The never-ending reading list: May ’24 edition

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‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’

The beginning of next month comes around. You forget to write down the books. The middle of the month comes around. ‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’

This carries on till you’re dead or you give up and start in the middle of the month.

I have a system for reading books, which is that I read poetry, non-fiction, then fiction, in that order. But to make sure that I read a good variety of things, I alternate between reading classic books (my definition of classic is, ‘Is the author dead?’ so that, e.g., Philip Roth became ‘classic’, by my morbid definition, sometime after I started this system) and contemporary (by not-dead authors) books. And, also, I read at least one poem every day, and in between each book, I read a short story and an essay from one of my ongoing books of short stories and essays. So, for example, I just read Quoof by Paul Muldoon (poetry, not classic), then I read an essay from The Penguin book of Feminist Writing and a short story from an odd textbook of short stories I picked up secondhand somewhere, and now I’m reading The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (non-fiction, not classic).

I allow myself some flexibility, so that I don’t get bored. For example, this month I also read everything by Neil Gaiman I’ve not read yet as my ‘fiction, not classic’ read for this cycle. I’ve also been reading The Mahabharata one book at a time, because it’s very long and would have taken several months of continuous reading to get through in one go.

Quoof, by Paul Muldoon

I loved Paul Muldoon when I was an undergraduate, but boy is he hard to get through now I have less time and fewer poetry professors to help explain things to me. I’ve talked before about the skill versus blood dichotomy, and I feel like in this collection Muldoon is unfortunately falling more on the side of having too much technique and not enough feel.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby buys a lot of books and reads some of them, while feeling ambivalent about the whole project. It’s less a reflection on books and more a reflection on how they make him feel, with a lot of charming honesty along the lines of ‘I sort of forgot what this book was like because I read it on a plane and all I really remember now is the plane,’ which I’m sure we’ve all felt at one point or another. It does, however, make it a bit difficult to take his recommendations all that seriously. Hornby liked a book because he read it while in a good mood, but what if I read it when I’m in a bad mood?

But this is Hornby’s point: there’s no particular point in reading either the classics or the current critical darlings unless you’re having a good time. I agree with him, up to a point. The problem, though, is that he only applies this argument within the province of reading. Hornby clearly thinks that you should read, that it’s bad that many people don’t, that the number that don’t is growing, that the number of young people, in particular, that don’t is growing faster still. But, if people don’t enjoy it, why should they do it? This is exactly the same argument that Hornby applies to ‘reading the classics’, but he never examines how it applies to just plain ‘reading’, which he’s very much in favour of.

On a timely note, Hornby complains in an aside that there isn’t an NHS anymore because the current government and in particular the current prime minister has sold it off. Sound familiar? I imagine it does, as a lot of people agree with that assessment. Except, the government he’s thinking of is Labour, the PM he’s thinking of is Blair, and the year he’s writing in is 2004. So, how can it be that the NHS doesn’t exist anymore because the Tories/Rishi Sunak sold it off, when it was already sold off twenty years ago by Labour/Tony Blair?

This is not a political point. This is a parable about hyperbole.

31 Songs, by Nick Hornby

This was quite fun, in roughly the same way as Spree, and also quite annoying, in roughly the same way as spree. It is very subjective, as good criticism should be, but it doesn’t do enough objectivity, which good criticism must do.

M is for Magic, Fragile Things, The Sandman (vol. 1) and Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman

A lot of short stories and one graphic novel, by Britian’s foremost SFF writer, Neil Gaiman. We all love Neil, and everything you love about him is on display in the more-or-less random selection of his books I read this month. He’s always smart, he’s never obvious. I had a particularly fun moment reading M is for Magic, because it contains ‘Troll Bridge’, a short story I read when I was thirteen which I didn’t realise was by Gaiman at the time. But now I know! It’s very good.

Fair warning, there’s some overlap between these collections, because M is for Magic was a round-up of Gaiman’s work for younger readers (YA, rather than children’s), so you’ll come across the same stories more than once if you buy all three collections. Fans of American Gods should definitely pick up Fragile Things and Trigger Warning (in that order) because they each contain the further adventures of Shadow, the protagonist of Gods.

The Sandman is really great, but you know that already.

The Mahabharata, Books 16 and 17

I’ve been reading The Mahabharata, possibly the longest poem ever written, in translation (of course), one book at a time, for a year and a half. The main plot is now over. At the equivalent stage in The Odyssey, we’re now at the point where Odysseus goes up the hill to find his old dad, Laertes. Now, Yudhishtira and the rest of the Pandavas, having won back their kingdom and done due repentance for all the killing that entailed, are climbing the Himalayas, with their wife Draupadi and a dog, for some reason. The others all fall back in the course of the climb, due to not having enough yoga power, leaving Yudhisthira to forge on alone like George Mallory, to the peak.

‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism‘, by Oscar Wilde

I’ve been meaning to read this one for years. Probably the best of Wilde’s insight is this one:

If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.

Now, if a man writing in 1891 could work this out, one has to wonder how it happened anyway and how people could deny it was turning out so badly, for so long.

Wilde case is that individualism can only truly emerge under socialism, that the whole point of the activity is the flourishing of humanity. This is an insight I feel a lot of people on the left, especially on the environmentalist side of the movement, are badly lacking. If socialism is sold as a matter of belt-tightening, why would anyone buy it? The point has to be more freedom, more happiness, greater luxury for all

For people arguing for ‘capitalist’ individualism, they have to explain the clear attitude of capitalism that all things, including people, are only valuable insofar as they contribute to GDP. You cannot believe in individualism and immigration controls, or individualism and benefit sanctions. It is not coherent.

Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto (trans. Jesse Kirkwood)

This is a book about a murder which is solved by careful examination of train timetables, a summary which is both true and a little unfair. The plot is laid out almost systematically, with nothing wasted. There’s even a note at the end claiming that it was all based on real timetables for the year 1957, so presumably Matsumoto really sat down and checked them all thoroughly, just as his characters do. As a result of this reliance on the cold hard facts, it might is a little cold and hard at times, for all the the heroic detectives’ suspicions are originally aroused by an understanding of human nature. It also does something I really dislike in detective novels, and has the antagonist confess in a suicide note. I know Agatha Christie did it, too, but I still think it’s cheating.

Again Behold the Stars, by Alex Josephy

Rejoice, formalism fans: a book of Pertrarchan (usually) sonnets (mostly)!

I went to an open mic night, so naturally I had to buy some poetry, to make it worth the price of the train ticket for the poet. Josephy’s colleciton is inspired by historical records of a siege in Italy during the Renaissance. Particularly good is ‘Great Grandmother’, where the siege of the city becomes a metaphor for the advance of old age: ‘aches / Bombard her, cares dig trenches, / Starve and ravine her cheeks.’

In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for our Century, trans. Wong May

This has been my daily poem read for the past two hundred days or so. It comes with a book-length afterword by the translator, so I treated that as my contemporary non-fiction read for this cycle. Much more fun than your usual academic reflections on poetry, May’s afterword imagines the whole work laid out as a museum and is helped along by a cartoon rhino who makes helpful comments from the margins, like ‘Don’t bonzai me!’ and, more than once, ‘zzzzzz’.

May’s translations seem good, insofar as I can comment at all (not very much). I especially enjoyed the poems by Bai Juyi and ‘The Garden of Golden Valley’ by Du Mu which ends:

                 Blossoms fall,

        A prodigious drift

Like a girl leaping
Off the porch

Archangel and The Ghost, by Robert Harris

There’s a particular problem you get when you read books by the same author in quick succession. This also happened with Hornby¹ this month. It’s this: you start to notice all their quirks and it gets annoying, probably more annoying than it would be if you hadn’t read them so close together.

Consider the following description:

Someone whose job is more or less ‘writer’ (a journalist, an academic, a ghost writer) stumbles upon a document of some kind that will, if its contents are verified and become known to the world, profoundly change the world. This someone is a British man, roughly in his thirties, certainly no younger than 25 and no older than 45, and currently single, although he’s had some quite stormy long-term relationships with women, who almost all find him attractive, and vice-versa, in the recent past. He just can’t quite settle, you see. He is able to support himself in his career as more-or-less-a-writer despite being fairly dissolute, usually with a liking for whisky (it must be single malt Scotch), in particular. He knows lots of American men and finds them all very irritating.

The problem with the writing of Robert Harris – which I’m not saying I don’t enjoy! – is that description applies not only to both the books I read this month but also to Fatherland and even, with perhaps some small modifications this time, to his non-fiction work, The Hitler Diaries.

So, do read Robert Harris. It’s great, smart pop, but do be aware there’s a formula.

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My back of the envelope maths says I read about a book a day in the second half of May, which is pretty good going. Will I beat that in June? No, because I’m starting with The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg² Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, which will probably take me the whole damn month, by the end of which I might know what ‘phenomenology’ means. Why am I reading Hegel? To understand the most famous Young Hegelian a little better, of course. Just in case you thought my criticism of the USSR was a dumb kneejerk thing. It’s actually a really very intellectual kneejerk thing.

And another thing

I also watched loads of Star Trek, both old and new. I think it was about time Discovery came to an end, to be honest, though I’ll miss Saru. I hope they do more 31st century Trek, and that Saru’s in it.

I also have another poem shortly coming out with Stanza Cannon, who previously published my poem ‘the trees – the forest – the trees – the forest’, so that’s something to look forward to.

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Review: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

A nearly great book reduced to a merely good one by a literal-minded editor

I really liked this book, is the first thing to say. It’s original and genuinely horrifying. The premise is, roughly, that an immortal demigod known only as ‘Father’ took a group of American children and trained them to be his successors as rulers of the Universe. Their training took place in the Library of the title, an interdimensional rift containing the sum total of inhuman knowledge. Each of the children was firmly restricted to studying only one area – languages, or medicine, or combat. As you will already have worked out, much of the drama derives from the fact that the children, of course, didn’t stay in their own lanes. The drama progresses with the various children – now adults – battling to succeed Father, while caught in the crossfire are numerous humans from our world, gradually increasing to include virtually everyone.

So, what goes wrong with the book? Not enough to knock it down from a great read. The problem is with the final third or quarter of the book. The plot is basically over. But now we get what amounts to a massive, lengthy info dump, the kind of thing that would’ve been in the manual of a ’90s videogame. The big problem with this info dump, for me, is that it was all exactly what I was expecting.

I don’t know exactly what happened but I will happily bet you any money I make this week that Hawkins wrote the book without that final section. Along came an editor who demanded that the backstory be filled out, lest the reader be permitted to use their imagination. And so, we have a fantastic work of imagination that declines to let you use your own.

A better editor might have allowed this exposition to be more evenly distributed throughout the book, so that we don’t get so much at the end. There’s clearly some attempt to do just this, but it’s not been done enough to fix the overlong final section.

There’s always a balance to be struck between telling the reader things and letting them work it out for themselves, granted. But the weight should always be with the latter. Reading is a work of imagination. Filling in the gaps left by the author – and there are always gaps – is the essence of the activity. The world’s zealous editors would do well to remember that.

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Somehow, the Kelvin timeline returned

Paramount, the world’s most boring media company, probably, are producing yet another Star Trek Prequel. No, not a new series of Discovery, which was a prequel to the original series, nor of Strange New Worlds¹, which is also a prequel to TOS and, also, a sequel to Discovery. It’s not even another entry in the franchise-killing TV show, Enterprise (latterly rebranded Star Trek: Enterprise, to trick you into watching it). And, nope, despite being helmed by noted hack writer JJ Abrams (who has also, somehow, returned), it also is not actually a fourth ‘Kelvin’ film, which were themselves a prequel/reboot starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as characters, confusingly called Kirk and Spock, who in no way resembled the Kirk and Spock you know and ship.

No, instead, the film is a prequel to the Kelvin films. That’s right, having done a prequel-sequel with SNW, Star Trek is now creating a spacetime singularity with the world’s first prequel to a reboot (requel? preboot?). Now, you might have noticed that it makes no sense to have a Kelvin-prequel because that timeline only split off at the beginning of Star Trek (2009) in an incident involving actual-Spock and the USS Kelvin, so you cannot possibly have a ‘Kelvin film’ set before this happened, to which objection JJ Abrams says: ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the cash register.’

The rumour mill has it that it will explore the origins of Starfleet, a truly insane idea for two reasons: one, Enterprise, a previous prequel or, if you will², pre-prequel, also explored the origins of Starfleet and, not unrelatedly, was bad. Two, Starfleet is the military. Would you watch an origin story about the real-life military? ‘We realised we needed some men with guns and that we should train them a bit. Thus, the military was origined.’ No. This is not a plot. It’s barely an idea. It’s a barely-idea that’s already been done.

If, like me, you were a child in the ’90s, the word ‘prequel’ will always be first associated with The Phantom Menace³, which you might think would be enough to put Hollywood off. Somehow, no. In the world of Star Wars (the starwarsiverse? IDK), since the prequel trilogy, there have been two more film prequels (one of which was actually good so that, naturally, we were all rewarded with a TV show which was a prequel to that prequel). There have been too many Star Wars TV shows to count, never mind watch, but I’m fairly sure most of them were somewhat-prequels, given that they didn’t take place after the latest film. The Potterverse decided we needed a five-film prequel series to an imaginary textbook, so we all had to sit through The Crimes of Johnny Depp JK Rowling Grindelwald until even Warner Bros realised we’d had enough and cancelled the rest of it. Elsewhere in the world of SFF telly, we’ve also had pointless prequels to Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings forced upon us. Even The Hobbit trilogy treated the source material not as a text in its own right but as a prequel to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Scenes and character were added or altered to ‘set up’ The Fellowship of the Ring, something that was manifestly unnecessary because we’d already seen it without the setup and it was already fucking great.

There is now an entire industry making films and shows that exist to explain everything you’ve ever seen on screen in another film. The last episode of Enterprise even included an origin story for the opening ‘Space: the final frontier…’ spiel, a thing which hadn’t appeared in that TV series but also didn’t even actually exist in-universe until that moment, so I fully expect this film to introduce us to the composer of Star Trek‘s opening fanfare. They’ll say it was written as a tribute to the founder of Starfleet or some nonsense, and the circle will be complete. Until the next(/previous) spacetime singularity, anyway.

1. One episode of which gave us an origin story – a prequel, one might say – for Khan Noonien Singh, who has already appeared in a sequel and a prequel. Hey, at least they actually made him Indian, this time. Third time lucky, eh? ↩︎
2. But you shouldn’t. ↩︎
3. Can I interest you in a prequel to this article? It involves thirteen year-old me going to see Attack of the Clones and discovering it was possible to be bored while watching Star Wars. ↩︎

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Lord of the Thrones; or, What if Martin Wrote Tolkien?

George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is, I think, a classic. I don’t think anyone who writes SFF for the next several decades is going to be able to do so without going through him, in some way. I want to get that statement out of the way now, because I’m going to spend the rest of the post explaining why, even though it’s very important, it’s basically a failure as a series. What’s most important about it, though, is that its failings are the very thing that make it improtant.

As someone who got bored of the TV adaptation a long time ago, I experienced a certain amount of schadenfreude when everyone hated the last season and then found House of the Dragon to be mid at best. But I didn’t get bored of it because it was, as one actor memorably put it, ‘just tits and dragons‘. It wasn’t even because of all the sexual violence, nor was it Aiden Gillen’s insane, possibly Irish, accent.

No, instead, it was something more profound to the series. The key problem was George RR Martin’s doomed attempt to break traditional narrative structures. This attempt failed, but it failed in a fascinating way. Narrative structures look the way they do for a good reason. Martin’s noble attempt to do something new with fantasy gave us a series of books which is not suspenseful, but badly plotted. It’s not a deep work that requires thought and interpretation, it’s simply that important information is hidden or just left out. It’s not an example of deep, detailed world-building and character development; it’s just that a great deal of irrelevant information is included and often expounded at great length. There are too many characters and we hear too much about them. This is why people were disappointed in the final season of the show and why it’s taking Martin so long to finish The Winds of Winter: it’s been badly written for so long that it’s probably unfixable.

But it was a big hit! Yes, it was well-cast and had an unusually big budget for a TV show, so that it didn’t look like anything else on TV. People tuned into a big, dramatic show with Sean Bean in it, and were quickly introduced to a world of political intrigue and ice zombies. What’s not to like? Then, there were some big plot twists: again, gripping stuff. The problem is that the twists broke the show. There was, essentially, a pretence that this wasn’t your normal fantasy fiction. We’re told that magic has gone out of the world but it plainly hasn’t. We’re told that just because you seem like destiny’s appointed hero doesn’t mean you’ll survive but then Daenaerys reveals that she can walk through fire and Jon Snow, made up as the crucified Christ, literally comes back from the dead. So, it turns out, it is your standard fantasy fiction. There’s magic. The hero lives. We just came to the same conclusions we always do by a circuitous route, much like the heroes of the show.

To further illustrate the narrative problems, let’s imagine that Lord of the Rings, the ur-fantasy novel, was structured like ASOIAF.

The book begins as we remember. Bilbo has his party, attended by Frodo and lots of characters who are introduced and discussed at some length, but never referred to again. Bilbo does his speech and vanishes, Gandalf explains the plot to Frodo, then Frodo waits years before setting off on his journey (note that this particular bit of strange and mostly unnecessary plot detail is in the original but was sensibly adapted out in Peter Jackson’s film version).

So far so good. But! Imagine if, additionally, from very nearly the start, we follow not just Frodo and friends, but everyone who eventually becomes a member of the Fellowship. We spend hundreds of pages with Boromir as he treks to Rivendell, alone. Ditto with Legolas and (separately) Gimli, who at least bring some buddies to talk to as they trudge along to they know not what, yet. There’s some talk of an evil ring, but what with spending so long with Gimli and co., it seems quite possible that the book is not about a magic evil ring at all, but in fact about mining rights or something. Because we spend so long with Boromir, we most likely hear about his relationship with his father and brother at this point. These random threads of character building will then be ignored for thousands of pages until we actually meet the rest of Boromir’s family, by which point we’ve forgotten who they are.

When Frodo eventually does start off on his quest, he and the Hobbits do all the already-excessive stuff with Tom Bombadil, then they get to Bree, but only after several hundred additional pages featuring Aragorn just killing time at the Prancing Pony, getting to know the horrible locals. Once the Hobbits get away from the barrow wight, they and Aragorn run around for a bit and Frodo gets stabbed by a Ringwraith. All of this is interspersed with more stuff about Legolas, Gimli and Boromir, slowly arriving at Rivendell and hanging out with elves, while also listening to even more songs than you remember.

We also, at this stage, read the whole narrative with Gandalf being held prisoner by Saruman, so that we know exactly why he didn’t show up in Bree as scheduled. We probably also follow Bilbo to Rivendell, where he sits around and gets old, much like us, the readers.

At last, the Hobbits, with Aragorn, also get to Rivendell. But! Instead of Frodo just waking up there and Gandalf telling him what’s been going on, everyone waits a week for Frodo to wake up and we read about the whole week. There are more songs.

After Rivendell, several secondary characters who we’ve spent hundred of pages with (i.e., the various elves and dwarves who accompanied Legolas and Gimli to Rivendell) vanish forever. Before we actually go on the quest, the story is interrupted by Frodo spending a great deal of time telling a heavyhanded story about his childhood which reveals something we already know about his character, because, as we know, real people are both willing and able to explain all of their character traits with trite just-so stories about their childhood.

At this point, we are one thousand pages into the novel. Inexplicably, a new major character is introduced: Galadriel, yet another elf queen, not obviously related to any of the other elves at this stage, is hanging out in her cool tree house. We spend 200 pages reading her thoughts about her cool tree house.

The Fellowship, though, are finally together and questing. This part of the book proceeds more or less as you remember, albeit interspersed with Galadriel looking in her cool mirror: the gang’s altogether! Quests are very stressful and feature setbacks! There’s a big battle! Gandalf dies!

After this, the eight remaining members of the Fellowship arrive in Lothlorien. Finally, the audience sort of understands why we spent two hundred pages with Galadriel: she’s very important! Okay, she’s gone now, forget about her.

Again, the narrative proceeds approximately as before: they get to the Falls, where Boromir falls, redeems himself, then falls again, only this time in a dead way. Thus ends the Fellowship of the Ring, both the book and the gang. You are 3,000 pages into this series of books.

The Two Towers begins! We start off following a previously unknown character, Theodred, who is the son of a king you’ve never heard of with the frustratingly similar name of Theoden. Also, the king is mad. After spending three hundred pages riding around with his cousin, Eomer, in a place you might vaguely recall if you spent a long time looking at the map glued to the inside cover, Theodred dies without at any point interacting with or even hearing about any of the main characters. His lingering death is described in lingering detail for fifty pages. He says ‘AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH [sic]’ several times.

Finally, you return to some of what’s left of the Fellowship: Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas are in Rohan, the kingdom of Theodred’s dad! Perhaps they’re going to meet Theodred and that’s why we spent so long with him? No, don’t be silly, he’s dead. We instead also spend a hundred pages with Eowyn, who is obliquely implied to be the sister of Eomer, Theodred’s buddy who you’ve probably forgotten about. The book does not come with a family tree attached, so you cannot remember any of this or understand why she’s nursing the old king. An old man turns up, shouts at Theoden for a bit, then steals a horse. We don’t see this bit, we just hear Eowyn half overhearing some of a description of it given by a washerwoman, with a lisp, which ith typed out in the tekth- the tektht- the thing you’re reading, to a blacksmith, who is hard of hearing.

We spend five hundred pages with Treebeard, who is just so boring, wandering around a forest and complaining.

We finally get to see Frodo and Sam, who are lost in a swamp with Gollum. It takes an incredible amount of time to cross the swamp, because George RR Martin is the kind of person who complains that characters in TV shows never have to look for parking. He would prefer if every sitcom featured long sequences of people going, ‘Oh, there’s a — oh, wait. No, I thought there was a space, but actually there’s a Mini in it. Oh! There? No, that’s a disabled spot. Ah!’ It took a really long time to travel in pre-modern times, and George RRR Martin is damned if it shouldn’t also take a really long time to read about.

Meanwhile, Merry and Pippin do their thing and meet Treebeard. We’ve already spent five hundred pages being bored by Treebeard, so it’s incredibly frustrating to spend another five hundred pages watching Merry and Pippin slowly get to know him, too, only to also discover that he’s boring, but, tough: that is exactly what you are going to have to read in this, The Lord of the Rings, as told by George RRRR Martin.

Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli look for Merry and Pippin in the same boring forest. Instead of taking about three pages, like in Tolkien’s LOTR, this takes five hundred pages. They eventually meet Gandalf, who did not die! A-and, remember the old man, who stole a horse, who we overheard about? It was actually Gan- sorry, you’re saying you don’t remember an annoying and apparently irrelevant conversation overheard by a secondary character two thousand pages ago? Oh, that’s… frustrating. Well, the old man was Gandalf. Honestly can’t believe you missed that whole setup. Never mind, it was in no way an interesting way of explaining where Gandalf got his cool horse from, and it’s also the only explanation you’re ever going to get, so it really is a damn shame you don’t remember it.

Anyway, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf go to Theoden’s place and save him from his grimy adviser. They head, together, to Helm’s Deep. A big battle looms.

But instead of reading about the big battle, we now, for some reason, meet Faramir, Boromir’s brother, who is hanging out near Mordor with various guys. He comes tantalisingly close to meeting Frodo and Sam. Good god, are some major characters going to meet? Yes, yes they are. In another 1,000 pages. While we are waiting for this to happen, there are some quite good bits of character development involving Frodo and Gollum, but they’re all a long, long way apart.

We also spend hundreds of pages slowly following Erkenbrand, and also slowly following Gandalf running after him on Shadowfax, who is a lot slower than you remember. Gandalf eventually catches up with Erkenbrand and the lads, and together they slowly ride across Rohan for two hundred pages. They arrive at Helm’s Deep just in time, but this isn’t surprising at all because you just spent hundreds of pages reading about them riding their horses towards Helm’s Deep. Slowly.

After ten thousand pages, The Two Towers draws painfully to a close.

The Return of the King begins in the time-honoured fashion: we spend 500 hundred horrible pages reading about a character we’ve never heard of in a place we’ve never been to. The place is Gondor. The guy is the guard who wasn’t in the film. You remember Beregond, right? He saves Faramir’s life but Aragorn exiles him anyway, but, you know, justly. That hasn’t happened yet and won’t for another ten thousand pages. You still have to read about Beregond for a long, long time, in case he mentions something that becomes important later, like the old man and the horse, remember? No? Oh. Anyway, he never does mention anything important.

We get back to the main characters. Sort of. For some reason, we’re mainly reading about it from the point of view of Gamling, Theoden’s batman, so the long-put-off reunion between Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf, doesn’t really feel very emotional and is basically a bit of an anticlimax. We also spend two hundred pages reading about how Wormtongue feels about Saruman, a character we know is a bad guy who no one likes. Wormtongue also does not like him.

Frodo, who, you may remember, is theoretically the main character, is still heading towards Mordor. A new character, an orc, is introduced. He’s a lookout at Minas Morgul. He has seen something interesting, and is on his way to tell the Witch King, who briefly played a major role under a different name, as the leader of the Ringwraiths, twenty thousand pages ago. The fact that these two characters are the same character will never be made explicit. Who the fuck is the Witch King? you wonder, Shouldn’t it be King Witch? as the orc very slowly walks towards the throne room or whatever, to tell the King about the thing he’s just seen, which you can just about work out, with the help of an old thread on Reddit full of people asking the same question, is probably Frodo and Sam and Gollum. This chapter ends as the orc is about to tell the Witch King about the thing he’s seen, whatever that is.

Frodo and Sam fight Shelob. Sam gets to be a badass, at last, and it’s quite cool. Frodo gets stung or bitten, though, and taken to a tower. Sam goes off to rescue him.

Instead of it being surprising when we find out Gollum is still alive towards the end at Mount Doom, we also now see Gollum following Sam and Frodo. He hisses the whole time. It’sssss incredibly annoying to read. Nothing actually happens in these chapters, he just sees Frodo and Sam doing what we’ve already seen them do, but from a dissssstance.

Meanwhile, we follow the various characters to Gondor. All of them. Individually. As at Helm’s Deep, it’s not interesting and fun when the riders of Rohan show up, because we’ve been explicitly told they’re going to, in great detail. Denethor, who we’ve also followed in great detail for a very long time, but who I haven’t mentioned because absolutely none of it was relevant to the plot, dies.

We also occasionally spend a lot of time with people we’d previously forgotten about or never heard of: Legolas’ dad, Galadriel again, maybe Arwen. These characters very slowly expound all the information currently included in the appendices and the Silmarillion. At some point, someone in passing mentions an orc who suddenly died of a congenital heart defect. This is meant to be the orc that was about to tell the Witch King something, but it’s never at all clear that this is the case, nor do we ever find out for sure that the thing he saw was Frodo and Sam and Gollum, but it probably was, because that was the consensus of the guys in that six year-old Reddit-thread. Right?

Frodo and Sam arrive at Mount Doom. Frodo fucks up at this point, and gets his finger bit off by Gollum, who falls into the volcano. The heroes have won. The end. Oh Christ, there are still four thousand pages to go. What now? What the fuck now?

Inexplicably, a new character, Sharky, is introduced. He apparently lives in the Shire and is attempting to introduce early modern farming techniques into Hobbiton. Elsewhere, Aragorn is crowned king and dispenses merciful justice. The end. The Hobbits head back to the Shire. This takes just so fucking long, you’re not going to believe it. It’s interspersed with all the other characters also slowly going back home. The end?

At last, the Hobbits get back to the Shire and are upset to learn about the early modern farming techniques that have been introduced into Hobbiton. They kill Sharky, more or less, who it turns out is… Saruman! Anyway, he’s dead, Grima’s dead, the novel’s over, surely? The end.

Bilbo heads to the Grey Havens. The… end. He gets on a boat. (The End?) This takes two hundred pages to happen. Frodo also gets on the boat and everyone cries, including the reader, but with frustration. End? Sam goes back home with Merry and Pippin which also takes one hundred pages. Nothing at all happens because the plot is over, but plebeian ideas like ‘Something should happen in books’ are of no concern to God King GRRRRR Martin. The end.

Sam gets back home. (The…?) He opens the door. He goes inside. He takes his coat off. He sits down. (…End?) He remembers he did not close the door. He goes to close the door. He goes to sit down again. He remembers he did not close the garden gate. He gets up again. He opens the door. He closes the gate. He opens the door. He steps through. He closes the door. Well, he says, I’m back, he says.

THE.

END.

(Except for all the pointless spin-offs!)

What I’ve described here basically is the plot of LotR: I didn’t add much at all, just the bit about the washerwoman, blacksmith and orc later on, to illustrate one of Martin’s annoying tics: hiding important information in irrelevant conversations. ‘Oh-ho, the monk with a limp is actually the Hound!’ Is he? Great. So? If he is, just tell us. Why does it have to be a fucking puzzle?

In LoTR, we know that Boromir went from Gondor to Rivendell, because he tells us in a few words. Martin cannot do this: we have to follow characters journeying for thousands of miles. We know Theodred and Eomer were friends and rode around fighting orcs, and that Theodred died, without having to see any of that at all actually on the page. By contrast, Martin really can’t tell us anything at all without showing it: he’s taken the dreaded ‘show, don’t tell’, maxim to a thoroughly illogical conclusion.

Martin’s supposed justification for his many Theodreds – apparently major characters who abruptly die without doing anything plotworthy – does not stack up. The futility of war, the fact that lots of people die horrible, pointless deaths, is present in LotR, too, and in countless other stories, going as far back as The Iliad and probably beyond. Theoden’s mourning of his son, in LOTR, is thus actually moving, precisely because it doesn’t happen over and over again in the novel. Equally, the ‘no one is safe’ message is present in LotR, too: Gandalf dies (temporarily, but then so does Jon Snow) and so do Boromir, Theodred, Theoden and Denethor, as well as (offscreen) Balin, a major character from The Hobbit. Frodo is maimed and traumatised, and Eowyn, Faramir and Merry all come close to death and are only saved by quasi-divine intervention. By including these deaths and injuries, the fact that adventures aren’t at all fun for the people having them is made clear, too. And this message is reinforced in other, more subtle ways, too, ones that don’t require repeated heavyhanded bloodshed, torture and rape to make their point.

Equally, Middle Earth’s world is famously deep. You don’t have to read the appendices to LotR, The Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales to appreciate it. Again, though, this is done in large part by implication: all the places on the maps they don’t visit; the brief mentions of the other wizards, like Radagast; Gandalf’s dark hint about Morgoth’s eventual return. All this stuff works as worldbuilding because we don’t hear too much about it: our imaginations do the work of building a world on these hints. The bad film trilogy of The Hobbit, which features characters like Radagast and the Necromancer at length, show exactly why these things were best left as hints.

Martin, by contrast, cannot help but tell us just how big his world is, but in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. We wind up with an endless glut of locations we can’t remember, and characters whose motivations we can’t possibly recall and whose stories are not interesting. In place of worldbuilding detail, we get weird hints that are sometimes followed up on (like the limping monk) and sometimes not. Because there’s so much of this stuff, there’s no way of telling what will end up being relevant and what won’t. Characters endlessly wander back and forth, while violence, especially sexual violence, is used to fill space while the characters do nothing. Because there are too many characters, Martin struggles to remind us of who they are and, reaching again for his limited repertoire of character development techniques, again uses sex, violence and sexual violence so that everyone can be memorably traumatised. Except, it isn’t that memorable, because so much of it is the same.

Martin’s verbal tics are also very annoying and distracting, and the books’ great length forces us to put up with far too many of them. What was he thinking when he decided the typical word for ‘breasts’ in Westeros was ‘teats’? It reads as though all the women have udders on their chests. Absolutely unbearable.

The TV adaptation has borne the brunt of the criticisms, partly because it finished first, partly because having to present all the violence on screen made it more obvious how gratuitous so much of it is, and partly because the producers, presumably out of boredom, made some of the stuff even more gratuitous. But the flaws are all present in the books themselves.

Well, if you enjoyed ASOIAF, I assume you also enjoy people making their points at great and unnecessary length, so this was hopefully fun for you. Here is the point: plots have a structure for a reason. That structure was not divinely ordained, much like the sturctures of language are not divinely ordained. But, to continue the analogy, if I suddenly started writing this in a made-up language, you’d probably stop reading. Equally, if you suddenly decide plots don’t have to have a recognisable structure, you’re going to find it very difficult to get to the end of your book or your TV show with anything like a satisfying conclusion.

Parallel plot lines in the ‘Wild’ Zeldas

In the world of videogames, Link is simultaneously the best and worst of protagonists. As far as personality goes, he doesn’t have one (he’s brave and… that’s it) but Nintendo have always been able to turn this into a virtue. Link, as has been said countless times including by me, is so named because he’s the player’s link into the gameworld. When you play Zelda games, the intention is that you feel not that you’re telling Link where to go but that you are Link.

This is why, from the leap into the 3D era onwards, Link has deliberately been given a somewhat gender ambiguous design. Even in the games where he’s an adult, he’s not only never given the stereotypically ripped, muscular MCU-style physique of a superhero, he’s actually visibly shorter and slighter than the games other male characters (especially the revitalised ‘Wet’ Ganondorf, who Link, as usual, defeats shortly before the credits roll). Even though the game is pretty unambiguous in stating that Link is a young man, his design is deliberately one that women can project on to, Nintendo having belatedly realised that girls also play games (people criticised this ad at the time, by the way; opposition to sexism was in fact invented some time before 1998).

The ‘Link is a link’ concept worked well enough back on the NES, but in an era where people increasingly expect games to have an intrinsic emotional resonance, including at least as much plot and character arc as a blockbuster movie (that is: not much, but also: not none), Link’s blankness and silence represent a challenge, which Nintendo have attempted to overcome in quite an interesting way.

Before I go any further, I’m just going to say that I don’t care at all about the supposed ‘timelines’ of the Zelda games. There is no timeline. The clue is in the name of the series: The Legend of Zelda. There’s no way of reconciling what happens in each game with the rest of the series (even the direct sequels don’t make much sense), for the same reason that there’s no way of reconciling all the different myths of Troy or of King Arthur. They are all versions of or expansions upon a legend. This is, apart from anything else, a far more interesting interpretation of the plots of the games than trying to tie them altogether, aiming for a chimera of ‘consistency’ in a series that is not and cannot be consistent.

Now, let’s get on with it.

Two leads, two plots

Essentially, both Breath of the Wild and its sequel have two plots each. The first plot is of the kind I’ve written about before. It’s essentially player-constructed and player-led. You develop an emotional relationship to the game as you get better at it. Simultaneously, you’re given more powers, more health, better weapons, so that your intrinsic sense of mastery is complemented by the extrinsic rewards system of the game’s learning curve. It’s not a coincidence that we use similar language when we describe character development and the process of getting better at a game: characters have a ‘character arc‘, gamers experience a ‘learning curve‘. All video games possess this form of character development to some extent and Zelda has historically been very good at it, partly because, as discussed in the intro, Link is a perfect videogame protagonist. The properly open-world format of BotW and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom mean that, when you get bored of something, or realise you can’t beat a Lynel or a Gleeok yet, you (and therefore Link) are allowed to run away and do something else, instead. Part of the reason, then, that these games are so good is that Link’s empty-shell of a protagonist is perfectly suited to an open-world game. I got TotK the day it came out and it took me weeks to take down a Gleeok. Those dudes are scary.

But both games also have that second plot. Appropriately enough for a game called the Legend of Zelda, they focus on the Princess herself.

In both games, this B-plot is presented in the form of cutscenes which are unlocked via exploring the right bits of the map. If you decided to take the time to watch all the cutscenes from these games back to back (and if you’re reading this, I bet you have), you see an almost entirely separate plot in which Zelda is the protagonist and Link is a minor character – indeed he’s almost entirely offscreen in Zelda’s plot in TotK. Link’s own journey rarely impinges on the action as shown in these cutscenes, except that, right at the end, in both cases, Link appears as almost a deus ex machina, wielding the appropriate weapon(s) to allow Zelda to finish off Ganon(/dorf). This is a precise inversion of the player’s experience, where Link is the hero and it’s Zelda who puts in a helpful last-second appearance to help you/Link vanquish the baddie.

Now, perhaps inevitably, these secondary plots aren’t entirely satisfying as far as Zelda’s character arc is concerned. Nintendo have always been quite open about the fact that they design the mechanics of the game first, then come up with a plot after the fact to justify the mechanics. As they see it, Zelda has to go missing somehow or other to give Link something to do, otherwise there would be no game at all. The corollary of this is that whatever she gets up to before or during the time she’s missing is always secondary to what Link is doing. Hence the fandom’s recurring jokes about Zelda desperately holding Ganon at bay for a century or more while Link builds crazy machines or just wanders around picking up rocks in case there’s a Korok underneath. This leaves Zelda with an unsastisfying arc in every game. And it’s unsastisfying not just politically but also in terms of plot.

The nature of the open world means that main ‘player’ plot has to be able to happen in any order. This works reasonably well because, as discussed, Link’s arc is really the player’s learning curve. But, in order for the open world dynamic to work, the B-plot also has to be presented to the player in a random order, even when, as in TotK, it clearly has a specific order. The ‘Memories’ tab on the menu lists the Zelda-focused cutscenes in order even before you’ve unlocked them all. This puts the B plot in an odd bind: there’s clearly an intended order of events but there’s no way of knowing what the order is until you’ve played the game (or unless you, for presumably tragic reasons of your own, decided to play with a walkthrough). Indeed, it’s literally impossible to discover all the Memories in the intended order as the opening cutscene comes second on the Memories tab. Ordinarily, we might call the first memory a flashback, insofar as it clearly happens before the game per se begins, except that its placement first means that’s impossible.

So this is another problem with Zelda’s plot. It has a clear logic and coherence. Briefly, WITH SPOILERS, STOP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT ANY: Zelda falls backwards through time, tries to understand what has happened, witnesses the rise of Ganondorf, the defeat of Hyrule’s sages and the self-sacrifice of Hylian king Rauru, then realises the only way to finally defeat Ganondorf is to also sacrifice herself. Simple enough. But it’s presented in a totally random order. The worst example of this chronological incoherence is the two memories that are clearly, but inexplicably, split mid-scene, so that all the dramatic tension is lost. The second half is strange and confusing if you happen to find it first, while this of course also ruins any tension you might have felt if you’d watched the first half first. Even writing about it is confusing.

The gambit therefore doesn’t quite work. This I think is partly because Zelda is too passive in her plot, which mostly involves her witnessing things happening to other people or being told things by other people, till she makes her grand sacrifice. The odd thing is that Nintendo could quite easily have presented a more straightforward plot by just having the memories appear in the ‘correct’ order regardless of when Link finds them. The downside of this is that the geoglyphs’ meanings would’ve been lost but, again, this could’ve been fixed easily (by having them just be abstracted geometric symbols rather than also being pictograms of a sort). An alternative, albeit more complicated, approach would’ve been to write the ‘memories’ differently, so that viewing them disjointedly still worked for the viewer/player. I feel this aspect of the plot worked better in BotW, where it was quite clear what Zelda wanted both throughout the B-plot and within each sequence: she wanted to unlock her power as a sage, to stop Ganon. We already knew she ended up trapped with him in the castle, so there was nothing significant to ‘spoil’ (except the unsurprising revelation that it was while trying to protect a stricken Link that she finally unlocked her power — and even this was kept back deliberately, so that you couldn’t see it till you’d seen the other memory cutscenes). In TotK, there is a surprise – it’s signalled quite heavily, but nevertheless — and the decision to include that surprise or twist is probably what trapped Nintendo into the slightly puzzling choices they made with the B plot.

While the weakness of the plot is partly a result of the constraints of the game design, Nintendo really haven’t helped themselves by getting so much of the basic stuff so badly wrong. We might not notice the flaws in the plot so much if they’d gotten these basics right. As it is, the voice acting is appalling throughout and, most unfortunately, Zelda herself is probably the worst actor of all. There was no need to hire someone who couldn’t do a passable British accent and then insist that she perform with a British accent, for starters. The script, likewise, is very bad. Consider the ending, where the Sages pledge allegiance to Zelda (for some reason). The wording of the pledge is ‘Those of us gathered here, swear on our lives to support Princess Zelda and safeguard the land of Hyrule’. Really? This doesn’t sound like any oath I’ve ever heard. They could’ve just ripped off a real coronation oath and it would have rung true. The one we’ve ended up with reads like someone wrote a note to the scriptwriter which then got accidentally incorporated into the final draft.

Nevertheless, it’s possible to imagine a fix of this plot by having the finale of the game not be a return to the status quo ante. Essentially, everything Link and Zelda go through – including significant trauma to their bodies – is completely erased by the end of the game. Link’s arm grows back, for God/Hylia’s sake! It would be far more interesting to have Link fail at his job of protecting Zelda. If, in the end, she remained a dragon and Link retained his prosthetic arm, it would give us some more information about both of the main characters. Zelda’s sacrifice would be meaningful. Our impression of Link’s courage and sense of duty would be strengthened by seeing him fight on when he’s already lost. It would also give us a Hyrule bereft of its leader, which would again give us a deeper feeling for the games’ setting: what is Hyrule without Zelda? What could it become?

Even an alternative wherein Zelda is actually crowned would have been better than her resuming her apparent role as eternal princess (presumably, since the King died in the Calamity over a century prior to TotK, Zelda has been de facto queen ever since then). Since Nintendo intend this to be the last of the ‘Wild’ Zeldas, they could have provided us with a more satisfying ending and then simply returned to the status quo with a new game, which is what they always do anyway. As it is, nothing feels settled. The major characters are even wearing the same clothes at the end of the game as at the start! What, did they have them remade? Did they go to Cece in Hateno Village and say, ‘I was wearing these clothes during the most traumatic moment of my entire life, even including the time I actually died, so could you please make an exact replica of them so I can be constantly reminded of the time my arm melted and the princess/queen/love of my life vanished into an interminable pit, and also there was this hideous ancient zombie that told me it had spent millennia dreaming of killing me…’? And while we’re talking of Hateno, did Zelda really steal Link’s house? There’s only a single bed, there. She even took down the sign describing it as ‘Link’s House’ and replaced it with ‘Zelda’s House’. What’s going on there? Does he move to his country retreat outside Tarrey Town permanently at the end?

So, there’s a failure of closure here. To extend a metaphor, plot threads are cut rather than tied up at the end of the game. As a game, Tears of the Kingdom is another excellent entry in the series. As a story, it’s a low point.

My poem ‘Love and Strife’, published by Apparition Lit!

I write all these normal poems about love and death and poetry, but people only want to publish the mad ones about love and death and poetry. Anyway, here it is.

I don’t exist in a vacuum, so I need to credit a few people for variously helping or inspiring me to write this weird poem.

It was partly inspired by The Atlantic article ‘No one is prepared for hagfish slime‘, which is true. No one is.

While the idea of wanting Socrates to shut up is not a recent one — the Athenians did vote to poison him, after all — I think my depiction of him and Plato here definitely draws on Existential Comics, so shout out to the them, too.

I wouldn’t have been able to read Empedocles and his weird ideas about evolution if WikiSource and, specifically, their edition of Early Greek Philosophy didn’t exist.

I’d also like to thank everyone who didn’t publish it (although they shall remain nameless) because that forced me to keep working on it till Apparition picked it up. If you enjoyed my poem, look around on Apparition‘s website and see what else they publish! If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the magazine or just throw them some good old fashioned money. They also have a Patreon and if you subscribe to that you can read an interview where I talk a bit more about the poem.

Alternatively, if you decide it’s me, specifically, who you like, you can subscribe to this blog, read more things I’ve written about poetry, follow me on Mastodon or just send me some money.

“My poem ‘Love and Strife’, published by Apparition Lit!” by Frank Podmore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Technoglossia: an imaginable itinerary through the particular universal

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.

– Gandalf the Grey

But Biggs and I were going to go to Tosche station to pick up some power converters!

– Luke Skywalker

I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow

– The Third Doctor

There’s a distinctly sci-fi/fantasy way of writing which I think a lot of people probably see as either filler or scene-setting, but I think there’s far more to it than that, when it’s done well. There are, of course, infinite examples of it being done badly, usually using the phrase ‘some kind of’ or ‘sort of’ something or other, which is neither informative nor aesthetically pleasing.

Whatever it is, exactly, I don’t think there’s not a precise term for the mode of writing, which I’ve given some samples of in the epigraph. In sci-fi it’s sometimes called technobabble (or ‘treknobabble’ when talking specifically about Star Trek), but that obviously doesn’t cover The Lord of the Rings or the other examples I’m going to get into. I don’t think ‘babble’ is an appropriate phrase for it, anyway, because I do think it serves a specific purpose, whereas ‘babble’ suggests randomness. Other terms like ‘jargon’ aren’t quite right, either, because jargon is subjective: meaningless to laypeople but meaningful to experts. With this type of writing, we usually know something of what is meant, but the precise detail is elusive.

I think a new coinage is needed. I suggest technoglossia, from the Greek techne, ‘art’, and glossia, ‘language’, hence, ‘a language of art’. As I’m going to show, technoglossia is language where meaning is irreducibly carried at the level of the phrase.

Like so much else, it was JRR Tolkien who introduced technoglossia to SFF writing. The fantastic thing about Gandalf’s speech at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm is that it seems to be absolutely freighted with meaning but it’s almost impossible to parse, even though only two of the words (Anor and Udûn) come from his invented languages. It seems to all be about different types of fire, but why should fire prevent other fire from passing? Who or what are Anor and Udûn? Why is only one of the fires – the ‘Secret’ one – given a capital F?

Tolkien has answers to all of this, naturally, but anything that requires you to look stuff up on a fansite can safely be said to be metatextual. More to the point, even when you do know what Anor and Udûn are (sort of) and what the Secret Fire might be, you still don’t really know much about what Gandalf means. ‘Anor’ turns out to be Sindarin (or Quenya?) for ‘sun’ and Udûn means ‘Hell’ or refers to a region of Mordor but presumably here it’s the former . Does knowing that Gandalf wields the sun’s flame or that the Balrog is a hellfire demon tell us much? Not really. For example, is the Secret Fire different from the flame of Anor/the sun? Can you serve one without wielding the other? It’s still unclear.

However, knowing the purported meaning does tell us something about why Tolkien wrote these lines in this way: they sound better with the Elvish words, which work better rhythmically: using Anor and Udûn brings the speech closer to iambic pentameter. The first two clauses reflect each other nicely, and then we get a great echo on ‘flame of Anor’/’flame of Udun’, contrasting the two flames. We don’t know what they are precisely, but we know they’re opposed and, most importantly, we know whose side we’re on.

There’s a definite hint here that, much like Jules in the final scene of Pulp Fiction, Gandalf just needed some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before he popped a cop in his ass. (Or did he expect the Balrog to go, ‘Oh yeah, good point. I’ll head home, then’?) In fact, in Pulp Fiction, Jules even notes that the content of what he’s saying isn’t important and allows of several possible interpretations. Certainly in the minds of whoever makes and buys t-shirts and posters with film quotes on them, the first interpretation, that it’s just cool, remains the prevailing one.

If you don’t have a Bible handy, you can look up Ezekiel 25:17 online and check whether Jules is really quoting it (he isn’t). For both Tolkien and Tarantino, what’s relevant is not the words themselves but their aesthetic value. Both are examples of what Tolkien called a ‘cellar door’: words or phrases with an aesthetic beauty that has nothing to do with their actual meaning. The reason this is technoglossia, though, is that ‘cellar doors’ are beautiful whenever and however they’re used, and independent of their meaning, but technoglossia serves a particular purpose.

Obviously the flipside of the existence of cellardoors is that there are some sounds that are just ugly. With apologies to the Gretchens and Ferguses of the world, I honestly though both those names were made up for fictional characters who the audience were supposed to dislike. There’s no earthly reason anyone would choose to attach those sounds to a baby. Sorry. I’m also not a huge fan of my name, if it helps. Slightly perversely, I do think it suits me, but did I have any choice but to be a weird nerd after I was lumbered with the name Frank Podmore? Imagine if I was a bodybuilder or something. It would just be crazy. No one would believe me. You read the name Frank Podmore and you just know that’s a guy with strong opinions about Balrogs (which do not have wings).

Anyway.

Treknobabble is a subtype, usually used to dig Star Trek writers out of plotholes caused by the laws of physics. Transporters obviously can’t work because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Not a problem: the Enterprise has a Heisenberg compensator! (I love this.) Here, treknobabble, and the associated imaginary technology, does the job that ‘fate’ does in fantasy fiction, by making sense of things that make no sense. Treknobabble is usually not chosen for its aesthetic quality, though naturally some of it is better than others. Reportedly, some Trek writers specialised in writing it and would be called on to add something appropriate when required. Similarly, some actors were especialy good at delivering it. The aesthetics of certain phrases I think partly explains why Star Trek‘s writers are notably fond of some phrases, almost to the point of their becoming snowclones. ‘Subspace/space-time anomalies’, for example, crop up so often that they’re no longer anomalous. Much like the possibly related ‘subspace/space-time phenomenon’, these sound best with an American accent.

We can see this effect happening with other technobabble, too. I don’t think neutron flows exist outside of Doctor Who but, if they do, you couldn’t reverse their polarity because neutrons don’t have one – hence the name. But aesthetically speaking, you couldn’t ‘reverse the polarity of the proton flow’ or the ‘electron flow’ because, ironically or not, neither alternative flows. Here, the Third Doctor gives us a sentence which is not only meaningless but defies a basic principle of the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter because it sounds right.

This foregrounding of aesthetic over meaning exists outside of SFF too. Sigur Rós often sing in ‘Hopelandic’, which the press often wrongly refer to as an invented language. It’s actually just a collection of speechlike sounds, an auditory equivalent of asemic writing. We can’t call Gandalf or the Doctor’s entires in this blog ‘asemic’, because they have meaning, but it at least gets us closer. There are also millions of fans of opera who enjoy music sung in languages they don’t speak. I’m not a big opera fan myself. Someone once gave me a spare ticket to see Carmen and I quite enjoyed it but I genuinely had to look it up just now to find out what language it’s in (French). Like most people who have ever listened to Carmen, I enjoyed the whole thing, including the words, on a purely aesthetic level, much as Sigur Rós fans enjoy their songs in Hopelandic (and Icelandic, for the overwhelming majority of us who don’t speak it).

In Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode reports asking a Shakesperean actor what they did when confronted with speeches they didn’t understand. The answer: they tried to deliver it as though they did understand it. Trek‘s actors did much the same thing. Again, it’s fair to say that a lot of Shakespeare goes entirely over the heads of contemporary audiences, yet we still flock to hear it performed.

Another parallel is in Finnegans Wake, another work that hacks often describe as being written in an invented language. In fact, it is recognisably English, often in a Hiberno-English dialect, in most of its grammar and vocabulary. For example, I just let the book fall open at random and landed on the passage famous for giving the langauge the word ‘quark’:

— Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark

Finnegans Wake, p. 383

Clearly, this isn’t a ‘made-up language’. Apart from ‘quark’, there’s no entirely made-up word here. The syntax is Hiberno-English and the only other oddity is ‘Muster’ (a real word) where we might expect ‘Mister’ or ‘Master’. What we don’t have for most of the Wake is the kind of clear meaning that we normally expect. It’s nonetheless a lot more like technobabble than it is like Hopelandic.

The other oddity of the Wake is that James Joyce insisted that it all had meaning, but most readers struggle to discern it and, even among those who feel they understand it, there’s not much agreement as to ‘the’ meaning (whether ‘actual’ or ‘original’ or ‘intended’). Whether this makes it a novel or something else entirely is an open question. One interpretation is that it was intended to foreground aesthetic beauty over meaning, in which case it has something in common with Tolkien’s use of invented language in LotR (particularly the elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin). It’s possibly not a coincidence that both work best when read aloud.

This might be a more controversial claim, but technoglossia also occurs outside of SFF and postmodernism. For example, we all know the word ‘tightfisted’ meaning ‘stingy’. It seems to refer to the way a miser might hang on to their cash or wallet: with a tight fist. So far so good. But look how Charles Dickens, from whom we derive the word, uses it in A Christmas Carol:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!

(my italics)

Scrooge doesn’t have a tight fist. He is a tight fist. This is more complex metaphor, but there’s more to it than that. What does this idea actually mean? Or, rather, how does it mean what it means?

Let’s break it down: I have some idea what a grindstone is, though I’ve never seen one. Based on what I know, it sounds like having a tight fist would be a good practice, approved by all health and safety officers, since I don’t want to drop what I’m grinding. But clearly Dickens isn’t complimenting Scrooge’s grinding technique. If Dickens had simply said, ‘He was (or had) a tight fisted hand’, it wouldn’t mean much at all. Nor if he said he was ‘a fist (or hand) at the grindstone’. Much like Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog, the meaning here is both obvious and hard to parse: take away any element and it falls apart completely. The phrase needs every word to convey the meaning, but when we break it down, the meaning seems to slip away from us. Maybe we’re not being tightfisted enough?

This is technoglossia. Neither Dickens, nor Tolkien, nor the various writers of Doctor Who and Star Trek are babbling when they use language this way. Nor is it exclusive to SFF, as we’ve seen with Dickens. It’s a mode unto itself, one which conveys a primary meaning at the level of the phrase, a meaning which, crucially, cannot be found only through analysing the meanings of the component words. SFF uses it perhaps more than other genres, though it can also be found in, e.g., CSI‘s descriptions of how forensics works (‘Enhance!’). It may appear more often in SFF partly because of Tolkien’s influence and partly because, when you’re imagining a new world it may come naturally to you to also bend the language a bit, even when you’re not also inventing one. I expect you can find technoglossia in all kinds of writing, though, because, as we’ve seen with Dickens, it’s a uniquely powerful way of conveying an idea.