Simon T. Kaye

This month, I got a paper published in a journal called History & Theory (the ampersand is important). It’s been a long wait – a round of revisions, some serious collaborative editing to make it consumable in America, plus the usual long stretches of peer-review and publication.

It’s about counterfactualism. Here’s the abstract as it appears in the journal and on the Wiley Interscience website, where it’s hosted for all (who have an Athens account) to see.

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism’s developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

As I mentioned on my facebook page, this is an article that includes Star Trek, Leibniz, Back to the Future, Plato, John Stuart Mill and Lost.

In other words, I’m very pleased, even if I am just going over it again and again now and spotting all kinds of problems, mistakes and missed opportunities. Worst parts are where something simply hasn’t translated so well into that terrifying niche-language, American Academese.

Now according to this nice contract with Blackwell, I can’t put it up on my website for another year, and even then I shouldn’t use the official PDF. But if you’d like to read it and don’t have an Athens account, drop me a line (to my usual address) and I’ll tell you how to get hold of it.

Don't worry, this isn't the Enterprise

 My dad introduced me to Star Trek. As a child, my brain was quickly filled up with the incredible idealism, aspiration and earnest good-nature at the heart of the show. I loved it. I loved the original series best of all, but the others were just great, too. I memorised the technical manual. I subscribed to the ‘Fact Files’ for years (though they contained very few ‘facts’).

Voyager was the beginning of the end for this love-affair. Maybe it was just a matter of timing – maybe I started to see how often the plots were being recycled, got to that stage in adolescence where cynicism overpowers optimism. The films took a turn for the worse, as well. Enterprise… well, Enterprise just had an appalling theme tune. I’ve been secretly trying to chew my way through the supposedly less-awful third season for a while now, and it’s tough going.

To cut to the chase, I lost interest. Th0ugh whole sectors of my brain remain dedicated to the layout of Deck 17′s Jeffrey’s Tubes and the middle name of Picard’s brother’s wife’s Tribble, I felt alienated from the show and the films. It seemed stolid, unrealistic, badly written and lazy. And to think that I could have learnt a language instead (no, I don’t count Klingon).

So just as it’s impossible to explain fully what a Star Trek obsession meant to this bullied little boy, it’s very hard to outline quite what put me off, either. But my dad? He was there before me, and he stuck around after I moved on as well. So it was clearly paramount (phnarr) that he and I see this latest entry together.

Let me try to put this in context: dad wore a T-shirt to the screening. On this T-shirt: a massive front-and-back image of Quark the Ferengi’s snaggle-toothed face, and a bit of text outlining some of the Rules of Acquisition. My dad can put most geeks to shame. He’s been doing it for a lot longer, to be fair.

A curious fact: out of all Star Trek, the original series has aged the least. It’s design ethic and budget are so clearly from a different age of television that the clunk and quirk that seem inexcusable in the more recent series are instantly forgiven. The writing is fantastic in places, some of the science fiction ideas are real classics, and the central triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (the holy trinity; the warrior, the mage and the cleric; the ego, the superego and the id) still sparkles on today.

It’s these mechanics that the new film had to live up to, really: the emotional and science-fiction heart of Trek that has kept the first series fresh for decades. Or so I thought. (I’m actually moving into a review now, honest).

This film has no ‘science fiction’ in it. It’s purest fantasy. There’s no exploration of philosophy, future politics, moral dilemmas or the like. And it doesn’t spend a hell of a lot of time developing characters, either. This is not the film of the original series. This is, in fact, the film that would be made from the original series if there had never been any films or spin-offs.

Draw a line right after the last episode of Season 3 of Kirk’s adventures. Or perhaps after Spock’s death in the Wrath of Khan. (Or, okay, just after the end of the third film). Now build a movie.

What’s the upshot? It makes Star Trek magical again. I’m not going to witter on about how it relates to the post-Obama optimism of a new era or helps us forget our credit-crunched woes. It’s a good film because it has surprising reverence for the mythology that gives Trekkers wet-dreams  – and successfully translates the stylistic and historical essence of Trek into a modern, self-aware cinematic language.

For the record, I’m wondering if this is the first in-universe reboot in the history of cinema. We are tied to the timeline we remember, and all deviations from it are excused, in one elegant sweep of J.J.Abrams’ pen. It’s the best possible utilisation and acceptance of everything that’s come before: this is the timeline that we want. It’s the utopia, Dr Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. Our understanding of all other Star Trek forms the emotional weight for this reboot.

This is just as well, because the film could use another ten minutes of character moments and dialogue. Who thought that anyone would ever write that about a Star Trek film?

Any other problems? Well, the Macguffins arguably fly a little too thick and too fast. There are few attempts to make plausible the ‘magical’ parts of the plot. What the hell is this ‘red matter’? I understand the appeal of just being shown what it can do, and the urgent need to minimise on technobabble. But… it’s unsatisfying. Similarly, our Romulan baddie, while overall very competently played by Eric Bana, seems to have minimal motivation for chasing Spock through time and blowing up whole worlds, Death-Star style (by the way, I love that his ship is just some miner in the future and it can totally outgun everything in Kirk’s era. I also love the idea of destroying a planet by making a big hole in it and planting a black hole). Yes, Romulus was destroyed. But Spock tried to save it. It’s not enough to say that you’ve spent a couple of decades “forgetting normal life”.

I have every expectation that this sort of problem is solved by the accompanying prequel comic-books, but the film ought to sort out motivations properly, at least.

Spock is more emotional in this film than in his previous incarnations. The attempt to explain this seems to be based on his fundamental decision to go to Starfleet instead of try for the Kohlinar, the ceremony that’s supposed to eradicate emotion altogether. But it’s still a departure. In fact, of all the new actors approaches to the classic roles, I think I find Zachary Quinto’s the most difficult to swallow.

But I’m nitpicking really. This is a great film, and it’s clearly being positioned to replace Star Wars and fill that yawning gap for big budget sci-fi adventures. It’s charming and funny.

I love that Kirk’s cheat on the Kobayashi-Maru is finally shown to us. I love that the new Enterprise is gorgeous. I love the way the film starts with a bang, and ends with an awesome version of the original theme tune (thanks, mr. Giacchino). I look forward to the rest of the trilogy (please please please).

Last word: my dad, more suspicious of this ‘rebooting’ nonsense than I, said that he loved it. Let’s just trust him on that.

Another marvelous image from XKCD

Evgeny Morozov, who writes an unmissable blog for Foreign Policy, makes a more important criticism of twitter’s current role, suggesting that it’s providing more disinformation than anything else – but also mentions the possibility that the internet could work as a fantastic finder and predictor of emerging biological threats. With the increasing integration of mobile phones and other devices, the internet ceases to be merely our nervous system, and emerges as a component of a global immune system.

Prospect Magazine (for whom I once worked! woo!) have put online a fascinating article: Mark Honigsbaum writes about the means of catching pandemics early. He points out that Swine Flu may well have been abroad in Mexico for a few weeks before the news broke in any meaningful way online. More importantly, his assertion is that the nature of the internet renders it less useful for disease detection – underinformed or worried searchers on google, for example, would distort the information on a given outbreak. Or, to extrapolate from this: the internet is too open, too democratic to operate as an even quasi-scientific virus catcher.

The logical outcome of this – and explicitly suggested by the above – is that the brains behind Twitter and Google and the rest turn their attention to a reserved system of aggregating relevant information for the purposes of planetary self-defence and early warning.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this recommendation. The advantage of the internet as it stands is that it is simply the broadest information-exchange ever constructed. I don’t see how a more limited network could articulate the information more quickly.

Swine Flu is surely the most quickly discovered and shared potential-pandemic that we’ve ever seen. If it had started in a western country, it would have broken out on Twitter within moments (though there is weight to the counter-argument that, hey, these things start in poorer countries were internet access is more rare. But that is changing…)

As for informational quality – well, this is a perrenial problem anyway. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the blind assumption that vetted, ‘establishment’ data is always preferable.

Systems such as Digg and others have an almost marketised hierarchy built-in. The preferences of many translate into the emergence of decent and flawed information: it’s all available, but it’s clearly sorted. Such a system is clearly the next step for micro-blogging as well.

This is the kind of thinking that reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, which posited an emerging planet-wide sentience. In effect, this is a far simpler idea: our ‘intelligent’ superstructure is conscious only as its individual, reporting components are. It’s the beginnings of a hive-mind.

So – I won’t be so quick to sneer at the torrents of little fears, hopes, jokes, and links that pour through twitter on the theme of Swine Flu. It may be our fastest defence against the next big pandemic - whether that’s tomorrow, or twenty years away.

On a slight tangent from the last piece:

A friend of mine on Facebook reminded me about Berkeley’s course on Starcraft and Game Theory. I tracked down this video of their first lecture. They all seem to be having a lot of fun.

This is probably of most interest to nerds who enjoy Game Theory experiments (like me!). But it’s an interesting interpretation of a strategy game, and the information they are deriving or modelling with it seems to have very little to do with narrative or story. Compare and contrast with MIT’s approach.

On a completely different topic –  doesn’t that guy look too young to be a teacher? Must be a PhD student.

(Click headings for links)

The sun is getting colder.

Only a bit colder. This sort of news tends to get the climate-change deniers very excited indeed. This is because they are idiots (a worrying trend, which I want to write about some other time, is how stupid science-denying and edgy-internet-libertarianism seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of the time. Just what kind of a super-culture are we breeding here?).

The sun has cooled from its modern-day heat peak of 1985. UK scientists suggest the sun is on an 11-year cycle; others that the sun follows a centuries-long pattern. Either way it’s unnerving that there is now no sun-spot or flare activity. One is put in mind of the excellent Sunshine. Or of Alastair Reynolds, who points out in his Revelation Space trilogy that messing with a star would be the best way for an advanced intelligence to totally obliterate planet-bound species. The sooner we’re operating in more than one solar system, the better. Also, someone should write about human civilization trying to cling on post-mysterious-sun-extinction.

The sun without its spots.

Alternatively, what if the intelligence is within the sun? Better yet,what if the intelligence is the sun? Watching us roast or throwing us a helping hand?
 

Scientists are reverse-engineering the mammalian brain.

This follows news a while back that half a rat’s brain was successfully reconstructed within a computer model and run for 60 seconds, non-real-time (the rat brain’s subjective time was operating at a fraction of real time for processing reasons). In just those moments of subjective time, the brain generated patterns recognisable from brain-scans of living rats. Now the Blue-Brain people have rebuilt a part of the human brain, with similar results. THE SINGULARITY APPROACHES. 

“It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed.”  – BBC News reporting on the ‘Science Beyond Fiction’ conference
 

The cow has now joined the ranks of the fully gene-mapped.

A Hereford cow named Dominette is deemed the archetypical bovine for the purposes of mapping their genetic profile. Perhaps we can take away their pain receptors for guilt-free meat-eating. That is all.
 

A vast ‘Lyman-Alpha’ blob – a bundle of gas and energy several times the size of a galaxy – has been spotted by powerful telescopes a long, long time before it should have had time to form in the early universe.

What exactly are we seeing here? Lyman-Alphas (not a term for the CoS of a fictional White House) are essentially structures that give birth to millions of stars. Clouds of interstellar material are ballooned by the energy output of their contents.  We’re starting to look so far back in time that pretty soon we’ll have to see some of the oldest emitted light in the universe. If this thing existed before it was supposed to, then what was it? A remaining cloud from whatever existed before the big bang?
 

Pig flu is more dangerous and more likely to go pandemic than bird flu.

Oh god, the Jews and Muslims were right.

Seriously, though, I’m starting to seriously think that pig-meat should be off-limits. We’re talking about the fourth-smartest animals on the planet here. The fact that their evil diseases could kill us all is just gravy for the potatoes.

And finally, we could send emails through the planet.

I had to include this, as it’s a Queen Mary scientist making noises about it. Perhaps a more intriguing use for this technology would be the ability to transmit signals through other planets – say, to our base on the far side of the moon without an intermediary satellite?

Everyone loves receiving packages in the post. I especially like the little non-commercial ones- with the textured white or brown recyclyed, reinforced paper exterior and that slightly spongy tightness as you pick it up or receive it from the postman, betraying the fixed masses of bubblewrap just beneath the surface.

Beyond such aesthetic concerns, there is an implicit promise from such packages: no matter the postage stamp, no matter the size: what’s inside was dirt-cheap, probably second-hand, bought not from Amazon but some other, private seller over the internet. And, in my case at least, is almost certainly an out-of-print science fiction novel.

Here is the beauty of internet shopping. People always complain that the likes of Abe Books and Amazon are putting the little sellers out of business. I was present at an extremely irritating lecture given by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, on the subject of ‘the challenge of new media’, and he essentially said the same thing, even though he had the dignity to admit that Abe is one of the sweetest things on God’s earth.

The end of the little businessman, the corner bookshop? Nothing could be further from the truth: there is a whole new generation of specialists and second-hand dealers, people who have come up through eBay and actually started small businesses. It’s the hobbyist’s dream, and also just simple, good news for people who are willing to do a tiny bit more legwork. The truth is, none of us are ever likely to pine for a certain book ever again. And this is a good thing, seeing as the vast, vast majority of all books are currently out of print.

The world of publishing is particularly cruel to science fiction authors: even after that monumental moment of actually selling a story, they have to face the fact that their initial run will be small, the book will never get properly marketed, the front cover and editing will be a shambles, and the finished product on the bookstore shelf will be almost unilaterally ignored due to a combination of the above factors and the truth that most readers have an enormous chip on the shoulders about science fiction as a genre. And sci fi books don’t get second chances. You’re either phenomenally popular, relative to more mainstream fiction, or you achieve a very short-term success within the relatively miniscule confines of your genre’s base readership.

And yes, massive amounts of science fiction is very very bad. In America particularly, the genre was essentially hijacked by nonsense-nationalists and ideologues during the 60s and 70s. The whole thing became politically charged and polarised: space-hippies roamed the spacelanes in every chapbook while the other side of the fence saw ridiculously overbearing libertarian dreamworlds, projected into the future or else crushed by the inevitability of the apocalypse. Apocalypse everywhere.

This is the start of a very dangerous thing: the ‘genre staple’. Think on those words. Try saying them aloud. Learn to loathe them. ‘Genre’ is as unnecessary a piece of terminology as any outside the elitist, pretentious realms of literary or media criticism. It confines, renders rules where the creative process ought to run wherever the creator damn well pleases it to. Add a ‘staple’- the repeated theme (connote that it is repeated ad nauseam). What is a staple? Why, it is the stodge at the side of your plate, the complex carbs excised from your atkins diet. It’s tasteless so that you can put other things on top of it. It’s comfort food.

And make no mistake: a ‘genre staple’ is as much invented by an author as by a critic. We can all accept a little of it- there’s a reason a cliche becomes a cliche, after all, and a few people did it first, or did it second or third or fourth in vaguely original ways. The post-apocalypse novel is an essential part of our literary geography now, and rightly so. But when even otherwise great books are marred by endless, meaningless cold-war bleating (see Greg Bear’s Eon) you can see where the science fiction authors shot themselves in the foot. It’s not a genre, it’s a culture, with as much negative as positive. But it’s also utterly dismissed now, and partly because science fiction writers have failed to do themselves any favours.

But in amongst the reams of books that have been published once, or trialled for a second run and then abandoned, or lost to dodgy reprints, or edited into oblivion before being consigned between the covers of a cheap anthology: in amongst all of those now-invisible words, there is the quality stuff that simply deserves to be recognized.

This morning, in a textured white envelope, beneath the bubble-wrap, I received a 1972 edition of the novel Phoenix by Richard Cowper, which was the pseudonym then under use by a certain John Middleton Murry Jr., who had previously published several excellent books under the name of Colin Murry. The man can write, by god, no matter what he decides to call himself:

Like a match struck up to the zenith of the northern sky the rocket flared, dwindled, and was lost behind the thin scrapings of cirrus. Within minutes the silver-white smoke of its trail, nudged to the east by the prevailing breeze, had crooked outwards into a colossal question mark which slowly melted away. Long after all trace of it had disappeared, Bard still leant against the railing of the penthouse balcony, gazing upwards.

Three hundred feet below him the evening exodus was beginning. The express track of the pedaway was already sprinkled with homeward-bound commuters speeding out towards Hendon and Golders Green, while the mono-rail cars from the Baker Street terminal, pinned by lancing shafts of sunlight, wriggled like slim silver-fish as they squirmed their way through the reticulated traceries beyond Regent’s Park…

Now if any of you have even heard this guy’s name before- any of them- then I’ll buy you a pint.

I bet I’ll read this tomorrow and write another thousand words about science fiction and genre-wars…