Postscript to the apocalypse...
... and preface to a Very Serious discussion of academia.
My latest serial is complete: eight fun episodes in a broken war-torn world. No, not this one — a decade in the future. That's right: an apocalyptic futuristic science fiction story, which also just happens to lightly satirise the world of academia. It's difficult to imagine a more exciting read!
If you were holding off starting because you didn’t trust me to finish it, you may now begin in confidence.
Having completed eight episodes of exceptional fictional entertainment, I believe I have earned a few weeks of non-fiction wittering. Including an article devoted entirely to self-indulgent rumination on the story I just wrote.
My intention had been to write the entire serial before publishing it.
I failed miserably.
This was despite the most careful preparations. Having written a series of articles about consciousness, inspired by Erik Hoel's extremely thought-provoking book, and then a four-part serial (see my clever plan here) I had two months of material. That meant eight entire weeks to concoct the next serial.
Every single week was squandered.
Ok, I did write three episodes of something. Then got stuck. There was also a week's holiday skiing because, while I may be an inept and income-free writer of fiction serials, I also have another life as a wildly successful physics professor. Then I took a couple more weeks off writing, because I had come home with a bad cold.
Then — surprise! — it's time to publish some new material.
Things were desperate. Help arrived from an unexpected direction. My university produced a video to provoke discussion about its future direction. It was surprisingly apocalyptic, given the usually anodyne and upbeat nature of such things. However, my reaction was, “You call that apocalyptic? I could do much better!” Then someone, inevitably, produced a spoof, and my reaction to that was, “You call that a spoof? I could do much better!”
It was in these heady moments of artistic bravado that I decided that an appalling apocalyptic future would be the perfect setting for some academic satire. It sounded like an easy way to make everyday annoyances entertaining. We all know about an ambitious jerk who wants to be in charge. Or pointless arbitrary decisions by the bureaucracy. Or silly rivalries. But remove them from the context of the people you know, and put them into fictional stories about made-up characters, and they are revealed as intensely boring. To exploit their full entertainment potential requires immense creativity, talent, and hard work. Or — just put them in a crazy setting!
I already had an idea lying around, which will give you a sense of the dire lack of talent I'm working with here: “A plot to overthrow the head of department.” What was the plot? No idea. Why might this be an interesting story? I dunno — isn't conflict supposed to be good? Shouldn't the protagonist have a goal?
It was a start, and I could put it at the end of the thousand-word apocalyptic vision I had just written, to pretend that an actual story was forthcoming. Wahoo! It had been lots of fun wiping out Sydney and Melbourne, and Oxford and Cambridge, and subjecting both Europe and the US to dictatorial rule, and imagining that the UK economy was so utterly devastated that academia was — finally! — the country's most successful industry. I could wait until next week to work out what would happen next.
I do not recommend this strategy.
However, I did find it interesting as a week-by-week recycling of random blips of information as they passed me by. Obviously there were encounters with topics that belong in an academic satire, like astronomical fees for international PhD students (guess who was in charge of our group's PhD hiring this year?), or the criminally high profits of academic publishers (allow me to use the topic of extortionate publication fees as an excuse to mention that I've published a paper in Nature). But there were also small things that popped up and seemed useful.
I wanted a one-liner about a publisher taking over an entire island, but needed a good candidate. Madagascar? Too remote. Ireland? Are you crazy!? Far too large! Then I remembered that that week's episode of the Rest Is Politics podcast had talked about a corruption case in Gibraltar. Gibraltar would be perfect!
Prior to the recent solar eclipse someone joked on social media that Bonnie Tyler must be making a killing with repeat plays of Total Eclipse of the Heart, just as Prince had made a fortune in 1999. That was a cute idea. Surely I could do something with It's The End of the World As We Know It?
And pretty much every day I got frustrated by pedestrians who walked mindlessly across the cycle lane. If I rang my bell they usually got out of the way. I felt a bit guilty about frightening them, but then they gave me such an aggrieved look, as if I was the one breaking the most basic road rules, that I wished I had a MUCH louder bell, and rode at them MUCH faster, and absolutely scared the shit out of them. So I found a place to get that off my chest.
What was more interesting to me was how the entire set-up was sub-consciously motivated by current events, notably the war in Ukraine.
In January 2022 we were told that of course Putin would not invade Ukraine, and were provided with footage of lovely Ukrainian towns and cities, full of beautiful old buildings and sophisticated modern infrastructure and people going about ordinary modern lives, as if to say, “Come on? Really? Can you seriously imagine this is in any danger? That's as ridiculous as imagining that your own city is about to be bombed.”
Well.
It turns out that the vast weight of modern infrastructure and a throbbing economy and the infinite detail of our millions of daily lives provide a compelling illusion of permanence — but an illusion it most certainly is. You can blow it all to rubble in a week.
That irrefutable evidence of impermanence sinks in, and mixes with nearly a decade of successive bouts of instability and unpredictability: Trump, Brexit, COVID.
These days imagining a war-ravaged future is hardly an act of creativity. (Anyone been to see Civil War?)
There are plenty of other wars going on — Sudan, Gaza — but I get the most detail about Ukraine, from reading Phillips O'Brien's Substack, which I heartily recommend. I suspect I read it as a form of confirmation bias: a common theme is that the media give Russia far too much credit; in reality Russia is doing a terrible job, and if Ukraine's allies grow enough of a spine to properly support them, all can be well. I am there for the optimism.
If I look back in ten years on the story I wrote, I expect to be surprised that a goofy satire of academia contains, in almost every episode, a reference to bombing and drones and air defences. Three years ago that would have been bizarre, and hopefully the same is true three years into the future. Right now it seems perfectly natural.
Some time ago I got a “Britbox” subscription, and watched some old Doctor Who episodes from the Jon Pertwee era. I doubt it seemed surprising to people at the time, but watching them now, I was struck by the number of stories that revolved around efforts to find new energy sources. And why not? This was in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis. If you were going to write science fiction, what else would you want to write about, besides miraculous new energy sources? Even when you're writing light entertainment for kids, the times seep in.
I'm not trying to pretend that my piece of frivolous fun was in fact profound and symbolic. Perish the thought! It was quite the opposite — but even when you cook up the most artless piece of nonsense, you can taste the atmosphere it was baked in.
The story was a mixed achievement.
In one way it was a big step forward. I managed to wrangle enough moments of my time, and conjure enough flickers of discipline, to put together a pretty good eight-week serial.
In other ways it was a step backwards. A decade ago I started a blog that was almost entirely lampooning of academia. That seemed like a fine idea until I discovered that social media was absolutely drenched in criticism of academia. It was full-on “the system is broken” discourse. Yes, there was plenty to criticise in academia, and plenty to improve, but the weight of the commentary was too much in one direction. It felt disingenuous to keep making jokes. Hey — I like being an academic! I liked being a grad student, and I liked being a postdoc, and now I like being a professor. And as far as I can tell, it's not the case that the vast majority of people feel differently.
What to do? If I wanted to write humour, but also paint a more balanced picture of academic life, then I would have to move beyond easy satire. As you can see, I have a very long way to go.
For the next few weeks I'm going to take a stab at it in the non-fiction realm. I will start next week by re-publishing a piece I wrote almost exactly ten years ago, in full cynical mode. Then make the case for the defence. This is prompted partly by what I wrote above, but additional motivation arrived recently in the form of a video from Sabine Hossenfelder. It was partly a personal “this is my experience and I'm not speaking for anyone else” take, and partly an indictment on funding in specific fields (I guess particle physics), but it was also a tank of rocket fuel for the “system is broken” brigade. Have a look, and read my (much more entertaining) piece next week, and get yourself fully immersed in the anti-academia mindset, and then you can decide how well I mount a defence.
If the links in the text weren’t obvious enough, here are the previous pieces I mentioned:
Where do you see yourself in ten years? (8 parts)
Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
A Scientist’s Revenge (4 parts)
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4