Mushroom-Robot Biohybrids

Robots controlled by electrical impulses from fungal mycelium threads:

Robot Blends Living Organisms and Machines

The "rootlike threads" are grown into a robot's hardware. I was surprised to learn fungi generate electrical impulses. Because the mycelia are light-sensitive, scientists can control the direction and speed of the robots' movements with ultraviolet light.

It's hoped that, when perfected, such biohybrid machines could have agricultural uses, among other applications. The article includes a photo of a robot covered with a "self-healing skin. . . that can react to light and touch." The picture looks a bit like the conventional image of a golem.

I'm reminded of T. Kingfisher's riveting novel WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, a retelling of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" in science-fiction terms. It attributes the eerie phenomena -- e.g., the climactic rising of a dead character from her tomb -- to an intelligent fungal colony that lives in the tarn and infiltrates the bodies of animals (and at least one person). The organism seems to be trying to communicate and apparently doesn't mean any real harm. How could it understand why humans get upset when corpses walk around?

Has anyone ever produced a horror movie about a swarm of intelligent fungi? If mushroom-robot symbiosis ever results in a successful commercial product, surely such a film couldn't be far behind.

One expert in the ethical implications of technological innovations expresses concern "that if biohybrid robots become more sophisticated and are deployed in the ocean or another ecosystem it could disrupt the habitat, challenging the traditional distinction between life and machine." However, there's no mention of a potential for mycelium-powered machines to become conscious and demand civil rights or fair salaries, fringe benefits, and working conditions.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

RavenCon 17 (April 2024)

Last weekend, my husband, our daughter, and I attended RavenCon near Richmond, Virginia. Here's the convention's website. Information about this year's con is still up.

RavenCon

Guests of honor were editor Ellen Datlow and author Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher. Since she's one of my favorite writers, I was thrilled when I learned she'd be there. Her reading consisted of excerpts from a new "Sworn Soldier" novel -- sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD and WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, yay! -- and a novel about an angel and a demon teaming up to solve a mystery in a small village. (She mentioned her dismay when the GOOD OMENS series premiered, after she was well into the book.) I watched part of her interview later, fascinating background information about the origins of her writing career.

I appeared on panels about Writing Believable Characters and Geeks Parenting Geeks. The latter especially was a lot of fun, the whole session filled with memories and anecdotes about introducing our children to the worlds of fantasy, SF, and horror, plus the works our kids turned us on to. My husband took part in discussions on Writing with a Partner and Writing a Series. Together we appeared in "How Will Religion Change in Space?" Well attended, that was lively and thought-provoking but slightly chaotic. In our opinion, the moderator opened the floor to questions too soon. Eager audience participation is always desirable, but people kept prematurely derailing topics in progress. I never did get to say much about Mary Doria Russell's THE SPARROW, one book I especially wanted to delve into, but anyway it was a worthwhile and memorable panel.

The most heavily attended session I watched, surprisingly, was a lecture with slides proposing that the folktale of "The Smith and the Devil" is the "world's oldest fairy tale." The room was packed, with people sitting on the floor and leaning against walls -- at 9 p.m. on Friday. An interesting late-night presentation I watched only part of was called "Ask a Necromancer," by a licensed mortician answering questions about her profession. On Sunday morning, a slide show about angel lore in myth, fiction, and film mentioned some works new to me that I may watch on video streaming. I brought up C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, strangely (from my viewpoint) omitted from her book list even though she cited several other things that sounded rather peripheral to the topic.

At the Saturday evening masquerade contest, even though I recognized hardly any of the costumes, I marveled at how impressively elaborate most were. Even the "cosplay showcase" of people who didn't enter the official competition featured many dazzling outfits. One I did recognize immediately -- the Queen of Hearts, complete with flamingo, with the equally regally dressed King of Hearts hovering in the background.

Fortunately for getting to events on time, the hotel restaurant offered buffets at all three meals on Saturday and breakfast on Sunday. Not so fortunately, we had to fend for ourselves at Friday dinner in the only food venue open, the bar. With the resulting crowd, we didn't get fed until half an hour after ordering, when the opening ceremony had already started. Aside from not being present for the self-introduction of guests, though, we didn't miss anything vital.

We drove there and back uneventfully. We arrived home on Sunday afternoon to find the house and the cats in good condition.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Gender Pronouns in SF

This week T. Kingfisher's new horror novel, WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, was published. Sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD (a retelling of "The Fall of the House of Usher"), it features the same narrator, "sworn soldier" Alex Easton. The language of Alex's homeland, Gallacia, a tiny imaginary country in central Europe, has at least six personal pronouns. In addition to the typical masculine and feminine, they have a pronoun for rocks (and inanimate objects in general, I assume) and one applied only to God. Pre-adolescent children go by a special non-gendered pronoun, which is also used by most priests and nuns. Someone learning the language who accidentally calls a child "he" or "she" must apologize profusely to avoid suspicion of being a pervert. Sworn soldiers adopt a nonbinary identity and the pronoun "ka" (subjective) or "kan" (objective and possessive).

The idea of having a unique pronoun for God appeals to me. It would avert controversy over whether the Supreme Being is masculine or feminine. In much of Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction work, she uses the Hebrew word "El" as the divine pronoun for that very purpose.

The masculine, feminine, and neuter system familiar to us is far from universal in real-world languages. French, of course, has only masculine and feminine, no neuter. Even "they" is gendered. Recently I was surprised to learn that Mandarin has no gendered pronouns at all. Japanese, on the other hand, has a daunting variety of pronouns with diverse shades of meaning. There are first-person pronouns used primarily by men and others primarily by women. I've read that Japanese women in positions of authority face the double bind of either referring to themselves in the feminine style and appearing weak or using a male-type version of "I" and sounding masculinized.

A chart of Japanese personal pronouns:

Japanese Pronouns

Until the 19th century, their language didn't even include a term for "she." A word was adapted for that purpose to provide an equivalent for the same part of speech in European languages.

As far as imaginary foreign or extraterrestial languages in speculative fiction are concerned, some authors embrace the concept of inventing pronouns, while others actively dislike and avoid it. At the time of writing THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Ursula Le Guin fell into the latter category.

Le Guin discusses the gendered language she used in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, on pages 16 and following of this essay:

Is Gender Necessary? Redux

The italic passages on the right sides of the pages express her later, revised thoughts about the topics covered in the original essay.

She critiques her own refusal to invent new pronouns for the alien society in the novel: "I still dislike invented pronouns, but now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech."

This 2020 article by Ryan Yarber analyzes Le Guin's essay in depth, going into detail about the issue of personal pronouns:

Beyond Gender: Exploring Ursula K. Le Guin's Thought Experiment

As for this issue in real life, people have tried to introduce invented third-person pronouns in order to get away from the awkwardness of "he/she" or using "they" as singular. No such system has widely caught on. While languages freely borrow nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from each other, the basic structural components are far more stubbornly resistant to change.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Deities in Fantasy Worlds

Recently T. Kingfisher published the fourth book in her "Saint of Steel" series, PALADIN'S FAITH. (The others are PALADIN'S GRACE, PALADIN'S STRENGTH, and PALADIN'S HOPE.) Also in the same setting: The Clocktaur War duology (CLOCKWORK BOYS and THE WONDER ENGINE) and the stand-alone novel SWORDHEART. These works may be broadly described as sword-and-sorcery romances in a late medieval or an early steampunk milieu.

The premise of "Saint of Steel" is that the deity in the series title died, from a cause so far unknown. His paladins felt his violent death. The few who survived the cataclysmic trauma struggle to carry on with their lives despite a void where the bond with their god should be. Two gifts of their divine patron remain, the "voice" that empowers them to persuade anyone of almost anything (provided the paladin sincerely means what he or she says) and a battle frenzy called the "black tide," which grants them superhuman strength and speed but leaves scars on their souls. The surviving paladins have been taken under the protection of the temple of the White Rat.

The stories in this fictional universe feature three principal deities, although others are mentioned: The Saint of Steel, whose warriors fight evil and protect its victims; the pragmatic White Rat, whose temples are noted for exercising charity and correcting injustices, many of whose devotees are lawyers or investigative accountants; and the Dreaming God, whose servants specialize in exorcizing demons. As illustrated by a scene at the climax of PALADIN'S FAITH when the Saint of Steel speaks to a large crowd through the mouth of a character, everyone knows and takes for granted the existence of the gods. In the face of incontrovertible evidence, nobody disbelieves in supernatural beings. If there are any "flat-earth atheists" in this world, we don't meet them:

Flat-Earth Atheist

The background of the Dungeons and Dragons games is similar, but even more so. Everybody knows that multiple gods exist and that clerics acquire their magic spells by praying to their patron deities.

What would it be like to live in a world where the existence of deities is a routinely accepted truth? Faith in the sense of intellectual belief would be unnecessary and nonexistent. You don't have that type of "faith" in something definitely known. No matter how powerful, divine entities would be as mundane a fact as the sun and the moon. Faith in the sense of trust, of course, would be an entirely different matter. Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Discworld doesn't approve of believing in gods; it only encourages them.

The rare person who experiences an epiphany like the characters in the aforementioned scene would presumably react with awe. Most ordinary people, lacking either a personal divine encounter or Granny Weatherwax's strength of character, would probably regard the gods as powers to be approached with caution, placating them but not getting too deeply involved. Rather like living next to a forest infested by semi-tame tigers, maybe.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.