil in this context -- are more stratospherically privileged not only than the average SF fan, but than Ross himself. As Frankie Boyle (is he free to host the awards, I wonder?) once put it: you think these megacelebrity filmstars and rockstars are 'like' you, or want to be your friend? You don't realise that they would throw themselves under a bus if they had to live your life for so much as one afternoon? When did the privileged become victims?

So, yes: I've changed my mind on this issue.

'This Is Just To Say' by William Satan Williams

I have eaten
the soul
that was in
your brain

and which
you were probably
hoping Jesus would save
for Heaven

Forgive me
it was delicious
so small
and screamy.

Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun (with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell), The Exploration of Mars (1956)

'So,' my wife said in her "disapproving" voice, as I brought this back from the charity shop: 'you've bought another Nazi book, I see.' I could have pointed out that German rocket scientist Willy Ley fled to the States in 1935 precisely because of the rise of the Nazis; but she would then have countered with 'and von Braun?' and I would have been silenced. Nonetheless, this is a lovely book indeed, with 16 gorgeous full-colour plates (and 5 black and white ones) by the peerless Chesley Bonestell, dozens of line drawings in the body of the text, and a splendid can-do attitude by the authors with respect to what they think will be, within a few years, the actual 'two year and 239-day' mission to Mars and back. (The images below should all embiggen upon clicking, I think):

But mars, man! Mars! Look how excited these tiny spacedudes are on Deimos, gambolling and leaping like giddygoats.

Ditto Phobos:

Now THIS is what a rocket ought to look like! --

On the left, assembling the Martian spaceship in orbit (check out the tiny ur-2001-A-Space-Odyssey wheel space station in the distance). On the right, 'the hardy lichens of earth could probably live under the severe conditions of Mars.' I'm a big fan of the Hardy Lichens, actually. I especially like A Laodlichen and The Moss of Casterbridge. Not forgetting the one about how happy Gustave drove all those people crazy, Fun Gus, the Madding Crowd:

Beauteous double-page spread of the Martian ground station! --