I love the idea of a novel; to me a novel is better than reality. (Norman Mailer, quoted in Lennon)

Norman Mailer saw the responsibility of the novelist is a double-edged sword: he must posit an authoritative vision of structure in form and content, yet always be aware that “no authorities exist that have certain knowledge” (Empty 218). This places the novelist in an ethical and existential position of great responsibility. One of Mailer’s chief concerns seems to be with the notion of individual truth and how that truth can lead to creativity, order, and action.

Mailer equates God with the novelist, or vise versa. Like the novelist, Mailer’s conception of the creator is an existential one: God is not all-powerful or all-good in Mailer’s conception, but make mistakes and tries again (God 7, 11, 13, 33, etc.). God as artist, it seems to Mailer, remains true to his vision and his own creativity, even though occasionally messing up. Like an artist, God evolves with us and “still has an unfulfilled vision and wishes to do more” (God 35, 22).

Mailer’s Christ in The Gospel According to the Son is also a metaphor for the novelist: one, Mailer suggests, who does the best that he can under difficult, if not impossible, circumstances (Empty 214). Christ’s voice is that of narrator and novelist, seeking through the “small miracle” of the text to “remain closer to the truth” in his account (Gospel 4). He explicitly distances himself from the gospels and the intention of the scribes who seem to have their own agendas. The truth, therefore, is in his vision — one that is subjective and existential, though authoritative. He, like the novelist, seeks to uncover the truth, unlike others who would bury it for their own purposes.

The authority here is not necessarily with an account of factual occurrences, but with the narrative, the struggle for order and identity. These are battles Mailer seemed to fight his whole life, and which kept him close to his vision of God, the ultimate creator and authority. Yet, for Mailer, God was not properly “God,” but a god among many that, like his narrators Christ in Gospel and Mailer in Armies of the Night, sought “to develop their vision of existence rather than accept visions from other gods opposed to them” (Empty 215). God is not all-power, but trying to do the best he or she can against great odds.

Creation seems to come, then, from narrative, or to paraphrase Mailer’s subtitle for Armies: the novel is history and history is the novel. Less a true “novel” and more of a journalistic-novel hybrid, J. Michael Lennon, in “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” reminds us that Armies was written during the period of Mailer’s career where he seemed to push the novel beyond its traditional limits — as if to be true to his own growth, the novel could no longer contain the truth that Mailer sought (94). He seemed to suggest that the narrative order of the novel and the waves of history were connected in extricably and dynamically, that even “facts” become like a fiction, as they seemed to do in Mailer’s work during this period, perhaps most successfully in The Executioner’s Song. Historical facts charged by the authoritative narrative of the novelist become, perhaps, closer to the truth than reality. There is a give and take: life is never as orderly as fiction, though everyday we attempt to impose our fictions upon it. Mailer states:

Similarly, Mailer states elsewhere that when the great historian writes, she is also a writer of great fiction (Lennon 96). Lennon goes on to conclude that Mailer elevated the novel and the novelist as the true creative spirits, ones that pose difficult questions in order to provoke, to incite, and to contend. Whereas the historian and journalist work with pre-digested facts, intended to answer, to clarify, and to end (97). Mailer is not writing in an easily understandable prose for the masses, he is challenging readers to rise up to his level; this is not journalism or television — it is literature (Bufithis 90).

Yet, while the novelist is not limited by the facts of history, perhaps the novel is for a Mailer — or at least the realities of identifiable historicity that remain the touchstones for communication and meaning. Mailer seems to be calling out the fictional nature of all narrative, whether based on fact or imagination, and as Lennon avers, Mailer uses whatever form he needs to “carry the tale forward to the century’s end” (101). In a way, it’s as if Mailer suspects that the novel is no longer capable of influencing people’s consciousness as it did before World War II (Adams 100-101). It’s as if the authority of the narrative is linked to history, culture, and the artist’s place in it: the narrative grows with the author and creator. The best novel, then, remains true to the novelist’s vision at the moment of creation. This seems to be a moral imperative with Mailer — an imperative that forced him to push the boundaries of genre.

Another link between history and the novelist is the idea of the novelist as savior. Alfred Kazin sees Mailer as primarily a “moralist” — one who has an “acute sense of national crisis” and a responsibility not to leave this crisis in the hands of the journalists (2). Mailer’s authority as a novelist attacks what he sees as an American authority that is misplaced and. Mailer plays the social miscreant and his role as the artist, asking questions, getting in the way, and putting himself in the middle of the conflict, both metaphorically and literally.

Armies is a novel of opposition: political, aesthetic, and moral. Mailer’s opposition in Armies holds contempt for the American military-industrial complex and is monolithic symbol in the Pentagon, but at the same time he it also sees as it’s opponent the mediocrity of the America’s insipid middle class. His revolution in Armies is not just against American leadership, but also those forms that have become too tarnished by quotidian reality. “Opposition” might best describe Mailer’s own aesthetic approach to literature which informed the narrative of his public persona. The best oppositional tool of the time was Mailer’s hybrid “novel,” a genre that might have been pushed and stretched as far as it will go.

Finally, Mailer might have been opposing the novel. After all, it’s older than the Pentagon, and perhaps more ossified. The civil unrest of the sixties demanded policial and social change, and maybe Armies of the Night itself demanded a new literary medium.

When I spoke at the Norman Mailer Society Conference in 2005, I was asked to discuss the position of literature and English Studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, how the work of Norman Mailer fit into these cultural and intellectual trends, and recommend ways that the Society might continue to flourish in a still incunabular information age. In 2005, books and the system that supported their publication still reigned supreme; thus US alone published 282,500 new titles, about 40,000 of which were fiction. Also in the fall of 2005, The Facebook, a successful social networking site for colleges and universities, had just launched its version for high schools; it was still a year away from opening its digital doors to the world’s Internet users, but it already showed the growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications and their integral foundation of community built on members’ affinity. And in 2005, the world had not yet heard of an iPhone; its launch wouldn’t be for another year and eight months.

In my talk, I highlighted the growing disparity between our play on the internet and our serious work as literary scholars and aficionados. I advocated flexibility and patience to help us through this transition from atoms to bits. I suggested that it’s up to us canon builders to decide what’s important, in Toni Morrison’s words, to “pass on” in both senses: that is, what needs to be preserved and emphasized for the coming generations and what it is we can safely leave behind. If anything, our digital lives — with their ever-increasing glut of information — blurs this distinction not only for us, but especially for those who have never know a world without the Internet.

So at the end of this century’s first decade, where are we? In the middle of March 2010, more people visited Facebook than Google, and by July the number of active users on Facebook had grown to 500 million. Facebook might be the apotheosis of the Web 2.0, but in its most insipid form. The idea of the Web 2.0 began as a reaction to static web pages. It proponents argued that the web should be user-centered and less like the printed page. Sites should be dynamic, allowing the users to participate, to contribute, and to collaborate. Web sites should be only frameworks, giving users the space to and tools for sharing their affinity with photography, video, books, cooking, and any other topic you can think of. However, since my discussion of the Web 2.0 in 2005, something shifted in its focus, and it might be blamed on Twitter, introduced in the summer of 2006. Twitter, as you know, allows users to follow other users’ “tweets,” or streams of SMS-like messages limited to 140 characters. Many users of Twitter attempt to focus on a topic, but according to Pear Analytic research firm, the dominant content of tweets is “pointless babble” — you know, the nonsense that makes up most of our lives. About Twitter, Bruce Sterling states, “Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad.” I would argue that Facebook seems to replace the topic-centered Web 2.0 with Twitter’s “pointless babble,” turning it into the ubiquitous “social media.”

In light of the Facebook revolution of the Web, even more voices are speaking out that lament the ostensible death of traditional literacy. More so, as the research of UCLA Professor of Psychiatry Gary Small suggests, reading the web is actually rewiring our brains. His findings will probably be no surprise to us: “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

Reading on the web — probably the most popular form of reading done off a computer screen — is not the same thing as reading a novel. Something about the computer — even a laptop — inspires a cursory, quick, and superficial consumption of text. Perhaps it’s because it looks more like a television than it does a book? Perhaps it’s because we have to lean forward, rather than lean back? Perhaps we are trained that what comes to us through a monitor should be consumed in a certain way, whereas that which is found on leaves in a cloth binding must be absorbed in another way. In many ways, books — especially novels — are like holy artifacts; computers, to paraphrase Norman Mailer, are machines of the devil.

I still hear people say that they can’t proofread or edit on a computer screen. There’s something about the printed word on a physical sheet of paper that allows our minds to take it more seriously than we would something appearing on a computer screen in a web browser. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I could never read a book on a PC.

Perhaps it’s the notion that what we see on the computer screen is somehow transient and impermanent — that it can disappear with a flick of a switch or the press of a key. Books sit heavily on shelves. They are weighty matter that can be handled and not so easily disposed of. Until recently, the idea of publishing was like, in Gilgamesh‘s words, “having one’s name stamped in bricks.” If you were mentioned by a poet, you achieved a kind of immortality. “Literature” deserves this treatment, after all. It is weighty. It matters. It should be in books, not on computer screens. Sven Bickerts in the The Gutenberg Elegies echoes this sentiment: “our entire collective history — the soul of societal body — is encoded in print. Is encoded, and has for countless generations been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books” (20). This is significant, no?

Birkerts goes on to lament what he sees as an inevitable paradigm shift away from print to the digital. His observation seems to agree with Small’s research: the Web is destroying our ability to read in a significant way.

Not only is our reading changing because of our digital lives, but also our writing. According to Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times, “Book publishing is simply becoming self publishing.” Based on numbers from the Bowker bibliographic company, she reports that 764,448 book titles were produced by self-publishers, 45,000 of which were fiction titles. Inexpensive digital-publishing technologies and print-on-demand companies make professional-looking books — complete with dust jackets and ISBNs — within any aspiring author’s reach. Waning are the days, too, of the stigma of the self-published, since many are finding commercial success without the hassle and frustration of dealing with the traditional publishing industry gatekeepers. Therefore, if anyone can publish a novel, is our access to digital technologies also destroying what we read?

These significant changes are not the only technical revolution to happen since 2005. Apple introduced the iPhone in January 2007, and the first model was available six months later. Not only has the iPhone made a significant shift in the cellular phone market, but it has also changed the way that many of us interact with our information, so much so, that Wired recently proclaimed “The Web Is Dead.” They argue that while information access is on the rise, how users get that information is changing from the Web to apps, like those Apple sells for its iPhone. These apps are smaller, sleeker, faster, and more specific to the task: they are about “getting,” not “browsing.” With technologies like push notifications, that information users want is delivered directly, rather than the user going out to find it. With the great success of the iPhone, Apple later released what might arguably be called the most popular and successful consumer device of the last couple of years: the iPad.

With the iPad, we can finally sit back again, like we would with a novel. The iPad is made for visually rich content; the user experience is more encompassing — applications use the entire screen, blocking out other distractions. Photographs and videos look beautiful; games are a new experience, but it’s the text applications that really won me over, so much so that I started cutting up some of my older and decaying books — particularly novels — to give them a new life. Welcome to the Novel 2.0.

There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. (Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night 197)

Arguably, the dominant form of literature in the twentieth century was prose fiction, of which the novel was a titan, if not a god. Indeed, there is something god-like about the novel and its relation to western civilization’s sense of identity and order. While the novel has its genesis in ancient prose texts, it didn’t develop fully until certain intellectual and technological foundations were laid. Since the Enlightenment, the novel has become an art form of — in Lukács’ words — the “new world,” a chief guide for the modern human seeking meaning in a cold universe (20). The novel, therefore, seems to be the medium of expression for a 20th-century zeitgeist, fully developed during the modernist days of recovery from the intellectual revolutions of the turn of the century and the literal rubble of the first World War. And while the work of the modernist novel was serious and sober, the postmodern novel’s authority is, perhaps, ironic and blasphemous.

While the world enters the digital age, the novel stands defiant. While many seek a new art form for the digital age — a cyberbard or a collectively authored cybertext — the novel appears to still provide something we need. After all, the novel has been developed since the invention of written language; it’s related to the epic, the romance, the novella, the picaresque and various modes of expression, the tragic, the comic, the moral, the licentious, the ideal, and the real. The novel’s emphasis on the character’s relationship to her society and her universe is traditionally told in a comfortable prose — in a language of verisimilitude that is comforting enough to allow the reader to engage new ideas. The novel, arguably, has become the medium of authority in the contemporary world, even despite the digital wave.

Perhaps the novel gives an order to life, particularly in the days following September 11, 2001 when America, as Norman Mailer noted in Why Are We at War?, was going through an identity crisis (10). The fact of terrorism shatters the meaning of life and death, robbing our lives’ order and replacing it with absurdity (War 18-19). The rest of Mailer’s essay examines the aftermath of 9/11: in an attempt to rebuild the national ego, many Americans became flag-waving neo-cons, drunk with a mindless patriotism that sought to reassert itself through a jingoistic wave of moral cleansing. A literal American supremacy in the form of empire must be asserted no matter the cost.

I would argue, too, that this struggle is expressed in the flow of the word. The digital word resembles the political anxiety of disorder and insecurity. With books, the word was solid, permanent, authoritative. With the Internet, words become tenuous, temporary, fleeting. Printing on dead trees provided a way to measure and judge the validity of the word because it could be held in the hand, put on a shelf, reliably referenced. The World Wide Web, too, opened up the flood gates of opinion, obfuscating the voices of authority by those of the masses: yes, the word gained more of an equality, but at the loss of the authoritative voice. In an age of print, achieving admittance into the world of publication was a Herculean task, but blogs now allow anyone with a computer to have a voice. These disparate voices represent for many the planes demolishing the towers of authority. While many revel in their newly found voices, many in America are left reeling and longing for the days of the few, sanctioned voices that could give them direction and order.

The problem with digital forms of art, especially literature, is that they seem to lack the necessary force of authority to provide them the structure they need to fulfill the audience’s aesthetic expectations. As Janet Murray points out in Hamlet on the Holodeck, audiences expect the guiding presence of the author to deliver a unified experience replete with all the accouterments of narrative (204). Without the authority, the narrative ceases to be engaging because it lacks the singular focus or unifying vision that we expect from literary expressions. The digital challenges the established conventions of the literary, and while we have traditionally turned to stories for a reflection of ourselves and for meaning, the digital explodes meaning into multiplicity (Murray 274).

It seems, then, that we are still in need of the author. Perhaps this will be the cyberbard that Murray suggests might become the voice of the digital age, or maybe we aren’t ready yet to dispense with the novel just yet.

Faust     So who are you, I’d like to know?
Mephisto     A humble part of that great power
Which always means evil, always does good. (Goethe’s Faust)

Lately, I’ve been feeling like Faust — more like Goethe’s version, rather than those of Marlowe or Mann. You know, the guy who sells his soul to the devil to have experiences he otherwise would not have in his life of a scholar. Of course there are many differences between me and the legendary scholar, but, like Faust, in my striving for the ultimate meaning in the universe, the reality of of it often seems too, well, real. Yet, instead of turning to alchemy, sorcery, and black magic, I look toward networked digital technologies for my escape. My Mephistopheles didn’t come to me in the guise of a poodle, but as computer-generated avatar carrying a super computer under his arm.

What exactly is Faust hoping to escape? Is “escape” the right word? In a way, Faust is like all of us: he inhabits a reality of his own creation. His life is a combination of external factors and choices he made to form his current reality — a part of the work-a-day world that no longer excites him. So, in his turn to the black arts, he is looking to escape his current life. However, since his reality has left him unfulfilled and longing, he must seek meaning elsewhere and through other means. Faust embraces the verboten, the immoral, the sensuous in order to eventually find redemption. Yet, while his decision threatens to damn him, for Faust, it is a necessary choice in order to experience every facet of creation. As I state elsewhere, “Faust acts by himself, for himself, without relying on an intermediary like the church.” In one respect (the church’s), this is arrogant and dangerous, but in another (Goethe’s), the individual has his own relationship with the divine and will ultimately be accountable for his choices and actions.

I guess I have been thinking about images of evil in literature lately. Mailer, like Goethe, seems to see evil as a necessary component of good, a shadow to the light. In On God, Mailer’s conception of the Devil seems akin to Goethe’s in that they are both challenges to an orthodoxy. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is a component of creation, one that acts on the Lord’s behalf:

Reminiscent of Job, the Lord allows Mephistopheles to tempt Faust, not as a test of the latter’s faith, but as a way “to prod and poke and incite” him to strive to be better. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is a necessary part of a hierarchical order: in challenging and attempting to undermine the Lord’s creation, he validates and reinforces it. Mailer, too, see the Devil as challenger: God hopes to make his creation better, and the Devil hopes to maim it (On God 36). The Devil, then, for both Goethe and Mailer, is a spirit of negation who attempts to undermine and perhaps replace God’s work.

For Mailer, the Devil seems to be similar to an orthodox conception: an accuser or an adversary. In On God, he conceives of God and the Devil as equally matched in their battle over our the souls of humanity. The individual human is a complex mixture of good and evil, with neither dominating absolutely (21). In fact, Mailer sees the individual as an important force in the outcome of this battle: “We are the third force as don’t always know which side we are on in any given moment, or whether on another occasion we are independent of both” (17). With our actions, we can actively oppose or support either side, with the outcome not necessarily matching the intent.

For this reason, I think Mailer makes Jesus or Yeshua the first-person protagonist of The Gospel According to the Son. While the first-person narrative is problematic from a logistical standpoint, it emphasizes the battle between God and the Devil within the all-too-human Yeshua. The first-person struggle seems to be an important part of Yeshua’s quest for his personal identity, his reconciliation with what people need him to be (hero), and what Satan ultimately stands for. His journey is a quest for good, but in any quest for good, one necessarily must confront evil. In fact, evil must be kept close, both as a reminder and a temptation. That is, evil reminds us of our path by offering comfort, an easy path away from our struggles.

During his fast and subsequent temptation in the desert, Yeshua discovers the most dangerous aspect of the Devil:

Comfort suggests an ease, a satisfaction that necessitates a waning of the critical capacity. Like a ripe piece of fruit, the Devil’s words taste sweet but hint at an underlying rot. Indeed, Mailer uses foul odors as a motif throughout Gospel; they always seem to accompany evil, like Yeshua’s breath after his encounter with the Devil, the unclean brigand that is possessed by demons, women and lust, and the “odor of sanctity” (which I’ll come back to momentarily) (80).
Yeshua’s observation about comfort seems to allude to Faust’s own deal with Mephistopheles. Mephisto wins if Faust is ever comfortable:

For Goethe’s Faust, the ultimate sin is a lack of motion, a satisfaction that comes with comfort and ease and stagnation. This makes sense, since Faust’s redemption is ultimately to come through his ceaseless striving for more of what life can offer, even though, as the Lord states in the Prologue, that “As long as man strives, he is bound to err” (l. 77).

In Yeshua’s narrative, he seems to have the most disdain for the pious, or those who are so comfortable in their thoughts, beliefs, and practices that they have become evil. Yeshua makes a practice of eating with the sinners, a practice looked down upon by the Pharisees, so much so that Yeshua begins to wonder about the “the godlessness of many who were rich” — who did “not use their wealth to make others happy” (83). As Yeshua gains further experience with the “rich,” the “pious,” and the “righteous,” he begins to see them as narrow of mind and shallow of focus, slaves to a tradition that aligns them with an obedience to an absolute Law, material concerns, a severity of temperament, and an intolerance of difference. Yeshua states: “The righteous could only see my efforts as the Devil’s labor” (88); he continues: the pious cannot be honored, “for no matter what care is taken to satisfy them by studious observance of the laws, they can never be satisfied” (121). These conservative attitudes are what ultimately deliver Yeshua into the hands of the Law: “The rich among them, and the pious, prevailed; how could the Messiah be a poor man with a crude accent? God would not allow it!” (239). The irony is that the Devil has ensnared the pious with comfortable rules, habits, and attitudes so that they were unable to see the truth in Yeshua’s message. At the novel’s end, Yeshua and Mailer seem to become one in role of the prophet:

I can’t help but be reminded of Mailer’s depiction of the “flag conservatives” in Why Are We at War?:

While these flag conservatives have recently suffered a democratic upset, they seem to maintain their righteous posturing, opposing change that will separate them from their wealth or ideologies even if it ultimately helps the poor and disenfranchised. The words and actions of Yeshua threatened the enfranchised powers of his day, just as progressive social and moral ideas question the right’s ideology today. The reaction from the right seems to be the same: resist at all costs. For, as Yeshua observes, “A man of small mind develops a hard shell so that he can protect his small thoughts” (189).

So, I mentioned my Mephistopheles at the beginning, and I’d like to close by following up on that. Throughout my experience with Mailer’s writing and ideas, I have always been struck with his distrust of “technology.” By “technology,” I think Mailer means anything that makes life ostensibly too easy — you know — comfortable. This includes everything from air travel to computers. In The Big Empty, Mailer states that he considers it a “point of honor” not to use a computer (5); he continues:

For Mailer, that which is worth doing, particularly the creative process of writing, is worth going through a process, a labor to complete. He states that with computers and the Internet

He takes this idea perhaps to its logical conclusion in On God, where he argues that technology

Indeed, technology is a devil that continues to get more powerful. It’s no mystery to most in this room that I sold my soul years ago. Through this deal with Mephistopheles, I’m much more powerful than I was before computers and the Internet. In fact, most of my work takes less time and effort, including keeping in touch with the hundreds of “friends” from my past, allowing me to express my creativity through photography and digital storytelling, and communicating with a broader audience. I might even say that it’s because of technology that I have a Ph.D., a job, and a pleasurable life.

I would suggest that while the ultimate promise of technology is comfort, we’re not there yet. In many ways, technology makes our lives more difficult and challenging and often more fleeting. With a book, we can hold it, smell it, be assured by its physicality. We have no such assurances form the digital world, where a lightning strike or arrant keystroke can easily annihilate a lifetime’s worth of work. The challenges of becoming digital are now facing us — because we are becoming digital. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that is a product of the Devil, but the lack so far or a digital medium that can rival the novel. No medium is inherently evil — just the uses we make of it. Like Faust, we will make plenty of errors while we strive to find our way in the new digital world, but ultimately we still might find a way to redemption.

This idea seems to come out of our discussion of Dune, which we also finished this week. While Paul Maud’Dib brings about multiple disruptions, the real one is yet to come. Dune ends with a sense of foreboding about the eminent jihad that Maud’Dib is powerless to stop. In human terms, war is often the ultimate social disruption. Even with its uneasy ending, there’s also a sense of an order established — that something repressive has ended, or at least changed with the coming of Paul Maud’dib. His endeavors mark a turning point in history, and change will come, for good or ill.

Asimov’s “Nightfall” has at its core something that seems always to be a central concern of his work: the limits of reason and science. Like his story “Reason,” ”Nightfall” shows how empiricism is always limited by location. The astronomers of Lagash know something is coming, but they have no idea what. Because of their location in the galaxy, Lagash is spends all of its time in the light of six suns. However, once every two-thousand and fifty years, all the suns but one set, and the remaining sun is eclipsed for about half a day. During this time, civilization ends and most of the population goes insane. This is the mystery and the conflict in the story. It is the point of disruption for their civilization.

Science, itself, disrupts. “Nightfall” illustrates the contention between science and religion, or fact and belief. The scientists attempt to explain what will happen, logically and empirically. The “Cultists” have their own explanation based on mythological narratives and mysticism. Asimov puts these views in the boxing ring. Both acknowledge the fact of the coming darkness, but both have different explanations about the significance of the fact. The point seems moot, but herein lies the point: facts have no respect for beliefs. The scientists agree with the Cultists; their facts support the coming doom. However, the Cultists belief — their faith — has been brought down to the level of measurable reality. Or, as the chief astronomer Aton 77 puts it,

What ultimately causes the destruction of Lagash’s civilization is up for interpretation, but is seems to have something to do with the sudden realization of insignificance. Ironically, since Lagash is bathed in perpetual light, being an astronomer there is limited. Their perception of the universe is like humanity’s old geocentric one: everything revolves around them. Therefore, they are the most significant entities in the cosmos. Only darkness brings light, in this case, but it’s such an unexpected disruption that reasonable men lose their minds. Curiously, it seems that the Cultist’s predictions are upheld here: in fact, much of the scientists’ knowledge about past cycles comes from the Cultists’ “Book of Revelations,” as Aton 77 admits above. Perhaps, since their belief included “Stars,” their minds are more able to handle the shock.

This is why Asimov is so good: belief is always significant in his vision.

The other selections from di Filippo and Pratt are essentially love stories. They look at what brings people together and the impossible odds that such things ever happen. In “Phylogenesis,” Earth’s ecosystems are destroyed by these mindless, gargantuan, alien entities, and the only way for humanity to survive is to evolve with the help of technology into a viral form that could feed on the creatures and therefore perpetuate the human species. Humans have always been somewhat viral in our approach to environment – as Agent Smith famously explains to Morpheus in The Matrix – and that propensity pushes an allegorical reading of di Filippo’s story. That’s fine, but it’s also about survival, adaptability, and the spirit of life.

Finally, Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams” is really just a good, old-fashioned, geek love story. It’s a celebration of fiction as it is, considers the possibilities of what might come, and wonders at what could have been. Pete’s world order is disrupted by the appearance of a movie store from an alternate reality. Pete knows films, but when he encounters films that never were, he gets angry because “movies mattered.” They mattered so much, his world crumbles when he encounters the impossible. Instead of going insane like the denizens of Lagash, he unexpectedly meets a girl. Out of this disruption comes the possibility of real, human contact. At least that’s the feeling at the end. Pratt’s story just makes us sf geeks feel good. And that’s OK.

Last week, my class and I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, something I haven’t done since high school. I remember being in awe of this novel: it was so big and rich — Herbert painted such a lush and complex picture of an epic future that I became an immediate fan. I was probably thirteen, and I tore through the rest of the novels, feeling sad that there were no more: Herbert died shortly after the publication of Chapterhouse: Dune in 1986. I did this a lot back then. What else was a nerdy little kid to do but to read expansive science fiction and fantasy cycles?

This time through Dune, I was still delighted at its complexity and nuance — particularly in its style, characters’ psychologies, and its examination of political power structures. (Oh, and there are the sf ideas, too.) I remember Herbert’s style as being unique when I read Dune the first time, and I still think so. He is one of the only writers to pull off a truly omniscient narrator. To me, his style is Homeric. Like Homer, Herbert’s most important character in the novel is the one he’s currently focusing on. His style discloses the huge gap between outward confidence and inward doubt. The reader is privy to all the characters’ thoughts, like we were reading Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, but we see that all characters are the Underground Man. Herbert’s god-like style also speaks to his most poignant concern: human power dynamics and the environments that shape them.

Herbert’s tale, much like the ancient epics, have at their center a demigod. I’ve discussed this sort of science fiction’s relationship to the epic before, so I don’t have to rehash the particulars again. However, the similarities that struck with me this time included the narrative foundations of a social order. The role of the hero — always a quasi-divine figure — in epic poetry is one of scapegoat: they undergo the ordeals so their people don’t have to. This is always a double-edged sword, for any assertion of power means that certain traditions and expectations will be crushed in the process. In order to have progress, something must give way.

For example, in Gilgamesh, in order for civilization to be built and remain secure, and in order for Gilgamesh to have his name “stamped on bricks,” the old order must die. This happens to be the “evil” Humbaba. We see this same narrative repeat itself over and over in epic poetry: Achilles must kill Hector, the champion of the Trojan forces, and by so doing, conquer the Trojan way of life. Odysseus meets and vanquishes all types of “evil” so he can reassert his order in Ithaca. These struggles for power and dominance are the foundation of the epics, and often religion texts. The hero represents a single people’s vision that asserts itself on those it conquers, eliminating the society and their cultural traditions — or at least trying to.

In Dune, this is no exception. Paul Atreides is the culmination of Bene Gesserit eugenics: he is their Kwisatz Haderach, their male super-being. The novel is bracketed by this idea: the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam goes to Caladan at the beginning to test the young Paul, thinking that he might be the one; the end of the novel has the older Paul Maud’Dib vanquishing his enemies and asserting a new order on the universe. Paul’s identity is split: he is both the Fremen revolutionary and the Duke of a Great House. These particulars join in an uneasy marriage in Paul Maud’dib, now the figurehead for the “creatures” he has created. Like Aeneas by the end of Virgil’s epic, Paul has become a messiah, a symbolic leader more powerful than the man ever was — a symbol grand enough to begin a new order, a new jihad.

I’m puzzled, however, about the genesis of the Bene Gesserit super being. One of the most fascinating and nuanced aspects of Dune is the Bene Gesserit order: they are an order of space nuns who educate, indoctrinate, and mythologize. They are the creators of the Missionaria Protectiva – a powerful missionary force that has seeded a particular religious mythology around the universe — allowing Jessica and Paul to more easily assume control within the Fremen culture. Herbert doesn’t dwell on this, but this sinister aspect of the Bene Gesserit shows that they are a sophisticated, manipulative force in the building and maintaining a particular cosmic order.

It’s the nature of this order that’s puzzling: it seems a traditional patriarchal one, put in place to support the male leaders of the great houses. Even the raison d’être of the Bene Gesserit is to create the ultimate male super being. Why? “Kwisatz Haderach” means “the shortening of the way” — the way to more male dominance over women? Yes, the Bene Gesserit are powerful, but they are always subservient. Weird.

So Jessica creates the Kwisatz Haderach in her son, Paul. Perhaps it’s not only nature, but also nurture that turns Paul into the super being. It’s only by staying on Arrakis for a prolonged period that allows Paul to develop his strange powers — powers that become so unpredictable that they even scare Jessica. It’s the spice mixed with Paul’s crafted genetics that allow him to reach his full potential. Perhaps gods are made only when forces converge precisely, when a place and time are right for a change that only a messiah can bring.

This might be the wisdom of the Bene Gesserit: they knew that even they could get complacent, stale, victims of tradition. Perhaps the ultimate goal of the hero is to occasionally destroy one reality so a new one can be built. This is Paul’s unnerving vision throughout the latter half of the novel: he ultimately sees jihad as an inevitable outcome of his victory. Paul’s choice to wear the mantle of the super being precipitates a violent disruption, but reluctantly and with a bittersweet outcome.

Jorge Luis Borges’ narrator is a Chinaman with a lack of self-esteem. Dr. Yu Tsun is from a once-great Chinese family that has fallen into obscurity and shame because of the mad ramblings of his ancestor Ts’ui Pên. The narrator’s main source of motivation is to prove that his actions matter — that he can do great things. He is a spy for the German Reich during World War I, and his dream is to overcome his own obscurity in the eyes of his German masters. His obsession takes the literal form of an English captain: the appropriately named Richard Madden. Madden pursues Yu Tsun like a madness, perhaps forcing the narrator’s decisions throughout the story. The story ends with an ultimate irony: Yu Tsun must kill the man who has decoded his ancestor’s novel. He makes the choice to fulfill his mission and allegiance to the Germans rather than to restore his family’s name and honor the man who did it. Here, the political vision of a government at war supersedes an individual’s own artistic sensibilities and his family honor. Dr. Yu Tsun remains pathetically insignificant, a pawn of others’ dreams.

One of the aspects of Arthur C. Clarke’s thinking is that he always includes a world beyond the real. That is, while he is a man of science and reason, he does not limit his vision to only what can be seen and measured. There is always a sense of something beyond the surface in Clarke’s work, and often it’s technology and scientific progress that reveals it. Science itself is not the answer for Clarke, but it can — often inadvertently — lead us to the beyond. This is true for both “Names” and “The Star.” Both juxtapose religious belief with science and technology. Both stories have Twilight-Zone endings — neither of which I’ll ruin here — but Clarke links scientific reality with religious truth in interesting and surprising ways. In “Names,” the computer becomes key in decoding religious belief. Rather than being the enemy of religion, here science provides the mechanism for making religious belief real: the computer joins these two seemingly disparate ideas. In “The Star,” a Jesuit scientist’s faith is shaken by a literal journey to another star. Can a religion created on Earth survive the vastness of space? Can our minds remain small while our bodies travel into infinity?

I’ve written about William Gibson’s vision in “The Gernsback Continuum” before. This story deals with the collective dreams of the past manifesting a new reality in the present through the perceptions of the narrator. Gibson’s story posits many questions. When do dreams become tyrannical, draconian, and nightmarish? How much reinforcement does an idea take before it begins changing reality? Or, do our dreams spare us from the multiplicity of too much reality and choice? How much room is there for choice in this world? Borges seems to be interested in the same question. Whenever we make a choice, we create reality by closing off possibilities. However, quantum mechanics suggests that in another reality, we make the other choice, thereby splitting the possible from the real and ultimately creating a livable reality. What if we were able to break through to the possible, and it was able to travel through the rupture into our real?

Isn’t this what fiction’s about? We want our reality to be safe and predictable, so we tend to make the choices that we hope will lead to that outcome. Fiction provides us with the playground for examining the possible, the absurd, the terrifying. In contrast, fiction allows us to wander through the labyrinth, choose various paths, and come safely back. Right?

Well, one might also argue that a journey through fiction’s garden leaves our reality altered. Ideas can be dangerous, literally changing our views of the world around us. Are there ideas so powerful that they can irrevocably disrupt our world? We see this all the time, no? What happens when truth becomes Truth? How far are will we go to convince people of the Dream, meanwhile smashing their dreams?

Too many choices can be as frightening as too few. In a universe of possibilities, perhaps it’s a necessity that we limit ourselves to “a single wavelength of probability,” as Gibson’s narrator suggests. Maybe our brains can’t handle reality that’s too diverse, too rich? Maybe it’s a limit of our brains to think in binaries, blacks and whites, rights and wrongs? Or maybe bowing to simple perceptions of the universe will only enslave us to others’ Truth and keep us from progressing? Is there a middle ground?

I think what I like most about Ilium is that Simmons imaginatively connects the Greek age of heroes with the future history of our solar system, about 2000 hence. His Greek gods connect the two. They are either posthumans that left earth for Mars, or they are literary beings that have somehow been transported to the reality of Simmons’ novel by some quantum physical singularity. By the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered — one being: who are the gods? In fact, Simmons’ chief protagonist Hockenberry has a discussion with Zeus near the end of the novel, but few questions are answered before Zeus is distracted. Whatever the “gods” are, they seem convinced they are actual gods, but they use technology out of science fiction, like rejuvenation chambers, quantum teleportation devices, super bodies, and other technology that makes them god-like. To the Achaeans and Trojans, this technology is inseparable from magic.

Simmons’ interplay of science and literature is intriguing, though somewhat vague. I’m beginning to see how the Greek gods fit into the story, but Ilium uses characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, too: Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel. An epilogue explains that Prospero is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth logosphere”; Ariel is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth biosphere”; and Caliban is “Prospero’s pet monster.” These show up at various times in the novel, and Caliban is the chief antagonist in the latter part of the “old style” human narrative thread. Simmons seems to be using these characters as allegorical projections of a future Earth. Perhaps they will be fleshed-out in the next novel.

As I mentioned, Ilium contains three distinct plot lines: the first-person narrative of Hockenberry — a Homer scholar in a previous life, he is now “scholic” who is literally observing the events of the Trojan war as they unfold. His job seems to be to compare the actual events with those that Homer narrated in his epic. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the scholics were there for. They worked for the “gods” observing the humans, but I’m not sure why. These gods are not omniscient, so the scholics might have been their necessary extensions. Still, it’s unclear why. I connected with Hockenberry’s character, as he is a scholar and a bit awkward. He works for the gods until he gets a bit of power. Yeah, I could see that happening to me, too.

This narrative was probably my favorite, for obvious reasons. As I said: Simmons did his homework. Not only has he done his research on Homer and his epics, but he uses epic conventions within his narrative. One that sticks out is the penultimate chapter where armies are lining up for battle. It’s a hoot to read about these heroes in an altered context. Simmons does a fine job here using Hockenberry as a twentieth-century interlocutor.

There’s the old-style human narrative with Daemon, Ada, Harmon, and Savi. This one’s set in a future where the posthumans have left earth, but seem to have supplied for the remaining old-styles. They have a long life of comfort and convenience, but — as Savi will quip later in the novel — they are much like the Eloi from Wells’ The Time Machine: naive to what they’ve lost — just children, bred for something more sinister. Essentially, this narrative is about Daemon’s growing up as a human, and the rest of humanity’s end of innocence. Oddly enough, the character Odysseus joins this narrative with the former. Again, it’s not quite clear how. (Yet.)

The third narrative centers around the friendship between two Jovian moravecs. Simmons playfully names these sentient robots after Hans Moravec, a roboticist and futurist. Mahnmut is a small humanoid moravec who is fascinated with Shakespeare’s sonnets, and his friend is a “hard-vac” moravec who has a penchant for Proust. The dialogue between these two is entertaining and colorful. Oddly, they are the most human characters in the novel; they provide comic relief and significant moments of pathos. Early in the novel, they are sent to Mars to investigate unusual and dangerous quantum signatures. This is how they become entangled in the first plot. They even meet Little Green Men who call themselves “zeks” — a word used by Solzhenitsyn in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the camp’s prisoners. I’m unsure what they’re doing in the book.

OK, these were pretty random thoughts. It seems like Simmons wrote Ilium and its sequel Olympos as a single book. There are many unanswered questions by the end of Ilium, some of which I’ve mentioned here. Maybe this is just good marketing; I think I’m going to have to read Olympos. Too bad Ilium took me two months to get through. Maybe if I start now, I can finish before the fall semester.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I had not read Jack McDevitt until I heard he was coming to this year’s Crossroads Conference. I’m embarrassed because I’m supposed to be up on all things science fiction. His novel Seeker won a Nebula award in 2006 for best novel (and most of his other novels have been nominated), and I have come to thoroughly enjoy his writing. I did manage to read two of his novels before meeting him.

I met Jack McDevitt early on Saturday morning. I was hurrying to hear him speak, and I saw him rushing out the door. He was going the wrong way. I said, motioning toward the door, “I think this is where you want to be.” He smiled: “I know. I’m just going to get my wife.” He did, and I began deciding how I was going to photograph the day. Yes, I was not really there as a writer, but as a volunteer photog. He soon returned with his wife Maureen. I snapped away while he gave the audience advice on how to publish. He reminded me of professors I most enjoyed in graduate school: ones who were no-nonsense – who just wanted you to know what you needed to know to be successful.

It wasn’t until the panel at 11:30 — “The Long and Short of It: Crafting Fiction” — where I finally introduced myself. I was scheduled to act as moderator, but this was a role I thought would require little more than my introducing the panelists. I was wrong. Since the panelists did not have prepared statements, they expected questions. Therefore, I put on my best Neal Conan hat, something I’ve done many times before. While the session was well attended, it took a while to get the audience asking questions that were actually germane to the panel’s topic. So, I ran things. No big deal, since I’m an academic conference veteran, but I did hope to take photos.

Afterward, I finally got to talk with McDevitt. I had many questions about his work, but I didn’t want to seem too forward or obnoxious — you know, fan-like. I think he sensed my enthusiasm, but he invited me to lunch anyway!  I graciously accepted, and he, Maureen, and I went downtown to Market City Café. We talked about sf, politics, and life. He asked me questions, and we had a pleasant meal. At one point, he said to me: “Jerry, life is good.” At that moment, I totally agreed. I just wish Autumn could have been there.

Next stop was the Golden Bough for McDevitt’s reading. Eric was waiting, but not many festival-goers were. I was disappointed in the low turnout, but it was a real pleasure to hear McDevitt read. He reminded me a bit of Asimov, though less Brooklyn Jew. He read two AI stories — “The Candidate” and “Henry James, this One’s for You” — both out of his Outbound collection. They are near-future stories about artificial intelligences: the former is George Washington running for president again and the latter is, well, you should read the story. There were only a couple of people in the audience, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the event. How often do you get a Nebula winner reading to you one-on-one? I’m glad I went to the bookstore, too, so I could get a book for McDevitt to sign: Time Travelers Never Die. I hope to start it this week.

After the Golden Bough was the book signing at the conference. I got Time Travelers signed. Since I enjoyed the stories from Outbound, I wanted a copy of that, too. I purchased a book from Lauretta Hannon (blog entry about that coming), so I only had $10 left. I told McDevitt that I was going to find an ATM, and he said “How about just taking the book?”

“No,” I replied, “I couldn’t do that.”

“OK,” he searched for one of his business cards and handed it to me: “you can send me a check.” What a guy.

So, I have two books inscribed by my current favorite sf writer. I attended his last panel, but had to duck out quickly afterward to photograph Steve Almond. Jack McDevitt came into the chapel, and I was able to say good-bye.

What a great experience. Thanks to Jack and Maureen for being so gracious with me — just a sf fan. You know I’m gonna have to read all of his books now, right? That’ll make up for my finding his writing so late.

It was not my favorite book. I’m not even sure I’d recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already a Stephenson enthusiast. I’d probably say: “Read Snow Crash, or The Diamond Age.” The former is a brilliant, fast-moving, and smart book — perhaps the most important work of cyberpunk next to Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Yet, I’m sad it’s over. I think this sentiment has more to do with long books. There’s something about a 1000-page novel that really brings me into it — in a way that no 200-pager can. It probably has something to do with the detail, but perhaps more with the commitment it takes to read it. Other books that I have felt the same way after finishing are: Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Herbert’s Dune (though it wasn’t particularly long), Brook’s original Shannara Trilogy (particularly Sword and Elfstones), any of Donaldson’s fantasy, like the Thomas Covenant books or the dream mirror ones). Yes, a long series can leave me with the same feeling. Perhaps this feeling has something to do with the popularity of the Harry Potter novels?

Still, I don’t think I’d want to reduce Anathem to the likes of Harry Potter. It is a very strong novel that deals with politics, religion, technology, academics, history, devotion, space travel, and quantum mechanics. I’m glad I spent the holiday with this novel, though it would have been nice to have gotten in another read or two.