John C. Wright's Journal

Now, I have to admit to an all-consuming jealousy, the kind of thing that makes the main character in Edgar Allen Poe’s A TELLTALE HEART commit murders and go stark gibbering mad. It seems as if the Mundane SF movement is garnering more attention and more support than the New Space Princess movement that I started as a joke! That hardly seems fair! Here are people who have something interesting to say about the future of SF, and it is getting treated with more respect than my completely shallow crackpot idea!! Where is the justice in that?

You see, if I had been serious, this could have turned into a serious and interesting debate, because the Space Princess movement  could act as a vanguard and spokesman for all writers and readers who want to see the fantasy aspects of science fiction, the sense of wonder, the romance, the time travel, the thinking machines larger than earth, the psionic mind-readers, the ninjas, the space-dinosaurs, the ninja-space-dinosaurs, the space-pirates, the amoeba-men, the ninja-space-dinosaurs of Mars fighting the psionic mind-reading space pirate amoeba-men of Boskone, and everything else that makes pulp-rooted science fiction the great genre it is. We could have taken the first step to undo the work John W. Campbell Junior did in introducing realistic science into science fiction during the Golden Age!

Butnow it is too late, and all we can do is post internet pictures of space princesses showing bare midriffs. Alack and wailaway.

You might not recognize her, but this above is Yin-Ylan, Flower of Cath, from a cartoon adaptation of Jack Vance’s TSCHAI books. She is a real honest-to-space Space Princess, but her fate is particularly Vancean. Vance characters never get the girl.

Evil Space Princess Aura, of course, standing between a evil barbarian space-viking and an evil space-mandarin!
She is the living symbol of our movement! Of course, she never gets the guy, does she? Flash Gordon escapes her evil, lust-filled painted-fingernailed clutches, doesn’t he, and she has to settle for that Robin Hood second-rate wannabe, the Green Arrow of Outer Space, Prince Barin of Arboria. Jeesh! I simply hate that Dale Arden! The Earthwoman is always spoiling Aura’s plans!

Irulan. So if princess Irulan fought princess Aura, who would win? Irulan could have her dad send his Saudakar Terror-Troops against her rival, or maybe even her messianic superhuman husband, Paul, but on the other hand, Aura could send her dad’s various Shark-men, Lava-men, Beast-men, robots and mutants. One the one hand, Ming the Merciless is immortal, but on the other hand, the Padishah Emperor has a greatly extended lifespan due to his addiction to the geriatric spice. The spice extends life! The spice expands consciousness! The spice is more addictive than thionite, and it is only a matter of time before the Galactic Patrol finds the apex of these drug-runners and smashes their whole evil zwilnick drug-ring! We all know the Padishah Emperor is merely another name for the Tyrant of Thrale, don’t we?

You see, while the Mundane SF movement is discussing the nature of human destiny and the role of realism in futuristic literature, we here at the Space Princess movement are discussing what Carrie Fisher looks like in a metal bikini.

Myself, I think that ‘materially profitable space travel’ is a question of economics, not just of physics. In my short story ‘Farthest Man from Earth’ I posited the only thing I could think of that would make travel to another star profitable: the secret of eternal life. You don’t think anyone who could do, would send an expedition to pick up Stroon from Norstrilla or the geriatric spice from Dune? The time in which to pay back the return on investment of the initial cost is expanded for the immortals. But notice I have to postulate one impossible (immortality) to explain another impossible (economic star travel).

Far more likely the only people ever to go to other stars are Jesuits. Life in a steel can for decades ship-time (or, more likely, in an inflatable mylar balloon) might be done to carry the Gospel to the E.T.’s — because even a worldly Pope might think the Popes two thousand years from now will remember him for organizing the expedition. But for conquest or trade? Not likely. Emperors and merchants do not think in those timespans.

Extraterrestrial life seems to me to be a very conservative speculation. There is water on Mars and on Io; the number of extrasolar planets known to us has gone in the last ten years from 1 to 21. That is of nearby stars, very nearby. Indeed, a science fiction writer who posits that we are all alone in this huge bejeweled cosmos has to postulate (and make seem likely to the reader) some sharp deviation from the conventional understanding of the origins of planets and the origins of life. I am sure we will find evidence of non-earth microbes or even seaweed within my lifetime.

So, I would not put alien life on this list, which otherwise is a fair summary of speculations that only could take place if our fundamental understanding of the universe is totally wrong (time travel, FTL) or could not take place until our fundamental understanding of the universe is expanded to include a complete and technical understanding of things we currently know not even fact one about (brain downloading? computer consciousness? — come on. We do not even have a definition of what consciousness is, much less what its physical, reproduce-able properties are.)

One last word on the nature of consciousness. I was surprised again to find out that the serious academic (or perhaps not so serious — I have not read the book) uses the same speculation for the origin of consciousness as I use in my THE GOLDEN AGE, namely, that any sufficiently self-referential information system must perforce become self-modifying and hence self-aware (which is my basis for arguing against the Asimovian idea that intelligent robots could be programmed. Brainwashed, maybe; persuaded, more likely; programmed, no. You cannot program a self-programmable entity without its consent, my dear materialists. The ‘positrons’ will not stay in the patterns you put them in once the positronic brain starts thinking.) Anyway, consciousness as a  side-effect of self-reference (he calls it a ‘Strange Loop’) appears in this book:  I Am a Strange Loop By Douglas R. Hofstadter

Interesting new idea. Except that, as usually happens with new ideas: science fiction was here first. I also speculate how an organism gets to be self-aware: by philosophy, or, in other words, by the increasing complexity of its self-referential sense impressions and categories of perception. A bug might not need categories of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ to operate, but something like a bitch protecting her puppies likely does.

(Science fiction is often here first. Does anyone but me get the impression that the debate about the morality of cloning humans was something we fanboys were talking about 40 years ago?)

But back to the original topic: I rather admire the idea of ‘Mundane SF’ because it follows that hard-nosed extrapolation school of Jules Verne rather than the social extrapolation of HG Wells. Barbacane’s cannon shell to the moon is perfectly feasible by Newtonian mechanics, albeit unmanned. Cavor’s gravity-ignoring sphere is as realistic as Lessingham’s chariot pulled by Hippogriffs flying to Mercury, or Cyrano’s gunpowder-propelled grasshopper. Compare the realism of Wells’ MEN LIKE GODS to the realism of the submarine of Captain Nemo or the aircraft of Robur the Conqueror. The submarine, the rotary engine, and the Clipper of the Clouds are here, or just like. Where is our nudist socialist utopia?

Nonetheless, as the founding member of the Space Princess movement, I have to issue my own list of the requirements for our very serious and somber literary school:

Today there is no —

• Extraterrestrial Life
• Evolved to human intelligence
• Occupying the roughly same technological stratum as Earth
• Except that they they fight with swords and rayguns and fly ornithopters or something
• On a world with an oxy-nitrogen atmosphere & earthlike shirt sleeve environment
• Not to mention dinosaurs, cavemen, robots, man-eating plants, undersea cities
• But are ruled by evil imperial Monarch
• Who just so happens to look like Max Von Sydow
• whose daughter is a nubile, voluptuous babe of Total Hotness
• In a skimpy, clinging costume
• that exposes her midriff
• who lusts after a clean-limbed fighting-man from Virginia

— And surely there never will be! But we can dream —