Café Lena and Fox Hollow

One bright afternoon at RPI, my friend Tom came in and said, “Utah Phillips is playing at Café Lena tonight. Want to go?”

“Okay,” I argued, and off we went. Thank God Café Lena wasn’t in Denver.

Café Lena was in Saratoga, NY, only about 30 miles up the Adirondack Northway (I-87) from Troy. Drive time was about 45 minutes, and the Utah Phillips show was the first of many. It wasn’t the only folk venue around, but it was the most venerable, and I went back a lot.

That first concert would have been during my junior year, 1970-71. In the summer of ’71 I also attended the Fox Hollow Folk Festival near Petersburg, NY. That one is easy to date, because it was the last Fox Hollow before the death of its founder, Bob “Fiddler” Beers, in 1972. I went to Fox Hollow until I left the East Coast, in 1975. The next year, 1972 was the Year of the Northern Lights, visible during the clear mountain nights that year. In 1974, Nixon resigned during the festival and you have never seen such a happy bunch of folkies.

I’m not always sure in which venue I saw which performers; often it was probably both. So I’ll just give the usual list of those who come to mind:

Utah Phillips, Dave van Ronk, Michael Cooney, David Bromberg, Jean Ritchie, Gordon Bok, Leon Redbone, Patrick Sky, Putnam String County Band, Bill Spence, Bottle Hill, Billy Vanaver, Alan Stowell, Jim Ringer, Mary McCaslin, John Roberts and Tony Barrand, Sarah Grey, Jean Redpath, The Boys of the Lough, Bill Staines, Horald Griffiths, Jim Kweskin…

You know, I’d probably be able to get a better list if I had the complete listing of Rounder and Folkways Records circa 1974. There doesn’t seem to be a performers list of Fox Hollow anywhere on the Web, and the Café Lena list is just that, a list, with no dates attached.

I do remember a few acts that were unquestionably specific to Fox Hollow, like Alhaji Bai Konte, a Gambian musician, who played the Kora. On the other hand, I have specific Café Lena memories of Horrald Griffiths and Dave van Ronk. Many of the others, like Michael Cooney, I saw in both places. And there are the acts that I remember, but the names are lost to memory, like the high school steel drum band, and the bagpipers, and man, did the team up between those two wake the dead.

There was some tension at the time between the “virtuosos” and the “folksy” type musicians, one that had some repercussions in the management of Fox Hollow around that time. This was not entirely unlike the format fracas at WRPI that also happened around that time. One of the Lena waitresses, Mary, was a bit perturbed at the overabundance of string band and fiddle players at Fox Hollow in 1972, but I was pretty firmly in the musicology camp. Fortunately, there were a lot of performers who were both.

Then too, there was all the politics. Utah Phillips can make the Wobblies sound fun, which is more than the Wobblies can do, and it’s sometimes a little creepy to hear middle class computer programmers singing about Joe Hill. Still, though I was never a leftist, except in the classical sense of not being in favor of hereditary aristocracies, in the early 1970s it wasn’t hard to find common ground with people who thought that ordinary people were getting screwed. Truth to tell, it’s pretty easy to support that opinion at any time and any place.

I have a number of treasures that came out of that period and those venues. One is the appreciation of folk music in the global sense. For a time at least, Fox Hollow was a confluence of world folk musicology, with everything from Balkan vocal groups to African M’bira to French Canadian accordion dance troupes. When Barnett and I branched out from the Indian music show on WRPI to a World Music exploration, the Upstate New York folk music scene was doubtless a major catalyst.

A slightly more tangible result came from the fact that a good bit of the sound technician staff at Fox Hollow came from WRPI engineering. Through a tangled web of acquaintance, that is how I happen to be in possession of a tape dub of a singular performance, Billy Vanaver backed by Alan Stowell on “Mad Tom of Bedlam.” It’s quite extraordinary, and maybe someday I’ll get permission to upload it. Until then, you’re just going to have to envy me my good fortune.

Superpowerful

[Being a continuation of a tangent begun on WAAGNFNP]

In The Deerslayer, one of the Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo, as part of a marksmanship competition, puts a musketball into the bullseye hole left by a previous contestant. Moreover, he knows he's done it, and tells the judges to dig both balls out of the wooden target, which they do.

The feat itself is possible, just as a hole-in-one in golf is possible, but it can't really be a product of marksmanship, as muskets simply aren't that accurate. Moreover, the calling of the shot is similar to calling a hole-in-one for a green that is not within sight. I mean, unrifled firearms are really inaccurate, and simply hitting a target at a distance is a challenge.

The story got used later in a (probably fake) "autobiography" of Davy Crockett, and was in one of the episodes in the Disney Davy Crockett series that sparked the Crockett craze in the mid-1950s (I had a coonskin cap, as did almost all my friends). Of course the tale itself has echoes of the "splitting an arrow with an arrow" stories of Robin Hood and practically every other legendary archer.

Anecdotes easily morph into tall tales, and heroes evolve into Heroes, as the barely plausible slips over the line from improbable into the impossible. Eventually Achilles becomes invulnerable (save for his heel), St. George slays a dragon, and Pecos Bill rides a tornado.

Odysseus, nevertheless, remains identifiably human through the Odyssey (albeit with the occasional godly assistance in stringing a bow), but Hercules is a demi-god, able to shoulder Atlas' burden for a while, kill the hydra, and "change the course of mighty rivers" to clean out the Aegean Stables.

And so we come to the comic book superhero.

Yes, it’s SUPERMAN, strange visitor from another planet, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way!

Superman began as "merely" superhuman, able to lift motorcars, bend steel, survive bullets, and leap over buildings. But his powers ramped up continually, and additional powers kept getting added to the mix, x-ray vision, super speed, heat vision, supersensitive hearing, breath that could blow out fires or freeze a lake solid in seconds. Plus, he could really fly, not just over buildings, but into space, and fast enough to travel in time. By the 1950s, Mort Weisinger's Superman was lighting dead stars with his heat vision.

So they gave him vulnerabilities, like kryptonite and magic. He had to keep his Superman identity secret, otherwise his "friends" would be in danger, somehow, from his "enemies," who were sometimes just criminals who kept trying to rob banks in the face of a guy who could destroy the world if he so chose.

Not that he would ever do so, of course, because of that "truth, justice, and the American Way," thing. It's just not the American Way to destroy the world.

So the middle period Superman stories tended to be about Lois Lane trying yet again to prove that Clark Kent was Superman (The Comics Code forbade the tactic of just hopping into bed with Clark, which brings up the interesting question of whether old Supes would pretend to be a poor lover to throw her off the track, or if, in fact, he would be a poor lover. These are the questions that fan boys ponder). Or the stories involved Lex Luthor finding some new thing that he hadn't put kryptonite in before. Or Superman had to trick Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards again. Or Superman's powers would become somehow unmanageable, usually due to red kryptonite.

Occasionally, some Kryptonian criminal would escape from the phantom zone. Those, plus the citizens of the bottled city of Kandor were the only survivors of Krypton. The Kandorians had Brainiac to thank for their survival, so apart from Supergirl and Krypto the Superdog, the only other Kryptonian survivors were either criminals or the victims of a criminal. The death of Krypton was nothing if not ironic.

They ramped old Supe's powers down a bit after that, so he could at least have adversaries that he could fight without planetary destruction being the logical result. But even now, there are only occasional stories about some of the aspects of the limitations of power.

One is that while Superman may be more powerful than anyone, he isn't ubiquitous. Even at super speed there are limitations on how quickly he can get a distress call (one of the original reasons for his newspaper reporter identity), and how to triage the crises that present themselves. There was an episode of Lois and Clark, the television series with Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain where Lois got Superman's powers and almost broke down under the sheer responsibility of it all. What was never made clear in that episode is that Clark/Superman had long ago had to come to terms with a simple fact: any downtime he took probably cost lives. In the time he spent having a cup of coffee, there were probably dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people dying that he might have saved.

In one of Kurt Busiak's Astro City comics, this is made clear by showing a day in the life of The Samaritan, the Astro City version of Superman. It's a day sliced into microseconds, with barely enough time for a semblance of life between the duties of saving the days of others. It's reminiscent of my favorite Superman story from the 1950s, entitled "All the Troubles of the World" that ends with a party at Clark Kent's apartment building. He's surreptitiously helped practically every person there at one point or another, and everyone is happy except for him. He's thinking something like, "Mrs. Jenkins is 4B is having troubles paying the rent this month, but she's too proud to ask anyone for help. I've got to find some way to get the money to her without her knowing where it's from." And another person is thinking, "Everyone here seems to be having a good time except for that poor Mr. Kent. Sometimes it seems like he's carrying all the troubles of the world on his shoulders."

In one of Eliot S! Maggin's Superman novels, he has the Man of Steel grappling with the idea of "moral hazard." An LPG terminal in Metropolis explodes and while he's dealing with it, Superman is thinking that this is one of the problems of having Superman in the world: that people do dangerous and reckless things because they know that Superman is around to protect them from the consequences of their actions. That marvelous irony, that we know that in a world without Superman people still do such dangerous and reckless things, is one of the best criticisms of the idea of moral hazard that I've ever seen.

But the greatest downside to extreme power has rarely been explored in comics. Yes, occasionally there is a nod to "power corrupts" but seldom is it noted that power corrupts not just its possessor, but also those around him. And power also is a magnet for corruption. I can think of almost no stories that deal with the idea of Superman being tricked into using his powers for immoral purposes.

There was a story some while back where someone sets up a situation that should have resulted in Clark Kent doing a reportorial expose, a noble plan that was wrecked because Superman decided to get personally involved (the original manipulator was unaware that Clark is Superman). So a small part of a much larger corruption was taken down by Superman, but the big fish were lost, because Superman himself has no legal standing, and only the law—and exposure—can really deal with large criminal organizations.

The larger issue of just how much trust should be placed in iconic "heroes" wielding superpowers is beginning to float to the surface in comics generally, however. The "grim and gritty" explorations of the id was a feature of comics in the mid-1980s, but the newer versions are more numerous and more varied, even in Superman, who seems to be currently dealing with a magical time-traveling fellow who believes that, unless the world can be made to distrust Superman, Armageddon will surely follow. Another theme that has occasionally surfaced is that the super-heroes do not, and cannot afford to, entirely trust each other. Each one of them has been either out of control or under malevolent control at some point, so many of them have contingency plans against such rogue events. Batman in particular had a file on how to defeat every one of the other members of The Justice League, just in case, including a kryptonite ring for use against Superman. Lex Luthor had a kryptonite ring for a while as well, but it gave him cancer as I recall.

Over in the Marvel Universe, or at least a variation of it, The Ultimates, the message is even more overtly political, with the other countries in the world ganging up to counter the U.S. monopoly on super-powered beings. War becomes the inevitable result. And I'm told that Spiderman once told Mary Jane that every superhero had a plan of attack against every other superhero, just in case.

Popular culture is never "mere entertainment." At the end of the day, "a movie is just a movie" and "a comic book is just a comic book," still mean that both show the fantasies that people want to believe in, or are afraid might be true.

The United States currently spends more on its military than the rest of the world's countries put together, although that figure is a little tricky, since the U.S. does not have anywhere near that kind of superiority in men-at-arms. Still, everyone knows that we have the military might to bring down any other government (though not necessarily replace it). We could destroy civilization and perhaps humanity with an unbridled nuclear tantrum.

One thing that the Clinton Presidency made clear was that there now exists a political faction in the U.S. that holds any President who is not part of the Conservative Movement to be illegitimate, and subject to extra-legal attempts to bring him down. One thing that the Bush Presidency has shown is the danger of having a President who is a committed Movement Conservative, willing to use that old pulp trope: "bend the rules in order to get the job done."

The rest of the world now knows pretty well that "truth, justice, and the American Way," have become empty phrases. The Superpower is under malevolent mind control, or worse. Perhaps sanity will return. But if it doesn't, the real question is, is Batman still holding onto that kryptonite ring, or would it be, in the end, Lex Luthor who does the deed?

Superfast

I remember a sequence in The Flash comics from only a few years ago. This would be the Wally West Flash, after the Barry Allen Flash had, um, "merged with the speed force," which is to say, died, albeit a comic book death (and they seem to be about to bring him back). He was Saving the Universe when it happened, so it would have been unseemly to bring him back too quickly.

Live fast, resurrect slow, that's Barry Allen.

Anyway, the gag, to use a movie stunt term, involved Wally West sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend when suddenly everything freezes. Everyone is a statue; it's dead quiet, and the movie is stuck on a single frame. Wally thinks, "What the hell?" then he notices a slight pressure on the back of his neck. It's a bullet; someone has tried to shoot him, but as soon as it entered his "speed force aura" his body switched to super speed and there you are.

The speed force aura is also what keeps his clothes and skin from being burned off when he's moving really fast, and also allows him to pick things (and people) up and carry them without them also suffering death by super speed. Very useful, that speed force aura.

In Justice League Unlimited, the cartoon series, the Flash is always getting hit or even knocked unconscious by folks that really should never be able to lay a finger on him. That's a failure of writing, of course. The movie theater gag did kick it up a notch; traditionally the Flash had to "get up to speed" as it were, so there was a window of opportunity for the bad guys to get him. (Phil Foglio once told me about a character he'd invented—but has never actually used, unfortunately—called "Tube Man": very powerful but who takes several minutes to warm up). But the JLU stuff sometimes has The Flash taken out while he's running, and that's just lame. You might be able to hit him with something that moves at the speed of light, although tracking him should still be an issue, but otherwise, the whole point of the Flash is that he's faster than anyone or anything else.

The Flash can be, but usually isn't, a vehicle for philosophical ruminations on the nature of time and humanity's relationship to it. As the Jay Garrick Flash said once, the point of being The Flash is that there are always enough hours in the day. Need to learn some branch of case law? Done in fifteen minutes. Build a house? A minute and thirty seconds. Study for that calculus test? Do it while everyone else is walking to class.

But it's a lonely time there in the speed force. Apart from the occasional carrying of the fair damsel away from the exploding bomb, The Flash is doing his job in a world of statues, reminiscent of the Arthur C. Clarke story, "All the Time in the World.

There have been variations of the super speed power that had more of a downside (though none greater than the Clarke story, I think). In Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, the character Lightning was using up his actual lifespan while doing his super speedster act, so he was aging more rapidly than his compatriots. The same was true for those under the influence of "tempus fugit" pills in Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. (Aside: there was also an episode of the 1960 television show The Man and the Challenge that involved a drug that hyperaccelerated reaction times. I'm only scratching a trivia itch with this tidbit).

The potential for loneliness inherent in the character of The Flash is interesting, and it's also interesting to wonder if that aspect of it has influenced the way that The Flash has been incarnated over the years. There have been more versions of The Flash, more different people carrying on the tradition, than any other character in DC Comics, (excepting Green Lantern, who became part of a universe-spanning Corps). Moreover, Flash's tend to get married. I doubt that the writers were consciously making the contrast between the need for companionship and the loneliness of the Power, but the writing is often smarter than the writer, and I speak from experience.

My friend Ben Sano also notes the interesting contrast between The Flash and one of his most formidable foes, Vandal Savage. Savage is immortal (though they've screwed around with that recently, and not to the character's improvement), so he has the complementary power to The Flash: they both have all the time they need. Savage, of course, has seldom been written well; over the centuries, his tactics should depend heavily on waiting out the opposition and, perhaps, compound interest. On the other hand, part of his deal is that he is a savage, having been born something like 50,000 years ago.

The time available to either The Flash or Vandal Savage (one compressed, one extended) also allows an examination of the some of the same issues raised in some variations of Supersmart. They had essentially unlimited time for learning, but learning, per se, does not equate to intelligence, insight, or judgment. The Flash may have "lived" the equivalent of many centuries while in the speed force, but can still be socially awkward, because little of it was in interaction with other people. Vandal Savage may have lived for 50,000 years, but he's never going to stare at the equations of atomic state transitions and invent the laser. The extra time can only be spent on the things you can do, not those things you can't.

Still, there are so many possibilities that never get explored, because there are only so many hours in the day. Except for The Flash.

What, did you think this essay was going to be about femto-second laser pulses?

Supersmart

Science fiction, being a literature that is fundamentally for geeks and knurds about geeks and knurds written by geeks and knurds, has had a lot of stories about characters who possess superhuman intelligence. Sometimes the characters are aliens (Clarkes' Childhood's End), sometimes machines (Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), sometimes "the next stage of human evolution (van Vogt's Slan)." Sometimes they are born that way (Shiras' "In Hiding"), sometimes somebody made them that way (Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon") and sometimes it's some sort of accident (Anderson's Brain Wave).

Of course, it's not just the psi powers that can muddy the waters. In Heinlein's "Gulf" we're presented with "Speedtalk," a language that follows the principles of General Semantics and makes your thinking better because, um, well, because General Semantics is so cool.

That leads us to another problem with the stories of the supersmart. Once given the gift of supersmartness, the protagonists often come around to various views, opinions, and theories that happen to coincide with either the author, John. W. Campbell Jr., or the average Analog reader, depending. Often it's all three, at least in a certain (and obvious) category of story. But one should also bear in mind the case of the translation of "Flowers for Algernon" to the big screen, where Sterling Silliphant's screenplay inserted all sorts of cliché's of mid-60s liberalism into Charlie's dialog.

The real difficulty is that it's very hard to write convincingly about someone who is smarter than you, and it's really, really hard to write convincingly about someone who is smarter than anyone who ever lived.

So there are various cheats. One cheat is to mash together all the tales of mental prodigies into one package. Good Will Hunting was one such. Math genius, plus eidetic memory, plus (apparently) total logical comprehension of everything he read, so he could put down a college student for just regurgitating his textbooks, without himself just regurgitating some more textbooks.

Also, he was really good in a bar fight.

There's a similar problem with the TV show, Numb3rs, where Charlie Eppes is a math genius (and former prodigy) who uses mathematics in all sorts of crime-solving ways. The show's advisors do a decent job of making the math realistic, but what they can't do is make it realistic that one single mathematician would be an expert in so many areas of applied math, all the more so because he was a math prodigy, and math prodigies tend not to be in the applied areas, but rather in things like number theory.

The focus of the supermind story is also important. Often the focus is on the genius' relationship to society and the people around him, so it's often an extrapolation of the gifted or geeky readers' experiences. One important question is whether or not the story offers some useful lessons to said gifted geek.

I remember being struck by one passage in George O. Smith's The Fourth R (which turns out to be available from the Project Gutenberg, imagine my delight). A wise old man named Judge Carver is speaking to the protagonist, who's been artificially given a full adult's education by a "brain machine":

"Let's take the statistics first. You're four-feet eleven-inches tall, you weigh one-hundred and three pounds, and you're a few weeks over fourteen. I suppose you know that you've still got one more spurt of growth, sometimes known as the post-puberty-growth. You'll probably put on another foot in the next couple of years, spread out a bit across the shoulders, and that fuzz on your face will become a collection of bristles. I suppose you think that any man in this room can handle you simply because we're all larger than you are? Possibly true, and one of the reasons why we can't give you a ticket and let you proclaim yourself an adult. You can't carry the weight. But this isn't all. Your muscles and your bones aren't yet in equilibrium. I could find a man of age thirty who weighed one-oh-three and stood four-eleven. He could pick you up and spin you like a top on his forefinger just because his bones match his muscles nicely, and his nervous system and brain have had experience in driving the body he's living in."

"Could be, but what has all this to do with me? It does not affect the fact that I've been getting along in life."

"You get along. It isn't enough to 'get along.' You've got to have judgment. You claim judgment, but still you realize that you can't handle your own machine. You can't even come to an equitable choice in selecting some agency to handle your machine. You can't decide upon a good outlet. You believe that proclaiming your legal competence will provide you with some mysterious protection against the wolves and thieves and ruthless men with political ambition--that this ruling will permit you to keep it to yourself until you decide that it is time to release it. You still want to hide. You want to use it until you are so far above and beyond the rest of the world that they can't catch up, once you give it to everybody. You now object to my plans and programs, still not knowing whether I intend to use it for good or for evil--and juvenile that you are, it must be good or evil and cannot be an in-between shade of gray. Men are heroes or villains to you; but I must say with some reluctance that the biggest crooks that ever held public office still passed laws that were beneficial to their people. There is the area in which you lack judgment, James. There and in your blindness."

"Blindness?"

"Blindness," repeated Judge Carter. "As Mark Twain once said, 'When I was seventeen, I was ashamed at the ignorance of my father, but by the time I was twenty-one I was amazed to discover how much the old man had learned in four short years!' Confound it, James, you don't yet realize that there are a lot of things in life that you can't even know about until you've lived through them. You're blind here, even though your life has been a solid case of encounter with unexpected experiences, one after the other as you grew. Oh, you're smart enough to know that you've got to top the next hill as soon as you've climbed this one, but you're not smart enough to realize that the next hill merely hides the one beyond, and that there are still higher hills beyond that stretching to the end of the road for you--and that when you've finally reached the end of your own road there will be more distant hills to climb for the folks that follow you."

Mickey Spillane did a similar turn in a book called The Twisted Thing, but he had the gizmo make the young boy into, mentally, a real adult, supersmart, but still locked inside the body of a boy. It's a horror study really, and doesn't end well. But what caught my attention in that one is that the supermind notes that Mike Hammer, not really the brightest guy in the world, manages to almost keep up, owing to the fact that Hammer is a specialist in criminal matters, and specialization allows lesser talents to equal or even surpass greater ones who cannot specialize in everything.

These are real lessons, and not just applicable to someone who is supersmart, but even to us folks who are middling to very smart. And ultimately, it's a lot better to pull such lessons from wish-fulfillment fantasies than such panderings as "they're just jealous of your intelligence" and "if everyone were really smart, they'd agree with you about stuff."

Conquest of Life

It’s always dangerous to revisit books you liked in your youth. Nevertheless, I’ve recently reread Conquest of Life by Adam Lukens. I first read this sometime between 1960 and 1962, so I would have been 10-11. That means that I missed, among other things, some pretty obvious references to sex and further hints of sexual deviance.

“Adam Lukens” was the nom de plume of Diane Detzer de Reyna, which pretty much exhausts my knowledge of the matter, though I think I remember Dick Lupoff once telling me that she’d been from Florida. I was already aware of the idea of “authorship” by then, so I also read several other books by “Lukens,” including one I’ve not managed to obtain, Sons of the Wolf (about werewolves who are part of a movie production on Mercury, as I recall).

The words-in-a-row writing of COL is pretty good, with dialog that’s believably from human beings, provided you don’t consider how far in the future the book is supposed to be. How far? The heroine, Shorty, is from one of the star colonies. Earth is now, well, basically a sort of theme park, the theme being Hedonism. Say it’s a planet-wide version of New Orleans (before Katrina), although one never gets a sense of planetary, or even urban scale. The final “battle” scene, for example, consists of a few hundred people fighting.

In fact, there are a number of traits in the book that bespeak a southern U.S. origin, including the sparseness of the cast (even the urban south was pretty small town in 1960), as well as the basic setup.

The setup is, Shorty has inherited “Kris” an artificial man, a la Frankenstein, in that he’s manufactured from the body parts of dead humans. His memories have been wiped and he’s conditioned to obey his master or mistress. He can feel emotions but is constrained not to show them. He’s also “infinite” i.e. unaging and possibly immortal, except that, after 30-40 years, the artificial men become “unstable” and are usually destroyed, i.e. killed.

Kris is 40 years old. We learn from internal monologues that he’d like to die, there being no real attraction in being an immortal slave.

Shorty immediately decides that the artificial men are people, and sets out to prove it, which she does in remarkably short order, by, among other things, getting Kris to slap her. It isn’t quite as coarse as this in the book, I’m just making part of the superstructure a little more obvious.

Shorty then goes about collecting as many of the “undependable” artificial men as she can find, soon filling the mansion that she has inherited, and which she and her uncle, cousin, etc. live. During this process, a visit from a star captain who is obviously smitten by her, makes plain that she has some, um, intimacy issues, caused by a trauma (vaguely described) that took place out in the Colonies. So she cringes at the captain’s touch, but has no such problem with Kris or the other artificial men.

Okay, that little bit went right past me when I was 11.

Most of Earth’s inhabitants, or at least those near Shorty and Kris, are devotees of “Night Palace Life” which is basically a sybaritic existence devoted to mindless pleasure, or sometimes mindless destruction. At one point, some Night Palace “Playmates” toss a firebomb into a plastic jungle structure near Shorty’s house and nearly kill her. Kris, of course, saves her life. Events soon swing out of control, because it’s getting out that Shorty is demonstrating that the artificial men are actually real people, which might very well throw a monkey wrench into Night Palace life, given that one of the main jobs given to the artificial men is that of gigolo.

Again, at 11, it didn’t occur to me to wonder why all the artificials were men, and their users were all women. Of course, if it were otherwise, it would have been a considerably different story.

Anyway, their lifestyle threatened, the “Playmates” launch an assault on Shorty’s home. The artificial men, led by Kris, fend them off, but Shorty is killed during the fighting. Kris goes to the developer and demands that he put Shorty through the process, all except the memory wipe and obedience conditioning, of course. Shorty comes out the other side as “infinite” as Kris.

So they live happily ever after. Literally.

Well, there we have it. A man, stronger, smarter, better looking, and practically immortal, who is locked inside of his own conditioning, unable to express emotion, and despairing of life. A woman who has her own demons, risks everything to reach the man, unlocking his potential and winning his undying love.

There are, of course, more plot holes than I can enumerate, none of which I noticed when I was 11, and actually, none of which bother me particularly now. This is an allegory as much as anything else, and repays the rereading.

Ah, one other thing. One of the artificial men is found to have serious whip marks on his back. Just another echo from the Old South.

Unremarkable

When I became a publications knurd at the Rensselear Engineer, there was a traditional path of succession, Technical Editor to Managing Editor, to Senior Editor. Each term was Spring/Fall, so there was a semester's overlap with the incoming and outgoing Senior Editor, and at the other end, the selection of a Technical Editor in the spring of their freshman year put them on track to becoming the Senior Editor two years later.

I stayed at RPI for two years of graduate school, but I kept my distance from The Engineer, not wanting to second guess the editors or otherwise be a pain and besides, I was having fun (mostly) playing radio. However, I was available if anyone wanted my advice, and one of them, Russ, asked my opinion on a couple of occasions, and on another, asked me to interview Ralph Nader, who was speaking at RPI, as well as several other venues in the Albany district on Earth Day. That's a story for another time, perhaps.

Russ was the middle editor of the three I saw during my grad school days, and the one that I had chosen as Technical Editor when I was Senior Editor. If you want to get picky, the decision was supposed to be made in consultation with the both the outgoing Senior Editor and the current Managing Editor. If you want to get pickier still, it was usually Hobson's Choice, and you were lucky if there was someone who was eager to take on the job. There was also the always present danger of flunkouts, although the Engineer wasn't nearly the cume killer that the Polytechnic (newspaper), the Bachelor/Unicorn (humor magazines), or Gorgon (literary magazine) managed to be.

Russ also asked my opinion about one particular article, about the Allman Brothers Band. The question was not about why an article about a rock band was going in the school's engineering magazine? As far as we were concerned, long standing policy was that if someone was willing to write something readable and wanted to put it in the Engineer, it was better than blank pages. Besides, the guy who wrote it was an engineer, so that clinched it.

No the question was about some of the quotes from band members, which contained some words that were scatological, as I recall. I don't remember any profanity (the Allman boys were southern and they did know the difference). Russ wondered if he should say anything about it, put a "rough language" warning, or whatever. I told him to just run it without comment, better to apologize later than up front, etc. and probably no one would care. The other school publications had already had their naughty word battles and hell, it was 1973 already.

I think they got maybe a single letter of complaint and Russ probably wrote the guy a nice letter of apology. Of maybe no one said anything. Like I said, those battles had already been fought to exhaustion.

Russ also asked my advice on what to say about the Editor that would follow him: Deb. As you may guess, Deb was female. Should he say something about it, maybe write an editorial?
And that was another one that I was tired of. The Women's Movement was in full flower around then, and I'd been seeing the "Look! It's a girl!" editorials from our sister (as it were) publications from other engineering schools for several years. It felt like it was getting old.

It also didn't seem fair, to be putting a spotlight on someone just for their gender, just a bit of additional pressure to add to the stuff about trying to do good work in an unpaid extracurricular activity.

Finally, and this was the real source of my discomfort, as long as things like this were matter for comment, then the basic program of equal opportunity for accomplishment was still far from its goal. I just wanted female participation in science and engineering to be unremarkable.

Russ took my advice and wrote an editorial about something else.

There were 50 freshmen women in my class at RPI, and about 1000 men. I understand that the fraction is now about 1/3, and the President of RPI is Shirley Ann Jackson, who was also President of the AAAS in 2004, and Chairman of the AAAS Board in 2005. She is, of course, a remarkable person, and a good sport about Alumni jokes and pranks as well, at least during Reunion Weekends. She still has our microphone, I think, and I can report that she's pretty good at impromptu karaoke.

I'll get to a review of the latest issue of Helix after I've had a chance to read all the stories (first glance: "The Center of the Universe" by Eugie Foster is one of those "fantasy or someone having fantasies?" stories that I like to talk about). All the stories are by women, and to his credit, William Sanders notes that such a thing is almost coincidental and should be unremarkable, though it isn't. And the guest editorial by Website Designer

Melanie Fletcher shows the right degree of annoyance that such a thing still bears remarking upon.

I mean, hell, it's not like this is 1973.

Clarke's Law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It was actually Clarke’s Third Law, but it’s the one that caught hold. Clarke’s first two laws have more or less fallen into obscurity:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

It’s pretty easy to see why the first two laws aren’t cited very often: they distill down to “nothing is impossible,” which puts them into opposition to, oh, I don’t know, practically every other scientific law in existence. If everything is possible, then there are no rules, and science is about rules.

In any case, Law #3 is usually just called “Clarke’s Law” and it has annoyed me for years. It has a sort of faux profundity that evaporates as you try to figure out what it actually is supposed to mean. You’re supposed to have a good idea about what magic is, and it feeds a mental image of primitives baffled and awed by the technology of the Great White Hunter, the savages thinking that there must be some strong juju in the guns and flashlights.

That’s a stereotype, of course, and almost completely wrong to boot. My own take on magic can be found in my essay Killing the Goat.

In any case, even the stereotype is silly. If a stone age hunter gatherer thinks that something he doesn’t understand is magic, it would be because he thinks that everything he doesn’t understand is magic. But that just maps Clarke’s Law to the proposition that any technology that is sufficiently advanced that you don’t understand it is the same as something else that you don’t understand.

Well, as they say, duh.

But, in fact, to a product of western civilization secular humanism, things not understood are nevertheless assumed to be undiscovered science. The history of esp and psi research suggests that the opposite of Clarke’s Law is applicable to us westerners:

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

I’ve got a list of SF stories to back it up, but many of us, including me, aren't that fond of magic-as-science stories. The genre had its heyday, back in the 40s and 50s, and Larry Niven almost single handedly extended the thing past its sell by date with his "Magic Goes Away" stories. But I don't think I've seen a good one in years.

Anyway, I've long had my own variant of The Law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from something that has no damn business working in the first place.

And I think I'll leave it at that.