Poem: Heroic Quatrains

 

In his martial rage, the high point and essence of his existence, is like a lion, a wild boar, a storm, a river in a flood, a raging forest fire, a bright star from a dark cloud; his armour blazes like the sun, his eyes flash fire, his breast is filled with irresistible fury, his limbs are light and active. He mows down opponents like a reaper in a cornfield, like a wind scattering the foam of the sea, like a great dolphin swallowing little fishes … When a hero dies, dark night covers him, he is seized by hateful darkness; he is robbed of his sweet life, his soul rushes forth from the wound; it goes down to Hades bewailing its fate, leaving behind its youth and strength. The doom of death covers his eyes and nostrils, he breathes out his life in the dust, hateful fate swallows him up, he gluts the god of war with his blood. [Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Clarendon: 1980), 90]

1
A lion in his martial rage
a boar, a river running loud,
a storm, a raging forest blaze,
a white star in a blood-dark cloud:

his armour blazes like the sun,
his eyes flash fire, his breast is filled
with irresistible fury and
his limbs are active. He has killed.

2
You’re covered by the night, you’re seized
by hateful darkness, you are rushed
below, you loose your limbs and knees
your gaping mouth bites only dust

down to hades fate-bewailing
leaving youth and strength behind
lightless eyes eyes cloud inveiling
as blind as death as dead is blind

you glut the god of war with blood
your blood your blood yours in his maw
your strength ebbs outward as a flood
for this is war is war is war

Frederik Pohl and Thomas T Thomas, "Mars Plus" (1994)

Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus (1976) is a minor classic of hard SF: set in the then-near future of the 1990s, it’s about the colonisation of Mars, but proposes that instead of terraforming the planet to make it hospitable to us, we should adapt and cyborgize our human bodies to make them fit for Mars as it is. The protagonist Roger Torraway is an astronaut slowly modified over the course of the story into a transhuman cyborg who can gambol happily through the extreme cold and near vacuum (1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure) of the Red Planet. These external alterations change his personality, which is one point of the book, although Pohl also chucks in a twist at the end: it turns out that humanity’s computers have become sentient and are promoting human colonisation of the galaxy to ensure the spread of computers and so preserve what Pohl, wincingly, calls their ‘race’.

Two decades later Pohl collaborated with the symmetrically-named Thomas T. Thomas to write a sequel: Mars Plus (1994). It’s not very good.

The sequel picks up from the computers-have-come-alive twist at the end of Man Plus, or it sort-of does. For it turns out that even after half a century of further developments, humanity hasn’t realised that ‘the cyber’ has become self-aware. Symptoms of sentience in the computer network read to the people living on Mars only as ‘system bugs and errors’. The novel’s 1994 idiom is creakily off-key where computing is concerned:

sometimes the cyber you were working on crashed its system through no traceable fault in the code … some said the grid was infected with the mother of all viruses, one so insidious that nobody had ever seen it, so rabbit-fast at replication that nobody had ever cornered.’ [26]

Rabbit-fast! Th-th-that’s A.I., folks. (We’re told that the Martian ‘cybers’ operate in the almost-inconceivable ‘teraflop range’—I mean, my son's PlayStation5 console operates at more than 10 teraflops, but I guess that seemed like a impressive number, computing-wise, in the mid-90s.)

Man Plus’s Torraway, more machine than man now, appears as a minor character in Mars Plus, but most of the sequel’s story is given over to Demeter Coghlan, a blonde, green-eyed, curvaceous Earth-woman sent to Mars to do some spying, or something, who gets caught-up in a local revolution. She undertakes some eyes-of-the-reader, look-at-the-worldbuilding wandering around, and she has a lot of badly-written sex. How badly written, you ask? Let's see.

‘Suddenly she felt his hands snaking around her from behind. They travelled up the length of her body from knees to breast cupping and probing as they went.’ [92] Nothing like a man cupping your knees from behind to turn a girl on, I suppose.

‘His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His domed, pink member slid up towards her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall.’ Sexy! Though the next morning Demeter, looking back, is not so sure: ‘it had not been good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested. It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist.’ [97] Wait, it was not clear?

Frankly it’s almost impressive how solidly unsexy Pohl/Thomas’s strenuous faux-lubriciousness is, throughout ‘… Jory working his hips up and down, pressing the bony arch of his pelvis into her convenient hollowness’ [129]. Convenient hollowness. ‘The woman had long, black hair that went across her shoulders, down her back and tucked under her rump’ [77] Under her rump, you say? What, poking out the front, like a sporran? 

Wait: what?

What are dresses like in the future, you ask? ‘Demeter wore a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch’ [187] Hung from her nipples. That’s practical couture, right there.

Anyway, we get a Cook’s Tour of future-Mars, which throws up some strange details (‘“Nobody speaks Finnish anymore.” He shrugged loosely. “Russian’s easier to pronounce, and English’s got simpler spelling rules.”’ [79]). The economy is hyper-capitalist, law-enforcement almost non existent and there’s a distinct wild-west vibe, although at the same time folk are too much polite for proper Deadwood-style swearing (‘“Oh, poop!”’ [89]). The book also contains some eye-popping anti-Asian racism: ‘Two sallow Asian faces, one fat, one thin, both with the sorts of eyes that were used to squinting down the sights of a rifle when the game went on two legs instead of four’ [57]; ‘his skin was much yellower, less healthy looking … she glanced around surreptitiously for the servant, Chang Qwok-Do … [he was] probably back in the kitchen arranging to barbeque a dog or something’ [118]). Ouch.

So, overall: no, not good. The plot meanders and drifts. There’s a big denouement when Torraway pops up again and goes mad, or seems to.

But look, never mind all that. One particular detail of the worldbuilding snagged my attention, and it’s this: instead of a space elevator, people enter and leave Mars via a ‘space fountain’. How does that work? Well: ‘on the equator near Tharsis Montes, a linear accelerator stood upright at the bottom of a well dug deep under the Martian surface’:

The accelerator shot a series of ferrite hoops, each a metre in diameter and weighing almost a kilogram apiece, straight up into the sky. Moving at some tens of kilometers per second this fountain of objects created a tremendous kinetic energy. At the upper end of their flight, the hoop-stream entered an electromagnetic torus that functioned like the pulley wheel in a sheave block: bending the stream back on itself to descend at gravitationally increasing speeds towards the planet’s surface. There the stream entered another torus which passed it across to the accelerator again, completing a closed loop of flying rings. The system resembled a chainsaw held together by the forces of inertia and magnetism. [11-12]

We’re told that building this mega-device had consumed ‘whole quads of electricity, enough to drive the industrial sector of a fair-sized moon’, but once it was up and running, and the upper-torus was in synchronous orbit, ‘it required only minor additions of maintenance energy to stabilize the stream … to replace the miniscule amounts of kinetic energy that the freight handlers bled off in the form of electricity.’ OK: but how do people ride this alarmingly chainsaw-ish structure, up and down? Grab a hoop, as it’s passing at tens of kms a second, and hope it doesn’t rip your arm out of its shoulder socket? (Obviously not that but—how? Pohl/Thomas don’t say. Am I missing something obvious?)

Arthur Montagu Brookfield, "Simiocracy" (1884)

 

Arthur Montagu Brookfield (1853–1940) was educated at Rugby and Jesus, Cambridge, afterwards serving as a lieutenant in the 13th Hussars in India and later commanding a battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War. He was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1903, and a JP for Sussex. In 1903 he stepped away from Parliament to become British Consul at Montevideo, and (in 1904) Consul to Danzig (then in Prussia, now in Poland). All in all, a successful late Victorian Tory career.

Brookfield had a sideline in writing novels, of which I have read two. The first is The Apparition (1884), a sort of Scooby-Doo-avant-la-lettre story in which a young scapegrace, Paul French, cashiered out of the army for fighting a duel with his commanding officer (he called him a cheat whilst playing, and losing, a game of cards) runs away to an English country house, dies, is buried in the ground and afterward appears as a ghost to various people. It turns out a different person, not French, was interred, that French is still alive, and the titular ‘apparition’ was people seeing him out and about (‘“But I buried him! That’s all I can say,” replied the Rector. “But did you ever see his face; or the face of the dead man, rather?” persisted the Colonel. “No,” answered the Rector after some pause. “And what’s more I must acknowledge that I ought to have insisted on doing so. Oho!” [233-4]’). It's not much cop, this novel. 

Then I read Simiocracy: A Fragment of a Future History (1884). This is a more interesting, although still not a very good, piece of fiction. It is, in a sense, science fiction, hence my blogging about it here—although it's a narrow, satirical and frankly racist piece of work.

What happens. Well, at the end of the 19th-century the wicked Liberal Party abolishes the monarchy and establishes ‘a new British Commonwealth’. In an attempt to bolster their electoral support they change the laws so as to enable apes to vote, afterwards importing large numbers of orang utan to tip the electoral balance in their favour. This move is described as ‘in perfect harmony with the progressive spirit of the age’:

The people had been gradually induced to perceive that the opinions so stoutly maintained by some of the most thoughtful men of the day as to the original connection between the human and the Simian races, were not to be disposed of by mere contradiction or intolerant ridicule. The people had not yet forgotten the teachings of Darwin ... Had not other alien races been once despised—nay, even slaughtered? And now, were not some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar these same abhorred “blackamoors”? And did not millions of English as well as Dutch men, women, and children bear allegiance to a dynasty of negroes whom we had once contemptuously handed over into slavery? [Simiocracy, 38]

South Africa as a majority-rule republic in this Victorian imagined future is a striking thing. But there is, obviously, no ignoring the racism here. The ‘some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar are “blackamoors”’ line intrigued me, so I checked. From the Society of Black Lawyers website I learned the following:

In 1854 John Thorpe, a Sierra Leonean, became the first barrister of African descent to be called to the Bar and Monmohon Ghosh in 1864, the first person of Indian descent to be called to the Bar, with John Mensah Sarbah the first Ghanaian called to the Bar in 1887.

Interesting! But what strikes me as a wonderful thing clearly struck Brookfield as deplorable. At any rate, Simiocracy elaborates its premise: apes flood into the UK. Their leader is Orang Api:

Many writers have described the gratification as well as the astonishment which they felt, on finding, instead of a savage creature running to and fro on the ground with his hands and feet, a calm, and indeed dignified being, dressed in a loose suit of blue serge, and seated in an arm-chair, from which he welcomed his visitors with an unembarrassed smile and a courteous wave of the hand. When Orong Api stood up, he measured just five feet six inches in height; but his frame was now somewhat bent ... His form displayed great strength, and a certain rugged symmetry. His body was for the most part covered with hair of a dusky brown; but his face and ears, his feet and the palms of his hands, were smooth. [44]

There are various other idiotic reforms: children petition to have schools abolished, which happens (‘the obnoxious Education Act was formally repealed, and the arbitrary and feudal calling of the pedagogue banished to the limbo of obsolete privileges’); hunting, shooting and fishing are outlawed and so on. But the main change is the influx of apes.

This immigrants have, surprisingly enough, a fair deal of support among the people, the ‘Simiophile’ faction. But these new arrivals also evoke hostility: Orong Api is assassinated, and other apes are attacked and beaten in the streets. Some Oran Otani retaliate: ‘in one instance a fruiterer was set upon, savagely beaten, and robbed of all his wares. In another case a representative of the press was forced to drink the contents of a small portable ink-bottle which he carried ; and finally thrust through a glass shopfront, and compelled to seek safety in flight, horribly cut and bruised’ [129]. But these ape-acts, the narrator tells us, with an irony heavy enough to bend metal bars, are the exception, not the rule:

Surely the friends of Progress may even now feel a thrill of honest pride when they reflect, that but for the wantonness of a few hot-headed young Simians, the conduct of two and a half million successful invaders, flushed with the victory they had already accomplished, and glowing with zeal for struggles still to be undertaken, was such as to elicit the warmest praise from some of the highest officials in the English Parliament. For ourselves, we must here express our deliberate opinion that the general behaviour of the Oran Otani, at the time when they first landed on British soil, was of a kind for which the previous history of European invasions supplies no parallel: and, but for one calamitous incident which we shall now describe, we believe that the entire English people would have eventually acquiesced in this view, by rising like one man to welcome, and not to repel, the pioneers of Simiocratic civilisation and freedom. [130]

This thrill of honest pride style of heavyset sarcasm increasingly manifests as the story goes on. The ‘calamitous incident’ is a fire by the London Docks that destroys a building housing thousands of Oran Otani. Suspecting arson, the apes rise up and despoil London:

What wonder that the Simian war-cry arose ... What wonder that a peaceful and indeed benevolent army of occupation became forthwith transformed into a furious and unreasoning army of vengeance ; that bands of wrathful warriors spread abroad in every direction — to the houses and churches, to the wine-vaults, the shops, the warehouses, the wharves, and the shipping — carrying fire and sword with them, leaving slaughter, rapine, and desolation in their wake!

An Anglo-Simian conference is organised. The increasing influx of apes into Britain means that there is now a large simian army, although the leader of the apes, Madame Jocki, relies not only on force: ‘her first act was to transfer the huge treasure-chest, which had been brought from Borneo, into the keeping of the English Premier, to be applied to the relief of the homeless poor who had suffered from the recent disasters.’ Either way, Simian domination of England is inevitable:

A few of the wealthier classes endeavoured to rally an armed force, in the neighbourhood of Dunrobin Castle, in Sutherlandshire; but the national spirit had become so effectually tamed, that the attempt had to be abandoned. Most of those who could afford the large sums which were now demanded for a passage to the European continent or elsewhere, made haste to leave the country; and the steamship companies, the owners of private vessels, and the German and French proprietors of the four submarine tunnels, speedily reaped a golden harvest. The British coast was crowded with poorer fugitives; some of whom succeeded in chartering fishing-smacks, and coal-barges, while others put to sea on timber-rafts — and even ruder contrivances — of their own manufacture. [179]

Those tunnels are a nice SF-futurist touch. Anyway, the (human) Prime Minister is deposed by Madame Jocki, who is then herself overthrown by an aggressive young ape called Pongat Wou. He issues a proclamation, on the basis of which Britain is now to be ruled (the ‘Tupa’ mentioned is a kind of legendary Orang, supposed to dwell in Borneo, the ultimate ape power): 

‘Talking’, in point 6, refers to human speech: the Oran speech is obviously still permitted. The novel gives us a few samples of that: ‘The Premier remarked that the heat in Borneo, during the mild season, could not be much more oppressive than that of a crowded London salon — or “salong” as he called it — in the month of July. Jocki immediately showed her white teeth, and seemed to articulate something like: “Uck-chi; uck-chi. Mi ni nik.” Which, according to the interpreter, meant: “Good; good. I agree with you.”’ But our narrator declares himself delighted to have been released from the prudery of wearing clothes, and commends his history to his apish overlords. But, wait: has he written it in (forbidden) English? Or are we to assume it has been written in ook-ook eek-eek and then somehow translated into English for our benefit? I don't know.

All in all it's not a very sophisticated or notable novel. There was, in fact, a vigorous nineteenth-century subculture of apes-as-humans satire and fiction, the ancestor of today's Planet of the Apes franchises. John Clute points out why it was, specifically, the 19th-century in which this sub-genre arose:

The necessary circumstance was of course Time, or Progress. Moderns instinctively think of beasts and monsters as being prior. For there to have been an eighteenth-century Primitivist vision of the Noble Savage there must have been a sense that we had advanced – or retreated – from some earlier state. So it is no surprise that the first apes-as-human texts of direct interest to an sf reader are probably two works by a Primitivist philosopher, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-1792) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779-1799) contrast humanity's corrupt nature with that of the pacific orang-utan, a vegetarian flautist who may not have learned to speak but who was otherwise capable of human attainments. Monboddo's orang-utan was a potent and poignant figure, and soon entered fiction in Melincourt, or Sir Oran Haut-ton (1817) by Thomas Love Peacock, where Oran Haut-ton saves a young maiden from rape, enters Parliament, and gazes wisely upon the human spectacle. Charles Pougens's slightly later tale, Jocko: anecdote détachée des Lettres inédites sur l'instinct des animaux ["Jocko: Anecdote Extracted from Unpublished Letters on Animal Instinct"] (1824), more directly connects the innocence of the orang-utan Jocko to the doctrine of the Noble Savage espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); this tale, along with other French-language stories of interest, like Émile Dodillon's Hemo (1886) ... But Jocko is not a Satire; and Peacock's instinct to pay less attention to the intrinsic nature of his ape, and to follow his incursion into human society in order to reflect satirically upon civilization, proved more immediately useful. ... The intelligent race of monkeys discovered in Léon Gozlan's Les Emotions de Polydore Marasquin (1857) also serve to hold up the mirror. The use of apes or Yahoos or houyhnhnms as exemplary inhabitants of a Utopia or Dystopia represents a very different – and ultimately more significant – tradition than the use of apes as illustrative examples embedded into our own human world, early examples of which are in any case hard to find: until well past 1850, therefore, an ape-as-human will typically either be discovered in a distant enclave or ideal society, or the ape-as-human will be making a visit to civilization. Only later will the enclave become a Zoo. After the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), the apes-as-human topos became, of course, far more loaded, a lightning rod for the expression of and discharge of deep anxieties about the nature and destiny of the human race. Indeed, it would not be until Darwin that the apes-as-human topic became sufficiently ambiguous or threatening to warrant widespread imaginative use.

In this larger context, Simiocracy seems thin indeed. It can't decide whether it is making a racist point about immigrants, or a local-political point about how stupid and wicked Whigs/Liberals are. Its tonal irony is too clonking, the worldbuilding too scanty. It reminded me a little, as I read, of Will Self's more scatological and wide-ranging but otherwise similarly hamstrung Great Apes (1997). Jerry Fodor's LRB review gets that book right, I think:

There are, in principle, two kinds of chimp jokes: the ones about how chimpanzees are much like us, and the ones about how chimpanzees aren’t much like us. Self’s chimps have a social hierarchy and a ritual of deference according to which one offers one’s respects by presenting one’s posterior. ‘“I am honoured, madam, to make your acquaintance. The entire scientific community is in awe of your ischial pleat ... and I, too, reverence your dangly bits. I would accord it an honour if you would kiss my arse” ... she bestowed the required kiss, then requested an arse lick from Busner in turn.’ Self finds this sort of thing endlessly hilarious; and he is the kind of humorist who thinks that you can’t tell a good joke too often. I guess he tells the kiss-my-arse joke maybe 800 times. Self also can’t get over it that chimps mate publicly and promiscuously, and only when the female is in oesterus. That, he thinks, is more laughs than a barrel of monkeys.

In all other respects, however, Self’s chimps are much like the people that they caricature; in fact, too much like and therein lies the novel’s structural problem. ... The effect is not of animals but of people all dressed up in chimp suits with nowhere much to go. By the end of the book, their fur has more or less ceased to matter to what the characters do and suffer. Maybe that’s Self’s point of course; but just what point does it amount to? Why have your people turn into chimpanzees if you are then going to have your chimpanzees turn into people? Self himself doesn’t seem to know. The novel eventually comes to a halt out of what feels like sheer authorial fatigue.

Something similar vitiates Brookfield's novel. Though it doesn't have any bottoms in it.

Ken MacLeod, ‘Beyond the Hallowed Sky’ (2021)

 

I enjoyed Ken MacLeod's Beyond the Hallowed Sky: a three-ply space opera/political thriller/first contact yarn. It’s the first Wordle-line in a trilogy, so the ending, though decently-enough landed, doesn’t tie the story into a nice little bow, and that fact perhaps dilutes the enjoyment a trifle. And there are some parts of the novel that don’t work so well: it’s overloaded with worldbuilding and tech-info in the first 50-pages, too much in too short a space I think, which makes the story a little hard to get into. And I suppose the problem with the three-ply approach is that readers are liable to enjoy one of the three elements more than the others, thereby unbalancing the whole. In my case I was less engaged by the “handsome young John Grant gadding about near-future utopian-socialist independent Scotland and stumbling into inventing FTL” story-strand. For one thing it turns out that pretty much everywhere else apart from Scotland already invented FTL fifty years previously, and that they’ve just all been keeping that fact secret, which is a little baffling. But perhaps the trilogy's remaining vols will make it clearer how all that’s supposed to go.

A little more engaging was story-strand 2: a starship (a repurposed nuclear submarine, in fact, as these vessels all are) has been shipping settlers from Earth to the extrasolar planet Apis, where we encounter a weird sentient crystalline lifeform. Apis appears to have been seeded with earthlike life many of millions of years before, such that the actual forms of life the settlers encounter have followed a different, achordate evolutionary path. This is all pretty diverting, although MacLeod has to plump it up with some running-around being-chased excitement to keep the storyline bubbling along. My favourite of the three strands was set on a floating settlement high above the surface of Venus, ‘Cloud City’. This story-strand concerns a blandly polite humanoid robot, Marcus Owen, sent to ‘Red Venus’ as a diplomat and spy (a fact he cheerfully concedes to anyone who asks) who also turns a nice line in boinking people, like Gigolo Joe from Spielberg’s A.I. There’s a mysterious ‘something’ down on the hellish surface of the planet, and Owen descends from the clouds to the Venusian ground in a super-armoured space-suit to investigate.

Although the novel takes a while to build its momentum, momentum is eventually achieved, and the final third is full of nicely-styled moments, cool ideas and narrative hooks. I will read vol 2, and indeed anticipate doing so with pleasure. That’s not exactly the ringing-est of blurbs to slap on the front cover, I appreciate. But there you go.

Hmm. That reference to Wordle, in my first paragraph, is going to date this post pretty catastrophically in the coming months, once the fad passes, isn’t it?

I know Ken, and it would be as unseemly for me to trash his novel as it would be compromised to overpraise it: it’s very good, he’s a master of contemporary SF, you should read it. His prose here, as ever, is clear and informative. You may (I tend to) prefer a more wrought, styled idiom but MacLeod’s approach is to lay the characters, material and ideas of his storytelling directly before the reader, which is a perfectly honourable way of proceeding. There’s a flat-stanley quality to many of the characters, but again, in Owen, MacLeod makes a virtue of necessity on that score, and it's both memorable and likeable the way the novel renders the robot’s convincing fakeness of subjectivity.

But this isn’t a review, so much as a notation of one thought I had, whilst reading. It has to do with story structure. So: you might write a novel and keep it focused on one p.o.v. the whole way through, but the danger there is that your reader will find this approach monotonous and tiresome. So you decide instead to dispose your narrative between two, three or perhaps even more storylines running concurrently. But how to combine them? Beyond the Hallowed Sky opts for: just plait them together, A B C A B C, one chapter at a time. It’s a common strategy, which perhaps speaks to its workability, but I find it (not just here, but wherever I encounter it) irksome, distracting, bitty and, as I say above, an invitation to skip the strands you’re less interested in to get to the ones you’re really enjoying.

‘Alright,’ I hear you say. ‘But what are the alternatives? I’m not sure. I think it’s right to say I’ve never written a novel that adopted the braiding strategy, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. My most recent novel (available from all good bookshops etc) deliberately disposes two quite different p.o.v sections into an overall amphibrach, a three-part shorter-A long-B shorter-A structure, for Dantean reasons. Otherwise I prefer the discrete Rothko-like blocks of text to the intimate braiding. I say ‘prefer’, in the sense that this seems to me a more aesthetically interesting and striking way of doing things, but my taste may well not be yours—and indeed, judging by reactions to my writing, it probably isn’t. So what’s a better way of doing it?

The First Generation Starship

 

Since faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the stars are so very, very far away, any craft making interstellar journeys will take many centuries to get where it is going. Generations will be born aboard these ships, live and die and be in turn superseded by younger generations. This standard trope of SF is predicated upon the unbending realities of physics.

But who was the first to hypothesise a ‘generation starship’? Wikipedia says this:

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his The Ultimate Migration (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an ‘interstellar ark’. The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory, first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, ‘The Future of Earth and Mankind’ (1928), a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called ‘Noah's Ark’.

Clute, Nicholls and Langford go further back:

Tsiolkovsky's ideas ... were anticipated as a passing fancy, though with a more realistic timescale, in John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897): “... with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.”

But 1897 doesn't take us far enough back into the early history of this idea, I think. Here's James E Lake's Bishop Foster's Heresy (1889), imagining a future-fleet voyaging out into the interstellar spaces for ‘millions of years’:

Look out from our flying ship as we sail out upon the universal sea of space. We turn our faces toward the sun, whose bright beams shed such a wonderful sea of material glory over us, that all nature is hid save this effulgence and our own ship ... we begin to look out through the evening twilight upon the vast ocean of trackless ether, upon which we are sailing, and now thousands, yea, millions of ships like our own heave in sight ... Come with me as this fleet of ships sails on its great voyage for a million years, and ask what mighty fleets are these that accompany us over this infinite sea! Hail, thou voyagers over this unsounded sea! Hail Arcturus! Hail Polaris! [154-55]

The scale of the cosmos had been understood for a while by this point, and it is a natural extrapolation from that knowledge to speculate how long it would take for a craft to traverse such distances, and what that would imply for the crew. H F Warren's Recreations in Astronomy (1879) included this intriguing Space 1999-avant la lettre conception:

If our earth were suddenly to dissolve its allegiance to the king of day, and attempt a flight to the North Star (the centre of the Circumpolar Constellation), and should maintain its flight of one thousand miles a minute, it would fly away toward Polaris for thousands of thousands of years, till a million years had passed away before it reached that northern dome of the distant sky and gave its new allegiance to another sun. The sun it had left behind it would gradually diminish till it was small as Arcturus, thus small as could be discerned by the naked eye, until at last it would finally fade out in utter darkness long before the new sun was reached. [72]

There's a lot of late 19th-c speculation about the distances of such voyages, actually.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir. Lana Wachowski)

I stand by my initial reaction to Matrix: Resurrections, tweeted immediately after leaving the cinema:

It’s a busy film—too busy, really—full of ingenious revisitings and twists on the original Matrix trilogy, but it falls flat. The main failure is tone: there’s none of the menace, the brooding Goth-intensity or bravura kung-fu brilliance of the first movies, and worst of all none of their chewy, thought-provoking ideas. I still cleave to my rather unfashionable take that Reloaded is the best of the original trilogy, not so much because its set-pieces are bigger/better (bigger doesn't automatically mean better of course) or because of the wonderful, bonkers Architect scene (love it though I do) but because it is built around what seems to me the most interesting idea out of the three films, and I'm old-fashioned enough to still think of SF as a literature of ideas. So: the big idea in Matrix 1 is ‘reality is an illusion’: a cool idea, but hardly original (Plato's Cave, Marxian ideology, Dick-ian paranoia and so on). The big idea in Matrix 3 is: ‘everything that has a beginning has an end’, which is, qua idea, less thrilling, athough it is at least saying something. But the big idea in Matrix 2 seems to me the most exciting and thought-provoking, though it goes largely unremarked in the fan reaction and critical commentary on that text: it is that choice is not a matter of choosing (to do A or B), because you have actually always already chosen (to do A or B). Choice is a matter of understanding why you have chosen what you have chosen, because we can't see past the choices we make unless we understand them. That's a very cool idea, I think.

There’s nothing so clever in Matrix 4. In place of ideas like these, the movie performs without really interrogating metafiction. Neo and Trinity are not dead, but living in an annex to the Matrix, she as a wife and mother, he as a successful but solitary game designer whose biggest hit is a playable version of, precisely, The Matrix Trilogy. He has flashes of true memory, catches odd glimpses of a balding greybeard instead of his still-handsome if grizzled fiftysomething Keanu face in the mirror, worries that he is hallucinating. But with the help of a blue-spectacle-wearing analyst, played by a simpering Doogie Howser, and bolstered by a constant stream of blue mental-health pills, he gets through the days under a blue-sky, living in a steel-blue appartment. He has the blues, though. Do you see? Blue is the Colour, Matrix is the Game, we're all together and winning is our aim.

Things start to unravel for Neo—or from the point of view of the ‘real world’, things start to ravel for him—when he is ordered to write a sequel game to his Matrix original, and the memories of his time become harder to repress. Then a new, younger Morpheus and a new character called Bugs visit and try, first unsuccessfully and then successfully, to get Neo to take the red pill and leave the simulation.

Intercut with the scenes set in this new blue-tinged Matrix are shots from the original movies, back when the Matrix had a pleasingly submarine-y green tint. Everything is a bit blue in the new Matrix because it is only by repeatedly dosing Neo with ‘the blue pill’ that the machines can keep him sedated and in-pod, although that raises the intriguing question of why the old model Matrix was so chlorine coloured. What does the green pill do? I feel we should be told.

The thing is, Resurrections isn’t really a movie about the world, or ideas, of The Matrix. It’s a movie about The Reboot, about our contemporary fascination with reshooting (as it might be) the same Star Wars film every few years, tweaking a couple of things and calling it The Eternal Recurrence of Skywalker or The Last—Last? Are You Kidding Me? There Are Dozens of These In The Pipeline—Jedi or whatever. Certainly no shortage of remakes and reboots today: endless the-same-but-slightly-different product extrusions.

Now Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ is a really intriguing idea (not right, I think; but fascinating). But where Groundhog Day did something both hilarious and profound, actually, with that notion, this movie only dips its toe in the water. After the first quarter-hour or so of Neo’s endless loop, the filmmakers, perhaps worried about boring their audience, switch mode to kick-ass shoot-em-up. There are gunfights, there is kung-fu, there are explosions and punchings on a train, punchings in a warehouse, a motorcycle chase and the like. But these scenes all under-deliver in terms of excitement, because they lack tension, because the audience never doubts that Neo will survive them all in order to rediscover his ‘one’-osity, and reunite with Trinity. In such a context the flash-back cut-ins only serve to remind us how much more exciting and high-stakes and intense these kinds of scene were in the original flicks.

There are several ways Lana Wachowski might have framed a story about postmodern self-reflexion as constitutive of modern life,  but I have to say the way she has actually chosen flirts with self-indulgence, a love letter to the earlier movies that reads them, facilely, as a simple narrative of heroic self-liberation. I mean, you’re free to interpret those movies any way you like of course, and this is certainly a reading. My problem isn’t that it’s ‘wrong’, it’s that it strikes me as not an especially interesting reading. There are cleverer, more striking and powerful things going on in 1-3 I'd say.

At any rate this film is essentially the same story retold, somewhat smugly, with some superficial self-referential upgrades—you remember the ‘exiles’ from Matrix 2, holdovers from an earlier version of the Matrix who can only be killed with a silver bullet? Werewolves, in effect. Well, Matrix 4 not only brings them back in for a curtain call, it includes Matrix-zombies, ‘the swarm’. You remember ‘bullet time’? Matrix 4 name-checks this constantly, bathing in its coolness, and then offers a bullet-time-plus, which turns out to be actually considerably less cool, a kind of super slow-mo.

This means the movie reverts us to its worldbuilding and story, and those, in Resurrections, are both shonky. Believe me, I love me some Meta, but a meta-gesture towards worldbuilding and story-coherence isn’t the same as actual worldbuilding and story-coherence.

So the premise behind the story is: a new programme, the Analyst, has taken-over from The Architect the job of designing and running the Matrix. He has discovered this One Weird Trick for maximising the power-output of the system: namely, to grow new versions of Neo and Trinity inside special pods that are near one another without actually touching. These two characters have been parked in a kind of annex to the Matrix, called a ‘Modal’, and run through endless cyclings of their respective lives, occasionally seeing one another but never actually connecting.

This tantalising unconsummated-yearning is, it seems, super effective at generating the electricity the machines need to survive—though, whatever Morpheus told us in Matrix 1, this is clearly not the same electricity that is generated by Duracell batteries and that flows around copper wires. It is, rather, some Monsters Inc style abstraction of human affective intensity, which the machines are able, somehow, to convert into workable energy. Fair enough. My problem isn’t really with this. I mean, it’s bobbins qua premise; but a premise is a premise. My problem is with the way this Monsters Inc premise is spun-out.

So: the machines can literally resurrect dead humans? Like, clone Neo, restore his eyes, restock his cloned brain with his personality and mentation, all that? That seems to me, if I may quote Ron Burgundy for a moment, kind of a big deal. The movie spins this as ‘special’: resurrected Neo and resurrected Trinity are kept in special pods in a special secret machine tower hidden from the rest of the machine city. But presumably ‘growing humans’ has been the machine modus operandi from the start. Where else do all the human bodies come from, otherwise? I assume it was never the case that the machines occasionally wake in-pod humans, have them fuck, wait for the females to come to term and so on? Which is to say, what’s big about this deal is not that the machines are cloning humans, but that they’ve found a way of recreating not just the bodies but the psychological, emotional and memorious aspects of specific humans. That’s—wow, though. If the machines are not only growing the flesh but adding-in consciousness, why not edit the latter to make the in-the-pod person more contented with their lot? Or if (as per the unfulfilled yearning energy-source) not contented, then discontented in ways that don’t lead to people taking the red pill?

More: if the continued power-source of the machine world relies on Neo not realising who he really is, why are the machine intelligences insisting he design a video game that rehearses, in minute detail, all the specific details of who he really is? Why not have him designing Minecraft? Or Candy Crush? I suppose it’s possible (this isn’t spelled out in the movie, but I’m speculating) that the machines can’t stop Neo remembering, howsoever vaguely, his ‘true’ past, and have created this world to give him a plausible explanation for these odd memories. But then you’d think they wouldn’t repeatedly insist that Neo return to this project. The whole opening move of the film is Neo’s boss—actually Smith, in a new, younger-handsomer skin—insisting over Neo’s demurral that he go back to the Matrix. Why would he want such a thing?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Young Morpheus is an agent programme that has switched allegiance and decoupled from the Matrix into a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings. So—not in any sense Morpheus, then? Why not a new name? And if his real-world avatar is a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings then why does he have to, as he does, clamber strenuously up the side of machine-world structures? Couldn’t he just float up?

Anyway, Neo's corporeal body is freed from the Matrix a second time in a smash-and-grab by a Quisling machine betraying its kind—I’m sorry did I say ‘Quisling’? I meant a brave fifth-columnist machine, secretly allied with humankind, truth and justice. The rest of the movie is about the mission to likewise free-up Trinity, which, since liberating Neo used-up mankind’s only insider fifth-columnist Quisling-robot, is tricky to achieve. That’s the whole story.

The ‘real world’ set-up is more than a little incoherent. On the one hand, since Neo’s sacrifice in Matrix 3, there has been peace between humans and the machines for 60 years, which has allowed such machines as wish-it to leave machineland and live with the humans, gigantic floating metal dolphins and insects and whatnot. Subterranean human city Zion, renamed Io, is enjoying the peace-dividend by growing strawberries and generating misty patches up by the rock-ceiling so it looks more like sky. Io is hidden from the machine’s spermatozoaesaque soldier robots by a magic holo-curtain, though I wasn’t sure why this was necessary, given that the two worlds have been at peace for so many decades. I also wasn’t sure how the camouflage was supposed to work: as if Poland erected an invisibility curtain along its border with Germany on account of their 60-year-old former beef, leaving invading German troops standing around scratching their heads, I guess. I mean: I guess?

President of humanity is Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe, the actress aged 60 years by the application of much latex. Pinkett Smith’s performance of a 90-year-old woman is a dreadful pantomime of creaky-voiced bent-backed shuffling about, and reminded me of nothing so much as the ‘I'm a poor old man, my legs are grey, my eyes are old and bent’ geezer from Life of Brian. 

Niobe rebukes Jessica Henwick’s ‘Bugs’ for rescuing Neo, and forbids any attempt at rescuing Trinity. She even locks Neo in a Rapunzel Tower, but real-world Morpheus is pooed out of a pipe as a stream of ball bearings in order to jailbreak him, and off they go to rescue Trinity anyway.

And here, actually, the movie briefly flickers with actual dramatic potential: Niobe tells Neo straight it’s a choice: leave Trinity trapped in the Matrix, or rescue her, restart the war and destroy all humanity. If the film had had the courage of its convictions where this choice was concerned it would have been much better. But it doesn’t: Niobe changes her mind, Bugs is reinstated, and leads the team to rescue Trinity through a baroquely over-complicated process of incursion, goop-draining, double-bluff, replication, shouting, fighting, motorcycle-chasing and assorted nonsense. This all felt markedly unexciting, partly because we the audience are never in doubt that Trinity will elect to leave her ersatz hubbie ‘Chad’ to ride again on the grizzled john ‘wick’ of the true love-of-her-life Neo, but mostly because the stakes here remain too low to generate drama. This is no longer saving humanity: it's reuniting two old flames, and just that. I mean: alright? But also: so what? It turns out the reunion doesn't damage the peace, reignite the war, or have any larger effects whatsoever. So: so what? So.

I see the point in swapping the grand-guignol melodrama of Hugo Weaving for the smarm and gym-built good-looks of Jonathan Groff—it’s a point about the blandification of modern life: everyone standing around in the elevator checking their phones, everything banalised. Lambert Wilson’s ‘Merovingian’, now trampified and dishevelled like Alan Moore dragged through a hedge, appears briefly ranting about how in his day it was fine wine, theatre and elegant conversation and now it’s all homogenised commodified soullessness and iPhones. But the movie as a whole doesn’t really commit to this satirical point. Lacking that we’re in a replay where the hero not only gets the girl, but does so costlessly. Imagine if Neo and Trinity getting back together actually entailed the destruction of Io and resumption of the war: imagine if this movie were actually The World Well Lost For Love. But it’s not. Neo gets his cake, has it too, and flies around rainbow skies with his newly freed, empowered and beautiful partner. Old tricks. Meh.

Robots and Orphans

 

The word robot, as every schoolchild knows, was coined in the 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek (though the ‘robots’ in Čapek's play, though artificial, are organic rather than metallic creatures). I sometimes see it claimed that robot is the Czech word for ‘slave’, but that's not quite right (the Czech word for ‘slave’ is otrok), although it's not entirely wrong either. In fact robota means ‘serfdom, villeinage, corvee’ and came to be used for any arduous work or drudgery. ‘Robot’ is Čapek's back-formation from this term. There are versions of the word robota in other European languages: Arbeit in German, arbeid in Dutch (the Middle English word arveð is a cognate) and that's because they all derive from a now-lost common etymological ancestor: *orbъ (“slave”), which itself is derives from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₃erbʰ, “to change or evolve status”. This speaks to a world in which not only was work what slaves did, but anybody might become a slave if their status was overturned or degraded, as for instance when a man or woman was captured in war, or a child was orphaned. Indeed, *orbъ is the root, via *h₃órbʰos, of the English word “orphan”. 

So many of our stories and folk-tales concern the magic orphan, the Moses or Oedipus or Harry Potter figure, the special child whose orphaning is only the prelude to a story of heroism, rise and greatness, that it's easy to forget the fate of children orphaned was, for thousands of years, servitude, so much so that ‘orphan’ and ‘slave’, and now ‘robot’, are all, fundamentally, versions of the same word.