Category: Books

What I’m Reading: “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record” (Repost)

Author’s Note: The Department of Defense released some more really cool ufo videos yesterday. So, I thought it would be a good time to re-post a review I wrote some years ago of a great book on the subject. Enjoy…!!!

UFOs

From 1989 to 1992 I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. This was around the same time that Fife Symington was elected governor of that fine state. I don’t remember having any opinion of Symington at the time, except that he seemed a man very much in the mold of Arizona politicians: a conservative, folksy cowboy.

So it was probably not that big of a surprise when, six years later, Symington handled an unusual political crisis in what many saw as a callous, flippant way. The crisis in question was a UFO—literally, an unidentified flying object—that was spotted by hundreds of people in the Phoenix area on the night of March 13th, 1997. The incident, which has since become known as The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident, resulted in dozens of 911 calls and hundreds of letters being written to the governor. Eventually, Symington was forced to hold a press conference about the event, in which he essentially laughed-off the whole affair. (One of his aides came to conference dressed as a green alien. Hilarity ensued.)

This is just one of many stories which writer Leslie Kean has recounted in her fascinating book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Kean, who has become a favorite bête noire of scientists and UFO debunkers, has been writing about the UFO phenomenon for many years.  In this book, she describes many of the more famous incidents in a sober, agnostic tone that I found completely engrossing. In fact, after reading Kean’s meticulously documented and detailed narrative, I decided that one of two things must be true:

  1. The book is an extremely clever work of fiction masquerading as journalism or…
  2. UFOs are a genuine mystery, one which has been experienced by many people for a very long time.
Leslie_Kean
Leslie Kean

Yeah, I know. Any rational skeptic would point out a third, more obvious possibility. Namely, that Kean is just a very silly woman who is misinterpreting the testimony of many other silly people who think they have seen something strange—odd lights in the sky which are almost certainly a natural phenomenon, probably the planet Venus. (Venus seems to be the go-to scapegoat put forth by many of these debunkers.)

But Kean has crammed her book with so many testimonials from so many apparently rational, non-silly people that I just can’t buy this argument. (I mean, have you ever mistaken Venus for a UFO?)

Most startling among these testimonials was that by none other than Symington himself. Incredibly, despite his ridicule of the sightings in 1997, Symington eventually admitted that he had seen the UFO. To his credit, he writes a chapter about this in Kean’s book, beginning with this simple, explosive statement:

Between 8:00 and 8:30 on the evening of March 13th, during my second term as Governor of Arizona, I witnessed something that defied logic and challenged my reality: a massive, delta-shaped craft silently navigating over the Squaw Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

Symington goes on to explain that the sighting were so widespread that he felt compelled to “dampen any incipient panic” on the part of his constituents, hence the infamous press conference in which he basically made the whole matter into a joke.

Arizona Governor Fife Symington
Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington

Which leads me to another aspect of Kean’s book that I found totally fascinating: the idea that so-called “UFO coverups,” which are the bread-and-butter of The X-Files and so many other science fiction stories, might be nothing more than an institutional form of denial.

One is reminded of the late Soviet Union, in which prostitution was officially declared to no longer exist, which meant that women who were caught engaging in that trade had be arrested for some other crime, such as loitering. The Party Line is a powerful motivator, psychologically speaking, and it might also be at the root of the self-censorship that high officials like Symington (Jimmy Carter is another famous example) imposed on themselves.

In fact, Kean suggests that such a choice might actually be a complex psychological defense mechanism, a way of dealing with the anxiety which might otherwise result from an actual admission that one has perceived a genuine mystical experience.  This idea was explicated in detail by two political scientists, Alexander Wendt and Robert Duval, in their 2008 academic paper, “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In this paper, they make the case that mere possibility that extraterrestrials might exist represents a such a mind-blowing idea that it cannot be entertained or harbored, not even secretly.  Such a discovery, after all, would completely undermine the legitimacy of every national governments on earth, whose compact with the citizenry is based on the premise that human beings are alone in the universe and must be final arbiters of their own destiny.

Phoenix_Lights

It’s a very clever theory, and typical of the kind of intelligent discourse that pervades Kean’s book. As she herself states early on, 95% of all UFO sighting are simple cases of mistaken identity—aircraft, balloons, flares, hoaxes and (yes) Venus. But the other 5% remain a mystery. Nothing more or less; just a mystery.

So what’s the big deal? Can’t we still have mysteries without getting all bent out-of-shape? Apparently, not.

The problem, as Kean explains it, is that…

…[t]he term “UFO” has been misused and become so much a part of the popular culture that its original (and accurate) definition has been completely lost. Almost everyone equates the term “UFO” with extraterrestrial spacecraft, and thus, in a perverse twist of meaning, the acronym has been transformed to mean something identified instead of something unidentified.

When I first read this passage, I was impressed by Ms. Kean’s obviously lucid and graceful explanation of this fascinating paradox. But I could also detect a faint whiff of disingenuousness. After all, if strange triangular objects really are zipping around our skies at tremendous speeds, thumbing their noses at our own pathetic avionic abilities, what other explanation comes to mind?

Even so, I found buying Kean’s essential arguments: that UFOs really constitute some kind of unsolved atmospheric events, that the people who see them are not crazy, and that they might indicate some world-changing scientific discovery (yes, aliens). If she’s a nut, then I’m a nut too.

You be the judge…

What I’m (Re-)Reading: “The Emperor’s New Mind”

It was a late-summer day in 1990. I was teaching two sections of English Composition 101 at the University of Arizona, and it was the first day of the semester. My second class was in the afternoon, three o’clock. Being a very young Teaching Assistant, I had dressed in my best slacks, dress-shirt, tie, and loafers in a rather comical effort to earn my students’ respect (or, at least, their forbearance). My outfit was also completely inappropriate to the 100-degree-plus temperatures outside, which I felt even more than usual because my classroom for that section was across campus, so I had to schlep it from the dark, air-conditioned office that I shared with a two-dozen other T.A.’s in the basement of the Modern Languages building.

The first class went well. I liked the students, and they seemed to like me. When class was over, I gathered my things into my backpack and headed out. The moment I stepped outside, though, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. A late summer rainstorm—monsoons, as they are called out there—had struck. I went back into the building and waited until the rain finally stopped. Unfortunately, Tucson, like every other desert city, is prone to flooding, and I knew the streets and even the sidewalks would be swamped for hours. Not wanting to wait that long, I took off my jacket and put it in my backpack. I did the same with my socks and shoes, then rolled up the cuffs on my slacks. Thus barefoot, I ventured out, sloshing my way across campus and then out into the little urban neighborhood where I had parked my car. 

Roger Penrose

I didn’t mind, in part because I had something to read, a paperback copy of Roger Penrose’s new book The Emperor’s New Mind. Yes, it’s one of those rare books that, even in chapter one, become so engrossing that one will read while walking through the streets after a monsoon, barely noticing the cold water that’s up to your ankles. I held it in front of me as I walked the familiar route, absorbed in the slow, methodical, yet miraculous argument that Penrose was weaving, which is simple yet dumbfounding: There is something non-mechanical (that is, non-algorithmic) about consciousness. 

That is, our brains are not merely “machines made of meat,” to paraphrase the words of AI pioneer Marvin Minski. Minksi is, of course, a founding proponent of the “Hard-AI” theory of computer science, which states that the brain is really just a very complicated computer, which, though made of biological parts, is nonetheless executing an algorithm. In the future—the theory goes—when digital computers become sophisticated enough to execute this mysterious algorithm, they will become “conscious,” too. Just like us. At this point in our technological evolution (the vaunted Singularity), machine consciousness and human consciousness will blur together, such that human beings might wish to “upload” their consciousness (i.e., all their thoughts, memories, desires, etc.) to a computer as digital data, and thus achieve immortality in cyberspace.

It’s an idea that would have seemed absurd—if not incomprehensible—a hundred years ago, but which has been gaining traction since the 1960s. Now, in the age of Generative AI—whose power really does seem miraculous, at time—the notion seems almost a given. A fait accompli. 

Yet, if you’re like me, you’ve thought to yourself: This is all bullshit. The human mind is not a computer; and computers—as we now understand them—will never be conscious. To suggest otherwise is a category error. 

However, you’ve probably kept this thought to yourself (deep inside your consciousness, as it were, heh heh) for fear of being ridiculed by the tech-bros and computer nerds in your office or classroom or wherever. Guys who not only completely subscribe to the Hard-AI theory, they read (and sometimes write) sci-fi novels about it. They not only believe in the Singularity; they look forward to it! 

Alan Turing

Not me. Whenever I hear one of these bros blathering on about Skynet becoming self-aware or uploading their consciousness to a computer, I just say, “Roger Penrose says it’s impossible.” At which point the bro in question will usually give me a befuddled look, as if to say, Who the fuck is Roger Penrose? Which is, of course, a kind of tragedy in and of itself. I usually answer: “Roger Penrose was Stephen Hawking’s partner in theoretical physics.” That shuts the bro up for a bit. After all, anyone smart enough to hang with Stephen Hawking is surely a force to be reckoned with. You can’t as easily dismiss a theoretical physicist of that stature, even when he is opining on a subject—computers—that might seem a bit outside his field. 

In fact, thinking about thinking is right up Penrose’s alley, so to speak. He’s not just a theoretical physicist; he’s a mathematical theoretical physicist, which means that he’s is a world-class mathematician whose creations are designed to help us understand cosmology, particle theory, etc. He shared the Wolf Prize in Physics with Stephen Hawking for their work on the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and he is the discoverer of the first known aperiodic tile, the now-famous Penrose Tiling. (Many other aperiodic tiles have been discovered since, at least one of which I have posted about.) His other accomplishments are too numerous to mention.

So, Penrose brings a considerable amount of street cred when he finally makes his main assertion in the book—namely, that there is some as-yet unknown quality about consciousness that computers do not possess, and probably never will. He writes, “…there must be something essentially non-algorithmic about consciousness.” He further writes,

When I assert my own belief that true intelligence requires consciousness, I am implicitly suggesting (since I do not believe the strong-AI contention that the mere enaction of an algorithm would evoke consciousness) that intelligence cannot be properly simulated by algorithmic means, i.e. by a computer, in the sense that we use that term today.

He doesn’t fully come out and say until last few chapters of this (very long) treatise. The bulk of the book is dedicated to the evidence he has for his belief, beginning with discussion of Turing Machines. There are a lot of great videos about Turing Machines on YouTube, but suffice to say that it is a very simple machine imagined by Alan Turing (yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie) in the 1930s. It consists solely of a reading head through which a long—infinitely long, if need be—magnetic tape is run back and forth. A mechanism inside the head is capable of a few simple operations: it can move the tape forward/backward X places; it can read a symbol off the tape in the current position; it can write a symbol to the current position; and it can store the last symbol read in a single variable (called a “state” by Turing). 

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. A Turing Machine is basically an abstract, idealized version of a modern, programmable computer. If you replace the magnetic tape with a hard drive, you essentially have a modern computer—albeit one with only 1 byte of RAM (or thereabouts) and a very simple CPU. Even so, with a sufficient amount of tape, a Turing Machine could run any computer program in existence, even those used currently by AI networks. (It would, of course, do so very, very slowly.)

Kurt Gödel

With this in mind, Turing set out to determine whether one could, eventually, make a Turing Machine that could solve any math problem. That is, could the science of mathematics ever become so advanced, so perfect, so complete, that one could use it to write an algorithm (which would be encoded on the tape) that could decide if any mathematical statement (also encoded on the tape) were true or false. 

If so, then one would never need another, more advanced calculator. It would be a universal computational device.

Sadly (or, rather, happily, in my opinion), Turing was able to prove definitively that this was not possible. One can never—not in a million years—devise an algorithm so smart it can decide the truth or falsity of any math problem. The logic he used to prove this fact is encapsulated in a scenario now called the Halting problem (on which there is at least one excellent video on Youtube here). 

Turing’s proof was the final nail in the coffin of David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, which posed the question of whether it was possible to make a perfect, complete mathematical algorithm. Two-thirds of the question had already been solved (in the negative) by Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, which rocked the worlds of math and logic in 1931. Penrose also delves into these theorems at great length, demonstrating how Gödel proved that no set of axioms can prove the truth or falsity of any mathematical statement. In other words, no single set of statements (no algorithm), no matter how large or sophisticated, will ever be able to solve every math problem. 

Penrose’s main point, however, goes beyond even this revelation. He asserts that Gödel’s theorems, by proving that no single algorithm can solve any problem, could not, themselves, be the product of any algorithm system! In other words, Gödel was not, himself, a computer running some incredibly elaborate, highly-evolved “consciousness algorithm.” Rather, Mr. Gödel, like all conscious beings, was…something else. Penrose writes,

Let us recall the arguments given in Chapter 4 establishing Gödel’s theorem and its relation to computability. It was shown there that whatever (sufficiently extensive) algorithm a mathematician might use to establish mathematical truth – or, what amounts to the same thing,1 whatever formal system he* might adopt as providing his criterion of truth – there will always be mathematical propositions, such as the explicit Gödel proposition Pk (k) of the system…, that his algorithm cannot provide an answer for. If the workings of the mathematician’s mind are entirely algorithmic, then the algorithm (or formal system) that he actually uses to form his judgements is not capable of dealing with the proposition Pk (k) constructed from his personal algorithm. Nevertheless, we can (in principle) see that Pk(k) is actually true! This would seem to provide him with a contradiction, since he ought to be able to see that also. Perhaps this indicates that the mathematician was not using an algorithm at all!

But if Gödel’s brain isn’t just a computer, what is it? Where does the magic of consciousness come from?

Well, nobody knows—not even Penrose himself, as he readily admits. Unsurprisingly, he does not reach for some mystical, supernatural answer (as I, ultimately, do). Rather, he argues—very convincingly—that consciousness might have some relationship to quantum mechanics. That is, there might well be some quantum mechanical aspect to minds, both human and animal.

This is not to say, of course, that quantum mechanics (QM) necessarily causes consciousness. Rather, Penrose merely suggests that there is some deep relationship between QM and consciousness. It’s a pretty cool idea, which he spends the last fifth of the book elaborating. 

When the book came out, critics immediately howled that Penrose is not a neurologist, nor an expert on the human brain, and that no one has (yet) found a truly quantum mechanical action in the brain. Still, there is something incredibly seductive—even uplifting, I would say—to the idea there really is something “magic” about us, our experience of life, which is still inexplicable to science. Still defensible, that is, from the brutal, deterministic nihilism of the New Atheists and the hard-core scientific materialists.

At least, I think so. Check it out.

Shameless Plug: Spring Edition

Well, it’s been a long, long time since my last Shameless Plug (okay, it’s been six weeks), but my publisher, Crooked Lane Books, is running a sale on the Amazon Kindle edition of my novel, Twice the Trouble. It’s a one-day only sale on Friday, April 17.

If you like this site and want to support me, Ash, your humble author, please consider buying a copy. It’s just two bucks. Cheap!

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Fountains of Paradise”

I’m no expert on the subject, but when I think of The History of Science Fiction, I imagine it in three big chunks. First came the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s, when pulp magazines like Astounding and Amazing Stories became enormously popular. Second was the era during and after World War II, when the so-called “Big Three” superstar authors—Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Authur C. Clarke—emerged. Then came science fiction’s “New Wave,” when literary writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Ballard transformed the genre.

Over my reading lifetime, I have mostly explored this third era—the New Wave—mainly because, frankly, it’s the only one where you can find some genuinely great novels. But in middle school and high school, I read some of the post-WWII writers, too, especially Clarke. I read Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earthlight, and Rendezvous with Rama. I loved all of them, particularly Childhood’s End, which is probably his best book.

Clarke was, by far, my favorite of the Big Three, even though he was far from a great writer. (Heinlein was probably the best, from a stylistic sense, but I disliked his books for other reasons.) Almost invariably, Clarke’s characters fall into a two-dimensional, generic type—the stalwart (male) hero, the honorable scientist, the devoted wife, the curious child, etc. etc.—but he was such a good story teller that no one cared. Essentially, his books are like extended Astounding magazine short stories, beginning with a fascinating, nerdy premise and weaving a cerebral-yet-exciting adventure tale around it.

I read one of his later novels, The Fountains of Paradise, when I was in college and enjoyed it immensely. Set in the near-future, it focuses on a stalwart scientist-hero—a civil engineer, in this case, named Vannevar Morgan—who is determined to build the world’s first space elevator, a literal railway to the stars. He needs to build it somewhere on the earth’s equator and chooses a mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (a thinly veiled Sri Lanka, which was Clarke’s home for the latter half of his life). Naturally, he immediately faces challenges, beginning with the intractable head-monk of a Buddhist monastery that happens to be smack in the middle of the site Morgan has chosen. The rest of the story follows Morgan’s struggle to build the elevator. Technical problems abound, and several mini-crisis intrude on the elevator’s progress.

One element that The Fountains of Paradise stand-out from the rest of his novels is a clever narrative trick he pulls off. The 21st Century story Morgan is interwoven with a 5th Century tale of a local monarch, King Kalidasa, who tried to build a heaven-like palace on the exact same mountain top. The parallels between the two men are obvious but interesting—each is driven, almost to the point of madness, to see his dream come to reality. But while Kalidasa is a ruthless dictator who amputates the hands off his craftsmen after they finish their task (so they can never reproduce the work for another king), Morgan is a deeply moral, modern, scientific visionary whose goal is the betterment of humanity. He also cares about his workers. In the books final act, an accident occurs that requires Morgan to risk his own life to get oxygen to the workers who are stranded high-up on the elevator’s monofilament cable. It’s a great sequence. (I won’t spoil the ending, of course.)

I really like this cover (by veteran illustrator Terry Oakes) from the 1979 Del Rey edition. I like the juxtaposition of the monks in the foreground with the ghost of King Kalidasa hovering over the mountain (albeit in a high-tech reincarnation, wearing a pressure suit) and the space-elevator cable shooting up into the sky. It’s a crazy cover, in some ways, but it captures the clever dichotomy of the book.

What I’m Reading: “The Elementals”

Last year, I wrote a post about a fine non-fiction book called Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction. I enjoyed the book primarily for the way the author, Grady Hendrix, mixes his obvious love of old, pulpy horror novels with an enormous amount of mockery and snark. Basically, he makes fun of the trends that ran through horror fiction back in the day, as well their emphasis on over-the-top gore and hilariously silly plots. 

As I read the book, though, I noticed Hendrix mention one writer whom he does not mock: Michael McDowell. Rather, Hendrix uncharacteristically bestows a bit of praise on this particular novelist, which made me curious as to why I had never heard of the dude. 

As it turns out, most people haven’t heard of McDowell, even though he was a very respected paperback fiction writer (Stephen King called him one of the best) as well as a successful screenwriter (he wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare before Christmas, as well as a lot of TV shows). I, especially, should have heard of McDowell considering he was, like me, a Southern writer—from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, not far from where I spent my summers in Pass Christian, Mississippi. He was also a writer who tried to blend a literary sensibility with an appreciation of genre narrative, which is an achievement which I admire.

McDowell died in 1999, a latter casualty of the AIDS epidemic in America, just a few years before reliable HIV treatments came into common use. In the years since, his reputation seems to have grown, steadily if slowly, to the point where he is now considered a forgotten master. I was surprised to find an e-book edition of his most famous novel, The Elementals, on my local library’s Overdrive site, and I immediately checked it out and tore into it.

It’s definitely worth the read. Set in Alabama, it tells the story of a two wealthy, intermarried families: the Savages, with matriarch Marian and her adult son, Dauphin; and the McCrays, with matriarch Big Barbara and her adult children, Luker (who has a thirteen-year-old daughter, India) and Leigh (who is married to Dauphin Savage). At the start of the book, Marian has just died and the rest of the blended family is attending her funeral:

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama. The air conditioning in the small sanctuary sometimes covered the noise of traffic at the intersection outside, but occasionally it did not, and the strident honking of an automobile horn would sound above the organ music like a mutilated stop. The space was dim, damply cool, and stank of refrigerated flowers. Two dozen enormous and very expensive arrangements had been set in converging lines behind the altar. A massive blanket of silver roses lay draped across the light-blue casket, and there were petals scattered over the white satin interior. In the coffin was the body of a woman no more than fifty-five. Her features were squarish and set; the lines that ran from the corners of her mouth to her jaw were deep-plowed. Marian Savage had not been overtaken happily.

Even for a funeral, it’s a very dreary and ominous affair. Yet it gets worse when, at one pre-arranged moment, Dauphin rises and stabs a ritual knife into his dead mother’s chest. Yeah, it’s that kind of book. The fact that McDowell can pull it off and still maintain a high-level of physical and emotional realism—not to mention vivid, sharp writing, as in the passage above—is a testament to his mastery. 

The book gets even weirder after the funeral, when the family retreats to their ancestral vacation spot, a tiny barrier island called Beldame, taking with them their Black maid, the long-suffering (and very smart) Odessa. We soon learn that there are three houses on Beldame, yet the family occupies only two of them, leaving the third abandoned. (You can probably guess the reason why, but it has something to do with the house’s intermittent habit of…well…eating people.) 

Michael McDowell

As the sand-dunes slowly encroach and bury it, the empty house attracts the curiosity of the young and intrepid India McCray, who ventures inside and sees something impossible yet real. And terrifying. 

Of course, The Elementals isn’t just a generic ghost story, nor a generic Southern Gothic novel. The characters are vividly drawn, sympathetic, and believable. Their conversation is fraught with age-old tensions and resentments, yet it’s often very funny in a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way. And the characters of India and Odessa are especially well-realized. Linked by their intelligence and, as McDowell implies, some kind of psychic power reminiscent of The Shining, each comes off as a kind of hero in their battle against the evil hiding (rather obviously) in House #3.

The Elementals is a literary horror novel, meaning that it bridges the gap between genre story-telling and development of realistic characters. The book really comes to life (forgive the pun) in the chapters about India as well as of the adult male characters, Luker and Dauphin, both of whom struggle—in true Southern fashion—with the dark legacy of the past and especially surround their own family. Self-indulgent, smothering matriarchs like the recently deceased Marian are, in particular, a source of psychological revulsion. Indeed, they are central to the main theme of the novel, which I will not spoil here.

There is also a good amount of subtle criticism about the racial divide that existed at the time (and now) in the deep south. Odessa, the Black maid, is the only character who does any real work in the book, busy doing the cooking and cleaning for the affluent Whites, just as she has done (we are told) for thirty years. And, of course, Odessa is not only smarter than most of the family members (except, perhaps, for India) she is the only one who knows what the hell is going on in House #3, using her power of second-sight as well as (it is implied) a familial knowledge of voodoo. 

Yes, as many reviewers on Reddit have observed, Odessa is an instance of the Magical Negro Trope, of the sort that genre writers, both Southern and not, have abused for a century. This trope is, of course, a literary stereotype, and like any stereotype it can be harmful if taken too far and left unexamined. But if Odessa is a Magical Negro, she is a very world-weary and snarky example, with both courage and brains. I simply loved her character. Sue me. 

In fact, I loved the whole book, which feels a bit like a mash-up of Tennessee Williams and Stephen King. Check it out. It deserves some attention. Better late than never.

Today I Learned a Word: “Precariat”

I’ve been reading an excellent non-fiction book by Paul Fischer called The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. It’s very similar to another great book I read recently (and subsequently wrote a post about), Don’t Stop: Why We Still Love Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” in that both books document the history of struggling artists—film directors, in the former, and rock stars, in the latter—who hit the Big Time. Inevitably, they each also tell the story of a bohemian sub-culture of the 1970s, when people lived hand-to-mouth in the canyons of Southern California, occupying cheap, hardscrabble houses and doing menial jobs while they developed their artistic skills. They also did a lot of drugs (mostly cocaine, booze, and marijuana) while having lots of sex with multiple partners. Fischer’s book, in particular, tells the great story of aspiring actress Margo Kidder, whose rented, A-frame house was frequented by young film makers, actors, musicians, and other arty-types, all attracted by Kidder’s good-natured wit, excellent cooking, and general hospitality. And by her beauty, of course. As Fischer relates, Kidder once joked that if she had bothered to write a memoir of that halcyon time, she would’ve entitled it I Fucked Everybody.

Such artistic, bohemian scenes are as old as…well, 19th Century Paris, when the term “bohemianism” came into use. Apparently, it first referred to the Romani people of Paris, who lived a nomadic existence doing odd-jobs and performing various services (most legal, some not) for local people. In French, they were called bohémiens, because they were thought (mistakenly) to have migrated to France from the Kingdom of Bohemia. Bohemian soon came to describe anyone who, by choice, lived an unconventional life on the edges of society, doing as they pleased. Often, these were artists (painters, writers, musicians) who refused to pursue a normal career, but it also included the moneyed, free-spirited offspring of rich people, who went “slumming” with those same artists. 

As I was reading the Wikipedia page on bohemianism, I discovered that such bohemian subcultures are often examples of a precariat. Precariat (I learned) is a mashup of precarious and proletariat, the latter being Karl Marx’s term for the working class. (“Proles” as they are called in George Orwell’s 1984.) People in a precariat are usually just as poor but also lack even the job security of the traditional industrial class, going from low-paying job to low-paying job, with no guarantee of when they’ll land their next position (or be able to pay the rent). 

The term (I also learned) is particularly apt today, being often used to describe our modern world of Uber drivers, digital freelancers, and other non-traditional workers. As I read about all this, I thought of a book I posted about some years ago called Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! by Chris Carlston. Written at the dawn of the so-called gig economy, Carlston describes how, rather than dreading the precariousness of modern capitalism, some people have embraced it. By working temporary gigs, such people—whom Carlson calls Nowtopians—have managed to preserve the time and freedom to pursue their true passions like art, or education, or community service, or whatever. He writes:

What we see in the Nowtopian movement is not a fight for workers emancipation within the capitalist division of labor….  Instead we see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifurcated life that is imposed in the precarious marketplace.  They seek emancipation from being merely workers. To a growing minority of people, the endless treadmill of consumerism and overwork is something they are working to escape.  Thus, for many people time is more important than money.  Access to goods has been the major incentive for compliance with the dictatorship of the economy.  But in pockets here and there, the allure of hollow material wealth, and with it the discipline imposed by economic life, is breaking down.

Looking back on these words now, they seem a bit naïve. The longings of a utopian dream. They hardly seem describe our current gig economy, which, instead of new bohemian class, seems little more than a last-ditch means of survival for those who can not find good, decent-paying jobs (with benefits). As wealth and power become more concentrated in the hands of a few (usually male) oligarchs, fewer people have the freedom to do anything, no less pursue art. They’re too busy working, looking for jobs, looking for housing, or generally getting by.

In fact, rather than a utopia, our precariat seems more like the dystopia of which William Gibson foretold in his early, cyberpunk novels. Worlds in which most people on earth are underemployed, rootless, and in constant danger, while a tiny middle-class manages everything for an even tinier upper-class. The heroes of such novels are usually young, smart people who resist in the only way they can—by entering an underworld of artists, hackers, thieves, and gangsters who make their living off the rich.

Does this mean that we, as modern Americans, are headed for a world in which the precariat is, essentially, everyone? I think so, yeah. After all, isn’t that the fantasy of every oligarch—to rule over a vast sea of unpaid serfs with no autonomy to control their own lives? A limitless, self-perpetuating underclass, with no agency to defend themselves from the predatory impulses of the ultra-rich, impulses are, ultimately, sadistic in nature.

I hope not. We’ll see.

What I’m Reading: “Mona Lisa Overdrive”

The great sci-fi writer Clifford D. Simak was known for writing novels and short stories with off-beat main characters. Often, his protagonists were cynical, working-class stiffs (often with a drinking problem) who stuck to their own, private, moral code, often at great cost to themselves. One of Simak’s editors once groused that all of his stories were about “losers.”

“I like losers,” Simak replied.

I just read this quote the other day, and I immediately thought of William Gibson’s books—specifically, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I first read MLO back in the early 1990s, just a few years after its publication, and I thought it was great. I never really thought of reading it again, but for some reason—perhaps because I’ve been a bit down, of late—I recently checked-out the book and re-read it. And I’m really glad I did. One of the foundational works of the cyberpunk sub-genre (along with Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and other books), it still holds up, both as a work of speculative fiction as well as just a damned good, vividly imagined, human story. 

A lot of people heap praise on Gibson’s novel—and on the Cyberpunk genre in general—because of their ideas, the thematic questions they ask about how humanity can relate in an age of overwhelming, dehumanizing technology. And what are the brutalizing effects of the ever-increasing disparity between the high-tech haves and the lower-tech have nots? Et cetera et cetera. 

Myself, I like Gibson’s characters. Often, they are losers, of the sort Simak wrote about. Little people eking-out an existence on the fringes of society. MLO is no exception. The last of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer and Count Zero, it’s set on a near-ish future Earth where mega-corporations, trillionaires, and criminal cartels have replaced all governments, and most of humanity muddles along in a rat-race of late-stage capitalism. The plot is a complicated skein of four interlocking narratives, each centered on a different character: Mona, a teenaged prostitute; Kumiko, the tween-aged daughter of a Yakuza boss; Angie, a beautiful young star of virtual reality films (“simstims”); and Slick Henry, an artist who sculpts robots and suffers from government-inflicted memory loss. I find it interesting that, of these four characters, two are children (Mona is sixteen), one is addicted to drugs, and one is brain-damaged. Additionally, two of them (Mona and Slick Henry) are poor, while the other two “rich” characters (Angie and Kumiko) are virtual prisoners of their wealth and position, separated from any real friendships or human connection. 

Most notably, none of them have real families. Mona is an orphan; Kumiko’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and her father is an aloof cypher.

In short, all of Gibson’s view-point characters are underdogs, one way or another. The closest he has ever come to a real, kick-ass hero is in one of his best supporting characters, Molly Millions, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary who figures so prominently throughout the Sprawl trilogy (not to mention Gibson’s landmark short-story “Johnny Mneumonic”, which first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1981; yeah, I read it fresh off the newsstand). And even Molly is more of an anti-hero, selling her services to the highest bidder, yet always displaying a basic, inner decency and compassion.

It is Molly, in fact, who becomes the physical catalyst that eventually brings the four narrative threads of the plot together in the MLO’s final chapters. I don’t want to spoil it completely, but the story involves a plot to kidnap Angie (the simstim star, whom Mona strongly resembles; hint, hint) and prevent her from reuniting with her boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, whose body lies comatose in Slick Henry’s art studio while his mind is busy in cyberspace. Kumiko, too, finds herself caught up in this plot, if only tangentially.

Having just re-read the book for the first time in thirty-odd years, I find myself liking it even more now than I did back then. I am awestruck by how deft Gibson’s prose is (he is surely one of America’s most underrated writers), as well as how quickly the story sucks the reader in. Almost every pop-novel out there these days is written from multiple, shifting points-of-view, but very, very few manage to draw their individual characters so vividly, or keep the reader as invested in the plight of each. 

And, yeah, Gibson’s ideas are really, really cool. My favorite revelation in the book is when Slick Henry’s friend, Gentry, figures out that the L.F., the device attached to Bobby’s skull, is really an aleph, referencing the 1945 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. (If you read enough cyberpunk novels—or urban fantasy novels, for that matter—you’re going to run into Borges eventually.)

To sum up, Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of my favorite novels, sci-fi or otherwise. Check it out…