"Walking into a major league stadium is like no other experience in the world."

I've never managed to cultivate an interest in baseball, but I often enjoy baseball writing. I finally sat down with Paul Auster's baseball-themed noir novel, Squeeze Play. It was his first novel, supposedly written for money, and published under the name Paul Benjamin. It includes very little baseball and few glimpses of Auster-prose. It's a surprisingly straight-ahead pulpy noir with dames and toughs, punches and sarcastic quips.

The summer before the pandemic Crystal's parents took us to a Twins game. The appeal of baseball was clearer to me in the stadium than it is to me on TV. The most impressive moment, though, was entering the stadium. Auster captures it precisely:

Walking into a major league stadium is like no other experience in the world. You've been in the subway, crowded into narrow spaces, surrounded by metal and machinery, and then you've gotten out to find yourself in yet another landscape of bricks, stones, and urban blight. You've circled the stadium with a few thousand other people looking for the right gate, given your ticket to a guy in a uniform, gone through the turnstile, and entered the gloom of bare concrete tunnels, echoing voices, and jostling bodies. It makes you feel you've come all this way just to become part of a dream sequence in a Fellini movie.

But then you walk up the ramp, and there it is. It's almost impossible to take it all in at once. The sudden sense of space is so powerful that for the first few moments you don't know where you are. Everything has become so vast, so green, so perfectly ordered, it's as if you've stepped into the formal garden of a giant's castle.

Paul Benjamin, Squeeze Play (1982) p. 181.

Sit as kings in your desires.

The only extant manuscript written in Shakespeare's hand is an insert to a play titled Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare has More deliver a speech defending refugees and upbraiding the proud populists anxious to rid their country of the immigrant threat. Ian McKellen contextualizes the passage and performs it here:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self-same hand, self-reasons, and self-right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another. 

What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you like rebels lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven! 

You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

SETI and the drive to contact intelligent life

I've been reading lots of papers in space ethics. One of the early texts is Beyond Spaceship Earth: Environmental Ethics and the Solar System, a collection of conference proceedings edited by Eugene Hargrove and published in 1986. It includes a wide-ranging paper by J. Baird Callicott. Among Callicott's criticisms of space fans in general is this comment on SETI in particular:

In the face of this sort of giddy enthusiasm for communicating with "intelligent life" on other planets, it is both sobering and irritating to observe that those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have not first established—as a kind of preliminary benchmark or data base, so that they would have some idea of what communicating with an exotic intelligence would be like—communication with nonhuman forms of intelligent life on Earth. Cetaceans carry the biggest brains on this planet, with richly fissured cerebral cortexes and a brain-to-body weight ratio comparable to that of humans. Like us they are social mammals. But they live in an environment, relatively speaking, very different from ours. Hence, theirs is a world apart from ours, a terrestrial analog of an extraterrestrial environment. And they engage, apparently, in complex vocal communication, of which we to date understand not one word—or rather click, grunt, or whistle. What this omission reveals is not only an arrogant disregard for nonhuman terrestrial intelligence; it also clearly shows that by "extraterrestrial intelligence" those involved in SETI mean something very like, if not identical to, human intelligence.

--Callicott, “Moral Considerability and Extraterrestrial Life”

 Exactly so. This point was later taken up in a characteristically excellent short story by Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence" (2015). Callicott tends toward anger; Chiang tends toward heartbreak. Both are appropriate responses to human refusal to value the Earth's animals.

Adrian Mole, possible blameless bystander

From the Friday, February 26th entry in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4:

My general physique is improving. I think the back-stretching exercises are paying off. I used to be the sort of boy who had sand kicked in his face, now I'm the sort of boy who watches somebody else have it kicked in their face.

Chad Oliver on animals: the only known life in the universe

Chad Oliver's "King of the Hill" is set in a near future in which Earth's environment has been almost completely destroyed.  Desperate to find a new place to live, humanity sends out probes, establish deep-space telescopes, scour the universe looking for other planets that could support life.  They find "only barren rocks at the end of the road."

From this, he had drawn a characteristically modest conclusion.

Man, he decided, was alone in the accessible universe. [...]

The plain truth was that it was earth that was unique and alone.  Earth had produced life.  Not just self-styled Number One, not just Superprimate.  No.  He was a late arrival, the final guest.

("All these goodies just for me!")

Alone?  Man?

Well, not quite.

There were a million different species of insects.  (Get the spray-gun, Henry.)  Twenty thousand kinds of fish.  (I got one, I got one!)  Nine thousand types of birds.  (You can still see a stuffed owl in a museum.)  Fifteen thousand species of mammals.  (You take this arrow, see, and fit the string into the notch...)

Alone?  Sure, except for the kangaroos and bandicoots, shrews and skunks, bats and elephants, armadillos and rabbits, pigs and foxes, racoons and whales, beavers and lions, moose and mice, oryx and otter and opossum--

Oh well, them.

Yes.

They too had come from the earth.  Incredible, each of them.  Important?  Only if you happened to think that the only known life in the universe was important.

What a great way to pump non-anthropocentric environmentalist intuitions. Loads of people are interested in extra-terrestrial life, and few of those are interested because they want to eat it, or use it to fuel their cars. There must be something important about life other than what it can do for us, yes?

A gripping story, avoided

Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" appears in SFWA's Science Fiction Hall of Fame, marking it as one of the most widely respected SF novellas of the 1940s.  For me it mostly illustrates a pet peeve I associate more closely with science fiction than with mainstream literary fiction.

The basic idea of the story: it's the future, but not the far future.  The main character is a salesman in the robotic domestic assistants game.  These robots barely clear the threshold of usefulness; they are big, clumsy, and dumb.  The main character's-- and everyone else's-- world is disrupted by the introduction, from a distant planet, of sophisticated humanoid robots capable of out-performing people along just about any dimension of evaluation.  They are programmed "to serve and obey and guard men from harm," and they rapidly take over all the difficult, dangerous, tedious, or otherwise unpleasant aspects of the industrial and service economies.  Almost overnight, there is nothing left for most people to do but enjoy their free time and the excellent products of free robot labor.

That setup is super interesting.  What would it be like to live in a world in which nothing I did was connected to the comfort, let alone the success, let alone the survival, of anyone?  What would it be like to have every possible use of my time boil down to leisure?  I think I want that.  But might there be downsides for me, or for other people in a similar position?  Would there be social downsides when everyone found themselves in that position?

Instead of developing the story to engage these questions, Williamson ducks them.  The humanoid super robots interpret their prime directive with a maximalist zeal.  They don't just protect people from serious harm, they prevent people from taking the kinds of risks that could lead to slightest harm.  They protect people from unpleasant states of mind. If a person is persistently stressed, frustrated, or unhappy, the robots intervene to remove surgically the unhappy portions of the brain.

So, duh.  No one would want to live in that world.  There isn't any question worth exploring.  Nothing about the difference between work and leisure, or their respective products.  Nothing about values at all.  We're left with half an unhelpful lesson story ("Boys and girls, you don't really want guaranteed safety and happiness!") and half a standard adventure story about escaping from confused benevolent oppressors.  (Our last hope for escape? A form a faster-than-light radiation that maybe possibly can scramble the circuits of the mothership from across the gulf of space.  Snore.)

I think:  did Williamson not see what an interesting issue he'd raised?  Why did he turn it into another adventure-story-slash-cautionary-tale when it could have been deep?  I think:  is there something wrong with me that so many people-- readers and writers alike-- hold this up as an example of the best SF has to offer?  Can it really be that a simple cautionary tale about technology was mind-expanding in 1947, two years after the atom bombs?

We can do such much better than lessons gussied up as fiction.  Science fiction is especially able to light up ambiguities that go overlooked in the real world and explore in new ways issues that are way too complicated to write essays about.  It's frustrating when writers pass up obvious opportunities to use the power the genre gives them, as Williamson does here.  And it's puzzling when readers react so enthusiastically to missed opportunities.

Cosmopolis and two kinds of surprise

I recently read Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. I pretty much hated it, and it's easy to identify why: there are no rules structuring the narrative. In Cosmopolis, everything happens with the sullen randomness of the third act of a JJ Abrams twist-fest. (This happened, and then this other thing happened, and you won't believe what happened next!)

I tried to stay on board. I tried to focus on DeLillo's sentences, which are always rewarding, and to ignore the stupidity of the narrative. But when the main character, in his limousine in the year 2000, and for no real reason, used his wrist-watch to hack into his trophy wife's Swiss bank account, I gave up. There is no way I was not going to hate this book.

Reading such an extreme example of rule-free fiction helped give some structure to some previously inchoate attitudes, so in that sense I'm glad I read it. The lesson lesson I took away from Cosmopolis:

Being surprised by a story is one of the main pleasures of fiction. "Predictable" is, in the context of fiction, everywhere pejorative. But there are different kinds of surprises. One kind of surprise invites a reaction like "that is what would happen-- why didn't I see that coming?" Another kind of surprise invites a reaction like "wow. I had no idea that could happen." I love the first kind of surprise, and I hate the second. There is no pleasure, for me, in discovering that the author has been withholding important rules, characters, or information from me. There is nothing better known rules, characters, and information snapping together in an unexpected way.

(A bit of introspection. The distinction between these two kinds of surprises is, effectively, the criterion I use for distinguishing science fiction from fantasy. I say I like science fiction, because it is characteristic of the kind of science fiction I like that it takes the world as given and changes no more than a few of the familiar rules. I say I don't like fantasy because it is characteristic of the fantasy I don't like that any rules are open to emendation at any time.

This obviously isn't going to work as a genuine criterion of distinction. Far-future science fiction, which I can't tolerate, has effectively no rules. And when fantasy authors talk about world-building, one of the things they're talking about is setting up a set of rules. But having realized that this is how I divide the genres in my own mind, I should be able to talk more temperately about fantasy.)