Summer Rerun: Stories of Solar Stress

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(rerun inspired by the Eclipse)

In my post  A Perfect Enemy, I mentioned Poul Anderson’s 1972 story  A Chapter of Revelation.  Godintending to demonstrate His existence to the world and thereby encourage people to prevent the global nuclear war which is about to occurstops the movement of the sun across the sky. (Technically, He does this by slowing earth’s rotation period to a value identical with Earth’s year.) The reaction to this event is confirmation bias on an immense scale: just about everyone draws the conclusion that the miracle  proves  that  whatever beliefs they already held  were the correct ones…for example, a  Russian scientist (remember, this was written in 1972) suggests that  “The requirement of minimum hypothesis practically forces us to assume that what happened resulted from the application of a technology centuries beyond ours. I find it easy to believe that an advanced civilization, capable of interstellar travel, sent a team to save mankind from the carnage threatened by an imperialism which that society outgrew long ago.”    Moralists, militarists, extreme right-wing evangelists, Black Power advocates…all find in the miracle only proof of their own rightness, and the world slides into further chaos, with riots, coups d’etat, and cross-border military attacks.

Several weeks ago, I picked up Karen Thompson Walker’s novel  The Age of Miracles, in which strange solar behavior also plays a leading part. Eleven-year-old Julia, focused in the usual challenges of growing up, is not too concerned when scientists announce thatfor some unknown reasonthe earth’s rotation has slowed very slightly and the days and nights are both getting a little longer. But the process, whatever it is, continues…the days and the nights get longer..and longer..and longer.

A very well-written book, IMO; especially impressive since it is the author’s first novel. Not everyone agrees: the Amazon reviews indicate that a lot of people liked it very much, and quite a few found it disappointing. But I thought it was very worthwhile; hard to put down, in fact.

Another coming-of-age story involving solar phenomena is Connie Willis’s  Daisy, in the Sun. Like the protagonist of the previous book, Daisy is dealing with the problems of adolescenceoh, and by the way, the sun (which Daisy has always loved) is going to go nova and kill everyone on earth. It’s a strange story, difficult to summarize…I’ll just quote from the author’s introduction:

During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day,  the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going.

It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow  impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing  London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that  had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.

The Poul Anderson story can be found in his short-story collection  Dialogue With Darkness, and  Daisy, in the Sun  is in  Fire Watch.

8/22/17 update:  Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall would be a good addition to this collection.

Seth Barrett Tillman: Karl Popper’s Falsifiability: The Foreign Emoluments Clause—A Debate Between Constitutional Eloi and Constitutional Morlocks

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https://ssrn.com/abstract=2996412

Abstract
How should we understand the Foreign Emoluments Clause? The debate has been presented to the public as a choice between idiosyncratic conservatives embracing early practice and liberals embracing intellectual reconstructions of constitutional purpose. That distinction is only the surface. The reality is that this debate is a conflict between constitutional Eloi and constitutional Morlocks.
 
The ninety-nine percenters are our constitutional Eloi, our beautiful people, our self assured true believers who regularly assume they understand 99% of the Constitution’s original public meaning. For them, figuring out what a yet-to-be adjudicated clause means is easy: it only requires their selecting the most eligible meaning which already fits in with what they already know. And what’s the danger of that strategy—when you already know (or believe you know) 99% of what there is to know?
 
On the other side, we have constitutional Morlocks. Morlocks are ugly, or, at least, their theories are ugly. Ugly and dangerous. Morlocks don’t believe they know 99% of what there is to know, and, not surprisingly, they don’t believe the Eloi or anyone else knows 99% either. Moreover, Morlocks believe that fitting what you don’t know into what you (think you) know permanently freezes our constitutional theories even when those theories are entirely wrong.

(Seth adds: The PDF posted on SSRN is my amicus brief in CREW v. Trump.)

Poetry for the Eclipse

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The impending eclipse reminded NeoNeocon of  a  poem by Archibald Macleish:

And here face down beneath the sun    
And here upon earth’s noonward height    
To feel the always coming on  
The always rising of the night:  

 

To feel creep up the curving east    
The earthy chill of dusk and slow    
Upon those under lands the vast    
And ever climbing shadow grow  

 

And strange at Ecbatan the trees    
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange    
The flooding dark about their knees    
The mountains over Persia change  

 

And now at Kermanshah the gate    
Dark empty and the withered grass    
And through the twilight now the late    
Few travelers in the westward pass  

 

And Baghdad darken and the bridge    
Across the silent river gone  
And through Arabia the edge  
Of evening widen and steal on

 

RTWT.  The poem reminded me of another poem, George Meredith’s Lucifer in Starlight:

 

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.  

From Ancient Grudge

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(An archive post from 2012, from my Celia Hayes blog – which I believe has relevance this week, considering the ongoing ruckus regarding Confederate memorial statuary.)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

When I was deep in the midst of researching and writing the Adelsverein Trilogy, of course I wound up reading a great towering pile of books about the Civil War. I had to do that even though my trilogy isn’t really about the Civil War, per se. It’s about the German settlements in mid-19th century Texas. But for the final volume, I had to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began. This was all in the service of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. At first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes. It was a long time brewing, and as far as historical pivot-points go, it’s about the most single significant one of the American 19th century. For it was a war which had a thousand faces, battlefronts and aspects.
There was the War that split Border States like Kentucky and Virginia which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

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