Due to the production lag of academic work appearing in public (peer review, people working for no remuneration, etc), some of the early work I’ve done on Science Fiction and Buddhism is only now emerging in print/pixels.
The first chapter of the slowly emerging book, which looked at Buddhist Reception in Pulp SF, appeared about 18 months ago, as I noted at the time.
Now two more chapters have emerged, long awaited and then arriving in tandem, like buses of legend. The first of these examines the crypto-Buddhism of Arthur C. Clarke, and can be found in a very excellent essay collection entitled Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays, published unsurprisingly to commemorate 100 years since ACC’s birth.
Contact the publisher Gylphi if it’s of interest, or else pick up a copy on Amazon or via your favourite brainy bookshop. Like all Gylphi books, it costs only a fraction of most academic texts.
Clarke on Clarke contained therein.
The second publication likewise focuses on a single author, this time Frank Herbert of Dune fame, and therefore it will come as no surprise that it’s entitled “The Dharma of Dune: Frank Herbert and Zen Buddhism”.
It can be found in volume one (of two) of Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them, or, to name it in its original language, Religioni fantastiche e dove trovarle: Divinità, miti e riti nella fantascienza e nel fantasy. If you follow that link, it will take you to the page of publisher Edizione Quasar where you will find both volumes, which contain an eclectic range of clever and considered takes on religion in a vast array of SFF texts, literary, televisual, cinematic and cultural.
Where can you find fantastic religion? In here!
Many thanks are due to the editors of both volumes, Paul March-Russell and Andrew Butler in the first instance, and Igor Baglioni, Ilaria Biano and Chiara Crosignani in the second.
You might reasonably wonder why all three of these chapters feature rather old SF. That’s partly because I’ve been working on this book chronologically, though I’d expect that the next chapter to emerge blinking into the light might jump a few decades to consider Cyberpunk. Don’t ask me when that will be though. The gestation period of academic texts is an arcane mystery. When it happens, I’ll be sure to let you know though.
How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today.
I’m not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the ‘Troubles’. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed.
Rather I mean the slightly earlier period of the early and mid-twentieth century, when Irish writing bestrode the world in the forms of giants like Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Behan.
What’s interesting, considering just these four (though we could add many other lesser names), is the varying personal reactions to the sectarian divide in Ireland. For the Protestant-raised, middle-class and cosmopolitan Beckett and Yeats, minor distinctions in flavours of Christianity was an irrelevance at best.
Yeats in later life veered into mysticism, theosophy, magick and the occult. Beckett by contrast tended to dismiss Christianity if not all religion entirely, referring to it as “all balls”, though conceding that it amounted to more than merely “convenient mythology”. Raised in the era they were, both Yeats and Beckett imbibed plenty of Christian dogma in school and wider culture however, and both demonstrate in their writing an easy and deep familiarity with Christian writings and the Bible.
Beckett, probably not considering conversion to Catholicism
By contrast, the Catholic, lower middle-class/working class Joyce and Behan seemed unable entirely to shake off the tribal Catholicism of their backgrounds and education. I was reminded of this recently when I re-encountered Behan’s hilarious take on Anglicanism:
Don’t speak of the alien minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII.
Behan wearing a rosette proclaiming what is undoubtedly the greatest sporting chant ever.
Behan was a self-described “daylight atheist”. This is often presented online in the form of a quote: “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic by night”. However, I’ve not found a reliable source for this variant. Anyhow, Behan clearly had not managed to transcend the petty sectarian rivalries which beset Ireland, and in this he echoes Joyce, who in the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes his alter-ego protagonist Stephen Dedalus refusing to consider conversion to Protestantism:
– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?
– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
We might consider this passage as a depiction in mature adulthood of his prissy adolescence were it not that it is echoed elsewhere in his work, such as the short story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners.
Joyce in his lengthy European exile.
It’s worth remembering too that Joyce and Behan both escaped the confines of petty Ireland if anything more completely than Yeats ever did, the latter becoming a senator in the newly independent Ireland whereas Joyce relocated permanently to Europe, while Behan spent much of his time in London and America. (Beckett like his mentor Joyce went to Europe and never looked back.)
So then, what fuels this seemingly pointless animus? The grounds of objection from both Joyce and Behan relate to an apparent illogicality inherent to Protestantism. Notably in both instances, there is no defence of Catholicism offered, merely a snide (and in Behan’s case, very funny) dismissal of Ireland’s second-largest faith.
And unlike Yeats, neither sought to construct a religious faith of their own, though in Joyce’s case at least there was an astonishing attempt to replace the religious impetus with an aesthetic one, succinctly underpinned as Joyce said, by “silence, exile and cunning.”
I think Behan’s piece (a translation as it happens from 16th century Irish) gives the game away here. In many locations, the first line of his translation is misquoted as referring to “your Protestant minister”. But Behan like his source material makes clear that while Anglicanism is being referred to, the issue is less the protest against Catholicism underpinning it than its alienness, that is, the fact that it was the faith of the foreign (ie English) overlords who governed Ireland from the time of bebollocked Henry to their present day.
In other words, it was an atavistic political tribalism rather than a theological objection. We still have those tribalisms in Ireland today, primarily in the North where those overlords remain in position, likely against their will and desire, due to the complexities of establishing a permanent and lasting peace. In the 26 counties of the Irish Republic however, these passages stand out as glaring anachronisms now.
And even in the North, the late great “famous” Seamus Heaney (like Yeats and Beckett a Nobel laureate) is best described as sociologically post-Catholic rather than a devotee of the creed of his birth. This runs counter to the opinions offered by some of his most astute critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edna Longley in particular of course, but is it unfair to point out that both critics came from Protestant backgrounds and hence saw the cultural references to Catholicism in Heaney’s work as more significant than it was simply because those references were alien to them in the same way that Protestantism was to Behan?
So, will you be converting to Protestantism, Seamus?
In other words, the sensitivities may be reversed here. Perhaps it is as readers that we detect these curious emphases. Perhaps we misconstrue the petty cultural rivalries of sectarianism in mid-20th century Ireland because religion played such a larger role in cultural life in those days, in ways that anyone under 50 is unlikely to recognise in Ireland today.
The great Irish writers never stop teaching us, and one of their lessons is that we must challenge ourselves as readers with regard to what we find striking in their writing. What we notice and what we do not says perhaps as much about us as it does about them. They hold a mirror to our souls, even if, like Behan, we are daylight atheists.
The Ponying the Slovos team were honoured to be able to contribute to the volume, and eagerly grasped the opportunity to compare Burgess’s Nadsat to that which features in Stanley Kubrick’s script (and thereafter, the movie itself.)
Alas, as is so often the case with academic research these days, the purchase price is not so cheap. My suggestion is to ask a friendly academic librarian to consider purchasing it on your behalf. However, I can offer you a flavour of what we discovered, and subsequently wrote about in the volume.
Last January, I flew out of Cappadocia and left academia, which was a strange thing for me to do really, since I’d aspired to be an academic for decades before I finally achieved it.
So what lured me away? The opportunity to work with Professor Yuval Noah Harari and his NGO Sapienship, a social impact company that aims to focus global attention on issues of global importance, including the climate crisis, technological disruption and the prevalence of war.
So what have I been doing with them for the past year? Largely, I’ve been working with my colleagues developing the Sapienship Lab which launches today. There’s a lot of content in there already and much more to come over the coming weeks and months. It even includes some audio dramas I wrote which I guess count as my first published science fiction in a while.
Most of the content is factual, educational, and intended to act as a guide through the labyrinth that is our fast-moving now. A lot is aimed at middle schoolkids through to undergrads, but we hope that everyone can learn something from it.
I miss teaching but I feel that in my new role I can still educate, albeit remotely, and contributing to the Lab is how I’m doing that now. I hope you’ll take a look at some of what we’ve prepared. It’s taken a lot of people a long time to put all this together.
And perhaps you might share it too with anyone who might be interested, which hopefully will transpire to be everyone, because we strongly believe that we’re all in this together and only by talking and listening to everyone will we manage to improve our world.
Over at Ponying the Slovos, our ongoing project on invented languages in art and literature, I wrote a series of posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few.
These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal of English literature, The Anachronist, and (almost all) the journal is free to read or download in the spirit of open access thanks to the publishers at ELTE, Hungary’s foremost university.
In this paper, Burgess is used to demonstrate that the role of invented languages in literature goes far beyond the existing well-explored territories of Science Fiction (SF) or High Fantasy, though they predominate therein, and can also be found in historical novels, and even realist fiction, as Burgess’s variegated novels reveal.
This is Ponying the Slovos’s second publication for 2023, and it’s not even two weeks in. We might need a little lie-down!
Anyhow, feel free to read the article here, and the whole journal, all of which will be of interest to Burgess scholars, may be accessed from this page.
This holiday period is an especially difficult one for many people, who will look up into the cold sky not in expectation of Santa Claus, but in despair. From wartorn Ukraine to the cost of living crisis in Europe, many people are suffering in ways that seemed unthinkable only a year ago.
This night, the seventh night of Hanukkah and the night before Christmas, pay a thought for those who are living insecurely and losing hope. There are many of them. All we have is each other, ultimately. Alas, some of us do not even have that. Here is the story of one such man, Maximilian Bern.
Maximilian Bern, (born Bernstein), was a Jewish German writer who died during the hyperinflation which brought the Weimar Republic to an end almost a century ago, in 1923.
He had been born in 1849 in Ukraine, in Kherson, where his father was a doctor. But then as now, people were leaving Ukraine, and Maximilian relocated with his mother to Vienna after his father died. Though the family fortune was lost, Maximilian’s first novel Auf Schwankem Grunde (“On Shaky Ground”), made his name, and he became a freelance poet, writer and novelist thereafter.
Bern is alas not much read today.
He lived for a couple of years in Paris, and for a time he was married to the renowned actress Olga Wohlbrück, who is now regarded as Germany’s first female movie director. She later left him for a playwright. However, until soon before his death in 1923, he lived an affluent life of artistic renown in Berlin.
In 1904, he published a collection of poems called Die zehnte Muse (“The Tenth Muse”), in which we may read two of his poems which now seem disturbingly prophetic. These are On a Dead Track, and Vagabond Song, which I have lovingly mistranslated below.
What do they appear to prophecy? His own death, which appears almost as a footnote or an aside in Frederick Taylor’s 2013 history The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class. Taylor had borrowed the anecdote about Bern’s death from a book by Otto Friedrich entitled Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the Twenties, wherein on page 126 we hear briefly about Bern’s fate.
Hyperinflation had destroyed Maximilian’s savings as it had so many others, and aged in his seventies, he was in no position to restore the family fortune a second time. He withdrew them all – over 100,000 marks – and spent the entirety of his wealth on a subway ticket, all he could now purchase. After riding one last time around the city, Bern withdrew to his apartment and starved to death.
Or, you are DEFINITELY the data they’re looking for.
Do you remember when AI was nothing to worry about? It was just an oddity, a subject of humour. But yet people with lots of money and power kept taking it extremely seriously. They kept training up AIs, even when they turned out to be hilarious, or racist, or just downright incompetent.
And then all of a sudden AI got good at things. It began to be able to draw pictures, or write basic journalistic-like factual articles. Then more recently, it began to write plausible student essays. I say plausible, even if it did seem to be doing so with artificial tongue placed firmly in virtual cheek, penning histories of bears in space.
Nevertheless, this was an example of the sole virtue which Silicon Valley values – disruption. And so everyone took notice, especially those who had just gotten disrupted good and hard. Best of luck to academic institutions, particularly those responsible for grading student work, as they scramble to find a way to ensure the integrity of assessment in a world where Turnitin and similar plagiarism software systems are about to become defunct.
And yet there are still some people who would tell you that AI is just a toy, a gimmick, nothing to worry about. And yes, as AI begins to get good at some things, mostly we are enjoying it as a new toy, something to play with. Isn’t it, for example, joyous to recast Star Wars as if it had been made by Akira Kurosawa or Bollywood?
(Answer: yes, it very much is, and that’s why I’m sharing these AI-generated images of alternative cinematic histories below):
Bollywood, long long ago, in a galaxy far far away…Akira Kurosawa’s version of Star Wars, as envisioned using Midjourney V4 by Alex Grekov
So where, if anywhere, is the dark side of this new force? Isn’t it fun to use the power of algorithms to invent these dreamscapes? Isn’t it fascinating to see what happens when you give AI an idea, like Kurosawa and Star Wars, or better again, a human-written script, and marvel at what it might produce?
(Answer: Yes, it is fascinating. Take for example this script written by Sapienship, inspired by Yuval Noah Harari, and illustrated by algorithm. Full disclosure: I wrote a very little bit of this.)
The one thing we all thought was that some jobs, some industries, some practices were immune to machine involvement. Sure, robots and automation might wipe out manufacturing and blue collar work. What a pity, eh? The commentariat for some time has shown little concern for the eradication of blue collar employment. Their mantra of ‘learn to code’ is now coming back to bite them on the ass as firstly jobs in the media itself got eviscerated and then so too this year did jobs in the software sector.
2022 tech sector job losses, Jan-Nov 2022.
But those old blue collar manufacturing industries had mostly left the West for outsourced climes anyhow. So who exactly would lose their jobs in a wave of automation? Bangladeshi garment factory seamstresses? Chinese phone assemblers? Vietnamese machine welders? (In fact, it turns out to be lots of people in Europe too, like warehouse workers in Poland for example.)
But the creative industries were fine, right? Education was fine. Robots and automation weren’t going to affect those. Except now they are. People learn languages from their phones rather than from teachers increasingly. (Soon they won’t have to, when automation finally and successfully devours translation too.)
Now AI can write student essays for them, putting the degree mills and Turnitin out of business, and posing a huge challenge for educational institutions in terms of assessment. These are the same institutions whose overpaid vice-chancellors have already fully grasped the monetary benefits of remote learning, recorded lectures, and cutting frontline teaching staff in record numbers.
What’s next? What happens when someone takes deepfakes out of the porn sector and merges it into the kind of imagery we see above? In other words, what happens when AI actually releases a Kurosawa Star Wars? Or writes a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or some additional Emily Dickinson poems? Or paints whatever you like in the style of Picasso? Or sculpts, via a 3D printer, the art of the future? Or releases new songs by Elvis, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Tupac?
Newsflash: we’re already there. Here’s some new tracks dropped by Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison and some other members of the 27 Club, so named because they all died at 27.
What happens, in other words, when AI starts doing us better than we do us? When it makes human culture to a higher standard than we do? It’s coming rapidly down the track if we don’t very quickly come up with some answers about how we want to relate to AI and automation, and how we want to restrict it (and whether it’s even possible to persuade all the relevant actors globally of the wisdom of doing so.)
In the meantime, we can entertain ourselves with flattering self-portraits taken with Lensa, even as we concede the art of photography itself to the machines. Or we can initiate a much-needed global conversation about this technology, how fast it is moving, and where it is going.
But we need to do that now, because, as Yoda once said in a movie filmed in Elstree Studios, not Bollywood nor Japan, “Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny.” As we generate those Lensa portraits, we’re simultaneously feeding its algorithm our image, our data. We’re training it to recognise us, and via us, other humans, including those who never use their “service”, even those have not been born yet.
Let’s say that Lensa does indeed delete the images afterwards. The training their algorithm has received isn’t reversed. And less ethical entities, be they state bodies like the Chinese Communist Party or corporate like Google, might not be so quick to delete our data, even if we want them to.
Aldous Huxley, in his famous dystopia Brave New World, depicted a nightmare vision of people acquiescing to their own restraint and manipulation. This is what we are now on the brink of, dreaming our way to our own obsolescence. Dreams of our own unrealistic and prettified faces. Dreams of movies that never were filmed, essays we never wrote, novels the authors never penned, art the artists never painted.
Lots of pretty baubles, ultimately meaningless, in return for all that we are or can be. It’s not so great a deal, really, is it?
Whereas last year the Oxford English Dictionary (with the somewhat American-sounding diminutive ‘vax’) and Merriam-Webster (with the more formal, and somehow British sounding vaccine) concurred on word of the year, this time they have diverged.
For the M-W, this year’s word is ‘gaslighting’, a not-especially-new term used to describe a kind of cruel psychological manipulation. However, the OED put their favoured options (which included a phrase and a hashtag!) to a public vote, and came up with ‘goblin mode’.
What is ‘goblin mode’, you may ask? Some Tolkienesque monstrous tendency to murderous behaviour?
Goblin Mode?
No, apparently it is a term of online usage which is defined as “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”
In other words, the kind of behaviour one expects from people who consider hashtags to be words and eschew responsibility by putting their work out to a vote.
I feel like the OED has started gaslighting me. I’m team Merriam-Webster until the goblin mode ceases in Oxford.
It’s been a while since I last published a mistranslation, so here’s The Iceberg, mistranslated from the poem by the late great Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski. It’s not the first of his I’ve egregiously mishandled. Regular readers may recall this travesty from earlier this year.
Having now done damage to his work twice, I will release Leminski from the clutches of this project and seek other subjects elsewhere. You, however, are advised to go and read as much of his poetry as possible.
One of the issues with trying to surf the zeitgeist is precisely that – you remain on the surface with no depth of understanding of any individual issue. So high is the noise-to-signal ratio nowadays that it is almost overwhelming for many people to ascertain what information IS relevant and important to their lives, and what is not.
It can be hard to find the time to think deeply about quickly moving events, or to link them correctly to one another. In fact, such are the time and cognitive pressures that many people end up succumbing to conspiracy theories which offer neat and totalising explanations for the state of the world, provide suitably nefarious-seeming scapegoats and attempt to rally the public to action.
Of course, a lot of this action devolves quickly into “send me money”, but at that point some people are already sufficiently relieved to find a handy explanation for everything, happy not to have to think deeply, and grateful enough to contribute to the professional liars.
Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes or easy answers. Not for the world, and not for those of us who live in it. And there are many ways to become confused, or to pursue dead-end fictions, in the attempt to comprehend the fast-moving reality we find ourselves in. Conspiracy theories are just the odious tip of a large iceberg of false information and fake news. Beneath the surface are many other attempts to explain the world simply, or to simplify it, most of which are not as nefarious as conspiracies, but are in some regards equally constructed and equally untrue.
Two terms which crop up often these days, though maybe not often enough in this context, are the multiverse and the metaverse. The multiverse refers to the idea, widely accepted by theoretical physicists, that our universe is not the only one, and instead exists in relation to an infinitude of other universes, some highly similar, some wildly different from our own.
Many universes – but isn’t this one enough already?
By contrast the metaverse is an as yet hazy idea quickly obtaining momentum among tech circles which proposes itself as the future of the internet, and seeks to displace or replace many aspects of contemporary life with a virtual reality alternative.
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of your future
So the multiverse is an expansive concept and the metaverse is a limiting one, but both seek to tackle the issue of explaining the complexity of the world by replacing it with something else. And they do so in different ways. While the metaverse is a collective effort by tech firms, Facebook (now renamed ‘Meta’) in particular, the multiverse is an idea poorly adopted from theoretical physics and science fiction novels which has grown, like conspiracy theories, in the corners of communication that the mainstream media do not reach primarily.
Already it seems that the brave new Metaversal world may not be about to materialise in quite the way its ‘imagineers’ were hoping. Only today, Facebook – sorry, Meta – announced swingeing job cuts across their company, which is undoubtedly informed by the one billion dollars PER MONTH they have been spending recently on developing Metaverse tech.
Over the past three decades, we have as individuals, societies and even as species, learned to adopt, adapt and accommodate the internet in our lives. But the prospect of a life spent primarily in virtual reality seems to be a bridge too far for many of us. We are not our avatars. We are not inputs into a global algorithm. We do not need to escape meatspace for metaspace.
But it seems some people do want to escape, though perhaps not into a corporate vision of virtual reality. After all, movies like The Matrix have warned the public to be wary of dreamscapes, especially when those dreams are programmed by others. Instead, they escape into their own dreams, where the complexity of reality can be argued away, in all its nuances and seeming contradictions, by the simple assertion that they have migrated between universes.
The growth of a subculture of people who appear to believe that they can traverse between universes is a particularly fantastikal form of failing to deal with how complex the world has become. It’s clearly not as nefarious as the various conspiracy theories circulating online, but of course any movement attracts shysters and wannabe leaders, in search of money or influence, and hence there are now people offering to teach others how to move between universes.
In one sense this is no less valid than teaching people how to chant mantras, say the rosary or engage in any other religious practice that is more metaphorical than metaphysical. But one of the catalysing aspects of online culture is the ability for people to find like-minded people. Hence conspiracy theorists can find communities where their toxic ideas are cultivated, while multiversers can source validation and endorsement from others who similarly seek to explain the anomalies of their memory or complexities of reality in the same way.
There are no doubt complex reasons to explain why so many people are subject to psychological phenomena like the Mandela Effect, but these explanations do not include watching YouTube videos on how to meditate your way into another universe while in the shower.
Both the multiverse and the metaverse offer simplistic and ultimately unsuitable resolutions to the ever-growing complexity of modern existence. Fundamentally, these escapist dreamscapes are coping mechanisms for dealing with this complexity.
The world is already too complex for any individual mind to comprehend, and probably too complex for even artificial intelligences to ever understand. But we can’t, or at least shouldn’t, escape it. Instead, we should try to understand it, and the best way to do that is to escape not from the world but from our online echo chambers.
If we can learn again to speak to one another, identify areas of agreement and try to find ways to foster collaboration despite disagreement, we stand a much better chance of improving our own collective futures.
At Sapienship, we believe everyone has a story to tell and all those add up to the story of us. We think everyone needs to be heard, and debated, and engaged with. It’s not easy, but it’s clearly the best way to resolve the major issues that face us, our planet and our reality.
We don’t need to hide in virtual realities or imagine alternative universes when the one we have is so rich with possibility and potential. Instead we need to come together to realise our hopes.
