Science and science fiction. I see this as a valuable comment on human habits understanding. We think of “Little Red Riding Hood” as a fairy tale, but you point to the truth value of its sobering themes. After all, such tales were once told to children to make them wary of friendly strangers, a very “woke” concern today, when some kids are not permitted to play outside lest they be snatched by predators. The fairy tale seems disturbingly pointed. Unseen dangers lurk.
We think of “science” as real, which means that it reveals unseen reality. The invisible world of science is a powerful force for control. “Science is real,” the virtue signalers remind us, eager to put “science” on the side of authority, their side. The virtuous tell us to obey. Only then will science save us from our selfish ways.
But as you point out, science is mysterious, contradictory, even confusing, its meaning easily reduced to what powerful people say. Masks are bad. Wait! Masks are good. Science is regarded as dogma and revealed truth. We are supposed to forget that science has its own hidden dangers and is open to error and mystification. Phrenology was very popular in the United States because it proposed a scientific explanation for individual difference and promised to correct social disorder, which it failed to do, even though most advocates of the science were among the elite. Sounds familiar. Now phrenology is a pseudo-science. There are plenty examples of one era’s science becoming another era’s joke.
All wonderful points, Allen! Thanks for weighing in. It seems there's a desire to control the God image, the voice of authority, and to locate its omniscience and omnipotence in one's own paradigm.
I read this on Sunday but forgot to come and comment. I haven't seen this show, although I may yet. (I am never in a rush to watch television shows). Although I love science fiction, I have found 21st century sci-fi to be weak and incoherent, so I'm seldom keen on sci-fi TV shows or movies these days. There's a reason I prefer to dig over the buried treasure in 1980s and 90s TV and film science fiction rather than talk about 'the new things'. 🙂
One small question: our collective use of 'the Science' (without wanting to define who 'we' are in that clause!) is becoming a shibboleth and that worries me somewhat, as it decreases the chance of critique reaching the people whose viewpoint needs challenging. I have started to try to avoid this term for this reason. Do you share this concern? Or do you think that it is too helpful a shortcut now that scientistic metaphysics are 'out in the open'...?
Great question, Chris. I've been using it less, likely because as a poet, I have instincts that make me shy away from overly repeated terms. However, cliches have a place, and it might just be that getting that concept out there will have the effect of influencing the culture. Perhaps folks need to start getting used to hearing the term before the Necker cube flips on them.
Another pithy-but-dense article that bedevils attempts to make worthwhile comments. Analogy is such a rare treat...
I read the books and they are chockfull of good ideas qua SciFi. The author really let himself get 'way out there' and even in those places where it's more 'fiction' than 'science', it made for exciting, complex read. Very satisfying.
I didn't think they could do a very good job making a movie out of this -- not as hard as Dune, but..a real challenge to 'get it right'. And then, when I heard it was NetFlix...yikes, i was pretty sure it was going to be a dumpster fire of add-on sex scenes, unbidden diversity, and lost nuance.
But watched it anyway.....
Having read the books made the movie feel cartoonish and incomplete. (They didn't finish the series, so i guess there will be more movies...<sigh>...) Interestingly, I think the audience will split roughly into two camps. Those who have not read the books and think the movie is just amazing, and "wow"..and those who have read the books and think it fell short.
There are political implications here as well. The aliens need our planet, and far exceed our technology. But because they live on a chaotic 3-star system whose motions they cannot predict (the Three Body Problem), their evolution is halting and punctuated. Ahead of us now, the Trisolarians fear Earth will catch up by the time their colonization ships arrive in 400 years, so they subvert physics by mucking with out experiments and data. Physicists, being the drama queens they are, predictably fall apart, commit suicide, go crazy, quit, etc. And progress in fundamental science stalls while technological advance continues.
I see a split, here, too -- some paint this as a US/China allegory. It seems most think America are the TriSolarians and China the target. Some who see the the advanced/colonized race infiltrating and monkeywrenching the science of about-to-be-colonized race as US and China, respectively. But before i heard this (e.g. on Bloomberg News haha) I thought of it as China who is infiltrating our science and institutions, and the US who is about to be the "bugs" in the cultural/historical war....
No matter. It's a good enough movie (less so if you've read the books) and a very good read (recommended, and preferable to skip the movie, imho.)
Thanks RDM. Great that you read the books and can weigh in here. You mention an aspect I didn't get to, which is their method of messing with the scientific advance of humanity. The electric universe theorists make the same claim, setting the stalling time around 1920 with the ascendancy of Einstein, and the end of aether theory. If you haven't yet read it, take a look at The Electric Universe Heresy here at analogy.
The political side is interesting, but misses the themes I like to examine. I'd like to think of issues regarding self-development as deeper than political, indeed as inimical to politics, which get us sucked into all manner of manipulations.
Are the issues I covered in the article relevant to the books? Is there more conscious critique of TheScience and science as salvation? And what about Little Red Riding Hood? Is that in the original?
It sounds like the show reflects the misanthropy underlying the current zeitgeist. It used to be that science fiction would ultimately point us toward what makes us human, as when the terminator discovers the human heart beating inside his mechanical body. But now we get sci-fi that imagines the human heart itself is a fabrication, a lie. And yet as you illustrate, the inner world expresses itself whether we like it or not, and the show seems to be critiquing its own metaphysic, somewhere below the level of consciousness, as if the inner life out of which the story came is sending us an urgent warning. At the risk of sounding naive, I see this as a hopeful sign. The human spirit is revolting against our radical neglect of it, asserting itself, making itself known to us again.
It's hard, because in the books, the Trisolarians can't "lie" because they see 'into' each other, communication is more complete and invasive in some sense, so that there are not private lives in the way humans can and do have private lives.
This nuance is lost in NetFlix-ville (of course!) and muddled/conflated with the confusion about stories-as-lies and stories-as-metaphors. It's exhausting to try to recover the original from the haphazard jigsaw pieces the movie provides.
The fact that we humans can have private lives/thoughts which differ from our external presentations troubles and terrifies the Trisolarians. This is part of the reason they 'turn against us' (they were never "with us", but that's another story...)
There is plenty of illumination of "... the misanthropy underlying the current zeitgeist..." in the book, and about the human condition/state in general. It's part of what makes it a hard, heavy read at times.
That sums it up pretty well, Harry. Thank you! I think you picked up on something that perhaps I didn't express quite poignantly enough: the evil alter-ego is precisely the place of demons that emerges when the inner world is neglected... as Ted Hughes explains, and as I've repeated probably ad nauseam.
Science and science fiction. I see this as a valuable comment on human habits understanding. We think of “Little Red Riding Hood” as a fairy tale, but you point to the truth value of its sobering themes. After all, such tales were once told to children to make them wary of friendly strangers, a very “woke” concern today, when some kids are not permitted to play outside lest they be snatched by predators. The fairy tale seems disturbingly pointed. Unseen dangers lurk.
We think of “science” as real, which means that it reveals unseen reality. The invisible world of science is a powerful force for control. “Science is real,” the virtue signalers remind us, eager to put “science” on the side of authority, their side. The virtuous tell us to obey. Only then will science save us from our selfish ways.
But as you point out, science is mysterious, contradictory, even confusing, its meaning easily reduced to what powerful people say. Masks are bad. Wait! Masks are good. Science is regarded as dogma and revealed truth. We are supposed to forget that science has its own hidden dangers and is open to error and mystification. Phrenology was very popular in the United States because it proposed a scientific explanation for individual difference and promised to correct social disorder, which it failed to do, even though most advocates of the science were among the elite. Sounds familiar. Now phrenology is a pseudo-science. There are plenty examples of one era’s science becoming another era’s joke.
All wonderful points, Allen! Thanks for weighing in. It seems there's a desire to control the God image, the voice of authority, and to locate its omniscience and omnipotence in one's own paradigm.
Hi Asa,
I read this on Sunday but forgot to come and comment. I haven't seen this show, although I may yet. (I am never in a rush to watch television shows). Although I love science fiction, I have found 21st century sci-fi to be weak and incoherent, so I'm seldom keen on sci-fi TV shows or movies these days. There's a reason I prefer to dig over the buried treasure in 1980s and 90s TV and film science fiction rather than talk about 'the new things'. 🙂
One small question: our collective use of 'the Science' (without wanting to define who 'we' are in that clause!) is becoming a shibboleth and that worries me somewhat, as it decreases the chance of critique reaching the people whose viewpoint needs challenging. I have started to try to avoid this term for this reason. Do you share this concern? Or do you think that it is too helpful a shortcut now that scientistic metaphysics are 'out in the open'...?
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Great question, Chris. I've been using it less, likely because as a poet, I have instincts that make me shy away from overly repeated terms. However, cliches have a place, and it might just be that getting that concept out there will have the effect of influencing the culture. Perhaps folks need to start getting used to hearing the term before the Necker cube flips on them.
Another pithy-but-dense article that bedevils attempts to make worthwhile comments. Analogy is such a rare treat...
I read the books and they are chockfull of good ideas qua SciFi. The author really let himself get 'way out there' and even in those places where it's more 'fiction' than 'science', it made for exciting, complex read. Very satisfying.
I didn't think they could do a very good job making a movie out of this -- not as hard as Dune, but..a real challenge to 'get it right'. And then, when I heard it was NetFlix...yikes, i was pretty sure it was going to be a dumpster fire of add-on sex scenes, unbidden diversity, and lost nuance.
But watched it anyway.....
Having read the books made the movie feel cartoonish and incomplete. (They didn't finish the series, so i guess there will be more movies...<sigh>...) Interestingly, I think the audience will split roughly into two camps. Those who have not read the books and think the movie is just amazing, and "wow"..and those who have read the books and think it fell short.
There are political implications here as well. The aliens need our planet, and far exceed our technology. But because they live on a chaotic 3-star system whose motions they cannot predict (the Three Body Problem), their evolution is halting and punctuated. Ahead of us now, the Trisolarians fear Earth will catch up by the time their colonization ships arrive in 400 years, so they subvert physics by mucking with out experiments and data. Physicists, being the drama queens they are, predictably fall apart, commit suicide, go crazy, quit, etc. And progress in fundamental science stalls while technological advance continues.
I see a split, here, too -- some paint this as a US/China allegory. It seems most think America are the TriSolarians and China the target. Some who see the the advanced/colonized race infiltrating and monkeywrenching the science of about-to-be-colonized race as US and China, respectively. But before i heard this (e.g. on Bloomberg News haha) I thought of it as China who is infiltrating our science and institutions, and the US who is about to be the "bugs" in the cultural/historical war....
No matter. It's a good enough movie (less so if you've read the books) and a very good read (recommended, and preferable to skip the movie, imho.)
Thanks RDM. Great that you read the books and can weigh in here. You mention an aspect I didn't get to, which is their method of messing with the scientific advance of humanity. The electric universe theorists make the same claim, setting the stalling time around 1920 with the ascendancy of Einstein, and the end of aether theory. If you haven't yet read it, take a look at The Electric Universe Heresy here at analogy.
The political side is interesting, but misses the themes I like to examine. I'd like to think of issues regarding self-development as deeper than political, indeed as inimical to politics, which get us sucked into all manner of manipulations.
Are the issues I covered in the article relevant to the books? Is there more conscious critique of TheScience and science as salvation? And what about Little Red Riding Hood? Is that in the original?
It sounds like the show reflects the misanthropy underlying the current zeitgeist. It used to be that science fiction would ultimately point us toward what makes us human, as when the terminator discovers the human heart beating inside his mechanical body. But now we get sci-fi that imagines the human heart itself is a fabrication, a lie. And yet as you illustrate, the inner world expresses itself whether we like it or not, and the show seems to be critiquing its own metaphysic, somewhere below the level of consciousness, as if the inner life out of which the story came is sending us an urgent warning. At the risk of sounding naive, I see this as a hopeful sign. The human spirit is revolting against our radical neglect of it, asserting itself, making itself known to us again.
It's hard, because in the books, the Trisolarians can't "lie" because they see 'into' each other, communication is more complete and invasive in some sense, so that there are not private lives in the way humans can and do have private lives.
This nuance is lost in NetFlix-ville (of course!) and muddled/conflated with the confusion about stories-as-lies and stories-as-metaphors. It's exhausting to try to recover the original from the haphazard jigsaw pieces the movie provides.
The fact that we humans can have private lives/thoughts which differ from our external presentations troubles and terrifies the Trisolarians. This is part of the reason they 'turn against us' (they were never "with us", but that's another story...)
There is plenty of illumination of "... the misanthropy underlying the current zeitgeist..." in the book, and about the human condition/state in general. It's part of what makes it a hard, heavy read at times.
That sums it up pretty well, Harry. Thank you! I think you picked up on something that perhaps I didn't express quite poignantly enough: the evil alter-ego is precisely the place of demons that emerges when the inner world is neglected... as Ted Hughes explains, and as I've repeated probably ad nauseam.