Beauty Vs. Sublimnity

From Michaelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King, a note that I'm quoting to remember for later:

One way to understand the differing styles of the two artists is through a pair of aesthetic categories developed two and a half centuries later by the Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756. For Burke, those things we call beautiful have the properties of smoothness, delicacy, softness of color, and elegance of movement. The sublime, on the other hand, comprehends the vast, the obscure, the powerful, the rugged, the difficult- attributes which produce in the spectator a kind of astonished wonder and even terror. For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michaelangelo sublime.


The best part of reading is when one book leads me on to another.

Seven Stanzas At Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike

Happy Easter, everyone!

Capitol

Orson Scott Card's Capitol is an early, uneven short story collection that has several interesting pieces. Many of the stories were later reprinted (some with adjustments) in The Worthing Saga.

It's a future history of a space empire whose most important feature is suspended animation. A drug called Somec allows people to be suspended agelessly for any length of time. This enables space flight, but its real function is social: important people can sleep for one year out of two, or three out of five, or nine out of ten, based on their status. This creates a society where the rich and powerful seem ageless; even though their experienced life is no longer than anyone else's, they can watch lesser people age and die while they're still young.

This illusionary immortality (and one of the nice touches is the way that its enthusiasts uncritically think of it as "immortality," when obviously it's not) becomes all-consuming: people are either on Somec, or desperate to get on it, which gives the system an unbreakable hold on society.

The stories don't necessarily fit together well. The first two are set on Earth, and feel strangely off-topic. We don't need to know how Somec was invented, and the Soviet invasion of the US seems too large a topic to just introduce and then forget.

Most of the remainder are set on the planet Crove, later renamed Capitol, and these flow better. (Well, most of them. "Burning" is interesting in terms of its later place in The Worthing Chronicle, but in this context it makes no sense. Where did these telepaths come from, what part do they play, why are they never mentioned again?)

The two best stories are "Skipping Stones," which sets up the dilemma of Somec and its effects; and "Breaking the Game," about a celebrity video game player. The latter is effective because Card, with minimal detail, succeeds at making the game interesting! You can actually believe that people would spectate, and pay to play in it.

(It also reminds me of the political message boards in Ender's Game- another detail of the internet that Card predicted, accurately if not completely.)

The Worthing Chronicle is a better, neater collection of most of this material, which I suppose is why they republished it that way. But it was interesting to see this alternative framing. And Worthing gives only a brief and unsatisfying summary of "Breaking the Game," which deserves a fuller treatment.

Star-Maker

Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker is interesting in several ways, and one of them just occurred to me: it probably could not be published today. Not because of any retrograde politics or language, necessarily, but because of the style.

There is basically no plot. There are almost no characters. I don't believe there's a single line of dialogue in the entire novel. It's basically a travelogue and summary of several different alien planets. And this seems to be normal for Stapleton- his Last and First Men seemed like a collection of worldbuilding notes rather than a conventional story.

Science fiction was much smaller and less-established in the thirties, and people could write weird sf novels like this and actually get them past an editor. I don't know that it's possible anymore. At any rate, I don't know of any modern sf writers like Stapleton.

The narrator is an Englishman who is taken out of his body on a kind of astral journey. He wanders immaterially through space for a long, long time before learning how to find planets with intelligent life. He descends to a world, telepathically learns about its people, and recruits some to come with him. This repeats many times, and we see various aliens at different stages of development.

(This is a big deal! One of Stapleton's themes is that all intelligent life evolves through stages towards unity, peace, and wisdom- unless their racial obstacles defeat them and cast them back down the evolutionary ladder, which happens all the time. No Whig History here- Stapleton's a big believer in "Rise and Fall," both here and in LaFM.)

The book's title refers to God. The spirits' quest is to find the Star Maker, and try to understand why He made the universe. As he collects more travellers, they unite spiritually into a group mind and become more and more advanced themselves, even as the universe seems to grind down into failure.

The narrator goes to some lengths to stress that the final scene is incomplete; that we cannot possibly understand what he experienced, since (restored to his human form) he can't even clearly remember it himself. He's too small now. His final understanding of God is... problematic?

It's really neat to see that C.S. Lewis' Perelandra was written as a response to this novel! I can read Weston's monologue there and see exactly what he was talking about- God isn't necessarily good or loving or wise, He's just the being at the top of the spiritual food chain. That's pretty much Stapleton's takeaway, which is not meant as a criticism- as far as Stapleton's concerned, being at the top means that the Star Maker deserves our worship. Which Lewis rightly tore into as power-worship.

Like I said, there are basically no characters, plot, or dialogue. Hardly anything human. But there are amazing vistas, and a sense of scale that's hard to find anywhere else- Stapleton is excellent at evoking the size and age of the entire universe.

Swamp Thing Lives!

From Wired:

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Well, cool and sort of creepy.

The Long Way Home

I went hunting through the used bookstores the other day, and came out with Poul Anderson's 1958 novel The Long Way Home. It's about a group of explorer-astronauts who are trying out an experimental new spacedrive- by taking a trip several thousand light-years away.

Their experiments in the solar system seemed to indicate that the drive was instantaneous, so they're shocked and appalled when they get home and discover that 5000 years have passed. In retrospect, they realized that puzzling errors of measurement meant that the trip was only instantaneous for them.

You really have to take this with a grain of salt- it's the same kind of pulp-sf assumption that lets the Fantastic Four fly out into space solely on Reed Richard's smartness, rather than an organized mission plan with ground support from NASA. But if you can get past that, it's pretty good escapist fun.

The future, incidentally, is a stulified caste society with a computer overlord. Needless to say, Anderson's hero gets over his future shock and makes short work of everyone around him.

Are Short Stories Scientific?

I was at the bookstore today, in the SF/Fantasy section as usual, looking at the anthologies that are lined up between "New Books" and the A's. They were all science fiction.

As I thought about that, it occurred to me that almost all the sf/f short story anthologies I'd seen were science fiction rather than fantasy. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to have all the super-long Jordan/Goodkind epics.

Why is that? Is it just a quirk of publishing history- i.e. if Jordan had been an SF writer, we'd have a lot of encyclopedia-length science fiction imitators? Or is there something in the vaguely-defined difference between the two that selects for story length?