Astrogator's Logs

50 Voices of Disbelief (editors Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk, publishers Wiley-Blackwell) just went on sale in most countries today and will be coming out in the US next month.  One essay in it is by yours truly, titled “Evolutionary Noise, Not Signal from Above”.

The anthology got two positive reviews so far  from Kirkus and Library Journal, but I’m sure that will change!  My thanks to Russ for inviting me to contribute.

Two articles of mine appeared today in very different venues.

The first article of my Eldorado Desperadoes series was Of Mice and Men.  The second Desperadoes essay, The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality, is now live on H+ Magazine.

And the Huffington Post reprinted the essay …Shall not Perish from the Earth,  with the title America, Then and Now.

Image: Cool Cat, Ali Spagnola

Update: Another article just appeared at the Huffington Post.  In it, I sing the praises of left-handers who include Alexander the Great, Jeanne d’Arc, Barack Obama… and yours truly.  If anyone feels motivated to comment at the Huffington site, please consider also clicking the Fan button!

Southpaws: The Hops in Humanity’s Beer?

Some of you may recall seeing this essay on this blog with the title The Left Hand of Light.  The Huffington article is an expanded, updated version.

“But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”  – Monique Wittig, Les Guerillères

A story of mine, Dry Rivers, just appeared in Crossed Genres. It takes place in an alternate universe in which the Minoan civilization survives the Thera eruption. Coincidentally, I recently finished a book by Dr. Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. The author discusses how the Minoan civilization served as a mirror that reflected the social biases of the era of its discovery – particularly of its idiosyncratic excavator, Arthur Evans.

During the Bronze Age, several major civilizations blossomed contemporaneously around the Eastern Mediterranean. Many are familiar to most Westerners, if only by name – the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Hittites. But one was sui generis: the Minoans. Despite their extraordinary achievements, we know a lot less about them than we know about their neighbors. Their alphabet, Linear A, remains undeciphered. Nor do we know what language they spoke, though a few Minoan words still adorn the Greek tongue, such as thálassa (sea), lavírinthos (labyrinth, house of the double axes), hyákinthos (hyacinth) and kypárissos (cypress).

I have always been haunted and beguiled by that lost civilization. Most of my fiction, whether of the past or the future, fantasy or science fiction, involves the Minoans. Not only are they part of my biological and cultural legacy; they were also unique. Minoan art is instantly recognizable. It is possible that the Minoan civilization might have changed the flow of history, had it not been literally snuffed out by the apocalyptic explosion of the Thera (Santorini) volcano. Such was the magnitude of the catastrophe that it became a potent, defining myth that echoes down the ages, from Plato’s Timaeus to Tolkien’s Númenor: the drowning of Atlantis.

How distinctive and advanced were the Minoans? Cathy Gere argues that they were not. She suggests that the attempt to portray Minoan Crete as a pacifist, matriarchal haven of high sophistication is not supported by the archaeological evidence, but is mostly a fantasy (largely created by Evans) to act as a paregoric to a world reeling from several major wars. Gere’s style is vivacious, articulate, elegant – and she knows her history. It is also true that Evans’ reconstructions of the Knossos palatial complex and its frescoes were heavy-handed and arbitrary. And in time-honored archeological fashion, he withheld evidence and suppressed careers that contradicted his theories.

If Gere’s book were your only source on the Minoans, you would come away well informed, highly entertained and with the impression that they were just a standard variant of the Bronze Age Levantine cultural recipe. And since Linear A has not been deciphered, the Minoans cannot tell their own story. However, extensive frescoes and other artifacts that have been gradually emerging from Akrotiri, the Theran equivalent of Pompei, support major portions of Evans’ theory. Because burial under volcanic ash kept everything intact, no question of false reconstruction intrudes. The frescoes didn’t adorn palaces, but residential houses. This fact alone says something about the Minoan culture. So does the finding that the houses were multi-storied and had hot and cold running water – amenities forgotten by their successors and the rest of Europe for almost four millennia.

Even more indicative are the subjects of the frescoes: women gather saffron crocuses, boys box, crowds watch a regatta in a harbor, swallows intertwine over lilies, gazelles gambol. War is conspicuously absent – not a single battle scene, not one weapon, not even a chariot. Gods and kings, with their usual smitings, are also conspicuously absent. The focus is on nature and daily activities. This is true of all Minoan art, from frescoes to pots to seals. Too, there is a fluidity and exuberance that sets Minoan art apart from its Egyptian and Babylonian equivalents, which are oppressive with their will to power despite their beauty. And women are everywhere, always more prominent and detailed than the men, in stark contrast to their absence or subordinate status in the art of Crete’s contemporaneous neighbors.

In all other Bronze Age East Mediterranean cultures, the Great Goddess (Isis, Ishtar, Inanna) suffered dethronement at the hands of her Consort/Son. But in Crete she retained her primacy till the Mycenaeans arrived after the volcano eruption. This does not automatically imply that Minoans were matriarchal or that women enjoyed equal status in Crete. However, the scenes depicted in Minoan art suggest that women had significant rights and were active and valued participants in society. This is not surprising. Merchant and seafaring cultures are flexible and open to new ideas which they encounter willy-nilly, and Minoan Crete was both: the Egyptian, Babylonian and Hittite archives as well as the economic system deduced from the excavations indicate that the Minoan hegemony was light-handed, localized, sea-based and economic rather than military.

There is no doubt that Minoan Crete was not the utopian paradise that Evans envisioned. For one, if the Minoans had insisted on wearing only white helmets, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to leave any legacy, wedged as they were between nations intent on empire. For another, the Minoans did have social classes: distinctions are clearly visible in the frescoes. However, it makes me happy and hopeful to think that there may have been at least one high civilization – the first one in Europe, in fact – that was not intent on conquest, enslavement and slaughter. That once perhaps there existed a people who were content to build and sail merchant ships, create ravishing art, sing harvest songs and love ballads… and gaze at the stars while sipping wine in the warm summer nights of the Aegean.

Further reading:

Introduction to Akrotiri

Minoan portal

Frescoes:

Top, “La Parisienne”, Knossos, Crete; Middle, Saffron Gatherers (detail), Akrotiri, Thera; Bottom, Antelopes (oryx), Akrotiri

Yours truly pontificates in the latest issue of Crossed Genres. And I don’t have even a Master’s in Futurism!

Many thanks to Peggy Kolm, whose post about The Biology of Star Trek drew the editors’ attention, and to Kay Holt for the penetrating queries.

Excerpt:

Crossed Genres: We send astronauts up; we try to keep everything very clean and very sterile. Am I right in guessing that it just doesn’t seem viable if the population is going to stay there for very long?

Athena Andreadis: Well, these are not self-sustained, long- term missions. The real reason for the sterility is not to contaminate exoplanetary samples. Also, if you read the fine print, you find out that one of the major and most time consuming tasks in places like the space station is scrubbing the fungus off of surfaces because there are no countervailing entities to take care of it. Not very heroic. All these macho alpha-type people up there going ‘scrubba-scrubba’.

Image: Blue Moo, by Sandra Boynton (detail)

Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

W. B. Yeats, The Four Ages of Man, last stanza

Two years ago, cancer struck me out of the clear blue sky at a moment in my life when I was gathering my strength for relaunching my research. I had just received two very hard-won grants after a lapse in funding that had essentially closed down my lab. The disease was at its early stages and I was spared the agony of chemotherapy, although some after-effects of the surgery (most prominently, severe fibromyalgia) are still with me.

I now know the paralyzing fear and the overwhelming anger as the disease takes over not only your body but your mind, the once wide-open life turning suddenly into a prison, the horrifying sense of being alone, the excruciating pain and discomfort from the treatments, the abject humiliation of not being able to control even basic functions of your once perfectly-allied body, the guilt of becoming a burden to those who love you.

We all die in the end, and we all hope that we will act well when our moment comes. But such heroic stances may only be possible if we die in a manner of our own choosing and if we die quickly. The lingering diseases that our lengthened lifespan has brought us — diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer — don’t lend themselves to such treatment. They require even greater stoicism and a different kind of bravery.

I don’t believe in gods or an afterlife. Yet perhaps the only myth that can sustain us in such circumstances is Poul Anderson’s of the Ythrian Hunter God, a story that the medieval Greeks also told in their folksongs of Dighenís Akrítas: The Hunter will always prevail. The only thing you can do is give him a good hunt, for your own honor if not for his. Keep as much of your self and your life intact as long as you can. And do what you can to be long remembered, to leave that tiny footprint in the sand that will eventually get filled and smoothed away by the tide.

‘I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself; unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’

The waves broke on the shore.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, final sentences

Top: Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur; Bottom: Plaka Sands, Naxos, Greece (John Block)

This post first appeared in George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments, where I’m his guest this month.

Years ago, I saw a short in an animation festival. It showed earth inhabited by men who happily bopped each other and propagated by laying eggs. A starship crash interrupted the idyll. Presaging Battlestar Galactica, the newcomers proved miraculously interfertile with the men who handed them the job of propagation along with all other disagreeable chores. Things went swimmingly, at least for the men, until a rescue ship arrived. After the women left, the men were once again free to pursue manly things – until they realized they had forgotten how to lay eggs.

The short was a wry, science-fictional version of the animal wife tale. But it’s interesting that we can program starships to ricochet from planet to planet and routinely use in vitro fertilization – yet if women want direct genetic descendants, they still have no alternative to pregnancy unless they are rich enough to hire a surrogate, an option burdened with ethical baggage.

Of course, a womb is much more than a warm sac of nutrients. The endocrine inputs alone would tax a medium-size factory, leaving aside those from the immune system. The complexities of its function have made an artificial womb remain a distant glimpse and attempts with mammalian embryos still fail at early stages. Yet cultural politics have been as decisive in this delay as biological challenges: think of the lightning speed with which Japanese officials approved Vi*agra versus their decades-long ban on oral contraceptives and you get the picture. And the upheaval brought about by contraception will be a mild breeze compared to the hurricane that will be unleashed if we ever succeed in creating an artificial uterus. Its repercussions may equal (and possibly reverse) those that accompanied the invention of agriculture.

Prior to agriculture, gatherer-hunters lived semi-nomadic lives in small groups of relatively flat hierarchies. Family configurations were fluid and quasi-egalitarian and children were few, spaced far apart and collectively raised. This persisted when the nomads first settled. The earliest agricultural communities show little social stratification: there are no ostentatious palaces or tombs. But with the ability to hoard food reserves, dynamics changed – and so did the status of women, now burdened with multiple children and deprived of mobility and the gathering skills and knowledge of their foremothers. Wombs became commodities and have remained so, with minor fluctuations, ever since.

If we succeed in creating functioning artificial wombs, they will remain luxury options (like surrogate motherhood) until/unless they become relatively cheap. At that point, it’s virtually certain that they’ll be heavily used for reasons outlined in many analyses elsewhere – primarily the sparing of both mother and child from the health problems associated with pregnancy and birth (1, 2). And if they’re used, they will have a predictable outcome: all parents will become fathers, biologically, psychologically and, possibly, culturally.

Women will be able to have as many children as men, even multiplets without the severe problems of extreme prematurity now inherent in such a choice. Additionally, women will not undergo the hormonal changes of pregnancy, which means they will be as much (or as little) emotionally invested in their offspring as men. And of course cheap working artificial wombs will also mean that women will become biologically redundant.

Having equally invested parents is standard in other species whose offspring have long periods of helplessness – birds are an obvious “nuclear” example, social insects an “extended” one. Adoptions in humans show that biological connections are not a prerequisite in forming kinship bonds, although adopted and step-children are often treated less well than biological ones.

If we go the friendly route, ending pregnancy may finally usher in true equality between the genders since women will no longer be penalized physically, psychologically, financially and socially for having children: many problems, from autism to bed wetting, will cease being automatically the mother’s responsibility or fault. Such a change may perhaps allow us to play with alternative family arrangements, from Ursula Le Guin’s Ki’O sedoretu to Poul Anderson’s Rogaviki polyandry.

If we go the other route, women could become extinct as soon as a decade after artificial wombs become widely available, except as trophies or zoo specimens. Those who think this is unlikely need only to be reminded that there are now regions of China and India where the ratio of boys to girls is two to one, courtesy of sex-selective abortion and infanticide. People may bemoan a potential world without women, but such pious thoughts didn’t stop us from extinguishing countless other species. Personally, I think that never getting born is preferable to a devalued life.

An all-male culture need not resemble a prison or an army barracks. Nevertheless, I suspect that such a society will have either slavery or indentured service even if it has advanced technology, as humans seem unable to avoid rank demarcations (although their natural ranking system is not the fixed rigid pyramid of canine packs). Their romantic Others may be transgendered men, or Wraeththu-like bishonen boys in a revival of the erastes/eromenos scheme of Periclean Athens. But like the men in the cartoon short I described earlier, even with artificial wombs these guys will eventually bump into another wall: ovarian stocks.

Like wombs, ova are not passive nurturing chambers. For one, they select which sperm to let in when the hordes come knocking. Additionally, beyond transmitting half the nuclear and all the mitochondrial genes, eggs also contain organized spacetime gradients that direct correct formation and epigenetic imprinting of the embryo. Re-creating this kind of organized cytoplasm makes an artificial womb seem simple by comparison and if there are any trophy women left at that point their fate may be grim.

Wanting to hear another person’s views on this matter, I asked my partner, without any preamble or explanation, “What do you think will happen to women if we create working artificial wombs?” And he, proving yet again how much he deserves the title of snacho, replied without missing a beat, “Nothing. Women are the reason men want to get out of bed in the morning.” I couldn’t help smiling… and I reflected that, as long as even tiny pockets of such people continue to exist, we may get to travel to the stars, after all.

… Centauri Dreams, where my friend Paul Gilster is graciously hosting my more extended take on the new Star Trek film.  I think that the mixed reactions are universal among those who loved the original Star Trek’s optimism and civility.   Here is the closing paragraph of my extended essay, to whet your appetites:

ST|| is an odd-numbered film in the series, so I’ll give it a long space tether. However, if Uhura degenerates into the Angel in the House or if the certain-to-come sequels become more generic, I will put ST|| permanently in the same category as Star Wars. Those who have read my essay on Star Wars know how dire a fate this is. And though my wrath may not equal that of Khan, if enough of my ilk get disaffected we may abandon all the old lumbering dinosaurs and manage to relaunch the real McCoy — the Firefly-class starship Serenity, with its true love of endless skies and its persistent aim to misbehave.

Eleven years ago, Random House published my book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek.  With the occasion of the premiere of the Star Trek reboot film and with my mind still bruised from the turgid awfulness of Battlestar Galactica, I decided to post the epilogue of my book, very lightly updated — as an antidote to blasé pseudo-sophistication and a reminder that Prometheus is humanity’s best embodiment.  My major hope for the new film is that Uhura does more than answer phones and/or smooch Kirk.

Coda:  The Infinite Frontier

A younger science than physics, biology is more linear and less exotic than its older sibling.  Whereas physics is (mostly) elegant and symmetric, biology is lunging and ungainly, bound to the material and macroscopic.  Its predictions are more specific, its theories less sweeping.  And yet, in the end, the exploration of life is the frontier that matters the most.  Life gives meaning to all elegant theories and contraptions, life is where the worlds of cosmology and ethics intersect.

Our exploration of Star Trek biology has taken us through wide and distant fields — from the underpinnings of life to the purposeful chaos of our brains; from the precise minuets of our genes to the tangled webs of our societies.

How much of the Star Trek biology is feasible?  I have to say that human immortality, psionic powers, the transporter and the universal translator are unlikely, if not impossible.  On the other hand, I do envision human genetic engineering and cloning, organ and limb regeneration, intelligent robots and immersive virtual reality — quite possibly in the near future.

Furthermore, the limitations I’ve discussed in this book only apply to earth biology.  Even within the confines of our own planet, isolated ecosystems have yielded extraordinary lifeforms — the marsupials of Australia; the flower-like tubeworms near the hot vents of the ocean depths; the bacteriophage particles which are uncannily similar to the planetary landers.  It is certain that when we finally go into space, whatever we meet will exceed our wildest imaginings.

Going beyond strictly scientific matters, I think that the accuracy of scientific details in Star Trek is almost irrelevant.  Of course, it puzzles me that a show which pays millions to principal actors and for special effects cannot hire a few grad students to vet their scripts for glaring factual errors (I bet they could even get them for free, they’d be that thrilled to participate). Nevertheless, much more vital is Star Trek’s stance toward science and the correctness of the scientific principles that it showcases.  On the latter two counts, the series has been spectacularly successful and damaging at the same time.

The most crucial positive elements of Star Trek are its overall favorable attitude towards science and its strong endorsement of the idea of exploration.  Equally important (despite frequent lapses) is the fact that the Enterprise is meant to be a large equivalent to Cousteau’s Calypso, not a space Stealth Bomber.  However, some negative elements are so strong that they almost short-circuit the bright promise of the show.

I cannot be too harsh on Star Trek, because it’s science fiction — and TV science fiction, at that.  Yet by choosing to highlight science, Star Trek has also taken on the responsibility of portraying scientific concepts and approaches accurately.  Each time Star Trek mangles an important scientific concept (such as evolution or black hole event horizons), it misleads a disproportionately large number of people.

The other trouble with Star Trek is its reluctance to showcase truly imaginative or controversial ideas and viewpoints.  Of course, the accepted wisdom of media executives who increasingly rely on repeating well-worn concepts is that controversial positions sink ratings.  So Star Trek often ignores the agonies and ecstasies of real science and the excitement of true or projected scientific discoveries, replacing them with pseudo-scientific gobbledygook more appropriate for series like The X-Files, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.  Exciting ideas (silicon lifeforms beyond robots, parallel universes) briefly appear on Star Trek, only to sink without a trace.  This almost pathological timidity of Star Trek, which enjoys the good fortune of a dedicated following and so could easily afford to cut loose, does not bode well for its descendants or its genre.

On the other hand, technobabble and all, Star Trek fulfills a very imporant role.  It shows and endorses the value of science and technology — the only popular TV series to do so, at a time when science has lost both appeal and prestige.  With the increasing depth of each scientific field, and the burgeoning of specialized jargon, it is distressingly easy for us scientists to isolate ourselves within our small niches and forget to share the wonders of our discoveries with our fellow passengers on the starship Earth.  Despite its errors, Star Trek’s greatest contribution is that it has made us dream of possibilities, and that it has made that dream accessible to people both inside and outside science.

Scientific understanding does not strip away the mystery and grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more and more of them appear and come into focus.  The sense of excitement and fulfillment that accompanies even the smallest scientific discovery is so great that it can only be communicated in embarrassingly emotional terms, even by Mr. Spock and Commander Data.  In the end these glimpses of the whole, not fame or riches, are the real reason why the scientists never go into the suspended animation cocoons, but stay at the starship chart tables and observation posts, watching the great galaxy wheels slowly turn, the stars ignite and darken.

Star Trek’s greatest legacy is the communication of the urge to explore, to comprehend, with its accompanying excitement and wonder.  Whatever else we find out there, beyond the shelter of our atmosphere, we may discover that thirst for knowledge may be the one characteristic common to any intelligent life we encounter in our travels.  It is with the hope of such an encounter that people throng around the transmissions from Voyager, Sojourner, CoRoT, Kepler.  And even now, contained in the sphere of expanding radio and television transmissions speeding away from Earth, Star Trek may be acting as our ambassador.

— Satan in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger

I’ve been writing all my life — fiction, poetry, book reviews, essays, the (so far) lone book.  Shaping worlds of my own and opining on the worlds of others kept me sane, or at least distracted me, whenever problems in real life grew so large that sleep became impossible.  At the same time, this was not therapy.  I wrote for publication and was lucky and persistent enough to push a decent fraction of the work out into the world.

Twice only in my four decades of writing was I induced to write fanfiction.  I didn’t venture into those creatively murky waters because I was a fan.  On the contrary, the urge arose from my profound dissatisfaction with the particular original sources.  In the first case, the (justly famous) author eventually extended the trilogy that had engaged me deeply, yet had left me so oddly unfulfilled.  She crafted three sequels that were so viscerally right — and so beautiful — that my take became redundant.  In the second case, I wrote the fanfiction when I still felt angry and bereft after I had written a lengthy critique of the original.  Intrigued by the fanfic forums, I posted on several and there I got to observe the phenomenon in all its bizarre glory.

Most contemporary Americans date fanfiction since its Star Trek beginnings, but the activity started ever since language-wielding humans gathered around their campfires.  Because ancient texts were transmitted orally, they are palimpsests created by grandmothers and bards, the plots and characters constantly borrowed and modified to suit the particular audience.  Many respectable artworks are de facto fanfic of works whose copyright has expired (Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead come to mind, as does West Side Story – not to speak of Romeo and Juliet itself).

Fanfiction and fanart are both artistic enterprises and social outlets.  When I posted my story, I was only aware of the former aspect.  When I realized the extent of the latter, I felt like Richard Burton wandering through Mecca in disguise: an infidel, a farang anthropologist watching the rituals of aliens.  Each fandom, an accretion around the kernel of its inspiration, combines the custom-bound outlook of an insular tribe with the hothouse atmosphere of a girls’ boarding school.  Fanfic writers and readers get as immersed and vested in their communities as do players of World of Warcraft.

The artistic level of most fanfic is lamentable.  But then, so is most of published fiction, especially the bloated sequels increasingly expected by fantasy and SF editors, the cynical commissioned works in franchises and the copycat clones in the various specialized genres — mystery, romance, westerns.  Good fanfic is on par with published work.  Fanfiction is the contemporary equivalent of storytelling, the return of mythmaking to collective ownership, the empowering of the fans (especially female fans, who write an estimated 98% of fanfiction) from passive consumers into transgressive creators, subversive Liliths rather than subservient Eves.

The opinions of published writers on fanfiction range across the spectrum but most don’t consider it a serious competitor.  Many are flattered if they evoke fanfiction from their readers, the sign of having attained iconic status.  Yet the phrases that encapsulate their views about fanfiction show fundamental contempt for the undertaking: “the intellectual equivalent of playing with dolls” and “a safe sandbox”.  Part of the condescension undoubtedly comes from the fact that fanfiction authors do this for love or pleasure and are not paid for their labors.  It says something about today’s mindset that professional authors who also write fanfiction almost invariably attempt to hide this fact, whereas authors who write commissioned works (officially sanctioned fanfiction) admit it freely.  Nevertheless, these phrases pinpoint two serious drawbacks of fanfiction.

The first puts fanfiction in a permanent defensive mode and this is not only because of its shaky legal status.  In traditional storytelling there was no dominant “truth”, no canon.  All versions of the Border ballads were equal, distinguished only by the skill of the story weaver.  The best survived, the rest sank into the waters of Lethe.  In fanfiction there is a “master”- the creator of the original source.  All fanfiction writers are eternal apprentices even if the beauty and originality of their writing exceeds that of the source.  And because fanfiction is not formally published, it’s all slated for oblivion regardless of its quality.

The second is critical if the fanfic writer is talented.  Inhabiting someone else’s universe is inherently constricting even if the author creates rebellious alternative versions of that universe.  At the same time, the ready-made mythology invites laziness and rewards short-hand.  Using a particular name in a particular fandom is guaranteed to invoke the desired response from readers, so why bother with careful craft?  And the feedback in fanfiction, always positive, creates the potential for emotional addiction, the craving for ever more uncritical admiration.

Fanfiction is here to stay. It fulfills many needs: it grants recognition, gives access to a like-minded community, feeds dreams (or obsessions).  And the Internet is an ideal venue for it.  Too, the publishing world may well change under the overwhelming presence of the new medium.  But if mainstream publications become more receptive to a larger, more informal concept of authorship, it would be better for everyone if all that talent that now spends its creative juices on Xena, Buffy, Harry Potter and the Skywalkers were given motivations to invent original stories.

It may be true, as Dostoyevsky so famously said, that there are only two stories: “Someone goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town”.  Yet across eras and cultures, humans have found infinite ways of telling these two stories.  Writing fanfiction is a pleasant and constructive hobby and it can foster loyal friendships.  It takes courage to leave such a cocoon, although it inevitably suffocates what it originally nourished.  But for those who truly want to create, there are whole universes yet to be dreamt and brought forth.

During the last week of September, I participated in the Viable Paradise writing workshop at Martha’s Vineyard. That time of year is ideal for the Cape: no bustling crowds, everything bathed in that saturated golden light unique to fall in New England. The crickets are in full cry, the night sky is adorned with both the summer and winter major constellations. Day by day, the sea turns to gunmetal silver, the salt marsh to beaten bronze.

The workshop itself was interesting, in terms of the writing as well as the social experience. I will comment on one aspect of it here: Almost all the work that I read took place either in the near-future United States or Victorian England. There wasn’t a single space opera or a truly exotic setting in the lot — on earth, let alone off-planet. In some cases, the setting worked well in service of the story’s central kernel. However, it’s very hard to make things look new if the setting is so well-worn.

The standard advice given to writers is “write what you know” (although it’s unclear how that fits with FTL, aliens or nanobots). Writers of speculative fiction might want to venture a little further afield. It seems to me that such travels would nurture the authors’ creative spirit and would also help the readers become receptive to more than iterations of Tolkien and Sterling.

“Maybe there are only two sexes: men and mothers.”
Alice Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree Jr. to Joanna Russ

Distracting myself with Google news while laboring over my grant progress reports, I caught sight of a headline exclaiming “Pregnant Man!” Intrigued, I read on, only to become more puzzled. I couldn’t figure out the novelty: the future parent, Thomas Beatie, identifies and is legally classified as male. However, s/he is chromosomally and somatically female, modified by breast surgery and testosterone injections. So Beatie’s fallopian tubes, ovaries and uterus are intact, making this a conventional pregnancy (and not the first of its kind, either).

For me, the real surprise was how reactions split. With few exceptions, women were positive, whether hetero- or homo-sexual. Most men (again, regardless of sexual orientation) were negative, many virulently so, resorting to utterances that could have emanated from fundamentalist tracts. The transgender community was ambivalent — and amazingly there, too, the division was along lines of gender identification. In essence, the men — born or made — were saying: Why would anyone calling himself a man go through this? That’s what women are for! Could this ever happen to me?? Some said this more or less verbatim. Beatie’s pregnancy pushed the buttons of this issue as forcefully as if the coming child had burst, Alien-like, from a male torso.

While I was pondering this, it dawned on me that unconventional biological and social human genders seem to be predominantly the domain of women in speculative fiction, from singletons (Le Guin’s androgynous Gethenians, Constantine’s hermaphroditic Wraeththu, Slonczewski’s parthenogenetic Sharers) to multiples (Scott’s five-gendered post-FTL humans) to bona fide male pregnancy (in Butler’s Bloodchild). Men tend to stick to dyadic genders and traditional family patterns, even when depicting otherwise exotic aliens.

Biologically, the two gametes of terrestrial lifeforms are a result of evolution once it went down the path of sexual reproduction. There is nothing pre-ordained about this outcome, nor does phenotype mirror genotype: many plants and several animals are unisexual or hermaphroditic, while other animals can switch sexes. Too, biomorphic and behavioral outcomes are not invariably binary. Humans are capable of an enormous repertoire of responses, and I cannot think of one that is completely gender-specific. The troubles start with the relative value assigned to the two genders — and to their behavior, conditioned and enforced by edicts throughout the ages that are as arbitrary as they are punitive.

I can understand the worries of the trans community, whose members are trying to gain acceptance as gay people did before them by adopting rigidly orthodox gender roles. Such stereotyped assignations also occurred in cultures that tolerated intersexes: the North American two-spirited, the Indian hijra. However, the men’s objections reminded me of the “eew” reaction of boys to girls, before the hormonal rise (or is it fall?) of puberty overcomes social conditioning. They highlight a profound and visceral male unease over blurred identities or breached boundaries — in bodies, gender roles, power; a wish to make an absolute, immovable distinction between penetrator and penetrated, implanter and implanted.

In most cultures, men are trained to compartmentalize and make a virtue out of this necessity. Additionally, surgery that accentuates sexual dimorphism draws surprisingly little criticism. Beatie’s biggest transgression was becoming a changeling, someone who cannot be easily pigeonholed. Shapeshifters, from Raven to Loki to Star Trek’s Odo, are never trusted even though all mythologies found it necessary to invent them. What set off the fuses was the perception that Beatie is claiming the perks of both genders — if pregnancy can be viewed as such, considering how dangerous it could be (both physically and socially) before the advent of reliable contraception.

In the last few decades, medical advances have made it possible for people to conceive and bear children by assisted reproduction: sperm banks, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood. Yet all these procedures kept one condition intact: women’s involvement and hence traditional gender roles. Schwarzenegger in Junior notwithstanding, there is no concerted effort to create artificial wombs, which would make childbearing optional for women and possible for men. With the continuing furor over embryonic stem cells, it is unlikely that such an endeavor will be pursued any time soon.

Childbearing and childrearing, even when greatly desired and welcome, take a toll on women individually and collectively, since their investment is much greater. As long as this dichotomy remains, all discussions of true equality (to say nothing of radical social engineering) will remain just vaporous talk. It is possible, of course, that once in vitro pregnancy becomes possible, women will disappear except for a few kept as trophies or specimens — and that humans will designate another group as the perpetual Other. However, I prefer to hope that this will bring true equality, and make everyone able to adopt fluid, flexible identities that, at their best, combine the gentle strength of the Gethenians with the passionate flair of the Wraeththu.

Shifgrethor: to cast a long shadow; prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, social authority (language of Karhide; Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness).

Credits: Top, Shaman by Susan Seddon Boulet;
Bottom, Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine.

Note: This post also appeared in George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments during my guest-blogging stint in May 2009.

In this time and place, poetry has been assigned a month, like other marginalized causes. I grew up in a culture where poetry was not precious and hermetic, but a vital way of expression that belonged to all. Poems were set to music and sung, poets were bards that could fuel revolutions. They, and the satirists, were the first to be exiled or imprisoned by oppressive governments.

I have too many favorite poems. The one I finally decided to post here comes from a Greek of the diaspora, a cosmopolitan and polyglot, who spent most of his life in Alexandria. He lived in self-chosen obscurity, but his power and influence have only grown with time.

The God Abandons Antony

by Konstantinos Kavafis

When abruptly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession pass by
with delightful music, and voices,
don’t grieve for your failing fortunes,
your spoiled deeds, the illusion of
your life’s plan; to mourn is useless.
Rather, with foreknowledge and boldness,
bid farewell to the Alexandria that’s departing.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t claim
it was just a dream, that you heard a lie;
avoid all such futile notions.
As if long prepared, and ever courageous,
acting as one who deserves such a city,
make your way to the window,
and listen closely with your heart, not
with cowardly pleas and protests;
hear, as a last pleasure, those sounds,
the delightful music of the invisible procession,
and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing.

Translated by Stratis Haviaras

The panel portrait is one of many found in the Fayum Basin of Egypt, dating from 1 BC to 3 AD.

Edo-period katana and Ainu tonkori (fretless zither)

When I was a child, among the highlights of my life were my visits to the tiny neoclassical building where my father’s stepmother (the only grandparent I ever got to know) was spending her autumnal years. At the center of its courtyard was a dried fountain where I launched a thousand imaginary ships. The house was an Aladdin’s cave of nooks and crannies, doors with panels of etched glass, clouded mirrors, boxes that held feather boas and yellowing photographs. Its guardian was a cat as fastidious and dignified as my grandmother.

In the evenings, my grandmother unfolded tapestries of stories while she cooked sophisticated dishes. A diaspora Hellene, born in Bulgaria of parents who fled Asia Minor, she was one of the first women to become a teacher in early 20th century Greece. On top of this scrumptious cake was a tart, sweet cherry: a nearby movie theater dedicated exclusively to cartoons. The fare was mostly Warner and Disney. I watched ecstatically the occasional avant-garde short from the Eastern block, whenever a “centrist” government made the censors relax their grip.

Then one time I saw something so different that I almost forgot to exhale while I watched it. For one, it was as long as a “real” film. The plot demanded attention, the characters engaged and compelled. There was derring-do; conflicted loyalties and betrayals; a doomed romance. Even more distinctive was the style: dynamic, fluid, sophisticated, with a distinct edge lacking from the sugary American cartoons. I never forgot it, nor saw anything like it again — until I came to the United States and found out the name of the genre. Somehow, a Japanese anime film had meandered into that tiny Athenian movie house on the afternoon that I happened to attend.

I have seen a good deal of anime since then, including the classics (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop). The combination of animation with adult themes is totally un-American, resembling the unexpurgated European fairytales before they got sanitized for “safe” consumption by children. However, I’m neither an expert nor an aficionado of the genre. Anime contains too much violence and too little sex for my taste and the gender stereotyping in most of it is disturbingly reminiscent of sixties sitcoms. Too, like the vast majority of comics and films across cultures, most anime is obsessed with maintaining proper order, safeguarding boundaries, battling monochromatically defined evil — and if saving the universe requires balletic decapitations, so much the better.

Exported anime is skewed towards what the Japanese assume Americans will find interesting, including plots and characters recycled from Western comics — very much like the late 19th century faux-exotic tchotchkes produced in Japan exclusively for gaijin consumption. There is a fascinating double distortion here: Americans watch what they think are true Japanese cultural products, while the Japanese have jiggled the content to make it palatable to outsiders, who miss most of the subtler cultural clues that are unavoidably embedded in the narratives.

But a few anime have been branded into my awareness as deeply as that nameless one I saw as a child: Mononoke Hime, Howl’s Castle and four arcs of Samurai Champloo: Misguided Miscreants, Lullabies of the Lost Verse, Elegy of Entrapment and Evanescent Encounter. Like the samisen and tonkori chords that haunt the Champloo arcs, these pluck almost painfully at my heart. And like Theseus in the Labyrinth, I decided to follow this Ariathne’s thread to the center.

At first glance, the three works make a grouping as unlikely as the Champloo protagonists. Howl’s Castle is a cultural hybrid, based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones. Samurai Champloo (as its name denotes) mixes eras and styles with unrepentant brio. Mononoke Hime is sui generis — a dark myth of sundering that is probably as disquieting to Easterners as it is to Westerners. They do share the large commonalities obligatory in the quest genre, from the Argonauts to Firefly: the chosen family created by misfits and outsiders, the defiance of oppressive social customs, the search for a larger meaning.

So what makes these three anime different? For one, they seethe with feisty, non-demure women — in fact, the women are the engines that move these worlds: the men often just react to the women or bounce off each other, whereas (in sharp contrast to the norm) it is the women who create the fellowships and launch the quests.

At the same time, all three reject the black-versus-white divisions of most comics. There is no absolute evil in the stories, only different (often irreconcilable) points of view. They show the viewpoints of the forgotten, the marginalized, the lost: the heroine of Howl’s Castle is an old woman. In Mononoke Hime, all sides harbor outcasts of different sorts. One of the Champloo protagonists is Okinawan, and in one arc the main character is an Ainu whose village was destroyed by the Shogunate’s representatives. Both these cultures were “normalized” out of existence by the Japanese, their fates closely parallel to those of the American Indian nations.

The refusal to categorize goes beyond good versus evil. These works are truly animist in their seamless fusion of realms usually kept separate: reality and dreamscape, the mundane and the spiritual, comedy and tragedy. And at the end, they have real endings: separations, irreversible losses, deaths. Hence their searing impact upon the mind and the heart. Other anime are stylishly gothic, or fashionably cyberpunk — or merely gorefests, albeit sophisticated ones. Mononoke Hime, Howl’s Castle and Samurai Champloo break the mould of the anime genre, just like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials decisively redefined young adult fantasy.

Prologue: After each bout of grant writing, there is a burst of cleaning. And so it came to pass that while neatening my computer I bumped into this article, which I wrote in 1988. What gave me a start was that essentially nothing has changed since then! The essay, edited for the blog, contains seeds that grew into trees – most prominently my Strange Horizons article, We Must Love One Another or Die (not to mention the Snachismo essay or the still-unpublished stories).

The Asymptotic Approach

Critics vaulted over each other trying to name all the sources that Lucas plundered in Willow. Trite, predictable, uneven, derivative, was the collective conclusion. So why am I discussing this film? Because buried underneath the rubble lurks a protofeminist fable – as much as that is possible in a Hollywood film.

It has been one of my greatest, lasting disappointments that in his Star Wars trilogy, with unlimited possibilities for recasting an ancient myth, Lucas chose the most pedestrian solutions (despite the glittering special effects). The films had a single, half-hearted, heroine: An untrained Jedi, ignorant of her powers and dependent on that old female cliché, intuition. At a loss what to do with the excess males, Lucas opted for the tame approach of making one her brother, another her father. Anything wrong with polyandry, in a galaxy so far away?

The worst offense, of course, was that all the wizard/teacher figures were men, too. It makes you wonder: who raised these children and taught them to be human, before training them for galactic knighthood? Willow is a stripped, down-to-earth version of Star Wars, and as such intrinsically inferior. But it does answer some of the questions left unanswered in the trilogy.

Despite its glaring weaknesses, Willow has one overwhelming attraction for me: it takes place in a matriarchy. The king (I am using male nouns on purpose here), Bavmorda, is a woman; the prince, Sorsha, is a woman; the wizard, Fin Raziel, is a woman; and the heir to the throne, around whom the entire action rages, is a girl, Elora. There is a conspicuous absence of fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, a reversal of the customary demographic in stories and films. Women interact, form and break alliances. Too, there is a subtle but discernible resemblance among Raziel, Sorsha and Elora – feisty, angular dark-eyed redheads, not the usual cute, helpless curvaceous blondes.

Well, you say, but the female king is evil, a stereotype. Perhaps, but she is powerful; she vanquishes an entire army without any help from either her ineffectual priests or her blustering but formidable general, whom she slaps around routinely. The benign sorceress is equally powerful and, even more amazingly, she is old! A beautiful, austere woman whose wrinkles add to her character and who, incidentally, is shown practically naked without losing a shred of dignity. Sorsha is a great warrior, the commander of her mother’s armies. If she defies her mother, it is to side with another woman’s cause – and she undergoes the internal growth and maturation cycle usually reserved only for the young men in quest tales.

What about the men – the title character, Willow, and the rogue warrior, Madmartigan? Willow is an androgynous character, with particular emphasis laid on his compassion and sense of community. He is shown more than once changing the future ruler’s diapers. Madmartigan wins Sorsha only by proving his loyalty, with much attendant danger to life and limb and after abandoning the cynical loner stance. More to the point, his children will not automatically inherit the ruler’s seat; it goes to the chosen heir of the women kings.

In short, Willow contains the three telltale signs of a society where women hold real power. In decreasing order of importance, descent is matrilinear, division of labor is diffuse and the men tend to be show-off peacocks. If women are the rulers and teachers, work and roles associated with the gender are respected and desirable. And if women are the brains, men have to cultivate looks, wit and prowess. How else are they going to be noticed by the ruler and chosen for royal stud? At the climax of the film, while the men are hacking at each other down at the courtyard, doing gruntwork, the women are up at the tower, hurling thunderbolts around. By the time the warriors enter the turret, the battle has been waged and won by women’s magic.

I am not arguing that Willow is anywhere near perfection, although I enjoyed it. I am merely suggesting that, things in Hollywood and in our culture being as they are, this may be the closest approximation to woman-friendly mythology that we will get on mainstream film. I strongly recommend that women filmmakers explore the sf/fantasy genre and create the Star Wars equivalent. The formative influence of such films on young people weaned on visual spectacles and bereft of real myths cannot be overestimated.

Photo: Lioness in front of Sunset, 2001, by Thomas R. Wilke

Remedios Varo: Creation of the Birds

Like all art, writing places harsh and divergent demands on the writer. We first have to sit for long stretches in a silent, empty room, and there struggle with the work like Jacob with his angel. Then we must step back, examine our creation dispassionately, and ruthlessly alter whatever we think falls short. To venture into the wider world, we are required to do work that has little to do with inspiration, although it, too, requires passion. We must write proposals, send letters, find agents, listen to criticism and adapt both our expectations and the work in response to it. And if we manage to navigate through all these shoals, we must be prepared for a significant portion of readers to dislike our work.

Until the early 20th century most authors paid to have their works printed or printed them on their own small presses. In other words, such luminaries as the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf would be considered “vanity authors” by today’s definition. Now, with the advent of e-books, print on demand and online publications, the boundaries are starting to blur and shift again. At the same time, both writers and readers are getting increasingly isolated in non-overlapping online universes dedicated to smaller and smaller subgenres.

Given these circumstances, what defines a writer? I have read informal writing that is of better quality than published works. Also, given the atomization of today’s readership, few writers can make a living exclusively on their writing unless they are recognized geniuses or can write very fast (there is, too, the occasional random lucky hit of a best-seller). The traditional advice to aspiring writers — found once in private letters, now in public livejournals — is to keep writing, no matter what. Unquestionably, writing is among the most creative and constructive hobbies. However, I noticed that these exhortations tend to come from people who are already published in official venues and/or have independent incomes.

After giving the matter a good deal of thought, I concluded that a writer is someone who writes with the goal of publication. Amusingly, two formidable institutions, the IRS and the NIH (National Institute of Health), agree with me. The IRS allows deduction of writing-related expenses if the writer can show that s/he attempted to publish the work, regardless of success. The NIH (and all agencies that fund research) allow investigators to list only published works on their grants. The Brontë sisters agreed as well: unworldly though they were deemed to be, they mailed their stories to London publishers the moment they completed them.

Publication rarely brings fame and fortune, especially in today’s climate of soundbites and short attention spans. Its major boon is that it takes us out of the lonely room where we stretch ourselves on racks of agony and ecstasy, out of the tiny ponds where social interactions overwhelm the primary objective of writing. It gives us perspective, it keeps us grounded. And it allows us to consider a particular work finished — finished enough to let go, like a child that grew up and finally left home.