Presenter:

"...and my revenue forecast says..."

Dilbert:"Did you make any assumptions?"

P:  "I made a lot of them."

D:"Then we don't believe your forecast."

P:"Can I tell you about it anyway?"

D: "Do whatever makes you feel less absurd."


I have been revisiting some of my science fiction days, particularly catching up with Arthur C. Clarke, the fabulously successful writer of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  And a quintessential logical positivist.  His less ambitious speculations were his practical ones, such as satellite communications. He was quite sanguine about technological progress solving the problems of mankind. As such, he was quite the moralist and his novels are full of amateurish philosophy and radical words of judgment upon almost everyone except himself and some scientifically enlightened friends.

His last of four novels on the monoliths is "3001:The Final Odyssey" in which the monoliths represent judgement--adverse and hostile of course, of a superior (of course) civilization about 450 light years off, upon our "new and impoved" solar sytematic civilization.

In his second novel/movie the monoliths make a second sun out of Jupiter, which makes things warm and cosy for almost 1000 years--sound like the millenial reign yet?-- during which time religion has been pretty well elminated ushering in world peace...but the aliens are about 450 years behind of course and don't know about our latest improvements, soooooooooooooooo...

Stop me if you've heard this one...

I confess that I skipped to the end of the Odyssey of  all Odysseys (which it is not of course--but we get a 450 year "reprieve")  and everything seems to be jammed hastily into the last 3 shortish chapters.  So it turns out I didn't miss much--one of the things I used to like about sci-fi was its utter predictability. But let me run through some of the phrases of the last few pages, which will give the reader an idea of the author's default  and utterly clear objectives.  (Read: "assumptions" )

"religious cultists...mentally deranged...unfortunate oversight... the madness...forced the world's law enforcement agencies to cooperate as never before...maladjusted individuals...perverted geniuses...apocalyptic sects, who were delighted to find this new armory...(the internet)  ...cult inspired rehearsals for Doomsday...no serious attacks on society for several hundred years.. the chief weapon...the "Braincap"...it was generally agreed that Communism was the most perfect form of government....it was possible to detect many forms of psychosis--it was accepted that this form of monitoring was a nesessary precaution against a far worse eveil; and it was no coincidence that with the general improvement in mental health, religious fanaticism also started its rapid decline.  The challenge to the demon programmers...(of) captured obscenities...evil genius might reinvent them and deploy them...the digital demons should be sealed in the Pico Vault..."(on the moon)

Get the idea?  These 50's style machinists of our souls could do with a dose of real tedium and dreariness; and perhaps  we can realize that this sort of writing is only a slight cut above the entertainment value of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose last adaption, John Carter (on Mars) was a complete flop; The "Rama" series of Clarke has been in the works for years but is finally dying on the vine as far as a movie adaption.  It doesn't match the spirit of our age, which is postmodernism, which has little use for logical positivists.  The depressive tendencies of the later Orwell and Wells are far to be preferred to the overweening ambitions of scientific idealists, who seem to think that the worst thing ever to happen to us is religion, and don't feel that anyone else's opinion counts.  It was not religion that brought us nuclear arms but Einstein himself...more than a match for Werner Von Brauhn, eh!

"Myopathy"  the disease not of the muscles but of our myopic vision, and our self-righteousness and the perpetual misuse of "projection," --assuming, again, that all the evil is "over there", not "over here--has caused the death of more peple than any form of supernaturalism per se.  (Some of which does leak over into Clarke's visions, which literally are quite a bit like seances with mysteriously moving hair brushes lovingly applied to his dying mother by the ghost --in the machine of course--of  a dead astronaut.) Demons everywhere.....reminds me of the fields of "Zelda."


The Land of Tommorrow--or thereabouts--I will bring to bear to this subject Anthony Lane,  satirist and movie reviewer who just skewered "The Avengers" in the last issue of TNY.  (Now that's good writing!)