So, congratulations to Amazon on a boner so huge it took Web 2.0 and microblogging to make it happen. And the French.

This is too much time in Las Vegas.

Still, some highlights from the Vegas roads less traveled:

I saw the Beatles-themed Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, which was (unsurprisingly) excellent. I went through a Beatles phase in about 2004 where I listened to their music exclusively for about six weeks. Beatles songs, at this point, are like Homer or the Bible – it doesn’t matter if you like them, they’re part of our shared Western cultural heritage. Fortunately, I like them.

A lot of my interest in LOVE was to see Apple’s first step into this brave new multimedia future – they went back to the original vaults to remaster and remix the tracks for the show. The result was great, and bodes well for September 9th’s Beatles relaunch – The Beatles: Rock Band, of course, but also the recently announced full catalog remaster. The remaster comes with a long-overdue global reset to the UK album system, which suggests The Beatles trust is finally dropping American Baby Boomers as their primary audience. It’s 2009 – we’ve all already met the Beatles.

I enjoyed the 16-course tasting menu at Joel Robuchon (full menu behind the link). I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what to say about the three-and-a-half hour meal – I even took some notes, afterward – but in the end I can only say it was the best meal – with the best service – that I have ever had or ever will have. I will, however, mention that the meal was not only full of amazing tastes, but featured a much wider range of temperatures and textures than I normally expect – and that the uni was the freshest I’ve ever had, including 7:30 A.M., Tsukiji fish market. If you have any questions about specific dishes, please ask in the comments.

I discovered a rare books store in the Palazzo that was like Needful Things for book lovers – everything was a first edition in excellent condition; most of it was also inscribed. They had a copy of The Waste Land from 1922, of Huckleberry Finn, of Blake’s Poems, of Ulysses (both first pressing and special Book Club edition with illustrations by Matisse). On the nerdier front, they had Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, The Martian Chronicles. Verne and Wells, of course. They had a 1909 Japanese translation of the Book of Mormon, which uses crazy archaic kanji and was surreal to flip through – like a Japanese book that slid over from a sideways universe.

The problem, of course, is the price. The cheapest book I found was $985 for a signed copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Most were $4000 plus, with the real eye-openers north of $20,000. Still, if you have an hour or so to kill some Vegas afternoon, there are many worse (and costlier) ways to do it than browsing rare books.

The final adventure I took was about a mile east of the strip, to the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum. If you like pinball or classic games at all, you must visit this place! 150 pinball machines in excellent condition, and all of them playable. Machines are $0.25 for classic electrostatics, $0.50 for “classic” pinball, and $0.75 for modern pinball machines. All machines are set to max balls per credit (either 3 or 5 ). Many have a small notecard with information about the machine’s rarity, release dates, and historical significance. There’s something cool about learning a machine was the first to introduce skill shots on ball release or the end-of-ball score bonus. I also greatly enjoyed the late 60’s electrostatics, most of which had an art-deco or pop art theme, c.f. “Op-Pop-Pop”:

At the other end of the historical spectrum are two unreleased prototypes from the 1990s, when the industry was floundering and companies were trying to “save” pinball. Pinball Circus is an impossibly complex “vertical” pinball game, with five stacked playfields, seven flippers, and an unbelievable amount of moving objects. It’s like a pinball machine and Rube Goldberg device in one. There’s also Pinball 2000, which “holographically” reflects a graphical display onto the end of the pinball playfield, resulting in a crazy hybrid of pinball and video pinball.

In addition to modern machines (there’s a new Batman machine released post-Dark Knight, and an Indiana Jones machine covering all four movies) and old favorites (Twilight Zone! Addams Family! Indiana Jones 1993!), I got to play some older machines I’d never heard of before. The most impressive of these was probably Gottlieb’s Haunted House, a 1982 machine featuring eight flippers – four on the main playfield, two on the elevated “upstairs” playfield, and two on the recessed crypt playfield – an upside-down playfield beneath the main playfield. That sound you hear is you freaking out SO HARD right now.

Anyway, yeah, Vegas.

I love time travel stories, from The End of Eternity to The Time-Traveler’s Wife. But my favorite is Philip K. Dick’s A Little Something for Us Tempunauts. The U.S. government’s first group of time travelers know that their upcoming mission will prove fatal – due to the untimely reentry of their corpses a few days before the launch. Do they proceed with the mission? Do they try to change the outcome? Is trying to change the outcome what caused the disaster in the first place? Dick’s story goes over and over those few days, postulating a closed time loop than may have happened a dozen (or 1200) times before. The characters intuit that they may be trapped inside this loop, but they can’t prove anything, and they can’t escape. The “vast weariness” Dick hoped to portray burdens every word.

Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes) is not as good as that short story. But this Spanish sci-fi drama is cut from the same cloth – how the repetition of time travel engenders weariness, and how unlimited chances to “put things right” only tends to compound what’s already wrong. It’s a low budget film with a bare minimum of characters and sets, so I’d rather not say too much about the plot – there are only so many jigsaw pieces on the table, and anyone familiar with genre conventions will snap them together rather quickly. That statement is meant as neutral; the movie’s strengths are in its tone and the precision with which it is executed, not its originality. David Cronenberg is attached to the U.S. remake and a very good fit.

Gene Wolfe is rightly famous for the epic world-building of future-history tetralogies like Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun. And while these books are unparalled in the scope and complexity of their imagined worlds, my favorite Wolfe book is There Are Doors, a deceptively simple tale of a department store clerk who falls in love with a woman from another world. Two other recent works, The Wizard Knight and his Locus Award-winning novella, “Golden City Far,” are concerned with love: true love, knightly love, adolescent love. Though arguably simpler than his “solar” cycles, Wolfe’s more “grounded” works leave a deeper emotional impression.

The publisher describes An Evil Guest as “a novel in which Lovecraft writes Blade Runner,” which is superficially correct but also misses the point entirely. At its core, An Evil Guest is a romance, a notoriously tough sell to the genre crowd. The three corners of our love triangle Cassie Casey, a struggling musical actress who appears in kitschy off-Broadway shows; Gideon Chase, a dashing detective-wizard who gives the U.S. government the brush off to follow his own investigations; and Bill Reis, former ambassador to planet Woldercan, recently returned to Earth and somewhat changed. Chase needs to use Casey to get to Reis, and he uses his magic to unlock her inner star. Reis wants Casey because she is beautiful and Chase because he is useful, and he finances Casey’s latest production (“Dating the Volcano God”) to get closer to them both. Casey wants them both because — well, she’s not sure what she wants.

The jacket flap claims the story is set “100 years in the future,” but the calendar year is irrelevant. The world has a hard-boiled noir atmosphere — the musicals and showgirls, the diners and automats, cars and trains, and South Pacific island getaways — but it also has interstellar travel, shapeshifting aliens, and superluminal communications. There’s also room for werewolves, fairies, and alchemy…despite the varied sources, the novel isn’t a pastiche; Wolfe’s world is entirely consistent with itself, if entirely confounding to expectations.

And it is, in the end, Lovecraftian. Though only in the end; the first four-fifths of the book will have you scratching your head about why that particular adjective was invoked. The truth lies so far beneath the surface that for most of the story, it’s completely invisible. When elements of the mythos do start to appear, they’re surprising, but also startlingly effective – the lurking horror is unnerving, but the invisible horror is terrifying. The sudden introduction of unknowable evil into Wolfe’s strange-but-rational world has a powerful effect on the reader; having spent the entire book trying to understand the rules of this strange world, it turns out that none of it matters. The surface strangeness was only a distraction from the true forces, both good and evil, at play.

An Evil Guest is not Wolfe’s greatest work. But the way it seamlessly combines Lovecraftian horror, pulp, romance and science-fiction into a cohesive whole could make it his most personal. It’s hard to imagine another author that could keep this many balls in the air.

Sometimes, when the existential ennui of Orange County seems all too overwhelming, I repeat to myself as a mantra: Philip K. Dick lived here. Forget conapts; Irvine is a city where a single corporation controls 95% of the residential, business, and retail real estate (the remaining 5% is available for 99-year-lease). Grass is “under renovation.” The toll roads stomp all over southern California’s natural beauty, then have the gall to direct drivers to RelieveTraffic.org – as if paying them $10 to drive to work were your civic duty. Arrested Development and The O.C. both milked our neuroses for several seasons worth of entertainment. Richard M. Nixon was born here.

It’s a messed-up, dehumanizing place, and it’s no wonder that Philip K. Dick wrote the stories he did – he only had to look outside.

Dr. Adder, by Dick protégé K. W. Jeter, continues his tradition of Southern California dystopia. Written in 1972 – but unpublished for over a decade, due to its controversial subject matter – Dr. Adder is shockingly ahead of its time, utterly foreshadowing the dystopian cyberspace of Gibson’s Neuromancer. It also grapples with the idea that media oversaturation inevitably leads to increasingly disturbing sexual psychoses head on – the same material that Cronenberg explored in Videodrome. Jeter’s first novel, Dr. Adder is raw, unfiltered, and frankly unpleasant stuff – perhaps the reason that the novel has fallen into sub-cult status, despite its prescient content and historical significance to the genre.

The protagonist of the book is E. Allen Limmit, a corporate chicken farmer from the Arizona enclave sticks, who arrives at the “Interface” between Los Angeles and Orange County with a mysterious package. But the star of the book is the eponymous Adder, the drug-addled black market surgeon whose shadow falls over everything that transpires. Adder has risen to power by mutilating and deforming the bodies of the city’s prostitutes – the better to satisfy the increasingly twisted desires of their johns. Though horrific in its grisly detail, this, too, seems eerily prescient; as the Internet has made “ordinary” pornography ubiquitous, content has become more and more graphic to get itself noticed. There are two sorts of memes, the interesting and the awful, and human beings willingly propagate both.

Too reprehensible to be an anti-hero, too clinically detached to be a villain, Adder simply is. He and his grisly trade are part of the landscape of the Interface, an almost inevitable product of his time and place. Refusing to judge, the book instead presents Adder as an amoral opportunist who saw a market niche and worked to fill it. In other words, Adder is the quintessential Orange County resident. All that’s missing is a sign proclaiming his willing victims’ bodies “under renovation.”

Ted Chiang’s short story The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is available online in its entirety. (And it won the Nebula, as predicted here months ago.) A time-travel tale with an Arabian Nights framework, this highly emotional short story packs a surprisingly strong punch. There’s also an audiobook version.

Kij Johnson, a lovely woman I had the opportunity to meet once in Japan, wrote an excellent short story that was nominated for the 2007 Nebula but did not win. It’s available online as well, and which one you prefer will depend entirely on your temperament: The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change.

My favorite genre “series” would be Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels; a loosely-connected group of stories set in a far-future utopia of unlimited plenty. Human beings and their AI “drones” have their every whim and want fulfilled by the benevolent, god-like “Minds” behind the curtain. (Gods with a self-deprecating sense of humor, no less.) In an unusual twist, the Culture really is a utopia, not merely a surface-shiny dystopia. People and AIs are basically good. The Minds do have everyone’s best interests at heart. The Culture is the Omega Point of civilization, where matter is an afterthought, and thought is all that matters.

But while a utopia might be a great place to live, it’s a boring place to tell stories. The classical conflicts don’t include Man vs. Nothing. Which is why the Culture novels almost always involve Contact, the Culture’s overt outreach program, and the euphemistically named Special Circumstances, an impossibly powerful black ops group that does what they must, because they can. When trouble comes knocking, it comes from outside the Culture.

Banks’ first book, Consider Phlebas, features the Culture in a good old-fashioned interstellar throwdown against a xenophobic, genocidal alien threat. Later novels are considerably more nuanced, using these external forces as an opportunity to shed light on the Culture itself. The Player of Games explores how The Culture evangelizes and expands its scope without proselytizing or aggression. Excession, on the other hand, introduces The Affront: an alien race that’s not evil, merely boorish and rude; a bunch of jovial ne’er-do-wells with a society completely and paradoxically immune to the Culture’s utopian charms. Use of Weapons, my favorite of the novels, explores the outer limits of the Culture’s morality and its reliance on outsiders to fill in both ends of that bell curve. Matter is concerned with the extent that the Culture is willing (and unwilling) to meddle in the affairs of lesser civilizations, while Look to Windward looks at how the Culture atones when this meddling goes horribly, terribly wrong.

But Inversions is something else entirely: it is a Culture book without the Culture. (Literally so; the word never appears.) The story is told as two unconnected narratives from two separate narrators in two vaguely medieval countries. One of these countries is governed by a King; the other, a military Protector. The countries aren’t at war, but they’re not quite at peace, either. The narrators of both sections are ordinary citizens of the realm,documenting the troubled times they live in. The story they see and tell is nothing more than a medieval history, full of the requisite war, politics, and backroom drama.

Two of the characters being documented, however, are more than what they seem. Vosill, the Doctor who tends to the King, and DeWar, the bodyguard who protects the Protector, are members of the Culture. We know this because we are familiar with the Culture, not because of anything in the story itself. Our viewpoint stays firmly grounded for the entire narrative, and there is no “grand reveal” when the camera lens pans back into space to show us it was science fiction all along. The effect is somewhat disconcerting; almost every event is given extra meaning by this absent galactic backdrop.

Though Vosill and DeWar are both from the Culture, each has come for different, personal reasons. Vosill is an agent of Special Circumstances, sent to subtly “uplift” the kingdom in any number of subtle ways. A suggestion here, a stern word there, an invention shown to someone else so craftily that they think it their own idea; Special Circumstances flaps the butterfly wing that topples governments and foments change. DeWar, on the other hand, has come to the planet naked; leaving the Culture and its technology behind so that he might improve things on even terms. Working within the political system – not above it – he hopes to allow strong leaders a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits.

This, then, is the central conflict of the book: the responsibility of the Haves to the Have Nots. If we can improve their lot, does morality insist we must? Is outside interference permissable, even obligatory, if the deaths of thousands can be prevented? Or is this the first step towards the imperialist worldview of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden; a “we know what’s best” that demeans all involved?

It’s not an easy question, and Inversions doesn’t answer it. But both characters have given up much in their search for the answer. This is a first contact novel where contact is never made; a story defined as much by its concavities as its surfaces.

Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I am an elitist.

Most people are, insomuch as they believe some things are better than others. Everyone thinks that they have good taste–but is there any way to know for sure? The popular modern thing is to try and prove it with math, leading to the rise of aggregate filters like Game Rankings and Rotten Tomatoes. But without a proof for the fundamental taste axioms that underlie these percentages, there’s no way to know that the math is sound. What if we’re all wrong?

What if Celine Dion actually makes great music?

Such is the thesis statement of Carl Wilson’s contribution to 33 1/3, a series of book-length essays about great and timeless albums…and “Let’s Talk About Love.” Sure, just thinking of Celine gives most music fans a case of the howling fantods. But could ten million people really be so completely wrong? Surely there must be something of merit in her overproduced, saccharine pop…right?

What begins as a tongue-in-cheek effort for Wilson to stretch the limits of his personal taste–to “train” himself to enjoy, or at least understand the merits of, music completely outside his baliwick–soon turns into a serious and heartfelt mediation on the nature taste. Why do we have taste? Who decides what’s “good” and “bad” taste? What are the social, political, and class implications of taste? Is taste really as personal as we think it is, or is it something affected for the sake of others? Does the nature of criticism subconsciously exclude certain works of merit? Why do we take taste so goddamned personally?

Wilson points out that the modern aesthete isn’t “highbrow” but “no-brow,” a cultural omnivore as comfortable at a monster truck rally as a Puccini opera. This redefinition is a result of globalization and multiculturalism; the “omnivore” demonstrates cultural adaptability and open-mindedness. The cultural world of today isn’t “flat”–it’s infinitely bumpy. But in a world where even ABBA and the Monkees can be “reclaimed,” what’s the point of “taste” at all?

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes that kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” But in much of modern, critically certified art, what happens is a denial of nonshit, of everything that is acceptable in human existence… Should we make it a point never to have a nice thought without a nasty one as well?

Wilson eventually finds some kind and generous things to say about Celine’s music–not begrudgingly, or sarcastically, or post-modernly, or winkingly. But honestly and fairly. And what probably began for the reader as a journey into kitsch ends up in a more uncomfortable place. We are forced to admit that there may be more to life than being right about music and movies. But on the other side of the abyss lies redemption; a world where multiple, equally valid “taste spheres” can coexist and even support each other; where the maniacal country fan, the Pitchfork-worshipping indie kid, and the Celine-loving housewife can find, if not mutual understanding, at least mutual respect. Other people love something as much as you hate it–instead of telling them they’re wrong, why not find out why!

It turns out that the “End of Taste” in the title is not the comical edge of the abyss; instead, it’s the tabula rasa of no expectations, no definitions. If you are at all interested in matters of taste or criticism, this book is an absolute must read. If you write reviews for a living and don’t read this book, your reviews will be poorer for it. This book is hilarious, eye-opening, touching, and informative. It will teach you that you might be wrong…and that’s not the end of the world.

We only laugh at those with whom we feel an affinity that we must repudiate, but the feeling of at-oneness has already happened… What mockery reveals, in other words, is the emotional terror of democracy. That what is always being ridiculed is our wish to be together, our secret affinity for each other.

Almost all of Smith’s stories are set in a shared universe known as the Instrumentality of Mankind. Despite the stories being set in a “shared” universe, most are set hundreds, if not thousands of years apart; the entire cycle spans tens of thousands of years. The Instrumentality is a semi-governing body responsible for guiding mankind’s evolution and preserving his, well, humanity, in the face of this transgenic, intergalactic, post-post-modern future.

One of the Instrumentality’s major initiatives is the Rediscovery of Mankind, a sociological/archeological program that unearths and reimplements ancient cultures and languages to fight the stagnating effects of a post-scarcity economy–the “nightmare of perfection.” Smith grew up overseas and was stationed in Asia for several years during his time in the military; it’s possible that this international background is part of what gives his works an unusual cultural awareness for the normally white bread 1950s.

The stories are packed with feverish detail, and no two stories share the same insanities. “Scanners Live in Vain,” perhaps his most famous story, tells of the first interstellar pilots, men who have surgically removed their emotions and feelings to survive the crushing madness that lies between the stars. “The Game of Rat and Dragon” tells of starships co-piloted by genetically engineered cats, the only creatures with the reflexes to defend against the unknowable creatures inhabiting the higher dimensions of hyperspace. “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” describes the failed revolution of D’joan, forgotten dog-girl martyr of the uplifted animal underpeople. “Drunkboat” tells of a pilot who went mad in hyperspace and whose mind cannot readjust to three dimensions. “A Planet Named Shayol” tells of a prison world where drugged, deformed prisoners are used to grow extra limbs and organs for the utopian Instrumentality beyond.

All of these stories take place in the same universe, a universe with so much history forgotten and remembered and reforgotten that our own era is known as the Second Ancient Days–rediscovered, as they were, after the First Ancient Days (those date to around 12,000 A.D.). Each story hints at the thousands of years of backstory that came before it, but none stop or stoop to explain this context.

What gives these stories their strongest staying power, however, is their lancing moral clarity; Smith converted to Christianity late in life, and this spiritual rebirth infused his later stories with a sometimes harrowing spirituality–sometimes Christian, sometimes non-denominational. Take this passage from “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” when the awakened D’Joan addresses the fearful animal underpeople for the first time:

Said little Joan, “I bring you life-with. It’s more than love. Love’s a hard, sad, dirty word, a cold word, an old word. It says too much and it promises too little. I bring you something much bigger than love. If you’re alive, you’re alive. If you’re alive-with, then you know the other life is there too–both of you, any of you, all of you. Don’t do anything. Don’t grab, don’t clench, don’t possess. Just be. That’s the weapon. There’s not a flame or a gun or a poison that can stop it.”

“I want to believe you,” said Mabel, “but I don’t know how to.”

“Don’t believe me,” said little Joan. “Just wait and let things happen. Let me through, good people. I have to sleep for a while. Elaine will watch me while I sleep and when I get up, I will tell you why you are underpeople no longer.”

Or this passage, from “A Planet Called Shayol,” when a deformed prisoner, freed from his centuries of torture, demands retribution against his jailer:

“The doctor has been cured and his memories of this erased, so that he need have no shame or grief for what he has done.”

“It’s unfair!” cried the half-man. “He should be punished as we were!”

The Lady Johanna Gnade looked down at him. “Punishment is ended. We will give you anything you wish, but not the pain of another.”

Or the rambling revelations of “Drunkboat”’s hyperspace-addled captain:

“What I found in space-three…this is what I now remember. Maybe it’s a dream, but it’s all I have…I was a boat where all the lost spaceships lay ruined and still. Seahorses which were not real ran beside me. The summer months came and hammered down the sun. I went past archipelagoes of stars, where the delirious skies opened up for wanderers. I cried for me. I wept for man. I wanted to be the drunkboat sinking. I sank… I heard phosphorescence singing and tides that seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their hooves beating the reefs. You will not believe me, but I found Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes like big cats… I can’t forget the pride of unremembered flags, the arrogance of prisons which I suspected, the swimming of the businessmen! ”

“What I did, I did not do. What I did not do, I cannot tell. Let me go, because I am tired of you and space, big men and big things.”

Smith’s stories have an inexplicable surety that reinforces their apparent simplicity. His future history is heavy with the ghosts of forgotten tales, but the ones we have are strong enough to carry the weight of the universe.

It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. You couldn’t communicate with [the lost souls]?their exile from God meant that they couldn’t apprehend the mortal plane where His actions were still felt. Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior. But to Neil, the prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him. –”Hell is the Absence of God,” Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is a speculative fiction author who has written nine short stories and zero novels over the past two decades. The first eight are collected in Stories of Your Life and Others; between them, they’ve won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a Sidewise award for alternate history fiction. If his just-published ninth story, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, doesn’t win either the Hugo or the Nebula, I will be extremely surprised. Like Harlan Ellison, another short story author who’s never written much of novel length, Chiang writes short, innocuous-seeming stories that, once inside your head, explode. And the rest of your life will not be enough time for your brain to rewire the damage.

One of these stories is “Hell is the Absence of God.” I placed the whole story online for you to read, right there, behind the link. I strongly recommend it.

Nine stories may not be a lot, but it’s more than enough to grasp an author’s major themes. Chiang’s stories are driven by the idea of what role there is for people in a post-faith universe. In “Story of Your Life” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” he seeks the purpose of free will in a strictly deterministic universe, much like Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. The former explores this theme through alien linguistics; the latter, time travel and the bustling suq of Scheherazade’s nights. But both struggle with the same question: if your entire life is already as frozen as a fly in amber, why live at all?”Division by Zero” equates the uncertainty of any relationship with the unprovability of mathematical axioms. “Tower of Babylon” equates the desire to know the mind of God with the spirit of scientific inquiry–and questions whether either path has an end or use. Though his stories are written with a beautiful clinical detachment, they wrestle with the most fundamental truths of faith and purpose.

The world of “Hell is the Absence of God” is devoid of faith, but not of God; instead, He and His angels are a given, and their destructive manifestations on the mortal plane both regular and unknowable. The story, a retelling of the book of Job and C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, poses two difficult questions. The first: in a world with so much suffering, how can you learn to love God? The second, more brutal one: should you? By posting these questions but refusing to answer them, the story has been interpreted as an argument both for and against “true devotion” by believers, unbelievers, and the undecided.

So what does this have to do with neurological dissociation and Chinese boxes? The core theme of the mix CD is that of estrangement. Estrangement from self, estrangment from God. In the former scenario, you cannot perceive the universe; in the latter, the universe cannot perceive you. This idea of unknowable falliability drove the musical selection; the idea that, somewhere between you and not-you lies a flaw that can never be corrected. That no matter how hard you try, there is a portion of the universe forever outside of your perception, grasp, and understanding. Even worse: you can never even know that you don’t know it.

This is not a pleasant thought.

“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.” – Ap Dijksterhuis, Neuroscientist

Apologies for the delay; work, last week, was insane. No further details forthcoming.

(Disclaimer: the opinions presented in these entries are not necessarily my own. I’m presenting the reasoning that led to the songs and structure of my latest mix CD, not my own personal ethos. That said, I found the emotional appeal (“thinking may not matter, but feeling makes me special!”) to be sweetly ironic. Please stop watching The Fifth Element.)

So. Back to Hell is the Absence of God.

There is a famous A.I. thought experiment called the Chinese box. It goes like this: put an English-speaking individual inside a room (the “box”) full of rules and regulations about how to parse Chinese input to create Chinese output. To someone on the outside, the box passes the Turing test–it “understands” Chinese. But the poor fellow inside the box has no idea what he’s actually “saying.” From his perspective, he’s just scribbling out glyphs according to an arcane, complex ruleset without any understanding of what’s going on. The point of the Chinese box experiment is that syntactic processing and an “understanding” of that processing are by necessity distinct. This has some parallels with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, in which no mathematical system is capable of proving its own validity.

This has some unnerving implications for cognition. Peter Watts’ Blindsight is a first contact novel with an unnerving twist. It takes the idea of the Chinese box and recent neurological studies–both Blindsight and “Second Person, Present Tense” are based on months-old research, not the decades-old Libet studies–to a chilling conclusion. After detecting a strange signal in the aether, Blindsight’s skeleton crew travels into the void to try to meet the aliens and determine who they and what they want. The answer, it turns out, is “no one” and “nothing.”

Blindight asks: what if humanity is an evolutionary fluke? What if “understanding” and self-awareness aren’t the pinnacle of meat-based achievement, but instead a resource-intensive braindrain with few tangible benefits? If ours is a “war universe,” then what the hell good are aesthetics?

Blindsight postulates a galaxy of creatures intelligent, but not sentient; fiercely territorial, but completely self-unaware; outwardly brilliant, but inwardly empty. “Second Person, Present Tense” postulated that “you” might be as ephemeral as a daydream; divert your attention for a while, and when you look back, there’s someone else where your personality used to be. Blindsight’s conclusion is even more disturbing: whether sentience is a trick of neurons firing or something more…at the end of the day, it doesn’t make a goddamned bit of difference.

Deep Blue may not “understand” the game of chess, let alone appreciate the rich history of the game or the unexpected beauty of a grandmaster’s unexpected move. But it still won. Kasparov still lost. And in our war universe, that’s the only thing that matters.