The Iron Thorn

Science Fiction Book Club edition

I just had the pleasure of re-reading an SF novel 40 years on: The Iron Thorn (Algis Budrys, Science Fiction Book Club, 1967, reprinted in paperback as The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn).

The book opens with a tribal hunter, Honor White Jackson, pursuing a winged reptilian alien across a desert. His prey - an 'Amsir' - is not stupid: it's leading him further and further from the Iron Thorn, a landmark structure that powers the 'honning cap' that enables Jackson to breathe. Eventually the Amsir leads Jackson out of sight of the Thorn, and he collapses, choking. The Amsir attacks, saying, "Yield, wet devil!", but Jackson overpowers and kills it, recovering his breath by sucking on an oxygen-generating organ from its corpse.

Jackson returns to the Thorn, the kill having gained him the title Honor Black Jackson, and we find more about his culture: a hunting-farming community clustered around the Iron Thorn (which we now understand to be some kind of local terraforming machine). Now a full Honor, he gets initiated into the society's secrets: that Honors are an elite presiding over a precariously-maintained ecosystem, a completely static society held together by taboo and a Darwinian belief that everything that happens makes things better. Jackson has been spotted by the elders as unusual (he has, for instance, artistic talents) and has every chance of rising to the top. But he finds the picture bleak, and is more interested in the mystery of what lies beyond the Thorn, evidenced by a particular thing the elders don't understand: that Amsirs speak, and why they ask Honors to surrender.

paperback edition

Pondering this, Jackson goes to the desert again, where he's ambushed by a rival Honor, who badly wounds him in the elbow with a hunting dart. Jackson is about to be killed, but the surprise arrival of an Amsir enables him to kill his attacker (thus becoming Honor Red Jackson) - and he decides to surrender to the Amsir.

The Amsir leads him across the desert to its own enclave, an Amsir village with its own Iron Thorn, where he's taken to see the crippled Eld Amsir. Within the limits of seeing him as a devil, the Eld Amsir treats him kindly and gives him a task: to open a door in a smaller Thorn before he starves to death. It has been preoccupying the Amsirs for centuries, and they've been capturing a long succession of Honors to try to do this on the basis of an observation: that the door kills Amsirs, but not humans (they know this because occasional more humanoid mutants among them are unharmed by the door). Jackson is given a minder in the form of one such mutant, the powerful but stupid Ahmuls, to keep him under control if he gets the door open.

 After a deal of contemplation, Jackson (by now very hungry, his arm badly infected) finally opens the door; it's voice-activated to admit only humans, and finally responds to "open up, you dumb bastard". He finds himself in a spacecraft. The ship's computer accepts him as commander and obeys his first order, to trap Ahmuls in the airlock. Jackson gets fed, his arm repaired by the robot doctor, and then receives an implanted education ...

you are now an Honors graduate in Liberal Arts from Ohio State University. You have a special Masters in Command Psychology from the University of Chicago and three semester hours in military journalism from the Air Force Academy.

 ... which qualifies him to command the ship. It also teaches him the martial arts necessary to defeat Ahmuls. He attempts to communicate with the Amsirs, but the ship won't let him, telling him he's contaminating an experiment (we, along with Jackson, now know that the Amsirs and his own tribe are experimental colonies on Mars). He, along with the hospitalized Ahmuls, returns to Earth.

On Earth, Jackson finds himself to be an anachronism. The ship being centuries old, Earth culture and civilisation have completely changed to a post-technological leisure society, with every physical need catered for bee-like ' exteroaffectors', the mobile agents of Comp, a benign world computer intelligence.

Alluding to the introduction of Tarzan to society, he introduces himself as Jackson Greystoke. He and Ahmuls are received cordially enough, but Jackson soon finds that jealousy and bullying are still fixtures of the human condition. Kringle, the nominal leader, is angry about the woman Durstine's interest in the newcomer, and also starts antagonizing Ahmuls, who has the sense to leave the group. Nevertheless, their chief interest is in novelty, and their mood perks up when Jackson agrees to participate in an 'actuality' - the live performance of his hunting an Amsir, recreated and controlled by Comp.

This he does, to great acclaim, but he's underwhelmed by the experience - the mock Amsir was a deliberately weak opponent - and doesn't understand the media conventions of the edited replay.  Neither does he relate to the ensuing enthusiasm to recycle his experiences into aesthetic forms. Comp creates a 'party Thorn' for a gathering, where the Earth people produce attempts (sincere, but to Jackson, naff) at artistic interpretation of his experience: the women mime the role of women of his tribe; one man writes a poem supposed to represent Jackson's feelings about the Thorn; and another dedicates a crassly-done painting to him:

You could tell it was a Honor because it was wearing something on its head that looked like a cross between the German helmets of World War II and the Franco-Prussian War. It was intended to be a honning cap, Jackson supposed.

Jackson puts a downer on the whole event by not praising the painting as he's expected to, and by drawing in charcoal a riposte to it, showing his world as he saw it. He walks out on the party.

He talks to Comp, asking if he can have a spaceship, but the answer is no. It seems Jackson is stuck with Earth and a future of having no-one to talk to "except them and things like them" (Comp has ensured that Ahmuls is content enough, running with the buffalo in a game park). But one of the women, Pall, follows Jackson, and assures him that he'll eventually fit into society, and that she understands him.

And then he thought, To me I am the only sane man conceivable. And she's just cookoo enough to go along with it if I take her. "Oh, come on," he said, turning away from the tent, holding her wrist.

They walk off into the fields, with no particular destination in mind, as Jackson tells her what it was really like on Mars:

The floor of the world is rippled like the bottom of the ocean, running out to the edges. Those edges are high and they're cruel. At sunset the eastern horizon is the far wall of the crater. It's black. Blue-black..."

His words, meanwhile, are already being recorded by Comp as another 'actuality' for public consumption.

"Great stuff! Marvelous!" Comp whispered admiringly in his ear. "Forgive me. I thought all you were going to produce was some sort of cliché. Any cliché from you would be admirably dramatic, of course, with great and wide appeal. But I do not want you to think for a moment that I can't appreciate the raw, honest ring of visceral truth. The audience for it isn't as big, of course, but that's all right—it's good for them. Don't compromise. Don't soften it up just because you want to please her. Make it ring, boy! Tell it like it was!"

The gap of 40 years makes some interesting changes in how you perceive a novel. When I first read The Iron Thorn, I remember enjoying it as SF - a conceptual breakthrough story - up to the point of Jackson's reaching Earth; the rest seemed rather dull. Now I find it's all of a piece, an extended examination of the treatment of misfits, as the driving characters are (Jackson, the Eld Amsir, and Ahmuls) - although let down a trifle by the lead character, presented as a thinker through most of the story, coming across as a culturally inflexible macho twit at the end. The Earth-based section has now, however, acquired an applicability that didn't exist when the book was written, as a sharp satire on reality TV. The ending made me think of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits, in which a man outraged with a media-driven culture breaks on to a reality show to make an impassioned protest, but when that protest is acclaimed as authentic experience, sells out and becomes a celebrity with that protest as a trademark act.

(Note: The Iron Thorn is not to be confused with the 2011 novel of the same name by Caitlin Kittredge. The latter does look of possible interest, as young-adult steampunk with HP Lovecraft borrowings).

- Ray

Life in Life

Via MetaFilter, Life in Life:a video of a remarkable piece of coding - OTCAMP - that runs a Conway's Game of Life simulation inside Conway's Game of Life.

It strongly reminds me of the theme of Daniel F Galouye's 1964 SF novel Counterfeit World (a.k.a. Simulacron-3), which had a theme of nested simulations. In Counterfeit World, a virtual reality city has been set up for market research; but after a death and a mysterious disappearance, one of the researchers twigs that his own reality (i.e. ours) may itself be inside another simulation.

Counterfeit World was filmed in 1973 as Fassbinder's TV mini-series Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), which is on YouTube, though without subtitles (part 1 / part 2), and as the 1999 The Thirteenth Floor. The latter is a much under-rated film, mostly through unfortunate timing; appearing in the same year, it was eclipsed by The Matrix.  In 2011, Janus Films released a digitally restored and subtitled version of World on a Wire.


US trailer for World on a Wire, Janus Film, 2011

- Ray

In praise of The Mathenauts

I just re-read Norman Kagan's 1964 short story The Mathenauts, which I first encountered in a secondhand Judith Merrill's 1965 10th Annual SF anthology. At 11-ish I didn't remotely understand it; only the sheer strangeness came across. But it gets better on each return visit.

The Mathenauts is set in a near-future where "Brill-Cohen flight" has been discovered: the ability to take a ship into the raw mathematical space underlying reality. Ships, which look like a radio minus the casing, are crewed by eccentric high-flyer mathematicians, but their internal reality is held together by a "psychic ecology" of students with more mundane mindsets.

The ship, the Albrecht Dold, was a twelve-googol scout that Ed Goldwasser and I'd picked up cheap from the NYU Courant Institute. She wasn't the Princeton IAS Von-Neumann, with googolplex coils and a chapter of the DAR, and she wasn't one of those new toys you've been seeing for a rich man and his grandmother. Her coils were DNA molecules, and the psychosomatics were straight from the Brill Institute at Harvard. A sweet ship. For psychic ecology we'd gotten a bunch of kids from the Bronx College of the New York City University, commonsense types - business majors, engineers, pre-meds.

Jimmy, the mathematician narrator, tells how there is a horrific in-flight accident when the "isomorphomechanism" (that keeps the internal reality stable) fails, affecting another member of the crew.

Instrument racks and chairs and books shrank and ballooned and twisted, and floor and ceiling vibrated with my breath. It was horrible. Ted Anderson was hanging in front of the immy, the isomorphomechanism, but he was in no shape to do anything. In fact, he was in no shape at all. His body was pulsing and shaking, so his hands were too big or too small to manipulate the controls, or his eyes shrank or blossomed.

Jimmy repairs the fault, but Anderson, occupying the same space as the "immy", is rejected by the "commonsense circuits" and disappears. After an unsuccessful search of a ship and mathematical discussion of where Ted might have gone, there's a further scare when the ship's psychic ecology - students in a facsimile of a New York streetcar - breaks down.

The walls were firm, the straw seats scratchy and uncomfortable. The projectors showed we were just entering the 72nd Street stop. How real, how comforting! I slid the door open to rejoin Johnny and Ed. The subway riders saw me slip into freefall, and glimpsed the emptiness of vector space. Hell broke loose! The far side of the car bulged inward, the glass smashing and the metal groaning. The CUNYs had no compensation training!

Johnny Pearl, the ship's "psychist", restores the ecology by singing a college anthem, and the crew finish their search and begin the tests the voyage is intended for. At that point, a ghostly Ted Anderson reappears and reveals an uncomfortable truth: that the raw mathematical space is the real universe. He gives Jimmy a glimpse of the creatures that inhabit it.

— I saw a set bubbling and whirling, then take purpose and structure to itself and become a group, generate a second-unity element, mount itself and become a group, generate a second unity element, mount itself and become a field, ringed by rings. Near it, a mature field, shot through with ideals, threw off a splitting field in a passion of growth, and became complex.
— I saw the life of the matrices; the young ones sporting, adding and multiplying by a constant, the mature ones mating by composition: male and female make male, female and male make female — sex through anticommutivity! I saw them grow old, meeting false identities and loosing rows and columns into nullity.
— I saw a race of vectors, losing their universe to a newer race of tensors that conquered and humbled them.

Reality as humans know it, Anderson explains, is the creation of a "Great Race" in this mathematical universe, who lost their powers but left mathematics as a "seed" by which humans might regain the ability to inhabit that reality. He then disappears permanently, leaving his notebook.

The surviving characters go on to live their lives, dealing with that revelation in different ways: one marries and has 15 children; one gets religion and writes a book about Ted's views; and Jimmy, the narrator, concentrates on the business side of marketing Ted's ideas, multidimensional products that make a paradise of Earth.

Me, I'll stick to the Earth. The "real" planet is a garden spot now, and the girls are very lovely.

Ted Anderson was recorded lost in topological space. He wasn't the first, and he was far from the last. Twiddles circuits have burned out, DaughtAmsRevs have gone mad, and no doubt there have been some believers who have sought out the Great Race.

The story, at one level, is a pastiche. Kagan wrote it when he was a mathematics student, and it abounds in punning use of mathematical terms and its characters' hardboiled mathematical exclamations ("Great Gauss!", "Holy Halmos!" etc). For that reason, I guess, it's often classed as humorous SF (as in the 1982 anthology Laughing space: funny science fiction). Its extensive mathematical content, and its excellent portrayal of the ethos of mathematicians, also accounts for its presence in Rudy Rucker's 1987 niche anthology Mathenauts: tales of mathematical wonder.

Nevertheless, I think it's an altogether better story than that, as an examples of "conceptual breakthrough" story (see PK Dick, Ubik and conceptual breakthrough and Breaking out of the game) that, despite the pastiche and generally positive outcome, leaves the reader with a continuing sense of unease that the assumptions of reality have been revealed hollow. It tackles the still-topical questions of Platonism and Neoplatonism: the idea that reality may have a mathematical structure, since mathematics describes it so well. An example of such theories is Antony Garrett Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, which proposed that elementary particles correspond to the symmetries of a vast mathematical group called E₈. All that aside, though, the strange and bold vision in The Mathenauts still makes it as fresh reading as when I first encountered it. It's a pity it's not online anywhere, but secondhand anthologies containing it aren't too hard to find.

Norman Kagan wrote several other mathematical stories, notably the 1964 Four Brands of Impossible, but didn't go on to an SF writing career.  According to the blurb in Rudy Rucker's 1987 Mathenauts anthology:

What ever became of Norman Kagan anyway? He left math for film and still lives in Manhattan. He's written a number of books on cinema, and is currently involved in putting together a TV science news magazine to be called "Spacetime Continuum News." When I pressed having once written a mathematical mystery story called The Venn Data Vendetta — but he lost the only copy.

I don't know what he's doing now (or even if he's still alive), but I assume these books - on the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, Robert Zemeckis and Roibert Altman- are by the same Norman Kagan.

Addendum: a personal note, via discussion with Felix Grant. The story is particularly memorable for me as one of the first SF stories I read. I got into the genre via my great-uncle Dennis, a nice autodidact polymath among my Wiltshire relatives who I regret not fully appreciating at the time - but I was only 11, so I guess it's excusable - and who gave me heaps of secondhand SF Book Club editions (including the brilliant The Hole in the Zero) and copies of Analog magazine. On those grounds, this post is dedicated to my late and excellent Uncle Den.

- Ray

Echoes of SF

From the BBC: Blind boy uses his ears to 'see', an account of Lucas Murray, who uses an increasingly popular 'click' echolocation technique developed by Daniel Kish and others (see the Times - Blind taught to ‘see’ like a bat). Although I knew of hardware setups - the "sonar cane" systems - I'd never run into this low-tech method using human-made sounds, despite its use by the famous "Blind Traveller" James Holman. Not in the real world, at least: however, such techniques are central to Daniel F Galouye's post-apocalyptic Dark Universe.

One of a number of Galouye SF novels focusing on some form of perception, Dark Universe is told from the viewpoint of Jared Fenton, a young man and skilled hunter of "soubats", in a tribe called the Survivors living in the "Lower Level" - what is evidently the depths of a cave system. Light having been forgotten except in name, the Survivors find their way about using echos: by a central "echo-caster" in their main dwelling area, and by rattling "clickstones" elsewhere. Their sense of smell is also well-developed. Jared has various problems - a forthcoming arranged marriage, his tribe's dwindling resources, and the incursion of foul-smelling wrinkly-skinned monsters that bring "screaming silent sound" - that lead him into an exploration, first meeting "zivvers" (humans who have evolved to see infrared), and finally the worldview-shaking reality that the monsters are clothed people from the outside world bringing light. There's a strong allusion to Plato's Parable of the Cave.

From a perceptual standpoint, the end of Dark Universe, when Jared emerges from the caves and adapts to his newly-discovered sense of sight, is unfortunately nonsense. It's now known - Google Wiesel and Hubel if you must - that if eyes aren't exposed to visual input at a formative age, the neural equipment to process it won't work. But the story is so well told and the details so well worked out, right down to the bureaucracy and ritual (among the Survivors, the "Misplacement of Bulky Objects" is a crime on a par with murder) that it's easy to suspend disbelief. I've mentioned other Galouye works in a previous post, PK Dick, Ubik and conceptual breakthrough.

- Ray

Breaking out of the game

A recommendation: Ian Watson's Queenmagic, Kingmagic (Grafton, 1988, ISBN-10: 0586074147), which Felix just lent me (I re-used the Flammarion woodcut as this is another conceptual breakthrough novel).

An expanded version of Watson's novella Queenmagic, Pawnmagic, it tells the story of Pedino, a "pawn-squire" in a world modelled on chess. Two kingdoms, Bellogard and Chorny, are locked in a centuries-long battle fought by assassination and counter-assassination among the few important individuals (kings, queens, knights, and so on) who have powers of magical teleportation and attack. The story initially follows Pedino's schooling in Bellogard, his elevation to a role in the battle, and his liaison with Sara, a young prostitute who is a spy for Chorny, but it then takes a more cosmic turn. Both sides know that the end of the war is the end of their world, and both have vague awareness of previous cycles of existence; this is leading a few mystics and academics to look for ways to break out of that cycle.

Eventually Pedino finds a way to jump with Sara into other realities based on other games: one world where snakes and ladders provide portals to enclaves of higher and lower standards of living; another based on Monopoly, where society is based on a lethal property ladder run by lottery; and a third, in which soldiers and civilians are muddling through during confused movements of military encampments, based on the scoring stage of Go. Finally he finds himself in a new cycle of existence of the Bellogard-Chorny war, his options cramped by elevation to ineffectual kingship, but with sufficient acquired knowledge to guide more focused efforts to break through the "bubbles" into other planes of existence.

I enjoyed Queenmagic, Kingmagic a lot, with some reservations; it does go on fast-forward toward the end, and some parts I suspect wouldn't be widely understood. Recognising the Russian in-jokes in proper names is a bonus - for instance, Bishop Slon = Bishop Elephant, referring to the piece's form prior to Westernisation. That's not crucial (though I'd like to know what exactly Watson meant by the repeated incantation "Opasnost po Zhivot!" which transliterates as "Опасность по живот" - "Peril to stomach". Maybe flank attack?). However, while most readers know chess at least theoretically, fewer will know Go, much less recognise the troop movements in that section of the book as a description of the rearrangement of stones during the scoring phase). But overall it's great fun, and manages to stay fresh and witty despite the fairly dark scenario of characters fighting the dissolution of their universe.

Queenmagic, Kingmagic obviously isn't the first fiction to be set inside a chess game; the best-known prototype is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Gutenberg EText-No. 12). 1 whose story is integrated with a real chess problem (see Gardner's classic concordance The Annotated Alice) though one that contains illegal moves. There's a detailed analysis in Glen Robert Downey's PhD dissertation The Truth about Pawn Promotion: the Development of the Chess Motif in Victorian Fiction which is very worth reading for its exploration of the long history, pre-Carroll, of allegorical chess motifs in Western fiction. In mediaeval times, a succession of authors wrote "chess moralities" that mapped the roles of pieces map on to the real-world hierarchy to morally instructive intent: for instance, John of Wales' Quaedam moralitas de scaccario per Innocentium papum (The Innocent Morality) and Jacobus de Cessolis' Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (see Power play: the literature and politics of chess in the Late Middle Ages, Jenny Adams, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, ISBN 081223944X). The drift of such works was generally to reinforce conventional moralities, often via edifying pseudo-origins to the game, but later, Middleton's play A Game at Chess took a more subversive stance and used the chess format for political satire.

Post-Carroll, chess continued to be a popular theme for fiction, particularly science fiction; Poul Anderson's The Immortal Game (F&SF, 1954) is also worth finding for its vivid insider view of a chess game:

The first trumpet sounded far and clear and brazen cold, and Rogard the Bishop stirred to wakefulness with it. Lifting his eyes, he looked through the suddenly rustling, murmuring line of soldiers, out across the broad plain of Cinnabar and the frontier, and over to the realm of LEUKAS. Away there, across the somehow unreal red-and-black distances of the steppe, he saw sunlight flash on armor and caught the remote wild flutter of lifted banners. So it is war, he thought. So we must fight again.

Again? He pulled his mind from the frightening dimness of that word. Had they ever fought before?

(The title and plot refer to the classic "Immortal Game" played between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, famous for Anderssen's win by audacious sacrifice of major pieces. The final moves of the same game are quoted in the game between Sebastian and Tyrell in Blade Runner).

The Greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy: themes, works, and wonders has more examples of this theme.

Ongoing: I recommend A haphazard way to move through life and treasure... at The Growlery, which has further recommendations (that I second) for the works of Ian Watson. Felix mentions that he "personally liked the Go section, finding it the most evocative of the whole book", and I can see why: it is the most realistic depiction of the human condition, akin to the age-old situation of refugees, airdropped supplies haphazardly, being shuffled around between temporary encampments in furtherance of a war whose tactics are indiscernable. I just didn't think it a wise choice of game given - at the time - its relative obscurity (outside cognoscenti) to a Western readership. Now, Internet accessibility, through IGS Pandanet for instance, has greatly increased its player base.

Go itself does have a considerable role in literature and art. Although the absence of identifiable special pieces doesn't lend it to personification in the style of chess, it has attracted a large body of philosophy in relation to war, business, and life in general (the two stone colours map readily on to the yin and yang of Taoism). I'll leave that aside mostly - except to recommend Japanese Prints and the World of Go, by William Pinckard, for its nice overview of its omnipresence in Edo period depictions of legend and everyday life - and move to the narrower field of its manifestation in Western fiction. Go in Western literature, by Brian ‘Chiwito’ McDonald, is a slightly out-of-date but still pertinent commentary on the relatively few Western works to feature Go in a major role. Iain Banks is mentioned (I'd forgotten that his Walking on Glass contained a number of variants on board games) along with Ian Watson, as well as a number of other familiar faces: some members of the aforementioned Oulipo were into Go. McDonald also debunks the common belief that Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is about - or even inspired by - Go, explaining how Hesse's game isn't physical, and even in its historical form within the book's mythos, used a wire-and-bead system unlike Go.

Oh, I've just recalled too that Katin in Nova knows about Go, but then he would.

And lights dimmed.

The captain hooked in. The grafitti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.

"A shook up go game," Katin said, "with iridescent stones."

Addendum, Friday 28th August The Guardian Books Blog has a piece by Stuart Evers, Why chess is a perfect game for fiction, which recommends the anthology of chess stories, The 64-Square Looking Glass: Great Games of Chess in World Literature (Burt Hochberg, Times Books, 1993, ISBN-10: 0812919297).
- Ray

1. Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a common misnomer.
2. Also worth looking at for Go and the 'Three Games', which explores the idea of three region-related philosophical subtexts to historically classic games: the Middle Eastern backgammon as Fate-dominated; chess playing out the "great myths of the West ... the overthrow of a hero and the crowning of a new hero ... a hierarchical and pyramidal society with powers strictly defined and limited", and the Eastern Go representing processes of pure mentation. Maybe - but this reeks of national stereotype, and ignores that chess - as shogi - is also highly traditional and highly popular in Japan, and that backgammon has been extremely popular in England and Europe: Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular Encyclopaedia, 1854, said of it:

the game has been long established in the country; and, as a fireside amusement of a decorous and exciting nature, is a favourite among clergymen, squires, farmers, and retired professional persons.

PK Dick, Ubik and conceptual breakthrough

I just ran into a couple of articles, one old, one new, about Philip K Dick: The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick (Frank Rose, Wired, Issue 11.12, December 2003) and Kick over the Scenery (Stephen Burt, London Review of Books, July 3rd 2008). In many ways it's a sad story of someone who just missed bigtime success. Dick was a cult figure in SF and counter-culture circles; his writing had strong niche popularity, but even when he won the Hugo Award, he never achieved mainstream recognition in his lifetime, or wealth (a situation not helped by his confused personal life). And yet, after his death, a string of cult films have been based (with considerable modification) on his work: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale became Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall, The Minority Report became Spielberg's Minority Report, and so on.

It's difficult to assess how this happened. Dick's world-view, as expressed in his books, was unusual; central to it is a conflict, not between good and evil, but between entropy and an ordering principle. The entropy typically involved degradation toward what he called "kipple"

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself ... the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization."
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

As to the ordering principle, in 1974 Dick, long troubled with mental health problems, experienced visions of being flooded with a "transcendentally rational mind" that he called VALIS, feeling (I summarise very crudely) that it was a manifestation of God drawing him back toward sanity. All this is pretty strange stuff, and yet Dick's works were nevertheless strongly in touch with the mundane human condition. His protagonists tend to be ordinary, not-very-successful people bewildered by events beyond their understanding. Those events, however, often involve changes in the fabric of reality, leading to "conceptual breakthroughs" and explorations of perception and memory of long-standing philosophical interest. As the Wired articles says, such themes are now in the zeitgeist, appearing in films such as The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Memento, The Truman Show, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

My personal favourite of Philip K Dick's works is his 1969 novel Ubik. Set in a near-future where various psionic abilities are routine, its protagonist is Joe Chip, a typically Dickian debt-ridden little man who works as a tester for a "prudence organisation", which hires out a team of misfits with anti-psionic powers (for instance, to protect businesses from telepathic eavesdropping). The team is lured to the Moon by a hostile client who attempts to assassinate them with a bomb, killing their employer, Glen Runciter. On their return, they begin to experience strange degradations: coffee is cold, cigarettes stale in the packet, though fresh out of the dispensing machine (again typically Dickian entropy), and they find America is reverting toward the 1930s around them. One by one, they begin to die, and Joe Chip finds himself on an urgent quest, guided by graffiti apparently written by Runciter, to find a restoring spray-can product called Ubik (the Dickian God-like ordering principle). Meanwhile, an even more unpleasant possibility is raised: that Joe and his colleagues were killed by the bomb and are in cryonic suspension ("half-life").

Ubik manages to juggle dark comedy, poignancy and outright horror, and (in my view rightly) made it into Time Magazine's 2005 All-Time Hundred Best Novels post-1923 (and was near the top of reader rankings there). Obsessed with Film and many other movie gossip sites report that a film is in the pipeline. Whether that's true, and if so, whether it'll be good, I don't know. More Background on Philip K Dick at the official website, philipkdick.com.

On a personal note - and I don't add many here - I've backdated this addition from the final substantive post for JSBlog on June 15, 2015, as my favourite of PKD's takes on the terror of dying. There's a fine quotation from Ubik whose pertinence struck me at the death of my friend Felix Grant in January 2014 on the role of those who communicate with us largely over the Internet ...

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart. And of all of them, he thought, thanks to Glen Runciter. In particular. The writer of instructions, labels and notes. Valuable notes. He raised his arm to slow to a grumpy halt a passing 1936 Graham cab.

- Philip K Dick, Ubik, 1969.

... and I find I've suddenly become one of those 'wise ghosts', still texting and functioning despite literally hovering between life and death. It may sound melodramatic, but I'm more than a little addled with morphine, and do have moments when I'm not 100% sure if I'm dead or alive.

On June 20th 2015, for instance, I had a long and heavy sleep in the afternoon, and woke with a strange malaise of being dead in an English pastoral sense. Later that aftetnoon, I had a shorter sleep that left me feeling dead only in a kind of technical sense. It's just the morphine, I assume. I got myself up to read, and there was *nothing* else - l'd taken all the necessary pills - and just couldn't think whatver else there was do. Was I a bit stoned or what? I don't think I've ever experienced such a lack of volition - just looking at the wall.

The terror is palpable, though, and PKD expresses it well through the progressive weeding out of Joe Chip's companions, and finally his own encounters with death-like exhaustion and pain.

He lay for a time, and then, as if called, summoned into motion, stirred. He lifted himself up onto his knees, placed his hands flat before him... my hands, he thought; good god. Parchment hands, yellow and knobby, like the ass of a cooked, dry turkey. Bristly skin, not like human skin; pin-feathers, as if I've devolved back millions of years to something that flies and coasts, using its skin as a sail.

I know where it's going to end, but the fear is how precisely. Anyhow ...

Returning to the movie list above: I especially like Alex Proyas' 1998 Dark City and Josef Rusnak's 1999 The Thirteenth Floor. With the timing of their release, they were rather overshadowed by The Matrix, despite handling of the untrustworthy-reality theme just as potently and without all the gun chic and pince-nez mirroshades. Dark City is deeply strange, an intensely atmospheric noir/SF/Gothic mix set in a generic American city where it is always night, yet no-one wonders why, and where the main character's quest to find the Shell Beach of his childhood leads to a denouement that could have been inspired by the classic Flammarion woodcut above. The film is inextricably mixed in my mind with Martha and the Muffins' Echo Beach, which Mark Gane described as springing from similar yearnings - see the official page - and from memories of Sunnyside Beach, Lake Ontario, in Toronto, an area whose map appears on some of the covers ("The lake and beach could have been in the middle of nowhere while the city behind became a 'surrealistic sight'"). It has also been memorably adapted, more than once, on YouTube: it's interesting to compare the works by SkyAboveWater and Eroock, both of whom used it to create a video for Rammstein's Sonne.

The Thirteenth Floor comes from the 1964 Counterfeit World (a.k.a. Simulacron-3) by Daniel F Galouye, who wrote several novels in the 1960s-70s on similar breakthrough themes. The Thirteenth Floor was an early (if not the earliest) exploration of the idea of virtual reality. Dark Universe was a post-apocalypse story set in a cave system where tribespeople live who find their way about using sound; their worldview is shaken by encounters with outsiders bringing light (almost certainly inspired by Plato's Allegory of the Cave, as coincidentally explained by Popeye to Bluto in a current McSweeney's post). The Lost Perception (a.k.a A Scourge of Screamers) is an SF thriller concerning the social upheaval when the Earth, after millennia of shadow, is illuminated by an astronomical body called Chandeen emitting a radiation that vastly enhances perception. All are worth finding.

The list of conceptual breakthrough stories can easily be extended into fiction going way back. The "Conceptual Breakthrough" article in Peter Nicholls' The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Granada, 1981, ISBN 0586053808) likens the general mindset of protagonists prior to such breakthough to that of Rasselas, the Ethiopian prince hero of Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, whose general intellectual discontent leads to him to visit the outside world. One might compare Titus at the end of Gormenghast, and the discontented heroes of any number of generation-starship stories, notably Chimal in Harry Harrison's Captive Universe (a 16-year-old who finds why he is the only intelligent person in a stultifying Aztec society).

There are similarities too in the protagonists of Jeanne DuPrau's Ember series - see The Growlery, where I mentioned to Felix Grant my slight misgivings at the geeky empowerment fantasy inherent in some conceptual breakthrough stories ("misfit finds what's really going on and becomes central to it"). Ember seems a more natural and healthy angle in having young protagonists, like Captive Universe and Hoban's Riddley Walker (another such story, though one where the breakthrough is an intellectual rather than physical one). At this age the curiosity and urge to explore is normal, yet the person small enough in the scheme of things to take a more humble role in what they find. A film based on The City of Ember is forthcoming; there's a trailer at the official City of Ember website.
- Ray