I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100% correct, and perhaps the single largest theme from Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ which has been thrown out by successors.
(For fellow Gene Wolfe fans: I was reading up on this topic earlier because of "Suzanne Delage", where I interpret (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage) as an inversion of _Dracula_ - in "Suzanne Delage", the protagonist & his allies are defeated by Dracula due to a lack of coordination/technology, in contrast to the successful protagonists of _Dracula_.)
A lot of vampire fiction includes themes about technology vs the supernatural, Anne Rice especially has the vampires being overwhelmed by the new world. The focus (not so much in Ann Rice books) can be more on more action oriented technology (trains and gadgets) rather than the modern weapons of a detective though. Weird steam-punk gun gadgets (even in a modern setting like Dusk to Dawn) are a common and lazy example of these. I think a wacky invention is a shorthand to the audience for "technology".
A modern Dracula with detective themes could use a "hacker" to put together the kind of digital trail that a modern police officer would follow, so we understand that checking a person's Facebook page is modern and high tech.
Yes, that's the opposite of _Dracula_, though. Dracula isn't overwhelmed by the modern world, he's defeated by it. That's not the same thing. He's no Lestat in _Interview_, driven to catatonia by change.*
Dracula loves the modern world (particularly with its lack of Catholicism & peasant superstitions about how to fight vampires). He is, in fact, an enthusiast for modernity and England, an anglophile otaku, you might say, with a library stuffed full of English books & periodicals he reads obsessively: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_2
Further, he is a dark counterpart to Van Helsing in that throughout the novel, he is 'waking up', and scientifically experimenting in learning how to use his vampiric powers effectively in the modern context, and Van Helsing tells us that Dracula was only days away from becoming invincible, after discovering that he is allowed to transport his own coffin-soil and hide them away in places that only Dracula's fog or animal forms could ever reach: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_23 (Rather than depending on humans, who keep receipts and addresses, and happily reveal the locations of all of the coffins to the protagonists.)
It is only by the skin of their teeth that they are able to destroy his backups before he has figured out how to move & hide them, and reduce him to a single backup and force him to flee to Transylvania before he finishes his 'hard takeoff vampire Singularity', if you will.
* yes, I know Rice retconned this for her narrative convenience so she could churn out sequel after sequel. Nevertheless.
> Anne Rice especially has the vampires being overwhelmed by the new world.
I think the point Rice makes in the books I have read is that the vampires are not equally overwhelmed. The Vampire Lestat is about capital-P Progress even more explicitly than Dracula. The protagonist, Lestat, is influenced by the Age of Reason he is born into. He witnesses the end of the old ways in the French Revolution. All of it prepares him for the future. This is in contrast to the younger Louis and the older Armand, who hang on to the past.
The introduction to that book is memorable for being an over-the-top paean to its time. Lestat is not overwhelmed; he loves the 1980s.
Quote:
> As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:
> The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.
> People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times.
The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired.
And the women-ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.
> For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
> And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past.
> The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to graceful things.
it's been a few years since I've read through Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles but I don't recall them getting overwhelmed by the "new world".
What I recall is that vampires who don't occasionally "go to sleep" never make it long enough to become truly strong. In essence, they burn out. Almost as if the world becomes so boring that they must sleep for centuries so they can wake up and find the new world _invigorating_ rather than overwhelming.
In her books, both the original vampires did this, as did Lestat.
It’s really Dracula vs Modernity. There’s nothing in the blog post that justifies the usage of the “Catholic” epithet. London is the seat of Anglican faith after all and using type writers and records are secular endeavors.
But the sacramentals used against him are Catholic (and in Romania Orthodox).
I didn't read all of it, but the first two pages of [1] demonstrate how the book is "Catholic" as opposed to Anglican, with the protagonist feeling awkward, as an Anglican, at the icons and crucifixes used as (in the book effective) protection.
Keep in mind, for the purposes of the book Catholicism and Orthodoxy can be considered the same as we both believe in icons, consecrated sacraments, apostolic succession, transubstination, etc
That's really splitting hairs. Crucifixes, holy water, and communion wafers are symbols from formal, organized Christianity, of which Catholicism is the most prominent example.
It's also a sneaky, underhanded way to make a point. The shell game of argument tactics.
> Bram Stoker died in April 1912: wonder what he might have made of the spectacle of Progress known as World War One, the applications of all that beloved industry, the rational pursuit of rational ends with well-engineered (hence, rational) means, the wholesale destruction of quaint rural culture and peoples, the royal connections by blood among the crowned heads of so many of the contending parties, to say little or nothing of the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
This reminds me of Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge (An der Brücke), published 1949. Its protagonist makes his own attempt to efface the legibility to technological modernity of his beloved, but as Böll had briefly worked as a statistician before turning to writing, the author was surely aware of the futility, or at least the limits, of his character's effort!
Thank you for introducing me to "Suzanne Delage," I am a Gene Wolfe fan but was unaware of this story until now. I found your interpretation incredibly convincing, too.
The author thinks that Helsing & company killed Dracula... and that is certainly the narrator's desperate belief. But as Fred Saberhagen pointed out in his more modern telling of the tale, Van Helsing himself maintains Dracula must be staked, decapitated and have his mouth stuffed with garlic to perish. And yet, despite this and despite knowing that Dracula can turn himself to mist, the heroes are content with victory when, in the shadows of sunset, they stab and cut Dracula with steel knives and he turns to "dust".
Fun article though, even with that small "mistake". :)
I have heard that the stake was specifically intended to be driven into the floor of the coffin once it had completely penetrated the body with the intention to hold the vampire in place, rather than merely used as a weapon stabbing the heart as is near universally depicted in film.
In the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula is eventually killed, but at what cost? Harker must eventually drive a stake through his beloved Lucy. Dracula is a virus, not a man.
Are you mixing things up? Harker's fiancée is Mina, not Lucy. And the novel is quite clear that since Dracula is dead, she's no longer going to become a vampire.
different things sure, but very different? Plants and molten lava are very different things, dust and mist have similarities to the human eye. I mean if the dust were blown away by a wind that might have been Drac turning into mist and just happening to have a little bit of dust on him he scattered. Maybe I'm just overly cautious but I've always been taught you can't be too careful with the undead.
Slightly OT but Dracula is not the only monster that has no chance in the modern world.
The "Quiet Place" movies make me laugh because if those creatures ever really came to Earth we'd have them under control in about 5 minutes.
Too many monsters? Rig up a battery-powered AM radio with a motion detector and a stick of dynamite. Toss 1000 of these things out in a field somewhere. Monsters go boom.
Every human now wears an electronic fob around their neck that emits a loud sound of the proper pitch to drive the monsters crazy.
We'd have those Quiet Place monsters driving Ubers for us and cleaning our bathrooms.
Same with all those zombie scenarios. Quite conveniently, each and every film or series starts with patient zero, skips the part where the whole world order, society and whatnot collapses, and starts with our heros trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
World War Z, the book that is, is the only instance that tried to explain how the collapse occured. I'd expect it to take a lot more than 5 minutes, a lot of my optimism around pandemic control died during Covid, but the full collapse that always happens as soon as zombies show up just won't happen.
The thing I find unconvincing about zombie movies is that the zombies are running around powered by human physiology for weeks in the middle of winter and yet their numbers are inexhaustible and they can get through security doors.
It seems like a far more realistic scenario would be a fortnight of chaos where everyone locks themselves inside, possibly enforced by 24/7 shoot on sight curfews, followed by the death of all the zombies and a partial and limited social collapse. Maybe sporadic continuing outbreaks, radically different border policies, and limitations on movement within countries after that.
My favorite take on zombie fiction was a short story that posited that nearly everyone is globally infected, but infection can take one of two forms: form A is the regular "undead"-style zombies, but form B merely makes humans stupid. This explains the foolish choices movie protagonists must make for the sake of plot.
> Poor Dracula, he never had a chance – not against the double-reinforced power of a Catholic Modernity.
To be fair, he hoarded wealth, drank blood, and sought eternal life. If I were in a room with Dracula and his enemies, and you told me to point at the Catholics, I'd be a bit stumped.
Marx was probably referring to the 1828 German opera "Der Vampyr" (in turn based on Polidori's 1819 English story of the same name). Polidori's Lord Ruthven was the most popular vampire in pop culture before Dracula.
On a related note, when I re-watch shows from the 1990's or even early 2000's it's amazing how many problems would be solved with a simple cell phone call or text message. Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a much shorter show if the gang could just text instead of wondering where the others were or if they knew some key fact.
Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications.
That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories.
Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors.
Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.
Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.
Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.
I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
> Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.
It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows.
- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing?
- Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones?
- And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?
Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
There is an episode of Columbia where he asks a receptionist for information about an employee. Instead of making a phone call to get the information, she kicks off a computer query on one of those teletype systems.
The gag is it takes seemingly forever for it to print all the data about the employee to paper, while Columbia fidgets and waits awkwardly to finish, repeatedly asking if there’s a faster way to get the information.
New tech at the time was often a plot point of the show, like using call recordings to fake the murderers location at the time of the murder, editing video surveillance, etc.
I think any scifi talking about LLM is just doing it wrong. Nobody watching a scifi cares about AI other than it's doing things--good or bad depends on the script. Imagine if Ripley and Dallas having a scene discussing if Mother can be trusted or if it's hallucinating. What if HAL told Dave that LLM isn't fine tuned well enough so he's sorry he can't do that at this time? I'll tell you what, that scene would be on the cutting room floor, and if left in, the audience would be snoring.
I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.
Not sure about that so. AI at the moment is a hype around LLMs. Given what the tech in the Expanse is doing, it is easily possible that AI is used as just another tool for everything from automated med bays to ships diagnostics.
Edit: Another great example of how computers are used is Perry Rhodan (a German SciFi series going since the 60s, and a rather good one). There, in books written up tobthe 70s, they have positronic computers (and other tech that beats everything Star Trek, Star Wars or any other sci fi universe I know has), and computers are still used with punch cards and stripe print outs. Even the ones salvaged from civilisation being millenias ahead tech-wise compared to humans. Pretty funny detail.
along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic compute device?
OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of what would probably happen if the US military merged with Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new gadgets.
STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code quickly on such a tiny screen?
What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? There’s a good half hour in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a vampire lays in wait for Buffy, with a rifle loaded and ready. The show didn’t end on that episode. At least one of Buffy’s friends knew what could be done with computers, and researched floor plans and “ancient lore” online.
Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
Or the opposite, like the demon that couldn't be harmed by any weapon - unfortunately for him, he wasn't around for the modern era. Buffy used a rocket launcher, worked just fine.
> What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire?
Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are.
This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
Along the lines of villains skirting identity-providing technocratic modernity, my head canon for Walking Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34284609
Readit News
I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100% correct, and perhaps the single largest theme from Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ which has been thrown out by successors.
(For fellow Gene Wolfe fans: I was reading up on this topic earlier because of "Suzanne Delage", where I interpret (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage) as an inversion of _Dracula_ - in "Suzanne Delage", the protagonist & his allies are defeated by Dracula due to a lack of coordination/technology, in contrast to the successful protagonists of _Dracula_.)
A modern Dracula with detective themes could use a "hacker" to put together the kind of digital trail that a modern police officer would follow, so we understand that checking a person's Facebook page is modern and high tech.
Dracula loves the modern world (particularly with its lack of Catholicism & peasant superstitions about how to fight vampires). He is, in fact, an enthusiast for modernity and England, an anglophile otaku, you might say, with a library stuffed full of English books & periodicals he reads obsessively: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_2
Further, he is a dark counterpart to Van Helsing in that throughout the novel, he is 'waking up', and scientifically experimenting in learning how to use his vampiric powers effectively in the modern context, and Van Helsing tells us that Dracula was only days away from becoming invincible, after discovering that he is allowed to transport his own coffin-soil and hide them away in places that only Dracula's fog or animal forms could ever reach: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_23 (Rather than depending on humans, who keep receipts and addresses, and happily reveal the locations of all of the coffins to the protagonists.)
It is only by the skin of their teeth that they are able to destroy his backups before he has figured out how to move & hide them, and reduce him to a single backup and force him to flee to Transylvania before he finishes his 'hard takeoff vampire Singularity', if you will.
* yes, I know Rice retconned this for her narrative convenience so she could churn out sequel after sequel. Nevertheless.
I think the point Rice makes in the books I have read is that the vampires are not equally overwhelmed. The Vampire Lestat is about capital-P Progress even more explicitly than Dracula. The protagonist, Lestat, is influenced by the Age of Reason he is born into. He witnesses the end of the old ways in the French Revolution. All of it prepares him for the future. This is in contrast to the younger Louis and the older Armand, who hang on to the past.
The introduction to that book is memorable for being an over-the-top paean to its time. Lestat is not overwhelmed; he loves the 1980s.
Quote:
> As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:
> The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.
> People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times. The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired. And the women-ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.
> For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
> And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past.
> The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to graceful things.
What I recall is that vampires who don't occasionally "go to sleep" never make it long enough to become truly strong. In essence, they burn out. Almost as if the world becomes so boring that they must sleep for centuries so they can wake up and find the new world _invigorating_ rather than overwhelming.
In her books, both the original vampires did this, as did Lestat.
I didn't read all of it, but the first two pages of [1] demonstrate how the book is "Catholic" as opposed to Anglican, with the protagonist feeling awkward, as an Anglican, at the icons and crucifixes used as (in the book effective) protection.
Keep in mind, for the purposes of the book Catholicism and Orthodoxy can be considered the same as we both believe in icons, consecrated sacraments, apostolic succession, transubstination, etc
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/5244/1/5244_1.pdf
It's also a sneaky, underhanded way to make a point. The shell game of argument tactics.
> Bram Stoker died in April 1912: wonder what he might have made of the spectacle of Progress known as World War One, the applications of all that beloved industry, the rational pursuit of rational ends with well-engineered (hence, rational) means, the wholesale destruction of quaint rural culture and peoples, the royal connections by blood among the crowned heads of so many of the contending parties, to say little or nothing of the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
This reminds me of Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge (An der Brücke), published 1949. Its protagonist makes his own attempt to efface the legibility to technological modernity of his beloved, but as Böll had briefly worked as a statistician before turning to writing, the author was surely aware of the futility, or at least the limits, of his character's effort!
I didn't realize Dracula lore was among your many sidelines :P
I didn't realize either until August last year!
Fun article though, even with that small "mistake". :)
GP neglects to mention that it might also be necessary to bury the decapitated, garlic-stuffed, staked corpse at a crossroads.
The "Quiet Place" movies make me laugh because if those creatures ever really came to Earth we'd have them under control in about 5 minutes.
Too many monsters? Rig up a battery-powered AM radio with a motion detector and a stick of dynamite. Toss 1000 of these things out in a field somewhere. Monsters go boom.
Every human now wears an electronic fob around their neck that emits a loud sound of the proper pitch to drive the monsters crazy.
We'd have those Quiet Place monsters driving Ubers for us and cleaning our bathrooms.
World War Z, the book that is, is the only instance that tried to explain how the collapse occured. I'd expect it to take a lot more than 5 minutes, a lot of my optimism around pandemic control died during Covid, but the full collapse that always happens as soon as zombies show up just won't happen.
It seems like a far more realistic scenario would be a fortnight of chaos where everyone locks themselves inside, possibly enforced by 24/7 shoot on sight curfews, followed by the death of all the zombies and a partial and limited social collapse. Maybe sporadic continuing outbreaks, radically different border policies, and limitations on movement within countries after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIG36gncSxs&t=33s
To be fair, he hoarded wealth, drank blood, and sought eternal life. If I were in a room with Dracula and his enemies, and you told me to point at the Catholics, I'd be a bit stumped.
Das Kapital was 1867; The Time Machine, 1895. They sure loved their vore in the 19th century!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Vampyr
That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories.
Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
A quick Google turns up:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...
Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.
Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.
Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.
I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.
- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?
Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
The gag is it takes seemingly forever for it to print all the data about the employee to paper, while Columbia fidgets and waits awkwardly to finish, repeatedly asking if there’s a faster way to get the information.
New tech at the time was often a plot point of the show, like using call recordings to fake the murderers location at the time of the murder, editing video surveillance, etc.
Edit: Another great example of how computers are used is Perry Rhodan (a German SciFi series going since the 60s, and a rather good one). There, in books written up tobthe 70s, they have positronic computers (and other tech that beats everything Star Trek, Star Wars or any other sci fi universe I know has), and computers are still used with punch cards and stripe print outs. Even the ones salvaged from civilisation being millenias ahead tech-wise compared to humans. Pretty funny detail.
Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are.
This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw