Peter Ward & Alexis Rockman's Monsters I Want to Fight - The Zeppelinoids

The last time I talked about the book Future Evolution, I mentioned that author Peter Ward and illustrator Alexis Rockman mostly did not engage in the kind of biological speculation that the title of their book seems to imply. 

 

But there is one exception, when Ward asks what could possibly come after the Age of Mammals, in the same way that our rise came after the Age of Dinosaurs. What currently living animal could serve as the starting point for a new set of adaptive radiation? And what new body plan would these dominant creatures take on? In basically his sole flight of fancy in the book, Ward imagines frogs developing the ability to separate liquid water into gaseous oxygen and hydrogen, giving rise to a whole new variety of life...

 

Jellyblimp illustration by Michael Whelan for Our Universe

"Can we imagine an entirely new type of animal that could replace the current evolutionary dominants, the large mammals? This new class would have to have evolved from some currently existing creature, but it could have characteristics and a body plan vastly different from those of the preceding dominants. Such a new body type could exploit some entirely new food type or habitat. Let us imagine such a breakthrough - the conquest of the lower atmosphere by floating organisms called Zeppelinoids."

"After the extinction of most mammals (and humanity), Zeppelinoids evolve (let's say from some species of toad, whose large gullet can swell outward and become a large gasbag). The great breakthrough comes when the toad evolves a biological mechanism inducing electrolysis of hydrogen from water. Gradually the toad evolves a way to store this light gas in its gullet, thus producing a gasbag. Sooner or later small toads are floating off into the sky for short hops (but longer hops than their ancestors were used to). More refinements and a set of wings give a modicum of directionality. Legs become tentacles, trailing down from the now thoroughly flight-adapted creatures, which can no longer be called toad: they have evolved a new body plan establishing them as a class of vertebrates, the Class Zeppelinoida. 

 

"Like so many newly evolving creatures, the Zeps rapidly increase in size: when small they are sitting ducks (flying toads?) for faster-flying predatory birds. Because their gasbag is not size-limiting, they soon become large. Eventually they are the largest animals ever evolved on Earth, so large that terrestrial and avian predators no longer threaten them, reaching dimensions greater than the blue whale. Their only threat comes from lightning strikes, which result in spectacular, fatal explosions visible for miles. The Zeps can never get around this inherent flaw, for there is no biological means of producing the inflammable, inert gas helium and thus avoiding instant death from lightning. But then, life is never perfect, and the Zeps still do well, especially in areas with little lightning."
 
"Now the dominant animals of the world, the Zeps float above the ground like great overgrown jellyfish, snagging with their dragging tentacles the few species of deer (and other herbivorous vertebrates) still extant and stuffing them into a Jabba-the-Hutt-sized mouth. Because Zeps evolved from amphibians and are still cold-blooded, they have a very low metabolic rate, and thus need to feed only sparingly. Their design is so successful that they quickly diverge into many different types. Soon herbivorous forms are common, floating above the forests, eating the tops of trees, while others evolve into zep-eating Zeps. Still others become like whales, sieving insects out of the skies; in so doing, they soon drive many bird species to extinction. The world changes as more and more Zeps prowl the air, floating serenely above the treetops, filling the skies with their numbers, their shadows dominating the landscape. It is the Age of Zeppelinoids."
 
"A fairy tale - but there is a glimmer of reality in this fable. Evolution in the past has produced vast numbers of new species following some new morphological breakthrough that allows some lucky winner to colonize previously unexploited habitat. The first flying organisms, the first swimming organisms, the first floating organisms, all followed these breakthroughs with huge numbers of new species quickly radiating from the ancestral body type, all improving some aspects of the design or changing styles to allow variations on the original theme."

 

the skies above Atlas on Alien Worlds

 

The idea of floating animals shows up in a couple other places. In my childhood favorite, National Geographic's Our Universe book, illustrator Michael Whelan imagined Jellyblimps and predatory Swordtails in the endless skies of Jupiter.

Netflix's Alien Worlds documentary miniseries, which I've recommended before, includes the speculative planet Atlas, which has a higher mass than Earth, and thus a denser, more buoyant atmosphere. The show's creators also thought of floating animals filling the skies.

On both Jupiter and Atlas, the stronger gravity creates much stronger atmospheric pressure, so that, ironically, floating is easier there than it is on Earth. (Think of how much easier it is to float in water than in air!) The Zeppelinoids are unique among these floating species because their specific lighter-than-air gas is hydrogen. This creates a special peril for them, as Ward mentioned in the quote, but also creates a special opportunity. 

 

The ability to separate hydrogen gas out of water might only evolve a single time, but once it does, the lifeform that evolved it might diverge into a number of new species that use it in different ways. In other words, the Zeppelinoids could be cousins to hydrogen-fueled fire-breathing dragons.

 

Zeppelinoid sketch, by me

 
Above is my own, very rough, sketch of a Zeppelinoid. (Possibly one still at an intermediate stage of evolution, not even its final form.) We see the base frog's throat pouch and belly monstrously distended into a spherical hydrogen bag. The Zep's spine is at the bottom of its body and its head, from the perspective of terrestrial beings, is upside down. Its fore-limbs have become bat-like wings, with the fingers of the frog's front feet becoming the spars of the wings, and the webbed skin between those fingers forming the membrane. Its hind-limbs have become masses of tentacles, with the toes of the frog's back feet becoming grossly elongated to allow the Zep to wrap them around its prey.

 

A fully evolved Zeppelinoid might have an even more specialized body, one that looks more like an octopus or jellyfish, whose original species might be much less evident.

 

In an adventure setting, relatively stationary Zeppelinoids might serve as a landmark by floating above a particular lake or body of water. Or their migratory routes might bob along a north-south or east-west axis, aiding navigation. They might even fly directly over a specific important trade route, showing the way from one city to another.

 

A setting that has Zeppelinoids could easily have airships. People might use a Zep as a draft animal, using it to pull a carriage through the sky. Or Zep hide might be used as the bag for an airship. Or the sight of them might simply serve as inspiration, letting humanity know that lighter-than-air flight is possible. Large enough Zeps might serve as a navigational hazard, like living icebergs. Predatory Zeps might attack airships, whether to eat the cargo, or the passengers and crew, or just to defend their territory against intruders. And of course, an airship might attempt to camouflage itself and hide from other human pilots by steering a course among a population of Zeppelinoids.

As a monster, a Zeppelinoid is a challenging foe. It likely hovers outside of missile range, untouchable until it's ready to engage in combat. It could pluck an adventurer from the ground or off of horseback, crushing them with its tentacle, biting them with its mouth, or most frighteningly, simply dropping them from a great height. 

 

The Zeps' weakness is that they'll die instantly if they take any damage from lightning or fire. An exploding Zeppelinoid might threaten adventurers if it's floating low enough at the time it combusts. There's also a chance that one exploding Zep could ignite any others nearby.

Avant-Gardes, Scenes, Industries, and Traditions in Jennifer Lena's "Banding Together"

I recently read Jennifer Lena's Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music, and although Lena is writing solely about music, it's not hard to think that her model might do a pretty good job describing other kinds of creative communities, potentially including tabletop rpgs.

Lena is a sociologist of culture, and a lot of her research focuses on popular music, especially rap. In Banding Together, she looked at the histories of 60 styles of music and looked for similarities in the ways the styles changed over time. Style here refers to a pretty specific community of musicians and fans; when many related styles coexist and follow after each other in a kind of family, they form what Lena calls a stream. So like, rock music would be considered a stream, while things like grunge, glam, garage, punk, and emo would be considered styles. Style and stream are categories that describe things that exist in the real world, but they have no existence of their own except as useful descriptors.

Lena observes that musical styles change over time in ways that are related to their popularity and access to resources, such as money, access to practice and performance space, and attention from fans, journalists, and academics. Her model suggests four main genre types that music styles can fit into - avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditional. Genre types are also descriptive categories, and she classifies each style as belonging to a single type at any given point in its history, and as I said, this classification is based on access to resources. 

A successful style might begin as an avant-garde, grow to become a scene, find commercial success in the industry, get taken up as a tradition, and eventually birth new avant-garde styles to either form a new stream or join an existing one. Less successful styles stop short of that in some way, and there are doubtless countless avant-garde styles that never become successful enough to form a scene.

What I find most interesting about Lena's model is her finding that each genre style has not only a predictable set of material conditions that go together - the size style, how it's organized, where its members can meet to practice and perform, how much attention it receives, what sources of money are available - but also a predictable set of cultural conditions - how codified the conventional ways of performing the style are, how style members use technology, how codified the ways of dressing and acting are, even what kinds of debates style members have with each other, a finding that was particularly interesting to me. Lena stops short of saying that the material causes the cultural, but she does observe that they tend to go together in predictable enough bundles that it was easy for her to identify four common bundles and call them genre types.

Really interested readers might enjoy Lena's whole book, but if you just want the primary model where she lays out the four genre types, that's in chapter 2, which I want to quote from some below. Lena's words appear in blue. I've removed all of her examples where she talks about rap, bluegrass, and bebop. But if you're like me, you'll be filling in rpg examples in your head as you read.

Avant-garde Genres

Music, like other forms of taste, changes slowly and incrementally. Nonetheless there are junctures when performers, fans, and commenters point to cumulative changes significant enough to distinguish it from earlier forms of music. Music performers always have some dissatisfaction with contemporary music or their place in it, and fans are looking for novelty, so there is a consistent, in inchoate, desire for change. Avant-garde genres are formed when music practitioners come together and share their concern over the state of music in their field of action and reinforce each other's desire to do something about it. Avant-garde genres are quite small, having no more than a dozen or so active participants who meet informally and irregularly, and are often conceived in spaces like coffee shops and basements. They attract virtually no press attention, performance conventions are not codified, and there is typically little consensus over how members should dress, talk, or describe themselves as a group.

Avant-garde circles are leaderless and fractious and consequently typically unravel in a matter of months from lack of recognition, or because a subset of the circle participants gain wider recognition. The objective of Avant-garde genres is to play informally together, share recorded music, and air complaints about the hegemonic music in the relevant stream of music. 

The genre ideal, and specifically the musical ideas that are central to it, may emerge from members taking lessons, carefully listening to records, and playing with different kinds of musicians. Alternatively, Avant-gardists may assert that prevailing musical styles have become predictable and emotionless and, flaunting the fact that they are not able to play instruments in conventional ways, make what others see as loud and hash sounds. In crafting music that is "new," Avant-gardists may combine elements of musics that have been treated as distinct. The desire to produce a new music drives the group to engage in experimental practices, including playing standard instruments in unconventional ways, creating new musical instruments, and modifying objects that heretofore have not been employed in the production of music. 

Such circles typically meet face-to-face, but this may be changing in the era of the Internet. Circle members need spaces to meet where they can freely discuss and cement their shared investment in musical innovation.

The experimental ethos of Avant-garde circles is often expressed through the idiosyncratic grooming, dress, demeanor, and argot of members, but these are not (yet) consolidated into a distinctive style.

In Avant-garde genres, circle members contribute resources, and they also get resources from others attracted to the musical experimentation. Partners contribute nurturance, financial support, and a home; other musicians and music industry people act as informal advisors and critics; buy supporting a new music, bar owners get customers on off nights. As a rule, Avant-garde members do not receive remuneration for their participation in music-related activities. They earn money for performing conventional styles of music and from nonperformance employment. Thus many Avant-gardists live with little recognition and many privations. These harsh conditions may retrospectively be romanticized as bohemian, but they contribute to the demise of many Avant-garde genres. The privations are exacerbated by the tendency of some Avant-garde musicians to consume quantities of drugs and alcohol.

The music and the people making it receive virtually no press coverage, which makes it exceedingly difficult for us to find accounts of Avant-garde genres that failed to progress to another genre form. Numerous appellations are given to the new music, which also contributes to the difficulty in identifying musics that do not survive the Avant-garde period.

Musics can remain in the Avant-garde period for a long time or may quickly transition into Scene-based genres. The key features of this transition are these: relatively stable aural and visible identifiers of the group emerge; artists begin to seek resources that allow them to perform their music for a larger public; and the group identifies a set of goals for action - actions or ideas that are seen to be solutions to the complaints the group has about status quo music.

Scene-based Genres

It appears that most Avant-garde genres wither or merge with other musical styles early on, and only a few begin to draw more substantial resources and a larger cluster of devotees and evolve into Scene-based genres. Scene-based genres are characterized by an intensely active, but moderately sized group of artists, audience members, and supporting organizations. For more than a decade the concept of "scene" has been used by scholars to refer to a community of spatially situated artists, fans, scene-focused record companies, and supporting small business people. Such local scenes may also be in communication with like scenes in distant locales whose members enjoy the same kind of music and lifestyle. In recent years, we have acknowledged the importance of virtual scenes composed of devotees who interact via the Internet. 

Scene-based genre members earn money from activities within the community, including music making, especially once they attract the attention of the local or specialty press. Much attention is paid to codifying performance conventions, and the dress, adornment, drugs, and argot of group members. Members are also concerned with distinguishing themselves from rival musics, especially those that share the same performance space or fans. Most Scene-based genres acquire a name for their group that is invented or announced in the Scene-based media.

Scene-based genres have a loose organizational form characterized by nested rings of groups characterized by varying levels of commitment to the community. At the center are clusters of those most responsible for the distinctive characteristics of the music, including many members of the Avant-garde genre. Then there is the ring of committed activists whose identity, and sometimes means of employment, are tied to the scene. Outside of this is the ring of fans that participate in the scene more or less regularly. The outer ring is made up of "tourists" who enjoy activities within the scene without identifying with it.

Stylistic innovations and charismatic leaders who promote them play a key role in developing the consensus around genre ideal. The consensus marks the transition from the Avant-garde to the Scene-based genre. Technological innovations can also change the balance among elements of the music during the Scene-based genre. The transition between Avant-garde and Scene-based genres marks the introduction of both technological and live performance conventions that in turn affect conventions in the recording studio later on. Social conventions, including styles of clothes and adornment, body type, argot, and "attitude," are codified in Scene-based genres. These allow fellow travelers to identify scene members.

Scenes, musical and otherwise, commonly emerge in so-called bohemian neighborhoods where rents are low, police supervision is lax, multiple opportunities for low-skill labor exist, concentrations of other artists are found, and residents tolerate diversity of all kinds. Such neighborhoods nurture the scene, and the lifestyle growing around it, by fostering constant interaction among scenesters without attracting unwanted attention from the wider community.

These neighborhoods include local businesses that support the Scene-based genre, including coffee shops, clubs, dance halls, record stores, churches, small recording studios, and independent record labels. Business entrepreneurs, often drawn from the ranks of scene participants, become music promoters, club owners, and band managers. Some found independent record companies, Scene-based fanzines, and Internet sites, while local newspapers, radio stations, and criminal elements arrive in the area to support the scene and to derive profits from it. 

Scene musicians and ancillary creative people are often not able to support themselves entirely from the music. They typically take low-skill service jobs in the community and also depend on money and other support from partners, family, and friends. As scenes develop, these neighborhoods draw both more casual scenesters and merchandisers of elements of the genre lifestyle, hastening the end of the intensely local genre form.

Genre-based media begin to develop in Scene-based genres. The strong and relatively coherent complaints of genre members against the status quo often attract attention from niche media, who provide the clearest, most nuanced and positive portrayals of the scene. These include fanzines, Internet sites, blogs, small-circulation magazines, and often the local free weekly entertainment guide. Collectively they serve to define, explain, promote, and critique the music and its associated lifestyle. Because these writers try to talk about the coalescing style, they have to find a name to describe its musical aesthetics. Thus begins the formulation of the collective memory about the history and founding heroes of the music.

In Scene-based genres stakeholders have only a few contacts with the world outside the scene, but those they do have are important in building the solidarity within the community. First, there is usually bitter antagonism between proponents of the new music and representatives of the status quo in the relevant field. Fighting against a shared antagonist often builds solidarity within Scene-based genres. Second, the operation of the scene in marginal facilities with opportunistic promoters means that scene participants are regularly exposed to what they identify as dangerous conditions, and they may be liable to arrest for violating ordinances concerning dancing, noise abatement, fire, and decency, as well as laws controlling liquor and drug use. Finally, symbols of inclusion/exclusion also serve to identify scene members to outsiders who may be alarmed, upset, or simply bemused. These three sources of censure all serve to build scene solidarity. As importantly, they typically lend the genre an oppositional political cast.

In addition to their musical complaints, Scene-based genre members will often critique large social injustices, although they may target their critique within the local environment. Lyrical content often incorporates aspects of this oppositional stance. Insertion of politics into the scene's identity is an indicator that the music has entered the mature phase of the Scene-based genre. An additional aspect of scene members' political identity project is that they begin to defend the borders of the group and differentiate between what are acceptable lifestyle choices and what are not.

Many Scene-based musics wither or merge into streams. For those styles that transition into an Industry-based genre, the key ingredient is that the scene attracts the attention of major music producers seeking to develop new music and new markets.

Industry-based Genres

Industry-based genres are so-named because their primary organizational form is the industrial corporation. Some of these are multinational in scope, but others are independent companies organized to compete directly with the multinationals. Along with industrial firms, the prime actors in these genres include singers and musicians who contract for their services, targeted audiences, and a wide array of ancillary service providers from song publishers to radio stations and retail outlets. Artists generate income from sales, licensing, merchandise, and product endorsements, and this often drives aesthetic decisions. Performance conventions are highly codified, driven by industry categories and the production tools that standardize sounds. The attire of performers is adapted for the mass market, and made widely available to fans, along with argot, adornment, or features of lifestyle that can be monetized.

The goal for members of Industry-based genres is to produce revenue by selling musical products to as many consumers as possible. There are several means employed to increase sales. Efforts are directed toward codifying, simplifying, and teaching the genre conventions. Tablature for guitars and other instruments and transcriptions of the lyrics are widely available, and musical teachers and mentors are in plentiful supply in most places. Firms train new artists to work within highly codified performance conventions, and record producers regularly coach songwriters and artists to make music that is simple and clearly within the style so it will appeal to the mass audience. 

Over the past century, technological innovations have also served to standardize and simplify the production of music in order to satisfy the needs of mass production. "Contact men" working for the firm conscript music critics and disc jockeys into promoting new works and new artists. Trade magazine-produced weekly charts of song sales help to guide industry decisions about the relative success of individual songs and whole musical styles. The otherwise highly competitive multinational conglomerates collectively fight the unauthorized use and distribution of their copyrighted music, and do whatever they can to frustrate the development of spin-off styles.

A common feature of the transition from the Scene-based to the Industry-based genre is the assertion of market dominance by major record corporations that gain control from the independent labels that had dominated the Scene-based genre. Enterprising independent label heads understandably seek to increase the visibility of their artists and the sales of their records, but insofar as they are successful, the major companies may buy out artist and label contracts. Sales success is a strong indicator of the presence of an Industry-based genre. Sales success is gauged according to codified performance conventions that are governed by industry categories, although they may sometimes be recognized as novel and added as a shelving designation, a type of sales chart, a division of a record company, and so forth.

Artists working in Industry-based genres earn their income exclusively from work performed for large organizations. However, it is a common misunderstanding that sales revenue is sufficient to provide artists with an extravagant lifestyle, or that record sales are the major source of income for artists working in such genres. In fact, industry-based genre artists profit more from merchandise sales, concert ticket sales, and performance royalties (from live and recorded performances of their songs).

In the process of absorption into multinational corporations and mass production systems, genre names become more clearly fixed. If a name emerged in the Scene-based period, producers and journalists may continue its use. Like the music, elements of dress, adornment, and lifestyle are exaggerated and mass-marketed to new fans of Industry-based genres. 

The financial resources and promotional expertise of major companies will often propel Industry-based genres into the national media. In most cases, national media coverage of the genre will be ill informed about the music, and will depict the musicians as the Pied Pipers of deviance. The danger of Industry-based genres is framed in three contradictory ways. Journalists may portray the genre lifestyle as innocent fun and feature its colorful surface aspects; they may spin the lifestyle as a danger to its fans; or they may claim a danger is posed to society by its "lawless, anti-social, and hedonistic fans." The media may also ignite a "moral panic" in which genre spokespeople, police, political authorities, religious leaders, parent groups, teachers, and moral pundits of all sorts provide the willing press with lurid quotes. Press coverage of these moral panics often highlights racist, classist, or sexist tropes. The added attention to the genre is likely to draw even more fans.

Despite the level of conflict that often accompanies the Industry-based genre, hard-core scene members often spend this period complaining that the sense of being oppositional and hip has been lost. The threat posed by the popularity of music created in the Industry-based genre encourages the hard-core scenesters to cleave to a reductionist notion of the genre ideal. Supporters of the Scene-based phase of the music are especially put off by the large number of "tourists" joining the ranks of the music's fan base in the Industry-based phase. New recruits argue over what constitutes authenticity in music, musicians, and signs of group affiliation, and committed older, longer-term fans and performers engage in a discourse about authenticity lost. This tension is sometimes divisive enough to propel some genre members into forming an Avant-garde genre, while the others create a Traditionalist genre.

Traditionalist Genres

Musical styles that have experienced the explosive Industry-based phase of development tend to suffer a crisis as their many casual fans find a new distraction, and a style's mass popularity wanes. Major record companies looking for "the next big thing" no longer promote the music, and the media see it as music to review rather than as a lifestyle that is the source of news. Resources shrink as players, performance space owners, and fans move on to other music interests. The massification of musical styles and growing friction between hard-core musicians and scenesters against outsiders fuels the fracturing of music into numerous distinct styles.

Traditionalist genres emerge when committed players, fans, and genre-supporting business people decry what they identify as the adulterating consequences of the commercial exploitation of the music in the Industry-based genre. They focus on purifying the music by eradicating the excesses of the Industry-based genre and reenacting a version of what the music was like in its Scene-based period. They seek to preserve the community's musical heritage and inculcate in a rising generation of devotees the performance techniques, history, and rituals of the style. Fans and organizations dedicated to perpetuating the music put great effort into constructing its history and highlighting exemplary performers who embody the collective memory of the genre they construct.

Traditionalist genres are discussed in academic or lay treatments of music, are performed at conferences and festivals, and rely on small-scale or non-profit organizations. The genre-oriented press publishes schedules of events, recounts recent events, prints articles on performance techniques, profiles both venerated and rising artists and groups, and review new and remastered records. Many archival music compilations are released, and a small industry is devoted to remastering and rereleasing old albums.

At the start of the Traditionalist genre, a scholarly literature emerges that strives to preserve, codify, and organize the field. Scholars and lay historians are often preoccupied with the quest for the true or authentic, complete history of a musical style, and this preservationist spirit is precisely what differentiates Traditionalist genres from other genre types. Musicians and promoters often play a key role in defining the field, particularly if they were active during the Scene-based form. The codification of a musical style's history and significance is the core activity of Traditionalist genre members.

Members of Traditionalist genres meet in clubs and at gatherings of musical associations, academic conferences, and festivals; they communicate at a distance through newsletters, academic journals, trade magazines, and discussion sites on the Internet. Traditionalist genres are populated by dedicated fans, semiprofessional and experienced musicians, and academics from a variety of disciplines. Academic classes in the music and its history often become available, but much instruction in musical techniques and genre lore is received via one-on-one interaction with established performers and other aficionados.

Performers and promoters commonly rely on employment outside the musical community. Festivals and tours often provide the greatest percentage of music-related income to Traditionalist performers, in combination with income from selling records, musical instruments, and music-related ephemera. Many fans sing, play an instrument, or act as promoters of events, so there is a less distinct division of labor among fan, artist, and industry than in Industry-based or fully developed Scene-based genres.

Members regularly travel to conferences and festivals, collect and display records and memorabilia, raise money for ailing artists, and build organizations dedicated to perpetuating the music. Festivals are extremely common among Traditionalist genres, and are critical to their momentum and cohesion. Festivals play a key role in codifying and legitimating a single genre ideal.

Members of Traditionalist genres tend to resemble one another in dress, adornment, and argot. They wear muted, somewhat stereotypic styles of the aging artist or academic and may often use verbal expressions seen by others as out-of-date. They may also resemble stereotypes of a Scene-based performer.

Committed Traditionalists expend a great deal of energy fighting with each other about the models they construct to represent their music and the canon of its iconic performers. They argue over which instruments and vocal stylings are appropriate, and they may even battle over the place and time when the music originated. The test of authenticity is often taken to be the race, class, educational attainment, and regional origins of performers. Even journalistic and academic accounts of Traditionalist genres engage in such demographic profiling. These outsiders often conflate stories of a musical style's origin with its present Traditionalist form, and these stereotypes influence tourists who want to know something about the musical style.

After the Tradition

Industry-based communities often disband with the drift of casual fans to new musical distractions and the consequent twilight of mass popularity. The crisis within the community is focused on the debate between the nascent Traditionalists, who seek to preserve the music performed in the Scene-based phase, and those who focus on continuing the aesthetic development characteristic of the Scene-based period and living out the creative spirit of the music through innovation and hybridization. This second group often forms a new Avant-garde genre. 

Avant-gardists revolt against the popularizing tendencies of the Industry-based genre, and those who write about them begin to use the evaluative discourse of art, evoking images of genius and creative quest. Some find inspiration in unusual meldings of music in cooperation with other creative artists working in other musical styles. The discourse of creative genius helps musicians to distance themselves from the demands of fans of the style from which they have hived off. Like all Avant-gardists, they must rely on sympathetic independent record companies, promoters, and venue owners. Avant-gardists also tend to distance themselves from Traditionalist artists and fans.

Vignette Book Reviews - Cities, Dreams, Afterlives, Odysseys

Current events have really depleted my attention span and my ability to focus. One solution, for me, has been to read books, not just of short stories, but of SHORT shorts, essentially vignettes.

 

I actually started out trying to read Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines, thinking those might be about the right length, but almost all the news-in-brief items that Feneon wrote that became part of this collection are murders or suicides, and there are an awful lot of them. The book might easily have been called Obituaries in Three Lines instead. It was just too much death for me to read this year.

 

 

Zenobia by Enrique Palacios

 

Zenobia by David Fleck

   

The first vignette collection I actually finished reading recently - well, re-reading, if we're being honest - was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I had in mind that I might try writing up mini-dungeons, or neighborhood adventuring sites, or something, based on Calvino's descriptions. The thing that I'd forgotten is that while every vignette is about what cities are like, only a few of them are about what cities look like. My favorite of those is Armilla from "Thin Cities 3", which is like a skeleton made up of nothing but plumbing and pipes with no buildings around them. The rest of the stories are more about what cities feel like, how we think of them and remember them. 

One recurrent theme is the way that we experience only a small part of any city, so that the versions that live on in our heads are much simpler, and involve more repetition of elements, than actual cities really do. Another is the emotion - often disappointment or disbelief - that accompanies the dissonance between the real city and the cities inside our heads.

Calvino's cities are organized by theme, and the themes are then braided so that you alternate between different themes as you read through. It's a skillful structure, and it reminds me of Calvino's Mr Palomar, which is similarly regimented. I don't know that there's exactly a trend toward modernity, but in the last section especially, the cities go from being timeless to being explicitly contemporary, somewhat belying the premise of Calvino transcribing stories that were told verbally in the 13th century.

The braided stories are divided into sections, and between them are interludes of Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn talking about cities. Some of these are obvious, functional framing devices, some are about the difficulty of communicating, and some are like Calvino's own meta-commentary about possible ways for us to interpret the stories, bit like Borges does in "The Immortal" and some of his other stories. He does something similar between the chapters of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. I'm not sure if the interludes get worse as the book goes on, or if I just get more tired of them. I do have an intuition that if Calvino didn't include the interludes and explicitly instruct the reader to look for possible and contradictory interpretations of the vignettes, the book as a whole wouldn't have been quite so well received by critics.

Although it's not my favorite vignette in the book, for a variety of reasons, the story of Melania felt like the only one I could choose for this moment.

Cities and the Dead 1 -

"At Melania, every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in a dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking note to the process. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.

Melania's population renews itself: the participants in the dialogues die one by one and meanwhile those who will take their places are born, some in one role, some in another. When one changes roles or abandons the square forever or makes his first entrance into it, there is a series of changes, until all the roles have been reassigned; but but meanwhile the angry old man goes on replying to the witty maidservant, the usurer never ceases following the disinherited youth, the nurse consoles the stepdaughter, even if none of them keeps the same eyes and voice he had in the previous scene.

At times it may happen that a sole person will simultaneously take on two or more roles - tyrant, benefactor, messenger - or one role may be doubled, multiplied, assigned to a hundred, a thousand inhabitants of Melania: three thousand for the hypocrite, thirty thousand for the sponger, a hundred thousand king's sons fallen in low estate and awaiting recognition.

As time passes the roles, too, are no longer exactly the same as before; certainly the action they carry forward through intrigues and surprises leads toward some final denouement, which it continues to approach even when the plot seems to thicken more and more and the obstacles increase. If you look into the squares in successive moments, you hear from act to act the dialogue changes, even if the lives of Melania's inhabitants are too short for them to realize it."

- from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
 

 

Valdarda by Enrique Palacios

 

Einstein's Dreams was one of the first collections of vignettes I ever read, and only later did I realized that Alan Lightman was emulating Calvino's premise and technique. These stories are supposedly dreams that Albert Einstein had while he was working on his theory of relativity. They resemble some of the thought experiments Einstein explicitly posed to both develop his theory and understand its implications. The "dreams" are like more fanciful, more poetic versions of those gedankenexperiment, and they seem largely truthful to what we know about relativity.

The stories I remembered best before rereading were the ones where some facet of time-dilation becomes a central feature of social inequality. Time passes more slowly the further you go from the center of the Earth, so everyone lives as high up the hills and mountains as they can, and the wealthy build their houses on enormous stilts. Time passes more slowly inside a fast moving vehicle, so every house is on wheels, cities are just fleets of racing buildings, and the wealthy drive the fastest houses of all. 

Other stories are more about the span of life, or about the subjective experience of time, especially during moments of great importance - some of these imagine that objective time works the way subjective time feels, others that subjective time feels the way objective time works. Some stories work by taking some feature of relativity and magnifying it so that it works at the scale of human life, rather than only being noticeable on the scale of planets and stars and the speed of light. Instead, it all matters at human size and human speed. Someone could probably write a successful collection of vignettes that do the same thing with quantum mechanics. All the stories are set in Bern, Switzerland, so we see the same city transformed over and over by different facets of time.

Aside from the structure of the collection, with dreams instead of cities, Lightman also references Calvino by occasionally interspersing a daytime meeting between Einstein and his friend Besso. These interludes seem largely historically accurate, and seem to be mostly an excuse to include biographical details that help contextualize what Einstein's life looked like before he was famous. None of these interludes annoyed me the was a few of Calvino's did, but they're also arguably less important to the meaning of the book.

15 May 1905 - 

"Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.

A child at the seashore, spellbound by her first glimpse at the ocean. A woman standing on a balcony at dawn, her hair down, her loose sleeping silks, her bare feet, her lips. The curved arch of the arcade near the Zahringer Fountain on Kramgasse, sandstone and iron. A man sitting in the quite of his study, holding the photograph of a woman, a pained look on his face. An osprey framed in the sky, its wings outstretched, the sun rays piercing between feathers. A young boy sitting in an empty auditorium, his heart racing as if he were on stage. Footprints in snow on a winter island. A boat on the water at night, its lights dim in the distance, like a small red star in the black sky. A locked cabinet of pills. A leaf on the ground in autumn, red and gold and brown, delicate. A woman crouching in the bushes, waiting by the house of her estranged husband, whom she must talk to. A soft rain on a spring day, on a walk that is the last walk a young man will take in the place he loves. Dust on a windowsill. A stall of peppers on Marketgasse, the yellow and green and red. Matterhorn, the great jagged peak of white pushing into the solid blue sky, the green valley and the log cabins. The eye of a needle. Dew on leaves, crystal, opalescent. A mother in bed, weeping, the smell of basil in the air. A child on a bicycle in the Kleine Schanze, smiling the smile of a lifetime. A tower of prayer, tall and octagonal, open balcony, solemn, surrounded by arms. Steam rising from a lake in early morning. An open drawer. Two friends at a cafe, the lamplight illuminating one friend's face, the other in shadow. A cat watching a bug on the window. A young woman on a bench, reading a letter, tears of joy in her green eyes. A great field, lined with cedar and spruce. Sunlight, in long angles through the window in late afternoon. A massive tree fallen, roots sprawling in the air, bark, limbs still green. The white of a sailboat, with the wind behind it, sails billowed like wings of a giant white bird. A father and son alone at a restaurant, the father sand and staring down at the tablecloth. An oval window, looking out on fields of hay, a wooden cart, cows, green and purple in the afternoon light. A broken bottle on the floor, brown liquid in the crevices, a woman with red eyes. An old man in the kitchen, cooking breakfast for his grandson., the boy gazing out the window at a white painted bench. A worn book lying on a table beside a dim lamp. The white on water as a wave breaks, blown by wind. A woman lying on her couch with wet hair, holding the hand of a man she will never see again. A train with red cars, on a great stone bridge with graceful arches, a river underneath, tiny dots that are houses in the distance. Dust motes floating in sunlight through a window. The thin skin in the middle of a neck, thin enough to see the pulse of blood underneath. A man and woman naked, wrapped around each other. The blue shadows of trees in a full moon. The top of a mountain with a strong steady wind, the valley falling away on all sides, sandwiches of beef and cheese. A child wincing from his father's slap, the father's lips twisted in anger, the child not understanding. A strange face in the mirror, gray at the temples. A young man holding a telephone, startled at what he is hearing. A family photograph, the parents young and relaxed, the children in ties and dresses and smiling. A tiny light, far through a thicket of trees. The red at sunset. An eggshell, white, fragile, unbroken. A blue hat washed up on shore. Roses cut and adrift on the river beneath the bridge, with a chateau rising. Red hair of a lover, wild, mischievous, promising. The purple petals of an iris, held by a young woman. A room of four walls, two windows, two beds, a table, a lamp, two people with red faces, tears. The first kiss. Planets caught in space, oceans, silence. A bead of water on the window. A coiled rope. A yellow brush."

- from Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

Sofronia by Enrique Palacios

 

Sophronia by David Fleck

   

The first time I read the vignettes of possible gods and possible afterlives in David Eagleman's Sum, it reminded me of a series of thought experiments I read in my college philosophy class (either Plato's Phaedo or one of David Hume's essays on Natural Religion) - what if god is an automated universe-building robot left behind on autopilot by an earlier inventor god? what if god is a vegetable and only cares about the existence of plantlife? what if our god is the youngest, weakest, most foolish member of a vast pantheon, and all the others created superior universes? etcetera ...

Some of Eagleman's vignettes imagine different versions of god, others imagine different versions of the afterlife, still others are really about different images of what the universe is and how it was made. Quite a few deal with the purpose of existence, which consistently seems to be something like achieving a lasting romantic love. There are recurrent themes of fallible gods being frustrated by their inability to fully understand or control the universe, and of human souls being disappointed with the afterlife. A few visions of reincarnation involve people alternating between modes of existence, each of which is intended to compensate for the flaws of the other.

The title story, "Sum", reminds me so much of Stanislaw Lem's "One Human Minute" that I wonder if Eagleman was inspired by it. The afterlife in "Metamorphosis", where people wait in a sort of heavenly antechamber until they are finally forgotten by everyone still living, strikes me as very similar to the starting premise of Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. There are a number of stories with alien creators, like Deep Thought in Douglas Adam's Hitchiker's Guide trilogy, who built both the Earth and human beings as a type of living computers.

The best stories here help you to think about life in a different way, or the many varieties of loss, or the many ways that adulthood involves becoming disillusioned with something that seemed simpler and purer when you were a child. The worst stories are typically too simple, too pat, too self-satisfied, invoking romantic love as some sort of compensation or cure-all for all of life's disappointments.

I found myself unable to pick between these two stories, both of which, I think, speak to the current moment. 

Microbe -

"There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn't exist - but you'd be wrong. It's simply that He doesn't know we exist. He is unaware of us because we're at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.

God created life in His own image; His congregations are the microbes. The chronic warfare over host territory, the politics of symbiosis and infection, the ascendancy of strains: this is the chessboard of God, where good clashes with evil on the battleground of surface proteins and immunity and resistance.

Our presence in this picture is something of an anomaly. Since we - the backgrounds upon which they live - don't harm the life patterns of the microbes, we are unnoticed. We are neither selected out by evolution nor captured in the microdeific radar. God and His microbial constituents are unaware of the rich social life we have developed, of our cities, circuses, and wars - they are as unaware of our level of interaction as we are of theirs. Even while we genuflect and pray, it is only the microbes who are in the running for eternal punishment or reward. Our death is unnoteworthy and unobserved by the microbes, who merely redistribute onto different food sources. So although we supposed ourselves to be the apex of evolution, we are merely the nutritional substrate.

But don't despair. We have great power to change the course of their world. Imagine that you choose to eat at a particular restaurant, where you unwittingly pass a microbe from your fingers to the saltshaker to the next person sitting at the table, who happens to board an international flight and transport the microbe to Tunisia. To the microbes, who have lost a family member, these are the mystifying and often cruel ways in which the universe works. They look to God for answers. God attributes these events to statistical fluctuations over which He has no control and no understanding."
 

Ineffable - 

"When soldiers part ways at war's end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person - it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening, or a congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life even though they can't quite put a finger on it.

In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.

And it turns out that anything which enjoys life enjoys an afterlife. Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension. They are things that were created and existed for a time, and therefore by the cosmic rules they continue to exist in a different realm.

Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. The people who constituted them are not included in their stories. In truth, they have as little understanding of you as you have of them; they generally have no idea you existed.

It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them. But the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you do not bring your kidney and liver and heart to the afterlife with you - instead, you gain independence from the pieced that make you up.

A consequence of this cosmic scheme may surprise you: when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on."

- from Sum by David Eagleman

 

 

Diomira by David Fleck

 

The last book of short-shorts I finished recently was The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason. These actually aren't all vignettes, and have the most variation in length. Both the shortest and longest stories across these four books are here. 

Some are retellings of parts of the Odyssey from different viewpoints - like in "Death and the King" where 'Paris' is the personification of Death and 'Ilium' is the City of the Dead, or in "The Iliad of Odysseus" where Odysseus deserts the war just before its conclusion and spends the years before returning to Ithaca disguised as a traveling storyteller, who invents the story that we know as the Odyssey to mythologize himself. Others are just interesting stories that involve the familiar characters - the best of these are like Greek myth themed episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Moreso than Calvino, I think Mason is particularly channeling Borges here. The book itself claims to be a series of translations of fragments of apocryphal versions of Homer's Odyssey found in an Egyptian rubbish heap, which is the sort false attribution that introduced so many of Borges' stories. "The Guest Friend" and "Agamemnon and the Word" in particular also feel like they're about Borges' preoccupation with ideas becoming reality, and with attempts to create a perfect language, respectively.

If Eagleman's weakest stories are too trite, Mason's are too obscure. I think this is especially true in the stories where he leans into the "fragment of a longer document" premise, but there are a handful of vignettes here where I don't really understand what effect Mason was hoping to achieve, and don't think I was moved in the way he might have hoped. 

Like Calvino, Mason includes a few stories near the end of his collection with anachronisms that subvert the supposed provenance of the writings, and in both cases I found the effect, used in small doses, to be humorous and enjoyable. Many of the latter stories are especially short, and many contain a fragment of a story within a fragment of a story. This story reminds me a little of the first vignette I selected up at the top of the post, and has the sort of Twilight Zone ending that I enjoyed in so many of Mason's stories.
 

The Other Assassin -

"In the Imperial Court of Agamemnon, the serene, the lofty, the disingenuous, the elect of every corner of the empire, there were three viziers, ten consuls, twenty generals, thirty admirals, fifty hierophants, a hundred assassins, eight hundred administrators of the second degree, two thousand administrators of the third and clerks, soldiers, courtesans, scholars, painters, musicians, beggars, larcenists, arsonists, stranglers, sycophants and hangers-on of no particular description beyond all number, all poised he serene, the etc. emperor's will. It so happened that in the twentieth year of his reign Agamemnon's noble brow clouded at the thought of a certain Odysseus, whom he felt was much too much renowned for cleverness and renown he preferred to reserve for the throne. While it was true that this Odysseus had made certain contributions to a recent campaign, involving the feigned offering of a horse which had facilitated stealthy entry into an enemy city, this did not justify the infringement on the royal prerogatives, and in any case, the war had long since been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, so Agamemnon called for the clerk of Suicides, Temple Offerings, Investitures, Bankruptcy and Humane and Just Liquidation, and signed Odysseus's death warrant.

The clerk of Suicide, etc. bowed and with due formality passed the document to the General who Holds Death in His Right Hand, who annotated it, stamped it, and passed it to the Viceroy of Domestic Matters Involving Mortality and so on through the many twists and turns of the bureaucracy, through the hands of spy-masters career criminals, blind assassins, mendacious clerics and finally to the lower ranks of advisors who had been promoted to responsibility for their dedication and competence (rare qualities given their low wages and the contempt with which they were treated by their well-connected or nobly born superiors), one of whom noted it was a death order of high priority and without reading it assigned it to that master of battle and frequent servant of the throne, Odysseus.

A messenger came to Ithaca and gave Odysseus his orders. Odysseus read them, his face closed, and thanked the messenger, commenting that the intended victim was in for a surprise, and that he was morally certain no problems would arise on his end.

On the eight succeeding days Odysseus sent the following messages to the court as protocol required:

'I am within a day's sail of his island.'

'I walk among people who know him and his habits.'

'I am within ten miles of his house.'

'Five miles.'

'One mile.'

'I am at his gate.'

'The full moon is reflected in the silver mirror over his bed. The silence is perfect but for his breathing.'

'I am standing over his bed holding a razor flecked with his blood. Before the cut he looked into my face and swore to slay the man who ordered his death. I think that as a whispering shade he will do no harm.' "

- from The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words

Steven Moore's history of the novel opens with a defense of difficult literature. The type of books he praises, books with stylized prose and experimental plot structures, are unquestionably books I want to read. The pleasure I feel when reading a love story told via a museum catalog of artifacts of a failed relationship, or a chronicle of academic failure inferred only through letters of recommendation, reminds me of the feeling I got as a child, reading the key to a dungeon and assembling a narrative of the place in my mind as I went. And really, several of the tricks Moore mentions sound like they'd make good organizing principles for dungeons.

"Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot, the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in woodcuts, a novel of first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology, Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors' notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms, sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality loose in the world."

Dystopian Fiction Review - "Travels in Nihilon" by Alan Sillitoe

Last year, Bombasticus from Future Sound of Lisbon lobbied me to start writing comic book reviews. He's going to have to keep waiting for those, but I thought I might like to occasionally write about some of the books I read. The first series of these will be dystopian novels, starting with Travels in Nihilon by Alan Sillitoe, best known to Belle & Sebastian fans as the author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and best known to everyone else as, {checks notes} um, {cricket noises}, well.

 
Travels in Nihilon was published in 1971, and the text represents itself as a non-fictional travel guide, assembled from the notes and reports of five correspondents by an unnamed editor. The editor gives us a taste of things to come in the introduction, when after extolling the excitement of freedom-loving, capitalist, nihilist Nihilon, he mentions that "it will be necessary to adjust the prose here and there, since the styles of the reports too often betray touches of panic and hysteria, a tone that may not commend itself to the general reader."

Structurally, each chapter follows one journalist with close third-person narration, and the viewpoint passes between them, although not in a strict order. The chapters are quite short, so we keep moving between the viewpoints. I would describe this book as a comedy, although it's not overtly funny. It is absurd. The events described are so extreme as to be surreal; the way the native Nihilonians instantly recruit the journalists into their various schemes gives each journey a dreamlike quality. Aside from the fact that the country itself is as dysfunctional as Freedonia in Duck Soup, the humor comes from the dry delivery of events that would indeed be "panic and hysteria" inducing to experience firsthand.

The journalists are right to feel overwhelmed, because they're each in over their heads from the moment they cross the border. The Nihilonian police insist each of them is carrying a fake passport. The journalists come with 2000 klipps each, and while I suppose 2000 dollars was quite a bit of money at the time, the prices they're charged suggest that a klipp has the spending power of more like a dime or a penny. It's also a problem that everyone wanting a bribe, and the name of the currency keeps changing, from "klipps" to "klopps" to "kricks" etc, which is either because there are multiple currencies in circulation, or simply because everyone is a liar and a thief. Nihilonians are also all drunk at all time on Nihilitz, which is about the only beverage it's possible to purchase, and sounds to be either a schnapps or a full-on hard spirit. They also all carry guns. Oh, and there's a war on, a revolution against the government and counter-revolution against the populace that starts up the moment the journalists arrive, and each of them gets swept up into it in their own way.

You'd be panicked and hysterical too, and perhaps ready for a stiff drink of Nihilitz, if you'd just survived a direct assassination attempt, indirect exposure to a bombing, you'd just spent all the money that was supposed to last you the whole two weeks of your visit, and you checked your watch and realized you'd only been there an hour. It's laughable how unprepared and out of their depths they all are, leaving for what they assumed was a cushy gig reporting on a free summer vacation, and finding themselves in a war-zone and conscripted into the action.

The journalists arrive by bike, car, boat, train, and airplane. They have somewhat distinctive personalities, with Adam being especially naive and Benjamin particularly grizzled. I kind of liked Edgar, who is relatively passive and ineffectual and ends up tagging along with a strong and stout-hearted Nihilonian lady who's instantly smitten with the poor dope. I also felt kind of badly for Jacqueline, because for her the danger is sexual peril and not just the usual mobs and explosions; she toughens up the most, the quickest. Adam, Benjamin, and Richard all end up heavily inveigled in the conflict, and they all prove relatively willing to let themselves be pulled into the heart of combat. (That aspect of the story is also a bit like Duck Soup, now that I think about it.) Ultimately, the story being told is about the revolution much more than it is about the journalist's individual trips, and so the book doesn't just end with them leaving the country at the end of their assignment, it also ends with the resolution of the war.

I feel comfortable calling Travels in Nihilon a dystopian novel, but it's almost difficult to describe what's dystopian about the country of Nihilon. It's not necessarily reducible to any simple, single thing. The government is a dictatorship masquerading as an illiberal democracy, but its control is not totalitarian. There are a lot of bad laws, truly insane laws with draconian prison sentences, like ten years for driving while not intoxicated on Nihilitz. But the biggest problem with Nihilon is its nihilism which seems to mean something like a combination of laws that enforce chaos, rapacious capitalism run truly amok, and citizens who are generally apathetic or complicit in one or both the other issues.

There's a town by a lake, for example, whose dam is failing, so that at any moment the town might be swept away by floodwaters and all the townspeople might be drowned. It's one of the nicest places in Nihilon, because the prices are so low, and because the mortal terror of being seconds from death every second of every day is considered relaxing by the Nihilonians who live there. That feels like a metaphor for something, but I'm not sure Sillitoe could have possibly been thinking about climate change when he wrote it. Maybe he was thinking of nuclear annihilation. Likewise, Nihilon itself seems vaguely Eastern European, and the fact that it's a failed state that's run badly by an incompetent strongarm thug while businesses at every possible level kleptocratically snatch up anything that's not nailed down feels like a prescient warning about the fate of former Soviet republics after the fall of the USSR, and the consequences of imposing of Reagan-Thatcher era free markets and austerity ... but could Sillitoe really have anticipated events happening 20 years after his book was published?

First, let's look at a couple examples of Nihilon's laws. These are both from chapter 25:

"I'm just out of prison. I was awarded twenty-five years because I exposed the manager of the factory I worked at for swindling. The factory was going bankrupt, so I made a formal complaint. I had irrefutable proof that he was ruining the firm, but when I presented it I was arrested, and given twenty-five years as a misguided idealist. Strangely enough, even though the manager kept on with his dishonesty, the firm did not go bankrupt. It even prospered after I was sent to prison, so I hear. People won't rebel against this government, because they see that God is on the side of the Nihilists."

"It's always been hard to get people to work in Nihilon. Naturally, nihilism and work are not compatible, but President Nil, damn him, came up with the following solution. A man was granted permission to kill somebody if he paid a hundred thousand klipps into the private account of President Nil at the State Bank. On receipt of this payment, the man was given a revolver and a Killing Certificate, with the name of the person inscribed on it whom he wished to put an end to. So everyone has an incentive to work, and save, because there is no one, in this country at any rate, who doesn't have someone he wants to kill. Many people fervently saved in order to get their hundred thousand, and therefor a Killing Certificate. There was no need to produce houses or cars for them to spend their money on. True, a lot of people die, and sometimes whole families are wiped out, but people are cheap."

Tldr; in Nihilon, murder is allowed as long as you bribe the president first, but blowing the whistle on corruption is illegal.

Next, I want to look at Nihilonian capitalism. One notable thing is the absence of any kind of insurance or safety equipment anywhere in the country. Even car repair kits are illegal for motorists to carry. It's an exaggeration of the idea that we can save money by not paying for preventative medicine, even though we'll pay a thousand times more later, after an un-prevented illness has become serious enough to warrant an emergency room visit. It's less like we're saving money, in fact, and more like we're paying extra to ensure that poor people suffer. Here's the safety announcement from Nihilon's airline in chapter 10:

"In case of emergency, passengers are kindly requested to carry on talking, reading, eating or sleeping, because though your lives are in our hands, and we will do our best to preserve them, there will be nothing anybody can do about it. Like all other airlines of the world we carry highly inflammable petrol, fly at a great height, and do not provide parachutes, so in the event of an emergency it is highly unlikely that either passengers or crew would survive."

There's also a kind of parody of the way we allow businesses to nickel and dime us with fees that are over-and-above the purchase price, that appear on our bills only after we agree to buy, and that are unavoidable, even if they're for "services" we didn't really use and don't really want. From chapter 20:

"The ticket collector apologised, and said that there had been a mistake. Instead of having the compartment to herself, she was to share it with another woman. He then demanded a supplement of fifty kricks because, he explained kindly, she would have company all the way to Nihilon City instead of travelling alone as hertofore, and all such extra comforts were provided at nominal cost. She gave fifty kricks to the ticket collector, who departed grumbling and swearing because she hadn't given him anything extra."

Sillitoe also seems prescient in anticipating the push for tiered services. After all, how can you really know that you're being treated well unless you can see someone else being treated badly? What does it even mean to be rich if poor people are still treated with dignity and respect? What good is all your money if it doesn't buy you the opportunity to watch someone starving to death with rickets in a sewage-filled gutter for your amusement? In Nihilon's airlines, second-class is what we'd consider "normal" service. On a first-class plane, there are no seats, you spend the whole flight ballroom dancing in formal-wear while being served gourmet food and champagne by naked flight attendants. And third-class? From chapter 10:

"Third-class tourist-economy night-flight in ten miserable hours? Yes, people are towed in huge gliders by obsolescent bombers, or so I hear. They sit on the floor with luggage at their feet and packets of sandwiches in their hands. A continuous tape of crying babies is played from stereo-speakers to make them feel more uncomfortable, and smells of fatty stew emerge from the end of a pipe near the tail of the plane as it goes through air pockets above mountain tops. Not very nice, I must say. During the flight passports are collected, and hardly distinguishable false ones are handed back before landing on an improvised field in some remote area fifty kilometers from the main airport, so that people have to make their ways to Nihilon City by a very irregular bus service on bumpy tracks, or walk through unmapped forest, if and when they get by the police and customs tent at the side of the field. Even disorganisation is well organised in Nihilon. The aim of our government is absolute chaos meticulously regulated."

Surely arranging this level of misery is more expensive for the airline than equality would be, but people are willing to pay extra to get the things they really want.

Finally, let's look at Nihilon's government. Unsurprisingly, there's propaganda instead of news and state-run media controls the airwaves, as seen here in chapter 18:

"Visitor to Nihilon! In order to find out about our country, you may wish to tune-in to the seven o'clock lies on Radio Nihilon. This is the most important information bulletin of the day. Regarding its curious opening of 'Here are the lies', tourists are earnestly requested not to be duped by it. They may be reminded, in fact, that the inhabitants of Nihilon take it very seriously. This National Bulletin owes its inverted title to the genius of President Nil, when he realised that the people of Nihilon were no longer interested in the News. He therefore proclaimed that henceforth all news would be lies. Thus, when people flocked to hear these lies they soon realised that they were, in fact, serious truth. But whereas before they had contemptuously referred to the News as lies, they could no longer do so, because Lies became its official name."

Also unsurprisingly, Nihilon gives the appearance of being a democracy, holds sham elections with fixed results, and insists that its dictator is really a president, as explained in chapter 22:

"Elections? Not any more, my friend. There were, at first, very early on, but the people were in such a euphoric mood of don't-care and don't-know, that vast deputations went to the government building and said: 'We don't want any more voting. We're happy. So after all, what does it matter?' And the government said: 'It does matter. It's democracy. It's your right to vote. It's your duty. So if you won't vote, we'll vote for you.' And that's how it's been ever since. At every general election the people get into great moods of excitement, wondering which way the voting will go, staying up all night to hear the results. And then at six in the morning, the government breaks the tension by announcing that it has got in once more, after which it declares a public holiday, so that the grateful people, secure in their very own and latest victory, can either go to sleep or continue their celebrations."

Maybe the most frightening, most dystopian thing about Travels in Nihilon, though, is the evidence throughout that the nihilists really have won in a very profound way. The ordinary people of Nihilon are by-and-large happy with their fate. Most of the people we meet don't just accept the arbitrariness of their laws, the thievery of their economy, and the brutality of their government - they like it, they prefer it to the alternatives, and they fight to defend it. Among those who dislike nihilism, a feeling of helplessness prevails before the revolution, expressed here in chapter 24:

"For years I've been disillusioned with nihilism, at having to get up every morning and invent more novelties of disorder for the pampered populace when President Nil forgets to send his own suggestions through. I've known for a long time that it was retrograde and immoral to live under such a system. My wife has often seen me breaking my heart at the waste and burden of it all. I've been secretly praying for a safe and orderly existence, but I was so influenced by President Nil and his philosophy, which said that life should be a great lawless adventure, that I never knew how to try and change it."

In the end, the revolution appears to be successful, but we're left with real doubts about whether and how the new government will be different, and about what it will mean to live in a country that is still filled with nihilists. From chapter 29:

"I like things to stay as they are, all mixed up and dangerous. That's normal now, isn't it? I'll always vote for normal, no matter what it is."