Sørina Higgins ran a photo contest for pictures of her book The Inklings and King Arthur at Mythmoot. I almost won. Apparently visual interest and well-thought-out composition count more towards photographic artistry than bad puns. Congratulations, Tom!
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A lot of Mythmoot V was recorded on video and will be posted to the Signum University channels on Twitch or YouTube, so I’m not going to do a full recapitulation this year. I’m just going to mention some talks where I have something to say. The Sunday morning paper session is one such.
Luke Shelton – Young Readers’ Receptions
Luke walked us through one of the survey methods he’s using in his dissertation research. He’s studying how young readers respond to The Lord of the Rings. One example of his methods is called “diamond-ranking”. You can see a diagram in the video, but essentially it’s a way of measuring readers’ reactions that takes account of the fact that people are generally pretty clear about the best and worst of a group, but don’t make such big differentiation in the middle. His example question was “Which members of the Fellowship do you feel positive about, and which negative?”
He passed out cards with the names of the Fellowship of the Ring on them, and split us into two groups to do the ranking. Interesting debates ensued, where “interesting” is defined as in the apocryphal Chinese curse. Judging from the decibel level, I suspect these groups were rather more opinionated than average. Both put Sam at the top. Luke noted that children never put Sam at the top. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions come out of this.
Arthur Harrow – Isaac Asimov and the rise of the Nerd Hero
Arthur began by surveying the dismal landscape of his childhood. Tom Swift books were just about the only good books for boys before Asimov came along. Then the Nerd became the target for science fiction. Not only are the heroes of Foundation mathematicians, psychologists, and disruptive students who are too smart for their teachers, but the whole trilogy assumes that the reader is widely read in history, math, physics, and psychology. Which is to say, us.
Then the talk veered away from nerdhood to talk about the role of women in SF. As far back as the 1930’s, Doc Smith’s Lensman series took tantalizing steps toward making women real characters, but they fall short – the only woman who could become a Lensman was “some kind of freak”. But mostly, space-opera sopranos spend their time screaming and being rescued. Doc Smith elevated them a bit.
Then came Asimov to the portrayal of women as heroes, just as he did for male nerds. In I, Robot, the hero is Dr. Susan Calvin, inventor of the positronic brain. She drives the plots of the stories, in the mid-1940s, ahead of the rest of SF, and far ahead of less forward-thinking genres.
Dom Nardi – How game theory solves the paradox of foreknowledge in Dune
If a writer is going to put knowledge of the future into a book, it’s going to be necessary to take a stand on the question of free will vs determinism. Frank Herbert put the sentence “Dreams are predictions” right up front in Dune. Do the characters still have free will, if someone can predict the future?
Usually, the author dodges. The Oracle at Delphi got around this by being incomprehensible. Hari Seldon resolves the problem by not telling people what he foresaw. Herbert’s characters grab the bull by the horns. Dom says this works because of game theory.
Towards the end, Paul sees branching possible futures in some cases, but in others its definite.
Other critics haven’t quite understood this. Lawrence Luton (“The Political Philosophy of Dune.” [1979]) applies a type of Heisenberg principle, saying that seeing the future makes it change. There’s no such thing as “The” future. This is only correct in Dune itself. In the sequels, characters can use their foreknowledge. Sam Gates-Scovelle (Nicholas, J. [2011], Dune and Philosophy: Weirding Way of the Mentat) says there’s a difference between knowledge and prediction. But we don’t see the difference in application.
In Dom’s view, prescience is a form of computation. The paths in the future that Paul sees are the same thing as the outcomes of a game in mathematical game theory. He gave us an example of a very simple game: Paul vs the Emperor. If everyone has all the information and both make rational choices, we see the emperor abdicate. But of course, Herbert was writing an interesting book, not a dull one. Imperfect information and bounded rationality are at the core of the difference between Dom’s simple model and the actual plot.
In this view, where any actor can make any move with some (unknown) probability, prescience is a power Paul can use to torque the game’s outcome because he has better knowledge of the probabilities than someone who’s not able to see the future. When Paul sees a single path, it’s because there’s a clear choice for both players. When he sees branching futures, it’s because the payoff is indifferent among some of the choices.
David Maddock’s comment got at the core of how clever this is. In computer jargon, he noted, prediction is an NP-hard problem. Translating into human language, that means that if you’re trying to test out possible futures, you do it by building a simulation, changing the inputs according to a model you’ve thought of, and running the simulation to see how it comes out. For a complicated system, though, the computation gets so big that it takes more time to run the simulation than it does to just wait and see how things come out. So prediction is impossible, and you can have free will and determinism at the same time, if you’d like.
Here’s the best thing about David’s observation: it means that the power of the Mentats can be thought of as a way to address NP-hard problems such that they’re solvable in a reasonable time. I’ve never been comfortable with the Butlerian Jihad, because if a science-fiction story is going to have a high-tech world with no computers, it should explain how a human mind by itself can be faster than a human mind plus a computer. This is a good way to do that.
(And congratulations on your new degree, David!)
Stephen Winter says a lot of nice things about Idiosophy over at Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings this week.
One thing I’d like to clarify: In case anyone concluded that the disjunctions in time in Middle-earth are a weakness in the story, I think they’re intentional. When Tolkien wanted his creation to resemble our world, he was careful to make sure his facts were correct. We have seen this in astronomy, botany, cosmology, ecology, and even in quantum physics.
But if there’s one discipline Tolkien didn’t respect, it’s economics. He went out of his way to break economic laws. The logic of economics is the logic of the Industrial Revolution, and Middle-earth was going to have none of it. So The Shire and Bree have money, but no government that coins it. The places with the most advanced technology are the ones with the lowest population density. Fast technological development in Isengard is the product of one single mind, not a collaborative community. All of these things contradict well-established economic theorems.
The one place I can think of where economic logic applies is in Lake Town. The stories people tell about the King Under the Mountain are a good application of Keynesian macroeconomics, but we readers are not encouraged to think of the Master and his guild-inspired community leaders as heroes.
That, I think, is the purpose of the steep time-gradients on the map of Middle-earth — to renounce Adam Smith and all his works. Faërie and Economics are natural enemies.
I love Shawn and Alan, The Prancing Pony Podcasters, but they’re such Americans sometimes. In last week’s episode, they heaped derision on Thorin Oakenshield for telling Bard, Gandalf, and the Elven-King, “Take him, if you wish him to live; and no friendship of mine goes with him.” “Him” meaning Bilbo, of course.
To our intrepid Digressors, this was childish. It sounded like a grade-schooler wielding his meaningless social connections as if they were punishments and rewards. That’s what living in America will do to you. But J.R.R. Tolkien was thinking of an older form of government. Here’s a story:
You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry
Imperator Caesar Augustus ruled Rome though his personal network. He was the patron of millions of clients (including the entire army and navy). He didn’t have much statutory power, just a few honorary titles. But when he said something should be done, it got done, because everyone wanted to be on his good side.
One day, he learned that the Governor of Africa had “appropriated” a golden statue from a temple in his province, which Augustus had forbidden. Augustus’s response? There was no indictment, or prosecution, or sentence. All that happened was that Augustus was disappointed and sad, and told the people in attendance, “That man is no longer my friend.” When word of it got to Africa, the governor committed suicide rather than bear the shame, and the disrespect from his followers that was soon to come. That’s power.
The same attitude applied up north. For example, look at how many Anglo-Saxon kennings for “king” have the word for friend in them. There’s Folcwine, Fréawine, Goldwine, and we haven’t even gotten to England yet. So when Thorin said he had “no friendship” for Bilbo, “friend” should be read this way. Those words are not empty.
Just for fun, let’s flash forward to the Scouring of the Shire, when Pippin gets fed up with the gangsters. Pippin makes a good warrior’s boast, but that’s not the scary part.
‘I am a messenger of the King,’ he said. ‘You are speaking to the King’s friend, and one of the most renowned in all the lands of the West. You are a ruffian and a fool. Down on your knees in the road and ask pardon, or I will set this troll’s bane in you!’
The King’s friend, huh? Is it any wonder that the ruffians turned and fled?
Have you ever wondered how exactly to define “science fiction”? I’ve seen lots of opinions, none of which sounded right. In an article in PMLA, though, Eric Rabkin pointed me in an interesting direction. He said “Carl Freedman wrote that his ‘thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other’.” Intriguing — they certainly have lots of things in common, since critical theory is constitutionally incapable of staying in one lane, and so wanders from literature to politics to economics to sociology to linguistics and back again. SF started out that way on purpose. Maybe there’s something there.
Via inter-library loan, Carl Freedman tells me that Darko Suvin defines science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.” Whoa! Assessing the analytical validity of that assertion will take some thought, but my immediate reaction was that it’s a perfect description of science-fiction fans. Suvin has got to be onto something. SF fans are not only cognitively estranged from the mundane world, they positively embrace that status. (I say “they” as if I’m not one of them, but I doubt anyone will be fooled.) We’re proud of how differently we think, and judge our ways superior. Somewhere in a box around here is a button that says “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.” We give non-fans scornful names like “mundanes” or “muggles”.
That last word brought me up short. Though SF fans use it, it’s from fantasy. I’m looking for a way to distinguish SF from fantasy. Fortunately, Darko Suvin actually said something rather different.
SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.
“Estrangement” is easy, and obviously correct. SF is set in a world that is not our own (though it may look just like ours, at the start).
The word “cognition”, once you work through the jungle of academic prose, isn’t quite right. As Suvin eventually explains, it means that the writer isn’t trying to give authoritative statements about characters, relationships, or phenomena. The writer is trying to pose them as problems to be solved, to expose them to inquiry.
The reader’s response is equally important. The reader of SF is expected to think about the story in the same way as a scientist approaches an experiment: “How does this work? What processes are happening here? What can I learn from this?” Fantasy is read completely differently. “What a wonderful/terrifying world! Can I go there?” This distinction in reader response is what distinguishes SF from fantasy, and from all other genres of estrangement. In fact, it may be what gives SF the right to have the word “science” in its name. Science fiction is not “fiction about science”. When I look at Robert Heinlein, for example, it’s hard to find any science in any book he wrote. All the characters are engineers, solving engineering problems. But they are solving problems, and the readers are right there working alongside them.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that when C.S. Lewis invented reader-response criticism, he talked for a whole page about SF [p.110], and said things that make it clear that he knew all this, but he never actually said it explicitly.)
So this is useful, and I shall use it. But now I’m wondering why the terminology shifted. The term that grabbed me was “cognitive estrangement”, not “estrangement and cognition”. And I’m not the only one. Here’s how the two terms have fared so far:
So I conclude that the road to scholarly fame runs through steps:
- Think an intriguing and useful thought.
- Give it a clunky name that uses the same words as a good bumper-sticker.
- Wait for somebody else to slip up and say the bumper-sticker version.
- Watch the citations roll in.
Obligatory Quantitative Appendix
- My citation of Rabkin is at the top of a blog post.
- Rabkin’s citation to Freedman is on Page 2 of his 18-page paper.
- Freedman’s citation to Suvin is on page xv of his book.
- Suvin’s concise statement is on page 7 of his book.
We don’t have to read far into a work of literary criticism to get all the good stuff!
Works Cited
Freedman, Carl. Critical theory and science fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Lewis, Clive Staples. An experiment in criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Rabkin, Eric S. “Science fiction and the future of criticism.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 457-473.
Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition“, in Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press, 1979.
In which the Idiosopher discovers a lot of new friends.
Antediluvian Friend-of-the-Blog Steve Devine points us to a paper in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics entitled “Franz and Georg: Cantor’s Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka“. If this paper is not idiosophical, then idiosophy has no meaning.
Knudson is discussing a posthumously-published story by Franz Kafka entitled “The Great Wall of China“. I had never heard of it before; getting to read a new Kafka fantasy means it’s already a good day. (The story is depressingly relevant in a few places.) Knudson’s paper talks mostly about the curious method of constructing the Great Wall, and notes its similarity to the “Cantor Set“. (Please go look at the pictures in that Wikipedia article — there’s a wonderfully unexpected one in there.) It doesn’t mention the messenger finding his way through the crowd, which appears to be a two-dimensional analogue of the same fractal process.
Cantor Set
If necessary, it’s possible to read Knudson’s paper like a moviegoer, skipping the theorems the way a Peter Jackson fan skips the poems in The Lord of the Rings. He always returns to plain English before long.
This kind of mathematics is related to graph theory in a way I hadn’t appreciated before, and graph theory is no stranger to Idiosophy. (Do you suppose the editors at JHM would be interested in hearing about calling people fools?) Anyway, at the end of Shi Wen’s post, there’s a link to a wonderful video, made by the kind of student I always wished I had.
Work Cited
Knudson, K. P., “Franz and Georg: Cantor’s Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 7 Issue 1 (January 2017), pages 147-154. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.201701.12 . Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol7/iss1/12
Mythmoot V is coming up, and the theme is “Fantastic Frontiers”. That’s got me looking at all kinds of boundaries, frontiers, and demarcations in speculative fiction.
Isaac Asimov once wrote this about how to write a science-fiction detective story (which his editor said couldn’t be done):
The writer must carefully explain to the reader all their boundary conditions of the imaginary society. It must be perfectly clear what can be done and what can’t be done and with those boundaries fixed, the reader must then see and hear everything the investigator sees and hears, and he must be aware of every clue the investigator comes across.
From the hundred-or-so Asimov stories I’ve read, I infer that this is a good rule for all SF stories if you replace “investigator” with “protagonist”. Readers are willing to make great leaps of faith to enjoy a story, as long as the boundaries are fixed [1] and we know how far the author wants us to jump.
There is one side, though, on which the boundary is fuzzy and permeable. That’s the side that faces the reader. Anything that’s familiar to us in our mundane world can be in a science fiction story. In fact, it’s almost essential to include a bunch of things from our world to keep from weirding the readers out.
It amused me to notice that the theater works the exact opposite way. The wall that faces the audience is the only fixed one, there. The other three walls are almost infinitely mutable. From one minute to the next they can be DUKE ORSINO’s palace, The sea-coast, OLIVIA’S house, A street, and Before OLIVIA’s house. The fourth wall can be broken, sure. When it is, the playwright is doing it consciously, in exactly the same way that a science-fiction writer might deliberately minimize the connections between the fictional world and the mundane to build a sense of alienation.
The theatrical version of boundaries seems to apply to television and movies, too. So when the subject of a movie is science-fictional, which one wins? Interestingly, it seems that all the rigid boundaries apply. A science-fiction movie is truly in a box.
[1] This is not to say the boundary is finite. Borrowing from complex analysis [2][3], I consider a boundary at infinity to be fixed.
[2] This concept is also useful in real analysis, but this is a humanities blog where the phrase “real analysis” can easily be misinterpreted, so I bumped it up a level.
[3] I’ve read so many Terry Pratchett stories that nested footnotes don’t look odd to me any more.
Tom Shippey’s lecture #8 of the Signum U class “Philology through Tolkien” is about Anglo-Saxon wisdom poetry. I found the claim particularly interesting that it is difficult to understand some of their maxims, which is interesting because people don’t agree on which ones are the hard ones. Here’s an example from the Durham Proverbs: “The fuller the cup, the fairer you must bear it.” Prof. Shippey threw the question to the class – what does that mean? He says his best guess was that it meant, “Don’t complain about the job, just get on with it.”
I would never have thought of that. I always look at the explicit denotation of a phrase first, because I’m better at that than finding connotations and implications. (For the record, Idiosophers have official permission to stick our noses into Anglo-Saxon proverbs.) And this proverb, taken almost literally, is relevant right now. In a modern system-management context, it means that optimized systems are brittle; they aren’t robust.
People who lead interesting lives won’t have heard about this, but the endless quest of managers to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of their systems changed a lot in the last 20 years. Now that they’ve started doing serious data collection and analysis on their operations, they have found opportunities to make even old legacy companies fabulously profitable. (Hey, kids! Did you know the middle seats on an airliner used to be empty most of the time?) But everything comes with a cost. The problem with these optimized systems, these cups full to the brim, is that even a tiny disruption can bring the whole operation crashing to a halt. (Airlines used to re-book passengers from cancelled flights into those middle seats within a few hours. Now it can take days.) The mead spills all over the floor.
So, recently, system engineers started getting requests from managers to increase the “robustness” of their systems. And the answer usually comes back, “That’s easy – build some extra capacity.” Which means giving back half the benefit of the optimization and undoing half of the doing-more-with-less innovations they got awards for. The managers were not happy. If those managers had just paid more attention to their Anglo-Saxon forebears, we could have saved everybody a bunch of soul-crushing PowerPoint presentations.
Now managers ask for “resilience” instead. We’ll see if that turns out any better.
For my talk at Mythmoot, I’m comparing two exemplars of the same story. This post is a lemma in which I figure out how to show that two stories are “the same”.
If I learned anything from my safari into the jungles of literary theory, it’s that starting anywhere but absolute zero can get you into trouble. So let’s get the trivial parts out of the way, and work towards progressively more difficult cases.
👉Two copies of the same book sitting on different shelves in a bookstore are the same story.
👉Two different editions of a book are the same story.
👉A translation of a book into another language could be argued either way, but I’m going to say they’re still the same story.
Fig 1. Nephew
I’m following Douglas Hofstadter on this, but a tangible example about translation is better. Le Seigneur des Anneaux is not the same thing as The Lord of the Rings to me, but I hypothesize that its relationship to a 14-year-old nerd in France will be the same as LotR was to me. Experimental verification will take a decade or so; my nephew is just learning to read. In any case, even with a lot of differences between the original and second languages, the story can remain intact. (Assuming that’s what the translator is trying to do.) Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, tweeted about that the other day.
Now that we’ve got the pedants safely back in their kennels, let’s look at the more-interesting case of two different novels. A story has lots of parts; some of them allow for more difference than others. What are the parts of a story? (Do I remember this from third grade? Yes, apparently I do.)
Setting
Doesn’t have to be the same. If you couldn’t tell the same story in a different setting, most of literature would never have happened. Resetting the Odyssey in 1900’s Dublin is perfectly fine. Romeo and Juliet in mid-20th-Century New York is brilliant.
Plot
The arc of the main plot has to be the same, though subplots can be different, and usually are. The presence of different minor characters is the primary driver of variation in subplots.
Characters
They don’t have to be the same, but major characters have to be isomorphic. That is, we have to be able to make a mapping of one major character in work A to exactly one character in work B. Minor characters don’t have to match at all. King Arthur stories, for example, have a literal army of extras around the perimeter. Authors use differences in minor characters to add individual flourishes to an old story. Definition: A major character is one who participates in the core conflict.
Conflict
Conflict in literature takes the form of protagonist vs. some element of the set {self, antagonist, society, nature, fate}. For these purposes, the core conflict has to remain in the same category, though I’d be willing to allow all sorts of other sub-conflicts. Conflicts with a different element of the set make a different story.
Amusing sidebar: When I was looking around the Web to make sure I’d gotten them all, I found two other possible elements of the set: technology and the supernatural. Since I’m interested in fantasy and science fiction, a.k.a. “Imaginative literature”, those two drop out. Conflicts vs. technology don’t exist — one of the most important lessons of science fiction is that technology isn’t an enemy. Any time it looks like it is, there’s a person behind it. And in fantasy, supernatural entities are just characters like anybody else.
Resolution
This one’s tricky. My first reaction was to say that the resolution has to be the same, but then I remembered the movie Roxanne . [1] This movie is unquestionably the same story as Cyrano de Bergerac, with a change of setting and the addition of a character (Dixie, played by Shelley Duvall). Adding a person to the plot who moves easily between the social classes and can talk straightforwardly to both the leads makes the resolution of Rostand’s play impossible. (Lucky for them!) I’m willing to say that the resolution can be different if the logic of the new setting and characters requires it. There are limits, certainly. Hamlet can’t have an ending where everyone lives happily ever after.
Where’s the dividing line? What kinds of stories can keep their integrity through a change in resolution? I think it’s in the core conflict. Cyrano is struggling against himself, and “snapping out of it” is always a possible outcome of such a conflict. Hamlet has a generous helping of internal conflict, but it’s subsidiary to the political battles and the inertia of armed forces. The outcome of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is constrained in ways that The Tragedy of Charlie, Small-town Fire Chief is not.
Conclusion
Two stories are the same if: Their Plot and Conflict are recognizably the same and their major Characters are isomorphic. The Resolution must be the same if the conflict requires it. Setting may change without restriction, as long as the other four properties of the story are still sensible in its context.
[1] Which contains one of my favorite cinematic sword-fights.
Tom Hillman has a nice essay about lameness and what it means in the Silmarillion, with particular attention to Melkor and the story of Turin. The piece begins, though, with Hephaestus’s lameness, and a quote from the Iliad.
From that snippet, I learn that the words Homer uses for “unquenchable laughter” are “ἄσβεστος … γέλως”, or in Roman letters, “asbestos gelos”. “Asbestos”, it turns out, is the Greek word for “unquenchable”.
This reminds me that in The Lord of the Rings, exactly one character is called “unquenchable”. If Pippin is the only hobbit who’s truly “ἄσβεστος”, shouldn’t he have been the one to take the Ring to the Fires of Doom?