week 09 / 2025

“Come on baby, do you / think it's good to feel / like I'm lying here / swimming in WEEKNOTES?”

This week I went to a screening of a new documentary by Danish director Max Kestner. Life (and Other Problems) takes as its starting point the 2014 viral controversy around Copenhagen Zoo’s culling of Marius, a young giraffe deemed surplus to the genetic needs of the captive population.

That’s where it starts, but it goes a long way from there before returning. Kestner interviews the zoo manager who made the decision and the keeper who pulled the trigger—both of whom, I might add, come over as being a very great deal more thoughtful than either the shrieking punditry or the oddly incurious protestors—but also talks to researchers working at the weirder edges of the life sciences. He also makes a good job of situating the dilemmas and existential questions in his own context, less as a filmmaker than as a middle-aged Danish professional with three kids and a curious mind.

(In the Q&A after the film, Kestner revealed that he studied philosophy at university, but gave it up after less than a year. Perhaps this is the optimal amount of exposure to that discipline: enough to establish the habit of confronting big questions, but not so much that you get channelised into the doctrinaire repetition of whatever position or approach currently dominates your department.)

I’ve been saying to people all week that Life (and Other Problems) is a weak signal for the popular emergence of a more-than-human perspective. A broadly posthumanist discourse has been bubbling away in academia for three decades or more by this point, but—with full acknowledgement of my complicity!—that discourse has not been at all approachable for those untrained to its vocabulary and rhetorical gymnastics. This movie presents a lot of the truths and questions underlying it, including the post-Darwinist turn in biology and ecology which has dethroned the gene, but does it using stories and characters relatable to ordinary people, plus interviews with some endearingly eccentric researchers. It’s elegantly put together, surprisingly non-didactic, and in places incredibly moving… and it feels like a movie for the moment. I commend it unto you.

(I will note, however, that there is a fair bit of footage from the public autopsy of Marius the giraffe, meaning that those of a particularly sensitive disposition may want to view with caution. However, I’d also say that in many ways the film is really about the epistemic basis of the revulsion that might keep you from seeing it—which is to say, if the autopsy footage is putting you off, that’s probably the best reason for you to watch the thing.)

Now, what have we been up to when we weren’t at the movies?

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Racked up seven full days on this one over the course of February!)
• Four hours on PROJECT LOFTY. (Mostly researching low-energy tech on the indispensable and fully solar-powered Low←Tech Magazine, rather than the writing I had planned to do… but I needed to know a bunch of things before I could start writing, so there we go.)
• Six hours of admyn.
• Four hours on PROJECT CASHBOX. (Responding to and acting on feedback from the client’s client, for the most part. Both my client and my client’s client seem pretty happy with the work, and that’s what we aim for.)
• Four hours of STPLN stuff. (Discussion sessions, plus planning for our group show at Southern Sweden Design Days. Hell knows when I’ll get the time to actually make the work I’m planning to exhibit… but paying clients take precedent over artistic experiments, at least at the moment.)
• Ten hours of undirected reading and writing, because that’s what we do.

I’m very pleased with the way February has played out: busy, but not overloaded; quality-oriented, but not perfectionist. I don’t want to overanalyse it, but nonetheless I’m treating this as a template for a happy and successful way of working.

kinmaking

Spent a couple of hours having my figurative arse handed to me at Malmö’s Royal Pool Hall by Finn Williams, the city architect. In advance of our meeting, Finn was at pains to portray himself as a decidedly mediocre pool-player; I’m in no position to judge, but I think we can say with certainty that I’m a good deal worse than he is.

Gamesmanship aside, it turns out that we both hail from the same corner of the Home Counties, though our journeys since then have been rather different (to say the least). But here we both are, in this city by the sea… funny how these things work out, innit?

reading

Walter M Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the sf classics which I felt sure I’d read before. It’s quite plausible that I did so, but if so it was long enough ago that this felt like a first read—albeit one unavoidably shaped by my awareness of its place in the sf canon.

The basic premise is that human civilisation all but wipes itself out in a global nuclear conflict some time in the late C20th, leaving a mutated monastic order, somewhere in what was once the USian midwest, to preserve and defend the fragmentary and much-feared knowledge of that suicidal civilisation against the day that its successor might be ready to handle it safely.

Canticle’s place in the canon is fully justified. Held up against other works of the late 1950s, it’s genuinely astonishing in terms of its technique, as well as its philosophy, and while it certainly bears a few marks of its sociopolitical era (along with some skiffy cliches), it has a moral complexity that squares up well alongside much more recent writing.

a clipping

Dovetailing quite neatly with that mention of Canticle’s moral dimension, here’s a post by Alan Jacobs in which he uses a passage from an old Dorothy Sayers novel to discuss the way in which fiction is currently read as a sort of statement of the author’s own moral position.

It never seems to occur to many people that fiction is an unideal vehicle for the direct propositional expression of personal convictions on specific points of public controversy – unless, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle, the work of fiction is explicitly written to address some matter of public controversy. (I would argue that fiction is rarely the ideal vehicle, but those two novels, among few others, make it work.) When a novel has no such plain purpose, then the attempt to discover through hermeneutical calibration the precise distance between a character’s views and those of the author strikes me as a pointless endeavor, and one utterly irreconcilable with the activity we call reading.

The assumption that works of art are (or at least should be) “direct propositional expressions” has resulted in our current situation, wherein an increasing number of works of art are (or at least aspire to be) such. The reasons for the establishment of that assumption are complex, and the causes likely well-intentioned. But it has resulted in a sort of illiteracy: in readers who at the strictly mechanical level may have no problems at all with reading a Sayers novel, or Canticle for Leibowitz, but who nonetheless miss much of what such books are actually doing with the machinery of narrative.

(That such readers are also often those most likely to repeat the rather shaky claim for fiction as an “empathy engine” is a paradox I am as yet unable to resolve to my satisfaction.)

OK, I need to start packing for a trip to the motherland, so I’ll leave it there. Thanks for your attention, and I hope all’s well with you.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 09 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!