The Great Reread: Hobart Floyt & Alacrity Fitzhugh

May 14, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

Too Many Books

Picture of old man on ladder in large library

Can one have too many books? I want to say no. (See the illustration, which hangs on our front hall next to the library.) On the other hand, it’s become difficult to fit my accumulated collection comfortably into any reasonable home—and doubly so when you add in my wife’s lifelong collection as well—even without the eight or ten boxes of books I sold off to the fabulous Wonder Books in Frederick in an attempt to thin out the collection. And nonfiction is another story. (Well, the stories are in the fiction section; but you see what I mean.)

This is so even though I’ve tried to exercise restraint by buying only those books I’ll want to read over again. I prefer to try out a new book by getting it from the library, and, after reading, to decide whether this is a “keeper” that I always want to have available. The rare exceptions are new books that I already know I’ll want to own, generally in a series. While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga was still coming out, for instance, I’d grab those off the bookstore shelves at once, sight unseen. (Though I admit I do have only an electronic copy of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen—but that’s another discussion.)

Aside from considerations of space, it occurred to me some years ago that the “read again” rationale necessarily diminishes over time. Given my likely lifespan, how many times am I likely to reread any given volume? That number is constantly decreasing. This makes me a little cautious about buying new books—as opposed to using the library. One of the great perks of my current job is that there’s a county library branch right on the first floor of our building. I can put a book on hold and nip down while at the office to pick it up. Same thing to return it. A wonderful arrangement . . . at least until I retire . . .

The other motivation I’ve had for accumulating books has been a vague notion that they serve as a kind of reference library. In writing posts like these, it’s convenient to be able to grab a favorite book to check on some point or to make a citation precise. For years, I kept around an old paperback copy of Neil Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (1931, paperback edition 1967), merely as an example of a really crummy old-time SF yarn. It finally occurred to me that there was no particular purpose in having it—rereading it would be too boring to be worth any use I might make of the mention—and I ditched, er, released my copy to find a new home with some historian of SF. Haven’t missed it since.

The Great Reread

In the process of going over my packed-and-unpacked-and-reshelved books (two moves in the last two and a half years!), I’ve sometimes found it hard to recall what some of the stories were actually like. Or I feel as if I’d like to read a book once more before I consign it to the outermost depths. So I find myself rereading a lot of old material. Some of it holds up pretty well. Others, I wonder what I saw in the tale in the first place. The rereads end up being a combination of final trial—do I want to keep this book?—and fond farewell.

Of course I continue to read new stories too: new good books are coming out all the time. But it’s rather enjoyable to revisit some old friends as part of a balanced bookish diet.

And sometimes the old stuff may be worthy of comment. So I’m going to include the occasional post here from the Great Reread. The inspiration comes from Jo Walton’s brilliant series of essays, “What Makes This Book So Great,” originally hosted, I believe, at Tor and published in a 2014 collection. (There seems to be a list of links here; Walton’s own comments on rereading are here.) I’m not spotlighting what are necessarily the greatest books—but there may be interesting things to say even about the non-great or non-classic tomes I find cluttering my shelves.

Since these books tend to be fairly well aged, I don’t think it’s necessary to issue spoiler alerts in each case. The comments all have spoilers.

Brian Daley’s Peripatetic Heroes

I first ran across Brian Daley (1947-1996) in his 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde, which has the irresistible premise that a sorcerer in a fantasy land summons magical assistance from another world—and it turns out to be an armored personnel carrier, with crew, from the war in Vietnam. The fish-out-of-water contrast was delightful and the action first-rate. I was primed to look for more good fun a few years later when Daley published Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (1985), the first in a trilogy of adventures featuring the mismatched buddies Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh.

They’re still good fun. The heroes are both likable and relatable—dashing and mercurial Alacrity, a knockabout itinerant spacer with “friends in low places” across the starlanes, and staid Hobart, a minor bureaucrat from a congested backwater Earth. Alacrity has some personal issues to get over, mostly in the third volume, but Hobart develops most, rising to the occasion as he travels into space to obtain a bequest inexplicably left to him by an interstellar magnate. The worldbuilding is brilliant: planet after exotic planet, oddball character after still odder character. The sheer variety and colorfulness of Daley’s cosmos is pleasing.

The Floyt-Fitzhugh saga falls into the category of the “picaresque” tale. Originally I misunderstood that term to mean the same thing as simply “picturesque,” and the story certainly is that. When I actually looked up the word, many years ago, I realized it had a more specific meaning: “Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero,” as Wiktionary puts it. That fits our heroes pretty well—Alacrity from the start, Hobart learning fast. They’re lovable rogues, often on the wrong side of the law (or at least local customs), with hearts of about 12-carat gold. Even in the last scene of the series, they’re off again to who knows where, one jump ahead of pursuit.

And thereby hang my possibly idiosyncratic reservations about the story. The plot of the first book is very good; there’s a clear goal and climax. In the second and third books, not quite so much. Alacrity and Hobart achieve some interesting results, but they themselves don’t actually stop to absorb or enjoy them. Our Heroes are always on to the next thing. Daley gives each of them a pretty good romance subplot, but these never quite resolve, since the MCs are always leaving their girlfriends behind—even at the end of the third book, Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I was left wondering, do these two ever get to settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labors?

This is a standard issue with wandering, picaresque heroes, particularly those who star in open-ended series. Daley even lampshades this aspect by including a whimsical journalist in the story who features Floyt and Fitzhugh in a series of utterly melodramatic “penny dreadfuls,” to Our Heroes’ perpetual embarrassment and annoyance. Daley seems to want to place them in the company of series heroes whose adventures never really end. James Bond is never going to stop secret-agenting; he just gets re-cast with increasingly younger actors. At the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just when we might expect Indy to retire and be replaced by his son, Indy snatches back his rolling fedora at the last moment. The ending of The Incredibles or Spider-Man 2 show the characters resolving their personal character arcs, but nonetheless leaping into the next adventure.

One wonders if these perpetual adventurers ever retire, even as they inevitably age. We’ve pondered this previously in considering the “professional hero.” There has been the occasional hero who explicitly retires and passes on the mantle to a successor. There’s a neat little story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City showing how superhero Jack-in-the-Box is training his successor. And Captain America eventually retires in the MCU, though the ‘line of succession’ is rather fraught.

Personally, I like to see the main characters settle down at some point, if only to enjoy a well-earned respite from perpetual danger and damage. They can continue to have interesting adventures later on; “happily ever after” need not be a static condition. Consider, for example, the somewhat atypical honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan in Diplomatic Immunity. But it’s satisfying to see beloved characters enjoying some degree of stability.

On the other hand, there’s also a certain appeal to the hero who’s eternally “out there,” a legendary figure, always at their peak and unabatedly themselves. In a way I don’t want to see Nero Wolfe or James Bond retire. So I do rather appreciate the perpetual motion of Floyt and Fitzhugh, despite the lack of resolution. To resolve, or not to resolve? That is the question—but either answer may be acceptable. I’ll be keeping the Daley books on my overstuffed shelves.

War of the Rohirrim

February 16, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

I finally got around to watching the 2024 film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Missed it in the theatres, but I caught it on streaming video while my wife (who is not quite so headlong a Tolkien fan as I am) was off on a storytelling adventure.

The movie is very good. Grim, but good. Of course, this came out recently enough that I should issue a

Canon and Its Discontents

I refrained from reading about the plot until I had seen the film, so as not to spoil anything for myself. When I went back to the source material—the tale of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, about 200 years before the War of the Ring—I was surprised to see how closely the screenwriters had actually followed what Tolkien provided in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings (section II, The House of Eorl). This isn’t essential—but it’s helpful.

At this point LotR has become a mythological wellspring of its own. I think it’s legitimate to treat the Tolkien materials as a basic canon that may still allow for some improvisation and variation, just as the stories around King Arthur are open to a variety of individual interpretations, and, generally, a powerful myth can be “malleable” in the right hands.

In other words, I’m not going to be scandalized just because a Middle-Earth tale isn’t entirely consistent with the canon. Firing salvos back and forth about canonicity isn’t very productive. What matters is what we do with the canon (or without it).

At the same time, if a work is worth adapting in the first place—book into movie, for example—then the adapters would do well to understand what made the source appealing. We can use a source simply as a convenient hook on which to hang a different story, but we’d be wasting what’s worthwhile in the original. Merely arbitrary or casual departures from the canon often degrade the result, rather than enhancing it. We have to look at the changes case by case. (The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies themselves are full of examples both good and bad—but that’s a subject for a much longer dissection, one of these days.)

Thus—to take an SF example—when Gregory Benford wrote one of the sequels to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Fear, Benford threw in a new means of interstellar travel—via wormholes—in addition to the “hyperspatial jump” that was standard in Asimov’s works. This addition made the story seem a little more up-to-date, since wormholes had come into fashion in SF after Asimov wrote the original stories. But inserting these wormholes into the background created unnecessary tensions in the worldbuilding, since events in the original series might have played out quite differently if these wormholes had been around as Benford assumes. And it added nothing much to the actual interest of the novel. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was an annoyance.

Thus, we can evaluate War of the Rohirrim fairly by looking at how well it used the original Tolkien material, and how effectively it went beyond.

Adding and Expanding

I thought the screenwriters here did a good job. The Riders of Rohan as pictured in the movie are recognizably the same civilization we saw in the book and the LotR movies. Helm Hammerhand is not at all the same character as Theoden, but he comes from the same culture. Rohan’s relationship with Gondor is consistent with what we see in the books, allowing for two hundred years’ difference.

When the movie brings in LotR’s “oliphaunts,” or mûmakil (appropriately, only the latter name is used, since the former is more of a hobbitish coinage), that may seem an anticipation of the LotR storyline, but it’s plausible enough, drawing on Tolkien’s worldbuilding to add a danger and a challenge to the bare-bones tale of Helm in the books’ appendix. The Wikipedia article on the movie makes some good observations here, and I’m inclined to agree.

The writers’ key decision, I think, was to use Helm’s daughter as the primary viewpoint character for this story. She’s mentioned in the book, but her name is never given. The screenwriters’ choice of “Héra” rather unfortunately invites confusion with the Greek goddess of the same name (less an accent), but it does fit her appropriately into a family containing Helm, Haleth, and Hama.

Telling the story as Héra’s tale allows the movie to create a sense of continuity that would be hard to achieve otherwise, since Helm and his two sons all die in the course of this war, one by one. None of them survive to carry the viewer through to the end. It is plausible, though, for Héra to come out alive. And that also enables the screenwriters to give us something more like a happy ending than would have been possible if the focus had been on, for example, Helm himself. Helm’s nephew Fréaláf takes the throne, and that’s fine. Héra, however, can continue forward unconstrained and free. The writers have wisely left her tale open-ended, rather than resolving it with a romance or other specific commitment. That open prospect—“the Road goes ever on”—seems an appropriate conclusion for a story that is wound almost too tightly around one set of royal family conflicts and geographic environments.

I’ve found Amazon’s The Rings of Power somewhat disappointing; I’m cheered by this modest, but enjoyable, alternative venture into Middle-Earth. Who knows: someday (if the intellectual property rights align) we might even see the stories of the First Age, the Silmarillion, come to the big screen—and wouldn’t that be a sight to see!

The Purpose of AI

January 6, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

I recently read an excellent cautionary tale (and with a romance to boot), David Walton’s Three Laws Lethal (2019). The subject of “artificial intelligence” or AI (it isn’t really intelligence, but that’s another story) is hot. To take only one rather specialized example, the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee last year carried out a brief survey of the roles of AI, both harmful and helpful, in dealing with robocalls and robotexts. So it seems like an appropriate moment to take a look at Walton’s insights.

Frankenstein and the Three Laws

It’s well known that the early history of SF—starting with what’s considered by some to be the first modern SF story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—is replete with tales of constructed creatures that turn on their creators and destroy them. Almost as well known is how Isaac Asimov, as he explains in the introduction to his anthology The Rest of the Robots (1964), “quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale.” Like other tools, Asimov suggested, robots would be made with built-in safeguards. Knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electric wiring is insulated. The safeguards Asimov devised, around 1942, gradually and through conversations with SF editor John W. Campbell, were his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics:

1—A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The “positronic” or “Asenion” robots in many of Asimov’s stories were thus unable to attack their human creators (First Law). They could not run wild and disobey orders (Second Law). Asimov’s robot could not become yet another Frankenstein’s monster.

That still left plenty of room for fascinating stories—many of them logic puzzles built around the Three Laws themselves. A number of the loopholes and ramifications of the Three Laws are described in the Wikipedia article linked above. It even turned out to be possible to use robots to commit murder, albeit unwittingly, as in Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun (1956). When he eventually integrated his robot stories with his Foundation series, he expanded the Three Laws construct considerably—but that’s beyond our scope here.

Autonomous Vehicles

To discuss Three Laws Lethal, I must of course issue a

Walton’s book does cite Asimov’s laws just before Chapter One, but his characters don’t start out by trying to create Asenion-type humanoid robots. They’re just trying to start a company to design and sell self-driving cars.

The book starts with a vignette in which a family riding in a “fully automated Mercedes” runs into an accident. To save the passengers from a falling tree, the car swerves out of the way, in the process hitting a motorcyclist in the next lane. The motorcyclist is killed. The resulting lawsuit by the cyclist’s wife turns up at various points in the story that follows.

Tyler Daniels and Brandon Kincannon are friends, contemporary Silicon Valley types trying to get funding for a startup. Computer genius Naomi Sumner comes up with a unique way to make their automated taxi service a success: she sets up a machine learning process by creating a virtual world with independent AIs that compete for resources to “live” on (ch. 2 and 5). She names them “Mikes” after a famous science-fictional self-aware computer. The Mikes win resources by driving real-world cars successfully. In a kind of natural selection, the Mikes that succeed in driving get more resources and live longer: the desired behavior is “reinforced.”

Things start to go wrong almost at once, though. The learning or reinforcement methods programmed into the AIs don’t include anything like the Three Laws. A human being who’s been testing the first set of autonomous (Mike-guided) vehicles by trying to crash into them is killed by the cars themselves—since they perceive that human being as a threat. Two competing fleets of self-guided vehicles see each other as adversaries and can be turned against their controllers’ enemies. The story is both convincing—the AI development method sounds quite plausible and up-to-the-minute (at least to this layman)—and unnerving.

But the hypothetical AI system in the novel, it seems to me, casts some light on an aspect of AI that is not highlighted in Three Laws-type stories.

Having a Goal

The Mikes in Three Laws Lethal are implicitly given a purpose by being set up to fight for survival. That purpose is survival itself. We recall that a robot’s survival is also included as the third of the Three Laws—but in that context survival is subordinated to protecting humans and obeying orders. Asimov’s robots are conceived as basically passive. They would resist being destroyed (unless given orders to the contrary), but they don’t take positive action to seek the preservation or extension of their own existence. The Mikes, however, like living beings, are motivated to affirmatively seek and maintain themselves.

If an AI population is given a goal of survival or expansion, then we’re all set up for Frankensteinian violations of the First Law. That’s what the book depicts, although in a far more sophisticated and thoughtful way than the old-style SF potboilers Asimov so disliked.

At one point in Walton’s story, Naomi decides to “change the objective. She didn’t want them to learn to drive anymore. She wanted them to learn to speak” (ch. 23, p. 248)—in order to show they are sapient. Changing the goal would change the behavior. As another character puts it later on, “[i]t’s not a matter of preventing them from doing that they want” (as if a Law of Robotics were constraining them from pursuing a purpose, like a commandment telling humans what not to do). Rather, “[w]e teach them what to want in the first place.” (ch. 27, p. 288)

Goals and Ethics

The Three Laws approach assumes that the robot or AI has been given a purpose—in Asimov’s conception, by being given orders—and the Laws set limits to the actions it can take in pursuing that purpose. If the Laws can be considered a set of ethical principles, then they correspond to what’s called “deontological” ethics, a set of rules that constrain how a being is allowed to act. What defines right action is based on these rules, rather than on consequences or outcomes. In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative, the basic moral law, determines whether we can lawfully act in accordance with our inclinations. The inclinations, which are impulses directing us toward some goal or desired end, are taken for granted; restraining them is the job of ethics.

Some other forms of ethics focus primarily on the end to be achieved, rather than on the guardrails to be observed in getting there. The classic formulation is that of Aristotle: “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good.” (Nicomachean Ethics, I.i, 1094a1) Some forms of good-based or axiological ethics focus mostly on the results, as in utilitarianism; others focus more on the actions of the good or virtuous person. When Naomi, in Walton’s story, talks about changing the objective of the AI(s), she’s implicitly dealing with an axiological or good-based ethic.

As we’ve seen above, Asimov’s robots are essentially servants; they don’t have purposes of their own. There is a possible exception: the proviso in the First Law that a robot may not through inaction allow harm to come to humans does suggest an implicit purpose of protecting humans. In the original Three Laws stories, however, that proviso did not tend to stimulate the robots to affirmative action to protect or promote humans. Later on, Asimov did use something like this pro-human interest to expand the robot storyline and connect it with the Foundation stories. So my description of Three Laws robots as non-purposive is not absolutely precise. But it does, I think, capture something significant about the Asenion conception of AI.

Selecting a Purpose

There has been some discussion, factual and fictional, about an AI’s possible purposes. I see, for example, that there’s a Wikipedia page on “instrumental convergence,” which talks about the kinds of goals that might be given to an AI—and how an oversimplified goal might go wrong. A classic example is that of the “paperclip maximizer.” An AI whose only goal was to make as many paper clips as possible might end by turning the entire universe into paper clips, consistent with its sole purpose. In the process, it might decide, as the Wikipedia article notes, “that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off,” which would diminish the number of paper clips. (Apparently there’s actually a game built on this thought-experiment. Available at office-supply stores near you, no doubt . . .)

A widget-producing machine like the paperclip maximizer has a simple and concrete purpose. But the purpose need not be so mundane. Three Laws Lethal has one character instilling the goal of learning to speak, as noted above. A recent article by Lydia Denworth describes a real-life robot named Torso that’s being programmed to “pursue curiosity.” (Scientific American, Dec. 2024, at 64, 68)

It should be possible in principle to program multiple purposes into an AI. A robot might have the goal of producing paper clips, but also the goal of protecting human life, say. But it would then also be necessary to include in the program some way of balancing or prioritizing the goals, since they would often conflict or compete with each other. There’s precedent for this, too, in ethical theory, such as the traditional “principle of double effect” to evaluate actions that have both good and bad results.

Note that we’ve been speaking of goals give to or programmed into the AI by a human designer. Could an AI choose its own goals? The question that immediately arises is, how or by what criteria would the AI make that choice? That methodological or procedural question arises even before the more interesting and disturbing question of whether an AI might choose bad goals or good ones. There’s an analogy here to the uncertainty faced by parents in raising children: how does one (try to) ensure that the child will embrace the right ethics or value system? I seem to recall that David Brin has suggested somewhere that the best way to develop beneficent AIs is actually to give them a childhood of a sort, though I can’t recall the reference at the moment.

Conclusions, Highly Tentative

The above ruminations suggest that if we want AIs that behave ethically, it may be necessary to give them both purposes and rules. We want an autonomous vehicle that gets us to our destination speedily, but we want it to respect Asimov’s First Law about protecting humans in the process. The more we consider the problem, the more it seems that what we want for our AI offspring is something like a full-blown ethical system, more complex and nuanced than the Three Laws, more qualified and guarded than Naomi’s survival-seeking Mikes.

This is one of those cases where contemporary science is actually beginning to implement something science fiction has long discussed. (Just the other day, I read an article by Geoffrey Fowler (11/30/2024) about how Waymo robotaxis don’t always stop for a human at a crosswalk.) Clearly, it’s time to get serious about how we grapple with the problem Walton so admirably sets up in his book.

Self-Spoofing

December 15, 2024December 15, 2024 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

Visions of Sugarplums

Among the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas season offerings this year is a comedy called Sugarplummed, which has the distinction of being a spoof of the Hallmark Channel itself.

Satirizing the recurring tropes of the innumerable Hallmark Christmas movies isn’t a new game. As noted in my 2019 post, takeoffs on this subgenre are legion. Just today, a “Sally Forth” newspaper cartoon rang yet another change on the meta-tradition of Hallmark spoofery.

Sugarplummed movie poster (from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33900751/mediaviewer/rm361928706/?ref_=tt_ov_i)

But it’s particularly entertaining to watch someone make fun of themselves. In Sugarplummed, Emily, the harried mother in a family of four, is devoted to a schmaltzy series of TV movies featuring a woman named “Sugarplum.” She’s thrown off the rails when the Sugarplum character magically materializes in the real world, determined to fulfill Emily’s wish for a perfect Christmas. Sugarplum carries around a thick book that contains The Rules. The Rules are a collection of mandates that embody all the Hallmark clichés we know so well. Sugarplum’s world, in her home town of (naturally) “Perfection,” lives by these rules. Why shouldn’t they work in Emily’s life as well?

For a while, they do, and we’re treated to a series of implausible “Christmas miracles” where everything works out perfectly. Then, as the Hallmark plot summary puts it, “when Sugarplum’s magical fixes start to backfire one by one, Emily begins to question what an ideal holiday really is.” The moral of the story is not to pursue perfection to the detriment of our ordinary relationships and joys—or, to put it another way, the familiar adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” That’s an apt reminder.

Enchantment and Reality

The Disney canon is another inviting target for satire. The long history of Disney movies and shows contains plenty of well-worn recurring tropes and themes. And, since much of Disney’s original focus was on children, those motifs tend to be on the sentimental or upbeat side, making the repetition even more attractive for satire. (For some reason, the repetition of ugly or grimdark tropes, as in the plethora of dystopian fantasies now flooding the market, doesn’t attract as much jeering.)

Shrek (2001) did a pretty good job of spoofing Disney, the theme parks as well as the movies—not just in the details, but in the overall plot. Instead of having the prince or princess turned into a monster or critter and restored in the end, Beauty and the Beast-style, Shrek’s inamorata Fiona turns out to be an ogre who’s been turned into a princess, and the happy ending ensues once she’s been restored to her natural homely form.

Of course, there’s a certain sniggering almost-hostility in making fun of somebody else’s clichés. We can undermine that attitude when we make fun of ourselves. Disney one-upped Shrek when it released the movie Enchanted in 2007. Here, an animated character named Giselle, a perfect exaggeration of a Disney fairy tale heroine, is sent by a wicked witch to a terrible foreign land that works by entirely different rules: New York City. Now in live-action, we see Giselle try to cope with the grittier world we live in, where her set of Rules don’t apply. (In one classic inversion, the climax sees Giselle attacking the monster to save the man she loves, rather than the other way around.) We do get a happy ending, but it’s much more along the lines of learning to be a grown-up and living with (while improving on) imperfection.

The Science Fiction Version

The self-spoof approach isn’t limited to fantasy, or to the big screen. Consider E.E. Smith’s Lensman series, the very model of classic space opera. Satires of the space opera genre are also common, from Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers to the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. But in one case, Smith did it to himself.

In the last Lensman book, Children of the Lens (1947), Smith’s redoubtable hero Kimball Kinnison goes undercover as—of all things—a science fiction writer, Sybly White (see chapter 3). We see a couple of excerpts from the SF novel Kinnison writes, which (of course) “was later acclaimed of one of Sybly White’s best.” The excerpts parody, not just space opera generally, but Smith’s own ebullient, melodramatic style. It’s charming to see Smith good-naturedly bringing onstage a caricature of himself.

Taking Ourselves Lightly

As I’ve noted elsewhere, humor can often involve a kind of meanness toward the target of the humor. The charm of the self-satire is that the temptation toward meanness or hostility is absent. Spoofing oneself is almost bound to be an affectionate parody, the kind where the humorist really likes the subject of the humor. These often make for the best satires, untainted by any sourness or smugness and genuinely understanding how the satirized thing works.

I give Hallmark credit for Sugarplummed, then, especially because it shows the showrunners are not taking themselves too seriously. That genial attitude is in tune with the Christmas season Hallmark is celebrating. As Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy (ch. 8): “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

Civilization and the Rule of Law (reprise)

October 27, 2024 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

Another rerun, adapted from a post from seven years ago.

We’ve talked about how the Star Trek-Star Wars divide reflects preferences for a more lawful or more chaotic world; how F&SF stories often show us a defense of civilization against chaos; and how civilization makes science possible and rests in turn on human technology. But both order and technology can be oppressive. The missing element is the rule of law.

Universal Laws

It’s a crucial element of right governance that there are rules applying to everyone, as opposed to the arbitrary wishes of a dictator, who can make decisions based on favoritism, political preferences, or personal relationships. The Wikipedia article describes rule of law as “the legal principle that law should govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by decisions of individual government officials.”

Rule of Law pyramid — (Rule of Law Institute of Australia)

As we saw in the recently updated post The Good King (reprise), the concept of the rule of law goes back at least to Aristotle. It became a central principle of the American founders via the English tradition of John Locke. “Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including lawmakers themselves” (Wikipedia again). It is thus in tension with kingship, where rule is almost by definition arbitrary and personal. But one can have mixed cases—kings who are bound by certain laws, as in the British constitutional monarchy.

Without the rule of law, we depend on the good behavior of those who have power of some sort—physical, military, economic. We slide toward the “war of each against all,” where might makes right and the vulnerable are the pawns of the strong. Autocracy soon follows, as people look for any means to find safety from those who are powerful but unscrupulous. Hence the quotation from John Christian Falkenberg, which I’ve used before: “The rule of law is the essence of freedom.” (Jerry Pournelle, Prince of Mercenaries (New York: Baen 1989), ch. 21, p. 254.) Strength itself, a good thing, is only safe under laws.

Test Cases

It’s easy to miss the importance of the rule of law. We’re typically born into a society with better or worse laws, and criticize them from the inside. It’s less common to find ourselves in straits where lawfulness as such has collapsed. Regrettably, sizable numbers of people are exposed to such conditions in the world today. But many of us are fortunate enough not to see them ourselves. As always, fantasy and science fiction provide useful “virtual laboratories” for examining the possibilities.

A classic SF case is where a group thrown into a “state of nature” attempts to set up a lawful society. For example, in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (1955), students from a high-school class on survival techniques are given a final exam in which they are dropped onto an unspecified planet to survive for up to ten days. When an astronomical accident leaves them stranded, they need to organize for the long term. Rod Walker, the hero, becomes the leader-by-default of a growing group of young people. The tension between this informal leadership and the question of forming an actual constitution—complete with committees, regulations, and power politics—makes up a central theme of the story.

David Brin’s post-apocalyptic novel The Postman (1985), later made into a 1997 movie with Kevin Costner, illustrates the power of civil order, the unstated practices of a culture, as recalling—and perhaps fostering—the rule of law. The hero, a wanderer who happens to have appropriated a dead postman’s uniform and mail sack, presents himself as a mail carrier for the “Restored United States of America” to gain shelter in one of the isolated fortress-towns, ruled by petty tyrants, that remain. His desperate imposture snowballs into a spreading movement in which people begin to believe in this fiction, and this belief puts them on the road toward rebuilding civilization. The result is a sort of field-test not only of civil order and government, but of what Plato famously imagined as the “noble lie.”

In Niven & Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), a small community headed by a United States Senator hopes to serve as a nucleus for reconstructing civilization after a comet strike. We see at the end the strong pull of personal rule or kingship: as the Senator lies dying, the future of the community will be determined by which of the competing characters gains the personal trust and endorsement of the people—and the hand of the Senator’s daughter, a situation in which she herself recognizes the resurfacing of an atavistic criterion for rule. Unstated, but perhaps implicit, is the nebulous idea that deciding in favor of scientific progress may also mean an eventual movement back toward an ideal of rule by laws, not by inherited power.

Seeking a Balance

The “laboratory” of F&SF is full of subversions, variations, and elaborations on the rule of law. In particular, we should note the counter-trend previously discussed as “chaotic good.” Laws can be stifling as well as liberating.

Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966) imagines how the “rational anarchy” of a lunar prison colony is mobilized to throw off autocratic rule. The healthy chaos of the libertarian Loonies is hardly utopian, but the story does make it seem appealing. Interestingly, Heinlein returned to this setting with a kind of critique twenty years later in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), where the post-revolution lunar anarchy seems much less benign, seen from an outsider’s perspective.

While fantasy seems to concern itself with this issue much less than science fiction, consider the region called the “Free Commots” in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. When protagonist Taran visits this area in the fourth book (Taran Wanderer), he finds a society of independent villages, where the most prominent citizens are master-craftspeople. They neither have nor need a lord to organize them. The Commots contrast favorably to the feudal or wilderness regions through which Taran travels. A kind of anarchic democracy, as an ideal, thus sneaks into what otherwise seems to be a traditional aristocratic high fantasy.

One way of managing the tension between a government of laws and a culture of liberty is the principle of subsidiarity: the notion that matters should be governed or controlled at the lowest possible organizational level where they can be properly handled. It’s frequently illustrated in G.K. Chesterton’s ardent defenses of localism. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), extreme localism is played for laughs—“half fun and full earnest,” to borrow Andrew Greeley’s phrase. The more mature Tales of the Long Bow (1924), which might qualify as a sort of proto-steampunk story, treats the idea more seriously, in the form of an oddly high-tech (for 1924) revolt of local liberty against overweening and arbitrary national rule.

It remains true that we need good people as well as sound laws. “Good men can make poor laws workable; poor men will wreak havoc with good laws” (James M. Landis, 1960; see this article at 432 & n.107). The quality of a civilization can also be assessed by whether it fosters citizens who act with decency and good judgment even when there isn’t a law to constrain them (as in David Brin’s “Ritual of the Street Corner”). After all, we neither can nor should try to create laws to govern everything.

But being willing to improvise well in situations where no law applies is different from considering oneself above the law, disdaining the constraints that apply to everybody else. This is doubly and triply true of rulers, who are constantly tempted to arrogate power and dodge accountability to accomplish their ends. If a ruler is allowed to get away with law-breaking, we’re headed for trouble.

Brin has noted that the stories that fill and shape our culture—movies, books, television—encourage a broad “suspicion of authority” that tells us all institutions are corrupt or useless, and so are most other people—so that the heroes and heroines of the stories can face and overcome challenges by their heroic actions. Like most attitudes, suspicion of authority is helpful in moderation, but corrosive when it gets out of hand. If that attitude leads us to throw over laws and institutions altogether in the hope that individual heroes or autocrats will save us, we need to keep in mind that benevolent dictatorship, unconstrained by law, is just one step away from despotism.

The Fragility of Civilization

When we grow up taking for granted the rule of law, we can fail to see how vulnerable it is—along with the civilization that it reflects and makes possible.

“The Establishment,” as they used to say in the 1960s, seems vast and invulnerable. When we’re trying to make a change, it seems insuperable, so rigid that nothing can be done about it. But this is an illusion. The structure of civilization, good and bad, is fragile. It’s easier than we think to throw away the rule of law, so painfully constructed (as Rod Walker found), in favor of shortcuts or easy answers to our problems.

One thing F&SF have brought us is a better sense of this vulnerability. The spate of post-apocalyptic tales in recent years—zombie apocalypses, worldwide disasters, future dystopias like The Hunger Games, going all the way back to the nuclear-war stories of the 1950s—do help us appreciate that our civilization can go away.

But that collapse doesn’t require a disaster. Civilization, and the rule of law, can erode gradually, insidiously, as in the “Long Night” stories we’ve talked about earlier.

Historically, the Sixties counterculture fostered anarchists who felt “the Establishment” was invulnerable. Often with the best of intentions, they did more to undermine civil order than they expected. Those who now see no better aim than breaking up the structures of democratic government and civil life—whether from the side of government, or from the grass roots—also fray the fabric of civilization. The extrapolations of science fiction and fantasy illustrate why eroding the rule of law should not be taken lightly.

Near the bottom of Brin’s Web home page, he places the following:

I am a member of a civilization

It’s good that we have a rambunctious society, filled with opinionated individualists. Serenity is nice, but serenity alone never brought progress. Hermits don’t solve problems. The adversarial process helps us to improve as individuals and as a culture. Criticism is the only known antidote to error — elites shunned it and spread ruin across history. We do each other a favor (though not always appreciated) by helping find each others’ mistakes.

And yet — we’d all be happier, better off and more resilient if each of us were to now and then say:

“I am a member of a civilization.” (IAAMOAC)

Step back from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating the civilization you inherited.

It’s incumbent on all of us to cherish and defend the rule of law. Give up civilization lightly, and we may not have the choice again.

Rick Ellrod's Observatory

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