You're Never Alone

This Crowded Earth
by Robert Bloch
Feedbooks

This science fiction novella alternates good old-fashioned action narrative, with lucid exposition about the future shape of society. There’s a surprising amount of the latter.

Published in 1958, the story begins in 1998 with the hero, Harry Collins, leading a nightmarish city life in a world stuffed with human beings. The opening passages are wonderfully ironic. Harry’s apartment is so small he can virtually reach every part of it in a single step. Commuting to work, his car accelerates up to about twenty-five miles per hour – and immediately hits a traffic jam. These early passages are evocative, current city life is not so different.

The exposition begins early when a neighbour, who conveniently enough happens to be a government worker, hitches a lift in Harry’s car. The journey is slow and tedious (for the characters) and gives the official ample time to explain why the government is helpless to stop the monstrous population growth, or even to solve any of the problems it creates. We are told that time is running out for civilisation.

But the scientists in the best tradition of the genre, as Harry will discover, are working on a brilliant – and bonkers – solution, which I shan’t spoil.

Obviously, Robert Bloch’s overall prediction hasn’t been fulfilled, at least in the short term, though to be fair, his analysis assumes the abolition of war and the mass production of ‘artificial’ food, together with an ongoing baby boom.

Still, I’m personally a real sucker for well formed rhetorical argument, and Bloch has some acute observations about the trends in society that we see even more clearly today – such as the paradoxical isolation of the individual as the crowd around him grows ever more large and anonymous.

Odd, isn’t it, a common piece of comfort murmured to the desperate and suicidal is – you’re not alone.

No, you’re not. You’re stuck in a crowd of seven billion scrabbling individuals and that’s why your life’s so shit.

In this Crowded Earth, Harry is incarcerated later in the story and doesn’t get to see anyone for years (more irony, eh?), but he can still talk to the prisoner next door. This turns out to be a science fiction writer, Wade, who in a striking passage explains why all the science fiction writers of his generation got their predictions hopelessly wrong. For instance, the idea that robots would be harnessed in the future couldn’t happen because the growth in population meant that the earth’s resources were consumed, and this in turn deprived manufacturers of the materials with which construct robots in the first place.

Like I say, there’s a lot of theory and conjecture presented in the form of platonic dialogue, but unless you don’t want to think too much, this shouldn’t put you off. After all, This Crowded Earth is a model of clear writing and it is this which fuses narrative fiction with social/political analysis to create a strange but highly readable work.

Perhaps it influenced Levin’s This Perfect Day.

Barnacle Joe

In the latest edition of the New Scientist there's mention of evidence that human beings are still evolving, which immediately leads one to assume we're getting brainier.

But as Darwin revealed in his work on barnacles, evolution is a process without ultimate direction.

More simple forms can evolve -- and indeed we see this clearly with human beings who, like barnacles, are free-floating when young, though in our case the young don't float, they speed around in cheap and crappy cars, recklessly endangering their lives -- and what's infinitely more important, endangering my life.

But Mother Nature is kind and as they whither and age, the up and coming generation more and more often glue their arses on the sofa and start slack jawing at a screen.

What's happened?

Their brains have become rudimentary filtering systems, good for nothing but extracting the tiny bit of nutriment that floats around in the great ocean of shit spewing out the telly and the net.

Ahem, including this shit.

picture courtesy of here

Breakthrough

Bulk Seeds enjoyed the last post. I've finally broken into the agricultural community!

Come again?

Impotence and IT Sourcing Governance
by Ernie Zibert
2011 Smashwords



The author tells us there are thousands of papers, books, blogs, and presentations on IT Sourcing Governance and yet, whatever IT Sourcing Governance is, it’s not holding its end up and doing what it is supposed to do.

For this reason, until we attain the efficacious deployment of IT Sourcing Governance, we ‘ . . . should treat a discourse on IT sourcing governance with the same reverence as neophytic treatments for impotence.’ (p 1)

What I find more disturbing than the metaphysical flaccidity in question is the possibility that this may not be a parody. It is with some trepidation that we join him on ‘ . . . the etymological journey of impotence or human sexual performance.’ (p 2)

Along the way, probably during a storm, we encounter Havelock Ellis on an epic voyage from England to Australia in order to increase the selection of words available to describe sexual dysfunction. With this heroic endeavour as our shining example, we now have a parallel with which to illuminate more fully the predicament of IT Sourcing Governance.

And in a strange sort of way, due a form of hypnotism perhaps, the argument suddenly makes sense.

Where are we today? Mr Zibert asks, relaxing a little after his throbbing sentences have finished with the reader’s brain.

Well, the answer is that, although there has been progress, we cannot, ‘ . . . agree on the active agent, the capabilities of such resources or their quantity and frequency of administration.’ (p 3) In reply, one murmurs – admittedly with little sympathy – ‘So, the outlook for IT Sourcing Governance looks pretty bleak, eh?’

Not at all! The good doctor provides ‘ . . . heuristics on this topic in another blog.’ (ibid)

Despite myself, I am glad to hear there is hope for IT Sourcing Governance.

The world of indie publishing is blessed with a great quantity of eccentric works – but they are often eccentric in the same way. Monotonously bizarre even. However, the use of impotence as a metaphor to sex up a subject is such an utterly astonishing strategy that one is forced to place Mr Zibert’s book in a class all of its own.

One for the connoisseurs.

Waiting for the Bus

Something of a breakthrough today, not one, but two review requests. And from a potential American President no less. Time is constrained, and I'll have to brush up on American politics and metaphysics, but I'll do my best over the months to come.
Honestly though, I'm kinda surprised that more people haven't asked, considering getting a review out of readers is like pulling teeth most the time; and then, there seems to be an infinite supply of books in need of a review. Yes, so very many books . . . if all that mechanical energy (fingers tapping away on the keyboard) were to be utilised, we could power a hospital for free.

Reconstruction Man

Five Forgotten Stories
By John Hall
Published 2011 by Theaker's Paperback Library
Available here at Lulu


I was really taken by the idea of reading a fictional author’s stories and, as it happens, the author in question here, Robert Harrison Blake, who meets his demise in Lovecraft’s Haunter in the Dark, turns out to have a more interesting "provenance" than many living authors. See his wikipedia page.

Mr Blake has not so much been resurrected by Mr Hall as reconstructed, utilising sparse notes from Blake's old exercise book. The prose style owes more to Conan Doyle than to Mr Blake’s other progenitors (Lovecraft, Bloch, Aston Smith), though the usual landmarks are in place – squat idols, neglected churches, inbred communities and hoary old books. However, the fact that Mr Blake writes on Lovecraftian themes, but doesn’t write like Lovecraft presents a problem, because the great Cthulhu can only really survive within a monstrously adjectival and yet lucid prose style. Concision is also detrimental to his health. Somehow, I wasn’t convinced that Mr Hall was writing about The Great Old Ones with conviction.

That said, I really liked the third story, The Burrower Beneath, which is set in 1920's New York and which posits an intriguing connection between gangsters and a Cthulhu cult. The main character is Edmund Fiske, Blake's friend and the setting is an office/apartment block unsettlingly referred to at one point as the twin towers. Potentially, this could have been far longer and more developed piece.

To his credit, in The Burrower Beneath, Mr Hall also reminds us that Lovecraft lived through the Jazz Age. In fact, was it me, or did Fiske, despite his love of antique books, have something of the Bertie Wooster about him?

Required reading for the Lovecraftian fanatic.

Programmed to Argue

The Programming Model of Creation
by James Haines
Smashwords 2011


The big idea here is that God is the ultimate programmer (the hardware is not specified though) and we and the universe are mere code.

Our existence has a point now. We’re all super Super Marios jumping around on the screen for the boundless amusement of the creator, trying to figure out what the rules of the game are.

When I think of a game developer, even if he/she is meant to be God, I tend to picture a young hollow-eyed slob glued to his/her seat. But then again, natural disasters may be accounted for in Mr Haines theory as mere, unmalicious little accidents – those Tsunamis are simply the great programmer spilling his coffee all over the keyboard. No harm meant.

However, Mr Haines does not explore the implications of his theory to this extent and he certainly doesn’t try to account for natural disasters. Instead, he prefers to keep it light and breezy, and go easy on our brains as he delves into the profound mystery of existence and comes up with the explanation that nothing really exists, except as information in the mind of God.

Read Bishop Berkeley (1685 – 1753) to see how this argument can be constructed without the aid of computers.

The chirpy style changes dramatically when Mr Haines talks about evolution. He says that he is pro science and he probably thinks he is too, but he has no problem distorting science to suit his preconceptions. His argument is that evolution cannot be a science because it is not testable. That is to say, you can’t replicate a billion-year-old fossil record in a laboratory at will. On that basis, I suppose, astronomy is even more of a pseudo science, since recreating the universe presents an even bigger challenge.

On the other hand, he has a point – if you accept his proposition that God makes it all up. He could have put the fossil record in place just to test our faith. That, however, is another well-worn suggestion from the time before we had computers.

What’s interesting about this book is how it uses advanced technology, metaphorically as well as in actuality, to sustain an outlook in which we can never be certain about anything at all. If someone claims that the moon is made of cheese – covered in a layer of rock just to test our faith – then we’d have to admit he/she might be right, because God is a programmer and he can do anything he likes with reality. And then, personally, I don’t see anything more positive about being some kind of Super Mario ghost-in-the-machine, rather than a real evolved being. If anything, the former is degrading.

Recommended for those interested in reworked rhetorical arguments.