Starlight (Bester, 1976): Classics from the Sci-Fi Golden Age.

 Alfred Bester. Starlight (1976) A combination of two previous anthologies. Bester is IMO an under-rated sci-fi author. He was a competent genre writer, and several of his sci-fi stories are classics. For example They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, which tells of a man and a woman marooned in a city after an unexplained catastrophe that removed all other humans. She’s careful to tot up all her “purchases” at the stores. He’s anxious to find a TV repairman so that he can watch his favourite shows. Read it to find out what happens. The twist at the end is typical of Bester’s stories. He wrote for a market and did it well. I enjoyed re-reading this collection. ** to ****.

The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

The Door To Anywhere (Pohl, 1967)

Frederik Pohl. Door To Anywhere (1967) Retitled reprint of The Tenth Galaxy Reader. Pohl’s selections are all worth reading; several have become classics of short science fiction. The 60s saw a shift from techno space opera to fictions speculating about the social and psychological effects of technical progress. Or rather, innovation; the stories generally clarify that innovation and progress are not synonyms.

Two samples: The Tunnel Under the World, in which miniature androids living in a miniature world harbour the minds and memories of real people, thus making them ideal test subjects for adverting campaigns.

An Elephant for the Prinkip, in which a spacer contracts to deliver an elephant to a collector of beasts. It’s a joke tale, but fun. The narrator ends up with are responsibility he didn’t count on. He should’ve read every word of the contract.

A good record of what sold in the 1960s sci-fi market. Recommended for any sci-fi fan. *** 

Nero Wolfe in Montana (Death of a Dude, 1969)

  Rex Stout. Death of a Dude (1969 Archie’s a guest at Lily Rowan’s ranch, on a rare break from work. There’s a murder, Archie’s stuck for various reasons, the main one being that he’s an outsider who believes the obvious suspect is innocent. The community believes the suspect acted out of exculpatory rage at the seducer of his girl. Archie’s attempts to find the real killer interfere with the sheriff’s investigations. A lot of people don’t want to talk. And so on.

Surprise, surprise!  Nero Wolfe travels to Montana to lend a hand. He ups the gastronomic and investigative ante. Lily Rowan helps out. Several people serve as plausible suspects for all the plausible reasons. The case ends happily for the people who deserve it. The reader (me) spent a pleasant few hours absorbing this concoction. Recommended. ***

Pym: The Sweet Dove Died (1978)

 Barbara Pym. The Sweet Dove Died. (1978) Leonora, a self-absorbed woman of a certain age, obsessive about her appearance and other people’s manners, decides that James, nephew of her long-time (and never-to-be-successful) wooer Humphrey will make a wonderful accessory. While on an antique-hunting trip for his uncle, James meets Phoebe, who seduces him despite himself, and later tries to assert property rights in him. But then James meets Ned, an even smarmier and vicious version of the self-absorbed narcissist than Leonora. In the end, James escape the clutches of both Phoebe and Ned, but Leonora decides that Humphrey will make a better dancer of sycophantic attendance.

Pym has a sharp eye for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and moral laziness. Her style is blandly descriptive, leaving it up to the reader to have both moral insight and the ability to make the moral judgments on her characters. Perhaps she also expects us to agree that these, too, are human beings, and deserve some measure of happiness despite their flaws. If so, she’s succeeded. After a couple of starts, I was drawn in. You may be too. Recommended, but Pym is an acquired taste. ***

Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.

Excellent Women (Pym, 1952)

 Barbara Pym. Excellent Women. (1952) Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman (deceased), narrates this tale of apparently uneventful lives. She’s generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing, but every now and then a throwaway remark reveals a sharp moral intelligence. She knows phonies when she sees or hears one. She has part-time work with an organization that helps impoverished gentlewomen, but we are told nothing about it.

Mildred is one of the excellent single or otherwise unencumbered women that every functioning, well-run parish depends on to do what needs to be done, because after all they don’t have much else to do, do they? Mildred’s a spinster. Her responses to the few men in her life show that it’s by choice. Everard Bone, an archeologist, is the one man who’s her equal in intellect and insight. But he’s emotionally awkward, so nothing comes of the couple of times she visits him. The Wiki article on Pym’s novels indicates that between books Mildred does in fact marry him; but as she’s background scenery in other books, we know nothing of their courtship and marriage. 

I enjoy Pym’s books. There are fierce undercurrents beneath the placid surface flow of the narrative. Every now and then, a swirl or eddy of indignation, or unwitting cruelty, or exasperation reveals that even the most humdrum lives include the usual quota of pain and suffering, most of it undeserved. This book has a good deal of this, but includes compensating (if small) pleasures and joys. Well, not so small when compared to the pain. Recommended. ****