Author: geoff

Hands up if you’ve ever thought of this plot for a science fiction story:

You discover an ancient device, frozen in a glacier, or embedded in fossils, or whatever. You’re amazed to find that despite its age it seems to be mostly in working order, and shows evidence of having present-day components. It must be a time machine of some kind. You repair it. Eventually you inadvertently activate it, and find yourself, with the device, back in the Pleistocene. You realize that the bones found with the device were yours….

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who read H. G. Wells, extrapolated along the lines that I just indicated, and had a chuckle about the paradoxical implications. Where did the machine come from? Could the contemporary scientist choose not to take the action that causes the machine to operate? What are the precise scientific objections to the sequence (loop?) of events? And maybe there’s a short story to be written about it.

This little speculation is the starting point for John Varley’s new book Mammoth. He adds several twists, which I’ll leave you to discover, but the basic plot is as I’ve described it. To flesh out the short story into a full length novel, Varley has used this tale as a vehicle for satire: satire of corporate capitalism, of entertainment-driven culture, of people’s willingness to be manipulated. Along the way he makes a stab at the scientific and philosophical issues of time travel and causality, but – like the culture that he is satirizing – such reflective moments are swept away by the impulse to action, preferably accompanied by special effects.

The self-causing time machine is still a good idea for a short story, preferably without the Hollywood treatment. Varley has shown us that he is one of the best writers of short science fiction working today. Unfortunately this one got away from him, like a runaway mammoth.

Mammoth. Varley is one of those writers that I’ll buy sight unseen.

Last year a friend recommended a “curious book” to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn’t get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C’est la vie.

It’s an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn’t, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there’s the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue – what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I’m still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that’s just fine: he’s asking the same questions that I’m interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd’s ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.

I just finished Aaron Glantz’s How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz’s editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz’s account suggests is that – contrary to my prejudices – the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah…. What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.
From Publisher’s Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors’ expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn’t tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.