Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Modal logic, necessity, and science fiction

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A necessary truth is one that is true in all possible universes. We can capture the concept of necessary truth with the 4 rules of S4 modal logic (where □ is read “necessarily”):

  • if P is any tautology, then  □ P
  • if  □ P  and  □ (P ⇒ Q)  then  □ Q
  • if  □ P  then  □ □ P
  • if  □ P  then  P

For those who prefer words rather than symbols:

  • if P is any tautology, then P is necessarily true
  • if P and (P implies Q) are both necessarily true, then Q is necessarily true
  • if P is necessarily true, then it is necessarily true that P is necessarily true
  • if P is necessarily true, then P is true (in our universe, among others)

The first rule implies that the truths of mathematics and logic (□ 2 + 2 = 4, etc.) are necessary truths (they must obviously be so, since one cannot consistently imagine an alternate universe where they are false). The second rule implies that the necessary truths include all logical consequences of necessary truths. The last two rules imply that  □ P  is equivalent to  □ □ P,  □ □ □ P,  etc. In other words, there is only one level of “necessary” that needs to be considered.

As it stands, these rules only allow us to infer the truths of mathematics and logic (such as  □ 2 + 2 = 4). One must add other necessary axioms to get more necessary truths than that. A Christian or Muslim might, for example, add “Necessarily, God exists,” and spend time exploring the logical consequences of that.

Countless things that are true in our universe are not necessarily true, such as “Water freezes at 0°C” or “Trees are green” or “Bill Clinton was President of the United States in the year 2000.”

For historical truths like the latter, it’s obvious that they are contingent on events, rather than being necessary. There is a substantial body of “alternate history” fiction which explores alternatives for such contingent truths, such as these four novels (pictured above):

  • Fatherland (Robert Harris, 1992): a detective story set in a universe where Hitler won the war; it is the week leading up to his 75th birthday (3.99 on Goodreads)
  • The Peshawar Lancers (S.M. Stirling, 2002): European civilisation is destroyed by the impact of comet fragments in 1878; a new Kiplingesque Anglo-Indian steampunk civilisation arises (3.86 on Goodreads)
  • SS-GB (Len Deighton, 1978): Hitler defeats Britain in 1941; British police face moral dilemmas cooperating with the SS (3.74 on Goodreads)
  • Romanitas (Sophia McDougall, 2005): the Roman Empire is alive and well in present-day London; slaves are still crucified (3.24 on Goodreads; first of a trilogy)

Three plant pigments: green beech, brown kelp, and red gracilaria algae (cropped from photographs by Simon Burchell, Stef Maruch, and Eric Moody)

The truths of biology are just as contingent as the truths of history. Trees are (mostly) green, but even on our own planet, brown and red are viable alternative colours for plants. From an evolutionary perspective, Stephen Jay Gould expresses the contingency this way:

“any replay of the tape [of life] would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken.” (Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, 1989)

(some of his colleagues would take issue with the word “radically,” but still accept the word “different”). From a Christian point of view, the contingency of biology follows from the doctrine of the “Free Creation” of God, independently of any beliefs about evolution. To quote Protestant theologian Louis Berkhof:

“God determines voluntarily what and whom He will create, and the times, places, and circumstances, of their lives.” (Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, Part I, VII, D.1.c)

The Catholic Church shares the same view, as none other than Thomas Aquinas makes clear (using the terminology of necessary truth):

“It seems that whatever God wills He wills necessarily. For everything eternal is necessary. But whatever God wills, He wills from eternity, for otherwise His will would be mutable. Therefore whatever He wills, He wills necessarily. … On the contrary, The Apostle says (Ephesians 1:11): ‘Who works all things according to the counsel of His will.’ Now, what we work according to the counsel of the will, we do not will necessarily. Therefore God does not will necessarily whatever He wills.” (Summa Theologiae, Part I, 19.3)

Having taken this line, one might ask why mathematical truths are necessary rather than contingent. The astronomer Johannes Kepler resolves this problem this by telling us that they are not created:

“Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God.” (Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi)

In fiction, alternative biologies are normally explored in the context of some other planet, because alternate earths are pretty much logically equivalent to other planets. Here are four examples of fictional biology:

  • Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis, 1938): written from a Christian perspective, this novel has three intelligent humanoid alien species living on the planet Mars (3.92 on Goodreads; see also my book review)
  • The Mote in God’s Eye (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1974): this novel is one of the best alien-contact novels ever written (4.07 on Goodreads)
  • the xenomorph from the film Aliens (1986)
  • the Klingon character Worf from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994)

The truths of physics are contingent as well; our universe could have been set up to run on different rules. Science fiction authors often tweak the laws of physics slightly in order to make the plot work (most frequently, to allow interstellar travel). Fantasy authors invent alternate universes which differ from ours far more dramatically:

  • Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965): faster-than-light travel is a feature of the plot; it follows that interstellar navigation requires looking into the future (4.25 on Goodreads; see also my book review)
  • Great North Road (Peter F. Hamilton, 2012): “Stargate” style portals are a key feature of this novel (4.07 on Goodreads)
  • The Many-Coloured Land (Julian May, 1981): a science fiction incorporating psychic powers (4.07 on Goodreads; first of a series)
  • Magician (Raymond E. Feist, 1982): a classic fantasy novel which explores some of the internal logic of magic along the way (4.31 on Goodreads; first of a series)

Because mathematical truths are necessary truths, they are potentially common ground with intelligent aliens. This is one theme in the book (later film) Contact:

“‘No, look at it this way,’ she said smiling. ‘This is a beacon. It’s an announcement signal. It’s designed to attract our attention. We get strange patterns of pulses from quasars and pulsars and radio galaxies and God-knows-what. But prime numbers are very specific, very artificial. No even number is prime, for example. It’s hard to imagine some radiating plasma or exploding galaxy sending out a regular set of mathematical signals like this. The prime numbers are to attract our attention.’” (Carl Sagan, Contact, 1985; 4.14 on Goodreads)

Of course, Carl Sagan or his editor should have realised that 2 is prime. Even intelligent beings can make mistakes.

In this post series: logic of necessary truth, logic of belief, logic of knowledge, logic of obligation

Planetary Intelligences

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In a book review of Out of the Silent Planet, I mentioned last year that C. S. Lewis had pioneered the science fiction sub-genre of a planetary intelligence or sentient planet which resists outsiders. A planetary intelligence provides a way of exploring colonisation and other issues, while still having a positive ending to the story.

The chart above (click to zoom) shows a timeline of the concept. Although there are many other stories based on the idea, these six seemed particularly noteworthy (star ratings out of 5 are from GoodReads and RottenTomatoes):

Solaris was filmed in 1968, 1972 (★★★★☆), and 2002 (★★★☆). Here are trailers for the last two films:

Readers, how do you feel the various books and films compare?

Fictional Scientists and Mathematicians

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I have been reflecting on fictional mathematicians and scientists. The image above shows four:

None of these are terribly good role models, it seems to me. Literature and cinema have some better examples, but on the whole, mathematicians and scientists are not treated well by fiction authors.

Milton Millhauser, in “Dr. Newton and Mr. Hyde: Scientists in Fiction from Swift to Stevenson” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1973, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 287–304) notes that, in literature, “broadly speaking the scientist is either disregarded or held up to contempt and ridicule.” But perhaps that is because some writers (Michael Crichton is a notable example) see dangers and dilemmas that demand exploration.

However, female scientists and mathematicians seem to be portrayed somewhat more positively. For example:

  • Eleanor Arroway from Contact by Carl Sagan.
  • Sarah Harding from The Lost World by Michael Crichton.
  • Catherine Llewellyn from the play (and later film) Proof by David Auburn.
  • Grace Augustine from the film Avatar by James Cameron.

Looking back: 2001

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The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey suggested that we would have extensive space flight in 2001. That turned out not to be the case. What we did get was the September 11 attacks on the USA and the military conflicts which followed. Nevertheless, NASA commemorated the film with the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Films of 2000 included the superb The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, several good animated films (including Monsters, Inc., Shrek, and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away), the wonderful French film Amélie, some war movies (Enemy at the Gates was good, but Black Hawk Down distorted the book too much for my taste), the first Harry Potter movie, and an award-winning biographical film about the mathematician John Nash.

In books, Connie Willis published Passage, one of my favourite science fiction novels, while Ian Stewart explained some sophisticated mathematics simply in Flatterland.

Saul Kripke (belatedly) received the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy for his work on Kripke semantics, while Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard (also belatedly) received the Turing Award for their work on object-oriented programming languages (both these pioneers of computing died the following year).

The year 2001 also saw the completion of the Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in Armenia, which I have sadly never visited.

In this series: 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1994, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2009.

Perelandra: a book review

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Perelandra (1943) by C. S. Lewis (1996 cover by Kinuko Y. Craft)

Having blogged about Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, the first and last novels of the “Space Trilogy” or “Cosmic Trilogy” by C. S. Lewis, I should also mention Perelandra, the middle volume.

While Out of the Silent Planet is science fiction, Perelandra is better described as religious fantasy (with portions of what could be called supernatural horror). However, in a 1962 discussion with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, Lewis states that “The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labors in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then, of course, the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.” When Aldiss responds “But I am surprised that you put it this way round. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose,” Lewis replies “Yes, everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong.”

The basic idea of the floating islands of vegetation on the ocean of Perelandra (what we call Venus) may have came from the novel Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (XII§4), after mankind has chosen to exterminate the native civilisation of Venus (something that Stapledon seems to approve of, but which Lewis explicitly criticised in Out of the Silent Planet): “Man now busied himself in preparing his new home. Many kinds of plant life, derived from the terrestrial stock, but bred for the Venerian environment, now began to swarm on the islands and in the sea. For so restricted was the land surface, that great areas of ocean had to be given over to specially designed marine plants, which now formed immense floating continents of vegetable matter.”

In Chapter 3 of Perelandra, when Elwin Ransom first arrives on Venus, there are some wonderful descriptive passages, which go far, far beyond Stapledon’s bald statement: “It seems that he must have remained lying on his face, doing nothing and thinking nothing for a very long time. When he next began to take any notice of his surroundings he was, at all events, well rested. His first discovery was that he lay on a dry surface, which on examination turned out to consist of something very like heather, except for the colour which was coppery. Burrowing idly with his fingers he found something friable like dry soil, but very little of it, for almost at once he came upon a base of tough interlocked fibres. Then he rolled round on his back, and in doing so discovered the extreme resilience of the surface on which he lay. It was something much more than the pliancy of the heather-like vegetation, and felt more as if the whole floating island beneath that vegetation were a kind of mattress. He turned and looked ‘inland’ – if that is the right word – and for one instant what he saw looked very like a country. He was looking up a long lonely valley with a copper-coloured floor bordered on each side by gentle slopes clothed in a kind of many-coloured forest. But even as he took this in, it became a long copper-coloured ridge with the forest sloping down on each side of it. Of course he ought to have been prepared for this, but he says that it gave him an almost sickening shock. The thing had looked, in that first glance, so like a real country that he had forgotten it was floating – an island if you like, with hills and valleys, but hills and valleys which changed places every minute so that only a cinematograph could make a contour map of it.”

It’s a great pity that Venus is nothing like that at all.


Lewis wrote Perelandra while a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Much of the rest of the book consists of conversations about theology and moral philosophy between Ransom, the scientist Weston (who first appeared in Out of the Silent Planet), and Tinidril, one of the two “people” on Venus. Tinidril corresponds to Eve in the Bible, so that we get a sort of alternate history of the “Temptation of Eve.” Weston is possessed by a “Force” that turns out to be Satan or a demon. As a former academic myself, it is interesting to see Lewis’s ascending hierarchy of potential moral failings:

“RANSOM: ‘Does that mean in plainer language that the things the Force wants you to do are what ordinary people call diabolical?’
WESTON: ‘My dear Ransom, I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level. The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality. The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism. When the leap has been made our “diabolism” as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage; but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers. …’
‘How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or to sell England to the Germans?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?’
‘Yes.’
‘God help you!’ said Ransom.”

The chart below shows a chapter-by-chapter frequency analysis of various names and words in the book (some obvious synonyms were also used in counting words, and characters mentioned but not appearing are included). There is also a chapter-by-chapter polarity (sentiment) analysis at the bottom of the chart.

When one considers the theological subject matter, the conflict with the Un-man, and the underground scenes towards the end, the novel is a little reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, but the final chapters are far more like the Paradiso, and (in a letter) Lewis himself tells us that some of the conversations between Ransom and Tinidril draw on Matilda in the Purgatorio. Aspects of the conflict between Ransom and Weston recall the interaction between Frodo and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, while other aspects of Perelandra are like visiting the Elves. It is not a simple book.

Goodreads rates the novel as the best of Lewis’s trilogy, giving it 3.99 out of 5. I’m giving it five stars, but readers not interested in theology or moral philosophy would no doubt rate it lower.

5 stars
Perelandra by C. S. Lewis: 5 stars

Out of the Silent Planet: a book review

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Since Mars is on my mind right now…


Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C. S. Lewis (1996 cover by Kinuko Craft)

C. S. Lewis is famous for the Narnia novels, but more than a decade before they were written, he published Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis was to write two sequels (I have blogged about the last volume, That Hideous Strength). However, Out of the Silent Planet is essentially science fiction, while the sequels are better described as fantasy.

Considered as a work of science fiction, Out of the Silent Planet was a pioneering novel. It followed (and was influenced by) novels by H. G. Wells, David Lindsay, and Olaf Stapledon, but preceded the work of Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, and other British science fiction authors of the “Golden Age.” Lewis’s novel was one of the first to sound a cautious note about human colonisation of other planets. In his 1958 essay “Religion and Rocketry,” Lewis describes the rather sad results that human colonisation could have: “We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space.”

Lewis’s word hnau (sentient being) was borrowed by James Blish in his alien-contact novel A Case of Conscience. In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis brings colonisation to a halt after three deaths; Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Word for World Is Forest is one of many where exploitative colonisation runs its course. Several ideas in the 2009 film Avatar can be traced back to classic novels that were, in turn, ultimately inspired by Lewis.

In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis introduces not one, but four, sentient species living in harmony with each other: the hrossa (farmers and poets), the séroni (scientists and philosophers), the pfifltriggi (artists, miners, and engineers), and the eldila (angels, essentially).

The scientist Weston actually recommends exterminating the inhabitants of the planet to make room for humans, claiming “Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons and beehive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization – with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is rapidly annihilating space and time. Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. Life … is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amœba to man and from man to civilization.” (this was an idea seriously suggested in the 1920s and 1930s, but one which was perhaps seen for what it was after World War II). The businessman Dick Devine simply wants to exploit the inhabitants for profit. Only the hero, Elwin Ransom, is interested in them for who they are.


Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet while a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

The science in Out of the Silent Planet is surprisingly good, considering that Lewis’s area of expertise was English literature. No doubt Lewis ran his ideas past the scientists at Magdalen College. There are some clangers in Lewis’s discussion of gravity onboard the spacecraft, and he no doubt knew that the theory of Martian canals was obsolete (although Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury were still using the idea of canals in the 1940s and 1950s). Lewis does an excellent job of explaining the impact of low gravity on Martian life, of pointing out that space is not “dark and cold,” and of describing the need for oxygen on the Martian surface.

“He learned from the sorn that he was right in thinking they were near the limits of the breathable. Already on the mountain fringe that borders the harandra and walls the handramit, or in the narrow depression along which their road led them, the air is of Himalayan rarity, ill breathing for a hross, and a few hundred feet higher, on the harandra proper, the true surface of the planet, it admits no life.”

Bringing in a specialist linguist (Elwin Ransom) to decipher the Martian language is a neat trick (and one repeated in Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade). Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien may have been an inspiration for this character.


Lewis’s naming of the planets. Out of the Silent Planet is set on Malacandra (Mars).

Lewis’s special interest was Mediaeval and Renaissance literature. In Out of the Silent Planet he is taking the cosmology of Dante’s great trilogy (see my discussion of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) and putting it through a Copernican Revolution, while retaining the Christian worldview. Naïve correspondences with Dante should be resisted, however, since Lewis was not originally intending to write a trilogy. If one absolutely must draw links, Out of the Silent Planet would probably correspond to the Purgatorio, with its emphasis on permissible vs wrongful desires.

Goodreads rates this ground-breaking novel 3.92. I’m giving it four and a half stars.

4.5 stars
Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis: 4½ stars

Fairy tale retellings

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Little Red Riding Hood, as depicted by Gustave Doré (1883)

A few years ago, I blogged about fairy tales. “About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale,” C.S. Lewis wrote in 1952, and Richard Dawkins had done exactly that.

Fairy tales are stories that have stood the test of time, and that means they have power. That power can be harnessed to teach science to children, but I don’t want to talk about that today; I want to talk about fairy tale retellings, which have become popular again in recent years.

It seems that Einstein did not say “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales” – but fairy tales do develop the imagination and speak to the human heart. And retellings keep fairy tales fresh.

Fairy tales are generally classified as fantasy, and most retold fairy tales fall within that genre too. Among my favourites are the dream-like novels of Patricia A. McKillip, including In the Forests of Serre (2003), which incorporates Slavic tales of Baba Yaga and the Firebird. In fact, pretty much everything that Patricia A. McKillip has written is superb.


“This Mortal Mountain” (1967), a novelette by Roger_Zelazny, collected in The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1971) and This Mortal Mountain (2009)

Fairy tales can be retold as science fiction too. After all, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In “This Mortal Mountain” (1967), Roger Zelazny mashes together Sleeping Beauty (or “Doornroosje” as I first learned to call it) with Dante’s Purgatorio, in a story of mountain-climbing on a distant planet: “‘A forty-mile-high mountain,’ I finally said, ‘is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw into orbit.’ … I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them upward once more again, until all color drained away, until the silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight, until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had failed.”

The spell described in this novelette is purely technological, but yet the story reduces me to tears every time I read it: “The planes of her pale, high cheeks, wide forehead, small chin corresponded in an unsettling fashion with certain simple theorems which comprise the geometry of my heart.”

The Lunar Chronicles, which I have not read, are a series of young adult science fiction fairy tale retellings, so the science fiction spin still exists.

Many fairy tales were originally intended to be scary. The terror of walking through a wolf-infested forest armed with, at most, a knife for protection is something that is difficult to imagine today, when Canis lupus is so much less common in the wild than it used to be. Deliberately swimming in shark-infested waters is perhaps the closest modern equivalent. Added to the wolves, bears, trolls, and giants, fairy tales also frequently have supernatural threats. In Faerie Tale (1988), Raymond E. Feist retells some Irish mythology as the straight horror it was perhaps once meant to be.

Fairy tales can also be retold with great success as Westerns. As with science fiction retellings, the frontier elements of danger and of the unknown help to set the scene. A particularly good example is The Mountain of the Wolf (2016), in which Elisabeth Grace Foley retells Little Red Riding Hood (or “Roodkapje” as I first learned to call it), but with a believable motivation for Red Riding Hood’s presence in the danger zone (I grew up with a Dutch children’s game that acted out the story; Red Riding Hood’s motivation in the original tale always struck me as confused).

Finally, fairy tales can be twisted. The outcome may be altered; the hero may become the villain; the beautiful dragon may be rescued from a ravening princess. This can become very dark, bordering on horror, or it may be light comic fantasy. And amusing recent example of the latter is The Reluctant Godfather (2017), a retelling of Cinderella by Allison Tebo in which the fairy godmother is (a) male and (b) totally uninterested in helping Cinderella out. In the movie world, Hoodwinked! is a well-known example of the twisted fairy tale in its comic form.

So there you have it. How do you take your fairy tales: black, or with cream and sugar?

Dune by Frank Herbert: a book review

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Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)

I recently re-read the classic 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert. This is Frank Herbert’s best book, and one of the best science fiction novels ever written. It won the Hugo Award in 1966 (jointly with Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal) and won the inaugural Nebula Award. It became a quite terrible 1984 film and a somewhat better miniseries.

Parts of the novel are reminiscent of the work of Cordwainer Smith, notably the idea of a desert planet producing spice, and the idea that navigating a faster-than-light ship requires a guild of unusual navigators who can see into the future. However, most of the novel was so original that it became a huge hit when it first appeared. Themes that are particularly notable are those of planetary ecology, intergalactic politics, and unusual human skills.

I have always been moved by Herbert’s idea of a symbolic ecological language that can “arm the mind to manipulate an entire landscape” (Appendix 1), and the idea of making ecological literacy a key part of education:

“At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs – circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.
Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.
‘Tree,’ the children chanted. ‘Tree, grass, dune, wind, mountain, hill, fire, lightning, rock, rocks, dust, sand, heat, shelter, heat, full, winter, cold, empty, erosion, summer, cavern, day, tension, moon, night, caprock, sandtide, slope, planting, binder. …’” (Chapter 22)

The unusual ecology of the desert planet Arrakis encourages us, of course, to think more deeply about our own planet (and Arrakis was apparently inspired by the Oregon Dunes here on Earth).

Also fascinating is the idea that the human race has turned away from computers and the Internet, and gone back to training human minds to remember, calculate, and think:

“‘Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.’
‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ Paul quoted. […]
‘The Great Revolt took away a crutch,’ she said. ‘It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.’” (Chapter 1)

The most obvious theme, and the source of the novel’s action, is the galaxy-wide intrigue between the noble House Corrino, House Atreides, and House Harkonnen; the resulting warfare between them; and the resistance of the desert Fremen to occupation (inspired by Lawrence of Arabia):

“Paul took two deep breaths. ‘She said a thing.’ He closed his eyes, calling up the words, and when he spoke his voice unconsciously took on some of the old woman’s tone: ‘ “You, Paul Atreides, descendant of kings, son of a Duke, you must learn to rule. It’s something none of your ancestors learned”.’ Paul opened his eyes, said: ‘That made me angry and I said my father rules an entire planet. And she said, “He’s losing it.” And I said my father was getting a richer planet. And she said. “He’ll lose that one, too.” And I wanted to run and warn my father, but she said he’d already been warned – by you, by Mother, by many people.’” (Chapter 2)

Goodreads rates this classic science fiction novel 4.2. I’m giving it 4½ stars (but be aware that the sequels are not nearly as good).


Dune by Frank Herbert: 4½ stars

Skylark DuQuesne by E. E. Smith: a book review

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Skylark DuQuesne by E. E. “Doc” Smith (serialised 1965)

I recently re-read E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark DuQuesne, the final story of Smith’s Skylark series. Smith, of course, is famous for the Lensman series, which is a bit annoying in places, but which is still full of all kinds of interesting ideas. This book is another matter. It’s just bad. Now poor writing may forgivable in “space opera,” and age may play a factor here too – the novel was serialised beginning in June 1965, when Smith was aged 75, and was published as a book in 1966 (Smith died during the serialisation). This novel has so many flaws, in fact, that I can only mention some of them.

To begin with, the sexual titillation for teenage boys is just over the top. Is there any reason why the characters need to be naked quite so often? Or for one of them to be a stripper? It’s a trifle creepy, to be frank.

The mathematics depicted in the book is also disappointing: “‘Hold it!’ Seaton snapped, half an hour later. ‘Back up – there! This integral here. Limits zero to pi over two. You’re limiting the thing to a large but definitely limited volume of your generalized N-dimensional space. I think it should be between zero and infinity—and while we’re at it let’s scrap half of the third determinant in that no-space-no-time complex. Let’s see what happens if we substitute the gamma function here and the chi there and the xi there and the omicron down there in the corner.’” (Chapter 24: DuQuesne and Sleemet)

Smith is describing simple high-school calculus (integrating a function on a single real variable). Even by the standards of the time (never mind the future!) there was a lot more mathematics out there. Robert Heinlein had no trouble getting that fact across in 1952 in The Rolling Stones / Space Family Stone: “Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it into his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of the fields of mathematics invented thus far by the human mind. ‘Let’s see you find your way around that page.’ The twins blinked at it. In the upper left-hand corner of the chart they spotted the names of subjects they had studied; the rest of the array was unknown territory; in most cases they did not even recognize the names of the subjects.” (Chapter IV: Aspects of Domestic Engineering).

And hinting at new, future, mathematics is quite possible too. Isaac Asimov did it in 1942 in the first part of Foundation: “‘Good. Add to this the known probability of Imperial assassination, viceregal revolt, the contemporary recurrence of periods of economic depression, the declining rate of planetary explorations, the…’ He proceeded. As each item was mentioned, new symbols sprang to life at his touch, and melted into the basic function which expanded and changed. Gaal stopped him only once. ‘I don’t see the validity of that set-transformation.’ Seldon repeated it more slowly. Gaal said, ‘”But that is done by way of a forbidden sociooperation.’ ‘Good. You are quick, but not yet quick enough. It is not forbidden in this connection. Let me do it by expansions.’ The procedure was much longer and at its end, Gaal said, humbly, ‘Yes, I see now.’” (Chapter 4)

In contrast, Smith’s novel seems to have the goal of making his teenage readers feel good about what they know, rather than encouraging them to grow (and that applies to both intellectual and moral growth).


A PDP-8 computer of 1965

A related problem (common to Smith’s novels, and indeed to much early science fiction) is the failure to imagine how computers might be used. The novel assumes powerful computers (“brains”) which can both sense and influence the physical world. Yet manual information processing is still the order of the day: “Tammon was poring over a computed graph, measuring its various characteristics with vernier calipers, a filar microscope, and an integrating planimeter, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging hand in hand into his laboratory” (Chapter 9: Among the Jelmi)

Finally, the antagonist Marc DuQuesne (the name is a Genesis 4:15 reference, since the surname is pronounced duːˈkeɪn) is a rather unpleasant kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, and the protagonist (Richard Seaton) is not much better. Julian May, in her excellent Saga of Pliocene Exile (and even better Galactic Milieu Series) apparently based her character Marc Remillard in part on Smith’s Marc DuQuesne. But Marc Remillard repents of his crimes, and atones for them, and is actually interesting to read about. Smith’s novel finishes with DuQuesne as arrogant, as unrepentant, and as banal as ever.

Goodreads rates Smith’s novel 3.8, and some old-school science fiction fans still seem to enjoy it. It was even nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, back in 1966, although it can hardly be compared to the other nominees – Dune and This Immortal (tied winners), The Squares of the City, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which was re-nominated, and won, in 1967). I give Smith’s novel just one star – but if you are nevertheless intrigued, it is now public domain in Canada and is online there.

*
Skylark DuQuesne by E. E. “Doc” Smith: 1 star

In the Wet by Nevil Shute: a book review

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In the Wet by Nevil Shute (1953)

I recently re-read the novel In the Wet by Nevil Shute. Like An Old Captivity, reincarnation is a key part of the storyline. The novel is set partly in the year in which it was written (1953, which was the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II) but mostly 30 years in the future (1983). The book is thus rather dated, with the “future” now 37 years in the past. There is also language that would be unacceptable today (“n—-r,” “b–ng,” and “g-n”) and, by modern standards, the novel is both fanatically monarchist and extremely right-wing.

The Hero

One of the things that makes the novel interesting is that the hero, David Anderson, is a quarter Aboriginal (the book expresses an optimistic view of Australian race relations). David is from Cape York. His maternal grandmother is of the Kaantju people, and his father is a white stockman. Born literally in a ditch, David grows up on a cattle station, learning to ride a horse at age 3 or 4, and eventually joins the Royal Australian Air Force. He becomes a pilot in some hypothetical 1970s war (note that the First Indochina War and the Malayan Emergency were both ongoing when the novel was written). After that David becomes a test pilot, rising to the rank of Wing Commander and earning the Air Force Cross. The novel focuses on his transfer to the Queen’s Wing, flying royalty in two aircraft donated by the Australian and Canadian people (while also dealing with some complex politics and falling in love).


The hero in a contemporary Australian Women’s Weekly serial of the novel

The Aircraft

Nevil Shute was an aircraft designer, and the hypothetical fast long-range private jet in this book seems to be based on a planned (but never built) civilian version of the Avro Vulcan bomber. Nevil Shute seems to me to have underestimated progress in the aircraft industry, however, with his reported speed of 500 knots (930 km/h) matched by the much larger Boeing 747, although matching the range of 8000 nautical miles (15,000 km) had to wait for the Boeing 747-400ER of 2000.


The Avro Vulcan bomber

The Society

Nevil Shute’s social prediction is even worse. A visitor to Australia, he underestimates the left-wing tendency in Australian politics, and overestimates the monarchist tendency. He postulates a large drop in the British population (with all kinds of economic consequences), and large rises in the Australian and Canadian populations (see dotted lines in the chart below). Immigration to Australia was, in fact, less than he expected, and much of it was to come from Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Malta, the former Yugoslavia, and (eventually) Vietnam. The UK, on the other hand, was to see substantial immigration from India and Pakistan.

On the whole, I would call this novel a well-written historical curiosity. As an old Danish proverb has it, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. Goodreads rates the book 3.86, which is similar to my rating.


In the Wet by Nevil Shute: 3½ stars
(subtract 2 if you voted for Australia to become a republic)