Well. It was weird. I’ll give him that.

The story concerns a group of children with seemingly random psychic gifts: a young man with telepathy, a young girl with telekinesis, young twin girls with teleportation, and a…baby…thing…with partial telepathy and “superintellect” (not sure what an appropriate psychic term for this gift would be).

It’s a short book that covers a lot of ground. The first section concerns how they are drawn together to form a cooperative psychic ‘entity’ they call the “gestalt” – they remain distinct individuals, but their abilities link them into a greater, integrated whole. The second section addresses what happens when one part of the gestalt is lost and must be replaced – by the non-ideal replacement available at the time – and how it changes as a result. The third section concerns a normal person affected by crossing paths with the gestalt, and how what happens to him threatens to pull the entity apart.

As I said, it was weird. Not good-weird, like a Twilight Zone episode or a Lovecraft story, nor bad-weird, as in consciously trying to be outré or cutting edge or ‘experimental’. It was weird in a very similar way to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from around the same time (1953 vs. 1946) – an unusual subject handled in an unusual way.

Sturgeon’s use of language is actually quite good, and he manages to successfully wrangle a number of details of the action, the nature of the various gifts, and in-story history, while showing believable character changes over time – all in, again, what is a fairly short novel.

Besides the resemblance to Bester, one thing that stuck out to me was the occasional pandering on racial issues. Like Heinlein, Sturgeon created non-white characters at a time (circa 1950) when that was not commonly done. But unlike Heinlein, Sturgeon wasn’t always as adept at smoothly weaving this ahead-of-the-times element into the story. There are moments when he presents the reader with a clumsy “racism bad, m’kay?” message of the type common to broadcast television of the Seventies, in what felt like the same manner: We interrupt the dramatic flow of this program to shoehorn in a Very Special Moral Lecture against __-ism. 

Overall, I can’t say that there was a much in it that stuck with me in terms of ideas. After reading it, it was like I’d…read it. That’s it. Entertaining in the moment but lean on lasting impressions, especially compared to Earth Abides, which I purchased at the same time and with which I read it back-to-back.

The post More Than Human first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

In every instance, the attempt to establish utopia has been instead the opening of a door to misery and murder. This should be kept firmly in mind when confronted with any scheme whose aim is the perfection Man or the construction of an ideal society. Visions of a state of organization or being which can never be achieved due to human nature or the nature of reality itself lead inevitably to chaos, violence, destruction, and death.

— Pavel Navarro, MATA Administrator, 2048-2060

The post Pavel Navarro on Utopias first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

True Believers in science believe, in short, that every phenomenon can be reduced to a few governing equations, as with physics. It’s inconceivable to them that there could be phenomena so complex as to be irreducible in this sense, despite their interacting every day with two textbook examples: the economy, and the weather.

— Hadrien Laporte

The post Hadrien Laporte on Complex Phenomena first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

It’s easy to point at the foolish and credulous and have anice laugh at their expense. But what does that accomplish? Does it remedy their failures of knowledge or reasoning? Does it make you wiser, or better informed, or morally or intellectually superior? Or is it simply a self-indulgence, an expression of a malicious and petty character?

— Miranda Waite

The post Miranda Waite on Laughing at the Foolish first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

My opinion is…mixed.

The story starts with the protagonist, Ish Williams, receiving a rattlesnake bite that happens to save his life. When he recovers and returns from his remote cabin, he discovers that nearly every human on Earth has died from “super measles”, an contagion of unknown origin and extreme lethality. The book then follows Ish through the next 50 years, focusing on three different periods, as he finds other survivors and builds a…er…tribe. 

And “tribe” is a big, big part of the problem.

On first reading, the story was entertaining and interesting. Stewart thought through a number of details well, such as the lingering of hydropower, the rapid failure of the roads, and the rewilding (or extinction) of domesticated plants and animals. There are a number of really good emotionally-charged scenes (dealing with Charlie, the Joey scene, and much of “The Last American”, for example).

It takes a little while to get used to his writing style, which I guess you could call “post-war experimental” (it was first published in 1949). The dialogue is sterile in some places, academic in others, rarely naturalistic. The ongoing effects of the near-disappearance of Man are described by italicized narrative dumps, whose perspective isn’t consistent (much of the time these read like excerpts from a far-future historical overview of the Great Disaster, but sometimes like a narration of ongoing events, and at other times like conventional omniscient perspective). It quickly takes on that “period” feel of other books from that era, e.g. Alas, Babylon (1959), and you just go with it.

It was compelling enough to read straight through over the course of a weekend. But the more I’ve thought of it over the past week, the more problems I’ve found with it.

• The repeated malthusian elements, which seem common to the point of obsession with SF authors from the end of WWII through perhaps the mid-1980s. Okay, we get it. There are a lot of humans. Fine. But it gets really tiresome when (like global warming, which took its place as favored hobby-horse) it has to be repeatedly, compulsively, reflexively inserted into every story.
• The nihilism. There is a thread throughout that, hey, you know, maybe it’s a good thing, after all, that human civilization is nearly dead. Maybe it’s overrated, and even a mistake, and we should let it die. Which they do, albeit passively.
• The passivity – the characters’ unwillingness or lack of motivation to do anything active to preserve civilization for the following generations. This is demonstrated intentionally through the running “joke” about getting a gas-powered refrigerator working, the single, desultory instance after two decades of scouting for other long-term survivors, and the lack of interest in restoring electricity or repairing the water supply. Ish himself comments repeatedly on how he feels himself to be an observer, which appears to restrain him from taking meaningful action when necessary.
  The most significant instance is Ish’s petulant and impotent complaints about lack of support from the other parents regarding teaching their kids to read. The abundance of long-shelf-life food is blamed (nobody has to work to eat, so the kids are allowed to play all the time, there’s no sense of urgency in learning or preserving knowledge, etc.), but this abundance could have had exactly the opposite outcome had Ish put any effort at all into actually being a leader: having no need to hunt, forage, or farm, the kids had all the time in the world to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to restart human civilization. But he didn’t plan for that when the kids were still infants, and he didn’t put his foot down when the parents didn’t support him, in spite of being the obvious and unquestioned leader of the Tribe.
  When he discovered that his failure to push their education had resulted in a growing superstitiousness among the children, Ish could have harnessed it to ensure a longer-term recovery of civilization by creating a “priesthood” to serve (and preserve) the university library. But nah. Better to let the kids continue goofing off and remain illiterate and innumerate, and complain  impotently about it, than to try.
  After Joey meets his blatantly telegraphed doom (you didn’t see that coming fifty pages away?), Ish performs one last act of teaching: showing the kids how to make a bow and arrow – as a toy. After that, he gives in and gives up, and does nothing more to rekindle civilization, letting the Tribe degenerate into a primitive, superstitious, and ignorant band of savages.

Ish is a pathetic coward. Kinda ruins the book.

The only other apocalypse fiction where I’ve encountered this “giving up on civilization” element is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. But there, a clear reason for doing so – the cycle of growth and collapse – had been established from the beginning (“All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”). The active choice at the end of the series to abandon technological civilization and merge with the early homo sapiens of our Earth is portrayed as a measure to break this cycle. The characters accept its necessity yet are hopeful that something better might emerge in time – they’re not passive in the moment and ambivalent about whether regains civilization or even survives as a species.

The post Earth Abides first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

Technocracy is not explicitly socialist, but like Marxism and Fascism it springs from the same roots. Each ideology claims to order society by scientific principles, with science cited as the basis of both its inevitability and its moral claim to power. In spite of these scientific pretensions, each ignores reality in service to its vision – in particular, the nature of the human material from which each would construct its vision of heaven on earth. But ‘scientific ideology’ is a contradiction: the hallmark of any ideology is the filtering of reality through the lens of political fantasy, the opposite of the pursuit of transcendental reality that defines science.

— Avery Easton

The post Pavel Navarro on Technocracy first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

These ‘priests of science’ are really no different from anyone else: when money, power, and status are on offer, they too will lie, cheat, and steal. Even if the gains are short-lived. Even if they destroy their reputations and credibility. Even if it wrecks the prestige of their profession or field. They’re only human, after all – a fact that they may find even harder to admit to.

— Avery Easton

The post Avery Easton on Scientific Honesty first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

The desire to win arguments is an intellectually corrupting one. When winning rather than a better apprehension of the truth is the goal, one is inclined to use any manner of sophistry to do so. The truth actually becomes an obstacle to doing what it takes to score points. The lust for demonstrating one’s superior intelligence overcomes any scruples about intellectual integrity.

— Avery Easton

The post Avery Easton on Winning Arguments first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

Truly intelligent people don’t try to make others feel stupid. They don’t need to.

— Miranda Waite

The post Miranda Waite on Smart People first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.

How do you persuade people who pride themselves on their intelligence to consider any novel idea, when that idea involves a truth they don’t want to hear, don’t want to think about, and will refuse to entertain even provisionally, even in those private moments when no one else can possibly guess what they’re thinking?

— Hadrien Laporte

The post Hadrien Laporte on Open-Mindedness first appeared on A Fistful of Photons.