Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Three new poems
Three new poems on the Human Genre Project: The Real Life Application by Daniele Talend, For Jaimee by Jay Coral, and Stories by Tracey Rosenberg.
Science and Poetry
After half an hour for people to get their drinks and start talking, the Library's director, Robyn Marsack, welcomed us and introduced the event. I then introduced the members of the panel and outlined what the event was about: science as an inspiration for poetry. I mentioned Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, and contrasted Morgan's enthusiastic and unabashed drawing on space exploration and science fiction with the more guarded attitudes shown by mainstream novelists. 'What I love about poetry is its ion engine' is a line from Morgan displayed on the wall of the library. Is science more inspiring to poetry than to prose?
Ron Butlin kicked off by questioning the dichotomy of science and poetry, arguing that the same human consciousness (and the unconscious) produces both, and that the early twentieth-century shock of the new was present in science, music, art and politics - a point he illustrated with a reading of his poem on Stravinsky. Brian McCabe followed this up with two or three poems - one on ants, another on eels. Tracey Rosenberg read Stories, her new poem on genetics and Jewish heritage (in both senses). Kelley Swain, the Forum's guest for the week, vividly remembered being a poet in a roomful of marine biology students dissecting dogfish, and read from her collection Darwin's Microscope and Jargon. Russell Jones talked about the science fiction poetry of Edwin Morgan (the subject of the PhD thesis Jones is working on) and read a Morgan-inspired poem, 'Star', from his own collection, The Last Refuge.
We then had a ten-minute break for refills and fresh air.
The Poetry Library's own Reader in Residence, Ryan Van Winkle then kicked off the second half with some comments, and a lively discussion followed - about whether the language of science may be more excluding than inspiring, about Ross's poem on discovering the malaria plasmodium, about the effect of a bang on the head on MacDiarmid's sense of rhythm, and much else.
Thanks to all who took part, and to Peggy Hughes, Emma Capewell, Isabel Fletcher, Margaret Rennex and Jo Law for all their work in making it all work.
Haiti
The true story behind the nonsense is outlined here.
Bogus Science: or, some People Really Believe These Things by John Grant
Fortitude
Skulls fossilised in coal, Sargasso seas,
frog-showers, flying lights, and coloured rain,
writing engraved on meteorites - all these
and more he could record, but not explain.
Aristotle called theories 'likely stories',
and this man, also, was not deceived:
all his deductions and hypotheses
were tales he went on telling, but no more believed
than he believed that two plus two make four -
an abnormal attitude that was completely sane.
Gripped by such facts, how could he set much store
in the fragile constructions of the brain?
In more recent years I read Fortean Times fairly regularly - I may even have subscribed - and although my reading became intermittent, the magazine came to occupy many a long railway journey home from Inverness. And then, quite suddenly a couple of years ago, I read an article in the October 2007 issue on the life of the psychic investigator Harry Price - an article that made pretty clear that he was a hoaxer and chancer, astonishing only for his brass neck - and I thought, well, there are better things to do with one's time. I began to suspect that by taking seriously - even if sceptically - an endless parade of tosh, the magazine was not as harmless a diversion as it had seemed. Because its abiding impression is that, while this or that claim might be false, this or that guru a charlatan, there might, you know, after all be something spooky lurking in some yet uninvestigated thicket ...
John Grant's Bogus Science gives much of the genuine pleasure I used to get from Fortean Times, with a far more bracing scepticism, and a harder line on the damage done by indulging credulity. Fort himself, Grant points out, trawled most of his anomalies - the frog-showers, flying lights, and coloured rain - from assiduous research in files of American local newspapers whose editors and reporters were, if a quiet day left them with space to fill, quite happy to fill it with bunkum. They just made the stuff up.
Grant's book ranges widely, from ancient and modern geocentrists and flat-earthers to inventors of perpetual motion machines, promoters of zero point energy, discoverers of Atlantis (my favourite is the Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) who found it a few miles from his own university, and proved to the satisfaction of many that the pyramids of Egypt were mere imperfect copies of the mounds of Gamla Uppsala) and hunters of Bigfoot (for whom Grant allows more latitude than most sceptics), taking in a lot more along the way. There's something very satisfying in seeing that every design for a perpetual motion machine (weights! magnets! no, wait, water ...) that I ever scribbled on the back of a physics jotter in high school was anticipated centuries earlier by people much cleverer than myself.
Bogus Science is a kind of rubble skip of what the author had left after taking a hammer to Discarded Science and Corrupted Science, and none the worse for that. Beautifully produced, endlessly entertaining and highly recommended.
Matt Coward's Acts of Destruction: neither Airstrip One nor Nowhere, but the Commonwealth!
Mat Coward sent me a review copy of this book, so I owe him a review. I don't owe him a good review, of course, but a good review is what he's going to get because I genuinely enjoyed the book.
It's very hard to think of a novel set in a future socialist Britain that isn't a dystopia or a utopia - Airstrip One or Nowhere. The Commonwealth of Britain in Acts of Destruction isn't described anywhere as socialist - in fact the word and its cognates don't occur anywhere in the text - but socialist it is. Socialism, if it's called anything, is called democracy. The revolution is called the Process and the constitution is called the Agreement of the People. After you've read a bit, you may find yourself thinking, 'Oh come on, it can't be as cosy and consensual as all that'. Reading on, you find it isn't: the state is definitely in the 'firm but fair' category, even if its laws are enforced by bobbies on bicycles.
Even Tories and libertarians might enjoy Coward's frequent baiting of current life-style politics: smoking is encouraged, particularly in local pubs, and healthy eating means good greasy spoon fare. There are even rifles in the hands of the people, though I would have strong objections to the limits placed on this - as does, to be fair, at least one of the sympathetic voices in the book.
Like in all the best crime novels, we start with the discovery of a body, go on to apparently unrelated matters - stolen tomatoes, a missing child, some problem about bees - and find they're all tied together by the end. Along the way we've had our viewpoint characters' relationships get interestingly more complicated. I hope Mat is working on a sequel, because I'd like to meet them again.
You can buy the book here (and sample it here).
Labels: climate, libertarian, Marxism, reviews, skiffy, writing
Jennifer Swift
I was shocked to learn yesterday from catching up with Ansible that Jennifer Swift had died three months ago. She was a lovely woman whom I'd met at cons over the years, and always had lively and friendly conversations with. Jennifer was a science fiction fan, author, and critic (warmly remembered here and here) a bioethicist, a journalist, and an Anglican. For my occasional crass vehemences she had - literally - the patience of a saint. It's a small consolation that my last interaction with her was a hug. Belated condolences to those who knew her better.
Happy New Year!
'We are cast upon the future without reluctance and even without regret, as finding there the substance of desire.'
- Barrows Dunham, Man Against Myth.