Reading the Nebula Award Winners - 1967 - The Einstein Intervention

Samuel R Delaney’s second Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel was bestowed for his book The Einstein Intersection (published in 1967). It was his last Nebula Award and having read two of his novels now, I know enough that I will never bother to tackle his famously impenetrable mid-70s bestseller Dhalgren which - as one reviewer put it “...genuinely has no plot or easily grasped points…” 

The Einstein Intersection hasn’t quite reached that level of impenetrability. It is a novel of the post human - a genre that is enjoying a renaissance at the moment with thoughts about AI singularities and so forth - but in the 1960s mostly meant post nuclear war telepaths.

The novel follows Lo Lobey through three acts that have familiar tropes: Overcoming the Monster, Containing the Beasts, and Journey into the Afterlife. Lobey is different - he can hear the music in people’s heads and his feet are hands.

The legend of Orpheus is specifically signposted in the text - what passes for a plot is driven by Lobey’s search for his dead lover Friza - but if one were looking for a mythological antecedent, the giant boar hunt in the first act put me more in mind of that part of the Epic of Gilgamesh where the titular king and his best buddy Enkidu fight and slay the Bull of Heaven - albeit the unknown author of that text took about a paragraph to describe what takes Delaney 50 pages or so.

The text is interspersed with postmodern elements - we read cuttings from the author’s journal as he travels around Southern Europe getting inspiration for a novel he is writing referred to as TEI. The characters recount myths including Orpheus and at one point the Legend of The Beatles:

“You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender? He was the one Beatle who did not sing - so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatle returned, finally at one with the great rock and the great roll.”

Ringo and Maureen Starkey got divorced in 1975 - but I guess it was well established prior to the divorce that he was an alcoholic and serial cheat - or so the legend goes...

There are great novels examining post humanism - emphasising the other as an understanding of our own humanity. If you want to read a good one from the 20th Century, I recommend Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, or John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The Einstein Intersection isn’t adding anything to the genre and was a slog to get through.

Reading the Nebula Award Winners: 1966

I decided I wasn’t reading enough, so I thought I would read all the novels that have won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. This is one of the two big prizes for science fiction literature. The first award was given out for a book published in 1965 for Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’ve read it twice before so I rewrote the rules of my game and decided I would read all the novels that have won the Nebula Award for Best Novel (that I haven’t read before).

Bizarrely, in 1966 there were joint winners due to a tied jury. I’m guessing they changed the rules or brought on more jurors because this has never happened since.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney

Babel-17 is a pulp sci-fi romp of the type popular in the 1960s. The heroine Rydra Wong is an attractive and sexually liberated spaceship captain, poet and linguist who is tasked by an ageing general with saving the Alliance from a new threat from the Invaders. The only clue she is handed is a series of transmissions in a language known as Babel-17. Can she translate the language and save the 5 galaxies? 

The parts of the novel that elevate it above the standard pulp of the era, are the bits that explore the impact on a mind of learning an alien language. This is done better than similar plotlines in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival (2016). 

“She didn’t ‘look at the room.’

“She somethinged the something. The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one, an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly 25 feet cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls - some blue metal - while the third was at once a placeholder for particles that should denote a room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only one symbol for as long as she needed it.”

The whole concept of your mind changing as a result of learning a new language is a popular trope in Science Fiction. A trope which draws rather heavily on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - a debunked linguistic theory that suggests that language determines thought rather than the other way round.

The novel falters for me when a plot point relies on a letter being delayed by a postal service customs inspection. And I don’t want to appear prudish, but the ghost sex chapter where the customs officer was seduced by a succubus was weird.

I’ll give it 4/10. It’s certainly no Dune and I won’t be rereading. However, this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Delaney. He won the Nebula again in 1968.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

This is one-note science fiction - the novelisation of a short story that was well received nearly a decade earlier. It zips along nicely and the central conceit - we are reading the diary of a man with low IQ who is given brain improving surgery that exceeds expectations then fails dramatically -  is well executed in the curve of the spelling and vocabulary. The main point I guess is the universal one - we all start out with lower intelligence in childhood, experience differing rates of intellectual and emotional growth during adolescence and start to sense our own mortality as brains and bodies become less capable. The central character, Charlie Gordon (the eponymous Algernon is the laboratory test mouse whose experiences foreshadow our hero’s journey) experiences this lifetime in a few weeks. 

The themes of personhood and intellect are well managed with the newly intellectual Charlie insisting that he was a person before the surgery and empathising more with his fellow test subject Algernon than the laboratory professors that he begins to outshine. 

Solid 7/10 though. I kept picking it up and reading a few more pages. And I can think of people who might enjoy it.

I’d be fascinated to hear your views if you’ve read either of these. Leave a comment below.

Three of the Worst Xmas Songs I Have Ever Heard

Xmas just wouldn’t be Xmas without the added stress of banging out a few Finnginn Festive countdown blogs. It’s been two years since the last musical one and my mum still hasn’t forgiven me for not including Greg Lake’s I believe in Father Christmas in my top 8. 

You’re probably familiar with the proverb: ‘You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your handsome prince!’ Nowhere is this more true than in the search for interesting tunes to liven up the old Xmas playlist. It’s an Xmas tradition of mine to spend early December hanging out in the lesser-listened marshy backwaters of Spotify, indulging in a spot of amphibian osculation in the hope of finding a minor royal or two to share with followers of the Finnginn blog. 

Occasionally, one encounters a frog so halitotic and slimy - I don’t want to be too cruel to the noble frog here so I will henceforth abandon the metaphor and just talk about songs. Occasionally, one encounters an Xmas song so bad that it deserves to be shared - dare I say, ‘celebrated’? - on its own terms.

The Magic of Christmas - A Heartwarming Holiday Song

The less dedicated pursuer of Xmas music may not have made it to Vol 2 of Christmas R&B Journey - so would not have been rewarded with the distinctly unmagical The Magic of Christmas - A Heartwarming Holiday Song. Call me cynical, but there is nothing warm about the decision to define your Christmas song as ‘heartwarming’ in the title. The song is flat and lifeless and the elements of a magical Christmas celebrated in the lyrics include… er… shop window displays shining bright: “So let us dance and celebrate, this season’s joy is truly great!”

Happy Christmas (War is Over)

Opera stars are, by their very nature, cover artists. The original version of Happy Christmas (War is Over) already hits so many of our favourite Xmas song tropes - sleigh bells, children’s choir, message of peace and unity, subliminal buddhist mantra in the outro. So any cover artist should sensibly ask themselves: what are you bringing to the table? Of course, the three tenors can always say: our incredible operatic voices! And that is all very well when covering e.g. Dormi, O bambino. But something about these pop/opera crossovers just don’t sit comfortably in the eustachian tubes of this listener. 

Get Low to a Holly Jolly Christmas

I suppose one could charitably say that the artist who recorded this song was taking a pop at the schmaltziness of Xmas music and certainly there are those in the comments section of the YouTube that think the juxtaposition of a few modern obscenities and a familiar jingly backing track are comedy gold. However, the slide into casual misogyny from a promising start is a missbeat for me.

What are your favourite worst Xmas songs? But please don’t spam the comments saying it’s Greg Lake’s I believe in Father Christmas. You’ll upset my mum. 

Header photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 1 - The Gimlet

Anticipation is better than reward. 

Cocktail hour in the Finnginn household is an established part of the weekend routine, and there’s no beating the thought of the sharp citrus hit of an ice cold lime green Gimlet. 

It's an easy cocktail to make as you can substitute a lime cordial for sugar syrup and fresh lime. 

(One of detective Philip Marlowe’s clients in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye opines about the quality of the Gimlets in the cocktail bar they meet in, saying: “A real Gimlet should be half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else. It beats Martinis hollow.” )

The essential part of the process is to shake the mixture over ice. The key to making half-diluted gin palatable is temperature.

In my bartending days, I would "freeze" the glass by putting ice and soda water in it while I mixed a Martini in the Boston Tin. Good odds a drunk person would take a sip of water and look perplexed if I placed this on the front bar.

The Perfect Gimlet

Cold glass. Cold mix of gin and cordial (squeeze of lime to freshen it up). Angostura Bitters. Just don't try and hit the high FaLaLaLaLas at the Carol Service afterwards!

Teetotal Alternative

Lemon barley water - that'll be my 5pm drink for dry January. Got to get that sour hit somewhere!

Happy Xmas Everyone!

Thanks for reading and sharing your favourite drinks on the social media. It's been loads of fun. As usual I've overstretched myself with no planning, but it's been a great diversion from the grind of corporate copywriting.

Catch you in the New Year!

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port

My notes for today’s blog read as follows:

• Tawny vs ruby vs LBV
• Cheeky vimto?
• With what cheese?

Just thought I’d give you a peek behind the curtain of how these articles are constructed. Typically I’ll start with these notes and then write an introduction. Then expand out the notes into paragraphs, then go back in to the text editor and revise at the sentence level. 

This week I thought I’d just pop these notes into Google’s Bard “AI” content plagiariser and get it to write the thing for me.

I used the following prompt:

“Write a Finnginn style blog article with the title "Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port" based on these notes: Tawny vs ruby vs LBV; Cheeky vimto?; With the Cheese?”

Bard seems to think that Finnginn is some kind of pirate and after some fairly laboured and dull descriptions of the three affordable port types finished with this paragraph.

“Cheeky Vimto? With the cheese?

Now, before you go pourin' Vimto in yer port (though I wouldn't put it past some o' ye!), remember, port is meant to be savoured. Take your time, swirl it in yer glass, and let the flavours dance on yer tongue. And as for the cheese? Well, that's a whole other story for another day. Just know that a good Stilton or a creamy Camembert can be the perfect partner for your port (though maybe not the Vimto).”

Large Language Models such as Bard are trained on billions of examples of text data, and produce outputs as correlated best guesses of likely word combinations that form grammatical sentences. 

A “Cheeky Vimto” you’ll remember is the classic combination of 275ml blue WKD alcopop and 50ml ruby port beloved of UK clubbers circa 2005. In a separate prompt, I asked Bard for a recipe for a Cheeky Vimto and it gave a passable one.

All this is weird because the actual blog I wrote up from my notes is as follows:

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port

I've written a handy poem to help you remember your different types of port. (I've excluded vintage port for reasons budgetary and literary). Here it is:

Finginn's guide to the affordable ports

Tawny’s brawny,

Ruby’s cheap, 

But FTW: LBV!

(“Cheeky Vimto?” - “Not for me.”)

-

As for the cheese I’ll be pairing with my Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage? Here’s my top 5 Xmas Tunes for 2023!

5: Christmas Wrapping: The Waitresses

4: Staple Singers: Who Took the Merry out of Christmas?

3: Boney M: Mary’s Boy Child

2: The Three Tenors: Adeste Fideles!

1: Dolly Parton: Hard Candy Christmas

What cheesy Xmas tracks will you be rockin' around the Xmas tree to after a sweet and mellow glass of port? Let us know in the comments or on the social media.

Photo by Stefan Grage on Unsplash

Finnginn’s Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 3 - Liqueur Coffee

Poultry including turkey is a great source of the amino acid L-tryptophan - a chain molecule so acute in its effects that a single gram can cause a delay in sleep latency. So if you find yourself nodding off during the Dr Who Xmas Special - you can blame the tryptophan not the triple amaretto you over-generously poured yourself.

For those of us anxious to stay awake to be disappointed by the Dr Who Xmas Special we’re going to need a post prandial stimulant. Coffee should suffice here, I don’t want a repeat of the Xmas where I made space at the table for three last minute Russian guests only to overhear one of them say “Нет, Виталий, мы не принимаем амфетамины до окончания банкета.”

I’ll never quite get the appeal of the Espresso Martini. Who wants to drink cold coffee? I recommend that we normal hot coffee drinkers have a delicious Liqueur Coffee to perk us up at some point after the pudding and before the cheese board.

What is it?

Liqueur coffee is sweetened coffee with a measure of alcoholic spirit added and cream floated on the top.

When I was younger I didn’t need coffee. If I was tired, I simply took a nap. Parenthood and the 9-to-5 grind removed this privilege, so I (like so many others) became slave to the bean - if only to stop the embarrassment of nodding off at the office desk while my hydrated caffeinated Gen Z colleagues giggle at the elder-millennial drooling in his keyboard.

These days I have a mug most days to fight the existential fatigue but, if I have one after 3pm, I’ll fall asleep fine at night and then awake suddenly in the wee hours and be unable to get back to sleep for an hour.

People who know more about coffee might disagree but personally I think freeze dried instant is fine for our purpose here - you’re going to add sugar and put a glug of grog in it anyway so save your finest Arabica whole beans for Boxing Day morning and go for Gold Blend instead.

Pro tip: Adding sugar makes it easier to float the cream. Pour single cream over the back of a spoon and it will form a distinct layer on the top of the coffee.

Any old cupboard booze can liven up a coffee. I’ll be going for Armagnac - as I’ll have some on hand to light the pudding. Liqueur Coffees are named after the country where (approximately) the bottle you choose originates. So mine is a French Coffee, someone taking rum will be drinking a Jamaican Coffee, Irish Coffee made with Jameson’s or Bushmills depending on whether you're Catholic or Protestant, Vitaly definitely doesn’t need a Russian Coffee but if he did it would be made with Vodka.

Teetotal Alternative: I don’t want to seem unimaginative here but I’m just going to go with coffee.

What are you splashing into your Xmas day coffee? Let me know in the comments below or on the social media. 

Image by Max from Pixabay

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 4 - Dishwasher Vodka

If you are stuck for a last minute gift idea for a sweet-toothed friend, remember: you can convert their favourite candy into an alcoholic beverage using your dishwasher.

What is it?

Definitely not bathtub gin.

Combining sweets and vodka is all about applying enough heat to melt the sweets without boiling off the alcohol. You can’t just chuck all the ingredients in a saucepan and hope for the best. Ideally, it will be done in the bottle in a temperature controlled water bath. Now where can I lay my hands on one of those…?

The dishwasher is not the first kitchen appliance you turn to for cooking. But it is basically a giant steamer with fairly accurate temperature controls. 

(I once read that you could wrap a side of salmon in tin foil and poach it in the dishwasher, but unfortunately I never owned a dishwasher before I was married and my wife is allergic to salmon so still no dice. Do let me know how you get on if you try it! - I reckon a quick shine at 60℃ should do the trick.)

Lidl's delicious Putinoff brand vodka makes a good base. Don't confuse it with Putinka vodka or profits from your purchase will go to allies of the Russian premier. Any old cheap vodka can be used as a base.

Dishwasher Vodka Method

Remove a few ml of vodka from the bottle, replace the missing liquid with sweeties, screw the cap on tightly, pop it in the dishwasher on its intensive 70℃ cycle (ethanol you will recall from high school chemistry boils at around 78℃). When it has finished its run, let the glass bottle cool down slowly (transferring to fridge straight away may lead to a shattered bottle) , shake gently to combine and then either gift wrap or chill ready for serving.

Pro tip: As the dishwasher’s running anyway, you might as well get all the unusual glasses - the sherry schooners, brandy snifters, martini glasses and champagne coups - out of the cupboard and treat them to a detergent-free hotwash ready for the season they’ll be in most demand.

Teetotal Alternative

Hot chocolate bombs. You’ll need some basic chocolaterie skills here and a silicone mould will help. But the principle is basically the same as making easter eggs. Hide marshmallows and a spoonful of instant cocoa in a chocolate sphere and then melt the whole thing in a small pan of milk.

What sweets would you like to see combined with vodka? Let me know in the comments or on the social media.

Photo credit: author's own