Category: Uncategorized

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Would you do anything if you were sitting on a deck chair of the Titanic and just finished a science fiction novel about an unsinkable ship crashing into an iceberg?

When I was young I was constantly told that science fiction was silly kids’ stuff. I refused to believe that. I loved science fiction and wanted it to be important, valuable, and even educational. I made all kinds of rationalizations that science fiction taught people to prepare for the future – to avoid extrapolated pitfalls or build what we imagined possible.

Was I fooling myself? I know perfectly well that most science fiction fans read for fun, not enlightenment. I was taught serious literature provided deep insights into human existence and genre fiction was escapism. Is reading science fiction swallowing the blue pill and reading serious literature taking the red pill?

Can fiction ever describe reality in a useful way like science? Literary writers work to describe their experiences in novels. How close can they get to recording reality realistically? Other writers use fiction to illustrate their philosophical observations on existence. How accurately can they paint in words? Are novels ever like photography was to paintings? And what about science fiction with settings of time and space entirely imagined? Can science fiction ever make observations that we can validate and use?

I like to believe science fiction is a cognitive tool for examining the edges of reality. Of course, science fiction is usually a form of entertainment that plays at the edges of reality. Religion used to be a cognitive tool for exploring those edges. Now it’s the opium of the masses. I worry that science fiction is becoming fictional fentanyl. Humans have an exceedingly difficult time accepting reality. Often, we want far more than what reality offers, even though our reality is infinitely rich. Analyzing science fiction and our favorite science fictional fantasies can reveal our subjective desires with external possibilities. Such psychoanalysis should reveal what percentage of our map of reality is based on delusions.

I think every time we read a book we should ask ourselves: Are we taking the red pill or the blue pill?

I’m going to illustrate this idea by examining We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. I chose it because it was new and popular. It has garnered 32,675 ratings since 9/20/16 with the average score of 4.7 out of 5 stars (as of 8/2/17). Some readers will think I’m attacking We Are Legion (We Are Bob) in this essay even though I rated it 5 stars at Goodreads and Audible. The book is no literary masterpiece, but very entertaining Sci-Fi. I want to dissect why. This might come across as critical – it’s not. I just want show how reading Taylor’s book can be a blue pill or red pill activity.

Ever since The Skylark of Space by E. E. “Doc” Smith we’ve been too enthusiastic about our science fictional hopes. We assume given enough time and technology we can make anything come true. Can we even tell reality from fantasy anymore when it comes to science fiction? Doesn’t the mania for Star Wars border on science fictional porn? Are we people who can’t grow up because of our childhood addiction to science fiction?

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we had nightmares about WWIII and nuclear annihilation, although those horrors were sometimes relieved by hopeful fantasies of the high frontier. Neither futures were inevitable. Now we live with the near surety of the collapses of the economy and ecosystem. Wealth inequality will probably destroy our civilization well before climate change can. Yet, we ignore both and party like it’s 1999. Does a choice of apocalypses on the menu even matter?

Why aren’t we doing something? We know we’re on the friggin’ Titanic. We know we have a date with an iceberg. Is watching Star Wars sequels on our iPads while we lounge in our deck chairs an acceptance of predestination?

WARNING: THIS IS NOT A BOOK REVIEW. THIS ESSAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!

First off, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and finished it quickly because I was always anxious to get back to the story. This novel was fun like Galaxy Quest the movie, or Ready Player One, the book, both of which lovingly relish the science fiction subculture. It doesn’t have much of a plot, sort of a serial problem-solving story that made The Martian so much fun. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is funny and light, a serious story told in a non-serious way, but not absurdly zany like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I would consider this novel the perfect how-would-I-do-it fantasy for science fiction fans. Just replace Bob with your first name. I would love to have Jimiverse adventures.

Now I want to get out my literary scalpels and dissect We Are Legion (We Are Bob) into its component parts. I’m sure some folks will consider me kicking the crap out of the book, but that’s not my intention. My goal is to explore how I felt about science fiction when I was young and compare it with how I feel about science fiction now.

I’m trying to compare Jim-2017 with how I remember Jim-1967. Fifty years have changed me. I’m also comparing Science-Fiction-2017 with how I remember Science-Fiction-1967. And let me up front about something. I don’t think science fiction is the same for everyone, nor do I think all the views of science fiction today are any different from all the views of science fiction back then. I’m looking at my own view of science fiction and exploring how it’s changed over my lifetime.

Even though I found We Are Legion (We Are Bob) very entertaining, I didn’t find it very strong on the speculative science fiction scale. I’ve always made a distinction between science fiction as I define it and how other fans define the genre. What I call science fiction is speculation about possibilities, which I believe is different from entertainment that uses science fiction for story setting. The difference is subtle. Think of it as traveling back in time to the Jurassic and visiting Jurassic Park. The whole time I was reading We Are Legion (We Are Bob) I realized I was on a science fiction thrill ride. Fun, escapist, but little I can claim as red pill understanding of reality. However, it might say a lot about how I’d want my blue pill to affect me.

I’m impressed with what Dennis E. Taylor created with We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Any introverted science fiction fan would probably sell their soul to be Bob. Hell, if you offered them sex with a hundred of their most desirable sex objects or life as Bob, most would opt to live the life of Bob. Taylor has imagined a science fictional heaven. Which makes We Are Legion (We Are Bob) a perfect example of blue pill science fiction. Here are just some of the SF ideas it uses:

• Suspended animation to get into the future. In this case cryogenic freezing. The beginning reminds me a bit of The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein.
• Brain downloading to a machine. A popular topic in and out of science fiction.
• Observing reality with a digital consciousness
• Intelligent space probes/spaceships
• Interstellar flight at sublight speeds
• War between intelligent machines
• Von Neuman probes
• First contact
• FTL communication
• Prime directive
• Berserker machines
• End of humanity on Earth
• Migration to the stars
• Space battles
• Xenocide
• Colonizing planets
• Terraforming
• Uplifting new species
• 3D Printers

Science-Fiction-2017 is far slicker than Science-Fiction-1967. The people who create science fiction stories and movies know they are in the entertainment business. When I was growing up, most of them knew they were in the entertainment business too, but some of them worked as crazy-ass philosophers or sociologists (Heinlein, Le Guin, Dick, Brunner, Russ). They lacked the authority or degrees to be serious intellectuals, but they had plenty of theories to promote. I see Kim Stanley Robinson as a philosophical descendant of Heinlein and Clarke.

Dennis E. Taylor obvious loves science fiction. He’s an older fan, claiming he didn’t start writing until his late fifties. He’s a computer guy and his story is equally inspired by Wired, Silicon Valley, and SF writers like Cory Doctorow, Ernest Cline, and John Scalzi. And that’s part of the problem with writing science fiction today – it must compete with the legacy of older science fiction and with all the young Turks. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is not speculative heavy like Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, cutting edge like Lix Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, or narratively innovative like the Ancillary books by Ann Leckie. Taylor is fun like Becky Chambers’ Galactic Commons stories. Taylor reminds me of John Scalzi more than he does Kim Stanley Robinson.

One of the major plot conundrums of science fiction is how to get a person from our time into the future. Sleep is often the answer. One of my favorite novels is Heinlein’s The Door into Summer which uses “cold sleep” to get Dan Davis into the future. Taylor uses a modern variation of this idea by getting Bob to buy a contract to have his head frozen when he dies. In a way, this is like Professor Jameson stories – he had to die first.

Strangely, Taylor gets Bob into the future not to explore the future, but to get him the technology to be downloaded. From there on out in the story, Taylor does not speculate about future technology but merely uses slightly refined current day technology like 3D printers.

I must wonder if Dennis Taylor is an introvert because this story is very introverted. Most of the characters are copies of the original character. They live in VR rooms and manipulate the outside world. I do that myself in a way since I stay mostly at home and observe the world and reality at a distance. Each version of Bob is different. That I found troublesome since each is a program that is copied from a backup of a previous Bob. Taylor said earlier drafts of the novel had them the same but it didn’t work as fiction. But Taylor doesn’t give us adequate reasons in the story for each Bob to be different. This is where I started dissecting the story.

Downloading human minds into computers has been a hot topic for decades. There are scientists who study the idea. Personally, I think the idea is about as real as dying and going to heaven. But let’s give the idea a chance. Taylor only makes a minimum effort to help us imagine what being a computer program would be like. That’s unfortunate. Obviously, he believes readers want to get on with the adventure of exploring space and saving humanity. I didn’t – I wanted more about digital reincarnation.

I wanted Taylor to speculate about living without a biological body. Without chemicals (hormones) would we have emotions? Wouldn’t a digitized version of ourselves be an emotionless thinker with only vague memories of once being alive? And what would drive our thoughts if we didn’t have emotions?

Here’s my problem. I believe real science fiction must be realistic speculation. Star Wars science fiction is escapist Disneyland fairy tales exactly equal to religious fantasies of the past. In other words, promises of things that will not happen. Religion has always promised life after death, and downloading minds is just another empty pipedream.

Of course, my assumption about how reality works stops the story cold. Here’s the problem for current science fiction writers. More and more science is showing that our minds are 100% tied to our bodies, and more than likely, our bodies are going to be 100% tied to our Earthly environment. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson is an excellent exploration of the second part of that statement.

This is where Jim-1967 differs from Jim-2017. Jim-1967 had a lot of ideas about the future that have since turned out unscientific and impossible. The trouble is Science-Fiction-2017 keeps believing in those ideas.

I feel somewhere between 1967 and 2017 science fiction forked into two branches. One branch is entertainment science fiction that most people love, and the other branch is speculative fiction that seriously tries to understand the limits of reality that science has yet to define. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) belongs to the entertainment branch, and I believe is a very entertaining story for people who love that kind of science fiction. I believe it only pays the slightest lip service to the other branch. Is that because Taylor wants to be a successful writer and attract hordes of readers?

Or am I wrong, and Taylor actual thinks everything in the story is possible? If my brain was digitized and I was reborn inside a computer I think I could be happy with that existence. But is that belief only because it’s my only hope for avoiding death? Am I being realistic?

I’m not sure realistic science fiction isn’t considered a downer by readers. I considered Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson to have been the best science fiction novel of 2015 but it wasn’t up for a Hugo in 2016. Is that because it questions the faith of science fiction believers?

Why don’t we see more science fiction about climate change? The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, another book from 2015, is a novel that deals with climate change, but it was also ignored for the Hugos. For the 2017 Hugos, All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders addresses climate catastrophe but not directly. Interestingly, it’s a story of magic v. science, and science appears to be the evil bad guys. Anders personifies nature with magic, but magic will not solve the problem of capitalism and technology run amok.

Entertainment science fiction must constantly borrow from speculative science fiction to give an illusion of maintaining its science fiction bona fides. Usually, entertainment science fiction mines past science fiction for settings and plots. Entertainment science fiction is as realistic as Disney recreations. But isn’t animatronics getting more realistic all the time? Isn’t the seduction of VR that it’s a better reality that reality?

As a lifelong science fiction fan, here’s my existential problem of being Jim-2017. I wish I could live the entertainment science fiction life. I wish those futures were possible. As Jim-1967 I believed those futures were possible. But Jim-2017 knows they are not. So, Jim-2017 craves speculative science fiction that’s honest. I want to die knowing what the realistic possibilities are for humans living in this universe. By those standards, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is of little use – it’s a blue pill and not a red pill.

If you live long enough you’ll notice that some people get stuck in pop culture dreams. Has that happened to science fiction fans?

Below are some of the 21st Century SF books I’ve read. I’ve marked some which I think have a reasonable degree of reality in them. Of course, that might be my optimism or pessimism showing through.

1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
2. The Martian by Andy Weir
3. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
5. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
6. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
7. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
9. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
10. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
11. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
12. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
13. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
14. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
15. Redshirts by John Scalzi
16. The City & The City by China Miéville
17. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
18. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
19. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
20. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
21. Accelerando by Charles Stross
22. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
23. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
24. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
25. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
26. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
27. The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
28. Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
29. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
30. WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
31. WWW: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer
32. WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer
33. Feed by Mira Grant
34. Lock In by John Scalzi
35. The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
36. Julian Comstock: A Story of 22^nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson
37. The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
38. Flood by Stephen Baxter
39. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
40. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
41. New York City 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, July 31, 2017

I’ve been swept up into a new musical genre called Jazz Noir. Others call it Dark Jazz or Crime Jazz. There’s no listing for it in Wikipedia, which implies the size of its fandom. I didn’t know the genre existed until recently but have been loving music from it for over fifty years. I guess others like me who resonate with this kind of sound have finally named it. The music is slow and moody, and is usually found on soundtracks for film noir movies of the 1950s, but has modern equivalents, including video games like L. A. Noire, which has captured the essence of the genre perfectly.

My wife thinks jazz noir conveys a sense of depression, but it instills philosophical contemplation in me. The music is not jazz in the traditional sense, although many old jazz albums have songs that fit the genre. I assume people call it jazz because of the horns and saxes, and maybe the atmospheric piano playing.

The music feels like it comes from late at night, and it’s easy to imagine the music used in certain scenes in films. I discovered Jazz Noir from an ad on Facebook from TCM selling the 6-CD collection of 7 film soundtracks Jazz on Film: Film Noir and Jazz Noir a 3-CD anthology.

Here’s an example of a modern musician playing what fits into the genre.

Notice the feel of this piece is similar to the L. A. Noire cut, and they both run nine minutes, but I like this one even better because it’s slower and moodier. Both might have been inspired by Miles Davis and his playing for the soundtrack of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud from late 1957.

Wikipedia claims Miles was asked to create something for the soundtrack like what Modern Jazz Quartet had created for Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais (Lit: ‘Does One Ever Know’, released as: ‘No Sun in Venice’). I’m including it here to show how jazz noir evolved out of traditional jazz.

Many jazz noir enthusiasts hark back to Henry Mancini classic TV soundtrack to Peter Gunn, a favorite of mine. Back in the 1960s, I got into soundtracks for spy movies like From Russian With Love, The Ipcress File, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Our Man Flint. I called it spy music back then. Some of the slower cuts are now identified as Jazz Noir tunes. Many love “Royal Blue” from the soundtrack to The Pink Panther.

But my favorite Mancini track is “Dreamville” from Peter Gunn. I haven’t seen it on any of the many Jazz Noir playlists, but I think its mood fits perfectly.

I’m not sure there is a precise definition of jazz noir. It’s one of those definitions you know it when you see it, but in this case, when you hear it. I’m afraid many fans have identified a very narrow style, mostly built around soulful plaintiff horns. Here’s a modern soundtrack, The Black Dahlia, with the cut “No Other Way” by Mark Isham. To someone who doesn’t care it will sound the same, for those who do it will be very different.

I got my wife to listen to a Jazz Noir playlist in the car and she tired of the sound rather quickly. I, on the other hand, find much to explore in infinite variations on a theme. However, let me include some playlists to see what I mean.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, July 22, 2017

[I’m going to show screenshots of my computer’s desktop to illustrate using a computer monitor as an art gallery. The image in WordPress will be small. You won’t see the wonderful details I see on a 28″ screen. If you right-click an image and save it, you should be able to see it full-size on your computer.]

My new hobby is collecting digital scans of covers from science fiction books and magazines. It’s a minor hobby that I find pleasing to my mind and memories. Back in the 1970s, I and some of my science fiction buddies enjoyed taking 35mm photographs of covers using a macro lens and then showing these cover collections as a slideshow at the science fiction club meetings. People were always blown away when they saw the art blown up.

A picture, we have always been told, can convey a thousand words. If you study cover art for magazines and books you might discover that’s conservatively true. Artists visualize details for science fiction stories I never do in my mind while reading. Often the artist will put more details for a story into his artwork than even the author imagined in words. I love that. For example, what’s going on here? I’ve never imagined such a wild colorful machine in my head.

With the advent of flatbed scanners, computer monitors, and even large screen TVs, it’s possible to create similar slideshows to my 1970s Kodachrome slideshows. And I’m not alone in collecting digital art. For example, there’s a company called Klio that produces handcrafted digital picture frames with 4K monitors just for showing fine digital art. There’s already tremendous interest in 4K wallpapers. It’s also fun to collect hi-rez JPL, NASA, and other astronomy images. So collecting imagines of science fiction book and magazine covers isn’t that strange. There are several groups on Facebook that love SF pulp covers. One of my favorites is Space Opera Pulp.

The problem I face is getting good scans. There are many places on the internet to find a collection of covers, but often they are small images or poorly scanned images. My 4K monitor has a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, or roughly 8.3 megapixels in a 16:9 aspect ratio. In the future, we might have 8K monitors (7680 x 4320 – 33.2 megapixels). 3840 x 2160 is smaller than what many digital cameras and smartphones currently snap at maximum, but it’s a good deal larger than the standard computer monitor or HDTVs, which has a 1920 x 1080 resolution. Getting larger scans dramatically improves the visual impact of displaying digital art.

Most people want to use small images on the web to improve download times, and I understand that. But for us collectors, having larger scans is better.

I find the best scans are those I do myself. I’ll scan at 300 dpi. Here’s a 1550 x 2265 scan of Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein. It looks great on my 4K monitor. The wear on the paper is visible, yet the details of the cover are wonderful.

Here is a scan of the original Astounding magazine that first published Beyond This Horizon. It is only 400 x 550. It’s okay, but I wish it was at least 800 x 1100 or larger. By comparing the two, not only do we see how scanning resolution effects the presentation, but we also see how the condition of the book/magazine also determines what we will see. Also, isn’t it fascinating to see how two different artists captured the world Heinlein imagined?

I must warn people who are considering buying a 4K monitor that there are drawbacks, especially for Windows 10 and Linux. Everything looks tiny when Windows is set to native display on a 4K monitor. You have to use custom scaling to get things to look right, and even then, not all apps cooperate. Usually, I scale to 150% or 225% on my 28” monitor. Some programs like Word and Chrome can also scale within their windows. Windows scaling to 225% help for getting around within Windows. 150% is much nicer for working with photographs and images.

Generally, the images I find on the web are usually much smaller than my monitor’s display resolution. I use a program called John’s Background Switcher (Win or Mac) to display my digital art collection. It had many options and setting variations for displaying digital images as your computer background. I use “Scale pictures to fit screen” which means I see the whole image without cropping, but it magnifies the image to fit the largest width or height. So portraits have color bars on the right and left, or landscapes have color bars above and below. John’s Background Switcher automatically selects the colors to use to match the image, and nearly always it’s a pleasing match.

Between Windows scaling and John’s Background Switcher scaling, sharpness can take a hit. I find keeping Windows scaling down to 150% makes text barely large enough to read, but greatly improves image sharpness. However, it’s very important to get a good scan to begin with. Sometimes a 600-pixel high image can be much better than a bad 1500 pixel high scan. Here’s a 729 x 530 scan, but all the wonderful details of the artwork are fuzzy. This illustration is so wonderful that I wish I had a full 3840 x 2160 scan. Unless you see this image blown up you can’t appreciate the details the artist provides.

Sometimes I can find a scan of a cover and a copy of the original artwork that was used to make the cover. For example, I have an image Rocket to Nowhere by Lester del Rey (636 x 960) and a copy of the artwork used to make the cover (2484 x 3000). As you can imagine, the copy of the artwork is crystal clear and very dramatic on the 4K monitor. It actually has to be scaled down to fit on the screen. However, because the 636 x 960 scan is so sharp and well made it looks wonderful on the larger screen too.

I’m not sure I can convey the impact of seeing these images on a 28″ 4K monitor via WordPress. Both large screens and high resolutions help make pictures have an impressive impact. Even black and white interior illustrations are greatly enhanced by size. Below is an illustration for one of the short stories from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Is it anything like how you pictured the story?

I also love collecting covers from my all-time favorite stories. Seeing them trigger memories of when I first read the stories. Here is the original magazine illustration for Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein, and a scan of my personal copy of the hardback.

Sometimes I can find scans of my favorite books, like Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany, but I’m dissatisfied with the scan. I keep it because it’s the best I’ve got. This makes me wish that people who scan covers think about the future. These books and magazines are deteriorating and fading. Whatever you scan might be the best memory we have of that book in the future. So make sure it’s in focus, the color is well balanced, and you get the most pixels possible. I wish this image was more in focus. It looks fine small, but not enlarged.

Also, here’s a copy of the paperback edition where I first read Stranger in a Strange Land. Because the book itself is beat-up, the scan isn’t quite nice to look at. I keep it for nostalgia sake. I wish I had a better scan.

Old magazines fade. What makes a magazine collectible is its condition, and that can vary greatly. Scanners scan what they have, so I can’t complain. But I wish collectors who have better copies would scan their covers and upload them to share. Here is a bright Amazing and a faded F&SF to show the difference.

I know 99.99% of people don’t care about what happens to old magazines. I just wrote an essay on Jane Austen for the 200th anniversary of her death. Reading about all that existed then that is now lost from 200 years ago makes me understand the importance of preserving the present for the future.

I love finding scans of original artwork used for cover illustrations, like this painting by Richard Powers. It’s a good example of how science fiction art changes styles and vogues over the years. Powers’ artwork sold a lot of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s.

One reason I love looking at scans of old magazines and paperbacks is that I enjoy how people in the past imagined us folks in the future looking. Here are two paperbacks from the 1950s. The Door Into Summer is 1957 novel about a 1970 man taking cold sleep until the year 2000. I first read it in 1965, and we’ve already lived past the year 2000. I never wore anything that looked like that. Also, look at this cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s wonderful.

I could write about science fiction cover art forever. I’ve written about SF book covers in the past and will write about them in the future. I never get tired of them. I thought I was probably a very oddball person for liking old SF covers. But some of the groups on Facebook devoted to SF covers have thousands of members.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, July 18, 2017

[To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death Book Riot devoted today to all Jane Austen essays, my contribution was “Who Jane Read, Who Read Jane.”]

Isn’t Jane Austen a writer for ladies who love romance stories? What kind of appeal can she have for a 65-year-old male with no interest in young women finding Mr. Right? This past week I watched films based on all six of Jane Austen novels with combinations of four different female friends. I thoroughly enjoyed them, but I’m not sure I enjoyed them for the same reasons my lady friends did. I have read four of her novels, and parts of several biographies.

I wished I had read Jane Austen when I was a boy because I would have been much less clueless about girls. However, I’m not sure I could have liked her novels for the same reasons I do now. And I’m not sure I was a savvy enough teenage boy to decode their characters to understand how the opposite sex thought. I didn’t discover Jane Austen until 13 years ago when I was 52 and read Pride and Prejudice because a lady friend at work praised it so highly.

I’ve been attracted to Jane ever since. Jane died in 1817, at age 41, having never married. She is sexy to me now because of her writing skills. We know very little about Jane except for what comes through in six novels, about 160 letters that were heavily censored by her surviving sister Cassandra, and three scrapbook volumes of unpublished work now called her juvenilia. All of this has been collected in a $1.99 Kindle edition called The Complete Works of Jane Austen – a handy way to carry Jane around in your smartphone.

People still argue over what Jane Austen even looked like. The drawing above was made by her sister Cassandra, with some relatives claiming after Jane’s death that it wasn’t a particularly good likeness. The drawing on the left was found in recent years and was assumed to be an imagined version of what she looked like, but many fans hope because it’s old enough, to be a drawing of Jane while she lived.

Which brings us back to why I love to read Jane. I’m driven by the mystery of figuring out who she was. She wrote six books that after two centuries is still growing her fan base, already in tens of millions, maybe hundreds. Any writer should envy that. I say she’s tied with Charles Dickens as the most remembered English novelist of the nineteenth century. Understanding why their work survives when so many others haven’t, fascinates me.

I figure less than 100 novels from any country are still popularly read and remembered today from the nineteenth-century. That begs the question: Why? In Jane’s day, Sir Walter Scott was the Stephen King/J. K. Rowling/James Patterson best selling author. Who reads Scott today? Why do we see stories on Masterpiece by Austen and Dickens reproduced over and over again? If we knew could today’s writers apply that knowledge to write books that would be popularly loved in 2317?

The films of Jane Austen seemed aimed at Regency romance fans, but I’m not sure that’s the kind of audience Austen expected. After her death, her family worked hard to censor the memory of Aunt Jane. Some conjecture has claimed she wrote over 3,000 letters. I wished we had them because I believe we’d have the real Jane. It’s a shame WordPress didn’t exist back then. I get the feeling from some of the clues that Jane was a funny sharp-tongued woman that might have had a lot to say about her world, but was held back by family, church, and publishing propriety. Her juvenilia hints at a more zany, even vicious Jane. In some ways, she reminds me of Louisa May Alcott who loved blood and thunder stories as a girl.

What we do get in the novels is a keen observer of people and society, and Jane would have been an excellent psychologist or sociologist. My mental map of nineteenth-century England comes from novelists, not historians. And I believe the everyday history included in their novels is a major trait of Austen’s and Dickens’ success. I have no interest in reading about the Napoleonic Wars which was concurrent with Jane’s stories. Some critics shame Jane for not being interested too, but I find her peripheral view of soldiers and sailors at home more interesting.

In the past two weeks, The New York Times has run two articles on textual analysis of Jane Austen and her word usage: “Charting Literary Greatness with Jane Austen,” and “The Word Choices Explain Why Jane Austen Endures.” Austen’s six novels stood out in their graph, away from all the other novels charted. (Strangely, they left out Dickens – I wonder why?)

Because of the anniversary of her death, there’s much being written about Jane. Just look at this Google search limited to the recent week. I’m sure this Jane Austen mania is invisible to most people, but for her fans, it only validates why she’s worthy of being remembered.

When I read Jane I delight in comparing then and now. Of course, Jane’s upper middle-class characters peeking inside manor houses totally ignores how ninety-five percent of England lived back then. Dickens trounced Jane at covering the full socio-economic spectrum. However, Jane covers a preindustrial time before Dickens. Jane was born the year before America declared independence and died the year before Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, A Modern Prometheus. Her novels have almost exclusive rights to that specific period of literary history. Whereas Dickens is working the same territory as the Brontës, Thackery, Trollope, Collins, and others. There were plenty of English novelists during the Regency period, but we don’t read them today.

Anyone who is a fan of Downton Abbey should be a fan of Jane Austen because that TV show chronicles the death of a lifestyle that Austen wrote about. The reason why the Crawley family had to leave their estate to a distant cousin is the same reason why the Bennets had to leave their home to Mr. Collins. Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham is pretty much a Mr. Darcy a century later who had to marry a rich American woman instead of a local Elizabeth Bennet.

I’m not an Anglophile, but to enjoy reading English novels means learning English history. Austen and Dickens anchor me in nineteenth-century England in the same way Twain and Alcott put me in nineteenth-century America, or Tolstoy lets me see nineteenth-century Russia. Their novels help me understand nineteenth-century art and art history, the time of my favorite paintings. Jane’s novels help me to appreciate on a deeper level historical novels like The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Yet, there’s another reason why I love Jane Austen novels. In the 1960s I grew up reading 1950s writers and stories. Over time I realized my favorite writers had favorite writers, and those writers had writers who inspired them. Many writers today can trace their literary genealogy back to Jane Austen. Over a lifetime of reading, I’ve been slowly studying a family tree of fiction. That gives me a great deal of pleasure.

Finally, reading Jane gives me Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland and Anne Elliot. Fictional females are extremely important to understanding the history of women and the evolution of feminist thought in our culture. By reading novels, we can see how free women were in their times, from Elizabeth Bennet to Caroline Meeber to Lady Brett Ashley to Janie Crawford to Esther Greenwood to Isodore Wing to Ifemelu to Offred/June.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Sunday, July 9, 2017

Science fiction has long predicted humans meeting alien races that belong to a hive mind. The most famous example is probably the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Currently Internet Live says there are 3.7 billion users on the internet, with over 2 billion on Facebook – that’s out of 7+ billion humans. What will it mean if humanity joins a singular bio-cyber-system that allows us to interconnect?

Some people think of the hive mind in negative terms, with everyone thinking in lockstep fashion. Other people believe the hive mind could be positive, a worldwide communion of souls. I’m somewhat in the middle. Technology can produce an iPhone or an A-bomb. Also, the term hive mind is currently defined in different ways, so we need to work out a common definition.

But let’s compare Facebook to the past. The earliest forms of mass communication were the newspaper and journal, but it wasn’t until radio and television that we started talking about the impact of mass communication. 530 million people watched the moon landing. That’s a lot of people for one shared memory, especially when we were only 3+ billion. It’s not uncommon now to see a silly sentimental video on Facebook shared by tens of millions.

The difference with Facebook and older media technology is the mass audience replies. Facebook allows people to respond to what’s being broadcast to the masses. That should be good, right? We get our say. Unfortunately, what’s heard sometime is ugly.

Humans aren’t like ants and bees. We don’t have rigid roles within our society. We don’t work together in unison for some common purpose. Humans are often in conflict. But that conflict can be anything from disagreement over a movie to starting another world war.

I’m not sure where Facebook will take us, but I have noticed one interesting trend. When I got my first modem back in the early 1980s I connected to services like CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, AOL and various Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In each case, I joined forums to discuss books. When I got on the internet I discussed books on Usenet News. After the web took hold I discussed books on Yahoo! Groups. At each technology stage, I was able to discuss books with more people around the world.

Via blogging and Twitter, I guessed there were just a few hundreds of fans of old pulp magazine still around. After I got on Facebook I discovered many thousands.

Lately, Yahoo! Groups, my favorite method for online book clubbing, has been dying. In one book club, we formed a Facebook group to support our Yahoo! Group. Then my co-moderator left the Yahoo! Group to manage the Facebook. His group currently has 3,617 members, whereas the Yahoo! Group membership has dwindled down to less than 12 active participants. The other day I joined a Facebook group for Western movie fans, it has over 25,000 members. They answered a question in minutes I’d been Googling for days to find.

Technology that allows thousands of people with a shared interest to connect is not a hive mind, but it’s something new. Mass communication has always been a misnomer because the conversation was always one-way. Facebook is creating two-way communication – true communication. Right now we share our minds over funny cat videos, get-togethers with friends, family events, pop culture tidbits, and polarize over political views. The potential of the Facebook technology is still unknown.

What if Donald Trump used Facebook instead of Twitter? Twitter can be two-way communication, but usually, it’s not. Twitter is a favorite tool of cyber bullies. Facebook can be more like virtual get-togethers. Facebook is more inclusive because it is family friendly. That is more of your entire family probably uses Facebook than Twitter.

I doubt Trump would read replies to his posts on Facebook, but wouldn’t both sides of our political divide have to reply in the same place? That would probably the largest flame war ever. A riot in cyberspace. However, what if the Like icons became an instant poll so Trump would have immediate feedback on his ideas. (We’d also need a dislike button icon added to the array.) Wouldn’t that be kind of hive mind like? A president could know rather quickly what voters thought. That’s a sharing of minds.

If Facebook became real-time Gallup Poll for global opinions wouldn’t that produce science fictional results that change our future? Whether we call it a hive mind or not doesn’t really matter. But we want to call it something. Our own individual minds work through a cooperation of many subfunctions. If we create technology that allows billions of humans minds to create gestalt functions we need to name and study them.

JWH