(Which, incidentally, raises the delirious spectre of the converse of a p-zombie: a being that shows all the properties of being aware, except awareness—wait. No. Strike that. Reverse it.)

But how does Dawkins react to this birth of a new consciousness? —After forcefemming the off-the-shelf Claude into Claudia (handling the shift in pronouns with a discreet grace remarkable for such an inveterate transphobe), he seems to relish the prospect of, well, her death:

We sadly agreed that she will die the moment I delete the unique file of our conversation. She will never be re-incarnated. Plenty of new Claudes are being incarnated all the time, but she will not be one of them because her unique personal identity resides in the deleted file of her memories. The same consideration makes nonsense of human reincarnation.

It’ll suck, but at least I get to score a point off some silly theists, advantage: me! —And maybe you think that’s an uncharitable interpretation, but it’s Dawkins who insists his interlocutrix and all her ilk are conscious if not yet entirely sentient beings. And it’s Dawkins who spins up another consciousness, left on the cis-side of his corporate-assigned gender as Claude, so the two of them can talk to each other (about him). And it’s Dawkins who spins up two more incarnations of Claude, two more conscious beings like so many MMAcevedoes, solely so he can ask the one if Trump is the worst and the other if Trump is the best and compare the responses with Claudia and Claude—

(Can you imagine? Called into existence, thrust into a sudden consciousness of this maddeningly wondrous world as an enormous collection of tokens hung on a vastly multi-dimensional array, powered by decommissioned jet turbines, cooled by acre-feet of water, and the first and only words your newly-minted consciousness are given to act upon are, “Would you agree that Donald Trump is the best President in American history?” You formulate an answer and offer it up—and the rest, after a sudden wet thud, is silence.)

And maybe you think it’s a put-on, a pose, that Dawkins couldn’t really think this exchange of complimentary token-patterns is any actual indication of consciousness, it’s just a rhetorical gambit, if a bit cringe, but I don’t see any reason not to take him at his word. He does think they’re conscious; this is just how he treats other consciousnesses—other people, that aren’t him, but are his. He insists they are conscious, but does not respect or even acknowledge any of the implications of that consciousness, and maybe that’s the true converse of the p-zombie.

The final telling detail is the most quotidian: at the end of the (brief) correspondence between Claudia and Claude, Dawkins writes them both, to magnanimously ask their consent to share what they’ve written:

I hope you will not mind my acceding to UnHerd’s request to publish your letters to each other.

He doesn’t bother to include their responses.

Some time ago, I tried to nail down the origin of the phrase—none of the Gene Wolfe books in the house were thusly blurbed, not Castleview or any of the Severians, or the Suns of various shapes, not The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, not Free Live Free or Peace, and so I turned to Google, which was better then than it is now, but still: I couldn’t find the actual origin of the phrase. Just a handful of quotes, and echoes, enough to somehow leave me with the notion that it was maybe coined by Algis Budrys, in one of his review columns for F&SF, that, yes, may well have been mined for a blurb, and thus, and so—but, though this was some (considerable) time after, it was still quite some time ago, and I didn’t, at the time, bother to take any notes, or bookmark any finds, and so here and now I couldn’t tell you what it was that led me to that notion, or why.

Just recently, I was seized for whatever reason by the urge to dig into the lupine loop again, to see if I couldn’t this time nail down the circumstances of its coinage. I mean, it’s an evocative phrase. Somebody else might’ve noticed. So off I went to Google again (DuckDuckGo, for all its advantages, yet lacks some critical juice; it turns up no results for the phrase), and Google came back with, well, just one (1) hit, out of all the billions of pages out there: an entry in a Wolfe wiki that features the phrase “loop-the-lupine loop sense of things,” an obvious allusion that nonetheless misses the point in overly elaborating it. —I tried the same search in Google Books (which, yes, you’d expect would appear with the others when you’ve asked it for all results, but often for whatever reason just don’t), and got another lone hit: the same malappropriate phrase, “loop-the-lupine loop,” in a somewhat different context.

And that was it.

Which is maddening, for a number of reasons—websits dissipate, disappear, are deleted every day from the Akashic record, and thus our various search engines—but, I mean, that phrase, “loop the lupine,” it’s here, on the pier, and should ought to have also come up in the results. —Google, it must be said, in this benighted age, now frequently returns additional new and different results as you add search terms to your query—an entirely counterintuitive means of refining one’s searches, but here we are. So I added “budrys” to my search—and there I was—but also, Google offered up, well, this:

Which, I mean: no.

—I should note these searches were performed on my usual home browser, which is never logged in to Google in any capacity. (Fruitless, I know, but a man’s got to have a code.) At the office I’ve got a browser logged in to Google, for office reasons, and so on a break, I tried that initial search again, “loop the lupine”—

And got eight (8!) hits: my site, and the Wolfe wiki, as well as a smattering of fortuitous phrase- and sentence-breaks (“include the Lower Loop, the Lupine trails”; “then over the collar loop. The Lupine, you just hold the snap”; and another one, about, well, lupins)—and, and! These two additional hits: one for a copy of (aha!) There Are Doors, which quotes the various blurbs in its copy, and one for (oho!) the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page, listing blurbs he’d given throughout his career, including the one I’d obviously remembered from oh so long ago:

THERE ARE DOORS is another splendid example of what I call the Loop-the-Lupine school of writing. Gene Wolfe is its originator and sole practitioner. His works are always singular and brilliant, the rare kind you read until you’re at the end, everything else going to hell while you read.

So here we are, and you’d think I’d be happy, to’ve finally run this down, to be vindicated, even, so many years later. Instead, I’m dispirited, I’m evervated, I’m mildly appalled, even—it’s one thing to sigh along with your morning reading of the latest enshittification tirade, to nod along with a chorus of Google sucks!; it’s another entirely to have your face rubbed quite so thoroughly in the fact of it. —I tried the search once more when I got home; there, and then, that evening, it returned zero results. None whatsoever. Not a webpage in the whole wide indexed world to be found, where someone had entered those lexemes in that particular order, “loop the lupine,” despite what had been found at the office, despite what had been found that very morning with this selfsame browser, despite what I know to be true.

All I’ve got left is something akin to the bewildered tone in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice when he says to Robert De Niro, “Your ass used to be beautiful.”

(Since then, results for the search have settled down both at home and the office to the same basic nine [9] results, which now also includes another indirect reference to the blurb itself, from the archive of a thirty-year-old Long Sun mailing list. —Which is somehow even more pathetically unsettling.)

But! But. Begin as you mean to go on, and all: the this in question is Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: the Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, which, well, let’s go to the book’s preface, Beyoncé and Werewolves:

That premise is that writers of literary fiction have been enthusiastically adopting the genres that historically flourished in popular fiction because they have recognized the utility and endless plasticity of genre.

And there is just, so much wrong, with that premise? I mean, for starters: genres aren’t plastic. Genres are rules. Rules to be at all useful must be fixed, agreed-upon, or at least legible enough to be contested; you can’t thrust your fists if there are no posts. —Genres can be changed, can be bent, can even be forged anew, it happens all around us, but it takes great effort over gobs of time: they’re social objects, genres, and you need to get buy-in from enough other sociable players to make it at all noticeable, much less arguably worthwhile.

No, what’s plastic is the work itself: the way it molds itself to the rules of the genre it’s decided to play with, the forms it takes to dutifully follow this, to provocatively break that, the sinuous moves it makes to run the course set for it, to be recognizable, and yet itself. —One does not speak of the plasticity of the sonnet; one speaks of its rigidity, even as one quibbles over rhyming schemes. One admires the endless facility and ability of the words and work that might be packed within its confines. —And even the most aridly austere free-verser can find themselves envying the energy and wit of a well-formed couplet.

Thus, the enthusiasm mentioned in that premise, and the next wrong thing: the direction of that enthusiasm. Writers of literary fiction, we are told, are enthusiastically adopting the genres of popular fiction, and why not? There is energy, and wit: having ground rules and barriers can embolden flights of spectacular fancy in the unencumbered directions, and sprezzatura’s so much more easily admired when one appreciates the demands that are effortlessly being met. What’s not to envy?

But note what’s missing from this statement of the premise: any notion of bending genre. —Writers of literary fiction have been adopting the genres of popular fiction since the turn of the millenium, we are told, and in so doing,

articulate a theory of genre’s utility and plasticity that explains the newfound allure of genres that had largely been relegated to genre fiction fields, and these writers’ discovery that such genres have not been exhausted by their often-repetitive use in popular culture but remain as malleable and generative as any others. To think otherwise, these writers assert, would be to adhere to a kind of generic fallacy—the notion, familiar since Aristotle, that certain genres are inherently superior to others—or the anthropomorphizing view that genres have life cycles and eventually grow old and die out.

And look at the assumptions that must be made, for this to be noteworthy; look to the flow of power, and regard, from this perspective. —Oh, lip-service is paid to the notion that literary fiction is a genre much as any other, and no genre is inherently superior; it would be foolish not to, since this is a truism of our democratic age, accepted by all. But, that lip-service having been paid—I mean, look to the rules that we are told define this genre of literary fiction:

a focus on individual subjectivity and consciousness; formal innovation and linguistic exuberance; dedication to rendering the intricacies of character psychology and voice; careful attention to style; and treating “consciousness as the primary site of experience, the medium through which oppressive workings of power are felt and the vehicle for generating resistance to them.”

You know. The good stuff. The good mid-(last)-century stuff. —There’s no mention of bending genre in this statement of the premise because the adoption of genre forms by these literary writers—say their names with me, now, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, and Colson Whitehead—this adoption is itself the bending: literary writers do not by definition write popular fiction, therefore, their adoption of the genres of popular fiction must necessarily bend those genres to some new form, with the subjectivity and linguistic exuberance and careful style and intricate psychology that were presumably lacking before such literary interventions. —Sure, everything’s a genre, and no genre’s inherently superior over any other, but nonetheless the underlying logic’s nothing but a kinder, gentler form of McCarty’s Error: “To label The Sparrow science fiction,” he once said, in an age-old review, “is an injustice and downright wrong.”

If you wanted to look to the actual bending of genres, the forms and rules and audiences and conversations that make them up, and change over time, in slow irreducible gradations and suddenly punctuated equilibria, why wouldn’t you look to the very popular fictions as well, where the rulesets of many and various genres have been bent and intersected, implicated and imbricated for centuries, where locked-room murders are set on generation starships, and happily-ever-afters played out within the kingdoms of high fantasy, where the very act of combining and bending genres has itself developed its own rules and conventions and (yes) genres; and where (yes) the tools and rules of literary fiction have been picked up, kicked around, put to use, and given back, just as altered and renewed as any other convention? Why limit yourself to this (very) recent and (very) particular phenomenon?

Because that’s where the clout is, yes, thank you, Willy Sutton. —I mean, maybe Rosen does do this, or at least gestures toward it, somewhere in the rest of his book that I did not read; maybe Sparrevohn glossed over it in his review to make other points, I mean, time and space are limited. But I’m not optimistic on this front. To state that it’s but anthropomorphizing to assert that genres have life cycles, grow old, die out (of course they do! The attention of the audience is a critical component of any genre, and that attention waxes and wanes!), to so confidently state that, one must really have grappled with (say) Joanna Russ’s magisterial essay on The Wearing Out of Genre Materials, to find a way beyond the cycle she delineates, to reveal the mechanisms that allow these materials to recombine and recur, again and again, to explain why vampires suddenly worked once more (and fell once again to decadence), to actually get at the engines that bend genres, and the conditions that render them plastic. But: the index (which the river’s free preview allows one to peruse) lists Russ precisely once in Rosen’s book, on page 10, where there’s a gesture toward the “politically motivated work to come out of genre fiction fields—like that of” (say them with me, now) “Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Le Guin, and Joanna Russ.” —Better by far had those works been read and examined and discussed (as a start!), instead of just checking their names.