A Puzzlement

[stoutfellow]

A day or so ago, I decided to reread Joan Vinge's "Snow Queen" trilogy - The Snow Queen, World's End, and The Summer Queen. That decision brought to mind something I'd read in John Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - something which puzzled me when I first read it and puzzles me still.

The article on Vinge was written by Peter Nicholls; the item in question, describing the first book of the series, is as follows.

Although the title and some of the plot come from Andersen, this is an essay in anthropology, much of it founded in the pseudo-scientific anthropology of Robert GRAVES in The White Goddess (1947 US), which Brian M. STABLEFORD argued in a review "is rather like a chemistry graduate writing a story whose plot hinges on the phlogiston theory".

This charge bothers me on several levels, detailed under the cut.

This is an essay in anthropology
Well, no, it isn't; first and foremost, it's a novel. It may have some didactic content, but it should primarily be judged as a work of art, not as a treatise. (Would Nicholls call The Time Machine an essay on socialism? He'd be closer - but still not very close - to the truth in doing so, I would judge.)

much of it founded in the pseudo-scientific anthropology of Robert Graves
All right, let's take it as given that the society Vinge describes closely resembles that described by Graves; also, that Graves' claims concerning such a society (or societies) have been refuted. (I haven't read Graves, even in synopsis, so I don't know precisely what those claims were.) What of it? The analogy given seems to mean that Graves made certain general assertions, which have turned out to be false. But I can't see any generalization Graves could have made whose falsity would imply that no such society could ever exist - especially since the society Vinge is describing is revealed, in the book, to have been deliberately designed to protect certain secrets and systems. Even if (a claim which sounds excessive to me) no such society could have emerged spontaneously, who is to say that one couldn't have been constructed?

As for the rest - why shouldn't a chemistry graduate write a story based on the phlogiston theory? Could a universe be conceived of in which the phlogiston theory was correct? (Okay, maybe that shades more towards fantasy than SF, but Stableford himself has written stories about vampires and werewolves, so that cuts little ice.) Bob Shaw wrote a story in which the value of pi was four; would our hypothetical chemist be doing anything more outrageous?

Am I missing something? Is there anyone reading this who has actually read The White Goddess, and can make sense of Nicholls' and Stableford's complaint for me?

Comments

[coyotegestalt.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, both Graves and Vinge are still on my "to read" stack... but I have to ask: What and where was the story with Pi=4? This sounds intriguing....

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

The Shaw story is The Fugitive Worlds, which is the third volume of his "Wooden Spaceships" trilogy (the first two being The Wooden Spaceships and The Ragged Astronauts). The series involves a pair of planets, both habitable, sharing the same orbit and close enough together that their atmospheres overlap. This being (I think) impossible under the physical laws of this universe, Shaw had to set it in another. The "pi=4" bit is mentioned only in passing and has no immediately obvious effect on the story. (I assume he threw it in to emphasize the fact that this wasn't our universe.)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

As Douglas Hofstadter once noted, if pi <> 3.14159..., we'd be looking at a major change in mathematics that would probably affect the universe in a fundamental way.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by "a major change in mathematics". We default to Euclidean geometry, because this universe is so nearly flat (at small scales, in the close vicinity of Earth) as to make that a reasonable approximation. In a universe in which that was not true, the default mathematics of any sentient (and mathematizing) species would be different, but it would still (I expect) be subsumable within the mathematics that we do (as ours would be within theirs). I see the problem as more a matter of physics than of mathematics.

If Pi (I'll use that form, to distinguish it from the specific number we call by that name) is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, then the local geometry of the universe comes into play. Take a two-dimensional example: on the surface of a sphere, the ratio in question is not a constant - it depends on the radius. (Specifically, Pi = pi sin(r/R)/r, where r is the great-circle radius of the circle and R is the Euclidean radius of the sphere.) In a universe whose metric was not as nearly flat as ours is, Pi could be nonconstant, or constant at some other value.

Yes, it would have fundamental effects; precisely what those effects would be is not immediately obvious, nor does Shaw indicate what they are or how they relate - except for the differences in physical law that I mentioned above.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Whoops: my formula for Pi in the second paragraph is too small by a factor of R. Sorry.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I got the first two volumes of Shaw's series backwards: it's The Ragged Astronauts, then The Wooden Spaceships. Sorry.