Jules Verne: Father of Science Fiction?

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Reviewing four of Jules Verne’s later works leads John Derbyshire to question his title as the father of science fiction:

You could make a case, in fact, that Verne was not really interested in science at all, so much as in technology. Certainly he was a magpie for curious technological and biological factoids, and had a fairly good head for numbers. The imaginative side of science, though — the side that actually propels science forward — was a thing he had no acquaintance with. I am sure he would have been baffled by Vladimir Nabokov’s remark about “the precision of the artist, the passion of the scientist.” The great pure-science advances of his time made no impression on him. I do not know of anything in Verne’s works that would be different if Maxwell’s equations had not appeared in 1865. About Darwin’s theory he seems to have been utterly confused, employing a sort of crude pop-Darwinism in books like The Aerial Village (1901), yet declaring himself “entirely opposed to the theories of Darwin” in an interview he gave at about the same time. This was not likely an opposition based on religious belief. Though he always, when asked, described himself as a “believer,” this was part of the bourgeois façade that Verne chose to live behind after some youthful dabbling in la vie Bohème. He actually gave up attending Mass in the 1880s, and probably died an agnostic.

Though a gifted storyteller, in fact, at any rate in his early years, Verne had not sufficient powers of imagination, or scientific understanding, to rise to true science fiction. Here the contrast with his much younger (by 39 years) competitor for the “father of science fiction” title, H.G. Wells, is most striking. The concept of a fourth dimension, for example, first took mathematical form in the 1840s. By 1870 it was, according to the mathematician Felix Klein, part of “the general property of the advancing young generation [of mathematicians].” Wells grasped the imaginative power of this notion and used it to produce one of the greatest of all science fiction stories, The Time Machine (1895). Verne never used it at all, and would probably have found the notion of a fourth dimension absurd.

Gifted storytellers are rare enough that we should welcome them when they appear, especially if they have a strong appeal to young readers. The Mollweide projection of the earth’s surface in my grandfather’s 1922 Atlas-Guide to the British Commonwealth of Nations and Foreign Countries still has a jagged blue-ballpoint line running across it, made by the hand of a fascinated small boy circa 1956, to trace the progress of Phileas Fogg on his eighty-day journey. The point of science fiction, however, is something more than to offer engrossing narrative. As was stated by Kingsley Amis in his survey of the field (New Maps of Hell, 1960), science fiction exists “to arouse wonder, terror, and excitement” in its readers. Verne rose to this challenge once or twice in his early books, but it is not met, nor even glimpsed, in these four Wesleyan translations of later works.

“Father of Tech Fi” is a title for which I would rate Verne a very strong contender. One of the blurbs on the Wesleyan edition of The Mighty Orinoco, taken from the New York Times, calls Verne “the Michael Crichton of the 19th century,” which I think is very precise, and conveys the same idea. True science fiction, however, began twenty years later than the masterpieces of Verne’s youth, and on the other side of the English Channel. I can’t say that I found it visible at all in these four later books of Verne’s.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Media, Science | No Comments »

Muppet Show Pitch

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Behold the original Muppet Show pitch reel — which failed to sell the show to any American networks:

This edited version, which appears on the season-one DVD set, lacks the punch-line:

After Leo’s powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, “What the hell was that all about?”

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Alfred Duggan’s Past

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

There are actually two quite distinct kinds of historical novel, John Derbyshire explains — hard and soft:

On the one hand the writer of historical fiction may attempt to capture the inner life and motivations of some real and well-documented historical figure. Robert Graves’s Claudius novels offer outstanding examples of this “hard” sub-genre. Our author might, on the other hand, center his story on some invented person, who is then let loose amidst historical scenery: think of Gone With the Wind or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. (As a slight variant of this “soft” sub-genre, the same thing can be done with a historical figure sufficiently obscure he might as well be an invention.)

The “hard” sub-genre is less often attempted because it is much more difficult to pull off. To give a convincing account of the thoughts and emotions of, say, Charlemagne, you need to do a great deal of research into the man, his family, friends and colleagues. You also need a good understanding of human types, an imaginative appreciation of people who may be quite unlike yourself. This combination of diligence and insight is not often found among fiction writers, who tend if anything to be more lazy and self-obsessed than the human average. “Soft” historical fiction, on the other hand, can be tackled by anybody, including the kind of novelist whose central characters are really nothing more than self-impersonations. It is, in fact, rather amusing to imagine oneself wandering around in old Carthage or fighting at Manzikert. Probably anyone who has contemplated fiction writing at all has had the urge to write a book of this sort; and it is plain from the proliferation of low-grade “bodice-rippers” that lots of people want to read such books.

The parallel to science fiction is clear:

Science fiction fans like to speak of the “sense of wonder.” Kingsley Amis, for instance, said that the purpose of science fiction is “to arouse wonder, terror and excitement.” Some similar sense is stimulated by good historical fiction. To think that this person actually lived! (Or, in the case of the “soft” style: To think that some such person probably lived!) Everyone who has reached middle age has a sense of the remoteness and strangeness of life even a scant few decades ago. Children in iron lungs; drama on the radio; having your feet X-rayed in the shoe store; people smoking cigarettes all the time, everywhere. How much odder things were a century before that! And a millennium? Two millennia? Even to try to imagine such worlds one needs help. The writer of historical fiction supplies that help.

Yet ultimately historical fiction is, like all art, an illusion. Here are people just like us: same facial features, same limbs, their desires and hates arising from the same springs as ours. And yet their actions were often bizarrely, fathomlessly inexplicable to us. When the clergy of Seez filled an episcopal vacancy by election without consulting Geoffrey of Anjou, their lay lord, Geoffrey had the lot of them castrated, and the bishop-elect, too. An earlier Count of Anjou, Fulk the Black, in penance for his sins, voluntarily shuffled to Jerusalem and back three times — total 15,000 miles, much of it trackless mountain and forest — while shackled in irons. What on earth were they thinking? We cannot know. By the narration of such things, though, a skilful writer can rouse us to wonder and awe.

I have not read Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy, by Alfred Duggan, which describes 13th-century Greece under the rule of Frankish knights, but I was just making the point to a friend that a modern audience would never recognize, say, the Old Testament, with the names changed — and that the original Battlestar Galactica was a thinly veiled retelling of Mormon mythology:

All the geography and ethnography of that place is refracted through the language and sensibility of these knights. Athens is “Satines”; Corinth is “Chorinte”; the natives are “Grifons” (Greeks) or “Esclavons” (South Slavs). The effect is to render the whole story as taking place in a completely imagined world, a Tolkeinian fantasy without the magic; yet the history is sound and well researched.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Media | No Comments »

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Daily Show

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I haven’t watched The Daily Show in quite some time, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made a recent appearance to push his new book:

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Posted in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Media, Policy | No Comments »

John Derbyshire and the Little Dragon

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Conservative commentator John Derbyshire (mis)spent some of his youth in Hong Kong — where he appeared in a Bruce Lee movie:

Well, I was sitting there reading when a young Chinese guy came in. Seeing that I was the only person in the lounge, he addressed me. “Do you speak English?” I said I did. “Know any martial arts?” I said I had taken a few lessons. “Want to be in a movie?” I asked him if it paid. “Sure. Seventy bucks a day.” (Hong Kong dollars, he meant — around US$12 at that time.) I said I was game. “Good. Be outside the Miramar Hotel front entrance tomorrow morning, seven thirty.”

There were half a dozen other ghost-heads (gwai-tau, the generic Cantonese term for a non-Chinese person) outside the Miramar. We must have looked an unsavory lot — the casting director had obviously just trawled around the low-class guest-houses for unemployed foreigners of a sufficiently thuggish appearance. One was a dead ringer for Jimi Hendrix. Another was a full-blood Maori from New Zealand, a huge fellow — an obvious rugby lock — who made a meager living as a night-club singer in the colony’s low dives. A minibus arrived and drove us out to the New Territories — that is, the countryside that stretches out back of urban Hong Kong forty miles or so to the Chinese border. (Beyond which Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going through one of its nastier phases. Rafts of rotting corpses would occasionally float down the Pearl River past the colony.) Here there was a movie studio. We were led into a huge shed used for indoor sets, and spent the next two days filming fight scenes in that shed.

Bruce himself directed Meng Long Guo Jiang. He was on set all the time, setting up the fights, working out positions, talking to the lighting crews and the cameramen. There was, by the way, no sound crew. Chinese movies at that time were shot without sound. The sound was dubbed in later. When you watch a Bruce Lee movie, you are not hearing Lee’s voice, though I think they might have inserted his qi-ai — the intimidating yells, grunts and howls he used when fighting — into the soundtrack of Meng Long Guo Jiang. The qi-ai sound like his, anyway. In fact the first dubbing was always into Mandarin, and the on-screen lip syncing was to Mandarin words. Bruce, though fluent in English and Cantonese, could not speak Mandarin, so this was a constant vexation to him when filming, and probably the main reason he has very few speaking lines in his movies.

Bruce Lee’s presence was as striking in person as on screen. I have never seen a man who gave such an impression of concentrated energy. If he got animated when talking to you, he would make little springy skipping movements with his feet, as if warming up for a fight. When nothing much was happening, he would drop down and do one-arm finger-thumb push-ups at one side of the set, or have someone hold up a board he could practice kicks on. Just as a skilful schoolteacher knows how to get the class’s attention by speaking very softly, you were most aware of Bruce’s presence, and he was most intimidating, on the rare occasions his body was dead still. In the relaxed state, he was in constant motion. Crouching tiger, indeed.

Movie fight scenes are a devil of a thing to get right. We did everything a dozen times, levels of frustration and discomfort rising each time. This was summer in the tropics, and if the place had any air conditioning, it wasn’t adequate. There were huge electric fans everywhere, but they had to be switched off for filming, or the actors’ hair would all be streaming out horizontally from their heads. Yet through the entire two days I was on the set, I never saw Bruce lose his temper, or display any negative emotion stronger than momentary mild annoyance. He was just as I had seen him on TV: smiling, cracking jokes, smoothing out difficulties and differences, coaching, teasing, encouraging, cajoling. I have a tall, lean physique, so he addressed me as “Slim.”

“Hey, Slim, let’s try that again — and this time look mean. You hate me, remember? I’m a runty obnoxious little Chink, just stole your woman, trashed your car and pissed in your beer. Whaddya gonna do to me? Huh? Whaddya gonna do? Come on …” (He spoke perfect idiomatic American English the whole time.)

The fight scenes were all improvised out of his head. I can say this authoritatively, as I got a chance to read one of the scripts. The entire section I was involved in — two days filming, though of course less than five minutes in the finished movie — was encompassed by four Chinese characters in the script: Li da xi ren — “Lee strikes the Westerners.”

Derbyshire put his two short scenes up on YouTube.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Martial Arts, Media | No Comments »

The New Ones

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

S. T. Joshi summarizes Lovecraft’s vision:

Humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the ‘gods’ of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage.

Samuel Francis, writing in the May 1997 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, offers his own take:

Mr. Joshi is correct about the cosmic level of meaning in Lovecraft’s stories, but he largely neglects another, social level of meaning. On that level, Lovecraft’s stories are dramas of modernity in which the forces of tradition and order in society and in the universe are confronted by modernity itself — in the form of the shapeless beings known (ironically) as the “Old Ones.” In fact, they are the “New Ones.” Their appearance to earthly beings is often attended by allusions to “Einsteinian physics,” “Freudian psychology,” “non-Euclidean algebra” (a meaningless but suggestive term), modern art, and the writing of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. The conflicts in the stories are typically between some representative of traditional order (the New England old stock protagonist) on the one hand, and the “hordes” of Mongoloids, Levantines, Negroes, Caribbeans, and Asians that gibber and prance in worship of the Old Ones and invoke their dark, destructive, and invincible powers.

What Lovecraft does in his stories, then, is not only to develop the logic of his “cosmicism” by exposing the futility of human conventions, but to document the triumph of a formless and monstrous modernity against the civilization to which Lovecraft himself — if almost no one else in his time — was faithful. In the course of his brief existence, he saw the traditions of his class and his people vanishing before his eyes, and with them the civilization they had created, and no one seemed to care or even grasp the nature of the forces that were destroying it. The measures conventionally invoked to preserve it — traditional Christianity, traditional art forms, conventional ethics and political theory — were useless against the ineluctable cosmic sweep of the Old Ones and the new anarchic powers they symbolized.

Lovecraft believed that his order could not be saved, and that in the long run it didn’t matter anyway, so he jogged placidly and cynically on, one of America’s last free men, living his life as he wanted to live it and as he believed a New England gentleman should live it: thinking what he wanted to think, and writing what he wanted to write, without concern for conventional opinions, worldly success, or immortality. And yet, despite the indifference he affected, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has in the end attained a kind of immortality, for the classic tales of horror he created will be read as long as that genre of literature is read at all.

(Hat tip to Bradlaugh at Secular Right who correctly notes that Lovecraft is more fun to read about than he is to read.)

Posted in Media, Policy | 7 Comments »

Wealthcare

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic takes the recent upsurge of interest in Ayn Rand — and publication of books about Rand — as an excuse to attack Rand and her followers — and anyone against government redistribution of wealth.

Some of his attacks on Rand and her Randroids could be considered fair:

  • She once wrote to a friend that “it’s time we realize — as the Reds do — that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.” She worked both to propagate her own views and to eliminate opposing views.

  • Rand’s hotly pro-capitalist novels oddly mirrored the Socialist Realist style, with two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props.

  • The subculture that formed around her — a cult of the personality if ever there was one — likewise came to resemble a Soviet state in miniature.

  • Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence.

  • Her ideological purity and her unstable personality prevented her from forming lasting coalitions with anybody who disagreed with any element of her catechism. Moreover, her fierce attacks on religion — she derided Christianity, again in a Nietzschean manner, as a religion celebrating victimhood — made her politically radioactive on the right.

  • Ludwig von Mises once enthused to Rand, “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” Rand articulated the terror that conservatives felt at the rapid leveling of incomes in that era — their sense of being singled out by a raging mob.

  • Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left.

Other attacks misunderstand — or misrepresent — what Rand believed and professed:

In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite.

Rand clearly respected honest labor — the architect-hero of The Fountainhead chooses to work in a quarry rather than prostitute his artistic skills.

When she attacked the “looters and moochers” stealing from society’s productive elements, she was attacking politicians and their cronies — the same corrupt politicians, special interests, and corporate fat-cats the Left attacks.

The important difference was that Rand did not see The Rich as a monolithic — and evil — entity. She saw successful businessmen who became wealthy by creating wealth as heroes, while she saw political cronies who became wealthy by redirecting wealth to themselves as villains — “looters and moochers”.

But Chait would rather prop up Straw Men, like the notion that all conservatives support The Rich against The Poor, rather than supporting creators over thieves, or that all conservatives see wealth as a perfect reflection of someone’s contribution to society.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Google now lets you custom-print millions of public domain books through their partner On Demand Books and the Espresso Book Machine:

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.)

That means you can stop into the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and for less than $10, custom-order your own copy of Dame Curtsey’s Book of Candy Making, the third edition of which was published in 1920 and which can only be found online for $47.00 used.

Dane Neller, On Demand Books CEO, says the announcement flips book distribution on its head.

“We believe this is a revolution,” Neller said. “Content retrieval is now centralized and production is decentralized.”


On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)

Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson notes that “Most people can’t get into the Harvard Library, but you can print their books next door,” at the Harvard Bookstore.

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | No Comments »

Astro Boy Gets the Hollywood-Blockbuster Treatment

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Hollywood always claims that its latest adaptation will be faithful to the original, and it’s almost always an outright lie. Now Astro Boy gets the Hollywood-blockbuster treatment — and Hollywood’s hoping it doesn’t end up like Speed Racer:

For starters, it’s not live-action; it’s CG produced by Imagi Studios, Hong Kong’s version of Pixar. The company’s founder, Francis Kao, not only secured the movie rights but also hired the son of Astro Boy creator (and god of manga) Osamu Tezuka as a creative consultant.

“I was encouraged to expand on the universe,” says the flick’s director, David Bowers. “But at its core the movie is still faithful to the original.” Case in point: Our favorite rocket tyke sports a windbreaker and slacks (good-bye red undies and go-go boots), but his original powers (x-ray vision and turbo butt) remain unchanged.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Movie Studios See a Threat in Growth of Redbox

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Redbox offers $1 DVD rentals through its bright-red vending machines — and, as always, Hollywood feels threatened:

“These machines are to the video industry what the Internet was to the music business — disaster,” said Ted Engen, president of the Video Buyers Group, a trade organization for 1,700 local rental stores.

Mr. Engen is enlisting lawmakers to attack Redbox for renting R-rated movies to underage viewers — the machines simply ask customers to confirm that they are 18 or older by pressing a button — and trying to rally the Screen Actors Guild and other unions.

“It’s going to kill the industry,” said Gary Cook, business manager for UA Local 78, which represents studio plumbers.

Redbox is riding several trends:

For starters, the dismal economy has made people think twice about buying DVDs, especially as the likes of Redbox have made renting easier. Consumers are also tiring of the clutter: The average American household with a DVD player now has a library of 70 DVDs, according to Adams Media Research.

Over all, DVD sales are down 13.5 percent for the first half of 2009 compared to the first half of 2008, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade organization. Studios say some new titles are selling 25 percent fewer copies than expected. Rental revenue is up about 8 percent over the same period, according to the group.

Retailers, struggling to keep people shopping, have realized that having a DVD kiosk in a store creates foot traffic, making it easier for companies like Redbox to sign wide-ranging installation agreements. Some partners, like Walgreens, have offered discounts that essentially make rentals free.

Redbox currently buys DVDs wholesale, rents them repeatedly for $1 per day, and then sells the DVDs into the used-DVD market. This upsets the studios:

By signing deals with Redbox, Paramount and Sony got the kiosk operator to agree to destroy their discs rather than resell them.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

What happened to Second Life?

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

What happened to Second Life?, Cringely asks:

Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality. Second Life is a fantasy environment — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem. It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of real life.

Facebook, being tied to the real lives of the people involved in it, never runs out of anything, whether it is server power (minimal requirements there. at least in comparison to Second Life) or stuff to talk about. Second Life is barren in comparison. By attempting to imitate life, it pales beside the real thing.

Posted in Games, Media, Technology | No Comments »

How Marvel Went from Bankruptcy to $4B Buyout

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Chris Zook examines how Marvel went from bankruptcy to a $4B buyout — and naturally he sees the same four-part pattern he discovered at Bain:

  1. The renewal of Marvel was based not on leaping to new hot markets, or dramatic new technologies, but the reapplication of the strongest assets in the company’s historic core — its loyal customer base, its stable of 5,000 characters, its library of 30,000 market-tested stories, and its brand.

  2. Profitability in the entertainment world has shifted dramatically from channels (e.g., stations, magazines) to proprietary content and from analog to digital. Marvel’s strategy follows the profit pool.

  3. The most successful strategic transformations are not those that find a large singular opportunity, but those that find a repeatable formula to take the strongest elements in its core and reapply them to new situations over and over. This is quintessentially true in the case of Marvel’s stream of movies, games, self-production initiatives, and even treatment of individual characters (e.g., Spiderman I, II, III….).

  4. We found that 90% of strategic comebacks were fueled, in part, by assets in the original core business when it was at its best that were adapted to a new environment and took on new value that had not been previously recognized. This was true of IBM’s service business that led its turnaround, or Harman Kardon’s automotive business that fueled its renewal, and even of Apple’s software interface differentiation and young and loyal customer base.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

Neither Steam Nor Punk

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

I don’t know how a post-apocalyptic animated movie, based on an Academy Award-winning short — with an intro by Ray Kurzweil — slipped under my radar, but 9 did. (It opens one week from today, on 9/9/09.)

A fan of the original short described its rag-doll heroes as stitchpunk, and the name stuck. In fact, the notion that the film’s setting and aesthetic are steampunk has stuck too, even though there’s very little Victorian about the whole thing. It’s a whole lot more Eastern Bloc, as Shane Acker, its creator, explains:

The design of the short film was inspired by the work of several stop-motion animated masters; Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and the Lauenstein brothers. [...] For that scenic design, I was inspired by photographs of European cities destroyed in World War II, as well as the fantasy artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski.

For the film, Jeff van der Meer gives an overview of steampunk, including its history, which seems to reinforce my point:

But it wasn’t until 1987 that K.W. Jeter coined the term “Steampunk” to describe his new novel Infernal Devices. In the pages of Locus Magazine (#315, April 1987), Jeter rather blithely wrote, “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term…like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.” Jeter, along with fellow writers Tim Powers (Anubis Gates) and James Blaylock (the novella “Lord Kelvin’s Machine”), spearheaded the Steampunk literary movement, despite being largely forgotten by the Steampunk community today.

Blaylock and Jeter in particular are to Steampunk what John Fitch was to the Steamboat. Fitch created a working steamboat, but Robert Fulton made the steamboat commercially successful. In the case of Steampunk, the iconic cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and William Gibson together play the role of Fulton. Their The Difference Engine (1990) is most often cited as the seminal Steampunk novel.

The Difference Engine could be seen as “historical cyberpunk,” another term for Steampunk. Set primarily in 1855, The Difference Engine posits an alternate reality in which Charles Babbage successfully built a mechanical computer, thus ushering in the Information Age at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. Juxtaposing Lord Byron, airships, and commentary on the unsavory aspects of the Victorian era, the novel’s many Steampunk pleasures include a vast and somewhat clunky mechanical AI housed in a fake Egyptian pyramid. Sterling and Gibson, like Moorcock, also comment on the negative role of new technology in propping up regimes, with a powerful British Empire facilitating the fragmentation of the United States into several less powerful countries, such as the Republic of California and the Republic of Texas. However, The Difference Engine, by positing a premature information revolution, also focuses on repression through invasion of privacy caused by an all-seeing mechanical “Eye.”

In the mid-80s, the hip new movement in science fiction was cyberpunk, which stood utopian science fiction on its head, emphasizing “high tech and low life” — cybernetics and punk — and how “the street finds its own uses for things.”

Authors who weren’t part of the hip new movement naturally resented that fact. I assume that’s what Jeter was getting at when he quipped, “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term…like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.”

The Difference Engine, on the other hand, actually transferred the cyberpunk ethos to the Age of Steam — where it didn’t belong, I might add — to create a true steampunk story — if not a reasonable projection of how Babbage’s analytical engine might have influenced history had it worked. Since then, the term has evolved to cover just about anything involving “retro” technology — or Victorian fashion.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

The Demystifying Adventures of the Amazing Randi

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

The demystifying adventures of the Amazing Randi are likely coming to a close — he’s 81 years old and fighting cancer. Here’s how he got started:

When Randi was 15, he heard of a preacher in his hometown of Toronto who claimed he could read minds. Randi had been reading every book he could find on magic and illusions, so he thought he could figure out what trick the preacher was using on his flock.

One Sunday morning, Randi watched the preacher set up a classic “one ahead” scam, using information obtained ahead of time to trick the crowd into believing he could read minds. Randi took the stage as he imagined his hero Houdini might have done and preached to the congregation about being duped, explaining the trick. He was immediately run out of the church.

Dissidence would become a regular reaction to Randi, who was born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in 1928. He describes himself as a quick learner but a bit of a rabble-rouser — he was once kicked out of his Sunday school class for heresy.

When he was 12, he stumbled into a matinee performance by famed magician Harry Blackstone Sr., who made a woman float in the air just feet from the stunned boy. “That got me,” Randi says. “That grabbed me, and it never let go. It’s still got a hold of my head right now.”

A year after the church incident, Randi was in a bicycle accident that left him in a full-body cast for 13 months. Randi figured that even confined to the cast, he could still perform at nightclubs as a mentalist. “In those days, they were paying me $70 a week,” he says. “Now that was a lot of Canadian dollars, I can tell you.” He decided he would make it clear at the end of every show that he was simply using illusions. But he was disturbed when audience members would insist he had paranormal powers — ironically ignoring the only bit of truth he’d spat out all night. People seemed to want to believe in the supernatural.

Before he graduated high school, Randi left town with the carnival, performing as “Prince Ibis.” At age 22, he pulled off a highly publicized escape from a Quebec City jail cell, a trick Houdini used to perform. A local newspaper dubbed him “L’étonnant Randi” — the Amazing Randi, “with an i at the end,” he says, “like Houdini.” For three decades, Randi toured the world by train, plane, and ship, headlining marquees from the Deep South to the Far East. He was bound in straitjackets and dangled over waterfalls; buried alive; and handcuffed and locked in an oversized milk jug.

But Randi could never shake the need to educate the naive. Working at nightclubs in East Asia, he learned new con-man techniques, and when he came back, he had a bug for debunking. In the 1960s, he hosted a radio show in New York in which he would, among other things, argue with astrologers (“Complete woo-woo,” he recalls) and confront chiropractors (“Three chiropractors, three completely different diagnoses”).

The height of his fame came when Johnny Carson invited him onto The Tonight Show. Carson had him back 37 times, and the two became good friends. “Johnny was a very skilled magician, very accomplished,” Randi says.

Living in northern New Jersey, Randi befriended other great American thinkers, including astronomer Carl Sagan and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Randi and Asimov would sing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes together deep into the night. “He had such a wonderful voice,” Randi remembers. Randi and Sagan would discuss their shared love of astronomy; Sagan helped name a comet after Randi.

Randi even played himself on an episode of Happy Days — he levitates Mrs. Cunningham, and in the final shot, he steals Fonzie’s patented “Ehhh.” At one point, Randi toured with Alice Cooper, cutting off the rock god’s head with a trick guillotine at the end of every show.

In the ’70s, Americans developed a new fascination with all things paranormal — crystals, Tarot cards, astrology parties. Randi found the trends disturbing; he was particularly irked by a young Israeli named Uri Geller, who said he could bend spoons with his mind and read the thoughts of strangers. Geller appeared on countless television shows and was featured in magazines in dozens of languages.

The degree to which people took Geller seriously bothered Randi. Reputable scientists from several labs studied “the Geller effect,” how brainwaves affect pliable metal. Those scientists no longer discuss those experiments. In 1987, Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, invited Geller to the floor of Congress to send positive brain waves to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The senator and the psychic later claimed at least partial success.

Randi tried to spread the message that Geller’s techniques were simple charlatan tricks, old Israeli shtick masked by a trustworthy voice and a warm smile. Randi performed Geller’s tricks himself for Barbara Walters. He arranged for Johnny Carson’s staff to foil Geller on The Tonight Show. “I’m just feeling very weak tonight,” Geller explained to Carson when he couldn’t perform anything supernatural.

In 1975, Randi published his first book, The Magic of Uri Geller, later retitled The Truth About Uri Geller. A series of lawsuits and countersuits between Randi and Geller ensued. Geller won a suit against Randi in a Japanese court, claiming Randi had defamed him, but the judge awarded Geller 500,000 yen, or just $2,000. Randi boasts that he has never paid a dime to anyone who has sued him.

Posted in Media, Science | No Comments »

How I got out of writing an essay on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I recently re-read Wells’ The Time Machine, which made Justin Kahn’s How I got out of writing an essay on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that much more amusing:

January 17, 2005

I received the syllabus for my Humanities course. A humanities course should not be required for my B.Sc. degree in Physics. To add insult to injury, we are supposed to do an analysis of Wells’ The Time Machine. We are to focus on the historical context when the topic is time travel?

Who reads a book on a time machine for social insights? I would do anything to get out of this essay.

At dinner, my friends complained about this assignment. I tell them a way out: I will build a time machine.

They mocked me, but they will see.

Posted in Education, Media | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »