Political theory and practice

And All the Stars (2012) by Andrea Hörst

GoodReads meta-data is 204 pages, rated 3.89 by 1223 litizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Creative.

Waiting for a City Circle metro train at the underground St James Station beneath Sydney’s Hyde Park, the roof falls in on young Madeleine Cost. Luckier than others on the platforms, she survived the collapse and slowly crawled out from the rubble. Thus begins the realisation that the aliens have landed.

In cities around the world gigantic spires have plunged into the earth of the Earth, one of them into Hyde Park above the station, and from them a dust floats far and wide. Those directly exposed to it die. Survivors’ skin turns blue or green (some with star markings per the title).  The population is culled by two-thirds we later learn.

Maddie shelters from the dust in an absent cousin’s flat on Finger Wharf, frantically trying to contact her parents in the high country near Armidale and, more generally, to find out what has happened, what is happening, what will happen but driven by excruciating hunger she has to scavenge for food. Ravenous hunger is a side effect of whatever causes the skin changes. That quest for food brings her into contact with others and she teams up with some teenagers whose survival rate seems marginally higher than that of adults. 

What follows is one of the most creative science fiction stories I have read.  That may seem an odd thing to say, but much of the science fiction is not creative. It is sacrilege to say it, but Philip K. Dick’s stores are commonplace decorated with space ships or androids.   

Social services and norms quickly erode; a state of nature emerges (see Thomas Hobbes), compounded by the aliens’ presence.  When the dust settles, the aliens seize the minds of some and announce their plans – which make little sense to those who hear. The aliens use the continued broadcasts of news services and the internet to proclaim their message.  Ergo the media is largely left in place, though many journalists were killed by the dust along with others. 

Even during the apocalypse the media remains irresponsible and cannibalistic. In the quest for the last Pulitzer Prize surviving journalists breathlessly report on humanity’s reaction, including scientific and medical efforts to defeat the dust plague, the best hiding places to avoid the dust, and later how to avoid alien patrols that begin to sweep up survivors of the dust, and finally the organisation and leadership of the human resistance to this alien occupation. All of this  information is monitored by the aliens who quickly extinguish the laboratories, destroy the hiding places, and slaughter the resistance groups. Like Comrade Putin, they use Pox News for their own ends, and Pox News revels in its murderous prostitution.   

The dust was just the beginning. Things get worse.

Meanwhile, Maddie and her Blues hide from marauding gangs of Greens, elude aliens who hunt for hidden humans to use in their competition, and manage tensions within their number. One or two want to fight the aliens they know not how. Another wants to compile a database. A third wants Maddie. They all want more food. The group also faces decisions: stay in the apartment, stay together, stay in the city, or move, split up, try to leave?  

Meanwhile, the aliens start some sort of competition among themselves using human surrogates, as though they are mortal chess pieces. It is incomprehensible but deadly. Needless to say Pox News is there to broadcast it.  

The Sanctimonious Broadcasting Service (once known as Your ABC) features much lip-pursing at the Government’s failure to prevent the invasion, defeat it, end it, and compensate survivors for the inconvenience. Some things never change, not even at the apocalypse. 

Among the surviving humans, opportunists take advantage of the situation. TED talks abound without a pause for breath. Entrepreneurs offer snake oil cures for the dust infections. Religious charlatans talk to god. Predators enjoy the mayhem. The NRA sells more guns that are useless, but comforting.  Lawyers propose making the aliens illegal immigrants and debate the wording of such legislation.  Academics have conferences to pronounce on the situation. Politicians promise to convene Royal Commissions. Ideologues ask the gender of the aliens. None of these standard operating procedures matters one whit but it is what they know how to do, so they do it. 

A very secret resistance forms and launches an attack. There is a great deal of action in the last quarter of the book, and it ends more or less literally with a pitch to make a CGI movie from it.  That deflated this reader big time. 

While there are many reviews on Goodreads, as usual, they are largely uninformative, I could not find a single one elsewhere in a 10-minute internet research. Behind paywalls I suppose. 

One can read all sorts of parables into the story.  Are the aliens the British come to terra nullius with their invisible diseases? Then the earthlings are the aboriginals who cannot fathom what is happening, let alone why. Or should we read the spires and dust as a climate crisis.  Or is it COVID. Take your pick, or add another.  The racial antagonism that quickly develops between the Blues and Greens, who blame each other for the calamity has also to be considered. Then there is the girl-meets-boy romance tucked into it, which is quite charming in its own terms, but attenuated.  (I never did get what cousin Tyler had to do with any of it. My attention span is like that.) 

The characters are differentiated and sympathetic. The tension and mystery are palpable. There are some nice passages about painting – Maddie’s chief interest in life before the Spires came.  But the alien mystery is so immersive that it envelops everything and slows it down…. I found the book easy to put down and hard to pick up.  Although there are some well-judged action scenes on the beach or a fight in a parking garage, and at the end, but along the way there is a lot of talk, talk, and more talk.  It requires some patience and persistence in readers, and this one seems to have less and less of those qualities.  

I found the opening in the ruin of St James metro station close to home because I have waited on that dreary platform at night after Parliament House sessions.  Ditto the mention of the Archibald Fountain above, which was one of my first references points in Sydney.  

Sheila McLeod, Xanthe and the Robots (1977).

GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.31 by 16 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Seminar. 

At an isolated but relaxed research institution Philophrenic robots are in development.  Pragmapractor robots are extensively used for simple and repetitive tasks, like telling people to brush their teeth.  (Joke.)  But the Philophrenics have much more complex programming and, perhaps, even emotions.  Xanthe is one of the programers and the story is told from her perspective.  

Xanthe is an only child, an introvert, solitary, obsessive, creative, and likes things that way.  Xeno the director of the institute saddles her with an assistant, despite her objections, and he becomes a source of tension.  While Xanthe swallows the libido-blocking tablets each day, the better to concentrate entirely on her work 18-hours a day, ….  But the reader knows that Daiman, the unwanted assistant, will overcome that chemical barrier.  There is no other reason for him to be there.

The Philophrenics are programmed in the humanities not science or engineering. Thus they know the works of Ibsen, Melville, Brownings, Byron, and prove it by spouting quotations. Each has a programmer whose personality shapes the bot, though it is not supposed to do so. 

Only half-way through the book does the reader learn that beyond the Institute’s walls the world is disintegrating into chaos, although it seems a polite sort of chaos compared to the kind the Republican Party creates these days.  Meanwhile, the Philophrenic robots develop wills of their own and demand autonomy which is conceded.  However no sooner do the Philophrenics take over than the Pragmapractors go on strike. It seems that they do not wish to take orders from other robots.  (At this point I expected Jim Kirk to appear and talk the robots to death in the great Star Trek tradition of low budget endings.)

The Philophrenics we learn in a sotto voce narrative from Xanthe were supposed to be perfected humanity, creatures of reason and knowledge, untainted by the weakness of the flesh.  Like the Pragmapractors, the Philophrenics are sexless, though there are anticipations that the latter may come to demand sex in order to more closely approximate human beings. Remember Mr Data or the Tin Man?  Try as the members of the Institute might, the robots cannot be any more perfect than the humans who program them, and we see early on the personality of programmer is reflected in the robot.  (It seems one programmer works on/with one robot.)

The Philophrenics seems poorly suited for the autonomy they demand since they are totally imbued with literature, and nothing else.  When granted freedom to create their own names they invariably choose the name of a literary character, and when they are also allowed to dress themselves (having theretofore worn coveralls or kaftans) they choose period clothing for the name they have chosen.  Do we detect a lack of imagination here?  (By the way, how such clothing is produced is off stage.) but then why are they clothed at all? 

Aside: the only other time clothing is mentioned it is used to indicate exasperation when Xanthe notes that Xeno’s necktie is at half mast. We are spared the detailed and pointless description of clothing that pads out so much genre fiction. Nor are meals described and decor detailed. Finally, there is no description of the robots, except that they are made in our image.  

All the programmers have code names and that is never explained within my attention span.

Once autonomous, the bots rapidly set about making all too human errors by dividing into hostile groups, going on ego trips, lolling around….  Meanwhile, Daiman and Xanthe become, as long predicted, a couple while the Institute disintegrates around them.  The conflict between the Pragmapractors and Philophrenics turns violent with the humans in between, not quite trusted by either camp, but trusted more than the other camp.  

In the end Daiman and Xanthe leave the shelter of the Institute to brave the misery of real world. That last phrase was not used but it seems right.

About midway there are explicit references to the laws built into bots but Asimov is not named.  

The verdict above, ‘Seminar,’ indicates how wordy the text is.  Every character is articulate and there are pages and pages of talk, or silent narration from Xanthe, and very little movement.  When Xanthe reluctantly takes a holiday earlier, well, that is one of the weakest parts of the text.  

This reader was left perplexed as to what conclusion to draw.  Moreover, the external chaos is never explained, and neither is any role for the robots in that wider world which undermines the whole purpose of the Institute. In that way, we seem to have only part of the story.  While at the Institute there are schedules and work, it never seems connected to the desperate world out there.  It is indeed an Ivory Tower.  The Philophrenics will do nothing to reduce the chaos, though the Pragmapractors might.  

I came across a reference to it somewhere, now forgotten, and being intrigued I found a used paper copy from Abe Books (despite being owned by Amazon, its stock does not appear in Amazon searches) and got it.  It is not available in an e-book. She has many other titles.

The Tango War (2018) by Mary Jo McConahay.  

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.08 by 172 members of the Human Comedy. 

Genre: History.

Subtitle: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin American during World War II. 

Verdict: Victimology.

As worldwide conflicts occurred in the middle and later 1930s, the relationship of the United States to the 33 nations in Latin American returned to centre stage.  For a century the United States treated as property those parts of this world it noticed, though it generally neglected the greater part. The Monroe Doctrine had originally protected some of the countries of Latin America from the threat of re-colonisation after they had thrown off their European masters, and at the time it was backed by a silent partnership with Great Britain, but in the intervening century the Doctrine had become a convenient excuse for exploitation, rapine, and arrogance.  

The Monroe Doctrine had been used to justify a hidden hand operation that hived Panama off Columbia and turned it into a de facto US dependency for a century. Earlier Mexico had been reduced by 60% in successive conflicts, hot and cold. Being closest, Mexico has always been favoured with US intentions. The best example is in a display of his ‘moral diplomacy’ when Woodrow Wilson had the US Navy bombard Vera Cruz in 1914. That was his phrase.  

Venezuela had once been protected from European creditors on battleships, true, but in return it endured the rapacious business practices of United Fruit (Rockefeller) and others from El Norte.  Since Latin America was all but closed to Europeans by the Monroe Doctrine wall, US businesses dictated terms at will. In the spirit of free enterprise they formed cartels to reduce competition among themselves, the better to exploit the land and people. Free market ideologues never ponder this sad story very long before returning to the clouds. 

Against this background in the late 1930s the Roosevelt Administration set out to vivify the Organization of American States and win friends with the so-called Good Neighbour Policy in which the US pledged never again to intervene by force in its good neighbours.  (Hence, the Cuban sad sacks had to front the Bay of Pigs invasion; black money funded the overthrow of the elected government south of the border more than once, private contractors flew covert bombing raids in Central America, and on and on.) Whatever the intentions of the policy, the administration was not well equiped to practice it.  US embassies in the Latin America were staffed with men (yes, only men above clerical staff) who saw themselves first and foremost as representative of those exploitative businesses.  The diplomacy they practiced often consisted of lecturing the host government on the best way to show gratitude for the US robbery they suffered.

A comparison could be made between the pre-War US domination of Latin America with the post-War Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  Albeit the US approach was masked and at times ineffective, as when its efforts to block elected governments like that of Juan Perón in Argentina failed.    

Apart from a vast population, the southern Americas possessed natural resources that anyone could see would be important, rubber, oil, platinum, bauxite, natural gas, copper, silver, and other metals and minerals, as well as vast agricultural production, and what’s more it fronted both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its single greatest strategic asset was the Panama Canal linking the two bodies of water. 

One of the most interesting parts of the story concerns the Rubber Soldiers in Brazil. To increase production Brazil mobilised for rubber production on a new level, and went at it like a military campaign.  

With thirty-three countries to choose from there is a lot to cover, and the author selects material that fit the overall approach of victimology.  The southern denizens have no wills of their own, but are enslaved by Norteamericanos.  The indictment goes on and on.  I admit I grew weary of reading the list of one-eyed wrongs, and tuned out. 

While there are occasional references to German and Italian interests, there is no sustained reckoning of their efforts to sow dissension and suborn the population. We are left with the Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious (1946) for that side of the story.    

And speaking of that population, much of it came from recent immigration which included millions of Italians, and also a million plus German-speakers from Central Europe.  The Italians were concentrated in Argentina, while the Germans were to be found there, and in Colombia (a two hundred air miles from the Canal), and Brasil. However these Germans and Italians were counted, they added up to a far greater number than the resident Anglos.  Then there was a significant Japanese presence in Peru to be considered.  Given the author’s silence, none of these Axis peoples were anything but peace loving innocents.  

…

One can spend a lot of time trying to define and express that group of southern nations.  Latin American includes all the countries south of the Rio Grande for 6,000 miles to the Antarctic Ocean.  That embrace includes the islands of the Caribbean, Central American, and South America. It includes the French-speaking Haiti and Guyana.  In but not of it are the Dutch-speaking Suriname and the Aruba isles, as well as English-speaking rocks like the Bahamas. But ‘Latin America’ is most general terms for this vast area, even if its people are not all Latins in any sense, starting with the indigenous in habitants. The dominate languages is Spanish but the largest single country is Brasil where Portuguese is the spoken.  For every rule there is an exception.  

To put it all other ways:

Spanish America includes Mexico but excludes Haiti and Brasil as well the Dutch territories and British islands. 

South American excludes Mexico and six other Central American counties as well as the Caribbean islands.  

The uncommon term Iberico-America combines Spanish America with Brasil but omits the French, Dutch, and English lands and islands. 

By the way, it seems ‘Latin America’ is a term attributed to Napoleon III when he had designs on recolonising Mexico as his White Man’s Burden before Kipling. It includes all the Spanish, Portuguese, and French settled lands but omits the Dutch and English.  

Then there is vexed question of the United States territories, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone.    

One thing common to all these variations is so obvious that it often overlooked.  All use the term ‘America,’ as in the Organization of American States.  One of the first concessions the Good Neighbour policy made was to re-title US embassies and consulates in this region as ‘United States’ and not ‘American,’ since everywhere was geographically American.