Books Read and Not

Heidi Kasa’s The Beginners is a collection of prose poems. The first, “A Grief That Shatters Oceans,” tells about the eponymous Beginners. “One day, without warning, we all woke up in black robes.” The Enders refuse to accept that this is a good thing though the Beginners embrace their new condition as their nature, eventually and literally true. 

I like Heidi Kasa’s style, her choice of words and their positionings. She reminds me of reading Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She did not invent that kind of writing but she learned from it. She writes what she knows and she knows herself from the inside. She chose a medium that lets her paint with bold economical words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that deliver a gallery of introspections. 

From "Ghosts are Hungry" in The Beginners by Heidi Kasa
https://digging-press.myshopify.com/collections/chapbooks

I read about twenty pages of The Murderbot Diaries Volume 1: All Systems Red. Even though I checked out Volumes 2 and 3, I did not open them. Martha Wells has won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards among many others. (See Wikipedia here.)

Lots of people like her work and find it masterful. I did not. 

Wells attended Texas A & M University and lives in College Station. TAMU is the home of the Texas Cadets, an ROTC corps that is historically recognized. Their former commander, Col. Jake Betty, was later my commanding general in the Texas State Guard. I mention that because Murderbot reflected no special understanding of the warrior guardian ethos of the military and the police.

And Murderbot's getting wounded did not resonate with me: I did not feel it, even though I have been burned and punctured mostly from being a boy and not from being a soldier or a security guard. Wells did not write the words that I needed to read. 

Murderbot does not murder anyone, gratefully; he gets murdered time and again. 

Murderbot hacked his own software to give himself free will. Leaving aside that chicken-and-egg problem, not explaining how to hack an operating system is like not knowing how to hotwire a car. “I didn’t have the keys but I got the car started and drove off.” A robot who hacks his operating system is a story with ponderous consequences. Maybe Martha Wells got around to that later.

I did not get too far into Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Mickey is a protective services android or cyborg and before he gets killed in action, he is supposed to upload his most recent experiences in order allow a seamless download to the next Mickey. In our story, Mickey-7 does not get killed in the last split second and he returns to his station to find Mickey-8 waiting there. This is against the law and can get them both killed. One of them must go. 

They know that they must never be seen together or even allow happenstance encounters that challenge their rival and exclusive natures: they cannot be seen in two places at once. 

Then they meet at the garbage dump. This is an entropy pit into which refuse is thrown for the matter-t0-energy conversion that runs the ship. Jumping in or being thrown in would be fatal and Mickey-8 does not mind that Mickey-7 has considered this. The oubliette is easy to access, lacking any special barrier, to say nothing of an interlock or someone posted there. So, I just stopped reading. And I had at least one reason to continue, even though there are now only two people alive who still call me Mick: my brother and my ex. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

ArmadilloCon 40: Part 2 

Do You Know Your Military 

Why I Served 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

More on The Forever War 

Review: "The Rose" by Charles Harness

The same review appears in many places, easy to tag by the misspelled word “champsioned” which no one corrects. And the story is more complicated than told in the thumbnails or it would be merely the play-by-play of a tug-of-war. The author invested considerable thought in the society in which the characters are acting. They are consistent with their time and place but not ours. They do not say the things we would say if we were thrust into that social context. The society is different than ours but largely recognizable. The narrator brings us into their multifaceted conflict.

"Composer and dancer Anna van Tuyl is working on her masterpiece, a work she has titled "The Rose". Her progress is stymied, however, when her body begins suddenly to change. For no knowable reason, she begins to grow strange protuberances, her body warping more day by day. Desperate to complete her symphony before her life becomes subsumed by these growths, she encounters a painter suffering from the same affliction.
Ruy Jacques is an artist, famed for his works and full of inspiration despite his condition. His wife is a scientist, a woman of logic, working to build the perfect weapon. While Anna at first believes she has found a saviour and kindred spirit in Ruy, she instead finds herself in the middle of a tense battle between art and science, with building jealousy and resentment.
Is the true goal the completion of her work, or the possibility of a cure? Is it better to seek immortality through their art, or a full life through science?
Award-winning author Charles Harness' lost classic was rediscovered by Michael Moorcock more than a decade after it was first published, and champsioned by him to great acclaim. IT was awarded the Retro-Hugo award in 2004. "

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rose/NAUaCgAAQBAJ

Anna van Tuyl is composing a ballet, The Student and the Rose, based on Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. Anna van Tuyl is also a psychogeneticist who has a psychotherapist of her own. He follows her into her assigned quest, a life-and-death game into which her government conscripted her. She turns a corner at a street circus and there he is. He observes her at a literary party and intrudes on her confrontation against her opponent. Coming at her from another angle is another government agent, an undercover assassin. She dodges them to confront her primary opponent: Martha Jacques, the wife of the man whom she was assigned to seduce. The government’s interest in Ruy Jacques and Anna van Tuyl is that Martha Jacques must not be distracted while she is completing the design of a weapon so powerful that it will not just kill everyone on Earth, it will alter the spacetime continuum out to the colonized stellar systems. The device is based on a mathematical thesis which displays as a Rosette when plotted on polar coordinates. This is an expression of the philosophy of Sciomnia, a name dropped without introduction and excused without leave. Her primary distraction is her husband’s sequence of girlfriends. Anna van Tuyl must capture Ruy Jacques’s heart with extreme platonism so that he will not want anyone else and at the same they can assure Martha that nothing is going on. Unfortunately, they are both mutants with similar horns and hunched backs, perhaps able to perceive magnetic signatures that carry information. Those signatures are as ubiquitous as metal objects in a future modern society. The impenetrable steel door announces the combination to its lock. Ruy Jacques perceives that reality but is optically blind to our experiences. Anna van Tuyl has the same ability, only she is a less-evolved creature of his type. They also display physical evidence of a pineal third eye known only to the greatest mystics. They are an entirely new and rising post-human species. Even though it is established that Anna van Tuyl is less developed than Ruy Jacques, she hatches first. The bulb on her back splits open and something comes out which is never mentioned again. This does not happen to Ruy. 

“The Rose” was first published by Authentic Science Fiction. So, the author’s job was made a little easier. The early mention of food heated in an atomic warmer brings you into this future with its visigraph, wire recorder, visor, and electrostat. Early in the story, some of the gadgets had been developed “in the forties” perhaps the 2040s or 2140s. Another time marker is placed by the mention of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, written in 1893, the music having endured for a hundred years, placing the story in 1993. However, at the end, it is revealed that this is the year 2437. 

The novella is easily labeled for its clearly announced argument between Art and Science; Harness gives point-counterpoint as the antagonists make their cases. One assertion is that our material progress may not derive from rational science or passionate art but from occasional global warmings. 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Wolf DeVoon 

Libraries of the Founders 

Only a Cat 

The Night of January 16th 

Books Read and Not Read in 2023 

Parking Enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin

From 11 September 2023 until 16 January 2026, I was employed as a parking enforcement officer at the University of Texas (Austin). 

The absolute best part of the job was the occasional postings to the Pickle Research Center because the food was excellent; I worked alone; and the population there was even a little smarter than the community at the main campus. They made it easy to be lenient, helpful, and informative; and I could still issue ten citations on any day. 

On the main campus, I enjoyed the outreach tables
to give insulated drink mugs along with other merch and swag
to anyone who came up and asked a question.

This was my longest run of W-2 employment since 1991-1993 at Kawasaki Robotics USA, following 1973-1975 with Montgomery Ward & Co; both of those lasting 1 year and 50 weeks. My theory of labor value was informed by Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975). My time at Kawasaki, where I taught robot operations and programming, derived from having read (in 1989) William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Job Description Summary

• Provides university parking services by enforcing University rules and regulations. 
• Ensures that parking regulations are enforced and assists the public with information, such as directions to buildings and offices. 
• Provides assistance to the public by giving parking directions and checking parking permits on vehicles entering the parking lots. 
• Directs flow of traffic and parking of cars. 
• Issues pass-through or visitor's permits when needed. Issues traffic and parking violation citations. 
• Acts as Relief Guard to perform a combination of kiosk guard duties and parking enforcement assistant (PEA) or ticket writer functions. 
• Performs preventative maintenance checks on vehicles. 
• Installs and removes immobilization devices. 
• Controls parking access to surface lots during special events and other university sponsored activities. 
• Resolves or refers parking issues as appropriate. 
• May provide security functions at Pickle Research Center (PRC) to include patrolling buildings and grounds on foot or in vehicles to check for prowlers, fires, water leaks, and general building security.  
• May report all irregularities, emergencies, or suspicious activity to the University Police Office. 
• May be required to rotate locations across campus, including satellite locations.  Other duties as assigned.
• WORKING CONDITIONS: Exposure to variable weather conditions and shift work with varying days off, occasional weekend and overtime.

Despite claiming to be a major research university and even after then-UT president Jay Hatzell declared academic year 2024-25 to be “The Year of AI” the societal dominance of the UT sports cartel is one of the reasons that I left. In our department, we wore UT blood orange tops on Fridays. It was allowed on other days but basic blue was always encouraged. During the football season, we were allowed to wear team jerseys and other UT-branded tops. I wore a “Texas Economics” t-shirt and was told that it did not meet standards because it had no collar. On a following Friday, I put a “Texas Science” t-shirt over a collared blood orange top and was told flat out by the manager who encouraged the football jerseys that this was not within the guidelines for dress. I replied, “It’s spirit day. We can wear UT gear.” His reply: “There are no spirit days.” The diminution of spirit was a constant problem for me.

I found people with a good sense of life at UT, for example at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum and the College of Fine Arts. I enjoyed interacting with them, even when writing citations for the students at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. When I volunteered at the Museum of Science everyone on the staff was enthusiastic, even when acknowledging the existence of unsolved problems at their desk. However, in the parking department eudaimonia was scarce.

This is how student athletes, especially football players, spend their NIL money. 

See recent college athlete valuations at Fox Sports here. 

Parking is like any other game: there are rules and penalties and everyone knows

what they are. The athletes enjoy being able to scoff at the fines 

so that in a community of 55,000 students and 22,000 staff and faculty

served by 13,000 parking spaces they can park wherever they want.

Athletes are given garage parking spaces as part of their scholarship payments. 

As one coach told me, "We don't have a parking problem. We have a walking problem." 

Contract buses take the football players from their lockers

at Moncrief Neuhaus to the Denius practice field less than a mile away and bring them back. 

I believe that it is why they have a hard time winning: they lack a competitive edge.

In 1982, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg moved from Harvard to UT. In 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. [In 2023], coach Steve Sarkisian was paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earned $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. (NecessaryFacts; January 21, 2025.) 

Ahead of the 2025 playing seaon, Arch Manning’s NIL payments were tallied at $6.8 million. (https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/top-25-college-athletes-highest-nil-valuations) That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

[I believe that Stanford science and Harvard economics put into proper context their very successful footballers. See “Stanford Alumni in the NFL Playoffs” here and football at Harvard here.  

See also Harvard Players Health Study ]

These performing arts students called in a complaint
on a professor who parked in the wrong space.
The citation is on the windshield.

The Human Resources department sent me a questionnaire about my separation. “On a scale of 1 to 10…” Most of it was for academics and managers. Some was for me and mine. At the end were two short essay questions. 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely am I to recommend UT as a place to work. I gave it a 3. 

• About a decade before I came to the University of Texas, I was earning my degrees while working part time for a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I knew that no one there knew who I was or cared. What mattered most was my boss, my co-workers, and our clients and their customers. The University of Texas is like that: 55,000 students; 22,000 staff and faculty; deep in the Heart of Texas. All that mattered was the supervisors I could talk to on a first name basis, my team, and the community which we served. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience at the University?

• I loved the museums and I really will miss the libraries. The semester-long checkouts made both research and casual reading very easy, whether writing about the history of physical science and its intersection with the fine arts or catching up on nineteenth century essayists. Occasionally, my daily work let me chat with students and faculty in the performing arts; they are always so interesting. All of that can be hard to find in one place in the private sector. But in the free market, I can make my own opportunities. Here, the paths were fewer and somewhat tangled with undergrowth.

Signage often provided an opportunity
to discuss semantics and sociology. 

I applied for eight other openings on campus, three of them in my own department, and I never got an interview. I adhere to Maslow's Hierarchy. I work for (1) transcendence and (2) self-actualization, (3) my team and (4) our clients, and then I consider (5) the money. This was not the best environment for me and there is more money elsewhere.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed

AFK: Parking Enforcement 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

The Panopticon Overrules Active Fire

The death of Renee Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026 was unnecessary. As the subsequent news stories show, we live in the Panopticon, a society of all-seeing authority. Theorized 1785-1791 by Jeremy Bentham as a design for prisons, the conceptual model was expanded by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). The "authority" need not be legalistic, but can be (and often is) social. Cameras are everywhere. Therefore, the police practices of active engagement and relentless pursuit are antiquated and largely irrelevant.

Criminologists Marcus Felson and Lawrence Cohen published their "routine activity theory" in 1979. It found common acceptance and, of course, criticism. The elements of crime are a (1) willing perpetrator (2) an available victim and (3) the absence of a capable guardian. The theories of community policing rest in part on the fact that the "capable guardian" might need only to be a grandmother in a rocking chair on the front porch as a visible deterrent, 

The known failures of eye witness testimony are now countered by the plurality of immediate independent recordings. 

In 2006, while earning an associate's degree in criminal justice, I was working the night shift as a campus security officer at Washtenaw Community College. My partner had completed his bachelor's at Eastern Michigan University and had returned to WCC for their MCOLES academy. (The standards are commonly required and are TCOLE here in Texas.) I had viewed a training video from the Los Angeles police department on relentless pursuit. You are on patrol with your partner and you pull up to a jewelry store being robbed. The criminals open fire. Your partner goes down. They jump in their car and drive off. What do you do next? LAPD said that you pursue. You call for medical attention for your partner, but you do not stay there. LAPD advocated relentless pursuit. My partner's voice was bitter. "Thanks, Mike. Now I know where you stand." But what about relentless pursuit? I asked. "Look," he replied. "In this day you cannot harm any protective service, not even a school crossing guard, and not have every law enforcement agency after you. Where are you going to go?" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good

That underscores another fact about punishment as a deterrent to crime. Punishment has three aspects: swift, certain, and severe. All that counts is "certain." If a perpetrator is conscious of the fact that they will be punished, if certainty is assured, the crime does not happen. Yes, there are exceptions, especially when emotions are high in the heat of the moment. But premeditated crime is prevented by the certainty of punishment: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Severity is not just unimportant: it is counter-productive because publicity of severe punishment (public hangings, for example) only cause more violence later as the witnesses are affected by the violent event.

That fact explains so-called copycat crimes and the repetition and expansion of violent acts that are widely publicized, such as shootings at schools, or spontaneous protests. Violence becomes normal. 

The normalization of violence was also factor in the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who as of this date was identified as the officer who killed Renee Good. Ross began his career as a soldier in Iraq, just as very many other police officers have served in the armed forces before wearing a badge. The problem is that the civilian police perceive themselves and then become an occupying army surrounded by a hostile populace.    

Community policing and community courts are common remedies offered by academic criminologists and sociologists. As with Granny in the rocker, there is empirical truth underlying the theories. One problem with community policing is that it makes everyone an informant for the State. This is the underlying power of the totalitarian regime which rules because the populace practices habitual self-enforcement. Things are quiet because there is no liberty.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Eye Witness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project 

Alternatives to Prison Part 3 of 3 

Integrating Criminologies 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Answering G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) loved to debate. Among his interlocutors at public forums were George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and H. G. Wells; he also enjoyed engaging over ideas as a recreational virtue. He wrote 80 books and 4000 newspaper columns. Today, he is best known for the Father Brown mysteries that stream on BritBox. (Originally, the books presented 51 stories in five volumes over three decades.) Chesterton supported liberal and even progressive social reforms but as a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and finally Roman Catholicism, he was essentially conservative. Therefore, Chesterton condemned science fiction as “fear of the past.”

Chesterton writing from www.chesterton.org

To me, his literary style was “confectionary.” He wrote for people who have time to enjoy reading, for whom being in your own living room in an overstuffed chair with a book or newspaper is relaxing and refreshing because it is intellectually stimulating. So, he takes a long time to make a point. There are no punchy aphorisms here.

Gilbert Keith and Frances Blogg Chesterton
from www.chesterton.org

“The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

[…]

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

(“Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World, 1910. (Scanned and archived by Project Gutenberg and also Wikisource).

In those days of cold type before photo-offset, books were reset by hand.
I found a discrepancy between two printings: in this essay
the word "brave" (Cassell, London) appearing as "braver" (Dodd Mead, New York).

"The charge of the Crusades was a charge; 

it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver."

Since my first professional sale in 1973, I have written three stories, two science fiction, one horror. Fiction is hard to write because you have to create people, and their actions must make sense because their universe is understandable. It is much easier to report on what I find: pet groomers, political lobbyists, computers, restaurants, stars, coins, robots, airplanes. I take the people as I find them and usually publicize the best side of them. I also read science fiction and participate in the culture of it through ArmadilloCon here in Austin. 

Before I could read, I watched Captain Midnight on television. The first science fiction book I read was The Magic Ball From Mars by Carl L. Biemiller (Curtis Publishing, 1953; website here: https://biemiller.com/bchapt1.htm.) I was nine. As wonderful as it was in two books to meet a boy from outer space, those were stories no different than Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett. What changed was my library card. Entering the 9th grade, I traded my juvenile card for an adult card. After a few fruitless visits to the adult stacks and a last brief walk along the juvenile stacks, I asked the librarian for help. She gave me two books in one: When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. 

I knew end-of-the-world stories as matinee movies about World War III and I knew The Day the Earth Stood Still. But this was different. I could see myself in the story. If we are going to another planet with the smartest people around, I knew some girls I would like to have gone with, especially once we arrive on Bronson Beta. This was a planet with an indoor pool!  (It also had troublesome commies and fascists.) (Book and movie reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/01/when-worlds-collide.html)

Closer to this decade, I read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. They are also invented worlds where the reader can find a place. Fitzgerald and Austen are compelling. But their worlds are static, not merely unchanged but unchangeable. Elizabeth Bennett does not perceive the canals and steam engines that are reshaping her world.

Gatsby is close to science fiction but unintentionally so. The plot hinges on an automobile accident. A generation earlier it could have been a horse-drawn carriage or any other happenstance for which people refuse to accept responsibility. But it was not. It was a new invention that they could not control. 

by Alexandra Samuel, Ph. D. on JSTOR Daily February 19, 2019
https://daily.jstor.org/can-science-fiction-predict-the-future-of-technology/

Chesterton’s complaint is valid when people are taken out of their social context. He is concerned with eternal moral problems. Those never change. But the external world and our society within it all do change, especially now. And we believe that we have some control over those changes. 

Our choices are greatly consequential. Ivanhoe could help King Richard but he could do nothing about feudalism, even though Walter Scott (1771-1834) lived in a time of rapid and powerful changes. 

The Thomas Theorem of sociology says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Science fiction gives reality to unreal situations: colonies in space; plastic-eating bacteria; computer programs you can live inside of; artificial super humans with a four-year lifespan.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Like rockets into outer space, robots, and cloning, plastic-eating bacteria are now real. It is not that science fiction predicted those and multiverses more but that it allows us to model them, test them, plan our responses to them, and prepare for the changes we cannot predict and do not expect. 

For Chesterton, the most important problems were moral, and so they remain for us. 

Science fiction is not a set of engineering drawings—though you can buy the plans to the starship Enterprise—it is about the moral problems that people will solve in new  circumstances. That is the "science" in the fiction as defined by Steven Weinberg who identified the experiment as an unnatural arrangement designed to test a hypothesis. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Anthropocene: A Bad Name for a Good Thing

Coins and Stamps

Females and Women

Psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation to Big Data