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rfmcdonaldLately, I've been listening to mashup mp3s. Mashup--also known as bastard pop--is a relatively new genre of music. To quote Neil McCormick, "[b]astard pop is the rather clever name being given to a new form of bootlegging, where two or more wildly different tracks are combined to (it is hoped) original effect, usually without worrying too much about who actually owns the rights." As this Wired article makes clear, mashups are a genre enabled by new generations of audio-processing software.
I can personally attest that the results can be quite catchy. For instance, as I write these words I'm listening to a mashup of Missy Elliott's "Work It" and Cameo's "Word Up," "It Works The Word." (The mp3, incidentally, can be downloaded here.) And now, it's Faithless vs Eurythmics' "Sweet Insomnia." Quite fun.
The whole idea of the mashup inspired me. To date, all of my book reviews have either been essay-length commentaries on single titles, or they have included multiple paragraph-length entries. What if, I wondered, if I did a mashup book review, combining two books which at first glance have nothing to do with each other, but which on closer examination have interesting points in common? So, here it is: A mashup review of Alison Landsberg's academic tome Prosthetic Memory and John Barnes' far-future science-fiction novel The Merchants of Souls.
Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia, 2004) is concerned with the ways in which modernity and mass culture have intersected--in the specific case of the United States, as the title indicates, and most strongly in the late 20th century--to produce new forms of public memory, of memory external to individuals. This production is particularly though not exclusively prominent in cases where normal parent-to-child cultural transmission fail:
For case studies, Landsberg examines American reactions to the immigrant experience of assimilation, to the African-American experience of slavery, and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. The idea that media and education can be used to enculturate people with group memories is hardly unique to the 20th century, of course. The late 19th century French scholar Ernest Renan, in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation, wrote about the importance of collectively-communicated memories for the wider group in his famous comments on the nation (English translation of the original French follows).
Until recently, Landsberg argues, sub-national groups have generally lacked the cultural influence necessary to communicate their own collective memories beyond their group memberships. These memories--remembrances of past sufferings, or of past joys, or of past endeavours--remained relatively private, with circulations limited to these groups. The development of inexpensive mass media with broad circulation, however--television, museums, movies, perhaps now the Internet and its associated technologies--has allowed these memories to propagate widely, with major ramifications for American society generally. The movie Blade Runner is a central text for Landsberg, inasmuch as this excellent science-fiction movie makes the ability of humans to empathize with their peers the cornerstone of just what it means to be human, creating communities based on experience shared directly or indirectly.
Prosthetic memory, in each of Landsberg's case studies, plays significant roles. In the early 20th century, for instance, immigrants could access, via cinema and print, narratives describing how others in similar conditions were successfully assimilated in an America relatively intolerant of hybridity. Later in our contemporary era, research into the material and cultural history of African-American slavery was reproduced in a wide variety of cultural works, like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History and the novels of Toni Morrison and the 1996 movie Rosewood and the television series Roots, communicating the African-American historical experience to people who otherwise would have been unaware of it. Landsberg's final case study on America and the Holocaust is a fascinating piece of cultural history, examining the development of American knowledge of the Holocaust from the relative obscurity it had suffered up until the 1970s to its highly prominent status now in the early 21st century.
Landsberg argues that prosthetic memory has a dual function. On the most superficial level, it acts as a commodity, as a consumer good acquired by people curious for more experiences. More profoundly, though, prosthetic memory in whatever form can be used to create new communities and new forms of social organization, by establishing empathic links between people who otherwise would not have had any contact. Prosthetic memory can potentially radically recreate social structures and attitudes, making people feel things and do things which they otherwise would not have done, making people care about the fate of that which was formerly Other. Landsberg's analysis seems plausible, though I suspect that her emphasis on the radical potential of prosthetic memory is a bit too accentuated.
This brings us to The Merchant of Souls (New York: Tor, 2001), the third book of an expected five in John Barnes' Thousand Cultures setting.
John Barnes' Thousand Cultures setting is set in the 29th century. The third millennium has been fairly busy.
Until the 23rd century, Earth had a fairly eventful history, including the development of two American empires (one limited to Pacific holdings, one with a land frontier in central Siberia), the extensive colonization of the Solar System, multple cold wars, and a World War III. Things changed with the 23rd century's World War IV in the 23rd century, fought mainly by Latin Americans and East Asians and killing two billion people, having as a notable side-effect the vitrification of most of Europe and the island of Honshu through antimatter bombardment. This last traumatic experience prompted a drastic change, as Solar humanity determinedly united in an intentionally bland culture as part of a concerted effort to avoid a worse World War V.
Many groups--ethnic separatists, planned cultures, ideological utopias--resisted this global trend towards homogenization. Fortunately, the stars were open to human colonization, thanks to the development of a mature early-interstellar level of technology. Interstellar slower-than-light spacecraft left Sol system in the hundreds over the 23rd and 24th centuries, arriving at that planets which prior generations of sublight interstellar probes had identified as potentially Earth-like with terraforming. In the subsequent centuries, these cultures took root on their new worlds, slowly being terraformed into habitability. Perhaps the most isolated culture was that of Nou Occitan, a modernized version of the medieval Provençal culture of what is now southern France, concerned with art and various passions, existing by itself on the terraformed former gas-giant core of Nansen, orbiting the red giant star Arcturus. The Thousand Cultures, as they are known, develop independently from an increasingly self-centered Sol system. To be fair, the more densely-settled systems of Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, populated by dozens of different cultures and developing populations in excess of one billion each, are beginning to converge with Sol system, but separated by the immense vastness of interstellar space and the ienvitable time lag involved with light-speed communications the other worlds of humanity exist apart, content with their own isolation and their prosperous AI-moderated economies and ecologies.
This situation changes radically when the springer is developed on Earth. A springer station in isolation is useless; two springer stations, however, can be used to establish instantaneous communication and travel between two points, regardless of the distances separating them (planetary, interplanetary, interstellar). As news of springer technology slowly makes its way into the human-settled universe, people begin to build springers of their own. Within a generation after the springer's development, humanity has once again been united into a single community, and, like clockwork, tensions between humanity's different cultures threaten civilization.
It's at this point that the Council of Humanity steps in. In the era of expensive sublight interstellar travel and light-speed interstellar communication, the Council of Humanity was a notional body, claiming to govern the human species but lacking any real authority. In the springer era, the Council of Humanity now can actually begin to govern the human species, minimizing the strains on the emergent pan-human culture and (where necessary) engaging in the very quiet editing of certain recalcitrant cultures and individuals through its special-operations branch, the Office of Special Projects.
John Barnes builds extraordinarily dense universes. His early essay "How to Build a Future", in addition to serving as an excellent guide for science-fiction writers interested in constructing plausible universes, sketches out the broad outline of the Thousand Cultures universe's history. Wonderful parenthetical references to the history of his characters and wider human society can be found everywhere, ranging from a passing mention of how Richmond once ranked alongside Nazi Berlin and Soviet Moscow as a centre of world espionage and a description of how a blind cleaning woman in her 80s assassinating the most powerful man on Earth to the mechanics of Nansen's terraforming and the future of wider expansion into the human universe. Barnes' protagonists--including his main character Giraut Leones, a native of Nou Occitan--evolve substantially over time. So as to avoid leaving readers in the dark, a brief summary of the previous two novels in the series follows.
In Barnes' first Thousand Cultures novel (A Million Open Doors), disappointments in love prompt Giraut to take the springer to the culture of Caledony with his friends, including one Caledony-born, as part of a Council of Humanity exchange trip. In Caledony (located on the world of Wilson in the neighbouring Eta Bootis planetary system, in case anyone's curious), Giraut comes to terms with his own culture and with the odd Christian/Friedmanite culture of Caledony, meets his future wife the Caledonian Margaret, and through his adventures (the details of which I won't reveal since I want you to read the book) gets recruited as an agent by the Office of Special Projects.
Earth Made of Glass is the somewhat depressing followup to A Million Open Doors. A decade or so later, as agents of the OSP, Giraut and Margaret travel to the hostile world of Briand to try to mediate the vicious ethnic hatreds between that world's two cultures, one Tamil and based on Classical Tamil's cankam poetry, the other an imaginative recreation of pre-Columbian Classic Maya culture. Barnes has a reputation for writing exceptionally dark and depressing books; his Century Next Door series, beginning with Orbital Resonance and continuing with Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, and The Sky So Big and Black ranks as probably the most depressing alternate history I've ever read. Earth Made of Glass fits into that pattern, between unrelenting ethnic hatred and murder and innumerable personal tragedies. I'd recommend it for people with a high tolerance for fairly graphic violence and depressing plots, but Earth Made of Glass is nonetheless a novel that I'm happy I read.
The book begins on the world of Söderblom in the Eta Cassiopeiae system, where Giraut is recuperating from the effects of his Briand mission. He's called back into OSP service from his much-needed vacation on an urgent mission. It seems that on Earth, there is a growing movement to transform the electronically-preserved minds of the Thousand Cultures' dead into entertainment for Earth's jaded billions. For Earth, this conversion is natural and unobjectionable, given the fact that human minds are recorded in the same file format used for conventional simulated experiences and Earth's need for new entertainment. For the Thousand Cultures, Earth's desire to cannibalize the minds of their departed loved ones is nothing short of a mortal outrage. Giraut's task is to try to engineer public opinion on Earth away from its plans to use the minds of the Thousand Cultures' dead, through any subtle ways possible.
There are a lot of interesting threads in this book. Giraut shares his body with his friend Rimbaut, killed in a duel almost two decades before in A Million Open Doors and now being given a chance to enjoy physicality as part of his reacclimation to life. There is, as one would expect given the conspiratorial backgrounds in so many of Barnes' works, a deep-rooted conspiracy effecting the heart of the Council of Humanity's affairs. At its base, though, The Merchants of Souls is concerned with the question of how one can feel empathy for other people, particularly for people with cultural background distinct from one's own, in an era of globalization. Before the development of the springer, Earth had centuries of experience in denying the existence not only of cultural differences but of all difference: Giraut/Raimbaut were surprised to find out that some of their Terrestrial counterparts were curious whether or not people in the Thousand Cultures actually believed in things. True belief, to 29th century Earth, is authentically threatening; encouraging the spread of the colourless Interstellar Metaculture, engulfing individuals in the Thousand Cultures, is Earth's response to the diversity of humanity's interstellar civilization.
The Merchants of Souls makes a very good case that neither separatism nor assimilationism are viable responses to the turbulent development of a cosmopolitan global culture. Rather, Giraut begins to convincingly argue that empathy for others, drawn from various sorts of prosthetic memory, is vital, particularly so as these cosmopolitan cultures form. The Merchants of Souls is the third book in what Barnes maintains will be a series of five. Throughout this series, but beginning strongly in Earth Made of Glass, the need for empathy across barriers of culture and personality--the need to see others as they see themselves, to empathize with their concerns and aid them as suitable with their various projects--is given increasing emphasis.
I'm not sure where Barnes will go with his followups. I do know, though, that I intend to find out when they come out.
I can personally attest that the results can be quite catchy. For instance, as I write these words I'm listening to a mashup of Missy Elliott's "Work It" and Cameo's "Word Up," "It Works The Word." (The mp3, incidentally, can be downloaded here.) And now, it's Faithless vs Eurythmics' "Sweet Insomnia." Quite fun.
The whole idea of the mashup inspired me. To date, all of my book reviews have either been essay-length commentaries on single titles, or they have included multiple paragraph-length entries. What if, I wondered, if I did a mashup book review, combining two books which at first glance have nothing to do with each other, but which on closer examination have interesting points in common? So, here it is: A mashup review of Alison Landsberg's academic tome Prosthetic Memory and John Barnes' far-future science-fiction novel The Merchants of Souls.
Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia, 2004) is concerned with the ways in which modernity and mass culture have intersected--in the specific case of the United States, as the title indicates, and most strongly in the late 20th century--to produce new forms of public memory, of memory external to individuals. This production is particularly though not exclusively prominent in cases where normal parent-to-child cultural transmission fail:
[T]he memories forged in response to modernity's ruptures do not belong exclusively to a particular group; that is, memories of the Holocaust do not belong only to Jews, nor do memories of slavery belong solely to African Americans. Through the technologies of mass culture, it becomes possible for these memories to be acquired by anyone, regardless of skin color, ethnic background, or biology. Prosthetic memories are transportable and therefore challenge more traditional forms of memory that are premises on claims of authenticity, "heritage," and ownership. This new form of memory is neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary, but it is powerful (2-3).
For case studies, Landsberg examines American reactions to the immigrant experience of assimilation, to the African-American experience of slavery, and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. The idea that media and education can be used to enculturate people with group memories is hardly unique to the 20th century, of course. The late 19th century French scholar Ernest Renan, in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation, wrote about the importance of collectively-communicated memories for the wider group in his famous comments on the nation (English translation of the original French follows).
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more-these are the essential conditions for being a people. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consented, and in proportion to the ills that one has suffered. One loves the house that one has built and that one has handed down. The Spartan song-"We are what you were; we will be what you are" -- is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie.
More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together. These are the kinds of things that can be understood in spite of differences of race and language. I spoke just now of "having suffered together" and, indeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.
Until recently, Landsberg argues, sub-national groups have generally lacked the cultural influence necessary to communicate their own collective memories beyond their group memberships. These memories--remembrances of past sufferings, or of past joys, or of past endeavours--remained relatively private, with circulations limited to these groups. The development of inexpensive mass media with broad circulation, however--television, museums, movies, perhaps now the Internet and its associated technologies--has allowed these memories to propagate widely, with major ramifications for American society generally. The movie Blade Runner is a central text for Landsberg, inasmuch as this excellent science-fiction movie makes the ability of humans to empathize with their peers the cornerstone of just what it means to be human, creating communities based on experience shared directly or indirectly.
Prosthetic memory, in each of Landsberg's case studies, plays significant roles. In the early 20th century, for instance, immigrants could access, via cinema and print, narratives describing how others in similar conditions were successfully assimilated in an America relatively intolerant of hybridity. Later in our contemporary era, research into the material and cultural history of African-American slavery was reproduced in a wide variety of cultural works, like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History and the novels of Toni Morrison and the 1996 movie Rosewood and the television series Roots, communicating the African-American historical experience to people who otherwise would have been unaware of it. Landsberg's final case study on America and the Holocaust is a fascinating piece of cultural history, examining the development of American knowledge of the Holocaust from the relative obscurity it had suffered up until the 1970s to its highly prominent status now in the early 21st century.
Landsberg argues that prosthetic memory has a dual function. On the most superficial level, it acts as a commodity, as a consumer good acquired by people curious for more experiences. More profoundly, though, prosthetic memory in whatever form can be used to create new communities and new forms of social organization, by establishing empathic links between people who otherwise would not have had any contact. Prosthetic memory can potentially radically recreate social structures and attitudes, making people feel things and do things which they otherwise would not have done, making people care about the fate of that which was formerly Other. Landsberg's analysis seems plausible, though I suspect that her emphasis on the radical potential of prosthetic memory is a bit too accentuated.
This brings us to The Merchant of Souls (New York: Tor, 2001), the third book of an expected five in John Barnes' Thousand Cultures setting.
John Barnes' Thousand Cultures setting is set in the 29th century. The third millennium has been fairly busy.
Until the 23rd century, Earth had a fairly eventful history, including the development of two American empires (one limited to Pacific holdings, one with a land frontier in central Siberia), the extensive colonization of the Solar System, multple cold wars, and a World War III. Things changed with the 23rd century's World War IV in the 23rd century, fought mainly by Latin Americans and East Asians and killing two billion people, having as a notable side-effect the vitrification of most of Europe and the island of Honshu through antimatter bombardment. This last traumatic experience prompted a drastic change, as Solar humanity determinedly united in an intentionally bland culture as part of a concerted effort to avoid a worse World War V.
Many groups--ethnic separatists, planned cultures, ideological utopias--resisted this global trend towards homogenization. Fortunately, the stars were open to human colonization, thanks to the development of a mature early-interstellar level of technology. Interstellar slower-than-light spacecraft left Sol system in the hundreds over the 23rd and 24th centuries, arriving at that planets which prior generations of sublight interstellar probes had identified as potentially Earth-like with terraforming. In the subsequent centuries, these cultures took root on their new worlds, slowly being terraformed into habitability. Perhaps the most isolated culture was that of Nou Occitan, a modernized version of the medieval Provençal culture of what is now southern France, concerned with art and various passions, existing by itself on the terraformed former gas-giant core of Nansen, orbiting the red giant star Arcturus. The Thousand Cultures, as they are known, develop independently from an increasingly self-centered Sol system. To be fair, the more densely-settled systems of Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, populated by dozens of different cultures and developing populations in excess of one billion each, are beginning to converge with Sol system, but separated by the immense vastness of interstellar space and the ienvitable time lag involved with light-speed communications the other worlds of humanity exist apart, content with their own isolation and their prosperous AI-moderated economies and ecologies.
This situation changes radically when the springer is developed on Earth. A springer station in isolation is useless; two springer stations, however, can be used to establish instantaneous communication and travel between two points, regardless of the distances separating them (planetary, interplanetary, interstellar). As news of springer technology slowly makes its way into the human-settled universe, people begin to build springers of their own. Within a generation after the springer's development, humanity has once again been united into a single community, and, like clockwork, tensions between humanity's different cultures threaten civilization.
It's at this point that the Council of Humanity steps in. In the era of expensive sublight interstellar travel and light-speed interstellar communication, the Council of Humanity was a notional body, claiming to govern the human species but lacking any real authority. In the springer era, the Council of Humanity now can actually begin to govern the human species, minimizing the strains on the emergent pan-human culture and (where necessary) engaging in the very quiet editing of certain recalcitrant cultures and individuals through its special-operations branch, the Office of Special Projects.
John Barnes builds extraordinarily dense universes. His early essay "How to Build a Future", in addition to serving as an excellent guide for science-fiction writers interested in constructing plausible universes, sketches out the broad outline of the Thousand Cultures universe's history. Wonderful parenthetical references to the history of his characters and wider human society can be found everywhere, ranging from a passing mention of how Richmond once ranked alongside Nazi Berlin and Soviet Moscow as a centre of world espionage and a description of how a blind cleaning woman in her 80s assassinating the most powerful man on Earth to the mechanics of Nansen's terraforming and the future of wider expansion into the human universe. Barnes' protagonists--including his main character Giraut Leones, a native of Nou Occitan--evolve substantially over time. So as to avoid leaving readers in the dark, a brief summary of the previous two novels in the series follows.
In Barnes' first Thousand Cultures novel (A Million Open Doors), disappointments in love prompt Giraut to take the springer to the culture of Caledony with his friends, including one Caledony-born, as part of a Council of Humanity exchange trip. In Caledony (located on the world of Wilson in the neighbouring Eta Bootis planetary system, in case anyone's curious), Giraut comes to terms with his own culture and with the odd Christian/Friedmanite culture of Caledony, meets his future wife the Caledonian Margaret, and through his adventures (the details of which I won't reveal since I want you to read the book) gets recruited as an agent by the Office of Special Projects.
Earth Made of Glass is the somewhat depressing followup to A Million Open Doors. A decade or so later, as agents of the OSP, Giraut and Margaret travel to the hostile world of Briand to try to mediate the vicious ethnic hatreds between that world's two cultures, one Tamil and based on Classical Tamil's cankam poetry, the other an imaginative recreation of pre-Columbian Classic Maya culture. Barnes has a reputation for writing exceptionally dark and depressing books; his Century Next Door series, beginning with Orbital Resonance and continuing with Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, and The Sky So Big and Black ranks as probably the most depressing alternate history I've ever read. Earth Made of Glass fits into that pattern, between unrelenting ethnic hatred and murder and innumerable personal tragedies. I'd recommend it for people with a high tolerance for fairly graphic violence and depressing plots, but Earth Made of Glass is nonetheless a novel that I'm happy I read.
The book begins on the world of Söderblom in the Eta Cassiopeiae system, where Giraut is recuperating from the effects of his Briand mission. He's called back into OSP service from his much-needed vacation on an urgent mission. It seems that on Earth, there is a growing movement to transform the electronically-preserved minds of the Thousand Cultures' dead into entertainment for Earth's jaded billions. For Earth, this conversion is natural and unobjectionable, given the fact that human minds are recorded in the same file format used for conventional simulated experiences and Earth's need for new entertainment. For the Thousand Cultures, Earth's desire to cannibalize the minds of their departed loved ones is nothing short of a mortal outrage. Giraut's task is to try to engineer public opinion on Earth away from its plans to use the minds of the Thousand Cultures' dead, through any subtle ways possible.
There are a lot of interesting threads in this book. Giraut shares his body with his friend Rimbaut, killed in a duel almost two decades before in A Million Open Doors and now being given a chance to enjoy physicality as part of his reacclimation to life. There is, as one would expect given the conspiratorial backgrounds in so many of Barnes' works, a deep-rooted conspiracy effecting the heart of the Council of Humanity's affairs. At its base, though, The Merchants of Souls is concerned with the question of how one can feel empathy for other people, particularly for people with cultural background distinct from one's own, in an era of globalization. Before the development of the springer, Earth had centuries of experience in denying the existence not only of cultural differences but of all difference: Giraut/Raimbaut were surprised to find out that some of their Terrestrial counterparts were curious whether or not people in the Thousand Cultures actually believed in things. True belief, to 29th century Earth, is authentically threatening; encouraging the spread of the colourless Interstellar Metaculture, engulfing individuals in the Thousand Cultures, is Earth's response to the diversity of humanity's interstellar civilization.
The Merchants of Souls makes a very good case that neither separatism nor assimilationism are viable responses to the turbulent development of a cosmopolitan global culture. Rather, Giraut begins to convincingly argue that empathy for others, drawn from various sorts of prosthetic memory, is vital, particularly so as these cosmopolitan cultures form. The Merchants of Souls is the third book in what Barnes maintains will be a series of five. Throughout this series, but beginning strongly in Earth Made of Glass, the need for empathy across barriers of culture and personality--the need to see others as they see themselves, to empathize with their concerns and aid them as suitable with their various projects--is given increasing emphasis.
I'm not sure where Barnes will go with his followups. I do know, though, that I intend to find out when they come out.
