Thought while listening to Studio 360.

Suppose you can travel back in time, and the rule is that you can change things that don't have any effects that endure to the future time you came from. You can then meet someone to whom it seems you can do anything. That person would then have to confront the fact that in a concrete, measurable way, nothing they do really matters.

I suppose some sci fi story somewhere has dealt with this idea.

Do all fictions occur in fictional worlds?

(with Battlestar spoilers)

So the big reveal in the series finale is that the characters we are watching our are ancestors, and that Hera, in particular, is the mitochondrial Eve. To normal people, this is just a nice plot twist. For people like me it is a little metaphysical puzzle.

Up to now, Battlestar has been painting a picture of a fictional world, a place that is like ours, but different in fairly rule governed ways. World-making like this has has been very popular in nerd fiction ever since Tolkien, and audiences have very high expectations of fictional worlds. Fictional languages now have to have invented grammar. We are expected to imagine all sorts of things are happening off screen. The Galactica presumably has a method for recycling waste. Somewhere there is a fictional person who wrote the fictional counterpart to "All along the Watchtower."

But fictional world-making is fairly new to art, and is still unusual as an explicit goal of an artwork. The recent miniseries about John Adams with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney was historical fiction. We are not supposed to imagine that there is an alternative colonial America where it takes place. We are supposed to imagine it takes place in the real colonial America. But can we really do this, or in imagining, do we create a fictional universe? You might think we have to create a fictional universe, simply to deal with the fictional elements of the historical fiction. If the miniseries shows John and Abagail having a certain intimate conversation, where they treat each other as equals, we imagine that this is a part of long relationship full of such conversations, even though such a relationship may not have existed. Thus a parallel fictional world is created.

But this all seems to have too many moving parts. Suddenly, John Adams is not a fictional representation of American history, but a fictional representation of a fictional universe that resembles American history. But that can't be right. It is not like John Adams is some kind of steampunk alternative history where punchcard computing helps Washington defeat the British. It makes sense to say there is both a fictional representation and a fictional world for Battlestar because the writers go out of their way to make you feel like you are watching an incomplete representation of someplace very different, down to shaky cameras.

This is just a part of the problem of fictional reference, and I suppose the final twist in Battlestar doesn't really add anything to the debate. But it does blur the line between science fiction and historical fiction in a weird way. When the reveal happens, we are meant to feel as though the fictional world has been revealed to be our world. The emotional impact of the reveal wouldn't exist without this jab into the world of historical fiction. But the fictional world of Battlestar hasn't actually changed. It is still obviously fiction, because no one expects us to believe we have robot ancestors.

Hrm, if I had time in my life to do real philosophy I could figure this out.

putting the internet to good use

John Holbo is using public domain etexts and the print-on-demand service lulu to create new editions of 19th century science fiction. Right now he is just offering the versions available as etexts, but his plan is to created better edited scholarly editions.

Speaking of hundred-plus-year-old fantastic literature, Caroline and I have been reading Little Nemo in Slumberland and it's been really fun for both of us.

We have been reading this edition, because it is the one we happened to own. It's complete, but the reprinting is lousy: the image has been reduced in size and the text frequently has bits of letters missing. Also, it is difficult to lie down next to a five year old, and hold up a five and a half pound book so that both you and she can see the pictures and you can read the small type. Purchasing this edition, which is incomplete, but looks better, might be in order. On the other hand, maybe we should go with one of the multi volume volume editions of the complete set. (Free e-version of some of the comics are available here.)

I'm also not sure what to say to Caroline when the character of The Imp is introduced.

The Original Battlestar Series

From the Battlestar Wiki. There is so much to love about this picture: the hair, the outfits. The outfits are officially pressure suits used by viper pilots. Viper pilots apparently need a horizontal strip of protection across their chest, and a triangle across the crotch. I really dig the fact that the panel on the crotch doesn't go all the way around their hips, like it was underwear. It is just a triangle, suspended there.

Battlestar Paper

So I'm writing a paper for the Blackwell volume on Battlestar Galactica and philosophy (my original proposal is here) and the author guidelines really push you to keep to the style of the series. Example: "Contributors should keep to the popular culture topic. Ideally, the topic should be mentioned several times on every page. At a minimum, don’t let a page go by without mentioning the popular culture topic at least once." I am of course glad to do so, but I really want to stick to the fun aspects of the style and avoid the pandering.

So the first decision along these lines has come up. They changed my title from the ponderous "Gaius Baltar and the Image of the Tyrant in Plato and Boethius" to "Being Your Own Worst Enemy: Baltar and the Image of the Tyrant." I'm down with having a catchphrase for the supertitle, but I want a better one than "Being Your Own Worst Enemy." Any suggestions?

Update: The new title is: "What a strange little man": Baltar and the Image of the Tyrant

My Proposal for the volume: Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy

Gaius Baltar and the Image of the Tyrant in Plato and Boethius

Villains in popular genres like science fiction, horror, or superhero fiction are generally written to thrill the audience with their image of power and freedom from petty conventional morality. This can lead the audience to identify with them more than with the putative heroes of the story. The late character actor John Calicos, who played the evil Count Baltar in the original Battlestar Galactica, specialized in playing this sort of bad guy. When Ron Moore re-envisioned the series, he gave Count Baltar a first name, Gaius, that also belonged Roman Emperor commonly known as Caligula, setting up the idea that this new Baltar would also be a larger than life villain. But the character that has evolved from the writers and the twitchy performance by James Callis is hardly likely to impress audiences with his dark power. The new Gaius Baltar is a traitor and a liar, to be sure. But he is also cowardly, vain, easily manipulated, and a prisoner of his passions.

The new Baltar shows the audience a less Manichean picture of evil, one that is more in line with classical philosophers like Plato and Boethius. Both Plato and Boethius were anxious to show that the unjust person was a miserable wreck who brought more harm to himself than he ever could bring to his victims. For Plato, this point is crucial for justification for being moral; for Boethius, the explanation of God’s ways to man. They were particularly focused on the image of the tyrant: a powerful person who gets what he wants, and who wants a lot. Many people envy this life, just as many wind up identifying with supervillains. Plato and Boethius want you to see that the tyrant is not someone we want to be, and in fact, the more apparent power they have, the less we should envy them. Plato describes the tyrant as someone who is actually himself tyrannized, because he is totally enslaved by his own lusts. And lust forces him into a truly miserable life. He is so afraid of being killed by his own slaves that he must fawn over them constantly. He lives “like a woman, confined to his own house” (Rep. 759c) for fear of assassination, and has no friends, only allies and enemies. Boethius accepts Plato’s psychological vision, and raises it to a metaphysical level. The evil person, for Boethius, has no real power and is not even really human. In fact, he doesn’t even really exist. “You could say a corpse is a dead man, but you would not call it a man pure and simple; in the same way, I grant that corrupt men are wicked, but I refuse to admit that they exist in an absolute sense” (Consolations 4.2)

This essay will illustrate the idea of the tyrant in Plato and Boethius using examples from the life of Baltar we are presented—clearly a life ruled by lust and hounded by fear. This will lead to some Platonic observations about identification and moral instruction.

Battlestar Galactica

= holy fuck