Atomic Razor

The Aliens Around Us

As I have said before, for all we actually know, the Solar System might be teeming with life. The clouds of Venus, the aquifers of Mars, the lakes of Titan, the clouds of the gas gianys, the subsurface oceans of all those satellites and asteroids, the geysers of Enceladus and Io. We simply haven't explored these environments to any significant degree. They might be full of microbes or even, in some, macrobes. 

Of course, what goes for the Solar System, goes literally billions of times over for the Milky Way galaxy, which is crammed with every imaginable time of environment, including ones much closer, in various ways to the Earth itself. So, it is is indeed, the case that there could be a lot of life out there. Of course, we know, from our own evolutionary history, that getting from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular ones to general intelligence to tool use to fire to language to civilisation to civilisation capable and sending and receiving signals across interstellar distances to civilisation capable of colonising the galaxy is non-trivial.

We iusually say there are no obvious signs of large-scale engineering works in the universe. We look out at the universe and we are not in general struck by phenomena that are best explained as the products of alien civilisations. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, for instance, not interstellar beacons. But what if we are just looking in the wrong places? What about fast radio bursts? We don't really have a clue what they might be. We do know now that they can repeat, which would seem to rule out a lot of explanations in terms of events like explosions caused by merging objects. I suspect, as with Tabby's Star, that a convincing natural explanation will eventually be adduced, but nothing looks terribly promising at the moment. Fast radio bursts could be artificial in origin, although how we woulkd prove that for certain is another question. They might, for instance, be microwave beams for driving interstellar sails. Interstellar sails like ʻOumuamua? Again, ʻOumuamua is probably a natural object, but we simply don't know. It is very very anomalous. It is like nothing we have seen before or predicted. For instance, ʻOumuamua is virtually at rest with respect to the local inertial frame (the average motion of nearby stars). This is not to be expected and indicates that it could be a space buoy. In effect, it was less of a case of  ʻOumuamua rushing past the Solar System as the Solar System rushing passed  ʻOumuamua. And there might be other interstellar objects flooding through the Solar System. It would be great if we were able to mount a mission to ʻOumuamua. Whatever we found out would be amazing and there is certainly, at the moment, a non-zero chance that it could be alien. The aliens could be all around us. 

The NLP Revolution

The Lex Fridman's MIT deep learning course has started again. I knew about this last year, but didn't get to see any of the videos, but am determined, as part of my New Year resolutions for 2019, to make an effort to watch them. (I am still hoping for another tranche of Andrew Ng courses.) 

Deep learning has been around for a while now and, of course, neural nets have been around for decades. Deep Learning just involves bigger neural nets and more data. Obviously, there is more to it than that, Deep Reinforcement Learning, for instance, is quite a different beast in a lot of ways, but it would be easy to feel that the Peak of Inflated Expectations had been reached. It would be easy to feel that if it were for what actually happened in 2018, which was the NLP revolution.

I have to admit that I was only vaguely aware of this. I had seen a few mention of it and hints about things around it, but I have not been paying the assiduous attention to the AI newsletters to which I subscribe. Again, that's something I can't let go in 2019. Various improved machine translation systems have been around for a while and they do seem to be getting better as far as I can see from translating Wikipedia pages. Certainly, the translations, if not quite perfect, are much smoother and more idiomatic than was the case only a year or two.

But the hot new thing is Google BERT. I hadn't even heard of it until last night, but apparently it created a splash back in November. It is open-sourced and already other groups have incorporated it and related ideas into their own systems. This is one reason that everyone has been excited about digital assistants. These have been around for a while now, but are coming on, I understand, in leaps and bounds. See, for instance, the leaderboard for "the very challenging GLUE benchmark, a set of 9 diverse Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks" on which BERT is now behind a Microsoft project. BERT reached human-level on the Allen Institute for Artificial Inteligence SWAG dataset, although it wasn't specifically optimised for the dataset. A problem with a lot of A(G)I problems is producing a system that works well for more than one problem. With Kaggle competitions and their like, there is a danger of overoptimising to the particular problem at hand. It's not that the system just memorises the training set, but that it is tuned to recognise just fish, say, and then has to be retrained expensively to recognise anything else. But with AlphaZero and BERT, we are definitely seeing transfer learning at some significant level. 

I do need to start exercising Google Assistant a lot harder. How good is it now? Now, I'd like to have a play around with these kinds of systems. A problem is the sheer amount of compute needed. I have a six-year old laptop. Yes, I need a new one, but how far can one get really get with our a fairlygrunty GPU or even a TPU? It would be nice to apply an AlphaZero-like system to something like FreeCell. But do I have the compute leaving aside whether there is an API for AisleRiot Solitaire?

A interesting facet of the NLP revolution is that there had been concern that had performance on various Deep Learning tasks had been plateauing, such as in computer vision or self-driving cars, but then we see sudden breakthroughs as also with AlphaGo/AlphaZero. But it is also clear that the possibility of rapid or even very rapid progress over short timescales is also possible. It is 2019 and I still think there is no reason to think that beyond 2025, we might see the emergence of true AGI. That 03:14:06 UTC, 19 January 2038 Singularity seems still very much on the cards.

 

Information Overlord

Some days there is just too much going on in my head

• Cybersyn
• Eden Medina
• cybereconomics
• Corbynomics
• "cyborg" socialism
• John Cruddas
• Beer's and Pask's pond
• Brexit
• Inventing the Future
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism
• B*st*n*
• Sir Geoffrey Vickers VC
• Systems Theory
• the Lorentz transformation
• the absolute centrality of MIT Press books
• my library of Verso books
• all the other books I have
• applying for a US visa
• Python
• language in Alsace
• Dry January
• dealcoholised wine
• that irritating new Economist advert
• Game of Thrones
• True Detective (season 3)
• places to eat in Preston that are open on a Monday
• running
• virue as its own reward
• the new Space Race
• artificial (general) intelligence
• the best place to live in 2100 (I will be 132)
• the size of the world
• too many things
• not enough things.

Earthrise Over Compton Crater

With all the excitement about the recent landing of the Chinese rover on the far side of the Moon, I hadn't realised that the US Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe has been orbiting the Moon for nearly a decade now and has created high resolution maps of almost the entire surface excluding only the polar regions in deep shadow. It has done particularly resolution surveys of the Apollo landing sites.

One image it returned, not a map, but the sort of thing you might see if you looked out of the window of a spacecraft orbiting the Moon.

(Source: By NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center / Arizona State University - http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/895, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45765646.)

As the Wikipedia page discussing the image makes clear, it might not look exactly like that if you were there. (Just as Mercury is not blue despite what the usual photograph of it seems to imply.) Nevertheless we can take it from Apollo astronauts that Earthrise over the Moon is pretty spectacular. No-one has seen that for more than 46 years. 

SpaceX had planned to do a Zond-style free return mission in 2018, but that got shifted to a BFR trip not before 2023, which probably makes more sense. I do seem to recall some suggestion that Blue Origin might have considered a similar flight. Yes, it would be a bit of a gimmick. more of a gimmick than Apollo 8 in 1968, which at least crew-rated the Saturn V and tested a lot of the systems needed for the later lunar flights. But it would be a hell of a trip. I wonder if there could be the possibility of a Blue Origin flip with the New Glenn. Could Bezos resist?

I might be nearly 51, but as my mum said to me today, my life is half-done. I have another fifty years to go. (I hope). One day, I would like to see Earthrise over Compton crater withmy own eyes. It could even happen.

Shortcuts through Time and Space

I was in the main library in Brighton the other day (S needed to print something out) and I spotted the Stephen Baxter section. From what I can tell the sf books and other genres are mixed together with the mainstream fiction, which may or may not be a good idea. Perhaps there is an sf section somewhere. A problem with libraries these days is that they are not as book-orientated as they should be. Anyhoo, it is difficult to keep up with Steve and I picked up a copy of, I think, Xeelee: Vengence. It was, I don't think the most recent "Xeelee" book from 2018, but the 2017 one. It had an acknowledgements section at the back and we all know the paratexts are the most interesting thing in most books and certainly the ones that people are most likely to heed casually flicking through a book plucked from the shelf.

In the acknowledgements, the first book Baxter mentions is Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space by Allen Everett and Thomas Roman from 2012. As you know, I am extremely interested in semi-popular books about time travel (and FTL, which is the same thing in a relativistic universe) and I had somehow managed not to come across this one. before so many thanks to Steve for putting me on to this. Luckily, the book was available on Kindle so I was able to bag it straight away. It also solved the problem of what to read next, which had been bugging me in the hotel in Brentford the previous night. I hgave a lot of books on my Kindle, a lot of good books as pretty much all of them are books I have chosen personally, but which do I actually want to read now.

The book is slipping down, although I doubt it will be as good as Paul J. Nahin's works on time travel, not even referenced in the current volume. Of course, what I really need to do is to coinvince myself that FTL requires time travel in a relativistic universe as a physicist who did study special relativity to a certain degree as an undergraduate decades ago. I hope Everett and Roman will be a help here. They say they are going to be and the book is aimed at a undergraduate audience. But, of course, I really need those afternoons with pen and paper in my study.

The thing is though that the book is a University of Chicago title. As you know, they give away a free title each month. It would be just my luck if this book is given away this month or before I have finished reading it. There is a probably a time travel parable in there somewhere. 

It is very easy to come up with whole classes of book I ought to read in 2019. But I have a couple of books I got recently I need to finish off (the new Posy Simmionds and Fantasies of the Library) and now the Everett and Roman, so that will keep me going for the next few days. But it doesn't help me get nearer to becoming the new Stephen Baxter does it?

The Size of the World

I just lost my post about the size of the Traveller universe. Typepad: it is nearly 2019. Some kind of autosave feature is not merely desireablm, but close to essential.

OK, my various were that our world is big, but the Traveller one is much bigger in lots of ways (size, time, population, technology, aliens). And the Traveller universe only occupies a small fraction of the Milly Way, although it is implied that there is something unusual about our part. Hints have been dropped about what might out there, but only hints. 

The Imperium is highly decentralised, but has a common currency. How is it used as a instrument of Imperial policy? Is there an Imperial Reserve Bank on Capitol? How are interest rates set, especially given the time lags between core and periphery? Are credit coins physical realisations of some kind of quantum entanglement system with the complementary particles stored in the secure facilities of the central bank? Does this make the coins impossible or very difficult to forge? And how do credits fit with cryptocurrency systems? This is not something that could have been imagined in 1977, but in 2018, we demand answers. As I said, people are not the same across space and time. Someone in C21st CE does not - cannot - possess the same worldview as someone in C21st BCE urban China or rural Britain. We don't even possess the same worldview as 1978.  

Perhaps Orion's Arm is something like what I am after, but who has sketched out a space opera environment in the greatest detail or at least given systematic thought to some of the interesting features implicit and explicit in these milieu? Presumably, there are explored to somne degree in the New Space Opera, so writers like Vinge, Banks, Ken MacLeod, Reynolds, Baxter and probably lots of others have played in this sandbox. But is there anyone who has done it canonically well for the late 2010s?

 

Hollyhead Fold

A map of the late 1880s shows a Hollyhead Fold, which I presume is a farm in the vicinity of Hollinshead Fold Bridge on the Lancaster Canal. I have also learnt that Hollinshead is a name of a prominent Lancashire family. The question is whether the map is correct. Perhaps the surveyor was told the name as Hollinshead Fold, but misheard it. Or perhaps the farm was called Hollinshead Fold in the C18th when the canal was built, but was Hollyhead Fold a century later. I suppose it is possible that the bridge name is a corruption or over-correction of the farm name, but that seems less likely. 

Interestingly, unlike some earlier maps, this mapdoes not show a Cadley Moor or a windmill. I presume there was a watermill on Savick Brook on Mill Lane at one time. In the late 1880s, it would still all be fields around here for another four decades. Which fields belonged to which farms would vary over time. Cadley Moor might have been coomon land. Like Preston Moor, which had been Moor Park from the 1830s and the first municipal park in the Nritain, although not a planned one as Birkenhead Park was, although it became one, the moors would never have terribly moor-like as they are neither high nor hilly. The FoAK indicates that the land on which Moor Park was established was a farm., although it was originally common land. Indeed, there are plenty of edgelands around Haslam Park and Sharoe Brook still, only a few hundred metres from here, which give an indication of what the wider area must have been like in earlier centuries.

From Hollinshead Fold Bridge to Ingolashes Bridge

I've walked before about by desire to travel by canal from Woking to Preston via Brentford. The online maps I could find weren't very helpful in indicating the route. In Skipton the other week I stumbled on a copy of the Collins Nicholson Waterways Guide 5 North West & the Pennines. This is helpful in indicating how exactly having got onto the main branxh of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal via the Ribble Link and the Rufford Branch of the L&L, one can get to into, I think, the Bridgewater Canal and from there, via Manchester into the either the Trent & Mersey or Macclesfield canals towards the Midlands. (Or, alternatively, if one were coming from the south, the reverse.) 

The Nicholson guides originated in the 1970s. Mine is the 2006 edition. I bekieve the most recent is 2015. Many of the pubs listed in my copy will have disappeared now or changed beyond recognition. The Lime Kiln, the Dr Syntax and the Fylde Tavern are long gone. The Hand & Dagger, on the canal, outside Preston is very much still there. We aree going tonight.

One interesting thing though that guide provides is the names of the bridges on the canals. On the Lancaster Canal, 11A is Blackpool Road Bridge and 12 is Woodplumpton Road Bridge. 13 is Savick Aqueduct. 14 though is Hollinshead Fold Bridge and 15 Ingolashes Bridge. I have crossed both of those hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times and never had any idea what their names might be or even if they had names. Hollinshead Fold Bridge is the one you cross if you are going the quick way to Haslam Park. I think there might be a Hollins Road or some such nearby. Yes, a Hollins Grove. The bridge even got a namecheck on the BBC News website in relation to the amount of duckweed on the canal this year.

The names might well appear on OS maps (the guide includes extracts of OS), although my ones of Preston are in storage. So I could have seen them on threre. Perhaps there are people who know and use the names rather than "that bridge that you go over to go to the park" or "that bridge that goes to that field that goes to the park." Perhaps they are used by the Canals and Rivers Trust and in other official documentation.

The area has obviously changed quite a lot since the canal was built in the C18th. Hollinshead Fold sounds like a feature on a farm. This part of Preston is a classic edgeland. It would all have been farmland round here into the early C20th. The field that you enter when you cross Ingolashes Bridge, which I do when I go on my run, is part of the valley of Sharoe Brook. The path goes into the park and the field is now in fact part of the extended park. I don't know when it became part of the park rather part of a farm. Perhaps it has long been an edgeland. That's the kind of detail that it would be fasinating to be able to back in time and find out. I don't recall things around here changing much over the last 50 years, but surely they must have in all sorts of ways. There are certainly private fields around the park and even the foundations of a ruined house. I remember the house, quite substantial, when it was still standing, so there must have been farm fields around here well into my time. The Ingol council estate wasn't built until the 1960s, so that must have farms until then aroud the east side of Ingolashes Bridge. There are some 1930s houses there too. I live in a 1930s house too and it is hard to imagine what it must have been like when it was all farmland/edgeland around here a century ago. But the canal and the railway would have been here then. Go back another century and the canal would have been and the bridges. But it must have been quite different to today. It would be a sight to see.       

(A quick Google suggests that Bostocks Farm was the name of the farm the fields of which were incorporated into the nature reserve in the 2000s. I don't know if the runined house was the farmhouse and I have no recollection of the land being heaily worked, but perhaps there were sheep or even cows. It would be good to have better recall of things like that. This suggests that the ruined house was Ingol Lodge. The house was listed and burnt down in the 1990s and was then demolished, although the remains of the foundations were, last time I was there, very extensive.) 

 

Occupied Yorkshire

I was in Clayton-le-Moors last weekend, which was why I was not blogging. We went to Skipton on the Saturday. This was probably the first time I had been on the A59 beyond Gisburn since 2004. Gisburn is in Ribble Valley and one thing I hadn't realised is just how of occupied Yorkshire there is after Gisburn. You actually go into Pendle before you get to Yorkshire. I couldn't spot if the administrative border is marked. There are some suggestions I have come across that it might not be. Lancashire County Council might fear vandalism from Yorkshire irredentists.

There's a post the Ranter did a while back in which he describes the borders of Yorkshire. The Ribble is unusual in that it is the only large river that begins on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines, but flows west. The Ribble Valley thus creates a natural conduit through which Yorkshire could pour into Lancashire. And pour it did. On the north bank, Yorkshire goes up to the Hodder and on the south bank to only just east of Clitheroe. the villages close to Clitheroe, like Waddington or Great Mitton or Dunsop Bridge, were nowhere near anywhere in Yorkshire. One could argue these were really bits of Lancashire that were accidentally in Yorkshire. That's less obviously true for somewhere like Gisburn. It is slightly nearer Clitheroe than Skipton, but the inhabitants might have preferred to look east. But the boundaries of the Bowland Rural District were unalienable.

That's part of the issue. There might be Yorkshire nationalist who dream of a two-sea polity. At its westernmost point, the Bowland salient can't be much more more than ten miles from the Irish Sea at Glasson Dock. But I don't want any part of Lancashire that is not in Lancashire. There is, for me, no desire for a Greater Lancashire. "One day, this will be Lancashire!" No, Occupied Yorkshire should be returned to Yorkshire and we should all those parts of Lancashire annexed by Cumbria, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

The thing is though, which borders? That's easy, you might, say. The 1888 borders. But borders change all the time. The course of a river or strteam might change. A farmer might buy a field. Where's the border now that the fence or wall is not longer there? It's all just a field. A town might grow across a border. It may make little sense to have one part administratively in another district to the main part. A friend of mine lives in Shipston-on-Stour. Shipston was/is in an exclave of Worcestershire surrounded by Warwickshire. That anomaly survived 1888 and was rationalised away in the early 1930s. I address his Christmas card to Worcestershire, but should I really? Warrington is administratively in Cheshire because if it weren't, it would be an exclave of administrative Lancashire. Southport could be in Lancashire. Is it really a part of Merseyside in a demographic sense? WAs it grandfathered into Merseyside on the basis of unalienable 1888 boundaries ultimately derived from those of the ancient hundred of West Derby? 

In Engel's England, Matthew Engel visits Barnoldswick. (I wonder if I have that book. I might have got from the Chiswick remainder shop.) The town was largest place to be transferred from Yorkshire to Lancashire. If there is anywhere that could most properly be called Occupied Yorkshire, it is here. Though it can't get television from Winter Hill, it could be argued to be more in Lancashire than Yorkshire. Again, it's not really near anywhere in Yorkshire, but it is near Colne and Nelson. Engels asks people whether they think Barnoldswick is in and should be in Lancashire or Yorkshire. Naturally enough, they are suspicious of him and tend to give the politically correct answer. To most people, it doesn't really matter, of course. The maternity facility for Barnoldswick is these days in Burnley, but there's no birth qualification to play for Yorkshire any more anyway. Some people might prefer the sometimes Labour LCC in Preston to the inevitably Tory NYCC in distant Northallerton (what of Pendle itself though) and a teenage girl might opine, in disgusted terms that only elderly people think Barnoldswick is in Yorkshire.       

I share her distate for Yorkshire naturally. It shouldn't be the case that Lancashire is like Yorkshire only better, but rather that Yorkshire is like Lancashire only worse. Of course, that is just a bit of goodnatured banter. I come from Lancashire and my intonation goes down at the end of sentences. No ad voiceovers for me. Yorkshire is a foreign country and I hate most people from Lancashire far more than I hate any Yorkshire person.

Of course, the kinds of people who dream of restoring 1888 boundaries are going to largely be the kinds of people who voted for Brexit. So what am I do here really? Shouldn't I be siding with the liberal metropllitans elites drawing lines on maps to maximise administrative convenience? But as Kevin Rattan said many years go, if you live somewhere like Waddington and have been happy in Yorkshire for centuries and then that is taken away from you, it is upsetting. Lancashire as we know today did not really emerge until the C12th. When did the boundaries become something close to the 1888 ones, Barnoldswick was claimed at times by Blackburnshire and when did the county become more important than the hundred. Bowland, for instance, crossed the border and did the few who lived there care which side they were on or did they think of themselves as living in Bowland first? And 800 years from now, what lines will there on the ground in this disputed territory?  

           

Occupied Lancashire

Back in the old days, I used to only read short books, ones less than 200 pages long, in November and December in order to get my total for the year up. There's only any real point doing that if you are keeping count and a list (indeed), although I did get to read some curios I otherwise might not have done.

Joe Kennedy's Games Without Frontiers I mentioned a while ago as the book that I saw in the Elliott Bay Book Company and clued me into him. It would probably be less than 200 pages. Having read Authentocrats, I thought I might as well make 2018 the Year of Kennedy Completeness. 

Early on (I am only a third of the way in so far), Kennedy describes a trip to Barrow to see a game against Darlington. We get this sentence

Finally working my way upstairs to the bar, wide windows looked out across the muddy, balding pitch and let in the watery sky of Westmorland.

I suppose it is just possible, depending on the relative position of the windows that some of the photons entering Joe's eyes originated above Westmorland. It is equally possible that none at all did. We can though, from a glance at the map, be certain that the vast majority did not. Barrow-in Furness, of course, is historically, traditionally, in Lancashire and that watery sky was the watery sky of Lancashire. I know it well.

That "the watery sky of Westmorland" is more poetic than "the watery sky of Cumbria" does not stop it being wrong. Kennedy in trying to be poetic and possibly trying to demonstrate some slightly arcane geographical knowledge committed a solecism. I don't know how many Lancashire irredentists there are in Barrow-in-Furness, much less amongst supporters of Barrow A.F.C.. I do not know how enthusiastically Lancashire Day was celebrated there last week. But I'm a Lancashire irredentist. Administratively, it seems unlikely that the Furness and Cartmell peninsulas - North Lonsdale, Lancashire North of the Sands - will be returned to Lancashire. But we can at least hope that more can be done to remind people that these places are in perpetuity proper parts of the True Lancashire, something even poetically minded writers of cultural analyses of fottball should bear in mind..      

   

Infinite City

If you entered Preston from the west along Blackpool Road (A5085) and continued on to the junction with the A59 (which is just a small roundabout surprisingly) and then continued down New Hall Lane for a little bit until the end of the obviously built-up area, the distance you would have travelled is about 5 and a quarter miles. It would take you about 15-20 minutes to drive the distance (there are a lot of traffic light) or about 80 minutes if you walked - or longer if you stopped off for some liquid refreshment on the way. There are at least three pubs directly on the route plus one more that you can see just down a side street. From my house, you would have to add another mile to get on to the route and back, so an entire psychogeographical dérive would have a distance of about 11 and a half miles door to door. I could walk that in three hours. (I suppose technically speaking it might be a dérive if you just walked along it having planned to do that, but then how is that any different from deciding where to go based on any other arbitrary rule?)

Preston is wider than it is tall, so this rute gives you more of Preston than you would get going north-south, for instance, whooshing through on a train. The oute does not go through the centre of the city, so you have to change buses if you wanted to travel along it by public transport and, indeed, there are probably parts where there are no buses because the busues, naturally enough, are going to and from the centre.

The point, of course, is that if you lived at one end, you'd have no particular reason to ever go to the other end, but to the person just driving through Preston on their way from somewhere else to somewhere else, it all looks the same. That's the same in the way that Malaga might look the same with endless kilometres of literal totalitarian apartment blocks. It's fractal. As I have said before, each bit of the city, like the Mandelbrot set, is different, but statistically it is, in some sense, all the same.

There are, of course, lots of interesting things that you would walk past if you walked this route and some of them would have more general significance like Deepdale or the Moor Park Observatory. There is a lot of personal significance for me. Parts of the route have been my stomping ground for five decades and I have driven along the whole route hundreds of time, although not, of course, at once. There just used to be a newsagent's at Lane End's that had a sign that ran down the wall of the building facing the oncoming traffic that said "Your Evening Gazette, sir". But since the Evening Gazette is the Blackpool newspaper why would there ne a sign advertising it in Preston? Could you at one time buy the Gazette in Preston? Was there competition between the titles in Preston itself once? Is Robbie's still there? It was a sweet shop and not a newsagents and certainly existed for many years have Robbie himself retired, but I remember it when it was a proper sweet shop in the early 1970s. 

But that something went years ago. Everyone has there own memories. Everything has heft in childhood and I spent mine in one place, so the place is drenched with them for me. Like the fact that you could buy winemaking kits in the Boots in the mid-1980s. "That used to a... That used to be... That used to be different... I remember..." And, yes, there will certainly be people around who remember Robbie's. I remember as a kid thinking there could be people living in these houses who like the things I like. And I eventually met some RPG and sf fans in Preston But even know I drive past a house and think there could be something interesting in there. And there might be, but there probably isn't.

There are all those people, leading all those lives. With all their own histories and all of their own stories. All that sheer weight of stuff. How could one begin to connect to them? Of course, one could just write one of those psychogeographical books about the route.But who reads those kinds of books expect for people like me?    

Little Nostalgia

Hat-tip to the Weasel for pointing out a recent New Yorker article on Stewart Brand and the 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog. It is, as he says, very New Yorker. Consider this sentence from the author's (Anna Wiener's) conclusion:

I pictured woolly mammoths roaming the charred landscape of Northern California and future archeologists discovering the remains of the ten-thousand-year clock in a swamp of nuclear waste. 

Although one sort of knows what she is getting at, it is unlikely that either 10,000-year clock will be in a swamp of nuclear waste at any point in the near future. The original site is in Nevada and a clock is being constructed in a mountain at Jeff Bezos's ranch in West Texas. Of course, you might tend to store nucleasr waste in remote, geologically stable areas,but, by definition, a mountain is unlikely to become a swamp. Of course, we tend to worry more about places becoming deserts because of climate breakdown, but it is also going to rain more, so some places will become swamps hat aren't presently. Of course, you could take this into account in deciding the location for your long-term nuclear waste depository. Indeed, where to put your depository is exactly the kind of issue that one woulkd expect the Long Now Foundation and Stewart Brand to interested in. It's unclear now paid progress on the 10,000 -year clock in Texas. The last update appears to be from 02011 (as they would have it). The Seminars About Long-Term Thinking though are very much current. Niall Ferguson is speaking on Monday (indeed, Niall Ferguson) and there is a schedule through April 02019. Bet there is something on nuclear waste in there (and Brand's book in which he promotes nuclear power).   

Wiener reports that Brand told her that he has "little nostalgia" for “Whole Earth.”

‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ is well and truly obsolete and extinct,” he said. “There’s this sort of abiding interest in it, or what it was involved in, back in the day, and so the reunion was a way for the perpetrators to get together and have a drink and piss on the grave.

We might feel that's all very well for Brand, but the only thing we have to look forward to is the past. In fact, we have double nostalgia, nostalgia for The Whole Earth Catalog and nostalgia for our first Whole Earth Catalog as the Weasel might have it. I remember my first encounter with Co-Evolution Quarterly, via News That Stayed News- 1974-1984: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly, which the Weasel had a copy of and I saw at his house in 1987. I latter got my own copy via Amazon. I once found a bunch of copies of Coevolution Quarterly in a shop in the Cut.   Of course, you can read them online now (if you could can get Flash to work). (The legendary, last, lost issue of Whole Earth on the Singularity is shown, but you not the articles.)

The Whole Earth Catalog, Coevolution Quarterly, The Media Lab, The WELL, How Buildings Learn. There is a lot to be nostalgic about there, both personally and vicariously. As we have said, what is interesting is whatever Brand is thinking. We have an idea of Brand is still thinking and that is certainly interesting (the Long Now material, history). But, as I have asked before, hat is the new thing? I am 50. I hope that 50 is the New 35. So what is that is happening now that I should look into? I know the dull, but important answers of Trump, Brexit, the Alt-Right, climate breakdown, Facebook. But are there other things, maybe even more positive things, that I haven't thought of yet? 

Just What is a Planet? II

Planet Nine would be a fairly large body, a mini-Neptune or even a full Neptune. One could presumably calculate whether it would have had time to clear its orbit. Mercury, as Del said many years ago, is a proper planet. Ganymede is larger than Mercury (in diameter; it's only about 45% as massive). One reason for demoting Pluto was fear of a surfeit of Pluto-sized objects in the outer Solar System. We know a few, but what is the best guess about the number and size distribution? Do we expect to find Ganymede-size objects? A Ganymede-sized object might be less massive that Ganymeded itself if it contained less heavier elements and more ice. Would such a object be able to clear it's orbit? And, as I understand it, it gets harder to clear your orbit the further out you are. If there were Ganymede- or even Mars- or Earth-size objects lurking in the outer Solar System, they might not satisfy the IAU definition and thus would be planets, when, clearly, by any reasonable notion of what a planet is, they would be.   

The Twin Dilemma

Imagine you have a pair of twins. On their birthday, the twins are drugged and then wake up in identical cells. Only one twin is in a cell on the surface of Earth and the other is in a cell on a spaceship accelerating at 1g. How does each twin work out whether they are on surface of the Earth or on the starship?

The answer, of course, is when the twin on the starship experiences a period of weightless when the starship is flipped for the return. That's what breaks the symmetry. Ler's say the twins are put in the cells on their birthday and are allowed to send a birthday greeting. The twin on Earth sends a message one year after being placed in the cell.

Now, I can't find a damned a damned calculator for what happens for a statship accelering at 1g, The one I thought was doing whay I thought it was was actually calculating the times for missions involving deaccelerating and possibly even a round trip. So I suppose I am going to have work it all out for scratch (at some point). I remember doing the calculation for an accelerating starship. It's a nice calculation and I remember finding it in a book later, so I did so correctly and, indeed, we find a FoAK article on the Hyperbolic motion (relativity). The point is that during the outbound leg, whether the starship is accelerating or travelling at a constant speed (which makes the calculation easier, but obviously misses the point about one twin being on Earth), the twins receive the messages at exactly the same ages. In the accelerating case, they must be increasingly spread out. But it is not until turn around that symmetry is broken.

This is one of those weird relativity things that is relevant to my notion of the extended now. There is no universal now. Although we might say that a picture of Andromeda shows it as it was 2 million years ago, in another sense, what we see is the shared now. This is something that I need to thing about a lot more and I wish we had had someone teach it us at university. We did do special relativity, of course, but only, I think, a couple of tutorials. I recall Ken making a complete howler about the relativistic Doppler shift and wondering how he could possibly have made that error, but he did get a double first and I didn't.

The thing is even if we drug the twin again in the starship at turnover and rearrange the cell, on the return leg, the starship will cross all of the messages the twin on Earth sent in a rush. THat almost makes it feel as though the Earth twin is put through an aging weapon, but, of course, that's not really right. Both twins have lead their perfectly normal lives, it is just on the return can the starship twin see this. If threy kept on accelerating in the same direction forever they would never know. 

It did strike me though that there is one way for the twins to tell which is on Earth and which on the starship. Coroilis effect is one, of course, Could you measure that in the cell? And, on a spinning spaceship, things would be weird, but there's no need to spin a torchship. On Earth though, the gravitational field strength is lower at the ceiling than at the floor. I don't how east it is to measure that with a pendulum, but it is not a completely minite amount over a few metres. At 64 km, there's about a 2% reduction or 2 parts in 100. That corresponds to 2 parts in 100,000 at 64 m or 2 parts in a million at 6.4 metres. If you had a time source accurate to the microsecond, you could potentially measure the difference in the period of a pendulum if a cell with a high enough ceiling. Of course, it would be easier if the cell were more of an office block.But a starship the acceleration would be the same at all heights. So there is a difference between the gravity field on Earth and one on an accelerating spaceship.

Hugging and Learning

Seinfeld famously had no hugging and no learning. Frasier had some hugging and learning. And what's wrong with a bit of hugging and learning? Frasier seems to aged a bit better, although perhaps that just because it is still shown on Channel 4 a lot. Or it might be the hugging and learning.

The New Sincerity goes back to 1985 (bands in Austin) and Wallace's essay was 1993, pre-Infinite Jest. Of course, Infinite Jest is just about the most insincere book ever written. It's a 1300-page, which after ploughing through 1000 pages of text plus 300 pages of endnotes, the final page induces many of the people who have got that far to want to pick up the book and throw it at the wall. 

Of course, it is still a very good novel and there is a reason it ends like it does, although I still imagine that a lot of people would probably cionsider the work more sincere if Wallace had spelt things out a bit more. We know from Wallace biography that he was a pretty serious asshole. In the biography, that's rather brushed away whereas a few years later in the current #MeToo era serious questions are being asked about whether Wallace's work should be in the canon. Wallace clearly behaved as an asshole at times. Does the fact that he was half-mad with severe depression excuse him? Does the fact that he promoted sincerity excuse him. Presumably Wallace would not have recommended others to try and buy guns with which to kill their lover's ex-husband. Was it just a phase he was going through. Also, it is very insincere to write a book about infinity when you don't understand the maths and refuse to take the advice of people who do. Sadly, he's not around to explain himself, 

I liked High Maintenance quite a lot (I haven't seen the most recent episodes). It reminded me of shows like Girls, Louis and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Louis CK has been associated with the New Sincerity, although I assume that was before the revelation that he liked to wank in front of people in his dressing room. I suppose that is a kind of sincerity, although perhaps not what Wallace had in mind. Does sincerity make you an asshole or would Louis CK be even more of an asshole if weren't trying to sincere. Evelyn Waugh made much the same point when he said he knew that he was an awful person, but that without Catholicism he would be even more awful. That might be a statement of self-awareness or just an excuse for being an asshole.

Larry David would hardly seem to be an obvious cheerleader for the New Sincerity though. Do these shows really have much in common other than certain elements of visual grammar? There are lots of other shows that have been associated with broad movement, New Girl, Community, BoJack Horseman, Parks and Recreations, The Office (US version). A lot of those are very far from the naturalistic style of High Maintenance. "Sincerity: if you can fake that, you've got it made." How many of those shows are actually faux sincerity. Indeed could any industrial television product under our neoliberal dispensation be anything else?

If the New Sincerity has been around for more than thirty years, it might be time for something new. The New Irony perhaps. After all, are Brexit and Trump the products of a surfeit of irony or a surfeit of sincerity?

Just What Is a Planet?

The 2003 IAU definition of a planet is

The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

The definition is clearly wrong as it excludes extra-solar planets. These were barely dreamt of when I was doing my PhD, but over the last twenty years have probably been the most exciting area of astronomy. Could a large planet be rigid enough to not be nearly spherical? I think there is a oval planet in the Traveller universe and Haumea is ellipsoid. Recent observations make it unclear whether Haumea is definitely in hydrostatic equilibrium. Haumea is far too small to clear its neighbourhood. One can debate whether the Earth, Jupiter and Neptune have cleared theirs or control it.

The problem is that there is a spectrum with necessarily fuzzy boundaries between classes of object. Ceres is much more planet-like than the modal asteroid, but it is also much smaller thsan the Moon.. My old argument that Pluto should be grandfathered in and anything bigger than it is a planret and anything smaller not would actually work fine at the moment giving us the traditional planets as Pluto has a slightly larger diameter than Eris, although it is less massive. You could, of course, allow in Eris as tenth planet as Makemake is quite a bit smaller, although Haumea might be as big as Pluto on one axis. Clearly, Eris is the same kind of object as Pluto. But both are much than Ceres. The problem is that there could be tens/hundreds/thousands of objects of Pluto/Eris size as yet undiscovered iin the outer Solar System. If it were just these two, fine, but add another ten and things get silly.

The other issue is whether we consider large objects like the Moon, the Galilean satellites, Titan and Triton as planets. Again, they are planet-like and would in some cases certainly be considered planets if they were not bound to a parent. The Galileans would be easily visible with the naked eye if they were not so close to Jupiter. In a way, it is odd to arguing about whether Pluto is a planet and not Ganymede.

And we can't just change the definition and replace "Sun" with "star". What exactly is a star? We hinted at that debate last week. Is awhite dwarf a star? It's certainly not fusing. By an extended  IAU definition, Sirius B would be a planet, but that doesn't seem quite right. And a white dwarf could certainly have planets (are any known?), even ones in the habitable zone - and they exist for a long time.

And then there are rogue planets, beloved of sf. They certainly must exist. Some will have expelled from their original planetary systems, others might have formed separately in molecular clouds and never orbited a star. Like so many things, we might not be able to define a planet, but we often know one when we see one.  

   

 

Planck Star

White dwarfs are sustained by electron degeneracy and neutron stars by neutron degeneracy. (It might be a bit more complex in practice.)  There is also the possibility of quark stars, of which I was only vaguely aware, supported by quark degeneracy. No quark stars have been observed, but they might in fact be difficult to differentiate from neutron stars, for instance, in having neutron star shells. The FoAK article suggests that quark stars might be unstable, but it is unclear what this would mean. I can only imagine that the quark star might evaporate on an astronomical short timescale.    

There are lots of other kinds of hypothetical stars, but the usual pattern is to assume that more massive stars collapse to black holes. However, I am reading Carlo Rovelli's books in which he discusses his idea of the Planck star. Eventually, the quantum foam, the very atoms of spacetime, would provide the pressure to support the star. Which would seem to me to indicate that there is no singularity. The classic picture is that what's inside the black hole is going to have a singularity, at least as I understand it. But a collapsing object will still have structure as it passes through its Schwarzschild radius. 

Now, we know black holes exist because we can observe them directly with gravitational waves merging and indirectly with electromagnetic waves doing lots of things we expect them to. Because as my astronomy tutor for first year astronomy said the density needed for a supermassive hole isn't very high and is the density at the centre of galaxies then you pretty much must have objects that at least look like classical black holes from the outside. Now there's obviously lots of weird quantum gravity effects that could stop a singularity forming or possibly do. Gravastars sound pretty contrived, but perhaps there are physical reasons that make them more plausible. Rovelli's Planck star seem more plausible in that the collapse of the star just continues until the quantum foam is hit. That's where things get interesting though. Rather than just forming some weird object at the heart of the black hole, forever out of sight, the Planck star rebounds. Nothing can escape from a black hole, although black holes do lose energy through Hawking radiation. So the question that needs to answered is how does the energy escape in the case of a Planck star. This must be something to do with the Schwarzschild radius. In the case of a stellar mass black hole, this is a few kilometres, so arguably it's not "far" from the event horizon to the Planck star and perhaps you can eventually get quantum effects at the boundary. Initially, it seems Rovelli hoped that Planck stars could be detected by the energy escaping, but stellar black holes, but it turns out these objects are stable on the current age of the universe, so we are not going to get Planck star novae at this epoch, unless there is an unsuspected population of small black holes. But, in the future, if Rovelli, is right, things could get quite spectacular. 

Looking North

I remember Look North rebranding itself as Look North West in 1980 and then in 1984 to North West Tonight. Everyone still refers to it as Look North. Well, by everyone, I mean my mum and me. The question is why did it do this? The answer presumably was to avoid confusion with the other two versions of Look North. Neither could be so easily rebranded. The Newcastle Look North couldn't be Look North East as it covered Carlisle and north Cumbria, definitely not in the North East, and the Leeds version didn't cover the actual North East.

But the confusion couldn't have been that great because 38 years, the two other version of Look North still exist and, indeed, the number went back up to three when the Hull version for East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire was launched. We might well argue that Lincolnshire is not in the North and certain Norfolk isn't. I remember being surprised to discover back during the early 1980s ITV franchise discussions that Yorkshire served North Norfolk. That must have been very strange if one grew up there.

What I do remember is that sometimes we would get Look North from Leeds. I remember thinking at the time that sometimes in Yorkshire then they must get Look North from Manchester, but we in the North West would never know. The question, of course, is why did this happen? Technical issues, or, more likely, industrial action?   

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.