GRAVITY, A HOME-COMING

I have a problem praising the film 'Gravity'.

I saw the film recently in 3-D, on the giant screen of Imax, Wadala, Mumbai and I was suitably impressed with the detailing, the 3-D effects, the uncomplicated plot which does not allow your attention to wander and thus enables you to enjoy the wonder of special effects bringing out the spacefaring in weightless conditions.

I am neither a space scientist nor am I an astronaut. So, I am not in a position to comment upon the arrangement on the control panels, the positioning and the alarms of the various indicators, the accuracy of the thresholds of the locks and human endurance, etc. I remember to have read that American astronauts and the crew of space missions were shown the film and that they expressed satisfaction about the way all such details were depicted in the film. I tend to trust the news report as fact and not doubt it as a publicity tactic. I accept that the authenticity of every detail should not be an issue since the film is not a documentary; the overall representation and a commitment to scientific truth should suffice. Moreover, even though the film does not introduce or assume any new scientific breakthrough, it is set in future and that makes the story 'Science Fiction' and in SF liberties with technical and technological details are permitted. I have no problem with that.

The problem that I have goes beyond these issues.

I have read a lot of science fiction. For example, stories by Arthur C Clarke. In 'Fountains of Paradise' Clarke describes how the Earth acquires 'spokes' all along the Equator, extending into space to a distance where there is no gravitational attraction pulling an object to the Earth. He postulates development of a synthetic crystal with tremendous tenacious strength. And as an appendix to the novel he presents plans and schemes of such 'towers' already put on paper in great detail by scientists and engineers. As a result, a story which could have been exotic, becomes plausible and comes down into the realm of engineering projects planned and executed by present-day mortals. In 'Rendezvous with Rama' he observes (as a part of the story) that not a few spacecraft accidents are the result of the distraction caused by the unstoppable oscillations in weightless conditions of the two orbs human females and therefore female astronauts possess. Clarke is always conscious of the laws of physics which provide the frame in which everything in his novels happens and so, when the alien spacecraft accelerates towards the Sun without any apparent push, someone exclaims, "There goes Newton's Third Law!"

Such attention to  the manifestation of laws of science in day-to-day life is not an exception in SF. I call such SF as engineering fiction because in it the exotic, fantastic happenings are subordinated to the universally valid Laws of Physics. Such references give an air of familiarity to the tale which then transcends its futuristic setting and attains a sort of contemporary existence; albeit in a parallel universe.

As an avid reader of science fiction, I have a second home in that parallel universe. I do not have to suspend my logical judgment there; all I am required to do is to accept some new contraption or some such technological advancement which is a part of the common existence of the parallel universe.  What happens in 'Gravity' is commonplace to a resident of that universe and one does not applaud the commonplace.

It may sound presumptuous but the film began and in a few moments, I had the feeling of being 'at home'. There it was, 'home' and someone had created limelight all around it. My heart swelled. The film being 3-D, I wanted to say 'Hi'  to the ones at home, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, without disturbing them of course. They were busy with some repair work and while Sandra was serious and sombre, George was his usual composed self, spreading the contagion of composure - which is more than confidence - into others.

During the interval and after the film, I became aware that I had company. And they near unanimously praised the ambience and the floating tear drop and the upside down image refracted in it and the 'normal' of the place being expressed so evocatively in the never ending slow motion and the bumps and of course the silence. Their chatter irritated me: this is how my home is, you ignorant guys! I wanted to exclaim at them.

I loved George that he was so composed even while saying adieu to life and I adored Sandra that though she talked to herself a lot - all alone for a million miles around you; anyone will talk like that - but she did not go into hysterics, was not  even heroic but doggedly went on and on and on and in the end laughed at herself a little when she had difficulty standing up in earthly gravity.

I liked the film for taking me home. Come to think of it, I should say, I adored the film. The problem is, these words will be so commonplace if I utter them to anyone at all. They all claim to adore it! How can I explain to them that my joy is different from their pleasure?

Got to see Gravity a few more times to notice and then cherish the smaller details, the nuances one so takes for granted while at home. I just don't want to be in an awestruck crowd, gawking at some exotic object.

 P037154 dated : 04-Nov-2013 [10:09 PM IST]

American and Arty

Saw the film Young Adult recently. Enjoyed it; though I was at a loss to understand why it is called a comedy. To my mind, a comedy makes you laugh in pleasure. Or the story has a happy ending. This film fails on both counts. It is not even a black comedy where there is a serious or a sorrowful undercurrent to the outwardly hilarious happenings. For example, Jagte Raho (a Hindi film), in which an innocent peasant enters an urban housing complex to quench his thirst and is hounded as a thief. Or Jane bhi Do Yaron (another Hindi film), in which two novices try to take on a whole corrupt system.

But then, are Chaplin’s films black comedies? They have happy endings all right; but is it a comedy when hunger drives him to cook and eat his shoe? Or when his friend takes him for a giant bird to be quartered, roasted and devoured? Now I am confused!

Coming back to Young Adult, it has a girl (or shall we call her a woman because she is quite grown up? All credit to Charlize Theron that such a question takes shape. And, it is admirable for a mainstream Hollywood actor to present herself as a plain Jane who takes the help of make-up while going for the kill. It could very well be interpreted as factual and could result in deglamourising her.) who wakes up next to a sleeping man, grimaces to reveal that she is far from happy with her last night’s association, downs big gulps of coke and leaves. Well, she leaves the life she is living and goes off to where she came from.

There is a transformation. She doesn’t change, the background changes and the relative valuation of her attributes changes. Back in her school days, she was a prom queen. Then she left for a bigger town and well, made it! She became a writer; no one in that place has been a writer. So, when she had left, it was in the halo of glamour and is now back with another halo. Never mind that she carries the baggage of a failed marriage and a failing career and has become an alcoholic to boot. The small people need not know that. She, in fact, has plans of reclaiming her old flame; which, in her opinion, should be a walkover; his small-town wife cannot be expected to offer any meaningful resistance. 

Of course things do not happen as wished. She is inexorably driven to accepting another old friend, who is now almost a cripple, as her alter ego and ultimately she goes back with a bad dent on her car’s bonnet.

I am a male on the wrong side of sixty and I never identified myself with the travails of Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gray even though her pathetic ordeal drew my sympathies; but the friend, a young female, who gave me the DVD called the ‘small people’ all sorts of names! I am a resident of Mumbai which is a sprawling metropolis where life generally is in the fast lane and success is defined as when you overtake others in your lane. Life laid back, does not count. Yet (or, may be because of that) I went with the small-towners who were more at peace with themselves and to me, that was important. For my friend, on the other hand, trying was far more important than failing. That Mavis tries and the others don’t, decided the race (which, to me, wasn’t there). That she becomes a psychiatric case (obsessively pulls out hair on her head) and they stay normal, did not matter. Rather, that was a great injustice.

The film reminded me of another film I saw during last year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI) at Goa. The woman in that film (Yellow) is a teacher in a nursery school and she takes quick breaks to go and swallow pills which give her a high. She too goes to her home and meets her mother, her sisters, her ex-fiancé and all of them are abnormal. The film is supposed to be a harsh comment on the materialistic world. I found it obnoxious. The woman takes refuge in fantasies because reality bores her. Everyone is obsessed with their own problems and they are all unhappy in general.

Young Adult is a mainstream Hollywood film with the accompanying mainstream aesthetic sense and a straightforward narrative and smart editing. You could call Young Adult realistic; though I found tendencies to cut corners as in a fable. For example, Mavis goes and sits right next to Matt on her first evening in her hometown. Again, her outburst during the party at Buddy’s place is more theatrical than natural (she is drunk; that is a good excuse though). Both instances serve to speed up the passage of the movie’s message, without compromising on content or credibility. They make the movie crisper.

Yellow depicted a similar content but made out as if it was touching upon something profound; which, to put shortly, is irritating. The boredom of the sharp and the degeneration of the numb among the irresponsible and the callous is of no concern to me. Mavis Grey comes back bruised; but the first thing she does every morning upon waking up, is take huge gulps of Coca Cola! (Which is pretty damning, I should say.) Her idea of relationship is wanting something and expecting it to be delivered. She is arrogant without any basis for the arrogance. The Yellow heroine and her kin too want providence to deliver and they too are as hollow, as incompetent as Mavis; but their short stature is presented as a philosophical issue! Mavis remains an ordinary being.

Perhaps that is why Young Adult is a ‘comedy’ and Yellow is ‘arty’!

The pleasure of reading a good book

I have already said here that I am a science fiction fan. The Marathi literary world has traditionally looked down upon things scientific and just as it ridiculed its female characters in the name of humour, fondly contending that women have no sense of humour; it treated science as something strictly non-literary. Or something exotic. Shri Na Pendse, one of the foremost Marathi novelists, had a character who passed electric current into water in order to study the effect on the productivity of betel nut plantation. Another one who becomes a scientist, as a boy betrays his scientific bend by making a torch to see in the dark by collecting a bunch of fireflies. So, I hardly got to read good SF as a young, voracious reader of Marathi fiction. The eminent astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar did write SF; but it addressed the juvenile mind.

Then, on a chance I attended an all-night session of star watching. I went there with my school-going daughter, with a vague idea that she could pick up something interesting. It was late evening when we reached the place and one of the organisers said, “Take a look at Mercury, which is about to set. Soon it will be dark and we shall see the satellites launched by man. Then Jupiter will rise and …”

I was there only to accompany my daughter and was wondering how I was going to keep awake for a stretch of time. ‘One look at the sky and you have seen the stars. What do you do for the rest of the night?’ I thought. His words shook me awake. The stars too rise and set! Just as the sun and the moon do! It had never occurred to me that the night sky presented you with a slowly but continuously changing scenario. Then staying awake was no problem as I took in this constellation and that and there was Andromeda, the neighbouring galaxy 22 lac light years away which you can see with bare eyes without a telescope and Saturn had rings and Betelgeuse was red and all celestial bodies described a circle around the pole star and all planets strictly passed under the heavenly arc made by … Castor and Polux I believe.

That hooked me to Khagol Mandal, the organisation devoted to promoting awareness of Astronomy. I attended a number of star watching sessions thereafter and took friends and their children to share the fascination. I discovered that the organisation had a good library devoted to books on Astronomy. I read them all. I do not pretend to have understood the relativity of Time and of Gravitation but the theories of Black Hole and the Beginning of the Universe and the SF stories fascinated me.

In the days that followed I mainly talked about my new interest and a friend responded by lending me four books. All fiction, all by Asimov; the Foundation trilogy and the fourth book was named ‘The End of Eternity’. That did me in and I have read more than a hundred SF novels and short story collections thereafter. I tried Marathi SF too but found most of it either simplistic or non-science. Pseudo-science if you want to be charitable. The complexity and the consistency one finds in the normal English (which includes books translated into English too) science fiction is missing.

When I say ‘science fiction’, I do mean any fiction based on fictionalising any aspect of science; but what I enjoy most, is the Astronomy genre. Going to distant stars and planets and finding exotic environment and matching species. Asimov completely steers clear of this possibility and describes a galaxy colonised exclusively by humans. But his genius has created a mythology out of the various tales he has spun! He went on to add more books in the Foundation series and ultimately logically linked even the Bailey books and Susan Calvin stories into it. His last (in the chronological order of what happens, not the order in which he wrote; he added prequels too.) book ends with an emphatic hint that the saga is to continue; but physical mortality caught up with him. Unfortunately no SF can overpower that.

The End of Eternity intrigued me. It reads like a suspense drama where you always remain unsure if the author has disclosed his (or her) ultimate destination. The characters’ actions are consistent to what they perceive as the ‘normal’ (SF normal please, whatever that is); but the protagonist has other designs. And the reader wonders if the author has yet other designs as to what ultimately is going to happen. It caught me by the neck right on the first page and did not let go till the very end. I totally submitted to it and stifling all my doubts and reservations, never went back to seek some clarification.

 But they remained as minor irritants. For example, why is a class of men called ‘Computers’ when we, in the real world, have given that name to machines? All right, this is fiction and the author has every right to deviate from reality. But why? It cannot be simply explained away as ‘his fancy’. Again, the idea of an ‘Eternity’ outside Time seemed too far fetched. Then there is a loop in the story and a character has to be hauled out from normal time again and again. The hero, Harlan does ask Twissell, his Computer and Twissell exclaims, ‘Of course! You think two is a magic number?’ (Or something to this effect; I don’t have the book before me at this moment.) This too taxed my credulity. ‘The whole superstructure is so unstable; how can it survive for any period of time,’ I wondered, ‘And that means the idea shouldn’t stand since this is a time-travel story!’

In the end, when Asimov did answer all my queries (though the answer to the problem of meeting oneself is fiction!), I felt like a child sitting in his lap listening to an absorbing tale told seductively. It was a sumptuous meal and I remained satiated for quite some time and kept postponing the repeat read in order to savour the sublime pleasure. The subsequent reads were as pleasurable and I read and reread the novel till I was sort of on first name terms with Harlan and Twissell, as also with Noys and Cooper and Computers, Technicians and others.

I still like the novel, though now I find the end unconvincing. I think this is one of the more emotional novels of Asimov. He is not averse to using emotion to push his story (Susan Calvin falls in love, Fastolfe’s daughter has a permanent grudge against him for refusing to have sex with her; why, the Mule is a master of emotion!) and here too Harlan in a fit of anger, sends Cooper down into primitive centuries; Noys plants ideas in his mind at a moment when he is emotionally vulnerable and so on. But all this goes to demonstrate that emotion is an unstable state of mind. That it can be induced from outside. That it can be changed and manipulated. So, it is hard to accept that Noys' argument convinces Harlan so that he decides to abandon his task and his decision is so irrevocable that the ‘undo’ option vanishes for good!

I am sure Asimov was no fan of Cameron or, like Terminator, he would have revived Eternity and continued to present equally intriguing tales involving eternals and Minimum Necessary Change!

The Mind and the Matter in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

    I enjoyed ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ immensely. I like British humour. The ‘trilogy in five parts’ provides a classic example of what I like about British humour: “What’s that strange thing you British play?” / “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” / “Parliamentary democracy. ...” (page 651 of ‘The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy’). Is this snobbery? Is this really self-loathing? Or is it simply word-play? Whatever; but there are layers to the humour and it is always difficult to pinpoint where it is directed.

    I am a science-fiction buff. I prefer distortion, manipulation, extrapolation of the laws of science to pure flights of imagination. Science-fiction always has an undercurrent of logic; it abides by the fact that existence, nature, are all about logic. (I am sorely tempted to present this proposition of mine, as a concise definition of science-fiction!) Imagination or fantasy, on the other hand, may take leave of logic altogether and then you cannot subjectively interact with the flow of the tale; you have to submit to it. The Guide is science-fiction. The details are authentic and quite a few times logic suddenly springs up to enliven some episode which had seemed bizarre, a flight of fancy. And there are some straightforward insights into oddities offering them a place in the logical scheme of things. To continue the above quote: (the subject is astrology) “.. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. ...” There! Astrology now is acceptable to the likes of me.

    Douglas Adams is a master when it comes to playing with logic. It is as if he has composed a play and logic is a ghost which makes dramatic entries on to the stage to tie loose ends. In the Guide, logic is a lively and a potent character in itself. Sometimes it makes you wonder if Adams wrote, at least part of the book, backwards. There is this episode (on page 89 of the combined volume) when missiles are about to hit a spacecraft when the ‘Improbability Drive’ is applied and the two missiles turn into 1. a bowl of petunias and 2. a very surprised-looking whale. As if this is not outlandish enough, there is more: in addition to the whale talking to itself from the moment it is created 300 miles from the ground, till it strikes the ground; all that the bunch of petunias says in its mind is “Oh no, not again.” You are prepared to live with ‘improbability’ turning missiles into whales and petunias, you also accept the whale reflecting upon his existence; but the exclamation of the bowl of petunias is so absurd! What is this if not flippancy, you wonder? And then as you read on, there arrives (on page 400!) an explanation which rounds things off pretty smoothly. And then you read further on and the rounding off becomes the ghost that haunts and ultimately gives the story a touch of pathos. Adams does it time and again. If you are in the habit of doing a critical appraisal as you read, then Adams shames you by neatly filling, at a later point, blanks and voids in the logic or in the event chronology or in some missing detail. Seldom does he indulge in the dirty trick of casually slipping in a vital piece of information only to surprise you in the end; a trick so often used by mystery writers from Agatha Christie to Asimov.

    Future world and outer space are where 90% of Science-fiction is. Computers are now taken for granted. The Guide begins in the present, never jumps into the future but merrily traverses time from primitive ages to the end of the Universe. It has robots too. And alien beings. But here they all are ‘people’. There are species with curious attributes and idiosyncrasies; but none with super powers to set them apart from all others. One of the main characters is humanoid with two heads. This gives rise to interesting possibilities but he is just a devilish, reckless character; not a demon. There is a super-intelligent robot but his defining feature is his mental depression. The Guide is not a story of a conquest or even an exploration though it travels wildly and one of the places visited is ‘The restaurant at the end of the universe’. But the four main characters meet ‘people’ who are waiters, accountants, civil servants and such like. The Guide in fact forces the reader to adopt the viewpoint of ‘people’: The villagers … had only ever seen one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had never realized it was entertainment (page 739). Note the key word: stupidly appearing between two commas. Its people; stupid, unintelligent people not in the know of the modern value system. Among the four main characters, one is a double-headed narcissist, one is a hyperactive rover, one is intelligent, sharp and independent girl who is always keen to take the initiative in any situation but the fourth, the main protagonist is a timid, self-conscious, mostly bewildered human.

    It is tempting to say that flashes of sharp, almost cynical insights from a hard-headed commonsense viewpoint are the characteristic attribute of Douglas Adams; but that would not be true. One, there are a number of SF writers who write about common people living in the future. And two, there is a far more pronounced feature of the Guide which sets it apart from the rest. (So I think. My statement is limited to my knowledge of the galaxy of SF writing.)

    SF is recognised as a genre of fiction writing; but that does not mean that all SF has a uniform purpose, or that it talks the same language. The fiction of Asimov and Clarke and Ballard is vintage SF; but along with H G Wells and Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) also qualify as SF writers. Even the two short stories Metamorphosis and The Borough by Franz Kafka may arguably be called SF writing. This inclusion does not in any way disturb their claim to be all-time classics. Similarly, if I state here that Douglas Adams writes science fiction of the mind; I shall not be making a comprehensive, meaningful statement. The Foundation series by Asimov postulates a body, rather several bodies, of men who exercise (in several ways) the power of the mind to influence the physical world. In an SF story I read, a man is obsessed to climb 100-story buildings. In another story, a drug completely wipes out the personality of a teen-aged girl. These too are SF stories of the mind. So, I have to explain how Douglas Adams is different. I shall do so through examples and shall try to arrive at a destination.

    Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect hitch a hike on the Vogon spacecraft where they are not welcome at all: Vogons are totally ruthless. It is said that you will be killed by them quickly if you are lucky and if you are not; you will have to listen to Vogon poetry. Arthur and Ford are made to hear poetry by the Vogon commander. As a result, they undergo severe pain. Even though by this time you are familiar with Adams’ crazy humour which usually is set in mortally critical conditions; this comes as cynical. So you ingest it as a left-handed comment by a writer who is either an unrecognised poetic talent or a contemptuous connoisseur. You may even call it another example of the ‘self-loathing’ practised by the British; especially by British authors.

    But no! As you proceed, you come across more and more instances where figures of speech sort of are personified. Embodied into physical realities. Here are some examples, not necessarily in chronological order.

    S. E. P. Short for Somebody Else’s Problem. Is it  a wonder that you fail to notice somebody else’s problem? But, “An S. E. P. is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. … The brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.” (page 334)

    It turns out to be a spaceship. And once Arthur and Ford know what it is; they manage to board it and are able to save themselves.

    Here is another gem. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, …. (page 635). Hang on; this is not a smart crack, or rather it is a smart crack but Adams effortlessly takes off into ‘science fiction’. … bad news, which obeys its own special laws. (Even now you can explain it away as a figure of speech; but then) The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.

    Another insight? Clearly surpasses Lewis Carroll though, doesn’t he? Do you still think Adams is just being tongue-in-cheek? Let’s see how Arthur learns to fly.

    And suddenly he tripped again and was hurled forward by his considerable momentum. But just at the moment he was about to hit the ground astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him a small navy blue tore bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his personal time scale, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off into the air with his brain singing. (page 405)

    

    You do trip when you are running as if running were a terrible sweating sickness. You do miss landing your next step on spot if you are not looking. You also misspell a word or have a slip of the tongue if your mind wanders from what your hand or your mouth is busy doing. In that case you may even send your drink into your windpipe and have a terrible fit of coughing. The co-incidence or concurrence between your mind process and your body-actions is lost and an accident takes place where your body ends up doing something which is neither in tandem with your mind nor in continuation of the course it has been following.

    This common logic is in place here too. Arthur’s body neither falls to the ground nor does it continue to run. Instead, he starts flying! Thereby subordinating physics to perception. What you perceive is what is real – as far as your own personal universe is concerned.

    This is the maxim of Douglas Adams. Stated very clearly on page 689: Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

    The flying Arthur knows this. How? It occurred to him almost instantly, with the instinctive correctness that self-preservation instils in the mind, that he mustn’t try to think about it, that if he did, the law of gravity would suddenly glance sharply in his direction and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing up there, and all would suddenly be lost. (page 406)

    Take note: Gravity becomes operational when it glances in your direction. And then too, before commanding you to fall, it wants to know what you think you are doing up there. Gravity too acts as a person. It thinks, it admonishes and therefore it can be hoodwinked.

    Once this is clear, it is easy to apply the maxim to technology. There is a robot, a security robot whose function it is to report other things moving about doing things they shouldn’t do. (page 670) It is an advanced, mobile version of a burglar- or a fire-alarm. Would it be right to say that this robot is happy when it is able to report things as above? Applying human psychology, fulfilling the one function you are created to perform, is bound to make you happy. This is applicable even to biology if the scope of the term ‘happy’ is widened enough. A dog is extremely happy to serve its master. In the Guide, not only the computers but even the elevators and the doors interact with the characters (whom they are supposed to serve) in terms of emotions. So, Ford goes on to short the circuit of the security robot in such a way that no matter what, it is in a ‘happy’ condition. So it is no more motivated to report unusual behaviour. Moreover, Ford can get it to do anything at all and the robot gleefully obliges.

    There is more than just paraphrasing functionality and happiness. Consider the ‘modern elevators’. They operate on the principal of “defocused temporal perception.” (page 179) They have the capacity to see dimly into the future, which enables them to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it …

    And where does this get the elevators? Many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanding participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.

    When Douglas Adams gets his tongue in his cheek, even his ordinary machines acquire human neuroses. (Marvin, the super-intelligent robot which is one of the principal characters, is always, ever, inconsolably depressed.) And he never lets the reign of logic slip from his grip. Read, for example, The Universe – some information to help you live in it.

1.       Area: Infinite

2.       Imports: None

3.       Exports: None

4.       Population: None

5.       Monetary Units: None

6.        Art: None

7.        Sex: None.

There is elaborate explanation under each head of course; which is, as always, very logical. For example, under Art the entry is: The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough – see point one. (page 243, 244)

    I think it is safe (logical?) to conclude that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is science fiction of the mind. This discovery made me read the whole trilogy in five parts all over again and I came across umpteen instances of ‘mind over matter’. Arthur C Clarke writes engineering SF. He gives minute details about the structure of his spacecrafts and other devices. The ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ trilogy (this one is in three parts; Clarke is not psychedelic) is a classic example. That makes his SF authentic, gives it an air of scientific prophesy. Asimov’s time-travelling ‘Eternity’ draws power from the Nova Sol. Encircling the Sun from all sides has been postulated as the energy source of a high-energy-consuming humanity of the future. With improbability drives and spaceships powered by bad news, there is no point in enquiring what energy source do the Adams’ spacecrafts use or how they traverse galactic distances. There is an eye for the detail but it draws a line at creating a sense of the normal. Just as you don’t have to explain the functioning of an internal combustion engine to say ‘I took my car to the office.’ However, it is unnerving to have a logic-driven narration ultimately underline the futility of the human effort. 

    Just as it happens with all good literature I read, I go and live it in my mind. So, not as an SF enthusiast but a frequent traveller, I wish to attest that Douglas Adams’ Guide to the Galaxy is absolutely authentic. If you are planning to take a trip there, it will be a most useful companion.