Into the gun shop

Where does this quote come from?

"The right to buy weapons is the right to be free"

The author at Tincknell Country Store this morning

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This is one of my favourite A. E. van Vogt books - classic pulp SF:

Amazon link

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Pretty much any week there will be angst about the prevalence of gun-atrocities in America. If you google "Game theory gun control" the results don't fail to be atavistic and tribal .. yet there is something useful game theory can tell us via the obvious payoff matrix.

Basically if a population is not armed at all (the European dove-dove situation) the result is optimal - but unstable.

If everyone who wants to be is armed (the American hawk-hawk situation), that's stable but very sub-optimal.

The mixed-situation (hawk-dove) is non-equilibrium, spiralling to (hawk-hawk); the doves always lose against hawks.

What keeps the European (dove-dove) situation in place is draconian enforcement against personal gun-possession by the state. But as commentator Tom Foale observes,

"The UK and Australia have banned all but a few guns and have draconian gun ownership requirements. The limited availability of guns and ammo means that criminals wanting a gun are often limited to modified starter pistols and making their own ammo - they are more likely to blow their own hands off. Being caught with one illegally means a long prison sentence. Enforcement keeps the overall equilibrium stable, although there are still a few shootings.

"The problem for the USA is that to shift from its current equilibrium (everyone can own a gun and very high homicide rates) to the better equilibrium (strict controls and low homicide rates) means making individuals feel less safe for quite a while, while the guns are removed. Unilateral disarmament is not a game-winning strategy for either a country or an individual if the risks (or the perceived risks) are high, so individuals will be reluctant to give up their guns. ...

"So I'm afraid that game theory says that the US is stuck with its current mess, unless something changes the game being played. That could be the establishment of large new 'gun-free' enclaves, where all guns (including law enforcement) are left at the entrances. This would require fences and border guards to enforce the rules, just like a small country. However, being as safe as the UK or Australia would make these enclaves very attractive, so I would expect more of these to be established over time.

"The cost of border security, distributed across all of the enclave's citizens, would drop as the enclave got bigger (by the ratio of the area enclosed, which grows in proportion to radius squared, to the circumference which grows in proportion to the radius), so it pays the citizens to encourage growth by inviting in the right sort of people. This might just lead to a scenario where general disarmament is possible."

Lurking behind these general remarks are specific American conditions. In many of the vast rural areas, law enforcement is thin on the ground and reaction times much delayed. Homeowners under threat are reliant on their own means of defence .. and are very reluctant to be disarmed.

In addition, American society is notably low on Asabiyyah - which raises the potential threat level - as compared to more homogeneous societies such as Canada, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland, all of which have high levels of gun ownership but low homicide levels.

So there are some good reasons why the hawk-hawk equilibrium can't easily be unwound in the States.

Super-intelligence: A. E. Van Vogt - "Asylum"

Another SF short story which made an impression on me as a young teen. I was fascinated by this graphic description of what reality would be like to someone of immense intelligence.

The observer here, apparently a reporter named Bill Leigh, suddenly discovers he is actually the personality overlay of a covert 'Great Galactic' operative .. with an IQ of 1,200!

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"The room and the girl in it changed, not physically, but subjectively, in what he saw, in the details.

Details burned at him; furniture and design that a moment before had seemed a flowing, artistic whole, abruptly showed flaws, hideous errors in taste and arrangement and structure.

His gaze flashed out to the garden, and in instants tore it to mental shreds.Never in all his existence had he seen or felt criticism on such a high,devastating scale.

Only - Only it wasn't criticism. Actually. The mind was indifferent. It saw things. Automatically, it saw some of the possibilities; and by comparison the reality suffered.

It was not a matter of anything being hopelessly bad. The wrongness was frequently a subtle thing. Birds not suited, for a dozen reasons, to their environment. Shrubs that added infinitesimal discord not harmony to the superb garden.

The mind flashed back from the garden; and this time, for the first time, studied the girl. On all Earth, no woman had ever been so piercingly examined. The structure of her body and her face, to Leigh so finely, proudly shaped, so gloriously patrician - found low grade now.

An excellent example of low-grade development in isolation.That was the thought, not contemptuous, not derogatory, simply an impression by an appallingly direct mind that saw - overtones, realities behind realities,a thousand facts where one showed. There followed crystal-clear awareness of the girl's psychology, objective admiration for the system of isolated upbringing that made Klugg girls such fine breeders; and then - Purpose!"

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Here's a summary of 'Asylum'.

" two fugitive Dreeghs – energy vampires that suck blood and use energy – land on Earth. They are in dire need of blood and attack two humans right away to restore themselves. They then bury their spaceship under a New York restaurant where they dwell.

The murders shock the people on earth because murder is almost unheard of since Dr. Ungarn – currently residing on an asteroid near the Jupiter moon of Europa – devised serum to rid most of mankind of its murderous impulses. The story is investigated and reported by one of the world’s most recognized reporters – Bill Leigh. Soon after the publication of his article, he is invited by a stranger to his favorite New York restaurant to dine in a private room.

Leigh arrives and soon is joined by a young woman who hastily takes him through a secret door to a subterranean chamber where the Dreeghs are living. The young woman confronts them and warns the Dreegh that Earth is to be left alone. As a lower, fugitive race, the Dreegh will be dealt with most harshly.

Leigh is stunned and isn’t sure how to report this story and make it believable. But before he can, he is kidnapped by the Dreegh who use their mental powers to convince him to travel to the asteroid where Dr. Ungarn lives to destroy him and his daughter. The Dreegh suspect that the Ungarns are agents of the Great Galactics who will prevent them from settling and taking over Earth.

Leigh manages to hitch a ride on the freighter that routinely transports supplies to Dr. Ungard’s laboratory near Jupiter with no idea what his real intentions are, other than to find the girl who he met on Earth that he is sure is Patricia Ungard. They arrive on the asteroid and just as they are meeting with the Ungards, the two Dreegh arrive and capture them. They inform the group that more Dreegh are on the way and that this vanguard against their invasion of this solar system will be destroyed.

As the Dreegh prepare to draw the life force out of their three victims, a powerful mental force awakens in Leigh and he is able to slay the Dreegh before they can harm Patricia or her father. He is then contacted by a higher intelligence that informs him that he has never really been Bill Leigh, reporter. He learns that it is he who is one of the supreme beings of the Great Galactics. Leigh, unable to comprehend all this, jumps into a small space shuttle and flees to earth."

"Asylum" is better known as the first part of A. E. Van Vogt's "fix-up" novel "Supermind", which postulated  "... on an IQ curve that would include humans, Kluggs, Lennels and Dreeghs, the respective averages would be 100, 220, 380, and 450 ... ".

Sadly not available on Kindle.

"Imposter" - Philip K. Dick

PDF of Philip K. Dick's short story

This short story, later made into a film, had a huge impact on the teenage me.

"Spence Olham, a member of a team designing an offensive weapon to destroy invading aliens known as the Outspacers, is confronted by a colleague and accused by security officer Major Peters of being an android impostor designed to sabotage Earth's defenses.

The impostor's ship was damaged and has crashed just outside the city. The android is supposed to detonate a planet-destroying bomb on the utterance of a deadly code phrase. Olham, in an attempt to clear his name and prove his humanity, manages to escape his captors and return to Earth after they fail to kill him on the moon.

Upon reaching Earth, Olham contacts his wife, Mary, but is soon ambushed by security officers waiting for him by his house. Out of options and with Major Peters' forces closing in, Olham decides to prove he is a human by finding the crashed Outspacer spaceship and recovering the android's body from the wreckage.

Unfortunately, the discovery of a bloody knife by the wreckage indicates to Olham that Peters was correct and that the real Spence Olham had already been killed. The android, now aware of the truth of its existence, proclaims "If that's Olham, then I must be..." causing the bomb to detonate, the explosion visible even to the Outspacers of Alpha Centauri."

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Philip K. Dick said of his more famous novel, "A Scanner Darkly",

"Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw."

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So what is "Imposter" really about?

I see a person with conventional, rather PC opinions, gradually observing the world around him. Realities begin to conflict with his bien-pensant views - he is mugged by reality.

Finally his consciousness catches up with his new worldview. In shock and horror, he sees himself as he really is - and he cannot help himself:

"Then I must be ... !"

You see, children, sometimes the bad guy turns out to be the narrator of the story.

The Cult of Null-A

In "The World of Null-A" (1945) and "The Pawns of Null-A" (1956) A. E. Van Vogt was writing as a disciple of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. I was going to write some thoughts on this, where it is now etc, but of course Wikipedia got there well before me.

Many people from Lao Tsu onwards have observed that the map is not the territory; the world is too complex to be circumscribed by mere words - language misleads by imposing simplistic models and categories on an always-more-complex-and-dynamic reality. Characterising this insight as 'non-Aristotelian logic' (null-A) is intellectual catch-up.

The cult-aspect arises from training purporting to suppress mindless emotionalism in favour of rational responses to life's complexities. There is of course something to it - rationality can offer superior solutions - but pure rationality is motiveless: there's always some underlying biological impulse driving our actions. Who's to say that murderously lashing out isn't sometimes the right answer? Certainly not the game theorists who analyse the logic of revenge. Suppressing your own emotions subcontracts your goals to those of others (the corporation, the state) while nullifying kindness, mercy or empathy.

Null-A's unemotional, hyper-rational supermen seem more like idealised Gestapo agents than heroes to me, although Van Vogt clearly liked them.*

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On a related topic, the prospects of genetically engineering our children never goes away, with daily reporting of advances in genetic sequencing, analysis and engineering. The professionally-horrified (it's ethically wrong to play God) seem to think we'd all elect for a kind of bland niceness: beautiful/handsome clone-ish people, uniformly smart and nice.

Game theory applies here as well: if the majority elected to have their children fashioned as doves, it would be very much in the interests of some to fashion their progeny as hawks!

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* This is a bit unfair, as Van Vogt seems to believe that the Null-A trained do not suppress but are consciously aware of their emotional reactions, integrating them as 'facts' into a supremely cerebral response through the famous 'cortical-thalamic pause'.

"The right to buy weapons is the right to be free"

A Google Nexus 10 will shortly be winging its way from Amazon's vaults as I've finally succumbed to mass tablet-hysteria. I'm motivated by two things - I do a lot of reading of the digital newspaper plus sundry eBooks: my Galaxy S3 is too small and my Kindle too obsolete. The second reason is that Microsoft are apparently going to release their Office suite for Android at some point, which finally saves me from having to consider a Microsoft tablet or another clunky PC. Now if only Amazon would support Amazon Prime video streaming (films, TV) to generic Android devices .. . Read my lips, guys, I am not going to buy a Kindle Fire.

Amazon have been reformatting some of the A. E. Van Vogt 'Golden Age' books for Kindle. The plots are clunky, the science lamentable and the attitudes dated, but they do pass the test of page-turning excitement! I started with "The Weapon Shops of Isher" and "The Weapon Makers". From Wikipedia:

"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.

"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."

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.

Van Vogt used to say that he always engineered a cliff-hanging crisis every 800 words: critics were divided

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 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."

In fact van Vogt was treated disgracefully by the US SF establishment.

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:

"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.

Read his stuff and judge for yourself.