The problem with Aldous Huxley

I presume he’s talking about BNW? Tried reading it once. It’s a fantasy. It doesn’t have any credible route to get from our world to its. But few of these sort of books have. And if they justify their own world, what use are they for prediction?

So because he has done the following:

He was also unaware that there are ways of tackling this. I have been persuaded to cut almost all carbohydrates and as much sugar as possible out of my diet. It has not been hard, although it has been akin to breaking an addiction. Nor has it been expensive. Savings in booze (I do not notice its near total absence at home now) and, in my case, savings on buns of all sorts, have more than covered the cost of more cheese (especially), eggs, cream (for pannacottas), and bacon, which was something I had not eaten for a while, but which I now do.

I now find I eat much less, because I no longer appear to be nearly as hungry as I was. The sugar spikes that used to feel like hunger, but were more like the messages my brain sent to me as a sugar addict to demand more of that substance on which it has become dependent, no longer get sent. I can go longer between meals. When I get to them, I am satisfied with less.

I sleep better.

I have more energy.

I feel better.

My head is clearer.

And I have lost a stone without noticing, or even trying.

I am down two inches in waist size.

The medical evidence is that I will have massively reduced my risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia and many forms of heart disease, at least for a long time.

The logical corollary is as follows:

– All alcohol should be banned. He doesn’t drink and has saved money. Booze costs the NHS money therefore we need to stop it

– That extends to ‘Ultra Processed Food’ and ‘Excess Sugar’

– What works for a sadly unretired ‘accountant’ and ‘academic’ in Ely, a sample size of one can be extrapolated to the entire country

– Policy must be dictated by what this self- proclaimed polymath determines

Time doesn’t permit it currently, but a project to compare Murphy’s witherings with that of another famous anti-semite from last century might yield some entertainment. I’ll have to dig my copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ out of storage but I am sure the same messianic self- righteousness suffuses the two people’s works,

It’s as Tim says, there’s simply not even a degree of either self- awareness or conception of his actual intellectual capacity versus the reality. It’s really quite sad that someone who I think is nearly seventy behaves like they’re in their early twenties.

Martin near the M25

Completely – there’s aspects of it (and I haven’t read it in a while) that chime completely with the current obsessions. Certainly anyone pushing the Militant trans bullshit and DIE come straight out of Brave New world. Easily translatable. And it is a totalitarian vision, which is of course why Murphy is completely on board with it, what he is too stupid to realise is where it ever to come to pass I’d expect him to be one of the first up against the wall (metaphorically speaking) – in the batches before myself. Believe me, that wouldn’t be much consolation,

It doesn’t really matter whether a wee drinkie-poo lowers mortality. As long as it doesn’t thrust it up the pleasure is justification enough. Not that how much I drink any of his bloody business anyway. Twat.

MNTM25 and dearieme, and I don’t suppose he’s considered that they’d have to find >£12.7 billion a year that HM Gov currently steals in Alcohol Duty if we did all become teetotalers.

BIS,

“It doesn’t have any credible route to get from our world to its. But few of these sort of books have. And if they justify their own world, what use are they for prediction?”

Most sci-fi is really about the fears of that time, exaggerated, stretched out. And generally wrong, but it’s also what sells because so much of the public is equally misinformed.

If I tried to do serious futurology of the next 35 years (and I could probably do quite well with 15-20 of those) people would dismiss it and it would also be really boring. Imagine if Blade Runner was how 2019 actually was? Not artificial people in flying cars murdering people, but low life drug dealers with cellphones or the occasional medieval shithead blowing up a bus, that isn’t that much different to what the IRA, ETA and Baader-Meinhof did.

@WB
There are some writers manage it. Gibson’s very clever. The Sprawl series anticipated cyberspace. Not the mechanics of it but the cultural effects. And the Blue Ant series explores the consumer world interestingly. There’s some other writers similar
But this speculative fiction not SciFi. Heaven knows what Huxley thought he was writing. Or why it gets so much acclaim. But of its time. Novel writing’s come a long way since then.

Van_Patten,

Yeah, most of this is “eat less sugar”. It’s not “ultra processed” or whatever. A bag of sugar isn’t classed as “ultra processed” by these people, but it really makes fuck all difference if you buy a Mr Kipling cupcake or bake it yourself. They just use a factory to do what you do with a food mixer and oven.

What’s really going on, is actually much more about romance and nostalgia than hard science. There’s a sense of something good about home baked cakes, or cakes from a little Cotswold tea room, and that being able to buy them off the shelf in Aldi is somehow wrong.

The opposition to McDonalds is fundamentally anti-modernist. People don’t like that it runs like a factory, even though factories are efficient. Every other claim against it in terms of the source of their ingredients, the way they treat workers, the cleanliness of how they work and health can be applied to your local cafe, kebab shop or Chinese take away AND SOME. It’s always wrapped up in these aspects but when you say “so should we ban Duchy Original Cornish Pasties which are less healthy than a Big Mac” these people don’t like it. Their version of acceptable fast food is some romantic bollocks about little farmers and artisan makers.

Write about what you know or, at least, that is where you have to start. And write to what you presume your audience knows. Otherwise there can be no start to the communication — for fiction, ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’. Fantasy, SF, faraway places, the past, the future: all these offer a freedom to stretch what the audience is willing to believe. But the base is always the perceptions of the present, it is all we really know,

The opposition to McDonalds is fundamentally anti-modernist.

Its mostly anti American cultural snobbery.

Ironic that the citation of Brave New World is made by the Epsilon Semi-Moron from Ely

The bio technology in Brave New World was impressive. Genetic modification and cloning were routine. Disease had been eliminated. No one was obese so either the desire for sugar and ultra-processed food had been eradicated or the bio engineered human metabolism processed them effectively.

Consequently what we get from the book is a failure to predict a non-event.

“All the evidence shows that moderate drinking lowers all cause mortality.”

Associative studies cannot prove causation, so we can’t say it lowers mortality rates. It’s like the WHO labelling red-meat as a carcinogen.