Nothing Matters?

houlios — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:31:46 +0000

I just discovered this interview with Scott Bakker, author of one of the three greatest fantasy epics of all time, The Prince of Nothing, as well as Neuropath, a near-future pyscho-thriller. In the interview Bakker mentions having had an email exchange with Richard K. Morgan regarding “the nihlistic implications of modern neuroscience.” Bakker says:

There’s going to be people who deny this stuff come hell or high water, just as there’s people who can’t abide evolution or the heliocentric solar system. Truth be told, I’m one of them. I believe there has to be something to my experience of free will, but all the credible evidence is piling up on the other side, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. All I can do is stomp my foot and say, “No! It just can’t be.”

Because if it is, then nothing fucking matters.

I don’t understand why “nothing fucking matters” just because the stew of chemicals in your brain determines all the decisions you’re going to make. I happen to agree with Richard K. Morgan, whom Bakker paraphrases and responds to as follows:

He says he’s okay with the illusoriness of it all, so long as the illusion functions the way he needs it to function. My answer was that this was like having a wife who sleeps around town, but being okay so long as she goes through the spousal motions at home. For me, the first function of this rich, wondrous, experiential life I lead, is that it be true.

I don’t get this. How are Bakker’s “rich, wondrous” life experiences untrue?

No one else has a brain with your unique neuroprint, nor have they had the exact same experiences as you, so what exactly is the profound difference between “free will” (whatever that means) and the complex interaction between the chemicals in your head and your experiences? And why are so many people bothered by this?

The essence of Noir

shanusmagnus — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:24:25 +0000

In the course of moving the blog over to WordPress and creating an archive, I ran across the first “real” LSH post, which was about a book I’d just read: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. As it happens, over at Clarkesworld there’s an extensive interview with him, mostly about his book Thirteen, but also covering general topics. For instance:

Noir writers detected that, maybe without even consciously realizing it, and so you have this very strong male protagonist in most noir fiction, but he’s keenly aware of his own thuggishness, if you like. He’s keenly aware that it’s not like he’s the white knight and the stuff out there is dark and evil. He’s aware that this is in all of us. And so I suspect that mirroring happens a lot in noir because it’s a genre that’s concerned with what’s inside, as well as what’s outside. In noir plots the assumption tends to be that the system is corrupt: what appear to be the bad guys might be the bad guys, but what appear to be the good guys might be bad guys, as well. There’s a sense that things are rotten, and that this is the human condition.

After reading that, I realized that I’d never been satisfied with what my definition of “noir” was. I think Morgan captured something pretty important there, that explains both my affinity for his writing and the aspects of my writing that make other people describe it as noir-meets-something.

Anyway, check out the interview if you know RKM, and check out RKM if you don’t. He’s really the most interesting guy to come out of sci-fi in recent memory, as far as I’m concerned.

Long Straight Highway (redux) » books

Nothing Matters?

The essence of Noir