Should We Settle? (2025-12-08)

Of course, as soon as we pick up such a loaded question, we have to deal with the issue of definitions and lack of specificity. It makes total sense to ask what “settle” means here, and furthermore, settle for what? Revealingly, “settle” is a verb with so many negative connotations I can’t help but think the various colonizing nations and those committed to their exploiting ways have taken against it. It is no longer positive to “settle” a new place, in part because there are no new places and it turns out there were never any new places. “Settling” a lawsuit doesn’t seem to have the happiest connotations among the people who insist that every lawsuit must have a winner and a loser. In that sense it seems to share the unwanted seat with the latinate verb “compromise.” But as it happens, that was not the context of how this rather colourless question came up. It is not meant to be answered except with the default answer of “no,” and that in itself is very revealing. Still, before continuing on I should explain the context, which admittedly was not on a trip into the dictionary or something. An example of that rara ava, an adult who managed to acquire a mortgage for a home when it was still comparatively affordable, exactly where they most wanted to live, followed by a combination of further good fortune, savvy, and hard work so the mortgage is paid. Now they are notionally semi-retired, though having had good fortune and good sense both, the adult in question is leery of getting any closer to retured than that. A combination of wisely and humbly hedging their bets makes excellent sense. Also notionally, that fortunate and sensible adult could “settle,” just keep doing what they’re doing. Considering how many times I have had less than praise for the greedy self-declared elites and their hangers on, the usually manipulative question of settling may seem like it should be answered “yes.” After all, the adult in question is in a good situation, and they have enough. But wait, that suggests the only definition of “not settling” at work behind the question is “not settling for less,” usually less of money, property, or even power over others.

So faced with an example where the pseudo-question “should that person or us should we be so fortunate settle?” came up, all manner of fascinating other ponderables arose. A person with such good fortune is able to choose what to do with much of their time and any funds beyond the necessities. If they decide to do nothing more with it besides play tiddlywinks, that strikes me as fair enough. This is rarely what people outside of the very capitalist set do though. They’ve usually got some serious practice to work on, whether it be art, some kind of spirituality, or ongoing volunteer commitments of one sort or another. They may or may not be politically active in a real sense, that is not just going through the sadly denuded process of voting in many “western” contexts, where the ballot votes are counted but the real voting is through money. (I don’t think there is any real evidence against the return of property qualifications for having a meaningful impact on political decision making in the “west.”) It actually brings to mind the famous Bill Watterson commencement speech illustrated by Gavin Aung Than in his now wrapped up zen pencils, still featured on the front page of the series in its online form. Watterson is an excellent writer, so we should not be surprised that he selects some zingers for the speech, making observations about people perceived to have “abandoned a career” and how “a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric if not a subversive.” I have encountered claims that such people are lazily zoning out, supposedly refusing to contribute or work hard enough, maybe even fleeing adult responsibilities and the real world. My activism inclined acquaintances demand to know why such people aren’t organizing. Well, maybe such people are, maybe such people aren’t. We actually don’t know. People who are so fortunate as to be able to make such choices about their time and work life are not exhibitionists about what they are doing. They may end up creating an award-winning comic strip like Watterson, but he is so notoriously publicity shy that I think even if they do achieve a conventional success, such people are inclined to avoid the spotlight. This actually makes sense to me.

If a major element of a person’s motivation is to be able to choose how to spend their time, which typically also means living by a particular set of values incommensurate with a constant drive to get more money and prestige, then fame itself is not a goal. We see all manner of examples every day of people who have some version of fame or its common correlates, lots of money and an apparent ability to control others. But these people don’t seem to have much control over their own time or what they do. Far from it, these are people whose fame includes a reputation for being in demand. When people with those goals really hit the “big leagues,” they end up paying assistants to manage their schedules for them, or at least managing the fall out when they pick on choose who to pay attention to and who to ignore. Still, they are extreme examples and tangled up in an openly corrupt system of perverse incentives. I think it is more common for people to value having a great deal of structure in their lives, and they may even be amenable to that structure being imposed by other people.

But the sad fact is far too many people never get anything that even remotely resembles a choice. A structure is imposed upon them, and they find theselves faced with the grim question of whether to resist and try to get out of that structure, or to settle. (Top)

Demanding Perfection is Political (2025-12-01)

By now even the people most inclined to give Aristotle a solid pass would probably begrudgingly all admit he wasn’t wrong or exaggerating when he commented about people being political animals, even if he was too much of a sexist jerk to admit women are political in their own right. I strongly suspect this caused him considerable difficulties when he went off to spend time in the macedonian court cozying up to future super mass murderer Alexander. In what today is recognizable as a gangster-land system where whole families are customarily part of the politics and associated intergroup violence, women didn’t have a choice but to be political even if they wanted to somehow keep out of the fray but paradoxically also stay with their family otherwise. Since in effect the only way families continue is through the women anyway, this just became one more way women caught up in sexist contexts get scapegoated, and sure enough the ways to accuse them of being less than perfect proliferated. Whatever the new philosophy, law, or technique, women could be faulted for using it, not using it well enough, or not using it at all. If they are successful at surviving and contributing to their family’s success, rest assured they will be impugned for supposedly being sexually impure, using some type of physical or mental poison, or of having generally tainted agency either because they did what they wanted or because they didn’t. In other words, no matter what, the women will be faulted. This is a political demand for perfection, and the way it is demanded of women is highly illustrative, because the same constant dishonest double bind creation is turned against any other person or group an exploiting class and their followers is desperate to keep down. The overt examples of this technique for maintaining the status quo are proliferating even more than usual because the established ways of keeping different people down and exploiting them are coming apart. Those ways are coming apart due to a combination of persistent and successful resistance, combined with the fact that those ways are the favoured approaches of people who are endlessly greedy and at best unwilling and at worst incapable of accepting any others besides themselves have a right to live independently.

The most obvious examples of the political demands for perfection recently involve anyone involved in land protection or resistance against what even united statesians have begun openly referring to as “american imperialism.” (I now dislike to use the term “american” in this way because the americas include many more countries and people than the united states. Colleagues from elsewhere in the americas helped me fully appreciate that.) In both canada and the united states, efforts are ongoing to declare any effort to protect the land from industrial exploitation “terrorism,” that abused term which nobody can claim isn’t a political swear word anymore. When the pretence to justification “it’s okay when we do it or when we pay for it” for a very restricted definition of a certain sort of “we” is so tissue thin as to be nonexistent, many people who might have otherwise gone along with it are no longer willing to do so. I don’t intend any sort of idealistic point by noting this. I think quite practically and understandably, people hate being called stupid, and that is true regardless of their political positions. The new marketing category of “environmental terrorism” has turned out to have some interesting enforcement nuances. For the children of the professional managerial class, it provides a status-raising minor arrest record. For the rest, especially the racialized rest, an entire infrastructure of legal abuse intended to drive them and their entire family into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, train derailments that blow up the centre of small towns or poison entire towns are not considered “terrorism” and there are no consequences for the executives who remove safety practices and refuse to spend money on repairs and maintenance to the train cars and tracks. Those executives are deemed a little careless maybe, and the corporation given a slap on the wrist fine. They don’t need to be perfect. Those are the examples it is okay to talk about in public. Then there are the others.

We aren’t supposed to talk about the demands for perfection of people resisting oppression. Those people are always supposed to do so nonviolently to be perfect, and why oh why, their critics moan, don’t they die nobly instead of fighting back? Why aren’t they following Gene Sharp’s playbook? Why aren’t they giving themselves up like Jesus? How dare they fight back and cause injury to soldiers who are only “doing their duty.” This litany comes roaring out especially against Palestinians fighting steadily to end the ongoing western-backed genocide against them and win back their homeland in a non-apartheid form. It also get an airing every time a “non-western” for which read non-united states affiliated country fights back against western-backed gangs trying to overturn their government. It’s interesting how all of a sudden, the “I was only following orders” defence counts, as long as it is western-backed people claiming to be following orders. They are never expected to be perfect. Not only that, whatever accusation a western-backed person makes against a targeted country or group or person, we can count on it to be repeated and bruited across the mainstream media with no effort at fact-checking or anything else. The correspondence to the way accusing a woman of being sexually promiscuous is taken as confirmation of guilt is exact.

Furthermore, we all know this is a political tactic. We all know that “perfection” is only demanded of people who are targeted for exploitation and even outright destruction. It has got to the point that the people who think they are elites and are in charge can’t even be bothered to pretend otherwise. I guess that is progress, of a sort. (Top)

Actual Thoughts on Steampunk (2025-11-24)

Quote of a lovely image of an orchestrion from Jake Von Slatt’s Steampunk Workshop website. The original-original source is a Collector’s Weekly 2012 article Von Slatt cites, which is also well worth a look. Both pages visited and working 24 december 2024.

Nearly seven years ago I wrote a piece called The Nineteenth Century Blahs, but never did get around writing much about one the stranger responses to the nineteenth century of the late twentieth and early twenty-first, steampunk. The great steampunk vogue came and went in the 2010’s, running alongside the temporary mainstreaming of so-called “geek culture.” For awhile there, every comic con or similar event had at least a solid steampunk-costumed contingent, if not a full track of sessions to complement a substantial number of vendors and products. Among speculative fiction writers, a very few tried their hand at writing counterfactual histories and alternate timelines that were really interesting. At the moment such writing is tragically blighted by the market hijacking and perversion of the concept of “woke” combined with protestant extremist demands for faith displays commonly designated “virtue signalling.” But if you can find at least the Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution anthology edited by Ann Vandermeer, you can have the marvellous experience of reading an excellent selection of stories including other than “white” main characters from before the blight took off. Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer is also good, if you can track it down. But the first Steampunk anthology they edited, which features the first short stories reveals profoundly violent and disturbed evidence of how most of the first steampunk writers were specifically nostalgic for an era when supposedly patriarchy was absolute and the lesser races were treated like subhumans without apology by “whites.” It’s a deeply disturbing read, but for anyone who is concerned to see a full spectrum of written treatments including the worst, then that first anthology represents an important historical record.

For good or ill though, in the end steampunk became almost wholly about an aesthetic, and so by nature this meant it could only become a fashion and then quickly miss or even actively close potential avenues for imagination and artwork. So if a person was drawn to steampunk by what could be construed as a critique of modern technology with its constant drive for centralized control and rendering everything possible into pictures under glass, the contradictions began to poke out in a hurry. While there is an admittedly fun thumb-nosing in steampunk redecoration of computers and computer peripherals, rendering them other than butt-ugly for most “PCs” and rejecting the weird anorexia-adjacent and colour palette-minimized aesthetics of recent apple products, the fact remains this is only about looks, not fundamentals. It’s less glamorous to get into the discussion and considerations about freelibre software and hardware, although the joys of joining the rogue repair community evident in such businesses as ifixit and the craft fora like instructables.com. Yet it seems to me there was an important element of an attempt to revalourize practical skills and ways of practising art still often sneered at as mere “craft” because they don’t depend on expensive art supplies. Still, I get why the aesthetic element took off long before the commercialization kicked in. Thanks to commercialization and mass production of products designed to land in the trash as quickly as possible, which if all else fails turns out to mean they are poorly designed and/or ugly and difficult to impossible to refurbish, the result is both boring and disgusting to the eye. Maybe various cynical parties saw this as a means to drive people back to the pictures under glass, where the colour and movement are. Then faced with the evidence from more than just steampunk aesthetic that people value pleasant textures and hefts, techbros decided handheld computers needed “haptic feedback.” (Including the jackanapes who decided they would literally hide all options to switch from “haptic feedback” to quiet, distinct click sounds instead.)

Perhaps what steampunk as an aesthetic and performance mode reflected more than anything else was a particular cohort of young but mature adults, who for awhile found a wonderful niche to meet up together and have fun in. It started out from rather humble beginnings, associated primarily with thrifting and reuse. In fact, it could even overlap with the larping scene, while not depending so much on waving around swords and pretending the world is full of elves and orcs or rolling dice. The few people who tried to “dress victorian” on an ongoing basis seem to have been after something else demanding rather more money, and in at least one case I am aware of, ended up with them being formerly ordered out of a local botanical garden and tourist attraction. (I don’t have the details about the botanical garden incident, it all sounded very odd, and seems to have come down to some sort of ban on “costumes” in the gardens unless it is hallowe’en.) This also suggests that this particular aspect of steampunk aesthetic was made ephemeral by default, because the people involved would tend to be pulled away from their original cosplay groupings by such life necessities as moving for work, dealing with lack of work, perhaps building a life with a partner and even having children. But hopefully the incidental reminders about how people can still create art in their daily lives, resist pressure to generate constantly growing mountains of plastic waste, and have fun with similar aged and/or like-minded friends.

I am not convinced by the people who sneer at handheld computers masquerading as phones as skinner boxes, nor when they sneer at people they think are run wholly by their “smartphones.” I am not too convinced by the people who have decided to reframe questions about “social media” and handheld computers in terms of demands for “digital veganism.” Yes, I too have seen toddlers handed a phone or tablet to keep them busy instead of more familiar toys whose role in building muscle and gross motor skills are now being rediscovered the hard way. While I agree wholeheartedly that we have a serious and growing problem with technologies designed and redesigned to encourage physical and mental helplessness with a strong side of surveillance and attempts to impose centralized control, the associated technologies are symptoms not the disease. The disease is the all-pervasive clash of social classes, whether we like it or not, and the best and most thoughtprovoking uses of steampunk as a loose category within speculative fiction and a cosplay aesthetic practice actually dealt with this element directly. After all, who had well-fitted, elaborate clothes in the real life nineteenth century and often the fictional steampunk reimaginings of it? Who could act as if there was no such thing as money and expect to be accompanied by servants who mysteriously never needed paying? Fashion is not so unimportant or unrevealing as we are encouraged to believe. (Top)

Revolt of the Tools? (2025-11-17)

Illustration by Gustave Brion from an 1867 edition of Victor Hugo’s Les misérables, courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

There is a farcical quality to how badly search engines perform today, even including the ones not designed or distorted into a poor cover for datamining and advertising. Even more hilarious is how suddenly it is all but impossible to roust up a search result to provide an online citation of any anthropologist or similar person who referenced at least in passing a Mayan or other story once easy to look up under a heading like “the revolt of the tools.” I am well aware of the possible and if so dubious reframing of it into the revolt of the toys in the original pixar hit “Toy Story.” There is a lot going on in the much earlier Mayan story, more than a person reading a transcription would necessarily pick up on, because they are often reading the story out of context. The question of who was telling it when must always be asked and preferably answered with stories featuring important social commentary. Nevertheless, even if advertising and datamining per se were not major issues of concern today, if there were nevertheless hucksters at large trying to sell magic “AI” to fill their pockets before the bubble pops, it would end up being difficult to find much about pre-computer era reflections on what could happen if the tools stop behaving as their users intend, let alone wish. There are many not so honest brokers who would like us not to take stronger notice of how so-called “tools” like what is advertised as “AI” are centrally controlled and completely unauditable. They are not “our” tools, nor indeed are they “tools” as such, they are not designed to help us complete a job. Unfortunately, these incredibly wasteful programs that met their moment by providing a means to keep selling GPUs and waste electricity when the bitcoin hype began to fail are not intended to be useful in the more common sense of the term anyway.

All that said, the obnoxious “AI” hype is not what brought the Mayan account of the revolt of the tools to mind, though the problems with large language models and other programs meant to put together statistically probable sequences of “symbols” may seem more directly relevant. My point is not to use the story as a means to emphasize that such models don’t have any agency, even though the Mayan story hinges on the tools having agency because they attack humans for abusing them, thereby forcing humans to correct their behaviour. No, a big part of what brought this story to mind recently was turning to my trusty OED – I have an older electronic one and an offline hardcopy compact – to examine the current meaning and connotations of the word “organ.” Quite unexpectedly, I learned this is a word with an opposite trend to the many words for living creatures applied to weapons and other poison-spewing technologies to make them sound less threatening. Back in the day Jane Caputi and Mary Daly were among the feminist scholars taking note of this uncanny and dishonest linguistic trend. Probably the most infamous and symbolic in a north american mainstream context is the nuclear power “plant.” This is not the same tactic as synecdoche, where a part is made to stand for the whole, but an effort to naturalize and render unthreatening a genuinely dangerous process or item. However, it turned out that “organ” originally referred to inanimate tools, as in hammers, saws, and the like, and only later was reapplied to parts of the body. The most common illustrations of this reapplication to part of a living being are basically men referring to their penises in pornographic or porn-adjacent contexts. I guess the logic of this, since these examples tended to be from various authors writing in england, is that supposedly the penis seems to have a mind of its own and the hope is to remake this sometimes embarrassing and inconvenient phenomenon into something more seemingly threatening or useful. I suppose it can be face saving to try to imagine an unruly seeming body part to be more like a tool that can be repurposed into a weapon, but I am not convinced.

More helpfully, this reminded me of an ancient greek habit of referring to slaves as if they were tools with feet, and then in turn of the fact slavery was practised in north america before europeans showed up, but not at remotely the scale of european practice, nor reframed in a way to slaughter people en masse, as became entrenched colonial practice even before then. With that detail in mind, a story detailing the revolt of the tools maybe doesn’t sound quite so whimsical. Maybe, if we are sensitive and thoughtful persons, we begin to wonder how the people wielding those tools were rendered so invisible that rather than automatically imagine people with those tools in their hands, we imagine tools mysteriously moving about in the air. Which, if your “we” is similar to mine, years of cartoons both by the now ever more infamous disney corporation and warner brothers shorts with their depiction of seemingly self-operating tools bubble up in memory. Thinking back, I remember my favourite book of fairy tales including the story of elves who help a poor shoemaker by making up shoes for him at night, leaving no other sign of themselves in the morning. Those shoes couldn’t possibly make themselves! Now I wonder at how the denouement of the story always reframes the shoemaker’s wife as making some sort of mistake by making those elves clothes, after which they leave the household. This ending always struck me as appropriate, because the family was no longer impoverished, and the wife was demonstrating respect and gratitude. Perhaps those elves had someone else to help. Or, if we consider the resonances with the original practice of live-in apprentices, the apprenticeships were done. Still, the point is, this old european story is a bit more honest. If we can’t see the tools at work, it’s because the people who use them are required to work out of sight. This is a common requirement of heavily exploited workers, since if their exploitation is too visible, well, others might object and the exploiters might find it impossible to keep their sense of right and wrong from troubling them.

What really brought the subject of this rangy thoughtpiece to mind though, was a pair of coinciding readings. One, Karen Messing’s wonderful and infuriating Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn About Work From the People Who Do It, the other a brief news article recounting walmart management’s latest attack against the dignity of the people so unfortunate as needing to work there. Said employees who work on the shop floor, stocking shelves, running the cash registers and so on, are to be fitted with body cameras to help stop shoplifting by customers. Of course, this is a bullshit claim. The point of the cameras is to degrade them and demonstrates walmart management is of the view that their floor workers are stealing basic necessities sold in the walmart stores. This is the same corporation keeping walmart wages so low that in some united states jurisdictions they “help” employees apply for foodstamps. It would please these greedy corporate types more to spend more money on various forms of automation to get rid of employees altogether than to pay decent wages and treat them with dignity. The cruelty, viciousness, power tripping, and waste are the point. Nevertheless, the same greedy people will whine and do whine when “the tools revolt.” (Top)

Image of indigo plant extract applied to paper by Palladian, 2004. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons, where Palladian has released it to the public domain.

Until not so long ago, mainstream views about writing and literacy seemed pretty much set in stone (no pun intended). According to those views, there was only one true form of writing, a perfect and best means of representing words for people to read later. That form of writing was and is based on using a small number of symbols, about thirty usually, representing both vowels and consonants. Punctuation seems to be taken as basically optional, and accents or other diacritics completely sneered at as unnecessary. This writing must be for representing words, that is speech, unambiguously. No interpretation! From this we land in a first contradiction, that the letters are supposed to do all the representing, and neither punctuation nor accents count as the writing, even though they are necessary for the disambiguation part. Well, and they don’t always work. And then there is the whole issue with spelling, which is most acute for french and english. But, anyway, still, common sense not long ago, and I suspect to this day still, is that alphabetic writing is the very peak of writing system development. Once an alphabet meant for representing words unambiguously is set up, there is nothing else to develop. After all, didn’t the original phoenician abjad get superseded by the greek and then latin alphabets? And haven’t even the slavic peoples who standardized at first on the cyrillic alphabet still start from an alphabet, and aren’t they adopting the latin alphabet after all? I’m actually not trying to be facetious or dishonest putting these questions here, even though, like it or not, in a context for others to read I too have not seen such questions presented because they record accurate ideas or perceptions. And yet, not so long ago, these would not have been questions but seemingly obvious reasons the latin alphabet is supposed to be the best and the end of the developmental line for writing systems.

Silly as it may be, while I have long been inclined to reject this idea of the latin alphabet being the top of the heap, I was hard pressed to say why. Even though considering such a status for it statistically unlikely is quite weak tea, even though it is true. The greeks still write with their alphabet to this day, though they may use a variant on “greeklish” (frequent visitors to the Perseus Project will be most familiar with the variant called beta code) when typing on a keyboard without ready access to a greek keyboard layout. Whatever the opinion of others, people across the part of asia with the orthodox christian church as a part of their religious history have mostly stuck with the cyrillic alphabet. Arabic cursive script, that other famous and widespread descendant of the phoenician abjad is not going anywhere either. It is well worth reading up on the korean hangul script, which is developed on rather different principles to generate the letter shapes compared to the alphabets I have mentioned. There is an underlying pictorial element, but unlike the widely accepted argument that the abjad letters reflected a series of pictures and related letter names derived from back projecting from hebrew, hangul letters reflect the shape of the organs used to make the sound they represent. If the qualification for best writing system is representation of sound as accurately as possible, it seems to me hangul would be the proper top of the class.

Part of what can make the naive claim about alphabet superiority seem reasonable is the way writing systems loosely called “hieroglyphic” are presented. Many of us encounter ancient egyptian hieroglyphics, and they can seem quite formidable. There are many signs of several types. There are the main pictorial signs, then the signs added to disambiguate meanings, a specific separate set for numbers, and then a subset used to represent foreign names. Those last ones are the progenitors of that famous phoenician abjad. The best known hieroglyphic writing uses the most elaborated version of the script, but there was also a simplified, cursive form for more everyday use. Practically speaking, the ancient egyptians used this script for thousands of years, and it took major and violent change over a long period to finally run it out of day to day use. The coptic alphabet is its closest descendant now, and I am not sure that alphabet is used for much outside of coptic bibles these days. The most famous logographic script system made on similar principles in use today is of course, the chinese one. No matter how complicated it may seem to a person who grew up just with the latin alphabet, clearly it is effective and useful. On seeking to improve literacy rates, china did not opt to abandon this old system, even if to an outsider it might look easier. But to do that would effectively cut off the people from their entre history and literature, so paradoxically they would still be illiterate. Rather than do such a dangerously disruptive thing, it is makes more sense to learn the latin alphabet as an extra script if desired. Such a policy seems to be what the chinese have chosen, and this is true of many other countries where the population has an older and deeper written tradition in a different script. (Many, not all. One of the most famous counter examples is turkiye.) As to why a people opts for a logographic script rather than an alphabet, I have not run into any author who has ventured to make an argument about that, or at least, not an explicit one. Syllabaries can look a lot like overgrown alphabets, but they are favoured by many peoples whose languages eschew bare consonants altogether. The best known is probably japanese hiragana, but there are many others.

Looking back in now hilariously dated popular ancient history books, the authors go back repeatedly to the difference between the phoenician abjad and the greek alphabets. They are really impressed by and exercised to explain the development of letters for vowels. This is an undeniable difference, but one that seems a bit strange to make a fuss over. All human languages have vowels, but whether humans seeking to write down their language want or need to represent them varies. If their writing system is logographic, then directly representing vowels can be utterly beside the point. Representing vowels doesn’t seem that special, because in the end, the phoenicians and other peoples using an abjad didn’t need to do so because they did not have words differentiated only by a vowel sound at that time. The greeks did, so if they were going to use a script that directly represented sounds, they needed to work out a way to represent vowels. They were solving a practical problem, that’s all.

But, if you are perhaps a person of a colonizing, extractively minded sort, then your perspective would be very different. If on encountering any person or thing different from what you already knew, you had in mind first of all to categorize them, identify something useful and exploitable in them, and then extract the exploitable bit, then the alphabet is the best possible way of representing language. After all, notionally an alphabet allows language to be represented accurately and permanently apart from the original speakers, especially if set down on an appropriate surface. Once the words are extracted and recorded, the original speaker and composer is no longer necessary. This very attitude is at the core of so-called “salvage archaeology” which was invented by scholars certain Indigenous people were doomed so they had best record all the good, interesting bits before they were wiped out. So in the end perhaps what happened was that finally somebody trying to formally write up why alphabets were “best” got cold feet about maybe having to admit what made them seem best was how certain colonizing people used them. (Top)

Funny Thing About Those “Last Human” Stories (2025-11-03)

January 2011 photograph by Alan of part of the giant chess set in wollongong, australia. Quoted from flickr on 15 december 2024.

To be fair, there are undoubtedly serious speculative fiction readers who could make serious arguments with many citations that in fact stories featuring last humans on Earth are more diverse than the small selection that contribute to my impressions about them. By nature trying to really dig into the concept and fan out from it into a story would be no mean challenge, since after all we humans are gregarious and are born into communities. Our survival depends on it. Hence, such “last human” stories must always feature adults. Even the hamfistedly secularized messiah backstory for the comic book character Superman reflects this. “Kal-El” is the last survivor of planet Krypton, sent off in a space capsule as an infant, but he is in some sort of suspended animation until he gets to Earth. My thoroughly nonrandom and not extensive knowledge of “last human” stories seem at first very logical in their premises. They agree that in order for there to be one human left on Earth all alone, some terrible disaster must have happened. The broad consensus on how this can happen, following in the wake of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who looks to be the first to write such a story in english, is via pandemic. Today we can expect authors will be less inclined to make this a “natural” pandemic, and more likely to frame it as the outcome of biological warfare or even a dread accident during peaceful medical research. So far I haven’t bumped into many examples of such ideas as effects of the tail of a comet impacting the Earth’s atmosphere, or a comet or meteor hitting the Earth. There are certainly “near miss” narratives, like the tragically awful Quatermass Experiment movie’s macguffin, the alien life form that if allowed loose on Earth will annihilate all life. So I bounced among older science fiction stories, hilariously bad comic books, and now free to watch online early black and white movies with soundtracks. Fun as this was, I began to have more and more questions, because it became clear there is a seriously bimodal distribution in the “last human on Earth” stories. Yes, it’s the obvious one, but it’s also weird.

The majority of the time, the conceit of the story is, “here is the story of the last man on Earth and what happens to him.” Sometimes it turns out he is mistaken about his aloneness, which can allow any number of clever plot twists – but they are difficult to do well, and tend to stick in the memory, and therefore thwart enjoyment of re-reading or re-watching unless there is a lot more going on. In any case, the last human on Earth is a man, and he is of course doomed, one way or the other, although in Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel, she leaves the possibility open that it is just possible the last man could find some surviving humans somewhere, eventually. As we might expect, there is typically a strong element of social critique in these stories, and a conclusion that european societies are too foolish in aggregate to reasonably cope with a pandemic. Ah, which leads me to realize that all of the examples of this sort of story I have encountered are by people of “european” background. I don’t think this means nobody from other backgrounds or histories has written or filmed a story on this theme. Even the biblical tradition (such as it is) doesn’t contemplate a population of less than two people. A far smaller number of stories purport to be about the last woman on Earth, but this always turns out to mean just that. As in, there is one woman trying to fend off the male population since somehow the rest of the female population is gone. I found it both sadly revealing and unsurprising the few examples I ran into showed up in a catalogue of science-fiction B-movies, and it was quite clear these were pornographic in nature.

The obvious sadly revealing point is the pornography. The not so obvious though, is how apparently nobody who has gotten the story into some sort of published form can imagine a last woman on Earth. They assume in such a disaster, all the women would certainly die, and can’t seem to imagine women would do anything or could do anything without at least one man around. This doesn’t really make sense, however. Like it or not, the actual evidence out there is that women are incredibly tough and able to survive quite astonishing and appalling levels of physical and mental insult. This does make grim sense, because among mammals generally it is the females who have to somehow survive pregnancy, childbirth, and child raising. Therefore they have to be pretty resilient – and if the female of the mammalian species is not surviving well, then that means conditions for that mammalian species are quite terrifyingly bad. Then again, perhaps it is these very practical facts that have militated against actual “last woman on Earth” stories. I can think of several different stories, including the wonderfully biting classic by James Tiptree, Jr. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” in which the probability of a serious number of women surviving a pandemic is acknowledged and followed through in the story. In light of the rather unhinged and extreme reactions typically invoked by any suggestion or indication of female separatism in fiction or real life, I suppose the rarity of such “women survivor” stories should not be surprising. (Tiptree also wrote “The Screwfly Solution,” which makes a similarly biting point about how a possible last woman on Earth situation faced with a population of men would really work out.)

For my part, somehow the idea of trying to imagine what a human woman left alone on Earth might do does not lead to the sort of mental grooves “last man on Earth” stories are typically full of. Many authors seem certain a last man would inevitably go through a phase of deliberately breaking every rule he thinks are mere products of social pressure. I don’t know about that, since I don’t think the only thing that keeps us from behaving badly or senselessly is other people. In any case, since the character of the last human who happens to be a woman is so unwritten, I find myself thinking not of doing obnoxious things, but in one of those interesting lateral associations, of the Voyager spacecraft that are now both just about beyond any means to transmit data back to Earth, between sheer distance and their decreasing ability to generate power to transit in the first place. (Top)

Phylogenetic Trees are Cool (2025-10-27)

My first encounter with the method of mapping relationships between different species was in a class about dinosaurs. This was in the days when there was still considerable resistance to the idea of warm-blooded dinosaurs, or survival of dinosaurs in the form of birds. While I couldn’t make head nor tail of the arguments for and against warm-bloodedness at first because of needing to learn more about the sorts of fossil evidence involved in it first, the idea of smaller dinosaurs surviving to the present in much altered and evolved forms made sense. After all, if mammals made it out first by being small and gregarious, then by evolving fur and other means to survive cold and wet conditions, then it didn’t seem so ridiculous for similarly small, gregarious dinosaurs to do the same. It’s toughest to make it through large change sin climate, even temporary ones, for larger creatures. They don’t have much wiggle room to go hungry, have less ease in moving to more promising places, and may not be able to live in groups large enough to get the benefits of a herd or troop. Well, I say all this now. Back then I found dinosaurs simply too cool to agree something as ridiculous as an asteroid strike wiped them all out completely in one shot. While obviously an asteroid strike is hardly trivial, if it was possible for one disaster to somehow neatly take out just one major type of animal or other organism from the world, well that just seemed too surgical. Plus, even then we had already learned about th