Can we have a moment of silence for all the fairytales disemboweled by their authors’ insistence that they have a moral message?

The Narnia stories are some of the best/worst out there. Ambivalent? Yes/no. Sometimes, CS Lewis’s imagination takes flight, and Narnia becomes a place of haunted splendor. Other times, Narnia is shallow and facile, with characters in constant danger of puncturing their paper-thin world with an errant swordpoint. CS Lewis keeps using them as a delivery vehicle for his moral views. His fairytale world seems fabricated and unconvincing when you realise that the fauns and centaurs are there to preach the views of a 20th century English professor.

Why does Edmund Pevensie have to die?

What crime has he committed? The word “traitor” is bandied about…who did he betray? He was not a citizen of Narnia. He swore no oath of fealty to Aslan. From his perspective, he met a nice lady who promised to do nice things for his family, so he’s throwing his lot in with her. Sounds fair. Is his crime that he was gullible, easily mislead? For fuck’s sake, he’s a young boy, talking to the embodiment of the devil. She could probably convince Henry Kissinger to eat the turkish delight.

Roger Ebert once said “You can’t have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense.” And it’s hard to view Edmund as a bad person when he’s only doing the things you and I would do, in his place.

Yes, he meets some other characters who speak ill of the witch, but who doesn’t spread rumours about their enemy during a war? What reason does he have to believe the beavers’ and Tumnus’s version of events, instead of Maugrim’s and the dwarf’s?

It gets worse when you consider that the witch’s turkish delight is described as enchanted: you will always want to eat more of it. All of Edmund’s decisions after meeting the witch were made with highly impaired judgement. How does it make sense to treat him as a bad guy, either from the reader’s point of view or from Aslan’s?

CS Lewis is trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents here, and it’s a problem he never manages to solve. You can actually see the exact moment when he gives up, and just declares ex cathedra that Edmund knew he was joining the side of evil.

“She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel. ”

This is shitty writing, and you can almost hear pipes and water mains burst inside the story. You can’t just declare by fiat “this character is evil”, you have to let their actions earn it. Edmund’s don’t. He’s a villain with no villainous acts, a guy on a wanted poster with his crimes reading “he was mean to his sister.”

But the Chronicles of Narnia are still great books, or at least fun books. You just have to indulge CS Lewis a bit. They’re like Saturday morning cartoons where every now and then the super hero jabs a finger at you through the screen and delivers a PSA about saying no to drugs and staying in school. Although in Narnia’s case it’s often more like saying no to school and staying in drugs.

Here’s West Hunter with an example of how following long inductive chains can cause you to arrive at wrong conclusions that perhaps end in Iraq getting buried in a ten-foot-deep layer of white phosphorus.

I would like to supply a similar case.

In 1989, a Missouri-class battleship called the USS Iowa was test-firing its 16-inch guns. Something went wrong. As explosive charges were loaded into the breech of gun turret number two, they suddenly detonated, sending the explosion back into the turret crew. Forty-seven servicemen died in a wash of fire.

How did it happen? The gun barrel in question was cold. No cold weapon had ever caused a spontaneous explosion in all of recorded maritime history. Navy investigators found traces of brake fluid, calcium hypochlorite, and steel wool inside the barrel. The remains of a sabotage device?

The story developed an interesting Brokeback Mountain-esque winkle when it was revealed that Clayton Hartwig, captain of the centre gun, had been in a covert relationship with a sailor in the turret crew. What’s more, he’d been in charge of the loading operation. Was this an act of revenge from a jilted lover? Both men had died in the explosion.

Elaborate theories of sabotage and murder-suicide looked right past the real reason for the explosion. Additional bags of explosives called “trim bags” are normally inserted into the main charge to correct for weight variations. Unlike the explosives in the main charge, the “trim bags” are not tightly packed, making them susceptible to the shock of the gun’s power-driven rammer. The Iowa, incidentally, had a rammer that forced the bagged explosives into the breech 0.6 meters further than regulation guidelines, and with greater force. The explosive charges remain stable under heavy pressure, but the loosely-packed trim bags were very unstable under those conditions.

A second technical inquiry established that the chemical remains in the gun barrel were most likely from a mixture of cleaning fluid, lubricants, and seawater. No reason to suspect conscious sabotage.

Finally, a test rig was built that simulated the Iowa’s 16-inch cannon, as well as the over-ramming. It was done five times, ten times, fifteen times, but nothing happened.

The testers persisted. As Nassim Taleb would point out fifteen years later, you have to make outliers part of your plan. Even if cold explosions almost never happen, you cannot escape the awful tyranny of that “almost”.

On the 18th test, the charge exploded inside the cold barrel, blowing the test rig apart.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aegean is described dozens of times as “wine-dark”. Honey is “green”. Iron is “violet”. This has led to fringe theories that the classical Greeks saw the world in very different colours than us.

The content of Agatha Christie’s writing has been analysed, uncovering some interesting patterns. Her vocabulary became much smaller as she grew older, and she started using far more indefinite words (“something, thing, anything”) Some now suspect that she was writing her final novels through the early stages of Alzheimers. Of course, could also have been suffering from a similar but unrelated disease called “who gives a shit, I live in a house of solid gold.”

Aquinas once said “beware the man of one book.” Most think that means “don’t trust people who rely on one point of truth and don’t consider outside perspective”, but actually Aquinas meant the opposite, that someone who has learned and mastered just one book can be formidable.

The entire Twilight series has about 43 million copies in print. By comparison, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung has only 820 million copies.

One of the earliest ebook readers, if you take a cosmopolitan view of the word, was the Nintendo Gameboy. In the mid-90s someone found a way to fit the entire KJV Bible on a GB cartridge (you can download a ROM here), allowing for reading and even advanced capabilities such as indexing/referencing. On eBay the original cartridges are selling for more than $500, making it one of the more expensive editions of the Bible.

Someone once described fiction writers as “professional liars”. If you accept this, science fiction might actually be the least lie-filled genre, since it has potential to become the truth.

After Marquis de Sade died, his skull was phrenologically examined. It was exactly the right shape for a priest. 

Dean Koontz sold the first story he ever wrote, and then collected 75 rejections before making another sale. Some wish this ratio still held true in 2015.

The most prolific author might well be this programmer, who algorithmically generated 800,000 books and started selling them on Amazon.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 has been packaged a lot of interesting ways. First Ballantine released a limited run that was bound in asbestos. A more recent one comes with a match and an igniter strip. And, of course, you can read it on the Kindle, after wiping away a thick layer of irony.

To paraphrase something recently pointed out to me, “buy my book” is the white person’s version of “buy my mixtape”.

On the topic of The Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, I find it likely that somewhere, sometime, a person in the midst of starvation actually tried to eat theirs.