Ding, Dong, Saddam Is Dead! :)

At 8 pm today I first received word that Saddam Hussein had been executed.

My overwhelming emotion was of relief.

Up until now, I had really been afraid that Saddam might somehow get away with it.

That, having murdered tens of thousands of his own people and indirectly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more in several nations; after being one of the main causes of Iraq's current agony owing to his idiotic refusal to order a general surrender when his army was shattered; that after all that he would somehow manage to either trick or threaten the Iraqis into letting him live. That then we would pull out of Iraq; Saddam would somehow make it back into power; and we'd be facing yet another war against Saddam in a few more years.

But, nope, didn't happen. Saddam's no more: or, if I was religious, I'd imagine that he was in Hell.

And Iraq has a chance.

Evolutionary Value of Homosexuality

This is from a Usenet post in which I speculated on why homosexuality was natural to many species, including Man.
==============================================

Homosexual behavior can be adaptive behavior in members of a species in several ways.

The simplest way is that it forms and cements affinitive bonds between members of the same sex. Remember that in Nature (and in primitive human societies) few individuals are wholly homosexual; what is more common is _bisexual_ behavior in which _frequency_ of hetrosexual intercourse is reduced, or homosexual behavior engaged in when hetrosexual intercourse is impossible owing to the unavailability of suitable females. This is strongly seen in bonobos (our close relatives), who use female homosexual intercourse to cement political alliances.

Another way is that it reduces tensions caused by an inability to mate with a female. This is most common in "harem" herd species such as many ungulates, where only a minority of the males get to mate in any mating season. Homosexual behavior is here used as a "consolation prize" to prevent bulls that are not likely to win a mating battle from getting so frustrated that they launch suicidal attacks, which would only reduce their future mating prospects while possibly damaging a worthier bull.

Finally, in a social group, since the more homosexual a human's orientation the less children he or she will produce (on the average), and since humans normally bias their assistance toward their own children, the existence of a few (5-10 percent) group members who are primarily homosexual creates a "reserve" of effort for the group as a whole (and remember that most members of the group are the homosexual's close kin). This reserve is important because it is not committed to any specific children: hence under extremely bad circumstances (such as a harsh winter) it represents some "slack" that can be made up without any children or elders having to perish. The homosexual himself is less likely to pass on his genotype, but because he aids his group's surivival he makes it more likely that _other_ copies of all of the genes _in_ his genotype will survive.

Think of it as "selfish altruism" in action.

END.

Proposed Proscriptions

A couple of days ago, I was walking out of the nearby Safeway when a young man collecting signatures spoke to me. Now, I'm not registered to vote here in San Francisco, but I wsa curious to find out what he wanted.

"Wouldn't you like to impeach George Bush?" the man asked.

"On what grounds?" I asked him.

"Going to war in Iraq and torturing people," he replied.

I thought about this for a moment and said. "No."

"Do you support war and torture?" the young man asked incredulously.

"That's not the point," I said. "Do you know what 'proscriptions' are?"

He didn't, not even when I spelled it out for him, so I explained:

"Toward the end of the Roman Republic, when a political leader would get into power he would make a list -- 'put forth in writing' -- the names of his political opponents. And they would then be killed or exiled or fined. So the costs of losing became so severe that politicians would eventually do anything to win. Including destroy the Republic.

"That's what happens when you criminalize policy differences."

The young man looked at me in puzzlement. He'd clearly never heard this before.

"But Bush is evil," he protested. (Ah, to be young and imagine that the current political leader I oppose is Morgoth Incarnate, again!) "Look at what he did in Lebanon!"

Now this was just out of left field, so I pointed out: "That's Israel you're thinking of there."

(not that I oppose Israeli policy in Lebanon, I just wanted to set it straight who did what to whom!)

"But Cheney met with the Israelis and told them they could do that. Don't you think the Bush Administration needs to be punished for this?" the man persisted.

"What, you're going to hold the US President and his administration responsible for merely talking to foreign countries that then go to war?"

He tried to argue that this, indeed, made sense.

"Look, you're not getting it," I pointed out to him. "Right now you have a Democratic Congress and a Republican Administration. So you want to see that Congress use that power to punish the Republicans, right?"

He agreed volubly.

"But what happens the next time you have a Republican Congress and a Democratic Administration?" I asked. "What happens when the Republicans start pressing for impeachments and prosecutions?"

"What makes you think there'll ever be another Republican Congress?" he asked.

I couldn't control myself, I laughed right in his face at that. My sin, by modern standards, is that I've actually studied history ... I KNOW that there's always a shift in power.

"Oh, come on," I said. "That's just the political cycle."

His face darkened.

"Then we'll have to break that cycle," he said.

I walked away, because I was frankly a bit afraid of what was on his face.

Not for me. He wasn't planning on attacking me.

For my country.

He was young. He was the future. And he had just, casually, implied that he considered making sure that his side won all the elections more important than preserving the Republic.

I write speculatively about a future time in which the politicians, backed by men with guns, consider that winning all the elections is more important than preserving the Republic. And it leads to the fall of the Republic, the end of democracy and civil liberties, and the formation of an increasingly-rigid Universal State that signals the final freezing of Western Civilization and its ultimate doom.

Rome fell this way.

We might, too.

Giants in Twilight (poem)

"Giants in Twilight"
by Jordan S. Bassior
(c) 2006

They stand in twilight.

Great gray giants, battleships of flesh
Living cruisers of the land
Trunks questing, tusks tossing
They cross the veldt.

Listen!

You can feel their rumbles
Too deep to hear
The air trembles
With their slow calls.

They move as families
Walking to waterholes
Stripping the forests
Remaking the land.

Dominance herds them
Memory guides them
Love, it unites them
On their endless quest.

What do they think
What do they feel
What do they know
In those vast brains?

Do they remember?

Once, they feared nothing,
Roamed Pliocene plains
Vanished forests of old
Five continents theirs.

See little man-apes
Squealing in terror
Fleeing the rush
Of a calf’s playful charge.

Time passed.

Now there is fear
Now there is fire
Now there is shouting
And stabbing of spears

See now the man-apes
Armed with their making
Not quite so little
Masters of all.

Time has passed.

Now see the giants
Shrunken in numbers
Wander the landscape
Last of their kind.

They know the fear
They know the fire
They know the fierce
Stutter of guns.

Do we remember?

It took courage
To slay the giants
Armed with nothing
But torch and spear

It takes no courage
To slay the giants
Riding a jeep with
Machine-gun in hand.

There is honor
In slaying a giant
Risking your life
To feed your kin.

There is no honor
In slaying a giant
Running no risk
For the ivory trade.

If we slay giants
Without mortal reason
We do not grow
To giants ourselves.

When we slay giants
When we slay beauty
For nothing but greed
More the dwarfs we.

END.

Retro Review - Jack Williamson, "The Prince of Space" (1931)

Introduction
=========

When I saw the title of this story, I was reminded mainly of a couple of really bad Japanese movies, which I saw on _MST3K_. On the other hand, the writer _was_ Jack Williamson, so I had some hopes of the story being good.

Plot
===

By the year 2131 (1) there is regular spaceflight to the Moon. A pasenger ship, the _Helicon_, is found drifting with everyone aboard horribly murdered. Blame is put on the "Prince of Space," a notorious pirate. A big reward is put on the pirate's head.

William Windsor, a reporter, decides to try to interview Dr. Trainor, a noted scientist who has built a 2-mile high skyscraper for the purpose of putting an astronomical observatory on the roof, gaining the benefits of a mountain location in the middle of New York City (2). He has had no luck getting an interview before, but to his surprise he succeeds in doing so now. He meets Dr. Trainor, the scientist's beautiful daughter Paula (3), and the scientist's mysterious sponsor Mr. Kain (4). They tell him, essentially, nothing.

A couple of days later the Moon Patrol is launching a mission to hunt for The Prince of Space and Windsor is invited along as special correspondent. Captain Brand, the leader and Named Character of the expedition, is an old friend of the reporter.

Nine warships set out. In cislunar space they encounter a mysterious big blue-glowing metal globe. The globe refuses to respond to their signals, so they open fire. Their weapons are completely useless, the globe blows them up one after another, and Brand, commanding the last surviving ship (5), decides to ram.

The globe fires first, and they are wrecked.

Brand and Windsor are saved from the wreck by Captain Smith (6), commanding the Prince of Space's personal cruiser, the _Red Rover_. The _Red Rover_ takes them to the Prince of Space's lair, a mile-long, mile-diameter rotating space hab(7). There they discover, to Windsor's surprise (because he doesn't know he's in _that_ kind of story) that the Prince of Space is none other than the mysterious Mr. Cain!

It turns out that the Prince of Space did _not_ attack the Hyperion or the Moon Patrol fleet. Instead, the attackers were invaders from Mars (which only one human expedition, which vanished decades ago, has ever visited). The Martians apparently want to conquer the Earth, a fact of which the Prince of Space became aware some time ago (8). He built his hab as a last refuge for humanity after the Martians enslave all other Earthmen (9), and has been kidnapping the best people he could get off the spaceships he's been capturing to populate the place (10).

Well, with this explanation, Captain Brand is inexplicably convinced that the Prince of Space is a good guy and that he should enter the Prince's service. Apparently such niceties as loyalty to the Moon Patrol, respect for basic human rights, and even the Prince's obvious insanity don't matter compared to the emotional attraction for a True Byronic Hero (11).

It so happens that the first Martian invasion sphere has landed in Mexico. Ordinary people, apprised of this information, might consider contacting the authorities -- American, Mexican, Boy Scouts, whoever -- but of course such is not for the Prince of Space. Instead, they fly down to Mexico, land, and engage the Martians in Thrilling Personal Combat with beam-riding hyperexplosive-firing bazookas versus the Martians' subtactical atomic bomb launchers.

This gets some of the Prince's troops killed (12), and their first look at a real live Martian. It turns out that the Martians are nasty multitentacled plant monsters with a taste for human blood (13).

There's also some character development. It turns out that the Prince of Space was a rich and important person (who, oddly, nobody can now recognize) who was tricked by a Deceitful Woman and thus doesn't believe in love anymore. It also turns out that Paula has a huge crush on him. Hmm, Love ... Line Segment?

So the Prince of Space puts Captain Barnd in command of the _Red Rover_ (14). Windsor tries to warn the world about the Martians but apparently few people him, despite his producing a Martian corpse. This is bad, because the Prince of Space needs two tons of vitallium, which is very expensive, and with general disbelief the vitallium is not forthcoming.

Being a space pirate, the Prince has a solution -- he raids one of the Lunar convoys carrying it back to Earth (15). Then the Prince of Space collects all the Named Characters and flies off to Mars, to put his plan into effect and end the Martian menace.

Travelling to Mars, they discover that the Martians are building a giant version of their invasion spheres -- one a mile in diameter and easily big enough to contain a big invasion force. They also discover that the Martians have enslaved a gray ape-like bipedal race and that this is from where they normally get their blood.

Windsor literally stumbles over the skeleton of the leader of the last Earth expedition, the one which vanished (16). With the skeleton he finds the guy's diary. This details that the Martians murdered the expedition, and mean to conquer the Earth (as if anyone really doubted either fact by this point in the story).

Paula, in despair that the Prince of Space will never love her, wanders out into the Martian desert to die (17). The Prince of Space saves her.

The Prince of Space and Dr. Trainor, now with the vitallium and the intelligence as to the Martian plans, launch from Mars. They build the "vitomaton," which is the Ultimate Weapon that they were collecting all the coupons for in the earlier parts of the plot.

Intercepting the Martian sphere they fire the Vitomaton, which generates a vortex of living energy that eats matter. The vortex destroys the Martian sphere's missiles, then the Martian sphere. Undaunted, the Martians launch a swarm of gigantic atomic bombs, meaning to destroy the Earth if they cannot have it. The Vitomaton destroys the swarm of atomic missiles and then the planet Mars (18).

Saving the Earth (and destroying Mars) apparently constitutes a courtship (19), because the Prince of Space then kisses Paula, and declares her his bride (20).

Dr. Trainor and William Windsor return to Earth, where nobody believes what happened. Astronomers can't explain why Mars changed colors (21) and then disappeared. The Prince of Space is still a wanted man. And the Vitamoton is packed away safely (?) in Dr. Trainor's safe.

Life goes on (22).

Characterization
============

Williamson actually says, on the first page of the story "Incidentally, the reader might be warned at this point that Bill is not, properly speaking, a character in this narrative; he is only an observer," and he's not kidding (23).

William Windsor has, essentially, no personality. He is described as "a hard-headed, grim-visaged newspaperman of forty," and that's really all we ever learn about him. He wants to be a multimillionaire, and is thus tempted into the story by the reward on the Prince of Space -- well, who _wouldn't_ want to be a multimillionaire? He is intelligent and has physical courage. And that's it.

Captain Brand is an idiot. He's described as "bluff," which in this context must mean "thick as a brick." He at no point makes any useful suggestion -- even his space combat tactics (the one field he should be an expert in) show no real talent or imagination. He wins the convoy battle against the Moon Patrol, but from the story's own internal evidence, it's quite possible that the tactics used were more the Prince's than his own.

Dr. Trainor also has no personality. He's "a mild bald man with kindly blue eyes and a slow, patient smile," which is pulp conventional code for "He's a Good Guy Scientist, not a Bad Guy Scientist." He's there basically to provide occasional exposition and technical support.

Paula Trainor has _too much_ personality. That long (and inexplicable) character description given by Windsor on first viewing her actually _does_ match her behavior in the story. She comes off as an impulsive manic-depressive, and probably the LAST person I would want to have anywhere in the vicinity of a camera-sized device that can disintegrate a whole terrestrial world! (24)

The Prince of Space also has a lot of personality. And Captain Nemo wants it back. What's more to the point, Williamson was obviously of the belief that Nemo was morally heroic (I incline more towards Philip Jose Farmer's point of view that Nemo was a Miltonian antihero) and means the PoS to be the same, but the Prince's behavior belies this.

Look at the evidence. He turns pirate and inflicts suffering (and presumably death) on strangers simply because _one_ woman severely harms him. He shows a complete and narcissistic lack of interest in anyone else's feelings, fate, or even basic human rights (he kidnaps two thousand people to populate his City in Space). He has a frightening charisma.

AND he has as his good buddy and father-in-law a brilliant scientist who knows how to build Weapons of Incredibly Massive Destruction. Does _anyone_ see a potential problem with this?

Yes, pulp heroes were often ruthless. But the Prince of Space makes Dick Seaton or Doc Savage look like extremely nice guys by comparison, because he has a demonstrated willingness to turn against his OWN people for fairly flimsy reasons. It seems to me that it is purely auctorial fiat that the ending of this story is to be deemed happy.

Setting
=====

The world of 2131 is a reasonable but rather conventional pulp science fictional future. New York City has bigger buildings and moving walkways. Rich people now own "heliocars," which essentially means "helicopters" or "aircars." The world's power comes from the mildly radioactive element "vitalium" which can convert sunlight to electricity; there are several large solar panel arrays in various Earthly deserts for this purpose. Spaceships use "positive beams" -- essentially ion blasters -- both for propulsion and as main armament. Vitalium mines are located on the Moon, a spur to colonization and the reason why there is a Moon Patrol to protect the mines and ore ships.

Substitute "tri-helium" for "vitalium" and "fusion power" for "solar power" and it might even look a lot like a plausible 2131 from the viewpoint of 2006.

We learn absolutely nothing about the Martians or their culture aside from the fact that (1) they are vampiric plant monsters, (2) they have atomic missiles and energy shields, (3) they have enslaved a possibly sapient race of gray apelike bipeds, and (4) they are Not Nice Guys. And we never will learn anything about the Martians or their culture, because Mr. Byronic Hero over there -- you know, the one with the psycho wife? -- disintegrated their whole damned planet. Good going, pal. Isn't there some intermediate level of destruction between "ignore their invasion fleet" and "destroy their whole world?" (25)

Some of the superscience is kind of cool. The Prince of Space has man-portable "motor torpedoes" which use the postiive beams to drive 50-lb hyperexplosive warheads made of "trainite" (Dr. Trainor's special mixture) right to the target, with a control system reminiscent of a modern wire-guided missile but without the wire. The Martians have several sizes of their atomic missiles, ranging from what appears to be about a 100-250 TNT ton-equivalent tactical missile to a roughly 10 kiloton range anti-ship one to the God only knows how powerful planetbusters they were going to smash Earth with in the final battle. The Martians also have a blue energy screen that can repel the postiive rays (26).

Description
========

With the exception of howlers such as the Far Too Much Information description of Paula, which sounds as if he took it wholesale from his own story notes, Williamson's descriptive talents are sound. You can tell from the style that he will develop into a good writer, once he matures. And of course he did develop into one of the greatest. He died only this year.

Theme
=====

"Superscience Conquers All," I guess. There's also a strong moral theory of the need for the superior individual to do what is necessary to serve the greater good. This is rather creepy, given that neither the Prince of Space nor Paula act with much in the way of any moral maturity at any point in this story -- the only even slightly mature reflection the Prince makes is at the very end, and even there he essentially convinces himself that he had no choice but to destroy an entire inhabited planet, including an innocent slave race, when in fact he had a number of other obvious choices.

All I can say about that is that Williamson's philosophy improved over time. Though he always did favor the notion of the superior individual acting to save society -- and there's nothing wrong with that, IF said superior individual isn't a ranting violent megalomaniac, as the Prince impressed me as being.

Conclusion
========

This story is seriously frightening in that Jack Williamson seems to have considered it as having a happy ending. It's interesting in that it demonstrates two ideas that Williamson would use again: the Ultimate Weapon and the Superior Man.

Notes
====

(1) Uncoincidentally, precisely 200 years after the story was published -- there is a strong temptation in some science fiction to set stories some round number of years after the time in which they are being written. This is a bit childish, but forgivable as it has no effect on the story's internal logic.

(2) This makes very little sense for three main reasons. First of all, there are mountains higher than two miles: why not put the observatory on top of such a mountain instead of building a very tall tower? Secondly, the skyglow coming from New York City would mess up observation -- Williamson should have known this as it was already a problem to 1920's astronomers. Finally, since they have space travel, why not simply put the observatory either in orbit or on the Moon?

(3) I knew there'd be writing trouble when I read this:

"Paula Trainor was an exquisite being. Her large eyes glowed with a peculiar shade of changing brown. Black hair was shingled close to her shapely head. Her face was small, elfinly beautiful, the skin alomst transparent. But it was the eyes that were remarkable. In their lustrous depths sparkled mingled essence of childish innocence, intuitive, age-old wisdom, and quick intelligence -- intellect that was not coldly reasonable but effervescent, flashing to instictively correct conclusions. It was an oddly baffling face, revealing only the mood of the moment. One could not look at it and say that its owner was good or bad, indulgent or stern, gentle or hard. It could be, if she willed, the perfect mirror of the moment's thought -- but the deep stream of her character flowed unrevealed behind it.
"Bill looked at her keenly, noted all that ..."

Now, this is a poetic description. You can see from this that Jack Williamson would _one day_ be a really good writer. But -- this is one of the worst violations of "show, don't tell" that I have ever seen, because it violates both letter and spirit of that writing rule.
You see, the problem is that Bill _has just laid eyes on this girl for the first time in his life_. I could understand if he knew her well -- then he would have had the opportunity to see her in various moods, get an insight into how her expressions reflected her personality. However, I cannot for the life of me -- unless we assume that 22nd-century reporters are telepaths -- see how he could possibly be observing all this in a single glance.
"Looked at her keenly" indeed!

(4) Proof that Tormented Byronic Heroes have to be coy about aliases.

(5) With the only Named Characters onboard, it _had_ to be the last surviving ship. Them's the Rules.

(6) Specifically an alias; this wasn't just Jack Williamson running out of names :)

(7) Possibly the first such space hab in the history of science fiction, though Konstantin Tsiolovsky originated the idea, as he did so many others, back around 1900.

(8) Yet couldn't be bothered to warn anyone about. Even though, as we will see, he bothers to do numerous more difficult and dangerous things. Oh, those wacky Byronic heroes, ya gotta love them, down to the last Nemo.

(9) As you can see, the PoS is not what we'd call an "optimist."

(10) One rather wonders why some 2000 of the "best people" the Prince can capture are ok with leaving their lives behind and being enslaved by a violent Byronic madmen -- one would imagine that they might try a revolt, or signal, or something -- but apparently this never happens, or if it does Williamson doesn't really care about it. I _do_ think that Gray Rogers was "Doc" Smith's answer to the question of the inherent morality of populating a space habitat by enslaving random captives.

(11) Really, this level of charisma is difficult to explain without Eddorian mind control. Gray Rogers made a lot more sense.

(12) Including Captain Smith, which is surprising because he had a Name. Though not much of a personality. And a guy called Walker whom we didn't know before, but I bet that if an unknown force ever throws the island of Nantucket back to 1250 BC, the people on Nantucket will have an easier go of it.

(13) Vampiric Martians are of course right out of Wells' _War of the Worlds_, though I did like the plant-monster touch. While we're on the topic, wouldn't it make more sense for blood-drinking vampires to drink from _cattle?_ They're less likely to put up a fight, and as bigger animals their bodies contain more blood. Ah, well ...

(14) He seems to have no fear that Brand will return to his former Moon Patrol allegiance, which supports my theory of Mind Control.

(15) A battle in which Captain Brand comments that he's fighting his old comrades, a battle in which a few of the Moon Patrol men get _killed_ -- yet there is no real moral problem with this, not even on the part of Captain Brand himself. Again, Mind Control.

(16) This is an _extreme_ example of the "Rainy Day on Mongo" syndrome -- the tendency to treat whole alien worlds as if they were the size of small villages. There is truly no logical reason why Windsor finds the skeleton or diary -- he just happens to be walking across the same tiny bit of Mars that the guy died on. And find the skull exposed rather than buried by the sands.
Right.

(17) As opposed to _talking_ to the Prince of Space about this, or settling for somebody else. Even though as far as we can tell, the sum total of their relationship before this has been friendship. Paula, as near as I can tell from this, is as extreme a manic-depressive as a MSTing of her character description would imply. Nobody seems to consider her action all that crazy, just "impulsive."
And, for the information of anyone who doubts this, this WOULD be insane behavior even by the standards of the early 20th century. It would even be at least a _little_ bit impulsive by _Barsoomian_ standards.

(18) This concept of an Ultimate Weapon capable of destroying literally _anything_ also appears, more famously, in Williamson's _Legion of Space_ stories.

(19) Dinner, movies, some dancing, a long moonlit walk -- such may be sufficient for ordinary mortals, but not for a Tortured Byronic Hero and a Scientist's Beautiful Daughter.

(20) Apparently, being a power-crazed Byronic Hero means that you can marry someone simply by kissing her and declaring her your wife. This is of course a moot point, as Paula was willing to kill herself rather than be deprived of his love, but it _is_ odd, especially by 1930's moral standards.

(21) To blue (the Martian energy shield) then green (the vitomaton vortex).

(22) And, apparently, the Prince of Space continues to rule his 2000 captives in his City in Space. Never the mind ...

(23) Using a rather bland character as an auctorial point-of-view in limited third-person narrative is not exceptional. _Explicitly warning the reader of this fact_ is, however. I assume Williamson did this to avoid getting the readers too interested in Windsor -- if so, he shouldn't have bothered, because Windsor isn't all that intereresting anyway.

(24) I mean, really. Someone who will credibly attempt suicide because her crush-object, _someone she has never actually had a sexual relationship with_, just wants to be friends, is someone to whom you would not want to hand a straight razor, let alone an operational Doomsday Device. It makes me seriously worry that Paula's father is keeping that thing -- apparently, even the Prince of Space sees the problem with actually having the Vitamoton around Paula, but it may not have occurred to anyone that Paula probably knows the combination to her father's safe. Or (since she was hanging around when he built it) that she may know how to build another one. I shudder to imagine her PMS, or their marital disputes. Though they would probably kiss and make up:
"Princie, I'm _sorry_ I got so mad at you ..."
"It's all right, Paula."
SMOOCH!
"I'm _sorry_ I wrecked our bedroom ..."
"It's all right, Paula."
SMOOCH!
"I'm _sorry_ I disintegrated Venus ..."
"It's all right ... wait a moment, WHAT did you just do?"

(25) What makes this worse is that, right after he destroys Mars, the Prince of Space does a little monologue about how tragic it all is:

"A terrible thing .... It is a terrible thing to destroy a world. A world that had been eons in the making, and that might have changed the history of the cosmos ... But they voted for war. We had no choice."

Now, this isn't even _true_. The Prince of Space has his ship with its superweapon, which he has just demonstrated can stop mile-wide invasion spheres and whole volleys of gigantic atomic bombs. He has his City in Space. He could obviously intercept future Martian fleets and choose to destroy only those objects threatening his forces or the Earth.

Basically, as far as I can tell the only reason he destroyed Mars was that Mars attacked Earth and then it refused to surrender. Not that he explicitly _asked_ it to surrender, either. One might argue military necessity, because of the risk that if he didn't destroy the Martians right NOW the Martians might figure out how to destroy him and the secret of his weapons would die with him, but nobody ever makes this point.

The fact that he seems to have destroyed Mars in a snit fit is scary. What if the Earth pisses him off some day?

(26) Quite plausible, since a strong electromagnetic field would stop weapons whose effects were based on the impact of charged particles.

Retro Review - Edmond Hamilton, "The Star Stealers" (1929)

Introduction
=========

The short stories of Edmond Hamilton, especially his _early_ short stories, are a bit difficult to find. There's the famous anthology _The Best of Edmond Hamilton_, but even that tends to select from his middle to later work, for the obvious reason that Hamilton improved as a writer as his career continued, and especially after he met and married Leigh Brackett.

So, when I had the chance to read an early Hamilton story in the new anthology _Space Opera Renaissance_ (ed. Hartwell and Cramer, 2006), I had high hopes. Those hopes were, largely, fulfilled. What is more, reading this story made me aware of a major early influence on the genre as a whole.

Plot
===

The story begins aboard an FTL cruiser in the service of the Federation of Suns, commanded by Captain Ran Rarak (1), returning to the Solar System from a two-year patrol of the Galaxy. The cruiser lands on a terraformed Neptune, outermost planet of the system (2) and the main interstellar port.

There, Hurus Hol, a high government official, orders Rarak and his cruiser to investigate a mysterious dark star which is plunging out of intergalactic space on a difficult-to-explain trajectory towards the Solar System. Hol joins them onboard as mission director. Accompanied by a fleet of 50 fast but unarmed courier ships, they proceed to the black star.

Nobody in this Universe has apparently done much voyaging in intergalactic space, and it comes as a surprise to them that there are powerful subetheric vortexes, one of which claims several couriers (3). After this apparent "Random Encounter," they make their way to the mysterious black star.

Surprisingly to them, but not to anyone who's read a lot of science fiction or knows that Hamilton was into mega-scale engineering long before it was routine in the genre, the black star is inhabited and has numerous cities on its surface (4). The fleet moves in to investigate -- and the aliens attack with conical drone-missiles (5) tipped with "etheric bomb" warheads!

Rather swiftly the whole fleet of unarmed courier ships is shot down, save for one possible survivor which may have fled back towards Sol (6). Rarak's cruiser defends itself capably with its "deadly de-cohesion" rays, shooting down most of the cones before they can close to impact. One of the cones nevertheless hits the cruiser and it is shot down, coming to a crash landing on the dark star's surface.

Fortunately, nobody is hurt and the damage is repairable. Even more fortunately, the aliens seem to believe that the cruiser is _hors de combat_ and don't adequately investigate the crash site (7).

In a tradition that would be copied in many future scientific works, a party consisting of Rarak, Hol, and the only other two named characters in the story goes on foot to investigate the nearest alien city, where they have seen a curious very large structure. They are captured and Rarak is knocked unconscious.

Rarak awakes weeks later (8), conveniently allowing Hol to summarize what he has learned of the aliens (through their telepathy) in the meantime rather than describing it.

The aliens evolved in a star system which was isolated in the intergalactic void. Consequently, though they developed an advanced technology they could not develop interstellar travel. Stuck in their star system, they faced extinction as their sun began to burn out. They kept themselves alive as long as possible by feeding their planets to its fires, one after another (9). Eventually they were out of planets, the star died anyway, and they colonized its surface.

But they knew that they had only put off their eventual extinction, because their star was still dying. They had only one chance. They were approaching the Milky Way on a trajectory which would cause them to pass by and fly off into intergalactic space again, but not if they could help it! They built colossal "gravity condensers" (tractor beams) which could be focused on a given star and used to exchange momentum with that star. They could, theoretically, slow their own star enough for the Galaxy to capture them -- at the price of tearing a star out of the Milky Way and hurling _that_ sun into the void.

Guess which star they picked? (10)

Well, no way is Our Hero going to stand for that! And if he needed further motivation, one of his (Named Character) pals got vivisected while he was in Sleepy Land. So Rarak and his friends Bust Out and make their way back to the cruiser (which has deprived of Named Characters, simply waited around for the weeks that Rarak has lain unconscious, instead of sending out a search party or anything like that) (11).

They get back to the ship with the cone-drones in hot pursuit and occasionally making pyrotechnic displays (which nevertheless fail to kill or even really hurt any of the Named Character escapees). Rarak decides that he must knock out the gravity condenser (conveniently located in the city they scouted out) (12).

The cruiser takes off, and is attacked by a swarm of the cone-drones. At this point, Dal Nara, one of the Named Characters who went off with Rarak on the expedition, informs Rarak that the "ray-tanks" are empty and thus the cruiser is defenseless! (13).

So they are about to be destroyed by hundreds of the cone-drones when the Solar Fleet shows up to save them (14), having been summoned by the one courier ship that got away. The Fleet blasts the cone-drones to bits. But the Fleet doesn't know about the gravity condenser and thus isn't bombarding the installation.

So Rarak decides to ram the condenser with his cruiser (15). He does this, the condenser is smashed, and for whatever reason involving Hamilton's technological assumptions this doesn't even slightly damage the cruiser. The aliens for some reason break off the attack, Rarak and the Solar Fleet fly away triumphant, and the dark star sails off into the intergalactic void, its population apparently doomed (16).

Characterization
============

Virtually nil. The characterization, or lack thereof, is the weakest part of this story. There are only four named characters -- Ran Rarak (the Captain), Hurus Hol (the High Government Official and Scientist), Dal Nara (the Second Officer and Official Sidekick) and Nal Jak, the taciturn but alert "wheelman" (helmsman or pilot in modern sf-nal parlance).

Ran Rarak seems to have no personality beyond being a Hero and enjoying interstellar travel. Hurus Hol is a Mouth Which Walks source of exposition -- because of the plot structure we don't even get to see his telepathic negotiations with the aliens, which might have been interesting. Dal Nara is cheerful, perky and bright, which she does show a couple of times in action, making her by far the most emotionally present character in the story. Nal Jak exists as far as I can tell only to get vivisected (off camera), which pisses off Ran Rarak because they are old friends.

What makes matters worse is that the non-named characters seem to have zero initiative, unless it is to do something convenient to the plot from the Hero's POV. And if it is more convenient to the plot to have them FAIL to do something they logically should have done (like check if their ray-tanks had any fuel in them) then they fail to do that thing.

The effect is of a world mostly populated by rather stupid robots with a few rather bland real people doing everything that needs to be done. Needless to say, this is a _bad_ effect, and not one entirely excusable because of the era -- other pulp stories being written around the same time, such as the "Doc Savage" series, had much better characterization, even of unimportant one-shot characters such as enemy guards. Even some space opera of the day was better-characterized -- look at _The Skylark of Space_, for example (17).

Hamilton would get a LOT better at this aspect of writing. If he hadn't, he wouldn't be famous today.

Setting
=====

This is pretty good. One reason is that this story was part of a series; another that High Concept was one of Hamilton's writing strengths, even this early in his career.

His description of the terraformed Neptune is very short but reasonably colorful, and in the process of doing so he gets to describe in passing several other aspects of his Federation, a good technique because it makes us actually care what happens to the people of his future world (18).

Rarak's space cruiser is pretty cool, despite the fact that it apparently has no name (19). It has "de-transforming generators" (whatever that means) capable of propelling it at almost 1000 C (Warp 10 to ST: TOS fans) (20). It also has "deadly de-coherence rays" (21). The ship has no energy shields, but does have an unreasonably tough hull, as it demonstrates by surviving a hit by an etheric bomb, a crash on the dead star's surface, and ramming the gravitic condenser, all without taking any severe damage. It appears to have artificial gravity and inertial compensators, since people can stand and walk normally inside it regardless of any normal maneuevers: these are not perfect and sometimes crew are thrown about the "bridge-room."

This is clearly the spiritual ancestor of _many_ science fictional space cruisers :)

The aliens seem physically rather Lovecraftian: here's Hamilton's description:

"... Imagine an upright cone of black flesh, several feet in diameter and three or more feet in height, supported by a dozen or more smooth long tentacles which branched from its lower end -- supple, boneless octopus-arms which held the cone-body upright and which served both as arms and legs. And near the top of that cone trunk were the only features, the twin tiny orifices which were the ears and a single round and red-rimmed white eye, set between them."

They in fact seem, physically, a bit like the Great Race of Yith, from Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time." This is interesting, because "The Star Stealers" was published in _Weird Tales_, in 1929 -- almost a decade before the publication of Lovecraft's story -- which also centers on a human being trapped in an alien city. It is possible that Lovecraft was influenced in his choice of body-types by Hamilton's tale.

The alien culture, however, is never described. This is a serious failing, because we never get a sense of the alien motivation beyond the desire for sheer survival: it's not obvious why this survival necessarily requires the abduction of the star of an inhabited system, nor why the aliens are so callous as to do so if they have any other stars to pick, nor why it's impossible for the Federation and the aliens to come to some other solution.

It's also a rather silly failing, because the very structure of the back-story makes it obvious why the aliens _might_ be callous and indifferent to peaceful solutions. They are a telepathic species who have been trapped in their star system long enough for their sun to go out -- even in 1920's physics terms, that means hundreds of millions of years. They probably don't even grasp the notion that any form of life _other_ than their own even MIGHT have any moral claim on them. Their culture is also probably very stagnant and ritualized, since there can't have been much opportunity for change by outside stimuli.

All this is plausible, but it doesn't occur to Hamilton to even consider it a problem. And this is _not_ purely a 1920's pulp failing -- compare with _Skylark of Space_ (1919), in which "Doc" Smith gives the various alien races that Seaton encounters all sorts of varying cultures and thus motivations to either help or hinder the heroes. Even Wells, in 1899, gave his Martians at least three good motives to invade the Earth and care little for the fate of the human species. And Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels focused heavily on alien cultures -- they were in many ways early examples of the "first contact" genre.

Because of this failing, we have no way to judge whether or not the Federation is justified in simply hurling the Dark Star back into the intergalactic void, resulting in the aliens' presumed ultimate doom (22). This is a serious flaw, because of the story's theme.

The alien technology, what we see of it, is somewhat interesting -- the cone-drones (or kamikazes) with their etheric-bomb warheads; and the giant gravity condenser. The battles are sparsely but interestingly described. One particular point is that Edmond Hamilton realized that energy-beams, while they lasted, would provide a highly effective defense against missiles -- this is very advanced thinking for an era that was just beginning to grasp the air threat to surface warships!

There are a couple of scientific oddities involving the Dark Star itself. For one thing, why does Hamilton (or Rarak, anyway) assume that it and the Milky Way Galaxy are mutually inacessible just because it is now out of the range of the gravity condensers? It is clearly within range of Federation starships, and the aliens probably have a lot of wreckage to examine. Not having read any of the other books in this series, I don't know whether or not Hamilton ever addresses this obvious point.

The biggie, however, is this:

Even granted that the Dark Star has condensed to a solid body, or at least formed a solid crust, whose surface is at a temperature consistent with people walking around on it unprotected, and has been terraformed by the aliens to an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere -- granted the assumptions of 1920's science which make this seem plausible --

How does the Dark Star have a surface gravity around that of the Earth's? I could make some _assumptions_ about this, given the fact that we know that the aliens have achieved tremendous control over gravity, but Hamilton did not explain or even mention the issue. The "normal" surface gravity of the Dark Star should have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of times that of the Earth, given 1920's physics assumptions (23).

Description
========

Here Hamilton shines -- he was already a poetically gifted prose author. His images of the austere beauty of deep space, of the crowded shipping lanes around Neptune, of the strange cargoes from alien worlds, and of the creepy surface, city and inhabitants of the Dark Star really make the story. One can see already hints of the the greater writer that Hamilton would become by the Golden Age.

Theme
=====

The grandeur and wonder of space and space travel, and the harshness of the struggle to survive in an uncaring Universe. Generally well done, but marred by the lack of description of the alien culture, which leads one to wonder whether it was really impossible to come to a peaceful solution.

Conclusion
========

This was a good science fiction story by 1929 standards, and it was fun to read today. For me, one of the big revelations of this story was that the oldest roots of _Star Trek_ stretch back further than "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" or A. E. Van Vogt's "Space Beagle" series. It is very clear to me that the basic character premise of this story -- heroic space captain commands star cruiser in the service of a peaceful multi-species Federation, fending off dangers to the peoples of that Federation -- is identical to that Roddenberry used for _Star Trek_. Indeed, this series (called the "Interstellar Patrol" in the Hamilton sites I accessed) may have been one of the strong inspirations for "Doc" Smith, in particular.

I'm _very_ glad that I was able to read this story, and wish I could locate the others written in that universe.

Footnotes
=======
(1) - Everyone in this story has a name which is not based on anything from English. This sounds "pulpy," but when one considers that the setting is at least 200 thousand years in the future, it's perfectly plausible -- why _wouldn't_ names change over time. Hamilton's love of alliteration is also clear in some of the names, something which he would repeat in his scripting of the early _Superman_ comics.

(2) A statement outdated the year this story was published with the discovery and designation of Pluto as a "planet," and then once again validated this year with the removal of the official "planet" status from that small world.

(3) In the light of later developments, it is quite possible that the vortex represented hostile action, so this is less silly than it sounds. It is _odd_ that nobody has ever flown outside the Galaxy before, but then Ranak's cruiser _is_ an advanced ship with a newly-invented drive: maybe earlier ship classes weren't _capable_ of such a voyage?

(4) Reading about the "inexplicable" trajectory of the star made it obvious to me that this would be one of those stories in which a super-powerful alien race had put some sort of engine on their homeworld and was flying it around as a giant spaceship. By the way, Konstantin Tsiolovsky was the first to come up with this idea, around 1900.
Oh, and the "inhabited" _star_ concept isn't a scientific error on Hamilton's part. The star had died and its surface temperature was in the humanly-habitable range. This would be very improbable by modern astrophysical theory, but in 1929 nobody had conceived of nuclear fusion, and in any case the aliens had obviously terraformed the dead star.\

(5) Or, possibly, kamikaze fighter-craft. We never find out which.

(6) This represents an annoying tendency in the old pulps, which was continued in quite a lot of modern video science fiction, in which a large fleet is assembled most of whose components apparently exist in order to get destroyed as a narrative device to convince us that the enemy really means business. As in this story, it is accompanied by incredibly inept tactics -- why did the whole fleet have to move together as a unit to investigate, and why didn't Ranak or Hol order the unarmed couriers to try to escape back to the Solar System? After all, one normally would have "couriers" to carry messages, not to serve as so many sacrifices to the God Of Putting Enormous Explosions In Space Opera Stories! All I can say is that an awful lot of (never-characterized) brave men and women die in these tales in order to make the hero look good.

(7) This struck me as more than a bit stupid on the part of the aliens. On the other hand, they had apparently had little or no experience with any other races for a very long time (as we find out later), so maybe they had forgotten how to fight wars intelligently -- in particular, the importance of studying enemy capabilities. You'd _think_ they'd want to find out how the Federation's technology worked, and capturing an intact wreck would advance that end, right?

(8) And yet not physically impaired in any way, shape or form. Oh, for the convenient knockouts of pulp stories, which put you out of action for whatever amount of time the author finds convenient, but do no lasting damage!

(9) Remember again that in 1929 nobody knew why a star actually shined: the most common assumption was some sort of nuclear _fission_, and under that assumption (because nobody really knew how nuclear fission would work either) feeding extra matter to the "matter-energy furnace" would make sense.

(10) Given the number of stars in the Milky Way, and the position of Sol (which is NOT at an arm edge), we got awfully unlucky. On the other hand, Hamilton's Galaxy is generally inhabited, so _someone_ was liable to get unlucky; furthermore the details of Sol's positioning within the Galaxy were not as widely known in 1929 as they are today.

(11) This gets into another bad pulp cliche: most characters are just spear-carriers who do not take _any_ action if left alone; even most of the Named Characters do nothing useful until the One and Only Hero tells them to act. Sometimes we complain today about mega-novels with dozens of characters being hard to follow: well, _this_ is what space opera looks like with only _one_ dynamic character!

(12) Unless they picked that city originally when making their descent _because_ of the gravity condenser being located there (which is nowhere stated or even implied), this is VERY improbable. The dark star is supposed to have been a super-supergiant (bigger than Betelgeuse): its surface area would thus be many orders of magnitude larger than the Earth; the chance of landing anywhere near the gravity condenser would seem low. If I were rewriting this story, I would change it so that they were attracted to that city because of "unsual etheric emanations" from it -- the way that the technology works this would actually make sense. But Hamilton didn't consider this point.

(13) I have no idea what the de-coherence ray is using for fuel. I do find it a bit curious that nobody bothered to tell Rarak that the ray-tanks were empty BEFORE he launched his attack on the gravity condenser. It's almost as if it's because only a Named Character would think of paying attention to a detail like that.

(14) Just In The Nick Of Time rescues like this were a cliche the pulp stories beat to death, then tenderized the remains and sold them to fast food chains. It's even stupider when it's Just In The Nick Of Time across long interstellar distances.

(15) It is never explained why Rarak can't simply _contact the fleet by radio and tell them to bombard the condenser_. This is a serious plot flaw, in my opinion, because the fleet is obviously very close to them, so signal lag shouldn't matter that much; and if Hamilton wants to believe, _in 1929_, that his super-duper science-fictional space cruisers _don't have radios_, he has absolutely no excuse -- one of the _obsessions_ of early hard sf was radio and radio-like technologies!

(16) Oddly, despite the fact that the Federation has starships capable of reaching the dark star, and that Hurus Hol, a high government official, was in telepathic contact with the aliens, _and_ that in the story universe that this is a part of, the Federation includes many different races, it seems never to occur to Hurus Hol, or anyone in the story, that the Federation's starships offer an obvious solution to the isolation and long-term doom of the Dark Star aliens. This may or may not be a fatal error -- it is _possible_ that Hurus Hol tried to suggest this to the aliens during their telepathic conversations while Rarak was unconscious. Still, it should have been _mentioned_, at least in a "I offered them a peaceful solution but they rejected it" sort of way. I can only assume that the idea didn't occur to Hamilton either.

(17) That early in his career, E. E. "Doc" Smith had not yet mastered the art of characterization either, but he did a smart thing -- he called in a writer of romance fiction to help him on the book to improve his character writing. The result is that even the first _Skylark_ seems to be about real people, which is one of the reasons why it made a strong impact on the nascent science fiction community.

(18) Hamilton seems to have gotten the point, in this and other early stories, that the emotional impact of threatening a fictional world with destruction is greater if you actually tell the readers something sympathetic or interesting about that fictional world. Not all writers of thi era realized this, so he should get points for this.

(19) One annoying attitude common to a lot of early 20th century science fiction was the notion that numbers were somehow more "scientific" and "futuristic" than names, with the result that nobody actually named anything. This notion is present in Gernsback's most famous story, as expressed in the designation of the titular character.

(20) This may be one of the first explicit FTL drives in science fiction. In _Skylark of Space_, "Doc" Smith originally assumes that one can travel FTL by simply applying sufficient thrust. Hamilton never describes the principle of the "de-transforming generator," but one might imagine that what it does is prevent the distortion of space, time and mass (the "transformation") experienced at high velocities.

(21) One of the many "disintegrator" beams common to much early and some later science fiction. It projects some sort of energy which produces green light as a secondary effect, and works by destroying the "cohesion of particles" in the target. I would assume that it is disrupting chemical rather than nuclear bonds, because targets simply glow with a green light and fall to pieces, rather than violently exploding.

(22) They have, of course, committed numerous acts of war against the Federation, including firing on their fleet, destroying 49 courier ships, and torturing a prisoner to death, And they were planning to hurl Sol into the void, presumably inflicting the same fate upon its system as they suffered themselves (they didn't realize that with starships the Federation could in the long run rescue the inhabitants). So they clearly aren't _nice_ guys.

(23) Given _modern_ physics assumption, it would of course have collapsed once it stopped burning, gone off as a quasar-scale supernova, and left a large black hole behind. We may imagine that the aliens did things to prevent this from happening, since this chain of events would have been Incredibly Bad from the alien POV.

The Future of Film-Making

Yesterday I saw the 3D version of _Nightmare Before Christimas_.

I was awestruck by the quality, smoothness, realism, and color-values of the process. This is NOT the primitive, gimmicky, and color-distorting old 3D some of you may be familiar with from the 1950's and 1960's. This is, with the one limitation that the point of view is fixed, as good as a hologram.

Pixar has already done a short (shown with the main film) and a second movie (shown in previews) using this process. It's obviously easy to do with CGI (all you need is to solve the equations for two separate points-of-view and integrate them using the 3D glasses); it could be done live-action using two cameras (Nightmare Before Christmas was originally mostly stop-action animated anyway); broadcasting it as a signal would not be especially challenging using HDTV; the cost of the required glasses would be trivial. And the improvement of picture quality and realism is immense.

It seems likely, therefore, that unlike the old 3D this process will be come into general use. I was priveleged to see the future of film making, in its very first incarnation. And this was made possible solely by the love and caring of Rosanna, who treated me to this film.

Thank you, darling girl.



Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone,

Jordan



PS - When I got back home, one of the people who run the hostel had prepared a big turkey dinner and was sharing, so I also got to have turkey for Thanksgiving. Yummy!

Not in Kansas Anymore ...

I warned you all. Oh, no, you said. The Gnome King just wants _peaceful_ atomic power. Oh no, you said. Surely he must realize that Oz is an American ally, and what would happen to him if he used his arsenal.

So you didn't want to hit their reactor.

And now the Emerald City is a smoking ruin and Ozma's nowhere to be found, possibly dead; American boys are dying on the Other Side of the Rainbow trying to winkle his troops out of their tunnels; and nobody knows when this war will end or how many will die before it's through.

And the images -- the pitifully half-melted Glass Cat; the few burnt rags that used to be the Patchwork Girl, still _talking_ because the Potion of Life can work even if there is only a few bits left ...

The horror. The horror ...

The Gospels According to Peckinpah and Tarantino

I had a very strange dream last night. It was, essentially, the Gospels, as they might have been done by Peckinpah or Tarantino. I was Jesus (of course), the most enlightened, wise and quick-drawing, crack-shooting philosopher-gunfighter of the Wild Judea. I had a band of rough, tough disciples and we roamed the land, speaking parables and casting out demons, usually with incredible amounts of slow-motion rendered gunfights. Sometimes the Romans or the Sanhedrin would interfere, usually with either men in black hats or Men in Black. They were no match for our two-fisted, lead-spitting brand of frontier prophecy.

Fortunately, I awoke before the inevitable Showdown at the Golgotha Corral.

Was that weird, or what? The strangest thing is that I'm not making this up ...

Twilight of the Giants

This is a reprint of a _Times_ article forwarded to me. My own comments follow.

New York Times

October 8, 2006
An Elephant Crackup?
By CHARLES SIEBERT

"We’re not going anywhere,’’ my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered to me one morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front seat of a jeep just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We’d originally stopped to observe what appeared to be a lone bull elephant grazing in a patch of tall savanna grasses off to our left. More than one ‘‘rogue’’ had crossed our path that morning — a young male elephant that has made an overly strong power play against the dominant male of his herd and been banished, sometimes permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue but part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush. We sat there watching the elephants cross the road before us, seeming, for all their heft, so light on their feet, soundlessly plying the wind-swept savanna grasses like land whales adrift above the floor of an ancient, waterless sea.

Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged — ‘‘the matriarch,’’ Okello said softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant’s favorite food, and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the brush a short distance away.

After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward, revving the engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The matriarch, however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the fierce white of her eyes as bright as that of her tusks. Although I pretty much knew the answer, I asked Okello if he was considering trying to drive around. ‘‘No,’’ he said, raising an index finger for emphasis. ‘‘She’ll charge. We should stay right here.’’

I’d have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable juncture in the course of human-elephant relations. In recent years, however, those relations have become markedly more bellicose. Just two days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a fishing village nearby. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park, near the village of Katwe. African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They’ve also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, ‘‘To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.’’ ‘‘Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,’’ Bradshaw told me recently. ‘‘What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.’’

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

Once the matriarch and her calf were a comfortable distance from us that morning, Okello and I made the 20-minute drive to Kyambura, a village at the far southeastern edge of the park. Back in 2003, Kyambura was reportedly the site of the very sort of sudden, unprovoked elephant attack I’d been hearing about. According to an account of the event in the magazine New Scientist, a number of huts and fields were trampled, and the townspeople were afraid to venture out to surrounding villages, either by foot or on their bikes, because elephants were regularly blocking the road and charging out at those who tried to pass.

Park officials from the Uganda Wildlife Authority with whom I tried to discuss the incident were reluctant to talk about it or any of the recent killings by elephants in the area. Eco-tourism is one of Uganda’s major sources of income, and the elephant and other wildlife stocks of Queen Elizabeth National Park are only just now beginning to recover from years of virtually unchecked poaching and habitat destruction. Tom Okello, the chief game warden at the park (and no relation to my driver), and Margaret Driciru, Queen Elizabeth’s chief veterinarian, each told me that they weren’t aware of the attack in Kyambura. When I mentioned it to the executive director of the wildlife authority, Moses Mapesa, upon my initial arrival in the capital city, Kampala, he eventually admitted that it did happen, but he claimed that it was not nearly as recent as reported. ‘‘That was 14 years ago,’’ he said. ‘‘We have seen aggressive behavior from elephants, but that’s a story of the past.’’

Kyambura did look, upon our arrival, much like every other small Ugandan farming community I’d passed through on my visit. Lush fields of banana trees, millet and maize framed a small town center of pastel-colored single-story cement buildings with corrugated-tin roofs. People sat on stoops out front in the available shade. Bicyclers bore preposterously outsize loads of bananas, firewood and five-gallon water jugs on their fenders and handlebars. Contrary to what I had read, the bicycle traffic along the road in and out of Kyambura didn’t seem impaired in the slightest.

But when Okello and I asked a shopkeeper named Ibrah Byamukama about elephant attacks, he immediately nodded and pointed to a patch of maize and millet fields just up the road, along the edges of the surrounding Maramagambo Forest. He confirmed that a small group of elephants charged out one morning two years earlier, trampled the fields and nearby gardens, knocked down a few huts and then left. He then pointed to a long orange gash in the earth between the planted fields and the forest: a 15-foot-deep, 25-foot-wide trench that had been dug by the wildlife authority around the perimeter of Kyambura in an attempt to keep the elephants at bay. On the way out of town, Okello and I took a closer look at the trench. It was filled with stacks of thorny shrubs for good measure.

‘‘The people are still worried,’’ Byamukama said, shaking his head. ‘‘The elephants are just becoming more destructive. I don’t know why.’’

Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, Calif., began wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary behavior of elephants in Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point? With the assistance of several established African-elephant researchers, including Daphne Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss, and with the help of Allan Schore, an expert on human trauma disorders at the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at U.C.L.A., Bradshaw sought to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience. Using the few remaining relatively stable elephant herds in places like Amboseli National Park in Kenya as control groups, Bradshaw and her colleagues analyzed the far more fractious populations found in places like Pilanesberg in South Africa and Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. What emerged was a portrait of pervasive pachyderm dysfunction.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or ‘‘allomothers’’) had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda, herds were often found to be ‘‘semipermanent aggregations,’’ as a paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations.

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. ‘‘The loss of elephant elders,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.’’

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’

In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.

But according to Bradshaw and her colleagues, the various pieces of the elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of neuroscience, or what might be called the physiology of psychology, by which scientists can now map the marred neuronal fields, snapped synaptic bridges and crooked chemical streams of an embattled psyche. Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still understood through research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants are now under way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of an elephant brain, taken this year, revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, a huge hippocampus, a seat of memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a prominent structure in the limbic system, which processes emotions.) Allan Schore, the U.C.L.A. psychologist and neuroscientist who for the past 15 years has focused his research on early human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it, recently wrote two articles with Bradshaw on the stress-related neurobiological underpinnings of current abnormal elephant behavior.

‘‘We know that these mechanisms cut across species,’’ Schore told me. ‘‘In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas.’’

For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains resonate far outside the field of neuroscience. ‘‘Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence,’’ she told me. ‘‘It is entirely congruent with what we know about humans and other mammals. Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar. That’s not news. What is news is when you start asking, What does this mean beyond the science? How do we respond to the fact that we are causing other species like elephants to psychologically break down? In a way, it’s not so much a cognitive or imaginative leap anymore as it is a political one.’’

Eve Abe says that in her mind, she made that leap before she ever left her mother’s womb. An animal ethologist and wildlife-management consultant now based in London, Abe (pronounced AH-bay) grew up in northern Uganda. After several years of studying elephants in Queen Elizabeth National Park, where decades of poaching had drastically reduced the herds, Abe received her doctorate at Cambridge University in 1994 for work detailing the parallels she saw between the plight of Uganda’s orphaned male elephants and the young male orphans of her own people, the Acholi, whose families and villages have been decimated by years of civil war. It’s work she proudly proclaims to be not only ‘‘the ultimate act of anthropomorphism’’ but also what she was destined to do.

‘‘My very first encounter with an elephant was a fetal one,’’ Abe told me in June in London as the two of us sipped tea at a cafe in Paddington Station. I was given Abe’s contact numbers earlier in the spring by Bradshaw, who is currently working with Abe to build a community center in Uganda to help both elephants and humans in their recovery from violence. For more than a month before my departure from New York, I had been trying without luck to arrange with the British Home Office for Abe, who is still waiting for permanent residence status in England, to travel with me to Uganda as my guide through Queen Elizabeth National Park without fear of her being denied re-entry to England. She was to accompany me that day right up to the departure gate at Heathrow, the two of us hoping (in vain, as it turned out) for a last-minute call that would have given her leave to use the ticket I was holding for her in my bag.

‘‘My dad was a conservationist and a teacher,’’ explained Abe, a tall, elegant woman with a trilling, nearly girlish voice. ‘‘He was always out in the parks. One of my aunts tells this story about us passing through Murchison park one day. My dad was driving. My uncle was in the front seat. In the back were my aunt and my mom, who was very pregnant with me. They suddenly came upon this huge herd of elephants on the road, and the elephants just stopped. So my dad stopped. He knew about animals. The elephants just stood there, then they started walking around the car, and looking into the car. Finally, they walked off. But my father didn’t start the car then. He waited there. After an hour or more, a huge female came back out onto the road, right in front of the car. It reared up and trumpeted so loudly, then followed the rest of the herd back into the bush. A few days later, when my mom got home, I was born.’’

Abe began her studies in Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1982, as an undergraduate at Makerere University in Kampala, shortly after she and her family, who’d been living for years as refugees in Kenya to escape the brutal violence in Uganda under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, returned home in the wake of Amin’s ouster in 1979. Abe told me that when she first arrived at the park, there were fewer than 150 elephants remaining from an original population of nearly 4,000. The bulk of the decimation occurred during the war with Tanzania that led to Amin’s overthrow: soldiers from both armies grabbed all the ivory they could get their hands on — and did so with such cravenness that the word ‘‘poaching’’ seems woefully inadequate. ‘‘Normally when you say ‘poaching,’ ’’ Abe said, ‘‘you think of people shooting one or two and going off. But this was war. They’d just throw hand grenades at the elephants, bring whole families down and cut out the ivory. I call that mass destruction.’’

The last elephant survivors of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Abe said, never left one another’s side. They kept in a tight bunch, moving as one. Only one elderly female remained; Abe estimated her to be at least 62. It was this matriarch who first gathered the survivors together from their various hideouts on the park’s forested fringes and then led them back out as one group into open savanna. Until her death in the early 90’s, the old female held the group together, the population all the while slowly beginning to rebound. In her yet-to-be-completed memoir, ‘‘My Elephants and My People,’’ Abe writes of the prominence of the matriarch in Acholi society; she named the park’s matriarchal elephant savior Lady Irene, after her own mother. ‘‘It took that core group of survivors in the park about five or six years,’’ Abe told me, ‘‘before I started seeing whole new family units emerge and begin to split off and go their own way.’’

In 1986, Abe’s family was forced to flee the country again. Violence against Uganda’s people and elephants never completely abated after Amin’s regime collapsed, and it drastically worsened in the course of the full-fledged war that developed between government forces and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. For years, that army’s leader, Joseph Kony, routinely ‘‘recruited’’ from Acholi villages, killing the parents of young males before their eyes, or sometimes having them do the killings themselves, before pressing them into service as child soldiers. The Lord’s Resistance Army has by now been largely defeated, but Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for numerous crimes against humanity, has hidden with what remains of his army in the mountains of Murchison Falls National Park, and more recently in Garamba National Park in northern Congo, where poaching by the Lord’s Resistance Army has continued to orphan more elephants.

‘‘I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,’’ Abe told me. ‘‘I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced-people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.’’

On the ride from Paddington that afternoon out to Heathrow, where I would catch a flight to Uganda, Abe told me that the parallel between the plight of Ugandans and their elephants was in many ways too close for her to see at first. It was only after she moved to London that she had what was, in a sense, her first full, adult recognition of the entwinement between human and elephant that she says she long ago felt in her mother’s womb.

‘‘I remember when I first was working on my doctorate,’’ she said. ‘‘I mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent scientist in Kenya. He looked amazed. He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before. To me it’s something I see so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.’’

Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and retirement facility situated in the state’s verdant, low-rolling southern hill country. The sanctuary is a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that the people who profited from them were eager to let them go. Given that elephants in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviors that were long observed in captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive working model for how to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown can be found in captivity.

Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the biggest hard-luck story is that of a 40-year-old, five-ton Asian elephant named Misty. Originally captured as a calf in India in 1966, Misty spent her first decade in captivity with a number of American circuses and finally ended up in the early 80’s at a wild-animal attraction known as Li on Country Safari in Irvine, Calif. It was there, on the afternoon of July 25, 1983, that Misty, one of four performing elephants at Lion Country Safari that summer, somehow managed to break free of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to make an escape. When one of the park’s zoologists tried to corner and contain her, Misty killed him with one swipe of her trunk.

There are, in the long, checkered history of human-elephant relations, countless stories of lethal elephantine assaults, and almost invariably of some gruesomely outsize, animalistic form of retribution exacted by us. It was in the very state of Tennessee, back in September 1916, that another five-ton Asian circus elephant, Mary, was impounded by a local sheriff for the killing of a young hotel janitor who’d been hired to mind Mary during a stopover in the northeast Tennessee town of Kingsport. The janitor had apparently taken Mary for a swim at a local pond, where, according to witnesses, he poked her behind the left ear with a metal hook just as she was reaching for a piece of floating watermelon rind. Enraged, Mary turned, swiftly snatched him up with her trunk, dashed him against a refreshment stand and then smashed his head with her foot.

With cries from the townspeople to ‘‘Kill the elephant!’’ and threats from nearby town leaders to bar the circus if ‘‘Murderous Mary,’’ as newspapers quickly dubbed her, remained a part of the show, the circus’s owner, Charlie Sparks, knew he had to do something to appease the public’s blood lust and save his business. (Among the penalties he is said to have contemplated was electrocution, a ghastly precedent for which had been set 13 years earlier, on the grounds of the nearly completed Luna Park in Coney Island. A longtime circus elephant named Topsy, who’d killed three trainers in as many years — the last one after he tried to feed her a lighted cigarette — became the largest and most prominent victim of Thomas Edison, the father of direct-current electricity, who had publicly electrocuted a number of animals at that time using his rival George Westinghouse’s alternating current, in hopes of discrediting it as being too dangerous.)

Sparks ultimately decided to have Mary hanged and shipped her by train to the nearby town of Erwin, Tenn., where more than 2,500 people gathered at the local rail yard for her execution. Dozens of children are said to have run off screaming in terror when the chain that was suspended from a huge industrial crane snapped, leaving Mary writhing on the ground with a broken hip. A local rail worker promptly clambered up Mary’s bulk and secured a heavier chain for a second, successful hoisting.

Misty’s fate in the early 80’s, by contrast, seems a triumph of modern humanism. Banished, after the Lion Safari killing, to the Hawthorn Corporation, a company in Illinois that trains and leases elephants and tigers to circuses, she would continue to lash out at a number of her trainers over the years. But when Hawthorn was convicted of numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act in 2003, the company agreed to relinquish custody of Misty to the Elephant Sanctuary. She was loaded onto a trailer transport on the morning of Nov. 17, 2004, and even then managed to get away with one final shot at the last in her long line of captors.

‘‘The details are kind of sketchy,’’ Carol Buckley, a founder of the Elephant Sanctuary, said to me one afternoon in July, the two of us pulling up on her all-terrain four-wheeler to a large grassy enclosure where an extremely docile and contented-looking Misty, trunk high, ears flapping, waited to greet us. ‘‘Hawthorn’s owner was trying to get her to stretch out so he could remove her leg chains before loading her on the trailer. At one point he prodded her with a bull hook, and she just knocked him down with a swipe of her trunk. But we’ve seen none of that since she’s been here. She’s as sweet as can be. You’d never know that this elephant killed anybody.’’

In the course of her nearly two years at the Elephant Sanctuary — much of it spent in quarantine while undergoing daily treatment for tuberculosis — Misty has also been in therapy, as in psychotherapy. Wild-caught elephants often witness as young calves the slaughter of their parents, just about the only way, shy of a far more costly tranquilization procedure, to wrest a calf from elephant parents, especially the mothers. The young captives are then dispatched to a foreign environment to work either as performers or laborers, all the while being kept in relative confinement and isolation, a kind of living death for an animal as socially developed and dependent as we now know elephants to be.

And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we’re learning that they can heal like us as well. Indeed, Misty has become a testament to the Elephant Sanctuary’s signature ‘‘passive control’’ system, a therapy tailored in many ways along the lines of those used to treat human sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. Passive control, as a sanctuary newsletter describes it, depends upon ‘‘knowledge of how elephants process information and respond to stress’’ as well as specific knowledge of each elephant’s past response to stress. Under this so-called nondominance system, there is no discipline, retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats, which are all common tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are taken, meanwhile, to afford the elephants both a sense of safety and freedom of choice — two mainstays of human trauma therapy — as well as continual social interaction.

Upon her arrival at the Elephant Sanctuary, Misty seemed to sense straight off the different vibe of her new home. When Scott Blais of the sanctuary went to free Misty’s still-chained leg a mere day after she’d arrived, she stood peaceably by, practically offering her leg up to him. Over her many months of quarantine, meanwhile, with only humans acting as a kind of surrogate elephant family, she has consistently gone through the daily rigors of her tuberculosis treatments — involving two caretakers, a team of veterinarians and the use of a restraining chute in which harnesses are secured about her chest and tail — without any coaxing or pressure. ‘‘We’ll shower her with praise in the barn afterwards,’’ Buckley told me as Misty stood by, chomping on a mouthful of hay, ‘‘and she actually purrs with pleasure. The whole barn vibrates.’’

Of course, Misty’s road to recovery — when viewed in light of her history and that of all the other captive elephants, past and present — is as harrowing as it is heartening. She and the others have suffered, we now understand, not simply because of us, but because they are, by and large, us. If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are. And while such knowledge naturally places an added burden upon us, the keepers, that burden is now being greatly compounded by the fact that sudden violent outbursts like Misty’s can no longer be dismissed as the inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the constraints and abuses of captivity.

They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.

On a more immediate, practical level, as Gay Bradshaw sees it, this involves taking what has been learned about elephant society, psychology and emotion and inculcating that knowledge into the conservation schemes of researchers and park rangers. This includes doing things like expanding elephant habitat to what it used to be historically and avoiding the use of culling and translocations as conservation tools. ‘‘If we want elephants around,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘then what we need to do is simple: learn how to live with elephants. In other words, in addition to conservation, we need to educate people how to live with wild animals like humans used to do, and to create conditions whereby people can live on their land and live with elephants without it being this life-and-death situation.’’

The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension, ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as a new ‘‘trans-species psyche,’’ a commitment to move beyond an anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be elephants. Two years ago, Bradshaw wrote a paper for the journal Society and Animals, focusing on the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, a sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants — more or less the wilderness-based complement to Carol Buckley’s trauma therapy at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. The trust’s human caregivers essentially serve as surrogate mothers to young orphan elephants, gradually restoring their psychological and emotional well being to the point at which they can be reintroduced into existing wild herds. The human ‘‘allomothers’’ stay by their adopted young orphans’ sides, even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caretakers make sure, however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans grow fond of all the keepers. Otherwise an elephant would form such a strong bond with one keeper that whenever he or she was absent, that elephant would grieve as if over the loss of another family member, often becoming physically ill itself.

To date, the Sheldrick Trust has successfully rehabilitated more than 60 elephants and reintroduced them into wild herds. A number of them have periodically returned to the sanctuary with their own wild-born calves in order to reunite with their human allomothers and to introduce their offspring to what — out on this uncharted frontier of the new ‘‘trans-species psyche’’ — is now being recognized, at least by the elephants, it seems, as a whole new subspecies: the human allograndmother. ‘‘Traditionally, nature has served as a source of healing for humans,’’ Bradshaw told me. ‘‘Now humans can participate actively in the healing of both themselves and nonhuman animals. The trust and the sanctuary are the beginnings of a mutually benefiting interspecies culture.’’

On my way back to New York via London, I contacted Felicity de Zulueta, a psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital in London who treats victims of extreme trauma, among them former child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army. De Zulueta, an acquaintance of Eve Abe’s, grew up in Uganda in the early 1960’s on the outskirts of Queen Elizabeth National Park, near where her father, a malaria doctor, had set up camp as part of a malaria-eradication program. For a time she had her own elephant, orphaned by poaching, that local villagers had given to her father, who brought it home to the family garage, where it immediately bonded with an orphan antelope and dog already residing there.

‘‘He was doing fine,’’ de Zulueta told me of the pet elephant. ‘‘My mother was loving it and feeding it, and then my parents realized, How can we keep this elephant that is going to grow bigger than the garage? So they gave it to who they thought were the experts. They sent him to the Entebbe Zoo, and although they gave him all the right food and everything, he was a lonely little elephant, and he died. He had no attachment.’’

For de Zulueta, the parallel that Abe draws between the plight of war orphans, human and elephant, is painfully apt, yet also provides some cause for hope, given the often startling capacity of both animals for recovery. She told me that one Ugandan war orphan she is currently treating lost all the members of his family except for two older brothers. Remarkably, one of those brothers, while serving in the Ugandan Army, rescued the younger sibling from the Lord’s Resistance Army; the older brother’s unit had captured the rebel battalion in which his younger brother had been forced to fight.

The two brothers eventually made their way to London, and for the past two years, the younger brother has been going through a gradual process of recovery in the care of Maudsley Hospital. Much of the rehabilitation, according to de Zulueta, especially in the early stages, relies on the basic human trauma therapy principles now being applied to elephants: providing decent living quarters, establishing a sense of safety and of attachment to a larger community and allowing freedom of choice. After that have come the more complex treatments tailored to the human brain’s particular cognitive capacities: things like reliving the original traumatic experience and being taught to modulate feelings through early detection of hyperarousal and through breathing techniques. And the healing of trauma, as de Zulueta describes it, turns out to have physical correlatives in the brain just as its wounding does.

‘‘What I say is, we find bypass,’’ she explained. ‘‘We bypass the wounded areas using various techniques. Some of the wounds are not healable. Their scars remain. But there is hope because the brain is an enormous computer, and you can learn to bypass its wounds by finding different methods of approaching life. Of course there may be moments when something happens and the old wound becomes unbearable. Still, people do recover. The boy I’ve been telling you about is 18 now, and he has survived very well in terms of his emotional health and capacities. He’s a lovely, lovely man. And he’s a poet. He writes beautiful poetry.’’

On the afternoon in July that I left the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, Carol Buckley and Scott Blais seemed in particularly good spirits. Misty was only weeks away from the end of her quarantine, and she would soon be able to socialize with some of her old cohorts from the Hawthorn Corporation: eight female Asians that had been given over to the sanctuary. I would meet the lot of them that day, driving from one to the next on the back of Buckley’s four-wheeler across the sanctuary’s savanna-like stretches. Buckley and Blais refer to them collectively as the Divas.

Buckley and Blais told me that they got word not long ago of a significant breakthrough in a campaign of theirs to get elephants out of entertainment and zoos: the Bronx Zoo, one of the oldest and most formidable zoos in the country, had announced that upon the death of the zoo’s three current elephant inhabitants, Patty, Maxine and Happy, it would phase out its elephant exhibit on social-behavioral grounds — an acknowledgment of a new awareness of the elephant’s very particular sensibility and needs. ‘‘They’re really taking the lead,’’ Buckley told me. ‘‘Zoos don’t want to concede the inappropriateness of keeping elephants in such confines. But if we as a society determine that an animal like this suffers in captivity, if the information shows us that they do, hey, we are the stewards. You’d think we’d want to do the right thing.’’

Four days later, I received an e-mail message from Gay Bradshaw, who consults with Buckley and Blais on their various stress-therapy strategies. She wrote that one of the sanctuary’s elephants, an Asian named Winkie, had just killed a 36-year-old female assistant caretaker and critically injured the male caretaker who’d tried to save her.

People who work with animals on a daily basis can tell you all kinds of stories about their distinct personalities and natures. I’d gotten, in fact, an elaborate breakdown from Buckley and Blais on the various elephants at the sanctuary and their sociopolitical maneuverings within the sanctuary’s distinct elephant culture, and I went to my notebook to get a fix again on Winkie. A 40-year-old, 7,600-pound female from Burma, she came to the sanctuary in 2000 from the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisc., where she had a reputation for lashing out at keepers. When Winkie first arrived at the sanctuary, Buckley told me, she used to jump merely upon being touched and then would wait for a confrontation. But when it never came, she slowly calmed down. ‘‘Has never lashed out at primary keepers,’’ my last note on Winkie reads, ‘‘but has at secondary ones.’’

Bradshaw’s e-mail message concludes: ‘‘A stunning illustration of trauma in elephants. The indelible etching.’’

I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it.

Even as we’re forcing them out, it seems, the elephants are going out of their way to put us, the keepers, in an ever more discomfiting place, challenging us to preserve someplace for them, the ones who in many ways seem to regard the matter of life and death more devoutly than we. In fact, elephant culture could be