Yet
another apocalypse? Bookstores and cinemaplexes are rife with them. Are authors
and readers/viewers everywhere sensing something in the air? As that may be,
this one is a little different. We’ve seen civilization brought to its knees in
apocalyptic fiction by plagues, asteroids, zombies, nuclear war, alien
invasion, and a myriad other causes. How about flies? This one has flies. A
mutated species of fly is infesting the world. It doesn’t spread disease in the
usual sense. There is no bacterium or virus. Illness isn’t spread person to
person. Instead, the fly’s saliva provokes a fatal autoimmune response in humans
and only in humans. The fly then lays eggs in the corpse it has provided for
itself: all in all a plausible life cycle. Only a handful of people are immune.
The flies have spread so fast that societies are overwhelmed by demands on
health care and basic services.
Unusually
for catastrophe-fiction, which tends to be action-adventure, A Necessary End is character driven. The
central characters Nigel and Abby, who had marital problems even before the
arrival of the flies, face their fates with very different philosophies. Nigel
is a firm rationalist determined to find physical causes and scientific
solutions while Abby relies on her faith. Other characters react with anger,
superstition, resolve, generosity, or violence according to their nature and
circumstances. Who lives or dies is less important to the story than how they
do.
A
collaboration between Sarah Pinborough and F. Paul Wilson, both talented
authors of horror tales (among other works), A Necessary End is a quick read and is as pleasurable as any story
with this premise can be. If you’re in the back seat on a modestly lengthy road
trip and have had enough both of scenery and your iPhone, this should keep you
occupied for the duration.
There
is a 1991 episode of Star Trek Next Generation
titled “Darmok” in which the Enterprise has a rendezvous with an alien species called
Tamarians whose speech is impenetrable. (The “universal translator” wasn’t ever
mentioned in the Next Generation, but
it turns up in the later Star Trek
prequel series Enterprise and
back-explains the oddity that everyone in the galaxy seems to speak English; they
really don’t, but a miniature wearable device translates in real time; it
evidently fails with the Tamarians.) When the Tamarians speak, the Enterprise
crew can understand all of their words but none of their sentences. They say things
like "Mirab, his sails unfurled" and "Sokath - his eyes
uncovered." Finally Counselor Troi perceives the blindingly obvious. “Imagery
is everything to the Tamarians,” she says. “It embodies their emotional states,
their very thought processes. It's how they communicate, and it's how they
think.”
It
is my suspicion that this episode was inspired by a book that made a splash in
1980 entitled Metaphors We Live By.
On my reading list for the past 35 years, I got around to it last week. We are
Tamarians. Civilizations don’t have knees, books don’t normally splash unless
you throw them in a pond, and for that matter we are not Tamarians, but I
assume the reader understands those images when I use them. Metaphors are our
dominant way of expressing ourselves. Most often we aren’t even aware they are
metaphors. For example, most of us would not consider the phrase “inflation is
rising” to be a metaphor, but it is. Inflation is not an object that rises up
or lowers down (“up” and “down” themselves being directions related to our
human experience); it is an abstraction to which we give a numerical value
based on a particular set of data. Yet we understand “inflation rises.” We
understand “moral fiber,” “falling in love,” "blindingly obvious," "food for thought," “packaging your ideas,” an “ugly
side to his personality,” and “a solution to her problems.” Chemistry and math
both work for that last one: take your pick. Yet, if we spoke to an alien
species about the “foundations of friendship” (friendship as a building with
foundations) or "foundations of a theory" they might well be utterly baffled.
Lakoff
and Johnson argue that metaphor is the way humans experience reality. It's how we
communicate, and it's how we think. The nature of our biological and social
existence forms the basis of our metaphors. The biggest challenge of ever
getting a computer to think like a human is precisely that computers don’t
experience the world in the same way we do. Our metaphors in turn shape our
views and actions. Consider the (often unspoken) metaphor that debate is a
battle in which one attacks an opponent’s positions, defends one’s own, and
either wins or loses. How would a debate differ if instead of a battle metaphor
we viewed it as a dance? The authors also discuss the limitations of both
objectivism and subjectivism as philosophical systems. They make their point
that human understanding is experiential and that new ideas are built upon
those experiences, which is to say they are almost inevitably metaphorical.
This is fine, they say, but it is “important to realize that the way we have
been brought up to perceive our world is not the only way and that it is
possible to see beyond the ‘truths’ of our culture.”
You
won’t finish this book in the back seat on that road trip. But if you’re inside
on a rainy weekend, the book is worth the time it takes to read.
Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart