Parallelepiped Ream

You shouldn't have to base fictional magic on real-world magic, for the simple reason that there's no real-world magic

On this corner: the Brandon Sanderson faction, which proclaims that magic in fantasy stories should have rules.

And on this corner: the N. K. Jemisin faction, which proclaims that magic in fantasy stories should not have rules.

These two authors aren't the founders of their respective factions, but they're the ones who have respectively written their most accessible summations. Supporters of Yay Rules think of magic as something much more important than a tool for the characters: it's a tool for the author, and thus cannot just be thrown at the wall to see whether it will work this time. Supporters of Boo Rules think of magic as a vibe, a feel, part of the charm of inhabiting a realm fundamentally different from Earth, and thus it would die if it were forced to follow the rigid rules of our physical world.

What I see is two mutually unintelligible languages. From the Yay Rules perspective, magic is an aid to plotting, so it obeys rules of cause and effect. From the Boo Rules perspective, magic is an aid to worldbuilding, so it follows aesthetic preference. That is why, in the essays I linked above, Sanderson is concerned with how magic lets you resolve the plot, whereas Jemisin is concerned with what magic feels like. They're asking different things of magic because they have different notions of what magic does in a story. You will expect magic to make rational sense if your starting assumption is that what magic does in fantasy is a question of writing craft. You will expect magic to instead be awe-inspiring and ineffable if your starting assumption is that what magic does in fantasy is a question of writing style.

As for me, my allegiance is with Yay Rules. Give me all your intricate systems of arcane calculations, your cyclical calendars of mystical energies, your periodic table of primordial essences. Show me the structure. Show me the limits. It's a lot more fun to write within limits. (I mean, it's more fun for me. I can't, and shouldn't, aspire to eradicate all fiction with numinous magic; what I'm doing in this essay is to describe why numinous magic doesn't work for me.) If you want your fictional magic to hook me, go to the trouble of asking yourself how your magic is integrated into the building blocks of your universe. And I can already hear the Boo Rules people protest: But that kills the sense of wonder! And my response is: What I seek when I read fantasy isn't the sense of wonder.

Let me explain. In most conventional fantasy, if you step into an enchanted forest and meet a flower that speaks fluent English, wonder would be the appropriate reaction to have (whereas in magical realism, if you step into an enchanted forest and meet a flower that speaks fluent English, your reaction is to go on with your day because talking flowers are nothing to marvel at). A sense of wonder is not the appropriate reaction if you happen to not know where rainbows come from, and therefore feel transcendent awe every time one appears. Alas, that's the reaction human beings had for thousands of years until Newton figured out how rainbows form. Rainbows didn't lose their charm; we lost the misconception that there was any charm to look for. Rainbows didn't switch from mysterious to ordinary; we became aware that they had always been ordinary.

Where I look for my sense of wonder is in the expansion of human reach that is described in the hardest of science fiction. Magic reminds me too much of the parts of our reality that cause me no wonder at all, because they don't cause anything. (And I write this as someone who used to devour the Harry Potter movies, and still laments that the Lord of the Rings movies have way too little magic.)

Fiction is sometimes described as following an implicit pact between writer and reader: the writer pretends this is true, and the reader pretends to buy it. Well, I don't believe in that pact. I don't concede my suspension of disbelief by default. You want my suspension of disbelief? Work to earn it. Oh, your story has magic? Work harder. And you're going to have it even harder if your idea of fictional magic relies on the conventions of mystical belief systems that have existed in the real world. That's where my suspension of disbelief is completely lost.

To illustrate this point: about a year ago, a Twitter user with the handle Bright__Whitney posted this:

One thing that drives me crazy about Western fantasy literature with “magic systems” is that magic is a spiritual technology in every real world culture.

Setting aside for a moment the outrageousness of the very concept of “spiritual technology,” Bright__Whitney's point is that magic does not belong to the realm of the natural sciences (sort of like D&D arcane magic), but to the realm of spirituality (sort of like D&D divine magic), and therefore fantasy authors should write magic as something deeply personal and unrepeatable instead of as an ordered progression of deducible laws. The reason why this piece of writing advice results in stories that won't satisfy me is that taking real-world cultures as your example for devising fictional magic gives me as a reader mismatching expectations. If you want your fictional culture of spellcasters to evoke in me that oh-so-important sense of wonder, don't draw inspiration from, say, the ancient Norsemen, who seriously thought that the rainbow was a bridge to the home of the gods.

This is why I'm not convinced by this part of Jemisin's essay:

In most cultures of the world, magic is intimately connected with beliefs regarding life and death—things no one understands, and few expect to.

That's all fine and dandy—if you're doing anthropology. If you're doing fiction, you can't rely on how real cultures understand magic, because their practices never produce any actual magic. Jemisin fails to see this key issue when she goes on to add:

Magic [...] can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language.

This statement reveals the error in Jemisin's line of reasoning. “Belief causes magic” is what the people involved in mystical practices think happens. But it's not what happens. What happens in the real world is that believers in the supernatural sing their incantations, or consume their herbs, or beseech their tutelary spirits, or offer their sacrifices... and that's it. Beyond a probably intense, sometimes life-altering emotional experience (which is no different from what you might get from standing in the presence of sublime art), nothing more happens as a result of the mystical ritual. In our world there are no magical effects. In our world it is known for a fact that the event A of burning Iphigenia alive can never produce the event B of bringing wind for the Greek fleet, and a story that makes the claim that that particular A leads to that particular B is going to have to make a really big effort to win my investment.

The only way I can enjoy a story with numinous magic is if the magic itself isn't the main focus of the story. This is the same approach recommended by Sanderson in his essay: if you invent a world where a preacher can use prayers to (only sometimes) remove tumors, don't make the entire plot hinge on removing a tumor.

And that's before we get into rituals that are explicitly described as lacking a reliable result. The idea that magic in fantasy is not supposed to make sense comes from noticing that all the mystical rituals that are performed in all human cultures have at best a coincidental link to the occurrence of the desired effect. And this is so because in the real world magic doesn't work, because supernatural forces don't exist. The preacher who claims to be able to remove tumors with a prayer can only point at anecdotes better explained by coincidence. This whole aesthetic stance that insists that supernatural forces don't proceed by logic, that you can't systematize them into regular laws, that their mechanisms aren't repeatable or predictable, has at its root the simple fact that real-world mystical practices don't do anything. If you spend your entire life doing prayer vigils to cure cancer and only occasionally see a tumor go into remission after you do it, of course you're going to end up thinking that the supernatural realm is mysterious and capricious.

(If any believer in supernatural forces is bothered by these remarks, please come up with a prayer that an impartial third party can verify actually cures cancer, and only then you get to yell at me.)

I can summarize the Boo Rules position this way: “Fictional magic shouldn't make sense because real-world magic doesn't.”

My response is: Real-world magic doesn't make sense because it doesn't work, so fictional magic based on (already known to be ineffective) real-world magic won't impress me much.

What prompted this post was a recent Bluesky thread by historian Bret Deveraux, which reignited the whole discussion and said this in its conclusion:

I'd encourage aspiring fantasy writers or world-builders to try to get a bit beyond their own modern thinking in order to develop rich worlds.

Earlier in the same thread, he said:

I can absolutely imagine a pre-modern fantasy society with magic understanding it this way, even if their magic works on regular physics-like principles. You absolutely could have a viewpoint character who wields magic and understands what works, but not why.

This, right here, is what boggles me: why on Earth would you ever want to pursue, and evoke in others, the experiential state of not understanding? In the end, this is what the “numinous” actually implies. To feel the numinous is to feel confused. This is why I don't consider the numinous to be a worthy aesthetic effect: in the real world, what people call numinous is only ever caused by incomplete knowledge (which, in turn, often comes from faulty reasoning), and I find it abhorrently beneath human dignity to treat our defects in reasoning with any reverence.

Devereaux does make a valid point here:

of course there's no reason that, in a fictional world, magic needs to follow physical laws at all, especially if magic is tied to something like the soul or the divine. Gods are not constrained by physics—so why should magic be?

That part is true; nothing in the writing craft forbids that you invent a world governed by totally random forces. But because randomness lacks intention, you wouldn't be able to credibly use such random magic to express any coherent theme in your story.

Devereaux then adds:

I think the demand for 'hard' fully systematized magic systems sometimes stems from this sort of failure of imagination to understand that to the ancients, even physics was a 'soft' magic system.

It's one thing to be informed about how the ancients thought. It's a noble and respectable endeavour; it is, indeed, how Devereaux makes a living. It's a different thing to take that mode of thought as an example to follow. Devereaux criticizes logical magic for being too modern. His core argument is: Even physics, which is fundamentally real and logical, was perceived by the ancients as something mysterious and ineffable, therefore even a world where magic is real and logical will have people who perceive magic as something mysterious and ineffable.

The problem with that argument is that none of us are pre-modern writers with pre-modern positions to express. Remember the Norsemen and their rainbow bridge? Why would we encourage anyone to cultivate a state of mind that understood the world less?

And I'll further add, as the conclusion to my argument:

Fictional magic should make sense because stories should make sense.

—Arturo

Stuff worth reading

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• Hollywood is terrified of offending its loudest fans, and some studios are letting them have a say in how movies are made. That's a terrible idea.
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• It's irritating that TV seasons have become shorter for no good reason.
• In relation to the same argument: Star Trek filler episodes are sorely missed.
• According to Charles Stross, “there seems to be an emergent discourse in fandom about the legitimacy of the authorial position.”
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Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Before reading Old Man's War, my only experience with John Scalzi's work had been the handful of episodes he wrote for Love Death + Robots, which were a welcome refreshing note in the middle of an otherwise very underwhelming show. After following him on Twitter and its descendants for quite a while, the moment eventually came when I simply had to see for myself what this multi-award winner was like. That moment happened when I stumbled upon Old Man's War in a Spanish translation at the Bogotá Book Fair. It will surely please Mr. Scalzi to hear that his books are selling in Colombia.

To summarize: Old Man's War is about a future where humankind is in a state of perpetual war with dozens of expansionist species, and the brutal conditions of war have led human scientists to design supersoldiers with extra strength, extra endurance, extra resistance to diseases, and extra hotness. So the old people of Earth are invited to join the Colonial Defense Forces. In exchange for legally dying on Earth, their minds are transplanted into magnificent young bodies that exceed every human standard but are the bare minimum for having a fighting chance against what the universe will throw at them.

Why old people? Because the necessary degree of self-sacrifice is harder for the young. This is an exceptionally horrific type of war that soldiers should not expect to survive, so the CDF only seek those with enough maturity to do a very difficult, very scary and very painful thing for potentially no personal benefit.

On one hand, it's brilliant of the author to have found a solution for the obviously suicidal problem of civilizations that throw away their most talented youth by making them cannon fodder. On the other hand, the fact that the CDF maintain an information embargo around Earth has a nasty vibe that isn't much questioned in the first novel, but I was relieved to find was put at the center of the discussion in the sequels. I'm talking about the arrogance of generals who don't bother answering to civilian oversight and at the same time behave condescendingly to those civilians who have no idea of the kind of sacrifices that are required to keep the civilization alive.

From the summaries I've read of the sequels, it appears that that arrogance will be faced with strong counterpoints. Good. But just judging by the first novel, it would be too easy to end up believing that the CDF status quo is presented as a good and desirable thing. Most of the plot of Old Man's War is about training new soldiers, and that is where the author repeatedly falls for a tempting misstep: the “this is not like the movies” defense. To hear CDF drill sergeants, all the space war movies you've watched have gotten it wrong. Dangerously wrong, if you go to space war with the garbage those movies put in your head. No, this is not like the movies! This is real life!! This is serious!!!! We have finally figured out how to fight in space the right way!!!!!!!!

(Whenever this claim appears in a work of fiction, it's inevitable to imagine the author chuckling at the keyboard and thinking, I have finally figured out how to write space war the right way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

The problem with inserting this explicit criticism of all other space war fiction is that it gives Old Man's War an insufferable air of “Verily, verily I say unto you.” For example, there's a chapter where the lesson is “You have heard that it was said, Thou Shalt Give Peace A Chance, but truly I tell you: Thou Dost Not Have Even The Most Basic Intercultural Context To Reliably Interpret The Intentions Of An Alien People.” Several times in the novel, a recruit meets a gruesome death as the predictable consequence of trying to do things his own way. But the mistakes these recruits make are too obvious, too amateurish, and it's hard to suspend disbelief about these scenes when one considers that these characters have the brains of experienced grandparents. This eagerness to demonstrate to the reader that all the movies are wrong and We Finally Got It Right contradicts the whole intention of recruiting old people in the first place.

The problem goes deeper: the reason why the CDF got it right is that humans do live in an extremely hostile universe, where some cultures treat war as a holy cleansing ritual that doesn't proceed according to human tactical thinking, while others (alarmingly too many) have a taste for human flesh. But that's the setting that Scalzi chose to create. If we're meant to read Old Man's War as Scalzi making a point about the prudent and imprudent ways of conducting interstellar relations, we must also keep in mind that it was Scalzi's choice to put Earth in a universe of fanatical mass murderers and cannibals. Scalzi even acknowledges this line of attack: one recruit, who in his youth was a diplomat, criticizes the CDF's readiness to use violence, and his superiors are too annoyed at him to bother explaining that diplomacy has already been extensively tried, that some cultures simply cannot be reasoned with. But again, that is only true in that particular setting, where humankind makes it into space when it's already dominated by a zero-sum squabble of territorial expansion. It isn't as hopelessly grim as Liu Cixin's detestable Dark Forest hypothesis, but the effect in game theory terms is very similar.

(Also, this is the image of the universe that the CDF have chosen to present to their soldiers, an image that the sequels will helpfully question.)

I went into this book hoping to get some insights on old age from the perspective of a young writer (Scalzi was 36 at the time of publication). And I have to admit he does a very good job of putting himself in the mindset of characters twice his age. But sometimes his personal brand of humor gets in the way when important ideas are being explored. I will definitely read more Scalzi, because he does have interesting things to say, but perhaps it won't be in this series. I guess I should have started this post by explaining that I have very little patience for military fiction, and it may take it some years to recover enough for me to try the sequels. What I will definitely need to brace for in future readings is the copious swearing that Scalzi is famous for. As with everything in art, your mileage may vary. In my case, it was exhausting.

—Arturo

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• The 2024 revision of the D&D 5e rules has reached reviewers, and they've already begun sharing their first impressions (see here, here, here and here). TL;DW: it's a mixed bag.
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• Want to feel old? The Matrix is 25 years old. However, it's even more relevant today.
• The Rebel Moon franchise is deader than the Betamax, but it's always fun to discover the creative ways reviewers have been eviscerating it.
• The Neil Gaiman scandal continues to unfold.
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• The modern state of Israel is an unstable contradiction: it pretends to follow the civilized rule of law while behaving barbarically toward Palestine.
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• Abigail Nussbaum has a lot to say about AI.
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• As Phil Plait puts it, telescopes are time machines.
• Gautam Bhatia writes about the late, great Ismail Kadare.
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• Aron Ra has made a practical video summary of the entire human evolutionary lineage.
• It turns out too many books can, indeed, be bad for you.
• Where do the quiet gays go?
• In communist China there was a period when mangoes were objects of public veneration, to the point that (at least) one guy who declared the mangoes unremarkable was executed for slander.
• Fascism is another disease for which laughter is the best medicine.

On Worldcons and moral judgments

For context: several draft amendments have been proposed to reinforce the WSFS Constitution against potential repeats of the Chengdu disaster of last year. One of them would add humanitarian criteria to prevent countries under tyrannical regimes from hosting the Worldcon. The intention sounds great in principle: there are currently no rules to automatically exclude locations that are obviously terrible ideas (e.g. Uganda, Israel) but that might win the right to host a Worldcon if they get enough votes. If such rules had been in place in 2021, the People's Republic of China wouldn't have been eligible and we all could have been spared a monumental embarrassment.

The criteria that have been suggested for filtering out candidate locations are three: the World Press Freedom Index, the Freedom in the World survey and The Economist Democracy Index. Helpfully, and impressively quickly, Camestros Felapton has already done the boring work of compiling all three reports in one document. The cutoff score given in the draft amendment is 60% in any of the three rankings. In the World Press Freedom Index, this means that Guyana passes (60.1%) but Guinea does not (59.97%). In the Freedom in the World survey, the cutoff lets Kosovo qualify but not Georgia. In The Economist Democracy Index, Paraguay makes it (60.0%) but Bangladesh does not (58.7%). And I have to ask: what's the significant difference between Guyana and Guinea, between Kosovo and Georgia, between Paraguay and Bangladesh? Any cutoff value would be arbitrary. By the proposed change, Israel would still qualify by two of the three rankings.

To give a clearer idea of how little help these rankings are, let's look at Uganda's competitor for the 2028 Worldcon: Australia. It has spectacular scores in all three measures, so it would seem reasonable to infer that human rights and civil liberties are respected in Australia, right?

Ahem.

Australia has serious failures with regard to Aboriginal rights, immigration policy and criminal justice. Human Rights Watch has pointed out several other problems in the country, and Amnesty International has this to say:

In February, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture cancelled plans to resume a visit to Australia, suspended in 2022, after failing to secure guarantees of unrestricted access to all detention facilities.

Or for more urgency, let's look at this year's host. Assessing the suitability of the city of Glasgow is tricky because Scotland has been a colony for three centuries; you only need to look at election maps over the course of the latest Tory regime to see that the Scottish people cannot be blamed for TERF Island's alarming retrogression in queer rights, immigration and welfare (see here and here). However, who wants to bite that bullet and ban the UK from hosting Worldcons? Britlandians still have enough freedom of speech for Doctor Who to produce the queerest season in its history, but apparently not enough freedom to question their form of government.

The thing is that numbers on a scale cannot possibly tell the whole story. If you rely on numbers, you could miss the annual reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which are richly detailed but, crucially, don't rate countries on a scale. If you rely on numbers, as the draft amendment proposes, you could end up with a future Worldcon held in such exciting places as New Zealand (ahem), Argentina (ahhhem), India (mmrrmmph), Moldova (owwwuffuffuff), or Hungary (harrrrrrruuuummmmphhhh). And here's the complication: it would be fantastic to have a Worldcon in India or Argentina. One of the arguments in favor of picking Chengdu was that fans shouldn't be punished for the government they happen to have, especially if said government doesn't really represent its people. But that argument has limits. No one wants a Worldcon in North Korea. On a scale from the United Federation of Planets to the Republic of Gilead, we need to decide where to draw the line.

Speaking of which, I'm puzzled by Felapton's counterproposal: a candidate location should qualify on all three scores, but with a cutoff value of 50%. To be fair, this modification to the modification includes more sensible terms:

Language should be added to make clear this is a minimum standard and that members should also use their judgement on a broader range of issues that can’t be covered by a set of indices.

As much as I'd love a move in that direction, the amendment would need to be a lot more specific if we want to implement it consistently. Do we want to make sure we don't give a free PR boost to countries that mistreat prisoners, fail to protect women from sexual violence and invade indigenous land? Then we'd have to ban Norway, frequent darling of freedom rankings.

I was watching this topic at a distance until I noticed that Felapton's modified rules would remove Colombia from the list of eligible locations. Look, you don't have to explain to me what's objectionable about Colombia. Trust me, I know. What you may not know is that Colombia has years of experience in hosting safe and successful international cultural events. We have three Hay Festival sites and two Comic Con sites. We also have our own geekdom conventions (see here and here) and the second-largest book fair in Latin America. And that's without counting the international festivals for film, visual arts, performing arts and countless musical genres.

So, under Felapton's proposal of a 50% score in all three rankings, Colombia wouldn't make the list, while far more problematic places, like Papua New Guinea, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kenya, Madagascar, Serbia, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Mongolia, Georgia, Senegal and Malaysia, would become eligible.

Numbers alone do not, and cannot, express the relevant differences. I know I may be accused of having a Latin American bias, so I'll be the first to admit that right now is the wrong time to try El Salvador or Venezuela, but seriously, in 2024 there's no way that Serbia or Papua New Guinea are freer societies than Mexico or Bolivia.

This leaves us no closer to solving the problem. Going by numbers + case-by-case will give worse results than just case-by-case, but we'd still be at the mercy of whoever is doing the judging. Imagine we're supremely unlucky and the Seattle Worldcon of 2025 fails to avoid the election of Tel Aviv for the 2027 Worldcon. Then the Tel Aviv organizers would be in charge of running the vote for the 2029 host city. It just so happens that the only current candidate for 2029 is Dublin. And it just so happens that Irish foreign policy hasn't been shy about denouncing the excesses of the occupation of Palestine. We have no guarantee that the Netanyahu regime won't get its nose where it shouldn't and pressure the Worldcon organizers into making up some excuse to veto Dublin from consideration.

This year, Glasgow will be in charge of running the vote for the 2026 host city. The only candidate left for the 2026 Worldcon is Los Angeles, which sounds like a great choice until you pause to wonder how the humanitarian record of the US may change if Hair Furor wins this year's election. Even today, there's no human rights standard that the US isn't breaking somewhere. It would further undermine the credibility of the Hugos if we introduced vetting rules but didn't allow them to apply to the country that created the award.

My countercounterproposal is to do away with numerical rankings and put the onus on the candidate cities to prove that they're safe locations. (That's what the magazine Amazing Stories tried to do this February with the Ugandan team, which responded with a non-response.) The change I'm proposing would be much simpler to implement, as another numeral in Section 4.6.1 of the WSFS Constitution. I'm thinking of something like this:

4.6.1: To be eligible for site selection, a bidding committee must file the following documents with the Committee that will administer the voting: ... (4) adequate evidence of a climate of political freedom, protection of queer rights, accessible infrastructure, and absence of censorship in the candidate city.

This still lets the organizers of the Worldcon where the voting will take place decide what constitutes “adequate” evidence, but that's the thing with us puny humans: there's no social rule without a margin of interpretation.

—Arturo

Stuff worth reading

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Ten-episode seasons are far from enough to develop an ensemble cast

The original Star Trek was never meant to be The James T. Kirk Show or The Spock Show, regardless of whatever diva complex the actors may have had behind the scenes. We have a roughly complete idea of what Uhura is like, what Chekhov is like, what Scotty is like, what Sulu is like. That's the function of so-called filler episodes: they give the writers a chance to showcase and flesh out the secondary characters.

This breathing room is lost in today's shorter seasons of television, but even in new shows, the writers can figure out ways to let us get to know the whole cast. Star Trek: Lower Decks has ten-episode seasons, and yet we've spent more than enough time with relatively minor figures like Billups, Kayshon, Migleemo and Barnes. Lower Decks is a particularly good example for my argument: as a comedy show, it needs to go out of its way to make every line of dialogue memorable. This means that a minor character with only one line per episode will still have a chance to stand out and leave an impression about their personality. We know nothing about Migleemo's family life, but we can guess what it would feel like to dine with him.

Star Trek: Voyager didn't know how to do this. It oscillated between wanting to be The Tom Paris Show and The Doctor Show until it got a severe case of whiplash and became permanently The Seven of Nine Show. In this case, characters were written either as one-note archetypes (Paris, Torres, Kim, Kes, Tuvok) or as protean entities with no defined shape (Chakotay, Janeway). At the very extreme of amorphousness stand both the Doctor and Neelix. But the Doctor, being a sentient AI on a quest to expand his capabilities, was an excellent fit for this style of writing that gave him a rapidly changing identity, whereas Neelix, who already had a life and a personal history, came off as desperate by trying to do everything and be everything.

The secret to threading the needle of characterization in Star Trek is showing us life outside the job. Star Trek has always had a problem of idolizing Starfleet a bit too much, and it hasn't explored with sufficient depth the way each character's whole self is subsumed in their job. The fact that an old Picard can immediately tell that Rios used to belong to Starfleet is intended as a glimpse inside Rios's character, but it's actually a tragedy. Here's how Picard inadvertently describes the reduction of Rios as a person:

I see this ship is impeccably maintained. Every bolt and clasp and fitting in place. Everything stowed in regulation Starfleet order. I don't know what happened to you, Rios, or to the Ibn Majid. But five minutes on this ship, and I know precisely what I'm looking at. You are Starfleet to the core. I can smell it on you.

The writing in Picard was never particularly well focused, but at least nominally it was supposed to be a show about one main character. The nature of the tragedy is that this character completely identifies with an institution (or rather with the idealized form of it; when Picard quits Starfleet in protest, it's to preserve his own Starfleet-ness). That is how he can figure out Rios, because the institution worked the same standardization magic on him. Defining Rios in that way, so soon after introducing the character, casts a shadow on everything else we can glean about him afterwards.

The actual purpose of all this rant is to point out the criminal disservice that Star Trek: Discovery did to its secondary characters. Rhys, Linus, Bryce, Arav, Pollard, Christopher, Owosekun, Detmer, Airiam, Nilsson (plus all the crew members who suddenly and inexplicably showed up in season 5 only to fill chairs: Jemison, Naya, Asha, Gallo)—why don't we know anything about them outside the job? This is an unusually large cast for a Star Trek series, and we only ever see them as the functions they perform on the ship. We don't meet them as people. Owosekun has a fascinating backstory that could provide endless drama; Detmer's PTSD promises a compelling season arc that goes nowhere; Arav has a fascinating design that hints at very unusual biology, yet is reduced to background decoration; and poor Airiam receives the worst treatment of all. Fans spent two whole seasons wondering what was Airiam's deal until it was finally explained in the most clumsily rushed manner in the same episode where she dies.

For all its talk of cooperation and community, Discovery was never an ensemble show; it was The Michael Burnham Show. We're constantly told that this crew has become a family, but we aren't shown why. The writers seem to have finally realized the problem by season 5, when new First Officer Rayner is ordered to socialize with the crew because he's a grumpy ball of bitterness. What he does instead is have a lightning round of 20-second talks with every one of them. The episode where this happens gives us the tiniest bit of characterization for the Discovery crew that is never revisited. It's not a cure to the problem; it's salt on the wound.

This neglect happens even to the main cast of Discovery. After Gray gets a new synthetic body, the fact that Adira still carries a Trill symbiont is never addressed again, and their character becomes a blank slate from then on. Reno's wonderful sense of humor is shamefully underutilized; in some episodes it's easy to forget she's even in this show. And Burnham herself is the poster child for workaholism. Who is she apart from Starfleet? Turns out she becomes mother to another Starfleet captain. I feel sorry for that kid.

It's tradition in Star Trek to use the tie-in novels to fill in the blanks left on screen. Discovery left far too many blanks about its own cast, and now that the show is over, an opportunity opens to keep Discovery fans hooked with dozens and dozens of books. Is Paramount hiring? May I call dibs on Owosekun?

—Arturo

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On categories and what we want from them

I had been planning to launch this blog around this time, but I wasn't expecting to do it with this topic.

For context: Some weeks ago, John Scalzi posted on social media that he'd seen people arguing whether Star Wars was science fiction. He said he's tired of that discussion, and he firmly stated that yes, Star Wars is science fiction and it's silly that people are even asking the question. In the responses to his post, I noticed many were making variations on one repeated argument: Star Wars has robots and spaceships, therefore it's obviously science fiction. That feels to me like a very reductive way of defining genres. So I published my opposing view on the same website, but without tagging Mr. Scalzi, because, after all, his post said he's tired of the whole thing. In my post, I said that calling Star Wars science fiction because it has robots and spaceships is like calling Casablanca a musical because it has people singing. Now, to be clear: I didn't see Mr. Scalzi use that specific line of argument; I only saw it in the responses to his post. But he didn't respond to his responders to tell them they were wrong, so at a minimum he doesn't seem to disagree with them.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down the posts I'm citing, so that you can read them for yourselves. “Weeks ago” is entire geological eras in social media. I actually had forgotten about the whole matter until this morning, when Marie Vibbert published an essay on her blog, where she specifically calls me out, framing her text as an answer to a challenge I issued. I honestly don't remember having issued any challenge, but, as I said to her, I'm flattered that my words got her thinking at such length. I met Ms. Vibbert personally at the Chengdu Worldcon last year, and she struck me as immensely kind, funny, and sharp-minded. We got along really well. To this day we remain in excellent terms. Her post on Star Wars makes many interesting points, and this post of mine is not a counter-attack. Dear readers, do not mistake this for a feud.

But in my never humble opinion, Star Wars is obviously not science fiction, and if you care enough about a very dead horse to keep reading this post, I'll proceed to explain what I mean.

First, I hope we can all agree that labels are made up. There's no law of the universe that objectively, unambiguously distinguishes Pride and Prejudice from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in the same way that we can objectively, unambiguously distinguish electrons from protons. The question about what Star Wars is can't be answered by appealing to any fixed, eternal standard. We, collectively, decide what Star Wars is. We decide how we talk about art. At some point in the future, a Tumblr post may invent a new label, let's say, “offspringpunk,” and define it as stories where the descendants of villains fight against their parents, and it's conceivable that the author of such definition will claim Star Wars as a precursor of offspringpunk. The key thing to keep in mind here is that no one involved in the production of Star Wars ever thought about such a label, much less about intentionally conforming their creation to it, but this admittedly absurd example shows how a label can be retroactively applied to art that wasn't made with that label in mind. That's how I can claim that Sherlock Holmes is science fiction even though its author may have never heard of that label—even though most people alive today who are familiar with science fiction will probably dispute that the label fits Sherlock Holmes.

So I guess it's time for me to clarify how I define science fiction. In very broad terms, I think science fiction is a mode of storytelling in which the resolution of the dramatic conflict hinges on the use of human-made tools. Star Trek is full of non-scientific stuff, like telepaths and all-powerful children and fungus-powered travel and divine koalas and horny ghosts, but a Star Trek plot has a stronger claim to being science fiction than a Star Wars plot because of the way the story proceeds. Characters in Star Trek solve their problems by using reason; moreover, the setting of Star Trek is intentionally conceived as one where problems respond to reason. That won't work in Star Wars, because the setting of Star Wars is conceived as one where problems respond to moral fortitude, so that's how characters in Star Wars go about solving their problems. It was by clever application of technology and tactics that the Rebels blew up the second Death Star, but it was by purity of heart that Luke defeated an Emperor. Even if Star Wars didn't have the supernatural ingredient of the Force, it would still rely on heart solutions over brain solutions. George Lucas intentionally modeled Star Wars on the structure of ancient myth, and that's the vibe it still goes for.

Again, all this is under the definition that makes sense to me. I have no way, and no right, to demand that you adopt my definition. When we're not talking about electrons and protons, most instances of the question “Does A belong in the category X?” are actually hiding the question “Is this definition of X good for anything?” Margaret Atwood still protests that her books are not science fiction, because the definition of science fiction that she happens to prefer is impractically narrow. John Scalzi calls all of fiction fantasy, because the definition of fantasy that he happens to prefer is impractically broad. So we have to pay close attention to the question we're actually asking. When two people discuss whether Star Wars is science fiction, they should first check whether they're speaking the same language.

The whole Star Wars thing resurfaced recently with this Reactor article by Kristen Patterson, which concludes that the fundamental difference between science fiction and fantasy is the way we treat them. But that answer doesn't cover the entire problem. A 19th-century novel about psychic powers could have been received as a scientific story in its day, but now we'd call it fantasy. How is it possible for a story to change genres if the text remains intact? It is possible because labels are mutable. I still hold that as soon as you introduce the supernatural, you're doing fantasy, but I suspect that someone who believes that the supernatural is a real thing would call Chilling Adventures of Sabrina something other than fantasy.

While it's true that labels are made up, it's also true that some labels allow for more productive conversation than others. In reference to that article by Patterson, John Wiswell has commented, “Fantasy is make-believe wearing a cloak. Science fiction is make-believe wearing a lab coat.” Which is a totally fine way of settling the question—if you believe that genre is reducible to aesthetics. That's how Star Wars uses science fiction: as a costume. A cool aesthetic. When you examine what happens in Star Wars, you can see that it doesn't need the robots and spaceships. In her blog, Ms. Vibbert asks whether the story of Star Wars can be told without the robots and spaceships. As it happens, it absolutely can: it's called The Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa. What Lucas did was retell The Hidden Fortress with a cover of chrome paint on it, just like Zack Snyder recently retold Star Wars with a dusty sepia filter. My point is that you could take the same plot of Star Wars and tell it with cowboys and trains, and it would lose nothing of its emotional core. So I find it very strange to see Star Wars classified as science fiction when you could remove the coat of science-looking paint and keep the same story.

So no, I'd say genre does not reduce to aesthetics. The Matrix is a feast of unbridled aesthetics, but you can't keep the same story of The Matrix if you remove the science element. It's the kind of story that can only be told by reference to a specific set of technologies. You can't tell the story of Blade Runner or Bicentennial Man without the artificial people, even if one grants that those stories can be interpreted as allegories for human-on-human discrimination. But there's also a danger of going too far in this direction. From this argument it would be easy to jump to the position that genre is defined by specific plot elements. That opens whole new cans of worms. Fans of romance have famously codified the hard rule that a story without a happy-ever-after cannot call itself romance. But that would leave great romance stories excluded from the genre. Where would we classify Titanic? Should we ignore the romance elements in Great Expectations? What about Before Sunrise and its sequels? Perhaps, rather than a hard yes/no rule, we need a more granular approach. One would have to be a very confused reader to call Romeo and Juliet a romance story, but any meaningful discussion of it must address the undeniable elements of romance that it contains. Likewise, there are undeniable elements of science fiction in He-Man, even though the resolution of dramatic conflict in a typical He-Man story tends to come down to who has the bigger sword.

Indeed, He-Man is a clearer illustration of the questions that Star Wars raises. In the setting of He-Man, magic and technology are equally accepted; a genius inventor may as easily resort to one or the other. It's a story where Clarke's third law is a fact of reality. Such an unfairly maligned piece of worldbuilding as midichlorians would comfortably fit with everything else in He-Man. So why isn't there a more heated argument about whether He-Man counts as science fiction? For that matter, why isn't more digital ink spilled on the proper classification of Steven Universe or Captain Planet or Doctor Strange or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Why the hyperfocus on Star Wars? Because none of those other stories has gone out of its way to deliberately claim the gigantic cultural cachet that Star Wars loudly insists it deserves. Star Wars is a unique case because it isn't satisfied with telling a story; by explicitly calling back to Campbell's monomyth, it aspires to convince you that it's telling the Ur-story. And that makes any discussion of Star Wars emotionally intense. For fans, this story has left an irreversible limbic footprint (which is exactly the effect Lucas intended). To hear criticism of Star Wars feels like receiving a blow to the self.

I have to agree with Patterson when she complains that there's a component of snobbism from my faction. When we deny Star Wars the label of science fiction, it's tempting to treat Star Wars as a lesser form of story, as a pretender to the dignified mantle of science fiction. So I find myself in the complicated position of having to admit that yes, I'm unimpressed by the storytelling tricks of Star Wars, but also, having to find reasons for my system of classification that don't come from highbrow affectations. There's a failure mode in this discussion that excludes Star Wars from science fiction on the basis that the genre would somehow suffer a degradation otherwise. Under this failure mode, Star Wars is seen as too crass and facile to merit membership in the refined club of Asimov and Wells. And you can see how that line of argument leads nowhere if you, like me, are a lifelong fan of Power Rangers. So I must hope that I can muster the necessary nuance to effectively convey that, yes, I do happen to think Star Wars is crass and facile (see, for example, any of David Brin's delicious diatribes against the franchise's flattened morals and faux pop-wisdom), but also, that's not the reason why I exclude it from science fiction. I don't want a genre (or a fan community) that would see itself as too good for Power Rangers.

I said above that I count Sherlock Holmes among the ranks of science fiction. Let me explain why: detective fiction only became possible after sufficient progress had been made in psychology, medicine, anthropology, legal theory, sociology, and the natural sciences for it to be thinkable that the evils of society could be fixed. Centuries under the defeatist poison of Calvinism had delayed that cultural moment. Once the daring idea emerges that evil is solvable, literature can dare speak of crime as a human-sized problem that human tools are equipped to address. And thus we get detective fiction. Crime was no longer seen as the result of an indelible corruption of the human soul, but as the result of choices motivated by concrete circumstances. Of course, we still find in these times the detective novel that romanticizes the criminally insane and shrugs before the mystery of the human mind. But that's not where the kernel of detective fiction is to be found. The truly interesting detective story is that where evil follows from an act of reason, and therefore can be opposed by reason. That's the basic attitude underlying the works that I classify as science fiction.

This is why I call Daedalus a science fiction character cruelly dropped into another genre. In a world of miracles and fate, of superstrong demigods and irresistible witches, Daedalus is the type of hero whose way of solving his problems is by using his intelligence. There's a seed of science fiction there, in the attitude that pits human intelligence against gods. It's in Sancho Panza as he tries to explain to his boss that what looks like the giants of legend are mere machines that need not be feared. It's in Dorothy Gale as she confronts the man behind the curtain. It's in Lyra Belacqua as she learns to take nothing on faith. It's in Batman as he goes to battle against demons and magical monsters wielding knowledge as his weapon. It's in the Doctor as he outsmarts entire armies from his little blue box.

Regardless of any supernatural shenanigans, at the end of the day it's that attitude, that trust in a character's intelligence (and the tools it can produce) as a sufficient engine of narrative resolution, that distinguishes science fiction.

And it's nowhere to be found in Star Wars.

—Arturo

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Skeptics in the Pub: Cholera by Mark Crislip

One day I'll have to write an in-depth analysis of that neglected step-child of the speculative subgenres, the motivational business fable. If you've ever heard of Who Moved My Cheese?, you know what I'm talking about. Among the few enjoyable moments I had in business school were when teachers assigned us those bizarre manuals of corporate culture disguised in the garb of fiction. The underlying reason for this form of literature is that top management is allegedly too busy to read an entire tome on organizational theory, so any new developments in the field have to be communicated in bite-sized format.

That's how I felt while reading the novel Skeptics in the Pub: Cholera. More than a novel proper, this is a vehicle of public education. Published during the coronavirus pandemic, and written by a real-life doctor who has done very important work in fighting pseudoscience for years, this book imagines an alternate timeline where the US never became independent and its system of free enterprise and free academia never developed. In the 21st century of this version of the British Empire, all doctors must belong to one of a handful of Crown-approved Medical Societies that have a legal monopoly on diagnosis and therapy. (An exception are surgeons, who have their own Guild and come from a separate tradition without fancy philosophy.) The problem is that these Medical Societies are founded on tradition and prestige, so they never bother revising their settled doctrines. Thus you see doctors prescribing obvious rubbish such as bloodletting, moxibustion, or homeopathy. And no one outside of those very distinguished clubs is legally allowed to learn or practice medicine. This is, of course, one of the most horrifying dystopias I've ever read.

The plot concerns an epidemic of cholera in Portland, Oregon, in a fictional 2017. This is only the latest in a series of periodic returns of the disease. But this time, someone has smuggled forbidden papers from France that speak of an “empirical method.” Any sympathy for French ideas is seen as traitorous in the British colonies, but the documents say that this method has already succeeded in proving Mesmerism wrong, so our protagonist, a mid-level public health bureaucrat, hopes that it can help him find the true cause of cholera and therefore its cure.

This mystery proceeds in the manner of a detective novel, which makes this book a very curious read, since we in this timeline and decade already know the answer. The protagonist starts collecting clues, making deductions, running some tests, and it's to the author's credit that he has managed to make these steps feel exciting even though the solution is not a mystery to the reader. We basically watch him invent the entire science of epidemiology in real time, with index cards and a mechanical computer. Of course, the political intention of writing this book is not to popularize the state of the art in therapies for cholera; it's to illustrate the catastrophic social consequences of letting pseudoscience take over the medical profession. At a key point in the plot, when the bureaucrat has finally figured out that the origin of the infection is a defective water pump in a city park, the heads of the Medical Societies stage a public event where they drink water from that pump to prove that their respective methods are effective. I don't need to tell you how successfully the theory of the four humors and its all-purpose treatment of bloodletting fares against a case of severe dehydration, or what awaits those patients who try to protect themselves against cholera by taking homeopathic drops made with water from the same pump.

In an obvious wink to the reader, the protagonist has a scene where he compares his situation to that of detective novels, and wonders, “Why would a novel be any kind of guide to reality?” This soapbox approach to literature reoccurs throughout the text; later on, we find remarks like “It is amazing how much information in the world appears to be hidden in boxes, gathering dust in basements, waiting to be discovered,” and “We need something more akin to engineering to take over Medical Philosophy.”

The author (who, let's remember, is a doctor) was obviously more interested in expressing a position than in telling a story. It's for that reason that I haven't dedicated any space here to speak of the literary qualities of the text; it's just correct prose without stylistic aspirations. More than a work of art for art's sake, this is a fable with the tone of an exasperated cry for good sense.

—Arturo

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