Original and Absurd

I awake on the couch, unaware of the hour.

Eventually rising, I see moonlight coming in the front windows.

It’s time.

Time for my annual Halloween walk.

Finding a sweater, putting on shoes, I anticipate the cool pleasant evening.

Children may still be out, but perhaps it’s too late. 

It makes no difference.

As soon as I open my door, the breeze brings change. 

Things are not as they were.

The street is my street, but the glow from the lamps is odd. 

Yellowish, like gaslamps.

Greenish.

No one is about. 

I step from my porch and set out. 

All is eerily silent around me. 

My feet crunch leaves, and I hear my breath.  

A sudden gust brings paper curling around my ankle. 

I bend to grasp it.

In charcoal scrawl, a line of doggerel:

              Home awaits, but you must win it;

              Find it first, and then get in it.

Suddenly, all light is gone.

 A dark cloud must have covered the moon, but what of the lamps?

In blackness I stumble on, the crunch beneath me the only sound, except my breath.

Then, the cloud passes. 

I am on a hill, above a valley. 

Stones and dead trees here and there.

And then, sounds.

A distant yowling, growing closer.

A hooting.

Owooo! 

Like a wolf – there are no wolves.

What must I win to; what must I find? 

My home must be behind me, but I dread looking back. 

Where is this hillside? 

How have I come here?

Again, the darkness. 

Another cloud, perhaps.

In the blackness I see nothing, but then…

Green. 

Two bright green dashes, near my feet.

Light returns again. 

It is a cat. 

Black, of course. 

My guide. 

I don’t know how I know this.
It brushes my legs once, then sets off.

I follow.

When the light returned, I saw I was in the valley below the hill. 

Trees loomed darkly overhead.

Their dead branches splintered the moonlight.

I had stopped feeling the breeze, but I could hear it.

Following the cat, I treaded over leaves and stones.

Dry streambeds.

More than leaves crunching down there.

Turn.

Turn again.

Following.

And then, the Fantasy.

Dark again.

Cloud, moon.

Dimmer light, and I am not alone.

Rank upon rank of them.

Arms raised, heads lifted.

Skeletons.

Their bones gleam whitely.

Dark returns, but I can see the bones, phosphorescent.

I am paralyzed, but my guide strides through them.

Home awaits, but you must win it.

Light returns, dimmer.

I start again. 

My arms brush them, but I feel nothing.

Their heads turn as I pass, so close they could bite me.

Or kiss me.

Dark again.

Light.

Then they are gone.

It’s even dimmer.

I begin to know where I am.

I begin to understand.

I see it ahead. 

The cat nuzzles it.

Before it, the fresh turned earth.

Find it first, and then get in it.

I don’t feel the damp or the cold.

The light had almost faded away, anyway.

Ever wondered how Dracula came to be the vampire we all know and fear? Probably, you haven’t.

What an absurd thought.

Hopefully, the following will be an original contribution to the question , if not a sparkling literary effort.

This is a story I submitted to the new literary magazine Dracula: Beyond Stoker. It was not selected for publication.

So…appearing here for the first (and last) time anywhere…

Wine

1894

            The old man sat at the heavy wooden table, his bright, piercing eyes studying the documents laid out before him. The skin of his hand seemed paper thin and nearly transparent as his finger moved over a map, tracing lines; but his hand was steady. The silence in the room was uncanny; one might have heard the beating of the man’s heart or the susurration of his breath. But no such sounds broke the stillness. The antique window in the large casement near the table, with its translucent colored glass set in small panes within delicate silver, was open to the cool night air of late autumn, yet not even a faint breeze entered the room.

            Time seemed not to exist within this chamber; the heraldic banners and suits of ancient armor against the stone wall suggested a time long gone, yet somehow kept alive. It would be easy to imagine that men, somehow prevented from departing this world in their natural time, still dwelt within the burnished, dusty shells. The future, also, seemed to live in this eerie room; an unknown future of unlimited possibilities. Long past and distant future combined and seemed to center in the figure of the old man. Eyes and fingers seem to devour the possibilities represented by the maps and papers before him; a child’s mind in a dying body, he seemed poised to sweep the past, which surrounded him in dust and darkness, into a future where his strength alone would be sufficient to achieve his will.

            Indeed, time seemed not to exist; only when the beams of the moon entered the chamber through the casement, casting colorful shadows as they passed through the tinted windows, did the man look up from his work. A shadow not cast by the moon seemed to cross his high aquiline features; a shadow that seemed compounded of the tiredness of ages and an ageless hunger. His papery white hand reached out toward a brass bell that sat on one corner of the table. His strong but delicate fingers brushed past but did not quite touch the bell; there was no sound. Only a brief look of concentration flickered in the blue eyes. A minute passed; another. Then, still soundlessly, near the closed door of the chamber, there was a faint motion, a swirl of dust. The dust caught the bright beam of the moon and, reflecting it, seemed to become a cloud of shimmering particles. Still, all was silence.

            A woman stood by the door. Tall, lovely; her long dark hair streamed over bare white shoulders. She stood perfectly still and upright with the dignity of maturity, but her face had the red bloom of youth. Her features were like a young, feminine version of the man’s; ears slightly pointed, arched nostrils, hair in a widow’s peak over a broad white forehead. She said nothing, but something in her posture suggested restrained energy, and her eyes burned with undecipherable feelings.

            Finally, the stillness of the chamber was broken. The man did not look up when he spoke; no opening door or sound of movement could have alerted him to the woman’s presence, and yet he seemed aware of her presence.

            “Your evening has not been profitless. The hunt went well?”

            The woman turned her head slightly. The moonlight seemed to pass through her; she seemed haloed by ghostly afterimages of the bright particles. The corners of her mouth turned up in the faintest of sneers.

            “I am like the lioness.” she said in a rich deep musical voice. “While my Lord sleeps, the sheep await my approach. He commands, and I can do not but obey; yet he lives only through my life.”

            “The lion hunts,” said the old man. “Come here.”

            A flicker of oddly mingled emotions appeared in the woman’s pale eyes; a revulsion oddly shot through with eagerness; resentment, mingled with servility. She seemed fighting a losing battle with her pride.

            “I am a countess!” she said, nearly a snarl.

            “You are my winepress.”

            The man pushed back his chair and the woman walked toward him; her footsteps made no sound on the cold uncarpeted flags. She knelt before his seated figure, lifted her chin proudly, but turned her head away. One delicate hand she lifted, and one sharp nail she drew across the side of her neck. A bright slender ribbon of red appeared against the pale skin.

            The last rays of the moon as it passed beyond view from the casement showed the room as it had been before; the woman was gone, the door had never opened, and the man once again pored eagerly over his documents. The skin of his hand was firm and unlined.

1594

            The young man stalked into the room which had been his father’s. He pulled the white cloth from around his throat and threw it into a corner. He pulled off his gauntlets and stripped his white gloves stained with blood from his strong but delicate hands. His eyes burned and his body trembled. There was about him a sense of the excitement of a mountain bear with a salmon trapped beneath its paw, or a lion fresh from its kill.

            His senses tuned to their sharpest pitch, as though he were still on the battlefield, the quiet footsteps of the woman as she entered the room behind him alerted him to her presence. He spun to face her.

            “Like wolves!” he cried. “My army fell upon them like a pack of ravening wolves! They tore into those devilish Turks with hungry fangs and soaked the earth with their blood!”

            With a delicate shudder of distaste, his sister, the Countess Valesca Dracula, lowered herself into one of the tiny chairs her father had imported from France years ago. “Dorin and Vasile arrived an hour ago,” she said. “They told me that our army died in its thousands; that never before had they seen such slaughter. Vasile said that the battlefield reminded him of Breugel’s Triumph of Death. It was no victory for either side, it seems.”

            “What else is an army for! Their lives, their blood, were spilled for me; what more could they ask? Today I command them; tomorrow I shall command nations, and the life within my people shall be my life.”

            In a sudden shift, the excitement seemed to drain from the young man. He drooped slightly and his eyes became unfocused, as if he peered into that future whose image he had just summoned.

            “I live today,” he said in a quieter, more subdued voice. “I live, and I bring glory to the name of Dracula. I live, and restore the pride of our people. Down through the centuries, my name will echo through the valleys of Carpathia. When the wolves howl, people will say, that is the voice of the armies of Dracula; he freed us from the oppressor; would that he were among us today! And yet, there will be many tomorrows…”

            He sat in his father’s great wooden chair, and finally the exhaustion of the day’s battle seemed to claim him.

“Wine!” he commanded, and Valesca hurried to obey. She barely heard the whisper that replaced his lion’s roar.

            “Today, I live… but what of all the tomorrows?

1694

            The man was old, old.

He had not left the castle in over thirty years. He knew that were he to leave, his life of well over a century would quickly end. Here, in the home of his father and his father’s father, something there was which made all who yet dwelled here cling to life. Perhaps it was the restless ghosts of all the thousands who had died in the name of Dracula; perhaps yet it was the strange exhalations of the earth near the castle, peculiar green-yellow mists which rose from deep within this ancient land. His sisters Valesca and Alina and his wife Bianca of the bright yellow hair were entombed here with him; alive, by some miracle, but buried away from the world.  Toothless mummies all; they avoided each other’s company for the same reason that mirrors had been banished. 

            More and more of late he spent his time in the deepest cellars of the castle where the mist seem to gather and clot. Shut away from the sun which had become hateful to him, as it represented the Life which he was denied, he would pull deep draughts of the mist into his lungs. Like wine, it gave him dreams which he would not remember, but the voice from those dreams was the only sound which his deaf ears ever heard. Sometimes it seemed it was his own voice.

“I am the last.”

“No, the first.”

“I shall die.”

“No, you shall live… forever shall you live.”

“But I am an old man.”

“You are a child.”

            The old man had read all the standard works on alchemy, and many which were unknown to all save a few. The conceptions of time and life of Paracelsus and St. Germain and dozens of others were well known to him. He had even delved into the strange new mysteries of experimental science championed by men like Bacon and Newton. Indeed, someday, he hoped to visit a meeting of the Royal Society in London. He had heard of the odd wonders displayed there; dead frogs animated by galvanic currents and other such circus wonders which the Romany people among whom he used to wander could easily duplicate, and better. He could show those Englishmen wonders, indeed!

            But, what fantasy was this! He, who had not left his ancestral home in three decades, dreaming of traveling across a continent. He wondered if he would survive a month, a week, a day away from the influence of the castle.  None of the books, nor even the scrolls he had imported at such great expense from distant Egypt could explain to him the vitality that he and his women endured. Yes, it was an endurance; it was not life. He felt like a bloodless thing; like a statue granted occasional movement. What his sisters and his wife felt, he had no idea. They rarely spoke, and when they did it was merely to grumble and complain. He wondered how they spent their time in their regions of the castle, which he never anymore visited. Thinking of his once-beautiful wife was intensely painful to him.

Had he ever known passion? She had borne him sons (and, if he remembered correctly, a daughter or two.) All were surely dead now, as they had gone out into the world nearly a century ago. So, therefore, there had been passion of a kind. Even love; though the fierce love of his people was nothing like the soft sentimental weakness of the West. The very last thing he could recall his foreign wife saying to him was that he had never truly loved. Yet he had. Her ancient crone’s brain had forgotten.

            Sons he had had, but they were part of the old world, the world which had given him life and purpose. A world in which the lives of men had been laid down before him as his due. Gone, all gone.

            What cruel Providence gave him this mere continuance in a world from which he had to hide away, where passion was a fading memory and hope, a dust he could taste? Yet still fiercely he clung to this shadow existence, for his overmastering passion had not left him.  Had any man ever loved life so much? Perhaps all the blood which had been freely spilled in his name and by his will had somehow fed this magic, this curse.

            More and more, as the days drew on – he lost track of them in the deep cave beneath the castle to which he had retreated like a wounded bear – he spent his time listening to the voice. Like a fond old man indeed, he sometimes imagined that it could give him the secret, and restore to him a purpose. Yet he knew that the voice was his own.

            He rang the bell.  He did not even know the name of the desiccated servant who brought him wine.  Perhaps a Szgany.  Was it recently that that people had taken up residence on his lands, where his father and father’s father would have chased them away with whip and sword?  Or was it ten years ago?  Twenty?

1896

            Callender shivered. The coachman had refused to bring him within ten miles of the castle. The Englishman could feel winter in his bones. Why had he agreed to come here? It seemed his life had followed a predestined path which had led him from the carefree days of his youth in his civilized homeland to this strange fantasy world where the battles of past centuries for dominance of these drear mountains seemed still to echo.

            He had been, in his days, a petty thief, a deserter, and a scoundrel. Now, it seemed, he had turned assassin. Had it been the strange, cold beauty of the woman who called herself Countess, and the vague promises she had made that she could give him a life he could never have dreamed of? Or was it merely that he had nowhere else to go?

            Tall and dark-haired and remote, he had trouble remembering the features of her pale face. It was almost as though she had not really been there. The flickering light from the fire in the tavern in Bistritz had brought no flush to her features, nor even seemed to cast shadows on them. It had even seemed as though the light had passed through her. Like the rest of this time-haunted land, perhaps she was only a ghost.

            And now, somehow, heeding the words of this phantom, he found himself here in the stone flagged courtyard of what appeared to be a deserted castle. Surrounded by chasms in the trackless wastes of mountain, the castle seemed barely to receive the rays of the sun, which made ready to disappear in the West. Far west of here were his friends and all he had known; why had he ever left them? And why had the Countess insisted that he perform this foul task with this sharpened piece of wood?

            He remembered little of what she had told him; about the cruel power this man had over her, and some excuse as to why she could not do this deed herself. She had given him a small sack of silver coins, but her eyes and her softly insinuating voice had promised earthier pleasures. In fact, she had seemed to suggest that he, Callender, would take up residence in the castle when her tormentor was gone, and that together they would live a new sort of life. Yet the only emotion he had found in her cold pale eyes had been a kind of wistful sadness.

            “I have lived too long. Unlike him, my passion was never to rule. Yet we shared this in common: I was unable to let go of life. I wonder what form this existence would have taken had I been the first? Ah… but that could not have been. That could not have been.”

            The only other words he remembered clearly were her frequently repeated exhortation to do what he had to do quickly (he remembered a similar line from scripture. The Bible his mother had given him he still had in a pocket of his coat. Why ever had he hung on to such an artifact?) Do it quickly, she had said, before the sun leaves the sky. Then, as if she too had some errand which had to be done quickly, or as if mention of the sun had reminded her of something, she swiftly rose and hurried out, and he heard a hissing command, and then the rapid striking of hooves and the creak of carriage wheels.

            Callender looked at the sketch she had given him of the castle, and walked quickly around its battlements, and found the wooden ladder just where she had said it would be.

1704

            The old man knew that death was finally about to claim the prize of which it had been cheated for so long. Weariness had reached to the center of his bones; he was deaf and nearly blind. He had not eaten or taken wine or water for more days than he could remember. Was his Szgany servant even still alive?

            With the last of his strength, he rose from the ancient chair and made his way through the room, out into the corridor, and to the stairs. Down and down he went. He had known for a long time that his final resting place would be the dank cellars deep within the earth, where even the strange green gas no longer renewed him. Years ago, in a strange passing fit of fancy, he had paid the Romany to bring a coffin into the castle. Like his fathers, though, he would be buried in his native soil: he had had them fill the coffin with it.

            Now, he laid himself out on the earth, and closed his blind eyes. He could sense but could not hear the squeaking of a bat which had somehow found its way into this cavelike chamber. Slowly, slowly, he drew breath into his body, and felt himself entering the trancelike state which had been the only sleep he had known for years. And then, in his mind, he began to speak, and to listen.

“It is time.”

“I know, I know. Finally.”

“Have you given up, then?”

“Never!”

“Then live!”

“For over a hundred years I have sought how this might be done. I found nothing; nothing but the chattering of children and the lies of old wives.”

“You have always known.”

“What have I known? I have known how to command men. I have known how to take life, and to spill blood. For years, that blood was my life. Ah! to taste that blood again! When that rich red life flowed like a river around me, when I waded in it, then I was truly alive!”

“Yes.”

“Am I to have that life again?”

“If it is thy will.”

“And command armies again?”

“Behold your army.”

            Then he saw again the vision, which he had seen night after night. The forests of Transylvania, shrouded in mist. From among the ancient trees a keening began; it grew to a howling. And then, his army appeared.

***

            Valesca lay in her bed.  She had not truly slept in years, and lately, she rarely rose.  Morning and night were the same to her.  She longed for death, but still she feared it.  Her existence had been a long, lonely vigil of unfulfilled longing and unending fear. 

            The moonlight entered through the translucent glass of her window. She heard nothing, but she sensed another presence in the room. Her limbs were frozen; a prickle played over her skin. The window was closed and there was no breeze in the room, yet she sensed the movement of air. She could not turn her head to look, but she knew that someone, something, was coming closer.

            Suddenly, she was overcome with a feeling of sensuous languor; an odd combination of fear and anticipation. It was as though she knew that something was about to happen, something that had never happened before. A strange thought occurred to her. For so many years, she had heard the bell ringing through the castle – her brother, summoning a servant. or summoning her. It had come to seem that she could hear the bell even before it sounded; as if his desire made itself known in her brain. For so long he had dominated her life; perhaps she had no mind, no will of her own. Perhaps his own will animated her and so his wishes were known to her. And now, she was experiencing the same sensation; she could almost hear her brother’s voice saying: “Wine, Valesca.”

            Then, she felt a sharp pain in her throat, and felt the life run out of her. Would the long vigil finally end?

            When she was sure that it would, when she felt that her breathing had stopped and her heart no longer beat, she tasted something on her tongue. Sharper than slivovitz and headier than wine, at first she tried to expel it from her mouth. Then, she began to draw it in.

1896

            The man sat at the table, holding a small leather-bound book in his strong, ruddy hand. Every once in a while his lips moved, as if he were tasting unfamiliar words, or practicing how he would pronounce them. Distracted by moonlight, he lifted his hand and brushed his fingers past the bell on the corner of the table. No sound was heard. Then she was there.

            The man said nothing. He slowly raised his arm and pointed one slender finger at the casement window. Slowly, Valesca moved in response. She seemed to float rather than walk. She did not gasp, nor did a blush touch her cheeks, when through the open window, she saw her Englishman in the courtyard. At first it must have seemed to her as though he stood perfectly still, waiting.

            Then, she saw the long metal stake emerging from his back, holding him up. He had been impaled.

            And then, the man at the table spoke. “Thank you, sister. I had never thought to add a King James bible to my collection of English literature.”

Shadow.

…

Tombstone.

…

…

(pause.)

(wait).

…

…

…

Moonbeam.

…

…

…

(pause again.)

Wait.  Think of sun and blue and breeze.  Think them disappearing.

…

…

…

(wait…)

…

…

Behind the tombstone, moonbeam.

(…)

 Beside the tombstone, shadow.

(wait.)

…

…

Under the tombstone, darkness.

Darkness and earth, beneath the moon’s shadow, below the cracking weathered stone.

Under the earth, hidden in darkness, darker than shadow…

Me.

Darkness and shadow, hidden in earth, under the stone, hidden from moonlight,

(Pause) waiting…..(wait)….

Shadow and darkness hiding from moonlight hiding in shadow shadow’s cold darkness

cracking and waiting lying here waiting darker than darkness

(wait)

(go slowly)

(read more slowly)

Shadow …and …darkness …hiding ….from ….moonlight …..hiding

in

     shadow

             shadow’s cold

                              darkness

                                      cracking

                                              and waiting

                                                      lying here

                                                               waiting

                                                                      darker

                                                                             than

                                                                                  darkness.

(pause.)

(wait.)

…

Waiting.

I have a theory that can never be tested. I think changes to the past would change everything about the present (if the time traveler goes back far enough.) The reason has to do with sperm, but I’ll get there.

Let’s start with the version of the grandfather paradox explored in Back To The Future. Recall that Marty McFly went to the past and inadvertently interfered with his folks hooking up. He began to fade from a photograph (as the timeline caught up with changes that hadn’t happened “yet?” It’s insane.)

But after Marty’s interference, it is astronomically unlikely that he would EVER be born. Consider: an average man ejaculates hundreds of millions of sperm each time. Which of these fertilizes the egg is essentially random. If his parents had sex at a different time, or in a different position, the result if fertilization occurred would not be Marty.

You might be wondering: why should they have sex at a different time, if he gets them back together? Because he has altered the background circumstances. Their lives might be essentially the same as before his initial interference, but surely enough has changed that it would be very unlikely that they would have sex at exactly the same moment and in exactly the same way as they did before his interference.

I’m quite convinced of this, but it cannot be proven. Unless we could travel in time, we could never test my hypothesis. Perhaps there is some “conservation” principle which swings everything back into the “original” pattern as much as possible. I just don’t think so.

Let’s look at another example. I take a walk every night at midnight. I follow exactly the same route and I don’t intentionally go any faster or slower, or do anything differently. Yet my apple watch gives me differing numbers of steps. Some nights 3805, some nights 4123. (Perhaps the watch itself has a large error margin, but let’s suppose that it does not. It’s quite plausible that my total steps would vary somewhat.)

Why do my steps vary? Some nights I glance at the moon and, looking up, perhaps take somewhat shorter steps because I’m unconsciously nervous about falling. Some nights I jump over cracks for the sake of my mother’s spinal health. All sorts of things might happen. These choices – looking up at the moon, skipping a crack – surely result from neurological events. We probably can never trace them back to their ultimate origin, but it’s plausible that a change earlier the day – a bad social moment, some anger at a friend, my mind being distracted by a news story – would affect my brain in such a way that those exact choices would not be made. I conclude that, if you traveled back in time and assassinated someone, and I saw a news story about it, or saw my neighbors discussing it even if I didn’t know what they were talking about, or if traffic patterns changed and I was irritated on my way home, then my step count that night would change as a result. I would be thinking slightly different thoughts and forget to glance at the moon. I would have eaten dinner a little faster and as a result my brain state would be a little different. Something.

So, if someone actually went back in time and saved Kennedy (Umbrella Academy), I think as a result not a single person born since 1963 would exist today. Everyone would be affected, and as a result, their brain states would be altered. Maybe just a little in many cases. But enough so that the exact moment of ejaculation (even if a conception event occurs at all) would be different, and a different offspring would result.

Creating artificial categories, and then deciding what belongs or does not belong in them, is such a fun and useless occupation. I think I could be happy doing this as a profession. Picking out the most important or relevant features of something, matching them to an arbitrary standard – it’s like making something up, plus! As you read my discussion of science fiction, please keep carefully in mind the title of my blog, and decide for yourself whether this essay belongs in it – whether it is at all original, or at all absurd.

[Parenthetically (how odd that I use brackets to enclose a parenthetical! Alas, there is no word bracketly), I have been annoyed by how writers dismiss some science fiction as fantasy, and declare some fantasy to be science fiction. Examples will follow. But there is my motivation, if you needed me to have one.]

I consider science fiction to be a subset of fantasy literature. I also consider Fantasy to be a subset of fantasy. (See how I distinguish the subset from the set, with a capital letter?) Of course, I should say, that Fantasy is a proper subset of fantasy. Obviously fantasy is a subset of fantasy given that all sets are subsets of themselves. Let’s divert for a moment more into mathematics. Set subtraction is defined as follows. B – A is the set containing everything in set B that is not in A ( e.g., {cow, horse, pig} – {pig} = {cow, horse.}.) So, if science fiction and fantasy do not overlap (if their intersection is empty) then science fiction is a proper subset of fantasy – Fantasy. (You may think that I ought to place the capital F on the larger set. You’d be mistaken.)

So, to define science fiction, I should first define fantasy.

fantasy (I needed to begin this sentence with a non-capitalized word) consists of stories about that which is not.

Now, there are already problems with this definition. I read a book a long long time ago, a British book written for younger readers about a plucky group of teenagers who, among other acts, attended a Beatles concert. I was troubled! (Recall how peculiar I was and am; for reference, read my first post about free will.) It seemed to me that the author made a terrible mistake. By including a real group, the Beatles, she (or he) laid her (or him) self open to a charge of falsity. I could (in theory only, in those pre-Internet days) look up the attendees of Beatles concerts (perhaps not even in the days on the Internet, but in theory at least). These kids were not there. Because they don’t exist. Somehow, this crossover with the real world bothered me. It was as though a character had been assigned a phone number, and not one of the phony (no pun intended) 555 ones. A simple call would prove the whole thing a tissue of lies.

The point of this digression is that ALL fiction deals with that which is not. So, we must understand fantasy as being about that which is not in general, rather than that which happens not to in particular. I trust this is sufficient here. But the following examples should make everything crystal clear.

High fantasy (Tolkien, Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, etc) and Heroic fantasy (Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian) feature elves and fairies and dragons – clearly, things which are not. Dark fantasy is sometimes populated by werewolves and ghosts. Light fantasy (Freaky Friday, for instance, which features body switching, or Oh God with George Burns) generally mixes mostly our world with just a dash of unreality. In Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, it turns out that men’s suspicions that all women are witches are literally true. In my favorite Leiber work (Leiber is actually the originator of urban fantasy; I highly recommend Our Lady of Darkness), You’re All Alone, the protagonist “wakes up” and realizes that almost everyone else in the world is essentially a sleepwalker, going through predetermined actions with no actual awareness (also see my discussion of free will for whether such “philosophical zombies” can even be possible.)

Alternate histories (the all-time master in my opinion is Harry Turtledove) tell stories in which history played out differently (maybe the Axis won WW2, or perhaps Lincoln survived.) Again, this is an example of “that which is not.” But in this case, unlike dragons, these stories deal with that which might have been.

Science fiction (as of yet undefined, but let’s just think of examples for right now) deals in general with that which is not, but could be – could have been, may yet be, could be now if we buckled down. Arguably Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars could happen now with technology we have (except he elongates the lives of his characters with a longevity treatment which I think is more a plot drug than a human drug.) Tales of the far future like Asimov’s Foundation deal with that which may be someday (or could it? I’ll return to that point later.) Tales of other worlds and the odd life that may have evolved there cannot be said to be tales of things that might be, since it would be a nearly-impossible coincidence if aliens exactly like those that authors fancifully describe were actually out there. But aliens as different from us as those in Clifford Simak’s Way Station might exist – just not those particular aliens. But this is not an obstacle – a novel that describes a murder that never really happened is generally not fantasy, because murders like that happen; again, it’s the difference between general and particular which I mentioned above.

So, at this point I think I’ve demonstrated that science fiction, however else we define or limit it, is a subset of fantasy literature. But, what sorts of stories are science fiction, and what sorts are Fantasy?

There are a number of ways we could proceed from here. My final answer will involve a sort of fusion of them. Before we get there, another digression.

Ludwig Wittgenstein talked about categorizing. He used games as an example.
What is a game? Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) mentions various traits that might make something a game. (I paraphrase here; in fact, I might be making some of this up. Philosophical Investigations is absurdly expensive, so I here rely on decades-old memories.) A game might be something that has rules, that features two or more players, and competition, and that has winners and losers, and that uses special equipment. Monopoly would fit all these. But surely not all of them are needed. Twenty Questions requires no special equipment. Solitaire has just one player. Cooperative games don’t involve competition at all.
Can we pare the list down to just those traits that all games must possess? Wittgenstein and I think not. Yet, if we can think of two games – let’s say Conway’s Game of Life (look it up, but not now; you’ll never stop playing and come back here!) and a footrace – games that have nothing in common – then why call them both games? Surely a definition must provide necessary and sufficient conditions that link all instantiations.
Wittgenstein concluded (as I recall) that it was sufficient that both examples have traits which are shared with other examples that share traits with the original games. In other words, while a footrace has no rules (well, it sort of does; you have to start at the same time and you can’t murder each other, but there are no detailed rules for how to run or alternate turns or roll dice or things) but it has two players and is competitive and features a winner and one or more losers. Life has rules but has only one player and no winner and no competition. But both are games because both are comparable to Monopoly. Make sense? (To go back to set theory, imagine a Venn diagram featuring three sets that have no triple intersection, like {1,2,3}, {3,4,5}, {5,6,7}. The first and third have no elements in common, and are thus disjoint. But both share an element with the middle set. I may have cousins on both sides of my family who are not blood-related at all, but they have me as a cousin in common and thus could come on a Cousin’s Weekend.)

So, what about science fiction? I have several characteristics in mind.

Consider Star Wars. We have space ships, aliens, planets, blasters, and more. These are science fiction tropes – the usual suspects. Yet, think of how the movie deploys them. We never get even a ghost of an explanation of how the ships work. Light sabers seem quite impossible – light just doesn’t work that way. The exotic worlds and aliens might as well be elves and dwarves; their characteristics have little to do with how evolution would work in different environments. And all of this is not poor writing, by any means – it is by intent! Star Wars is, in my opinion, Fantasy that uses science fiction tropes. It has no intent to show how the universe might actually be (the Force is pure religious fantasy). It deploys creatures in exactly the same way that Tolkien does. Yet, we might say that tropes are enough. We might say “magic swords=fantasy. Laser swords = science fiction – even though they could incidentally only work if magic were real.

Other than tropes, what have we? I think we could look at intent. Let’s go back to Foundation. It is clearly Asimov’s intent to show how science – in particular, the not-yet-existing science of psychohistory – might impact human life (even though the worlds of Foundation are not linked to earth in any real way, but their inhabitants are human beings. Later books would make a connection.) The faster-than-light ships that make the story possible do not and almost certainly cannot exist. So, what’s more important? Intent, or possibility?

Here we reach one of the complaints I promised to circle back to. Larry Niven seems fond of claiming that various works of science fiction are in fact fantasy – whenever he finds something in them where the science is not solid. (Niven is a proponent of hard science fiction – science fiction that takes science very seriously and provides often tedious explanations of how it all works. Some would define hard science fiction as dealing with the hard sciences of physics and chemistry and astronomy, and soft science fiction as dealing with the soft sciences of psychology and sociology, etc. I use the term hard science fiction to describe science fiction that doesn’t just use science but is really about science. Characterization in hard science fiction – check out Niven’s books like Ringworld for examples – often takes a back seat. Because I think fiction is fundamentally about character, even though I love science I much prefer soft science fiction.)

Should Foundation be relegated to Fantasy? Nonsense! It is a story in which science is fundamental to everything that happens. I would call it hard science fiction – with some impossibilities.

What about A Princess of Mars (magazine serialization title Under the Moons of Mars), the first novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs wonderful Barsoom books? Unlike Star Wars, this book explains John Carter’s greater strength in terms of the lighter gravity of Mars (which makes no sense really because he has been psychically projected to Mars and his body is back on Earth in a cave, but don’t get me started.) The breakdown of atmosphere-making machines drives the plot (Mars has too thin an atmosphere to support life as we know it). What little was known about Mars (the canals, for instance, which never really were meant to be waterways) is included. So – science fiction! Yet women on Mars lay eggs, but still have large breasts. As mentioned above, John Carter projects himself to Mars unconsciously by thinking about it hard. And almost none of the details are right or plausible, even given the state of science at the time. The intent is not to look at how science affects human life, but to use science fictional tropes to tell a traditional kind of fantasy story. And yet…..it isn’t entirely a traditional kind of fantasy. Unlike Buck Rogers serials, science isn’t completely foreign to the goings-on. I might argue that, just as in the best examples of earth-people-on-other-planets-of-our-solar-system (and those best examples would be Robert Heinlein’s juveniles like Red Planet), and regardless of Burroughs main preoccupations (male power fantasies, though not as distressing as E.F. Bleiler thinks), the Barsoom novels invite us to expand our imaginations as to what it might be like to be on another world. Burroughs, you see, doesn’t just recreate Earth and call it Mars. Barsoom is memorable and feels real – and new.

I’m wandering a lot. I doubt I’ve made much of a consistent point. Perhaps I’ll try, before the end, to summarize and bring it all together. Then again, perhaps not. That’s a great thing about blogging. I can handle my material however I want. This topic is all over the map, so my discussion is also.

I think science fiction shouldn’t be defined merely as fiction that has sci-fi tropes, nor just as fiction that shows how new technologies and scientific discoveries may affect humans. (Harlan Ellison didn’t like the term sci fi, which was, I believe, coined by Forry Ackerman, who loved “pop art” type expressions. Ellison preferred “sf” for science fiction, and proposed that sci fi (which he would reserve for what he thought of as low-brow science fiction) be pronounced “skiffy.” Most serious fans and critics of science fiction as literature use “sf” exclusively.) I think there is also the question of mood.

I would like to draw a contrast between the dominant mood of horror fiction and that of science fiction.

In horror fiction, people have no control. The world is unknowable and attempts to think one’s way out of problems are doomed to fail. Frankenstein is sometimes considered the first modern science fiction novel. But it has the mood of a horror novel. Yes, the monster is created by “science” (actually more alchemy; Baron F gets himself ousted from scientific respectability by studying the works of wizards lime Paracelsus) rather than by magic or demonic summoning. But knowledge is not power and control is an illusion. The Baron is wrong wrong wrong to try to seize the power of God (and that of women, by the way) by creating life. (Asimov referred to the fear of science transgressing the domain of God as “that damned Frankenstein complex!”) In H.P. Lovecraft’s best works, the “elder gods” are really space creatures, not gods. Does this make his work sf? Maybe. But the mood is pure horror. Control is an illusion and attempting it is a path to madness. The unconscious mind dominates horror fiction. Symbolism abounds and nothing is what it seems. Fear is generated by the fact that we are helpless pawns of a universe in which our powers and ourselves are tragically, even comically, meaningless.

The dominant mood of sf is control. We can learn, and know. The universe is fundamentally knowable, and problems can be solved with the rational mind. Things make sense, and await our probes and investigations. There are rules, and beings from here to Andromeda galaxy must all follow them.

I would argue that a novel like Matheson’s I Am Legend, which uses a horror trope (vampires) but explains vampirism as a virus and offers hope that science can solve the problem, is science fiction – at least by mood. (It’s still quite scary.) Whereas Lovecraft, who deploys science fiction tropes like aliens from other worlds, but doesn’t even pretend to suggest that understanding them is advisable or even possible, is pure horror.

What about alternate history? It is typically classed with science fiction. Like Wittgenstein’s game examples (or mine, whatever), it’s hard to see what traits alternate history stories share in common with other books classed as sf. They rarely feature tropes of sci fi (though in a great fusion series, Turtledove tells of a WW2 interrupted by alien invasion!) They don’t at all address how new technologies or scientific discoveries affect human life. Yet, by mood they are more like sf than other fantasies. They are exploring the way that history, almost as a science, might unfold under other initial conditions. Maybe the science here is closer to mathematics. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and chaos theory – the butterfly effect, and all that.

Okay, time to wrap up. I guess I will try to summarize and offer some kind of usable conclusion.

1. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy: fiction which deals with that which is not.
2. Science fiction typically deals with that which could be, or might have been. It should take science seriously, but it doesn’t have to be entirely possible.
3. Science fiction ought to deal with the effect on people – individuals and cultures and organizations and societies – of technologies and discoveries. But it doesn’t absolutely have to.
4. Science fiction (and here is my original and absurd contribution – all of the above is available elsewhere) is as much defined by mood as by content. It is the literature, not necessarily of the possible, but of the rational, the conceivable, the understandable.

Final tally. Is Star Wars science fiction? If you like, but I’d say no. A Princess of Mars? Yes. The Call of Cthulhu? No. The Shrinking Man (also by Matheson, dealing with the utterly impossible shrinking to subatomic size of a man)? Yes. Tolkien-like fantasies where the elf-haunted worlds are other dimensions or other planets? No. Alternate histories (Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick)? Yes.

(A side note. Perhaps you’d like to consider the Barsoom books Fantasy. I won’t fight you. But…what about books that genuinely represented science as known at the time, but are hopelessly outdated now? Like War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells?
Well, Wittgenstein aside, I think a definition to be meaningful at all has to be permanent. Intent is what matters. War of the Worlds? Absolutely!)

In my last essay, I suggested that the definition many philosophers use for free will is not what we actually experience; I implied that there is a “real” free will that the definition doesn’t capture. (Note that there is a third definition – the everyday, non philosophical one – which I will get to soon.) I want to explore these ideas a little now. But first, some motivation for the topic.

Free will is a precious idea to us. It lies at the core of what makes us who and what we are. We are not slaves, nor objects existing at the whim of external forces. We have agency; we determine our course, and steer our ships. Many philosophers believe that free will is a precondition for the existence of morality. How can we blame someone for doing something wrong, if he had no actual choice? We don’t actually blame machines for their actions. They are doing what they are programmed to do. Losing this precious power would be a devastating loss that would strike at the heart of our most cherished feelings about ourselves and our roles within the world, and alter our perceptions of experiences. Just as I feared that my mother’s kiss was rendered meaningless by the fact that atoms don’t touch, now that kiss would be even more destroyed – since she didn’t choose to give it to me. (Read Fritz Leiber’s brilliant, terrifying novel “You’re All Alone” for an excellent picture of what it would be like to be the only “awake” person in a world of “philosophical zombies.”)

I’d like to follow one more tangent before addressing my main point.

I think there are two kinds of powers we might wish we had. The first: powers we might have had. Most of us wish that we could fly. I class this as a power we might have had. If we had evolved on a world with lower gravity, or if we had hollow bones, or even if the laws of physics were different from what they are. So, it is not unreasonable to envy birds and pine for this “missing” ability. We might even resent God for creating us without it (I am speaking metaphorically.) The second kind of power is a power we could never under any conceivable set of circumstances have possessed. This would be a power that was a contradiction; a semantic trick, in a sense. Like being in two places at once, or existing at the same time as we fail to exist. When people say, “Could God create an object that even He could not destroy,” they malign the Almighty with a trick. This power is logically incoherent.

I think that when most people, including philosophers, accept the dire truth about our deterministic universe, they feel this envy and this resentment. After all, why couldn’t we have free will? Why were we created, or why did we evolve, without it? A kinder universe would not have arranged matters so. In any case, we see the “reality” of a world without free will as a bleak one.

I don’t think our reality is bleak. I think we possess the only kind of free will worth wanting (this expression is a paraphrase, I believe fro Daniel Dennett, but my ideas are not.) I think the kind of free will we don’t have is a logically incoherent power, and not worth wanting even if we could have it – which we absolutely cannot. Like touching by atomic collision, it only seems desirable because we have mapped our intuitive notions of freedom onto a bad definition.

Let’s start with the typical philosophical understanding of determinism.

The argument for absolute determinism – the idea that all our choices and actions are “predetermined” and not actually products of our spontaneous will – starts with the proposition that everything that happens is caused by something else. A simple example would be, that if a rock slides down a hill, something must have pushed it, or pulled it, or the ground underneath it must have given way. It wouldn’t simply start down the hill on its own. This push or pull is the cause of the slide – not the rock itself, nor any choice the rock made.

Well, we all know rocks have no free will; they have no will at all. The argument for pure determinism seems to posit that we are so many rocks; what we do is really just another way of saying, what happens to us. Even if we seem to be agents, we cannot be.

Before we come to the reasons why so many philosophers have accepted this startling conclusion, it is important here to consider the difference between the philosophical idea of free will, and the “ordinary” concept.

Let’s use everyone’s favorite, violent metaphor – the gun to the head. Someone puts a gun to your head, and demands that you turn over your money. Now, you probably will do so, but you will say later that you didn’t really want to – you were coerced. This is a perfect example of a non-free-will action. Free will, in the everyday understanding of the concept, involves choices that we make without external coercion. They represent the things we “want” to do.

But, don’t you want to hand your money to the gunman? After all, your life is at stake. I think you are very eager to hand the money over! In a philosophical sense, we have to say that, if free will exists at all, it exists here. You are freely responding to your environment, which just happens to offer you too few good options. Determinists are not committed to the idea that all our decisions are coerced in this way. They want us to understands that all our choices – the choice to turn the money over, or the choice to keep the money if we are not threatened in any way – are all equally predetermined. The gunman seems to have reduced our viable choices to one. Determinists tell us that we always have just one choice – the thing we actually do. (I’ll get back to this “common sense” version later, because it forms the core of what I actually think free will as we should understand it is.)

How is it that all our actions are predetermined this way? Well, let’s take another example. This one will be kind of long, because I need to do what determinists do – close off every avenue of escape. As you read this, and feel your agency slipping away, you will probably start looking for escape routes. There aren’t any. But it’s okay.

Every action you take is caused. Suppose you selected waffles for your breakfast. You feel that you freely chose them – that your choice was not in any way forced upon you. The sun was shining, you had leisure to consider, you weren’t so hungry that you couldn’t think clearly, and you are privileged enough to have many breakfast choices. You simply preferred waffles. What could be more free?

But, why did you prefer waffles? Let’s say you really like waffles. This means that your body chemistry is such that the experience of tasting waffles is more pleasant to you than it probably is for me (I rarely eat them.) Or perhaps you are on a low-protein diet, or perhaps the waffles remind you of your childhood.

Well, okay, you’re thinking. I am motivated to select them, perhaps by unconscious forces. But I am still free to choose!

But, exactly how are you free to choose? Before you even woke up, your body chemistry, your previous diet alignment, and your childhood memories, were already in your brain. The very factors that cause you to choose waffles were already predetermined, waiting their opportunity to affect you.

Ah! You say. But I am no slave to my preferences, or to nostalgia, or to my diet. I could throw all that to the winds, and eat an ice cream sundae!

But – you didn’t. So, in what sense are you saying that you could have done so? There may be two possible answers to this.

One: you could choose not to eat waffles, in ordeer to prove that you are making your own choices, not your chemistry or your memories. But, in order to have any reason to do this, you would need to be challenged to prove it. Perhaps you are reading this right before breakfast, and desire to prove me wrong!

But – that desire is also part of your brain; part of the overall state that inevitably leads to your “choice.” How is it different from your chemical predisposition to prefer waffles? All it means, is that there are competing chemistries, and the more potent one wins. It will always win.

Second: perhaps what you mean by the statement that you could have chosen differently, is that, under the exact same circumstances (with the universe in the exact same initial state, in other words), something different might have happened.

But, this is like saying that if you rewind a film and play it back, the characters on the screen will do something different!

Let’s take another tack: if we could “change” our choices on a second run-through, where would the cause of this change be found? Since nothing in the universe, by hypothesis, would be different, if we behaved differently, this could only mean that our choices are caused by exactly nothing. But, that’s not what we want! We want our choices to be caused by us, rather than by exigent circumstances or pre-existing conditions that act in the role of so many unacknowledged gunman, limiting our choices to one! We never wanted our actions to be purely random, chaotic events that are totally uncaused! *

Basically, the options are two. One: our actions are random uncaused events that might go one way once, but another way another time, even under identical circumstances. Or two: our actions are caused, and can only be what they are, and could never have been otherwise.

Where does this leave our desire for freedom?

I’ll address that next.

*Many scientists and philosophers, who should know better, (like Roger Penrose) refer to quantum mechanics as a possible way out of a deterministic universe. The idea of a “clockwork universe,” wound up at the beginning of time and unfolding in an inevitable manner, goes back to Isaac Newton and even earlier. Newton is well known for it because his idea of universal gravity made it clear that the same forces that govern the earth, also govern the heavens. Many people express determinism as the idea that, if we knew the total state of the universe at any time and totally understood all the laws that act on it, we could predict every future event, including the choices of all so-called agents. Somehow, being predictable seems to many to be the equivalent of being not-free. Quantum mechanics, with its reliance on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, seems to offer a way out. Einstein famously dismissed it with the phrase “I refuse to believe that God plays dice!” Quantum mechanics may restore unpredictability.

But, alas, it doesn’t help. As I pointed out above, absolutely random events aren’t what we are looking for. We want events where we are the cause. Not uncaused events. The trick is deciding what we mean by us.

This is the first, and maybe the last, of many posts about this vexed and vexing topic. I have read and thought about it so often and so intensely that I really need to share my ideas. Sadly, they are neither original nor absurd. Unless (and this is likely, actually) I have misinterpreted what I’ve read badly enough to make nonsensical claims. Well, if I have, then perhaps I had no choice. I was determined from the origin of the universe to make these mistakes. The belief that I might have done otherwise may be an illusion.

I’ll begin with full disclosure: my two favorite philosophers, William James and Henri Bergson (who quite admired each other) both speak up for free will. James, in his essay about the judgment of regret (my essay on which in philosophy class, scribbled at the very last minute, made Fr Moeller at University of Detroit ask me to become a priest), argues that only an insane universe would predetermine its creatures to necessarily feel regret about acts which they had been predetermined to necessarily do. Bergson thinks that originality and freedom are absolutely fundamental to what make us human. Neither argues absolutely persuasively, but I think they’re both right. However, I would consider myself not a libertarian (on this question – don’t get this confused with people who don’t like national parks!) but rather what many philosophers call a “compatibilist.”

I’ll start (different from beginning, I guess) with an anecdote.

I was a peculiar child. I was smart and quiet, and I lived mostly an internal life. My thoughts were my best friends, and what happened amongst them and me constituted the real events of my life. I was barely aware of my surroundings at times.

I wanted to know how things worked, and why they worked, and what the truth was, and how we knew. In single digits age-wise, this was a recipe for trouble. I often asked questions that I wasn’t ready for the answers to, or read books far above my station. Here’s a bizarre example:

I learned at a very young age that objects never really touch each other. It turns out that all matter is composed of atoms, and that the vast majority of the mass – virtually all of it – is contained in the nucleus (composed of protons and neutrons.) Surrounding the nucleus is a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Like charges repel, and this cloud creates a force field that repels other atoms, if they get close enough.

So, what we experience as “touch” – when you press your finger on the table – is actually the interaction of force fields. The nuclei of atoms NEVER touch (except when BOOM events are desired) and even the almost immaterial electrons don’t either.

What was the result of my learning this?

I cried.

I really did. Because, you see, my mother’s lips had never touched my cheek. I had never felt the pages of my beloved books. All things were sundered from each other irrevocably in a cold, cruel world of non-touch.

For years this bothered me. It was only when I was older that I was able to resolve this problem.

IT wasn’t, you see, that touch had existed as a wonderful thing, then been reft away. “Touch” had simply never been what I thought it was. Often, we mistake our intuitive notions of definitions for what those words “actually” mean, as if there were some root, basic meaning open to intuition. I had imagined that “touch” meant “zero distance between the matter in objects.”

But this never happens in nature (maybe in the heart of the Sun, but not your backyard.) What I called touch, and all that it meant to me, has ALWAYS been “electronic field repulsion.”

I think the same is true of “free will.” Those who deny that it exists, I think are denying the reality of what they and others have always believed or characterized it as being. But, I think it never was that.

I will expand on this in “Free Will – Two” (if I ever write it) but here’s a hint: if free will means that I might have done things differently than I did them under identical conditions, then this must mean my choices are not caused by anything at all. Because, if my choices are caused by anything, then those causes are part of the “identical circumstances.” So, this idea of free will – the most common one, I think – describes something that CANNOT exist, or, if it does, would render the whole idea of free will meaningless. (If you really want a candy bar, and so you reach for one – your desire “causing” your action – and then with no cause whatsoever inside or outside yourself, you pull back, this is not free will, it’s a stroke.)

My brother and I have a longstanding discussion topic: James Bond titles.

Ian Fleming had a way with words. His titles (and character names) resonate with a quality that combines a sense of simplicity with sophistication. From single words like “Goldfinger” and “Moonraker” to altered phrases like “You Only Live Twice,” Fleming captured an appealing feel. (Fleming also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with a classic “Bond girl” character – Truly Scrumptious.)

You may disagree. Perhaps you find the sexual innuendo childish and the wordplay obvious. (Pussy Galore? Tiffany Case?) But the point is that there seems to be a “Bond” type of title. Consider some of the novels written about the character by others. “Colonel Sun.” Hmm. It has almost the flavor of “Doctor No” – a title followed by a one-syllable word that can be a name but usually isn’t – but it doesn’t quite work. “No” as a name suggests negativity. It’s vaguely menacing. “Sun” doesn’t really tell me anything. Or what about “No Deals, Mr. Bond.” That one doesn’t even try.

How about the movies, since they ran out of Fleming titles to attach to them? “Tomorrow Never Dies.” Hmm. It has one of the classic Fleming Life/Death words….but….it doesn’t quite make it. “Live and Let Die” is simultaneously absurdist and scary. Tomorrow is a day. We don’t expect it to die. If it could be said to “die” when the sun goes down, then the title is saying … the sun will never go down? I guess that’s a scary thought….

“Goldeneye” was pretty good. But….that was the name of Fleming’s home.

So, the debate is….did Fleming have a unique, irreplicable ability with titles? Or are we just fooled into thinking it because we are so familiar with his actual titles? This would be a testable claim, if only an undiscovered, unheard of Bond draft by Fleming turned up, with title. If my brother or I heard of this title without knowing it was Fleming and concluded that, for the first time, someone else had made fire with two sticks, then we would have some proof. Contrarily, if we decided it “wasn’t Bond-like”, but then after learning it was Fleming, decided it really was after all…well then, we’d know we were reasoning from bias. Sadly, this happy event is highly unlikely.

What makes a good title? I admit I have a particular dislike of using a character’s name as a title. With obvious exceptions – if you have named your character something symbolic or meaningful, like “Doctor No,” then I’m okay with it. But Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Martin Eden….all feel lazy to me. Great books! Great authors! Poor titles.

You might be thinking, “but those books are about those characters. They are character studies!”

I would answer: all novels are about characters. It’s what characterizes the novel and distinguishes it from the short story. Stories are about events; novels are about people.

“Frankenstein” might seem to be an exception. It’s so perfect, right? But that’s a bias. We all know the story! It only seems like a scary name because the book was such a success that that name conjures images that scare us.

“Dracula” is a bit better. A big part of Stoker’s point was a panic at foreign-ness. Dracula is a Romanian name, and readers are unlikely to know anyone by that name, so it attaches more easily to the idea of a particular being. In other words, it’s not just lazily naming the book after the central character, it’s doing a little more with the word. (It’s a little ethnically biased, to be sure.)

“Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” works. It adds “strange case,” which typically wouldn’t satisfy me (“The Life and Death of Martin Eden” is little better, in fact not as good, as just “Martin Eden.”) But the Stevenson title works because even in the title is a sort of play on words. The “and” is a lie.

“Rebecca” also plays a game with the reader (title and novel both.) I won’t spoil the game, but it’s worth it to call the book by that name.

I have to admit to a fondness for titles that actually tell you what the book is about. “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov. “The Puppet Masters” by Heinlein. “Five Boys in a Cave”* by Robert Church. I also like poetic titles that evoke the feel of the book. “The Last Call of Mourning” and “The Sound of Midnight” by Charles L. Grant. I’m much less fond of titles that have a meaning that only makes sense after you’ve read the book, like “Middlemarch” or “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (Christopher Hitchens asked Salman Rushdie what Robert Ludlum, author of”The Bourne Identity” and “The Osterman Weekend,” would have titled Hamlet. Rushdie replied “The Elsinore Vacillation.”)

How important is a good title? I guess it depends. If the work becomes famous like “Frankenstein,” a poor title choice can borrow the glow. (I much prefer the subtitle, “A Modern Prometheus.”)

*This particular book has a special meaning for me. Not because I read it – but because I didn’t. Many, many years ago, my grandfather (a librarian and book lover) brought two books to my house, one for my sister and one for me. We were probably about 10 and 11 at the time. For my sister, Andrew Lang’s “Yellow Fairy Book” (girls, fairies….) For me, “Five Boys in a Cave.” I was in fact a boy.

We promptly traded. I have no idea if she read about those boys. I devoured the Yellow Fairy Book and it began a lifelong love of fairy stories (don’t say fairy tales!) that led me to collect all the “color” fairy books and to meditate on the nature of literature. I may add an essay about how ridiculous people sound to me when they claim to desire “a fairy tale wedding…”

In a previous post, I talked about the downside of immortality – the depressing idea that, if we continue to change and grow, then the time will come (and not too far off) when we would have become unrecognizable to our original selves. And of what value would “survival” be then? I would rather not have a monument to my having existed in the form of someone claiming to be me that I might loathe on sight.

Of course, there is always the terrible fear of death. It naturally dwarfs all our other fears, as it comprehends most of them in its fell domain. I fear being sick. Death means never being well, because I won’t be ‘being’ at all. I fear loss. Death is the loss of everything. I fear poverty…well, you get the idea. But, if death could only be deprived of its finality somehow…It’s really the utter finality of it that is its only terror.

I propose the following thought experiment. It has a bit of a mathematical flavor, I think. It may be no help at all. But, it meets the one requirement of these thoughts – it is, as far as I know, original, and it may well be absurd. (I recently heard that Supreme Court Justice Scalia, when asked to decide an issue about a the nature of the game of golf and whether walking the course was essential to it, said something like “this is an incredibly difficult and silly question.”)

So, here it is. Suppose I was a supernatural being, and I came to you with good news: death is not final! You shall live again, in any way like. As pure spirit, in your own body, on a parallel earth or in heaven, or reincarnated in some more desired form. There’s only one thing….

There’s a waiting period. You (your essence, spirit, mind, memory) will be asleep for a time. A sound and dreamless sleep. I guarantee you that, when you awaken, you will have no sense of time having passed. Your first thought will be the last one you had when you died. There will be no change in you. No sleep crumbs in your eyes, no odd disconnected sense of having missed things.

Would you mind? Would it terrify you that this deep, dreamless sleep, a coma really, is a form of nonexistence?

I don’t suppose you would mind that much. So long as death isn’t final, and so long as you aren’t aware in any way of being nonexistent. After all, you will close your eyes, and without any sense of the passage of time, you will open them again upon your new and endless life. (If you have thought of an objection – that your friends would have gone on without you and lived again after their deaths during this waiting period, and you would have missed sharing their afterlife – no worries; everyone waits for a like interval.)

So, you don’t mind not existing. That’s what it comes down to. You don’t mind not existing; you just mind never coming back.

So, how long would you be willing to be in suspended animation? A year? Ten? A hundred?

What about a billion….a trillion….a number so large there is no name for it?

Perhaps you are horrified at the scope of such a time period. It’s a natural feeling. The vertiginous quality of such a yawning abyss of time would give anyone the heebie jeebies. But, the important thing is, you’re no more aware of an eon than of an instant. So…may I take it you don’t object to a time period of indeterminate length?

But this is leading to the concept mathematicians call “infinity.” Or, in the context of time, eternity. In other words, if you pick an interval, be it ever so large…may I add a year to it? Just a year. But of course your interval plus my year is another interval, and as the original interval was arbitrary anyway, we may take yours plus a year to be the original, and I renew my question…may I add a year? Just one?

So…you will rest easily for an infinite time, and then, awaken to a wonderful new life. We can guarantee this awakening, and make it any kind you like, since it won’t happen in any time period that requires us to prove that it CAN happen in that time period.

I don’t even need actual infinity for this. I can set it up as a theorem that neatly avoids infinity (as Riemann and other did for calculus.)

Afterlife Theorem: Any afterlife you wish will and does exist, so long as it needn’t be realized in any period of time short enough that the physical objections to its existence become an insurmountable obstacle to its existence.

You see? You needn’t sleep forever. Just…long enough. And, who is to say how long that is?

But…you really weren’t worried about sleeping…remember? It wasn’t nonexistence, however long, that bothered you.

So…don’t be bothered.

(Postscript: Recall Lovecraft’s couplet: “That is not dead which can aeternal lie/ And with strange eons, even death may die.”)

I walk upon the carpet of crunching leaves; dying husks;

In their final days, they reveal all their colors – they die

More beautifully than they ever lived.  But they die.

The night air is crisp; I pull it into my lungs like a diver who has just surfaced

After being deep, deep beneath the air

For a long, long time. 

Deep, in darkness unfathomable and cold that he can’t feel anymore.

The moon is full; a moon that transforms men into beasts, they’ve said.

But it doesn’t transform me. (Would that it could! To walk under its light,

And feel my skin and bones and muscles drinking in that glow, and becoming

Something new.)

My feet spurn miles as the night advances toward dawn,

But I know the world turns so much faster beneath me.

Am I going along with its movement, so that it pushes me on ahead before it

Like a leaf caught in a breeze?

Or am I breasting its current, and losing ground with every step?

It doesn’t matter.

It’s Halloween night.  The one night when I walk under the moon and drink the starlight.

The one night when I rise, I rise from lightless unfathomables,

To hear the leaves in their dying. To follow the curve of the earth and long

To be transformed.

Isn’t that what was promised?  To be transformed.  Like a child,

Shedding her costume after a long night, and being no longer

A ghost, or a pirate queen, or a bumblebee.

As I shed my flesh, or thought I had.

But I am flesh; flesh that yearns, flesh that seeks, flesh that walks.

But only on Halloween night.  And only while the moon and stars rule heaven.

I’m glad, to walk.  I thrill to the crunch of the leaves, the crisp in the air, the light of the moon.

I’m glad, that the grave isn’t forever.  I don’t know how I emerge, or how I am clothed

In flesh.  I seek no one; could they see me if I did? Yet I avoid them.

Perhaps that is the nature of the dead.  Yet I am glad, to walk in their world, just once again,

Before a year of sleep, in lightless fathoms.

I am glad.

But, Oh!  To be transformed!

Isn’t that what was promised?