by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist, SF aficionado. The article first appeared at Science That.
Two physicists decide to visit Las Vegas to try their luck at gambling. One of the pair plays craps, where he proceeds to rapidly lose their limited funds as he continually throws one poor roll of the dice after another. His companion, none too pleased at watching their money disappear, demands to know from his friend why he keeps playing this game despite losing every time.
“I may be losing at craps in this universe,” replies the first physicist, “but in an alternate reality, my duplicate is making a fortune!”
Among the biggest mysteries of modern cosmology is the question of whether other universes beyond our own exist in the Cosmos, or Multiverse, as it would be called should they prove to be real.
The general public is aware of the concept of parallel or alternate universes largely through popular science fiction, where they have been a plot device for a long time. Perhaps the best known of those imagined alternate existences is the Mirror Universe of the Star Trek series, where we meet the “bad” versions of the main characters from our universe – or their own fictional “reality” parallel to our real reality.
But do parallel universes truly exist? Are they composed largely of varying degrees of the people and places we know from this reality? Or could they be something far more complex and vast than most science fiction has ever attempted to portray?
If certain physicists who study this concept are correct, then parallel universes exist on a number of “flavors” or levels. Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says there are four levels of parallel universes. They range from the first level, where alternate realities exist at distances well beyond the observable Universe we live in, to the fourth, where all mathematically possible universes can and do exist. Many if not most of those universes would not resemble ours at all, obeying entirely different laws of physics. The universes envisioned by Tegmark would be virtually impossible to visit, barring some breakthrough in physics and technology.
Another type of alternate universe is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). This theory was first proposed by Hugh Everett III in 1957 and later became the Level Three type of alternate universe in Tegmark’s catalog of parallel existences. Utilizing quantum physics, MWI claims that every action by every person and object creates an infinite number of alternative actions that branch off into their own universe. In this scenario, every possible history and future becomes reality in its own existence separate from our own. This idea was the plot device for the science fiction television series Sliders, which had a group of people travel to alternate Earths every week from 1995 to 2000 via a machine that generated a wormhole.
Could we ever detect or visit these parallel universes? If the theories of current physics are proven true, then the answer would be not any time soon in most cases. However, there has been speculation that four “cold spots” or “bruises” in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation – the surviving remnant of the Big Bang which began our universe some 13.8 billion years ago – are alternate universes which either once quantum entangled with or “bumped” into our reality at some point in the distant past.
If there were parallel universes which collided with our own Universe, one has to ask why they did not create a new Big Bang as predicted by the ekyprotic cosmological model: In this scenario, a physical property in string theory called branes has the branes of several universes collide perhaps once every one trillion years or so. Their collision releases huge amounts of energy to create a new universe. This is what some scientists say is what brought about our Universe in contrast to the current Big Bang model of creation.
There are those who disavow the idea of other universe beyond our own. They correctly state that there is no scientifically empirical evidence for their existence, only theories and mathematical models. While these skeptics are correct in their reasoning, one also has to ask if they need to take another look at our perspectives on the Cosmos over the centuries. Not too many centuries ago, only a few people dared to speculate there were any worlds beyond our Earth or that the Sun was just a very close member of those myriads of twinkling stars in the night sky.
As late as 1920, astronomers were still debating whether the Milky Way galaxy was the ultimate cosmic structure or just one of many billions of stellar islands in the Universe. We now know the latter to be true, adding to our list of cosmic “demotions” from thinking we were the literal focus of existence to just being residents of a rather small world circling a typical star in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of suns, all of which is part of an immense and ancient Universe with at least one hundred billion galaxies if not more.
So are we part of a vast, singular Universe, or is our reality just one of an infinity of alternate existences on a scale far beyond what even our current knowledge can determine? Just as with the possibility of there being extraterrestrial life now that we know many billions of worlds exist in our Milky Way alone, or the historical precedent of Copernicus and others claiming that Earth is just one planet orbiting its sun and not the other way around, it is very tempting to conclude that even something as massive as the Universe might not be the only one in reality. However, we must temper our conclusions on this exciting possibility until the day science determines their existence – or lack thereof.
Three of the sixteen stories in The Other Half of the Sky have been chosen by Gardner Dozois for inclusion in The Year’s Best SF (with a fourth possible).
I will simply say this is unprecedented — and the best solstice gift I could receive.
Another lagniappe was Chris Moriarty’s review in F&SF which included this sentence: “The Other Half of the Sky, a new collection of women’s sf edited by Athena Andreadis, stands as a 443-page refutation of all Heffalump Hunters who have ever marched in self-referential circles while loudly lamenting the inexplicable failure of women to write “real” sf. However, I intend it to do double duty in this column…because I can’t think of another anthology out this year that so utterly refutes Paul Kincaid’s assertion that our genre has succumbed to intellectual inertia.”
In other words, the anthology will make a good gift not just for readers of the genre, but for readers who want stories written by and for literate adults. A full list of reviews, interviews and round tables connected to the anthology is at the book site and on a sidebar page on this blog.
“Highways and dance halls, a good song takes you far;
You write about the moon and you dream about the stars…”
— Jackson Browne, The Road
The Byzantine Empire, 1025 AD (medium extent)
[click on image for bigger version]
A slight variant of the article below first appeared in Stone Telling issue 1 (Sept. 2010) with the accompanying images in different internal locations. The reposting was triggered by two events but has been in my thoughts for a while, partly because of the recent fashionability of “hidden histories” in SFF. This directive considers “European-based” narratives undesirable as over-represented, shopworn, colonialist, etc. Like many western European history scholars, though for different reasons, the holders of this view (and, ironically, their ideological opponents) conflate “Europe” with its northwestern/central part and erase/ignore portions of European history that have always been unfashionable because they can’t be neatly slotted. Among those so erased are the Byzantines, who weren’t exactly a blink in history’s eye: they bridged east and west for a millennium. Yet on a rapid skim, I can count a single fantasy short story based on them, Christine Lucas’ “On Marble Threshing Floors” (Cabinet des Fées, Jan. 2011).
The shorter fuses that lit my decision to repost came from Twitter. One was an exchange with someone deemed a “scholar” in the SFF domain who informed me that “Greeks aren’t Eastern European, according to Wikipedia” (which makes me weep for the level of “scholarship” in SFF). The second was a link to someone’s article in which they called St. Basil of Caesarea “a Turkish bishop” again invoking Wikipedia as their authority – even though Logic 101, coupled with a modicum of historical knowledge, should have led them to wonder: a Turkish… bishop… in 330 AD?
A (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards
Today the sky is different, today the light has changed,
Today the youths are riding out to join in the battle.
— Start of The Song of Armouris, the oldest Akritikón
In the first chapter of Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, enemies overrun the protagonist’s mountain fortress home. Rather than suffer the usual fate of captive women, his mother leaps to her death from the parapet. Western readers considered this a dramatic gambit, but to me it was routine fare: I had already encountered it in the history and folksongs of my people; prominently so in the Akritiká, the songs of the Byzantine border guards.
The common view in the West is that the Roman Empire fell in the fourth century, when it was overrun by the Goths, Vandals and Alans. In reality, only the western half disappeared under the waves of invaders. The eastern portion became a great multicultural empire that lasted a thousand years, acted as both a buffer and a bridge between Asia and Europe, and gave the Rus Vikings of Kiev the Cyrillic alphabet. Instead of Latin its lingua franca was a Greek evolved from the Alexandrian koiné, and its dominant religion was Orthodox Christianity. Renaissance scholars called it the Byzantine empire, but its citizens called themselves Romioí, Romaíoi – Romans – and they retained much from the older empire.
One of the Roman customs that the Byzantines kept was the entrusting of their eastern border defense to local militias in addition to the professional army. Ákron is the Greek word for “edge” – so these guards became known as Akrítai. In exchange for their service, they received small land holdings and tax exemptions. Not surprisingly, they were an ethnic and religious kaleidoscope. They were Greek, Armenian, Syrian, Bulgar, Thracian; they intermarried, changing religions as they did so. Usually they acted as guards and scouts, sometimes becoming the brigands they guarded against. They reverted to farming whenever the din of war subsided, though that never lasted long for them to put away their weapons.
From the 8th to the 10th century, the Akrítai were instrumental in checking Arab incursions into Asia Minor, from Syria to Persia to Armenia. They helped the Byzantine army push back the formidable armies of the Damascus Caliphate. They became crucial again in the Black Sea Byzantine empire of Trapezous (Trebizond), founded after the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 in their zeal to punish those the Pope declared schismatics (the Byzantines compounded their unnaturalness by giving some power to women and “effeminate” men and they also happened to possess astonishing riches as well as decadent habits, such as using forks).
From this liminal zone at the edge of the empire arose the earliest Greek folksongs to survive till our days: the Akritiká. The earliest versions hail from the 9th century. Some scholars consider them the beginning of modern Greek literature. The main figure in them is Diyenís (Two-Blood) Akrítas, a cultural hybrid representative of his entire group.
The songs tell that a Saracen emir kidnapped the daughter of a Byzantine general. Her five brothers hunted him down and the youngest challenged him to a duel, the prize being his sister’s freedom. The emir was defeated, but he had fallen in love with her. To keep her, he decided to convert to Christianity and live among her people. Diyenís was the child of this marriage. The lays of the exploits of Diyenís and the other Akrítai are equal parts Homeric saga and chanson de geste – and like them, they were sung by wandering singers (ayírtai) kin to troubadours.
The songs thrum with thirst for honor and glory, attainments that obsess men in such settings: the heroes swear unbreakable oaths, avenge murders and kidnappings of kin, duel and become blood brothers with worthy enemies, receive counsel from faithful horses and prophetic birds, fight entire armies single-handed, slay preternatural beasts. In deeds and attributes they are close to Herakles, Achilles and Cuchulainn, even to the extent of the berserker fury that can possess them in the heat of battle. These echoes have deep and tangled roots. The Akrítai not only lived and died on the plains of Hector’s Troy and the hills of Medea’s Colchis, but long ago the locals had also absorbed the Celts that once comprised the Anatolian nation-state of Galatia.
The songs also echo with laments about courtship and star-crossed love, loveless marriage and abusive in-laws, devotion or hatred between children and (step)parents, enslavement, exile. Through these preoccupations, the other half of humanity appears in the Akritiká. Byzantium was a stiffly patriarchal society that deemed women inferior, temptresses if not controlled. Nevertheless, its women were better off than their Roman, Frankish or Slav counterparts. They did not suffer the inequities of Salic law: they owned their dowries and were equals in inheriting and bequeathing property and status to their children; they could own businesses, be heads of households, even Emperors; and they were at least basically literate, while the upper class produced several female scholars and historians whose works are still studied today.
Young women in the Akritiká are invariably single daughters, prized and cosseted. The apple of their parents’ eye, they are surrounded by an army of devoted brothers. Perhaps the most famous Greek ballad, The Dead Brother’s Song, begins: “Mother with your nine sons and with your only daughter/ Twelve years she had reached and the sun had not touched her/In the dark her mother bathed her, in the dark she combed her/By moonlight and starlight she braided her hair.” A woman’s brothers drop everything to defend, rescue or avenge her.
Although Byzantine marriages were usually arranged, the Akritiká sing the praises of romantic love, just like the courtly love lays they resemble. Their heroines are often kidnapped (sometimes in raids, sometimes by a smitten spurned suitor) but equally frequently they elope with men whose singing or looks they like – as Yseult did with Tristan. The Akritiká also reflect the fact that women wielded real authority in the household. They marked their children’s lives by blessing or cursing them and, as with the Iroquois or contemporary jihadis, only mothers could give their sons permission to go to war.
Women’s power partly arose from the constant war footing of the society portrayed in the Akritiká. It is a sad fact that women’s status is often higher in warlike societies, from the Spartans to the Mongols: they have to keep everything going when the men are absent or dead. In the case of the Akrítai, there was an additional wrinkle. The Byzantine border populations came in touch with the more matriarchal (or at least less patriarchal) Scythians, Sarmatians, Phrygians and Lydians. Around the Black Sea, archaeologists have been excavating kurgans that contained skeletons adorned with jewelry and mirrors – but also with daggers, javelins, quiverfuls of arrows and weapon-inflicted notches on their bones. These tomb occupants merited human sacrifices and their pelvic angle leaves no doubt that they were female, once again vindicating Herodotus whose descriptions tally with the findings.
So women in the Akritiká are not just the “Angels (or Demons) in the House” but appear in yet another guise: as warrior maidens who hold besieged castles and best all men but the hero in single combat. Taking his cue from his Bronze Age confrères (Theseus and Hippolyta or Antiope, Achilles and Penthesilea) Diyenís almost finds his match and soulmate in the Amazon Maximó, a renowned fighter and the leader of her own band. But the more common tropes and mindsets prevail: the encounter ends with her rape and/or murder – and the warrior maidens in the Akritiká either fall to their death (just like Bagoas’ mother in The Persian Boy) or become diminished consorts to their conquerors. Just like the real-life sworn virgins of the Balkans, the women, unlike the men, can only have half a life.
Death, often chosen, awaits the women who cross boundaries. Death is also where the pagan bedrock surfaces in the Akritiká. If illicit lovers cannot reconcile their kin to their decision, they invariably die by suicide, the church teachings ignored. And the afterlife in these songs is not the Christian or Moslem garden of delights, but the dank, dark underworld of The Odyssey and of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. When Charon (Death) comes for Diyenís, he comes as the warrior whom none can withstand. For three days and three nights the two clash on a stone threshing floor. But Charon always wins, and the hero knows this when he agrees to the duel. The goal is to maintain honor by giving him a good fight. As a final shamanistic turn, the hero’s blood brothers dance and sing around him fully armed while he dies, defiant to the end.
Inaugurating the major shift from the older dactylic hexameter, the Akritiká are in blank verse iambic heptameter: fifteen syllables with a caesura after the eighth one. The style is known as “politikón” (civilian – that is, secular) or “galloping chariot” because of its rhythm. Like the British Border ballads, the songs are unadorned and straightforward, with barely any adjectives or adverbs. They also have a strobe-light effect, highlighting some telling minute action but compressing large swaths of events into a few words. The songs are sung either a capella or with a flourish-free instrumental background – usually the three-string Cretan or Pontian lyre (known as the kemenché to those familiar with World Music albums by Peter Gabriel or Yo-Yo Ma).
Just as the Akritiká were birthed at the borders of Byzantium, so did they persist there. While the rest of the Byzantine territory evolved different songs under Ottoman rule, the Cretans, the Cypriots and the Pontians of the Black Sea continued to sing them. From those peripheries, always more culturally conservative than the center, the lays survived to our days, shards of once great diadems. My people used the Akritiká as rallying cries during times of oppression – the Ottoman era; the German occupation and the resistance to it during WWII; the military junta of the sixties. I was raised and nourished on them. They run and murmur in my veins with all their glories, blind spots and contradictions.
The time has come to let the songs themselves take center stage. Included is a Cretan rendition of the Death of Diyenís by the famous singer and lyre player Níkos Ksiloúris (who, like Diyenís, fought Charon at the flower of his maturity). Here is a bare-bones translation of the text:
Diyenís struggles for his soul and the earth is frightened.
And the gravestone shudders — how shall it cover him?
As he lays there, he speaks a brave man’s words:
“If only the earth had stairs and the sky chain links,
I would step on the stairs, seize hold of the links,
Climb up to the sky and make the heavens quake.”
Sources and further reading/listening (partial list):
John Julius Norwich, Byzantium – The Early Centuries, The Apogee, The Decline and Fall
Neal Ascherson, The Black Sea
Christódoulos Hálaris, Akritiká – Odes of the Byzantine Empire Border Guards vol. 1 and 2
Images within the article:
Diyenís Akrítas, woodcut by Spiros Vassiliou
Amazon, Attic white-figure vase, 470 BC, British Museum
Armed Pontian Greeks dancing to the lyre, Trabzon, 1910
