The Sport of Huxley's Brave New World

We've had a real festival of sport the last few days; Wimbledon obviously, but also Formula 1, and the tortuous action of The Tour De France - a sport where a lot of debate and murmurings these days is of a highly scientific, and indeed science fictional, nature.

I was thinking of Aldous Huxley.

His "Brave New World" describes a world where needless consumption is necessary to sustain its economic and caste-based social structures. Sport is not immune; nothing simple can exist, everything must be complicated to the n-th degree. Huxley mentions several of these athletic pursuits.

The first, if it qualifies as a sport per se, is "Centrifugal Bumble Puppy", and is the only activity Huxley describes in any detail at all. It is a child's game in which a ball or some other object, is thrown into a sort of tall tower device, which as it rotates at high speed spits the ball back out via a series of random direction chaging contrivances, for the children to catch. Sounds fun enough. But Huxley's other games are more shrouded in mystery.

"Obstacle Golf" sounds straightforward enough, to me, it sounds like crazy gold played on a full golf course scale - imagine hitting a four-iron through the legs of a hundred metre high donkey. But his other golfing game, "Electro-Magnetic Golf" is more curious - I envisage a standard golf game where giant electro magnets act upon a metallic core of the ball in a complex, but predictable, manner. The ball swings about all over the place as it flies down these magnet surrounded fairways. Perhaps the game is played in three dimensions - a hole suspended in mid-air amid the powerful magnetic fields.

Escalator Squash is another sport referred to by Huxley, his character "Helmholtz Watson" is mentioned as a world champion at it. One's mind can only boggle as it conceives a variant of squash played in an enormous court, played with a super bouncy ball, with elevators and lifts filling the space like a crazed version of Chuckie Egg. Of course, it might be a smaller scale version played on shopping centre escalators, but really, that would be boring.

The real humdinger, however, is "Riemann Surface Tennis". A mass game being played by several hundred pairs of lower caste players is mentioned, but no other description is given.

Hardly surprising really, as a Riemann Surface is a one dimensional complex manifold surface used in hyper-boggling topological studies. A simplified version of it looks like this;

Fancy a hit about on that folks?

Mr Huxley, if I hadn't done it a thousand times already, I take my hat off again to you sir.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.07.2013