A is for Absence, Accident, Aricept, Acetylcholine, and Getting Ahead of Myself.

The few loyal followers of this blog who remain will probably have noted my prolonged absence. There were many things that interfered with my ability to post here over the course of the past year or so; the most severe was a motor vehicle accident that injured my child and resulted in some neurological injuries of my own that impaired my language centers, memory, and attention, as well as my sense of balance and the sensation in my hands and  upper body. All in all, not ideal conditions to write a blog. I have missed you all, and I apologize for not at least explaining myself better. I had the persistent delusion that I would be able to return to blogging at any moment. I was wrong. I may be back now more regularly. I hope so. There's always the chance that I'm still harboring a delusion.

Still, the whole experience has been an excellent opportunity to explore the mind/body interface, and to learn more about the ways that the structure of the brain affects the function of the mind. It's been an interesting self-study. Apparently, traumatic brain injury (TBI) results in decreased levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. My physician started me on Aricept, an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor also used to treat Alzheimer's disease, this week, and I am heartened by the fact that I can sit down tonight and write this, even if it is terribly slow, laborious, and possibly incoherent. I have wanted to write here many times since the accident, but failed to produce anything remotely readable. That I can write this at all is a great encouragement.

It's clear that my initial excitement should be tempered with caution, though. I had ideas tonight for a full week's worth of small April A-Z posts; I am managing this one, and a Flash Fearsday for "F", and I find that the others will either have to wait or have fled my mind completely. "Better" is not "well."
I'll be around as much as I can.

L is for Literature, and Laziness

My post for "L" in the April A-Z Challenge is another one that is pulling double-duty: it started out life as a reply to a blog post at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, here. I found this post while I was loitering over here at Porky's Expanse!, one of my favorite internet places.

For those of you who didn't read the IEET article linked above, I'll summarize, admittedly very roughly: David Brin says that the main difference between Fantasy and SF is that fantasy is about resigning yourself to your fate and SF is about having the power to change it through scientific progress. I've included almost all of my response to his article below:

For starters, I don't believe that Fantasy teaches us to be resigned to Fate. Fate and Prophecy appear frequently in Fantasy stories, but often more in the role of a challenge to be met by the heroes than of a foregone conclusion. In LoTR, Gandalf says "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies just because you had a hand in bringing them about!", yet the reader in LoTR, and in most fantasy, has the definite sense that the outcome could have been far different, if any of the characters had chosen differently, had not shown courage and determination, had not persevered through daunting and seemingly hopeless situations, and had not acted from positions of high moral and ethical standards. On one level then, prophecy or fate in the fantasy story is the yardstick against which we can measure our hero - did he or she fulfill the prophecy? Was he or she found worthy in spirit and deed? If so, then his or her behavior is a worthy guide to how we should conduct ourselves when faced with similar, if less potentially Earth-shattering, situations. If not, then his or her behavior is still a worthy guide, but a guide of how not to behave.

Far from teaching resignation to injustice and social inequity, many fantasy stories are explicitly about the weak or the disregarded finding the courage, the skill, and the ingenuity to defeat the established power structure when it has become corrupted or destructive, and establishing or re-establishing a more just and equitable system with the formerly-powerless taking control.

Fantasy uses archetypal settings and elements, many of which derive in part from feudal systems and mythos - kings and peasants, damsels and monsters, swords and shields, magic and witches, and dungeons and riddles - not because feudalism mixed with superstition is or was such a great form of government and social structure, or even because readers want them to, but because fantasy deals with archetypal themes where the details of the setting are not the important issues, where, instead, the questions are of the relationship of the powerful to the weak, of what constitutes the nature of good and the nature of evil, of the right relationship of the individual to the society, and of the society to the individual, questions and answers that are intended to be universal, or at least culture-wide, and that are primarily directed at issues of human relationship and moral behavior. For these types of stories, being able to access the rich history of previous experiences and literary references that most readers already have around these types of characters allows much more freedom to spend time and text on the interesting and meaty part of the story rather than spending a great deal of time developing the reader’s understanding of what a “king” or a “wizard” is. There is plenty of this type of archetypal fantasy that gets shelved under SF, in my opinion, and these science fantasies are littered with similarly readily-recognizable archetypes, just decidedly non-feudal ones: "The Mad Scientist", "The Flawed Creation", and "The Unsuspecting (member of the ) Public”, as well as “The Scientist-Messiah”, “The Greedy Competitor”, “The Miraculous Creation”, and “The Unappreciative (or Idiotic or Interfering) Public”.

"Hard" SF, which is comparatively rare these days, is concerned entirely with the permutations of the realm of the possible, the answer to the question "What if...?" constrained firmly within the boundaries of the Real. Science or scientists or technology or even the scientific method may play either heroic or villainous parts in such tales - but the stories are located in physical frameworks outside the realm of the fantastic: they follow from what we know (or currently believe) to be true. In SF, the questions the writer and the reader wish to explore often reside firmly in the details – “What kind of life could develop on the surface of a neutron star? What would a society made up of such organisms look like? Could we detect it, or recognize it as life? Could it detect us, or recognize us as life?“ or “What would happen if we had a genetically-engineered plague that only killed fertile women of childbearing age?”

From my perspective, then, the core difference between the two genres is that fantasy is almost always about the big picture of what should be, and SF is much more about the details of what could be and what is.

I'm a huge fan and voracious reader of both genres, and I think that they both have a lot to offer people who are concerned with ethics and how to apply them to emerging technologies, and even to people who couldn't care less about how to apply ethics to emerging technologies, although I confess I have a hard time imagining that you could spend much time reading F & SF and not be concerned with that.

I'd love to hear what the rest of you think.

The Portals of the Muse, or How I Discovered the Nine Worlds in a Package of Crackers.

This blog was created at the insistence of my son, with the express purpose of erecting and detailing the framework for the narrative space contained by the Nine Worlds. I didn't even know that the Nine Worlds existed until I referred to them in this comment, so no one was more surprised than I to find that they required not only a blog post devoted entirely to them, but an entire blog of their own.

It is a strange and wondrous thing that, often, I find that I do not truly know a thing until I say it aloud or write it down, and then suddenly, it is spread out there before me, crystallized into reality. It is as if giving voice to it brings it into existence, echoing both Lao Zi's assertion that "The Named is the mother of the Ten Thousand Things.", and the biblical account of the Creation proceeding from the Divinely spoken word. Or as if beginning to speak the words opens the gates of mystery, or portals through which the Muses can speak, and I am merely their scribe. This was certainly the case for the Nine Worlds. A packet of caraway, sesame, and poppy seed-topped Lavasch crackers that advertised "Authentic Seed Overload", a son with a penchant for punning, a momentary mis-reading by a person on the internet, and suddenly not one, but nine worlds appear, demanding that their histories, songs, stories, and fates be detailed.

This triggered some musings (and I use that word intentionally) about the creative process, intuition, and the nature of truth, reality, mythos, logos, psychological archetypes, and their relationship to fiction, poetry, and song. The arts and even the sciences are, at their most compelling, a way for us to tell ourselves and our community truths that we cannot express any other way. They are a way of exploring the boundaries of our mental, social, physical , and spiritual worlds while staying safe from the dangers inherent in pushing those boundaries to their limits in "real life". They are portals into the highest and deepest recesses of our minds, bodies, and souls, surrogates for rituals and rites of initiation, trials and tests and templates that we shape through the lenses and filters of our own temperaments, times, and cultures, and that shape us in return, but they are also, first and foremost, amusements, ways to engage the mind and the senses, to divert us from troubles and pain, to help us make sense of our world, and to open us to a greater capacity for joy and delight. It is with this understanding, that amusement is of the essence of the creative process, that I begin the task of making the Nine Worlds manifest, here and now, if my Muse allows.