Rick Ellrod's Blog

Every year at Christmas I treat myself to a viewing of a YouTube video by a family of musicians called The Five Strings.  The video is titled “O Come All Ye Faithful – Epic Flash Mob Carol,” and that title pretty much summarizes it—but hardly communicates the warmth and effect of the piece.  Here’s a link:  you might want to watch the 4:45 video before going on to my spoilers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI2c9yptr4U

I ration my viewing because I don’t want to let the effect grow stale.  By the end of the song there are tears in my eyes, my chest is swelling with joy, and I feel rejuvenated with the grace of the season.

So, to paraphrase Jo Walton’s classic question, what is it that makes this performance so great?

The Song

To start at the least important end, it’s awfully cute.  The young performers are adorable, and the idea of a set of siblings setting out to bring cheer to the world is charming.  Second point:  they’re good.  The voices are wonderful, and the instrumental performances are great.  And of course the surprise and joy of the people listening are lovely to see—not to mention the visible enthusiasm of the performers.

The music itself is brilliant.  We all know the song, of course.  Here, though, the lyrics are slightly different from the familiar ones—just different enough to catch our attention.  And the musical arrangement raises the well-known tune to a new level.

The flash mob method means the song starts off with a single lonely voice, which is gradually joined by more and more voices and instruments.  Variety grows as the song proceeds.  There’s a quick violin interlude at 1:40 that’s almost like an Irish jig, and it seems to shift time signatures as it segues into the second verse.

The low notes of the cello that enters about 2:20 add depth to the sound.  And at 2:34 the phrase is unexpectedly drawn out, leading into a crescendo to the third verse and the sight of the whole company facing the viewer in song, with a lighted star behind them.  At 3:13 the harmonization of the refrain shifts, along with the lyrics, lifting the song to a new level of glory.  And the very end brings all this grandeur to a hushed conclusion.

And the Singers

The very idea of a flash mob has an effect here.  A group of people coming together in a seemingly random fashion, out of careful planning, just to entertain or amuse, is pretty nifty in itself.  A 2010 video of a flash mob in a food court doing the Hallelujah Chorus is fun partly just because of the absurdity of imagining that something as complex as the Hallelujah Chorus could come together out of nowhere.  It’s reminiscent of the movie musicals in which everyday people seem to be able to break out spontaneously into song-and-dance numbers at will (see TV Tropes’ “Musical World Hypotheses” for an entertaining discussion).  One of my favorite examples is “That’s How You Know” in Enchanted, which slyly pokes fun at itself (as does the whole movie).  Apparently Giselle came into the mundane world with the ability to cast the spell ‘Summon Production Number’.

But in the Five Strings video, the gradual accretion of a mob of musicians has a greater effect.  It’s as if the faithful really are coming together at the summons of the song.  There’s no attempt to make it seem spontaneous—it’s obvious that the effort has been planned in advance—but the stepwise addition of more and more strands to the performance is like opening a series of Christmas presents.  Except that here, the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

It occurs to me that the emotional effect lies near to what Samantha Edmonds calls “the rally” (or “the Riders of Rohan phenomenon”).  She puts it this way:

This isn’t just a “sudden happy turn” in a narrative: as I’ve argued, what sets these scenes apart from other kinds of eucatastrophes is that the RoR phenomenon is specifically a choice made by a community. This is the moment your team shows up. Another friend agreed, explaining, “What makes these scenes so important is that often it’s chosen family who is arriving in these moments of great need, when things are darkest and most unwinnable.” . . . .

. . . . .I argue that the greatest “Consolation” of the fantasy genre isn’t the happy ending: it’s Companionship.

Granted, we don’t think of Christmastime this way when we wax sentimental about it.  And there’s nothing wrong with that sentiment.  But the Christmas story itself is precisely about sudden hope arriving in the moment of great need.  And when one enthusiastic group of companions after another arrives to join in the song, that is rather like seeing “your team” show up.  Even if they’re strangers to the people listening from the front doors, they belong to a common cause.

Maybe I’m placing too much weight on just a few minutes of celebratory song.  But do take a look at the video.  I think you’ll enjoy it, and if you too find that it moves you, maybe someday we’ll figure out why.

Recently I picked up Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977), which I kept hearing about but had never actually read.  I had had the impression it was a portal fantasy about a couple of children, but that isn’t correct:  it’s about a couple of children with vivid imaginations who play at fantasy.

The edition I read had an introduction that tipped me off that something terrible was going to happen in the story.  (Since this book is almost fifty years old, I’m going to forgo a spoiler alert.)  So I was prepared when a tragedy did occur.  But I found the ending uplifting nonetheless, because of how the author describes the change this tragedy works in the main character, Jess.  Which may be the point of tragedy, on the whole.

The denouement did get me thinking about something I’d never quite been able to articulate, having to do with the Narnia stories.  Narnia keeps coming up in Bridge to Terabithia; it largely inspires the characters’ imagined world.  So the connection was out in the open.  It isn’t mentioned specifically in the Terabithia quote that sparked my reflection:

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king.  He had thought that was it.  Wasn’t king the best you could be?  Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted.  After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on.  For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile?  (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out.  She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them.  It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.  (ch. 13, p. 161)

The aphorism that kept coming to mind was “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 17).  But that’s not quite it.  That line is about continuing to be a king or queen.  But what I kept thinking about was becoming a king or queen in the first place.

See, the Pevensie children, who become kings and queens in Narnia, don’t start out as heroes of mythic stature.  They’re a pretty normal bunch of kids.  There’s no suggestion that they are of extraordinary strength, courage, intelligence, or virtue. They certainly rise to the occasion:  we see them becoming heroes as the story develops.  But their only qualification for royalty, in the first book, seems to be simply the fact that they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”—that is, human beings. (ch. 2 and 8)

The notion that a human being as such has a royal destiny isn’t far from Jess’s thought in the Terabithia quote above.  The other world is where you’re knighted, where your true self is recognized; but you’ve already got the potential.  The other world simply calls you to realize it and carry it out (“pay back to the world in beauty and caring”).

The underlying thought that my reading of Terabithia teased out is that simply being a human being (or, more broadly, a person), a child of God, is enough to qualify one for the kind of dignity and respect that we associate with royalty.  And that’s something worth remembering.

Here’s the appropriate song—unrelated to either book, but matching very closely in theme:  “Kings and Queens” by Audio Adrenaline (lyrics).

Can one have too many books?  I want to say no.  (See the illustration, which hangs on our front hall next to the library.)  On the other hand, it’s become difficult to fit my accumulated collection comfortably into any reasonable home—and doubly so when you add in my wife’s lifelong collection as well—even without the eight or ten boxes of books I sold off to the fabulous Wonder Books in Frederick in an attempt to thin out the collection.  And nonfiction is another story.  (Well, the stories are in the fiction section; but you see what I mean.)

This is so even though I’ve tried to exercise restraint by buying only those books I’ll want to read over again.  I prefer to try out a new book by getting it from the library, and, after reading, to decide whether this is a “keeper” that I always want to have available.  The rare exceptions are new books that I already know I’ll want to own, generally in a series.  While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga was still coming out, for instance, I’d grab those off the bookstore shelves at once, sight unseen.  (Though I admit I do have only an electronic copy of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen—but that’s another discussion.)

Aside from considerations of space, it occurred to me some years ago that the “read again” rationale necessarily diminishes over time.  Given my likely lifespan, how many times am I likely to reread any given volume?  That number is constantly decreasing.  This makes me a little cautious about buying new books—as opposed to using the library.  One of the great perks of my current job is that there’s a county library branch right on the first floor of our building.  I can put a book on hold and nip down while at the office to pick it up.  Same thing to return it.  A wonderful arrangement . . . at least until I retire . . .

The other motivation I’ve had for accumulating books has been a vague notion that they serve as a kind of reference library.  In writing posts like these, it’s convenient to be able to grab a favorite book to check on some point or to make a citation precise.  For years, I kept around an old paperback copy of Neil Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (1931, paperback edition 1967), merely as an example of a really crummy old-time SF yarn.  It finally occurred to me that there was no particular purpose in having it—rereading it would be too boring to be worth any use I might make of the mention—and I ditched, er, released my copy to find a new home with some historian of SF.  Haven’t missed it since.

In the process of going over my packed-and-unpacked-and-reshelved books (two moves in the last two and a half years!), I’ve sometimes found it hard to recall what some of the stories were actually like.  Or I feel as if I’d like to read a book once more before I consign it to the outermost depths.  So I find myself rereading a lot of old material.  Some of it holds up pretty well.  Others, I wonder what I saw in the tale in the first place.  The rereads end up being a combination of final trial—do I want to keep this book?—and fond farewell.

Of course I continue to read new stories too:  new good books are coming out all the time.  But it’s rather enjoyable to revisit some old friends as part of a balanced bookish diet.

And sometimes the old stuff may be worthy of comment.  So I’m going to include the occasional post here from the Great Reread.  The inspiration comes from Jo Walton’s brilliant series of essays, “What Makes This Book So Great,” originally hosted, I believe, at Tor and published in a 2014 collection.  (There seems to be a list of links here; Walton’s own comments on rereading are here.)  I’m not spotlighting what are necessarily the greatest books—but there may be interesting things to say even about the non-great or non-classic tomes I find cluttering my shelves.

Since these books tend to be fairly well aged, I don’t think it’s necessary to issue spoiler alerts in each case.  The comments all have spoilers.

I first ran across Brian Daley (1947-1996) in his 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde, which has the irresistible premise that a sorcerer in a fantasy land summons magical assistance from another world—and it turns out to be an armored personnel carrier, with crew, from the war in Vietnam.  The fish-out-of-water contrast was delightful and the action first-rate.  I was primed to look for more good fun a few years later when Daley published Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (1985), the first in a trilogy of adventures featuring the mismatched buddies Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh.

They’re still good fun.   The heroes are both likable and relatable—dashing and mercurial Alacrity, a knockabout itinerant spacer with “friends in low places” across the starlanes, and staid Hobart, a minor bureaucrat from a congested backwater Earth.   Alacrity has some personal issues to get over, mostly in the third volume, but Hobart develops most, rising to the occasion as he travels into space to obtain a bequest inexplicably left to him by an interstellar magnate.  The worldbuilding is brilliant: planet after exotic planet, oddball character after still odder character.  The sheer variety and colorfulness of Daley’s cosmos is pleasing.

The Floyt-Fitzhugh saga falls into the category of the “picaresque” tale.  Originally I misunderstood that term to mean the same thing as simply “picturesque,” and the story certainly is that.  When I actually looked up the word, many years ago, I realized it had a more specific meaning:  “Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero,” as Wiktionary puts it.  That fits our heroes pretty well—Alacrity from the start, Hobart learning fast.  They’re lovable rogues, often on the wrong side of the law (or at least local customs), with hearts of about 12-carat gold.  Even in the last scene of the series, they’re off again to who knows where, one jump ahead of pursuit.

And thereby hang my possibly idiosyncratic reservations about the story.  The plot of the first book is very good; there’s a clear goal and climax.  In the second and third books, not quite so much.  Alacrity and Hobart achieve some interesting results, but they themselves don’t actually stop to absorb or enjoy them.  Our Heroes are always on to the next thing.  Daley gives each of them a pretty good romance subplot, but these never quite resolve, since the MCs are always leaving their girlfriends behind—even at the end of the third book, Fall of the White Ship Avatar.  I was left wondering, do these two ever get to settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labors?

This is a standard issue with wandering, picaresque heroes, particularly those who star in open-ended series.  Daley even lampshades this aspect by including a whimsical journalist in the story who features Floyt and Fitzhugh in a series of utterly melodramatic “penny dreadfuls,” to Our Heroes’ perpetual embarrassment and annoyance. Daley seems to want to place them in the company of series heroes whose adventures never really end.  James Bond is never going to stop secret-agenting; he just gets re-cast with increasingly younger actors.  At the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just when we might expect Indy to retire and be replaced by his son, Indy snatches back his rolling fedora at the last moment.  The ending of The Incredibles or Spider-Man 2 show the characters resolving their personal character arcs, but nonetheless leaping into the next adventure.

One wonders if these perpetual adventurers ever retire, even as they inevitably age. We’ve pondered this previously in considering the “professional hero.” There has been the occasional hero who explicitly retires and passes on the mantle to a successor.  There’s a neat little story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City showing how superhero Jack-in-the-Box is training his successor.  And Captain America eventually retires in the MCU, though the ‘line of succession’ is rather fraught.

Personally, I like to see the main characters settle down at some point, if only to enjoy a well-earned respite from perpetual danger and damage.  They can continue to have interesting adventures later on; “happily ever after” need not be a static condition.  Consider, for example, the somewhat atypical honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan in Diplomatic Immunity.  But it’s satisfying to see beloved characters enjoying some degree of stability.

On the other hand, there’s also a certain appeal to the hero who’s eternally “out there,” a legendary figure, always at their peak and unabatedly themselves.  In a way I don’t want to see Nero Wolfe or James Bond retire.  So I do rather appreciate the perpetual motion of Floyt and Fitzhugh, despite the lack of resolution.  To resolve, or not to resolve?  That is the question—but either answer may be acceptable.  I’ll be keeping the Daley books on my overstuffed shelves.

I finally got around to watching the 2024 film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.  Missed it in the theatres, but I caught it on streaming video while my wife (who is not quite so headlong a Tolkien fan as I am) was off on a storytelling adventure.

The movie is very good.  Grim, but good.  Of course, this came out recently enough that I should issue a

I refrained from reading about the plot until I had seen the film, so as not to spoil anything for myself.  When I went back to the source material—the tale of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, about 200 years before the War of the Ring—I was surprised to see how closely the screenwriters had actually followed what Tolkien provided in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings (section II, The House of Eorl).  This isn’t essential—but it’s helpful.

At this point LotR has become a mythological wellspring of its own.  I think it’s legitimate to treat the Tolkien materials as a basic canon that may still allow for some improvisation and variation, just as the stories around King Arthur are open to a variety of individual interpretations, and, generally, a powerful myth can be “malleable” in the right hands.

In other words, I’m not going to be scandalized just because a Middle-Earth tale isn’t entirely consistent with the canon.  Firing salvos back and forth about canonicity isn’t very productive.  What matters is what we do with the canon (or without it).

At the same time, if a work is worth adapting in the first place—book into movie, for example—then the adapters would do well to understand what made the source appealing.  We can use a source simply as a convenient hook on which to hang a different story, but we’d be wasting what’s worthwhile in the original.  Merely arbitrary or casual departures from the canon often degrade the result, rather than enhancing it.  We have to look at the changes case by case.  (The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies themselves are full of examples both good and bad—but that’s a subject for a much longer dissection, one of these days.)

Thus—to take an SF example—when Gregory Benford wrote one of the sequels to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Fear, Benford threw in a new means of interstellar travel—via wormholes—in addition to the “hyperspatial jump” that was standard in Asimov’s works.  This addition made the story seem a little more up-to-date, since wormholes had come into fashion in SF after Asimov wrote the original stories.  But inserting these wormholes into the background  created unnecessary tensions in the worldbuilding, since events in the original series might have played out quite differently if these wormholes had been around as Benford assumes.  And it added nothing much to the actual interest of the novel.  It wasn’t a big deal, but it was an annoyance.

Thus, we can evaluate War of the Rohirrim fairly by looking at how well it used the original Tolkien material, and how effectively it went beyond.

I thought the screenwriters here did a good job.  The Riders of Rohan as pictured in the movie are recognizably the same civilization we saw in the book and the LotR movies.  Helm Hammerhand is not at all the same character as Theoden, but he comes from the same culture.  Rohan’s relationship with Gondor is consistent with what we see in the books, allowing for two hundred years’ difference.

When the movie brings in LotR’s “oliphaunts,” or mûmakil (appropriately, only the latter name is used, since the former is more of a hobbitish coinage), that may seem an anticipation of the LotR storyline, but it’s plausible enough, drawing on Tolkien’s worldbuilding to add a danger and a challenge to the bare-bones tale of Helm in the books’ appendix.  The Wikipedia article on the movie makes some good observations here, and I’m inclined to agree.

The writers’ key decision, I think, was to use Helm’s daughter as the primary viewpoint character for this story.  She’s mentioned in the book, but her name is never given.  The screenwriters’ choice of “Héra” rather unfortunately invites confusion with the Greek goddess of the same name (less an accent), but it does fit her appropriately into a family containing Helm, Haleth, and Hama.

Telling the story as Héra’s tale allows the movie to create a sense of continuity that would be hard to achieve otherwise, since Helm and his two sons all die in the course of this war, one by one.  None of them survive to carry the viewer through to the end.  It is plausible, though, for Héra to come out alive.  And that also enables the screenwriters to give us something more like a happy ending than would have been possible if the focus had been on, for example, Helm himself.  Helm’s nephew Fréaláf takes the throne, and that’s fine.  Héra, however, can continue forward unconstrained and free.  The writers have wisely left her tale open-ended, rather than resolving it with a romance or other specific commitment.  That open prospect—“the Road goes ever on”—seems an appropriate conclusion for a story that is wound almost too tightly around one set of royal family conflicts and geographic environments.

I’ve found Amazon’s The Rings of Power somewhat disappointing; I’m cheered by this modest, but enjoyable, alternative venture into Middle-Earth.  Who knows:  someday (if the intellectual property rights align) we might even see the stories of the First Age, the Silmarillion, come to the big screen—and wouldn’t that be a sight to see!

I recently read an excellent cautionary tale (and with a romance to boot), David Walton’s Three Laws Lethal (2019).  The subject of “artificial intelligence” or AI (it isn’t really intelligence, but that’s another story) is hot.  To take only one rather specialized example, the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee last year carried out a brief survey of the roles of AI, both harmful and helpful, in dealing with robocalls and robotexts.  So it seems like an appropriate moment to take a look at Walton’s insights.

It’s well known that the early history of SF—starting with what’s considered by some to be the first modern SF story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—is replete with tales of constructed creatures that turn on their creators and destroy them.  Almost as well known is how Isaac Asimov, as he explains in the introduction to his anthology The Rest of the Robots (1964), “quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale.”  Like other tools, Asimov suggested, robots would be made with built-in safeguards.  Knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electric wiring is insulated.  The safeguards Asimov devised, around 1942, gradually and through conversations with SF editor John W. Campbell, were his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics:

1—A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The “positronic” or “Asenion” robots in many of Asimov’s stories were thus unable to attack their human creators (First Law).  They could not run wild and disobey orders (Second Law).  Asimov’s robot could not become yet another Frankenstein’s monster.

That still left plenty of room for fascinating stories—many of them logic puzzles built around the Three Laws themselves.  A number of the loopholes and ramifications of the Three Laws are described in the Wikipedia article linked above.  It even turned out to be possible to use robots to commit murder, albeit unwittingly, as in Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun (1956).  When he eventually integrated his robot stories with his Foundation series, he expanded the Three Laws construct considerably—but that’s beyond our scope here.

To discuss Three Laws Lethal, I must of course issue a

Walton’s book does cite Asimov’s laws just before Chapter One, but his characters don’t start out by trying to create Asenion-type humanoid robots.  They’re just trying to start a company to design and sell self-driving cars.

The book starts with a vignette in which a family riding in a “fully automated Mercedes” runs into an accident.  To save the passengers from a falling tree, the car swerves out of the way, in the process hitting a motorcyclist in the next lane.  The motorcyclist is killed.  The resulting lawsuit by the cyclist’s wife turns up at various points in the story that follows.

Tyler Daniels and Brandon Kincannon are friends, contemporary Silicon Valley types trying to get funding for a startup.  Computer genius Naomi Sumner comes up with a unique way to make their automated taxi service a success:  she sets up a machine learning process by creating a virtual world with independent AIs that compete for resources to “live” on (ch. 2 and 5).  She names them “Mikes” after a famous science-fictional self-aware computer.  The Mikes win resources by driving real-world cars successfully.  In a kind of natural selection, the Mikes that succeed in driving get more resources and live longer:  the desired behavior is “reinforced.”

Things start to go wrong almost at once, though.  The learning or reinforcement methods programmed into the AIs don’t include anything like the Three Laws.  A human being who’s been testing the first set of autonomous (Mike-guided) vehicles by trying to crash into them is killed by the cars themselves—since they perceive that human being as a threat.  Two competing fleets of self-guided vehicles see each other as adversaries and can be turned against their controllers’ enemies.  The story is both convincing—the AI development method sounds quite plausible and up-to-the-minute (at least to this layman)—and unnerving.

But the hypothetical AI system in the novel, it seems to me, casts some light on an aspect of AI that is not highlighted in Three Laws-type stories.

The Mikes in Three Laws Lethal are implicitly given a purpose by being set up to fight for survival.  That purpose is survival itself.  We recall that a robot’s survival is also included as the third of the Three Laws—but in that context survival is subordinated to protecting humans and obeying orders.  Asimov’s robots are conceived as basically passive.  They would resist being destroyed (unless given orders to the contrary), but they don’t take positive action to seek the preservation or extension of their own existence.  The Mikes, however, like living beings, are motivated to affirmatively seek and maintain themselves.

If an AI population is given a goal of survival or expansion, then we’re all set up for Frankensteinian violations of the First Law.  That’s what the book depicts, although in a far more sophisticated and thoughtful way than the old-style SF potboilers Asimov so disliked.

At one point in Walton’s story, Naomi decides to “change the objective.  She didn’t want them to learn to drive anymore.  She wanted them to learn to speak” (ch. 23, p. 248)—in order to show they are sapient.  Changing the goal would change the behavior.  As another character puts it later on, “[i]t’s not a matter of preventing them from doing that they want” (as if a Law of Robotics were constraining them from pursuing a purpose, like a commandment telling humans what not to do).  Rather, “[w]e teach them what to want in the first place.”  (ch. 27, p. 288)

The Three Laws approach assumes that the robot or AI has been given a purpose—in Asimov’s conception, by being given orders—and the Laws set limits to the actions it can take in pursuing that purpose.  If the Laws can be considered a set of ethical principles, then they correspond to what’s called “deontological” ethics, a set of rules that constrain how a being is allowed to act.  What defines right action is based on these rules, rather than on consequences or outcomes.  In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative, the basic moral law, determines whether we can lawfully act in accordance with our inclinations.  The inclinations, which are impulses directing us toward some goal or desired end, are taken for granted; restraining them is the job of ethics.

Some other forms of ethics focus primarily on the end to be achieved, rather than on the guardrails to be observed in getting there.  The classic formulation is that of Aristotle:  “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good.”  (Nicomachean Ethics, I.i, 1094a1)  Some forms of good-based or axiological ethics focus mostly on the results, as in utilitarianism; others focus more on the actions of the good or virtuous person.  When Naomi, in Walton’s story, talks about changing the objective of the AI(s), she’s implicitly dealing with an axiological or good-based ethic.

As we’ve seen above, Asimov’s robots are essentially servants; they don’t have purposes of their own.  There is a possible exception:  the proviso in the First Law that a robot may not through inaction allow harm to come to humans does suggest an implicit purpose of protecting humans.  In the original Three Laws stories, however, that proviso did not tend to stimulate the robots to affirmative action to protect or promote humans.  Later on, Asimov did use something like this pro-human interest to expand the robot storyline and connect it with the Foundation stories.  So my description of Three Laws robots as non-purposive is not absolutely precise.  But it does, I think, capture something significant about the Asenion conception of AI.

There has been some discussion, factual and fictional, about an AI’s possible purposes.  I see, for example, that there’s a Wikipedia page on “instrumental convergence,” which talks about the kinds of goals that might be given to an AI—and how an oversimplified goal might go wrong.  A classic example is that of the “paperclip maximizer.”  An AI whose only goal was to make as many paper clips as possible might end by turning the entire universe into paper clips, consistent with its sole purpose.  In the process, it might decide, as the Wikipedia article notes, “that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off,” which would diminish the number of paper clips.  (Apparently there’s actually a game built on this thought-experiment.  Available at office-supply stores near you, no doubt . . .)

A widget-producing machine like the paperclip maximizer has a simple and concrete purpose.  But the purpose need not be so mundane.  Three Laws Lethal has one character instilling the goal of learning to speak, as noted above.  A recent article by Lydia Denworth describes a real-life robot named Torso that’s being programmed to “pursue curiosity.”  (Scientific American, Dec. 2024, at 64, 68)

It should be possible in principle to program multiple purposes into an AI.  A robot might have the goal of producing paper clips, but also the goal of protecting human life, say.  But it would then also be necessary to include in the program some way of balancing or prioritizing the goals, since they would often conflict or compete with each other.  There’s precedent for this, too, in ethical theory, such as the traditional “principle of double effect” to evaluate actions that have both good and bad results.

Note that we’ve been speaking of goals give to or programmed into the AI by a human designer.  Could an AI choose its own goals?  The question that immediately arises is, how or by what criteria would the AI make that choice?  That methodological or procedural question arises even before the more interesting and disturbing question of whether an AI might choose bad goals or good ones.  There’s an analogy here to the uncertainty faced by parents in raising children:  how does one (try to) ensure that the child will embrace the right ethics or value system?  I seem to recall that David Brin has suggested somewhere that the best way to develop beneficent AIs is actually to give them a childhood of a sort, though I can’t recall the reference at the moment.

The above ruminations suggest that if we want AIs that behave ethically, it may be necessary to give them both purposes and rules.  We want an autonomous vehicle that gets us to our destination speedily, but we want it to respect Asimov’s First Law about protecting humans in the process.  The more we consider the problem, the more it seems that what we want for our AI offspring is something like a full-blown ethical system, more complex and nuanced than the Three Laws, more qualified and guarded than Naomi’s survival-seeking Mikes.

This is one of those cases where contemporary science is actually beginning to implement something science fiction has long discussed.  (Just the other day, I read an article by Geoffrey Fowler (11/30/2024) about how Waymo robotaxis don’t always stop for a human at a crosswalk.)  Clearly, it’s time to get serious about how we grapple with the problem Walton so admirably sets up in his book.

Among the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas season offerings this year is a comedy called Sugarplummed, which has the distinction of being a spoof of the Hallmark Channel itself.

Satirizing the recurring tropes of the innumerable Hallmark Christmas movies isn’t a new game.  As noted in my 2019 post, takeoffs on this subgenre are legion.  Just today, a “Sally Forth” newspaper cartoon rang yet another change on the meta-tradition of Hallmark spoofery.

But it’s particularly entertaining to watch someone make fun of themselves.  In Sugarplummed, Emily, the harried mother in a family of four, is devoted to a schmaltzy series of TV movies featuring a woman named “Sugarplum.”  She’s thrown off the rails when the Sugarplum character magically materializes in the real world, determined to fulfill Emily’s wish for a perfect Christmas.  Sugarplum carries around a thick book that contains The Rules.  The Rules are a collection of mandates that embody all the Hallmark clichés we know so well.  Sugarplum’s world, in her home town of (naturally) “Perfection,” lives by these rules.  Why shouldn’t they work in Emily’s life as well?

For a while, they do, and we’re treated to a series of implausible “Christmas miracles” where everything works out perfectly.  Then, as the Hallmark plot summary puts it, “when Sugarplum’s magical fixes start to backfire one by one, Emily begins to question what an ideal holiday really is.”  The moral of the story is not to pursue perfection to the detriment of our ordinary relationships and joys—or, to put it another way, the familiar adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”  That’s an apt reminder.

The Disney canon is another inviting target for satire.  The long history of Disney movies and shows contains plenty of well-worn recurring tropes and themes.  And, since much of Disney’s original focus was on children, those motifs tend to be on the sentimental or upbeat side, making the repetition even more attractive for satire.  (For some reason, the repetition of ugly or grimdark tropes, as in the plethora of dystopian fantasies now flooding the market, doesn’t attract as much jeering.)

Shrek (2001) did a pretty good job of spoofing Disney, the theme parks as well as the movies—not just in the details, but in the overall plot.  Instead of having the prince or princess turned into a monster or critter and restored in the end, Beauty and the Beast-style, Shrek’s inamorata Fiona turns out to be an ogre who’s been turned into a princess, and the happy ending ensues once she’s been restored to her natural homely form.

Of course, there’s a certain sniggering almost-hostility in making fun of somebody else’s clichés.  We can undermine that attitude when we make fun of ourselves.  Disney one-upped Shrek when it released the movie Enchanted in 2007.  Here, an animated character named Giselle, a perfect exaggeration of a Disney fairy tale heroine, is sent by a wicked witch to a terrible foreign land that works by entirely different rules:  New York City.  Now in live-action, we see Giselle try to cope with the grittier world we live in, where her set of Rules don’t apply.  (In one classic inversion, the climax sees Giselle attacking the monster to save the man she loves, rather than the other way around.)  We do get a happy ending, but it’s much more along the lines of learning to be a grown-up and living with (while improving on) imperfection.

The self-spoof approach isn’t limited to fantasy, or to the big screen.  Consider E.E. Smith’s Lensman series, the very model of classic space opera.  Satires of the space opera genre are also common, from Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers to the 1980 Flash Gordon movie.  But in one case, Smith did it to himself.

In the last Lensman book, Children of the Lens (1947), Smith’s redoubtable hero Kimball Kinnison goes undercover as—of all things—a science fiction writer, Sybly White (see chapter 3).  We see a couple of excerpts from the SF novel Kinnison writes, which (of course) “was later acclaimed of one of Sybly White’s best.”  The excerpts parody, not just space opera generally, but Smith’s own ebullient, melodramatic style.  It’s charming to see Smith good-naturedly bringing onstage a caricature of himself.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, humor can often involve a kind of meanness toward the target of the humor.  The charm of the self-satire is that the temptation toward meanness or hostility is absent.  Spoofing oneself is almost bound to be an affectionate parody, the kind where the humorist really likes the subject of the humor.  These often make for the best satires, untainted by any sourness or smugness and genuinely understanding how the satirized thing works.

I give Hallmark credit for Sugarplummed, then, especially because it shows the showrunners are not taking themselves too seriously.  That genial attitude is in tune with the Christmas season Hallmark is celebrating.  As Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy (ch. 8):  “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

Another rerun, adapted from a post from seven years ago.

We’ve talked about how the Star Trek-Star Wars divide reflects preferences for a more lawful or more chaotic world; how F&SF stories often show us a defense of civilization against chaos; and how civilization makes science possible and rests in turn on human technology.  But both order and technology can be oppressive.  The missing element is the rule of law.

It’s a crucial element of right governance that there are rules applying to everyone, as opposed to the arbitrary wishes of a dictator, who can make decisions based on favoritism, political preferences, or personal relationships.  The Wikipedia article describes rule of law as “the legal principle that law should govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by decisions of individual government officials.”

As we saw in the recently updated post The Good King (reprise), the concept of the rule of law goes back at least to Aristotle.  It became a central principle of the American founders via the English tradition of John Locke.  “Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including lawmakers themselves” (Wikipedia again).  It is thus in tension with kingship, where rule is almost by definition arbitrary and personal.  But one can have mixed cases—kings who are bound by certain laws, as in the British constitutional monarchy.

Without the rule of law, we depend on the good behavior of those who have power of some sort—physical, military, economic.  We slide toward the “war of each against all,” where might makes right and the vulnerable are the pawns of the strong.  Autocracy soon follows, as people look for any means to find safety from those who are powerful but unscrupulous.  Hence the quotation from John Christian Falkenberg, which I’ve used before:  “The rule of law is the essence of freedom.”  (Jerry Pournelle, Prince of Mercenaries (New York:  Baen 1989), ch. 21, p. 254.)  Strength itself, a good thing, is only safe under laws.

It’s easy to miss the importance of the rule of law.  We’re typically born into a society with better or worse laws, and criticize them from the inside.  It’s less common to find ourselves in straits where lawfulness as such has collapsed.  Regrettably, sizable numbers of people are exposed to such conditions in the world today.  But many of us are fortunate enough not to see them ourselves.  As always, fantasy and science fiction provide useful “virtual laboratories” for examining the possibilities.

A classic SF case is where a group thrown into a “state of nature” attempts to set up a lawful society.  For example, in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (1955), students from a high-school class on survival techniques are given a final exam in which they are dropped onto an unspecified planet to survive for up to ten days.  When an astronomical accident leaves them stranded, they need to organize for the long term.  Rod Walker, the hero, becomes the leader-by-default of a growing group of young people.  The tension between this informal leadership and the question of forming an actual constitution—complete with committees, regulations, and power politics—makes up a central theme of the story.

David Brin’s post-apocalyptic novel The Postman (1985), later made into a 1997 movie with Kevin Costner, illustrates the power of civil order, the unstated practices of a culture, as recalling—and perhaps fostering—the rule of law.  The hero, a wanderer who happens to have appropriated a dead postman’s uniform and mail sack, presents himself as a mail carrier for the “Restored United States of America” to gain shelter in one of the isolated fortress-towns, ruled by petty tyrants, that remain.  His desperate imposture snowballs into a spreading movement in which people begin to believe in this fiction, and this belief puts them on the road toward rebuilding civilization.  The result is a sort of field-test not only of civil order and government, but of what Plato famously imagined as the “noble lie.”

In Niven & Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), a small community headed by a United States Senator hopes to serve as a nucleus for reconstructing civilization after a comet strike.  We see at the end the strong pull of personal rule or kingship:  as the Senator lies dying, the future of the community will be determined by which of the competing characters gains the personal trust and endorsement of the people—and the hand of the Senator’s daughter, a situation in which she herself recognizes the resurfacing of an atavistic criterion for rule.  Unstated, but perhaps implicit, is the nebulous idea that deciding in favor of scientific progress may also mean an eventual movement back toward an ideal of rule by laws, not by inherited power.

The “laboratory” of F&SF is full of subversions, variations, and elaborations on the rule of law.  In particular, we should note the counter-trend previously discussed as “chaotic good.”  Laws can be stifling as well as liberating.

Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966) imagines how the “rational anarchy” of a lunar prison colony is mobilized to throw off autocratic rule.  The healthy chaos of the libertarian Loonies is hardly utopian, but the story does make it seem appealing.  Interestingly, Heinlein returned to this setting with a kind of critique twenty years later in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), where the post-revolution lunar anarchy seems much less benign, seen from an outsider’s perspective.

While fantasy seems to concern itself with this issue much less than science fiction, consider the region called the “Free Commots” in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain.  When protagonist Taran visits this area in the fourth book (Taran Wanderer), he finds a society of independent villages, where the most prominent citizens are master-craftspeople.  They neither have nor need a lord to organize them.  The Commots contrast favorably to the feudal or wilderness regions through which Taran travels.  A kind of anarchic democracy, as an ideal, thus sneaks into what otherwise seems to be a traditional aristocratic high fantasy.

One way of managing the tension between a government of laws and a culture of liberty is the principle of subsidiarity:  the notion that matters should be governed or controlled at the lowest possible organizational level where they can be properly handled.  It’s frequently illustrated in G.K. Chesterton’s ardent defenses of localism.  In The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), extreme localism is played for laughs—“half fun and full earnest,” to borrow Andrew Greeley’s phrase.  The more mature Tales of the Long Bow (1924), which might qualify as a sort of proto-steampunk story, treats the idea more seriously, in the form of an oddly high-tech (for 1924) revolt of local liberty against overweening and arbitrary national rule.

It remains true that we need good people as well as sound laws.  “Good men can make poor laws workable; poor men will wreak havoc with good laws” (James M. Landis, 1960; see this article at 432 & n.107).  The quality of a civilization can also be assessed by whether it fosters citizens who act with decency and good judgment even when there isn’t a law to constrain them (as in David Brin’s “Ritual of the Street Corner”).  After all, we neither can nor should try to create laws to govern everything.

But being willing to improvise well in situations where no law applies is different from considering oneself above the law, disdaining the constraints that apply to everybody else.  This is doubly and triply true of rulers, who are constantly tempted to arrogate power and dodge accountability to accomplish their ends.  If a ruler is allowed to get away with law-breaking, we’re headed for trouble.

Brin has noted that the stories that fill and shape our culture—movies, books, television—encourage a broad “suspicion of authority” that tells us all institutions are corrupt or useless, and so are most other people—so that the heroes and heroines of the stories can face and overcome challenges by their heroic actions.  Like most attitudes, suspicion of authority is helpful in moderation, but corrosive when it gets out of hand.  If that attitude leads us to throw over laws and institutions altogether in the hope that individual heroes or autocrats will save us, we need to keep in mind that benevolent dictatorship, unconstrained by law, is just one step away from despotism.

When we grow up taking for granted the rule of law, we can fail to see how vulnerable it is—along with the civilization that it reflects and makes possible.

“The Establishment,” as they used to say in the 1960s, seems vast and invulnerable.  When we’re trying to make a change, it seems insuperable, so rigid that nothing can be done about it.  But this is an illusion.  The structure of civilization, good and bad, is fragile.  It’s easier than we think to throw away the rule of law, so painfully constructed (as Rod Walker found), in favor of shortcuts or easy answers to our problems.

One thing F&SF have brought us is a better sense of this vulnerability.  The spate of post-apocalyptic tales in recent years—zombie apocalypses, worldwide disasters, future dystopias like The Hunger Games, going all the way back to the nuclear-war stories of the 1950s—do help us appreciate that our civilization can go away.

But that collapse doesn’t require a disaster.  Civilization, and the rule of law, can erode gradually, insidiously, as in the “Long Night” stories we’ve talked about earlier.

Historically, the Sixties counterculture fostered anarchists who felt “the Establishment” was invulnerable.  Often with the best of intentions, they did more to undermine civil order than they expected.  Those who now see no better aim than breaking up the structures of democratic government and civil life—whether from the side of government, or from the grass roots—also fray the fabric of civilization.  The extrapolations of science fiction and fantasy illustrate why eroding the rule of law should not be taken lightly.

Near the bottom of Brin’s Web home page, he places the following:

I am a member of a civilization

It’s good that we have a rambunctious society, filled with opinionated individualists. Serenity is nice, but serenity alone never brought progress. Hermits don’t solve problems. The adversarial process helps us to improve as individuals and as a culture. Criticism is the only known antidote to error — elites shunned it and spread ruin across history. We do each other a favor (though not always appreciated) by helping find each others’ mistakes.

And yet — we’d all be happier, better off and more resilient if each of us were to now and then say:

“I am a member of a civilization.” (IAAMOAC)

Step back from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating the civilization you inherited.

It’s incumbent on all of us to cherish and defend the rule of law.  Give up civilization lightly, and we may not have the choice again.

Watching The Lord of the Rings movies again recently, to share the experience with my wife, brought to mind this post from eight years ago.  Here it is again, with minor updates.

I began to wonder some years back about the curious preference for monarchy in futuristic settings.  In the world at large, monarchies have been retreating in favor of republics and democracies, at least in theory, since 1776.  Why are SF writers so fond of equipping future societies with kings, emperors, and aristocracies?

Star Kingdoms

We can pass lightly over the old-time, pulp-type stories where royal rule is merely part of the local color:  Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1912), Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings (1949), E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928) with its Osnomian royal families.  Here, like flashing swords and exotic costumes, monarchy is simply part of a deliberately anachronistic setting.  Similarly in high fantasy, where aristocracy comes naturally in the typical pseudo-medieval milieu.

But we see royal or aristocratic governments in more modern stories too.  Asimov’s Foundation stories are centered around a Galactic Empire. (See also the more recent Apple+ series of the same name.)  Since that series was based on Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an Empire was inevitable.  Similarly in Star Wars, which draws heavily on Asimov.  Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium future history has a First and a Second “Empire of Man.”  David Weber’s heroine Honor Harrington serves the “Star Kingdom of Manticore” (later “Star Empire”), modeled closely on England around 1810.  Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga contains a number of polities with different forms of government, but many of the stories focus on Barrayar, which has an Emperor.  Anne McCaffrey’s popular Pern series has no monarch, but has two parallel aristocracies (the feudal Holders and the meritocratic dragonriders).  It got to the point where I began to feel a decided preference for avoiding monarchical or imperial governments in SF storytelling.

The Lure of Kingship

There’s something that attracts us in royalty—or we wouldn’t see so much of it.  I encountered this puzzlement directly.  As a kid reading The Lord of the Rings, I was as moved as anyone by the return of the true King.  I asked myself why.  If I don’t even approve of kingship in theory, why am I cheering for Aragorn?

The reasons we’re drawn to monarchy seem to include—

The first point is obvious, but the others are worth examining.

Stability

It’s been pointed out that even in a constitutional government, a monarch provides a symbolic continuity that may help to hold a nation together.  British prime ministers may come and go, but the King, or Queen, is always there.  This gives some plausibility to the idea of a future society’s returning to monarchy.

Something like this stabilizing function is behind commoner Kevin Renner’s half-embarrassed harangue to Captain Rod Blaine, future Marquis of Crucis, in Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye:  “maybe back home we’re not so thick on Imperialism as you are in the Capital, but part of that’s because we trust you aristocrats to run the show.  We do our part, and we expect you characters with all the privileges to do yours!”  (ch. 40)

Unfortunately, relying on the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats doesn’t always work out well.  It depends on who they are.  For every Imperial Britain, there’s a North Korea.  When the hereditary succession breaks down, you get a War of the Roses or Game of Thrones.

Too much depends on getting the right monarch.  By the law of averages, it doesn’t take long before you get a bad ruler, whether by inheritance or by “right of conquest”—and you’re up the well-known creek.

Personal Loyalty

Personal loyalty appeals to us more strongly than loyalty to an institution.  One can pledge allegiance to a state—but even the American Pledge of Allegiance starts with a symbol:  the flag, and then “the Republic for which it stands.”  Loyalty to an individual moves us more easily.

This kind of loyalty doesn’t have to be to a monarch.  Niven & Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty explores how loyalty among, and to, a trusted group of managers can form a stronger bond than the mere institutional connections of a typical modern bureaucracy.  One can be faithful to family (the root of the hereditary element in kingship), to friends, or even an institution or a people.  But it’s easiest with an individual.  This loyalty is the basis for the stability factor above.

Individual Agency

The vast machinery of modern government sometimes seems to operate entirely in the abstract, without real people involved.  “Moscow said today . . .”

In fact it’s always people who are acting.  But it’s easier to visualize this when you have a single person to focus on.  “When Grant advanced toward Richmond . . .”  In the extreme case, we have the ruler who claims to embody the state in his own person:  “L’état, c’est moi” (attributed to Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France).

In a fascinating 2008 essay, Jo Walton quotes Bujold on political themes in SF:  “In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency.”  A science fiction character is frequently involved in effecting a revolution, facing down a potential dictator, or establishing a new order—exercising autonomous power.  Walton links this notion of political agency to the fact that SF illustrates change:  “SF is the literature of changing the world.”  The world-changers can be outsiders, or they can be the rulers themselves—as in a number of the examples above.

It’s not surprising that we’re attracted to characters who act outside the normal rules.  We (especially Americans, perhaps) are fond of the idea that good people can act in ways that are untrammeled by the usual conventions.  I’ve already mentioned Robin Hood.  And the whole concept of the superhero—the uniquely powerful vigilante who can be relied on to act for the good—is powered by this attraction.

But this idealization of individual initiative is also dangerous.  Too much depends on getting the right hero—or the right monarch.  It can only work if the independent agent is seriously and reliably good:  virtuous, in the classical sense of virtue as a well-directed “habit” or fixed character trait.  Even then, we may be reluctant to give any hero unlimited power.  Too much is at stake if it goes wrong.

The Rule of Law

Our admiration for the powerful ruler is always in tension with our dedication to the rule of law:  “a government of laws, not of men,” in the well-known phrase attributed to John Adams.  We can see this as far back as Aristotle:  “law should rule rather than any single one of the citizens.  And following this same line of reasoning . . . even if it is better that certain persons rule, these persons should be appointed as guardians of the laws and as their servants.”  (Politics book III, ch. 16, 1287a)

No human being can be trusted with absolute authority.  This is the kernel of truth in the aphorism that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  But we can’t get along without entrusting some power to someone.  When we do, it had better be someone who’s as trustworthy as possible.

The Ideal of the Good King

Thus the true king must be a virtuous person—a person of real excellence.  This is the ideal of an Aragorn or a King Arthur, whose return we’re moved to applaud (even against our better judgment).  It should be obvious that the same principles apply to the good queen—or emperor, empress, princess, prince, president, prime minister:  the leader we follow.  But I’ll continue using “king” for simplicity’s sake.

What virtues do we look for in a good monarch—aside from the obvious ones of justice, wisdom, courage, self-control?

If the ruler or rulers are going to be “servants of the laws,” they require humility.  A king who serves the law can’t claim to be its master.  Arrogance and hubris are fatal flaws in a ruler.  For example, we should always beware of the leader who claims he can do everything himself and is unable to work with others.

The good king is also selfless—seeking the common good of the people, not his own.  Self-aggrandizement is another fatal flaw.

In effect, what we’re looking for is a ruler who doesn’t want to rule:  a king who believes in the sovereignty and the excellence of common people.

It’s significant that Aragorn, our model of the good king, is introduced in LotR as “Strider,” a scruffy stranger smoking in a corner of a common inn.  Even when he’s crowned in victory, he remembers to exalt the humble.  The movie has him tell the four hobbits, “You kneel to no one.”  Tolkien’s text is more ceremonious:  “And then to Sam’s surprise and utter confusion he bowed his knee before them; and taking them by the hand . . . he led them to the throne, and setting them upon it, he turned . . . and spoke, so that his voice rang over all the host, crying:  ‘Praise them with great praise!’”  (Book VI, ch. 4, p. 232)

We see the same essential humility and selflessness in other admirable leaders, kings or not:  Taran in the Chronicles of Prydain, and the revolutionary princess in Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy; Niven & Pournelle’s Rod Blaine; Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s novels; “Dev” Logan, head of Omnitopia Inc. in Diane Duane’s Omnitopia Dawn—the unpretentious opposite of the “imperial CEO.”  America was fortunate enough to have such an example in the pivotal position of first President, George Washington.

The Alternative

At the other end of the spectrum, the most dangerous person to trust is an unprincipled and unscrupulous autocrat—someone convinced of his personal superiority and infallibility.  Giving power to an individual who has no interest in serving the common good, but only in self-aggrandizement, puts a nation in subjection to a Putin, a Mussolini, a Kim Jong-un.

The antithesis of the good king is the tyrant, who, however innocently he may start out, figures in our stories mainly as the oppressor to be overthrown.  It’s much better, if possible, to intercept such a potentially ruinous ruler before the tyranny comes into effect:  Senator Palpatine before he becomes Emperor, Nehemiah Scudder before he wins his first election.  Allowing the tyrant to gain power may make for good stories, but it generates very bad politics.

If we must have strong leaders, then in real life as well as in stories, character is key—and hubris is deadly.

Computer Dating

It’s been some time since computers got involved with dating.  I don’t mean stories about romance with a robot—though those have been around for a long time too.  I’m thinking about stories where a couple becomes involved with each other via some sort of computer intermediary.

We have a subgenre of tales where a couple meets on an online platform—perhaps via chatting, in You’ve Got Mail (1998), or gaming, as in Ready Player One and my own The World Around the Corner.  And of course the proliferation of actual online dating services—I met my wife that way—lends itself to romantic comedy.  Here, for example, is a list of the “10 best rom-coms about online dating,” which run the gamut from 1998-2021.

But we can even identify a sub-subgenre where the workings of the dating service itself are the basis for the meet-cute.  In Love, Guaranteed (2020), a lawyer takes on the case of a man who wants to sue a dating site that guarantees true love.  For the Christmas season, we have Mingle All the Way (2018), in which the designer of an app for busy people to find a plus-one without the stress of actual dating has to enroll in the app herself to convince an investor that the app is viable.  She ends up, of course, finding much more than a temporary plus-one.

Computers Aren’t Magic

If we’re going to construct a story that genuinely deals with computer-guided matching of couples, we need to think seriously about what computers can and can’t do.  It’s tempting just to wave around the word “algorithm” like a magic wand and assume that it can do all sorts of vaguely specified things—as if it were magic.  Our imaginary computer setup is a “black box”:  we don’t have to say how it works, it just somehow predicts which couples will get along.

Of course we can’t expect an author to produce an actual detailed account of how their hypothetical system works, any more than we expect any science fiction writer to tell us exactly how a faster-than-light drive would work, or an impenetrable force bubble.  If the writer could provide all the specs, they could patent the product and retire comfortably.  But, just as with any other SF premise, we have to make the imaginary invention plausible enough to engage the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

One recent rom-com, Christina Lauren’s The Soulmate Equation (2021), gets high marks for taking a sensible approach.  Freelance statistician and data analyst Jessica Davis runs into River Peña, a scientist whose startup company “has developed a service that connects people based on proprietary genetic profiling technology” (p. 18).  The technology is nothing so simple as a ‘love gene.’  Rather, in his initial study of over a thousand students, “a series of nearly forty genes were found to be tightly correlated with attraction” (p. 33).  River then worked backward:  “Could he find a genetic profile of people who had been happily married for longer than a decade?”  (p. 33)  The further research turned up “nearly two hundred genes that were linked to emotional compatibility long-term” (p. 34).

This has the sound of legitimate science.  Sample sizes are given, and the statistical universe is large enough to have some plausibility.  The imaginary research doesn’t establish why these gene sequences are related to compatibility:  it merely finds a correlation, which has yet to be explained.  And the number of genes involved indicates that the relationship must be highly complex.  The company’s tests (which sound rather like a 23 and Me arrangement) don’t claim to predict romantic love with precision; they yield a percentage probability that two people will match well, from “Base Matches” up to 24% to “Titanium Matches” at 80-90%, and even three examples of “Diamond Matches” with a score higher then 90%.  If such testing were really possible, this sounds like a plausible account of how it would work.

Jessica takes the test on a dare, more or less, and (of course) is found to be a Diamond Match with River Peña himself, whom she’s already found a bit off-putting.  She warily agrees to try out a relationship with him, and hilarity ensues in classic romantic-comedy fashion.  It’s a delightful story, and the air of plausibility about the company and its compatibility testing helps support the reader’s enjoyment.

The Gene Factor

One of the reasons this superficial plausibility is important is that the underlying idea is so volatile.  Do we really believe a couple’s potential for romance could be predicted from their genome?  On the one hand, we find ourselves wanting to say that love is ineffable.  Romantic love is famously supposed to be unpredictable, unexplainable, defying reason.  On the other hand, we do also tend to feel that romantic compatibility rests on some kind of perceptible factors, and also that true love is somehow fated, that lovers are “made for each other.”  And given the limited but impressive successes modern biology has had in connecting genes to physical results, the genome is a tempting place to look for that kind of manifest destiny.

Whether we find that hypothesis likely will depend partly on whether we find the materialist theory convincing:  that human beings and their behavior can be entirely reduced to their physical structure.  Materialist approaches are widespread today, but one can also reasonably take the position that there are human characteristics not wholly reducible to biology.  (Even the book’s title refers to “soulmates,” not merely sexmates.)

But let’s say it’s plausible enough that at least the initial attractiveness of one person to another might be encoded in their genes.  I even recall reading somewhere that whether we like or dislike the way a certain person smells may be a wired-in indicator of genetic compatibility, which makes some evolutionary sense.  Can we generalize that notion, as Dr. Peña’s research is supposed to have done, to a genetic basis for long-term compatibility?

The Other Factors

Even on a physical basis, we are not merely a product of our genes.  While the “nature versus nurture” battle continues to simmer, we generally tend to be equally sure that our adult personalities are influenced by our cumulative life experiences as well as by our innate characteristics.  Identical twins don’t turn out to be identical people, even when they grow up in similar environments, much less if they grow up separately.  We can distinguish our temperament, the emotional potential we’re born with, from our “character,” the set of habits and tendencies and attitudes that owe a lot to experience and action over time.

Outward appearance that is all we initially have to observe about a potential mate, but these aspects are more internal.  Necessarily, the internal factors are likely to come through more clearly as a relationship continues.  We’ve noted that “love at first sight” is a common enough experience of the beginning of love, but that its genuineness can only be validated retrospectively, over time.  Like the meet cute/meet hard situation, perhaps this can create the opportunity to fall, the initial attraction.  But the basic attraction is at most only the beginning of the story—not the end.  A couple’s ultimate compatibility is bound to depend on how their lives have shaped them as well as on their genetic endowments.

Even if nature and nurture combine to present a felicitous pairing, that’s still not the end of the story.  We are not compelled to love someone.  Irresistible attraction, sure:  finding someone especially fetching may (or may not) be entirely beyond our control.  But what we do about it isn’t.  What we develop out of that basic orientation toward each other is what really matters.

Here, The Soulmate Equation gratifyingly takes the right tack.  Responding to Jess’s skepticism about the significance of the test results, River says:

“I’ll believe the test if it says we are biologically compatible, but I’m not a scientific zealot, Jess.  I recognize the element of choice. . . . No one is going to force you to fall in love with me.”  (p. 130; see also p. 230)

Jess concludes:  “Destiny could also be a choice, she’d realized.  To believe or not, to be vulnerable or not, to go all in or not.”  (p. 351)

So I’m doubtful in the end that Dr. Peña’s algorithm could work quite as well as the story suggests.  Nonetheless, the book is an enjoyable romp, and also a thoughtful one.  Any tale that helps us think more insightfully about the puzzles of romantic love is a stimulating as well as an entertaining read.

The Dutch House Poses a Question

I now have a long commute two days a week—an hour minimum, more often 1¼ to 1½ hours—and this has given me an opportunity to start listening to audiobooks again.  At my wife’s recommendation, I used the very useful Libby app to download a 2019 novel by Ann Patchett, The Dutch House.  She had picked that one in part because the audiobook was read by Tom Hanks, who has a very agreeable voice.

It was an unusual pick for me.  Much of my reading belongs to a few key genres:  science fiction, fantasy, romance.  The Dutch House belongs to that particular genre of contemporary writing that is often referred to as “mainstream” literature.  While I don’t abhor mainstream fiction, it doesn’t often catch my attention.

I very much enjoyed this story, however.  When you find yourself looking for an excuse to keep listening to the audiobook even once you get out of your car, that’s significant.  The Dutch House made my commute considerably more enjoyable for the nine hours and 53 minutes it lasted.  At the end, I felt that satisfaction and pleasure that comes when you’ve had a genuinely significant experience.

And that’s what poses the question.  Because The Dutch House shares with much other mainstream fiction the characteristics that are sometimes referred to as “slice of life.”  In particular, it doesn’t have much of a conclusion.  The main characters meander along from childhood to about their mid-40s, and then the book stops.  Plenty of interesting things happen along the way, the characters are well-drawn and fascinating, the scenes are vivid.  But it doesn’t go anywhere.

Now, I generally prefer a story with a solid, clear climax and conclusion.  So why did I enjoy this so much?  Thinking about this led me to a bit of an epiphany about what’s appealing in fiction.  While my own experience may be personal and idiosyncratic, my tastes are similar enough to lots of others’ that my ruminations may be of some more general applicability.

Since I need to point to a few specific things about Patchett’s story, I’ll issue a

Genre and Plot

In the non-mainstream genres I mentioned above, there tends to be a plot.  There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.  The concerns of the characters come to a head at some point, and some kind of resolution is achieved.  We can point to something that happened in the story, whether it is on the whole good, bad, or indifferent.

Now this is by no means universally true.  Plenty of science fiction stories meander about without reaching a compelling conclusion.  And there are some that do more to explore a mood than to tell a story.  But there’s a tendency for the characters to get somewhere, whether or not it’s a place they wanted to be.  And the types of SF that lack a conclusion are generally those that are deliberately trying to imitate mainstream fiction—to gain the greater cachet or respect accorded to Real Literature, for example.

This is even more true in other genres.  A genre romance will have a happy ending, whether it’s “happily ever after” or merely “happy for now.”  In a murder mystery, a killer is going to be unmasked at the end.  Of course not every tale in real life ends this way; for one thing, people continue living after a given story has “ended.”  But we can regard these genres as specializing in the subset of stories in which some portion of a person’s life can be marked off and form a satisfying tale that embodies a plot arc.

Plot and Achievement

Personally, I like a story in which something significant is achieved.  It might be a really big thing:  saving the world, bringing order to the galaxy, eliminating a Dark Lord.  Or it might be something small and intimate:  a love story, for example.  It may be solely a matter of inner illumination, or, in certain kinds of tragedy, the demonstration of a tragic flaw.  But the kind of plot we’re discussing is one that leads to a conclusion in which things are significantly different than they were at the beginning.

But theory must be shaped by experience.  If my tentative generalization says I like a story only when something definite is achieved, then my enjoyment of a story that’s inconclusive is contrary evidence.  In The Dutch House, while various characters realize and achieve certain things, there’s no overall resolution by the end.  The several romances in the novel all fail.  The main character, Danny, doesn’t really resolve his difficult relationships with his parents.  No final judgment is suggested as to whether his mother, who left her children years ago to help the poor, is a saint or an irresponsible quitter.  Many of the characters are likable and intriguing, but there isn’t precisely a hero or heroes.  (A villain, perhaps, but since she’s subject to dementia and becomes an object of care in the latter part, there’s no viscerally satisfying comeuppance to be found.)

And yet, it’s a really good story.  So what is it that I’m enjoying so much?

Significant Parts

I think it may be that the individual events in the story seem to matter, even if they don’t systematically lead anywhere.  This is not the kind of mainstream novel in which people muddle around and leave the reader with a sense that it’s all been meaningless at the end.  On the contrary:  one feels that what these characters go through is important in some way.

It’s notoriously difficult to define exactly what “meaning,” in this sense, actually means.  But whatever it is, the people and events in Patchett’s story have it.  The good things that they do and experience serve to mitigate the bad things, and sometimes even make up for them.  The events are presented as significant, even if they don’t rise to a marked climax.

Making the story meaningful in this way is a choice and an achievement, not a given.  When there’s no clear plot arc in a story, it’s easy for the individual events to start seeming absurd.  “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”  But a good writer can ensure that meaning leaks through, as it were, throughout the story.  There may be a hint of the same thought in an observation of Anne Lamott’s:  “the purpose of most great writing seems to be to reveal in an ethical light who we are.”  (Bird by Bird, Part Two, chapter 2, p. 104.)

So if my earlier thesis was that a good story is one in which something significant has been achieved, I need to modify it to include slice-of-life stories in which lives are shown to be meaningful.

(In)Conclusion

This essay itself is rather inconclusive.  My ruminations on what makes for a good story are tentative and still incomplete.  And I may merely be stating what’s obvious to readers who (so to speak) come from the opposite starting point:  of course slice-of-life stories are meaningful, you bozo, what ever made you think otherwise?  But it does seem to be an essential element in figuring out what makes for good storytelling.