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Palestine

A friend made herself watch footage taken by the Palestinian perpetrators of the massacre that took place on October 17th 2023. I don’t fully understand why she put herself through this, but the scenes she witnessed were absolutely hideous in their savagery.

But if the Israeli government had ever been serious about agreeing a two-state solution with the Palestinians, it would not have deliberately neutered, humiliated and discredited the Palestinian partner that was available to it to deal with – the Palestinian Authority, a partner which accepts Israel’s existence as a fact – by, among other things, allowing settlements to continue to mushroom all over the West Bank, and by protecting the settlers with soldiers, even when they roam about with guns and terrorise their Palestinian neighbours. Indeed, as Israeli politicians openly admit (see this article in the Times of Israel), Israel quite deliberately built up Hamas in order to further weaken the Palestinian Authority (thus also helpfully building up a Palestinian enemy too fanatical for people in the West to feel much sympathy for).

When Israel became independent, Palestinian Arabs were the majority in the area that is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians still constitute about half the population of the area. If any of them claim that the whole area belongs to them ‘from the river to the sea’, there are howls of outrage – and yes, whatever the history, it’s not reasonable now to claim more than half of it. Yet many Israelis, including members of the current government, also claim everything from the river to the sea.

What’s worse is that, even when Israeli politicians did pay lip service to a two-state solution, they were in fact making that impossible by colonising the land all the way to the river. They must have known this. It’s been obvious for half a century.

And we’re all complicit because, though we could see perfectly well what was going on- it’s not difficult: you do not colonise territory you intend to give back – we allowed our leaders to pretend not to see it. We are like the man who makes friends with an affable neighbour and pretends, when he calls round to take him to the pub, that he doesn’t notice the bruises on the face of his affable new friend’s wife or the cowed look in her eyes.

(To continue the analogy, the neighbour has now taken a hammer, smashed all his wife’s things, and is chasing her screaming round the house – and we’re just beginning to mutter embarrassedly, ‘Oh mate! We know she’s annoying, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit far?’)

The Book that Launched a Thousand Fantasy Clichés

I enjoyed the Odyssey – there was a sort of rough naivety about it that was lively, and gave me a sense of human minds looking out at the world at a time when the the Bronze Age was simply the thing you woke up to every morning – but I’m getting bored of the Iliad. I started losing interest during a seemingly endless account of a battle between ‘mighty’ ‘brave’ ‘handsome’ ‘god-like’ kings and princes: Thisos, Son of Thatos, ‘Lord of Horses’, ‘ruler of the fair city of…’ etc etc etc

The aim of it all is to raze to the ground a city, and kill or enslave all its inhabitants, because a prince from that city had the gall to kidnap the pretty wife of Menelaus and won’t give her back. (The besiegers also kidnap princesses and use them for sex, but that’s different, right, because this is war and that was just stealing?) I haven’t reached the end, and I don’t think I will, but I seem to remember from versions I read as a kid that, when Menelaus finally does recover Helen, he is briefly tempted to kill her because of all the trouble she’s ’caused’. But then he sees how pretty she is and changes his mind. Awww!

What tosh it all is, what utter tosh, this stuff we’ve been fed for centuries as something big and uplifting and heroic and important.

Spoils of War

I’ve been listening to the Odyssey and the Iliad, as translated by Emily Wilson and read respectively by Claire Danes and Audra McDonald – they were written to be performed out loud, after all. Wilson has done a great job of stripping away all the pompousness and phoney archaism which (for me at least) is associated with the classics. As she points out in her introduction, it’s nonsense to think that archaic English from two centuries ago is somehow a more authentic representation of Homeric Greek than modern English is: these poems are getting on for three thousand years old!

Having them read by two American women works well for the same reason. When not portentously declaimed by middle-aged men with public school accents (i.e. people who sound a bit like me), these ancient texts no longer smell mustily of Oxbridge lecture theatres, and I felt like I could catch a glimpse, though very dimly and filtered in all kinds of ways, of living human beings going about their lives, all the way back in the Bronze Age. Danes’ youthful, slightly husky, passionate voice worked particularly well, making the rough but vivid storytelling feel alive.

These are evocations of a very strange world. I loved one moment in the Odyssey where a princess sets off to do her washing in a nearby river. The dirty clothes are loaded into a cart on which the princess herself rides while a dozen of her slave girls walk beside her. While the clothes are drying, the princess and her slaves play games together on the bank. How alien this all is to us! She’s a wealthy princess, she owns many slaves, but she still washes her clothes in a river, still goes along herself to do it, and her slave girls are – sort of – also her playmates!

There seems to be a widespread assumption around at the moment that the arts are there to subvert and challenge the established order, but actually, as I’ve observed before, they most often serve the opposite purpose, of bolstering and legitimising privilege. And while these days they often do the latter while pretending to do the former, until recently they made no bones about it. In Celtic Britain, a prince would employ praise poets whose job was to celebrate his achievements. Go back another millenium and Homer is raising to mythical status a class of warlords, who own slaves, go on raiding parties, hobnob with gods, and themselves employ poets to entertain them at their sumptuous dinner parties. We are constantly being told about their wealth and their many beautiful possessions. A sewing basket made of silver stuck in my mind, because the poet made a point of mentioning that it even had wheels.

But what was particularly striking for me is that these poems were written not only for the ruling class, but for the ruling gender. There are many women characters, some of them powerful (notably the goddess Athena), but this is a world in which you raid a city, kill the men and carry off the women as part of the loot – and that apparently is fine. The Iliad famously begins with a quarrel between two men, Achilles and Agamemnon, over a beautiful princess, Briseis, who Achilles has captured and made his sex slave, but who Agamemnon demands for himself, having had to give up his own sex slave for diplomatic reasons. When he loses Briseis, Achilles sulks like a spoiled child and has to be comforted by his goddess mother – but no one considers what Briseis thinks.

The Trojan war itself is fought over another woman, Helen, who a Trojan prince, Paris, has kidnapped from her Greek husband, Menelaus, taking her away also from her daughter and friends. There is an attempt -it doesn’t work out- to avert war by having a duel between these two men, with the agreement that whoever kills the other gets Helen as his wife, plus all the dead man’s wealth, and then the two sides will make peace. Weirdly, Helen is presented in the text as an intelligent human being with feelings of her own, and yet her own preferences regarding these two men are apparently still as irrelevant as the preferences of a herd of does watching two stags fighting for control of them.

Women belong to the men who capture them. Men do as they please, but the slave women in Odysseus’ household who had sex with the suitors who pestered his wife Penelope in his absence, are hanged by our hero on his return. (Neither Odysseus’s son nor Penelope were strong enough to stop these men coming round and eating their food, but apparently their slave women should have stood up to them.)

By the way, I’ve looked into this recently and having sex with women you capture in a war – which to say, in modern parlance, raping them – is permitted both in the Koran and the Bible. Here’s the Koran telling Mohammed it’s okay to have sex with woman prisoners:

Oh prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee… (Surah 33: 50)*

The Bible, meanwhile, is all heart and allows a captive woman a month to grieve her families before her new owner is permitted to ‘go in unto her’. It even – awww, God, you’re so nice! – forbids him from selling her for money if he decides he doesn’t like her:

10. When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands , and thou has taken them captive, 11. And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to be thy wife; 12. Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13. And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14. And it shall be, if thou hast no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou has humbled her. (KJV: Deuteronomy, 21: 10-14)

Jeez! What a legacy women are up against!

*My copy of the Koran is published by Amana publications with a commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and was given to me free at a street stall by the Albirr Foundation UK.

Upon Blackfriars Station, Platform 1

I frequently travel back and forth these days between my home in Cambridge and London, in order to spend time with grandchildren. I rather enjoy being part of that enormous tide of people that flows into London every day, and across it, and then flows back out again every night, train after train from all those mainline stations, each train filling up with people and rushing out into the home counties, only for another another train to arrive and fill up in turn. What a strange thing: all those thousands of human souls on the move, each one an entire universe!

My favourite station is Blackfriars, which (uniquely as far as I know) straddles the Thames on its own bridge. As you emerge from the train on Platform 1, you are faced with a single enormous window, the length and height of the station itself, which takes in, to your left, St Pauls and the prestige office blocks of the City, and to the right, the Tate Modern building in the foreground and the Shard behind it, while between them the wide river, sparkling in the sun, is spanned by a series of bridges, each slightly more hazy than the last, stretching back to Tower Bridge in grey silhouette in the distance. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, and it puts me in mind of a poem by Wordsworth that my father liked to recite, about the morning view from another London bridge:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…

* * *

I was talking to a writer friend, Colette, about the Neapolitan Quartet and I said one of the things I felt the lack of when I was reading it was sensory information of any kind. The narrator just talks about relationships and interactions and, if she mentions the material setting at all, does so only minimally, in the way that a dramatist does in stage directions. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a personal choice. What you exclude is as important as what you include in any sort of work of art. Colette likes pared-down writing and, as she says, descriptive passages in books are often boring and can feel quite self-indulgent on the author’s part. But my own personal feeling is that I want a novel to evoke, as far as possible, the full breadth of the feeling of being alive, and experiences such as standing in front of that window, or being part of the flow of people in and out of London, are as much a part of that, as are personal interactions.

It seems to me (and this probably isn’t an original thought) that of all art forms, novels are uniquely well placed to encompass the whole picture: interior and exterior worlds, human relationships and material reality… Other art forms can arguably portray any one of these things better than novels can, but novels (and even short stories for that matter) have a sort of ‘jack of all trades’ quality that means they can bring everything together in a way that no other form quite can.

* * *

The other day on Platform 1 of Blackfriars station, with a few minutes to wait for the train to Peckham, I was standing by the glass taking in the view next to a smartly-dressed woman who was doing the same thing. I made some comment about how beautiful it was and she said ‘You know what? I pass through this station every single day, and I never grow tired of it.’

See also (while on London bridges): Waterloo Sunset

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

In his excellent book, The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor of political philosophy, refers to another book, now out of print, published in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and took the form of a dystopia.

Writing as if he were a historian looking back from the year 2033, he [Young] described with uncanny clarity the moral logic of the meritocratic society that was beginning to unfold in the postwar Britain of his day. Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.

As Young’s imaginary historian writes:

Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are… no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too that not only are they of higher calibre to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.

‘Not only did Young anticipate the meritocratic hubris of elites;’ writes Sandel, ‘he glimpsed their affinity for technocratic expertise, their tendency to look down on those who lack their lustrous credentials.’ He quotes Young again (still writing as if a historian in 2033) who suggests that ‘some members of the meritocracy… have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern’. Some of them, indeed, are ‘so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended’. Here Sandel references Hillary Clinton’s famous —and extraordinarily politically inept— remark about half of Trump supporters being ‘a basket of deplorables’. I saw the same kind of contempt over and over again coming from remain voters in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Indeed I felt so disgusted by it, as a remain voter myself, that I wished I’d voted leave.

As Sandel notes, in Young’s dystopia, ‘resentment against elites was compounded by the self-doubt that a meritocracy inflicts on those who fail to rise’, for, as Young’s historian wrote, ‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance.’ Sandel goes on:

Young predicted that this toxic brew of hubris and resentment would fuel a political backlash. He concluded his dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
Continue reading “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”

Trump etc

I have read a lot of pieces lately that thundered about the many infamies of Donald Trump. It’s certainly not hard to compile such a list, or to get upset about it, but I’m reminded of the aftermath of Brexit, when stunned/outraged remainers liked to enumerate, over and over, the many reasons why Brexit was wrong, why leavers had lied etc etc. In both cases (or all three cases, given that Trump is in his second term) what I think these pieces fail to engage with is the fact that people voted for Brexit and voted for Trump – a majority in the case of Brexit and Trump Mk. 2 – and did so in spite of all these many arguments against.

It should be obvious by now that what we are calling ‘populism’ is not just a glitch or temporary aberration from which we will one day return to the comfort of the old familiar world. That world is history now. It’s gone. If you are going to accuse Brexiters and Trumpers of harking back to a mythical golden age, then don’t do the same thing yourself. We’re here now, and wishing you didn’t have to start from here is as futile in politics as it is in personal life. You have to ask yourself why those things did happen.

Why did people vote for things you hate and not for the things you wanted? Why did they ignore all the wise counsel, all the expert advice? The answers often given are either that people were duped by bad actors and foreign dictators, or that they were in some way morally bad themselves (racists, bigots, misogynists perhaps – or wilfully ignorant – or only interested in their own financial gain…) I have seen both remainers and Democrat voters speaking of those who voted the other way almost in the way that religious folk talk about sinners. I have seen both remainers and Democrats say they are not prepared to ‘forgive’ those who voted the other way, even if they subsequently change their minds. (I mean, come on! You’re talking about people here whose votes you’re going to need!)

I have also heard many remainers say that people should not have been allowed a vote on EU membership (something, incidentally, that in relatively recent times has been a manifesto commitment of Greens and Liberal Democrats as well as of the Tories) or that the outcome of the vote should have been ignored. Casting your opponents as the dupes of saboteurs and foreign agents, demonizing them as evil, denying them the vote, or overruling votes that they win are surprisingly Stalinist moves to come from the supposedly liberal side of the argument. They also fail to engage with the new reality.

The people who voted for Trump 2.0 or for Brexit are not some small minority cult. They were more than half of those who turned out to vote. Of course they are deluded, but to varying degrees we all are. We all have our own dreams and fantasies, designed to comfort and reassure us that we are the good guys, that we are entitled to what we have, and that the ‘precious ordinary’* that makes us feel secure can somehow be preserved. And even the clearest-eyed among us project these fantasies into the political sphere where there are in fact no certainties, and no experts who can tell us for sure what the consequences might be of any particular action.

Politicians of all stripes seek to win our votes by pursuading us that they will nurture the things we cherish, and typically fail to live up to their own rhetoric. (Quick thought experiment: imagine that by some electoral freak, the Green Party, who I sometimes vote for myself, had won the last UK election. Would the gap between aspirational rhetoric and practical reality by this point have been any less wide than the gap between Leaver rhetoric and Brexit in practice?) We all know you can’t take politicians’ rhetoric literally, but we try anyway to choose the options we find the most reassuring, and in Britain in 2016 and America in 2024 that was, for a small majority, respectively Brexit and Trump. Unless the opponents of these things are willing to engage with that fact and address the fears and insecurities that Brexit and Trump apparently do address, then they’ll continue to lose, no matter how loudly they thunder their outrage.

The liberal elite/experts. Voting for Brexit involved voting against the recommendations of all the major political parties in mainland Britain, most of the intelligentsia, most business leaders, and most economists and bankers. Instead of asking, ‘how could people be so stupid as not to listen to all those wise, successful, and knowledgeable people?’, a more productive question might be, ‘why are all those voters so distrustful of the whole educated class?’ (I’m going to write another post about this soon, but previous thoughts here and here.)

Disruption. Also, instead of asking the question, ‘how could people be so reckless as to do such damage to so many precious things?’ it might be more useful, even just from a self-interested, strategic point of view, to ask ‘why are people willing to risk so much?’, or ‘what is it about major disruption that appeals to so many people?’, or ‘why does what seems precious to me, not seem equally precious to all these compatriots of mine?’

Globalisation. Both Trump’s programme and Brexit place a strong emphasis on restricting migration from other countries, and putting up barriers to international trade. While it’s possible to respond to this with a lot of thundering about racism, xenophobia, inward-looking nationalism, and how you ‘don’t recognise your own country anymore’ and are going to move somewhere else, it would also be reasonable to ask why so many people are hostile to economic globalisation.

It doesn’t require rocket-science levels of expertise to guess at answers to that one. Why would anyone be a fan of having their job outsourced to another country, or of having to compete for work with people from poor countries who are willing to work for much less, and put up with much worse conditions, than you’ve learned to think of as your due? There are no easy answers here -even people who are threatened by globalisation as producers, are beneficiaries of it as consumers – but these are reasonable concerns and, however simplistically, the populists address them while the old mainstream politics really didn’t.

Even concerns about losing a community of likeminded folk and being surrounded by people with an entirely different culture are actually reasonable ones -as any impeccably liberal person knows who prefers to live in a nice bougie part of town with likeminded neighbours. Populists are prone to address such concerns with dangerous rhetoric that encourages racist hostility, but mainstream parties have historically dismissed the concerns themselves as racist.

I saw someone saying the other day that it was time we understood that migration was part of human life and always has been. This is perfectly true. Every human being on Earth is descended from someone who came from somewhere else. But it would be equally true to say that frontiers, and restrictions on movements across frontiers, are part of life and always have been. If we want grownup politics that deals with reality, let’s try not to cherrypick the bits of reality that suit us and pretend the others don’t exist.

*The phrase ‘the precious ordinary’, a favourite of my wife’s, comes from Benediction by Kent Haruf, a novelist of small lives in small forgotten places.

Alice Bradley Sheldon

Alice Sheldon, 1983, aged 58, four years before her suicide: Photo by Patti Perret

Alice Sheldon (‘Alli’) wrote science fiction mainly under the name of James Tiptree, Jr. Some while back, I wrote an appreciation of her stories here. Of all science fiction writers, she and Philip Dick are the two I feel the closest affinity with.

Alli liked to correspond on a friendly basis with editors and with other writers whose work she enjoyed. Her penfriends included Joanna Russ, Frederick Pohl, Ursula le Guin, Robert Silverberg, Gardner Dozois and Harlan Ellison. I’d like to think that, if I’d been older and my writing career had started ten or twenty years earlier, I might have been one of her penpals too. I think she might have liked my stories -some of my stuff, including the novel I’m struggling with right now, is thematically quite close to hers- and she made a point of contacting writers whose stuff she liked. But in fact she died – she shot herself, to be precise, after first shooting her blind husband in his sleep – three years before my first story appeared in print. (My first ever published story, A Matter of Survival, was about a nation of men at war with a nation of women, a very Alice Sheldon subject.)

The odd thing is, though, that if there had been an overlap between our careers and I had been her penpal, I, like all the people I’ve just listed, would have believed I was writing to a man. Because James Tiptree wasn’t just a pen-name for her stories, but the persona under which, over some years, she engaged in all this correspondence. It wasn’t just superficial stuff, it was often quite deep and intimate, yet it was all signed off by James Tiptree.

I’ve been reading her biography by Julie Phillips. Alli (I’m calling her that because Julie Phillips does, and because Sheldon was her married name and not a name she had from birth) was the only child of a wealthy Chicago family. Her parents were adventurous people with the resources to have big adventures. As a child Alli was taken on trips to Africa – living in the bush, hunting, visiting remote communities… – and her mother was a successful writer who also did lecture tours in which she regaled audiences with tales of these adventures. Alli herself grew up as a vigorous, outdoorsy sort of person who liked riding and fishing and shooting.

She was a painter for a while. In the war she was a photo analyst for the army, and went on to do this work for the CIA, which is where she met her second husband, Ting, who was 12 years older than her and came from a similarly elite background. Ting was who she lived with for the rest of her life and eventually killed, believing this to be an act of kindness.

She wanted a child but wasn’t able to have one. She studied psychology and engaged in psychological research. She enjoyed ‘masculine’ pursuits and the company of men, though she was sexually drawn to women. She suffered from depression. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, loving in a way, but intense and stifling. And when I say stifling, I mean stifling. Alli told Joanna Russ that, when she was fourteen, in a stateroom on a ship, her mother had ‘more or less openly invited me to bed with her’.

My main criticism of Phillips’ excellent book would be that she doesn’t dig deeper into this episode. I can appreciate the difficulty of doing so in the absence of any other material, but to be sexually propositioned by a loved parent -and in fact even just to have the sort of enmeshed, boundaryless relationship with a parent in which that is even thinkable – is liable to turn the rest of your life into a knot that can never completely be undone. Nothing quite makes sense any more. The things you most long for are also the things you dread. You’re like a circuit board with the components linked up wrong so that the switches don’t do what they’re supposed to do: lights that are supposed to come on at the same time don’t do so and others that aren’t supposed to come on at the same time, nevertheless always do. The fact that 14-year-old Alli was tempted to say yes to her mother’s proposition, and never blamed her for it, doesn’t alter that fact – it just shows how tangled things already were. I wonder what else happened that Alli never chose to share?

Anyway, when you know about that, you can certainly understand better why she wrote stories like ‘Love is the Plan the Plan is Death’ in which the spider-like narrator is slowly being eaten alive by his mate.

Tiptree was unmasked as Alice Sheldon in 1976. (He had told his correspondents about his mother’s death, and people looked up the obituary notices in the Chicago papers and worked it out.) Alli was frightened that all her pen friends would be upset by the deception and desert her, but it seems that everyone, men and women, reassured her of their continued friendship. Ursula le Guin wrote her a particularly lovely letter, welcoming her as a ‘sister soul’.

I found the chapter in which Tiptree unravelled particularly powerful. It reduced me to tears in fact. It was touching to see le Guin and others welcoming Alli as a woman friend but it was also obvious that something important to her had begun to fall apart, something that had made it possible for her to share her inner self, and yet feel safely hidden. I think of a spider creature again, one that longs to join with others, but fears being devoured.

Happy Ēostre

I looked up the etymology of ‘Easter’. According to Bede it was named for a pagan Germanic goddess, Ēostre. So as with Christmas, a Christian festival may be piggybacking a previous pagan celebration, and so cashing in on the extra depth, the layers of associations, that this would have provided for recent converts from paganism.

Ēostre is thought by historical linguists to be traceable to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *H₂éwsōs, and to be cognate with ‘East’, that being where the sun rises. Apparently, in Indo-European myths, the *H₂éwsōs figure is often a daughter of the sky-god, who brings light to the world only reluctantly and is punished for doing so. In which case a daughter of the supreme god who is punished for bringing light has been supplanted by a son of the supreme god who is also punished for bringing (many would say) a kind of light.

There’s lot of guesswork in all this whose plausibility I am certainly not qualified to evaluate on the basis of reading a couple of Wikipedia articles, but I love the depth of words, the stories they contain, the endless chains of associations from which they derive their meaning, stretching back until they disappear into the mists of the past. There’s more more richness in this than in rigid theological systems which, like language pedantry, seek to set in stone something which is by nature always in a state of flux.

Alien Life

Astronomers believe they may have discovered signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. The planet itself is only known to them because of the slight flicker that occurs each time it passes between its sun (K2-18) and us, and the indicators of life are the tiny changes in the colour composition of that light that occur at the same time, assumed to be the result of light passing through the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopy suggests that these changes indicate the presence of dimethyl sulphide and/or dimethyl disulphide, both of them gases which on Earth are produced by marine algae and bacteria. The planet is so far away that the light being analysed has been travelling towards us for 124 years.

There have been claims like this before which haven’t stood up to further examination -claims, for instance, that the imprints of bacteria had been found found in meteorites of Martian origin – so too much excitement is premature. Also, even supposing that the biological origin of these chemicals is somehow confirmed, this doesn’t mean that K2-18b is populated by organisms like our animals and plants. On Earth, as I understand it, these chemicals are produced by simple prokaryote organisms, and there is a really huge evolutionary leap involved in getting from prokaryotes to the much more complex eukaryotes that are the basis for all large multicellular organisms on Earth.

Nevertheless, even the discovery of something resembling bacteria or algae on another planet would represent an enormous change in our knowledge of the universe. As far as we’ve known up to now, life could be unique to our own planet -the result perhaps of a set of coincidences so unlikely as to literally never have occurred anywhere else. But if we know that life also exists on another planet only 124 lightyears away (‘only’ is an odd word to use for such an immense distance, but bear in mind that our galaxy, itself one of billions, is some 90,000 lightyears wide, and 1,000 lightyears deep), it becomes clear that life must be present all over the place. Like the Copernican revolution, proof that this was the case would represent a futher radical decentring of our place in the universe. Or at least it would do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that it doesn’t feel all that surprising. We have been familiar for a long time, after all, with the idea of life on other planets, which has been a staple of science fiction for a century and more.

This, for me, is a reminder that science fiction, dismissed by many as a rather lowly form of writing -escapist entertainment and no more- is a modern form of fantastical literature that burgeoned in the wake of the incredibly rapid scientific and technological changes of the past two centuries, and perhaps serves a rather important cultural function for such a constantly changing world. Interplanetary travel, robots, artificial intelligence… all were explored in fiction long before they actually existed. (Social media, admittedly, not so much!) And, just as children’s play helps prepare them for adulthood, science fiction helps us deal with the fact that, unlike people in earlier ages, we live in a time where, within a single lifespan, things will be discovered that will turn upside-down the way we see and interact with the world.

And science fiction also provides a way of visiting, if only in our imaginations, the places in the universe which we know might well exist, but which we know we will never actually see. I mean, how could we bear knowing that there is, or may be, other life out there, without at least speculating about the forms that life might take? And isn’t it the function of all fiction, in fact, to take us to places where we couldn’t otherwise go?

The wrong side of history

I don’t always like Marina Hynde’s column in the Guardian – her heavy sarcasm can get a bit relentless – and, for that matter, I don’t always like the Guardian, but I thought this piece of hers, about the reaction to the movie Emilia Pérez and what it tells us, was right on the nose, so much so that I’m going to quote about half of it right here:

… A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.

Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too… It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.

… I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.

In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right…

I agree. I think that particular kind of judgy, conformist, witch-hunting ‘leftism’ must take some share of the blame for the rise of the authoritarian right. In other words, in its own terms, it’s ‘on the wrong side of history’, though, like Marina Hynde, I’ve always hated that phrase, with its smug implication that the speaker’s world view is the one that will ultimately prevail.