by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky is the world’s most prominent anti-militarist campaigner and, wearing a different hat, the acknowledged founder of modern scientific linguistics. Any attempt to understand Chomsky’s huge influence on modern thought must appreciate the connection between these two roles. And to do this we must begin with a paradoxical fact: Chomsky has spent his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in what was originally a military lab. As he himself says about MIT in the 1960s:

[It] was about 90 per cent Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics [RLE].

The Pentagon showed a keen interested in linguistics during this period. Colonel Gaines of the US Air Force recalled why during an interview in 1971. Having referred to the military’s computerised systems of command and control, both for defense against nuclear missiles and for use in Vietnam, he complained about the difficulties of teaching computer languages to military personnel. “We sponsored linguistic research”, he explained, “in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”

If Chomsky’s linguistics was being funded for this purpose, it seems all the more remarkable that Chomsky ended up publicly opposing the Vietnam War and denouncing the very military institutions that were sponsoring his research.

Modestly, Chomsky has always downplayed any moral dilemmas, suggesting that the military had no interest in his work. But I have recently come across restricted-access documents which refer to Chomsky as a “consultant” to a project funded by the Air Force in order “to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.”

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William Pope. L. William Pope. L: Trinket, 2015.

More here, here and here.

by Emrys Westacott

A virtue is a quality that people consider valuable, admirable, or desirable. Human beings exhibit various kinds of virtues, many of which are specific to particular roles or activities. A strong throwing arm is a virtue in a baseball player. A good memory is a virtue in a stage actor. Some qualities, however, such as courage, kindness, or generosity, are typically viewed as moral virtues.

It isn't easy to specify just what makes a virtue a moral virtue. Like certain talents, qualities such as empathy or cheerfulness may be gifts of nature or ingrained by a certain upbringing, and they can also be deliberately cultivated. So the difference between moral and non-moral virtues doesn't lie in their origin, or in the degree to which one is responsible for possessing them.

Moral virtues do tend to be qualities that it is thought good for everyone to have; but that is also true of such things as intelligence or physical fitness. In general, though, we think of particular skills as valuable for some people who engage in particular tasks, while moral virtues are qualities that it is good for anyone and everyone to have. They are those excellences that help one to be a good human being (rather than just a good x) and to live a good life. Something like this underlies the way Socrates talks about virtue in Plato's dialogues.

These days, we tend to think of moral virtues as traits that directly affect our dealings with others; they are traits that make someone a more valuable colleague, neighbor, friend, companion, or compatriot, or fellow citizen. If we adopt Peter Singer's notion of expanding the circle of moral concern, we will also count among "others" humanity as a whole, and at least some non-human animals. But philosophers, like Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics conceive of moral virtues more broadly still, as including traits that have to do with how fulfilling a life one leads. Thoreau, for instance, who could reasonably be described as a modern stoic, views curiosity about the natural world, or an ability to appreciate beauty, as moral virtues in this sense.

Can a moral virtue become outdated? However one conceives of the moral virtues, this is an interesting question to ponder.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The statistics are shocking. A Russian troll farm created false anti-Clinton stories and distributed them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As many as 126 million Facebook users may have encountered at least one piece of Russian propaganda; Russian tweets received as many as 288 million views. The Russians, just like Trump’s campaign itself, leveraged the adtech infrastructure developed by social media companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to identify and target those most receptive to their lies and provocations.

What is going on? Is this something new? Does it matter?

I. Do People Believe Fake News?

One popular interpretation of what is going on is that social media and its associated adtech have isolated us in filter bubbles and made us newly vulnerable to politically or commercially motivated lies. The bubble is a controlled information environment based on what we want to hear and what adbuyers want people like us to believe. Organisations that know how to use this – whether a Russian troll farm or the company hired by the Brexit campaign – can exercise enormous power over the information we are exposed to and thus our beliefs about the world.

I disagree. I think very few people actually believe fake news. Rather, they indulge in believing that they believe it. People’s relationship to such beliefs is much more like the way they relate to icecream than the enlightenment idea of respecting objective truth. Consider Pizzagate, a recent very famous example of fake news.

At the end of October 2016 an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory started circulating on fringe rightist social media and fake news websites like Infowars. Russian troll accounts seem to have been among those helping the story spread. Over the next month, millions of Americans heard or read that top members of the Democratic Party were running a child sexual slavery ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.

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by Brooks Riley

by Holly A. Case

Wilhelm Kotarbiński, Camel Cavalry (1848-1921)

"People who were not born then will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel….But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward."

So wrote Robert Musil in Man Without Qualities, describing the atmosphere in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

*

The historian Carl Schorske used Musil's "cavalry camel" passage to open the third chapter in his famous Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Written over the 1960s and 1970s, Schorske's book explained why the intricacies of Viennese high culture should concern readers of his own time, in which "liberals and radicals, almost unconsciously, adapted their world-views to a revolution of falling political expectations."

Now a mood of pessimism—sometimes of impotence, sometimes of rigid defensiveness, sometimes of surrender—settled over an intelligentsia that, whether centrist or radical, liberal or Marxist, had for several decades been united in social optimism.

Schorske noted how some liberals who had never given a whit for religion became enamored with "neo-orthodox Protestantism," and how "patrician wisdom" overtook "ethical rationalism." In short, what had once been left behind was laid in front like new track.

*

A while ago I went to see Black Panther. The best part was hearing the audience address the screen as though the characters could hear them. It reminded me of the descriptions of cinema's earliest viewers, who fled from their seats at the sight of an oncoming train on the screen.

We have a president who watches the news and calls into the news and tweets the news and is the news. So perhaps King T'Challa does hear. I feel like he even said as much at some point, in response to an outcry from the audience.

*

Apparently, a good many clock radios in Europe are running three to six minutes slow these days. The German press calls it "Weckergate" (Alarm clock-gate). It has something to do with a conflict between Kosovo and Serbia over payments for electricity in areas of Kosovo where Serbs are in the majority. Somehow this makes a lot of clocks run slow, including German ones.

A day after "Alarm clock-gate" swept the German headlines, it hit the Austrian ones. The day after that, the English-language ones.

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by Richard King

There's disagreement about who first described politics as "show business for ugly people": some commentators attribute the zinger to Jay Leno, others to political consultant Paul Begala. But there is broad agreement that whoever it was identified a genuine phenomenon. Politics in the era of mass communication has indeed become more "mediated" – as focused on personalities as it is on ideology and policy, and a prey to the dark arts of image-making and spin. The successful modern politician knows that in order to be successful s/he must defer to the media consultant and submit to the stylistic makeover. Above all, s/he knows to stick to the script.

Now, however, we have a different phenomenon – not new, exactly, but newly prominent: the political celebrity. Actors and other media personalities are increasingly engaged in awareness-raising, social media campaigns and activism, and the news media's appetite for their interventions is huge. When celebrities speak out, their words are reported, analysed, criticised, celebrated. If politics is show business for ugly people, show business is looking more and more like politics for beautiful people.

In the event, last Sunday's Oscars ceremony was a more muted affair, politically speaking, than previous recent industry gatherings, perhaps because the organisers of Time's Up and its analogues are aware that the law of diminishing returns may soon kick in, if it hasn't already. But the broader trend is conspicuous. From the celebrity envoy or "goodwill ambassador" to the "controversial" acceptance speech to the red-carpet anti-fashion statement, the idea that Hollywood and the media more broadly have a responsibility to deal with issues of social justice is now utterly mainstream.

The intersection of showbiz and activism is by no means a new phenomenon. Jane Fonda's opposition to the Vietnam War, Harry Belafonte's involvement in the civil rights movement, and Charlton Heston's advocacy on behalf of the National Rifle Association are just a few examples of celebrities lending their imprimaturs to issues that are important to them. Nor is this an unwelcome phenomenon, necessarily. It isn't incumbent on anyone to shut up about the state of the world just because they have money in the bank and a state-of-the-art home-security system, though an intelligent analysis will account for the skewed perspective such privileges tend to engender. Yes it can be irritating to hear ditsy A-listers wax political about topics they'd never heard of until the day before yesterday. But these aren't crimes against humanity. And, really, Clint Eastwood's heart to heart with an empty chair was no more embarrassing, at the end of the day, than American Sniper.

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by Paul North

Humanities professors are the true conservatives. What is it to be conservative? A professor hunches over a podium and says, "well, … you know…." The lecture begins. Well you know: Chateaubriand's pro-restoration journal Le Conservateur started it all off in 1818, proposing a return to the society of orders after the revolutionary republic. For this lecturer, saying what something is requires saying what it was. A minimum description of a conservative is that. A conservative prefers what was to what is.

Humanities professors are way ahead of the curve on this kind of thing. A rambunctious student wants to debate current events: a humanities professor blinks and says "well…it wasn't always that way." Thank goodness for the delaying, retarding, preserving "well…"! Humanities professors use the opening that a strategic "well" gives them, in order to talk about how it was.

Well…

Why don't we ask what it was to be conservative.

A classics professor dusts off a volume of Cicero and finds these words:

pro di inmortales, custodes et conservatores hujus urbis atque imperii.
Oh immortal gods, protectors and preservers of the city and the empire.

It is a cliché phrase, really. Cicero repeats it from old political chatter.

Still, it's a huge claim—who is the conservative? The gods conserve the city and the empire. Cicero has heaven in mind, the classics professor a much smaller thing. Not gods or empire—words are what's important. Who conserves Cicero's words? The classics professor of course. a conservative of the highest order, the professor nonetheless is faced with a hard question. What do Cicero's words preserve? Here is the real crux of the matter. For there are two words here, "protectors" and "preservers." What is the difference? Something is being said in the contrast between the two. The difference will help us say what it was to be conservative. Conservatores differ from custodes, though here they are put together. To know what it means to be a conservator in old Roman republican wisdom then, we also need to know what it means to be a custodian. Gods are custodians: they protect the city from inside and outside, keep it safe from tyrants and from enemies, and they carry out this protection for the purposes of preservation. Gods protect the city in order that the city may endure as it is, as it was.

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by Michael Liss

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

—Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861, First Inaugural Address

Irony. History offers an inexhaustible supply of it. Lincoln stood on the podium that March morning across from the one man who may have most helped put him there—the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney. Four years earlier, on March 4, 1857, Taney performed what he considered a far more pleasant duty: to swear in his fellow Dickinson College Alum James Buchanan. Then, just two days after, he lit the first match to Buchanan’s Presidency by reading from the bench what was probably the most consequential, and certainly the worst Supreme Court decision ever, Dred Scott vs. Sandford.

Dred Scott was born a slave in Missouri, owned by an Army Surgeon named Emerson, who often traveled to new postings. For roughly a decade, they lived in Illinois, a state where slavery was prohibited by both the Northwest Ordinance and its own constitution. Later, Dr. Emerson was posted to Fort Snelling in Minnesota, then a territorial area where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise. They finally returned to Missouri, and, after Emerson died and “title” to Scott passed to new owners, he sued for his freedom and that of his wife and children. Scott won at the trial court level, then lost in Missouri’s Supreme Court. At that point, he turned to the federal courts. Finally, in 1856, the matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The question was achingly simple on a human level, yet agonizingly complex from a public policy perspective: Was Dred Scott entitled to freedom by virtue of the amount of time spent in free areas? Scott contended he was. Scott’s master insisted that a “pure blooded” African and descendent of slaves could never be a U.S. citizen, and so therefore was not qualified to access the U.S. courts. The case was argued in February of 1856, then reargued en banc that December to specifically address two key points.

No one would argue with the idea that the issues were timely. Slavery was always timely; it was the intractable, incurable American Original Sin. The Constitution itself was jury-rigged to accommodate it, with painful concessions to which neither side ever fully reconciled itself. Conflicts arose continuously, not just over the Peculiar Institution itself, but by anything that it touched—internal improvements, trade and tariffs, even foreign policy. Every few years there would be a flare-up, sometimes resolved by quiet compromise or concession, sometimes by grand bargains, sometimes, as in the case of the South Carolina Nullification and Secession crisis, by the application of a combination of Jacksonian tact and Jacksonian brute force.

And still, it went on. Lynchings, raids, arson, smashing of presses, intimidation. The country seethed, quieted down, then seethed again. Preachers read from different sections of the Bible to claim spiritual support for their sides. Politicians alternated between bile and eloquence; newspapers wrote inflammatory, pointless editorials; and Congress debated endlessly.

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Astronomer

—for Owen
.
I unclip the latches of your seat
lift and pull you from the car
into full light, into the light of the thing
which dimples the gauze of space
and holds you in that cup
like a ball in a ring of roulette

in my arms you turn,
and from the cuff of your coat,
shoot your finger east at the pale face
of second-hand light hung in blue
and bay “Moon!”
the way I cry “Improbable!”

but you are two and I am
much closer to the gate of
utter space
.

Jim Culleny
3/2/18

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

I'm currently living in an Ingmar Bergman dreamland of cinematic ecstasy, because I'm watching 43 of his films in a retrospective at Manhattan's premier arthouse, Film Forum. Bergman would've been 100 this year, and this retrospective will be shown in some other cities in America and the world.

Bergman is one of my all-time heroes, along with Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, J.M. Coetzee, Matisse, Anselm Kiefer and not many others.

Here is my take on my all-time favorite film-maker (other just-below-Bergman favorites include Visconti, Dreyer, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Renoir, Tarkovsky, Ozu and Bela Tarr).

And if you live anywhere in or near Manhattan, go see Bergman's movies playing at Film Forum now (more about the nine not-to-be-missed ones later).

1. ALL-TIME GREATEST FILMMAKER

People say Bergman's films were bleak. What they should really be saying is that all other films are sentimental.

One might go further: Bergman was an artist; all other filmmakers are boulevardiers.

Let's not pull our punches here: in writing we have Shakespeare, in music we have Beethoven, in painting we have Picasso, and in film we have Bergman. Unlike any other filmmaker, he belongs in the pantheon of humankind's greatest artists.

I count myself lucky: Bergman made his films in my lifetime. I could live my life waiting for the next Bergman film, like I spent my teens and twenties waiting for the next Beatles album. I am happy to have been alive when these two giant entities were doing their work, experiencing the same good fortune of those lucky Londoners who went to see Shakespeare when he was doing his work, those Germans who heard Beethoven and Mozart at the time they were creating their music, and those Parisians who went to Picasso's shows while he was painting away in their hometown.

I have Woody Allen on my side: "There's no question in my mind that Bergman is the greatest of all filmmakers. No one else even comes close. His accomplishment is that immense. He is the only movie director to ever probe the human psyche on such a profound level. He's the first director to dramatize metaphysical issues. His body of work compares to Proust's cycle of novels or even the plays of Shakespeare."

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Gohar Dashti. Home, 2017.

More here, here, and here.

by Maniza Naqvi

The Hyderabad, Karachi and Lahore Literary Festivals have concluded successfully for this year. And a couple more are about to begin in Gwadar, Islamabad and Faisalabad. These two to three day events full of sessions ranging from literature to songs and theater and stand up comedians and the memoirs of politicians and bureaucrats are a delicious and strong mixed brew of annual events leaving some contented and other not so much. In any event they are now in their third through ninth years of occurrence in Pakistan's all too short season of Spring.

The credit goes to the Karachi Literature Festival for getting this annual event started in Pakistan inspired by the Jaipur Literary Festival in India. In Pakistan all of these festivals include a few sessions for works of fiction, non fiction and poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi and Pashto but predominantly the sessions are focused on English writing especially in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.

The number of novels written by authors of Pakistani origin who write in English are increasing at an increasing pace. So that from three in the 1960s there are at least twenty whose novels were published in 2017. If I were to hand out awards for best novels in this category it would go to Osama Siddique, for his superb, succinct yet vast book Snuffing Out the Moon, and to Sami Shah for Fire and Earth Boy. With these exceptional debut novels, the two writers have changed the texture and tone of Pakistani English fiction.

The irrefutable evidence that possession and being possessed is the current state of Pakistani English literature can be found in The Djinn Falls in Love, a captivating collection of short stories edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin. Included in this collection are spellbinding and riveting stories by new writers of Pakistani origin such as Sami Shah and Usman T Malik. Transformative? Yes.

Most of the authors getting attention are those who emerged on the international scene and are on their third or fourth novel. Mohsin Hamid with Exit West and Kamila Shamsie with Home Fire, were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in London in 2017. Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, too, was shortlisted for the Booker, in 2007.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

On particularly tough days of my first Ramadan in college, I had vivid dreams of Peshawar, my hometown. Eager to succeed as an international student, I would never have confessed to being homesick but for my Psychology course “Sleep and Dreaming” which required a dream journal. “It’s mid-day,” I noted in one of the entries,” I’m having piping hot, fried fish from that vendor next to Dr. Framji the dentist’s clinic in sheher (Peshawar city). I’m with my mother. The naan is fresh.”

For years, nostalgia emerged only in poems or in snippets of conversation with my brothers, but around the time I had lived away from Peshawar for longer than I had lived in Peshawar, I began to draw maps from memory: earliest home, school, airport, TV station, Abasin Arts Council, Qissa Khawani bazaar, chowk yaadgaar, Peshawar club… the maps were eccentric, juvenile, and completely inaccurate. The best map of my Peshawar, was handed to me in the neat hand of my father.

Pondering beyond the intimate and focusing on the larger, global significance of the ancient city of Peshawar, as I researched the Silk Road cultures for a manuscript, I found myself irked and emotionally exhausted by the material generated by Western authors; I did not recognize the city in their writings. I continued hitting dead-ends until I came across Dr. Amjad Hussain’s work. As a distinguished cardiovascular surgeon/researcher and long-time academic, Dr. Hussain is well-known in the international medical community, but he’s also recognized as a photographer, an expedition-leader, a builder of interfaith dialogue, a journalist and author; it was quite a stroke of luck for me to receive a beautiful, handmade map of Peshawar from him, to read his publications in Urdu and English, his running journal from a recent Silk Road expedition and especially, to meet this true polymath belonging to my beloved city in person.

Our conversations crisscrossed myriad topics, as expected. For this particular email interview, I decided to capture a part of the wide range of things Dr. Hussain’s work encompasses.

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by Brooks Riley

by Akim Reinhardt

Pocahontas was an informal childhood name, a nickname meaning "playful one" or "mischievous girl." Although "Pocahontas" is what the British colonists came to know her by, her formal name in public was Amonute. Her ritual name, known to her kin, was Matoaka.

Amonute spoke an Eastern Algonkian (sometimes spelled Algonquin) language. While some Eastern Algonkian languages are still spoken, such as the Abenakian dialect of Mi'kmaq and the Delawaran dialect of Munsee, Amonute's Powhattan dialect is extinct. However, modern English retains several loan words from her language, including: hickory, hominy, moccasin, muskrat, opossum, persimmon, raccoon, terrapin, and tomahawk.

Amonute was not a "princess." This is a designation of European royalty, not Algonkian hereditary politics. But even if we use the word more colloquially, she still would not qualify, despite being the daughter of "royalty." Her father, Wahunsenacawh, was the werowance (leader/ruler) of a large Native confederacy in the southern Chesapeake Bay region. He is more commonly known by his throne name, Powhatan, which was also the collective name of his confederacy's people. However, the Powhatan people had a matrilineal society, and Amonute's mother was a commoner; thus, her daughter did not inherit any aristocratic lineage from Powhatan.

Amonute was about 9 years old when she first met John Smith, maybe a year or two older.

The story of her saving John Smith from a beheading by her father is a myth, nothing more than a colonial creation story. In later years, Smith published sensationalized accounts of his globe trotting exploits, and a literary theme he repeatedly invoked was stories of exotic and infatuated young women rescuing him from certain doom; it helped sell books. Smith's tale of Pocahontas saving him from execution does not appear in his initial reports, but only in his later, fantastic travelogues. The story also does not align with any known Powhatan diplomatic rituals. Furthermore, the idea that her father, the ruler of some 20,000 people over an area larger than the modern state of Delaware, would set vital foreign policy based on the impetuous whims of a nine year old is, at the very best, utterly laughable. Smith was indeed a captive whom Powhatan eventually adopted diplomatically as a "son" (akin to a vassal). But however Powhatan's diplomatic adoption of Smith unfolded, the young girl either played a minor, prescribed role, or more likely, was not even present. She was probably outside her father's great hall, tending to chores or playing with other children.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

I've been dreaming of al-Andalus my entire life.

I'm not even sure where I first heard the name–and indeed, the name is like a one-word poem. A magical incantation; for it is enough just to say it–or better, to whisper it. Al-Andalus. I might have learned about the glories of Muslim-ruled Spain in a story by Borges I read as a teenager. It was about the philosopher Averroes. Have you read it? As far as I am concerned, it is the best story ever written. Born in Córdoba during the heyday of the Caliphate, Averroes (aka, Ibn Rushd) represented the golden age of Islamic Spain. This being a subject near to Borges' heart, he once said in an interview that he thought it fortunate his blindness came only after seeing the Alhambra–not before. Not surprising, this palace which moved him so deeply appears in several of his works; as al-Andalus itself became part of his vast fictional landscape.

So, back to Borges' story. Averroes, also known as the smartest man in the world, is utterly absorbed in the task of understanding Aristotle; indeed, so daunting is this challenge that it occupies him day and night for many years. Working one day on a particularly tough problem, he realizes to his great annoyance that his work will be interrupted because he has dinner appointment that evening. A famous traveler it seems, who claims to have traveled all the way to the Kingdom of Sin, had arrived in Córdoba, and Averroes has been invited to dine with this traveler in the esteemed home of Mr. Farach, the city's great scholar of the Koran.

Poor Averroes. All he really wanted to do was continue working on Aristotle.

Working from a translation of a translation (since he could not read Syriac or Greek), Averroes' challenge was enormous. Hating to tear himself away, little did he know that the very question that had been troubling him in the work of Aristotle concerning the words comedy and tragedy, would become clear to him at last that very evening during dinner. However, before discussing the wonders of Cantonese theater, their conversation first turned to the rose garden in the palace. The Koranic scholar Farach asks the traveler about the roses of Hindustan; about which he notes that, "The learned Ibn Qutaiba describes an excellent variety of the perpetual rose, which is found in the gardens of Hindustan and whose petals, of a blood red, exhibit characters which read, 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.'"

As a young teenager (I was probably 12 or 13 when I read the story), I was quite taken by the image à la Borges of scholars looking for the name of God in the rose petals. And I never forgot the story. Delightfully, many, many years later in Tokyo, a friend of a friend (who was also a great scholar at Tokyo University) told me over soba noodles and beer all about the time he fell in love with life one day when he gazed on the roses in the gardens of the Alhambra.

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by Richard Passov

On the night of December 8th, 1864, George Boole, 49 years of age, in the grips of pneumonia, expired. He left a wife, Mary, and five daughters. Unfortunately, Mary had always carried two of his beliefs: the health benefits of long walks and the healing powers of homeopathic remedies. Late in a winter evening, after finishing his work at the University, under a cold rain, George walked the two miles to his home. Over the next several days, guided by her belief that the cure lay in the symptoms, Mary repeatedly doused George in cold water.

* * *

George was born in a small rail hub one hundred and fifty miles north of London, in the den of a cobbler who, said his wife, was ‘…good at everything except his own business of managing shop.’ Unable to afford an education, Boole’s father nevertheless encouraged his son to study. Dutiful, George taught himself six languages, read the classics, read philosophy and studied his figures.

By twelve he had a reputation owing to his father’s submission to the local newspaper of a poem translated from ancient Greek. Interested readers were surprised to discover that the translator was an unschooled boy. The Town Councilor, fancying himself an amateur mathematician, provided George access to a library filled with mathematics.

George calculated that math would be more remunerative than his first love, theology. Some things don’t change. After enough self-study, hoping for tips from grateful parents he secured a position as an usher tutoring students in theater-sized classrooms. By nineteen, he opened his own school to which he gave the very unoriginal name: “The Classical, Commercial and Mathematical Academy.”

Teaching during the day, studying at night, living with and the sole support for his extended family, George mastered the complete cannon of contemporary math. Mastered to such an extent that in 1837 he responded to an advertisement from a newly established mathematical journal with an astonishingly original piece of work.

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by Thomas Manuel

More than ten years ago, in a now iconic pronouncement, the writer M. John Harrison decried worldbuilding as “the great clomping foot of nerdism“. He called on every science fiction story to represent “the triumph of writing over worldbuilding”, calling it dull and technically unnecessary. “Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent”, he wrote. “Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.” To writers and readers of SFF, these words cannot help but be troubled. And yet, they demand being read again and again, as China Mieville said, “especially [by] those of us fortunate enough to look down and see the targets on our shirts, and look up and see one of the most important, savage and intelligent (anti-)fantasists of recent times aiming down the barrel of his scorn-gun at us.”

I am one such fortunate soul. As I write this essay, not five inches from my right hand, is a sheet of paper with the scribbled schematics of my mongrel, dream city of Orbaiz. I patched together this bastardized urban backdrop for an imminent tabletop RPG campaign and a less-imminent fantasy novel and have enjoyed every minute of it. And now, as intended, I am troubled.

It’s clear that Harrison doesn’t mean these words literally. He has, with a certain amount of arrogance clearly, thrown out this provocation, knowing full well that it lends itself to misinterpretation and enraged internet commentary. If the words hadn’t done the job, the tone of moral superiority and whiff of ‘high art’ sentimentality certainly would’ve. But Harrison isn’t a civilian and can’t easily be dismissed. As a writer, critic and editor, he looms over British SFF. He was a vital member of Michael Moorcock’s team at New Worlds, which ushered in the New Wave of the 60s and 70s. For those who are civilians, the New Wave was, in simplistic terms, the movement in SFF away from pulp to more artistic or literary ground. (Of course, the truth is more complicated. As Helen Mirrick writes in the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, “For some it is “the single most important development in science fiction”, an era that “transformed the science fiction landscape”, but others suggest that it is a meaningless generalization or that it never really existed.”)

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