The Misjudgement of Jupiter

Bad decision making by Orlando Bloom, and an arcane joke by an old science-fiction author.

In Greco-Roman mythology, the Judgement of Jupiter (or, Zeus) in the argument between Minerva, Juno and Venus (i.e. Athena, Hera and Aphrodite) over Discordia/Eris's golden apple, was the divine spark for the Trojan War. The goddess of strife, irked at not being invited to a wedding feast as it was assumed she would cause trouble, threw in a golden apple marked kallisti (for the beautiful one). As intended, the goddesses argued over who it was meant for. Jupiter chickened out of the judgement (1), sub-contracting it to the mortal Paris, prince of Troy, for which reason it is more commonly known as the Judgement of Paris. Unable to decide, Paris allowed himself to be bribed by Aphrodite with the love of the world's most beautiful woman - Helen, wife of Menelaus. Given that the alternative bribes were (from Juno/Hera) dominion over Europe and Asia (2) or (from Minerva/Athena) wisdom and martial skill, this makes Paris a colossal idiot; it takes a special kind of jackass to not only make the choice which leads to the destruction of one's city, but to do so by selecting the weakest of three alternatives. (It almost justifies having him played by Orlando Bloom in the rather silly Troy, except they didn't use that part of the backstory.)

 "Judgement of Jupiter", John Deare, marble relief (1787) - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Judgement of Jupiter is also the title of a ludicrous book of astrological/pseudo-scientific claptrap by Richard A. Tilms, which I bought from a remainder bookshop in Cambridge (3) many years ago. I am not usually inclined to buy this sort of thing, even in remainder bookshops, but I was aware that this book was not quite what it seemed. In fact, Richard A. Tilms was a pseudonym of the science fiction writer John Sladek, and was a piece of mischievous "false flag" propaganda...

John Sladek, though a native of Iowa, was living in Britain by the 1960s and got drawn into the circle of the British New Wave of Science Fiction, centered around the Michael Moorcock-edited New Worlds magazine (4). His long fiction included Mechasm (a.k.a. The Reproductive System), in which self-replicating machines get out of control, The Muller-Fokker Effect, a slapstick satire about the recording of human identities (5), and a trio of books about robots. Tik-Tok featured a clever, charming but murderous robot with no "Asimov circuits" to restrain him from mayhem; Roderick and Roderick at Random his opposite, a naive, Candide-like innocent. No guessing which one ends up as US Vice President.

 Omnibus edition of the Roderick novels, originally intended as one book anyway.

Sladek, an enthusiastic lampooner of other writers' work, had a fondness for absurdist humour and mickey-taking which also found an outlet in a number of pseudonymous works pastiching occult nonsense. Judgement of Jupiter "predicted" large scale chaos as a result of allegedly malign alignments of the planet throughout the 1980s. Arachne Rising invented an entire "supressed" zodiac sign; this was written as James Vogh, a name also used on The Cosmic Factor, of which I know little. These works were conceived as jokes, an attempt to demonstrate people's gullibility, but Sladek eventually came to feel that they had been a waste of time, having neither dissauded anyone from quackery, nor made any money. He had previously written under his own moniker The New Apocrypha, an expose of pseudo-science and New Age/magical nonsense, though he said that he had originally hoped to find some worth in subjects such as parapsychology when he started his research. However, "all I found were murky experiments, self-deception and fraud" (6).

A young Sladek.

I met John Sladek once, at a talk for the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society after which we all retired to Pembroke bar. He was a funny and gracious guest; he was, however, already talking about returning to the USA. He could make a better living (as a technical writer) there, and felt that the differences between the UK and America which had drawn him here in the first place were being rapidly eroded, making it less essential to remain. He moved to Minnesota in 1986, and died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2000.

Guardian Obituary
Ansible Obituary (both by Dave Langford)

Notes
(1) OK, that meant something different (and lesser) then, but still - what a numpty.
(2) I seem to have been brainwashed into accepting "judgment" as a correct spelling for this word, but that's an American affectation, from the same people who decided to re-spell defence but not fence.
(3) I don't remember the place's name, but it was in the rather grim pedestrian arcade leading to the Drummer Street bus station, which I am pretty sure was demolished years ago. Why anyone should be interested in that I don't know :)
(4) Apart from Moorcock himself, the luminaries of this movement included John Brunner, J.G. Ballard and M. John Harrison. Like-minded writers who have been, somewhat retrospectively, included as New Wave authors include Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, and Brian Aldiss.
(5) This novel has obtained a sort of permanent infamy as, written in 1970, it depicts a 1980 in which Ronald Reagan had become US President, an event Sladek had assumed to be so absurd it could only happen in an obvious satire. I enjoyed it a lot when I read it thirty years ago, but I suspect I'd be a bit more critical now. I love the title, though, and have considered using it as a band name.
(6) In other words, "cargo cult science". Quoted by the Ansible obituary. I've not read The New Apocrypha, though people I was at college back then with were enthusiastic about it; I guess it is rather out of date now.

EDIT: Music link removed 2/1/2013