Soft-boiled Sci Fi

In the inimitable 1980 rendition of Flash Gordon, Voltan
(Brian Blessed) brandishes the Hawk Men's giant crystal
tribute to Ming - that's hard SF, right?

In the October 9^th issue of T.P.’s Weekly [1] in 1903, journalist Robert H. Sherard quoted Jules Verne’s comment on his British peer H. G. Wells:

‘Je pensiez bien que vous alliez me demander cela,’ he said. ‘His books were sent to me, and I have read them. It is very curious, and, I will add, very English. But I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine. We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli,’ cried Monsieur Verne in an animated way, ‘but show me this metal. Let him produce it. (T.P.’s Weekly, ii, 589) [2]

And so it was that one of the arguments of our genre began: hard vs soft.

Fast forward to today, and the battle rages on: does Star Wars count as SF? If not, why not? How about Star Trek? Battlestar Galactica? Avatar? Iron Man? Lord of the Rings?[3]  And of course, the argument boils down to the question of hard vs soft.

Traditionally [4], science fiction has typically been looked at mainly in the context of the science or engineering aspects that are presented, but of course the position these concepts have in the story varies widely.  Now, the concept of “hard” science fiction wasn’t really coined until 1957 [5] and its counterpart “soft” SF not until the 1970s [6] but it should be noted that the three types of SF identified by Asimov in his 1953 essay (which I referenced here) are already beginning to create this distinction, with his scale that goes from (effectively) “explain this thing” through “use this thing” to “how is society changed by this thing” – and of course Verne’s comment tells us that the tension has been present more or less from the beginning.

Asimov, of course, was writing at a special time in SF, more or less at the beginning of a cresting wave of “Campbellian” hard SF popularity that gave rise to the crystallization of science fiction as a discrete genre. [7] Nevertheless, the concept of “hardness” in science fiction has endured, and the modern era has even given rise to a Mohs Scale just for SF.

In general, people think of this hardness scale as having to do with “realism” – that is to say that the more realistic a work is (i.e. how closely it adheres to what we actually know about science and engineering) the harder it is.  Thus, things like A Princess of Mars are at the extremely soft end of the scale, while things like 2001: A Space Odyssey are at the hard end. 

As such things go, the scale is an interesting way to sort science fiction literature, but I see a problem with it:

The scale practically invites fans to argue over whether a work belongs in the category of science fiction at all – it creates an implicit scale of legitimacy, in other words.  Is A Princess of Mars science fiction? Or is it just sword and sorcery fantasy that happens to include other planets and atomic rifles?

Does this distinction even matter?

And in fact I think this is an important question; when you look back at the sorts of work that were being published prior to the Campbellian revolution and the de facto establishment of this scale of hardness, it becomes clear that authors routinely mixed and blended aspects of science, fantasy, and horror in their stories.  True, stories seem to lean heavily in one direction or another, but there’s no hesitation to include fantastic elements in what is essentially a science fiction tale, or to include some esoteric technology in what is essentially a horror or fantasy one. After the philosophical shift that Campbell encouraged, on the other hand, there appeared to be a fairly clear division between fantasy/horror and science fiction – with those works that straddled the gap becoming gradually more uncommon through the 50s and 60s.

Part of what drove this shift was of course the tendency toward hardness in mainstream science fiction, which makes the gap more obvious – but it also leaves some kinds of work (work that harks back to the roots of science fiction itself!) difficult to classify.

And if rigorous realism in speculative fiction is what constitutes “hard science fiction” what are we to make of books like The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien built rigorously with his knowledge of the mythology and history of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, and his intricately considered languages? Is this science fiction? Is it “hard fantasy” – can there even be such a thing as “hard fantasy”?

For that matter, how can we deal with magical realism from this kind of perspective?  Is it unusually “soft” science fiction?  Is it fantasy? Is it something else entirely? [8]

And then let's consider this side of things: if a book waves away the technical details of engineering but instead presents a detailed view of the biology and sociology of the world, is that soft? Bearing in mind the fact that the hard/soft dichotomy in SF was in conscious reference to the hard/soft division in the sciences, the answer would seem to be yes...and yet, the story may well be as rigorous a consideration of the sociological aspect as, for example, Niven's Neutron Star is a rigorous treatment of the physics of the situation.  Surely that qualifies as hard? 

I think to answer these questions we have to come to some understanding about what exactly it is that this “hardness” is referring to, and ultimately I think that the problem really lies in that the classification isn’t sufficient to deal with the two key dimensions from which people usually look at science fiction, and for an added bonus it over specifies the one dimension it actually deals with. [9]

In order to try to re-unify the genres into a more coherent means of classification (one that doesn't rely on what are essentially marketing categories rather than literary ones) I suggest that two dimensions (at least) may be needed.

Integrity

Here's the thing: consistent and coherent trumps nearly anything else when it comes to how satisfying a story is. [10] In essence, most readers will swallow nearly anything so long as it makes sense within the boundaries of the story.  This is one reason why the reflexive habit of thinking "harder" science fiction (in the usual sense) is obviously better is a problem: just because something is ruthlessly rigorous in its science doesn't make it a good story [11] - the story part is just as important.  

So there we have one criterion - or one dimension if you like: internal consistency, rigorous rules. a coherent reality from which the action derives. This, more than realism per se, is the core of what makes hard SF compelling to those who love it. Certainly, those who love what we call hard SF (and I am certainly one) love it because of the way in which the story itself is rooted in concrete facts, and how events follow in a logical progression of cause and effect, taking into account the unchanging rules of the universe.

Niven's Neutron Star is of course an example of this (SPOILER ahead - but then, if you're reading this you're almost certainly familiar with Known Space...right?): the necessity for Beowulf Shaeffer's mission [12] derives from the known characteristics of neutron stars and their consequences. The events of the mission likewise. Beowulf's actions, reactions, and eventual fate are firmly rooted in the cause and effect of known physics.

But the point I want to make here is that while Neutron Star and the many stories like it [13] rely on real-world science and the engineering that can reasonably be extrapolated from it [14] the same principle can be applied not only in SF but in fantasy as well.

No, really - consider:

George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series does contain some iconic fantastic elements, but on the whole the story proceeds according to fairly concrete rules, with very little in the way of deus ex machina introduction of new powers or abilities just to allow the plot to move ahead. In fact, much of the action is, really, grittily grounded in a fairly realistic Dark Ages/Mediaeval style world, despite the dragons and the dread prophesies and the apparently odd climate. Moreover, thus far it appears that Mr. Martin is making a serious effort to ensure that even the fantastic elements operate in a consistent, coherent way - as though they were subject to laws of nature. [15]

Similarly, C. S. Friedman's Black Sun Rising [16] seems on the surface to be fairly fantastic. But we can look more closely, and it quickly becomes clear that Friedman has thought out the implications of the Fae and their impact on Erna very carefully - everything follows rules, the Fae are consistent, and despite the trappings of ritual and myth, the "magic" her characters wield is very much like engineering.

Both science fiction and fantasy can have this characteristic of a coherent set of fundamental rules - what I call integrity - and the degree to which it has this character can vary widely, from the most rigorous examples like Neutron Star and Game of Thrones to what might be thought of as their opposites: Perry Rhodan and Narnia: tales where the rules are flexible and can be bent, broken or replaced according to the needs of the story.

These counter-examples are what make it clear that the ordinary "hardness scale" by which SF is sorted is insufficient (not to mention a useless measure of quality - but that's another argument) by itself.  Clearly, even stories with very flexible integrity can be deeply satisfying to our sense of narrative. This makes it clear that there must be another dimension with which we measure them, but what?

What over-analysis of genre fiction is complete without
some kind of artificial visualization?

Symbolism

One thing that separates Narnia from Game of Thrones, and Black Sun Rising from Neutron Star is the way in which the world is presented - the logic by which it works.

Stories like Neutron Star rely on real world science and engineering for their narrative - they may throw in bells and whistles like a presumed FTL mode of travel, exotic hull materials, or flashy aliens like the Puppeteers, but at base that's all they are: bells and whistles. The story itself runs on the fuel of a gritty, concrete set of rules that drive the cause and effect of the action. But this isn't the only way in which the engine of a story can run.

In Black Sun Rising we have an example of a world which at first glance seems to operate without logic, at the whim of mysterious forces.  As the story progresses, however, we learn that there is a coherence to the rules, but that those rules don't bear much resemblance to the gritty realism of physics - instead, the driving force is symbolism. The world runs on a magical logic, the logic of essential resonance and symbolic harmonies. Cause and effect is still the rule, but the nature of causes - and the nature of effects, of course - is radically different, because the important factor is no longer the physical facts, but the abstract, "Platonic" meaning behind them.

For a similar example, and one where the symbolic nature of the logic is more evident, we can look at a book like Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea - here the rules are more flexible, but nevertheless there is a fairly coherent pattern of cause and effect, though it is more explicitly founded on a logic of symbol and abstraction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of Naming as the foundation of magic, and the use of the Gebbeth as Ged's nemesis, the personification of his inner failure.

This style of storytelling naturally lends itself to fantasy - indeed, where it can most evidently be seen is in things like myth and fairy tales, where the symbolic or abstract dimension is paramount. But that's not to say that symbolism can have no place in science fiction as well.

Look at the way symbolism and abstraction are leveraged in the storytelling we see in superhero comics, for example:

Superman is rendered impotent by the presence of a symbol of his shattered past: crystals of kryptonite.

Captain America lives as a personification of the essence of the democratic revolution of the post-Enlightenment era, a reminder of the ideals that the Allies were fighting for in World War 2 and later the Cold War.

The Hulk - does the symbolism here really need exposition?

Superhero stories are typically presented as rooted in science and engineering, but that's really window-dressing.  The truth is that while science and engineering may play a part, the more powerful fuel for the narrative engine is symbolism. Doctor Doom isn't a super-villain because he has technically superior tools that he uses inappropriately - he's a super-villain because he represents the arrogance of believing that technology can make a person superior, and give the right to dominate others. But the important part is this: what he does, and how he is opposed by the heroes, is driven by this super-structure of representation.

All stories, I believe, contain some degree of rigorous narrative "consequence", some degree of flexibility. All stories likewise contain some degree of concrete realism, some degree of symbol. It's the nature of things - it's the foundation of what makes us love stories that we can blend these aspects together.

Great writers carefully balance these two dimensions - abstraction and integrity - to match the tone and nature of the story being told.

For some stories, granular, concrete reality will work best. For others, symbolic drivers are a better fit.

For some stories, it's critical that effects flow naturally from causes, that the reader can clearly see the nature of the underpinning reality. For others it's less important how characters get from A to B than that they do.

Where a story falls on these dimensions doesn't make it good or bad - but a mismatch between where it lies and the nature of the story being told can be jarring, and that's where the feeling that "harder SF is better" (and its equivalent for other qualities) comes from.

--30--

1. One of several publishing ventures by T.P. O’Connor, a penny weekly that featured such names as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Joseph Conrad.  Interestingly, the journal had been launched less than a year previous to the interview in which Verne made this comment.

2. Having read Verne, the idea of him positioning himself as a technically precise SF author is actually rather amusing – even taking into account the knowledge gained in the past century.

3. No seriously: why is Lord of the Rings not science fiction?

4. Insofar as you can call it tradition with a realm of literature so young, I suppose.

5. Apparently, the first appearance in print was in Astounding Science Fiction (Nov 1957) by SF writer and critic P. Schuyler Miller in his review of the modernized novelization Campbell’s serial Islands of Space which had previously been published in the Spring 1931 issue of Amazing Quarterly. Miller, incidentally, was an amazingly prolific reviewer, with an astounding <snerk> number of entries in nearly every issue of Astounding that year – heck in quite a few years!

6. Unsurprisingly: this corresponds with the peak of New Wave, which in contrast to the Campellian “Golden Age” SF was delving more deeply into sociology, anthropology and psychology – thus the analogy to the academic division of hard and soft sciences.

7. More on this another time, but I believe that the Campbellian revolution was responsible for the “divorce” of science fiction from the more general speculative or weird fiction of the pulp era, and in turn the growth of science fiction and fantasy as independent genres combined with the boom in corporate, mass-market book-sellers in the 80s to cause The Great Delisting, a literary extinction event of amazing proportions that may never have been possible before.

8. I confess to leaning toward “something else” but for the sake of argument, let’s consider it.

9. This isn't so much a criticism of the concept of SF hardness itself, but an observation that it was intended for what is essentially a very arbitrary subset of speculative fiction, and one that doesn't seem to really reflect either the history of the genre or the reality of readers' experiences. 

10. This is part of my reluctance to include magical realism, since...well, it's the nature of the genre to be incoherent. (I mean that in a technical way, not a slur)

11. If you disagree, I have a couple of old Apple II+ operation manuals you might be interested in.

12. Fun fact: Neutron Star (Worlds of If Magazine, August 1966) was Beowulf's first appearance in Niven's universe. Part scientist hero, part Harry Lime lookalike, Beowulf may well be my favorite of Niven's characters.

13. Engineering puzzle box type stories have a long and glorious history well back into the era of the pulps, after all.

14. And in fact in Neutron Star Niven really only relies on "unobtainium" to generate the necessary "frictionless sphere of uniform density" needed to make the calculations work, if you ignore the framing.

15. Of course, Professor Tolkien is the iconic example of what might be described as "hard" fantasy, but the enormous variety of ways in which his work has been re-interpreted - not to mention the range of ways in which he himself wrote in works other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - makes his work a tricky choice here.

16. Incidentally one of my favourite books from the 90s - I thought Black Sun Rising was amazing fantasy in an older ethos when I read it. The rest of the Coldfire Trilogy is also strong, but it was the first book that really caught my imagination.

Electric baths and Imperialism - Unno Juza, Japan's Hidden Master

A man in a galvanic bath, a (frankly terrifyin) concept from the
19th century that was considered cutting edge in Unno's time, and
despite having featured in his first murder mystery is
occasionally faddish even today.

Ever wonder what a cross between Arthur Conan Doyle and Nikola Tesla would be like?

Meet the godfather of Japanese SF, Unno Juza! [1]

Unno is a fascinating character, and a writer whose impact on Japanese fiction was enormous, so let's explore a bit.

Unno Juza is actually one pen-name of a man by the name of Sano Shoichi [2], but the one by which he was best known, and the one under which he wrote some of his most interesting work.

Born in 1897 Sano Shoichi came into the world at a time of enormous change in Japan: Matthew Perry's famous "opening of Japan" had occurred only a bit more than a generation previously, triggering not only Japan's full entry into international politics, but also a wave of rapid modernization - technological, of course, but also social, with the disruption cresting in the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, which Tom Cruise's film so poorly documents. [3] Likewise, Japan was starting to feel its oats in the outside world, having debated the value of invading Korea in 1873 [4], won a war against Imperial China, invaded Taiwan, and at the time Sano Shoichi was born tensions were rising between Japan and Russia over control of the North Pacific coast of Asia.

Socially and technologically, Japan was racing to catch up with the European powers by aggressively adopting new technologies such as steam engines, railways, modern firearms, electricity, medical advances - in fact, attempting, essentially, to graft the entire post-Enlightenment academic achievements of the West in one huge gulp. At the same time, enormous social and political reforms were occurring, with the abolition of the Shogunate in 1868 being just the first step in a long process of internal government reforms. [5]  Suffice to say, times were turbulent!

By the time Sano Shoichi published his first story, Denkifuro no kaishijiken (The case of the mysterious death in the electric bath) in 1928, Japan was well on the way to full industrialization and was already the dominant power in the Pacific arena.  But what of the man himself?

Born to a wealthy, educated family [6] in Tokushima City on the island of Shikoku in Western Japan, the boy Sano Shoichi entered primary school and spent his first three years of education in this quiet castle town [7] but moved to the cultural and economic center of Kobe for the remainder of his preparatory schooling.  As a major center, Kobe was a city where young Shoichi could be exposed to the new world that was emerging, and so it was that somewhere between 1913 and 1916 he moved on to Tokyo, where he was to study electrical engineering at Waseda University, and on graduation the Ministry of Communications [8] as a official in their electrical testing and certification laboratories.

It was while working at the Ministry that Sano Shoichi began writing for science and youth magazines, publishing short pop science and educational articles aimed at young people under a variety of pen names to obscure his identity.  Like many educated young men of 1920s Tokyo, Sano was very interested in the outside world.  In his work, he was greatly influenced by the work of Nikola Tesla - a fact that emerges in his writing, reflected in the kinds of electrical technologies he imagines for the future - but of course in order to even do his work, he needed to be fluent in English (to have access to the latest developments and correspond with colleagues in various countries - principally the United States and Britain) and in his readings he seems to have at some point developed an interest in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - in particular the Sherlock Holmes stories: and so he came to pen his first "scientifiction" [9]story, Denkifuro no kaishijiken, a murder mystery revolving around technological ideas in the same way that Holmes uses his penetrating reason to link together human observations.  It was with this story that Sano established his most enduring pseudonym, and the one under which he wrote the majority of his corpus of fiction.[10]

Over the next decade, Sano wrote mostly as Unno, producing a number of scientifiction stories - mainly mysteries of various kinds that featured a prominent scientist hero, including his most frequently used hero, the rather obviously named Soroku Homura. [11]

Many of his stories involved the use of emerging technologies in innovative ways either as a murder weapon or as a means to defend the intended victim - in his biographical writing, Sano said that at the time there was a great enthusiasm for new discoveries and new technologies, but also fear.  This was part of what spurred him to write popular science articles, believing that education would help balance enthusiasm with prudence, and fear with familiarity.  From this perspective, it seems natural that he would move into fiction as a vehicle to achieve the same end.

Interestingly, as Unno in particular from among his pseudonyms, Sano's work often also serves the purpose of gently - and sometimes not so gently - satirizing the government in which he worked. [12] While it can probably be said that he approved of the rush to industrialization and the advance to join the Western world in modernity, he often made comments on Japan's increasing militarism and expansion, and of course the increasingly firm hand with which the government held the people.  In addition, a number of his works between his initial publication in 1928 and the beginning of World War 2 are clearly intended as social commentary on the incursions into Manchuria, and the increasingly strident tone of nationalist propaganda (and the blank acceptance with which the people accept it)

In a Kafkaesque twist of fate, Sano was one of a number of writers of the era who were drafted in 1941 by the military arm of the Japanese government to write propaganda copy - and in addition to writing leaflets and other materials for the "education" of troops and factory workers, 1942 Sano was posted as a propaganda officer to the Japanese occupation forces at the recently captured Rabaul on East New Britain Island (Papua New Guinea).  He expressed the deep impact of the experience in a letter home to his wife, and although the ship he had been assigned to (the Aoba heavy cruiser) remained until the bombing of Rabaul in November 1943, Sano's deteriorating health and mental condition led him to be recalled to Japan after only two months.

Sano's impression of the government of Imperial Japan at the time was already not the best, as reflected in his satirical Tokkyo Tawan Ningen Hohshiki (Patent for a Multi-armed Man, 1941) in which an inventor is repeatedly thwarted by bureaucrats and their nonsense, until at last he realizes that they're only interested in the use of his idea as a military tool.  After this experience he seems to have become even more negative, though in the war era his published work was of course limited in its ability to reflect this due to censorship regimes (not to mention personal danger).

The era leading up to the war was surely a time of elation for Sano - this was science fiction made real! The transformation of his country as he watched, the amazing discoveries and new technologies, the bubbling innovation he must have seen in industry and the universities of the era must have been inspiring, perhaps even more so than it was to writers in the West, who had grown up embedded in societies far further along in industrialization than Japan. Imagine, then, the impact of seeing this shining future turned into a tool for war, culminating in the ultimate science fictional weapon being levelled at Japan itself at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, Sano's scientifiction shifted - where he had previously explored the dangers and uses of technology in murder mysteries, he was reluctant to portray technology as a potential weapon and so he focused on stories of space exploration and futurist specuation in the style of Wells.  In this period he produced a fair bit of work, publishing not only science fiction and futurism but biographical works and commentary on the state of things - moreover, in the recovering economy of post-war Japan many of the industries that had been subverted by war were being retooled in ways that must have already shown the direction that Japanese technology was going to go.  He could see the light coming, but sadly he never really recovered from the crushing defeat of the war, and passed away in 1949 at the age of 51.

In his persona as Unno Juza, Sano was really a remarkable writer, and without a doubt his work had an impact on an entire generation of writers including such greats as Hoshi Shinichi, Komatsu Sakyo and others.  His influence can continue to be seen today, echoing in several well-known space opera series of the 80s and 90s, from where it reverberates again in modern Japanese science fiction.  Despite the age of the work, he is also one of a handful of Japanese science fiction writers whose writing continues to get re-printed in collections and anthologies today.

Remarkably, it doesn't appear that his work was ever translated into English in any significant way - in fact I challenge you to find professional translations on the internet.  In part, this is probably a problem of format - a large portion of his work was published as shorts and serializations in a wide variety of relatively ephemeral venues, such as long-extinct newspapers.  This has proved a challenge to anthologists in the Japanese market as well, but of course in the era in which he wrote it would have been very uncommon for "yellow" publications like the daily newspapers and weekly or monthly entertainment pulps to ever get enough attention to be translated, and as a result Unno's work is nearly completely unknown in English fan circles.

This is a crying shame - here we have a man who wrote brilliant futurist predictions in the style of H. G. Wells (and ironically, was born in the very year Wells first wrote about the dangers of future weapons in War of the Worlds), who wrote scientific mysteries and puzzles with the skill of Arthur Conan Doyle, and who was writing as sophisticated a social and political commentary as any of his peers in the West.

Sadly, Sano seems never to have been honoured during his lifetime - though he has been given the nod by many of those who followed after him, with tribute references such as in naming the captain of Battleship Yamato "Okita Juzo."

Perhaps its time for a translation project.

--30--

1. Once again, I am giving the surname first, because westernizing the order just feels strange.

2. Japanese order again.

3. I'm being unfair - such things rarely lend themselves to entertaining films, so I suppose we should forgive its failings to some extent. But seriously...

4. They decided not to - probably wise considering the string of rebellions between the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Satsuma Rebellion.  It seems doubtful the emerging parliamentary monarchy could have survived the pressure of a serious land war with that level of internal unrest.

5. The plight of the newly unseated samurai class is what usually gets the spotlight, but in fact the changes were disruptive at all levels, particularly the "domino effect" caused by removing the feudal system of land management, which left peasant farmers in the novel position of having to pay rents or taxes on their lands.  The disruption in the economy, including a serious depression in the price of rice, led to critical debt loads (up to 2 trillion yen total in modern terms - $20 BILLION!) and serious hardship.  There was a more or less constant brushfire of local "debt rebellions" around the country, the most famous of which is surely the Chichibu Incident in which possibly as many as 10,000 farmers rose up to attack government buildings and lenders' offices to obliterate their debts, and in the process loosely organized into a democratic revolution.  Due to the government's vicious crack-down and the destruction of whatever literature there might have been (these people were largely illiterate, so probably not much was in text other than among the ringleaders, who appear to have had some education in Western ideas) it's hard to say, but this might well have been essentially a marxist revolt against the increasingly harsh conditions of the rapid transformation of Japanese society.

6. The two were of course synonymous - and the family were doctors, a profession that even now tends to run in families in Japan.

7. As a key agricultural center, Tokushima was large and significant enough to attract the attention of US forces during the war, and the city was nearly completely destroyed by more than 1,050 tons of incendiary bombs.

8. This was an Imperial Ministry, and a the time it was also responsible for things like electrical infrastructure - after the war the functions were divided between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (who handle regulatory matters), Japan Post, and NTT.

9. Like many of his contemporaries, Sano/Unno didn't write strictly what we would call science fiction - in Japan the science fiction genre was largely considered a branch of detective fiction, and the influence is evident in the types of stories that were written in the early magazines.  As Sano/Unno wrote not only real SF and real detective mysteries but curious blends of the two I'm going to refer to his style as scientifiction - this also divides it from the emerging science fiction genre that was crystallizing in the US and UK toward the end of his career.

10. Amusingly, Sano himself wrote in a biographical work that he took the name from his love of Mahjong: in Japanese Mahjong circles there's a turn of phrase un ga juu meanting "luck is 10" (a reference to the way in which different pieces combine to create winning hands) - he converted this to un no juu (luck's 10) and added a casual post-fix on the end to get un no juu, sa  "luck's ten, eh!"then just slotted in kanji characters to come up with a name that more or less read that way. (this, incidentally, is a common approach among Japanese authors, and a lot of Japanese pseudonyms are a pun of some kind, often a personal joke)

11. Perhaps a bit warped from the perspective of an English speaker, but an obvious play on the Japanese rendition of Sherlock Holmes - Shaaroku Hohmuzu

12. Another reason to obscure his identity for sure!