Kim Stanley Robinson – a giant among men (with some others)!

I am reading fiction for the fun of it. I don't have a lot of professional reading and for the first time in my life I am in very easy walking distance of a branch of a decent public library system. I don't have to plan a trip to the library, I just have to remember when the branch is open.

One of the things that I am reading is science fiction that's strong on presenting future (and past) history. I have in the past read Neil Stephenson, whose work sometimes falls into that category; now I am getting into Kim Stanley Robinson. KSM wrote what I think is the best American utopian SF ever created, the Mars trilogy. I read it a ways back and I enjoyed it tremendously. In the last month or so I have read two large KSM books that rethinks the developments of world history in the early modern and modern eras by creating alternative histories.

One of them is Galileo's Dream which follows Galileo Galilei both through his own life in the 17th century and his quantum-theory-implemented trips to the Galilean moons of Jupiter in the year 3000. There is a tremendous amount of philosophical thinking embedded in this book, as we follow Galileo's life and researches in great detail and the efforts of human colonists in the Jupiter system to encourage and protect and even sacrifice him to make sure that Galileo's thought develops and is disseminated in such a way that humanity benefits from the Scientific Revolution and is not destroyed by it. There is a great deal of discussion of physics, ancient and modern, and more about the politics of the 17th century Vatican than you want to know.

Another KSM book that I am finishing up is the Years of Rice and Salt, which almost reads like a first draft of Galileo's Dream. It is an alternate history based on what might have happened if the Black Death had killed off the people of Western, Eastern and Northern Europe while only diminishing the population of the rest of Eurasia. It is a world where Christianity has been eliminated as a cultural influence, and the major cultures are Chinese, Muslim and Iroquois. Plus Buddhism.

Rice and Salt has a lot of explication but it does not lack human interest. We are given to understand that many of the characters we meet in different eras are reincarnations who meet occasionally in the bardo, the Buddhist hell to talk about how tough it is to make a difference in the earthly life. The characters are interesting in their earthly existence and every once in a while KSM throws in a vivid description of a place or a situation. For instance, here is KSM discussing the lack of trees in the Chinese capital after the tremendous sufferings and dislocations of the Long War (sort of like World Wars I and II, but much longer):

Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide.

Do you have to be a historian to like these books? No, KSM sells a lot of books and the readers can't possibly be all historians.

I should mention a third author who has a touch of this alternative history but who actually explores even bigger ideas. Robert Charles Wilson is somebody who I met on my first month in Toronto, back in the early 70s. He is one smart guy and it shows in his fiction. RCW has written a variety of books, but some of the best ones combine a lot of contemplation of the history of the whole universe (sort of like Olaf Stapledon) with individual human characters. If you know Stapledon, you know that's an unusual combination.

"The gleaming cities of Earth...

...Where peace reigns, and hatred has no home."

These are the last lines of the episode "Muse" from the series "Star Trek: Voyager." The episode is characteristic of the series as a whole.


Voyager is not the most popular series in the Star Trek franchise. Like some of the other series – maybe all of them – it started out rather weak, and with characters that were not particularly well developed. But I have seen the series twice now and I think that once the series got rid of the character Kes and brought Seven of Nine into the story, about halfway through, it got a lot better. Sure, there are some fairly dumb and typically dumb stories, but there is some very good science fiction as well.


The episode "Muse" is an example of how serious television, if the creators take it seriously themselves,  can give writers and directors and actors space do all sorts of interesting stuff. The existence of Netflix shows us how some series work very well as they build on previous strengths.
 The characters of Voyager are very good examples of this. They aren't brilliantly done, but they are increasingly good as things progress. The character of the doctor by Robert Picardo and Seven of Nine by Jeri Ryan come to mind. In both cases, incomplete human beings turn into something else as they mature, and as is repeatedly emphasized by the development of the series as a whole, they have to be accepted by the flesh and blood human beings as equals. I think Ryan, whom many people think got the job sheerly on the basis of astonishing physical beauty, had a very tough assignment here and did it very well.

In the case of "Muse" we see an alien culture that seems to have developed to an era similar to archaic Greece. A local poet rescues one of the members of the Starfleet expedition and uses her story to create a drama far away better than anything that has existed in his culture before. It's not really a very believable story when it comes down to it  but it does make you think about how astonishing the effect of early Greek drama must've been. Classicists know this, but how often has this been explored on TV or in any other popular genre of fiction?

The quote I used for a title for this post indicates a final characteristic worth noting. It is spoken by the poet of the alien culture who has visualized Earth as the home of peace and perfection. According to the series, he's absolutely right. The 24th century according to the writers of the series is a time when the most optimistic dreams we have for our future have come true. Sometimes that optimism seems a bit overdone, but I would say that the whole dramatic interest of the series is that it argues that even when peace and concord have come to Earth, there will still be plenty of problems in applying all our best ideas to real-life situations.

Another answer -- Shevek speaks

Shevek the anarchist from another planet speaks to the dissatisfied people of the homeworld:

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when it is forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers and what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And
the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made 200 years ago in this city – the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have  nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you can have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

The crazy years?

The famous and influential science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, was known early in his career for creating a future history in which individual short stories were framed. There was a big timechart in which the stories and other background events were located. One feature that looked big and important on the chart, which was never quite developed by Heinlein was "the crazy years." Presumably all sorts of bad things happened in that time, one of which was specified: the creation of the repressive puritanical theocracy in the United States.

Back in the 1990s I was thinking about the future history and I thought that Heinlein had really blown it. He himself, when he put together that chart, was living in the crazy years, which included a worldwide depression, the rise of genocidal and frankly insane regimes in major countries, and finally a huge world war. Surely these were crazy years?

Looking back from now until 2001, however, I have to say that I am less critical of what was after all a fictional construct for the fun of it. Put aside 9/11 and the American reaction to it – at least the direct reaction. How about today's events, as seen through various Internet sources?

• In a major jurisdiction in North America, a gay woman is elected premier and nobody notices or cares.
• After billions and billions of dollars invested, an American client regime in Iraq begins to collapse, with American trained soldiers throwing away their weapons and stripping off their uniforms.
• Next to the World Cup, the most puzzling sporting event is the Battle of Nations, "medieval historical warfare" mostly fought between teams from Eastern Europe at a venue in Croatia. Russia and Ukraine, which are almost at war with each other now, are leading in the standings.
• And of course one must mention the lunatic spouting of American politicians who seem to be dedicated to building a theocracy.

One of these things is not like the others, of course:  the election of Kathleen Wynne's party in Ontario. Everyone who cared about the sex life of Ontario's Premier, a smaller number than you might think, knew she was gay. She had been premier for a while, succeeding her predecessor when he retired. This was the first time she led the party into an election. Her orientation was not even mentioned during the campaign.

I was at an event in Ontario not long ago where same-sex couples are allowed to take part in a prestigious contest on an equal basis with heterosexual couples for the first time. There was a very positive response to this turn of events, but I was blasé and did not mention it when I wrote up a short account of it. I told a friend that I did not know whether society had moved on on this issue, but I had.

Now there is evidence that at least in this part of North America, society seems to have moved on pretty definitively.

Which does not cancel out what I said about the crazy years. I'm just glad to keep some aspects of the crazy a little bit further away from me than some people are able to do.

Does Star Trek: the Original Series belong on this blog?

Alas, that's what I'm thinking about these days.

This year I am teaching much the same courses as I've been teaching for the last four years. My teaching, thinking about basic facts and concepts that should be presented to my students, is a major source for much of my blogging. Then there are current events. Right now I find little to inspire original thought in the news. I don't have such respect for my own opinions as to think that my readers will be interested in hearing me go on about American politics, Canadian politics, or even Middle Eastern politics. I find all these developing stories to be stalled in patterns that I have either talked about before or are just as obvious to interested readers as they are to me. I am not interested in being another political ranter, not unless I have a really good rant to trot out.

Similarly, I don't have much new to say about chivalry or deeds of arms right now. I should have a book out this spring on Charny's Men at Arms, and I continue to work on the Chronicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon, but I'm at the stage where I really can't offer up new material from either  source.

I am working away on various projects but I am not reading really interesting material of the right size and complexity to be described in a blog entry. My thoughts recently tend to be suitable for a Facebook post. Namely, a couple of sentences of reaction linked to an article that has something to do with current events.

Which leaves me with my TV watching habits, especially my use of Netflix to look over and reevaluate some of the more interesting popular phenomena of my lifetime. One of these, one of the most important really given its great popularity, is Star Trek. What does Star Trek tell us about the last half-century?

I have put a little bit of this material in the blog already, in part because I was pleasantly surprised by how good average and above average television series are when seen through Netflix, without commercial interruption, and at a pace set by the viewer – who if he or she is really interested will not wait a week to see the next episode of the series that really appeals.

So what about Star Trek? As I expected Star Trek: the Next Generation was really entertaining when seen through Netflix. I was rather surprised to see that Deep Space 9 was far better when viewed rapidly than it was in its original presentation, which caused me to give up on it early in its second season. I was very impressed by most of what I saw on my recent viewing.

So what about the original series? My memory of the original series is that it was not really very good. I was only about 15 when it came on, but I'd already read a lot of high-quality science fiction in print, and I thought that the TV show was not really giving the best selection of science-fiction ideas available. The series was better than most of what was on TV, but most of what was on TV was pretty lame.

Part of me wondered why the series had such a tremendous impact. I knew plenty of people who really loved it.

Well, re-watching the first season of the original series has confirmed me in these opinions:

It was pretty lame.

At least, the first half of the first season was really leaden. The characters are poorly drawn and poorly presented.

A good half of that season focused on exactly one idea, which is not really much of a science fictional idea as much as a horror genre idea. That idea is that universe is filled with things that look like human beings that are actually monsters; or alternatively things that started out as human beings have turned into monsters, sometimes only moral monsters. There's a lot of betrayal and menace in those early episodes, and they're not really very good episodes otherwise.

But about halfway through that first season, what people have loved about this series begins to emerge. By that I mean the characters and the interactions between the characters on the ship and particularly on the bridge of the ship start making you really care about what goes on with them.

What really surprised me was that I liked the first season James T Kirk. I have always been someone who put James T Kirk down as a borderline maniac whose prominence in Starfleet reveals a weakness in their whole system, especially the recruiting efforts.. My image of Kirk is a rather smug character who relies on his physical charisma (which did not really speak to me) to get his way. But the first season Kirk is not really like that. He's trimmer, fitter, handsomer and – can't believe I'm saying this – more intelligent and more philosophical than he was later on in the series or in the movies. He says a lot of things are actually smart. He looks smarter than Spock!

Is there any historical point to be made from this material? Well, I do now have a more sympathetic view of the popular influence of the series. And if any of you are watching the old Star Trek, you might keep an eye out for the awe and discomfort that the characters have for anything to do with computerization.

Wit and wisdom from Deep Space 9

Quark, a merchant and a predatory capitalist criticizes the chivalry of his time:

Do you know what I like about Klingon stories?… Nothing! Lots of people die and nobody makes any profit!