Oh the Humanity

In the ongoing lockdown there is time to sample yet more “overlooked” scifi television shows. The British series Humans is not short-lived in the usual sense. There are three seasons. Yet, the show never did build a sizable audience either in the UK or US. I caught a couple of episodes on AMC back in 2015 but, while intriguing, they were non-sequential mid-season episodes, so the story arc was confusing. Whatever intention I had of restarting the series from the beginning to clear up the storyline was soon forgotten – and stayed so until this past weekend. Season 1 is on DVD and the following seasons are on streaming services including Amazon Prime. So far I’ve watched only season 1, which consists of 8 episodes.

Questions about Artificially Intelligent (AI) humaniform robots are as old as the word “robot.” The word was coined by Czech playwright Karel Čapek and appears in his drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) published in 1920. Rossum’s robots are intelligent but not conscious, which is to say they don’t experience that meta-state of not only knowing but knowing that one knows. They don’t, that is, until a do-gooder who is worried about their exploitation (a concept the robots simply don’t understand any more than your car understands it) arranges to tweak the manufacturing process so that they do have consciousness and a sense of having rights. Naturally, the robot uprising swiftly follows. The trope has recurred in scifi ever since including the Terminator franchise and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve written a couple short stories myself, e.g. Circuits Circus. There is life in the notion still, abetted by the voiced worries of such serious people as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk (among many others) that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.

In Humans, the stakes are much more personal than in most examples of the genre, and the show is better for it. The setting is an alternate present in which technology is basically the same as our present-day real world in all ways except AI robotics. The robots (“synths”) have permeated factories, offices, homes (as domestic servants), hospitals, and (of course) the red light districts. Humans have become economically dependent on them, yet many resent the loss of purpose they feel because the machines can do their jobs better. Many treat the machines in ways that, because they look human, are disturbing. The household models are apt to generate jealousy because most are attractive. (Is it cheating if a spouse employs a non-conscious machine for erotic purposes?)

Anyway, the Hawkins family (husband, wife, and three kids) acquires a domestic synth (Gemma Chan) that, unknown to them, is not a new machine but a stolen, repackaged, and illegally rebooted device. It behaves oddly for a synth, demonstrating a capacity for empathy and for telling white lies. The synth is actually one of five that were upgraded to full consciousness by a rogue scientist named David Elster before his death. They scattered to avoid discovery. The conscious synths fear that humans will fear them (remember R.U.R.?) so they try to remain undercover. The rogue scientist’s son tries to help with that. There are subplots involving each of the conscious synths (all five have distinct personalities), an ailing former colleague (William Hurt) of Elster, police detective partners, and a hunter who believes conscious synths exist.

The show is smartly written. It raises questions about the nature of consciousness, nature versus nurture, and what it means to be human. Is a biological body necessary to qualify? What of human rights? Are they literally that or do they belong to any being able to truly understand the question and demand them? The personal dramas, meantime, are credible once one allows for the incredible premise.

I doubt we will face such questions for real anytime soon. The old joke about fusion power (20 years away: always has been, always will be) is easily modified to be about conscious AI (50 years away: always has been, always will be). That is, however, just a joke. If not ourselves, our descendants may well face them. I’d actually give better odds on that than on fusion power.

Thumbs Up on Humans, but watch the show from the beginning as I neglected to do in 2015.

Humans: Trailer Season 1

About Time

Many TV shows, while praised by critics, fail to build enough of an audience to impress the networks’ producers and so are canceled after one season – sometimes two. The poster child for this is Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which failed to last even one season, but it has plenty of company:  another Whedon show, Dollhouse, among them. Nowadays, their brief lives can be revisited on DVD and streaming services. A recent WhatCulture video recommended ten such short-lived TV series in the scifi genre. A few on the list that I had overlooked while they were on the air looked interesting, and the current “stay at home” virus-control policies make this a good time to sample them. The first arrived in the mail last weekend: Flashforward, which lasted a single season on ABC in 2009. It’s about time.

Humans have puzzled over the nature of time since ancient... well… times. Is the universe deterministic? Does the future follow from the past in an unalterable cascade of cause and effect so that “choice” is an illusion? Do the future and the past in some way coexist so that it is merely human perception that is limited to a “present”? Kurt Vonnegut took this position in his scifi novel Slaughterhouse-Five in which the protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time”; he experiences parts of his life in nonlinear order but, while his consciousness relocates to earlier moments in his life (repeatedly) as often as it jumps forward, he is never able to change a single word or to act differently because “that is the way things are structured.” Others insist that Vonnegut was wrong and the future is not fixed but entirely random: the uncertainty principle writ large. Strangely enough, this idea long predates current physics. In his book De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius (c. 50 BCE) declares that matter consists of atoms in motion but that the motions have “swerves” that make the universe nondeterministic. Yet others argue that all possible outcomes occur simultaneously: the “many worlds” theory so beloved by scifi writers. Though unprovable, this has gotten surprising support from some eminent scientists including Stephen Hawking. Whether there is room for free will in any of those scenarios is another ancient debate.

In the first few minutes of the first episode of Flashforward, the entire population of earth simultaneously loses consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. You can imagine what happens on highways and airports among other places. In in a budget-busting sequence impressive for a TV show, we see the disaster unfold in Los Angeles. We learn later that 20,000,000 people worldwide died in the event. When everyone else wakes up, all but a small minority have had a vision of 2 minutes and 17 seconds of their own lives 6 months in the future. The minority who didn’t have a vision wonder if that means they will die before then. Is the future fixed? Are the visions accurate? At first they seem to be. In the months following the blackout events large and small seem to unfold inexorably toward creating the circumstances in the visions. Then one character, who had seen a future in which he will be very much alive but unhappy, commits suicide just to prove that human choices still matter – that the river of future events, despite a strong impetus to flow a particular way, can be diverted by determined canal-digging.

The show centers primarily on members of a special FBI task force designed to uncover the cause of the blackout, on their families, and on scientists who in fact were responsible. There is more than a little soap opera in the depiction of the lives of the characters, but not so much as to make the viewer’s eyes roll. There is also suspense, a dark conspiracy to be uncovered, and a looming risk of a second blackout/flashforward event. The final episode ends on the day of everyone’s flashforward, so the series does complete at least that much of the story. Not all questions are answered and many teasers are set up for a second season that never happened. Nonetheless the show has an interesting premise and good enough writing to justify a weekend binge-watch. Thumbs Up.

In an unplanned synchronous event (a real one: not one onscreen), a scifi novel that arrived from Amazon in the same package as Flashforward also has at its center questions about consciousness, time, and choice: Recursion by Blake Crouch. Perhaps my selection of the title from a list of book recommendations on the website was influenced (without much deliberate thought) by the DVD purchase. As that may be, the novel offers a different take on time.

In 2018 in NYC, detective Barry Sutton fails to talk Ann Voss Peters off a 41^st story ledge. She reveals before she jumps that she is suffering from False Memory Syndrome (FMS), a strange neurological disorder with an unknown cause that is increasing in frequency among the populace. People with FMS recall two entirely distinct life histories at the same time – including different children and spouses. They know which memories are “real” but the other set is also fully detailed and vivid. Sutton remembers his own real life all too accurately: his teenage daughter was killed in an auto accident, which precipitated the breakup of his marriage. He decides to follow up on the jumper case by interviewing a man Ann falsely remembered having married.

The setting jumps back to 2007. We meet scientist Helena Smith who is working on memory enhancement. She hopes her work will alleviate Alzheimer’s, a disease from which her mother suffers. Super-rich young tech wiz Marcus Slade offers to finance her work, but it develops that he has his own agenda. What if consciousness needn’t be fixed in time? What if you could (with technical assistance) evoke a memory and, like Billy Pilgrim, shift your present-day consciousness to that earlier time. What if, unlike Billy Pilgrim, you could then choose to act differently than the first time around? It is practical time travel. What if Helena Smith’s invention can do just that for you? As you might imagine, the technology would be dangerous in the wrong hands (are there right hands?) as it could wreak havoc with the timeline.

You probably see where this is going and the connection to FMS. The lives of Sutton, Slade, and Smith cross – in most futures anyway.

Thumbs Up on the book, too.

What is the true nature of time in reality? I don’t pretend to have the answer when Nobel Prize winners disagree about it. Nor do I know if free will “really” exists – if we really make choices. But, as I recently wrote in a blog on BF Skinner, as a practical matter we not only do have choices but we have no choice but to make choices. [Irony intended.] Whatever the ultimate underlying cosmic reality might be, we have to hold people (not the universe) accountable for the decisions they make, which means we have to assume people make them. The assumption, right or wrong, is a condition of existence. Existentialists need not yet retire. Choices matter, like it or not.

Trailer: Flashforward

Lately Craig

Late night talk shows were a staple of my viewing habits until several years ago when the appeal faded. I’m not entirely sure of the reason for the fade. Perhaps the increased politicization on display has something to do with it in an era when plenty of that is available… well… everywhere else. Then again, maybe I just like getting to sleep an hour earlier nowadays. As that may be the last late night talk show I made a point of watching was The Late Late Show hosted by Craig Ferguson. It was rarely intellectually taxing but at one o’clock in the morning one rarely wants something that is. It was pleasant silliness, which was a good way to end a day full of much harsher realities.

No one plans a career as a television talk show host – or, if anyone does, he or she almost certainly will be disappointed. The gig goes to someone who has made enough of a mark somewhere else in entertainment to catch the attention of a producer in search of a host. Craig Ferguson, raised in the post-war housing projects in Glasgow Scotland, tried his hand with varying degrees of success as a drummer, actor, stand-up comedian, novelist, and screenwriter (The Big Tease). He caught the attention of producers at CBS and was offered the chair of The Late Late Show in 2005. He sat in it until 2015. The show aired 12:35 to 1:35 a.m. weeknights just after David Letterman. The show contained reliably enjoyable low budget humor plus casual banter with guests.

I tend to be suspicious of memoirs and autobiographies. An author’s all-too-human impulse to self-justification all too frequently muddies the waters of truth. I sometimes read them anyway while keeping a saltshaker handy. The better ones still contain insights not obtainable from third parties. Riding the Elephant by Craig Ferguson is one of the better ones. Very little about The Late Late Show is in the book. In fact, very little about the substance of any of his show business career is in it. It is a more personal memoir than that. It deals with his childhood, his youth, his battle with alcohol, his marriages, his move to Los Angeles, his kids, tattoos, the experience of aging, and the acquisition of aspects of wisdom a bit too late (which is so much better than never). Naturally his career history intersected with all of that, but it isn’t at the center of the book.

Ferguson retired from the show by his own wishes – and even extended his stay by six months to give CBS more time to find a replacement – but he does express some satisfaction that he doesn’t have to deal with the current walk-on-eggshells environment in which so many folks seek out ways to be offended. In a format where most of the dialogue is extemporaneous and intended to keep an audience amused, there is always a risk of a random quip that doesn’t land well. There was some of that even during his stint, of course. “Occasionally I’d find myself in the doghouse for some stupid comment I’d made the night before. I once had to apologize to the entire country of Australia for calling their capital city a shithole… I should not have said that Canberra was a shithole, I should have said it was allegedly a shithole.” Youtube clips are forever, however, so he still gets flak for old silly banter that is by any reasonable standard harmless.

He recounts the change of perspective that occurs to anyone with a few decades in the rear view mirror. Example: “One of the interesting quirks of the aging process is that events that seemed to have little or no impact at the time resonate with thunderous importance later on, like an expertly constructed detective novel. I thought it was the relationship with Gillian that was important, but at this point in my life, the half-hour conversation with Allison seems much more significant.” Allison was a young woman he met in the 1970s who died six months after that conversation.

The book ends with a sentimental fictional short story about an old woman named Margret in Glasgow. It seems out of place until one recalls his memory in an earlier chapter of an “old lady who died alone in a Glasgow tenement. What was her name? Margret, probably. Who will write her story? I will. I’ll make it up and it’ll be true, like a lot of stories.”

Upshot: Thumbs up for a more or less true life story by a natural raconteur.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: clip from 2009 with Shirley Manson

Shrinking the Joker

It’s an old observation that comic book characters in the modern world have replaced the demigods and heroes of ancient mythology. Modern-day comic book superheroes are just Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, et al. in tights. Sometimes the borrowings are literal as in the case of Marvel’s Asgardians. Ares spars with DC’s Wonder Woman. More often, though, the debt is unspoken. The ancient heroes proved their mettle against bizarre and challenging adversaries just as comic book heroes do today. For example, Procrustes (who must have gotten lousy reviews on Yelp as an Airbnb host) stretched travelers or chopped off their legs so they would fit his bed exactly. The Joker surely would approve. It is exactly his brand of humor: funny only to himself. The myths persist in their original and modern forms because they reveal something about real people: our aspirations, fears, better natures, and dark desires. When Aphrodite struck down Hippolytus for disrespecting her or Dionysus struck down Pentheus for failing to give him proper due, we understand (as did the ancients) that the mortals really were destroyed for denying aspects of their own natures. The better-written comic books also speak to us about who we are, or fear we are, or want to be.

Dennis O’Neil, author of several Batman comics, wrote that readers’ reactions to Joker killing Robin in one of the stories “taught me that I wasn’t just doing for-hire work, that these things were important to people. I realized that comic-book and some other media characters are all modern folklore, so I should pay some attention to that and not be as cavalier about it as I’d been.” He made this comment in the introduction to Batman and Psychology, one of numerous books on the mindsets of superheroes. The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration by Jennifer Canzoneri and Robin S. Rosenberg is a particularly useful one since it covers several of them.

As in ancient times, heroes are defined as heroes by the villains they oppose. What of the  psychology of villains? They have not been ignored. A worthy entry to the genre, The Joker: Evil Clowns and the Women Who Love Them, arrived in the mail last week. Edited by Travis Langley, it is a collection of essays by a mix of academics, forensic psychologists, and comic book authors on the psychology of the Joker – taking account of three distinct phases in his representation since 1940. The underlying discussion (which makes it relevant beyond comic book fandom) is about criminal psychopathy in actual life. The Joker merely serves as an illustration. Harley gets commentary in the book as well.

Psychopathy by itself is not actually regarded as a disorder. It is not listed as such in the current DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Psychopaths are not unhappy on account of their condition, and most lead (as a result of self-serving calculation) productive law-abiding lives. They often are charming until you get to know them better. (In essence, just being a jerk is not a mental problem.) However, psychopathy in combination with other factors that form Antisocial Personality Disorder is a problem. It is one of the “dark triad” of personality traits so common in chronic criminals: narcissism (extreme egotism), Machiavellianism (manipulative behavior), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). Add sadism (joy in the suffering of others) to form a “dark tetrad” and you will have not just an ordinary criminal but a serial killer. You have a Joker. Wrote forensic psychologist Robert D. Hare on people with these traits: “Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person’s expense.”

(Note: Everyone has dark personality traits, especially those who deny it. We all have the opposite positive traits, too. The question is which traits are dominant. A little propensity for schadenfreude does not make a serial killer.)

The original Joker was a murderer who liked to taunt the police. His first words in his very first comic book appearance in 1940 were, “Tonight, at precisely twelve o’clock midnight, I will kill Henry Claridge and steal the Claridge diamond.” Then, during the decades-long phase when comics strove to be family-friendly he was prankishly criminal but not-lethal. In his current incarnation he again is a killer but has acquired a nihilistic philosophy. From The Dark Knight: “I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair!” Our understanding of all three Jokers (and of their real-world counterparts) benefits from a psychological discussion. Joker’s relationship with Harley Quinn, and hers with him, are particularly revealing.

Harley, too, has evolved since her appearance in 1992. Her actions in early storylines are best characterized in terms of Stockholm Syndrome and the pathology of codependents in abusive relationships. Her more recent representations are less sympathetic but more interesting. True, she allows herself to be manipulated, but “allows” is the key word. She makes her own choices for her own reasons, and any traumas that might have influenced those choices are older than her interactions with Joker. She is not a psychopath, which in a moral sense makes her more culpable for her actions but it also makes her more redeemable. (See earlier post Harleen Casts a Shadow below.)

Can the Joker (and his real world counterparts) be cured? Though some therapists contend that everyone can be mended or at least helped, the broader consensus is that the prospect is bleak. Langley quotes Dr. Robert Hare: “It’s difficult to be a therapist and not believe everyone has some capacity for positive change. However, I think they’re wrong and that this thinking can be dangerous in the wrong setting." Harley has a better chance although there is a caveat: “The therapies for Harley all call for her to be open to help.” There is an old joke that is bad enough to be in the Joker’s repertoire (though to my knowledge it isn’t): How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the bulb has to want to change.

Melanie – Psychotherapy

Homespun Movies

One of two cases

Today most movies viewed at home are streamed over Netflix or Amazon Prime or some similar service. Nonetheless, DVDs hang on. They have accumulated on my shelves since the days when they were the cutting edge in home video. It is silly to keep them without an intent to re-watch them at some point. In the current situation, as health authorities urge us to stay in our homes, it is as good a time to revisit some as any. These are seven (one per day) I spun up last week. All are worth a look. That is not a happy accident. I’ve thinned out the shelves during random re-watch schemes over the years (as long-term readers – there are a few – of this blog might be aware) by discarding the most groan-worthy. A few of the flicks below accordingly have received mention on this site before, but a second shout-out won’t hurt, so let’s do it again.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) – This silent film stars Kansas-born Louise Brooks though it was filmed in Germany. Plot: an unmarried teen named Thymian has a child thereby prompting Thymian’s hypocritical father to send her to a reformatory while placing the baby in the care of a midwife. The reformatory is run by a perverse sadomasochistic couple. Thymian escapes with another girl who takes a romantic interest in her. She discovers that the baby has died in the midwife’s care. She then goes to work in a brothel for a kindly old madam and marries a Count. This is a fascinating film on many levels.

The Philadelphia Story (1940) – The list of my top ten favorite movies has altered quite a bit over time, but in my adult life The Philadelphia Story always was on it and still is. Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) divorced Dexter (Cary Grant) after a short tempestuous marriage, and now plans to marry the self-made nouveau riche George (John Howard), who lacks not only the easy grace of old money but lacks its relaxed morality as well. A tabloid newspaper sends reporter Macaulay (Jimmy Stewart) and photographer Elizabeth (Ruth Hussey) to cover the high society marriage. Macaulay is so self-satisfied in his disdain for the privileged class that Tracy calls him out for being a snob: “You're the worst kind there is. An intellectual snob. You made up your mind awfully young, it seems to me.” Throw in Tracy’s precocious younger sister, her crapulous uncle, and a father with a taste for chorus girls. Stir with dialogue that is intelligent, sophisticated, and funny (if occasionally un-PC), and you have a bona fide movie classic.

Hold That Ghost (1941) – No one expects an Abbott and Costello movie to be Shakespeare, but this is one of their better vehicles. The duo (here named Chuck and Ferdie) are gas station attendants who by dumb luck are in a car with gangster Moose Mattson when he is killed in a shootout with police. The terms of Mattson’s will state that, since he doesn’t know whom of his friends to trust, whoever is with him when he dies inherits his estate. The boys find they now own a spooky and isolated roadhouse: a former speakeasy and gambling joint. Moose’s money is rumored to be in the house. Strange things start to happen when they are stranded there overnight with other bus passengers. Perhaps the house is haunted or perhaps other gangsters are after the money. The movie is silly in the ways one expects with these two, but it has some comic moments that still work and it features numbers by the Andrews Sisters.

King Creole (1958) – This Elvis Presley movie was made just before his stint in the army and is the best of any of them, before or after. Later films contain his most iconic movie numbers (e.g. the duet with Ann Margret in Viva Las Vegas) but as a movie the noir melodrama King Creole stands out. Elvis plays a high school dropout in New Orleans who gets a chance as a night club singer, but he makes some seriously bad choices and runs afoul of a gangster (Walter Matthau). He is torn between two women, nice girl Nellie (Dolores Hart) and the worldly Ronnie. A pre-Morticia Carolyn Jones is perfect as the over-educated moll Ronnie. When she flirts with Elvis on orders from her boss, Elvis complains, “Your heart wouldn’t be in it.” “You wouldn’t miss it,” she answers. This film was Elvis’ favorite, too.

The Night Stalker (1972) was a TV movie that served as a pilot for the short-lived TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75). A pushy newspaper reporter (Darren McGavin) willing to think outside the box suspects that a Las Vegas serial killer is a vampire. The movie also stars Carol Lynley. 25 years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a 1997-2003 TV show that I hold in high regard, unlike the 1992 movie) this film and the subsequent series had a similar combination of horror and understated comedy that clicked well. What Kolchak didn’t have that Buffy later did (besides teenage characters) were character evolution, multi-episode story arcs, and philosophical themes. Kolchak had a “monster of the week” format instead. Nonetheless, as a standalone modestly budgeted movie The Night Stalker isn’t bad.

Great Balls of Fire (1989)

For a brief moment in the 1950s, rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis (b.1935) was as big as Elvis. When tabloids reported that he had married his 13-year-old cousin, however, his career crashed. He never fully recovered his popularity, though he continued to work in smaller venues and to record – and still does despite a 2019 stroke. Despite some trite and stereotypical elements, this movie is a surprisingly good depiction of Lewis’ rise, fall, and survival. It stars Dennis Quaid, a young Winona Ryder, and the music of Jerry Lee Lewis.

Crash (1996), not to be confused with the 2004 movie of the same title, is directed by David Cronenberg and is based on the novel by JG Ballard. Cronenberg, a Toronto native, set the movie version of Crash in Ontario instead of the UK, which changes the tone but not the substance. The central character is named James Ballard (yes, really) and is played by James Spader. James barely survives a head-on crash that kills the other driver; he then encounters and becomes erotically involved with the other driver’s wife, played by Holly Hunter, who also was injured in the crash. They fall in with fetishists who tap into primal eroticism through car crashes. This group is led by the philosopher-artist Vaughan (Elias Kotias). Rosanna Arquette brings a special weirdness to her fetishist character Gabrielle. JG Ballard had a notion that modern life is so at variance with the natural world in which people evolved that it takes very little push to make us a little crazy – in this case tangling car crashes with eroticism. Rated NC-17, Crash is creepy, violent, sexually graphic, and not for the easily offended. But, in its own warped way, it has something interesting to say. Be selective with whom you share it, though; many viewers truly hate it.

A Re-Watch Anthem:

The Beach Boys – Do It Again

Farmer’s Future

Every book – or movie for that matter – is a product of its time, and never more glaringly so than when it is “ahead of its time.” This is especially manifest in science fiction where every laudatory response of the type “Wow, I can’t believe this was written back in 1957” will be paired with a headshaking “Wow, this was written in 1957, alright.” The imaginative, freethinking, and socially unconventional HG Wells, for example, is nonetheless deeply grounded in +-1900 in ways that were invisible to himself. His unconventionality is very much of a Victorian/Edwardian brand. As a screen example, the otherwise groundbreaking Forbidden Planet is infused with 1950s sexual dynamics. The best works rise above their time even while remaining rooted in it, however, by revealing constant truths – truths which may be publically discussed in some eras, but only whispered in others. It is currently fashionable not to make allowances for past mores that are unacceptable today – a judgmental fashion that no doubt itself will cause eye rolls among our descendants – but one gets the most out of older fiction by doing so. That applies to one novel on my nightstand this past weekend; it is enjoyable if read in the context of its publication date.

Scifi master Philip Jose Farmer published Flesh in 1968, the high water mark of the counterculture that was so integral to the decade 1965 to 1974. The book arrived from Amazon on Friday. As you might imagine there is not much social distancing in it. (An earlier shorter version came out in 1960, but he rewrote it extensively in 1968.) It is very much of its era. And yet, it is much older, too.

A starship crew has sought out and found new habitable worlds. Thanks to sleep stasis and time dilation, they are not much older than when they left although 800 years have passed on earth. They return to a widely depopulated post-apocalyptic world on which technology is no more than 17^th century (sail and animal power) in every way but biology: a religious order is quite skilled at bioengineering. The North American Eastern Seaboard is divided into several entities including Caseyland (New England), Deecee (New York to Virginia), Pants-Elf (Pennsylvania), and Karelia (a Finnish colony bracketing the others to north and south). The societies differ significantly but they play each other in a deadly variety of baseball. The balls are steel with spikes, the bats have metal plates, and it is perfectly legal for the pitcher to kill the batter (or a runner) by hitting him with the ball if he can. Casualties are expected.

The ship lands in the former city of Washington in Deecee. The crew discovers a pagan society dedicated to a fertility cult of the triple White Goddess (manifested by the waxing, full, and waning moon) whom they call Columbia. (They assume the White House is dedicated to her.) While men occupy many prominent secular offices (with titles such as John Barleycorn and Tom Tobacco), they are just executing the policies of the priestesses in this fundamentally matriarchal society. Arriving shortly before the winter solstice, the starship captain, whose name happens to be Stagg, is modified with antlers that hormonally influence him to behave according to his intended role as the year’s designated sun-king (having actually arrived out of the sky) in Deecee’s central mythology. The crew at first think they have landed amidst a free love free-for-all, but they have not. The orgiastic goings-on are ritualistic, which is not the same thing – they are a seasonal rite. The book interweaves the stories of three crewmembers (one of them Stagg) who try to make sense of and survive in the new world.

Philip Jose Farmer clearly was strongly influenced by Robert Graves’ 1948 book The White Goddess – and also by Frazer and Campbell though Graves seems to have had the biggest impact. The White Goddess is a rewarding read, though a difficult one for anyone not well-grounded in (at the very least) classical mythology and preferably Celtic as well. Robert Graves (classicist, poet, novelist – author of I, Claudius) argues (as does Frazer) that Neolithic (i.e. farming, but pre-urban and pre-copper) or earlier peoples throughout northern Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean basin shared similar fundamentally matriarchal religions based on the seasons and the cycle of birth, life, and death. Their rituals involved a chosen sun-king who was either figuratively or literally sacrificed at the solstice under the auspices of the Triple Goddess (maiden, matron, crone) represented by the moon. Elements of this primal myth underlie later more masculinized mythologies of early civilizations; they are there to be uncovered if you look for them as are the ways in which they were transformed by the rise of warrior states. He looks for them, finds them, discusses the evolution of mythology from earlier to later forms, and additionally comments on such matters as tree alphabets and pre-literate numbering systems that had occult significance. He further argues these elements are still embedded in our culture (however obscurely) and that all true poetry (not everything that scans is poetry) figuratively or literally expresses some aspect of this most ancient myth:

“My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry.”

Anthropologists differ on the value of Grave’s analysis. Some dismiss it outright as wholly imaginary, some find the evidence (admittedly interpretative) for it compelling, while others are agnostic since at this distance in time there is no way to prove or disprove the thesis. Something about it seems right to many readers though, for the book has been influential on historians, psychologists, major literary figures as well as pop culture authors such as Farmer, and practitioners of the pagan revival including Wicca. As to whether priestesses of Columbia will be grafting antlers onto sun-kings’ heads in our future, I guess we’ll have to wait 800 years to find out.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Pagan Baby