Nugget of Pratchettology

A funny little article popped up in The Guardian today to say, "I haven't read any Terry Pratchett, but I know he's mediocre, not a genius. Everyone stop liking him!"

I don't think it's deliberate clickbait, really. It's more a sign of how saturated we are with clickbait: clickbait becomes a form through which you can channel a little temper-tantrum, whose shape would otherwise have been a harrumph, or going to wait in the car.

Anyway, if The Shepherd's Crown is one of the columnist's least favourite books he's never read, I thought I should share a listicle of my Top Ten Favourite Books I've Never Read:

1) Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
2) John Crowley, Little, Big
3) Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
4) Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper
5) Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet
6) Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
7) Shea and Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
8) M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
9) Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
10) Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

I can recommend them all unreservedly. Really unreservedly. I know you'd love them and I know I would too.

If we read them, they would change our lives. Everything does.

I want to be fair to Jonathan Jones. For reasons I won't frighten you with now, I actually think there's a lot to be said for exceptionally-fleeting engagements with books. There is an art of not-reading, just as there is an art of reading. Maybe there should be poetics, polemic and literary criticism of not-reading too.

But the article's silliest assumption (and Jones knows he's being a doofus) is its broad-brush division between "mediocre" and "genius," as if most people wouldn't want to place Pratchett somewhere in the middle.

And even if we do place him somewhere in the middle, that's only as a shorthand. Because literary value doesn't exist on some kind of spectrum or leader-board. There isn't a top spot. There isn't really any such thing as "genius." (Except maybe getting a double-headed blackbird to live on your hat: that's pure genius).

In 2005 Pratchett declined a Hugo nomination for Going Postal. Maybe it was because he wanted the Hugo Awards to be run as efficiently as Ankh-Morpork's postal service. Pratchett loved a well-run institution, and he didn't need that Hugo.

Literally a knight?

Pratchett also didn't really need literary criticism, but literary criticism does need him. It's worth talking about Pratchett's writing in an academic mode and/or in a fannish mode -- just not in a pontificating arbiter-of-taste mode. It's important to go beyond merely evaluating, and to really explore and interpret Pratchett's writing qualitatively. So with that in mind, here are some pointers to finish with, suggestions for both Further Reading and maybe even Further Writing.

The Pratchett meta-text is enormous, and bits of it are watchable, wearable, playable, etc. I have been a little surprised by how scant the core academic literature on Pratchett actually is, although I bet that's going to change. A lot of what's out there so far is also a bit . . . odd, idiosyncratic, rough-around-the-edges, though I really don't mean that pejoratively. I think this has to do with: (a) an oddness which always crops up in any literary criticism on comic writing; (b) academics who aren't primarily literary scholars, but who are Pratchett fans and manage to find a bridge to his work; (c) quite a lot of theses put online rather than adapted for publication, and quite a lot of undergraduate work.

L-Space maintains a link list of essays and analysis (and the L-Space wiki is itself an unremittingly dope apparatus criticus. I think these people have read the books). Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, ed. Alton and Spruiell (2014) is a recent edited collection where you could also go to for a fairly comprehensive bibliography. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (2008) ed. Andrew Butler seems to be currently the only other literary-critical collection on Pratchett, although there are useful books I think aimed at slightly more general audiences, including The Folklore of Discworld (2008) by Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, The New Discworld Companion (2008) by Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (2007) by Andrew Butler, Philosophy and Terry Pratchett (2014) ed. Held and South, and Pratchett’s Women: The Unauthorized Essays, by Tansy Rayner Roberts (from these blog posts). There's also the excellent Science of the Discworld series (1999-2013) by Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen.  Pratchett's own 2000 article, "Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories," on the relationship of his writing to folklore, has some interesting critical reflection. Dorota Guttfeld's chapter in Ideological Battlegrounds: Constructions of Us and Them Before and After 9/11, ed. Joanna Witkowska and Uwe Zagratzki, feels like a much-needed examination of the politics of Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork strand. I don't think Discworld 'does' 9/11, does it? I also liked Janet Croft’s ‘The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of the Means of Production in Pratchett’s Discworld’ (2014), which you can read all of on Academia.edu. All these people are actually just getting on and having a conversation about Pratchett, not blustering about whether or not it's worthwhile having a conversation.

Any other suggestions, recommendations? If I don't find a proper sympathetic-but-critical overview of race throughout the Discworld series soonish, I may just have REF up my own QED-bike. I pray to all the spirits (but not too hard) that nobody ever feels it necessary to write about the relation of Pratchett's narrativium to Baudrillard's hyperreal.

Finally, here's one big, blunt question. Pratchett is a satirist and a moralist, whose villains are usually fundamentalists, and whose heroes often show devotion to the rule of law. So are the politics of his work simply classical liberalism, perhaps with a special love for civil society? Does anything complicate that label -- "Pratchett is a classical liberal"?

*   *   *

Mansfield Park is my favourite Jane Austen. "Sir Thomas in the house!"

Earlier: posts about Pratchett.

Elsewhere:

In Response to Jonathan Jones and his Bullshit Article about Terry Pratchett
Sorry, Jonesy, But I Can Write for The Guardian and Love Terry Pratchett
Get Real. Jonathan Jones Is Just A Professional Troll
Terry Pratchett's books are the opposite of 'ordinary potboilers'
Jonathan Jones is a sneering priggish snob shocka
On Terry Pratchett and the art of comedy
Despite What Ignorant People Say, Terry Pratchett Is Destined For Enduring Fame

Where to start:

Stupid Obvious Hugo Question

Yo. The Puppies had a go at gaming the Hugo Awards but they lost resoundingly, and (I assume?) rules will change to make Hugo Awards a bit more resilient to gaming next time round. Let's see what happens next year! Yeah! ("Hi Sad Puppies 2016. Please roll 1d4 and vote only for the corresponding name ...")

Also, the full Hugo data came out and it became (mostly) obvious who was edged out of the shortlists by the Puppies slates. And some of those authors, and their friends & fans & whoever, are probably a little sad about that, though they're probably mostly looking on the funny side, or the bright side, or some other great side -- I don't know, the halloumi-flavoured side or something. Gah!

So, I'm wondering:

Would fandom be interested in holding a kind of one-off, informal, bolt-on prize, drawing on the same data? 

Kind of to see what would have happened? A special prize, just for this one weird year, where everyone who could vote in the Hugo Awards can vote again, but on short-lists where all the Puppies-slated nominees have been removed, and other authors bumped up to fill their spots?

(Or indeed, if possible, generating a set of shortlists for this year by running whatever rules will be used next year on the nomination data?)

Call these one-off awards the Hug0 Awards or something? Or Hugos Prime? Okay, probably those names are a bit close to the real thing, at least without some kind of official endorsement. So call them the Stalinist Disappearing Wrongthink Paint Happy Faces on Sad Puppies Awards? Whatever you called it, it might generate significant prestige! Or not! Yeah!

It would never be a perfect exercise. It's impossible to interpret and interact with the data as though the Puppies never happened at all. For instance, there's no way to figure out which Puppies-slated nominees might still have made it onto the ballot without the Puppies situation -- or at least, without full Puppies situation, with only discreet, informal bloc-building and virality effects -- and who knows, whether some of them might even have won if they hadn't withdrawn, or forged ahead all sticky and gross with Puppies licking, unable to draw love from a non-Puppies crowd. And there's also no way to be fair to whatever vaguely Puppies-friendly authors Puppies followers might have voted for who weren't included on the Puppies slates.

But you could do a pretty interesting approximation of an alternate timeline Hugos.

Is there appetite for that kind of thing? Is something like it already happening?

Probably not, I'm guessing? Better to move forward not back? Better to move left not right? Better to move mercy not nostalgia? Better to dwell in a floaty bittersweet ethereal Schrödinger's Hugos, where everyone who might have won in a way has won, and everyone on the long-list just shares in the ectoplasmic superpositioned rocket, with Noah Ward as the trustee, better that than NAIL EVERYTHING DOWN EXACTLY WITH ROCKETS? Better that than have most nominees wind up sad about losing in two timelines, and even the winners a bit disappointed that they won only on the wrong timeline?

Or maybe it'd be fun. Thought I'd ask.

*   *   *

Earlier posts: Quick Hugo Thought (in a very similar vein). Happy Puppies > ideas for reforming Hugos (which might also work for a kind of bolt-on award layer run on Hugo data).

Elsewhere: File 770. Wired on Hugos. We've Always Been Here Storify about that Wired article (which I think maybe has led to it being a bit amended?).

PS: There's a super-quick way of doing something a bit similar, which is just to assume the winner is whoever gets the most nominations but avoids being included on a Puppies slate. Or a variation: the winner is whoever the winner was except the No Awards are replaced with whoever got the most nominations but avoided being included on a Puppies slate.

PPS: Update! Doing an ickle bit of research, I come across GRRM's Alfie Awards, and the poor ol' Paranoiappies who have doxxed them as the SECRET REAL SJW HUGO AWARDS. Because, you know, a secret Hugo you can't tell anybody about would definitely be as good as a normal one. Better. Shhhhh. Also, I come across Jay Maynard's proposal for a Trust Level Trophy.

PPPS: Update! A Kickstarted anthology. Yeah that's a better idea.

SFF names #7: Shevek

Wickes: How do you choose your names? it seems to me you have a hodgepodge, or is that deliberate? 

Le Guin: I don't think you'll find too much hodgepodge in the phonemes of any language that is implied by the names in a certain island or a certain country in my books. I tried to have fairly clearly in mind what pool of sounds they used because it bothers me very much in other people's fantasies when they have a hodgepodge of sounds that don't go together. 

(Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Carl Freedman, p. 23)

Ursula Le Guin is sometimes given as an example of a SFF author with a rare skill for naming. (Anne McCaffrey is supposedly the other end of the spectrum. The Evil Overlady solved a pressing problem in 2007: all apostrophes in the middle of fantasy names are to be pronounced "boing").

It is interesting, therefore, that the founders of Le Guin's ambiguous syndicalist anarchist utopia in The Dispossessed (1974) seem to care so little for names. Parents do not give names. Names are randomly generated and assigned by a computer:

“Shevek,” he said mildly. “No ‘doctor.’”
“Is that your whole name — first and last?”
He nodded, smiling. [...]
“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”
“Yes.”
“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”
“Why dreary?”
“It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”
“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”
“No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”
“While I live. There were others, before me.”
“Relatives, you mean?”
“We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don’t know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a ‘shevek.’” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”
Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”
“Well, we have discovered methods...”
After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. “Yes, perhaps you are uncouth! ... Did they all take made-up names, then, and learn a made-up language — everything new?”
‘The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic people, I suppose.”
“And you’re not?”
“No. We are very pragmatic.”
“You can be both,” she said.
He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her. “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

(Chapter 7)

This isn't really indifference, of course. The founding utopians were very interested in linguistic determinism, the idea that language enables and constrains the possibilities of thought and experience.

The founding utopians knew that names were a special kind of language, and they recognised the danger of names. Unless names are constantly redistributed, they start to accumulate reputations. Names become markers of status or faction. Shevek marvels at Dr. Atro, a hawkish conservative from the neighbouring capitalist society of A-Io:

Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of seven thousand acres and fourteen villages in Sie Province, the most rural region of A-Io. He had provincial turns of speech, archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues and crawling politicians.” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek — an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Unas. 

(Chapter 5)

So how many bi-syllable, non-hodgepodge, non-bong! names are possible? Well it all depends, but let's assume a monosyllable can have one of about 80 onset phonemes, one of 12 vowel phonemes, and one of 100 coda phonemes. That might work out to about 9.2 billion, which is interestingly where some demographers see world population peaking some time this century. I'm sure my math is at least as dodgy as theirs.

But the proposition is not only mathematical: it is also cultural. The preoccupation with scale and boundary is inscribed into all Annareans names. Every new Annarean you meet reminds you of the permutational plenitude, the almost -- but not quite -- endless diversity contained within certain inflexible shared limits. Shevek meets a Shevet: they fight. How would Shevet have felt had he met a Shevet?

Somewhat relatedly, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn shares this in How Forests Think:

Another common form of perspectival joking in Ávila, as well as in other Runa communities, occurs when two people share the same name. Because I share my first name with a man in Ávila the running joke was that his wife was married to me. [...] His older sister jokingly addressed me as turi (sister’s brother), and I addressed her as pani (brother’s sister). Similarly, a woman who shares my sister’s middle name called me brother, and one with my mother’s name called me son. In all these cases shared names allowed us to inhabit a shared perspective. It allowed us to create an aff ectionate relationship despite the fact that our worlds are so different.

Despite the huge number of possible names, and despite the Millennium Bug style fixes we can imagine for Annareans's naming computer, this utopia (in sharp contrast for instance to the constitutively imperialist utopia dreamed up by Iain M. Banks a decade later) has an inner commitment to the enclave form. It is a utopia that doesn't think it can be endlessly scalable. Okay, maybe this is a utopia that could be for everyone. But perhaps only for certain values of "everyone."

Earlier:
SFF names #6: Buhle
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie

Sad Chess

I made a weird little pamphlet called TEN LAWS which comes free with, like, the first 25 or so copies of Sam Walton's poetry pamphlet Strange House. Get 'em at Sad Press.

UPDATE: all out!

SFF names #6: Buhle

From the Department of Caffeine & Overthinking: Cory Doctorow's "Chicken Little" is explicitly a response to Frederick Pohl, but I wonder if he ever read Larry Niven's short story "Convergent Series." Because the two tales are vibrating pretty hard in my head.

Then again, so is everything else.

"Convergent Series" is a breezy, no-frills story, built around its twist. Besides that twist, the most memorable thing about it is (another kind of twist) the rotation of appearing demons by 90 degrees. Pentagrams are supposed to be drawn on walls, not on the floor!

A pentagram was a prison for demons. Why? I'd thought of the five points of a pentagram, and the five points of a spread-eagled man ...

The Quadrillionaire

Cory Doctorow's "Chicken Little" is the story of an intrapreneur, Leon, who struggles to do business with a quadrillionaire person-in-a-vat, Buhle.  Buhle is practically immortal, and a special kind of stinking rich: the kind that starts to stink less like a person, more like a corporation, or like a state, or like money itself. What could Buhle possibly want that Leon has to give?

Well, that corpus of Buhle suspended in his vat (see note) is very suggestive of Niven's profane flesh affixed to the network nodes in "Convergent Series." Perhaps Leon could have progressed the deal more quickly, if he'd noticed that he was actually in a pact-with-the-devil story.

Buhle thirsts for Leon's soul or, in more properly Satanic fashion, he thirsts for everybody's souls. "I am Leon, for we are many." Yes, it's been Buhle seducing Leon all along: Buhle wants Leon's help with mass soul-ectomy, reprogramming humankind via a bioweapon to give us the narrow preference-realizing rationality of homo economicus.

One meaning of Buhle (in German) -- admittedly, probably not the meaning that is behind the surname, etymologically -- may be relevant here. Buhle can mean the paramour, the illicit lover, the one who does not publicly declare desire. "The Leon shall lie down with the goat": Buhle as devil-lover recalls one described in 17Cth France, whose penis "was of two parts, half of iron, half of flesh, and similarly his testicles" (De Lancre, Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, 1612).

There are so many smart conceits in "Chicken Little," you could almost miss the one at the end where Leon and Ria outwit the devil. That's where the comparison with Niven's story really helps to clarify things.

Niven imagines some fairly arbitrary demonic bureaucracy to make his twist possible. The fiend grants a wish, vanishes back to Hell to get a stamp from his supervisor, then rematerializes inside the pentagram to scoop up the nameless narrator's soul. But Niven's narrator foxes his fiend by wishing to freeze time, and then re-inscribing the pentagram somewhere special:

A cheery bass voice spoke out of the air. "I knew you'd move the pentagram. Made it too small for me, didn't you? Tsk, tsk. Couldn't you guess I'd change my size?"

[...] 

He was a small red star.
A buzzing red housefly.
Gone. 

[...]

Eventually he'd look down and see the pentagram. Part of it was in plain sight. But it wouldn't help him. Spread-eagled like that, he couldn't reach it to wipe it away. He was trapped for eternity, shrinking toward the infinitesimal but doomed never to reach it, forever trying to appear inside a pentagram which was forever too small. I had drawn it on his bulging belly.

"Chicken Little" apparently ends on a cliffhanger, but I think we get pretty heavy hints that Buhle will never roll out his brain-rewiring bioweapon. Buhle's comeuppance is of the same flavour as Niven's demon's: his spurious omnipotence can be defeated only by a kind of iterative move.

Buhle is persuaded to try a version of his own bioweapon on himself. Leon thereby inscribes the market logic in which Buhle is embedded into Buhle himself, and Buhle starts to shrink away to zilch. As Ria has already explained, homo economicus is not homo entreprenaurus:

“Evolutionarily, bad risk assessment is advantageous.”
Leon nodded slowly. “Okay, I’ll buy that. Makes you entrepreneurial—”
“Drives you to colonize new lands, to ask out the beautiful monkey in the next tree, to have a baby you can’t imagine how you’ll afford.”

Buhle has always been the quintessential entrepreneur, because he can stomach two contradictory ideas: that the market knows best, and that the thing to do with the market is to endlessly disrupt it.

Disrupt: no matter how many baby monkeys die in the process! Disrupt: no matter how many entrepreneurial monkeys following similar high-risk strategies have perished (along with all their genes)!

Why does Buhle agrees to reprogram himself as someone who will never want to reprogram anybody? Leon exploits his blind spot, his survivorship bias. We are all a little prone. But a quintessentially entrepreneurial monkey like Buhle can't help but attribute his repeated successes to something other than chance. He cannot believe that there are countless others who have taken similar stupid gambles, and that he just happens to be the tail end of the bell curve.

Or the 'Buhle curve.' Which brings us to the word that is behind the surname Buhle, etymologically speaking. The name Buhle. It probably signifies a rising of the land, a hill, butte or knoll. Like a belly. A demon's bulging belly.

*

Note: Or, like I suggested earlier, Buhle Inc. suspended in its VAT.

Elsewhere: Jeff Lint's belly fiction.

Earlier:
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie

The Gold Touch

ONCE upon a time, there lived a very rich man, and a king besides, whose name was King Midas; and he had a little daughter, whom nobody but myself ever heard of, and whose name I either never knew, or have entirely forgotten. So, because I love odd names for little girls, I choose to call her DANG!-ADJUTANCY!-CLOTH!-LATTICE!-REAL-TALK!-NOCTAMBULIST!-LIGHTNING-STRIKE!-DOOGY-WOOFY-YOOYY-MISSY-GIRL-NAME-ENVELOPE-TRICE-ANKLES-NNNOW!-NOW!-ALICE!-ARABRONCHIUM!-THE-ENVIRONMENTAL-HUMANITIES!-ONLY-FANCIER!-SPARAH!-PRECEPTORY!-MOUNTWEAZELS!

This King Midas was fonder of gold than of anything else in the world.

THE END

Marta & the Demons

My near future SF novelette Marta and the Demons is now up on Smashwords as well, and for the time being it's free.

I am the VAT thy God! -- thoughts on sales-fi

Two pieces of short SF about selling stuff.

1.

David D. Levine’s short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ (which I read in Hartwell and Hayden's big Twenty-First Century Science Fiction) focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.

Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.

Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.

That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture, 1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).

We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.

Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.

Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.

2.

Doctorow’s novelette ‘Chicken Little’ appears in the same anthology, and also follows a salesman, Leon, into a difficult market. But here, I think, things manage to be genuinely a little stranger.

Leon works for Ate, a corporation whose opulent fortunes are entirely based on one previous sale, and are now looking to make their second. Nobody at Ate knows what they sold last time. It's a well-kept secret. Better than well-kept: deliberately lost, forever. They do have a general idea of the type of customer they sold it to:

The normal megarich got offered experiences [...] The people in the vat had done plenty of those things before they’d ended up in the vats. Now they were metastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling solution of a hundred vast machines that laboriously kept them alive amid their cancer blooms and myriad failures. Somewhere in that tangle of hoses and wires was something that was technically a person, and also techincally a corporation, and, in many cases, technically a sovereign state. (p.535)

Here we encounter a connection, which crops up pretty frequently when fantastic literature thinks about economics: that is, a connection between capital and living, disaggregated bodies:

“The monster in the vat. Some skin, some meat. Tubes. Pinches of skin clamped between clear hard plastic squares, bathed in some kind of diagnostic light [...] Eyes everywhere else. [...] I looked away, couldn’t make contact with them, found I was looking at something wet. Liver. I think.” (p.548). 

Compare that with the many wriggly legs of Terry Pratchett's Luggage (a diabolic avatar of Echo-Gnomics) in the Discworld novels, or the mashed-up flesh which Marx points out is the real substance of which all commodities are made (“human labour in the abstract . . . mere congellations, semisolid, tremulous comestible mass, Gallarte, of homogeneous human labour” (Sutherland 2008)), or, of course, Adam Smith's monstrous Invisible Hand.

These immortal quadrillionaires are capital personified, referred to as monsters, gods, and at one point, “the fortunes in the vats” (p.533).

The equivocation in first of the above-quoted passages over sovereignty – “in many cases” (q.v.) – is also worth noting. “The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the shift from state power to market power” (Susan Strange, Mad Money, p.183). Somewhat distinct from the questions of how market power operates, and the ways in which they do or could serve human needs, there is controversy over the extent to which market power remains embedded in and limited by state power. The historical and ontological relationships between states and money is also complex and controversial: very briefly and broadly, chartalist accounts of money tend to emphasize money's unit of account function, and see the relationship between money and state as crucial, whereas the metallist accounts emphasize money’s function as a medium of exchange, and argue that money can emerge and operate independently of state action. These issues are complicated by the fact that the ingredients of sovereignty vary state-by-state: China, Greece, ISIS, Luxembourg, Somalia, and the United States of America, to pick a few, are not all states in the same way.

‘Chicken Little’ offers us a glimpse of Mammon, of the monetary sublime, of capital purified and personified, and so it confronts this difficult question: is what we see still mingled with state power? Is capital power by its very nature entangled with state power? Or does capital in its fiery, purest form finally shrug off the state altogether?

Finally, an answer!

Or . . .

One sharp approach is to allegorize all the ambivalence, equivocation, frustration and controversy itself -- which is what Doctorow goes ahead and does. 'Chicken Little' tells us that in many cases, the people in vats are "technically sovereign states" -- but not in all cases, and the assertion is in the same breath as an allusion to corporate personhood, something we all know to be at least a bit unsavory, and probably completely ludicrous.

There's also another reference to a person in a vat as a country unto himself, but it has a kind of metaphorical, "no man is an island, wait, this man is a big scary quadrillionaire island" vibe to it.

But the novelette's most interesting move in this respect involves a bit of wordplay, centred on the one way in which the people in vats (they're most frequently referred to in that way, "the people in vats," "the quadrillionaire in the vat," "the old thing in the vat") still somehow come across as vulnerable. Buhle, the one person in a vat whom we meet, is essentially on life support. Despite his no doubt endless state-of-the-art fail-safes and back-ups, he feels unpluggable. He may be pure money, but he's nothing without his vat.

Personified capital's continued reliance on the state is thus inscribed, punningly, into its very name -- PERSON IN A VAT -- through an allusion to one of the state's more subtle and pervasive forms of extrusion, which makes itself felt in every "pure" market dyad, if only by its conspicuous absence. VAT: Value Added Tax. Money is not really money without the support of the state's taxonomization and taxation of our material existence.

There is some thematic movement in the second part of the novelette. But Doctorow isn’t abandoning one set of themes for another, so much as rapidly orbiting to a new vantage point. And that’s something I’ll deal with, probably, in the next blog post.

3.

PS: Compare Jack Vance's 1961 story, 'The Moon Moth' . . .

Thissell came to a breathless halt in front of the hoslter. He reached for his kiv*, then hesitated. Could this be considered a casual personal encounter? The zachinko perhaps? But the statement of his needs hardly seemed to demand the formal approach. Better the kiv after all. He struck a chord, but by error found himself stroking the ganga. Beneath his mask Thissell grinned apologetically; his relationship with this hostler was by no means on an intimate basis. He hoped that the hostler was of sanguine disposition, and in any event the urgency of the occasion allowed no time to select an exactly appropriate instrument. He struck a second chord, and, playing as well as agitation, breathlessness and lack of skill allowed, sang out a request: "Ser Hostler, I have immediate need of a swift mount. Allow me to select from your herd."

 The hostler wore a mask of considerable complexity which Thissell could not identify: a construction of varnished brown cloth, pleated gray leather and, high on the forehead, two large green and scarlet globes, minutely segmented like insect-eyes. He inspected Thissell a long moment, then, rather ostentatiously selecting his stimic,** executed a brilliant progression of trills and rounds, of an import Thissell failed to grasp. The hostler sang, "Ser Moon Moth, I fear that my steeds are unsuitable to a person of your distinction."

 Thissell earnestly twanged at the ganga. "By no means; they all seem adequate. I am in great haste and will gladly accept any of the group."

The hostler played a brittle cascading crescendo. "Ser Moon Moth," he sang, "the steeds are ill and dirty. I am flattered that you consider them adequate to your use. I cannot accept the merit you offer me. And"—here, switching instruments, he struck a cool tinkle from his krodatch† —"somehow I fail to recognize the boon companion and co-craftsman who accosts me so familiarly with his ganga."

 The implication was clear. Thissell would receive no mount. He turned, set off at a run for the landing field. Behind him sounded a clatter of the hostler's hymerkin— whether directed toward the hostler's slaves or toward himself Thissell did not pause to learn.

 * Kiv: five banks of resilient metal strips, fourteen to the bank, played by touching, twisting, twanging.
** Stimic: three flutelike tubes equipped with plungers. Thumb and forefinger squeeze a bag to force air across the mouthpieces; the second, third and fourth little fingers manipulate the slide. The stimic is an instrument well adapted to the sentiments of cool withdrawal, or even disapproval.
† Krodatch: a small square sound-box strung with resined gut. The musician scratches the strings with his fingernail, or strokes them with his fingertips, to produce a variety of quietly formal sounds. The krodatch is also used as an instrument of insult.

What counts as "published"?

AM I PUBLISHED YET. HOW ABOUT NOW. HOW ABOUT NOW. IS THIS PUBLISHED. IS THIS PUBLISHED. HOW ABOUT THIS.

Honestly I'm super-busy today so I hereby promise myself I will not spend more than ten minutes on this blog post. I will time myself.

What counts as "published"?

Well, obviously, you decide!

The law has to decide sometimes too. What does the real law say?

Well, something I just Googled in thirty seconds, without properly checking it out, suggests that the legal definition of publication in the USA is:

“the distribution of copies [...] of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies [...] to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not itself constitute publication.”

AND THAT'S THE REAL LAW.

Hmm, so does that cover when you post something on a blog? Is that a "transfer of ownership" etc. which counts as published, or is it merely a "public performance"? Well, I'm assuming it does count, because the file that is downloaded onto your computer is a transfer of ownership. Ownership of the digital file, not of the rights in the work, is what matters here. That makes good sense: I couldn't get a court order for you to delete a file you've saved from All That Is Solid Melts Into Aaargh! just because I wrote the words that are in it! (But if anyone knows better, please tell me about it).

Courts can be expected to navigate through any murky territory by making regular reference to competition. If something has been maybe-published, and the courts were trying to figure out "well heck has it been published or not?" they'll usually pay attention to whether the maybe-publication hurts the commercial opportunities enjoyed by the definite-publication. If the work in question had appeared in a different version, for example, the law on originality and materiality (labour and skill or judgement etc.) might come into play.

So much for the law. But what really interests me here is the extra-legal definitions of "published" we make up -- or could make up -- for our own uses, informed by the sense that "the public" and "the market" are not self-evident incontestable realities.

That is, I'm interested in the definitions of "published" we could make up when we fully realize that we can make them up.

In making up our own definitions of "published," we should be striving to keep focused on the nitty-gritty deets of why publishing things is valuable and worthwhile -- who actually edited or proofed or typeset it, who actually read how many pages, how do they actually feel, what do they actually learn or think or forget or write or say or do as a result, and how do you actually feel about whatever it is you've done with those words? -- and of course, how much you actually get paid for it, what you can actually put on your CV or whatever? We shouldn't be thinking of publication as crossing a magic line (not to buy into the expression "of publishable quality").

From time to time you get that in writers' groups and workshops: "Oh, you're a writer. Are you published?" I understand the impulse to get a better sense of how writing fits into a person's life, but it does seem to pose the question in a misleading way. (Maybe "how do you publish?" would be better? Not sure!)

Let me take a step back. Here is a pretty intuitive pair of individually sufficient conditions for "publication," which I think a lot of magazines and sites use:

(1) If there was ever a time when "anyone" could buy access, then it's been published. Cf. Kickstarter and, especially, Patreon.

(2) If there was ever a time when "anyone" could see it -- if you've put it up on your blog -- then it's been published.

So if either of those things have happened, you could say, you've totally published.

The scare quotes are because, obviously, the "anyone" isn't really "anyone alive on the planet," it's a much more narrow "anyone": shaped by literacy, digital divide, leisure time, disposable income, languages spoken, etc.

These two criteria might be important, for example, in the relationship between a magazine or a podcast and an author, if the former were trying to figure out whether to pay for first rights or reprint rights. I think using these criteria is perfectly okay, if a bit stern. In fact, I think being a bit stern with a threatening and quite possibly ultimately destructive unbundler / disintermediator like Patreon is a sensible thing to do. (Although there may be more weird & creative approaches to dealing with it too. Idk, stuff like this).

But here's a list of questions / counterexamples, which draw those two criteria into question.

I'm not posing them as some kind of attempted take-down or weird sea-lioning or whatever -- just, hopefully, bringing out the ways in which those criteria are deliberate constructs, based practical working hypotheses, with particular rationales and particular effects -- and so bringing out ways in which they could be constructed differently, if we felt like it, or could see some use in doing so.

(1) What about people who have done open calls for beta readers, e.g. on Twitter? "Anyone" could see such a call, and have been e-mailed a copy. So it perhaps meets one of those two criteria, but it doesn't "feel" published, does it?

(2) What about authors who maintain a regular pool of beta readers, e.g. on LiveJournal? Or is really prolific with review copies?

(3) What if you publish it on your blog, but your blog's private? What if it's private, but with hundreds or thousands of subscribers -- what if it gets more hits than the webzine you're submitting it to? The webzine probably won't count it as published, but it does feel published to me.

(4) What makes the difference between a private blog or e-mail list, and an online forum which requires you to register as a member? What if the forum has certain membership requirements, does it still count as published? What if they're really strict -- say it's just for members of your class -- does it count then?

(5) If the difference between "privately circulated" and "publicly available" doesn't come down to the number of readers, perhaps it comes down to the author/publisher's theoretical ability to approve access on a case-by-case basis. So what if your blog's private but you'll invite anyone who goes to the trouble of e-mailing you ("aha! the bouncer was a scarecrow!")? In fact, what if you make it a solemn oath that you will invite anyone who asks? Is it fair to say that whatever is on there is now "published"? Or what if you make a big fuss about your right to exclude somebody who looks dodgy, but in practice have never exercised it? In those cases, should the texts count as published? What if you just e-mailed it to yourself, but told everyone the password?

(6) Then there are the silly Sorites paradox-style thought experiments. What about a post that was live for one second, then deleted? What about two seconds? How many seconds is "published"?

(7) What if "anyone" could buy it, or "anyone" could see it, but your analytics tell you nobody did? Or what if hardly anybody did? What if  the number of people who saw it mean its reach is comparable to something that had been circulated in a crit group, or among beta readers? (If I were an editor, and I trusted an author who told me this, I'd be very inclined to treat their work as unpublished! But I am not an editor, and I do not trust anyone, and my heart does not beat but hisses).

(8) And/or should barter, gift economy, reciprocity, non-standard currencies be treated any differently? What if there was a huge forum, a bit like a social media site for writers, where your activity got rewarded by virtual points (compare e.g. Patreon Good) -- would "transactions" denominated in WriterCoin count as money changing hands?

(9) Is the point that it's been published if people you don't know have had a look at it? Who you know and who you don't is a funny old thing, especially online. If you have a Patreon and only a few supporters, and you and they are active on your Patreon page, they may well become more like a crit group / friends. In fact they may eventually understand you better than anyone including maybe your dog? Shouldn't we differentiate between a Patreon which has a rich little community like this, and a Patreon which is operating much more like a small market? (Cf. Polanyi, disembedding etc.).

Okay! Yeah!

(PS: So the next fun thing to do might be to make up some more exotic rights and licensing arrangements. For instance, a publication could decide that it pays "Signal Boost Rights Rates" for some fiction which it really just wants to get out there: the deal with those could be, you automatically license reprint rights to anyone else who pays the same Signal Boost Rights Rates to the author as you did. It would be a way for publications to tacitly compete with each other on some stories, while tacitly collaborating with each other to signal boost others. That's kind of how the press operates: sometimes it's about an exclusive, but sometimes it's about getting a political agenda out there, and you want your competitors running the same story. Here's another one: a publication could purchase "You Get Going We'll Catch You Up Rights," which actually requires that the author to have sold a certain number of copies within a specific timeframe -- not too many and not too few, just enough to prove to the editors that the story has some traction. (Compare how translation rights tend to work now). But those are just two small and not very great ideas. Earlier I argued that the Hugo Awards voting system itself should be fantastical and/or science fictional, because why not? And the same could be done for rights. So the next fun thing to do might be to make up even a quasi-mathematical Total Possible Publication Rights Space. Now we're talking).

(PPS: One of the reasons I'm interested in that is because I've been involved in micropress poetry publishing for a few years, and I know that: (a) printing out 1600 A4 pages, folding 100 pamphlets & "binding" them with a long-armed stapler, and giving them to your friends, can be a major literary event whose reverberations permanently remake the literary landscape; (b) or you can sell 200 books and not a single one of your readers will read more than a few sentences, plus they'll hide the fact from you; (c) you can put a lot of time and effort into editing e.g. a digital magazine and never know what, if any, difference your curation has made, compared to if the contributors had simply posted their poems on their own blogs; (d) aaaand fwiw I don't always feel convinced by the distinctions usually offered between self-publishing, indie publishing, vanity publishing, boutique publishing, etc.; & (e) aaaaaand come to think of it, back in the SFF world, it all feels a bit relevant to Jonathan McCalmont's BSFA-nominated (including by me!) moan last year about the publication ecology of short SFF fiction. But maybe that's all by the by).

(PPPS: Here's Neil Clarke laying out some clear guidelines about what Clarkesworld considers counts as publication).

Yeah! Aargh!

Twenty-one twenty-four thirty-two thirty-six minutes. Not bad. Kind of bad.

Marxist Science Fiction Studies

According to Mark Bould, because science fiction rarely addresses “the economic dimensions of social totality” it leaves a negative space which “is often primarily, if unwittingly, bound by the structures, potentials and limits of capital” (Bould in Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), p.4).

According to this approach, fantastic literature, and science fiction especially, has a particular mode of telling us about the historical moments which produce it. For the most part – and despite the importance to science fiction of pedagogic essayistic or dialogic inserts (info-dumps) – this mode isn't overt or deliberate. Teasing out science fiction's knowledge requires interpretation that can see the text’s “negative space”: that is, which is alert to a variety of allegorical figurations, psychic transferences and disguises, symptoms, inversions and negations, and lacunae and aporia.

Behind such thinking, there is also the excellent intuition that it is difficult to directly acquire and sustain knowledge of the economic dimensions of social totality. It is not just for the extra challenge that we try to discover such knowledge in certain kinds of cultural production: it is because we think we have good reason to believe that it will be more discernible there than elsewhere.

For Bould, the reason that science fiction reliably produces these rich negative spaces is that it does not “take place in a world which pretends to straightforward mimesis” and it therefore cannot help but foreground its own internal consistency. Reading science fiction implies a continuous process of identifying fantastic elements and trying to relate them to each other and to its less fantastic elements. The systems which are thereby produced tend to “impact against material reality,” sort of in the sense that material reality leaves scuff-marks and indentations.

In short, material totality falsifies itself through ideology, and one of the best ways of exposing it is by studying the false totalities of fantastic literature.

There are some elegant ideas there, and they aren't just Bould's. I think that theoretical approaches of this kind underpin a great deal of science fiction scholarship (especially Marxist of course), and a great deal of that scholarship is very useful. It's roughly the sort of thing I did in my sprawling review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think we should keep doing it, too!

But the paradigm has been creaky for a while. Here are some of the main issues.

First, why should tacit knowledge of social totality be so reliably present in cultural production at all, let alone at such a convenient grain and scale, and in association with so many striking shibboleths? Is it not just as likely that at, any one moment, the most significant features of social totality may have left no traces, or a pattern of partial and misleading traces, in whatever work of fantastic literature happens to be under inspection?

Well, good progress can be made on those questions just by setting aside the habit of scholarly squeeing -- where valorizing the text and valorizing the institution of text-valorizing comes first -- and thinking carefully and realistically about ideology (and by looking at what theorists of ideology, especially Althusser, have actually said, not what we tell undergraduate students they said in the hope of being proved delightfully and invigoratingly wrong). One rule of thumb is: the author (and perhaps some editors) made this text, so let's think about how the supposed tacit knowledge was preserved intact through that particular bottleneck.

Second, how should we approach science fiction which does attempt, in one way or another, to address the economic dimensions of social totality? When it comes to economics, it is difficult to sustain a firm distinction between science fiction (where material reality leaves its imprints) and science fiction studies (which exposes them, as if by taking rubbings). Why shouldn’t science fiction writers undertake, within their narratives, to also interpret and explicate the negative spaces created by their imaginative world-building? As a reader, I know that they do do this. They go ahead and weave the sorts of statements you could imagine literary critics making into the texts. Why wouldn't you? And so when economic terminology and concepts appear explicitly in science fiction narratives do they require some different interpretative approach? And/or the same approach, with particular alertness to the confusion which will be caused by interpreting economic language as a symptom of something which is, once hermeneutically excavated, necessarily construed in the same economic language?

Third, what word can I use instead of "totality" to avoid a really boring conversation?

Fourth, there is a tradition of more-or-less informal literary criticism which places science fiction in some privileged relationship to the future. It is easy to take the mick out of futurism, and although science fiction studies rightly rejects naive accounts of science fiction as a predictive art based on rigorous extrapolation of present circumstances, the notion that science fiction has a distinctive temporal orientation is intuitively pretty persuasive -- and it's an influential part of how writers and readers of science fiction talk about science fiction. Science fiction is about the future (including Gibson's famous future that is "already here"). Science fiction tells us what's going to happen, what might happen, what won't happen but at one point could have.

Approaching the same issue from the other side, the economic humanities unpick the ways in which the models, thought experiments and other cognitive-rhetorical constructs of our best predictive sciences -- economics, say -- work as fictions, albeit also as sporadically performative, self-fulfilling (or other-fulfilling) prophecies. In short, while science fiction studies has got comfortable with the idea that science fiction doesn't predict the future, the study of future-predicting practices has started investigating the ways in which they are science fiction.

Design fiction in particular seems to be challenging the scholarly orthodoxy that science fiction tells us more about its contemporary moment than any future moment, by orienting itself at materialisation, mediated by readers. Fabian Muniesa (2014), drawing on Jean-François Lyotard, remarks that “[k]nowledge about things no longer occupies an overarching, critical, general and properly modern position but is now, in a sense, part of the industrial functioning of things” (p.8). We might not want to accept design fiction as SF or SF-related in any way; it could be understood as a kind of unsubstantiated grab for some cultural capital clustered around the idea of the future. But assuming we did accept it on more-or-less its own terms: design fiction doesn't fall into the trap of trying to work with complex and chaotic social trends. Instead, it usually concentrates narrowly a single imaginary product or service in the hope of performatively influencing its likelihood of emerging. A video clip on Kickstarter, which portrays a mock-up or prototype of a product in an effort to fund its development, may be considered a design fiction.  Design fiction does not attempt to predict the future: it attempts to pitch it.

Authors and fans have a particular way of evaluating science fiction: according to what it knows about the future. Literary critics don't have to get on board with every bit of that, but they can't afford to ignore it either.