Mania

by Lionel Shriver
Harper, 2024, 277 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

alling a person “stupid” has long been forbidden in our culture. In this novel, it has become a fanatical obsession. America has adopted the idea that “every brain is the same.” The slightest suggestion that anyone has more ability than anyone else gets people canceled, fired, bankrupted, and ostracized.

Welcome to a world where ‘cognitive neutrality’ and ‘mental parity’ (MP) fanatics have taken over. Signs professing obeisance to MP are in everyone's front yard. Using a word like ‘smartphone’, ‘deep’, ‘slow’, ‘dimmer switch’, ‘gift’, ‘bovine’, ‘meatball’, ‘dumbwaiter,’ and so on gets you labeled as a ‘cerebral supremacist.’ ‘Dummy,’ ‘retarded,’ ‘stupid,’ and ‘IQ’ are now hate speech. It becomes illegal to discriminate on the basis of merit or ability of any kind. So the inevitable occurs: Reruns of Get Smart are banned. Surgeons know nothing about medicine and mangle their patients. Companies are forced to hire incompetents who injure their co-workers. Students refuse to learn. And our political leaders, selected from the dumbest among us, run the country into the ground. It is a brilliant satire of today's cancel culture.

The main character, a college teacher named Pearson Converse, an apostate Jehovah's Witness, rebels against this.

All I could think about while reading this was: If you in the future want to know what it was really like in the 2020s, read this book. I was once told we would have to bring toys for pharmacy graduate students to keep them interested in the subject. Whenever I gave a talk there was always a row of students in the front row glaring at me with cold hatred in their eyes, as if daring me to say something incorrect, just as Shriver depicts Pearson Converse's students in the book.

One day, fed up with all the deceit and insanity, she snaps and assigns Dostoevsky's novel with the five-letter I-word title to her International Literature students, and almost gets fired. Her seven-year-old daughter rats her out to the Mental Parity Champions (MPC) for saying the S-word at home, and she almost loses custody of her three children. After her husband is injured by an incompetent co-worker, then almost killed by incompetent doctors, she can't stand it anymore. She says the R-word in front of her class of dimwits and is immediately fired and publicly denounced and her life is ruined.

The novel is supposed to be satire, but it reads more like prophecy. And indeed, it's telling that Barnes & Noble didn't print their customary “Great pick, by the way!” when I ordered it. They should be ashamed. This book is Orwell's 1984 for our time.

sep 27 2024

The Three-Body Trilogy
The Three-Body Problem (434 pages)
The Dark Forest (550 pages)
Death's End (721 pages)

by Cixin Liu
Head of Zeus, 2006 / 2016, Transl. by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen
reviewed by T. Nelson

arl Sagan and his academic followers often said that any advanced civilization is automatically benevolent. The universe is friendly and someday we'll all be sailing among the stars, skipping along hand-in-tentacle, and swaying happily with our green friends.

This brilliant but slightly depressing book uses science fiction to tell us this is dangerous wishful thinking. Mankind is ignorant about the universe, like an ant crawling on a tombstone without recognizing what it is. The universe is absolutely ruthless and it could well be filled with intelligent beings who routinely destroy any planet with intelligent life. The first things we find could well be the tombstones of great murdered civilizations. Indeed, everything we can see might be a tombstone, but just like the ant we're too small to recognize it.

The Story

If you don't have time to read all three books, read the second one. You need all three to understand what's actually happening and why.

The Three-Body Problem

Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics student, witnesses her father's murder by the Red Guards and joins a secret radioastronomy lab known as Red Coast Base. She discovers its purpose is to communicate with beings from outer space. No doubt she's thinking: A secret Chinese military lab doing dangerous research: what could go wrong?

One day she picks up a reply signal from outer space that warns Earth, saying “Do not answer! Your world will be conquered!” Heavily influenced by her past and by what she perceives as environmental destruction as depicted in Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring, she hates humanity, so she answers “Come here! I will help you conquer this world!”

The aliens, called Trisolarans, implement Project Sophon, which is a way of turning an isolated proton into a super­intel­ligent computer called a Sophon. This turns out to be a bit tricky, but they eventually succeed and use the smart protons to block science research on Earth.

Ye looks at the sunset and says, “Sunset for humanity.”

The Dark Forest

Four guys are given the task of devising a defense. Three fail and the one survivor, Luo Ji, remembers this clue left by Ye Wenjie:

Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe. . . . Survival is the primary need of civilization. Civilization continually grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. . . . To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two concepts, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and technological explosion. I'm afraid there won't be that opportunity.

Luo Ji realizes that this means any planet with a techno­logic­al civilization is marked for annihilation as soon as its location is found. This is called the “Dark Forest” theory. To test it, he picks a star at random and sends out a map of its location. It is immediately annihilated.

Eventually, Earth accepts his strategy of mutually assured destruction. The Trisolarans calculate that this guy who they tried to assassinate countless times is serious, so they back off.

Death's End

The stalemate holds for a while, but time and again the humans revert to wishful thinking and disaster occurs.

This third volume is a Romeo and Juliet story. The boy decides not to kill himself and has his brain frozen and sent out into space to test the harebrained idea of using H-bombs as a propulsion system. The girl is elected Swordholder, named after the sword of Damocles, which means she now holds the key to the mutually assured destruction. Knowing she is too sentimental, the aliens immediately attack. When asked why, the aliens answer: “Because the universe is not a fairy tale.”

The boy's brain gets thawed out. He calls the girl up and gives her clues about how Earth could still survive, but nobody can figure out what they mean. It turns out that annihilation of intelligent life is nothing compared to the almost unimaginable horrors in the universe that threaten the existence of the universe itself. The two star-crossed lovers never meet because the girl gets stuck in a time warp.

Comments

The author's idea is that sending messages into space is suicidally dangerous because it reveals the location of a planet that contains life. Whoever receives it is faced with the choice of acting benevolently or maliciously. If they act benevolently, the sender might be a malicious species that will eventually try to destroy them. Therefore, it's in their interest to destroy the other civilization first.

This might sound unlikely: if you destroy another civilization, some even more powerful third civilization, call them the space sheriff, would become aware of your existence. They would know for a fact that you are malicious and would have no choice but to destroy you to protect other innocent species. That could even cause a chain reaction, as there is only one compelling reason to destroy another civilization: the knowledge that it destroyed some other civilization. And there are a dozen reasons not to; maybe some of them even apply to humanity.

Logic is one. If you're invincible enough to destroy the new guy without fear of retribution from a bigger guy, you have no reason to fear the new guy and therefore no reason to annihilate them. If you're not invincible enough, then your logical course is to let the bigger guy do the dirty work. But the bigger guy has even less reason to worry about the new guy. So logically nobody gets wiped out.

And then there's the possibility of civilizations forming an alliance against you. That alliance might transmit a decoy signal to flush out any potentially malicious civilizations. If so, your attempt to destroy the civilization would reveal your existence. Sentient life might be so evil the universe will be lucky to make it to the next Big Bang, as the author says, but it might not be a Wild West either.

On the other hand, there could be species so advanced that the disasters in this story are of no more significance to them than one bug eating another. The author says we've seen in Earth history how big powers on Earth attack smaller ones to remove the threat to their hegemony, but also often refrain from total annihilation. Life in space would have no such constraints. And we better face it. Until we know the truth, the aliens' point, which has been made by many others, is a good one: Hide yourself well. The universe is not a fairy tale.

oct 15 2024. revised oct 19 2024

As I mentioned, this book is a little depressing. To cheer you up, here's a joke.

What would a dalek say at a restaurant?
“Eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, and eggs, Bacon, bacon, bacon, hash browns, . . . seven expressos, um, and one decaf. ”