Eric Faden is an Associate Professor of Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University. His research has appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture, Strategies, Convergence, The Journal of Film and Video plus the anthologies Arrêt Sur Image and The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Faden also creates videographic works that explore how scholarly research might appear as visual media. These experimental films are distributed commercially (Third World Newsreel, Media Education Foundation), published in on-line journals (Vectors, Mediascape, The Cine-Files, and [in]Transition), and screen internationally (The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania and the Contemporary Culture Center in Montpellier, France).
Black Hole Survival Guide – is probably top ten of Survival Guides in the Universe (even better than The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attack; Downtown LA). Can one pull trough the math behind the existence of black holes and still come out sane on the other side? Well, if math is not your strength but you’re still willing to grapple with inherent complexities in a readable form and enticing style, this is your entry. Even without the tongue-in-a-cheek survivalist or prepper add-on, it is still a remarkable book about the most extreme objects in the universe.
I truly appreciate an author taking time to take us along, to cognitively estrange us from everything we thought we knew about the tangible universe, and funnel us towards things that lie beyond any type of immediate perception or empirical experience. No wonder, since time itself begins to comport weirdly around them. Benjamin Bratton wrote in his intro to The Terraforming about the impact of the “The Black Hole”(of M87*) picture, and where this representation stands in a lineage of astronomic imaging. Blue Marble or Earthrise images are still images of the Earth, still operative, still clinging to the geocentric iconicity that props up “transitional humanisms” of an unfinished Copernican Turn. The Black Hole image is frightening because it resists mirroring back, and in a way this non-operative image makes our planet turn into a camera that is not looking “up” or “in” but “out”. The hyperdense void enclosed by the Event Horizon is frightening, and not just because it “uproots the human” as in Heidegger’s angsty 1966 interview in Der Spiegel. Once the certitude of extinction seeps in and uprootedness is taken as a given, there is room to move on. This “something” that is a crushing time-space nothingness- makes us care here on Earth for an impossibly remote invisible object (its light arriving from the Eocene to us) at odds with every other single phenomenon we encounter in our earthly life.
Black holes have become huge imaginary and cultural attractants in SF, movies, books, artwork, philosophy, etc At the same time, even when dealing with black holes – cosmic or bodily, I agree that we should beware of male authors or artists making claims about emptiness since as Audrey Wollen’s beloved meme keeps remind us that ‘Girls own the void’. How is it that we start to care about something so remote from everything that we know or care about?! Janna Levin guides us patiently, step by step towards this all-engulfing event horizon & even towards what might lie beyond it. This travelogue puts any other travel (cheap flight or X spaceship included) to shame. It is a rendezvous with an astronomical feature that we never think as – tangible, as touchable, and that will always keep being doggedly theoretical. It was a theoretical object not so long ago. Janna Levin makes the impossible happen – an embodied experience of what it would be like to go down the drain of a black hole, in fact, several such black holes. Another important inescapable fact is that black holes have the same status as elementary particles, and this is definitely hard to grasp. No matter how big, they are all equal in a way that all atoms of the same kind are equal.
Yes, we think we know about trees falling in the pre-human forest without our minds realizing or sensing it, but what about a non-sensuous perception of objects whose ‘nothingness’ shapes the largest galactic structures, giving a twist to everything, even our spiral galactic core.
This delightful book makes Janna Levin stands tall on my list of fav STEM outreach examples. The book works for all age groups and even has some great illustrations to make her point. Exposing us to remote larger-than-life forces, she managed to pull me beyond a reality of terrestrial lockdown and uncertain futures. Scientists or authors with a background in life sciences writing sci-fi (i am thinking here of Peter Watts, Adrian Tschaikowsky, Chris Beckett or the great Joan SLONCZEWSKI!) have a special spot in my heart. I live for (and love) speculative fiction – yet I still recognize that without Kip Thorne’s contribution to Christopher Nolan’s filmic oeuvre the CGI-digitally designed black hole Accretion Disk in Interstellar might have felt quite anodyne, maybe less appetizing and less aesthetically entrancing and tangible.
So I think that black holes via Black Hole Survival Guide – will definitely become more accessible to non-specialists in a way that is not dumbing down nor patronizing, attractive in the most literal sense of the term. Ominous and good to speculate (get comfy?) with, the STEM scientist/physicist/astronomer by training makes a good friend to have along on a deep dark cosmic journey. I could not pinpoint what are the new “rules of the game” that Janna Levine brings or if there is any magic secret to this scientific imaginary (i want to believe that imagination pools and informs both rigorously scientific and non-scientific speculative endeavors). From that special skillset, if I can single out one- is the ability to sum up the current state of knowledge on a given topic. What are the implication of black holes, unthinkable (for us) implications((for now) not just on stars but carbon-based bodies and minds such as ours, seemingly prisoners of our isolated sensorium and our speck of the universe?
I appreciate her own subjective-objective intervention – the informed ability to lean on other available explanations, or limit or circumscribe explanations while reaching out for other theoretically sound possibilities.
This I find vital. There is of course and the silliness and the sound advice one gets (how to choose which black holes to fall into! answer: the larger the better) along the way. As remote as it sounds – you can play around in your head with monstrous black hole peculiarities that seem to multiply. As we get closer to these cosmic sublime objects we seem to get a taste of infinities. As we taste some of the limits of science when approaching or entering a black hole we look beyond. To be able to hold on to this you need to envision the precise moment when you start seeing the back of your head (truly) and Janna Levin brings us as close to that as currently possible.
This is a visual essay exploring the future technology of synthetic biology. In recent years there have been major breakthroughs in DNA editing. Making it inexpensive and precise to modify and or combine living organisms to our design specifications. Through the combination of organic and mechanical archetypes into new forms, we wanted to stir the imagination of designers and engineers. The goal of this project is to spread synthetic biology into the sci-fi communities. To help us visualize the design and engineering possibilities that this technology can bring to us in the future. https://www.behance.net/gallery/66208181/Synthetic-Biology
Within the simulation generated by the brain of the mechanical saccorhytus, Mr. Greetings speaks with Henryk about his past and his role in the future. He gives Henryk a choice, to join him and betray Mischief… or not.
Zero Sum Game – kind of speculative fiction as developed by S.L. Huang revolutionized, for me at least – how and why action works. We think we know how action movies have this mass appeal, yet why and how does the action suplly those thrills. How did action get so popular or how does it involve the reader/viewer? How does action makes us run and jump while lying in our favorite reading spot. When does something become ‘actionable’ and how does action with more and more frames/minute even get perceived – having epileptic fits in tune with abstract flows or even enjoy non-dynamic decomposed movement, spatialize flux, embracing a schematic or even too blurry (too fast) to describe action? Can Cantorian set theory move us or the world around us? What could be the hidden motion laws be – and are these laws enough to animate the action packed novel?
Zero Sum Game made me rethink why action is important. Action is sometimes driving entire science-fictional domains (just think what would non-action space operas be like – looong in transit journeys, hyperspace lockdowns?). At the other end the interior dream world is full of action commonplace (just think about the incredible Sweet Dreams SF by Tricia Sullivan). Action drives us to read back to back, cover to cover, jumping over filler moments to the ones that feel like reading and living at break-neck speeds (even if under lockdown). As we became more sedentary – action – was increasingly (and underhandedly) adopted by authors and appreciated more and more by a growing and more diverse reading public, from the 19 c onward. A readership that was learning to read avidly in the midst of both industrial squalor & bourgeois comfort and where peaceful breaks were important but also when time had a different pace and the higher speeds and machinic modernity were yet but a dream. Action was initially not so well-received inside the literary fiction forum. Action was conceptually performative in a bizarre way. It could exist only if acted out. A chase was a chase, a struggle was a struggle, a fight was a fight. Various voluntaristic modern philosophies responded by praising, highlighting action and exhorting the transformative power of action over the stale structures, the burdensome overly-theoretical. Action was opposed to melancholic meditative states (choose btw ‘vita contemplativa vs vita activa’) or pitted against intellectually rewarding (analysis) but action-dampening approaches. Action became not just a way to write but also a philosophical style as well. Passivity and fatigue became suddenly uncool, almost a giveaway of civilizational burnout. But action had to be justified and meritorious and was given right of passage only if linked with higher ideals, morals, as purveyor of other stylistic and refined aesthetic qualities. Action per se was just a vehicle, was tied to plot, deemed too low brow or too general to have its own category. We could definitely say that most blockbuster movies nowadays are FX action movies and somehow slow cinema stands for art cinema as such (think Bela Tar, Tarkovsky etc). Action was always maligned and usually gets aligned to what Linda Williams (in 1991) has been describing as “body genres” in cinema: melodrama (especially – ‘the weepie’), pornography and horror. Something that’ll move, arouse, emote and push you off the chair.
19 century imaginative action was genderized, and action was kept the preserve of ‘men of action’ (although there are many important exceptions to the rule) and (High Imperialism) was also propping up a certain notion of muscular Christianity or selling the boy literature with values of pluck & grit. In the early XX c ERB’s Tarzan was again an example of pulp that could cut across audiences, even bring the promise of rejuvenated civilization by promoting a sort of neo-colonial rewilded white manhood reborn out of (hugely exploitative and exoticized) jungle life and strenuous physical training. This was done with disregard to the possibilities of making – Action – available to others. Suffragette’s Action was deemed obnoxious by the patriarchal establishment, and women who were not chained to what was at the time characterized as feminine occupations, domesticity, the non-adventurous were ostracized, deemed dangerous and scandalous (even committed to the sanatorium in order to quiet down over excited women). Later on, in high art and XX c the bloody spectacles of Viennese actionism seemed again also seemed to place men at the center of the action. While at the same time – such key counterculture & iconic performance art figures as Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti or Marina Abramovic pushed further than many in the 1970s. Action always is at the forefront of what drives and sweeps us till the end of a movie or the end of a novel or of a comic. It offers us enough impetus try changing the world and enough fuel to pull through, enough time to keep us munching through huge portions of adventure, SF, pulp, science fantasy, horror, heroic fantasy cultural products.
S.L. Huang introduced me to a new type of action – a sort of mathematized mercenary action able to abstract from the events themselves it feels to me. An enhanced math nerd mercenary that is able from the first page on to calculate (what can be most non-action than strings of math formulas or physics equations?!) every move into a procedural, every jump & dodge is pre- calculated. Huang does this on almost 300 pages. Zero Sum Game does not print the impossible to follow geometries of action (for me at least, one of the most un-mathematical minds of Goodreads i am sure) but spends time with mentioning trajectories, alluding to hidden graphs – the abstruse calculations that have probably driven Norbert Wiener to develop cybernetics in order to model fast moving real-world targets?!
In this eminently readable you change places with a character that is able to infer & combat enemies at the same time, save the day, dodge bullets, not because everything is a matrix, not because everything is data or we are living inside a computer that we can hack, but because of some inherent computational capacity out there – a general compute-ability that permits some to see everything in terms of calculable distances, speeds & optimize decisions & act at the same time(!!).
“Forces. Movements. Response times”- maybe it is the pure joy and fact of participating in this six sense of mathematical interplay that gives the near-future SF Zero Sum Game its impact. It is a sense in every way as revealing or more than the other 5 – and only speaks volumes about how other non-mind (non conscious, non cognitive) parts of us seem to calculate weight, trajectory and permit us to coordinate and not tumble at each step. At the same time what if we could multiply our quantify at will? S L Huang makes clear that such capacities come with a cost attached. Maybe it is exactly this – the surprising fact that we could equate sensory overload with invisible computational trauma. What is this computational trauma like? S.L. Huang takes you through the action via the possibility that there might be somebody out there that is able to suffer & take advantage (hopefully somebody from the good side of the force) of peeking into probabilities live, deciding on life & death choices during split-second windows. It is almost the real world physics of why algorithms manage to game the flash trading stock exchange system with a certain latency. Even including the limits set by the speed of light – these split decision of buying and trading are completly imperceptible to us, or beyond any human action potentials of human traders on the trading floor. Science fiction makes liveable this inhuman math on the edge of life and death. One can live through the most harrowing calculus and still survive to tell the tale. I hope you’re convinced by now that all these weaponized math magnitutes, all these quantifications are never boring (never repetitive or pedantic).
They are almost like the wishful thinking or unconscious desire of full automation or self quantification. Math is not restricted to a special region, far in Plato’s world of transcendent perfect geometrical shapes (well it might be there as well) but immanent, evenly spread and unleashed all around. Everything is first person and everything allows access to this most impossible and dangerous of jobs (future jobs?). Cas Russell’s job is dangerous and involves various deadly agents and some pretty dangerous and delightfully (and scary) conspirative stuff (hint: world domination by Pithica). The main character is a walking talking biped calculator but also a very involved, good and dependable person. She is not on top of the world but suffers under the effects of her enhanced capacities. What I like is that this post-human mind trip can be a showcase of mathematics unbound. Mathematics gets untethered from its cold beauty (of Bertrand Russells quip) and in the writing of S L Huang becomes quite searing, quite brutal, hellish number-crunching that hurts physically, leaving deadly bloody marks and scars everywhere. Math is paradoxically erupting almost like a telluric force, leaving algorythmic shrapnel embedded everywhere.
Mathematics in Zero Sum Game is lived phytagoreic seizure and embodied equations have a heaviness of their own. Completely underlying all reality there is this world of angles and swerves, that somehow escapes attention and gets ignored (otherwise it would drive us mad)at our own peril, like data streams mostly churned outside of our bodies. Blissfully here is one such data analyst on our side, although this might be changing (importantly Cas Russell prefers retrieving inanimate objects more than people). If the most minute phenomena somehow do have their data imprint, if they are conscious and do not just enter our consciousness, they posses their mentat masters. Calculation happen everywhere already, not just in minds. Minds seem to just tap into outcomes, not even able to follow blandly newtonian givens. After Zero Sum Game base reality ceases to somehow be base reality although most of the things and people around you still inhabit this placid world. These physics or these kinetic details do not clutter the novel and keep peppering it at the right moments that offer you a glimpse of what it is to feel the effects and act according to such a mathematically infected worldview. Again I hope there’s not too many spoilers since the discovery of the actual material is most important. These are just a few thoughts about my honest puzzlement after reading such an incredible SF book.
How the invention of writing gave humanity a history. From hieroglyphs to emojis, an exploration of the way in which the technology of writing has shaped the world we live in played in three consecutive parts.
TimeSpace Warps 