Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

“Boom boom, guys! Liberalism is happy, healthy, and alive!”

That seems to be the message coming from the party leadership, which should tell you everything you need to know.

There is a problem with the Liberal Democrats, and it’s a problem which has got worse and worse, to the point that I don’t know if the party can be saved, though I hope to God that it can. And the problem is this — many people in the Lib Dems seem to have accidentally received the Labour Party constitution in their membership pack, rather than the Lib Dem constitution, and to be acting accordingly.

For those who don’t know, the Lib Dem constitution says “The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity”, and then goes on to explain how that will be done, with things like “Our responsibility for justice and liberty cannot be confined by national boundaries; we are committed to fight poverty, oppression, hunger, ignorance, disease and aggression wherever they occur and to promote the free movement of ideas, people, goods and services. Setting aside national sovereignty when necessary, we will work with other countries towards an equitable and peaceful international order and a durable system of common security. Within the European Community we affirm the values of federalism and integration and work for unity based on these principles.”
That sort of thing.

The Labour Party constitution, on the other hand, says
“1. This organisation shall be known as ‘The Labour Party’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘the party’).
2. Its purpose is to organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour Party”
It’s just a tautology. The purpose of its existence is so it can continue to exist, not to support a particular set of aims.

And the problem is, many — not all, but possibly most — activists in the Lib Dems, and a majority of our Parliamentarians, see our purpose the same way.

It comes down to a simple fact: systems behave according to the incentives they have. And in the Lib Dems it was decided, in the 1997 General Election, that our incentives would be based on targeting — winning seats, either in Parliament or in councils, rather than persuading people of liberal values and trying to get liberal policies implemented, by whatever means.

And to make it clear, that *was* a change in tactics. The Lib Dems and their predecessors in the Liberal Party (I’m less sure about the SDP as I’m not so aware of that party’s history) had always operated since at least the 1940s first and foremost as a party of radical ideas, and those radical ideas had been adopted, later, by other parties. The NHS, the welfare state, legalising abortion, legalising homosexuality — these were all Liberal ideas which were later made law, despite the lack of Parliamentary representation.

Which is not to say that representation in Parliament or on councils is a *bad* thing, of course — just that it’s not the *only* way of effecting political change, and it’s also only useful *as* a means of effecting political change.

But in 1997 came Rennardism, and the ruthless allocation of resources to individual constituencies where those resources would make the most electoral sense. As a single-election strategy, this was a good idea (though possibly not *as* responsible for the massive Lib Dem gains that year as it’s credited for — this was, after all, a year when people engaged in tactical voting on a massive scale in the hope of getting out what seemed then to be likely to be the most venal and corrupt Tory government of our lifetime (but which in retrospect looks like a near-utopian example of good governance compared to what we’re experiencing now). But targeting did, at least have some positive effect. Twenty-one years ago.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, that seems like the moment when most of the party machinery took a wrong turn, one which it has still not turned away from. From that point on, the party (at least the party HQ and most of its executive) became, not an organisation which exists to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity, but instead an organisation which exists to organise and maintain in Parliament a Liberal Democrat Party.

And so now we have disgraces like the party’s leader speaking in support of Gordon Brown in his calls for “tighter controls on immigration” (I did warn people about this before Vince Cable was made leader by acclamation). This goes directly against the parts of the party constitution I quoted above, but on the other hand it *does* appeal to exactly the kind of people who want a non-ideological (by which they mean conforming to the implicit ideologies that they have) “new centre party”. We have the party’s immigration policy working group being chaired by someone who spends his time on Twitter trolling Lib Dem Immigrants and mocking anyone who wants a motion that actually promotes free movement.

And we have, time and again, pushback from councilors and Parliamentarians about any attempt to get liberal policy passed, with complaints that it would make it harder for them to continue to get elected. The most awful example of that was in 2016, when we came up with a Brexit policy that, again, goes against everything in the party’s constitution, and which removed our ability to actually campaign against Brexit and distinguish ourselves from the other parties, because Norman Lamb and Greg Mulholland were worried about losing their seats (and Mulholland went on to lose his anyway).

This is *not*, I hasten to add, a problem with the membership. The membership vote for liberal policy when it’s put in front of them. As a result we still, amazingly, have policies that are far to the left of Labour (though you wouldn’t believe it from hearing our leadership speak). Rather it’s a problem with the party’s organisational structure, and the people who’ve taken control of it.

Because the party functions, not as a political party that exists to promote a type of society that it wants to see, but as a pyramid scheme. You deliver leaflets until you’ve recruited ten leaflet deliverers who’ll deliver leaflets with your face on them, at which point you become a councilor. When your ten leaflet-deliverers have each also recruited ten leaflet deliverers and get promoted to councilor, you become an MP. No liberalism required.

And the rhetoric of these people is also pyramid-scheme style mixtures of magical thinking, promises of future rewards, and healthy doses of guilt for not having achieved unreachable goals, mixed in with management-speak bullshytt.

So now, when the limits of that approach become painfully apparent, after the leadership got so good at steering right into the middle of the road that we ended up getting smashed by speeding lorries coming from both directions, the party is in a far, far worse state than the old Liberal Party was in the 1960s. We have the right values, but leaders who don’t believe in them. We have the right policy, but get told to shut up about it in case it scares racists. There are large areas of the country that have been left with no liberal activity, as activists have worked neighbouring wards or constituencies, meaning no future activists have come up, and that when people in those areas do join the party they have no local party to work with.

And most annoyingly, almost all the MPs we had who didn’t fit this description lost their seats in 2015, largely as a result of the actions of those who do.

While the Lib Dem party has some of the finest thinkers I know, some of the most principled progressive activists I’ve ever come across, a set of policies that would make the world a much better place, and even more than all of that a guiding philosophy which I happen to think is as close to absolutely right as one can get in politics, all of this is going to waste as the party prioritises “local champions” (who may happen to share the same values as UKIP, but they really *care* about potholes) on councils and nationally spends all its time worrying about placating five swing voters in Nottingham who won’t vote for us if we state a single principle.

Paradoxically, I think that Lib Dem electoral success can only come if, in the short term, we start to work towards goals that have no immediate electoral reward. For a start, we need to have a 650-seat/9456-ward strategy. There needs to be *some* Lib Dem activity in every single ward in the country. One notable thing that’s been seen in recent council by-elections is over and over again Lib Dems have taken seats where we didn’t even stand a candidate in previous elections. People will support Lib Dems when given the opportunity.

But it’s also important to realise that *not everyone will support us, and that is OK*. Over and again in discussions about Brexit, I have run into people saying “but we can’t be just a party for the forty-eight percent, we need to be for the other fifty-two percent as well!”

Well, currently, we’re a party for the eight percent, which is what we’re getting in the polls and have been consistently for several years now. Maybe try actually appealing to somebody, rather than think you can get everyone’s votes if you’re inoffensive enough.

But neither of these things will happen without a change in the party’s culture. We need more ideas, and more discussion of ideas. And by this I *don’t* mean big thick policy-wonk documents put out by think-tanks. And nor do I mean party policy which reads like it’s draft legislation. I mean discussion of radical liberal solutions to the problems in front of us. I mean changing the terms of the debate. Instead of pushing for “Soft Brexit”, push for the old Liberal goal of a united federal Europe. Instead of talking about “firm but fair” immigration policies, talk about the freedom to move where you like without arbitrary restrictions. Instead of tweaking universal credit, talk about bringing in basic income.

We need to get out there and make the case for liberalism, while also making the case for the party. If done properly, that will eventually yield electoral results — but even if it doesn’t, it may well lead to other parties taking on our policies and implementing them. Which for those of us who are more focused on ensuring no-one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance, and conformity than we are on furthering our own careers and maybe getting a knighthood should be the actual point.

Remember, UKIP *never* got a single MP by any means other than defections from another party, yet their entire policy platform has been taken on wholesale by the Tories and Labour, and our own policy on the EU and immigration is currently closer to theirs than to our own constitution. Why? Because they didn’t compromise, and they kept pushing a clear message, and got enough people to support them that they were a threat to the jobs of MPs under first past the post, even if they weren’t going to win those seats themselves. The fact that their policy platform is pure evil to the extent it’s coherent at all, which it mostly isn’t, didn’t matter. UKIP won.

There is no reason why if we picked a handful of solidly liberal principles, ones that were simple to explain, and *did not compromise on them*, we couldn’t do the same.

But for this to work, we will also have to fight the party machine, because the party machine is dedicated to self-preservation above liberal principle.

I’m not at all sure that the party *can* be saved at this point — the people with power in the party are so utterly determined that the way they have done things for the last twenty years is the only way things can ever be done that they will do everything they can now to oppose making the Liberal Democrats back into a party that actually matters. Most of them appear to be hoping against hope that the mythical New Centrist Party with Chuka and Woke Soubz will happen and they can all indulge in their eighties nostalgia and engage in Alliance cosplay, and various signs and portents within the party are leading me to think that some people in party HQ are setting up their own parallel organisations and parties-within-a-party, capturing as much of the party’s functionality as they can so that when and if this New Brand (for it will be a brand, not a party in any real sense) forms they can go off to be Proper Centrists Like Macron and not have to worry about that pesky liberalism stuff (and you can guarantee that any future New Centrist Party will keep the pyramid scheme elements but ditch the member-led policy-making, except maybe for the odd Twitter contest for a new way to give supermarkets tax breaks).

But if it’s possible to save the party, I think we should. The Lib Dems as they exist now are a horribly flawed vehicle for liberalism — and even if they suddenly became focused on the priorities I think they should have, they would still be very flawed, because that’s the nature of organisations that are made up of humans, especially organisations that are working within the ultra-flawed world of politics. But, flawed as it is, the party is the only one that really represents a significant strand of thought in British politics — a strand of thought that prioritises freedom over conformity, and which seeks to allow everyone to become the version of themselves they most want to be, and to free everyone from oppression. If the party dies, or if it stops having even a nominal connection to liberalism (in the sense in which the party has traditionally meant it, not as a synonym for centrism), we will have lost something unutterably precious.

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Last Monday was Autistic Pride Day. I couldn’t commemorate it then because I was shepherding a pair of neurotypicals around a crowded, sensory-overstimulating, city I don’t know. There was also an Autistic Pride Picnic in Manchester today, which I was unable to attend because having spent a week and a bit dealing with neurotypicals, I had some important hiding and not interacting with anyone at all that I urgently needed to attend to.

So, belatedly, here are a few thoughts on autism pride.

Pride seems a strange emotion to me, at least as far as one’s neurology goes. It seems a little like being proud that I’m bald or have blue eyes. It’s not really an achievement to be autistic, it’s just something you’re born with.

But then again, maybe it is an achievement to be proud of that I’ve survived this long as an autistic person. We don’t tend to have long lives — our life expectancy is fifty-four (and that’s for those lucky enough not to have comorbid conditions such as epilepsy). And the reason for this is mostly down to the fact that we have to fight every day for our lives. The biggest killer of autistic people is stress-related heart disease. The second biggest killer is suicide — and the suicide rates for people who get diagnosed as adults (or those who, like me, know we are autistic but didn’t get diagnosed as children because of changing diagnostic criteria, and who when we attempted to get formal diagnosis as adults get stuck on literally endless waiting lists because no-one in a position of power gives a shit about autistic people, only about the neurotypical parents of autistic children) are astronomical. Sixty-six percent of newly-diagnosed adults have considered suicide, and thirty-five percent have made serious plans or attempts to kill themselves. The only group of people I know of with similar statistics is trans people, who suffer a similar (possibly even worse) level of societal marginalisation. 

So yes, I can be proud that I’m alive, I suppose. 

I’m alive in the face of a society which is so set up to marginalise autistic people that when I had to take time off from work with work-related stress in my last job, the management’s response was to make me spend more days in the office rather than working from home, increasing my stress at the expense of my productivity. Apparently my old employers didn’t care if I did less work, so long as I was also more unhealthy.

I’m alive in the face of a society which is so skewed against autistic people that Autistica, the charity which produced those statistics about autistic suicide rates, has recently announced its involvement in clinical trials in partnership with Autism Speaks, a “charity” which wants to eliminate autistic people from existence altogether for the convenience of the neurotypical parents of autistic children.  

I’m alive in the face of the kind of pervasive ableism which sees my party’s own health spokesman call for abusive behavioural “therapies” for us, and which sees the Lib Dem Disability Association say on its website (despite numerous corrections from myself and other autistic Lib Dems) of autistic people “Their ability to develop friendships is generally limited as is their capacity to understand other people’s emotional expression,” and “Some people with autism, whilst being appearing to be stupid or thick, may actually have a skill, such as an artist, that they can excel in”.

I’m alive in the face of a culture which sees even people who are otherwise decent human beings share articles on the toxicity of nerd culture, and go on to blame that toxicity not on a culture that rewards entitled cis het white men who abuse their power, but on autistic people, most of whom have less than no ability to change culture in any meaningful way.

And I’m alive in the face of a culture which sees a group of people, many of whom have a variety of life-impairing illnesses such as autoimmune diseases, inflammatory illnesses, and many other things which occur comorbidly with autism in a huge number of cases, and says “we need to pour billions of dollars into medical research to find out why they’re a bit quiet and don’t want to talk with us, so we can kill anyone who behaves like that and replace them with someone more sociable! Fuck curing their epilepsy or arthritis or diabetes though.”

And even worse than all these, I’m alive in the face of a culture which at every turn, in a million little ways, prioritises the comfort of the majority over the needs of the autistic minority, in everything from the existence of job interviews to shops like Lush which make entire sections of cities a no-go zone for those with sensory issues, to the way people judge you for not making eye contact. A world which prioritises “teamwork” and punishes the “antisocial”, a world which runs entirely on ability to perform neurotypical social rituals, and where if you break down and scream “just leave me the fuck alone, you’re torturing me” after spending too long being forced into performing tose rituals against every instinct in your body, it’s you, not your torturers, who’s considered at fault, because they were only being normal and friendly.

(I never do break down and scream, because of this. I internalise it instead, and end up with cardiovascular disease, so I’ll die of stress “naturally” without causing too much discomfort to neurotypicals. Yay?)

So yeah, that’s something to be proud of, I suppose.

And so autism pride is necessary, in the same way that pride in membership of LGBT+ groups is necessary. We’re both groups that face significant threats to our very existence, and who need at times to say “fuck you, I won’t let you stop me from being myself”. Many of the pressures, indeed, are the same — masking for autistic people is essentially the same thing as being closeted is, while both groups have to deal with eugenicists wanting to eliminate us altogether.

(This is not to enter into oppression olympics — as an allocishet man I have no way of knowing to what extent the ableism I face compares to the various bigotries and oppressions faced by LGBT+ people — so it’s not a comparison of my experience, just a statement about the nature, not the level, of these shared difficulties).

And there’s a *huge* amount of stigma attached to autism. Being autistic is alternately used as a slur (for example the accusations that Theresa May is as cold and heartless as she is because she’s autistic, with no evidence for that other than a neurotypical inability to admit that they share a neurology with evil people) or dismissed altogether (“but isn’t everyone a little bit on the spectrum?”). Autism is simultaneously something that renders one lacking in the basic elements of humanity (see the claims that we are lacking in empathy, which are wrong on many, many levels) and something that doesn’t even really exist, so no accomodations need be made for autistic people’s differences.

So, I’ll say it, but only because it needs saying:
Autistic people are valid.
Autistic people are humans and deserve human rights.

Autistic people are capable of love, compassion, and empathy. 

Autistic people have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Autistic people have a right to be proud.

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Just a brief explanation for my current lack of posting: my in-laws have been staying with me for a week, over from the US; I’ve got a book that’s quite a bit past deadline and a few other writing things I can’t talk about that had deadlines that either just happened or were just about to; and there are *major* health crises happening with two different relatives (the latter don’t currently need my active involvement, but I’m having to do emotional support stuff a lot). Tomorrow is something of a crisis point for all of this, and after that I’ll be able to get back to clearing stuff from the to-do list a bit.

I’m currently not very online because my in-laws are visiting. Proper posts resume Friday, but I’ve got an odd question for anyone I might have lent DVDs to — have I lent any of you the Doctor Who DVDs Robot, The Hand of Fear, Pyramids of Mars or Mark of the Rani? For some reason those four aren’t on my shelves with the rest of my (not-quite-complete) set of Doctor Who DVDs, but I know I own copies of them. If any of you have borrowed them, could you let me know? (And, in the case of Mark of the Rani, could you also let me know why on Earth I lent you that of all things?)

As always, I’m going to try to write blog posts about all the shortlisted works for the Hugo Awards and Retro-Hugos this year. As always, I will almost certainly not manage that. In particular, unless I somehow get stranded on a desert island, with only the nominated books for entertainment, and with a time machine that allows me to get back in time for voting, I won’t even be attempting the Best Series nominees (a category I don’t believe should exist at all, frankly, for a variety of reasons). It is, of course, extraordinarily generous that, for example, all of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books are included in the Hugo Packet, but I have a low tolerance for epic fantasy anyway, and faced with three 2500-ish page (according to Calibre, the ereader software I use) novels, one of which starts with a prelude, then “4500 years later”, and then a prologue before getting to the first chapter proper… well, I’d *like* to judge the category properly, but I’m afraid I have some important literally anything else in the world to be getting on with.

(No slight intended to Sanderson, who seems from the Writing Excuses podcast to be a very nice man. But my own view is that around two hundred and fifty pages is the optimum length for a novel, and I’m immune to the charms of epics generally, preferring books to be about ideas first and foremost rather than about character arcs or immersion in a world).

The short stories, on the other hand, are far more in my wheelhouse. I’ll be ranking these best to worst, mimicking my ranking on the eventual ballot. To avoid too much tension. I’ll say straight away that for the first time in a long time there is nothing here that should go below “No Award”. There’s work that’s not to my taste, but with all of it I can see why it would be to someone else’s. It’s all at least competently written, and it’s all actual science fiction or fantasy. None of it is outright propaganda for fascism, and none of it appears to have been gamed onto the ballot by Gamergate-wannabes.

These should not be exceptional criteria for an award, but after a couple of years where none of those were true (and last year where the quality was back up again thanks to the rule changes but there were still a handful of fascist shitsmears on the ballot), it’s a relief to be able to say those things.

It’s still not the case — and hadn’t been for a couple of years before the fascists tried their takeover bid — that this list contains only exemplary material, and there has always (since long before the Puppies) been a lot of work on the short fiction ballots that I’m unimpressd by. But partly that’s a fashion thing, I suspect — what impresses fandom at the moment is different from what impresses me, and the pendulum will undoubtedly swing again (and may already have done so had the fascists not tried to pull the pendulum off altogether). What we have here is a selection of well-reviewed, well-liked stories that are the consensus choice of fandom as the best stories published last year, and I’m not going to put “No Award” over anything that meets those criteria.

So, going from best to worst:

Fandom For Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad is an absolutely joyous little vignette about fandom, in which an obsolete robot from the 1950s (in a world in which robots exist but have made basically no difference to the culture) discovers online anime fandom and becomes a regular participant in fanfic groups — and in doing so helps build up appreciation for the obsolete aesthetics of 1950s robots generally.

I might not have liked this *quite* so much if I didn’t read it in the same week that Doctor Who on Twitch was causing much squeeing and injokes among tens of thousands of people, many of whom were discovering Hartnell-era Doctor Who for the first time — it’s not particularly strongly plotted and contains no revelatory ideas. But it’s celebratory, and funny, and it pings a *lot* of my buttons on all sorts of issues — the way online communities allow spaces for people who don’t fit in with conventional society, ways that accommodations can be made between authenticity-police style fans and the younger, more female, online fandoms around Tumblr and AO3, the way my personal favourite museum (the Media Museum in Bradford, now sadly the “Science and Media Museum”) is focusing less and less on the things that make it special, the idea that “outdated” aesthetics still have value, and the appreciation of nonstandard forms of physical beauty.

These are things that *really* resonate hard with me, and Prasad’s writing is clear and witty. It also includes copious exchanges from the message board conversations the robot takes part in, and I’m a sucker for found-document and epistolary stuff in my fiction. Basically, this is a story that seems designed to hit *all* of my buttons, so much so that I’m completely willing to forgive its comparatively slight plot. Just lovely. Far and away my favourite thing on the ballot.

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience TM by Rebecca Roanhorse is a really strong piece, written in second person, about portrayal of native experience for colonialist tourists, about cultural appropriation, the idea of “authenticity”, about colonialism more generally, and about betrayal. It only peripherally involves the SFnal aspects of the story — it could very easily be rewritten as a piece of straight contemporary fiction — but it would be a *very good* piece of straight contemporary fiction. It’s probably a better piece than the one I’m putting in first place, but I’m ranking it second partly because it’s less SFnal and partly because it has less to say to me personally. No doubt anyone who isn’t a white man who’s lived all his life in a country where he is the default would find this speaks more to them, and I certainly won’t be at all surprised or disappointed if it wins.

Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand by Fran Wilde is much more impressive than the previous work of Wilde’s I’d read, last year’s “The Jewel and Her Lapidary”. This is an atmospheric piece about freak shows, and eugenics, and medicalisation, told in the form of a tour guide taking you through an exhibition of curiosities. It’s genuinely creepy and disturbing, but like much of what gets nominated for the Hugos at present is a little too dependent on description and prose style for my tastes (one thing about being aphantasic is that it makes reading long descriptions of environments a little difficult and unrewarding). However, it makes good use of these things, and has some *really* disturbing passages — “Open the drawers of Items We’ve Let Touch Us Because Someone Just Like You Said It Would Make Us Well. The hooks and saws, the foul tastes and that stuff that made us gag and didn’t make us any better. You all wrote neat words down about each experiment anyway and that made you better.”

The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata I could very easily have put third, and possibly even second — while my top choice was an easy one, the other three bunch together very closely for me. The most conventional SF story of the bunch, this is something that I could easily see Galaxy having published in the 50s, both in writing style and in subject matter. An elderly woman living in a world beset by environmental disaster, where everyone is agreed that the world is going to end sooner rather than later, and that the best thing to do is to just let entropy win quietly, and to just accept that everything is going to disintegrate.

She’s working on building an obelisk on Mars, by remote-controlling from Earth a set of machinery left there by a previous failed colony attempt, as a final marker that yes, humanity did exist and were capable of art, when something happens to change everything.

It’s a very well written story, definitely worth reading, and probably the story that most fits my idea of what a science fiction story “should” be — but for that reason possibly a little too conservative, hence me ending up ranking it fourth. But all the top four stories are ones I genuinely like. The next two I don’t.

Carnival Nine by Caroline M. Yoachim does some very interesting things with its worldbuilding, but uses it, much like Roanhorse’s story, to tell a story which could have pretty much the exact same emotional effect without the worldbuilding. Which is not to say that the worldbuilding has no effect on the story as a whole — it’s intriguing, and leaves us asking a lot of questions, and it adds to the story — just that most of it works as a straight analogue (or nearly) for things in the real world, and stories which have one to one correspondences like that are less interesting to me.

(I’m really not expressing this very well. This is *not* a story where you could remove the SFnal elements and still have the same story, but it *is* a story where you could write a story set in the real world which had exactly the same emotional beats, beat-for-beat).

The story, about clockwork people who only have a certain number of spring turns a day, seems inspired by the “spoon theory of disability” — a clockwork woman who has a stronger spring than almost anyone, and who was abandoned by her mother (who didn’t want to waste turns on anyone but herself) and brought up by her father, has a clockwork child whose spring doesn’t work properly, and who she has to take care of. This leads to the breakup of her marriage, and so on, (although she later reconciles with her husband).

The reason I’m ranking it so low is… well, it’s a story that focuses on how hard it is to look after a disabled child, and on what looking after a disabled child does to the mother. The child is barely characterised, and the focus is all on the abled mother’s feelings and on her relationships with other characters.

Now, it doesn’t present the child as a burden in the metaphorical sense — she obviously loves the child — but it does in the literal sense, in that she has to carry the child everywhere because he’s too weak to walk.

Now, I don’t think it was the author’s intent by any means to reinforce harmful tropes about disability — in fact I suspect it was the opposite. Certainly the central conceit of the story suggests familiarity with disabled and chronic illness sufferers’ discourse around “spoons”. But whether it intends to or not, I think the story *does* reinforce ableist tropes, and so I can’t in good conscience rank it any higher than this, despite the imagination that’s gone into the worldbuilding and the emotional power of the story itself.

And finally Sun, Moon, Dust by Ursula Vernon is a short piece about a farmer who gets given a magic sword. It hits a lot of Vernon’s familiar themes — gardening, grumpy elderly women who have secret magical knowledge — but while I usually like her work, this does little for me. Like many of the stories this year, it works largely on description of a space and on subtle implications and things left unsaid, but when a story in that style doesn’t work for you, it can feel very bland even if (as this one is) it’s well written.

I have problems with all of these stories (even the one I’m ranking at the top), but at the same time there are four stories here I genuinely like, and two more which are certainly not bad. And while I think Vernon’s one is a little bit of a misfire, she’s a good enough author that I’m entirely willing to accept that the problem is with me, and that I’ve missed something that makes it exceptional.

It’s lovely to finally have a Hugo shortlist which, even if it doesn’t match my taste, is completely free of anything that’s actively awful or actively evil. It’s also good to see that the shortlist is made up of all female-named people (I word it that way because I know little about these authors, and one or more may be nonbinary or genderqueer, and I wouldn’t want to presume), and with a fair few non-Anglo names in there.

Because part of the reason not all of these stories feel like they’re for me is that the target audience for SF is no longer just fat white English-speaking men with glasses and beards who have a STEM background. Other people have stories they want to hear, or want to tell, and those stories are just as valid as the ones for me. And sometimes, as in “Fandom For Robots”, I’ll find out that those stories are also stories that are for me as well.

This is what the Puppies never understood, but what “Fandom For Robots” says really well. When someone different from you shares an interest, the community around that interest will change. But that only means you’re unwelcome if you’re unwelcoming. None of these stories were aimed at me, some of them worked for me anyway, others didn’t. But none of them made me feel excluded in any way, while the Puppies, writing stuff that was targeted with an almost laser focus at allocishet white men like me, made me feel horribly excluded.

Here’s to many, many, more years of stuff on the Hugo ballot that isn’t all my kind of thing.

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There could be some artistic justification for defacing the Mona Lisa — drawing a Groucho Marx moustache and glasses on it, spraypainting a green Mohawk on, or whatever. You might not improve the painting, but it’s possible you could get people to look at it a different way, maybe get them to question what they think of art, make some kind of artistic statement. It would probably be a facile one, and it’s unlikely it would be one worth making, but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

However, if you were to take the Mona Lisa and make a couple of tiny, subtle, changes — increasing the amount of shadow around her mouth so that the smile was slightly less ambiguous, and adding an extra few millimeters to her dress, to cover up the tiny amount of cleavage she’s showing — in order to make it more palatable to audiences for whom even the tiniest hint of ambiguity or sexuality would be too much… well, there’d be no possible justification for that kind of desecration.

To change the subject completely…

In recent years, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has had chart successes by taking the recordings of two of the greatest vocalists of the last century, Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, removing their vocals from the context in which they were carefully placed by those peerless artists, and placing them in new contexts which perform a sort of cargo-cult imitation of the surface elements of 19th century Western art music, in the hope of convincing people who don’t like music, but who have a vague memory associating popular songs from their youth with happiness, and who believe that slapping an orchestra on something makes it classier than the same music without an orchestra, to buy it.

Sadly, this tactic has proved a commercial success, and has allowed the estates of those performers (estates that are losing money as their fanbase dies off and younger generations show little interest in their work) to “reinvigorate their IP” or some such argument.

I haven’t listened to those albums myself, as I have no desire to witness the corpses of men I admire being violated for commercial gain, no matter how “classy” the violation. However, the latest release in this series, with the Beach Boys, is slightly different in that two thirds of the Beach Boys (in the lineup that recorded most of these songs) are still alive, including Brian Wilson and Mike Love, who between them wrote or co-wrote and sang lead on almost all of them (Wilson also produced all but two of the original tracks). They have given their consent to the album being created, although they appear to have had no active participation, and so I have no ethical problem with this. Aesthetic problems are another matter.

(Just to be clear — I have no objection in principle to the use of works by dead artists as a source for remixing and creating new art. I have a *tremendous* ethical objection to that new art being presented under the name of that dead artist, as an improved version of their work. It’s disrespectful to both the audience and to the artist. You could probably make a fun film by editing together bits of Citizen Kane, the 1940s Batman serial, and stock footage to create a film about how Batman was secretly Charles Foster Kane. If, however, you put that out as “Orson Welles’ Batman!” with loads of sanctimonious press releases about how you were respecting Welles’ art and making it relevant for a new generation, and how it was the film that Welles would have made had he only had today’s technology, you’d be behaving reprehensibly.)

Now, I happen to think it’s very hard to improve on Brian Wilson’s original productions, but it would theoretically be possible to create something that was worth listening to using his work as raw materials. The Beatles’ Love album, for example, which repurposed bits of Beatles recordings in unusual new juxtapositions, was a surprisingly worthwhile record. It didn’t improve on the originals, but it made for genuinely interesting listening, and I’m glad I own a copy, and still listen to it every so often.

However, making a record like that would involve “worth listening to” being a criterion used in the creation of the album. After listening to this (though thankfully not buying it, as I’m not such a completist that I need to own a “new” Beach Boys album which contains not one note of new Beach Boys vocals), it’s very apparent that nobody involved actually gave any thought to whether anyone would ever actually listen to the thing.

To start with, there’s the song selection. As Tilt Araiza has pointed out on Twitter, there are several songs which could actually suit an orchestral treatment. The obvious example is “Surf’s Up”, a song with which most of the fanbase under fifty are familiar, which is one of the band’s greatest achievements, and which, crucially, was originally intended to have an orchestral arrangement for its second half — an arrangement which was never recorded, because Smile was scrapped. That would, simply, be the most obvious choice for anyone doing this who cared about creating something someone might want to listen to. But “Surf’s Up” is not on the album.

Instead, I can tell you right now what the algorithm for selecting these tracks was, without having to ask anyone — and it is an algorithm; a very simple one. Take the typical 40-song setlist that Mike Love’s touring Beach Boys play on tour, when they’re playing theatres so they do a few songs from Pet Sounds on top of their standard hits set. Scrap any songs for which it’s impossible to get an isolated vocal from the multitracks (so no surf or car songs, other than “Fun Fun Fun” and “Don’t Worry Baby”, because they were mostly recorded too early). Scrap the Love solo songs. Scrap anything which wasn’t written by a Beach Boy (so no “Do You Wanna Dance”, “Barbara Ann”, “Rock and Roll Music”, or “Then I Kissed Her”). You’re left with roughly sixteen songs — the sixteen songs which appear on this album.

Note that this process does not include anything like thinking which songs would benefit from orchestration.

Now, second, they’ve added a huge dollop of pretension, to allow the consumers (and this really is aimed at “consumers”, not an audience) to think that what they’re getting is high art. So, for example, the opening instrumental track is called “California Suite”. It’s a single ninety-second piece. Personally, I hold the old-fashioned view that words should be used to communicate meaning, rather than used at random to add a patina of pseudo-class, and so I would only use the word “suite” to describe a suite, rather than a single piece, but then I suppose that’s why nobody puts me in charge of “prestige” projects for major labels.

Then there’s the general incompetence of the mixing. If you or I, or someone else with a sense of musicality, were going to do a project such as this, we’d probably think that the appeal of the album was hearing the Beach Boys’ vocals in an orchestral setting, so you’d want to have the vocals sitting in the mix in such a way that it sounded like the Beach Boys were, you know, singing with the orchestra. You’d spread the vocals out through the stereo mix in the same way you spread the orchestra out, and you’d have them with the same sort of sonic ambience as the instruments. You’d mix the vocals up, and have them prominent, but create a stereo picture that rewarded close listening.

However, if you’re the producers of this album, what you do instead is put a mono dump of the isolated vocals dead centre of the stereo spectrum, then pan half the orchestra hard left, and the other half of the orchestra hard right, slathering the orchestra with digital reverb, so it sounds like there are three isolated groups of musicians, all in different acoustic spaces, which happen coincidentally to be playing the same song. But not in a good way.

(Not *all* of the songs have the vocals in mono — “Disney Girls”, for example, has them with a fairly wide spread — but almost all have them either actually in mono or far more tightly centred than they should be).

And then, finally, there’s the orchestrations themselves. For the most part, these tend to reproduce the original arrangements as closely as possible, but then add some strings running up and down a chromatic scale or playing a pad or something equally unimaginative. Often there’ll be some horns doubling some of the vocal lines in the same range, mixed louder than the vocal part so it’s drowned out. There is not one example here of anything even slightly interesting.

To take the two worst tracks as examples… “Disney Girls” actually does attempt to rearrange the original quite a bit. Unfortunately, while “Disney Girls” is a great record, it’s largely great because Bruce Johnston’s natural schmaltz is restrained and tempered by the mandolin-and-Moog oddness of the arrangement. Replace that with syrupy strings, and the whole thing becomes like drowning in candyfloss.

At the other extreme is “Fun Fun Fun”, where the orchestra attempts to reproduce the original arrangement near-exactly (and indeed it sounds like it uses large parts of the original instrumentation), so you have what sounds like the original record, but with the instruments spread out over the stereo spectrum while the vocals still all sit in the middle in mono, and with a load of strings playing the Chuck Berry riffs as well, because nothing says driving celebration of teenage freedom and rebellion like twenty violinists playing in unison. And while they reproduce *almost* all of the original arrangement, what they don’t reproduce is the repeated drum fill at the end, which is one of those exciting moments in Brian Wilson productions where a new element is introduced in the fade which kicks it up a notch — because God forbid you include anything exciting in the arrangement.

I *would* say you should only buy this album if you’ve ever said to yourself “you know, what I want to hear more than anything else in the world is ‘Kokomo’, but with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing the synthesiser parts”… except even then, there’s a better option. In 1998, Bruce Johnston put together a project called “Symphonic Sounds: The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays The Music Of The Beach Boys”, in which members of the Beach Boys and guest singers re-recorded Beach Boys tracks (many of them the same ones that appear here) with the RPO, who also recorded a couple of longer pieces combining themes from various other Beach Boys songs.

That album is often regarded as one of the nadirs of the Beach Boys’ career, and I certainly don’t recommend anyone actually listen to it, but at least that was someone’s passion project, made with care, because it was something somebody wanted to have exist in the world. It was not, in any way, a good album by most standards, but it had a reason to exist outside of pure commercial gain, and there are moments of interest in it (albeit fleeting).

So in one sense, at least, this album has done what all great art should do — it’s made me reassess my opinions, and challenge my previously-held belief. Suddenly, Symphonic Sounds isn’t seeming nearly as bad as it was.

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Before I start, I want to clear something up. My earlier posts in this series were linked on Metafilter, and some people there, who aren’t used to what I normally do with my writing, thought I was doing the Rick and Morty fan thing of saying “you’re all not understanding this very popular piece of entertainment — only I am clever enough to see its real subtleties”.

So just to be very clear, that’s not what I’m doing here. Most of my critical writing isn’t written to impress people at all — it’s not written for an audience at all in any real sense. I write because it helps me to understand what it is I’m getting out of art, not to tell anyone else what they should be getting out of it, and certainly not to make myself seem any cleverer than anyone else. The stuff I talk about is mostly surface-level, but stuff I’ve not seen anyone else talking about. Half that time, that’s because it’s too obvious for anyone else to bother mentioning, and the other half the time it’s just as likely that I’m reading too much into it.

Anyway, on to the meat of the essay…

Names have meanings in The Good Place, in ways that are sometimes not at all obvious. Eleanor, for example, goes under other names in her previous life, at one point even having a boyfriend get a tattoo of one of her pseudonyms, and she’s told that she was chosen for the Good Place by mistake because she was confused for someone else with the same name. Jason spends much of the first series living under the name Jianyu, while Tahani makes a point of explaining the meaning of her name to Eleanor during their first conversation of more than a couple of words — and Tahani’s parents can’t even get her name right in their will. Chidi, unlike the others, treats his name merely as a name, not as something to be hidden or that has a secret meaning, but of course Eleanor can’t get his name right and claims he’s changing it — a mercurial character like her can’t recognise the solidity of identity that Chidi represents.

Janet’s name is interesting given her position as an information delivery system. It was almost certainly unintentional, but one of the big networks that came together to form the Internet as we know it, and still one of the biggest networks in the UK, is the Joint Academic NETwork, or JANET for short. It’s vanishingly unlikely that anyone involved in the series had that in mind, but the coincidence is still striking for those of us who studied at UK universities during the time when having JANET access was a major advantage.

But the character whose name is most interesting in this respect is Michael. Michael seems, unlike the other demonic figures in the story (other than Sean and Adam), to be using his real name when dealing with the humans, and this is an absolutely fascinating choice.

People have pointed out of course that “Michael” is also the name of the series’ creator, Michael Schur, and that in many ways the character Michael is in a position similar to that of a showrunner. This is true, and certainly ties in nicely with a lot of the metatextual stuff that the series is doing, and so it is worth a little examination. After all, it’s not as if the principal creative figure behind the show giving one of the characters his own name is a coincidence, and Schur has acknowledged several times that Michael in some ways represents himself, with his responsibility for creating the whole environment in which the characters interact, and for coming up with scenarios to torture them, and directing the other demons (who explicitly think of themselves as actors).

But at the same time, i think that Schur is playing with a far more important set of associations. And those associations are ones that will affect a lot of the discussion in these essays.

That said, I have had two types of reactions to talking about this. The first kind of reaction — generally from those brought up Catholic, or with some level of religious education — is to say “of course, that’s totally obvious, and I just assumed that from the start”. The other, generally from atheists or people brought up with the typical levels of default background Christianishty that British people tend to be brought up with, has been to say “holy motherforking shirtballs” or words to that effect. So what I’m saying below will either be obviously how you’ve been reading the series more-or-less since the start or will be a total revelation (pun sort-of intended).

Michael is an angel name — you can tell this because it ends in “el”, like other angel names (Gabriel for the most obvious example). It means “he who is like God”. And this is something that we need to look at very closely, because what we have in Michael the demon is, quite simply, a Christ figure.

Yes, the demon who is torturing our characters is Christ. I know this makes little sense, but the logic is sound.

Christ, in orthodox [small o] Christian thought, is God himself, in existence since the beginning of time, who chooses to experience what it’s like to be a human, and who incarnates (literally gets made into flesh), in order to experience what his creations experience by living among them as one of them in the world he created, before sacrificing himself to expiate their sins by taking the punishment for all humanity.

Michael, in The Good Place, is a demon (or is he? He says he doesn’t like that word), in existence since the beginning of time, who chooses to experience what the humans experience by living among them as one of them in a world he created, and at the end of season two he attempts to sacrifice himself to expiate the sins of the people he’s been torturing by taking their punishment for them.

(Indeed, Michael incarnates multiple times within nested worlds — within the simulation world he and the Judge create at the end of season two, Michael appears not only as the figure who pushes Eleanor out of the way but also as the barman who points her in the right direction again).

And there’s a tradition among at least some Christian worldviews that identifies St Michael, the archangel, with Christ, Adam, or both. (For those of you who have no religious knowledge but some appreciation of old science fiction, you will now be thinking of Michael Valentine Smith from Stranger In A Strange Land, whose name was similarly chosen).

The Archangel Michael is a figure in all the Abrahamic religions, but in the context of viewing Michael as a Christ figure it’s worth looking more closely at how he is viewed by those religions which actually have the concept of a “Christ”.

In some Protestant denominations, Michael is another term for the Logos, for Christ itself, before the Word is made flesh and becomes Jesus. The name “Michael” literally means “he who is like God”, and many Protestant denominations identified Michael with Jesus, although only more extreme groups like the Adventists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses do so today. The Mormon Church believes that the Archangel Michael merely helped Jesus create the world, rather than that he is identical to Jesus — but they also believe that Michael was himself incarnated as Adam, and that the Fall was not a bad event, but was part of God’s plan to create an army to rise against Satan. (And several Mormon leaders in the past, notably Brigham Young, have claimed that Adam was actually God incarnate — this is no longer official Mormon doctrine, but is believed by some of the small splinter groups from Mormonism).

So… this all seems to tie in rather nicely with Michael in The Good Place, whose entire plan is based around his desire to discover what it is like to be a human — his fascination for them leads him to take on the form of one of them, and everything about his story so far is about a supernatural being becoming human and eventually sacrificing himself in order to save the humans who his incarnation has allowed him to understand.

But there’s also the way in which Michael is viewed in Catholicism — in the Catholic Church, Michael is associated with the dead. Specifically, his role is to come down at the hour of each person’s death, and give them a final chance to repent and redeem themselves, to prevent them from going to Hell, and then once they have died to act as their advocate during their judgment.

And what does Michael do in the season two finale? He gives the four humans another chance on Earth to repent and redeem themselves in order that they won’t have to go to Hell, at the hour of their death, after advocating for them in front of the Judge.

It’s also interesting, in this, to look at Michael’s job description — he is an architect who has created a universe of his own. “The great architect of the universe” is a phrase derived from Aquinas (the Christian theologian who is perhaps most connected to the philosophical traditions that The Good Place is dealing with) to describe the Christian God, which is also used by the Freemasons. But this phrase (or equivalents) was also one that was used by the Gnostics, to describe the demiurge who created the fallen physical world, as opposed to the true God of pure ideas. In most Gnostic conceptions, that true God is equivalent to Christ and the demiurge is the Devil, but in some, Christ was the demiurge/Devil.

And St Michael the archangel is also a figure who’s very like the conception of Satan, as can be seen from another figure, this time from the Yazidi religion, which features a figure named Melek Taus, also known as the Peacock Angel. This figure is the leader of the archangels, as Michael is, but he’s also created from God’s own light and is God’s first creation (as both Michael and Satan are in different traditions), but refuses to bow to Adam, as Iblis/Satan does in Muslim tradition. This character is very clearly a link between the conceptions of the Archangel Michael and Satan — and this can also be seen in the fact that while the Peacock Angel is a Luciferian figure, Michael is often traditionally portrayed with a peacock’s feathers for his wings (as in the image at the top of this post).

And, indeed, Richard Flowers pointed out to me, as he’s rewatching the show, that the bow tie Michael is wearing in the first episode shows a peacock. And, happily, the logo of NBC, the US TV network that shows The Good Place, is a peacock. So this simultaneously ties in to the parallels between Michael and Michael Schur.

They’re clearly playing with this imagery in a very deliberate fashion. With a few well-placed decisions about the imagery they’re using, the character’s name, and some of the plot twists (and with a certain amount of luck due to the happy coincidences of Schur’s forename and the network’s logo — but as Schur himself said in the first episode of the Good Place podcast, this was one of those projects for him where the universe seemed to line up right and provide him with coincidences), they’ve managed to evoke a whole set of religious imagery that ties in with the programme’s themes of creation, redemption, and the afterlife.

The end result is that we have a character who in his name, behaviour, and occupation, is designed to evoke a whole set of conflicting-but-compatible characters — Christ, Satan, St Michael the archangel, and Adam. But of those, St Michael is the one who seems to apply most strongly, with his importance to the concept of redemption.

And so it’s interesting to note that the role of Michael in Christian conceptions of the end times is that he leads the army of God against the forces of Hell. It is, then, very clear that if The Good Place follows the natural arcs that it appears to have been setting up since the very first episode, it will end with Michael actually going to war with Hell, not merely trying to find a loophole for himself and his friends.

I suspect that if this is done at all, it will again play up the Christ parallels, and will be portrayed as a harrowing of Hell. For those who don’t know that story, according to many Christian denominations, in the days between his death and resurrection Christ descended into Hell and freed some or all of those suffering there, sending them to Heaven and depriving both Satan and Death of their power. Most Christian denominations believe that Christ freed only those who had been righteous before he came to Earth, so the truly evil were still damned forever, but others (notably Mormonism) claim that he freed everyone, righteous and unrighteous alike. Some have claimed, in fact that Christ did not descend into Hell at all, but only into Purgatory, in which case we would expect to see Mindy St Clair, but no-one else, freed at the climax of the series.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. Assuming the series is allowed to come to a natural end, I think we’re going to see the end of the story involve Michael going to war against the forces of Hell, and defeating them. I don’t think we’re going to see an explicit playing out of the story of the Book of Revelation — that would *not* make great sitcom material, unless you have a very odd idea of what works as comedy — but I do think we’re going to see something that works with some of that symbolism, without ever going into explicit claims about what religion is or isn’t the true one.

More in a day or two.

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