Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021

to quote George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And to quote him again: three words: Tell. The. Truth.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

What do we want? Here’s a partial list. We want the purse that will always be filled with gold. We want the Fountain of Youth. We want to fly. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will clean up afterwards. We want invisible servants we’ll never have to pay. We want the seven-league boots so we can get places very quickly. We want the Cloak of Invisibility so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and that will destroy our enemies utterly. We want to punish injustice. We want power. We want excitement and adventure; we want safety and security. We want to be immortal. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners. We want those we love to love us in return, and to be loyal to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve, and who will not smash up the car. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don’t want to be too hot. We don’t want to be too cold. We want to dance. We want to drink a lot without having a hangover. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be as gods. We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves stories that deal with the darker side of all our other wants.

Every breath we inhale comes from nature; kill it and we kill ourselves.

Learning begins when the learner feels safe and comfortable; provide an atmosphere of safety and comfort. And keep trying!

Thus already pre-loaded, as it were, with verbal scrambled eggs, and, not incidentally, well primed to be a coiner of neologisms later in life, I entered my adolescent years. We were not taught languages properly then. There were no language labs—it was all written work—and we had no access to the vocabularies of swearing or sex. Think how much more interesting French would have been with a few choice Madame Bovary excerpts, or Latin with a sampling of the more outrageous epigrams of Martial! But it was not to be. Caesar droned on about himself in the third person, conquering this, overthrowing that, while we drew arms on the Venus de Milo in the textbook; and in French class, the pen of my aunt rested inexorably on the desk, in the past, the past perfect, and the future perfect.

Do you as a writer expand the meanings of words, or are you merely their tool? Is your own language programming you like a computer, or are you wielding it like Prospero’s magic charms, and is there in fact a difference? Small children, when asked by Jean Piaget what part of their body they thought with, said, “My mouth”. Is thought possible without words? Do words determine what we can think, and if so, can we think some thoughts in one language that are impossible to articulate in another? (Translationland)

The oceans are the living heart and lungs of our planet. They produce most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, and through their circulating currents they control climate.Without healthy oceans, we land-dwelling,air-breathing mid-sized primates will die.

If you’ve lifted a song or a film off the Internet without paying—if you’ve got something out of it, as we say—if you’ve treated it as a gift, which by its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, what do you owe its creator, who has been the instrument through which it has arrived in your hands? Your gratitude, via a word of thanks? Your serious attention? The price of a latte deposited in a beggar’s-bowl e-tip jar? The answer is never “nothing.

The urge to tell is balanced by the urge to know. We want the story, we want the true story, we want the whole story. We want to know how bad things are, and whether they might affect us; but also we want to make up our own minds. For if we don’t know the truth of a matter, how can we have any valid opinions about it?

However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for. Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life—in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.

On the first encounter with any program, it would co-operate. Thereafter, it would do whatever the other program had done on a previous encounter. One good turn deserves another, as does one bad turn.” This program won out over time because it was never repeatedly victimized—if an opponent cheated on it, it withheld co-operation next time—and, unlike consistent cheaters and exploiters, it didn’t alienate a lot of others and then find itself shut out of play, nor did it get involved in escalating aggression. It played by a recognizable eye-for-an-eye rule: Do unto others as they do unto you. (Which is not the same as the “golden rule”—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That one is much more difficult to follow.)

Anger was something that long puzzled Le Guin. In her 2014 essay “About Anger,” she writes: Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defence….Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice….Valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness.

Other sources of puzzling words were the science fiction magazines of the times. It was still the bug-eyed space-alien monster era, so these stories featured many languages containing high-value Scrabble letters such as Q, X, and Y.

The novel proper has always laid claim to a certain kind of truth—the truth about human nature, or how people really behave with all their clothes on except in the bedroom—that is, under observable social conditions. The “genres,” it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, a bad and escapist thing, rather than just rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for novelists, the larger reading public quite likes being entertained.

The arts” – as we’ve come to term them – are not a frill. They are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not just by our minds. A society without the arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart. It would no longer be what we now recognize as human. (Scientific Romancing)

However, this does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist dystopia” except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered “feminist” by those who think women ought not to have these things. (Scientific Romancing)

I made the engineers do writing exercises based on Kafka's short parables, which was good for them, I felt, since I was sure it would be of use in their future careers.

Once you've published a book you are often asked why you did it- as if you've stolen an ashtray- and you will find me, in one of these essays, dutifully trying to account for my crime.

As the publishers were still not convinced, I told them that R, Y, X, and K were power letters, and that no title that contained all of them could possibly be without virtue. Did they believe me? It is hard to say. But Oryx and Crake has remained the name of the novel to this very day.