James L. Cambias's Blog, page 19

Another Cup of Tea

The complete "Teatime Readings" series is now available for viewing on YouTube. You can see them here. Or you can skip right to my reading from The Initiate.

There's a lot of good stuff and some interesting comments and conversation. Check it out.

Inland Seas Reviews

The first reviews of Retellings of the Inland Seas are out, and it looks as though this collection is getting a good reception. 

Nerds of a Feather reviews it here.

Treehouse Writers blog reviews it here.

It's always interesting to see how different reviewers look at the same book. I like to see varying takes. When everyone focuses on the same things I'm always suspicious they're just reading the press release.

 

The Glorious Fourth of July

Two hundred and forty-four years ago a group of men signed a remarkable document: a Declaration of Independence. They wrote out their reasons for defying their King, and signed their names to it, then published the whole thing. They even sent a copy to the King they were challenging, even though they all knew this would bring down the full force of what was, at the time, the mightiest military power in the world. 

The signers of the Declaration were not desperate men. Most were well-off, and some were quite rich. They had a lot to lose, and of course the penalty for what they were doing was death. But they made their choice because they ��� and many of their fellow citizens ��� believed that they were no longer Englishmen. They were Americans. They chose to be Americans and fight to be Americans even if being American would get them hanged or shot.

Today we should remember that choice, and live up to it. Be Americans.

 

Set Sail on the Inland Seas!

The anthology Retellings of the Inland Seas launches today, from Candlemark & Gleam publishers. Edited by Athena Andreadis, this collection of original short fiction takes the myths and history of the Mediterranean into the realms of fantasy and science fiction. I'm proud to be one of a rather impressive lineup of contributors, including Shariann Lewitt, Alexander Jablokov, Judith Tarr, Melissa Scott, and many others. My own story, "Calando," takes place in the same "Billion Worlds" future I'm using for the novel I'm finishing up for Baen Books. You can get it in print or digital form, from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. 

 

Luna in the Night

We got our cat Luna as a little black kitten in 2006, and she quickly grew into a grouchy, headstrong animal ��� always quick to nip or hiss when she didn't get her way.

She was never an "inside cat." We let her outside any morning she wanted to go. In practice this meant any morning when the ground wasn't covered with snow. Once outside she was the apex predator of our yard, bagging some critter almost every day. Field mice, chipmunks, voles, a mole once, and at least one songbird.

Despite her proven hunting ability she always liked a nice disgusting can of cat food for dinner. We learned to keep her inside after feeding her, since without hunger to bring her home she'd stay out until all hours. She often objected to this arrangement, especially on summer evenings when it was still broad daylight after dinnertime.

A couple of nights ago she managed to slip out after dinner. None of us saw it happen. I only noticed after full dark outside, when it occurred to me that I hadn't seen the cat in a while. Hmm.

Checked the screen porch (sometimes she gets shut in there overnight when we lock the house door). Nope. Checked all the downstairs rooms. No sign. Checked all the upstairs rooms. No cat.

This was when I alerted Diane, and the two of us went through the whole house again, checking the basement, looking in cabinets, and opening the closets in case she had gotten herself shut in. Checked under the beds and behind the piano. No sign of Luna.

Logically, if she wasn't in the house she was outside. We called, we made tapping noises (like the sound of knocking the last globs of disgusting cat food off the spoon into her bowl). We called some more. We shone flashlights around and turned on all the exterior lights. We checked all her favorite spots outside, and looked under the porches. We checked to see if she'd gotten locked inside one of the cars. No cat.

Then we heard the coyotes.

We didn't have coyotes in New Orleans when I was growing up. At night a full pack of coyotes make a weird, demented-sounding chorus of high-pitched howls. Almost like shrieking. It doesn't sound like any kind of animal, more like a troop of goblins or something. In the dark woods it's hard to tell what direction the noise is coming from, and even an adult human with a flashlight and boots finds it unsettling.

They must have been somewhere towards the back of our property, because every time a train went by it set them off. Maybe they were down by the tracks. Luna doesn't normally go that far, but a dreadful suspicion was growing in everyone's mind.

What can you do? We called and searched and searched and called and finally gave up. I went to bed. Diane took one more look outside.

And found the cat!

She was perfectly fine, but obviously something had spooked her badly. Her tail was fluffed and didn't get back to normal for quite a while. All that night and all the next day she stayed close to my son Robert. Presumably because he's now the biggest thing around.

We'll never know what happened, of course. She can't tell us. The best guess is that Luna did catch wind of the coyotes and sensibly found a place to hide. I know of some spots on our property where a cat could hide but a coyote couldn't get into. Maybe she climbed a tree. She waited until she was sure the coast was clear before bolting back to our door.

Less than 48 hours later she was trying to get outside after dinner again. No.

AmazingCon Continues!

The online SF convention AmazingCon continues all this weekend. Tomorrow, June 14, I'll be doing a panel at 10am on Worldbuilding. It should be a great show, as the lineup of panelists is pretty impressive: me, Paul Levinson, Rosemary Claire Smith, and T.B. Jeremiah. We'll be talking about how to make convincing and unique science fiction and fantasy settings. Join us tomorrow morning!

 

 

This Con Will Be Amazing!

This weekend Amazing Stories is sponsoring a virtual science fiction convention: AmazingCon! It features readings, panels, special events ��� all the good parts of a convention without the hotel food and travel expense. 

I'm doing two events: a reading from my work in progress at 3pm on Friday, June 12; and a panel on Worldbuilding at 10am on Sunday, June 14. 

So put on your virtual hall costume and come to the virtual con. Ralph 124C41+ would approve!

 

Time For Tea!

There's an excellent series of online readings organized by Sarah Smith, Brookline's Grande Dame of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called Teatime Readings. I did one last week, and now everyone can enjoy it here. The first half of the video is me reading a chapter from The Initiate, and the second half is a question-and-answer session about why and how I wrote that book ��� and some hints about what I'm doing right now!

Work In Progress: The Billion Worlds

A while back I started thinking about the distant future. What can humanity expect if we don't invent a magic FTL drive, don't go extinct, and our civilization mostly putters along the way it has been since the invention of agriculture? I described some of my thoughts in this blog post from 2018. Extrapolating with quite modest expectations gives amazing results.

Then I started thinking about what it would be like to live in that kind of future: one where humanity has filled up the Solar System, terraforming everything that can be terraformed, hollowing out asteroids and moons or breaking them up for raw materials, and capturing most of the Sun's energy output. This is what Freeman Dyson meant when he described his famous "Dyson Sphere" (not a giant ball around the Sun.) It would be a true Kardashev Type II civilization.

I made a few ground assumptions. First, that there will be no major alterations in our understanding of basic physical laws. Thermodynamics, conservation of momentum, Relativity ��� those all apply. No psychic powers, no magic.

Second, I decided to focus on a time when the majority of recorded human history has been in a Dysonized Solar System. Our own history goes back to about 2000 B.C., and construction of a Dyson Sphere probably wouldn't get rolling until at least A.D. 3000, so that pushes us to the Ninth or Tenth Millennium at least. I picked the Tenth Millennium (the thousand years ending in A.D. 10,000) because it sounds cool.

Third, I assumed that while some beings can and do ascend to Godlike (or even super-Godlike) levels of power and intellect, a vast number of humans will remain more or less unmodified. And while there will doubtless be post-post-post-scarcity societies where one can conjure up whatever one wishes with a handwave, a great many places will not have those levels of abundance. People will still want things and strive to get them.

Fourth, the focus is on humans and human-created beings. If aliens exist, they are known only from radio transmissions.

Some basic math indicated that such a civilization could support quadrillions of humans (that's a thousand trillion), with abundant room and energy for all. If the average space colony is as big as a modern city, then you'd have a billion worlds circling the Sun. The Billion Worlds. That's a pretty cool title . . .

A few other notions just pop right out: with so many worlds you'll have a vast variation in social customs, local technology, attitudes ��� not to mention life forms. Genetic manipulation means each of those worlds could be populated by intelligent descentants of Earthly animals, wildly varying modified humans, or new organisms cooked up from scratch. So even without actual aliens, one can still have intelligent nonhumans as weird as anything SF writers can imagine.

On such a scale, a space habitat with a million people living in it is about as important as one human on Earth today. That means it will be almost impossible for any being (except a Godlike artificial intelligence, of course) to remember or keep track of all the worlds of space. It also suggests a certain degree of callousness about individual lives in such a setting: a catastrophic war that destroys a dozen space habitats would be as important as a shootout among gang members in Sao Paolo would be to a modern resident of Kazakhstan.

Hmm. A vast number of worlds, with tremendous variety in their inhabitants and local societies, all within a reasonable distance of each other (in space, time, and energy required). What does that remind you of? It's the classic space-opera universe!

Which means all the great old "discredited" tropes of old science fiction can come roaring back with perfectly valid hard-SF credentials. Want to rescue a scrappy Space Princess from dastardly Space Pirates in a hidden Space Fortress, with the aid of your smartass Space Gorilla sidekick and a hyper-logical dude with green skin, before blasting off in a beat-up tramp Space Freighter? In a setting as broad as the Billion Worlds, that's not just possible, it's practically inevitable.

Right now I'm working on a novel for Baen Books set in that future. My working title is The Godel Operation. I've also written a couple of short stories. One of them, "Calando," is in the new original anthology Retellings of the Inland Seas, edited by Athena Andreadis, coming soon from Candlemark and Gleam. I'm still trying to place the other one. Watch this space for more developments.

Historical Perspective

Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers.

         

The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the figure of 20 million most frequently so let's use that. World population at the time was about 1.8 billion, so that represents a death rate of 1.1 percent of the entire population (not just the infected).

 

Coronavirus: deaths currently stand at just over 200,000 people. Let's be pessimistic and assume twice that many die of it before the epidemic subsides. The world currently has 7.8 billion people. That would be a death rate of 0.005 percent. The influenza was 200 times more deadly.

 

I'm not trying to minimize the current crisis. What I am doing is pointing out that modern civilization has weathered much, much worse. A pandemic today would have to claim about 86 million people to be as bad as the Spanish influenza. That's about the population of Germany or Iran.

 

A death rate like that nowadays would be an inconceivable tragedy. But in 1920 . . . not so much. Sure, the world had just come through World War I, and wartime controls on news may have limited how much people knew about the epidemic. But I've read a fair amount of literature from that era, both fiction and nonfiction, and it's kind of surprising how little attention the influenza got compared to the war itself. My collection of H.L. Mencken's writings doesn't touch on the flu; James Thurber references the Dutch Elm disease epidemic but not the Spanish Influenza. Hemingway, Graves, Isherwood ��� nothing that I can recall. 

 

In historical fiction set in that era, written by later writers, there's likely to be mention of the terrible epidemic, and it may even claim a minor character or two. But at the time, writers just shrugged it off. And the world's economy pretty much shrugged it off, as well.

 

I have a few theories about why it wasn't such a big deal.

 

The Greater Trauma: I think that a lot of people at the time simply lumped the epidemic in with the Great War. After all, for all of recorded history up to that point, wars were invariably accompanied by plagues. World War I was something of a turning point in that more soldiers actually died of wounds than disease, but it was not a huge margin. So the epidemic and the battlefield deaths were all part of "The War" in most people's minds.

 

People Get Sick: It's also worth remembering how much more prevalent and deadly infectious diseases were, right up to the mid-20th Century. Epidemics may have been less widespread, but they could still generate shocking local death tolls. Germans in 1920 could remember the cholera outbreak of 1892, which took nearly 10,000 lives. Americans at the time might recall their grandparents talk of the cholera epidemic of the 1870s, which caused about 50,000 deaths. 

 

And it's not as if the Spanish influenza was the only fatal disease around in 1920, either. People still died of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever ��� and the undefeated historical grand champion killer, malaria.

 

For modern Americans (and increasingly for modern people all over the world), dying is something that happens to the very old, or to soldiers in wars. But for most of human history, right up to around the time I was born, people could die at any age. An epidemic with a death rate of one percent was just part of the "background noise." This leads to my final explanation.

 

We Care More: Medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have worked miracles in the past half century. Increasingly, people just don't die of infectious diseases. They die of old age, cancer, and violence. This is a wonderful thing, but it has encouraged a dangerous way of thinking. For most people nowadays, dying before you're in your seventies means it's somebody's fault. The product was defective, the pilot made an error, the driver was drunk. This is also why we often slide into victim-blaming when people get sick. He was obese. She smoked. He should have taken better care of himself. She should have stayed out of the sun. We have lost the easy fatalism of our ancestors. We don't want to think of death as a random event. We want it to be a solvable problem.

 

Hence the widespread paranoia about "toxins" in foods or consumer products making us sick. Hence the "anti-vaxxer" movement. Hence the anger about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. And hence the current omnidirectional finger-pointing and rage about COVID-19. I think there is some good in the view that illness is a problem to be solved, rather than something you just have to live with. But the problem with this virus is the virus. Not the people you already disagree with.