In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium, which tranlates as “Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.” Fifteen centuries later, William Shakespeare expounded upon this at great length in Rumor’s prologue to Henry IV, part 2. Two centuries later, Jonathan Swift wrote “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” A century later C.H. Spurgeon said “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia while truth is pulling her boots on,” but it would appear that he was quoting Fisher Ames, who said the same thing thirty years earlier.
Perhaps unhappy with having lifted the quote directly, in 1859 Spurgeon wrote “A lie will go ’round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.” Eighty years or so after that, Winston Churchill slowed falsehood a bit, and then vastly improved the quote with a different article of clothing when he said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Within four hundred years, however, truth could not find the airlock. In a stroke of irony, the previous pedigree was lost, which means that not only did all copies of The Yale Book of Quotations go missing, but now falsehood spread throughout the galaxy while truth never left the house. Also, somebody deleted this footnote.
Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary, 2012-11-18
September 7, 2013
QotD: Truth, rumour, and sketchy footnotes
August 29, 2013
Meet the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford
A profile of economist and popular author Tim Harford in The Independent:
Tim Harford can’t help himself. We are navigating our way to lunch in an unfamiliar city and I am momentarily disorientated by the mass of visual paraphernalia at a busy crossing. My hesitation is his cue for a story about the Dutch traffic engineer who found that getting rid of excess street furniture forced car drivers to take more responsibility, dramatically slashing the number of accidents.
Welcome to the world as seen by Harford, a man who made his name explaining the economic rationale behind everything that we do. His tale about the late Hans Monderman is illustrative. Later, over a tableful of dim sum, he adds: “The world is a constant source of ideas for someone who thinks like an economist.”
His bestselling “Undercover Economist” books have made him a founding member of the new tribe popularising the dismal science; not before time given the circumstances, you might add. His latest volume, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, subtitled How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy, is out this week. It tackles the recent “titanic” mess and is his first foray into macroeconomics, also known as the “bigger picture”.
“It’s my job to figure out an interesting way to talk about these things, and a different angle that’s fun and memorable and tells people something about how the economy works…. I’ve always been much more of a micro guy — individual behaviour and the psychological elements of game theory were always my thing, so when I started, it felt like a sense of duty. But halfway through, the subject had won me over.”
[…]
As it happens, Harford, who turns 40 next month, didn’t intentionally study economics. His undergraduate PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) was the “classic Oxford degree for people who don’t know what to do”, and he spent his first year intending to drop economics at the end of it. Pressed by his tutor, after doing “really well”, he changed his mind and thus his life, not least because he met his wife while working at Shell, in the scenario planning team for a certain Vince Cable.
Despite starting out in a job that required forecasting, Harford is defensive of his profession, which is much maligned for not predicting the global crash. “Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can,” he says, pointing again to a Keynes quote, this time aligning economists and dentists. “You don’t expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you’ll have when you’re 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems. We’ve allowed ourselves to become really bad weather forecasters, which is a shame.”
August 25, 2013
QotD: Persian and Greek views of abduction
Up to this point, there had been abductions only from each other, but after this the Hellenes were largely responsible for offenses. For they began to make war on Asia before their enemies made war on Europe. Now the Persians think that the abduction of women is certainly an act only unjust men would perform, and yet once they have been abducted, it is senseless to make a fuss over seeking vengeance. It is the way of sensible people to have no concern for abducted women; it is quite obvious that the women would not have been abducted if they had not been compliant.
Herodotus, “Book 1”, The Histories, c.450-420 BCE
August 24, 2013
QotD: History and fiction
It’s possible to cut and slice history really any way you want to … That’s probably why history belongs more to the novelists and the poets than it does to the social scientists. At least we admit that we lie.
E.L. Doctorow, Essays and Conversations, 1983
August 23, 2013
The avant-garde is dead, dead, dead
In Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory talks to Camille Paglia about themes in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars:
In Glittering Images, you argue that the avant-garde is dead. Are there any artists — be they painters or pop stars — who are making innovative work right now?
The avant-garde was a magnificent and revolutionary phase in the history of art, but it’s completely over. Artists and galleries must (in Ann Landers’ immortal words) wake up and smell the coffee! The avant-garde, whose roots were in late-18th-century Romanticism, was a reaction against a strong but suffocating classical tradition. The great modernist artists, from Picasso to James Joyce, were trained in that tradition, which gave audacity and power to their subversion of it.
But then modernism began to feed on itself, and it became weaker and weaker. As I argue in “Glittering Images,” there has been nothing genuinely avant-garde since Andy Warhol except for Robert Mapplethorpe’s luminous homoerotic images of the sadomasochistic underground. Everything that calls itself avant-garde today is just a tedious imitation of earlier and far superior modernist art. The art world has become an echo chamber of commercially inflated rhetoric, shallow ironies and monolithic political ideology.
In the past year, the only things that sparked my enthusiasm and gave me hope for an artistic revival were in pop music: Rihanna’s eerie “Pour It Up,” which uses a strip club as a hallucinatory metaphor for an identity crisis about sex and materialism, and the Savages’ slam-bang “City’s Full,” which channels the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith to attack (with gorgeously distorted, strafing guitars) the urban parade of faux-female fashion clones. The visual arts, in contrast, are being swamped by virtual reality.
Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits.
[…]
Earlier this year, you wrote a highly critical article about recent academic books on the world of kink. What do you wish that these academics would say about BDSM?
My principal complaint about those three books, all from university presses, was that their intriguing firsthand documentation of the BDSM community was pointlessly shot through with turgid, pretentious theorizing, drawn from the slavishly idolized but hopelessly inaccurate and unreliable Michel Foucault.
In this tight job market, young scholars are in a terrible bind. They have to cater to and flatter the academic establishment if they hope to survive. Furthermore, they have not been taught basic skills in historical investigation, weighing of evidence, and argumentation. There has been a collapse in basic academic standards during the theory era that will take universities decades to recover from. I was incensed that none of those three authors had read a page of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and influential writers of the past three centuries. Sade had a major impact on Nietzsche, whom Foucault vainly tried to model himself on. Nor had the three authors read The Story of O or explored a host of other crucial landmarks in modern sadomasochism. No, it was Foucault, Foucault, Foucault — a con artist who will one day be a mere footnote in the bulging chronicle of academic follies.
You’re such a beloved and divisive figure, I had to solicit questions from folks on Twitter. Here’s a funny one: “Why do you come down so hard on skinny white girls? Your views on sexuality leave so much room for individuality, so why is it so bad if I am attracted to Meg Ryan or Gwyneth Paltrow?”
When have I ever criticized anyone’s fetish? I am a libertarian. Go right ahead — set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir. No one will scold! Then whip down to the kitchen to heat up those foil-wrapped TV dinners. I still gaze back fondly at Swanson’s fried-chicken entree. The twinkly green peas! The moist apple fritter! Meg Ryan — the spitting image of all those perky counselors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow — a simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas.
August 22, 2013
Exercises in “guerrilla ontology”
An excerpt from Jesse Walker’s new book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory has been posted at disinformation:
[Robert Anton] Wilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends (including [Paul] Krassner). Participants were “to circulate all rumors contributed by other members,” and they were “to attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the other member-groups.” The one great risk, he cautioned, was that “the Establishment might be paranoid enough to believe some wild legend started by one of us and thereupon round up all of us for killing Abraham Lincoln.”
So they sent a letter on Bavarian Illuminati stationery to the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, just to confirm that “we’ve taken over the Rock Music business. But you’re still so naïve. We took over the business in the 1800s. Beethoven was our first convert.” Robert Welch of the John Birch Society got a letter informing him that Gary Allen was an Illuminati agent. When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison’s booster Art Kunkin of the leftist Los Angeles Free Press received a missive from the “Order of the Phoenix Angel” revealing that the jurors were all members of the Illuminati. The telltale sign, the letter explained, was that none of them had a left nipple.
The Discordians planted stories about the secret society in various leftist, libertarian, and hippie publications, introducing the Illuminati to the counterculture. “We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,” Wilson recalled. “Nixon, Johnson, William Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody.” But they
did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology.
My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.
August 21, 2013
Dispatches from the front – “the American police officer works a battlefield every day he patrols his sector”
Radley Balko on some of the interesting and revealing responses to his book Rise of the Warrior Cop:
Over the last several days, the popular online police magazine PoliceOne site has been rolling out a series of opinion pieces in response to my book. As you might expect, most of them are critical, although a couple have been thoughtful.
One essay by Sgt. Glenn French was particularly disturbing. French serves as commander of a SWAT team in Sterling Heights, Michigan. French doesn’t criticize me for arguing that too many police officers have adopted this battlefield mindset. Rather, he embraces the combat mentality, and encourages other cops to do the same. Referring to an article I wrote here at HuffPost, French writes:
“What would it take to dial back such excessive police measures?” the author wrote. “The obvious place to start would be ending the federal grants that encourage police forces to acquire gear that is more appropriate for the battlefield. Beyond that, it is crucial to change the culture of militarization in American law enforcement.”
We trainers have spent the past decade trying to ingrain in our students the concept that the American police officer works a battlefield every day he patrols his sector.
Note the choice of words. Not neighborhood, but “sector.” Although I suppose such parsing isn’t even necessary when French just comes right out and declares America a battlefield. Note too that French isn’t even referring to SWAT teams, here. He’s suggesting that all cops be taught to view the streets and neighborhoods they patrol in this way.
French then tosses out some dubious statistics.
The fact is, more American police officers have died fighting crime in the United States over the past 12 years than American soldiers were killed in action at war in Afghanistan. According to ODMP.org, 1,831 cops have been killed in the line of duty since 2001. According to iCasualties.org, the number of our military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan is 1,789.
Cops on the beat are facing the same dangers on the streets as our brave soldiers do in war.
Even accepting French’s preposterous premise here, his numbers are wrong. The U.S. has lost 2,264 troops in Afghanistan, about 22 percent more than French claims. Moreover, more than half police officer deaths since 2001 were due to accidents (mostly car accidents), not felonious homicide. Additionally, depending on how you define the term, there are between 600,000 and 800,000 law enforcement officers working in the United States. We have about 65,000 troops in Afghanistan. So comparing overall fatalities is absurd. The rates of cops killed versus soldiers killed aren’t even close. And that’s not factoring in the soldiers who’ve come home without limbs. The dangers faced by cops and soldiers in Afghanistan aren’t remotely comparable.
August 20, 2013
Another reason to stick with printed books – “undownloading”
At Techdirt, Glyn Moody has another word you need to know about those convenient ebooks you’ve been adding to your reader:
So, it seems that ebook users need to add a new word to their vocabulary: “undownloading” — what happens when you leave the authorized zone in which you may read the ebooks you paid for, and cross into the digital badlands where they are taken away like illicit items at customs. If you are lucky, you will get them back when you return to your home patch — by un-undownloading them.
What makes this tale particularly noteworthy is the way it brings together a host of really bad ideas that the publishing and distribution industries insist on deploying. There’s DRM that means you can’t make backups; there’s the country-specific usage that tries to impose physical geography on your digital ebooks; and there’s the update that spies on you and your system before deciding unilaterally to take away functionality by “undownloading” your ebooks. And copyright maximalists wonder why people turn to unauthorized downloads….
I have dozens of books stashed away on my iPhone … but they’re all public domain works. I doubt I’ll be adding any DRM-afflicted items to my library any time soon.
August 19, 2013
Jesse Walker on his new book, The United States of Paranoia
An interview by Tom Jackson:
What do you hope people will learn after reading The United States of Paranoia?
WALKER: I hope they’ll learn that conspiracy theories are not some new invention: that they’ve always been with us and that they aren’t going away. I hope they’ll learn that there isn’t a single all-purpose political or psychological explanation for why such stories take hold. I hope they’ll learn that the American establishment is prone to conspiracy thinking, no less than its critics on the left and the right are. I hope they’ll learn that these stories have something to teach us even when they’re entirely false — that a conspiracy theory doesn’t take hold with a lot of people unless it speaks to their anxieties or experiences.
And I hope that as they read about the things our ancestors believed, they’ll feel a little shock of recognition. The fears and folklore of modern times can sound a lot like the fears and folklore of earlier generations. We’re not as unique as we think.
It seems to me we are living in very paranoid times, akin to what the country went through in the 1970s. Do you think the timing of your book turned out to be good, perhaps by accident?
WALKER: Many people have said this to me. But as I say in the book, “it is always a paranoid time.” If this had come out last year, people would have looked around at all the election-year conspiracy chatter and told me how well-timed the book was. If it had come out the year before that, people would have pointed to the birthers or to the conspiracy theories about the death of bin Laden.
Do you hope some of your readers will become more tolerant? Much of the book seems to argue for tolerance of other peoples’ conspiracy theories, or at least an effort to understand where they are coming from.
WALKER: Well, I’m all for debunking claims that aren’t true, and that includes untrue claims about conspiracies. But I do hope the debunkers will approach their task with a little humility, an awareness that they’re capable of believing dubious tales too.
[…]
So, what do you think happened to JFK in Dallas?
Walker: Contrary to what you may have read in the Weekly World News, he died.
August 17, 2013
Molly Crabapple in conversation with Warren Ellis
Any interview introduced with the line “Somewhere, on an NSA server in Utah, there sits an email from Warren Ellis threatening to strangle me to death with my own intestines” has to be worth reading:
You’re semi-crack-addicted to information. Whenever we talk, you have a podcast, the Economist, some ambient drone music, and a reader full of links open. Dead Pig Collector was inspired by an article you read on Chinese garbage disposal. Tell me about your information consumption.
This is going to be just another way for you to insist I listen to the sounds of insects having sex and calling it music while you pollute your apartment with the strains of some idiot with a ukulele wailing about consumption and sodomy.
We call that culture. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t understand.
What would you know about culture? You come from the town that gave the world the cronut.
Cronuts are tasty. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t know what that word means.
We have a joke in this country about American food. It goes like this: “American food.”
I’m sure my information diet isn’t that special. I check the overnight email and RSS feeds in bed, read the Guardian, BBC news, and the Foreign Policy dailies, and scan Twitter over coffee and juice while listening to a couple of podcasts (I subscribe to around fifty podcasts). I have digital subscriptions to the TLS, the LRB, The Economist, National Geographic, and The Wire magazine. I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I’m getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go. I watch Instagram a lot — that service was on the verge of doing some really interesting stuff, and I have a feeling it might die of Facebook disease. You know people are not only running things close to “secret brands” on there, but also selling drugs? I get maybe a dozen email newsletters, maybe less. I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there.
[…]
What’s the relationship between one’s ethics and their art?
I like to say “none” because you have to be able to wear other people’s ethics in order to write personalities other than your own. But the truth, I suspect, is that your own ethics dictate how that should be done, and for which purpose. It’s probably as indelible as a fingerprint. That actually kind of bothers me. If you can’t subsume yourself into an alien ethos, then you’re being caught writing, as it were, in the same way that actors fear being caught acting. I think it’s probably quite different to painting, in terms of expression of ethics in an artform.
Also, I only threatened to strangle you that one time.
Per hour. As a writer of graphic novels, you’re known for Transmetropolitan, which follows Spider Jerusalem, a gonzo journalist living in the twisted future. At a time when journalism is radically mutating, where do you see as medium going?
Oh, ask the small ones, why don’t you …
I remember Nick Davies saying, after his phone-hacking exposes, that even other investigative journalists at his own newspaper — the independent British newspaper the Guardian — were fighting him on the investigation. Not because they or the Guardian were culpable in any way, but because they were afraid of the boat being rocked. The field’s in a pretty dismal place.
People talk about journalism having been fatally disrupted by the Internet, but, honestly, it was coughing blood long before then. The only potentially good thing about the disruption of journalism is that it’s an ongoing process, and the people who’ve made bank on that disruption today will themselves be disrupted into the ground some time tomorrow.
August 7, 2013
Reason.tv – Radley Balko Discusses Militarization of Police Force
Published on 6 Aug 2013
“The police have become more militarized, more soldier-like in the last generation or two,” explains journalist and author Radley Balko. “It applies to the weapons they are using, the uniforms they wear…to the tactics they use, to what I think is the most pervasive problem which is the mindset that police officers take to the job.”
Balko, author of the new book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, sat down with ReasonTV to discuss the book, the growth and development of SWAT forces, and how the drug war has fostered an “us against them” mentality within police departments.
Balko is a senior writer and investigative reporter at the Huffington Post. His work primarily focuses on the drug war and police abuse. Previously, Balko worked as a senior editor for Reason Magazine.
August 2, 2013
Forbes talks to Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis has a new novella out (that I haven’t read yet) and talks to Alex Knapp about the new work and other topics:
In Dead Pig Collector, the process of disposing of a body is fairly well detailed. How much research did you do for that?
Four or five hours. Believe it or not, a lot of people seem to spend time talking on the internet about getting rid of bodies. And now they’re all on PRISM-generated watchlists. And so am I.
One of the things that’s fascinating about your work is that it explores subcultures that seem like fantasy, but very much exist in real life. I know, for example, a lot of the cultures you explored in Crooked Little Vein are horribly true. What interests you about them?
I think one of the bigger lessons the internet has taught us is that “niche” or “subculture” are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought. And, frankly, if it’s on the internet, the biggest and widest communication and information system in the world, then it’s not really a subculture any more. If it’s accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it’s as mainstream as it gets. More people visit body modification websites than watch some tv shows, and yet we think of television as the most mainstream, monocultural thing in the world. How can you not be interested in them? They are the shape of the world to come.
[…]
Also infused in a lot of your work is what appears to me anyway to be a deep and abiding love of space travel. What is it about space that fascinates you so much?
Space is the place. We currently keep all our breeding pairs in the same place, which is kind of a stupid way to run a species. Also, it’s full of stuff we haven’t seen yet, which should be impetus enough to go and look.
What do you think about the current state of space travel, especially now with China and now private companies getting into the mix?
I find it all sadly boring. I mean, yes, the Chinese programme looks awfully promising, but it’s just re-running the prime NASA years in fast-forward — doing things we already did, all over again, in a compressed timeframe, with what is probably fairly similar technology. I’m interested to see what they do once they attain the Moon. And, again, the private stuff — Virgin is just finding a new way to replicate Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital lob. That said, Elon Musk’s projects are getting more interesting by the day. I’m starting to wonder if he doesn’t have a full-on James Bond villain long-game scheme. Wouldn’t that be great? Right up until, you know, the orbital death ray platforms.
July 30, 2013
Was Caligula the victim of a historical smear campaign?
I confess, my views on Emperor Caligula (formally Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) were almost completely informed by the character in the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. BBC News Magazine‘s Mary Beard thinks Caligula got a fearful load of bad press:
Of course, there had been some very nasty monarchs and despots before Caligula. But, so far as we know, none of his predecessors had ever ticked all the boxes of a fully fledged tyrant, in the modern sense.
There was his (Imelda Marcos-style) passion for shoes, his megalomania, sadism and sexual perversion (including incest, it was said, with all three of his sisters), to a decidedly odd relationship with his pets. One of his bright ideas was supposed to have been to make his favourite horse a consul — the chief magistrate of Rome.
Roman writers went on and on about his appalling behaviour, and he became so much the touchstone of tyranny for them that one unpopular emperor, half a century later, was nicknamed “the bald Caligula”.
But how many of their lurid stories are true is very hard to know. Did he really force men to watch the execution of their sons, then invite them to a jolly dinner, where they were expected to laugh and joke? Did he actually go into the Temple of the gods Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum and wait for people to turn up and worship him?
It is probably too sceptical to mistrust everything that we are told. Against all expectations, one Cambridge archaeologist thinks he may have found traces of the vast bridge that Caligula was supposed to have built between his own palace and the Temple of Jupiter — so it was easier for him to go and have a chat with the god, when he wanted.
So the idea that Caligula was a nice young man who has simply had a very bad press doesn’t sound very plausible.
All the same, the evidence for Caligula’s monstrosity isn’t quite as clear-cut as it looks at first sight. There are a few eyewitness accounts of parts of his reign, and none of them mention any of the worst stories.
No revisionist slant on Caligula is complete without a few nasty cracks directed towards kindly old Uncle Claudius:
More topical though is the question of what, or who, came next. Caligula was assassinated in the name of freedom. And for a few hours the ancient Romans do seem to have flirted with overthrowing one-man rule entirely, and reinstating democracy.
But then the palace guard found Caligula’s uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and hailed him emperor instead. Thanks to Robert Graves, Claudius has had a good press, as a rather sympathetic, slightly bumbling, bookish ruler.
But the ancient writers tell a different story — of an autocrat who was just as bad as the man he had replaced. The Romans thought they were getting freedom, but got more of the same.
Considering what happened then, it’s hard not to think of the excitements and disappointments of the Arab Spring.
July 22, 2013
Detroit as Ayn Rand’s “Starnesville”
In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan quotes Ayn Rand:
Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:
What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.
Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.
Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.
They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.
“Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.
The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.
Rearden pointed. “That one.”
“It’s closed.”
Now here’s the really extraordinary thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest per capita GDP in the United States.
July 13, 2013
Charles Stross on the inspiration for Saturn’s Children
It’s rather fascinating — especially if you’re also a fan of Robert Heinlein:
Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Robert A. Heinlein’s work. I am not American; much of his world-view is alien to me. I did not grow up with his 1950’s juvenile novels, and I don’t like them much. Some of his work is deeply, irredeemably flawed and should probably be taken out back and shot. (Does anyone have a kind word to say for Sixth Column or Farnham’s Freehold? I’ll try: 6thC was written to an outline supplied by famously racist editor John W. Campbell, at a point when Heinlein needed the money, and he is alleged to have watered down the racism as far as he could; as for FF, here was a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre-Martin Luther King era. And getting it wrong for facepalm values of wrong, so wrong he wasn’t even on the right map … but at least he wasn’t ignoring it.) Ahem. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to ignore Heinlein unless you’re going to ignore all American SF, and as that’s my main market and my main publishers are American, that’s not an option.
So I decided to pick a Heinlein novel and do a homage to it. One of my two favourites would do: that narrowed it to Glory Road (not really an option because: space opera contract) or Friday (problematic, later work showing flashes of earlier brilliance but impossible to read now without much head-clutching or making excuses for the author’s lack of a language with which to tackle issues of racism and child abuse, which is what underpins that book). This made things both easier and harder, because Friday is a late period work — distinctly different from his early and mid-phase novels (although it was something of a return to his mid-period form).
Then everything came together in my head in a blinding flash of enlightenment, thuswise:
I was going to write a late period Heinlein tribute novel, because everybody (I’m looking at you, Scalzi; also John Varley, Spider Robinson, Mike Ford, Steven Gould …) else who does Heinlein tributes does early Heinlein. And if you want to stand out, the best way to do it is to look which way the herd is stampeding in, then go somewhere else.
Heinlein in his dirty-old-man phase seemed to have a nipple obsession. Worse: an obsession with nipples which, as piloerectile tissue, made an implausible noise — “spung!” Thus, the word “spung!” becomes the centerpiece of any successful late-period Heinlein pastiche.
We in the reality-based community are aware that real human nipples do not do “spung”. But under what circumstances might a nipple go “spung”? Well, if it was some sort of pressure-relief valve on a robot, that sound wouldn’t be totally implausible.
Nipples … on a robot. Why would a robot need nipples? The answer seemed obvious: it was a sex robot. A sex robot in the shape of a Heinleinian omni-competent and beautiful yet sexually submissive heroine. (There is nothing politically correct about Heinlein: he was a product of a different age.)
