Books, Film and Other Popular Culture

What common elements made science, markets, democracy and justice so successful? How do the popular arts -- books, film, television, magazines, and the like -- contribute to, undermine, or distract from that success? Here are some net-accessible articles, interviews, and essays examining such questions.

I'm a Comic Strip!

Seems I'm making appearances in a number of surprising pop-cult venues. See a recent spread that features a novel by yours truly, in a popular literary comic strip... the "Unshelved Book Club." I've also been interviewed for several episodes of a podcast "The Future And You."

Of course some of this is in reaction to the wildly pop-culture book King Kong Is Back!: An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape! (Smart Pop series) -- a fun and smart collection of 21 essays examining King Kong from every angle. (Some will surprise you.) But if you think that was something, just keep your eyes open for the next brash offering -- Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (Smart Pop series)!

Tribute to Jack Williamson

While reprinting this 10 year-old tribute to my dear friend, Jack Willaimson, I will also append a memorial addendum, on the day of his passing, November 10, 2006.

"Jack Williamson is no Yankee trader, but he might have been. His life is one long tale of hoodwinking fate, of turning adversity into advantage, and above all, changing the world through the sheer magic of his perceptions. By seeing the universe in a new way -- and conveying his vision through science fiction -- Williamson helped break the old spell that held human beings enthralled for so long. The tradition of static sameness. The old fear of innovation."

Star Wars on Trial

Shipping in June 2006, Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (Smart Pop series) by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, with two dozen wonderfully articulate authors "testifying" either for the prosecution or the defense. Is SW fantasy disguised as science fiction? Does the series spread doom-pessimism about democracy? Has it been a let-down since "The Empire Strikes Back"? Does it even make any sense? Pick up a copy and be prepared for a wild, extravagant "trial" -- brash and entertaining and downright fun!

King Kong Is Back!

Appearing just before the arrival of the 2005 Peter Jackson epic, King Kong Is Back! looks at "an ape, but so much more. A proto-man, primitive, solitary and fiercely proud, representing everything about us that the architects and builders aimed to ignore, or leave behind." This book looks at all three films, and more -- it's a fun and smart collection of 21 essays examining King Kong from every angle. (Some will surprise you.) Read my introduction to the book, then decide for yourself.

Settling Disputes

For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit."

"Our neo-western civilization throngs with "human T Cells" -- educated, skeptical, independent-minded and ego-driven to pounce on some terrible mistake or nefarious scheme."

Millenium Madness

For a broad-spectrum look at the future, from near-term effects on biology, medicine and democracy all the way to issues of transcendence and human immortality (or at least living a very long time), see a series of three articles that were originally commissioned in late 1999 for AOL's Online Magazine, to commemorate the new Millennium.

"Something deeply human keeps us both fascinated and worried about tomorrow's dangers. We all try to project our thoughts into the future, using special portions of our brains called prefrontal lobes to envision, fantasize, and explore possible consequences of our actions, noticing errors and evading some mistakes."

Seeing the Near Future

Carrying these themes a little farther, here's an essay on exploring the near future, titled "Can We See the Near Future? The Odd Way We Design our Destiny," which supplements a transcript of my interview on the Public Television show Closer to Truth.

"About a hundred years ago, people all over the world began drifting away from priests, kings and national flag-totems, transferring their loyalty instead to fervid ideologies -- models of human nature that allured with hypnotically simplistic promises. Often viciously co-opted by nation states, these rigid, formulaic, pseudo-scientific incantations helped turn the mid-20th Century into a hellish pit."

The Meme War

In light of the tense and tragic events of September 11, 2001, I've posted here a portion of a speech I gave in 1989... one that seems -- rather eerily -- to predict much of what we've seen happen. It's about a war between basic worldviews, or "memes," that are rooted far deeper in our hearts and minds than even nations and religions -- the things that we often think we are fighting about. Take a look, and judge for yourself if the predictions were prescient.

"There are presently four major worldviews battling over the future of this planet. These four combatting worldviews have little to do with all those superficial slogans that people have let themselves get lathered about in this century. Things like communism, capitalism, Islam. We have seen wars and death aplenty, but they weren't fought over such simpleminded ideologies. Not really."

George Orwell

Two anniversaries prompted essays about important works that affected our lives in the late Twentieth Century. In the first, a speech given at the 2000 Orwell Conference at the University of Chicago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, I talk about how the greatest works of science fiction do not attempt to predict a future as much as prevent their own scenarios from coming true - an aim that Orwell achieved with fantastic success.

"History is a long and dreary litany of ruinous decisions made by rulers in all centuries and continents. No convoluted social theory is needed to explain this. A common thread weaves through most of these disasters; a flaw in human character -- self-deception -- eventually enticed even great leaders into taking fatal missteps, ignoring the warnings of others."

2001: Not a Science Odyssey

In the second article, commissioned to recognize the arrival of the year for which the epochal film 2001: A Space Odyssey was named, I discuss the unique light that the film sheds on a modern cliché... the absurd and easily disproved, yet tediously-repeated plaint that human wisdom hasn't kept pace with our technology.

"It is our attitudes that have undergone a transformation unlike any in history. All kinds of unjust assumptions that used to be considered inherent -- from racial, sexual and class stereotypes to ideological oversimplifications -- have been tossed onto the trash heap where they long deserved to go, in favor of a generalized notion of tolerance, pragmatism and eccentricity that seems to grow more vibrant with each passing year."

Y2K-Not!

Did anyone notice how the much-feared and ballyhooed "Y2K Bug" fizzled? See my brief essay titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Y2K" predicting this outcome, at iMP Magazine.

"The Y2K computer glitch, by attracting so much media attention, has seemingly acted as a sort of lightning rod for paranoiac fantasies, drawing much of the inevitable fin-de-siècle panic into a fairly harmless set of doom scenarios, none of them involving fire from the sky or Last Judgement. At worst (according to Y2K apocalypse warnings), we will all spend a few months eating canned food by candlelight, while listening to the Bill Gates trial ("It wasn't my fault!") on solar powered radios."

Burning Genius

Read an article I published in Slashdot, titled "Giordano Bruno After 400 Years: A Pain in the Neck Who Would Be Treasured Today," which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the day when that profound eccentric was burned at the stake for views that would nowadays have made him a rich and famous crackpot.

"Few people know of him today. Tourists blink in puzzlement at his statue, now standing in the Roman square -- the Campo de Fiori -- where the Inquisition incinerated him. But his name wasn't always obscure. With a colorful personality and a flood of unconventional opinions, Bruno was a sensational figure as the 17th century drew to a close -- a prominent Renaissance thinker who, true to that complex era, mixed philosophy, religion, logic and mysticism while preaching a daring worldview that helped set the stage for what we now know as science."

Collapsing Societies

When it comes to Earth's future, we tend to be offered two simplistic choices, either guilt-ridden pessimism or a pollyanna faith in market forces. Too much planning or too little. Here I reprint my lengthy review of Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. No society ever succeeded using the prescriptions we hear touted from today's Left and Right. But history does offer some alternatives.

"Amid his outpouring of dour facts, Jared Diamond pauses to wonder. 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?' Then, more generally -- 'How can a society have failed to have seen the dangers that seem so clear to us in retrospect?' It is in addressing this core question -- why do cultures so often falter? -- that his book shows both strengths and faults."

The Republican War on Science

Will the first decade of the 21st Century be known as the time when our Scientific Age came to a whimpering end? The one trait shared by anti-modernists of both left and right appears to be disdain for our ability to learn and do bold new things. My published review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, explores how partisanship can explain much of this collapse of confidence... and why partisan interpretations don't cover everything.

"Alas, "wisdom" is seldom obvious. We rely on politics to determine policy -- an improvement over the whim of kings. But politics, despite centuries of hard refinement, is still far more ego-driven art than craft. Habits of at least four thousand years seem to favor self-interest, hierarchies and dogma, instead of gathering evidence and cheerfully letting facts guide us."

The Past and Future of America's Economy

On a related note, two recommended books that tout assertive problem solving are The Past And Future of America's Economy: Long Waves of Innovation That Power Cycles of Growth by Robert D. Atkinson, and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The first explores measures that would allow us to play our roles better in the world economy. The latter pursues Kurzweil's argument that our scientific competence and technologically-empowered creativity will soon skyrocket, propelling humanity into an entirely new age. I don't entirely agree. But boy, what a ride.

No Place to Hide

See my review (originally published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) of Robert O'Harrow Jr's book about privacy, No Place to Hide. O'Harrow is informative about many ways that big data companies aim for Big Brother omniscience while avoiding all accountability. Too bad there's no suggestion how to make things better. O'Harrow knows there are methods. Perhaps his next book will mention some.

"No issue has helped stoke this ecumenical sense of alienation more than the Great Big Privacy Scare. While the Information Age seems at one level more benign -- (the Internet won't directly blast, kill, mutate or infect us) -- social repercussions of new data-handling technologies seem daunting. Pundits, spanning a spectrum from William Safire to Jeffrey Rosen, have proclaimed this to be our ultimate test. I don't disagree."

The Progress Paradox

The clichés that most hobble us are those we don't notice, because we accept them so readily. Like the common belief -- shared across the political spectrum -- that the world is going to hell. Or the truism that "our wisdom hasn't kept up with technology." In December 2003 I reviewed a new book that challenges this truism. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, by Gregg Easterbrook, suggests we may be better than we thought. There's a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if we open our eyes to how much good has already been done.

"Are we ready, at last, to stop ridiculing those eager, can-do boys and girls who believe in progress?"

Leaving the Matrix

This article about The Matrix films appeared in Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present, a book of essays about the popular film series, edited by Karen Haber, and published in 2003 by iBooks.

Yes, Matrix is filled with "up yours" messages against some brutish authority. You cannot bond with a modern audience without those. Tolkien and Lucas do it with straw man baddies with red glowing eyes. That doesn't make 'em enlightenment tales. Demigods rankle me, naturally. Chosen ones. It can be done in a way that is pro-people. But rarely.

"Science fiction, in effect, has become a central battlefield in one of the most important disputes roiling in the human mind -- the decision whether to continue our obsession with hierarchies, demigods and the past... or to turn with confidence and wary optimism toward the future."

One Ring to Rule Them All

In December 2002, Salon Magazine ran another of my articles about popular culture. This one focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, and how that famous trilogy has played an important role in the long struggle of romanticism against the modern world. The version on Salon was abridged. The full-length article can be viewed here.

"Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals! Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of commercializing every discovery, bottling and marketing each new marvel to the masses for a dollar ninety-five?"

Clone Attacks!

The appearance of Attack of the Clones has renewed interest in my original Salon article and followup essay about Phantom Menace, George Lucas and The Star Wars Universe, so I've added a new essay, exclusive to this site, in which I critique Attack of the Clones.

"I knew my piece in Salon -- about the many storytelling sins of George Lucas -- would raise a lot of heat out there. In the first day alone, I received over 900 emails... and this doesn't count the tsunami of commentary taking place at Slashdot and other discussion groups. Seems I struck a nerve."