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| The Moat at The Bishop's Palace, Wells |
"The Isher/Weapon Shops novels are very rare examples of Golden Age science fiction that explicitly discuss the right to keep and bear arms, specifically guns. Indeed, the motto of the Weapon Shops, repeated several times, is "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free". Van Vogt's guns have virtually magical properties, and can only be used in self-defense.Other great van Vogt novels are "Slan"; "The World of Null-A" and "The Players of Null-A" (both ordered); "Empire of the Atom" and "The Wizard of Linn" (both featuring scientific genius Clane Linn in a post-apocalypse barbarian age). Treats for the scientifically-inclined intellectual teenager of any age.
"The political philosophy of the Weapon Shops is minimalist. They will not interfere with the corrupt imperial monarchy of the Isher government, on the grounds that men always have a government of the type they deserve: no government, however bad, exists without at least the tacit consent of the governed. The mission of the Weapon Shops therefore is merely to offer single individuals the right to protect themselves with a firearm, or, in cases of fraud, access to a "Robin Hood" alternative court system that judges and awards compensation from large, imperial merchant combines to cheated individuals. Because the population has access to this alternative system of justice, the Isher government cannot take the final step toward totalitarianism."
One early and articulate critic was Damon Knight. In a chapter-long essay reprinted in In Search of Wonder, entitled "Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt", Knight famously remarked that van Vogt "is no giant; he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter". Knight described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published". About van Vogt's writing, Knight said:In fact van Vogt was treated disgracefully by the US SF establishment.
"In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real."
About Empire of the Atom Knight wrote:
"If you can only throw your reasoning powers out of gear - something many van Vogt fans find easy to do - you'll enjoy this one."
Knight also expressed misgivings about van Vogt's politics, noting that his stories almost invariably present absolute monarchy in a favorable light.
On the other hand, when science fiction author Philip K. Dick was asked which science fiction writers had influenced his work the most, he replied:
"I started reading sf when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A.E. van Vogt. There was in van Vogt's writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that's sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else's writing inside or outside science fiction."
The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 14th Grand Master in 1995 (presented 1996). There had been great controversy within SFWA regarding its long wait in bestowing its highest honor (limited to living writers, no more than one annually). Writing an obituary of van Vogt, Robert J. Sawyer, a fellow Canadian writer of science fiction remarked:Read his stuff and judge for yourself.
"There was no doubt that van Vogt should have received this honor much earlier — the injustice of him being overlooked, at least in part because of damnable SFWA politics, had so incensed Harlan Ellison, a man with an impeccable moral compass, that he'd lobbied hard on the Sci-Fi Channel and elsewhere on van Vogt's behalf."
It is generally held that the "damnable SFWA politics" concerns Damon Knight, the founder of the SFWA, who abhorred van Vogt's style and politics and thoroughly demolished his literary reputation in the 1950s.
"Robots may also make it possible for old people to stay independent in their own homes for longer. Mr Angle says this is iRobot’s “long-term guiding star”, towards which the Roomba is a small step. Mr Gupta at the NSF thinks that general-purpose home-help robots would be a big advance which, given a push, could be achieved in a couple of decades (though that, he stresses, is his own view, not the foundation’s). Mr Thrun reckons it could be done more quickly.Comparing this with other transformational technologies, we're 10-20 years from such products becoming affordable and widely available. A teleoperated home-care robot is a kind of household drone. One could imagine an operator controlling maybe twenty of them (one at a time, mostly). Sure they'd be expensive, but compared to what? Care homes? Even without full autonomy this could happen sooner than you'd think.
"Mr Ng points out that if you get a graduate student to teleoperate a PR2 robot, it can already do more or less everything a home-help robot might be required to do, so all that is needed is better software and more processing power, both of which are becoming ever more easily available."
Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)Bring on those robots, Mr Gove!
Hey everybody take a look at me
I've got street credibility
I may not have a job,
But I have a good time
With the boys that I meet down on the line
I don’t need you
So you don’t approve,
Well, who asked you to?
Hey, jerk, you work
This guy’s got better things to do
...
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| Burrington Combe looking west |
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| Burrington Combe looking east |
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| Clare buffeted by a cold, blustery wind |
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| Arts and Crafts: before and after |
"Salter argues for ’the importance of genetic continuity as an end in itself (p.24)…the process of genetic evolution is certainly the ultimate cause of our existence (p.25)… From an evolutionary perspective…genetic continuity is the ultimate interest of all life, since it has priority over other interests (p.26)… The ultimate interest is reproduction, the goal towards which all life is shaped through natural selection. Adaptive information carried in genes is transmitted between generations, and is therefore an ultimate interest (p.341)…’ So, according to Salter, genetic interests are very important. In fact, more important, or at least more ’ultimate’, and therefore deserving ‘priority’, than any others.So what does David Lowry think of this?
But Salter believes that most of us are unaware of our full genetic interests, and in particular our ethnic interests: 'changed environments have effectively blinded us to large stores of our genetic interests, or to put it more accurately, for the first time situated us where we need to perceive those interests and be motivated to pursue them (p.31)… ethnic genetic interests are usually very large [in aggregate] compared to familial genetic interests (p.66)’.
Salter’s book is aimed at bringing these neglected ethnic genetic interests to our attention and exploring their implications for social and political issues such as immigration, birth rates, and inter-ethnic marriage"
"My short view is that, as Bentham famously said of ’natural rights’, the whole idea of ’ethnic genetic interests’ is nonsense on stilts. While reading Salter’s book I kept getting vague reminiscences of something else, but it took me a while to pin down what it was: General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, with his paranoid ramblings about our Precious Bodily Fluids.Gene Expression's criticism which had occurred to me with most force as I read the book was this:
"But vulgar abuse is no substitute for reasoned argument (or vice versa), so here are some more considered criticisms:"
"The doctrine of genetic interests is inherently backward-looking and conservative. In contrast, the eugenic position is that we are able to make value judgements about what characteristics are desirable (such as health, intelligence, and beauty) and undesirable (such as stupidity, mental illness, and physical disabilities) and then to take reproductive decisions based on those judgements. Of course eugenics is controversial, but many of those who might feel vaguely sympathetic to Salter’s approach would also feel vaguely sympathetic to eugenics, and they should at least be aware of the conflict between them."If we could genetically improve our offspring to eliminate harmful mutations and to increase perhaps their physical, cognitive and social capabilities .. which of us would decline? So enlightened genetic progress is something which humans can potentially sign-up for, in contradistinction to every other species.
"Periods of great inequality are good for social theorising. Last year Charles Murray, a libertarian columnist and pundit, warned in “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” that mating among people of similar means is increasing the divide between a motivated elite and a listless underclass. In “Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy”, another commentator, Christopher Hayes, showed how the elite are using their resources to circumvent the meritocracy and establish a permanent upper class. Now the fray is joined by Gregory Clark, a Scottish-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis. In “The Son Also Rises” he argues that social mobility is low everywhere and always will be, and there is nothing society can do about it.Clark is largely content to examine the data he and his team researched in the context of his mathematical model of social mobility (a first-order Markov social-mobility diffusion process) without imposing any personal agenda. His public-policy thoughts are restricted to a chapter at the end where, as The Economist notes, he expresses an ethical preference for Nordic-type societies.
"Mr Clark has waded into these waters before. His 2009 book, “A Farewell to Alms”, reckoned that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was attributable to faster breeding among the rich, which raised the population’s underlying competence. Critics pounced, crying that the book was thinly sourced. Perhaps for this reason, he has armed his new book with reams of data. Most of the text is given over to methodical presentation of research, with the uniting theme that optimistic assessments of mobility are badly wrong.
"Conventional research has it that society is highly fluid: the effect of inheritance is almost nil in some Nordic societies, and family explains no more than 25% of an adult child’s status in America, which has always been less mobile. But Mr Clark points out that these studies track change over just two or three generations and are therefore biased by quirks of fate: the working-class lottery-winner or the scion who chooses social work over high finance. Longer projects average out this randomness and paint a darker picture.
Mr Clark draws upon research that uses surnames to track status over centuries. The academics he follows have mined sources as varied as the Domesday Book, the Royal Society’s records, even membership of the American Medical Association, in order to find surnames that are over-represented in elite positions. Researchers then track how long it takes those monied surnames to lose their wealth-predicting power.
"With surprising consistency across countries and eras, mobility is found to be painfully slow. Birth has predicted more than 50% of one’s income or education status, Mr Clark reckons. Erasing the legacy of past prosperity takes 10-15 generations rather than the three or four implied by sunnier estimates. So the shadow of 18th-century wealth still darkens income distributions today.
"That is the most unexpected finding. Efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility, leading Mr Clark to conclude that mobility is strongly linked to underlying social competence—an “inescapable inherited” trait. Only the intermarriage of people who are more prosperous and educated with those less fortunate will dilute the genetic resources of well-off families, slowly pushing them back towards the average and preventing the rise of a permanent overclass.
"Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.
"This conclusion gives the book a cheery tone, but there are also plenty of nasty conclusions to be drawn. One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.
"That is a weakness. Mr Clark is too quick to write off the promise of recent social changes. The oldest Americans born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act are barely 50. Impressive work on the effect of good teaching or well-targeted poverty assistance suggest such programmes make a difference. Yet Mr Clark follows his logic to an unexpectedly egalitarian end. Redistribution is sensible, he argues, not in order to boost mobility but because mobility is intractably low. The cream will rise regardless, and so paying extraordinary salaries to capable workers is unnecessary. If high rates of mobility are used to excuse or justify inequality, he suggests, then the reality of low mobility implies something quite different: that great inequality serves little purpose and redistributing income from the rich to the poor might raise overall welfare at little economic cost. This makes for uncomfortable reading for those of all ideological persuasions."