The Amateur Hero

August 13, 2023August 13, 2023 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

At the end of the previous post, we noted that, depending on the kind of story authors want to tell, they may choose to deploy either a professional hero—someone whose job it is to face perils and challenges, like a military officer or police officer—or, on the other hand, someone who is dragged unwillingly or unexpectedly into a crisis. But I didn’t actually say much about how that difference plays out in a story. This post, then, is a kind of afterthought to the last one.

“You Are Not Prepared”

The first expansion for the online game World of Warcraft greeted players with the ominous declaration, “You Are Not Prepared.” That’s exactly the situation of the individual who didn’t expect to be called upon to be a hero. The lack of preparation may manifest itself in several ways, any of which can help to shape the story.

Competence. The main character (MC) may lack the skills or expertise to deal with the kind of crisis that’s occurring. Maybe there’s fighting involved, and the MC isn’t skilled with fists or swords or rayguns or whatever the weapon of choice happens to be. It’s a lot easier if they do happen to have the pre-existing skill: Glory Road’s Oscar, for example, was already experienced at fencing. If they don’t, then one can expect an extended period of training, since this sort of skill isn’t one that can be picked up in a day. Luke’s training montage in The Empire Strikes Back is a classic example, taking him from someone with potential and the occasional burst of unexpected powers (“Use the Force, Luke”) to someone who can face off against Darth Vader at the end of Empire and present himself as a full-fledged Jedi Knight at the beginning of the sequel.

Information. The amateur hero may be drawn into an environment where they aren’t familiar with the geography, the factions, the customs, the people and powers. In Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree, for example, the heroine is kidnapped by aliens, then rescued by others, all in an unconscious state, and “comes out of it” to find herself in a thoroughly incomprehensible situation. Glory Road reflects the same struggle by a MC to cope with an unfamiliar environment, though in this case the hero has all the assistance one could desire in learning to deal with the new circumstances.

The same kind of thing occurs in the classic fantasy trope where MCs from a backwater locale are sent into a wider world with which they’re only vaguely acquainted, as in The Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time. One of the advantages of this setup is that the MCs will need to have many things explained to them by more knowledgeable characters; they are the “ignorant interlocutors” whose presence is so convenient for exposition.

Even in more mundane cases, the MC may be placed in conditions where they don’t know their way around. The eponymous TV series hero Chuck Bartowski is suddenly pitched into the world of intelligence operations and secret agents; he and other characters spend much of the first three seasons learning the ropes. In a similar way, but much faster (in a two-hour movie rather than a long-running series), the hero of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest must learn the players and the goals of the spy game into which he has been drawn.

Confidence and maturity. The MC may also be personally unprepared to deal with the crisis posed by the plot. My favorite example is Romancing the Stone, in which the shy, introverted heroine suddenly has to travel far from home, ally with an unexpected stranger, fight her way through a jungle, and match wits with smugglers and thugs. Much of the fun of the story is in watching the ironically-named Joan Wilder gain in courage and self-reliance as she overcomes these progressively more dramatic challenges.

Other aspects. The MC may be unprepared in other respects. The elemental fact of facing death will be a shock to those of us brought up in more placid situations. The hero may lack equipment or resources to deal with the new challenges—or, conversely, may happen to have exactly the right resources available; this may actually bring about the adventure, as with the spacesuit in Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Moreover, the homebody hero probably has not yet come to terms with the degree to which the adventure might impact family or personal connections—unlike the hero-by-trade, who has probably reconciled spouse or family with a dangerous career.

The Character Arc

The need to cope with such challenges almost automatically sets up an arc of character development for the MC, reflected in the examples above. The MC can be expected to grow in confidence and independence. They may also be tempered by tragedy or suffering; this is the primary course for the young graduate-school characters in Gay Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.

The developing hero may become more street-savvy, more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. This sort of practical wisdom is a common theme, given the age of the characters, in young adult-targeted stories or the bildungsroman. For example, Rod Taylor, the MC of Heinlein’s young adult novel Tunnel in the Sky, becomes the informal leader of a band of marooned students by a gradual process. A group of older students, schooled in political theory and more alert to how groups can be manipulated, ease him out and take over control—with the best of intentions, to be sure. By the end of the story Rod, once again in command, has become a bit more canny in dealing with the group. In a similar way, Don Harvey in Between Planets starts out as a fairly naïve high-schooler who learns some hard lessons about political realities as he becomes embroiled in an interplanetary revolution.

Finally, if the MC learns new skills or abilities in the course of the story, they will have grown in that respect too. The new abilities may qualify the MC for new roles or positions, and perhaps to actually become a professional hero in the end. We see this in superhero origin stories, where a MC is initially unskilled in managing their superpowers, but gradually takes on the role of a professional do-gooder. Spider-Man is the classic example, a teenager who didn’t expect to become super-powered and takes a while to become used to his new potential; unlike, say, Iron Man or the Fantastic Four, who start out as grownups and adapt fairly quickly.

As we saw in the last post, an amateur hero almost by definition rises to the occasion. This is a sufficiently satisfying theme that I suspect adventure stories may tend more to this approach than to that of the professional hero—though I haven’t attempted to take a count.

Unlikable Lovers

February 11, 2018October 7, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 10 Comments

It’s hard to root for a romance if you don’t care about the characters. We generally sympathize with the main character (“MC”). But that’s not always so for the MC’s romantic interest (the “RI,” let’s say). What happens when we don’t like the person the MC’s supposed to be interested in?

There’s a variety of types of problematic lovers, and sometimes a particular type is called for by the nature of the plot. Let’s look at a few.

The Friendly Enemy

There’s an entire category of plotline in which the eventually happy couple start out at odds with each other. TV Tropes captions this “Belligerent Sexual Tension,” and has a splendid list of examples. They range from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing with the feuding Beatrice and Benedick (here’s the Tropes page) through F&SF examples like Leia and Han in The Empire Strikes Back, Kim Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall in the Lensman series, Taran and Eilonwy in the Chronicles of Prydain, Aravis and Shasta in C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy.

A subcategory of these turnabout stories involves characters who fight in one context while falling for each other in another. 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, and its predecessors such as The Shop Around the Corner (1940), fall into this group, as does my forthcoming novella The World Around the Corner.

Sometimes the turbulence between the main characters is based on some conflict in their characters (scoundrel and diplomat in Empire) or their interests (rival businesses in You’ve Got Mail). Sometimes it’s almost a matter of their own combativeness or aggressive attitudes, as in the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction (2004). But the writer has to walk a fine line here. If the relationship is so strained as to become hostile or nasty, we may begin to wonder whether the RI is that great a catch after all. Would Leia be better off with a “nice man”? (Other than Luke, of course.) In You’ve Got Mail, is Frank disqualified by his willingness to take unfair advantage of the fact that he knows who Kathleen is and not vice versa?

In a fight-then-flirt scenario, the romantic interest has to be sufficiently flawed that his tension with the MC doesn’t seem contrived—yet not so flawed that the attraction seems implausible. The tension must be difficult enough to pose a challenge, and to keep the romance from concluding too quickly. But the RI has to be admirable enough to be worth winning.

Winning Over the Bad Boy

There’s another class of plots that depend on making the romantic interest disreputable, troubled, or outright wicked. Not too wicked, of course; they’ve got to be capable of reform—by the right lover. We see this predominantly with female MCs and male RIs, but not exclusively so.

Take Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. His appeal seems to lie especially in the fact that he’s a smuggler who defies the gentleman’s code of the antebellum South and pokes fun at their romanticized ideals. Scarlett O’Hara doesn’t set out to reform him, but she does find him fascinating. And she does reform him, as we can see but she can’t. Interestingly, in this case Scarlett herself is pretty problematic too: she’s a difficult, self-centered, domineering woman, with whom it can be hard to sympathize—though we do sympathize, mainly because we can see her inner thinking and where those traits come from. (Personally, I always liked Melanie better.)

Edward Rochester of Jane Eyre barely escapes crossing the line into unacceptability, to my mind. He’s brusque, domineering, and frighteningly deceptive. We’re willing to approve him mostly because Jane is in love with him, and we love Jane. And his comedown at the end both chastens him and engages our pity.

In my view, Wuthering Heights’ Healthcliff does cross the line. I’m unmoved by his harsh and erratic behavior, and I don’t respect Catherine for her mad attachment to him. He lacks redeeming qualities. On the other hand, his very flamboyant unlikability is the basis for a hilarious imaginary counseling session held for the novel’s characters in Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots (2003, chapter 12)—so I guess there’s some justification for his existence, at that.

The Proud, the Crude, and the Gothic

Few of these undesirable, yet desirable, RIs are as comprehensively intolerable as Heathcliff. Generally one or two off-putting traits are enough to create the necessary tension or conflict.

The archetype of the proud or arrogant RI, of course, is the much-loved Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. Darcy has some unpleasant attitudes and makes some dreadful missteps, but Austen succeeds in convincing us that he’s admirable for all that, partly through his delayed but ultimately sincere devotion to Elizabeth. Darcy retains such a hold on romantics that he’s even been successful as an artificial intelligence (AI) in Ashlinn Craven’s contemporary story.

Our era’s fondness for the earthy and outrageous gives us a procession of crude romantic interests, whose vulgarity or rudeness may represent a barrier to be overcome by the Right Woman or merely a species of candor and bluntness—especially in romantic comedies. Mike Chadway in The Ugly Truth (2009) has made a profession out of cynicism and outrageousness, but comes around in the end, after we’ve seen that his attitude stems from a past rejection. The main character of Andy Weir’s 2017 novel Artemis sails perilously close to this edge. But in this era we’re tolerant enough of crudity that the merely indecorous RI doesn’t usually pose a problem.

The brooding, Gothic or Byronic hero can also win readers’ hearts—witness Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. But his kind of moodiness can so easily slip into annoying self-indulgence that it’s highly vulnerable to parody. We may be more inclined to snicker than to sympathize, as we see in much of the critical response to Twilight.

The Misguided Romantic Interest

One of the easiest ways to generate conflict without wholly compromising the RI is to make them simply mistaken or wrongheaded. This aligns neatly with a plot in which the MC shows the romantic interest the error of his (or her) ways.

Pretty Woman (1990) is a fine example. Edward Lewis (the third Edward on our list so far—coincidence?) is a repressed workaholic who uncaringly buys up business operations and sells them off in pieces. Lively Vivian Ward not only loosens him up personally, but goads him into “using his powers for good” and working to save a company rather than break it up. Edward’s change of heart in business parallels the more obvious romantic softening and emphasizes the completeness of his transformation.

A character—particularly a female character—working for the bad guys is especially subject to this kind of change. For example, the atypical Disney heroine Megara in Hercules (1997) aids the scheming Hades, albeit for initially noble reasons. There’s an entire category of such repentant subvillainesses, documented by the ever-vigilant TV Tropes.

Because the merely misguided RI is only superficially unworthy, this trope is a favorite of Hallmark Christmas romances, where either the MC or the love interest is often a big-city character who wants to turn some idyllic country spot into a soulless commercial enterprise. This kind of relationship works equally well for either gender.

Overdominance

Genre romance with a female MC has a certain fondness for the strong, dominant male RI. (If you belong to Critique Circle, here’s a lengthy forum discussion on the “alpha male” from mid-2017.) But this can easily go awry. What sounds romantic at first blush may be creepy or distasteful once we think of it in real life. Many of the male leads discussed above can be classified as dominant types, but there’s a fine line between dominant and domineering. When this is taken to extremes, we can drift into the dubious territory of the Fifty Shades books.

But we don’t have to go that far to encounter difficulties. Heinlein’s juvenile SF novel The Star Beast features a somewhat passive hero, John Thomas Stuart XI, and his bratty high-school girlfriend, Betty Sorenson. Betty is laudably active and independent, but she’s so brash and overbearing that she rather gets on my nerves. We like to see both strong women and strong men—but we don’t like to see them demonstrate their strength in ways that are tyrannical or overbearing.

The various iterations of Beauty and the Beast illustrate the difficulty. The Beast has to be fearsomely harsh and threatening; that’s the point. But this quality can’t be so exaggerated as to undermine his potential for transformation into a caring lover.

Excuses

A romantic interest’s bad behavior can be offset when the author provides information that makes the actions understandable, or even sympathetic. An io9 article by Charlie Jane Anders makes the general argument that there are “10 Ways to Make Everyone Root for Your Amoral Protagonist.”

Anders is a good source on the subject: her Hugo-nominated 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky features male and female protagonists who are each highly stressed and at times hard to love. But the ending, to my mind, is very satisfying. Part of the reason is that we see so much of the characters’ prior experiences and difficulties. We comprehend how they got to where they are.

One technique that can help us excuse a character’s faults is to let us hear them speaking in first person at least part of the time. The romance technique of telling the story by alternating the two principal characters’ viewpoints does the same thing. It’s rare that characters seem evil to themselves, and letting us in on their thoughts gives us a useful perspective.

Female Variations

We’ve noted that the “bad boy” characters are generally, though not exclusively, male RIs for female MCs. There are other potentially troublesome character types that tend to skew female. One is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: as TV Tropes puts it, “She’s stunningly attractive, [e]nergetic, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness) . . . She’s inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live freely and love madly.” An example that seems to go too far is Sandra Bullock’s character in Forces of Nature (1999). Possibly this is why, unusually, the hero ends up marrying someone else, although he benefits from the Dream Girl’s free-spirited attitudes.

Another primarily female archetype is what we might call the Siren, the mysteriously fascinating and unattainable character with whom the male MC is irresistibly obsessed—frequently capricious and even cruel. My favorite example is the title character in Stanley Weinbaum’s SF classic The Black Flame. Here, as with the equally melodramatic Byronic hero, the character type has been so overused that it’s easy for it to become either unbelievable or unlikable.

When It’s the Main Character

Less common, but not unheard-of, is where the main character is the one whose romantic suitability is in question. We’ve noted Artemis as one such case.

I recently got around to watching About a Boy (2002), starring Hugh Grant, which came highly recommended by Connie Willis. While it’s been observed that Hugh Grant is inherently irresistible, I found that in this case his character was so aimless and shallow that I felt the women in the story would indeed be well advised to steer clear of him, until almost the very end, when he finally shapes up a bit.

The 1999 romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (a modernization of The Taming of the Shrew) also successfully makes the main character just sympathetic enough to sustain our interest. It’s essential to the Shakespearean plot that Kat be so prickly and abrasive as to be a questionable romantic prospect. But the excuses we hear, and the perfect fit of the actress’s persona to the dual requirements of abrasion and attraction, give us just enough to go on.

Conclusion

In gauging the acceptability of a character as a romantic partner, even more than in most such judgment calls, “your mileage may vary.” But we can all recognize that just as there’s peril in making the romantic interest too perfect, there’s a corresponding set of pitfalls if the object of our MC’s affections pushes imperfection to the point of no return.

Mind Powers

January 28, 2018January 28, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

Mental powers are a staple of both science fiction and fantasy—and even quasi-SF genres like paranormal romance. The idea’s like the traditional iceberg: easy to put into a story, but with some major assumptions lurking under the surface.

The Physical and the Non-Physical

In SF, it became fashionable to use the invented term “psionics” to refer to powers of the mind. The term seems to have originated by analogy to “electronics,” giving it a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) cast, and using the Greek letter psi, the first character of psyche, “soul” or “mind.” Sometimes simply “psi” is used, as in “psi powers.” It’s a useful coinage.

There are two broad approaches to psionics. One treats mental power as acting purely on other minds—what we can loosely call nonphysical: for example, telepathy. The other approach allows mental powers to act directly on matter: the most familiar example is telekinesis, moving things by mind power.

Note that distinguishing “physical” from “nonphysical” already involves some pretty big assumptions—but we’ll get to that.

Mind-to-Mind

Quite a few science fiction stories postulate mental powers that have only mental effects, such as talking mind-to-mind.

The “Lens” worn by the “Lensmen” of E.E. Smith’s classic series is essentially a psionic amplifier. It gives the wearer telepathic abilities. This is extremely useful in making contact with unfamiliar species—especially in interstellar law enforcement, with instant communication an essential for “lawmen” that might be pursuing criminals into unknown regions of space. The Lens also serves as a means of identification that cannot be faked, since an individual’s custom-made Lens will kill anyone who touches it if it’s not in contact with the designated wearer.

But Lensmen can’t make things physically happen by mind power alone; they have to use the conventional space-opera gear of ray guns and such. The Lensmen can communicate mentally; they can influence or even take over the mind of another person; they can erase or implant memories. But a Lensman can’t lift objects and throw them around without flexing his muscles in classic action-hero fashion.

There are some odd borderline cases. The main character, Kimball Kinnison, gains a “sense of perception,” allowing him to perceive nearby objects without using the standard five senses. He can “see” through solid objects, for example. That does involve interaction with inanimate matter, of course; but the interaction is all one way—he can’t affect the things he perceives.

Now, a contemporary scientist physicist would find this paradoxical, since it’s fundamental to quantum physics that you can’t perceive an object without interacting with it—bouncing photons off it to see with, for example. But the Lensman stories were planned out in the 1940s, when we were not so acutely aware of quantum-type theories of perception. The anomaly does illustrate the difference between these two theories of knowledge: one in which the knower is the passive recipient of information, and the other in which knowledge is always the product of interaction.

James H. Schmitz’s numerous stories set against the background of the interstellar “Federation of the Hub” use a similar theory of psionics. Telzey Amberdon, one of the main characters, can communicate telepathically with nonhuman creatures such as her massive “pet,” the crest cat TT (who turns to be a formidably intelligent being in his own right). Hub psis like Telzey can influence other minds and can be extremely dangerous—whether in a good cause or a bad. But physical objects aren’t affected.

A similar sort of psionics is assumed in A.E. van Vogt’s classic mutation novel Slan, and in one of my childhood favorites, Star Rangers (The Last Planet), by Andre Norton. For a more well-known example, the movie Independence Day showed the inimical aliens using mind control to speak through a captive human to communicate with other humans. But to properly destroy humanity, they used conventional physical weapons. (Well, “conventional” as science fiction goes; the alien weapons were dismayingly novel for the embattled Earthlings.)

Fantasy, too, can feature purely mental abilities. There are references in The Lord of the Rings to the ability of elves and wizards to speak mind-to-mind. (This was shown more explicitly, as I recall, in the movie versions of The Hobbit.) An analogue might even be found in ghost stories. Ghosts are often portrayed as acting only through influence on human minds, whether through terror or telepathy—as in A Christmas Carol: the various spirits do not act except on Scrooge’s own consciousness.

Sometimes telepathy is imagined as “hearing” only what people verbalize—what’s put into words; for example, in Al Macy’s novels about mind-reading detective Eric Beckman. In other cases, telepathy allows direct access to other people’s feelings and inchoate thoughts, somehow getting behind the speech-forming function. The notion that one can think without words would itself be anathema to many a twentieth-century linguistic philosopher—consider the linguistic relativism or “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” so adroitly used in the movie Arrival. The difference raises basic questions about the relation between speech and thought, and how thinking works.

The divide between mental and physical powers gets further eroded when the story includes telepathic machines. The Psychology Service in Schmitz’s Hub routinely uses mechanical detectors to monitor psis. In Slan, “Porgrave broadcasters” can send “recordings” telepathically. Even aside from the Lens itself, which is a quasi-living physical device, the Lensman series eventually gives us machine-generated mental screens, analogous to the physical force-fields of space-opera lore. If psionics were confined to minds alone, how can machines handle it?

I’ve spoken loosely about this sort of mind-on-mind power as “nonphysical”; but that involves a very significant assumption—that the mind is not a physical thing. If the mind were wholly reducible to the brain, there would be no reason in principle why mind powers would only affect matter in the form of other brains. By analogy, microwaves can be used for communications, but also for cooking dinner. On this assumption, mind powers would constitute just another kind of physical force, the analogy often being a different “wavelength” of energy. Second Stage Lensman refers to the “frequency-range of thought” (ch.14), and Smith’s Skylark series presents thought as a “sixth-order wave”—whatever that may be.

Mind Over Matter

We’ve gotten so used to things like telekinesis nowadays that the mind-only abilities discussed above may seem oddly constrained to us.

The original Star Wars film, A New Hope, showed us that the Force could mediate mental communication, even with the dead (“Use the Force, Luke”), and some degree of mind-control or mental influence (“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). But it was only in the sequel that we saw that it could also enable telekinesis. I still recall the moment when Luke, ice-cemented to the ceiling in the wampaa’s cave, strains fruitlessly to reach his light-saber—then relaxes and closes his eyes; and I thought with some excitement, so, we’re going to get telekinesis too! By the end of the episode, we’re watching Darth Vader use mental power to throw objects to distract Luke and keep him off-balance. You can even use this matter-moving power to move yourself, or in effect to fly without wings—as we saw in one memorable scene in The Last Jedi.

By now this sort of mind-over-matter is familiar territory. But there are still aspects that aren’t obvious on the surface. For one thing, telekinesis is apparently reactionless. It’s unclear whether it obeys Newton’s laws of motion, under which action requires an equal and opposite reaction. It would have been a great comic scene in Empire when Yoda impressively lifts Luke’s X-wing fighter into the air—and Luke had looked over to see Yoda rapidly sinking into the muck, with the entire weight of the X-wing bearing down on his diminutive form.

The simplest fantasy version of telekinesis is the poltergeist, an immaterial spirit which (rather bafflingly) is capable of throwing around physical objects. Levitation, whether of oneself or of something else, is a commonplace for magicians. In fantasy, however, mental powers tend to bleed over into magical powers, which we don’t think of in quite the same way—although one way of conceiving magic is as a kind of mind over matter.

There are other kinds of (fictional) mental interactions with matter, over and above mere movement. A common trope is the ability to start fires, or “pyrokinesis,” as in Stephen King’s Firestarter. This might be interpreted as a subtle form of telekinesis—since heat consists of motion at the molecular level, maybe a telekinetic could create heat by causing an object’s molecules to move faster. Such an explanation leaves open the question of where the added energy is coming from; but that’s an issue common to any form of telekinesis. There may be a certain nerdy satisfaction in supposing that a physically puny specimen like, er, yours truly could throw things around by sheer power of mind, even though one’s muscles aren’t up to it. But whether things are moving by mind or by muscle, there has to be energy coming from somewhere.

There are other things you can do with matter besides just moving it around. Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile, and related stories, postulate “metapsychic powers” that include “creativity,” allowing metapsychics to change the form of matter and thus materialize or convert physical objects. Other stories imagine psionic abilities to “read” the history of an object or a place.

Teleportation—instantaneous movement from one place to another—represents a kind of in-between. Physical objects are obviously affected, but the physical object in question is typically the practitioner’s own body, and perhaps other objects physically connected (such as clothing—but clothing doesn’t always come along, depending on the story, which can be inconvenient). Does it count if your mind affects only your own body—the one locus where even theories that sharply separate mind and matter have to assume some crossover between the two?

There’s a long tradition of mental powers in comic books too. But given the visual nature of the medium, physically effective mental powers tend to predominate over the purely mental. We do see some of the latter—pure telepathy in Marvel’s Professor Xavier or DC’s Saturn Girl. But much more popular is Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), whose telekinetic powers make for much more striking imagery.

Minds and Bodies

Considering these two approaches to mind powers raises the philosophical question of whether minds affect matter only in and through a person’s body, or can do so independently.

If we exclude direct physical effects from the scope of (fictional) mental powers, this suggests parallel realms, with thought proceeding on one level while physical actions occur on another, linked only through the minds of humans or other intelligent beings. It’s almost a Cartesian approach (that is, a theory similar to that of René Descartes) of mind-body dualism, and sinks roots into the long-standing debates over the “mind-body problem.”

The “sense of perception” concept, similarly, functions as if there were two independent metaphysical levels, mental and physical, and this mental sense could allow a person to go “around” the physical senses and inspect an object directly. The philosophical notion of intentionality (not to be confused with the usual sense of “intentional” or deliberate) is adaptable to such non-sensory knowledge. But the trend in both philosophy and physics over the last couple hundred years has been to focus on the physical connection between the knower and the known.

It’s become a standard assumption that we can’t know or do anything without a physical connection. Anything else seems “unscientific.” What’s interesting is that we seem to be willing to accept the now-unpopular postulate of non-physical knowledge and events when we’re dealing with fiction.

Of course, it’s also possible to meld the two back together by taking the position that mental powers really only reflect physical events taking place at a level we can’t yet detect—as with Smith’s “frequency range.” But that isn’t the only way to conceive of the relationship. There is still a certain imaginative appeal, at least, to the notion that mind can act independent of the constraints of the physical body.

I think such stories are helpful. We’re apt to rush to conclude “science has proven” that the mind equals the brain and the brain is just a particularly subtle form of matter. Science has not, in fact, proven any such thing. The physical sciences assume, understandably, that only physics is involved. But they have by no means demonstrated that all observable phenomena can be wholly explained by physics. The arguments on this subject are still live. We should still apply sound standards of evidence, and not leap to conclusions—but that applies in both directions, whether to materialism or to its alternatives.

In other words, there may still be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our physics, and one of the uses of speculative stories is to help us keep an open mind on these subjects.

Star Wars VII: The Old and the New

May 8, 2016May 8, 2016 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

By now it should be possible to discuss The Force Awakens without issuing a spoiler alert, since everyone in this galaxy has probably seen it.

I was tempted to use “Everything old is new again” for the way SW7 harks back to the original movie, but it turns out several commentators have already done that. Then I thought using the phrase “Back to the Future” might express the sense of familiarity the new movie evokes for old-time fans—but it turns out a number of reviews have already done that too (for example, here, here, and here). Somebody’s even done a Star Wars-Back to the Future mashup.

The great thing about the Internet is that it’s easy to find out what everyone else is saying. The depressing thing about the Internet is that, when you set out to say something, someone else has probably said it already.

Is the familiarity of Episode VII’s tropes a strength or a weakness? Is director J.J. Abrams just rehashing old material, or is he providing us with a charming return to our roots?

In this case, I think imitation is the sincerest form of homage.

The familiar moves came off well, by and large. Heroes with downtrodden humble beginnings – that’s classic storytelling. Desert planet—Actually, I could have done with a new setting. But the landscape does express the aridity of Rey’s prior life, and it allows for some nice contrasts. (“I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.”) And we aren’t there for very long, after all.

Invoking family dysfunctions and mysteries also harks back to the original trilogy, of course. The angle that struck me particularly (since I’m old enough to appreciate it) is that “Rey Who?” sparks as feverish a storm of fan speculation as Darth Vader’s Empire Strikes Back bombshell.

It’s hard to remember now, when “I am your father” has become a ubiquitous meme, that at the end of ESB we didn’t really know whether Vader was telling the truth. He probably was; it was too good a narrative twist to pass up. But those us who were still attached to the image of Luke’s heroic dad spent three years trying out alternative scenarios.

Even more, we debated “There is another.” We canvassed every conceivable answer to that mystery, and some that were inconceivable. Same with Rey’s parentage: I’ve already heard suggestions that are all across the map.

At least, on Disney’s more aggressive release schedule, we’ll only have a year and a half to run this issue into the ground, as opposed to three years back in the 1980s. Which is a good thing: by the time Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, we had overthought the matter so much that the actual revelations were almost anticlimactic.

(Of course, the real answer, obviously, is that Rey is Chewbacca’s daughter. They hit it off so well, and he accompanies her to find Luke at the end. This explains why Han, Chewie’s old friend, is so protective of her. She doesn’t look like Chewie, you say? We can just assume that Wookiees develop all that hair and the growly voice later, post-adolescence.)

By and large, I enjoyed the frequent callouts to Star Wars IV-VI. The new movie combined the nostalgic recognition of familiar themes with the freshness of new characters and relationships. Rey and Finn and Poe play off each other well, but not in the same way as Luke and Leia and Han. Abrams has restarted the story without having to reboot.

On the other hand, there were a couple of repetitions that could be dispensed with.

The biggest (in every sense) is the Death Star. Er, Starkiller Base. The whole end sequence in SW7 was fun, to be sure. But we’ve seen this scenario twice already in the original trilogy. Three desperate attempts to blow up an Ultimate Weapon is enough. Can we agree, no more Death Stars, no matter how big they are or what fancy names we give them?

We need something different for the third trilogy. It’s not as if there aren’t other mythic motifs available. I’ve always felt the third trilogy would work well as a Quest. Let there be something Our Heroes need to find to set a New Republic or new Jedi Order on the right track.

With the classic quest theme in mind, the fact that Luke set out looking for “the first Jedi temple” is suggestive. He’s not just on this island as a hideout; he seems to have been looking for something. What might one be looking for in the Jedi temple that would make a good MacGuffin for Episodes VIII and IX? The “Holocron,” a Jedi teaching device invented for the Star Wars Expanded Universe, might be a good candidate. (In a year or so, we can look back and see how far off-track I was—which is the fun of making rash predictions.)

We can analyze all these questions to death while we’re waiting for Episode VIII to come out. But if we’ve learned from the 1980s experience, we may prefer just to enjoy the anticipation.

Rick Ellrod's Observatory

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