I’ve long been a fan of Roger Ebert’s film criticism, so how could I resist “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”? Chaz Ebert (his widow) introduces it thus:
In honor of World UFO Day we are reprinting Roger’s unfinished science fiction story about a phenomenon on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In 2013, I invited readers to write an ending to Roger’s tale and we got so many good ones that I asked our Far Flung Correspondent Krishna Shenoi to illustrate all of the finalists. They are also being reprinted today in a separate Table of Contents on this website. Please note that the version of Roger’s short story printed below is slightly altered in that it contains a couple of sentences added from a second version he wrote.
I know lots of Hatters are sf fans and will appreciate both the story and the artist’s rendering of the “cover of Amazing Stories from the Gernsback era” mentioned therein; furthermore, the central question of what kind of pattern might be coming from Titan resonates with the themes used by Peter Watts in his novels Blindsight (see this post) and Echopraxia (which bulbul gave me and which I am reading with great enjoyment now). What is communication, anyway? Something to ponder.
Oh, and here’s an amusing bit:
“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and maintain an open mind in the subject.
Good heavens, U of I nostalgia.
The point that Peter explores is what if human communication is a virus to most other species.
That kind of thing also comes up in “The Things,” Watts’s fan fiction about the 1982 film.
Huh, it got published in Clarkesworld. I was initially looking for it at his blog. Was it really 15 years ago? It seems like yesterday.
I know lots of Hatters are sf fans …
There’s also a lot of Hatters delight in Bad Fiction/Writing awards. This story could appeal to either constituency.
I wonder how he’d review this story? I found the first three paragraphs unreadably clunky. In the interests of fairness and science, I persevered. But found no need to revise my opinion. Mostly platitudes. The characters seem to be ciphers.
Contrast, I’ve just started (re-)reading a Dorothy Sayers story. It similarly starts in media res, needing to thread a complex back-story without derailing narrative momentum. Within three pages, a couple of dozen characters get introduced (admittedly half of that is the jury), each with enough personality sketched to lock them in memory for later.
Is ‘The thinking Molecules’ regarded as average/mediocre/whatever for the genre, vintage 2013?
Unitarians reject the Trinity, not God – or is Alex just being ignorant?
I think that’s a reference to the wisecrack
There is somewhere an Alan Bennett sketch with him doing his inimitable Anglican Bishop bit, where he talks about mutual understanding between “those of us who worship God in His aspect of existence, and those of us who worship Him in His aspect of nonexistence.”
Is ‘The thinking Molecules’ regarded as average/mediocre/whatever for the genre, vintage 2013?
Boy, you’re really determined to crap on the genre. Obviously it’s not a “good story” — it’s not even finished, let alone published (except on the internet, as an interesting curiosity). It’s not regarded as anything but a sketch of an idea by an amateur who was a fan of the genre. If you’re using this as an example by which to judge the genre, why don’t you dash off a page or two of a mystery story and I’ll judge mysteries on that basis.
@Kate Bunting: In the U.S., “Unitarian” usually refers to our Unitarian-Universalist Church, and in my limited experience, most members are atheist or agnostic. My father, a long-tijme agnostic, was a “Jewnitarian” during the later part of his life. I went to a service at the first church he belonged to, and the topic that Sunday was God, complete with singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee”. There were murmurs, and the ones I could hear were “I joined this church to get away from this.” After Dad moved, I met the minister of his new church, who described himself as unusual in the Unitarian clergy because he believed in God.
So Ebert’s venture into pulp SF did not yield the same high-quality literary results as his famous/notorious screenplay for _Beyond the Valley of the Dolls_?
In the N.Y.C. area and a few other places you historically had the Ethical Culture Society as an alternative for those who found the Unitarians too oppressively theistic. But after the 19th century turned into the 20th, that sort of oppression became harder to find and the ECS failed to thrive. UUism (in the US) has itself probably been substantively unstable over time (on a long enough timescale) because in most parts of the country it has long existed as a somewhat self-conscious alternative to the generic mainline Protestant denominations, and as those denominations over the course of the last century-plus became notably less dogmatic and more “liberal” or “progressive” than they had previously been, the UU’s needed to shift even further to maintain a contrast. But my own real hands-on experience with UU-ism is now over half a century old (from attending one of their Sunday schools in the early 1970’s), so I do not claim great expertise in the exact current situation, which no doubt varies somewhat from place to place.
@Jerry, wow. Sounds like a joke.
So why do they come there? (or “what do they come for?”)
The moral or ethical part of the religion?
Community?
Something that transcends what seems dull?
Yes, the ethical part (Dad’s churches were involved in various charitable endeavors), the community, and maybe the chance to think and talk about things outside the daily routine. I don’t remember hearing anybody saying anything about the transcendental, but some might still have such a feeling.
Another question might be why they call it a church. The answer might be historical reasons and tax advantages.
Since they retired and moved to Texas (to be near their grandchildren), my uncle and aunt have started attended and being active in volunteer opportunities through a Unitarian Universalist church. He was raised in a very secular Jewish household, and she was raised as a mainstream Protestant. However, neither of them had practiced any religion in their previous adult lives, and they are both agnostic, if not atheist. I think they became involved with the Unitarian congregation to give them something more to do with their time (they also got dogs) and to provide a wider circle of people with values they shared, following their dislocation to the Deep South.
Because of the particular course of American history, until fairly recently (in most parts of the country) churchgoing and church membership were quite important as sociological phenomena and just as normal activities normal people were expected to undertake at least occasionally if not every week, yet pretty much any sort of church was as good as any other for this purpose because of the lack of an “official” church combined with the reality of pluralism and in most areas the lack of any overwhelming “unofficial” market share dominance for one particular sort. It was usually more “respectable” to go to a church that everyone else quietly thought was kinda theologically flaky than to go to no church at all, and standard Unitarian jokes aside (there are also standard jokes about Baptists, etc etc etc) there were certain polite taboos about questioning the bona fides of some other church in many social contexts.
@Jerry, my third option was an attempt to describe vaguely the “mystical” part (but it sounds af people believe in what they believe in ‘because” they “want” to transcend something. Some may have such motivation, but it is not necessary).
Ginzburg, the Nobel prize winner, wrote a series of articles about, as I remember
(a) why he doesn’t like the idea of God (because how God can allow all those horrible things that humans do)
(b) why he believes Judaism is superiour (because it is not even a religion, it is about traditions and gatherings)
I was seriously disappointed by (a) – I didn’t think of myself as a believer but I didn’t like that someone so clever won’t even listen to what believers think about his objection (which of cours occured to each of them).
Not by (b). Can’t say it is totally nice, because a part of the context was the sentiment among many sceintists that as religion is one the rise, the medieval horrors and ignorance are advancing and encroaching and we must do something etc., so some likely took it as “let’s fight against religion but NOT Judaism”.
But what I like about Russia in 90s is that one could write such things and it didn’t lead to conflicts.
(I found the idea “X is a good religion because it is not a religion” funny, I can’t be offended by that someone feels that his religion is superiour, and I can’t be offended by that such people say what they think.)
@drasvi: The statement “Judaism is not even a religion” isn’t true. The English word “Judaism” refers to a religion. Maybe Ginzburg used a Russian word that might be better translated as “Jewishness” (or yiddishkeit)? Certainly there are Jews who participate in traditions and gatherings but aren’t religiously Jewish. Some are more or less pretending (I don’t think the friends whose annual seder I go to are in much doubt about my beliefs) and some are explicitly in the “secular movement”.
Separately “religion” is a notoriously slippery word in English and I daresay the common Russian word thought of as its usual translation might be differently slippery and handle various edge cases differently? Reconstructionist Judaism might fall outside many attempted coherent Anglophone definitions of “religion,” but it seems to function sociologically like a religion and just as importantly is certainly a religion for U.S. tax-law purposes.
David E. has previously noted how western concepts of what is and isn’t “religion” do not do well in handling the actual situation in now-Ghana net of the comparatively-recently-introduced Islam and Christianity.
why don’t you dash off a page or two of a mystery story and I’ll judge mysteries on that basis.
Because I’m not a Pullitzer-Prize winning writer. I’ve never had anything published in swanky newspapers. It’s never been said of my writing
So you could expect a dashed-off (or any) mystery story of mine to be crap [since you introduced the word]; not representative of the genre.
If you’re using this as an example by which to judge the genre, …
No. I asked a question. Because I didn’t know. Because the odd pieces of sf I’ve come across in the past few decades (or that appear here) seem to me mostly bad writing. They seem not credible as ‘a form of life’, so whether they pose interesting questions about life the universe and everything is moot. Thank you for your answer.
With JWB’s remark about _Beyond the Valley of the Dolls_, I’m still unsure whether the Ebert piece is more of a candidate for a Bad Writing competition, or to be judged as a satire/spoof. (Never the less, satire can be ‘done well’.)
I didn’t like the writing in “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”. Having seen an issue or two of Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine recently, I don’t think it could have been published there (and IASFM doesn’t seem to be leading the genre any more), but I did read some of a multiauthor anthology a while back and some of the stories there seemed just as bad.
I don’t know what you mean by “credible as ‘a form of life'”. Much as I like Sayers’s novels, I don’t think Wimsey is a credible character, even without the judo, the duels, and the dive into the fountain. Your appreciation of different genres might depend on what you’re willing to suspend your disbelief about and what you’re not.
(It’s not relevant to your point, since Ebert was a good writer of film criticism, but when I went to grad school in Illinois in the ’80s, the Sun-Times was considered barely above tabloid level.)
LOL. Proud though brief S-T alum. Immediately out of college and working at the high school sports desk. But you’re not wrong. One of the (classist but still amusing) jokes was that Murdock had a meeting asking the chair of Marshall Fields why he didn’t advertise. The reply, Rupert, your readers are my shoplifters.
Actually it was a good paper. I read it for decades. But you’re accurate about the reputation. I imagine today’s Sun-Times has a similar reputation in some circles. “Why do they write about ICE 37 times a week?”
On the subject of tainted but still amusing, I just finished Lucky Jim. I can well imagine Amis telling the shoplifter joke. And it’s troublingly dated enough about women that I wouldn’t recommend the book to my impressionable nephew in college. I thought it was mild till near the end when Dixon and Catchpole share their fever-dream malignancies against Margaret.
But I don’t know when I’ve laughed out loud so often at a book. Two memorable moments. When Dixon is complimenting the Welch’s cat at length for having the wisdom to snarl at its owners and urges aloud that he scratch them next time, and the cat rolls over and purrs. And Dixon imagining new reasons his bus to catch Ms. Callaghan will be delayed – a masked hold-up, a flat tire, an electric storm with falling trees and meteorites, an attack by a small squadron of Communist aircraft, sheep, the driver stung by a hornet.
Sheep may have been the most routine issue in 1954, but that was where I lost it, the incongruity of Dixon’s throbbing, impatient anger and a muddle of docile creatures oblivious to any reason to move faster.
I rejoined the narrative and a paragraph later the bus driver’s “psychopathic devotion to the interests of other road-users” had me laughing out loud again.
Jim’s repertoire of faces is thing that stuck with me after my first reading of the book.
Your appreciation of different genres might depend on what you’re willing to suspend your disbelief about and what you’re not.
Fair point. I’m not sure I can explain what I mean by ‘a form of life’ [Wittgenstein, btw] so much as demonstrate it, in equally W-ian fashion, like this recent discussion.
Ebert seems to know what I mean (and plentiful demonstration that he could write well)
“meaningless episodes of human behavior” pretty neatly describes ‘The Thinking Molecules’. We get no character development, so I’ve no idea what dipping “fried lake perch” in tartar sauce tells us about Dixon. Canned creamed corn sounds revolting, so it tells he has a strong stomach?
U of I campus looks like exactly the concrete hellscape of my own varsity days, down to the grunge eateries, and the prodigiously barfing inmates [**].
I don’t think Wimsey is a credible character, even without the judo, the duels, and the dive into the fountain.
True that I count no Dukes amongst my acquaintances, but Blighty continues to produce throwbacks to that milieu, like Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, who seem buffoons/villains straight out of Wodehouse. (Perhaps I’ve read too much Wodehouse.) Curious you should question the diving: every public swimming pool in my borough had a high-diving platform; I was not particularly precocious in being able to execute a Wimsey-like elegant entry from the 10-metre board. I suppose council-provided divable fountains not so much.
[**] Is that “barfing Greeks” a typo for Geeks? No: wikti sense 3 (US, not comparable) Of or relating to collegiate fraternities, sororities, or (uncommon) honor societies. Also ‘Alma Mater’ seems to be a sculpture on campus. Ok, so part of my alienation is I’m more familiar with the upper classes of Edwardian Blighty than with U.S. University argot.
@AntC
Re tinned creamed corn, maybe it is time for you to discover your inner nursery food lover-delight also in cream soups (esp. mushroom, but also pumpkin, broccoli, carrot and parsnip, tomato, etc.), rice pudding, gooey cake and mushy peas!
Thanks @PP.
I live in New Zealand. Pumpkin soup is often the only ‘heart-warming’ hot food on offer through the winter. I can’t get it anywhere near my mouth even if I pinch my nose. This is a well-known shibboleth to detect ex-Brits.
Cream of mushroom soup I cook myself. Cream of tomato are you sure? Doesn’t the acid in the tomatoes curdle the cream? (I suspect the canned stuff hasn’t encountered any actual tomatoes.)
Rice pudding my mother used to make. Gooey cake sounds ok in theory; in practice it’s too sickly-sweet.
I’ve lived in Yorkshire, I’m well familiar with mushy peas. Delicious with fish and chips with plenty of vinegar-infused mint sauce. Can’t get it in NZ.
But yeah, overall my inner nursery food lover hasn’t been seen since I discovered Asian cuisine.
@AntC
For cream of tomato soup, I would probably use peeled plum tomatoes (the ones in tins and jars are usually better, because allowed ripen on the vine) and fry them with onions and/or garlic for a long time in oil at the lowest feasible frying temperature then add salt, pepper and basil to taste and water and wine to dilute, simmer without boiling and add butter and cream at the end with minimal reheating. But you can probably find a more reliable recipe online.
AntC : I tried mushy peas with fish and chips when in Glasgow, it was quite good. I’ve always loved peas, but hated fish as a child.
It occurs to me these Greeks might be barfing not so much due to the beer but the dairy products and mashed vegetables. (@V that might also apply in Glasgow. Billy Connolly has a gag (!) about diced carrots.)
Was the fish you hated more like fried lake perch [**] in tartar sauce, or (say) seared swordfish steak or baked trout?
[**] “appealing even to those who don’t love strong fishy tastes.” according to Google. In other words, unappealing.
I really love a nice Danube fish soup, with some lovage.
Not perch. IIRC halibut was the usual fish-and-chip fish, but it’s been almost fished to extinction now in the Atlantic, and is only imported from the Pacific? The one I don’t mind, but I actually don’t like eating is sturgeon, but I’ll still eat it. Trout is doing well in Bulgarian rivers — I like trout. The one I really didn’t like like when I was young, but actually kind of like now is pike.
As for fish from the Aegean islands, fagri is not too bad. I also like salmon, but only raw in sushi.
My favourite is indeed baked trout, stuffed with lemon slices and dill. Sorry for rambling. I get very passionate about food.
PlasticPaddy : I have never made American-style tomato soup, rather than gazpacho. What do you think is the difference between Campbell’s and gazpacho?
I get very passionate about food.
It does you every credit. I see no rambling.
Cod is (or at least was) the premier fish for f’n’c; haddock a cheaper (used to be) substitute. There was a cheaper yet called ‘Rock Salmon’ (no sort of salmon/a euphemism for you don’t want to know).
In my experience in Blighty, canned tomato soup (usually Heinz) had a nasty metallic taste, quite unlike homemade. Gazpacho (in Spain) all fresh and zingy — make sure everybody has some if you’re planning breathing anywhere near them for the rest of the evening.
@AntC, V
The zingy part is lemon juice, peppers and probably extra-virgin olive oil. Also, I do not think tomatoes in gazpacho are peeled and/or seeded, so this would also add to complexity. The main thing, of course is that gazpacho is not cooked. Another difference, I think is the addition of gelatine, flour, etc., to thicken the Campbell’s soup. Re difference gazpacho/Campbells, you have to consider that Campbells is using an industrial process with a view towards a greatly reduced variation in product quality measured by some chosen metrics. The product must also have a good shelf life and appeal to a mass market. With food or drink, this can result in a rather bland product which the consumer is expected to customise to his/her own taste (or use as an ingredient, e.g., in a casserole). A home or restaurant cook making a Campbells style soup would produce something different, like the difference between beer brewed by a microbrewery or brasserie and mass-produced beer.
Rereading some of what I have written here, it looks to me like AI spew. I apologise and affirm that it is all my own.
My gazpacho does not have lemon juice but plenty of garlic, fresh basil, and perhaps a chili pepper. To each their own.
My gazpacho does not have lemon juice — the tomato gives the zing, but no basil either.
True that I count no Dukes amongst my acquaintances, but Blighty continues to produce throwbacks to that milieu, like Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, who seem buffoons/villains straight out of Wodehouse. (Perhaps I’ve read too much Wodehouse.)
Wodehouse can certainly strain credulity. But the way Wimsey strains my credulity is not the kind of manners he has but the perfection of his tact. His psychological insight is probably necessary for a detective, but it combines with being a cricket blue and getting a First in history and being able to identify the best wines from three countries to vineyard and year and speaking perfect French and quoting obscure passages from Marlowe and a preface to Hegel and being able to improvise modulations on the piano and play everything from random Elizabeth songs to angry modern pieces in the key of seven sharps.
Curious you should question the diving: every public swimming pool in my borough had a high-diving platform; I was not particularly precocious in being able to execute a Wimsey-like elegant entry from the 10-metre board. I suppose council-provided divable fountains not so much.
It’s not the height (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 10-meter board or platform) but the shallowness of typical fountains.
[**] Is that “barfing Greeks” a typo for Geeks? No: wikti sense 3 (US, not comparable) Of or relating to collegiate fraternities, sororities, or (uncommon) honor societies. Also ‘Alma Mater’ seems to be a sculpture on campus. Ok, so part of my alienation is I’m more familiar with the upper classes of Edwardian Blighty than with U.S. University argot.
“Greek” is widely known here (and the barfing is unquestionably due to beer), but I think the majority of Americans wouldn’t recognize the statue of Alma Mater. (If you looked it up, you probably saw the joke.)
By the way, I don’t recall seeing lake perch on menus in Champaign-Urbana, but maybe I’ve just forgotten. Eating it deep-fried and dipping it in tartar sauce tells you nothing except that his tastes are typically American, including limited concern for nutrition. I think it’s just supposed to be a detail that gives you a picture of the scene.
(I still remember enjoying a late breakfast of pan-fried lake perch on Catawba “Island”—the fish was brought by my hosts’ friends in the boat they’d just caught it in.)
Like this one?:
and speaking perfect French
Ay, yes. That does strain credulity for a English miLord.
Seven sharps, not at all angry, quite delightful.
the statue of Alma Mater. (If you looked it up, you probably saw the joke.)
Before I only skimmed. mm(?) As of 2013, the statue was not standing. So this joke dates the story to before 2012. Was there some long debate/foreshadowing that the statue was to be removed for cleaning? [wikip doesn’t say]
I have; 3, 5 and 10 m are the standard heights (though of course 10 is the rarest and 5 the most common).
Sa Majesté la reine du Canada et le duc de Normandie did speak very good French.
Ah, but she wasn’t a miLord, was she? She didn’t have to spend her days huntin’ and shootin’ and could therefore expend time on such fripperies as needlepoint and French.
David Marjanović : three’s is usually flexible, while five and ten are rigid. That’s what the place where we hosted the youth diving competitions in my home town is. It’s also five meters deep, and we used to throw something the pool that would sink, and have a competition to retrieve it.
Me and a friend from high school that I met a few days ago would break into the pool in spring climbing the barrier, when it was still closed.
We all had a crush on a girl who always did a perfect jump from the ten-meter platform.
I just called my brother to refresh my memory, and there is indeed also a seven metre ramp, and that’s the best me and him did.
speaking perfect French
to get fully watsonian on this: the biographical sketch appended to many of the books recounting lord death’s exploits, penned by his delightfully louche maternal uncle, makes it quite clear that milord’s unnatural-seeming facility with foreign tongues, and the french langue in particular, is to be ascribed to genetics: he is in fact himself partly french, on the distaff side*. whether this lineage also explains other improbable aspects of his character or accomplishments is hard to ascertain.
.
* what admixture of norman stock is present in the wimsey line itself – which we may, i believe, presume to be saxon in its origins (likely with some element of the roman) – is not clear, but, as the generality of the english peerage shows, could have no relevance to a scion’s abilities with the vernacular [sic] of paris.
In English, as far as I know, flexible things to dive off are boards and rigid ones are platforms.
I haven’t looked at a diving board in a swimming pool for a long time, and photographs of the ones I’ve used seem to avoid showing the diving board(s), for some reason. But I believe that the usual “low board” in a recreational pool here is 1 m, which is more than enough for me, and the “high board” is 3 m. The idea of a 10-m board or platform in a high school or public pool is strange to me, though maybe you could find them in places such as Florida and California where aquatic sports are especially popular.
My association with it is the delightful short film Ten Meter Tower (discussion here: “When the film played at the Music Box this past May, I sat in the back row and listened to the audience gasp, laugh and recognize their own anxieties when it comes to taking a literal giant leap”).
Diving boards and platforms are just far, far less common than they used to be in America. There were too many injuries. At the big outdoor pool at Michigan State University, the platform diving tower had one-, three-, five-, seven-, and ten-meter heights in the 1980s, but you would probably never seen that at a recreational pool today. Traditional diving pools were nine, ten, or even twelve feet deep, which is easily sufficient to make any of those dives safe if the diver doesn’t make a serious mistake; I’ve even seen a dive from ninety feet into about seven feet of water.
I went to find the height of the platform I mostly jumped and occasionally dived off as a kid, only to discover that several years back in prep for winter, they emptied the diving well below the recommended level, and a heavy spring rain so saturated the soil that the entire concrete diving well floated up out of its hole. It seems it was never replaced.
The 2025 World Aquatic Championships offered various competitions that involved diving from 1 meter, 3 meter, and 10 meter starting points, plus apparently-conceptually-separate “high diving” events from a platform that was either 27 meters (men) or 20 meters (women) above the water The most recent Summer Olympics only had events at 3 and 10 meters, presumably because they have tighter maximum-number-of-different-events constraints.
Diving as a sport has been infamous for creating additional spurious events, since they dreamed up synchronized diving.
A linguistic angle – in German it’s called Turmspringen “tower jumping” (and, accordingly, Synchronspringen), so the emphasis is on the jump, not on the ending up under water.
I finished Echopraxia yesterday and … oh my God. And not in a good way.
Yup, same here.
Is that a “oh my god” in a good, neural, or bad way? Also, which God?
Also, Purple or Orange?
I think Charlie (Stross) and Peter (Watts) are in a unintentional chase as to who can come up with the more disturbing aliens.
You don’t want to know what Charlie told me he has in mind for his next series, as if that would disturb me. Peter — just read his blog. Or Charlie’s
EDIT: from the outside, it would almost seem like an arms race, but it’s just two great writers doing what they do. I love them both to bits.
Has anybody read The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell? The descriptions I’ve seen make it sound like the kind of thing Peter Watts does (“a philosophical novel about the nature of good and evil and what happens when a man tries to do the right thing, for the right reasons and ends up causing incalculable harm”), so if it’s good I’d be interested in giving it a try.
I have tried. I will try again.
Context : It took me two years to read Dhalgren, and I was _very_ determined. And I’m usually a very fast reader. I read Babel-17 in half a day.