Having a major (the major?) sci-fi convention materialize on your doorstep—well, across the Irish Sea rather than the Atlantic Ocean—seems an opportunity too good to miss. So, I’m going to be there from Thursday 14th to Sunday 18th of August—and would also be there on Monday if I hadn’t assumed it ended on Sunday. So, if you see me wandering around, do please come and say hello (assuming you’re there in the flesh rather than watching through some kind of surveillance).
I have been hard at work on the Second Edition of my Stone Dance trilogy (transforming it into a ‘septad’)—working so hard indeed that it is going to be a bit of a wrench to tear myself away to attend the con. News about the imminent release of the Second Edition will follow shortly after I return.
Much that is alluring in a youthful thing—a child, a young woman, the bud of a rose, even a fresh morning—is that each has the potential to become so many forms of itself; that, in a way, all those possibilities exist at that moment in superposition.
We can imagine any number of futures for a young man: he can become all sorts of people, have all sorts of experiences. His life, in its youth, is like a sheet of paper not yet written on. His mind, his face, his skin, is fresh and uncreased by striving, unwounded by living.
Yet, the older something becomes, the more the possibilities for what it can still become are cut off. Until we, and it, narrow down to death.
Thus the sadness of life. For, when it is spent, the observer sees that, at that moment of youth, the path that will be taken can only ever be the one that was taken.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an ivory tower as “a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world”; the Merriam-Webster as “a secluded place that affords the means of treating practical issues with an impractical often escapist attitude.” These definitions also describe the apex of a Maslow hierarchy of needs. If the occupants of an ivory tower lacked for water, food, clothing or shelter, they would not be separated from practicalities. They must be secure from attack, have enough money and access to doctors. They have at least each other’s companionship and might expect mutual esteem. Others less fortunate might disparage them, but their envy is mixed with grudging admiration.
Humanity throngs the various levels of the Maslow hierarchy. Most of us have no choice but to deal with the facts and practicalities of the real world. But that ‘real world’ is predominantly the ‘human world’: our ways, our rules, our systems dominate people’s lives. Apart from a tsunami or an earthquake, Nature no longer holds sway over us: we are elevated above other animals into a privileged seclusion and separation from the Natural world.
It seems then that we all live in an ivory tower: our human world is an ivory tower in which some are separated from need, but all are separated from Nature; it is not Nature but we who determine who lives and dies, and how we live and how we die.
Unlike the Maslow hierarchy, our ivory tower has a basement, and it is packed with wretches who lack even the basics of life. In the floor above are the poor, prey to violence and disease. Above them are those who enjoy healthcare and safety, but who suffer from the loneliness, the strains and dislocation of modern life. Within view of the apex are those who would appear to have everything, but feel they are neither seen nor admired enough. Those in the bright and airy apex lack for nothing. Through luck and perhaps hard work, because of talent and good guidance, supported by the labour of the people below, they can seek to become the best they can be: to create and think, to gaze out from the tower—deep into the heavens or under the sea; into the mysteries of material reality or pure mathematics; into the past, and even into the future.
But ivory is ripped from elephants, walruses and narwhales. Look closer at our tower. Beneath its gleaming surface are dead forests and ash, the remains of extinguished species, metals gouged from land wounds that weep poison, living soil turning to dust in the sun—all saturated with thick black oil and choked with plastic. We take more of everything to build the tower higher, whatever the cost. While some of us plan to reach heaven, others struggle, dog-eat-dog, to climb up towards the promise of the apex that glares from their screens. Up there, the fortunate indulge their appetites, lost in dreams of greatness and power, blinded by utopian visions; and most who peer down see an Earth as flat and remote as if viewed from an aeroplane window.
While we obsess over the strife and chaos in the tower, its foundations fail. What if our tower falls? Too many of us have now climbed so high that, even if we descend, we no longer have the skill and resilience to survive on the lower floors. Besides, the ravaged world outside cannot support our multitude.
We have but one resource that has any chance to save us: the people in the apex. For good or ill, what we call civilization—our technology, our art, our science, our philosophies—originates* there. We have despoiled the Earth to raise millions into privilege that not even kings dreamed of. An ocean of educated minds with access to godlike freedoms and powers and knowledge. If only we could put aside our vanity and petty rivalries and together save what we can while we still can.
Years ago friends christened my apartment in Edinburgh the Ivory Tower. Rather than fight this, I embraced it, and still use the domain ivorytower.co.uk.
Richard Cross and I have completed a rejigging of this website that includes putting the ‘support material’ for the Stone Dance into a stand alone SDC Bible. This ‘Bible’ has a sub-section for the First Edition and another for the Second—to accommodate their division into a different number of volumes. In the sub-section for the Second Edition you will see blurred versions of the new covers that I am working on.
I haven’t written here for a while, and I’ve not had a book published for even longer. That doesn’t mean that I have not been working and writing, it’s really just that I’ve been down various rabbit holes and am only now emerging. To mark my return I am pleased to announce that my science fiction novella, Matryoshka is to be published by NewCon Press on the 21st August 2018.
Matryoshka is a strange beast. It is the first proper book that I wrote after the 700K words of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. As you may imagine, after 10 years struggling over such a colossal work, I was aiming for something shorter and breezier. As it turned out, I overshot by quite some margin, and Matryoshka didn’t even end up long enough to be a novel. Not that I see that as a problem: it seems to me exactly as long as it needs to be. Besides, I have come to the conclusion that it’s about time that there was a renaissance in short form fiction—though that may also be me coming to terms with my inability to write very fast—that if I am to have any chance of getting out a fraction of the ideas that I would like to before I pop my clogs, immense trilogies are not the way to go.
For such a relatively short work, Matryoshka is the result of a serious effort of world building. And though it may appear on the surface to be a fantasy story, it is built on some pretty hard(ish) science. Do give it a try and let me know how you get on with it.
In an ironic throwback to the Islamic medieval Cult of the Assassins, it is the West that seeks to suppress the enemies it terms terrorists by decapitating their organisations with drones. But what if killing the people at the top of a terrorist organisation – or anyone you’re fighting with – is like cutting the heads off a hydra: that every time you take one off, another two grow in its place?
Perhaps a more serious drawback than: it simply doesn’t work, and may even lead to more people joining the hated organisations, is that drone assassinations may directly reduce the chances of arriving at a peace agreement. As the Taliban seem to be proving, unless you negotiate a peace of some kind, the fighting will carry on – with all the attendant deaths and destruction, and the laying up of grievances that may lead to future conflicts. To negotiate a peace you need to have someone to negotiate with. As history has proved, it is far harder to fight and win a war against a disparate enemy than it is against one that is unified under a single leader.
Drones can kill the leaders of your enemy, but in the conflicts in which they are being used now, this is only causing the enemy to splinter into many groups that are thus harder to bring to a negotiation table, or else encouraging organisations like ISIS to have a flat hierarchy so that there may be no one to negotiate with at all.
micrograph: black & white silver particle in gelatin
I was talking to a photographer friend about the post production he was carrying out on his “digital negatives”. It had not occurred to me that something similar goes on, with the application of Photoshop to a raw digital image, as with the chemical processing in a dark room of a traditional ‘chemical’ photograph. Thinking about this, I was surprised by how profoundly different these forms of photography are from each other.
The image on a chemical photograph is produced by photons striking the crystals of an emulsion and reacting with them. The contours of the negative produced occur down to a molecular level. The processing of that negative with chemicals continues to form the image on a molecular level. There is in this the natural mystery, serendipity and unknowability of any analog process. The image is as much a part of the world as a landscape, and is similarly a ‘fractal event’. You could no more identify the precise contour of a line on that image, than you could the coastline. However close you look you will find more detail.
A digital image is also theoretically limitless in its level of detail, but in a different direction: one of intention, experiment and iteration. It too is produced by photons making impressions on a substrate, but in this case that substrate is digital. Unlike the chemical photograph, the digital image occupies a precise grid of pixels, each occupying an x and a y, each holding a range of numerical values. The value of each pixel will lie on a scale between black and white, or of hue and depth of chroma, but this scale will have a fixed number of gradations. A pixel can have a value, or a value one lighter, but not a value in between.
When a digital image is processed, the variations that are produced occur not as a result of physical interactions – as occurs with the chemical washes on the chemical photograph – but as a consequence of the algorithms that are processing the pixel values. Of course, we can keep adding more resolution to our digital image, by adding more pixels. And we can add more values to our scales for each pixel by making the ‘widget’ more sensitive to the frequency and energy intensity of the photons hitting it. But the resulting image will always be restricted to the ranges of numbers that we choose to ‘fit it into’.
Of course we may be able to increase the resolution of our ‘matrix’ to the point where its pixels are the size of molecules, or even smaller. But our digital image would still consist of numbers. And the way we would process it must still be through algorithms. Until our digital substrate becomes identical with physical reality, there will be an uncrossable barrier between digital and chemical photography.
Chemical photography seems to me to be the world ‘coming up to meet us’. Whereas digital photography is another example of our minds pushing outwards to assimilate the world on our own terms.
In a previous post, I argued that LEGO, when it consisted mostly of simple bricks, was a superior creative tool for a child than more modern LEGO with its complex pieces. I have come to a more nuanced conclusion: that though classical LEGO promotes one kind of creativity, it may do so at the expense of other kinds.
I still believe that simple, classical LEGO is an instantiation in the physical world of an aspect of human thinking that is located in the left brain hemisphere and that focuses on orthogonality and the counting numbers. Orthogonality is expressed in LEGO by the dominance of horizontals and verticals and right angles. The counting numbers are expressed by the studs on the upper surface of its bricks, and the tubes or bars on their undersides*. We can build structures that have width or length 1, 2, 3 studs etc, but not 2 and a bit. For this reason LEGO was used in my primary school as a way of learning basic arithmetic. Classical LEGO is essentially ‘digital’.
In a sense classical LEGO is a way to exercise this aspect of human thinking using our hands. I believe that this is not a one way process, that it feeds back into our minds and reinforces that way of thinking, perhaps even affecting brain structure.
I should have noticed this feedback effect when I stated in that previous post that LEGO has influenced the way that I ‘build’ texts. This is my lived experience, and suggests that LEGO has influenced the way my brain functions, or at least the system of conceptual metaphors that I use in my creative work. This effect is unlikely to be unique to me.
When I wrote that other post, a friend disagreed with my claim that modern LEGO was restrictive on the creativity of children. He told me that he had witnessed his children being freely creative with LEGO Technic. That niggled at me. I still believe that classical LEGO does enhance creativity, but specifically that kind of left brain processing that is obsessed with straight lines, horizontals, verticals, right angles and the counting numbers. Modern LEGO, by being less digital and more analog, may encourage a more freeform creativity that may even be beneficial to the development of a child’s brain.
Increasingly I suspect that our ‘digital revolution’ is something of a trap. Digital objects and processes are profoundly human; we find few right angles in the non-human world. As more and more of us live in man-made spaces and are mesmerised by digital objects, our exposure to and interaction with the analog geometries of the non-human world diminish. This leads inevitably to a diminishing awareness of the natural world from which we arose, and upon which we still rely in so many ways.
I began these musings by trying to express the superiority of classical LEGO over the forms it has evolved into. But as I strive to free myself from the tyranny of the right angle, I now wonder what part this children’s toy has played in that indoctrination. Considering how many children’s minds may have been at least partially formed by classical LEGO, is it fanciful to suppose that this had something to do with the advent of the digital revolution that occurred when they grew up?
*The bricks were also generally of a unit height, but this was somewhat diluted by the introduction of pieces a third of that height.
Afterthought When I arrived in Dundee as a seven year old, I was playing with my LEGO on the floor of a hotel foyer. A woman knelt beside me who had just arrived from Hong Kong. She talked about the junks in the harbour there and offered to show me what one looked like. She began to build a junk with my LEGO, trying to capture the swell of its hull by connecting it at all kinds of angles, and without regard to the colours of the pieces, and leaving holes everywhere. I remember being outraged at this not being the proper way to build with LEGO. What really offended me was the lack of right angles.
Eating meat adjusts how we think about other animals, could that in turn carry over to how we treat each other? Meat eating is playing a part in the various ecological crises that we are intensifying. We became major predators when we first brought down a large animal and devoured it. A prey species, we have become the greatest predators of all. Is it time that we should give up being predators altogether?
A lion takes his meat as his by right. Whatever doubt his species may once have had about its right to feast on meat, was lost way back somewhere in its descent from those tiny mammals that scurried at the feet of dinosaurs. By contrast, we still have most of our prey instincts intact. We are a recent predator descended from a long line of prey. Sure, like other apes, we sometimes fed on meat, but that would have been prey smaller than ourselves, and rarely. When we joined the wolves in being able to bring down animals far larger than ourselves, it was because, like them, we hunted in a pack, though we had to arm ourselves with the weapons that nature did not endow us with. This was and is our first and greatest prize. When we began to eye the crown of supreme predator. Now even lions fear us.
Prey become neurotic predators. We, the supreme predator, are afraid of the dark. The stories we tell our children are haunted by the barely concealed terror of being eaten alive. We have often taken on the guise of other predators – becoming Eagle and Jaguar Warriors, beserkers in bear skins; we have tried to associate ourselves with wolves, tigers, sharks – in the hope that something of their sleek and merciless ease with killing might rub off on us. Killing doesn’t come naturally to us. Once the killing of animals is not something that we grow up with, many of us become squeamish and reluctant predators. Even as we farm animals to be slaughtered for our plates, we tell ourselves, especially our children, sunny stories of smiling cows in green fields, of gambolling lambs on hillsides, and littly piggies who wear waistcoats and live in houses. We hide the slaughter, and increasingly eat only those cuts of meat that carry fewer hints of where they come from. Not for us the trotter, nor the boiled head. Not for us the lungs, the heart the brain. In school we are taught about our own lungs and heart and brain, and perhaps, seeing such organs on our plate, we smell cannibalism.
On another front, the march of science has consistently whittled away at the barrier between us and other animals. Once this barrier was absolute. We had been made in God’s image and the animals had been put on Earth for our use. Darwin fatally wounded that conceit. He forced us to accept what in our hearts must have always been obvious: that we are just another animal. It must have always been difficult not to notice that we shit as animals do, and have sex, that we die of disease as they do, and bleed as they do when we are cut. Yet still we have tried to cling to our otherness: we make tools, we have feelings, we make plans, we speak to each other. One study at a time, these supposed differences are melting away. Not only apes but crows make and use tools. Elephants and chickens communicate with a variety of calls. Elephants and dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors. Jackdaws hide nuts from other jackdaws by employing a ‘theory of mind’ to understand what the other bird is seeing and thinking. We are in such confusion that serious attempts are being made to give our nearest cousins ‘human rights’. And once we let them in to sit beside us, how long will it be before we invite the next species, and the next?
It is hard for us to give up eating meat – it is entrenched at the heart of so many of our cultures. People everywhere, for whom meat has long been a rare treat, long to gorge on meat as a proof and demonstration that they have become rich. Yet, we are learning that our desire for meat is outgrowing the capacity of our planet to supply it.
It seems to me that there may be a deeper imperative to consider giving it up. So many of our problems seem tied up with our need to maintain our claim of being exceptional, special and unique. Is this not the basis on which we prioritise our wants over those of the other animals with whom we share our planet? And the primary commandment that enshrines this relationship is that we forbid animals to eat us, while we insist on our right to eat them. Not only to eat them, but to brutalise and diminish them in our factory systems. And as the barriers between us and them thin, so the barrier between a factory farm and a death camp thins. And I come back to this: how much does the way that we treat animals contribute to the way that we treat each other?
So, perhaps, it is time for us to give up that first prize. Becoming predators allowed us to become who we are. Becoming the supreme predator has long supported the vainglory that allows us, an animal with prey instincts, to kill and maim, to mistreat and treat as objects not only other animals but perhaps each other. Perhaps we will not stop mistreating each other until we stop mistreating animals. If we learn to treat them with compassion, how could this not help us to treat each other with compassion? Now, we have no reason to fear other animals. Let us stop making them have to fear us.
revised on 24th of November after a comment from John Robertson
When I gaze up at a starry night sky, struggle as I might, I am unable to see it as other than a great dome patterned with stars. In spite of the knowledge that I have that what I am looking at is a large portion of the universe, and that each prick of light is a sun or a nebula or a galaxy a vast distance away, I still see the same curving ceiling that the ancients saw, who imagined it to be a crystal sphere, surrounding the Earth, or a system of such spheres. I know that it is not that, but that is what I see.
If I struggle to pierce this crystal sphere and to see what I know it is that I am really looking at, my mind revolts. Pushing against my mind’s refusal to see the depth is almost painful. But why should this be surprising? Even at the more mundane distances that exist on Earth, we struggle to comprehend scale. Again, I do not mean that we can not imagine it, but rather that we are incapable of actually experiencing it. Perhaps a measure of this limit is shown by how much more frightening it is to look down from a high cliff than from the window of an aeroplane. I once threw myself out of an aeroplane, but would have found jumping off a cliff with a parachute far more daunting. I suspect that this is because – at least for me – at ‘aeroplane height’ I am beyond my animal capacity to judge height, so that from an aeroplane I see the ground with the same level of abstraction that I see the starry sky.
Our brains and our eyes are simply not designed to see across galactic distances. Perhaps this is a blessing. If it is daunting for us to cope with looking down from a high cliff, then imagine how we would react if we could really experience the true depth of the night sky. If looking down from a cliff gives us vertigo, looking down into the vast and essentially bottomless well of the universe would boost vertigo to an intensity where it must surely explode our brains.
