The British TV Mystery -- Successes, Drawbacks

 

The British are known not just for their rich literary history but also for their mysteries: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercules Poirot. It's their most common export to American television.

My parents used to stay up to watch British mysteries--a highlight of their Sunday evenings--preferring their intellectual engagement over the American variety although they watched American variety as well. Dad, despite or because of having been in the FBI, never lost his penchant for police investigations.

Mom, however, has become a powerful story-telling barometer. If the story is good enough, she'll stay awake. If not, she sleeps. It's not that she does this intentionally, but a good story will keep her up. Show her a literary adaptation, and she'll remain rapt.

Now why should she still love British mysteries if half lull her to sleep? One thing they're selling is their culture. What is ordinary life in England like? They often will show a pub, a committee meeting, a family home, a school house, a police department. Whatever. How aware they are of this? Keenly? Or not so much? Americans at least recognize it as one sponsor is a cruise line that briefly advertises at the beginning and end of a show. So the mystery is a vicarious travelogue.

Clearly, this alone, however, won't hold one's attention

There's almost always a status quo scene, which American shows may skip. But it plays a vital part of setting up the story. Now if done right, the status quo scene(s) can hold one's attention. An episode of Midsomar Murders Spanish dance scene at a local dance hall that held fairly strong tension as people displayed their attitudes. This led into the first murder. 

These status-quo scenes can be rich and powerful opportunities not just for culture, but also character, which can make the mystery memorable. But sometimes the British mysteries trudge a bit too slowly--I'd qualify this "for American taste" but how is that we remain rapt for the British literary adaptation? 

Beside tension and characters, another powerful draw is the unraveling through-thread that provides a pull throughout the story. It is the scaffolding that allows us to cobble together the story from the investigation. Take the compelling game of the power of attorney in "Sauce for the Goose." While the murder itself may be absurdly improbable, the unraveling of this game of power is riveting.

I'll come back to this topic again later.

"Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang

First appeared in Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Starlight 2. This won the Nebula, Seiun, and Sturgeon awards. It was up for the Hugo, Tiptree, Locus, and Homer awards and was reprinted by Gardner Dozois (twice), Robert Silverberg, David G. Hartwell, John Joseph Adams, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Summary:

Aliens arrive and the military (via Colonel Weber) hire Louise Banks to do the translating. She succeeds.... perhaps too well.

Meanwhile, interspersed with the alien narrative is Banks addressing her child in the future tense discussing memories. The point of these sections is a spoiler.

Commentary with Spoilers:

When I first read Chiang, I read him wrong. I kept expecting something that he wasn't doing. Chiang is old-school SF. He squeezes all he can out of an idea.

Here the idea is language:  What if you could read a language, not sequentially, but wholly at once? The shape of the aliens--not bilateral like us, which caused us to read sequentially, Chiang's story hypothesizes--is radial symmetry (that is, the same all the way around). So their language absorbs all information from the past, present and future. This in turn shapes their thinking so that they actually perceive future and past simultaneously.

When Banks grasps this, her brain alters so that she can perceive the future and the future child it contains--a child who will die. This is emotionally poignant--one of Chiang's more powerful works.

Chiang's idea rests, in part, on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states language shapes the mind. This notion was discredited, but has reemerged with new nuances. Here are one and two articles from Scientific American that suggest that words can at least sharpen our awareness to what can be observed. This is SF, after all. It's aim is to get you think, not necessarily describe the universe perfectly. Who knows? Maybe a language will get us to grasp the universe in completely different terms.

When Colonel Weber arrives, the narrative is uncannily familiar. It took a minute to recall that it rang of the opening to Samuel Delany's Babel-17. No doubt this is an homage to Delany's own investigation into Sapir-Whorf.

The original idea that inspired Chiang's story is Fermat's principle of least time. Normally, in physics, we say that light travels in a direction at the speed of light until it hits a new medium where it slows a changes direction. Fermat suggested that light (as if it had agency of its own) arrives at its destination because it is the fastest route to get there, not a straight line, because it can travel faster in the first medium than the second. The way this applies to your own life might be traveling on the interstate as far as you can before entering city streets. You might overshoot your destination if you didn't have drive as long on the slower city streets. To see how this applies to the story in question, see quote below.

Quote:

"[T]he ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in." 

Studying, Science, Grammar links

Studying

• You learn better with a pen in your hand, even than a laptop.  Though I wonder if laptop users follow a similar method of note-taking.

Science

• NBC's Science Behind the News -- mostly not standards based, but questions that students will ask

Grammar

• Here's a 10-question grammar quiz.

• Here's your cheat sheet:  Grammar Girl.

The Explicable, Inexplicable, and Opinions

Largely Explicable:

Pictures of sinkholes--formation often caused by underground water forming caves.  When the water's gone, nothing's left to support the earth above it.

Can a zombie plague get us all?  Joan Slonczewski tackles the topic.

Nigh Inexplicable:

Egyptian statue moves

Scientists guess at why the early universe is not evenly distributed:  Multiple universes

Opinion:

The need for more English majors:  Learn how to write

Philosopher Michael P. Lynch connects personhood and privacy (food for thought)