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A rigged game

In my other life (I work part-time as a lecturer), I’ve sometimes used a rigged monopoly game – a game where one person starts off with, say, ten times as much money as the other, as a way of representing the unfairness of life. I used it in a text book too. The point I wanted to make was not only that life is unfair, but that it is so unfair that, if it was a game, most of us would refuse to play.

I only recently found out (thanks to Thure Etzold) that a rigged monopology game has actually been used as the basis of a psychological experiment to explore the effect of wealth on human behaviour. Paul Piff observed games of monopoly between pairs of players, randomly assigned to advantaged and disadvantated positions. Even though they knew the game was rigged to make it virtually certain that they would win, advantaged players would start to act in a more arrogant way towards their adversary. If we are doing better than another person, the experiment seems to suggest, we start to feel superior to them, even if our rational head knows that our success is none of our doing. Financial success means status, and status means we can push other people around.

This is consistent with other studies by Piff in which he found that, for instance, expensive cars are less likely to stop at pedestrian crossings than cheaper ones, and that better-off people in psychological experiments are more likely than poorer ones to help themselves to sweets that they have been specifically told are there to give to children in another study. If you haven’t come across this work, there’s a PBS video here, and an article here.

Through endless skies

My son Dom and I have a habit of sending each other interesting songs that we come across, and he recently sent me this one, ‘Planet Caravan‘ by Black Sabbath, about the singer wandering through the universe with his lover.

Listening to it reminded me of one very simple reason why I write science fiction rather than realist fiction. If you are going to make stuff up, why confine yourself to the narrow and parochial limits of our little patch of space and time?

It was twenty years ago today…

Well, maybe not today exactly, but it was about this time of the year in 1994 that I embarked on six months unpaid leave from my then job as a social work manager to write The Holy Machine. An expensive decision, which looked at the time as if it wouldn’t yield much in the way of concrete results. What I managed to complete in 1994 was a clumsy thing that I knew didn’t quite work, but couldn’t figure out how to fix. It was was to be another three years before I thought of a way to recast the book in its present form, ten years before it was first published (by Wildside in the US) and sixteen years before it was first published in the UK by Corvus. A long haul, but I’m very proud of the end result.

Holy Machine cover — The wordless cover of the original Wildside edition. Image by Wilhelm Steiner

Join us, and you’ll be saved

One of Richard Dawkins’ Twitter homilies recently irritated me sufficiently to engage in a little tweeted debate with him and some of his followers. 140 characters don’t exactly lend themselves to nuanced discussion, however, so here are my more measured thoughts.

“As I repeatedly said [Dawkins wrote], some atheists do bad things. But it is not their atheism that drives them to it. Religion can do that.”

It’s obvious that horrific things are indeed done in the name of various religions. I think of the Taliban, the Spanish Inquisition, the Magdalene Laundries. But horrific things have also been done in the name of atheistical regimes who believed (as Dawkins does) that religion is harmful. The following is from Wikipedia, so feel free to question its accuracy, but it concurs with what I have understood to be the case from other reading.

State atheism in the Soviet Union was known as gosateizm,^[2] and was based on the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. As the founder of the Soviet state, V. I. Lenin, put it:

Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.^[6]

Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted.^[7]

And this is about the cultural revolution in China:

Marxist-Leninist ideology was opposed to religion, and people were told to become atheists from the early days of Communist rule. During the Destruction of Four Olds campaign, religious affairs of all types were discouraged by Red Guards, and practitioners persecuted. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes converted to other uses, looted, and destroyed.^[30] Marxist propaganda depicted Buddhism as superstition, and religion was looked upon as a means of hostile foreign infiltration, as well as an instrument of the ‘ruling class’.^[31] Chinese Marxists declared ‘the death of God’, and considered religion a defilement of the Chinese communist vision. Clergy were arrested and sent to camps; many Tibetan Buddhists were forced to participate in the destruction of their monasteries at gunpoint.^[31]

Of course there are all kinds of complex socio-political reasons why the Soviet and Chinese authorities felt the need to persecute religions (the Chinese still do, of course, notably in the case of the Falun Gong) but the same kind of thing can be said about the activities of the Inquisition or the Taliban. There’s always a political agenda and a political context for everything but if the latter can (somewhat simplistically) be described as bad things driven by religion, then it seems to me that the former can be also be described (also simplistically) not just as ‘atheists doing bad things’ but as bad things driven by atheism.

Richard Dawkins would be perfectly entitled to say that this isn’t his kind of atheism at all, and I know it isn’t. (Many Marxists, I know, would also say it wasn’t their kind of Marxism!) But in that case aren’t religious people equally entitled to say the the Inquisition isn’t their kind of religion? It’s pretty meaningless to generalise either about ‘religion’ or about ‘atheism’, since both embrace a vast range of possible worldviews, but if we are going to lump all these worldviews together into these two camps, then it really isn’t fair (though it is, unfortunately, extremely human) for one camp or the other to point to its own good guys and compare them to the other camp’s bad guys.

What I object to in Dawkins’ position isn’t atheism – I suppose I’m an atheist myself, if we have to use these simplistic categories – nor his robust critique of the unpleasant aspects of religion: I’m confident that no one who’s read The Holy Machine would suggest that I’m in any way soft on those. What I’m objecting to is the implication that ‘atheism’ (which after all just means not believing in God) is in some magical way incapable of being a pretext for bad things. This seems to me curiously reminiscent of certain of the less attractive aspects of organised religion. Join us, and you’ll be saved!

140 characters wasn’t enough, and nor is this either. The Holy Machine explores this stuff further, and I tried to critique in it a kind of intolerant literal-mindedness which can be found both among fundementalist religions and among some atheists.

None of us know the truth about the universe, not even Richard Dawkins, and we should be as generous as we can towards one another’s faltering attempts to glimpse it.

Talibanesque

Looking further at these Old Testament rules, Talibanesque really is the word! The same mindnumbing double standards, the same absence of any sense of women as anything other than pieces of male property. But then the Taliban are simply taking seriously a set of rules which all three Abrahamic religions traditionally assert to have been laid down by God.

Thus, a man who rapes a betrothed woman gets the death penalty (Deuteronomy 22:25), but for a man who rapes a woman who isn’t engaged to be married, the penalty is to pay her father 50 shekels, marry the lucky girl and never be allowed to divorce her (Deuteronomy 22:29).

Similarly, a man who wrongly accuses his wife of not being a virgin when they married must pay a fine of 100 shekels to her father, and is forbidden from ever divorcing her (Deuteronomy 22:19). But if a woman is so accused, and can’t prove her virginity, she must be brought ‘to the door of her father’s house’ and stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:21).

Thought for the day

It’s pretty depressing to learn that an Arizona state law has just made it legal for shopowners to refuse to serve gay customers, in the event that serving gay people is contrary to their religious beliefs.

It would actually make more sense if they refused to serve rich people, since the founder of their religion – I’m assuming that in Arizona the religion in question is Christianity! – spoke specifically of the difficulty of rich people entering the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24), but said nothing whatever about homosexuality.

No, to find biblical injunctions against homosexuality you have to trawl through the murky and Talibanesque depths of the Old Testament, which also prescribes (for instance) that if a man sells his daughter as a slave she is not to go free after six years as male slaves do (Exodous 21: 7), or that if a woman lies about her virginity, she should be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:21).

Dreams and stories

A story written in a dream is one thing, but of course dreams themselves are stories, protypical stories that everyone weaves for themselves in the night, whether or not they think of themselves as story tellers.

Like good stories dreams are constructed of disparate elements and have many layers, bringing things together that in the ‘real’ world may not seem close, but which are connected in some way at the level of meaning. And in dreams, as in stories, things of the mind may transformed into tangible objects out there in the world. Once I spent a day walking in woods with a friend, during which I pretended to carefree, though all the time a big secret was burdening my mind. As I sank into sleep that night I found myself back in the woods, and saw a brontosaurus tiptoeing delicately through the trees: the abstract ideas of bigness and secrecy succinctly captured in concrete form.

Of course, like stories, dreams often come from places which we are not consciously aware of. Freud saw them as rising from the unconscious, and being manifestations of our forbidden desires. I only partly buy that. Yes they can be manifestations of desires, but in my experience dreams can also be wiser and less driven than my waking self. Sometimes in dreams, what seem alluring temptations when I’m awake, are revealed to be drab and tawdry. And often dreams make things clear to me that I find confusing or overwhelming in waking life. That tiptoing brontosaurus was not a symbol of desire, but a succinct summing up of what, in essence, that day had been.

I think in waking life, time and literal space can overly dominate our thinking. We see things stretched out across time, scattered across space, and imagine that this matrix – this grid – defines their true relationship. But I think there’s a level of the mind that isn’t fooled by this. It works in an entirely different kind of space, that you might call the space of likeness. (After all, even in waking life we use the language of literal space to describe relations of likeness and difference.)

All the while, as parts of our brain beaver away at understanding causal connections within the matrix of space and time, other parts of our brain are weaving this entirely different kind of space constructed of metaphors, similes and associations. It’s a space that disregards proximity, category, causality and scale, and it’s a big source of invention, intuition and lateral thinking. Dreams are the purest manifestation of that alternative space, but all good stories dip into it too. So useful is dreaming, in so many ways, that we’ve found a way of doing it in waking life.

Dream stories

I often have dreams in which I find new things in familiar places or unearth new events in my past. I discover an extra room in my house which I’d forgotten was there, for instance, or recall a place I once stayed where I was exceptionally happy and at home. In the real world, I’ve kept goldfish for most of my life – why I’m not sure, but in my dreams goldfish seem to stand for plenty and abundance – and I quite often dream of fishponds that I’d forgotten I had. These are all delicious dreams and, even when I’ve woken from them and realised that the room, or the fishpond, or the event in the past isn’t actually real, I still feel comforted.

One dream of this type that I have from time to time involves stories that I’d forgotten I’d written. It might be a short story published in some obscure magazine which has gone out of print, or a book published by a small press that’s no longer trading, but whatever narrative the dream supplies, I remember the existence of a additional story, over and above the ones I already knew about. For me my books and stories are, like my goldfish, reassuring signs of abundance and fecundity, so the discovery of stories I’d forgotten I’d written is a deeply satisfying thing.

I can never recall the stories themselves when I wake up, but I’m left with tantalising glimpses of what they were like. They’re not science fiction or fantasy, but nor are they shackled by realism and its tedious need to reproduce quotidian life. (These stories exist after all, only in dreams, and dreams disdain realism). There is just a hint in them of Arthurian romance, but by that I don’t mean that there are knights in armour in them, or archaisms, or damsels in distress. I’m just referring to the sense I took from those stories as a child of a forest, a matrix, through which a traveller could move and encounter events which aren’t linked together in a single narrative stream. I get the same sense sometimes from stained glass windows, where different stories, or different episodes of the same story, can take place simultaneously, as if in a place outside time.

My dream stories do not have plots. They aren’t dramatic. There are events in them, or at least encounters and scenes, but they manage to work, somehow, without that tiresome need to bring everything together at the end, which so often diminishes or trivialises what has gone before. The elements in them, in other words, are not parts of a machine. They make satisfying wholes, like paintings do, rather than coming to satisfying conclusions. Stuff happens, and that is enough. The lighting is subdued and shadowy, without being glum.

I’d be curious to know if other writers have these dream stories (as opposed to dreams which become stories, which is another whole thing!)

Voices from Eden

There is already a British audio book version of Dark Eden (read by Oliver Hembrough and Jessica Martin), but I’m very much looking forward to hearing the new US audio book from Random House Audio which is still under development. This will involve 8 actors, so that the book’s various narrators can all have different voices, but what is particularly intriguing about it is that the producer Janet Stark and her cast of actors are attempting to develop a whole new Eden accent for the recording.

What will this sound like? Everyone in Eden is descended from just two people – a white man from Brooklyn, New York, and a black woman from Peckham in South London – so one thing that we can be sure of is that the accent will bear traces of both those different sources. During the early years too, the entire human population of Eden consisted of a single family – mum, dad, kids – and some of the characteristics of Eden English derive from that fact. Parents with little kids tend to simplify their speech, even when speaking to one another, and this effect would be even more pronounced in the absence of other adults (or the written word) to pull the speech of family members back in the direction of adult norms. This is the source of the use of double adjectives for emphasis – something that little children often do – and the tendency to drop direct articles, but it will have had an effect too on pronunciation and on the rhythms of Eden speech.

But all that is only part of the story. The accent of Eden would not just be a blend of its two sources. People play with language, change it like clothes. They get bored with saying things one way, and try another. New things appear and become cool, others fade out of use. Who could have predicted the trend towards a rising inflection at the end of a sentence in spoken English here on Earth, or the more recent fashion of beginning sentences with the word ‘So’? The people of Eden have lived in isolation for 160 years. Less than 160 years after white settlers first arrived in Australia, Australian English had developed its own distinct and instantly recognisable accent, and that was in spite of continuing contact with the mother country, and continuing large scale migration (even today more than 10% of Australians were born in the UK).

I think the spoken language of Eden would be slow. Both the source accents are fast, clipped and urban, but Eden folk are as rustic as it is possible to be, and rustic people tend to speak slowly (think Somerset, Queensland or Alabama). I think too that it would be more musical, more singsong. These are people with no TV, no books, no video games, no movies. The repetition of oral traditions is much more important to them than it is to us. I think they would savour language and linger over it in a way that we don’t.

As to those double adjectives which everyone notices (and some people hate!), I hear them with the first adjective emphasised and drawn out, with a slight fall at the end towards the lower, shorter repetition: B-I-I-I-G big.

But then again, sometimes Eden folk do it the other way round. They just feel like it. That’s what humans are like.

The blog tour continued

Following on from my post in this series, Tony Ballantyne and Una McCormack were the next links in the chain. Links to their posts are below. There are lots of things they say that apply equally well to me. (I guess you expect that with friends!)

Here’s Una’s post. ‘…What the trappings of science fiction allow me to do,’ she writes, ‘is move from the particularities of specific real-world situations in order to think abstractly about… well, everything really…’ Exactly so!

And here’s Tony’s. ‘…I get ideas all the time,’ he writes, ‘and I write them down to be used later, but every so often one idea collides with another and I suddenly get really excited and I just have to begin writing.’ Precisely, and without that collision, there’s no story. It’s the lightning bolt that brings it to life.