Stromata Blog

Another Year of Hugo Nominees

The list of Hugo nominees for 2008 has just appeared. Some of the choices of vox populi surprise, and a couple appall, me, which isn’t any different from years past.

At a recent con, I heard Mike Resnick bemoan the vast falling off of the readership of the print SF mags, which today have about a tenth of the circulation of 20 years ago. Even though he himself edits the on-line Jim Baen’s Universe, he urged the audience to subscribe to Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF. The nominee list shows one good reason why: Of the 15 short fiction candidates, 11 appeared in the print magazines (four only in anthologies, none on-line), and one of the novels (Rollback by Robert Sawyer) was serialized in Analog. They may be short of readers, but the old mags still print the best stuff.

I’ll reserve comments for later but do want to express my delight that Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community got a Best Related Book nomination. I can pretend that my review was responsible.

Time Travel! In Chicago!!

The Sun-Times, not at all the same paper since Conrad Black departed, buries the greatest scientific achievement of all time in its police blotter:

A man in his 40s who inhaled a powder that helps extinguish fires was hospitalized after a fire that police said was burning in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a North Side building early Wednesday.

The fire started about 1:20 a.m. in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a building in the 5000 block of North Western Avenue, according to a Lincoln District police sergeant.

Fire crews responded about 1:15 a.m. to a fire at 5037 N. Western Ave. where a man in his 40s inhaled a power substance that helps extinguish fires, according to Fire Media Affairs spokesman Richard Rosado. The man was taken in an unidentified condition to Weiss Memorial Hospital, according to Rosado. The man may have been trying to put the blaze out when he was injured, Rosado said.

Police Bomb & Arson Section Sgt. Joe Poland said the fire was under investigation.

A time the fire was extinguished was not known at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday.

I also wonder about the “powder” or “power substance” that extinguishes fires and leaves people “in an unidentified condition”. That could be an intrusion from the future – or just the latest street high. The authorities’ ignorance of when the fire was extinguished is presumably because it took (is taking? will take? will have taken?) place within a closed timelike loop.

(Thanx to Best of the Web Today (last item).)

A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival

Two years ago, Robert Ferrigno published Prayers for the Assassin, a novel set in a Moslem-dominated United States a few decades from now. To summarize the plot may be a thought crime in Canada, so, lest I be forbidden to attend next year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I’ll just say that the book was a political thriller whose hero, in true thriller fashion, battled a shadowy, globe girdling conspiracy, the full extent of which became evident only at the climax. Also in thriller fashion, the villain, temporarily thwarted, escaped to plot again in the sequel. That sequel, Sins of the Assassin, has just gone on sale. A third volume will, the author tells us, complete the story.

In Sins, the scene of the action moves from the Islamic Republic to the “Bible Belt”, the section of the former U.S.A., roughly coterminous with the “red” Southern states, that resisted the Moslem advance. As the nickname suggests, it is modeled on liberal shibboleths about Christian fundamentalism, though the model is subtly subversive of left-wing conventional wisdom. Individualistic hyper-piety can lead to many bad things, but it is a poor foundation for an effective theocracy.

The Bible Belt that we see through the eyes of Rakkim Epps, a Moslem “shadow warrior” assigned to penetrate the top secret project of a charismatic warlord, is weak, backward, fragmented, superstitious, corrupt and in thrall to foreign powers, yet it is also freer, more tolerant and more hopeful than its Islamic counterpart. This difference is not exactly an ostentatious theme. It is never emphasized, and the hero doesn’t notice it. The reader must observe and ponder for himself. If the author’s intention was propagandistic, it is propaganda of the only kind suitable for fiction, where we are shown a variation on our own world and must tease out the implications for ourselves.

Regardless of the background, the thriller is the foreground. I’m not a great afficionado of the genre, but, so far as I can judge, this is a first rate exemplar. The plot moves twistily and rapidly. The hero receives a little supernatural aid but none from sheer good luck. The characters, while not realistic, are interesting and multi-dimensional. Even the secondary ones have memorable touches, like the grotesque pride that an end-times cult leader takes in having once been a tenured university professor. When the hidden hand of the archvillain is at last disclosed, the form that it takes is characteristic but unexpected. The prose is clear and energetic, albeit more telegraphic than I like. (Did the publisher ration the word “and”?)

From what one might call the Alexandre Dumas perspective, Sins is, I think, more successful than Prayers. It isn’t quite perfect for two reasons. First, and less importantly, the Big Secret proves to be a macguffin. Maybe Mr. Ferrigno will surprise us, but I don’t see how it can be of any actual use to the parties that have so desperately sought it. (Also, unless he springs a second surprise, it is scientifically absurd.)

Second, as the middle volume of a trilogy, the novel doesn’t come to a real end. True, the plot lines are tied up, which is better than many middles do, but the villains are left in a position of strength, from which the world needs to be rescued. Rakkim’s mission has ended in, at best, a draw. Meanwhile, the secondary narrative thread concludes with an effective, though invisible, coup d’etat against the Islamic Republic’s moderate governing authorities. Prayers ended more satisfactorily. While it left room for a sequel, none was urgently demanded. Sins, by contrast, will be less than half a book until the next volume appears.

The upside is that volume three, if Mr. Ferrigno goes on as he has begun, will be worth waiting for.

Noted in Passing

■ I promised not to fill this blog with blather about my recent travels, and I won’t, but I was interested to see that David Frum, in the course of writing about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sums up my reaction to Paris:

It is very weird to think that the Paris of 1831 [the year of Hunchback’s publication] looked much more like Paris of 1482 – the year in which the novel is set – than the Paris of today.

There was of course no Eiffel Tower, no Grand Palais, no Pont Alexander III. There were no Belle Epoque apartment houses, no Metro signs, no Opera, no Haussman boulevards. The Arc de Triomphe was begun - but abandoned unfinished.

Ile de la Cite was still a jumble of ancient houses and shops. The area around the Beaubourg, the old marketplace, was still one of the most densely inhabited in the city. Montmartre was a semi-rustic village, covered with vineyards and windmills. The Tuileries marked the westward end of the built-up city, with the Champs Elysees a long suburban promenade spotted here and there by palaces new and old.

The city would change more in the next 175 years than it had in the previous 350. . . .

It’s a very striking thought that a modern tourist can see much, much, much more of the scenes and surroundings of the American Revolution than of the French. The Bastille: gone. What was the National Assembly: gone. The Jacobins and the Cordeliers: gone. The prison in which Louis XVI was held: gone. The Champs de Mars: changed beyond all recognition.

You can stand where Patrick Henry gave his oration, visit old North Church, tour the hall in which the Constitution was written, and of course see the homes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and so many others. Let nobody talk of the European sense of history and American neglect!

■ I’m reminded, by his linking to one of my posts, that I ought to call attention to Nicholas Whyte’s series of reviews of works that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula. He is currently up to number 28 (Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag”) and has about 30 to go. It’s a worthwhile project, illustrating the breadth and vagaries of taste within the SF community, and Nicholas’ comments are readable and perceptive. In fact, he deserves a Best Fan Writer nomination for them.

As a completely separate interest, fantastical in its own way, Nicholas maintains a site devoted to election results in Northern Ireland from 1885 to the present.

■ Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story about a new twist in Koranic studies [link may work only for subscribers].

Before World War II, German scholars compiled a huge photographic record of early manuscripts of Islam’s sacred book, with the aim of bringing modern scholarly methods to bear on the text. The effort ground to a halt under the Hitler regime, which had other priorities for men who knew Arabic. Then, on April 24, 1944, British bombers devastated the Bavarian Academy of Science, where the collection was housed. Its custodian, Anton Spitaler, reported that it had been destroyed.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars – and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Since contemporary Moslem governments show little inclination to grant Western scholars access to documents, the rediscovered archive is a vital resource for Koranic studies. Not surprisingly, some Moslems feel threatened.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable.” . . .

In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.

Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran “didn’t just fall from heaven” but “has a history.” When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents,” read one letter to the Yemen Times. “Allah, help us against our enemies.”

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

For some perhaps fathomable reason, I suspect that there will never be much enthusiasm for finding layers of redaction in the Koran. The rediscovered archive is a valuable tool for scholarship, but tools are useless without the will to make use of them.

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

If mere cartoons can give rise to murderous rage, what will happen when and if the Germans produce “the first ‘critical edition’ of the Quran – an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature”? It’s hard to be extremely optimistic.

Trees with Maps, and Other Frivolities

“Ancient Trees Found Using 200 Year Old Maps”, says yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Okay, it figures that elderly trees might not have replaced the maps they used in their younger days, but what I don’t understand is, Why does a tree need a map? It isn’t going anywhere.

Or is this evidence that Ents still lurk in the English forests? I rather hope so.

Also in the Telegraph is a report on a scientific inquiry, published in the British Medical Journal, into the genetic basis of wizardry.

Based on an analysis of the Harry Potter novels, Sreeram Ramagopalan, Dr Marian Knight, Prof George Ebers, and Dr Julian Knight of Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, conclude that “magic shows strong evidence of heritability.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows provides a lot of valuable information about magical families that strongly suggests a role for genetic factors,” says Dr Knight, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

“For example, magic exists in at least seven generations of the Black family and at least three generations in others. We also see twins – the Patil and Weasley twins – with the same magical abilities.”

The new analysis is considerably more sophisticated than a predecessor’s simplistic model:

[I]n the journal Nature, Dr Jeffrey Craig, Dr Renee Dow and Dr MaryAnne Aitken claimed magical abilities depend on a recessive version of a gene: all wizards and witches thus have two copies of the wizard “W” gene, distinguishing it from the ordinary M, or Muggle, version.

Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom and Draco Malfoy are pure-blood wizards - with WW ancestors over many generations. Hermione Granger is a muggle-born witch (WW, with WM parents). . . .

But the team shocked Potter lovers by claiming it had uncovered evidence of “questionable paternity” in the case of Filch the caretaker, who is a “squib”, someone who has been born into a wizarding family but lacks full blooded magical powers.

If Filch had been the offspring of a witch and a wizard, he would have had to be a wizard himself, for the same reason that two blue-eyed parents can’t produce a brown-eyed child. Only lack of marital fidelity can explain his lack of magical talent.

An unpleasant corollary of this theory is that wizardly bigots are not irrational to stress purity of blood as a desideratum. Widespread intermarriage with muggles would lead to a steady diminution of the wizard population and ultimately make a separate wizard society impossible to maintain, thus leaving mankind open to the depredations of dementors, basilisks and other malign magical creatures.

Data from the latest Rowling opus convinced the Oxford scientists that the single-gene hypothesis was “simplistic”.

Rather than being all down to one gene, they believe enchanted skills can vary across a spectrum of strength, depending on the combined influence of a dominant gene for magic, which is turned on or off depending on epigenetic effects, and modified by the influence of a number of genes, along with the environment.

There appear to be three magical skills that are conferred by specific genes. “One of these is the capability to speak to snakes (parseltongue), known to be only a feature of those who are direct descendants of Slytherin.

Another is to be a seer; Sybill Trelawney, although not perfect, has this ability, and her great-great-grandmother was also extremely gifted in this respect.

Lastly, being a metamorphmagus (the ability to change one’s physical appearance) is an ability that Nymphadora Tonks passed on to her son,” says the BMJ paper.

There are even some candidate genes: given their reported association with speech and language, further mutations at the FOXP2 gene, already linked with Muggle language skills, could account for the rare magical ability to speak parseltongue while variants in a gene linked with hair colour, the MC1R gene, may explain Tonks’ hair-changing abilities.

All of these conclusions are necessarily tentative. If only England had the U.S. Congress, an earmark might even now be embedded in the budget bill to support further research.

Finally among these lighter items, I must call your attention to the best parody ad of the campaign season. The really amusing part is that Bill Clinton’s life-partner doesn’t realize it’s a parody.

The Computer I Want for Christmas, and Other Thoughts

Although David Frum is, according to himself, “not a reader who craves sci-fi, period”, he recently posted an informal review of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which prompted a reader to apprise him of the existence of steampunk. The reader included a link to the marvelously Victorian rendition of a computer pictured opposite (click to enlarge). If Wells or Rudyard Kipling or G. A. Henty had owned a computer, isn’t that exactly what it would have looked like? A large percentage of the past century’s cultural upheaval can be intuitively grasped by comparing it to a modern desktop machine.

On a more serious question, I’m afraid that David, through lack of acquaintance with “sci-fi”, goes astray. He writes,

Striking too is the weird role of technology in this classic work of science fiction. The Eloi and Morlocks are decayed species, living amidst the ruins of a higher civilization. Yet when Wells imagined the achievements of this high civilization, so far in the future, he imagined it still using paper backs (the Time Traveler comes across the ruins of a library), and displaying its museum collections in glass cases, and manufacturing its necessities with huge machinery built of iron and belching exhaust. . . .

Wells is clearly much more impressed by the pace of the social changes of his time than the technical changes. He could envision a total transformation of humanity, but not of humanity’s tools. And I don’t think this is just a matter of artistic imperative, although su