Atomic Razor

Dark Matter

I'd known that the idea of missing mass stretched back to the 1930s with the work on galaxy clusters. I hadn't known that Lord Kelvin had looked into the issue in the late C19th. It's not clear to me whether the observations of stellar motions then were accurate enough to suggest that there wasn't enough mass in the galaxy from the visible stars to produce the orbits seen, but Kelvin was potentially on to something interesting.

Now, the thing about missing mass is that we know there wasn't any in the Solar System. Of course, the orbit of Uranus was discovered not to conform to predictions. Something was disrupting it. That something turned out to be another, more distant, planet, Neptune, found through the use of Newton's laws. Once Neptune was found, the mass was no longer missing. Of course, Mercury and Vulcan and Neptune and Pluto and, now, trans-Neptunian objects and Planet Nine, but only in the last case might there actually be some missing mass and it would be a planet.

Now, of course, Kelvin calculated the age of the Sun. He didn't know about nuclear fusion, but he did know about gravitational energy. So he got the lifetime of a star wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude. Thus in Kelvin's universe, it is perfectly reasonable that the galaxty is littered with the corpses of dark stars. We can see some stars, the bright ones, and had an idea how far away they were, but, in the C19th, we couldn't see the dark ones. We knew that there couldn't be a dark star very near the Solar System as it could disrupt the orbit of Neptune, but there could still be lots and lots of them out there.

And in the 1930s, there wasn't a great mystery about the missing mass. It could just be gas and dust and unbound planets and substars and dark stars. It's only later when you start measuring the amount of gas and dust that you realise,m it can't just be them. And once you understand how stellar evolution works, it can't be dark stars (i.e. neutron stars, in practice, or black holes, there being no black dwarfs yet) because you would be able to detect them. What about substars, what we call brown dwarfs now? These are very Kelvinian objects because they don't fuse (except maybe their deuterium briefly). The intial mass function could suggest there ought to be a lot of them, but it just turns out there isn't sadly, so there must be a maximum in the initial mass function. We this don't live in a Kelvinian galaxy with lots of brown dwarfs we can as stepping stones to reach the stars.

Anyway, the amount of baryonic matter you can make in the Big Bang isn't enough for the missing mass and then it turns out that even though the (non-exotic and very plentiful) neutrino does have a mass after all, there still aren't enough of them to provide the missing. So, it must be something exotic (or possibly that our theory og gravity is wrong).

But why don't we the effects of the missing mass in the Solar System. We discussed this at the Continental the other week. Why doesn't all the gas and dust in the Solar System not all into the Sun. Because everything was fully thermalised in the cloud of gas and dust from which the Solar System originated. So most of the mass does end up in the Sun, but a bit of it doesn't and ends up just orbiting the Sun. Now, we know how star work, so if there were a lot of additional non-baryonic mass in the Sun, they wouldn't work as they do. So, we must be in a bath of dark matter. The particles don't interact strong, so they don't thermalised (i.e. they don't share energy with one another). So they are basically whizzing around and through everything. So in the Solar System, there's no gradient or at most only a very slight gradient of the density of the missing mass. The dark matter is gravitationally attracted to mass concentations, i.e. to clusters of galaxies, so it will be found there rather than in the intercluster voids preferentially. But in the Kelvinian way, it won't affect what is going in the Solar System. If we want to find the dark matter, we are going to have to do something clever and nothing we have done so far has more than hinted at what might be out there. 

Just a Piece of String

It was the esteemable and impeccably orthodox Cosma Shalizi who pointed me in the direction of Peter Woit. This would have been in the mid-2000s. Cosma is an actual physicist, far more of one than I am or could ever hope to be. If Cosma thought there was something in what Woit wass saying then perhaps there was. Which was that there was nothing (much) in (super)string theory.

Woit's main point then and his main point now nearly 15 years later is that superstring theory doesn't make any testable theories and has no real prospect of making any testable theory. As such, it should be abandoned and resources redirected to alternative theories for unifying fundamental physics at the general relativity/quantum mechanics and gravity/electronuclear force levels.

Now, Cosma's is impeccably orthodox and wouldn't be pointing me in the direction of anything that wasn't at the very least well-founded. I remember back when I was at QMW, Michael Green was still there, and superstrings were a big thing. Indeed, superstrings have had not one, but two revolutions. But the second one ended in 2003 and there does seem to be a definite perception, not just from Woit, but more broadly, that the steam has gone out of superstrings. 

This isn't a political debate like the ones around climate breakdown or evolution. It's not entirely clear to me that the goodies are on the side of Woit and the baddies on the side of strings. Now, strings must have had something going for them. There were two revolutions after all. They must at least, presumably, have been providing a self-consistent description of something. Of course, what you want is a self-consistent theory that makes predictions. Such as new particles that you can make in particle accelerators or detect in nature. But you might settle for self-consistency. Like epicycles, they don't predict anything new, but they do describe beautifully what we already know.

Now, a string theorist might come along and say this isn't really like epicycles. Epicycles were just, we might say today, curve fitting. Superstrings are doing a lot more than that. OK, they don't really predict anything new, but perhaps they will one day, one day soon, and anyway predictions are a bit vulgar. Superstring theory might predict there are a large number of different universes with different values for their physiucal parameters. Then asking why are the values what they are is irrelevant because they can only be values that allow the universe we observe ourselves in to exist. 

I'm in position to judge. Woit sounds plausible to mem but then the string theorist might sound plausible if I were listening to them, String theorist like Clifford Johnson. What would he say? That string theoiry is too beautiful not to be true? That it's all or at least the best theory we have and that we have to keep on with it for as long as it takes? That nature is under no obligation to provide us with an ultimate theory that is either complere or empirically verifiable? 

Woit says that Clifford "has famously admitted that he refuses to read my book or Lee Smolin’s." We would not expect a climate scientist to read the works of a climate breakdown denier or an evolutionary biologist those of a creationist. But is string theory in that situation with respect to scepticism about it as climare science or evolution? Perhaps 20 years ago it might have seemed unassailable as the coming theory. But in 2018? Shouldn't Clifford at least want to know his enemy? What would David Starkey say?

For, yes, there is more to this than meets the eye. I went to sixth form college with Clifford. We did A-level Pure Mathematics together. My brother was at Commonwealth Hall in London with him in 1986-7. I saw him once as I was walking into a seminar at QMW. I was having a bad time and I just could not bear to speak to him in the circumstances.  

Woit is also very down on the multiverse, which is something I am temperamentally rather inclined towards. Of course, there are many different kinds of multiverse. As I have said even an infinite or just Big Enough physical universe is disturbing enough in its metaphysical implications. You can go back to a nice small, closed, short-lived 1970s universes, but I don't think that voids the philosophical question of where did all come from and whether there are higher and higher ensembles of muliverses even if there is no empirical way of examining the question. But, of course, lack of potential empirical verification should at least quench our enthusiasm slightly. But what are the chances that of all the string theorist who could have (famously) refused to read Woit's book, it was the one I was in the sixth form with? That alone should be enough to give us pause about whether we are living in a simulation.  

  

Metabiology

Well, that's annoying. I have a flaky computer. Typepad, in 2018, does not have an automatic save feature or really any kind of save feature that is not the same as posting (you don't have to post publically). So, my point is that biolgy, despite the fact that it is trated as co-equal with physics and chemistry as an academic discipline at school and university is really a very different kind of thing. The laws of physics were the same billions of years ago and billions of parsecs away. The laws of chemistry are derived from the laws of physics. But biology is the study of contingent objects on one planet. Which seems unlike physics and chemistry. (Geology is an interesting example here in that it is an historical, observational science like astronomy and the geological evolution of the Earth has been profoundly influenced by biology, but we can already do geology on other planets.)

So, what should a generalized biology be called? Xenobiology? Exobiology? Astrobiology? Speculative biology? Obviously, there are various things we can already do from a theoretical perspective. There's the discussion, even at O-Level, of what life is. We can apply cybernetic principles to biolgical systems. As far back as the 1950s, von Neumann had proven that cellular automata can be self-reproducing. Evolution will apply universally. There is much that can be said about the origins of life even if the gap between pre-biotic systems and biotic ones is still vast. We can do comparative biology and compare the Archaea with the Bacteria with the Eukaryota. But, of course, these are still DNA-based systems. So we have Alife (in computers and potentially as cybernetic systems such as Shannon's mouse), Elife (the biological life on Earth), but no examples of Xlife (life that has originated elsewhere than the Earth). 

For all we know the Solar System could be teeming with life from multiple origins or a single one. And then there are trillions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy and probably a trillion or so galaxies in the observable universe. We have no idea how life that we should recognise as life is. Just finding a single example of a biological system that originated elsewhere than the Earth would be a epochal discovery. But imagine having hundreds or thousands or millions or trillions of different biota to study and compare. How typical would the Earth be? How are we truly positioned on the Tree of Life? And it is only when we can make those comparisons that biology will finally come into its true form as a science.   

The Holographic Novel V

I have already written something like 4000 words on a minor late Priest novel, but there was one more thing I wanted to say. Priest (I may have mentioned this earlier) complains on his blog of the difficulties he has had in finding a US publisher for An American Story. Furthermore, he states that there haven't been that many 911 novels, a surprisingly small number in his opinion. I don't know how true that really is. There have certainly been films and tv series and some novels. The FoAK lists 15 in its category Novels about the September 11 attacks. Don DeLillo's Falling Man is one, but it is another that I want to talk about here.

Priest was born in 1943 and published an An American Story at 75 in 2018. Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 and published Bleeding Edge at 76 in 2013. Pynchon lives in New York and was quite likely in Manhattan on 911. Bleeding Edge is a novel about 911, but the event itself is absent. "Of that which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence." (Heck, I prefer that gloss to any more official versions!) I don't know where Priest was on 911, Ben is on a plane in the US on 911. (I left San Francisco on 10 September 2001 and arrived back in Woking just after midday on 11 September. At 14:00 BST, I put on the television.) Of course, there is no reason not to try and describe what someone actually felt on 911 in whatever situation they happened to find themselves. Pynchon might have over the actual event in his novel because it was too painful or because he felt his powers of description were inadequate to the task or because he did not want to project fictional experience on to such an outrage.

That's a minor issue though. Perhaps Priest was on a plane in the US on 911; more likely, he derives Ben's account from the recollections of people who were. There is a lot of peculiar detail given by Priest, which has, I imagine, to be taken from eyewitnesses. After Ben's plane has landed in Ohio, the crew are taken off the plane leaving the passengers on their own. I find that very hard indeed to credit. But strange things do happen. Pynchon is a fractal writer. So, we are to assume, is Priest. What are we to make of that then?

Priest is a novelist of perception and Pynchon a novelist of paranoia. Of course, perception and paranoia are really the two sides of the same coin. To pereceiuve the world truly is to perceive that They really are out to get us. Perhaps, in the Platonic version of An American Story, we might discover the significance of the passengers being abandoned. It feels horribly like something Priest lifted from his notebooks, but we should think better of him than that. There are plenty of places where Pynchon is pushing the limits, political, technological, of what exactly is going on 2001, although the sense I have is that for Pynchon the conventional account of what happened is more or so less correct, it's really a matter who and why, not how.   

But Pynchon's characters feel like real people, his America feels like the real place I have visited, his history feels like real history and his sentences feel like the ones you can swallow like an oyster. Pynchon has published two late shorter novels that prbably weren't planned from the beginning of his career (Bleeding Edge couldn't have been and Inherent Vice is set in 1970). Pynchon is 81 now. We might not get any more novels from him. We have had four Priest novels in the last ten years. I look forward to more Priest novels. There will come a day eventually of Pynchon and Priest completeness, but that's still a while off yet. And I feel we know which writer and which novel is going to be more poured over in the decades to come.  

The Holographic Novel IV

In light of the recenbt announcement that Ian McEwan is writing an sf novel, someone posted a link on Twitter to a blog post that Christopher Priest did on McEwan a few years ago. I must have read the post at the time, but I had forgotten about it, but it shines some interesting light on An American Story. I have only read one McEwan novel, Enduring Love. I did not care for it. It is an A-Level set text (or has been) and it is very easy to imagine unfortunate students having to write essays on the different types of eduring love in Enduring Love. One of the most notable things about Enduring Love is the amount of conspicuous research that McEwan puts in the book. From what I know of McEwan's other later novels (consider Saturday and the legendary review of it by John Banville in the NYRB), this is very much a feature of McEwan's novels at least since he stopped being a Young Turk.

Priest in his post in particular discusses The Children Act, which involves the case of whether ior not a 17-year Jehovah's Witness should receive a blood transfusion. I recently saw the film version. Most films irk me, most British films even more so. I wasn't as irked by the film as I feared, but there is not a lot to it. According to Priest, the novel (barely more than a novella really) focusses more on the vicicitudes of the relationship between the judge and her husband than the film, but the court case is based very closely on a real one. Priest makes the point that McEwan makes very assiduous use of his notebook, but that he doesn't write down the sources. This keeps leading him into danger in terms of accusations of plaigarism. But more importantly, Priest opines that 

A serious writer will consider the information gained from research, digest and absorb it, think about it and wonder about it, seek a significance that is greater than that of mere plotting, look for any relevance that might exist on a symbolic or unconscious level, then write it from the heart. 

In other words, McEwan is not a serious writer. Whereas, we must suppose, Priest is.

Now, it's true that some of Priest's novel have been heavily researched. The Prestige, for instance, and The Separation. But I think it is fair to say that research is worn fairlyt lightly, that has been absorbed into the substrate of the novel. I really don't though think that we can day that about An American Story. Clearly, Priest did a lot of research for the novel. But he also his characters (or, really, "characters") regurgitate large amounts of that material to one another. Which feels more like the kind of mistake that McEwan would make. Perhaps Priest felt that because of the dearth of novels about 911 he perceives and the lack of discussion of and credence given to the supposed anomalies in mainstream sources, he needed the characters to more explicitly make their points than might have been the case if he felt he weren't experiencing such resistance. 

But there is the other side of being a notebook writer, which is to take personal experience and put them straight into the book. I mentioned in an earlier article the scene in the London hotel, the flasback to Texas, the airport hotel in America and the Whitby jet key fobs. Now, certainly in the case of the Whitby key fob, the material has been worked through. Did Priest ever have Dracula jet key fobs made? Or did he just see them in Whitby? I was in the kind of hotel in London Priest describes a few months ago. In my case, the window looked out onto Charing Cross Road. But it is very natural to imagine Priest being a room with a curtained window and wanting to see what was outside it and discovering unpleasant, depressing and tawdry. That's the dustbin quad problem. The dustbins have to go somewhere and where they go will necesarily be a contrast with the non-dustbin areas. It's exactly the kind of observation we expect from a writer of Priest's perspicacity, whose theme has been perception for decades. It just feels, to me, less digested and absorbed than it might, more just stuck at random. But perhaps if we had access to the entire novel and not just the holographic slice we have, matters might be clearer.

Priest was one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 1983, along with McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, the Big Three (add Ruhdie to get the Big Four perhaps). He might have been the token sf writer and there might be a sense to him that his career, though it has been pretty successful in some ways, hasn't quite matched that of McEwan, despite being a truly serious writer, largely because of genre prejudice. It might not much consolation to Priest and the genre isn't what it was 35 years ago, but I suspect people will still be reading Priest long after McEwan is forgotten. (The caveat to that is though McEwan's later novels aren't very good, what of is early novels and poarticular short stories. Was there something there once? Will sf be able to provide enough of a space for Priest in the decades to come as the genre is transforms itself? A had read The Quiet Woman, pretty minor Priest really, but she did not care for it at all and, by direct implication, the author. So we shall see.)

The Holographic Novel III

The now of An American Story is the 2020s. In the final chapter, we learn that it is 2024, althoughg as this is a Priest novel, it is possible that the now earlier in the novel is not 2024 or is a different one. There's no particular reason why Priest couldn't have set the now of novel in the 2010s. In fact, the timeline might work slightly better if he had. There might be subtle clues in the ages of Ben's partner and her mother than I am missing, although, again, who knows what the significance of that might be supposed to be. Setting the novel in the 2020s allows Priest to have an independent Scotland. We don't expect Priest generally to be focussed on worldbuilding. The Scotland here declared UDI, presumably shortly after Brexit in 2019. Now, I am sure there are plenty of Nats in the cafes and bars (do they have pubs on Bute?) who fantasise about Nicola Sturegeon declaring UDI. The problem is, as the Catalans have found, international law just does not work that way. Brexit will be ruinously damaging to Scotland, but declaring UDI would compound that ruin in multitudinous ways. Now, one might imagine the EU looking comparatively favourably upon Scotland compared to Catalonia in the case of a chaotic Brexit. But in practical terms, an independent Scotland would probably not be back in the EU by 2024 and almost certainly wouldn't be in the euro. 5 years is a long time, but the consequences economic damage of combined Brexit/UDI would likely still be being keenly felt in 2024. England is an authoritarian surveillance state, but Ben might have commented on the residue of anti-English feeling there would probably still be in the air (hard border, pound, jobs, banks, inflation). In 2024, an independent Scotland might well have a female prime minister. It could easily be Ruth Davidson.

Now, one can quite understand why Priest might not want to twit his neighbours with discussion of the merk, but there is one lacuna that is hardly to ignore. Less than 30 kilometres from Bute is Faslane. By 2020, all Royal Navy submarines will be based at HMNB Clyde. In order to get to the open sea, the Vanguard-class boats must pass through the 11 km or so stretch of water between Bute and the mainland, the stretch of water that Ben can see from his bedroom and spends much time rhapsodising about. And yet he fails to tell us that English SSBNs are still slipping silently through those waters with their deadly cargo.

For Faslane is the 900-pound gorilla in the room of Scottish independence. As Sturgeon, Britain's self-image is instrinicly tied up with its status as a declared nuclear power and that will be even more true in a post-Brexit England (we are not told what has happened to Northern Ireland and Wales, as far as I recall, in the novel). In a managed exit, it might be possible to move the facilities at Faslane to Plymouth, although this would a non-trivial exercise and hugely expensive and would, realistically, take some significant time. But in a UDI Scotland, Faslane would simply remain. Priest even mentions Guantanamo and its anomalous status as well as the fiction of US bases in Britain being officially RAF ones with just a single RAF liasion officer. But, in the novel's timeline, England would have a nuclear Guantanamo in Scotland. Given the peculiar sections concerning the temporary US base at the Hydro on Bute and its extra-territoriality. I can see why Priest wants to put Tatorov on Bute. It's where he lives. But it still seems an extraordinary omission not to even mention Faslane.  

The Holographic Novel II

Like all narrators, Ben is necessarily an unreliable one and, of course, in a Christopher Priest novel, we would least of all expect him to reliable. So, we can't really trust anything he says. Which is obvious an issue in a novel about conspuiracy theories. If narrators (or witnesses of any kind) are unreliable why should be trusy what they say? One can, perhaps, forgive Michigan University, but Tatarov, we are told, turned down the Fields Medal. There was a real life Russian mathematician who did. The problem is that the Russian-American Tatarov was born in the early 1930s, came tio the US when he was 7, hardly spoke Russian after he arrived in the US and turned down the price in the 1990s. The Fields Medal is only given to mathematicans under 40, something Ben would surely know, but Priest himself might not. So, it is possible that we have a clue that we are in an alternative word in which the Fields Medal is given to mathematicians over 40. Or it is also possible that Priest made a mistake.

Ben is in the US over 911 and there is some discussion of him and Lil exchanging texts. Priest even goes so far as to tell us that Ben is surprised to get a text from Lil. Now, as any fule kno, the only GSM there was in the US in 2001 was GSM1900. Triband phones existed in 2001, but they weren't that common. Siemens only had one, the S40, which had actually been developed by Dancall, who were bought by Bosch, who were bought by Siemens. The S40 didn't look like the other Siemens phones. Siemens had bought Dancall to get the triband technology. I asked to borrow one when I went to the US in 2001 (I have my own 911 story), but no response from the mobile phone side. Now, Ericsson and Nokia may well have triband phones in the same era. If Ben were going to the US a lot, he might well have a sought out a triband phone. He might even have got a US mobile, although little prepaid there then, so you would have to be in the US a significant amount of time to justify having a US postpaid subscription. 

GSM coverage was patchy in the US in 2001. Even if Lil had a GSM phone herself was texting even enabled on US GSM networks in 2001? How many GSM networks were there in the US? It might be that Ben wouldn't necessarily have roamed on to the same network as Lil. But was inter-network texting supported in 2001 in the US? And this assumes Lil has a GSM phone. OK, that's not unreasonable. She would want a compatible phone to Ben's and is in the UK a lot for work, so it would make swense that she did have one. In 2001, most US mobiles would probably still have been analogue and even 2G networks might well not have supported SMS, which was originally a GSM feature, and not texting between networks.

Does this really matter? For the texts, not really. In 2018, it is taken for granted that you can just text anyone from anywhere. That might not be wholly true, but it was definitely not the case in 2001. Priest could have had a line about Ben and Lil getting mobiles together in London, so we would know that it was at least possible for them to text one another. But Priest includes a lengthy discussion about how it was possible for passengers on the hijacked 911 planes to make phonecalls. Now that's a good question. But Priest never points out that analogue and digital phones would have very different characteristics in terms of making calls from a fast moving aircraft at altitude. GSM phones were designed to support cell handover at TGV speed. But analogue cells would be big (ten of kilometres) and there would be some leakage upwards plus you could pick up a cell close to the horizon. So whereas that won't work with 4G as well, it probably does work with the 1G phones a lot of people on the 911 planes would have had. If you are 30 km from the basestation, even travelling at 900 km/h, you could still get a minute or two of connection time. So, to me, as a telecoms engineer, no, it seems perfectly reasonable you could make calls from a plane in 2001.

Again, it is possible that Priest knows this. In a conspiracy theory, we are often looking for the tiny detail that doesn't fit and which will destroy the entire edifice. "People made phone calls from the planes." "Just a minute! It's not possible to make phone calls from planes" "Actually, it is - or was in 2001. The fundamental issue with a digital phone (2G/3G/4G) is that the plane is moving so fast it is crossing through lots of cells and the cells are a long way away and thus the signal strength is weak, so the phone can never make a call setup with a particular cell. With an analogue phone, not only ony is the range longer because a lower frequency is used, but call setup is easier and there is cell handover. If there is a cell there and you might well be in it for a couple of minutes, you can make a call." So the edifice is preserved.

It might not natter. In Priest's world(s), Flight 77 is found at the bottom of the Atrlantic. Live news reports of the discovery in 2024 are suppressed. Given that that is not the case in our universe, Priest is providing a fictional resolution to the issue. All his discussion about aircraft alloys is moot. It's not a real discovery, so there is nothing in our timeline to explain. Furthermore, of course, the floor of the Atlantic Ocean is littered with bits of aircraft alloy (Air India Flight 182, TWA Flight 800 - now, there's a conspiracy theory for you! - EgyptAir Flight 990, Air France Flight 447). OK, Ben finds Lil's jet key fob. But within the cointext of the novel, it is not as though there aren't ways for modern aircraft alloy to get into the wreckage of a Second World War Liberty ship.

And I haven't even got on to Priest's British worldbuilding or Thomas Pynchon. Looks like I will have to go again next week!  

        

The Holographic Novel I

I have been a big Christopher Priest fan for many years. I even went to an Arvon course specifically because he was one of the tutors. So, when I saw that he had a new novel out soon, I preordered it. I then realised that I already had Priest's three previous latest novels unread. Not having any more David Mitchell to hand, I thought I had better read An American Story when it arrived. So I did.

I have always found Priest's prose scrachy. I know I am not the only person who thinks this, but, for most people, it seems to be something that passes them by. There is obviously something in the rythyms of Priest's sentences that I am hypersensitive to. I have wondered wthether it is because his prose feels like it has been translated that explains why Priest has achieved more critical in non-English-speaking world than in the UK and the US. The scratchiness might get smoothed over by a skilled translator and any residual roughness can be put down to the text being a translation. But it sems to me that Priest's sentences are more than ever angular. Perhaps I just haven't read any Priest for a while or he is no longer quite the writer he was 40 years ago. Of course, just because I would write a sentence differently, doesn't mean that I am right. 

An American Story is about Ben, a 50-something science journalist living on Bute in the early 2020s in a post-UDI Scotland. His fiancee, Lil,  was killed on Flight 93 in the 911 attacks, which, it is generally believed crashed into the Pentagon. The novel doesn't really have much of a plot (we get chapters with flashbacks to Ben's earlier life before and after 911 and as well as chapters set "now"), but at the end Ben discovers (or, I suppose, this being Priest after all, believes he has discovered) a momento (a jet keyring from Whitby showing a scene from Dracula) of Lil's in the recovered wreckage of a plane found in the Atlantic and Lil's, in 2001, presumed soon-to-be-ex-husband, is elected US Vice President in the 2024 election (it is established that he is a senior Department of Defense official at the under-secretary level or whatever the generic term in the US is for what would be junior ministers in the UK). 

Nothing is quite what it seems. This is Priest and we would not wish it otherwise. We are in the Garden of Forking Paths (I saw what you did there, Chris). As with nearly all of Priest's novels, there is more than one world here and the world or worlds are only there if you can see them. The official story of the 911 attacks is one version of the truth. We might cling to it. But there is none so blind as he who does have eyes to see. What about the various anomalies? How do we fit them into our world picture? Priest may or may not have gone full Truther, but certainly his characters are tending that way. Well, they are barely characters and tend to spout page-long screeds on 911 conspiracy theories at one another. But this is novel. THe characters don't have to be realistic.

Almost everyone Ben is involved with has an association with 911. The father of his current parent turns out to have written a suppressed book on the subject. The father of the women he met when working on a film and who turns up pretty much out of the blue later on was killed in the attacks. Tatarov, the Russian-American mathematician sufficiently famous that his death is mentioned in the 2020s on the Scottish morning radio new bulletin, who Ben interviewed in the mid-1990s turns up on Bute in the mid-2000s working for the US government and summons Ben to see him and expound on his theories of reverse causation. As Ben's partner's mother, who has memories of impossible timelines, reflects towards the end of the book, this can't all be coincidence.

So what is going on? Probably if I reread the novel I'd have a better idea. I also suspect that if one were to read the chapters in chronological order, it would give a different perspective on matters. In some of Priest's other novels, it might be a technology device or a computer simulation or magic perhaps just the nature of human perception that gives us access to multiple worlds. Here is the Thomas Theorem with vague gesturing towards topology. In fact, I was reminded somewhat of the Incantors and the Rhetors in Stephenson's Anathem. One imagines that Tatarov is manipulating  Ben's reality. Or that someone is manipulating Tatarov to manipulate Ben. But what the manipulation is and how it works and how it fits in with the actions of the deep state is a mystery to me. That's probably how Priest wants it. This might not be a very good book, but it is a very Priestian one. Priest';s concern has long been with the fantasy of perception in all its manifestations. It is not something that can be summed up in a sentence.

But this is where for me the idea of the holographic novel arises. We are given a lot of apparently extraneous information about characters and the world(s) they are in. For instance, twice we are told that  Lil has an identical twin sisters. That feels like it is going to be significant in some way. We know that twins are important to Priest. And yet, as far as I can see, Priest does nothing with that information. If this were a David Mitchell novel, it could be that it might turn out to be significant in some other part of his meta-novel or it could just be a deliberate gesture at thickening the world(s). And perhaps Priest is doing that. There are a lot of characters in the book who often don't seem to do very much. Yet we are often told their names, when they could be just anonymous spear carriers, even their middle names in some cases. We are even told the name of the popular maths magazines for schools that Ben ostensibly interviews Tatarov on Bute for and where it is based (Derby). But why do we need know that?    

What we have in An American Story is a slice through the full novel that exists in Priest's heads. Like a hologram, everything exists in the novel we have , just at a lower resolution than in the true representation. So, in the full novel, the significance of Lil having a twin or being a Goth or having a husband who is sufficiently like Dick Cheney that he ends up becoming vice president or obviously being up to something as part of the deep state is all fully explicated or at least as fully explicated as anything is ever going to be with Priest. 

The problem with this approach is it is a bit like laughing at one's own jokes. "What's the significance of Lil being a twin?" "Isn't it obvious?"/"If only you knew!"/"It's just a bit of character colour." Perhaps it's all three. But as I shall discuss in part 2 of this post, we might need more than that if we are to give the benefit of the doubt to the author.

 

Now Read On...

There are the writers you've read everything by, the writers you want to read everything by, the writers you've read some stuff by, the writers you've read a book by, the writers whose books you own, the writers you own a book by, the riters who would like to own, the writers you have heard of it, the writers you have vaguely heard of it and the writers you have never heard of it.  

It's easy to assume that you have heard of everyone you could have heard of because if there were writers like the writers you like you would have come across them somewhere. It's not as though you don't come across a lot of writers after all. And to some degree that probably is true. One could, for instance, list a lot of British New Space Opera writers if one were asked to, although there were would be quite a few who might get missed and there are still others you would never think of. 

There are new writers, of course, but as my old writing chum, Greg Keen, liked to say, 80% of writers who get a two-book deal never publish a third novel. And there are a lot of those old two-book writers' books cropping up in the charity shops of North Laine. So there is always the hope that the perfect novel is lurking out there somewhere. It's just that it is hard to shake the feeling that if it were, someone would have mentioned it already.

I got to thinking about this after finishing David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zeot. I read all the Mitchell short stories I could find online and I still have one short story in a Verso anthology I have to read plus, of course, that copy of number9dream somewhere in my Brentford shortage unit. But I am bereft. I have, for the time being, until he publishes a new novel, done Mitchell. OK, there's the film of Cloud Atlas and a couple of operas and Sense8 and interviews and critical works on Mitchell and the translations from Japanese, but none of those are going to give me the fix I crave.

Of course, I have lots and lots of books to hand, some of them by writers I like, all of them at least potentially books I want to read. But they aren't want I really want. What I want is Mitchel. Or some like Mitchell. But who is like Mitchell?

But there are lots of writers who are like Mitchell. In the ultimate case, all writers are like him, which, of course, isn't very helpful. But lots of people have written slightly fantasticated historical fiction. Pynchon, natch, Stephenson. But there are also writers like Iain Pears and Andrew Crumey. Who was the writer who wrote that novel about the rival language to Esperanto. Lawrence Norfolk is a mate of Mitchell's (he usually getrs an acknowledgement in the Acknowledgements of Mitchell's novels). See the SFE for the links between Norfolk, Pears and Stephenson. Rushdie would clearly be another one. 

There are writers who have clearly influenced Mitchell such as Martin Amis, Jonathan Coe and Haruki Murakami. I have not read any Murakami and there are probably lots of Murakami-like writers in Japan, some of whom may have been translated. The ESF states that Murakami is like Brautigan and Vonnegut, although I am not so sure I see those writers in Mitchell, at least not directly. 

I thought Priest and then not Priest and then, yes, actually Priest. Both The Affirmation and The Glamour could be seen as having something in common with the kinds of ideas that led to Mitchell's Immortals and The Separation is a fantasy of history. Simon Ings is both Priestian and has written at least one historiographical novel. Hari Kunzru. Francis Spufford. John Fowles. A.S. Byatt. Tom McCarthy. Take a look at the list of writers on the FoAK article on historiographic metafiction. There are a lot of writers there and Mitchell wasn't even one of them. (He is now.)

We have to careful not just to list writers we like. One could use some machine learning technique to determine which writer in all of the space of writers is most like Mitchell. That would probably miss the point. One could read the interviews to discover more writers Mitchell likes or was influenced by, but those writers might not be very like Mitchell. More interestingly, Mitchell's first novel was published in 1999 and he has been a prominent figure in literary firmament now for nearly two decades. Who has Mitchell influenced? Who read Ghostwritten on their gap year Inter-Rail trip in 2005 and was inspired to write Mitchellean novels? Surely they should be out there by now.   

But whichever way, at least this side of the Singularity. there is no end to the books to read. There's more. 

Brighton Is Nothing At All Like Preston

I first went to Brighton in 1987 for the World Science Fiction Convention. Several members of Jomsborg lived in Brighton. C came from Brighton (her parents were still alive then and still lived in her childhood house there) and S lives. I have been to Brighton so much over the years that I consider it evidence that we are living in a simulation. 

Brighton is nothing at all like Preston. In fact, Brighton isn't even anything at all like the other canonical British seaside resort, Blackpool. And Brighton isn't very much like other Southern seaside towns that it might be compared with such as Bournemouth, Easbourne, Hastings, Margate or Southend. As Joe Kennedy points out in Authentocrats, everywhere is unique and Brighton is more unique than most places.

There are lots of restaurants in Brighton. There are lots of pubs, even lots of pubs you might want to go in, which can't be said of Preston, which has both few pubs these days and almost none you would really want to go in. There's the festival, an arthouse cinema, lots of little theatres, any number of cafes, a wine bar or two, night buses (although you enter and exit by the same door), a large Waterstone's. There's a Carlolucci's, a Franca Manca, a Wagamama, a Yo! Sushi. OK, they are chains, but they wouldn't even be dreamt of in Preston. Brighton is an apex of the Giolden Triangle, London by the sea and the San Francisco of Britain (although it is many other things too). So nothing at all like Preston.

Of course, running around a Preston Park in Brighton is much like running around a park in Preston. OK, they are fewer jioggers, sio the dogs are less used to them and are more likely to gassle you and you get more looks askance, but it's same basic experience. OK, Preston Park might claim more global significance in psychgeographical terms than Haslam Park, but how much that really matters is a question for debate.

Brighton is a university city. In fact, it has two, even if the days of Asa Briggs and Balliol by the Sea are long gone. Preston is too, not that you'd really notice, even with an urban campus close to the city centre. Lancaster feels a lot more studenty and also has a lot more pubs you would want to go in. Everywhere is unique.

"Wherever you are, that's where ar e you." If you live in Brighton, you've got to get up, clean your teeth, go to school or work. A supermarket in Brighton is much like a supermarket anywhere else in the country and the television is the same. For S growing up in the far north suburbs of Brighton, the experience couldn't have been very different to mine in Preston even if you could see the sea from the kitchen window of the house.

But sure, you might same, a lot of mundane stuff is the same, but it's not the mindane stuff that makes a place interesting. OK, as a kid, you mostly do suburban kid stuff and even wiit hen you went into the town centre, it would mostly be to do standard town centre stuff, but you probably did get sometimes to do stuff you couldn't do in Preston like go on the pier. Actually, as a resort dependent on daytrippers what do people do in Brighton?

One thing is shopping. The Lanes have been famous for decades, but there's also North Laine, which Kennedy discusses in his book. The thing about North Laine is that it is big. There are four streets of niknak shops plus more shops on the parallel streets and cross streets. In most towns trying to do this, they would feel they were ahead of the game with half a street. And it is not as though the only niknak shops are in North Laine. There's the Lanes too and Kemptown and Seven Dials and parts of Hove and even bits of London Road and probably other areas of Brighton too. If you want niknaks, Brighton is your place. 

Not so much for books, not since the remainder shop became a children's clothes shop, but there is the secondhand bookshop (good stock, but not priced to sell) and the magazine shop. And there are the Oxfam and Amnesty bookshops. Now, here's a thing. According Kennedy, North Laine as we know it emerged in the mid-1990s. It is the last redoubt of Cool Britannia. 

I was born in 1968 and bought my first flat in Woking in December 1996. Of course, under slightly altered circumstances, I might have bought a flat in London or Brighton. One thing that has struck me is that the charity shops of Brighton, especially, the Amnesty one, are full of paperbacks that are immediately identifiable by the characteristic cover designs and typography, and even the colour of their paper, as from the 1990s. I think perhaps the most characteristically of its time volume that I have found was A Book Of Two Halves: New Football Short Stories from 1996. This had stories by Simon Ings, Liz Jensen and M. John Harrison, the two tutors and the guest at the Arvon sf course I went on in October 2014, amongst a whole bench of other sf and mainstream (slightly cult) writers. But the thing is that that is a book I didn't even know existed in order to want until I found in the Amnesty bookshop. It can be compared with, for instance, the Disco Biscuits and Disco 2000 anthologies (one of those even has an extract from a Neal Stephenson novel) or that earlier Paul J. McAuley/Kim Newman music one, In Dreams. 

There are probably lots of others as yet not dreamt of and there are certainly lots of novels and non-fiction books I have never heard from that era. That's true of all era s,but there seems a preponderance in the North Laine charity shops from the 1990s, which seemed significant somehow to me, but I couldn't quite find the angle until now. Lots of people about my age bought flats in Brighton in the 1990s. They also bought books. Years later they are still living in Brighton. Most are not going to be as onseesive bookhoarders as me (One In, None Out), so they underload books on the North Laine charity shops when they have a clear out/move/get divorced/die. So with a whole class of people with tastes like mine who moved to Brighton in the period that these books were being published, it is no surprise that the charity shops are full of them. The question, of course, is whether the books were better then, but that is a subject for another essay.

For some of then discovering something unexpected from the 1990s is better than finding a "box-fresh Han Solo". You can still get them, I suspect, in that shop near (next to?) the comics shop. The poster shop that Kennedy is surely referring to (Art Republic) and you can get still get Pulp Fiction posters and t-shirts.  Kennedy is 37, which young as far as I am concerned, but not in the absolute sense, so what do 37-year olds or 27-year olds or 17-year olds like these days. As with towns, each is different, but they have a lot in common with each other under the surface. I've lived in Preston, Oxford, London, Bournemouth, Woking and Seattle and spent significant amounts of time in Ipswich and Brighton. They are all different, but they are also the same, but perhaps it is just me who is the same. The places to go are different, the things to do can be, but the things to like and be interested in are the same. It was the same books and newspapers and magazines and radio and television in Preston as in Brighton. It wasn't even that different in Seattle. And of all the places I have been to a lot, Brighton is the one I have liked least. Perhaps it does try too hard.

(The more you think about this, the more there is to say. For instance, on the many Brighton. But that will have to wait for another day.)

And as for the Fun Police, given that I am right smack bang in the middle of the prime demographic for North Laine, perhaps they only make themselves apparent to those who are not. (Or I am just too grumpy.) There's a short story in that. Anyone know of an anthology I could get it in?   

January Men

David Mitchell was one of the twenty Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. This was announced in Granta 81, Spring 2003. The Granta website gives a publication date of 14 April 2003. Cloud Atlas was published in March 2004, so Mitchell got his place on the strengtrh of his first two published novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream, both of which had been well received plus any rumours that might already have been circulating in the hermetic world of London publishing about the forthcoming Cloud Atlas.

Interesting then, the sample of Mitchell's work provided in Granta (and one of only three pieces from that volume to be freely available on the Granta website) is not from Cloud Atlas, but is a version of the first chapter, "January Man", of Mitchell's fourth novel, Black Swan Green, which was published in 2006. This strengthens the suggestion that Black Swan Green was originally early on in Mitchell's career and then revised. In fact, I suspect that Ghostwritten, number9dream and Blackds of the magazine.  Swan Green were all written more or less concurrently in the mid to late 1990s. Ghostwritten is Mitchell's Asia-Europe trip, the trip during which was when he met with an agent in London who urged him to abandon his first novel, The Old Moon. (There was also an sf novella.) Ghostwritten is then written in Mitchell's natural default globetrotting mode and Black Swan Green is the opposite with its focus on a particular place and time. I haven't read number9dream (I wish!), but the impression I have is that it is somewhat like an outgrowth of Ghostwritten plus it's a Japan novel. Mitchell then goes back to globetrotting (and timetrotting now too) for Cloud Atlas before pulling Black Swan Green out of the drawer. There are plenty of interviews with Mitchell though I haven't yet read, so there is an opportunity to discover whether or not I am way off beam here.

But the "January Man" we have here is quite different in some ways to the "January Man" in the novel. 5166 words, a 16-minute read according to Granta. BSG's JM is 27 pages, so probably about 8000 words. Of course, the Granta version might have been cut to fit the needs of the magazine.  The basic structure of the chapter is more or less unchanged, but I suspect there aren't very many sentences that haven't been changed. That, of course, is how you are supposed to revise a novel. It should all go through the fingers again. In most cases, Mitchell has made things more specific (fish fingers, chips, sprouts and tomato ketchup become Findus ham'n'cheese Crispy Pancakes, crinkle-cut oven chips and sprouts). In the particular is the universal.

Of course, me being me, it was the matter of some the particular details that got me thinking. Interestingly, Granta Jason is only 11 and he does sound slightly younger than BSG Jason. Now, why did Mitchell change Jason to being exactly the same age as himself? In Granta,"[o]n her eighteenth birthday last summer [Julia] was allowed to go to Tanya’s nightclub in Worcester." "Summer" implies before September, but then why is Julia revising for her A-Levels? OK, she could be doing retakes or have fluffed her O-Levels. In BSG, the summer has been dropped and he can assume her birthday is in the autumn term, which fits better. 

In Granta, Jason has seen Superman II for Robin Dukes's birthday, but in BSG, it's Neal Brose's. That links us not just to the climax of BSG, but to Ghostwritten. Jason's dad's called Clive (his mum is still Helena) and works for the real Iceland not the fictitious Greenland. Stephen Branch becomes Tom Yew and his Suzuki 450cc scrambler a more probable purple Suzuki 150cc scrambler. Stephen is on HMS Sheffield and Tom HMS Coventry. Why did Mitchell change the ship? In Granta, The Day After is discussed despite the fact that it did on air in the US until 20 November 1983. (When was it first shown in the UK?) In BSG, Tom describes a post-apocalyptic dream in the context of a conversation about the most unpleasant ways to die. In a later chapter, he as an other vision/premonition of death.   

Checking things like dates was much harder in the late 1990s than in the mid 2000s much less today. As I discussed earlier, the 1982 of BSG is not our 1982, so there's no especial reason it couldn't have been have a 1982 in which The Day After was broadcast two years earlier than in our timeline. The Granta "January Man" might well have been a piece of more or less standalone writing than Mitchell had lying around. Pehaps he felt that an extract of Cloud Atlas would not work as well.

The Granta JM is not the only part of the ur-BSG out there. A version of the second chapter, "Hangman" appeared in New Writing 13 in 2005. So that has to be tracked down. Will that sit closer to the novel version? There's also "All Souls Day", which is apparently discussed in the collection of essays on Mitchell (unclear actually if this is from BSG or is a part of a future novel) and finally appeared in 2016 in Jealous Saboteurs (https://donlonbooks.com/products/jealous-saboteurs-by-francis-upritchard). I haven't got £25 right now. 

In Granta's JM, Jason reads The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World. We know that, like me, Mitchell was very taken by Isaac Asimov's short story discussions in his collections. For me, I have always been more interested in reading about the thing than reading the thing. Mitchell though has said that wasn't the case for him at university. (BSG would also suggest he was keener than I was on being liked at school.) It would be good if Mitchell were to a short story collection with full Asimovian apparatus. We know that Mitchell is writing an uber-novel, but the Granta JM isn't just an early draft of the real version in BSG. "One of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip." That's true of Doctor Who. Mitchell is a fan. It's true of the uber-novel too. it contains multitudes.

50 Shades of Centrism

When I was in the Elliott Bay Book Company I came across in the sports (sic) section a book about football called Games Without Frontiers by Joe Kennedy, published by Revolver Books, which was started by a breakaway from Zero Books. Of course, it is the kind of book that turned up in the "soccer" subsection in a bookshop in America, but it looked interesting as a book about football rather than, natch, about football. But who knew about leftwing ultras in non-league teams in England? There is always more.

So, I looked Kennedy up and saw that he had another book coming out in 2018, Authentocrats, which would have been worth buying on the strength of the title alone, so I bought it when it came out and have read it. I also got Games Without Frontiers, but that will have to wait in the virtual pile, although it's not very long and it would good to be a Kennedy completist.

Authentocrats is not a book about the New Sincerity, although interestingly Kennedy does spend a lot of time discussing the 1990s. If Blairism is your enemy then the 1990s is where it all comes from so that makes sense. I don't know how many New Labourites read Infinite Jest, but there probably is a book to be written about the kinds of ideas that were circulating in the Anglosphere at that time such as the Third Way and which Wallace articulated and their influence on political discourse. I seem to recall, for instance, that comuntarianism was popular amongst the Blairites for a while. 

Authentocracy, of course, is about the channelling the Will of the People. Only certain people, of course, get to count as People, of course, when it comes to ascertaining the Will. The "White Working Class", for instance. Kennedy only mentions focus groups once, although there were quite possibly the cause of the mess we are in. There's a book in that too. I wonder whether Kennedy has read Stephen Bury's Interface, which, of course takes us back to Stephenson and Wallace and Pynchon, who always imagines on summer school reading liusts ("Know your enemy"). 

The doorstep can be a pretty authentocratic place and Owen Jones might claim that no-one was bringing up Brexit in 2017, so it is an non-issue. Certainly, a strength of Corbynism would seem to be that it is not obviously authentocratic. You wouldn't focus group Corbyn/Corbynism. It just is. And it got 40% of the vote in 2017. Of course, the non-authentocratic thing to do would have been for Corbyn to have said on the morning of 24 June to have said "Brexit was wrong yesterday, it is wrong today and it will be wrong forever. I will fight to be dying breath to stop Brexit and the fascist coup that it embodies." But, obviously, there is more than one way of arriving at a particular point of view. "The EU is a nasty ordoliberal club and I'd frankly rather have nothing to do with it."

Kennedy doesn't have much time for the Centrist Dads. I am neither a centrist nor a dad. But it seems to me that the Centrist Dads can't really be very authentocratic. I am not sure that many people are claiming that many Remainers claim they are channelling the will of the people. Leaving the EU is a n incredibly stupid thing to do for all sorts of patently obviously reasons and if you are too stupid to see that or that Brexit has been handled in jusdt about the worst possible way imaginable over the past two years you are too stupid to have an opinion that should be taken into account. We musst do this or the People will be terribly angry strikes me as very Authentocratic perspective. So lots of Blairites (or "Blairites") are authentocrat and they now constitute a large part of the shrugger element of our political class. Interestingly, Blair himself is a (sometimes) vocal Remainer. Perhaps Blair is no longer a Blairite. Corbyn's shrugging/pre-1973 nostalgia is much more in line with the authenocrat position, but perhaps there is more than one way of being or not being an authentocrat.

That other Owen, Smith, is a case in point, and is amusingly speared earlky oin by Kennedy, although it has been suggested that there is more to the frothy coffee comment than might be apparent. I wonder if they had cappucincos at Bruccuiani's in the 1970s. The only mineral was, disappointingly, Sparkling Vimto. A British cappucinco bears little resemblance to anything every drunk in Italy. Who knows what Smith was really expecting, although certainly he would have been well advised to just drink the coffee. I recall going to a cafe in Oban in 1988 and getting a mug o black instant coffee, so the frothy coffee, leaving aside the impact of the arrival of American-style coffee shops in London in the 1990s or an excited article about the arrival of a cafe with an espressio machine in Brentford in the 2000s(!), is perhaps not so ubiquitous in time and space as we might imagine. Smith's father wrote the biography of Raymond Williams and Williams wouldn't have cared for Smith Junior having been a PR flack. Of course, part of the appeal of Corbyn over Smith or the 2015 Labour leadership candidates was that he didn't come from the SPAD-type background, but perhaps you can be authentic without being authentocratic. 

In a First Past the Post system, the electoral emphasis is on Bromsgrove Man and Worcester Woman, in otherwise on floating voters. The problem with floaing voters is that they can do and vote Tory. This pushes Labour to try and find ways of appealling to BM/WW and these tend to authentocratic, especially if you've ruled out big ticket items like (re)nationalisation. Of course, Labour can try and appeal to the kinds of voters, to the extent that they still exist, who voted in 1970, but stopped voting. That did work for Corbyn in 2017. Whether one more big push is enough another matter. A lot of people who stopped voting in 1997 and later are Tories. How much do the different groups of non-voters have in common.

I was expecting Kennedy to have more to say about the Tories, but as he indicates early on, that's almost too easy. This is a book about the travails of Labour. But I was surprised that though be mentions Blue Labour 11 times, he mentions Red Tory only once and then only in passing. There are also mentions of the Big Society. As I recall it, Blue Labour was an explicit reaction to Phillip Blond's Red Tory ideas, but perhaps it was just the name. Again, the whole Red Tory thing ran out of gas pretty quickly and the Big Society was lost in the chaos of the coalition. Furthermore, it's a Tory fight even if, supposedly, May's 2017 manifesto was heavily influenced by Nick Timothy, who was chanelling Red Tory (i.e. authentocratic) notions, which apparently include bringing back foxhunting. Of course, Blond is Daniel Craig's step-brother, so Kennedy missed a trick in not bringing up that in his discussion of modern Bond. (I wonder if there could be something linked to the New Sincerity there, although in truth, Craig's Bond is really a reaction to Brosnan's combined with an audience more used to a broken protagonist.)

Of course, as is often the case with this kind of book, there are more interesting books stuggling to get out. I'd like to have read more about the New Natural Writing and how it relates to the authentocracy, neonationalism and libertopianism of the Brexit moment. What of Corby and his allotment? Is that enough to connect him to Deep England? There is always going to be more that can be said about the trope of the Bluff, No Nonsense Northerner (or Provincial) or 1990s (or 1960s) sitcoms. 

And should read some Gramsci, I think. It would probably help/

Kennedy's thoughts on Brighton and in particular North Laine suggested an angle to me on a post I have been trying to find one for a while, so I will have much to say on that subject at a later date.

Those of You Who May Have a Nervous Disposition

Wood and Miles are right. Quatermass was not a very strong direct influence on Doctor Who or at least not until the Pertwee era and then it was probably more a case that it was influence on Derek Sherwin, who, of course, left to do Paul Temple at the beginning of the era. Hartnell is, I suppose, a little like Quatermass, although it is Pertwee who is mostly clearly channelling him.

But Quartermass was a huge cultural object. Its memory lived and was still sharp in the mid-1970s. Clips would occassionally be shown. I remember the 1979 John Mills Quatermass was a big deal, although I don't think I actually saw any of it. I have a vague recollection it might have started being shown on the day ITV returned from its strike. It was an easy mistake to make to assume that Doctor Who was a 1960s sf tv series and therefore must have been like Quartermass. But Quartermass is all about alien possessions of different kinds on contemporary Earth and it is not the 1970s that the notion that the best ones are set on (contemporary) Earth really sets in (although there are a few clear precursors in the 1960s). 

In the winter of 1958-9, Quatermass and the Pit must have been quite the thing seen on a small, low resolution television. It would seem that they made a bit more of an effort in the studio than with previous series. The Martian spaceship is an effective prop and the whole pit set, although it is probably not as vast as it looks seems large. The insectoid Martians are a pretty horrific piece of design (i.e. good) and the recovered race memory of the Wild Hunt must have been terrifying as indeed must the scenes of panic spreading across London. Even the slightly cheesy scene with the American pilots has a suitably impactful payoff. 

Although the episodes are only about 35 minutes long, they do tend to drag a bit. We have 6 35-minute episodes, which is about the equivalent of an 8-part Who and some (much) long Who drags too. One big advantage of the Doctor is that it wouldn't have taken him beyond the end of the first episode to realise that the spaceship is a spaceship. I also think, on the whole, that they would have handled the B plots better. One feels that the material with the journalist should amount to something as with the couple who experienced the 1920s hauntings. Indeed, I think in a modern version, there would be some attempt to try and tie together the historical material, although I suppose the argument is that it is implicit in realisation that disturbing the spaceship through digging causes the race memories to be manifested. Perhaps we don't need anything more to be said or shown.

And there are lots of great bits of 1950s colour. The sandwiches in the club! The contractor with the drill! The newspaper office! The constant resort to brandy (and whisky)! The tea leaf-reading landlady. The sympathetic vicar. Military and ministerial stupidity. The television in the pub! The pub itsrelf and its clientele.  

So, this is a very solid piece of television, which would have been much more effective in its. There is a awful lot of mixing science and mysticism about in this period and it was a furrow Kneale himself would keep on cutting. Of course, this goes back to Frankenstein and probably however was influencing Shelley. Science is a kind of magic in that both are systems that claim to provide a model of the world and allow adepts to control the world through knowledge of that model. We can have an article in the current LRB in all seriousness suggesting that it has to the fairies who are piloting the UFOs. Clearly, we must be channelling a race memory if we want to keep to writing novels and scripts that juxtapose standing stones and radio telescopes and, ideally through in a nuclear power station and a prehistoric barrow.

I do wonder though if we get as much of this kind of thing as we used. Would Children of the Stones wash in the late 2010s? Was there something in the air in the second half of the C20th, possibly something inherited from early modern period that is less apparent in hypermodernity. Jodrell Bank is an icon, but it must have seemed even more uncanny when Alan Garner moved to within sight of it in a time when few people had televisions or even inside privies. The past is a foreign country. Although, of course, Kneale's pessimism might well turn out to be fully justified even if we aren't ancient Martians.  

The Laboratory of Time

As we demonstrated a few weeks ago, Black Swan Green is set in 1982, but it is not set in our 1982. Characters from one Mitchell novel pop up in others, sometimes for just a cameo or as an extra in a crowd sene and sometimes as major characters. It is well-known that Mitchell is writing a metanovel. The Atemporals apparently turn up in Mitchell's early unpublished novel, The Old Moon, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell convinced the whole enterprise in his 20s and is just filling in the gaps. Ghostwritten is basically an account of his mid-1990s six-month Japan-to-Europe by rail holiday and though there are doubtless Atemporals lurking in there somewhere, there are obviously issues about how it might fit into the overall oeuvre.

Mitchell, of course, has spoken about his forthcoming novel in more detail than is usual for writers. And I wouldn't put it passed him to have come up with the basic architecture of the metanovel in the early 1990s. (I came up with my own 366-chapter novel then, but whether it wil lever be written is another entirely, but it is not quite the same thing necessarily even if Kingsland and Grove are likely to crop up in various places.) But it is unclear whether Slade House was one of the five novels Michell spoke about in interviews at time of the publication of The Bone Clocks. It seems clear it is not the third part of the Marinis trilogy, but a Twitter expeiment that got out of hand. But it shows that the metanovel is not absolutely fixed in structure.

I read recently a complaint that the techniques used by the monks in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are different to those of the Anchorites in The Bone Clocks. But if magic is technology, there might be moree than one way to achieve immortality (Lord Abbot Enomoto is certainly strongly implied to have at least some of the powers of the Anchorites). Both novels are chapters in the metanovel (will it ever have a name?), but that doesn't mean they exist at the same ontological level within it. In Cloud Atlas, we start with a the C19th, which is implied in the second section might be a fake. In the 1930s letters are a MacGuffin in the 1970s thriller, the MS of which is encountered by the vanity publisher in the fourth section. In the fifth section, the misadventures of the vanity publishers are a classic film comedy viewed by the character who in the seventh (middle) section is worshipped as a goddess. So, we have seven layers, but there is no reason to believe that the seventh layer is the tru.

The Mo Muntervary in Ghostwritten is not necessarily the same as the Mo Muntervary in The Bone Clocks, indeed probably isn't the same. Consider the case of Hugo Lamb. We first meet him, as far as I know in the third chapter, "Relatives", of Black Swan Green. BSG is very explictly set in 1982, not a vague "early 1980s", but a very definite 1982. "Relatives" is set in March 1982 on Easter Saturday. Yes, Easter was in April in our 1982. Jason, the narrator of BSG is exactly the same age as Mitchell and was born in January 1969. Hugo is described as being two years older than Jason. That makes him 15 to Jason's 13. It also probably indicates two school years ahead of Jason. So Hugo, in BSG was born between 1 September 1966 and 31 August 1967.    

Hugo narrates the second section of The Bone Clocks, "Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume: 1991". This is divided into seven subsections: 13 December, 20 December, 23 December, 29 December, 30 December, 31 Dccember and New Year's Day, 1992. I think we have to take iut that Mitchell cares about dates. Every section in The Bone Clocks has a year in its title and the subsection titles are all dates. Hugo is a third year undergraduate at Humber College, Cambridge. Elijah D'Arnoq says to Hugo "You're economics and politics, right? Must be in your final year?" Hugo doesn't contradict him, though there is (or was) as far as I know no joint tripos in those subjects at Cambridge, but I suspect that people do switch between the Economics and Social and Political Sciences triposes at will. We can therefore assume that Hugo is in his third year. POssibly, I suppose, he could be in his fourth year if there were some mucking about with changing triposes, but I don't think there is any textual evidence for that.

Hugo is the type who would have a year off, which means that he would have done his finals in summer 1992 at age 22. TBC Hugo was therefore born in academic year 1969-70. He is thus three years younger than the BSG Hugo. (Four years if Hugo didn't take a year off or was in the express stream at Richmond "Preparatory" School and took a year off.)

We know from the UK and US editions of Cloud Atlas situation that Mitchell is self-admittedly not necessarily a fiddly detail person. But CA, BSG, TTAoJdZ and TBC (and Slade House) are all novels in which dates clearly matter very much to Mitchell. The chapter titles of TTAoJdZ also contain dates. If you care about dates that much, you care about the differences between dates, which means it is very likely you care how old people are. 

So, it's possibly a mistake. Perhaps Mitchell just did his arithmetic wrong. Holly we know was born in September 1968. The BSG Hugo would have been 21 going on 22 at Christmas 1988. At 20, Holly might have been a bit too young to plausibly have been a bar manager and have good enough French ("very good French") to pass for native even to the self-absorbed Hugo, but then couldn't the 1984 section of TBC have been shifted back to 1981? TBC Hugo is somewhat younger than Holly. I doin't know if anything is made of that, but her greater quantity and quality of experience penetrates Hugo's London day school insouciance. (What is the nearest day school to Richmond? St Paul's?  But there is probably somewhere more obscure nearer.)

But I suspect Mitchell knows all this. The two Hugos are the same and not the same. Hugo might well turn up again in later novels and will always, of necessity, be a different Hugo and quite possibly with a different age. (OK, in theory, Mitchell could write a direct sequel to BSG or TBC in which the Hugo is the Hugo in that book, but I don't think that is likely. "Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet: 2015" was entirely in the future when TBC was published. The subsection 20 August 2018 will be history on Tuesday. I imagine that the metanovel will include 2015s and 2018s and 2025s that are the historical or contemporary versions in future volume and, I hope, a 2043 that is more hopeful than the one in TBC. Mitchell will be 74, but Pynchon published Bleeding Edge at 76. The ultimate metanovel will contain many Hugos and many 2018s. It will contain multitudes. Which seems right for Mitchell. He wants to put everything in his novel. So do I: All That Was, All That Is, All That Will Be, All That Could Have Been.

Guardians of High Frontier

According to the FoAK, the United States Air Force Space Command has a size of 19,944 airmen. However, the article states

More than 38,000 people perform AFSPC missions at 88 locations worldwide; they include military personnel of the Regular Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard; Department of the Air Force civilians (DAFC); and civilian military contractors. Composition consists of approximately 22,000 military personnel and 9,000 civilian employees, although their missions overlap.

Which suggests 22,000 personnel. There ius also the United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command, which would presumably become part of a United States Space Force. The Army Space and Missile Defense Command even has a 1st Space Brigade, although I suspect that is not quite as exciting as it sounds.  There are. I'd imagine, sections of the Navy too that might well be incorporated, such as parts of the Naval Network Warfare Command. So perhaps a reasonable estimate that I have seen elsewhere for the initial size of the USSF would be 30,000.

This is much smaller than the Marine Corps at 182,000, but the Coast Guard has a total "workforce" of 87,569. The United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps has 6,700+ officers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps just 321, but they are special cases. The Royal Navy has 33,280 regulars and the New Zealand Army has 4,539, so by those comparisons, the USSF would be of more than ample size. The issue, of course, would be its relative size to the other United States armed forces and the possibility of inter-service in-fighting and unnecessary duplication.

Of course, given that four out of the seven US uniformed services use navalk ranks, shouldn't also the Space Force and thus, in fact, be a Space Navy?

It's quite likely that Congress will block the Space Force proposal. And even if it isn't, the USSF (or USSN) will be very unlikely to much resemble what it probably dies in Trump's head. Space Command is mostly engaged with managing reconnaissance and communications satellites. In 2018, we are very far from any kind of crewed military presence, although it has been talked about for decades (Dynosoar, MOL) and we are certainly nearer to than we were a decade ago. What with SpaceX and Blue Origin and, in time, the commoditisation of the technologies they use, within a decade, we might finally see nation states such as Russia, China, India and the US projecting military power into the Near Earth space environment regardless of what the Outer Space Treaty might stipulate. The Weasel asked the question of whether there is anything sensible about the current proposal. They might not be necessary be the case at the moment, but is not as though it is not going to get easier to get into space. There might well come time in the next decade or so when it might be sensible or even essential.

 

Shining Tor

Shining Tor is a wonderful name for a hill like something out of Tolkien or Garner. It's the kind of name you would want a county top to have.  It is the highest point in the current administrative county of Cheshire (559 metres). But the highest point in (true) traditional county of Cheshire is the much more prosaically named Black Hill (582 metres), which is now just in West Yorkshire, but the council top of that area.

So why was Black Hill moved from Cheshire to Yorkshire. Of course, in 1974, there was a hell of a lot messing around with the county boundaries. We have discussed the case of the Bowland Salient. This makes a kind of sense to the unromantic brain of the bureaucrat. This is a largely unpopulated region and what villages and other habitations there are are nowhere substantial settlements in Yorkshire. The case of Barnoldswick is a borderline (Boom! Boom!) one,: it's not especially close to Skipton and is fairly close to Nelson and Colne, but probably should have been retained in Yorkshire.

Without having access to comparative pre- and post-1974 maps of the Cheshire/Derbyshire/Yorkshire tripoint, it is impossible to know why the boundary was changed. The Bowland Salient is a large area, but, of course, boundaries are fractal. On a suitable length scale, we might well have a situation like that of, say Dunsop Bridge, in which a village in Cheshire or even just a farm was surrounded by Yorkshire and perhaps only accessible through Yorkshire. Administratively, it might be more convenient to have everything in a single district.

A related question is whether now the Pennine Way passes through Cheshire. It certainly used when Wainwright wrote his guide. It might no longer. And does it pass through Lancashire. Again, I am pretty certain it used to, but it is highly unlikely it passes through the current administrative country of Lancashire.

The Tees-Exe Line

I remember being taught about the Tees-Exe Line in first year geography by Mr (J). Wilson. Looking back it is surprising that we were taught such a useful concept, but I am probably being unfair. So, the Tees-Exe Line divides Britain or at least England and Wales into Lowlands and Uplands. What that means, of course, is there are Lowlands in the North (the Vale of York) and Uplands in the South (Dartmoor, Exmoor). Equally, of course, there are flat areas to the north and west of the line (the Flyde, the West Lancashire Plain, the Cheshire Plain) and hilly ones to the south and east (the Surrey Hills, the Downs). 

I am reading Joe Kennedy's Authentocrats about which I will have much more to say in the fullness of time. Kennedy is keen on particularity of places as indicated by the Mass Observation diaries. Of course, places might have been more particular in the 1930s to a degree than today, although industrialisation from the early C19th and before created working and middle classes with a certain degree of mobility. Lancaster is different from Preston, but what they have in common largely outweighs that and, as someone who comes from and lives in the North, I have always been struck by how similar the South is, whether Oxford, Bournemouth, Woking, Ipswich, Brighton or even, largely, London.   

Kennedy makes the seminar point that the Northern clerics at Cambridge in Chaucer shouldn't be thought of as a bluff and no-nonsense. There were no Northerners as we think of them before the Industrial Revolution. Well, that might or might not be true. You don't have to Northern to be a gammon and the bluff no-nonsense character could just as easily be Scottish or Welsh or Irish or generic Southern Mummerset or even Cockney. It's about class as much as location. 

Kennedy seems reluctant to define Englishness, much less Britishness in any normative sense. Some of that might be on theoretical grounds. People are divided into Us and Them, the We and the Not-We. But the We is the Not-Not-We. There is a sense that Us are defined by a double negative. I am not sure that is wholly the case. We had the English and the Northern English in the C14th. I wonder if Kennedy, despite his first book being on football (I came across it in the soccer section of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle; globalisation in action there) is reluctant to go down the whole football as a defining characteristic of the English avenue. Kennedy might be one of the first to admit that not everyone likes or cares about football and the English existed long before football. Equally, he might be reluctant to go down the I Heart the 1970s/1980s/1990s-Andrew Collins Where Did It All Go So Right? line, partly because it all terribly parochial and self -indulgent and partly because you are then going to struggle to see something essentially English in The Crystal Maze. You got and get Scottish software consultants and Welsh quantity surveyors, although we can have a debate about how like Stevenage Swansea and Stirling really are.    

I do get the feeling that Kennedy though would fundamentally reject my claim of the essential unity of North and South. "The North and South are look different and this is reflected in the underlying character of the people." Living on a council estate in Bath is thus a different experience to living on one in York, even if both are on the same side of the Tees-Exe line. Indeed, what side is Bath? Is Bath actually in the "North"? But who would say York was in the South despite being to the south and east of the line and flat? 

I was thinking about Kennedy's book when I was driving to and back from Milton Keynes. Can you tell you are in the South or North just from the look of the land? If you dumped after being driven around blindfolded for hours in a field you could immediately know you were in the South or the North or the side of the line you where just by the vegetation of the general appearance of the landscape? We've discussed this before with respect to The Doctor dropping off Sarah Jane in Aberdeen or Croydon, but actually filmed in a village in Gloucestershire. When I went to the neutron scattering summer school in 1993 we were taken on a trip to the Cotswolds and remember the entire landscape giving off a golden glow in a way that it never does in the North. But the North is hilly and the South isn't. There is rolling countryside in the Ribble Valley, but Longridge Fell, the southernmost fell in England is too big to be in the South. But there are plenty of places in the North you can't see the hills.

On the M6, you can see Winter Hill from Warrington if not even further south. But Winter Hill, prominent from Preston, stands out so boldly because it is a relatively large hill (and a hill not Winter Fell) because it is a bit of the Pennines stuck out far to the west to define the Lancashire plain. You can't see the hills from my bit of Preston, but you could from the window in the men's in the crown court building. You could see the Pennines from our office (sixth floor) in the Maxwell Building at Salford. From Lythan you can see Winter Hill, so you might argue that even though the Flyde is flat, you can see the hills. But then what of Hindhead or the Sussex Downs, which stood in for Derbyshire and Inverness-shire in "Doctor Who and the Silurians" and the "The Terror of the Zygons"?    

When I went to the International Zeolite Conference in Garmish-Partenkirchen, Bavaria in 1994, we got the train from Munich into the Bavarian Alps. Sunshine and lilac cows, this felt a soft, Southern European landscape. We later got the cable car to the top of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. Alfred Wainwright says of the summit of Scafell Pike, words to the effect that it is a hardy and rocky place, but it is the roof of England and we would not wish it otherwise. Of course, there is much that Kennedy might want to say about a character like Wainwright - his next book is there for the taking!- but  sometimes we don't get to choose which ones is ours, the Zugspitze or Scafell Pike.

Time Smash

 I have something in common with Jason Taylor, the narrator of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. We were both born in "Preston Hospital". Of course, there was no Preston Hospital in 1968-9, but both Mitchell (born in Southport, in, I'd hazard, "Southport Hospital") and, even more, Jason, can be forgiven for that. In 1968-9, Preston's main hospital was the Preston Royal Infirmary; today, it has been for several decades the Royal Preston Hospital. 

Of course, it doesn't matter. Mitchell was born in the North-West and lived out the formative years in Worcestershire, oddly described by Matthew Reynolds in his LRB review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as being in the Home Counties, the kind of mistake that if casually put emitted in a tutorial at St Anne's (so there's a link between Reynolds and me) might damage one's confidence in the speaker. Entropy is a state function, so if the pressure and temperature are different, typically, so will be the entropy. That was clearly what the mods question wanted, but that wasn't what David Sinclair said to us. In equilibrium thermodynamics, the system is always in equilibrium. You then have an issue about how the system ever changes, but certainly, though Dave was quoting some axiom of thermodynamics (if only I had my copy of Adkins to hand; Finn, I think, knew better), the entropy will only remain constant if the process is adiabatic. I remember discussing this in the television room with Paul Hansford, who came from and may well have been born in Blackpool.  

Jason's father has some other northern connections that are mentioned including his father in Grange-Over-Sands. These presumably reflect some of Mitchell's own family. BSG is clearly an autobiographical novel. But it would be a mistake to assume it was too autobiographical. It is not, after all, even set in our 1982.

2 January 1982 was a Saturday. I know that because that was the day that Erica Roe did her legendary streak at Twickenham. This was a big deal back in 1982 and one something that one would expect the characters in Mitchell's first chapter to mention. The chapter is set in January 1982 on a weekday before the schools have gone back. But there was no such day. 1 January 1982 was a Friday. Schools would have gone back on 4 January when the children would have been talking of Erica. I don't think she had any impact on my psychosexual development. It wasn't as though anything was shown on television or the newspaper or even that I would then have found the whole event titillating in any particular way. But I do remember thing there was something out of kilter about having such a big news event so early in the year.

Jason towards the end of the first chapter falls on the frozen swanless pond and smashes his grandfather's 1949 Omega Seamaster de Ville on the ice. In other words, he fragments time. It is perhaps significant that as far as I can see from the web the Seamaster de Ville was not introduced until the 1960s (so it seems they did not stop making them in 1958). The Seamaster itself though was first released in 1949. The story of buying it from an Arab in Aden in 1949 might suggest the watch was a fake. I am not sure if that is born out by the end of the novel when one might have expected Jason's father to say something. But then it is a novel. It's all fake.

The novel has thirteen chapters, one for every month from January 1982 until January 1983. We know the third chapter must be in March because the fourth is set on April Fool's Day and the third is set around a bank holiday weekend, the only one which can be in March being the Easter. Of course, Easter was in April in 1982 and 1 April was not a Saturday. Valentine's Day was at the weekend and not on a school day. 

So, what's going on here? Even if Mitchell had forgotten about Erica Roe, it would have been easy enough for him to find a 1982 calendar, even in Japan in the 1990s. So, we are supposed to know that there is something not quite right about all this. Tom Yew, a sailor killed on HMS Coventry, somehow is able to write a letter to his parents telling them that the Falkland Islanders are referred to as Stills because they still Bennys. That's a famous story, but it is unlikely that a sailor on the Coventry would ever have had the chance to meet a Falklander. And, as any fule kno, Geoffrey Boycott played his final test match on England's 1981-2 tour of India, so he couldn't have congratulated Ian Botham on "another superb century", although curiously Botham did score a double century at the Oval in 1982 , but that was in early July, not late August.

Black Green Swan is a book very explicitly set in a particular year. With the exception of the Falklands War, I don't think there are any explicit references to historical events. Mitchell could have set the novel in a generic early 1980s. He choose not to. Some novelists might simply not care about finicky chronological minutiae. But this is Mitchell. He's a writer for whom things are never quite what they might seem. I am certain we are supposed to know this is not the real 1982.   

The question is who is narrating the novel. Jason's voice is, I think, fairly convincingly, that of a 13-year old boy. But, of course, no 13-year old would write such an MS. But the book is actually written by the historical David Mitchell. However, it is a text that exists as part of Mitchell's single megatext. All his novels are one novel and BSG is stuffed with references to other parts of Mitchell's oeuvre. Do we find Jason Taylor anywhere else (yet) in the megatext? (Of course, he is in a sense Mitchell himself and thus everywhere.) Or is there anyone who might at some point create the text we have, someone with only a partial understanding of certain aspects of late C20th Britain. Someone perhaps 250 million years in the future?

But Can I Relate to That?

Clayton Hickman opined that the teaser trailer for the new season of Doctor Who was "full of relateable people, just the kind of thing to appeal to the World Cup final audience?

But was Susan relateable? Or Vicki? Or Steven? Or Katrina? Or Sara Kingdom? Or Jamie? Or Victoria? (Never noticed that there were two companions with the same name.) Or Zoe? Or Leela? Or K-9? Or Romana? Or Adric? Or Nysaa? Or Turlough? Or Chameleon? If the television audience in the era of the boxed set, of Game of Thrones, is so sophisticated, why do we have to be able to relate to the companion? Why are we so frightened of anything that isn't quotidian? Why can't we just use some imaginative empathy for once?

I'm hopeful that Chibnall will have some trick up his sleeve. Hope springs eternal...

Unicorns All the Way Down

There is no good Brexit, only a choice of bad ones: Pointless Brexit (Norway), Ruinous Brexit (some kind of Canada-style Free Trade Agreement), Calamitous Brexit (No Deal). Which is the problem with arguing for a second referendum. People can vote - and probably would - for Brexit until they are blue in the face, but there are no unicorns. Unicorns don't exist. Brexit is always going to be a bad idea. The complexities and complications of the modern world, much less five decades of profound economic and political integration with Europe, simply can't be wished away.

Leaving aside the corruption around the referendum campaigns and the Russian interference, which should be enough in and of themselves to invalidate the result (consider for one moment if the corruption were on the Remain side and imagine the continuing reaction of the BBC, gutter press and the political class in general), what we need is an opposition that makes the No Unicorn point, morning, noon and night. Yes, people might not like it. They have a lot invested (in some cases, literally) in the unicorns, but that doesn't affect the fact that they are going to like it even less when the discover the promised unicorns don't exist. The problem is Labour's policy has been one of creative ambiguity at best, planning to basest instincts of the peanut gallery at worst. It's hard to see Corbyn having the imagination, much less the political energy, for a Damascene conversion and he is unlikely to be replaced, and most of the people who could in theory have already disgraced themselves through shrugging (although that might matter less than it might). But there is no King or Queen over the water, no anti-Johnson, no anti-Rees-Mogg. 

There are, I suppose, two scenarios that could stop Brexit. May capitulates, agrees to Norway (by some name or other). There is uproar from the Ultras. This is not the Brexit we voted for! (Well, no!) May says this is it, it's this or no Brexit. There is a crisis that leads either to a second referendum (Norway or Remain) or a general election (but how would that work?) or May withdrawing Article 50 ("temporarily"). The second is the death spiral. No Deal starts to grow more and more likely. The pound tanks, the bond markets downgrade gilts, the FTSE is in free fall, everyday brings new news of job losses and corporate relocation, the supermarket shelves are bare, the petrol stations dry. There is a political crisis, perhaps the Liberal Democrat dream of the Government of National Unity emerges, and Article 50 is withdrawn. 

Andrew Adonis assures us, and I believe him, and certainly the markets do, that there is zero chance of No Deal (but the markets are not good at discounting political or most other kinds of risk). The danger is too many people still believe there are unicorns hidden away somewhere and if they threaten to hold their breath, the unicorns will be revealed. There are a lot of ways this could end badly and only a few in which it doesn't.

Bigger on the Inside: Notes Towards an Examination of Doctor Who IV

Doctor Who was first transmitted on 23 November 1963 with episode one of what we now call "An Unearthly Child\" and the classic era ended on 6 December 1989 with episode 3 of "Survival". Interestingly, if we see which story was transmitted at the midpoint, we discover that none the less than "The Deadly Assassin" itself (broadcast 30 October-20 November 1976). 

13 years up to "The Deadly Assassin" then and 13 years down. (There are, of course, a lot more episodes before "The Deadly Assassin" than after.) There are those who consider it to the finest Doctor Who story of all (Nicholas Whyte, I believe for one) and it is certainly very, very good indeed. But then it was written by Bob Holmes in his prime.

Famously, Tom Baker didn't see the need for a companion now that Elisabeth Sladen had left. He felt he alone could carry the show. "The Deadly Assassin" is the only companionless story of the classic era. In truth, we probably need the companion less than we think we do and NuWho has featured the Doctor travelling alone on several occasions. Indeed, the best story of the new era, "Heaven Sent" is companionless. Probably, by late 1976, Tom Baker's ego was so large than he would have burnt out without a companion, but it would have been an interesting counterfactual if he had gone into "The Face of Evil" alone and come out alone.

Another interesting counterfactual is what if Mary Whitehouse hadn't got Philip Hinchcliffe sacked for that freeze frame of the drowning Doctor. One kind of imagines that Hinchcliffe might have wanted to leave after the best part of three seasons, then again Letts did five. Hinchcligge might have done another season. What we know of the proposed stories, for instance from the Big Finish Philip Hinchcliffe Presents audios suggest that perhaps we were coming to the natural end of the era, but, of course, the Big Finish stories don't necessarily bear even a passing resemblance to what would have ended up on the screen, especially after Robert Holmes had worked his magic. It's hard not to wish Hinchcliffe had got another year.

"The Deadly Assassin" is, in a sense, the second ending of Doctor Who, after the first in "The war Games". Although we had of hints about Gallifrey over the last 7 and a half seasons, here we reach peak Gallifrey. People were famously upset at the time that it didn't match their expectation. But this is the 1970s, the era of Watergate and the Wilson resignation (and Civil Assistance). The combination of Manchurian Candidate-style political paranoia and the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy-type shabby chic decay to be Oxbridge colleges, the House of Lords and the British Civil Service. At the time, although it was a surprise that the Doctor should become President of Gallifrey, it felt right.Who else could it be? But it was hardly going to the case that the Doctor was going to remain on Gallifrey as president (and end the series) any more now than in "The Five Doctors" (or "The War Games"). Where as it would have made sense, in all sorts of ways, for the show to end with Troughton's departures in 1969, the show wasn't going to end with Tom in his pomp.

And the Master! Even at the time I thought you can't just replace Delano, so that was way to go. And the scrolling text at the beginning (with a voice-over) - before Star Wars did it! And the twelve regeneration limit. I remember worrying about that my brother telling me they will find a way round it if necessary. And the Matrix - years before Hollywood!

If "The Deadly Assassin" is not the apotheosis of the Doctor in becoming President (the Other is still years away), it is perhaps the apotheosis of Doctor Who. We wouldn't have Alien Bodies without "The Deadly Assassin" or any version of the Time War. It is fitting that comes halfway through the show's original run. Those next 13 years are going to be constantly looking back at "The Deadly Assassin". We will see plenty more of Gallifrey in the years to come, but there is always the sense that we are in a situation of diminishing returns no matter how wonderful "The Invasion of Time" is. Which is why people keep trying to get rid of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. But we are stuck with them. Their shadow - the shadow of "The Deadly Assassin" is here forever now.

Bigger on the Inside: Notes Towards an Examination of Doctor Who III

As Wood and Miles out, one of the curious things about Doctor Who is that it has an ending. The show asks a question: who is the Doctor? And that is answered at the end of "The War Games". He is a renegade Time Lord (not yet from Gallifrey, of course). So, the show ends in 1969 and another show with the same name, but a completely different premise starts in 1970.

Now, it is interesting that Dicks and Hulke do end it so definitively in "The War Games". By the time, that story aired, Pertwee was already announced as the Third Doctor, but I wonder if it's possible when threy were writing the story that the show might end. Derek Sherwin (born on Glubb Day 1936) had, of course, already in late 1968, done the pilot for his new format, "The Invasion". It's quite possible, one imagines, that the BBC might not taken it up and the show, which was no long a ratings success, might have been perceived as having run its natural course and been ended. 

The thing is if the show had ended in 1969, it is likely that there would be far fewer episodes in the archive and Doctor Who would be primarily remembered for the two Dalek movies. It would just be another 1960s curio like Adam Adamant Lives! or The Andromedra Breakthrough and its sequel. The late sale to Algeria might still have happened, which led to the preservation of many early episodes, but without an ongoing show would there have been a organised fandom that was able to engaged to ensure the recovery so many of the episodes? Since the show has we know essentially didn't exist until 1970, no-one would have been able to remember anything that was like Who as we know it.   

Perhaps no BBC serial is ever invoked in such reverentially tones as Paul Temple. Had Derek Sherwin not moved to the more prestigious show, how long would Who have lasted? As Terrence Dicks has pointed out, there are only stories you can have had on Earth: the alien invasion or the mad scientist/ Lots of people, of course, do think the best ones are set on Earth and Doomwatch ran for three seasons under the basic conditions that Dicks outlined. Doctor Who has had many miracles and one of them was Letts/Dicks. They broadened the show back out to what it should be and created much of the show's mythology going forward. One has to wonder whether Sherwin would have done that. It's certainly one of DW's biggest what ifs.    

"Happy Day!"

I don't know if I saw Children of the Stones at the time, although I have a very clear memory of Raven by the same writers about a year later. I think the original transmission was against Blue Peter on a Monday, but I might have seen it repeat. Certainly, although the name was familiar, on watching it I had no specific memories of having seen it before.

But a lot of people do. It is said to be the best-remembered show its kind. It is the one, for instance, that El Sandifer, wrote a  "Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea" about on her Doctor Who blog. So, it must have something pretty powerful going for it, mustn't it?

The thing is you can watch mid-1970s Doctor Who and it is still watchable or even good or even very, very good. OK, "The Talons of Wang Chiang" is not necessarily directly comparable to Children of the Stones. But we can certainly see that DW benefited from its bigger, non-children's department budget. Of course, it also benefited, then as now, from being part of a ongoing story. We can forgive its lapses because we know something better is coming along soon.   

So, CotS was famously scary. And there are, to be fair, some effective and unsettling scenes. If I had seen it in January 1977 at 8 years of age, one episode a week in the dark winter evenings, I might well have found it more unsettling than I do as 50-year old in June 2018. The theme music is eerie., the aerial shots of Avebury in the title sequence taken in summer evocative. I would have been less likely to have noticed that in one episode, we are at the 4-minute mark before we get any new material or that the on the shots on the actors at the half-time cliffhanger (this is an ITV show) linger on their face over an increasingly embarrassing eternity. But I might have found the ever increasing sense of paranoia as more and more people are converted to the "Happy Day!" cult to be unsettling. And I would have loved the mix of technological paraphernalia, technobabble and pseudoarchaeology.

Now, of course, simply laying out the attractions and saying "Isn't all this marvellously exciting?" really isn't enough for me in 2018. There are too many awkward questions that pop up. But it is possibly that some of these unanswerable questions add to the uncanniness of the piece. Presumably, as shown in the painting, two always escape from time trap/bubble. But presumably the exact details of the events that occur between each cycle. Adam and Matt in our cycle escape by fiddling with the signal from the atomic clock. Hendrick is an astronomer, who might plausibly have an atomic clock. But what was the case in neolithic times. Of course, the stones themselves are a kind of computer, but how do the earlier Adams/Matts disrupt the ceremony? Is the new Hendrick also an astronomer and discoverer of the eponymous black hole? The dialogue with the butler seems to suggest otherwise. But what of the computers in the church crypt. 

So everyone gets resurrected at the end. But the village is clearly a modern one. How does it connect on an ongoing historical basis with the rest of Britain? ("Britain" here advisedly as we might wonder why Dai is Welsh and both Adam and Sandra have Welsh accents, despite neither Matt or Margaret having one. Also "Happy day!" sounds vaguely Welsh to my ears. If this were Alan Garner, I'd assume that was deliberate.) How long does each cycle last? What happens to Matt and Adam? (There is a recent novel sequel.) Do they constantly themselves constantly return? Presumably not unless they are reborn too after the ceremony, although that not seem to be how the story is told. But who painted the picture? How did get it where it was bought by Matt? Do the couple who go to the village and escape always have the picture with them? And what of all that advanced mathematics in the village school/ Certainly, that would struggle to get past Ofsted in 2018.

This is a seven-parter and like a lot of longer DW stories really struggles with its length. It would be more effective as a four-parter. The producer-director, Peter Graham Scott, was experienced, but clearly struggled, perhaps because of the limitations of time and budget as much as anything. There are a lot of very abrupt cuts and some slightly stiff acting. For instancer, I found it hard to make out what Fredie Jones. This might have been deliberate, but is still irksome. I suspect DW simply had more rehearsal time and probably better studio facilities than HTV. 

We might allow that the lacunae ultimately manage to add to the overall atmosphere of the piece in hindsight. For instance, Adam has a telegram sent to Mount Palomar Observatory in the US. This costs less than £5 as Matt has change for an ice cream. (I can hear the Weasel cheering.) But what's the purpose of the telegram? The landlady pockets the reply when it arrives suggesting she shows it to Hendrick, but it is not as though Adam or Hendrick seem to use the information. The implication is that it confirms something about the black hole. But Adam could just as easily have got the Right ascension and declination by ringing up someone in his department.Of course, Mount Palomar is more glamorous than University College Cardiff (although Matt's accent suggests that's not where they are from), but it also suggests there is a world outside Milbury to send telegrams to.   

One thing I think is a genuine dramatic mistake is not having Matt and Adam try to rescue Sandra and Margaret when they go to dinner at Hendrick's. Instead we have Matt relaying telempathic impression via the connection through Sandra's scarf. Now Adam might be reluctant to break into the manor, but surely Matt less so, especially in the circumstances. It surely violates some law of narrative structure that the two heroes don't try and rescue their love interests. Yes, it does set up the bit of business with Margaret denying they ever got to the dinner, but I am sure something that is more active.  

And the sheer amount of casual daytime drinking that was considered acceptable on children's TV is pretty mindboggling from a C21st perspective. What kind of message about appropriate behaviour were they trying to communicate to the children of the nation? You also get this in 1975's Sky, an episode of which is included on the second disc of the CotS set. This seems more confidently directed, although again I don't have any recall of it. I'd have thought it would have right up my brother's street. But perhaps the overall effect of CotS is simply more memorable.   

The DVD doesn't, sadly, come with any Making of... documentary (although the Stewart Lee radio documentary is still available on iPlayer), but there is a detailed booklet by the estimable Tim Worthington who quotes Patrick Dromgoole, HTV executive producer for much of their children's output of this era as believing explanations weren't actually needed

[A] crucial element as in his experience children tended to respond well to stories built around unexplained forces, and providing too much of a realistic framework may have left its intended audience unsatisfied.

I am no longer the intended audience and I am perhaps too much of a hopeless materialist-realist. I can't say I wasn't a bit disappointed with CotS. Seen cold in 2018, it really just a curio of its times. I wonder, for instance, how The Owl Service would stand up. (The novel did when I read it in my mid-20s.) That shares the recurrence motif, but in much more purely mythological terms, although Garner does introduce some suggestions of technofantasy in Elidor and Red Shift. It should surely have been to Jodrell Bank that Adam sent the telegram. There is a vast amount of other material of this type to explore. The Stone Tapes, Penda's Fen, Red Shift, Sapphire and Steel (I have the DVDs) are just a few examples. But I am the man who didn't really like The Wicker Man. I know, I know. Perhaps I am just too soaked in Who. But who knows what I might have thought had I caught CotS when I was 8. But I very much look forward to Nick Campbell's Silver Archive volume on CotS in 2020. Perhaps he can get more out of it (and it's there) than I did.

Bigger on the Inside: Notes Towards an Examination of Doctor Who II

"The Space Museum" is the first ordinary Doctor Who story. So basically it took more than halfway through the second season to get to the point at which structurally, tonally we are going to pretty much remain for the next 24 years. "The Space Museum" is famously not very good,. But then a lot of the DW we are going to be having in the future is not very good. "The Space Museum" illustrates something that will be very apparent in years to come. The director really matters. If the director doesn't really care about the story and treats it as just a throwaway bit of fluff for kids, the actors tend to too. Mervyn Pinfield should have known better as associate producer of the show, but his track record wasn't particularly good (four episodes of "The Sensorites" and the first two of "Planet of Giants"). Perhaps he was already ill (he died in 1966) or, there were other pressures on the production.

Of course, the first episode with the jumping of the time track and the TARDIS crew discovering they are exhibits in the Space Museum is very eerie and with its timey-wimey very much ahead of the game. Rob Sherman makes valiant attempt to defend the story in an item on the DVD, but the dull and inept revolutionaries and the even duller and more inept reactionaries (or is it the other way round?) defeat any attempt to claim this is actually good. Like "The Dominators" though, it is quite possible this story was influence on a young Douglas Adams.      

Bigger on the Inside: Notes Towards an Examination of Doctor Who I

There is a lot of Doctor Who and it took me a long time to go through it all and even now, of course, there is still canonical material that I haven't ingested, even leaving the vast quantities of deuterocanonical material. I have listened to a fair amount of Big Finish stuff, but I doubt that amounts to even a twentieth of what there is, but as for the hundreds of novels and more than 50 years of comic strips, one wouldn't be run out of DW to consume soon. So there is much to say about DW and like Joyce or Borges or Pynchon, it's fractal. The more you dive in, the deeper it gets. So I am not going to try and put down everything I think in one megapost. That would be madness. Consider the entries over the next few weeks to be notes for the eventual DW book. Indeed.    

I got The Beginning DVD for Christmas 2009. I don't know if I began my marathon before or after 1 January 2010, the end of the RTD/Tennant era, but essentially it has bookended the Age of Moffat. We had great hopes for Moffat back in 2010. It's hard now to imagine all of what we have seen over six seasons as non-existing, but I will start with what might be an unpopular opinion: the six season of Moffat comprise the consistently successful run iof episodes in the show's history. But we will get back to why that is in due course.

As we begin in Hartnell, by curious coincidence Moffat comes full circle in "Twice Upon a Time", the last episode of my grand watch. It's, of course, a brave move on Moffat's part. Most of the Christmas Day audience (my then 10-year old niece, for instance) would only have the vaguest idea who Bradley was supposed to be playing. It doesn't really matter. It is obvious this is the Doctor from the mid-1960s. It's all you need to know. And I suspect, Moffat's intent is that with his retro-sexism, One is trolling Twelve. But the question is: does One have anything in common with Twelve? Moffat obviously thought so.

Hartnell and Capaldi were the oldest Doctors. Both were 59 when they relinquished the role. Hartnell played older, but he was also increasingly ill. Perhaps in the late 2010s, 60 is the New 40 (I can hope). But both are grumpy Doctors. Of course, the Doctor is often grumpy and One isn't necessarily that grumpy. But Chibnall could go along way to defining Jodie Whittaker by having her brain a caveman in her first episode.

"An Unearthly Child" is brilliant, well, the first episode, "An Unearthly Child" itself, although, as Wood and Miles opine, if you have the starter, you have to have the main course. It's not surprising that very early Doctor Who is nothing like Doctor Who as we know. What is perhaps surprising is how quickly it does become like it. The Doctor is originally the show's protagonist, but he is not its hero. But very rapidly he does become that. He might get accidentally betrothed in "The Aztecs" and "The Aztecs" might be a pure historical, but it feels like Who.     

In "The Sensorites", which was the first story to be written after the show had started, is nothing like modern Who, but it is the first story in which the Doctor does something not because he wants to get away and get back to the TARDIS or out of curiosity, but because it is the right thing to do. "The Rescue " is a two-parter that could easily be a modern episode, although I don't think we'd have Barbara blasting Vicki's alien pet. "The Web Planet" is highest rate story of the Hartnell era, although it is nearly unwatchable today (although not as unwatchable as "The Sensorites"), but comes from an age when people were used to watching experimental dance on television.

But perhaps most importantly, in "The Daleks", the Doctor, hundreds of years old and an experienced time traveller, has never heard of the Daleks. By the third Dalek story, 18 months later, the Daleks are calling the Doctor their greatest enemy. That takes little sense diegeticly within the stories - the unfolding text - as they had been presented to us. But it makes perfect sense extradiegeticly within the metatext. As far as the viewers are concerned, who else could be the Daleks' greatest enemy? Today, we might see this as part of the Time War, but this and "Genesis of the Daleks" and those articles in the first Doctor Who annual on the mystery of the Doctor and "The War Games" and "The Deadly Assassin" are all part of a piece. Before we knew the Doctor even was a Time Lord, we knew that he was far more than just another one.

What I've Not Heard

I am about to watch "Twice Upon a Time", which will complete my Doctor Who marathon after eight and a half years. I had to plough through the 12 episodes of The Fan Show in the Series 10 boxed set today, which normally would have taken me about a week. But I want to see TUaT today. Actually, there was some vaguely interesting stuff on the Fan Show. But tip to boxed set producers: where possible always put metacontent next to the content it pertains to. I know why the don't, but it would have been better to watched each Fan Show with the episode to which it related.

I will save my though on the whole Doctor Who in general until next week, but I wanted to make a record of what I have seen and not seen. Of course, there is a lot more to see now than there was in 2009. Not only was the Classic DVD range then far from complete, but 13 lost episodes have been recovered and 13 animated plus "Shada". And, natch, the whole of the Moffat era of NuWho. But there is still a lot of missing Who. Now, all of that exists on audio. I should have got the CD Lost Stories boxed sets when I had the chance. Call myself a fan when I have never seen a reconstruction not on a BBC DVD? But that is the case. There are whole levels f what it means to be a Who fan to which I can hardly hope to aspire. So what have I seen ans what is still to come for me?

Post-1970

This is easy, of course. Everything exists, although one episode of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" is only offered in colour as a special feature. So I have seen 30 season of Who including the various minisodes plus the two animated Tennant stories plus the various version of "Shada" (original reconstruction with Tom Baker voiceover, Big Finish web animation with Paul McGann, complete 2017 version with animation) plus four seasons of Torchwood, five seasons of The Sarah Jane Adventures and one season of Class.

Pre-1970

This is trickier!

Season 1

Everything except "Marco Polo". There is a condensed reconstruction of "Marco Polo" on The Beginning boxed set. "The Reign of Terror" has two animated episodes.

Season 2

Everything. Audio of two episodes of "The Crusade" are on the Lost in Time set.

Season 3

One episode out of four of "Galaxy Four" plus condensed reconstruction on "The Aztecs" special edition. "Mission to the Unknown" and "The Myth Makers" are missing. Three episodes out of twelve of "The Daleks' Masterplan". "The Massacre" is missing. Four episodes of "The Ark". One episode out of four of "The Celestial Toymaker", four episodes of  "The Gunfighters". "The Savages" is missing. Four episodes of "The War Machines".

Season 4

"The Smugglers" is missing. Four episodes of  "The Tenth Planet", one of which is animated, Six episodes of "The Power of the Daleks", all of which are animated. "The Highlanders" is completely missing. Four episodes of "The Underwater Menace" including two reconstructed episodes with telesnaps, four episodes of "The Moonbase" including two animated episodes. "The Macra Terror" is missing. Two episodes out of six of "The Faceless Ones". One episode out of seven of "The Evil of the Daleks". 

Season 5

"The Tomb of the Cybermen", one episode out of six of "The Abominable Snowman", six episodes of "The Ice Warriors" including two animated episodes, six episodes of "The Enemy of the World", six episodes of "The Web of Fear" including one reconstructed episode with telesnaps, two episodes out of six of "The Wheel in Space". I have not seen or heard "Fury From the Deep", except for the famous Australian censor trims. 

Season 6

Everything expect five episodes of "The Space Pirates". "The Invasion" has two animated episodes.

So that's 77 episodes that I have never seen/heard in any full form. Quite a bit then to keep me going, although it might be a while before I try and track them down! There are lots of other things to watch. 

All Very ... Well, Bourgeois

I have been reading (have I said?) Adam Roberts's excellent blog on H.G. Wells. In his article about Anticipations, Wells's best-selling non-fiction work from the early 1900, Roberts states

But worse than the notion of Wells himself gifting himself a philanderer's get-out-of-jail-free-card from his own earnestly purely-procreative future is the feebleness of imaginative extrapolation that characterises the gestures at variety—the sheer banality of his attempts to offset what is otherwise a pretty oppressively monolithic future conformity. Of the future mega-cities Wells insists that they will be ‘far less monotonous than our present English world’:

In many cases the houses may very probably be personal homes, built for themselves as much as the Tudor manor-houses were, and even, in some cases, as æsthetically right. Each district, I am inclined to think, will develop its own differences of type and style. As one travels through the urban region, one will traverse open, breezy, “horsey” suburbs, smart white gates and palings everywhere, good turf, a Grand Stand shining pleasantly; gardening districts all set with gables and roses, holly hedges, and emerald lawns; pleasant homes among heathery moorlands and golf links, and river districts with gaily painted boat-houses peeping from the osiers. Then presently a gathering of houses closer together, and a promenade and a whiff of band and dresses, and then, perhaps, a little island of agriculture, hops, or strawberry gardens, fields of grey-plumed artichokes, white-painted orchard, or brightly neat poultry farm. Through the varied country the new wide roads will run, here cutting through a crest and there running like some colossal aqueduct across a valley, swarming always with a multitudinous traffic of bright, swift (and not necessarily ugly) mechanisms; and everywhere amidst the fields and trees linking wires will stretch from pole to pole. [Anticipations, 61-62]

Golf again, you notice. It's all very ... well, bourgeois,

Now, Roberts was brought up in "Kent", by which he seems to mean South-East London, i.e. Bromley. He presumably lives somewhere near Egham. Marlow is mentioned in his story-pennant to The First Men in the Moon and seems horribly plausible.  He also declares himself to be, in a later a later article discussing Wells's connections with the Fabians as "a thoroughly middle-class individual." So we might wonder what exactly is going on here.

Although various people have tried over the years and continue to try to revive interest in the suburbs, we are all mostly good (or bad) Jacobsite urbanists these days and witness the amount of building in places like downtown London or New York or Seattle or San Francisco, although we might worry about gentrification that goes along with any mass return to the city.

For the young Roberts, all the cool stuff might have up in London, but at least for him Victoria was only 16 minutes from Bromley South. But the suburbs are homogeneous, staid, safe, lifeless and not environmentally sustainable in contrast with creative excitement, energy, danger and chaos of the high heterogeneous city. It might well be frustrating that having left, one finds oneself back there again. I know the feeling.

But Wells's vision of suburbia or, rather, exurbia, isn't too far off what life is like in the South-East of England in 2018 or even, to a degree, the North-West. Metroland was created by the railway, but it was the motor car that made the suburb/exurb so ubiquitous in the C20th. The railway stations were all there in the 1900s, but Woking or Egham or Bromley or Brentford would have looked and felt quite different those days. Towns were physically denser (and smokier) and the countryside impinged itself more sharply upon the city. But the bicycle also made it possible to enjoy the amenities of the suburbs and some people had cars in 1905. And there was golf. Guildford was founded in 1885 and Woking in 1893. Did Wells ever play there?

We might or might not like it, but Wells's vision isn't so far out from the reality of 2018 Britain. But what of 2118?

By then, most people will live in arcologies, largely self-sustaining in terms of energy, food, water. Arcologies will vary in size from populations of thousands to millions, but all will be very densely populated. Different arcologies might well have have their own very different characters and all will be charged with true Jacobsite spirit of life, colour and variety As transport, private and public, will largely be by rapid drone, hyperloop and vactrain travel, the last two mostly in tunnels, there will be much less need for roads and railways. These will mostly be greenways. But, also, as most food will be grown in the arcologies (flavoured blue-green algae will taste good), the "brightly neat poultry farm" will be a thing of the past. What are currently exurb, suburban and rural areas will be converted to parklands. There will be allotments and gardens, although people will also have gardens, private and public, in the arcologies. There will be the odd, and necessarily, of course, purely arable farm. 

But the vast swath of the country will be rewilded. It will be return to primordial forest, thick with badger, beaver, boar, deer, lynx and wolf. This will be a fiercer place than Wells imagined, although it will also be possible to be droned out at a few minutes' notice. And there will be plenty of game, so need for people to be wholly vegetarian. An - why not? - perhaps the true apex predator could be reintroduced - so we might have to accept the odd C21st utopian being gnawed on by a lion (the Late Pleistocene Eurasian cave lion was probably a different species to our familiar lion, but I think selective breeding and genetic manipulation could reconstruct it). I hope to around to see that. There may or may not be something bourgeois about eaten by a lion. I wonder what Wells would have made of it.   

40(0) Years On

I'm 50 years old. I don't remember 1968, natch, that signal year (I am surprised the anniversary of les événements passed with so little comment in the UK), but I do remember 1978 and, although, of course, there are many sociocultural and technoeconomic differences between then and now, it is still recognisably the same world. Reading through Adam Roberts's H.G. Wells blog, one can conclude that Vicwardian Britain wasn't so different from today expect in those aspects in which is was.  Of course, this is not so surprising. We can place the beginning of modernity in 1890 or 1870 or some other point in the C19th. Whereas nothing like the modern world existed in 1800, it did in 1900. No-one was writing sf in 1800 (yes, I know about proto-sf), but they were in 1900, and the world they imagined isn't really, in the grand scheme, so far from what exists now.

So 1900 was unimaginable from 1800, but not 2000 from 1900. I might be alive in 2058 (I am hoping that 90 Will Be the New 50), but we imagine that it will be exactly the same as the present only more so. Well, that's not quite right, of course. We can imagine some catastrophe having occurred. We have been imagining that since the early C19th if not earlier. Or we can imagine some kind of Singularity/ A Singularity might be a catastrophe, but it is different from a standard one in that a Singularity involves some kind of evolutionary transformation for at least some group of people. After the standard catastrophe, whatever it might be, we will still always have the eternal verities of Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare. The standard catastrophe is bracing because although millions - billions - might die, some of the rest can discover God.

Many people have been and are nostalgic for the Middle Ages - lots of Victorians, Adams, Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, Waugh, the Alt-Right. A problem with that argument is that there a lot mote to the High Middle Ages than Catholic Europe (indeed, there's a lot more to Catholic Europe). What of the urban cultures of India or China, Africa or the America? There's no real reason to assume that the future is going to be Catholic, much less American Protestant Evangelical. 

The world can't be exactly like it is now in 100 years because of fossil fuel depletion, population growth, Moore's law (quantity has a certain quality). So, sure, in 40 years, it is quite possible that Beechwood Avenue might look not that different than it did in 1978. But by 2118, much less 2418, things are necessarily going to be very different indeed.

Of course, if you believe in the Christian account of the world, at some point God infuses man with an immortal soul. At that instant, the true nature of humanity is fixed. OK, it takes thousands of years to even discover there is such a thing as Christianity and there's lots and lots of contingent cultural stuff, but the basic essence of man has already been laid down for eternity. What it means to be a person is decided once and for all and is never going to change.

I'd do as far as to say that this is obviously nonsense. Now, of course, a sophisticated Christian can play all sorts of tricks around this. Basically, we are all striving to get to achieve a sufficient state of grace to be with God in Heaven after we die (although how does the Last Judgement fit in with this?). We can't know what this is going to be like before we get there, but it isn't going to be anything (much) like we imagine it is going to be. What a treat for the children in The Chronicles of Narnia to get killed in a train crash and go a live with Aslan/Christ/Jesus/God in (a) Heaven! But being in Heaven is going to be so much better than we can possibly imagine it here. And certainly a lot better than any ersatz Heaven we might create technologically.

The theological argument isn't an evolutionary one. We might contend that all members of Homo sapiens have far more in common with one another than we do with any other species whether living in the African savanna in 70,000 BCE or an Indian village or Chinese megacity in 2018. But Christianity would argue that all these people have the same type of soul are subject to the same ultimate final things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell). It might come as a surprise to a lot of people.

So, transhumanism is bad, presumably, because either you are creating being that think they have souls, but don't or you are endangering your own soul by conjuring with powers beyond your ken. Christianity has always done Hell much better than Heaven. It still is. So, transhumanism is Bad because it will lead to killing lots of people, which is Bad (and which God doesn't like and for which you will go to Hell) or other Bad things, which is Bad (and which God doesn't like and for which you will go to Hell). It's Hell all the way don.

Christianity is likely to exist in 40 years, it is likely to exist in 400. It's managed nearly 2000 so far. 4000? Hindu ism has, but whether modern Hinduuism is much like ur-Hinduism is another matter. 40,000? We can suppose that hunter-gatherers then were some kind of animist. It's easy to imagine people 400 or 4000 or 40,000 years from now being animist hunter-gatherers. Or non-random fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Or both. And lots of other things beside. But sooner or later, things are going to be different. 

Intergalactic Stars

I read recently that half of stars might not be in galaxies. Most galaxies are small and irregular, although the majority of stars were thought to be in larger galaxies. It's not clear whether most intergalactic stars have been expelled from small galaxies or larger ones. That would make quite a big difference to the experience of being on one. If you have been expelled from a small galaxy, you might well be in the middle of the intergalactic void pretty much. Unlike planets and stars, galaxies are compared to the distances between them, but they are also two-dimensional largely. So, if you were halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda, but the only lights in the night sky would be the planets in your stellar system, perhaps a companion star and a couple of parches of faint nebulosity. The nearest star would probably be over a thousand parsecs away and would probably be a red dwarf. Of course, you would learn once you have reached C20th level of technology that the nebulae are also made of stars.

I suspect most intergalactic stars are actually in galactic halos. In that case, half of the sky would be dominated by the Milky Way. It might not be very bright, but you would probably be able to make out structure in it. There might be a few naked eye stars too depending exactly where you were in the halo, but distances to the stars would be an order of magnitude greater than they are for us. Interstellar travel would be even more problematic. But, of course, if you had evolved in such a system, you would convince that such systems were the natural abode of life. So passing stars disrupting the Oort Cloud, no nearby supernovae, much less chance of being hit by a gamma ray burst, no giant molecular clouds to encounter. Being safely away from the febrile turmoil of the galaxy would seem the safe and sensible place to be. Which might explain the Fermi Paradox. Where are they? In the galactic halo.   

GW170817

Not quite sure how I missed this, although I suppose, even though there haven't been that many publicly announced detections of gravitational waves there have been enough that they are no longer the news they were. But GW170817 was a big deal because it was the first time that the merger of two neutron stars had been detected.

Now, neutron stars don't produce as much energy in gravitational radiation as black holes when they merge. Which means that they have to be closer to us to be detected. (The event occurred in the galaxy NGC 4993 at a distance of only ~40 Mpc.) Which means that if such an event is detected there is the possibility of following up the detection in the electromagnetic spectrum. Which is exactly what happened with GW170817 with observations made of the aftermath of the kilonova in every part of the spectrum from gamma rays to radio. This is the first example of multi-messenger astronomy to involve gravitational waves. Which is pretty cool. As is the fact that it is estimated the kilonova made "[a] total of 16,000 times the mass of the Earth in heavy elements [...] including approximately ten Earth masses just of the two elements gold and platinum."

There are 245 related preprints currently on ArXiv. The main paper announcing the event (https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0145/P1700294/007/ApJL-MMAP-171017.pdf) has 4000 authors, which is apparently about a third of the entire global astronomical community, so is quite a thing in itself. Perhaps most interesting of all, the event ruled out a number of alternatives to general relativity, including variants of scalar–tensor theory, Hořava–Lifshitz gravity, Dark Matter Emulators and bimetric gravity. Ruling stuff out is good, of course, although we could do with some more ruling when it comes to foundational physics. But hopefully gravitational astronomy and other non-traditional modalities such as detection of dark matter (is it really there?) will give us some new physics in the years to come as well as exciting "traditional" physics like coalescing neutron stars and black holes.