Farmer Barton shooed Lee away from Marilyn, affection in his eyes.  He matched words to the action, just to pretend that he wasn't alone.

"Now, Lee, I've told you before.  You can't eat the chicken.  I'll need the eggs on this trip, and I need her alive to barter with when we get to Woden.  Go hunt yourself down some field-mice."

The fox cocked its head, appraising Barton for a moment, then obediently moved off the side of the trail, shadowing the farmer and his hen as they walked.  An hour later, when Barton stopped at the bank of the river, Lee returned, her mouth spotted with blood.  Barton had put down his heavy bag of feed and was frowning at the water.

There was no sign of the bridge.  He wondered if he'd come to the wrong place, but no, he'd followed the trail.  The recent disasters, it seemed, had torn the bridge down, and the river had erased all evidence that it had ever been.

He couldn't go back.   There was nothing left of his home.  And to leave the trail, to strike out into unknown regions in this chaotic time, was to court death.  The frontier was everywhere now.

Then he spotted it!  A tiny canoe, lodged in the bank.  Some traveler, more skilled than himself, must have carved it, after the bridge was gone but before Barton arrived.  Barton hurried over to inspect it, but turned back as he heard an ominous tearing.  Marilyn had gotten into her feed.  She'd torn open the bag, and was gobbling it down as though she thought she'd never get another chance.  Barton yelled--that feed had to last her many more days yet!--but it was Lee who chased the chicken off, nearly catching her.  Barton scooped Marilyn up before the fox could get at her, or she at the feed.

The farmer sighed, hoisted the feed-bag, tear-side up so it wouldn't spill, and started again toward the canoe, then froze.  The cold logic of the situation had arrived.  The canoe was only big enough for him and one other--the fox, the hen, or the feed.

He'd have to take three trips, with two returns, but no matter what order he did it in, he'd have to leave either the fox and the hen, or the hen and the feed, alone together at some point.  If he left the fox and the hen behind, most likely that would be the end of Marilyn before Barton could return.  If he took the fox first, the hen would be left behind with the feed.  She'd eat too much of it, maybe all of it, which would also mean her death soon enough on this long journey.  And Marilyn couldn't die.  Lee was a beloved pet, but Marilyn was his last valuable possession; without her, Barton himself was most likely lost.

There was no choice.  The cold equations of mass and volume, the harshness of the place and time, dictated everything.  Barton seized the fox, relying on her tameness, her trust in him, and dashed her head against a rock on the bank.  He buried her shallowly, with a swift economy.  Then he hoisted the feed into the canoe, and began the first of two trips across the river.  He hid his tears.  Not because there was anyone watching; just so he could pretend that he wasn't alone.

The unsolvable problem is a powerful tool in fiction.  At minimum, you get pathos from it.  You can use it to set up a wrenching choice, wherein our insight into the character is deepened by what she decides to sacrifice, or the character evolves from the trial.

Awkwardly, the reader is typically a human, a strange creature who, when faced with an unsolvable problem, often solves it.  This tends to undermine the pathos, distract from the actual plot, and--worst of all--means that the reader has beaten the author.  Authors are also typically humans, and they hate losing.  They'll often end up solving the problem themselves, which can lead to an incongruously happy ending that sabotages the emotional impact.  This too is annoying to the reader.

In realistic fiction, the rules are generally well-defined enough that a reader will accept that a problem that appears to be insoluble truly is.  But in speculative fiction, where the rules are always poorly defined compared to realistic, this awkwardness shows up more often than it doesn't.  Any time an episode of Doctor Who has an unhappy ending, online fora will instantly fill with fans indignantly explaining that this tragedy could have been avoided; and the hero, a super-smart alien, should have seen the loophole.  You can't rule out every single loophole in dialogue, because in speculative fiction anything is possible, and with enough viewers, anything will seem plausible to someone.  The only way I know of that a speculative fiction author can create a true no-win scenario is to declare that The Very Laws of the Universe Demand That This Must Be, and You Can't Fight Fate.

As a reader, what I hate is when I can see a solution that clearly didn't occur to the author, and that still involves pathos, drama, character development, et. cetera.  Of course, I need to complain about this at length whenever it happens, because it means that I've beaten the author, at least in my own mind.  Ask me some time how His Dark Materials should have ended (everyone has a different idea, but mine is the best one).  But in this space I'll restrain myself to one general pattern that needs to go away.  I've seen at least two stories, The Matrix Reloaded and the short story Endosymbiont, that use it blatantly.  Several more that do similar things, sometimes with hand-waving excuses.  It's this: a person who is also a computer program is faced with two doors.  Go through one, and continue living as before: a true person, though a digital one.  Go through the other, and become the contemporary kind of computer program: useful, but no longer truly a person.  They're being asked to heroically sacrifice their independent existence for the good of the world.  The fatal flaw with this idea is that programs can be copied.  Go through both doors.  It's still a sacrifice, because half of you experiences dying, or unlife, or enslavement, or something.  But it's better than going through just one.

There's a joke people usually tell at this point involving a man who goes to the circus, is insulted by the clown, and many years later seeks revenge. I'm not going to tell it, because I've got a much better version that is probably true.

Henry Gates Jr. is a renowned literary theorist, best known for his 1989 book The Signifying Monkey, named after a traditional African-American story in which a monkey heaps verbal abuse on a lion. The story has many, many versions* but usually ends with the monkey falling off the tree and getting pounced on. I'd be remiss if I didn't embed a nature video with a happier ending here.



Gates's book discusses this story and the various tropes of verbal abuse invented by African Americans; he analyzes, for example, why

Q: Who's buried in Grant's tomb?
A: Yo mama!

works as humor. He uses this as a theme to discuss African-American literature in general.

On July 16th, a police officer entered Gates's home under the mistaken belief that Gates was a burglar**. The two got into some sort of argument. According to the police, this included the exchange


Q: Sir, would you mind talking to me outside?
A: I'll talk to yo mama outside!

After the officer satisfied himself that Gates was who he said he was, he began to leave. Gates says he followed him outside trying to get his name and badge number. Upon stepping outside his house, Gates found himself surrounded by police officers, who quickly cuffed him and drove him to jail, waiting only as long as it took to fetch the 60-year-old man's cane.

And thus did the chaired Harvard professor encounter a tension between theory and practice.

Which takes me to my real topic, Anathem, the latest Neal Stephenson doorstopper. Anathem seems to be a response to Das Glasperlenspiel, Herman Hesse's Nobel-Prize-winning*** sci-fi novel published in English as Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game.

I read Das Glasperlenspiel during my high-school-dropout period, and even though its anti-institutional content appealed to me I hated it. It struck me as a facile condemnation of intellectualism. I was probably missing the good stuff, reading it as a kid and in the wrong language, but that first impression still stuck with me like a wound; the book said, to me, that all abstract, complex pursuits are the same (the glass bead game with different names for the pieces), and the more you pursue theory the less likely it is you will ever be of any use to the world.

Reading Anathem this spring was balmy for me and my wound. It deals with the abstract vs. concrete issue in what struck me as a much more sophisticated way. Part of this difference has to be due to the respective engineering backgrounds the two authors have: Hesse spent a mind-numbingly boring year as an apprentice in a clock factory, while Stephenson enjoyed programming so much that he switched to an easier major in college just so he could spend more time working. Stephenson witnessed first hand what was not yet common knowledge in 1943: the two most rarified pursuits in the world, theoretical physics and number theory, had turned into the most practical. A secret government project in Los Alamos was harnessing the former and would defeat the Japanese with it, while a secret government project in Bletchley Park was harnessing the latter to defeat the Germans. These same technologies then remade the peace: nuclear bombs led to nuclear power, and cryptology to e-commerce.

Both books obliquely reference the Aristotelian Trichotomy: theoria, praxis, and poiesis. Theory, putting that theory into practice, and activity divorced from theory. It's pretty clear that this is a compelling but false distinction. And not because, as Hesse seems to say, there's no such thing as praxis. When I program, I'm often building in n-dimensional space, or dividing integers into modulu-p chunks, where p is a prime number. The most influential recent advance in the field is Object Oriented Programming, a metaphor that doesn't directly say anything about what your code looks like, what it does, or how it does it. OOP is a metaphor about an abstraction. Yet programming is mundane and practical as hell. I find binary search trees beautiful, and I use them to reduce the time it takes an Excel macro to find the discrepancies between two spreadsheets. And there's no moment in this process when I switch between praxis and poiesis, or distinguish between theoria and praxis.

The books nominally share a premise. In the far future, a cloistered community, half-monastery, half-university, devotes itself to abstract pursuits, supported by the outside world. Those within have chosen to remove all distractions, to ignore almost everything about the world. Both Hesse and Stephenson understand that doing this weakens you, that any ignorance can be your downfall. But Stephenson shows that everybody, always, has tunnel vision, and that dangerous as it is, recognizing and using this is the path to strength.

Anathem is also a really fun read. It's similar in tone, structure, and pacing to Harry Potter, but develops its alternate world with the care and love you find in Tolkien. The viewpoint is at once a sympathetic everyman and an elite intellectual. Just like you.

The black Africans who survived the dreaded "Middle Passage" from the west coast of Africa to the New World did not sail alone. Violently and radically abstracted from their civilizations, these Africans nevertheless carried within them to the Western hemisphere aspects of their cultures that were meaningful, that could not be obliterated, and that they chose, by acts of will, not to forget: their music (a mnemonic device for Bantu and Kwa tonal languages), their myths, their expressive institutional structures, their systems of order, and their forms of performance. If "the Dixie Pike," as Jean Toomer put the mater in Cane, "has grown from a goat path in Africa," then the black vernacular tradition stands as its signpost, at that liminal crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference at which Africa meets Afro-American."--Order The Signifying Monkey

"Do your neighbors burn each other alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec. Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head. "Do your shamans walk around on stilts?" Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging from its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, "You might call them pastors or witch doctors." The embarrassment had turned runny. It was horrifying my scalp across a spreading frontier. "When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?" Now it was sleeting warm down my face, clogging my ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo's questions: "Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?" Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I'd said yes.--Pre-order Anathem in paperback


The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal. This fact remains one of the abiding characteristics of intellectual life in our Province. If we have nevertheless persisted in our endeavor to determine some of the facts about the life of Ludi Magister Josephus III, and at least to sketch the outlines of his character, we believe we have done so not out of any cult of personality, nor out of disobedience to the customs, but on the contrary solely in the service of truth and scholarship. It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for an antithesis. We uphold and venerate the idea that underlies the anonymity of our authorities and our intellectual life. But a glance at the early history of that life of the mind we now lead, name, a glance at the development of the Glass Bead Game, shows us irrefutably that every phase of its development, every extension, every change, every essential segment of its history, whether it be seen as progressive or conservative, bears the plain imprint of the person who introduced the change. He was not necessarily its sole or actual author, but he was the instrument of transformation and perfection.

Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological.--Order The Glass Bead Game

*The lion was on him with all four feet!--

**"Broke in and hung up pictures of his family"--

***Okay, pedant. A book can't technically win a Nobel Prize. But the book was cited specifically when Hesse was given the award.