Coming up in November is what’s been billed alternately as a stand-alone Galactica tv-movie (to tide us over until season 4 starts in January) and as an early fourth-season premiere. Whatever it is, it’s known to feature lengthy backflashes to the ill-fated Pegasus and its equally ill-fated Commander Cain, though it’s also supposed to lay some groundwork for the future.
Anyway, some major news is out about its contents. For SERIOUS SPOILERS, click here.
I’ve recently reread A. E. van Vogt’s out-of-print 1977 novel The Anarchistic Colossus. (To the right are some of the covers that have graced the book; as was common for science-fiction novels in the 70s, none of the covers seems to have very much to do with the book’s contents. The bottom one is the most bizarrely off-target of the batch.) The title turns out to refer equally to the anarchistic society depicted in the story, to the human brain, and to the universe as a whole.
The society – its rules the result of a kind of compromise between capitalist and socialist anarchists (called Caps and Co-ops in the book; the former are egoistic, the latter sentimental) – avoids all need for human retaliatory force by relying instead on a worldwide system of ubiquitous computerised monitors that are able to detect symptoms of aggressive emotions and instantly incapacitate anyone who behaves aggressively. The result is the closest thing to the Hobbesian-Randian dream of an automatic “final arbiter” independent of the human wills it constrains.
There are ways of gaming the system, of course. One is to modify the computers; the other is to modify oneself, training oneself to commit aggression while suppressing the emotional accompaniments. But pulling off either method successfully turns out to be tricky. (It’s never clearly explained why the Techs, the engineers in charge of maintaining the computer system, don’t reprogram it for their own purposes. Evidently they are committed to the status quo, whether from ideological conviction or from fear of one another.)
In an introduction, van Vogt suggests that this kind of mechanised system is the only way that anarchy could work: “what kind of technology would be required to maintain a system of anarchism among all those misbehaving human beings around us? No government. No police. Nobody minding the store. The entire operation would, of course, have to be automatic.” Yet on the other hand he does have one of his characters remark that “[a] segment of this society believes that the careful use of language all by itself, without any help from the [computers], is all that anarchism needs,” which seems like a nod to van Vogt’s own Null-A trilogy (which is worth a read, if you can get past the fact that van Vogt uses the term “Aristotelian logic” to mean a habit of thinking in terms of false dichotomies, apparently unaware that transcending false dichotomies is one of the central themes of Aristotle’s entire philosophy). The author talks a bit more about this here.
The economic system seems to allow private property and private enterprise (presumably a Cap contribution), but also a requirement that anyone willing to work must have access to sustenance or the means of obtaining it (presumably a Co-op contribution). We don’t see much detail as to how this all works, however – just a few enigmatic glimpses. Passengers on a bus can choose either to pay the fare or to take turns driving the bus. An automobile driver who fails to put money in a parking meter will find that his vehicle automatically deactivates itself. (But what would happen if someone started producing cars that didn’t do this?) Whenever someone invents a new, not-obviously-aggressive way of annoying other people, the Techs have to reprogram the computers to recognise and react to the new behaviour. (So is it really the Techs, not the computers, who constitute the “final arbiter”?) Parents can authorise their teenaged sons’ conscription into the military (which seems un-anarchistic?), but it’s unclear just how the military operates, since the soldiers seem free to wander off whenever they like – which rather defeats the point of conscription.
The plot is a complex tangle, but the central action concerns an attempted alien assault on the anarchist society. The book poses the question: how can the society as described here defend itself from bombardment by orbiting hostile spacecraft, when all use of violence has been delegated to machines that do not exist on those spacecraft? The answer is a SPOILER so I’ll hide it in the comments section.
Incidentally, I can’t help wondering whether the one-soldier-for-a-whole-society concept in John Wright’s Golden Age trilogy was inspired by a similar (not identical) notion in van Vogt’s book.
Addendum:
I’ve added the paragraph I accidentally left out.
Uh oh. Ron Moore really likes the Sopranos finale.
No, Ron. Don’t you dare. I can just see it: “Admiral Adama, if Thrace’s coordinates are correct then this next jump should bring us to Earth – though we still don’t know what awaits us there.” “Jump!” Fade to black.
We’ll kill you if you try it, Ron. Let it go.
Two interesting science-fiction stories that I read years ago stay in my mind, but I don’t recall the authors or titles. If you remember either of these, please let me know. (My vague feeling is that the first story is by someone famous, perhaps Asimov or someone like that, and that the second story is by someone less known.)
1. A device is invented to see into the past. But it can’t go farther than a few decades back, so it’s no use for finding out the truth about ancient history (by contrast with the next story). The ultimate upshot of the story is that the device means a drastic social change, the end of privacy forever, because five seconds ago is still the past, and so anyone can watch what anyone else is doing anywhere. (Libertarian sidenote: if this were indeed to happen it might initially seem to make resistance to government much harder, since the state could spy on everyone easily; but I’m not sure it would, since – assuming, as the story does, that everyone has one of these devices – the true actions and motivations of government officials would be much easier to expose. Also, determining guilt or innocence in court would be a lot easier. But these are my own remarks; the story didn’t explore these political implications.)
2. A team of time travelers is going back to the first century to observe the life of Jesus and find out what’s true and what’s false in the Biblical account of his career. A Catholic priest is invited to join the team but is reluctant. Everyone assumes that his reluctance stems from fear of finding out that the Church’s teachings about Jesus are mistaken. But in fact it turns out that the priest’s belief in the historicity of the Gospels is perfectly firm, and the real reason for his reluctance is his fear that he couldn’t honestly look Jesus in the eye and claim to have been a “good and faithful servant.”
Definitions can be either theoretical (as when one attempts to express the essence of some already-known phenomenon) or stipulative (as when one simply lays down certain criteria for what is to count as such-and-such). Theoretical definitions have a mind-to-world direction of fit, and can be true or false; stipulative definitions have a world-to-mind direction of fit, and so cannot be false. It’s not always easy to tell of a particular definition which category it falls under, however, since sometimes our stipulative definitions are implicit; hence when a proposed definition seems open to criticism, that might be either because it is theoretical or else because it is an attempt to capture explicitly some implicit stipulative definition. Call the latter kind of attempt an implicit stipulative definition. (Actually there are good Wittgensteinian reasons for thinking that the distinction between theoretical definitions and indirect stipulative definitions is rather fuzzy; this in fact I take to be the real, though not the intended, moral of Alan Sidelle’s Necessity, Essence, and Individuation. But never mind for now.)
This brings me to the recent decision to reclassify Pluto as no longer a planet. Is the new definition of “planet” stipulative? Presumably; but I don’t think it’s best understood as directly stipulative. The controversy over the decision was not simply about convenience or sentiment. Rather it was an attempt to identify (and prioritise) the classificatory principles implicit in our existing practice. In that sense it was a “grammatical” inquiry. (I’m agnostic as to whether the answer reached was, or is now, correct. It’s in principle possible for it to have been incorrect and yet now be correct, if the practice of experts plays a role in determining the definition.)
On a vaguely related note, the fictional planet Yuggoth (which I guess is no longer a planet either, since it was supposed to be identical with Pluto) is referenced several times in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, but the fullest description is in his short story “The Whisperer in Darkness”:
It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system – unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. … There are mighty cities on Yuggoth – great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone …. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad …. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen …. that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities ….
But essentially the same picture is offered in two early poems (evidently earlier than the story), though neither explicitly identifies its subject as Yuggoth. One is “The Cats,” where the setting is blurred between Yuggoth (the mention of Pluto, most of the descriptions) and Earth (cats and bats, the reference to the fictional Massachusetts town Arkham):
Babels of blocks to the high heavens towering,
Flames of futility swirling below;
Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flowering,
Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,
Cobwebs of cable to nameless things spun;
Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers
Streams of live foetor that rots in the sun.Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,
Shrieking and ringing and crawling insane,
Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,
Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal.
Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,
Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,
Yelling the Garden of Pluto’s red rune.Tall towers and pyramids ivy’d and crumbling,
Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber’d streets;
Bleak Arkham bridges o’er rivers whose rumbling
Joins with no voice as the thick horde retreats.Belfries that buckle against the moon totter,
Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac’d,
And living to answer the wind and the water,
Only the lean cats that howl in the waste.
The other is an excerpt from the poem-cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (which despite the title does not deal exclusively with Yuggoth). Here the reference to “long rows of windows” clashes with the short story’s reference to “windowless cities,” but nevertheless it is clearly once again the same place.
Somewhere in dream there is an evil place
Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along
A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong
Of frightful things whence oily currents race.
Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead
Wind off to streets one may or may not know,
And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow
Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound
Is of the oily water as it glides
Under stone bridges, and along the sides
Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.
None lives to tell when that stream washed away
Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.
So what does all this have to do with anything? Not much; I just like those descriptions.
I just got back from seeing Pirates of the Caribbean III – which was a lot of fun, despite the plot’s being a tangled mass of incoherences and loose ends.
But what I haven’t seen anyone in the libertarian blogosphere comment on is the film’s opening lines, in which the mercantilist villains announce the suspension of the rights of – if I recall correctly – assembly, legal counsel, jury trial, and habeas corpus.
On a less political note, did anyone notice Reggie Lee, the actor who plays the slithery Agent Kim on Prison Break, as one of Chow Yun-Fat’s henchmen here? His Wikipedia page says he was in the previous Pirates movie too, but I don’t remember him. He certainly stood out for me this time, though.