Timeslips (1)

This is, functionally and organically, an extension of my first Vie Hebdomadaires post, “The puzzle that is me”, from 30 July. Perhaps extension isn't the right word; ‘descendent’ or ‘inheritor’ might be better. It's likely to be quite short; partly because I have only as long as it takes me to eat a bowl of soup, and partly because I don't yet know exactly where it is heading. It will have to be the first fragment of a self exploration in progress.

I said, back then in July, that a particular science fiction novel read in my early teens “changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life”. To a more diffuse but equally real extent, that is also true of the whole gamut of science fiction which I read between roughly thirteen and sixteen. While this is a fact of which I've been generally aware for some time, over the past three months I've been thinking about it consciously and explicitly.

In second hand bookshops, charity stalls, digital reissues and the always excellent Marx Books, I've been deliberately looking out for copies of those titles and authors which I can retrieve from memory. Not according to a grand strategy; each quest is triggered by a chance association from another book read, by a day to day experience, by a remark in conversation.

I was a voracious reader at that time. Though many of the books concerned are, I now discover, quite slim, I nevertheless cannot any longer devour six or seven of them in a day. It's perhaps fortunate, then, that I can't remember enough bibliographic details to track down more than a few of them. Some I remember clearly and can go straight to them in a catalogue; Geoffrey Hoyle's October the first is too late was one such. Others I can find by following trails of breadcrumbs backward ... I could remember neither author nor title for Frederik Pohl's A plague of pythons, for instance, but searching online for a combination of things I did remember (coronets, mind control, science fiction novel, hoaxer, etc) brought them up fairly quickly. For some I have to rely on the black arts of which Ray Girvan is master; he has located several titles which defeated me completely, from almost no clues at all, and is currently chasing another for me.

There are several things that particularly interest me about delving back into what I read at a formative time in my life. The most obvious and superficial is finding out what it was, exactly, that so strongly influenced me – and why. There is also a historical fascination in looking back to how things were then. Even more interesting, though, is to discover what I was like then: to see what sort of teenager I must have been for this fiction to have precisely that effect upon my developing psyche. It's a fascinating voyage of self discovery.

I have to pick up my stylus and walk, now. A lecture hall full of eager (or perhaps somnolent) students awaits me. Rather than stow this and continue it later, this seems like a good point to break and post. I'll be back, in other (no doubt equally fragmentary) posts, to follow some of the threads I've started to gather here.

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• Fred Hoyle, October the first is too late. 1966, London: Heinemann.
• Frederik Pohl, A plague of pythons. 1966, London: Gollancz.

The puzzle that is me

[this is a copy of my first post as guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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When I was about thirteen years old, I read a novel which changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life.

Given a dramatically hyperbolic statement like that, you’d expect me to have strong and detailed memories of it, wouldn’t you? Yet until quite recently I remembered only four partial sentences (not even verbatim, at that; just as paraphrase) which accounted for its influence on me, and one visual image constructed from text of which not one word remained. Title and author lost without trace. There were insufficient details in accessible memory even to attempt a Google search. I mentioned all of this to Ray Girvan (last week’s Vie hebdomadaires incumbent), in passing, during a walk and talk. The conversation pulled out of my memory a few details which I hadn’t previously known were there, and a few days later Ray sent me not only title and author but the link to an online copy of the text so that I could reread it.

Bear with me; the link to this week, this day, will (I hope) emerge.

The book in question was Eight keys to Eden. It’s what is usually labelled “SF” … I really don’t much like such labels, but they do simplify discussion so I’ll grudgingly let this one in for now. And the reason it affected me so? It presented me, in a way which made sudden epiphanic sense to my thirteen year old mind, with the idea of critical thinking. The eight keys of the title refer to eight progressive steps in the development of thinking, of which only seven are given in the book – discovery of the eighth being, in a sense, the “next level” discovery of which the book is about. I won’t bore you with the full list (some of which are a bit dodgy anyway, I now see with adult eyes) but here are the first three which, in retrospect, were my launchpad:

1. Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without question.

2. Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general contrariness.

3. Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn’t? How then to account for the phenomenon?

It’s clear enough to see how this fits with the development of the early teen years.

I was emerging from my childhood, in which I automatically accepted what I was told by adults (the Eminent Authorities of my world at the time): Key 1. I was entering that phase where rebelliousness made me automatically reject anything an adult said, on general bolshie principle: Key 2. What the third stage, Key 3, offered me was a way to dignify my rejection (and also the all too frequent experience of discovering that I was wrong) with something more defensible, more philosophically grounded. I have no doubt that my parents and teachers found it even more exasperating to have me stroke my chin and say “hmmm … let’s examine that statement, shall we?” than the “who says?” which had gone before … and it was, to be honest, an egotistical act: but it also, nevertheless, triggered a real step forward in my development.

I’ll skip the others apart from this one, Key 6, which would sink down to sit as a slow burner in my subconscious and later emerge with particular relevance to my drift into statistics and, later still, research:

6. What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered effect is really cause?

So far, so good … but that conversation with Ray, and my rediscovery of Eight keys to Eden, was some time ago, now. I wouldn’t call on it as part of this, a “weekly life” series of posts, if it hadn’t a current relevance.

Though I’ve always been aware that I was a science fiction junkie in my teens, I’d not until recently connected that fact with either my own present state or my “laissez faire, laissez aller” belief, as an educator, in encouraging every student to embrace even the mistaken as part of a route to critical evaluation. Today, as it happens, has seen a stage completion in both processes (which turn out to have been the same process) in two parts.

The first part involved interweaving conversations with several people, including Ray again. Ray and I agree over much, but our occasional disagreements are what spur me to think. The second part was a serendipitous result of having been frenetically busy over the past month: my reading of fiction (vital to me as a way to unwind and maintain my balance) was mainly in very short fragments (sometimes as short as thirty seconds at a time) using an iPod hosted eReader app, supplemented (when at home) by parallel reading on paper of M K Joseph‘s The time of Achamoth (lent to me by Ray; see his post on it) and China Miéville‘s eight hundred and something page tome Perdido Street Station.

Of the conversations, I’ll mention only two strands as examples. With Ray, I discussed our shared tendency at a point in our development to wallow in (using Ray’s words) “ Von Däniken style mysteries, ley lines, Lethbridge pendulums, dubious ‘unlocking your inner powers’ books, Colin Wilson’s more flaky output, etc.” I personally feel that I came to no harm from that phase; it opened my mind to possibilities, and then provided me with plenty of opportunities to hone my critical faculties. I think the same is probably true of Ray, too, though he looks upon it with more scepticism – a good balance and mirror for my own assumptions. The second strand involves discussion of critical constructivist process with my two brothers (both of them also involved in education, though in divergent fields), kicked off by discussion of a paper in Pedagogy about close reading (or lack of it) by students.

The advent of eReaders, which make books very cheap to reissue, has had a similar effect to CDs and downloads in music: stuff which I read long ago, long out of print and unobtainable, emerges again into daylight. These digital reissues are, admittedly, of variable quality; the best are perfect, but many, like Gateway’s Kindle edition of Clifford D Simak’s Time is the simplest thing, are littered with OCR errors; they are, nevertheless, a goldmine of renewed easy access to otherwise lost material. Time is the simplest thing is also SF, as is The time of Achamoth, and the two have a common thread: travel denied to the human body (interstellar and temporal, respectively) are achieved by projection of the mind. Transfer of minds (from embodied brain to digital backing store) is also central to Iain M Banks‘ latest “Culture” novel, Surface detail. All of these have been in my fractured reading across that crowded month

Perdido Street, by chance, I started reading just as the overstuffed month began. I would normally have read it in a couple of days, but in the circumstances it took the full month and I only finished it this morning – just as I have the comparative leisure to start synthesising all of this. Perdido Street is not science fiction in the same sense as the others; its steam punk physical science is not just speculative, it is impossible in this universe … but I would classify it as SF nevertheless. It shares with Time is the simplest thing and Surface detail a common theme (amongst the many intertwined strands in each): what it means to be human.

And that, in a funny sort of way, is what has gradually trickled into my mind today: what it means to be human, and more specifically the question of what it means to be me. Because what has today suddenly become clear to me, after reading several science fictions from my early teens and several new ones as well, is that it’s not exactly what I read that decided what I am but the fact that I read it. Mark Clifton, Clifford D Simak, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and all the rest, rattled around in my head along with, ground and winnowed by, the heavier and more abrasive likes of Durrell’s Alexandria quartet and C P Snow’s Strangers and brothers sequence, Joyce’s Ulysses (another tome of similar size to Perdido Street Station) … and the result of the whole chance mélange, on this August day, decades down the line, is me.

With which I will end. If you’ve followed me this far through the rambling and incoherent maze (the title of this post, by the way, comes from a Simon and Garfunkel song – S&G lyrics also having been an important part of the mix), thank you. Good night.

- Felix

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• Ian M Banks, Surface detail. 2010, London: Orbit. 9781841498959 (pbk). [Amazon link] Also Kindle edition, 2010, London: Hachette [Amazon link]
• Mark Clifton, Eight Keys to Eden. 1962, London: Victor Gollancz. (originally a book club edition 1960, Garden City NY: Doubleday. Also 1982, Norfolk VA: Donning. 0898652588. Available as electronic text from The Gutenberg Project.)
• Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria quartet. 1968, London: Faber. [Amazon link to 2005 paperback edition] [Amazon link to Kindle edition]
• M K Joseph, The time of Achamoth. 1977, Auckland NZ: Collins. 0002223023 (hbk.).
• James Joyce, Ulysses. 1922,London: Egoist Press. [Amazon link to 2010 paperback edition]
• Karen Manarin, Reading Value: Student Choice in Reading Strategies. Pedagogy, 2012. 12(2): p. 281-297. (Abstract available here.)
• China Miéville Perdido Street Station. 2011, London: Pan. 9780330534239 (pbk.) [Amazon link] (original publication 2001, London: Macmillan). Kindle edition [Amazon link]
• Clifford D Simak, Time is the simplest thing. 2011London : Gateway [Amazon link]. (Original publication 1961, Garden City NY: Doubleday)
• C P Snow. I’ll not take up the space necessary to list the whole Strangers and brothers sequence of eleven novels, but here is an Amazon search link.

California arsenic dreaming

For at least as long as I've been reading it, speculative fiction has been proposing alternative biochemistries to the carbon based one which we know and love.

My first encounter with the idea was in one of Isaac Asimov's Wendell Urth mysteries, written when I was three years old though I didn't read it until I was ten. The talking stone, in which a race of "siliconies" live amongst the asteroids, posits a silicon based biochemical economy which, I later discovered, was popular with other writers and speculators too.

Another candidate is phosphorus which, like carbon, can (in combination with nitrogen) form a variety of complex molecules including long chains and phosphazene rings. But phosphorus also has a more conventional rôle in our own carbon based scheme of things, as one of the six main elements from which living matter is constructed. Amongst other things, phosphorus is a component in the cell's energy storage mechanisms, and in the binding together of DNA. Could phosphorus be replaced within our carbon ecology?

I am, as said recently, a mediocre chemist at best (and most chemists would describe me even less charitably than that), so I'm not in a position to have opinions on these speculations, but that doesn't stop me being interested. So, I was intrigued by an article in Science (organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) at the end of last year, positing a bacterium which had pulled exactly this trick: substituting arsenic for phosphorus.

As the authors point out, instances of biochemical substitution for trace elements are not unknown, examples being “tungsten for molybdenum and cadmium for zinc in some enzyme families and copper for iron as an oxygen-carrier in some arthropods and mollusks”. This would, however, be the first known example of substitution for one of the big six. Trace element substitutions rely on close similarity between the usual supects and their surrogates, and the authors argue for the same sort of similarity here:

“Arsenic ... is a chemical analog of phosphorus, which lies directly below [it] on the periodic table. Arsenic possesses a similar atomic radius, as well as near identical electronegativity to [phosphorus. The most common form of [phosphorus] in biology is phosphate ... which behaves similarly to arsenate over the range of biologically relevant pH and redox gradients. The physico-chemical similarity between [arsenate] and [phosphate] contributes to the biological toxicity of [arsenate] because metabolic pathways intended for [phosphate] cannot distinguish between the two molecules ... ... ... given the similarities of [arsenic] and [phosphorus] ... we hypothesized that [arsenate] could specifically substitute for [phosphate] in an organism possessing mechanisms to cope with the inherent instability of [arsenate] compounds.”

They then went on to identify a naturally occurring organism, a bacterium in a California lake, in which this substitution seemed in fact to have occurred.

My attraction to this is. of course, a potent amalgam of intellectual curiosity and childhood dreams. Alas, a number of comments in yesterday's issue (they are also available on the Science web site) dispute or question the findings. The authors respond; the debate continues...

As a nonchemist academic, I can only wait impartially for the final verdict. As a childhood dreamer, however, I surreptitiously cross my fingers and hope for that verdict to vindicate the original findings.

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• Isaac Asimov. "The talking stone" in Astounding science fiction. 1955, New York: Fantasy house.
• Felisa Wolfe-Simon, et al. 2010. "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus" in Science [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258.full.pdf [Accessed 2010-12-02].

infinity and limitation

Science Fiction (note the capitalisation!), often in Gollancz yellow jackets, played a significant part* in shaping me, culturally and intellectually, during my teens. A prominent name was Arthur C Clarke whose particular rôle, like Jules Verne, was to point the way into a technological future.

The trouble with future gazing is that it is inevitably overtaken by the future itself. Clarke, like Verne, got some things very right but others, inevitably, he got wrong; it's an occupational hazard. The more precisely the writer defines a future, the less future proof the fiction becomes.

I've just been rereading some of Clarke's short stories. Some of them are as fresh as the day they were written; others show how unimaginatively bound we humans are to the temporally and spatially parochial.

Writers, and Clarke is not immune, often see the future in terms of current cutting edge. Looking back from a few decades on, it's noticeable how much science fiction is dominated by the splitting of the atom: no further fundamental development in either physics or military science seems to occur over fictional history subsequent to 1945. A technological point reached after ten thousand years of human development is not expected to change noticeably over the next million.

Clarke's story Superiority, set in a future when whole stellar systems are gained or lost in a military engagement, describes problems with a computer which contains "just short of a million vaccuum tubes". Few people now know what a vacuum tube was; many have never even heard of a transistor, the vacuum tube's replacement before large scale integration of gates on a chip supplanted it in turn.

More startling, though, in its illustration of both imaginative power and limitation, is his Second dawn. This story is remarkable in imagining a ace of creatures (a sort of cross between cow and rabbit, but unable to swim) which have developed powerful intellects but have no hands. Unable to affect the physical world, they have nevertheless achieved a great deal in philosophy, mathematics, certain conceptual arts, through pure power of mind. These creatures, despite their advanced culture, can only hypothesise the existence of other continents on their own world, never mind worlds beyond it. This creation is, for me, a remarkable feat. And yet, the imagination which called forth this thought experiment of a race is unable to transcend 1950s social structure. It is a patriarchal and hierarchic society. All serious thinking and organisation is done by males; the only female in the story is there to offer emotional empathy alone, and her support for ideas is bought with a string of beads for adornment.

To be clear: I'm not criticising Clarke, whom I consider to be an exceptional figure. On the contrary; I'm simply musing on the fact that even an exceptional figure has such closely constraining limitations, and what that says about us all.

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*Several significant parts, in fact; but that distinction can wait for another time.

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• Arthur C Clarke, Superiority, in The magazine of fantasy & science fiction. August 1951, Fantasy House.
• Arthur C Clarke, Second dawn, in Science fiction quarterly. August 1951, Columbia Publications.

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Cupboard love

Thanks, once again, to Watoosa at Conscience pudding for recommending another winner: 100 Cupboards.

The mechanism of the story (twelve year old protagonist* Henry York discovers a wall full of cupboards leading to other space/time loci) links to many other fictions from which Through the looking glass, Changing planes, Ancient shores and Monsters Inc are only a snapshot. Why didn't I didn't include CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles in the comparison examples above? It is, admittedly, the first that springs to mind (and Watoosa made use of it). But, to my mind, the fresh, new and engrossing story in 100 Cupboards sits more comfortably alongside contemporary (and adult*) equivalents.

There are the classic oppositions of good and evil (reminiscent not only of Narnia but, as Watoosa also says, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings – and, of course, many another tale). Among too many notable facets to mention, the evil to be opposed is not an abstract or a neatly packaged bogey but something always potentially present, requiring resistance day to day. Henry learns this through vivid lessons which hint at our own world's genocides and show the difficulty of always behaving heroically (do you save yourself and one within reach, or make a principled but doomed stand?) But don't make the mistake of thinking it's gloomy: though unafraid of darkness, the book has a bright warm heart.

I started 100 Cupboards on a bus journey, last Wednesday morning, and I finished it on another the same afternoon. In between, though only half way through, I ordered the first sequel (Dandelion fire) which arrived today and which I look forward to starting when it rises to the top of the "waiting to be read" pile ( probably some time next week). I have no doubt that I shall shortly thereafter be ordering the third book, The chestnut king.

(An aside ... Henry's parents are unsympathetic characters. They share some characteristics with me ... but hey, I can laugh at myself :-)

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• N D Wilson, 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
• Lewis Carroll, Through the looking-glass, and what Alice found there. Illustrations by John Tenniel. 1872, London: Macmillan & Co. [Available from Project Gutenberg or as numerous recent reprints including 2006, London: Macmillan, 9781405055680 (pbk.)]
• Ursula K Le Guin, Changing planes. 2003, New York: Harcourt. 0151009716.
• Jack McDevitt, Ancient shores. 1996, New York: Harper. 0061052078.
• Pete Docter et al, Monsters Inc. 2001, Emeryville CA: Pixar.
• N D Wilson, Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842 (pbk).
• N D Wilson, The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk).

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* Preachy and teacher-ish footnote: I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Some people won't read children's literature, making the assumption that it is beneath them. If you are one of those people, then you'll never discover the joys of 100 Cupboards or of many other richly and imaginatively rewarding fictions which leave much adult literature in the shade. You may not agree with me about this book, and that's perfectly OK; but if you don't even try it, just because it is written for an age group which is better equipped with open minded imagination than yours or mine ... then I urge you to think again. Your choice, but I believe that you are impoverishing yourself (or, as TTMF put it a couple of days ago, in a different context, "I reserve the right to think you're daft").

Food for a future

It’s fashionable to scoff at Thomas Robert Malthus’ predictions, two hundred years ago, that human populations would grow until stopped by famine, disease or ‘moral restraint’. He wrote before the arrival of modern scientific crop research or contraception, and it’s unfair to blame Malthus for not foreseeing those breakthroughs. However, he was essentially right: the food supply expanded but remains finite, and contraception has not fundamentally disrupted the shape of the population growth curve, which is asymptotically approaching the vertical.

What to do about it is a matter of vigorous debate. To simplify: in the red corner are those who focus on means of increasing supply; in the blue, those who emphasise a dietary shift away from inefficient use of that supply. An Isaac Asimov short story^[1] did suggest exploiting the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum physics to disperse a trillion-strong population by placing every family on its own otherwise uninhabited Earth, but that one is a little beyond the reach of even today’s scientific computing power. In the long run, if the upward population curve continues, neither red approach nor blue will do more than defer the problem; in the meantime, pragmatically, both are needed. [More]

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1. Isaac Asimov, “Living space”, in Science Fiction. 1956, New York (NY, USA): Columbia Publications.

Two historical fictions

I've neglected books lately. There have been several good ones, which I've intended to mention ... but then time and a half slipped by... (Ray Girvan used to have a link to my books tag but I notice that he has tactfully removed it to spare my blushes.) One of them I really must address because it's one of the most impressive fictions I've ever read ... watch this space, “real soon now”. The rest, since time is finite, will have to drift away.

I will, however, briefly mention a young adult novel which I read on the recommendation of The conscience pudding – Jennifer Donnelly's “lovely, plaintive book”, A northern light. I won't review it here; Watoosa has done that for me. I'll just add a couple of comments. First, to register a small reservation (as she does in her current post) about the tendency of fiction in general, and young fiction in particular, to "prettify" or idealise the past – there are some social aspects of Mattie's world which are more generous than true. At the same time, I nevertheless am impressed by the way difference between “then” and “now” is soaked into the fabric of the book in a way which brings it home to the intended audience. Chrissie, a 16 year old of my acquaintance, was deeply affected by the description of life only a hundred years ago and embarked on a library search to fill out her understanding of social development in the century between. (Aside: this book is an example of the irritating practice, mentioned by Watoosa, of changing titles as they cross the Atlantic: in Britain it is for some reason known as A gathering light which somewhat misses the original point.)

Also a hundred years ago is the story within a story of Salvador Carriscant, a surgeon in the early 20th century, told in retrospect by the narrator of William Boyd's A blue afternoon. The descriptions of surgical and medical knowledge (or, from our viewpoint, lack of it) didn't actually tell me anything I didn't already intellectually know, but they did for the first time bring many things home to me in visceral (literally!) and vivid context just as A northern light did for Chrissie. Two days after reading this, serendipitously, I found Unreal Nature's post on surgery and poetry and the ensuing discussion in its comments.

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• Jennifer Donnelly, A northern light. 2004, San Diego: Harcourt. 0152053107 or 978-0152053109 (published in the UK as A gathering light. 2003, London: Bloomsbury. 0747570639)
• William Boyd, The blue afternoon. 1993, London: Penguin. 0140238255 (pbk)

The balance of science

A good conversation in the comments to “The Crystal Clarity Of Great Scientific Prose”, over at Unreal Nature. Several aspects of it intrigue me, but I'll confine myself to one: the relation of "Bad science" to "good science". Read the full set of comments at the link given above for the full background; I'll begin at the point where Julie H says: “A wider tolerance for Bad Science, in my opinion, yields a larger crop of good science.”

I find myself torn on this one.

On the one hand, I do agree that wacky ideas in science are the flip side of creative thinking. Blue sky science needs freewheeling thinkers who are not trammelled by accepted positions – and it needs them to be safe outside the pages of science fiction. Without them it cannot make the imaginative leaps open the way for sober discovery. I do believe that science is at present too straight laced, too reluctant to think radically and say “just imagine if...” Clinging to orthodoxy is bad science, too; so is a stodgy insistence that imagination has no place and only critical thinking will do.

On the other hand, the fruitcake brand of "bad science" is usually accompanied by a dearth of (or, often, complete absence of) critical thinking. Without critical thinking, intuitive leaps are worthless. Worse than that, too many intuitive leaps with no critical thinking to either back them up or weed them out will clog the air to suffocate both thinking and imagination alike.

So we need both. We need the willingness and freedom to make and listen to completely off the wall assertions without rejecting them, but also the critical habit of then subjecting them to scrutiny. We also (perhaps the hardest part) need to abandon our love of definite certainties in both directions. Bad science is typified by certainty that an off the wall idea is definitely true, established science too willing to state that it is definitely untrue, rather than being satisfied with levels of likelihood or unlikelihood.

What is the best balance between the two components? The value of soaring imagination on one hand and analytic evaluation on the other? Acceptance of one kind of "bad science" against toleration of the other? Analytically this is a mixture problem, in which progress is the dependent variable against inputs of wackiness and conservatism in different proportions.

It's not, unfortunately, a mixture problem which it is realistically susceptible to analysis. It's too big, we're too much in the middle of it, and the variables are too hard to define. Nevertheless, I'd love to see Mark J Anderson of Stat-Ease, who regularly produces whimsically humorous mixture problem examples in his company's newsletter Stat-Teaser, have a go at it.

It was Anderson who, just a month ago, quoted Isaac Asimov in a vein relevant to this issue: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny...'.” What we need is an atmosphere in which people can say “that's funny...” without fear of ridicule, even when they get things wildly wrong, but then retain the analytic frame of mind to critically examine what they have spotted. They are much rarer than they ought to be – on all sides.

The hunger games

A little while back, Watoosa of The conscience puddingmentioned (“The evil that men do...”) two books read in conjunction. With one of them, Art Spiegelman's superb two part graphic novel Maus, I was already very familiar. The other, The hunger games, a young adult novel from Suzanne Collins, was new to me.

I've just read The hunger games (herein and after THG) at a sitting. That Watoosa links it with Maus is interesting, and true, and influenced my own reading. Both are about the discontinuity between civilisation and survival, peace and war, community and self. Both THG and Watoosa's observations set me off on a tangled web of responses which I'll never be able to gather into any sort of whole here; I'll stick, for the moment, to THG itself.

The setting is a dystopic future in which the USA has collapsed through internal strife to a small empire. “The Capitol”, somewhere in the Rockies, possesses and controls all wealth and all high technology while maintaining twelve “districts” in starvation level serfdom. For me, though quite possibly not for the author, it seems a metaphor for the position of the present day USA in relation to external client states – though it could equally well be any empire, at any time. Within each district, the population lives in a fenced towns surrounded by wilderness; venturing beyond the fence means facing death by predator (no weapons are allowed in the hands of district citizens) or the Capitol's police. The conflicts of the past have left a legacy of genetically engineered hazards and byproducts: some of them harmless, some lethal.

The “games” of the title are a straightforward transfer of Roman gladiatorial games into the age of reality television and, as such, THG has direct links to a whole range of fiction such as Sos the rope, The continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, The iron thorn, The long walk and many others including, as Watoosa says, The running man meets Lord of the flies. As with most of those titles, there are (as Watoosa has suggested) links to other moral and philosophical questions central to present time: the list will no doubt be different for every reader but, for me, the primary concern is a critique of war and the cult of celebrity.

From each of the twelve districts, two young people (one male, one female, aged 12-18) are chosen each year by lot and sent to the games. They are called “tributes”, not contestants: tributes from the districts to the imperial centre. They are built up and glamourised in a series of media events, then thrown into the arena – actually an section of wilderness under intensive TV coverage – from which only one is allowed to emerge alive. They are, in other words, set to kill each other for public entertainment.

The main protagonist, Katniss (named, with explicit symbolism, for plants of the Sagittaria genus with edible tubers; her sister is Primrose), is sixteen. She lives in District 12, a mining community in the Appalachians. Since the death of her father in a mine explosion, she has been the sole support of her family whom she feeds by her illegal poaching in the wilderness beyond the fence. Her hunting skills and gathering, primarily learned from her father, centrally include an illegal long bow made by him.

Katniss is not drawn for the games in the lottery; but her twelve year old sister is. The rules permit volunteers to replace those selected by lot, and Katniss steps forward to take Primrose's place – knowing that she must survive not only for herself but to continue keeping her family from starvation. Her male counterpart from the same district is Peeta, which presents particular additional problems: Katniss and her family owe their survival to an act of kindness by Peeta shortly after her father died and, worse still (since she may, to stay alive herself, have to kill him), she discovers that he is in love with her.

I don't think I am giving much away by saying that Katniss does, physically, survive the arena and the games. The stuff of the story is how she does so while trying to stay human and preserve her innate decency as she puts her poaching experience to work against opponents who range from psychopaths to a frightened child very like her own sister – and, crucially, is to live with herself afterwards.

The author handles it well; there are a couple of mildly deus ex machina moments to make it all work, but they are made perfectly believable within the context.

There is to be a trilogy, the second part of which (Catching fire) is due out in September. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Unlike (for example) The city of Ember which rounded off a first phase satisfactorily and delivered its protagonists into a new world where I (as reader) could only ask “what next?”, THG leaves Katniss returning to the same world from which she was plucked. I can see a number of ways in which a compelling new story could be generated, and a number of existing hooks from which they could satisfactorily grow, but none of them necessarily follow as a narrative consequence of this first one. This is not, I emphasise, a criticism ofTHG: exactly the opposite, it is a consequence of how complete, satisfying and impressive THG is. It seems likely that I'll forego reading the successors; though I do wonder about the redheaded Avox...

The thing I like best about THG is the fact that it resists any glorification of the games (though that's not always true of some Scholastic marketing, and some fan following comment) and makes clear the vicarious nature of reality spectation. The superficiality of the effete Capitol world around the games is also well observed.

“They chatter so continuously that I barely have to reply ... even though they're rattling on about the Games, it's all about how they felt when a specific event occurred. ... Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.”

It could all apply as much to our TV news coverage of conflicts such as that in Gaza as to openly acknowledged entertainment... which takes us back to Maus, of course.

Thoroughly recommended.

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• Piers Anthony, Sos the rope. 1970, London: Faber. 0571091016
• Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King), The Bachman books : four early novels. (Includes The long walkand The running man) 1996, New York: Plume. 0452277752
• Algis Budrys, A., The iron thorn. 1969, London: Coronet. 0340043997
• Suzanne Collins, The hunger games. 2009, London: Scholastic. 9781407109084
• D G Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. A novel. 1974, London: Gollancz. 0575018283
• Jeanne DuPrau, The city of Ember. 2003, New York: Random House. 0375822739
• William Golding, Lord of the flies. London: Faber and Faber, and 2004 (originally 1954). 0571224520
• Art Spiegelman, Maus I : a survivor's tale : my father bleeds history. 1986, London: Penguin. 0140173153
• Art Spiegelman, A., Maus II : a survivor's tale : and here my troubles began. 1991, New York: Pantheon. 0394556550
• Art Spiegelman, A.M. Spiegelman, and A.M. Spiegelman II, Maus : a survivor's tale. 2003, London: Penguin. 0141014081

Judging a sardine by its can

Both JSBlog and DrC have mentioned the strange covers which adorn some fiction paperbacks; both draw their examples from science fiction. Neither mentioned film posters, which were very similar – consider, for example, the semiotically similar images used to publicise The day the earth stood still and King Kong.

On the covers of SF paperbacks, a frequent feature was a young woman in stylised pose wearing a costume which served no discernible purpose beyond attracting the viewer's eye to her erogenous zones. An example which I particularly remember was Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars which, in the version I read (illustration on the left), appeared to show the protagonist clutching a crystal ball whilst standing on one leg, examining the horizon, and being molested by a green octopus (this may or may not relate in some way to Unreal nature's post on Isabella Rossellini; I wouldn't know).

A quick Google image search reveals numerous other covers including, to be fair, a range of approaches ... from a skinny rib disco Podkayne whose handbag can also be used as a large padlock to the one also shown here (right) which sees our heroine as a latter day Alice in Wonderland.

As an aside, I seem to remember that the Podkayne storyline includes nuclear device which goes well beyond the rumoured “suitcase nuke”. It comes a s small package which can be hidden amongst the sundry travel items within an eleven year old boy's carry on luggage.

Unreal nature has a related post, considering book cover depiction of male stereotypes.

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• Robert A Heinlein, Podkayne of Mars, her life and times. 1963, New York,: Putnam.

  
  

A haphazard way to move through life and treasure...

When Ray Girvan (JSBlog) asks to borrow a book, you can be sure that it will come back with interest – in both senses of that word. His request for Queenmagic, kingmagic will be no exception, but in the short term has itself set me trundling along other lines of thought. Thinking about Ian Watson in particular and, in general, what forms our perception of an author.

The first Watson book I read was God's world, an ideas novel with interstellar travel powered by love, poised somewhere between fantasy and science fiction . That's a difficult triple point to occupy without falling into either tedium or derision, but (to my mind, anyway) he succeeded: God's world struck me as fresh, potent and stimulating.

I was in the middle of a long tramp through East African mountain scenery at the time, and there were no other books to follow it (a fellow traveller let me read this one before using it as toilet paper), so there was ample empty time in which to study it in my mind and appreciate how remarkable it was. As soon as I again had access to libraries and bookshops, a year or so later, I randomly picked up those Watson novels and short story collections which came first to hand. Chekov's journey, Slow birds, Miracle visitors, Deathhunter ... all brilliant.

I was lucky in the chance sequence which presented itself to me. All of those shaped my perception of him and his fiction. When I found The book of the stars and The book of being less satisfying than their predecessor The book of the river, that was OK – every author is allowed fluctuation.

Queenmagic, kingmagic was, in chronological publication terms though not in my order of reading, to be the last novel before Watson turned to a different style. With Evil Water, The Power and The fire worm, he switched to using schlock horror as his vehicle.

Not that those books were any less well envisioned, constructed or written; they were just not ... me. I've never been a horror fan, and (I'm a devout physical coward) least of all physical horror. At that particular time I was also inclined to feel that there are enough real horrors in the world without inventing any. Nevertheless, having built up a high opinion over so many books, I went on reading – those three and another before I gave up. I put him aside and didn't return for a couple of years.

If chance had led me to The power, for example, first or even second, I would probably have put him aside and never returned at all – which would have been a great loss. Even if The book of being had been the first I read, though it was SF and not horror, I would probably have shrugged and not bothered to go further.

Iain Banks us another example; so is Salman Rushdie; in each case, I was lucky in the first couple of examples and that carried me through those which I felt less impressive. Ditto Joanne Harris – Five Quarters of the orange drew me in, where Evil seed or Holy fools certainly would not have done.

It seems a haphazard way to move through life and treasure, but there you go.

Of course, even if an author knew in advance which books would grab me and which would not, other readers would react differently. I was deeply impressed by Under heaven's bridge, written by Watson in transatlantic collaboration with Michael Bishop; other people whose opinion I respect were completely unmoved by it.

Coming back to Queenmagic, kingmagic, I agree with Ray's comment that it goes into fast forward towards the end. There is a feeling that Watson has worked through the ideas now and is impatient to be finished ... though I personally liked the Go section, finding it the most evocative of the whole book, which I suppose only goes to show that every reader is different. The central ideas, though, always Watson's driving force, are fascinating. And the mapping of fictional physics variants onto game play is an effective frame, which Ray (judging by his post title and closing line) apparently intends exploring further; I'm looking forward to that in anticipation. (Update, 2307Z on Monday 27 April 2009: Ray's post has, since I wrote that, been extensively expanded.)

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Ian Watson,

Chekhov's journey. 1983, London: Gollancz, 0575032138 (hbk), and 1984, London: Panther, 0586059792 (pbk).

Deathhunter. 1981, London: Gollancz, 0575030232 (hbk) and 1982, London: Corgi, 0552120715 (pbk)

Evil water, and other stories. 1987, London: Gollancz. 0575039531 (hbk), and 1988: Grafton, 0586201939 (pbk).

God's world. 1979, London: Gollancz, 0575026839 (hbk), and 1982, London: Granada, 0586052100 (pbk).

Miracle visitors. 1978, London: Gollancz, 0575024747 (hbk), and 1980, London: Panther. 0586049355 (pbk).

Queenmagic, kingmagic. 1986, London: Gollancz, 0575038837 (hbk), and1988, London: Grafton, 0586074147 (pbk).

Slow birds, and other stories. 1985, London: Gollancz, 0575036753 (hbk), and 1987, London: Grafton, 1987, 0586071431 (pbk).

The book of being. 1985, London: Gollancz., 057503596X (hbk), and 1986, London: Grafton, 0586063897 (pbk).

The book of the river. 1984, London: Gollancz, 0575033967 (hbk), and 1985, London: Panther, 0586063870 (pbk).

The book of the stars. 1984, London: Gollancz, 0575035080 (hbk), and 1986, London: Panther, 1986, 0586063889 (pbk).

The fire worm. 1988, London: Gollancz, 0575043008 (hbk), and 1990, London: Grafton, 0586207635 (pbk).

The power. 1987, London: Headline, 0747200319 (hbk) and 0747230412 (pbk).

with Michael Bishop, Under heaven's bridge. 1980, London: Gollancz, 0575029277 (hbk) and 1982, London: Corgi, 0552120316 (pbk)

Joanne Harris

Five quarters of the orange. 2001, London: Doubleday, 0385601697 (hbk), and 2002, London: Black Swan .0552998834 (pbk)

Holy fools. 2003, London: Doubleday, 0385603649 (hbk) and 2004, London: Black Swan, 0552770019 (pbk).

Déjà vu, all over again

Oh and tell me if you want to catch
That feeling of redemption...*

For no obvious reason, whilst doing the washing up, it recently occurred to me how common in fiction is the theme of “trial and improvement”. This is where a character (or, much less often, group of characters) have the opportunity to refine their responses to a situation through repeated reruns – improving the outcome by progressively learning from mistakes. It's the sort of topic which Ray Girvan, over at JSBlog, does so much better than I ... but hey, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and so on.

Trial and improvement is one of the many fictional structures which originated (so far as I am aware, anyway) in science fiction. Algis Budrys' novella Rogue moon is an example: the protagonist, investigating an alien environment, repeatedly dies, is resurrected, tries again using knowledge acquired. (For any SF purists reading this: resurrection is an oversimplification, but will do as a short hand for my purposes.) An episode of some TV series like The outer limits or The twilight zone (apologies for the lack of exact attribution; I was eleven years old at the time) had a pair of time travelling “editors” from the future running, reversing, subtly altering, rerunning a domestic dispute to fine tune a desired future outcome. Ray and I have spent many an hour debating whether this sort of transference from genre to mainstream is or is not a good thing (and for which side of the transaction), and whether or not the label should transfer along with the concept, but it certainly takes place.

The best known mainstream manifestation is the film Groundhog day, in which Bill Murray's character, Phil, starts off selfish, egotistical, callous, self serving, unsympathetic, miserable, but after living through one day thousands of times becomes sensitive, caring, and (the pay off) happier – winning, in the process, the love of Rita.. The Dickens favourite A Christmas carol could be taken as a forerunner (as an aside, Bill Murray played the central character in Scrooged, a retelling of the A Christmas carol story.), as could Dante's Inferno, but both lack the repeated “action replay” quality.

These examples all have personal redemption as the goal towards which refinement leads: analogous, in some ways, to the cycle of incarnation ascending towards perfection in Hindu and Buddhist belief.

There is an obvious connection to, but distinct difference from, “parallel universe” or “alternative history” fictions. The reruns could be seen as analogues of numerous simultaneous quantum universe segments, except that the protagonist successively builds up experience gleaned in each and applies the resultant learning to succeeding instances. This transfer of experience doesn't occur in parallel universe scenarios. Neither of the Gwyneth Paltrows in Sliding doors, for example, is able to benefit from the experience of her parallel self; each must plough their own furrow. Nor is Gully Foyle, in Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! in the same mould; though he is shaped and changed by his quest, and so achieves redemption, his is a linear journey of transformation and not a refinement by repetition of the same time segment.

Ian Watson's The Bloomsday revolution takes the same “repeated day" mechanism as Groundhog day but changes the outcome. While Phil seeks escape from the cycle, he achieves it only as a byproduct of progress to socialisation; for Bloomsday's players, escape from the cycle is itself the outcome and comes as a result of breaking, not learning, rules. Ursula K Le Guin's The darkness box is a more mythic, less explicit fiction; it is by no means clear that any escape or redemption takes place, although nor is it clear that they do not. Repetition, in The darkness box, is the subject and not the mechanism.

Kate Atkinson's Human croquet is a different approach again. Here, the repetitions take place within a dream space as Isobel, the protagonist narrator, lies in a coma. The end point is neither redemption nor escape, in the usual sense, but a coming to terms with both adulthood and reality by a troubled adolescent personality struggling to integrate family secrets, prejudices, ambivalence, complexity and repressed knowledge.

The time traveller's wife (for introduction to which I am indebted to Donna Kirking – thanks, Donna) appears, at first sight, to be unrelated. There is no repetition of one episode, over and over again; the two central characters, Clare and Henry, repeatedly meet in different combinations of ages. Clare is six years old when she first meets the 36 year old Henry; she is in her teens when he dies, though she doesn't see him die until after they are married. I nevertheless classify this along with the other “trial and improvement” fictions because, by repeatedly meeting in new combinations of innocence and experience, Clare and Henry shape each other towards the people who will eventually share a life. Henry can be seen as an equivalent of Groundhog Day's Phil, “improving” through the repeated necessity for relearning Clare.

None of this has gone anywhere; just a form of talking to myself about something that interests me. Redemption used to be a religious preserve; now it's secular, crossed from SF into generic literature.

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• Kate Atkinson, Human croquet. 1997, London: Doubleday. 0385405960

• Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger! (aka The stars my destination). 1956, London: Sidgwick & Jackson.
  

• Algis Budrys, Rogue moon. 1980, London: Fontana. 0006154093

• Charles Dickens, A Christmas carol, in prose : being a ghost story of christmas. 1843, London: Chapman & Hall.
  

• Richard Donner, Scrooged. 1988, USA: Paramount Pictures.

• Ursula K Le Guin, The wind's twelve quarters. 1976, London: Gollancz. 0575020709

• Audrey Niffenegger, The time traveller's wife. 2004, London: Jonathan Cape. 0224073087

• Harold Ramis, Groundhog day. 1993, USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation..

• *Tanita Tikaram, "World outside your window" on Ancient heart. 1988, WEA. 2292438772.

• Ian Watson, "The Bloomsday revolution" in Slow birds and other stories. 1987, London: Grafton. 0586071431

Footnote in a Strange land

I am still chuckling with appreciation over Unreal Nature's gently barbed Christmas Eve gift of a "Thank you (foot) note". While Ms Heyward has me in her sights, I need never be blind to my own pomposities^[1].

Through that post, I was delighted to discover three references to engrossing material about the footnote. Thinking onward from those, I pondered the footnote's move out of academia to become a postmodern component of fiction. Jasper Fforde's protagonist Thursday Next, when recruited as a "Jurisfiction" agent keeping law and order within published texts (Lost in a good book, et seq), learns several means of keeping in touch with her colleagues: one of which is the "footnoterphone" network. The book which this chain of thought sent me back to reread over the holiday break, however, was Susannah Clarke's wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. (JS&MN)

Clarke's use of footnotes is not, in the scale of things, huge. A quick and very approximate sampling of pages from JS&MN suggests a roughly 14:1 ratio between text and footnote – or, put another way, an average page carries roughly 340 words of text and 24 words of footnote. But the footnotes play a far more important part in the fiction than their weight implies.

JS&MN is, amongst many other things, an affectionate and playful commentary on both science and academicism; footnotes are central of this aspect. More important, though, is the rôle they fulfil in storytelling. Some of them are simple bibliographic attributions for (usually nonexistent) books such as "John Segundus ... Life of Jonathan Strange, pub. John Murray, London, 1829". Others provide a genuine factual aside such as "Merlin is generally assumed to have been imprisoned in a hawthorn by Nimue". Others again, though, tell whole subsidiary or complementary stories over several consecutive pages.

A brief reference to a legal precedent ("Tubbs versus Starhouse must stand as a warning to all magicians") on page 71 of my paperback copy and a conversational reference ("Look at Bloodworth") on page 73 trigger a pair of footnotes which, over four consecutive pages, tell stories of magicians, deceptions, fairies, abductions, supernatural domains, dissatisfied families, the Raven King, misunderstandings, coextensive geographies, malicious suits for inadvertent magical slander, and much more besides. (Click the thumbnail to the left of this paragraph for a view of page 73.)

What is already a disarmingly convincing reinvention of the Napoleonic wars acquires both substance and flavour from the detailed asides and anecdotes contained in its footnotes.

How to close this post is a puzzle which I feel too lazy to solve. Perhaps (in Growlery Green^®) with Clarke's last footnote of all, which manages to sum up the inconclusive qualities of many (though not Clarke's) footnotes:

There are very few modern magicians who do not declare themselves to be either Strangite or Norrellite, the only notable exception being Childermass himself. Whenever he is asked he claims to be in some degree both. As this is like claiming to be both Whig and Tory at the same time, no one understands what he means. (JS&MN, 0747579881, p.1000, footnote 69:5)

Long live the footnote – and good humoured sniping at it.

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• Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. 2004, London: Bloomsbury. 0747570558 (hbk), 0747574111 or 0747579881(pbk).

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1. It's actually debatable, on a quiet and otherwise unoccupied evening around the fireside, whether footnotes to a web document deserve that name or should be called endnotes instead. Footnotes appear at the foot (unsurprisingly) of a page; endnotes at the end of a text. The question probably has no answer, since a web page entry usually has no pagination as such. Perhaps they are both. I personally see mine as neither, in most cases; since they are usually bibliographic references (though this one is an exception) ... but I digress and become boring.

Feeling the way to moral philosophy 101

Better late than never ... since the 12th of October, I've been turning over in my mind various spin off from JSBlog's interesting and thought provoking Law and the Potter mythos and the intriguing source papers (especially Schwabach) which prompted it. I agree with Ray on almost everything he says; there is only one point on which I differ, and then it's an only partial difference in expectation of moral affect. Will Rowling's depiction of a society under a largely arbitrary emergency powers régime cause young readers to confront and think through legal issues, or will they just accept "the usual action story convention that a hero's violent actions against villains are rarely questioned"?

I certainly agree that that action story convention is harmful, and I also fear that it reinforces the strongman myth model of justice. However, I also suspect that the only way to tempt young minds away from this convention is to present them with situations where they are asked to consider it.

Children are naturally inclined to a warlord view of the world: "it's all ranks, being a boy, like the army" as David Mitchell's thirteen year old protagonist comments in Black Swan Green. At home, parents dictate rules; outside it, a popularity fuelled gang hierarchy does the same. Socialisation is a gradual weaning from this to a more polity based view – by communal pressure, by replacement of parent with police, or by thought through moral frameworks. Fiction which explicitly tells the young reader what to think will either lead to the second (replacement) or trigger rejection of the whole message. Inviting the reader to empathise with the protagonist's own moral dilemmas may not work at all; but it is the only hope of triggering them in that reader. If the reader admires Harry and identifies with him, then either the identification breaks or Harry's dilemma becomes the reader's. This, I think, is why Harry is presented as realistically indecisive; it is left to Ron to be the action advocate, Hermione the thinker (no accident that Ron and Hermione are mutually attracted and eventually marry).

In my Harry Potter and the war on terror post, just over a year back, I suggested that Harry's own arbitrary use of an unforgivable curse for trivial reasons (late in The deathly hallows) is, while very emphatically wrong, also realistic. Under stress, people become irrational and act on impulse. In danger, people react violently. In war, the fabric of socialisation is disrupted and people fall back on more visceral drives. I, at least, have to confess to having done things in the heat of the moment which I cannot defend – starting with the day when I deflected the attentions of a primary school bully onto my smaller friend. Harry (and, in theory, his readership) is, by the time of that action, eighteen – of military age, of voting age, of an age when he is required to take ownership of his society's strengths and failings. To pretend that such things don't happen would be to abdicate reality; to admit and confront them is more honest.

There are, I'm glad to say, a fair few authors around who try to pull off this valuable balancing act. Two examples which I've mentioned before are Philip Reeve's Mortal engines (et seq) and Jeanne DuPrau's The city of Ember (also et seq). Reeve's hero, Tom Natsworthy, is forced to kill those who would kill him, but never loses his revulsion or grief at that necessity – nor his agonised moral hesitation over it before the act. DuPrau's Doon and Lena try very hard to do everything within the laws of their community, only stepping outside those laws when they are left with no other moral choice – and in the sequel, The people of sparks, they are saddened by the accidental drowning of immoral and corrupt officials who sought to suppress them.

Film has much greater pressures on its bandwidth than text, and these moral subtleties are often amongst the first to be squeezed. In the film interpretation of The city of Ember, for instance, Lena and Doon spend little time on trying to work through their society's mechanisms before taking the law into their own hands, and the corrupt mayor meets prompt summary justice in the jaws of a giant mutant mole.

In none of these books are the moral issues explicitly sign posted; but they are, in my opinion, all the more powerful for that. Returning to Harry Potter, the almost nonexistent judicial and legal systems jostle with racism, compassion and redemption, the balance of security and liberty, and others too numerous to list. Ember and Engines each have their own, different but equally rich, spectra of moral issues. I'm glad of them, and glad that children are so captured by them. Both moral conscience and moral thinking are muscles, best developed by exercising them rather than instilling them. They are education at its best.

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David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. 2006, London: Sceptre. 0340822791 (cased) and [978]340839260 (pbk)

J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the deathly hallows. 2007, London: Bloomsbury. [978]0747591061 (hbk.)

Futures wot I have known

Moving away from alternative and parallel fictions to multiple possible futures, Julie Heyward's comment (to my "The rise of the machines" link) that robots must, necessarily, evolve as competitors to their makers is an interesting one.

As she says, it's been a frequent theme for science fiction – Gregory Benford, in particular, advancing it compellingly in the "Galactic Center" sequence of novels (if, towards the end, somewhat tediously – the second, Across the sea of suns, is enough to get the idea). Stanislaw Lem^* made it more fun, with his asteroid belt gang wars between washing machines and refrigerators, and the Terminator franchise runs along the same general set of assumptions.

I'm less convinced than Julie, however, that this is inevitable. I'm not even sure that it's the most probable scenario, though I agree that it may be. There are a number of parallel futures which seem, to me, possible. I don't offer these as being my preferred options, nor as ones which I believe superior; just tossing around ideas which her comment triggered in the rummage room I call a mind.

Perhaps true machine intelligence will never occur at all. I wouldn't, myself, put real money on this one but it's probably (a guess: I've not done a survey) the majority view. In that case, conflict doesn't arise and the whole question is, of course, irrelevant.

Perhaps machine intelligence will reach a threshold short of and/or different from the human, as it has for the most part in terrestrial biology. In that case (assuming that it arises from human design rather than spontaneously evolving, as ours seems to have done, from its environment), we should not be looking to competitor species or human slavery models but the various types of dominance (eg sheep, cattle) or mutual benefit (dog, cat) relationships. These have formed as a result of differences between potential competitors and the ability of humans to distort natural selection in directions favouring a desired interspecies relationship.

Perhaps the reverse will occur: machine intelligence, starting with a design bunk-up and early assistance, rapidly evolves beyond our own and we ourselves become the useful dog/cat (I don't want to think about sheep/cattle...) partners.

Perhaps, again given its origins in design by humans, machine intelligence will evolve in an analogue of symbiosis or biological cooperation with homo sapiens. We are, after all, designing machines to do what we cannot, and which cannot do things which we can. The best known science fiction example of this is Iain M Banks' sequence of "Culture" novels (for example, Excession), in which humans and machines coëxist as equal partners to mutual benefit in a single society. Greg Bear's Moving Mars also has a variant on the same idea: science, society, economy, are dependent upon compact supercomputers known as "thinkers" which, being immobile (in fact, unconnected with the outside world except through data input/output) and so are equally dependent on humans and are equal citizens. In Clarke and Baxter's Sunstorm, the developed internets of Earth and Moon in 2037 have citizen status on the same basis.

Perhaps which route is taken depends on the balance of development between military and peaceful developments of robots. Perhaps we will see a battle not between human and robot, but between pure machine and mixed human/machine societies.

Finally ... perhaps, as in Banks' The Algebraist, we will see the conflict which Julie anticipates but not Benford's envisaged outcome: machine intelligences driven into hiding and subterfuge by human xenophobia, along the lines of Wyndham's human mutants in The Chrysalids.

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* I don't remember, off hand, and can't quickly establish, which Lem short story collection contained this one ... if I find out, I'll come back and add a reference.

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• Iain M Banks, Excession. 1996, London: Orbit. 1857233948
• Ian M Banks, The algebraist. 2004, London: Orbit. 1841491551 (hbk), 1841492299 (pbk.)
• Greg Bear, Moving Mars. 1993, London: Legend. 0099263114 (hbk) 0099261219 (pbk)
• Gregory Benford, Across the sea of suns. 1997, London: Vista. 0575600551. (Originally 1984, London: Macdonald & Co. 0356102254)
• Arthur C Clarke. and Steven. Baxter, Sunstorm. 2005, London: Gollancz. 0575075317 (hbk) 0575076542 (pbk.)
  
• John Wyndham, The chrysalids. 2000, London: Penguin. 0141181478 (originally 1955, London: Michael Joseph.)