Harry Harrison

I only found out about this last month, but science fiction author Harry Harrison died back in August, aged 87. He was one of the greats. I’ve just finished reading Make Room! Make Room! which is a rather bleak novel about overpopulation, published in 1966 and set in New York at the millennium; searching for an ebook version of this story is how I found out that he had died. More typical of Harrison were the Stainless Steel Rat books, which I enjoyed, and his stories of Bill the Galactic Hero.

What I really love, though, is his trilogy starting with West of Eden, which is based on a what-if scenario where the dinosaurs did not die out but continued to evolve into the human era. It is excellent speculative SF, in my opinion, and the paperback versions I have contain beautiful illustrations that resemble medieval woodcuts, which help to bring the stories to life. Wonderful stuff. He will be missed.

Fellow SF author Christopher Priest wrote an obituary of Harry Harrison in the Guardian, and you can read it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/15/harry-harrison

Summer’s End

It’s that time of the year again. Mornings and evenings are becoming noticeably shadowy and chill. August is behind us and we’re starting to head back down into the cold and the dark of the year. Time to bolt the doors, draw the curtains, turn up the lights and settle down to some blogging once more.

This is a particularly beautiful time of year, I always feel. The autumn leaves are just starting to fall, fungi are ripening, the woods and parks and riverside areas of west London are still full of colour. This is when garden spiders are at their largest and most fearsome, and when the dew on their webs sparkles in the bright morning sunshine. Michaelmas daisies are everywhere, suddenly.

Definitely time to get down to some more writing – and there’s lots to write about.

UPDATE

And now it’s November. Yes, must do some writing before year’s end! I’ll probably do a sort of round-up edition of “100 Years of Climate Change” towards the close of 2011, but before then, I’m planning to write a few book reviews.

Douglas Adams: The Salmon of Doubt

In 2001, when I heard that Douglas Adams had just died at the age of 49, I remember feeling an acute sense of loss. This was not only because I was, and still am, a fan of his, and not only because he was dead and at a relatively young age. Quite a few of my favourite SF writers have died during my lifetime, including Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and while I’ve always felt a sadness and a sense that their absence has taken some of the light out of the world, there’s also often been the feeling (certainly in the cases of Asimov and Clarke) that they had a good innings and pretty much fulfilled their destinies as writers. It was different in this case.

I felt that after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Dirk Gently novels, Douglas Adams still had a lot more to write about and would have taken his stories to some pretty exciting new places. There would have been another Dirk Gently book, of course, and then an embarking on who knew what amazing projects. Alas, it was never to be.

Instead, we have The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous collection of Adams’s articles, bits and pieces salvaged from his computer, and some rather fragmentary chapters of the third Dirk Gently novel (which is where this book’s title comes from.) Reading it left me amused and entertained, as always with Adams, but also inevitably quite melancholy. I wish he were still alive.

The articles are a showcase for Adams’s wit, his curiosity about the world and his love of technology, and have titles such as Hangover Cures, The Rhino Climb, Little Dongly Things and Is There an Artificial God? There is also – and this is poignant – a review of P.G.Wodehouse’s unfinished novel Sunset at Blandings. He writes: “…But you will want to read Sunset for completeness, and for that sense you get, from its very unfinishedness, of being suddenly and unexpectedly close to a Master actually at work – a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel.”

I say this article is poignant, because Adams is also describing something akin to the sense I get from reading what there is of his novel The Salmon of Doubt. There are 11 chapters in all, most of them featuring the eccentric and perennially disorganised Dirk Gently of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, although one chapter is about a rather laid-back, godlike person called Dave, who inhabits DaveLand in DaveWorld, and there is also a bewildered rhinoceros called Raymond, who is teleported somehow into Los Angeles and ends up in someone’s swimming pool.

None of these elements hang together really, or make any kind of sense. But you just know that Adams would have edited them, written the rest of the chapters, added other characters and plot threads, and in some magical sense made it all work out beautifully, albeit in a supremely unpredictable way. The secret of Dirk’s mission would have been revealed in all its cleverness, Dave’s existence would have fitted in perfectly, and Raymond the rhino’s story would have shown us that being teleported into a Los Angeles swimming pool was logically the most likely fate that could have befallen him.

Unfortunately, now we will never know how Douglas Adams would have done it. A few months ago (I’m writing this in early 2009) it was announced that Eoin Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl stories) has been commissioned to write a sixth Hitchhiker novel, possibly using some of the material Adams had been working on. It might be that Colfer will also go on to write a third Dirk Gently book and carry it off very well indeed – in this unpredictable universe of ours, who knows? But it wouldn’t be the novel Douglas Adams would have written.

For me, he was one of those people who left the world a better place, because he wrote stories that were funny, intelligent, brimming with ideas and that somehow made you feel happier for having read or listened to them. I have been a fan of Douglas Adams from that day in 1978 when I happened to hear the very first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; over thirty years later, reading The Salmon of Doubt made me feel sad, amused, exasperated and delighted all at the same time, a mix of emotions that seems somehow appropriate, given the wonderfully quirky nature of the man and his stories. How typical, really.

© Alex Cull, 29th January 2009

(As usual I’ve posted this on Helium.com and Planet Bookworm. Also on Ciao!)

The Writing on the Wall for Writing?

Is written text doomed to die out? At first glance, this might seem to be a real possibility. Fewer people are reading books and newspapers; on the other hand, digital media are proliferating like crazy, providing us with ever more available streaming audio and video. Will we eventually arrive at a future without writing?

I think not. It is obvious to me that writing has always been a core part of who we are. It is how we have made our mark on the world, as humans. And it would take extraordinary measures, as I will explain, to exterminate written text forever.

However, it would be easy to feel pessimistic these days, in the Western world at least. A 2006 survey from the from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US found that the number of 17 year olds who were non-readers more than doubled, from 9 to 19 percent, over a 20-year period – just one of an array of disappointing results, which have provoked much comment both in the States and abroad. In the UK, which is where I’m from, a general impression seems to be that people are reading fewer books and spending more time with their TVs, computers and games consoles. Does anyone actually sit down and read mammoth novels like War and Peace or Moby Dick nowadays? Would Leo Tolstoy or Herman Melville even find publishers, were they first-time authors writing in the 21st century?

Everything is faster, briefer, punchier and more visual now. Who wants to plough through a whole textbook, when Google is a couple of clicks away? Who dusts off their fountain pen and writes a long letter when an e-mail, phone call or text will suffice? Who has time to read long bedtime stories to their kids, when ultra-condensed 1-minute versions are available? We live in an age of rapid-fire commercials, sound bites, podcasts and even SMS-style digests of classics like Homer’s Iliad (“Muse, wot hapnd wiv Achilles?”)

Could there come a time when none of us actually read or write anything? In 2070, perhaps all communication will be verbal or visual, with ubiquitous machines serving as intermediaries and digital storehouses of knowledge. Even technical documents could be reduced to images on screens, much like sophisticated versions of today’s instructions for assembling flat-packed furniture. Is this our future?

In the short term, certainly not. Although folks are not poring through as many books as they used to, they are now reading with alacrity the thousands of online articles and blogs that the world wide web spawns every month. And they are writing, too! Not with pens but with keyboards, not on paper but on the myriads of social networking websites that have sprung up like mushrooms during the last five years.

Also I find it very difficult to believe that manual writing will disappear – for mundane but vital tasks such as scribbling a shopping list or jotting down a phone number, there is currently no real substitute. And although a piece of paper can be burned, torn up or thrown away, it can never be deleted, hacked into or scrambled by a computer virus. Paper files, notebooks and legal pads thus have a certain comforting solidity, and this will surely be true for some time to come.

No, there is only one scenario I can think of, which might doom the written word. Computers might become intelligent by a magnitude so great that they will be in a position to take effective control of human affairs; the general scenario has been explored many times in science fiction, for instance by writer Vernor Vinge (who first started to use the term “the Singularity” for this stupendous turn of events.)

If super-intelligent computers ruled the world and were seeking ways to perpetuate their power over us, one strategy would surely be to deny humans the ability to read and write (and thus receive and transmit “dangerous” ideas.) New generations of humans might become little more than biological servitors for the machines – sturdy, dextrous, easy to manufacture, illiterate and in total ignorance of the past glory of their race.

(There is also the chance that alien invaders would do something similar. However, to keep it simple I’m ignoring that situation for the purposes of this article – we have no firm evidence that aliens exist, but we know that computers do.)

It is an extreme possibility, of course, and might never actually come about. Even if cyber-minds became fantastically clever and advanced, there is no guarantee, of course, that they would acquire an urge to seize power at the same time. I would like to think that human writing will survive the rise of the machines.

Now maybe you are wondering whether I’ve forgotten about other bad things that could happen. Civilisation faces possible threats from sources other than power-mad computers, after all; a giant meteorite could strike the Earth, or a supervolcano might erupt. There is a theory that between 70 and 75 thousand years ago, a supervolcanic event at Toba in Indonesia pushed humanity towards the brink of extinction; there is nothing to stop something like that occurring again.

But I contend that as long as humanity did survive such a truly global catastrophe, writing would survive too. I think this becomes clear when we look at the origins of written text.

At its most basic, writing is making marks on a surface. You can use something sharp to scratch your marks, or use a staining liquid, such as ink or paint. The earliest known mathematical artefact is a 37,000 year-old piece of bone (a baboon’s fibula, to be precise) found in Border Cave, South Africa – basically a series of 29 notches which mark the Moon’s phases. Look at later developments such as Roman numerals, or the Chinese characters that represent numbers, and you will still find one scratch for 1, two scratches for 2, three scratches for 3 and so on; what could be more fundamental?

Consider the letters that make up our modern alphabets, for instance the letter “a”. You can trace its lineage back via the Greek “alpha” and then to the Hebrew “aleph”, which derives from a hieroglyph of a bull’s head. Going back as far as the last Ice Age, we find beautiful paintings of bulls on the cave walls at Lascaux, and surely there was a chain of development – from lifelike pictures to the more stylised pictograms, from works of art to symbols and abstractions.

This is also very apparent with Chinese words – the two letters which mean “qiche” or “car” are “qi” (“steam” or “energy”) and “che” (“carriage”), which can then be broken down into more basic representations – steam rising from a rice bowl and a cart with wheels revolving on an axle. Just as the latest version of Microsoft Windows can be traced back to its origins in MS-DOS, all our sophisticated modern lexicons are underpinned by simpler and far more ancient codes.

Should something truly disastrous happen to the human race, the few survivors would probably have to devote all their energies into scavenging and staying alive; their descendants might well be illiterate, unable to decipher the strange squiggles adorning the rusted, crumbling wreckage of civilisation all around them. Future generations might ultimately forget their past and grow to resemble the hunter-gatherers our hominid ancestors became, many millennia ago.

But as long as they still had human brains, eyes and hands, this would not matter. Someone somewhere would begin to keep count by carving notches in a branch or a bone. Someone else would make hand-prints in wet clay on a cave wall and start to experiment… And then, slowly but surely, writing would return to the world.

(An article I posted on Helium.com earlier.)