garethrees.org

Method combinations in Python

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Django is a popular web development framework for the Python programming language. Each request to the server is handled by a view function, and in the typical case where the response is going to be a web page, the view function makes queries to the database, assembles a context dictionary based on the results, generates an HTML page using a template, and returns the result to the client. (The context dictionary is just a collection of values which the template can refer to.)

When you have lots of view functions there tends to be a lot of common functionality: for example, every view that requires the user to be authenticated has to check the session credentials; and every view that accepts a form submission from the client has to decode and validate the form contents. In Django 1.3 they introduced a system of class-based views to allow each piece of common functionality to be factored into a base class or a mixin, so that you can put the user authentication code into an AuthView class and the form validation code into a FormView class, and then combine these bits and pieces using class inheritance.

Where this becomes a bit of a pain is in the assembly of the context dictionary. Django’s built-in class-based views expect there to be a get_context_data method returning a dictionary. So each class needs to put its own piece of data into the context while co-operating with all the other classes in the hierarchy. So you end up with code like this:

class AuthView(View):
    # ...

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        c = super(AuthView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        c.update(user = self.get_authenticated_user())
        return c

class FormView(View):
    # ...

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        c = super(FormView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        c.update(form = self.get_form())
        return c

class AuthFormView(AuthView, FormView):
    # ...

Which involves a rather high boilerplate-to-content ratio, but worse than that: it is also highly error-prone. It’s natural to create a new get_context_data method by copying and pasting an old one and changing the c.update line. But wait! You also have to remember to change the class name in the super() call too. If you forget, then if you are lucky you’ll get

TypeError: super(type, obj): obj must be an instance or subtype of type

and if you are unlucky the object in question will happen to be an instance (via inheritance) of the class you forgot to change, and so the super() call succeeds but skips parts of the inheritance hierarchy, leaving you wondering why your HTML pages have mysterious gaps in them.

Common Lisp programmers will recognize this as a problem of method combination. Thinking abstractly, when you call a method on an object you get some kind of combination of the methods of all the classes to which the object belongs. In many object-oriented languages, there is only one way of combining methods, and that is to call the most specific method (the first method found when looking at the classes in method resolution order). This is such a common implementation strategy that it is easy to forget that you might want to have other kinds of combination. And in the particular case of assembling the context dictionary in a Django view, we want the union of the results of calling the methods in all the classes to which the object belongs.

In the Common Lisp object system, method combinations are first-class objects. There are ten built-in method combinations, and you can define your own using define-method-combination. Were we developing our views in Common Lisp, we might find the append method combination useful.

In Python, things are not quite so nice, but classes have a mro method that returns their superclasses, in Python’s standard method resolution order.

>>> AuthFormView.mro()
[<class 'AuthFormView'>, <class 'AuthView'>,
 <class 'FormView'>, <class 'View'>, <type 'object'>]

Using object.__class__.mro() we can make a method combination that calls the method in each class to which the object belongs, and takes the union of the results:

class BaseView(View):
    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        c = super(BaseView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        for cls in self.__class__.mro():
            if hasattr(cls, 'extra_context'):
                c.update(getattr(cls, 'extra_context')(self))
        return c

class AuthView(BaseView):
    # ...

    def extra_context(self):
        return dict(user = self.get_authenticated_user())

class FormView(View):
    # ...

    def extra_context(self):
        return dict(form = self.get_form())

A credo for critics

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Bad reviews are a basic fact of literary life, you might have thought. There are so many different kinds of literary taste, that no book can be all things to all readers. One person’s comfort reading is another’s trash, and what’s thought-provoking to one is high-faluting nonsense to another. But the essential subjectivity of taste is hard to keep in mind when it’s your favourite book that’s getting a pasting: what seemed to the reviewer to be a careful and evidence-based summary of the book’s failing, seems to you to be an attack on your taste, your culture, and your personality. To criticize something you like is tantamount to criticizing you, and that’s personal, damn it!

It’s this reaction, I think, that explains why responses to bad reviews so often take the form of personal attacks on the reviewer. In fact, there’s such a standard playbook of responses, that you can play along at home:

1. Bad review bingo


You’re a failed writer.	You’re just jealous of the author’s success.	The book’s popularity proves its quality.	You’re stuck in an ivory tower, out of touch with the real world.	You’re a frustrated academic, not a real reader.
You’re a snob who likes to sneer at authors.	This essay/interview/blog by the author shows that you’re wrong.	Events in the sequel demonstrate that you’re wrong.	Your plot summary contains a minor mistake; therefore everything else you say is wrong.	How dare you attack the taste of the readers?
It’s fiction: how can you criticize its politics/ethics/accuracy?	It’s fantasy/sf: how can you bring the real world into it?	FREE SPACE	You’re only criticising because you can’t write.	You probably didn’t even read the book.
You’re denying me the right to my opinion.	Everyone else says it’s great: how can you disagree?	You’re prejudiced against the author.	You’re prejudiced against the genre.	Your review is badly written, therefore it is wrong.
You’re just trying to assert your superiority.	You’re mean.	You’re engaged in a deliberate hatchet job.	You’re just trolling to provoke a reaction.	You’re bolstering your own ego.

For practice, try it on the comments to this review by Janet Potter of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

2. “A natural delight in hurting people”

The thing that inspired me to write this post was the reaction to Liz Bourke’s review of Michael J. Sullivan’s fantasy novel Theft of Swords at Strange Horizons. It’s a stinker of a review, to be sure, but the contumely seems pretty solidly backed up by some specific criticisms: the plot is predictable, the characters stock, the prose clumsy, the treatment of women sexist, and the author’s attempts to write Early Modern English are replete with grammatical mistakes (a common failing, sadly). I guess you could politely disgree about some of this—stock characters have virtues of immediacy and familiarity that can be useful in a fast-moving plot—but if you’ve been following along then you’ll probably have guessed that what’s coming isn’t going to be particularly polite:

“This should be highlighted in the “worst arrogant review” hall of shame. Whoever edited (if anyone as I have major doubts any self-respecting review editor would allow this crap to be published) shares the shame and this saddens me.”
“The other thing I detect is the envy that Mr. Sullivan ... dared to self-publish and achieve success.”
“There’s a level of vitriol in this review I can’t stomach.”
“It seems that you, the reviewer, are angry at reading the book. It makes the review less of a review and more of a carpet-bombing the author’s work.”
“The review would have much more power if the opening paragraph would not be so obviously biased and the vitriol would be tuned down a little; this way it reads like envy and a specific agenda.”
“Speaking as someone who loves the series as the light, but heartfelt fare it is, to see someone call themselves a “reviewer” or even a “critic” and then spout this kind of nasty vitriol actually stuns me.”
“You don’t like the book. That’s clear. But to attack it in the style of a schoolyard bully who literally hasn’t the foggiest idea how to objectively write a negative review, that is baffling.”
“This post actually disgusts me and makes me feel very sad that the author (who’s work a lot of fantasy fans have enjoyed) has to even read this biased review.”
“What I see in this diatribe, is not an objective analysis of the work as it is (or was intended), complete with both faults and positive attributes but what would appear to be the ravings of someone whose camel’s back has been broken and Mr. Sullivan happened to be the unfortunate straw that came along to do so.”
“What is most evident from the voice of the review is the pleasure the reviewer took in trying to hurt the author (who she undoubtedly knew would read this). The obvious glee, while entertaining, is also distasteful and says a lot about how the reviewer chooses to take her pleasure. It would actually be nicer if it was born of jealousy (as has been mooted) rather of a natural delight in hurting people, but who can say? It’s also clear to me that Liz revels in the fight that she opted to provoke, so we’re simply feeding her sense of self importance here.”

(If you look through the thread, you’ll see some much more personal insults, but I don’t think they need repeating here, even for the purpose of exemplification.)

3. “Why he can’t simply write a story?”

There are any number of other examples of this kind of reaction to criticism, but for its viciousness combined with a relatively elevated level of discourse, I’ve picked Jonathan McCalmont’s discussion of conservatism and authoritarianism in mass-market fantasy, where he selects this as an example of his thesis:

My favourite example of this is the case of Stark, in the first book of A Song of Fire and Ice, carrying out his executions himself. [George R. R.] Martin takes this to be proof that Stark does not sentence men to death lightly and takes the job so seriously that he carries it out himself personally but within that idea are the unexamined assumptions that capital punishment is necessary and that a willingness to kill someone yourself is somehow indicative of greater character than having an underling do it.

The commenters propose several lines of objection to this judgement, but the one I’m going to focus on is the suggestion that it’s illegimate for the critic to import morality from our world into the world of the novel. The novel, they suggest, is just describing how things really are within the invented world, and it’s as unfair to criticize an author for describing this world as it would be to criticize a historian for describing a similar historical period. Elio García: “Within the context of the culture created within the series, being willing to carry out the killing with your own hand does seem morally superior to having some underling do it—at least if you’re not a bloodthirsty killer at heart, who enjoys that sort of thing. [Martin] is a writer who is writing about another where and another when (in this case, a fantasy setting somewhat analogous to mid-14th century Europe), and he seems able to grasp what you don’t: ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’” Adam Whitehead: “[Martin] wanted to write a story set in a medieval world of his own devising. Medieval societies are by their nature authoritarian, hence his medieval world would also be authoritarian.”

This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”

Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.¹ This doesn’t mean that you must hate these books: you can love The Lord of the Rings and still observe that it spends a great deal of time on promoting the pernicious idea of the ‘rightful king’.

4. “I will hate you till the day I die”

After the Bourke review, there was quite a bit of soul searching along the lines of Oh woe, what is the genre coming to? Liz Bourke collects some of these links here. But really, this kind of kerfuffle is as old as reviewing. Authors have always taken criticism of their darlings personally, and have been tempted into responding in kind over the years, from Michael Crichton writing reviewer Michael Crowley into his novel Next as a paedophile, to Alain de Botton’s spectatular hissy fit at reviewer Caleb Crane:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon—so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as ‘nice’ in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It’s only fair for your readers to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.²

My own brief venture into book reviewing in print (many years ago) provoked a similar response from a wounded author. My review was as harsh as I’ve ever written, to be sure, but it wasn’t biased, or dishonest. Maybe I’d pull one or two of my punches if I wrote it again, but I’d stand by the sentiment.

Jonathan McCalmont laments what he sees as a retreat into tribalism but I think he has things backward: the Internet brings together worlds that were previously separated. Before the Internet, people who read literary criticism and people who read pulp fantasy could live out entirely separate lives. Most people who enjoyed The Sword of Shannara in 1977, say, were not likely to encounter the criticism of Marshall B. Tymn or Lin Carter. But now, these groups are much more likely to collide: the fans and the critics are both on the Internet and when criticism is harsh, someone is sure to bring it to the attention of the fans.³

This ought eventially to be a positive development: whatever their other qualities, the fans are at least enthusiastic about literature. If they could just be persuaded not to take things personally, I think we could learn a lot from them.⁴ With that in mind, I present:

5. A credo for critics

(And for readers of criticism.)

“The author is dead”, so criticism shouldn’t be taken personally. And claims by the author, while often interesting, take a distant second place to the text itself.⁵
Even though there’s no way of deducing an author’s views from their fiction, nonetheless a fiction can itself implicitly approve or disapprove of political and ethical positions, by reflecting the truth or falsity (within the invented world) of these positions, or by validating or undermining the characters who hold them.
Aesthetics are relative: in other words, aesthetic opinions are unanswerable. If you don’t like someone’s reading of a work of fiction, you can offer what you think is a better reading, but you can’t refute the original reading.
No one critic or one review can give a definitive verdict on a book: it’s their combined responses over many years that matter.
We all like works that have flaws, and we just have to suck it up when other people point out those flaws. Your taste doesn’t deserve respect just because it’s yours. Before trying to argue away the bad aspects of a work you like, think: are you identifying too closely with the work? Better to treat it lightly, and see its flaws clearly.⁶

^ By this sentence I don’t mean that the real author endorses the conservative and authoritarian ideas—it's the implied author, as deduced from the text (see articles 1 and 2 of the credo). Here’s someone having difficulty with this distinction. It looks like I may need to write some more about this problem.
^ De Botton having a genius for publicity,⁷ this could of course have been a piece carefully crafted to get his name (and his book) into the media. It certainly succeeded: there were reports of this blog-spat in the Telegraph, the BBC, the Observer, and elsewhere.
^ And by “fans” I mean, “people who haven’t fully internalised article 5.”
^ For example, Adam Roberts spent a number of blog posts trying to figure out exactly what is the appeal of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series? Despite some impassioned discussion with fans, I don’t think we ever really got to the bottom of the question.⁸
^ This claim is phrased over-broadly, but I’m not going to change it: I think it would be wrong to fill up a credo with caveats. I don’t deny the validity of biographical or psychological criticism: what I mean is that if someone makes a claim about a text based on evidence from that text, then you can’t refute them by bringing the intentions of the author into it.
^ Rachael at Social Justice League covers this in more detail.
^ As illustrated by his recent absurd proposal for an ‘atheist temple’ in London, which I am sure is just a stunt to raise publicity for his forthcoming book, Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion.
^ This series of comments from Jeremiah Whitmore was perhaps the most insightful.

Law-breaking among cyclists: perception vs reality

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Jim Chisholm asked me to write an article for the newsletter of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign about the public perception of law-breaking among cyclists, how this arises and persists through cognitive biases, and some consequences for campaigners. I think most of the material will be pretty familiar to my readers here, but you never know.

There’s a general belief in this country that cyclists are a bunch of scofflaws: that we ignore red lights, ride on pavements, endanger pedestrians, ride without lights, and generally have a propensity to commit crimes.

Where does this belief come from? People who hold it think that they got it by observation: we’ve all seen lots of cyclists riding without lights at night, haven’t we? Indeed we have—but are they a representative sample? The problem with trying to infer a general law from observation is that fallible humans like you and me are subject to confirmation bias, the tendency to notice things that confirm our beliefs, and to ignore things that don’t. If you already believe that cyclists are law-breakers, then whenever you see a cyclist without lights this confirms your belief, but cyclists with lights don't register so strongly. Over time you’ll build up a collection of anecdotes, all of which confirm your belief. This bias is then reinforced by the media, because the stories that get published are chosen to be the most shocking and newsworthy. No newspaper is going to print a story of the form “vast majority of cyclists did no harm to anyone today.”

These effects are so strong that they affect members of the Cycling Campaign, whom you might think would be more resistant to bias against cyclists. In a discussion of this phenomenon on the Campaign’s e-mail list one member estimated that the proportion of cyclists who are law-breakers in general is “close to 95%” and another estimated that the proportion of “without lights, front and back, would run at about 70%.”

I did a couple of informal surveys on 2011-12-09 to cast some light on the latter claim. On my commute home across north Cambridge, I counted 42 cyclists with two lights and 2 with none (5%); on a second trip through town later in the evening I counted 66 with two lights and 10 with one light or none (13%). This kind of informal survey is very easy to do and I encourage you to try it out to see if your own perceptions of the rate of law-breaking are accurate, and how representative my own surveys were.

This Toucan crossing at Maids Causeway in Cambridge has an automatic detector. The signal turns red for crossing cyclists and pedestrians after just six seconds, but the lights for traffic on Maids Causeway remain at red for as long as it detects people on the crossing (or for up to three minutes). So when there is a queue of cyclists, as there usually is at peak time, all cyclists have to do is to keep entering the crossing as long as another cyclist or pedestrian is still in the detection zone. However, in practise this does not work, because there are too many law-abiding cyclists who are unwilling to enter the crossing when the Toucan shows a red light, even though this is legal. (Photo and text adapted from cyclestreets.net, licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0.)

For red light running, you might want to look at the Transport for London publication Proportion of Cyclists Who Violate Red Lights in London, which reports on a survey that observed the behaviour of 7,502 cyclists at five junctions in London in 2007. I won't spoil the conclusion here: I suggest that you first make your own estimate of the proportion of cyclists that violated red lights, and then take a look at tables 16 and 17.

Confirmation bias explains how incorrect beliefs persist, but not how they arise. Here I believe a second cognitive bias is responsible: the outgroup homogeneity effect. This is the tendency to believe that members of an outgroup are similar to each other, much more similar than members of the ingroup. Cyclists are a tiny minority in the UK, so when someone sees a cyclist breaking the law, the most salient group to which they belong is “cyclists” (as opposed to the many other groups, such as “men” or “tall people”, to which they might belong), and then the outgroup homogeneity bias leads people to generalize from “this cyclist broke the law” to “cyclists in general have a tendency to break the law”. You can see that there is a bias in effect because it doesn’t happen for ingroups like motorists—when one driver breaks the speed limit, people don’t think that this means that drivers in general break the law.

A third form of cognitive bias that’s important here is the fundamental attribution error. This is the idea that your behaviour is due to the situation in which you find yourself, but the behaviour of others is due to their character. Thus you might cycle without lights because you forgot to recharge your batteries, and it’s just this once, and you can’t be late for dinner (situational explanation). But you believe that he cycles without lights because he has no respect for the law or other peoples’ safety (dispositional explanation). It's clear that law-breaking among cyclists is situational if we look at red light jumping. Cyclists don’t jump red lights at random, they jump them when the road environment makes it safe to do so and when waiting at the lights puts them in the path of motor vehicles. For example, I often go through the Milton Road/Kings Hedges Road junction and I never see red-light jumping there. The junction is too large, the traffic too fast, and there’s no gap in the sequence of lights. But at the Silver Street/Queen’s Road junction there’s an all-red phase for pedestrians in which it’s safe for cyclists to go (as long as they are careful to look for and give way to crossing pedestrians), and you’ll see many do so.

What does this mean for campaigners? Because people don’t get their beliefs about cyclists from accurate observation of the behaviour of cyclists, it follows that we can’t expect to change peoples’ beliefs by changing our behaviour, or by trying to improve the behaviour of other cyclists. Campaigns along these lines are likely to be futile if the objective is to change attitudes among the general public.

And the situational explanation for law-breaking ought to inform the strategy for dealing with it. Instead of a strategy of enforcement and punishment, can we find some proposal for changing the situation so that the law-breaking disappears by itself? (Just as, to stop wrong-way cycling on one-way streets, we campaign for the streets to be made two-way for cyclists.) For example, at the Silver Street/Queen’s Road junction, why not allow cyclists to go during the all-red phase? (As at this junction in Assen.) Where it’s safe for cyclists to turn left on red, why not put in a way for cyclists to bypass the light and do so? (As here in Cherry Hinton.)

(Sadly, some readers—not you, of course: other readers—are likely to imagine that my arguments are intended to be self-serving, so I had better emphasize that I don’t break the law myself. There are good reasons to obey the law, but persuading the public that cyclists in general are law-abiding is not one of them.)

The hidden dangers of cycling

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A list of Don’ts for women on bicycles from the New York World, 1895, has been doing the rounds (thanks to m-bike.org). The list consists of about 20% good advice (“don’t criticize people’s ‘legs’”) to 80% sexism (“don’t use bicycle slang: leave that to the boys”). But what on earth does this mean:

Don’t cultivate a ‘bicycle face’.

My usual sources failed me: the phrase doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example. But I tracked this down with the help of Google book search to an 1897 article by a doctor who claims to have originated the phrase. The article as a whole gave such an interesting insight into attitudes towards the democritization of cycling, and especially towards women taking up cycling, that I’ve decided to republish the whole thing. (If you’re just here for the explanation of ‘bicycle face’, see here.) The choice of illustrations is mine, as are the footnotes. I’ve assembled it from the Google Books snippet view, so there are bound to be typographical errors—let me know if you spot any.

This article was first published in the National Review on 1897-02-01. It’s a masterclass in how to medicalize an ordinary activity (at least when performed by women): the tone is smooth, rational, apparently concerned only to advise women against “attempting a novel and peculiar experiment with their precious persons”. But read it closely and you’ll see the desperately thin cloth out of which the whole argument is constructed. There’s not even a syndrome. The symptoms reported in the anecdotes are not related: we have some six-day riders suffering from delusions due to drug-taking and sleep deprivation; one woman who suffered an attack of appendicitis while riding a bicycle and another an attack of goitre; and some cyclists reporting tiredness and headaches. There’s nothing here beyond a handful of anecdotes, a good helping of rhetoric and insinuation, and a powerful dose of sexism.

The hidden dangers of cycling

by A. Shadwell, M.D.

The cycling season will be coming on soon, and there is every reason to suppose that more people than ever will take advantage of it—women especially. The first blush of fashion has already passed away from the bicycle, and with it the principal attraction for very smart folks, but that is more than counter-balanced by the wider popularity of an established practice. The correct instincts of English (and I believe American) women having relegated all unfeminine costumes to the limbo of bad style, and resolutely vindicated the supremacy of the skirt,¹ there is no longer anything for nice scruples to boggle at. Riding has acquired an irreproachable title to respectability. The matron in her most desperate mood would scarcely venture to snort at it now; she could not do so without making herself ridiculous—a thing inconceivable. To do her justice, she does not attempt it. She may shake her head at some of the uses to which the British maid puts her machine—as at everything else that misguided young person does—but speaking in a general way, instead of condemning, she is much more likely to get astride of one herself, if only to show how it should be done. Her conversion has been gradual, but is pretty complete. In short, the bicycle has established itself as a family institution, like sea-bathing in summer and pantomimes in winter. Nothing need prevent any one from enjoying it save want of means, and it is safe to say that an increasing number of people will manage to find the means with the assistance of a market rendered pliant by competition.

The one consideration that might induce cautious individuals to hesitate before attempting a novel and peculiar experiment with their precious persons—the doubt whether it is good for them—has hitherto been ignored or stifled. Everybody sees swarms of men and women like unto themselves skimming gaily along. Everybody hears daily of friends who have gone the same road, while to authoritative warnings have been uttered, and whispers of ill-effects are lost upon the wind, like idle gossip that doth not happen to jump with inclination. Accidents, of course, are not to be denied, and if totted up they would probably cause some consternation for a day or two; but accidents happen everywhere, even in bed—earthquakes for instance—and if one begins worrying about them life becomes impossible. No one allows gloomy anticipation of broken bones and sudden death to interfere with pleasure; they are wisely put aside with the genial conviction that, if come they must, someone else will be the victim. That cycling may possible entail other untoward consequences is a proposition out of harmony with current ideas. It is not associated with any particular microbe, and is, therefore, necessarily harmless. On the other hand, it means exercise and fresh air (all out-door air is fresh by courtesy) and, therefore, it is necessarily beneficial, provided that two or three simple rules are kept. Such is the orthodox teaching of the day, as every board-school infant knows, or should know, if it listens to its accomplished teachers, who are always in the van of intellectual progress. But, in spite of the orthodox teaching, I will venture to say that in the course of the next year or two we shall hear quite a different story. That little has hitherto been heard to the disadvantage of cycling is natural enough. Sufficient time has not elapsed since it became a general practice to bring the disadvantages to light—to the light, that is to say, of public recognition. Medical men have been kept studiously in the dark on the subject. They always are in like cases. It is the old story of the bone-setter’s art and similar popular fancies. The successes are blazoned abroad, the failures concealed. So with bicycling. The fortunate persons who have derived benefit as well as pleasure from it volubly recount their experiences to the experiences to the largest audience they can command, and the chorus of praise waxes louder by reiteration. Those who have suffered conceal the fact as far as possible, and especially from the doctor, for fear of being forbidden their “beloved bikes.” That is noticeably the habit of young women, who are the chief sufferers. They have a double reason for silence. They set exceptional store by the amusement, and they are by nature shy of saying anything about their health. They will often go nigh to death rather than confide in a mother or sister, lest haply the doctor, whom they dread, should be consulted.

The medical profession generally has thus, I believe, been misled into an overfavourable or overconfident view of cycling, and has a medical man I know their attitude pretty well. They are naturally and quite rightly inclined to approve of anything which takes people into the open air and gives them occupation and exercise, and since all that they hear of the bicycle is in its favour, they readily commend it to all and sundry, unless some serious and definite reason exists to the contrary. If any suspicion of ill-effects does happen to be confided to their ear, it is lightly dismissed as due to “overtaxing the strength.” The world feeds on phrases, and they are nowhere swallowed more greedily than in the sick-room. The patient and the patient’s friends (happily) never ask what they mean, whether much or little or nothing at all; and the doctor very seldom asks himself. Mathews Duncan² used to tell a story about that in his dry way, which derived much of its effect from the broad Scotch accent, not reproducible unfortunately on paper. A lady came to him complaining of a pain in the face, and wanted to know what it was. It is tic-douloureux³,” said the eminent physician. “Oh, really! Tic-douloureux,” said the lady, quite satisfied. “But if,” he used to add, she had asked me what tic-douloureux was I should have had to say, It’s just a pain in the face.” “Overtaxing the strength,” “overfatigue,” and similar expressions may mean a little more than “tic-douloureux,” which is nothing but a label, but they conveniently mask an indefinite amount of ignorance. I shall return to this point later, merely observing here that the easy-going use of such wide and superficial formulas leads to self-deception and error. Doctors put off their guard by a phrase, may miss the real bearing of facts before them, and give disastrous advice when consulted. I have known serious and long-continued mischief caused by riding, as the subsequent course of the case proved; but a doctor, to whom it was suggested that the machine might be to blame, pooh-poohed the idea, because the amount of riding was so very moderate as to preclude “over-fatigue,” and he had never heard that it could do harm in any other way. He confidently recommended the patient to continue riding “in moderation,” with the result that she has never been able to ride since. So far as can be judged from public utterances that is the general view of the profession and of the public alike. Observe moderation and you are perfectly safe. Perhaps one ought to add, “Wear flannel next the skin,” a time-honored shibboleth, which derives its only authority from constant repetition, but is received by this enlightened age with as much respect as a formula for exorcizing the devil used to inspire in our benighted forefathers.

I ought, perhaps, to mention the late Sir Benjamin Richardson⁴ here as otherwise some one is sure to throw him at my head. I knew him, and desire to speak of him with all respect. He was undoubtedly responsible for much of the general confidence in the hygienic virtues of cycling. But at the time he devoted attention to it comparatively few people rode: he had not had the opportunity of observing its effects, by which alone it can be judged, when practiced in the indiscriminate manner that now prevails. Latterly he did, I believe, considerably modify the views he once held, but naturally he attracted less notice as a wet blanket than as an enthusiastic advocate. In that capacity his ardour was somewhat apt to outrun his judgment. Moreover, his own experiences, on which his favourable opinion was mainly based, were, if I remember right, confined to a tricycle, which is by no means the same thing as a bicycle. On all these grounds the favourable opinions associated with his name require to be discounted when applied to the question as it stands to-day. He was quite right in drawing attention to the value of this form of exercise—it is good for many people. My point is that among the enormous numbers who have taken to it within the last two years, there are many others for whom it is not good, but distinctly hurtful, and that in ways and for reasons which are not yet generally recognized.

In spite of the tendency of riders to conceal untoward results and of doctors to minimize or misinterpret them when discovered, the facts come gradually to light, and from what I have observed I cannot but think that before long they will attract serious and general attention. Since last summer, wherever I have been I have heard of persons who are unpleasantly disappointed by the effect of riding on themselves, and of others who have been completely “jacked up” by it, to an expressive piece of schoolboy slang. At the same time I have heard of others again—including women—who do their thirty, fifty, or seventy miles and “never felt better in their lives.” I do not happen to have met any of those who are said to have been restored by the curative bicycle to perfect health from a condition reminding one of the testimonials to somebody’s pills, but I am quite willing to believe that they exist. It would not affect my argument in the least if swarms of them had been rescued from the grave and could ride a thousand miles without turning a hair. It is of those who cannot that I speak; of those who cannot ride even a moderate distance without unpleasant or serious consequences. They may not be so numerous as I suppose but they exist, and there is nothing on the face of it to distinguish them from the rest. That is where the danger lies. Here is a case. A girl, healthy, rather stronger than the average, able to take her part with the rest in other things, learns to cycle. She rides with her friends and rather enjoys it. To all appearances she can do as much as anybody in short flights. One day they go farther, nothing much, perhaps ten miles: the result, utter collapse, with bed for several days. And the same thing happens whenever she ventures beyond the merest potter. Her friends, no stronger, no more experienced, are not affected in the same way at all. She “overtaxed her strength.” Of course she did: but she did not know she was doing it, and had no reason to suppose it. That was just the mischief. Sometimes the consequences are much more serious. In case within my knowledge a girl developed exophthalmic goitre as the result of a rather long ride, which she supposed herself able to accomplish without difficulty. Her throat swelled at the time, never went down, and quickly developed into a well-marked case. This obscure but serious affection is said to be chiefly caused by “mental excitement.”⁵ Another form of organic injury that I have come across is internal inflammation, of which the symptoms are much pain and a kind of chronic dysentery, extremely obstinate, and of the most lowering character.” The first case that I noticed was that of a lady, of good constitution, active and able to hold her own at other forms of exercise. She mastered the machine with exceptional facility, almost at the first essay, and was an easy and graceful rider. But being rather timid she never rode more than a mile or two at a time, and that at the most moderate pace. Nevertheless, this trouble developed itself, and did not subside for months, to the great detriment of her health, which has not yet recovered. At first I was not sure about the cause, but the recurrence of acute symptoms so long as the bicycle was used, and their gradual subsidence when it was completely laid aside, left no doubt. Since then, other precisely similar cases have occurred within my knowledge. And I notice that quite recently one of the medical journals has called attention to the occurrence of appendicitis caused by bicycle riding.⁶ A definite anatomical explanation is suggested, into which I need not enter, as this is not a medical review, and I am not a New Woman.⁷ Suffice it to say that internal inflammation is not only a conceivable, but a likely consequence of the motions involved. I submit that its occurrence without any excessive indulgence in riding is one of the hidden dangers against which people should be on their guard. The cases I have mentioned were greatly aggravated by want of early recognition. How many other women have spent the major part of the winter in bed or on the sofa from the same cause?

But more important, perhaps, because more common and more easily overlooked, than such decided injuries, are the various forms of ill defined nervous effects to which attention is at length being called. The Standard has lately given hospitality to a voluminous correspondence on the subject, which merits more notice than popular newspaper controversies usually get—or deserve. It began with reference to the six days’ race that took place at New York a little before Christmas with such disastrous results to the competitors. They broke the record decisively, and their own health still more so.⁸ The account which reached this country is worth quoting:

Several of the competitors were seized with a species of dementia. Taylor was quite out of his mind for nearly two days, refusing to touch food or drink and charging his attendants with attempts to poison him. Hale showed slight symptoms of delusion of Saturday, when he dismounted and declared excitedly that there was a scheme to run him down. Rice threw himself down by the side of the track, declaring that one-half of his head had been carried away, and that he would be killed if he remounted his machine. On Saturday afternoon he addressed the audience, saying they were throwing stones and brickbats at him. Another rider dismounted, turned his wheel about, and started at a lively pace in the opposite direction. Few of the other contestants were able to stand without support when they retired.⁹

The account may be exaggerated, but is too circumstantial to have been invented, and at any rate Hale (the winner) was too ill to enter for another race about three weeks afterwards. After allowing a liberal discount for the well known propensities of the Transatlantic cable, one must admit that the details are rather striking. In commenting on the occurrence it was suggested that in addition to the want of sleep, to which the conditions of the riders was no doubt partly due, bicycling in itself puts a peculiar strain upon the nervous system, not shared by other forms of athletic exercise.¹⁰ The suggestion drew two corroborative letters and then the flood-gates opened, pouring forth columns of opinions and experiences and theories, many emanating from medical men, and all from obviously intelligent persons. There were sixty-six letters in all, and they may be analyzed thus: Thirteen roundly maintained that cycling is absolutely beneficial on the strength of the writers’ experience. Thirteen testified to bad effects of the kind suggested; eighteen more or less admitted them by implication; twelve denied bad effects except from “over-exertion;” and the remainder dealt with matters irrelevant to the question. Practically there were twenty-five against the theory of special damage, and about thirty either in favor of it or not against it. Of course these may not in the least represent the relative proportions of the letters received on each side; probably a selection was made to represent all opinions fairly. And therefore no conclusion ought to be drawn as to the verdict of the majority, or anything of that kind. The evidence must be weighed, not counted. And, first, the fortunate persons who take their stand upon the virtues of bicycling may be dismissed with congratulations and a gentle reminder that what is sauce for the goose is not always sauce for the gander, that one man’s meat in another man’s poison, and so forth and so forth. Their testimony is an interesting proof that cycling is very good for some people, but it is no evidence at all that it may not be bad for others, which is the point at issue. Cold baths, strong ale, and very light clothing conduce greatly to my health, but I should be sorry to assert that they must suit everybody. On the other hand, the testimony of those who have suffered must be accepted as proof positive that bicycling may be bad for some people. That, indeed, cannot be seriously denied. The only question is, How and why is it bad? The stock answer, sufficiently exemplified in the Standard correspondence, is that it has been “carried to excess,” and that if practiced “in moderation” it would have no such results. Really one cannot help sympathizing with a writer who called himself “Common Sense,” and described this dictum as a “meaningless platitude,” to the great wrath of some others. It is not meaningless, because the nature of a platitude is to have some meaning, but so elementary as to be useless. A platitude it undoubtedly is—one of the oldest and widest of all platitudes—and therefore useless for particular application: it is too wide. “May I cycle, doctor?” “Certainly, but remember that excess is bad. You must be careful to observe moderation.” Observe moderation! You might as well say, “Look before you leap,” or “Pride goes before a fall.” What the intending cyclist wants to know is, What are excess and moderation for him or for her?

The implied answer is that they are to be measured, just as in other forms of exercise, by the amount of muscular effort expended by the individual. In short, stop when you feel tired. Now, I am not constrained to deny that neglect of this rule is responsible for a good deal of the mischief. There are several reasons why it is neglected. To begin with, cycling as a fashionable craze has been attempted by people unfit for any exertion. Then there is emulation, which stimulates to ride as far and as fast as someone else; and as regards women, there is the ardour that characterizes the sex in all it does, even—and most particularly—in the act of unsexing itself. But these things are general; they apply to every form of active occupation. A vice—from another point of view a virtue—peculiar to the bicycle, that I do not remember having seen noticed, is that the ease and rapidity of the locomotion tempt to over-long rides by bringing some desirable objective within apparent reach. Going to nowhere and back is dull, going to somewhere (only a few miles farther) is attractive; and thus many are lured to attempt a task beyond their physical powers. “Expeditions” have much to answer for. But mischief is often done, I maintain, without going to such lengths or consciously exceeding the limits of strength at all. It is a fallacy to make muscular effort the measure of excess and moderation in this form of exercise. Some people contend that cycling is very hard work, and if that expression is used in the sense of general strain upon the organism I have no objection to it; but if it mean severe muscular effort I deny it altogether. Putting aside racing, which always entails great effort, the ordinary propulsion of the machine demands amazingly little exertion, compared with most other forms of exercise. Therein lies its greatest attraction and its greatest hidden danger. Children, fragile women, and old men, who would be quite incapable of really hard work, find that they can do it with ease. It may be said that for them it is hard work, and that accounts for the complaints. If they alone suffered the contention might stand, but that is not the case. Men of more than average vigor, and accustomed to far harder work, complain of the peculiar effects, nor are the symptoms those of over-exertion. They are essentially nervous, not muscular—headache, insomnia, lassitude, nervous depression, and prostration. “The after effects of cycling,” says an experienced rider and one accustomed to far more violent forms of exercise, “are quite different from those of any other outdoor exercise with which I am acquainted, and less pleasant. Even a short ride leaves me with a pallid face, a palpitating heart, the beginnings of a headache, and a tendency to insomnia.” Another speaks of the “peculiar form of nervous exhaustion,” and “that strained feeling which led to insomnia and headache.” A third, the “holder of many cups won on the running path and river,” declares himself “quite unable to cycle, as even a short run on a machine at the easiest of paces gives me a severe headache.” A fourth, sufficiently robust to have covered one hundred and fifty miles of hilly road in a day, confesses to “having experienced the unpleasant sensations described.” A fifth, who has ridden every sort of machine from the bone-shaker onwards, testifies to having experienced “great nervous exhaustion,” loss of appetite, restlessness at night, and, the next day, a “very low, irritable, and depressed feeling.” A sixth “victim to the errors of cycling” suffered a complete break-down after twelve years’ riding, during which “nervous symptoms and weakness of the heart’s action gradually grew upon him;” after going abroad to regain his health he took it up again, “with the result that my heart and nerves have suffered perhaps beyond repair this time.” A seventh assures us that the “symptoms complained of—headache, insomnia, etc.—were known and recognized as an evil sixteen or eighteen years ago.”

Now I submit that the theory of over-exertion is quite inadequate to explain the kinds of effects here described. To my mind they point distinctly to a cerebral, and not a muscular, origin. They are not associated with other far more severe forms of exercise, such as football, rowing, running, swimming, gymnastics. They rather resemble the effects of overindulgence in tobacco or alcohol, and are nearly allied to that affection of nervous origin which is called sick-headache. Their independence of muscular effort is further demonstrated by the fact, testified by several sufferers, that they do not follow on the use of the tricycle, which, undeniably, entails much harder work. It is therefore fallacious to make bodily strength the measure of indulgence in bicycling and to rely on the sense of effort to indicate when to stop, as in lawn-tennis or walking, for instance, when the arm or the leg gives timely warning that the limit of ‘moderation’ has been reached. In bicycle riding it is the very absence of conscious effort, in the ordinary sense, that misleads the susceptible into “excess”, unless they are warned to look out for a different kind of fatigue.

Various causes are assigned for these nervous troubles. Some blame the saddle, others the vibration or the mechanical defects of the machine; and no doubt anything which increases discomfort tends to aggravate the mischief. But all these factors are common to the tricycle, which has been found void of offense. The vera causa seems to lie in the extreme instability of the two-wheeled machine, which can never be left to itself for a single moment without dismounting. In this respect bicycling differs from any other occupation whatever. The strain of attending to it may not be very great in itself—sometimes it is and sometimes it is not—but it never ceases, and this incessant tension is the thing which tells upon the nerves. How incessant it is, the demeanor of most riders declares with an emphasis which still excites ridicule, familiar as the sight has become. Some time ago I drew attention to the peculiar strained, set look so often associated with this pastime and called it the ‘bicycle face’; the general adoption of the phrase since then indicates a general recognition of its justice. Some wear the “face” more and some less marked, but nearly all have it, except the small boys who care little for croppers. Has anybody ever seen persons on bicycles talking and laughing and looking jolly, like persons engaged in any other amusement? Never, I swear. Doubtless they can at a pinch, but in practice they don’t. All their attention is given up to the road and the machine. With set faces, eyes fixed before them, and an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best stony, they pedal away, looking neither to the right nor to the left, save for an instantaneous flash, and speaking not at all, except a word flung gasping over the shoulder at most. It is this strange and unhuman gravity which excites the ridicule and hostility of the street cad and of the dull-witted rustic alike. The enthusiast will indignantly deny the description, but I ask him to look at his fellow. Did ever pastime wear a mien so sombre? The bicyclist has reason, for let the attention wander for more than an instant, an the odds are heavy on a spill. The machine is so excessively crank;¹¹ it cannot stand the slightest shock. To ride it safely entails a double strain—a general one on the nerves and a particular one on the balancing centre. The latter does not affect everybody, but I am certain that it affects some very seriously. People differ in balancing capacity as much as in an ear for music or a gift for speech; and it costs some riders real and constant effort to keep their equilibrium. They show it by suffering from headache at the back of the head, where the balancing centre is situated. The general strain on the nerves affects everybody, but some people “have no nerves,” and therefore do not suffer. The naturally timid and anxious feel it very acutely. Apprehension works their senses up to a high pitch of tension, and puts a severe nervous strain upon them. Then certain persons are specially susceptible to the work thrown upon the optic nerve by the rapid succession of impressions received when moving quickly. Hence the headache commonly caused by looking out of the window on a long journey—“sick headache” or migraine. That is exactly the sort of headache many bicyclists complain of.

I do not want to labour the point too much. Surely the foregoing considerations are enough to explain the nervous exhaustion caused by bicycling, wholly apart from over-exertion. The close and incessant application of mind and brain and senses is the root of it. Riding this fascinating contrivance demands much the same sort of attention as crossing a crowded thoroughfare; and if any one will spend an hour or so straight on end¹² in that amusement, say at Blackfriars or Charing Cross or Piccadilly Circus. I will wager that he will experience something of the symptoms we have been discussing, although his physical exertions have been inconsiderable.

The foregoing observations by no means pretend to exhaust the subject; they merely aim at elucidating, however roughly and tentatively, some of its obscurities. That bicycling is attended with serious evils which do not appear on the surface and have received too little attention cannot well be denied. I have endeavored to explain their why and wherefore, and to show that very much greater caution is necessary than has generally been supposed. My arguments will doubtless meet with criticism and opposition, but it is only by the accumulation of experiences and the clash of discussion that the truth is ultimately reached.

^ Cycling was one of the epicenters of the rational dress movement.
^ James Mathews Duncan (1826–1890), physician-accoucheur at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and author of Lectures on midwifery.
^ “Tic douloureux [French, = painful twitching], severe facial neuralgia with twitching of the facial muscles.” [Oxford English Dictionary]
^ Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson (1828–1896) was “one of the earliest advocates of bicycling” [Wikipedia].
^ Goitre is caused by iodine deficiency.
^ Here’s a case study along these lines published in Annals of Surgery in 1898: “CASE IV.—O. A., aged thirty-three years, businessman ... During the period that he has been under my care he has had two attacks of appendicitis; the last, which occurred during the month of June, was probably brought on by bicycle riding, indulged in contrary to my explicit directions.”
^ “New woman: A woman who is considered different from previous generations; esp. one who challenges or rejects the traditional roles of wife, mother, or homemaker, and advocates independence for women and equality with men.” [Oxford English Dictionary]. The implication seems to be that a new woman would be more willing to discuss female anatomy explicitly than a male medical doctor.

^ Six-day racing was a form of endurance racing in which cyclists competed to complete the most circuits of a track in six days; it became popular in the 1890s at Madison Square Garden in New York. This article from the New York Times gives a flavour of the sport:

It is a fine thing that a man astride two wheels can, in a six-day race, distance a hound, horse, or a locomotive. It confirms the assumption, no longer much contested, that the human animal is superior to the other animals. But this undisputed thing is being said in too solemn and painful way at Madison Square Garden.

An athletic contest in which participants ‘go queer’ in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them, is not sport. It is brutality. It appears from the reports of this singular performance that some of the bicycle riders have actually become temporarily insane during the contest, while all of them are sore, cross, and distorted. Permanent injury is likely to result from the attempt to perform any task that is beyond the limits of what a man can undergo and make up for in one night’s sleep. Days and weeks of recuperation will be needed to put the Garden racers in condition, and it is likely that some of them will never recover from the strain.

The knowledge that a man can propel himself 1,769 miles in 110½ hours is purchased too dearly when it costs the reason and the physical well-being of the person who imparts it.

The sport was made more humane by switching to two-man teams from 1898. In this format, one rider can sleep while the other races. (But modern ultra-long cycling events like the Race Across America have sprung up to test riders in similar ways to the old six-day races.)
^ I can’t find the Standard report quoted here, but the event referred to seems to have been the race of 7–12 December 1896 (race 19 in this list). There was, however, a report on the race in Good Roads, the journal of the League of American Wheelmen, from Clarence A. Shedd, a New York member:

That it was a race for the survival of the fittest is, indeed, true. That it required great endurance, long experience, and a most determined grit to win, was plainly manifest. It was a pitiful and unpleasant sight to watch the corpse-like faces of some of the suffering riders as they passed around the ten lap to the mile circle, and only fifteen of the original twenty-seven were able to hold out to the finish.

Hale’s feat of riding 1,910 miles in 142 hours is an average of about 13½ miles per hour; but out of this must be taken the time for sleep, meals, etc.—say, one-quarter of the time,—this would increase the pace to about 18 miles per hour for six days. (How does this strike you for effort and endurance?) Of the $4,000 in prizes, [Edward] Hale receives $1,300. [Joseph S.] Rice (the pride of Wilkes-Barre) gets $800.

During my visit at this extraordinary and unprecedented bicycle race, I observed that nine nationalities were represented, ranging in ages from nineteen years,—that of ‘Major’ Taylor, the colored rider,—to that of forty years, of ‘old-time’ [Albert] Schock.

That no two bicycles in the race were built by one manufacturer—all had different saddles which were set well forward. Most all used special handle-bars, while the gears run from 70 to 100 [inches]. All the riders but one or two used toe clips. That one of the riders rode 145 miles without getting out the saddle, which was a feat entitled to much credit.

It was anybody’s race, and we must bow to ‘Teddy’ Hale, the champion.
^ Aside from the ordinary rigours of sleep deprivation, six-day riders also suffered from the side-effects of the drugs, like nitroglycerin, that they took to enhance performance and to stay awake.
^ “Crank: [Of a ship] Liable to lean over or capsize.” [Oxford English Dictionary]
^ “Straight on end: consecutively, uninterruptedly.” [Oxford English Dictionary]

Polystom

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Adam Roberts’ 2003 novel Polystom opens with a breathtaking scene:

Polystom climbed into his biplane one morning, having made up his mind to fly to the moon. It had come to him upon waking, the sudden whim to visit his uncle Cleonicles—the great Scientist Cleonicles, none other—in his mansion on the moon.... Stom pulls back the long stick and sweeps upwards again... When he next looks down he can see half a hemisphere, the whole of his estate and half a dozen other ones, the Middenstead and the Farrenstead seas, the scaly-looking chain of mountains stretching far to the west.... Now he can see the curve of the planet, the perfect arc marking off the browns and greens and blues of his world from the blue-purple of interplanetary space.... The interplanetary air was weirdly thin, breathable of course but not relishable. Some fashionable newsbook opinion pieces made great claims for the purity of it, even to the point of suggesting merely breathing it as a treatment for various ailments. But it always made Stom feel slightly headachy.... His plane pulled away from the world and towards the moon.

Easy travel to other planets has been one of the dreams of science fiction—perhaps the dream—from Lucian’s True History, in which the heroes were “lifted up by a giant waterspout and deposited on the Moon on the eighth day”. But everything we’ve learned about the universe—from Aristarchus’ determination of the distance to the Moon in the 3rd century BC down to the confirmation of the Standard Model in the Large Hadron Collider—has only made it clearer how much just this dream is an illusion. But science fiction still clings to the comforting illusion that other planets can be repositories for wish-fulfilment and adventure: the hostile reality of space travel is tamed and distanced by strategies of nostalgia, irony, and -punk.

Polystom is all about clinging to illusions. This novel is really three linked novellas, all set in a miniature solar system filled with breathable air. The names of the characters are Greek, but the social structure depicted seems more like that of Tsarist Russia, with power concentrated in the hands of a land-owning aristocracy, with the majority of people enserfed to the estates they live on. The aristocratic protagonist Polystom is oblivious to his privilege, indeed remarkably oblivious to nearly everything around him.

In the first part of the book, Polystom conceives an infatuation for the headstrong Beeswing, and marries her in the belief that he can turn her into the kind of wife that everyone expects a man of his position to have. In a very skilfully written narrative, Roberts manages to keep a tight third-person perspective on Polystom, while making it clear that he is wrong about more or less everything, and about his wife spectacularly so. (What’s much less clear is why she agreed to marry him in the first place: the narrative focus on Polystom gives us little insight into her thoughts. Perhaps she had little choice in the matter.) Eventually she dies, and it is not clear whether it was a horrible accident, or whether the narrative is somewhat unreliable and Polystom really murdered her.

The second part features Polystom’s uncle Cleonicles. He is fêted as a ‘great scientist’, and sees himself as an elder statesman and scholar, but he is as grotesquely self-deluded as his nephew: utterly insensitive to the injustice and abuse on which his peaceful life of study reposes. Events bring this home in an especially unpleasant fashion.

The third part returns to Polystom, who decides to play at soldiers and soon gets himself (and his serfs, who have no choice in the matter) into a kind of World War I, where the gruesome realities of trench warfare, and the incompetence of artistocratic officers like Polystom, throw away lives like so much chaff. And then the novel takes a further turn toward the bizarre: the device over which the war is being fought is a mountain-sized computer on which the personalities of the dead are simulated, based on written accounts of their lives.

There seems to be a recapitulation of the history of science fiction here, from the fantastic voyage, via planetary romance and war story, to cyberpunk and the singularity, and each stage associated with a characteristic delusion that reality cannot shake. Science fiction continues to kid itself with fantasies like the colonisation of space and the uploading of minds, and Polystom goes on to the end kidding himself that war is glorious, and that a simulation of his dead wife Beeswing can forgive him.

The Clockwork Rocket

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

There’s something about reviewing that has been troubling me for a while: how do you decide by which aesthetic standards to measure the work under review? A typical review evaluates a work against an aesthetic standard, but the standard itself is usually implicit and almost never justified. The reader has to deduce the standard by looking at the reviewer’s judgements of success and failure. For example, if the reviewer praises or damns a book’s “characterization”, the reader deduces that “good characterization” is part of the standard by which the reviewer is judging the book. But where does this standard come from? I guess if you’re an aesthetic objectivist, there’s no problem here: the standards of good works of art are what they are, and that’s that. But all right-thinking people are aesthetic relativists, and for us this means that there’s a lacuna here: who’s to say that “characterization” is an appropriate yardstick to judge the work under examination? It’s easy to think of books where characterization has been deliberately excluded by the author: The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the characters are subsumed by their allegorical roles; Last and First Men, where the grand scope of the work renders the human scale invisible; or The Erasers, where the distinctions between characters have been deliberately erased. If “characterization” is part of the measure of a good work, then these works are failures. But surely we want to be able to say that this is missing the point: different works can achieve different goals.

Where writers, reviewers and readers largely share a common set of aesthetic standards, this problem can safely be ignored. I’m pretty sure that the readers of the London Review of Books, for example, share the standards of the reviewers—or why else would they buy the magazine?—and the writers they choose to review are selected from the same literary establishment.¹ But on the Internet such cultural boundaries are harder to maintain, and when groups with different (but unstated and implicit) aesthetic standards meet, misunderstanding results.

1. Ebert on games

I’ll give just a couple of examples out of the many that have pushed my thinking in this direction. First, a case where people have implicitly (and unwisely) accepted a critic’s aesthetic standards, and thus find themselves impotent in their disagreement with him. This is the long battle of film critic Roger Ebert against the idea that video games can be “art” (by which he means, great works of art). Ebert’s views are perhaps best summarized² in these two replies to video gamers from November 2005:

2005-11-13: I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.

2005-11-27: [I] consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

There are two arguments here.³ The one about “choice”, is, I think, down to a mistake. A natural mistake, certainly, for a non-player, because the idea—that the actions of the protagonist in video games correspond to moral choices on the part of the player—has been awfully convenient for game developers when challenged about the unsavoury content of their games. When it’s suggested that, say, murder is a pretty unpleasant subject for a game, the game’s developer and its fans can respond to the effect that murders are the player’s moral choices, and if players don’t want to commit murder they can do some other missions instead. The relative amount of development effort put into the depiction of murdering versus other activities get swept under the carpet.

Ebert’s other argument is that no game can be as good as, say, Seven Samurai, or Les Misérables, otherwise someone would have brought it to his attention. The unasked question here is by what aesthetic principles is that someone supposed to have made this judgement? Ebert leaves his principles implicit, but his choice of examples suggests that he has in mind visual, social and psychological realism, complex plots, elegant prose, and insight into human character. This is a well-laid trap: if you accept that the quality of a work of art depends on whether it adheres to these principles, then you’ve accepted a standard that privileges certain artforms over others. Novels, plays and films are forms that are simply better at achieving these kinds of effects than, say, music, dance, sculpture (and video games).

Ebert’s implicit choice of aesthetic principles is not, strictly speaking, answerable. If you believe that the greatness of all art is to be evaluated by the similarity of its emotional effects to those produced by great novels and films, then video games are certainly not great. But why would you expect one art form to produce the same kinds of effects as another? No-one expects music to resemble sculpture: why should games resemble novels or films? When Ebert asks when games will produce something with the emotional impact of Taxi Driver, it’s a mistake to try to bluff with a response like “well, um, the end of Ico is pretty moving, and well, it’s kind of sad when Aeris dies in Final Fantasy VII”. Attempting to bluff in this way just gives critics like Ebert an open goal to shoot at: for example, Kellee Santiago’s attempted defence, ‘Are Video Games Art?’ implicitly accepts Ebert’s aesthetic principles, and so is easy for him to demolish in ‘Video games can never be art’. No: you should ask instead, when film will produce as challenging a boss battle as the ones in Ocarina of Time?

This implicit acceptance of aesthetic principles that video games struggle to live up to turns actively harmful when game developers internalize them and try to make games accordingly. Most common is the game that wants to be a film, and wastes its development effort on lame cut scenes and irritating voice acting. Other games would like to be literature: Braid, for example. This is an elegant platform game that creates complex relationships between space and time and makes the player figure out how to manipulate them. But the game elements are interleaved with a poorly written story that makes out that this elegant puzzle-platformer is some kind of metaphor for the protagonist’s regret for things that went wrong in his relationship with a woman. What confusion of ideas could have led Jonathan Blow to imagine that a game ought to aspire to the condition of a bourgeois novel, but with additional platforming elements?

2. Greg Egan’s The Clockwork Rocket

The science fiction writer Greg Egan is another pertinent case. Judged by the standards of the literary novel, Egan’s works fall far short: his prose is dry and impersonal; his characters carry out their function in the story but no more; his plots are often episodic and lack dramatic conflict or resolution; he has a tin ear when it comes to satire. But all of that can be forgiven because he brings to his work a unique interest in the character of physical law. Many science fiction writers pay homage to this subject, of course, but for most the laws of nature are there to serve the story: a discursion on the physics of a wormhole, say, would be for most writers an adjunct to a fantastic voyage therein, but Egan has the chutzpah to imagine that the reader will delight in the physics for its own sake.

It’s this unique quality that makes Egan’s deficits excusable: a reader who seeks a novel that aims to provide insight into the human condition has ten thousand exemplars to choose from, but a reader who seeks a novel that aims to provide insight into the laws of general relativity has only Egan’s Incandescence.

And this is where the arbitrariness of aesthetic standards should be clear: if Egan had written “better” works, according to the standards of the literary novel, then that would have impoverished our culture and not enriched it.

Of course, general relativity doesn’t have as widespread appeal as the human condition, so it’s common for a reviewer to see clearly the flaws in a Greg Egan novel, but miss its qualities entirely, or to misidentify them as another kind of flaw. I dealt with Adam Roberts’ review of Incandescence at length here, so I won’t repeat myself, but I recently spotted a review by Jonathan McCalmont at sfsite.com which contains an off-hand dismissal of the meat of the work:

Clearly, Egan was sufficiently intrigued by Roi’s world to put up some drawings and maths on his website but in truth, the amount of detail lavished on these chains of reasoning smacks of self-indulgence...

This is an astonishingly poor judgement from a usually insightful critic: not only does McCalmont most probably have the inference backwards,⁴ but this ‘self-indulgence’ is precisely what is most unique and interesting about Egan’s work. You might as well admonish Tolkien for self-indulgence in the matter of Elvish languages, or Melville for self-indulgence on the subject of whales.

Egan’s new novel The Clockwork Rocket follows very much the same template as Incandescence: on an alien world, a young person studies basic physics, and in doing so uncovers a threat of catastrophic proportions. Only by the concerted and co-operative effort of the whole civilisation can the catastrophe be averted—though we don’t find out if the effort succeeds, as there are still two volumes of the ‘Orthogonal’ trilogy to follow.

(Reviewers who are primarily interested in the human condition ought to give pause for thought here, because this is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves: the study of basic physics—in our case, the absorption/emission spectrum of carbon dioxide—uncovered the threat of climate change, and only by concerted global action can catastrophic change be averted, if it is not already too late.)

In Incandescence, the characters’ discovery of general relativity reveals their peril: their world is spiralling into a black hole. In The Clockwork Rocket, Egan’s scheme is much more ambitious, because the world obeys different laws of physics:

For the past year or so I've been spending most of my waking hours in a place where light, matter, energy and time obey different laws of physics than those that rule our own universe. Studying the way things move and interact under these alternative laws reveals some familiar behaviour, some strange and eerily beautiful phenomena, and some terrifying risks. [From Plus, Minus: A Gentle Introduction to the Physics of ‘Orthogonal’]

The point of departure is just a change of sign in the formula for the space-time metric in special relativity: in our metric (‘Lorentzian’ in Egan’s terminology), the space-time separation of two points is (Δx)² + (Δy)² + (Δz)² − (Δt)², but in The Clockwork Rocket (‘Riemannian’) it’s (Δx)² + (Δy)² + (Δz)² + (Δt)². The consequences are worked out thoroughly and convincingly, and when the nature of the threat is revealed, its physical concept follows so naturally from what we have painstakingly learned over the first half of the book that the sheer chutzpah of the concept takes a while to sink in. In fact, so bizarre is the concept of this universe that I wonder if Egan can possibly pull off the dénouement: I’m in suspense not only as to whether the characters will survive and succeed, but as to whether the invented laws of physics will ultimately make sense. Now that’s a cliff-hanger!

In my review of Incandescence I appealed “for a second edition of the novel with twenty or so well-chosen figures”. I’m glad to say that I don’t have to make this appeal again here: The Clockwork Rocket has as many figures as you could wish for.

I’ll finish with a selection of reviewers who have missed the point of the novel in various ways:

Gary K. Wolfe in Locus misunderstood the physics: “given the inverted relativity of this universe, a spaceship sent out on a circuitous route, at something like four-fifths the speed of blue light (the fastest of the wavelengths), could return in only a few years.”
Josh Vogt: “when I put a book down and feel like I just sat through a college physics class, that’s not cutting it for me.... The thing with Clockwork Rocket is it feels like the reader is required to do a lot of work just to appreciate the story.... I want to read books to be entertained, not lectured.”
Douglas R. Cobb: “Egan has posted over 80,000 words on the physics and math of Yalda’s world on his website, over and above what’s in The Clockwork Rocket. He even has tutorial videos online. However cool they may be, when does it begin to become overkill?”

^ I am perhaps rather unfair in picking out the London Review of Books here: John Lanchester is insightful here on the subject of video games, for example.
^ It is not altogether easy to trace Ebert’s opinions on video games, as these were committed to writing piecemeal, in dialogue with video game fans. As far as I can tell, it started with his panning of the movie Doom in October 2005. Vikram Keskar wrote in to defend the movie as a “tribute” to a great game and Ebert responded, “As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.” In November 2005, Josh Fishburn challenged this “denial of video games as a worthwhile use of your time,” prompting Ebert to strengthen his stance: “I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time.” Andrew Davis was “saddened to read that you consider video games an inherently inferior medium to film and literature” and in reply Ebert made his most explicit justification. That in turn elicited a whole slew of responses from gamers, but there the matter rested for a few years.
^ This section is based on discussions in the comments to two posts on Emily’s Short’s blog.
^ As I hypothesized in my review, Egan’s goal in writing Incandescence seems to have been to dramatise the theory of general relativity by making the survival of the characters dependent on their accurate understanding of the theory, and to show the discovery of the theory by direct observation. The location and nature of the society support this goal, not vice versa.

Update 2012-01-02: There’s some discussion of this piece over at the Strange Horizons blog and at Super Doomed Planet.

A foolish consistency

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Something that stands out from Christopher Tolkien’s History of the Lord of the Rings is the effort that J. R. R. Tolkien put into ensuring the consistency of the chronology. The journey to Rivendell was the first big source of trouble, with the movements of the hobbits, Gandalf, and the nine Black Riders to be synchronized. From The Treason of Isengard:

Scheme D [c. August 1939] provides an account of the movements of the individual Riders, who are identified by the letters A to I. It was D who came to Hobbiton on 23 September, the night on which Frodo left, and it was D and E who trailed the hobbits in the Shire, while GHI were on the East Road and F was to the southward. On the 25th, the day that Frodo reached Crickhollow, DEGHI assembled at the Brandywine Bridge; G waited there while H and I passed through Bree on Monday the 26th. On the 27th D and E ‘got into Buckland and looked for Baggins’; on the 28th they ‘located’ him and went to get the help of G. On the night of the 29th DEG crossed the River by the Ferry; and on the same night H and I returned and attacked The Prancing Pony. Pursued by Gandalf from Crickhollow DEG fled to the King. ABCDEFG ‘rode East after Gandalf and the supposed Baggins’ on 1 October; F and G were sent direct to Weathertop, and the other five, together with H and I, rode through Bree at night, throwing down the gates, and from the inn (where Gandalf was) the noise of their passage was heard like a wind. F and G reached Weathertop on the 2nd; Gandalf was pursued North from Weathertop by CDE, while ABFGHI patrolled the East Road.

The story after the breaking of the Fellowship was even more complex, with eventually four parties to be co-ordinated (Frodo & Sam; Gandalf & Pippin; Merry & the Rohirrim; Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli), as well as the phases of the Moon and the weather to be taken into account. Tolkien’s desire for Pippin to watch the full moon rise from the battlements of Minas Tirith required complex adjustments to the calendar (and the idea that the storm that battered Frodo and Sam on the Emyn Muil should later that night pass over Helm’s Deep during the siege had to be abandoned). In this section of the book the geography was still malleable (unlike in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the journey passed over lands which had been fixed in The Hobbit), with each party moving over different parts of the landscape, so that re-arrangement of the major landmarks (for example, to bring Helm’s Deep closer to Isengard, and Minas Tirith to Minas Morgul), together with diversions on the road to Mount Doom, could bring the distances to be covered by each party into line.

Our impulse as readers to imagine a consistent world based on the fragmentary information in a story is so very strong (and in the real world a vital skill) that we don’t always look carefully at its function in fiction. At tvtropes.org they say, “Consistency aids Willing Suspension of Disbelief” in the reader or viewer, but I don’t think that fully explains Tolkien’s need to construct an elaborate schedule for the movements of the Black Riders: the nine Riders are not distinguished in The Fellowship of the Ring, and we don’t really know their powers, so that even the most careful reader would not be able to spot a mistake or a double-counting simply by consulting the published text.

The careful synchronization does allow Tolkien to create powerful dramatic effects by comparing the perils of the dispersed fellowship, as in this passage from The Return of the King:

Out westward in the world it was drawing to noon upon the fourteenth day of March in the Shire-reckoning. And even now Aragorn was leading the black fleet from Pelargir, and Merry was riding with the Rohirrim down the Stonewain Valley, while in Minas Tirith flames were rising and Pippin watched the madness growing in the eyes of Denethor. Yet amid all their cares and fear the thoughts of their friends turned constantly to Frodo and Sam. They were not forgotten. But they were far beyond aid.

I think you could imagine creating the same dramatic effects without the need for such careful accounting, just by being a bit vaguer about dates and lengths of journeys. But Tolkien’s view was that this kind of attention to detail was necessary to overcome the in-built disadvantage of fantasy. From ‘On Fairy Tales’:

Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more subcreative; but at any rate it is found in practice that ‘the inner consistency of reality’ is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of ‘reality’ with more ‘sober’ material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely ‘fanciful’.

It’s also clear from The History of the Lord of the Rings that Tolkien’s pursuit of consistency was one of the drivers of his creativity. His need to figure out “what really happened”¹ made him latch onto small inconsistencies in chronology, or gaps in motivation, or a character possessing an item of equipment that had not previously been mentioned²—lacunae that would not worry a writer more pressed by deadlines—and worry at it until everything was satisfactorily explained.

So those are some of the literary effects produced by consistency. They are so well known that I think people take it for granted that consistency is a virtue, and neglect the equally interesting question of whether there are interesting effects to be achieved through inconsistency.

Emerson’s saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, is well known, but the rest of the paragraph (from ‘Self-Reliance’) is interesting too:

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

There’s a tendency in science fiction and fantasy for fans to perceive inconsistencies as mistakes simpliciter—to be ignored or smoothed over by fanon, or retconned. But that’s not the only possible reaction.

So here I want to explore a series in which discontinuity has, at least for me, a positive effect: the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance. This is a quasi-Arthurian historical fantasy set on the mythical island of Hybras, peopled with characteristically Vancian sardonic heroes and swaggering villains.

The inconsistencies are mostly minor, but surprisingly numerous, especially between the first and second books in the trilogy. I can perhaps best indicate the flavour by giving a selection of examples.

How many people did the witch Desmei make in her vats?
- Three [Suldrun’s Garden]
- Two [The Green Pearl]
How long has Valdez been spying for Casmir?
- Since before Aillas became king [SG]
- He can only have been doing so since Aillas became king, since Valdez is Yane, who was enslaved in Castle Sank until he escaped with Aillas [GP]
What was the initial reception of Aillas by the people of South Ulfland?
- Favourable — the barons join him to destroy Carfilhiot [SG]
- Suspicious [GP]
What species of fish swallowed the green pearl?
- A turbot [SG]
- A flounder [GP]
What was the origin of the placename ‘Twitten’s Corner’, where stands an iron post?
- Twitten himself was compressed into a post and placed there by the magician Murgen [SG]
- The post was placed there by Twitten [GP]
Who made the prophecy about Suldrun’s son?
- Desmei [SG]
- Persilian [GP]
Who appointed the devils Vus and Vuwas to guard Swer Smod?
- Murgen’s enemies [SG]
- Murgen [Madouc]
What is the name of the mad king of Pomperol?
- Deuel [SG]
- Deul [GP]

There are other inconsistencies that are harder to summarize so succintly as these. For example, in Suldrun’s Garden Aillas mounts an expedition to South Ulfland, and he does so again in The Green Pearl in terms that suggest it must be the first such expedition (for example, Aillas meets the merchants of Ys and the barons of the moorlands for the first time). So is it the same expedition described in two ways, or two expeditions that are superficially similar?

You can, of course, try to explain these away (in The Green Pearl it doesn’t say that Desmei made only two people; perhaps ‘Valdez’ was a cover name used by two different spies; in the U.S., turbot can refer to “any of various large flat fishes” [OED]; perhaps Persilian was merely repeating Desmei’s prophecy, or both got it from a common source; and so on) but I think this kind of exercise is rightfully known as fanwank.

There is an extrinsic explanation for these inconsistencies: Vance lost his sight in the 1980s, so that when composing The Green Pearl (published 1985) he must have found it difficult to consult Suldrun’s Garden to resolve issues of detail.

But the effect of reliance on memory is that the trilogy acquires some of the characteristics of a folk tale. Oral retellings gradually diverge, as speakers remember the events in different ways, or elaborate in idiosyncratic ways. This can lead to multiple versions of a story that may later be stitched back together in a way that leaves the inconsistencies outstanding. A well-known instance of this is the Documentary hypothesis for the Book of Genesis, whereby two different creation myths (or divergent versions of the same myth) appear to have been edited into sequence in chapters 1 and 2.

The inconsistencies in the Lyonesse books—and the pairs of episodes that seem to have sprung from the same inspiration, such as the two incursions into Ulfland, or the very similar descriptions of the childhoods of the princesses Suldrun and Madouc—give the books the flavour of tales from Arthurian legend: told, retold and edited.

^ Compare with letter number 180 (14th January 1956) from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien:

I have long ceased to invent ... I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the ‘Treebeard’ chapter without any recollection of previous thought: just as it now is.

The evidence from The History of the Lord of the Rings is that this facility of invention was not by any means a continual achievement; and often only by long struggle was he able to find a satisfactory sequence of events.
^ In this passage from The Return of the King, Sam returns the sword Sting that he had taken from Frodo’s unconscious body outside Shelob’s Lair:

Then Frodo took the small sword that had belonged to Sam, and had been laid at his side in Cirith Ungol. “Sting I gave to you Sam,” he said.

“No, master! Mr. Bilbo gave it to you, and it goes with his silver coat; he would not wish anyone else to wear it now.”

Frodo gave way.

This passage was inserted here because in the first drafts of ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, Frodo had fought a duel with Sharkey (who was at that point not yet identified with Saruman):

“Very well,” said Frodo, “one to one.” He took off his cloak. Suddenly he shone, a small gallant figure clad in mithril like an elf-prince. Sting was in his hand; but he was not much more than half Sharkey’s stature. Sharkey had a sword, and he drew it, and in a [?fury] hewed double-handed at Frodo. But Frodo using the advantage of his size and [?courage] ran in close holding his cloak as a shield and slashed his leg above the knee. And then as with a groan and a curse the orc-man [?toppled] over him he stabbed upwards, and Sting passed clean through his body.

This required Frodo to be in possession of Sting, and therefore he must have re-possessed the sword at some time after their rescue from Mordor. Even though nearly seven months of story-time had passed, and no reader could have had any problem imagining how this might have happened, this was the kind of loose end that Tolkien could not allow to go untied.

Later on, Tolkien’s conception of Frodo’s character on the return to the Shire changed radically, so that “he had not drawn sword, and his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.” But the return of Sting at the Field of Cormallen remained.

Five minute foreshadowing

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve not published much here for a while. That’s not to saying that I haven’t been writing anything. I have a stack of drafts this high. No, it’s that I’m not happy with the quality or the originality of what I’ve written. There’s so much stuff being written on the Internet that it always seems the case that I stumble across a piece on a similar subject that’s much better written than mine, and so another file lands in the drafts folder, perhaps never to emerge.¹ Anyway, I’ve resolved to be less hard on myself and post more stuff, even if there are holes in my arguments or my evidence is not watertight, or even if there’s already an article on more or less this subject at tvtropes.org. And in return, you should comment more. And not just to tell me how wrong I am.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Christopher Tolkien’s fascinating account of how his father wrote The Lord of the Rings, in volumes VI–IX of The History of Middle-Earth. And I just saw J. J. Abrams’ 2009 film Star Trek. What possible connection could there be between these two? Well, it’s all about the dramatic climaxes.

A common style of plotting works backwards: the dramatic climax or set-piece is imagined first, and then the necessary preconditions are deduced and inserted into earlier points in the narrative. For example, suppose you’re writing a science fiction film and you decide that it would be a good idea to have your hero and villain duelling with swords on the edge of a bottomless pit. This is sure to be exciting, but it’s fundamentally stupid, so you face a choice. You can leave it unexplained, but that way lies camp like Flash Gordon. Or you can try to justify it in some way that preserves the drama you are hoping for. But the stupider the idea, the more imaginative work you have to put in to figure out how this can happen, and the more the audience has to pay attention. The bottomless pit ought to be easy enough (though Star Trek manages, implausibly, to botch this with its mid-air drilling platform). But why fight with swords when guns are available? Well— Perhaps bullets are stopped by personal forcefields and “slow blades” are not [Dune]? Perhaps a sword is “not as clumsy or as random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized time” [Star Wars]? Perhaps guns are too dangerous to fire because “they’ll rupture the cooling system” [Aliens] or “put a bullet through the hull” [Alien Resurrection]?

But this kind of thing isn’t costless: the need to justify your dramatic set-piece can end up distorting the whole background to the story, and unless you weave the justification into the story skilfully, its arbitrariness can deprive the viewer of the pleasure of appreciating the logic of the world and the hero’s use of skills and resources that were established earlier in the movie.

But what makes Star Trek so “painfully, spectacularly dumb” (to quote Abigail Nussbaum) is not any particular one of the stupid justifications it comes up with, but the sheer relentless quantity of them. A modern action movie attempts to deliver dramatic set pieces one after the other, and depending on how you count, Star Trek has fifteen to twenty of these, which gives it six to eight minutes of screen time in which to justify, set up, and carry out any one of them. So the script follows a pattern whereby each set-piece stands more or less on its own: a problem is mentioned and then more or less immediately solved. For example, the script establishes that it is difficult to teleport onto a moving target:

                SCOTTY

        Look, we're still talkin' 'bout slingshotting aboard
        while she's going faster than light. Without a proper
        receiving pad, that's like tryin'a hit a bullet with a
        smaller bullet, wearing a blindfold. On a horse.

But then, no more than a couple of minutes later:

        Amid the ROAR of the ship's plasma drives, PARTICLES
        rematerialize... it's KIRK

And then the issue plays no further part in the rest of the film. This is no way to make a satisfying piece of drama, even for a throwaway vignette like this. Just telling us that the feat is difficult is not remotely convincing, especially since there is in fact no difficulty in practice. If you want us to believe something, you need to demonstrate it: at the very least, have a scene earlier in the film in which the transporter fails at some key moment for this reason. But of course in this kind of film there is simply no room to put in such a scene: the running time is already packed solid with incident, and even if it were, no audience could possibly be expected to remember so many arbitrary details.

The action-movie template can work in a contemporary setting because there’s much less need to justify what’s happening on screen: the audience can supply the necessary background details. When there’s a car chase, there’s no need to explain the capabilities of the vehicles or the consequences of crashing: the audience has a pretty good idea. But in science fiction there’s a temptation to go for the most spectacular of dramatic climaxes, but these have to be explained, and good explanations take a lot more screen time than an action movie has available.

Tolkien, by constrast, was a perfectionist when it came to working out the necessary preconditions for the dramatic moment, and weaving them into the fabric and languages of his invented world so thoroughly that it is hard to see the joins. In The History of the Lord of the Rings you can see his method at work: a dramatic event or dialogue appears in a very early draft or outline, and in successive drafts he tries out different ways to explain it, until the result is satisfactory. Christopher Tolkien comments on this in his foreword:

My object has been to give an account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, to exhibit the subtle process of change that could transform the significance of events and the identity of persons while preserving those scenes and the words that were spoken from the earliest drafts.

For example, the Black Riders enter the story long before their identity as Ringwraiths is settled on, and yet Gildor says to Bingo (who later became Frodo) that the use of the Ring “helps them more than you.” Christopher Tolkien again:

It is deeply characteristic that these scenes emerged at once in the clear and memorable form that was never changed, but that their bearing and significance would afterwards be enormously enlarged. The ‘event’ (one might say) was fixed, but its meaning capable of indefinite extension; and this is seen, over and over again, as a prime mark of my father's writing.

A second example: it was clearly essential to Tolkien that Gandalf should not accompany the hobbits on their journey to Rivendell, and yet should overtake them so that they come to Weathertop after he has left. In successive drafts a series of different explanations are tried out, including one in which Gandalf gives a lift to the hobbit Hamilcar Bolger, who is disguised as Frodo in order to draw off the Black Riders, and another in which Gandalf “was caught in Fangorn and spent many weary days as a prisoner of the Giant Treebeard.” The satisfactory explanation took a long time to work out.

The climax of The Lord of the Rings was perhaps the most difficult case. The crucial scene was imagined early on: in “a page of pencilled notes which bears no date” (but which is apparently from around August 1939, when the story had just got to Rivendell), Tolkien sketched “an extremely abbreviated outline of the end of the story”:

At end when Bingo [written above: Frodo] at last reaches Crack and Fiery Mountain he cannot make himself throw the Ring away. He hears Necromancer’s voice offering him great reward—to share power with him, if he will keep it. At that moment Gollum—who had seemed to reform and had guided them by secret ways through Mordor—comes up and treacherously tries to take Ring. They wrestle and Gollum takes Ring and falls into the Crack.

But making sense of this scene caused a lot of difficulties. For if Frodo “cannot make himself throw the Ring away” because of its malign influence, then how can Bilbo have given the Ring to Frodo so easily (it was Bilbo’s “parting gift” in early drafts)? And more importantly, how can Gollum possibly have been willing to give the Ring to Bilbo as a prize for winning the riddle contest, as in the first published version of The Hobbit? At first Tolkien tried to preserve the published account: in this passage from the first draft of the chapter that became ‘The Shadow of the Past’, he attempts a psychological explanation for Gollum’s giving up the Ring:

“That was the Ring,” said Gandalf. “Of course it is a poor sort of long life that the Ring gives, a kind of stretched life rather than a continued growing—a sort of thinning and thinning. Frightfully wearisome, Bingo, in fact finally tormenting. Even Gollum came at last to feel it, to feel he could not bear it, and to understand dimly the cause of the torment. He had even made up his mind to get rid of it. But he was too full of malice. If you want to know, I believe he had begun to make a plan that he had not the courage left to carry out. There was nothing new to find out; nothing left but darkness, nothing to do but cold eating, and regretful remembering. He wanted to slip out and leave the mountains, and smell the open air even if it killed him—as he thought it probably would. But that would have meant leaving the Ring. And that is not easy to do. The longer you have had one the harder it is. It was especially hard for Gollum, as he had had a Ring for ages, and it hurt him and he hated it, and he wanted, when he could no longer bear to keep it, to hand it on to someone else to whom it would become a burden—[? bind] itself as a blessing and turn to a curse. That is in fact the best way of getting rid of its power.”

But this is clearly unsatisfactory, and finally Tolkien resolved upon the desperate scheme of denying the account of events in The Hobbit, via the ingenious conceit that the published story was Bilbo’s fabrication to better establish his claim to the Ring. That’s the kind of trouble you have to go to if you want the dramatic payoff to resonate with your audience.

^ Marco Arment calls this “the blogger trap”.