James L. Cambias's Blog, page 34

Where to Find Me at WorldCon 76

This coming week the 76th World Science Fiction Convention will be held in hazy San Jose, California, and I'll be one of the participants. If you want to see me, here are my scheduled appearances:

THE CULINARY SPECULATIVE: Food in Fiction (Friday, August 17, 12:00 noon in room 210C of the San Jose Convention Center). Join me, moderator Nibedita Sen, Kat Tanaka Okopnik, Rose Lemberg, and Hector Gonzalez in a discussion about food in science fiction and fantasy. 

AUTOGRAPHING (Saturday, August 18, 12:00 noon in the Autographing Area of the Convention Center). I'll have my signing pens, so bring anything you want me to deface.

Those are my only "official" appearances, but you can also find me wandering about the con all week. I'll be passing out bookmarks and postcards with a first sneak peek at the cover art for my upcoming novel Arkad's World! 

 

Emotionless Bad Guys

Yesterday I was reading a James Lileks blog post about the legendary 1956 Roger Corman sci-fi movie It Conquered the World. If you haven't seen it, you probably should ��� because effects, locations, and extras were expensive, Corman reduced an alien invasion of Earth to a character piece, focusing on Lee Van Cleef (of all people) as a scientist collaborating with the villainous Venusian carrot trying to Take Over the World. Ultimately (of course) Van Cleef sees the error of his ways and sacrifices himself to destroy the googly-eyed giant alien vegetable, thereby Saving the World. We get a final encomium by his pal Peter Graves before the fade-out.

What struck me was the moral of the story so clunkily stated by Graves: that Van Cleef forgot that people are feeling creatures, so that the idea of an emotionless, perfectly rational world is impossible, or at least nightmarish.

It caught my attention because I've seen it before. It's a constant trope in Fifties SF. There's an example in Famous Science-Fiction Stories, for instance. It turns up on Star Trek quite a bit, as well ��� most notably, of course, in the character of Mr. Spock, who is a "logical" and emotionless Vulcan.

But . . . where does it come from? No Utopian thinkers ever imagined a world without emotions. Thomas More, who invented the whole idea, certainly never proposed that his Utopians should be emotionless. Naturally he thought that they should ensure that their emotions did not overwhelm their reason, but that was as far as he went. No one since More ever proposed that a world without emotions would be a Good Thing. So where does the idea of a Horrid Emotionless Society come from?

I blame the French Revolution. Its leaders ��� particularly the Jacobins ��� loved to wrap themselves in the mantle of Reason, overturning centuries of ignorance and ridiculous superstition. And, oh by the way, murdering tens of thousands of Frenchmen and plunging Europe into a titanic series of wars for the next thirty years. And then their self-proclaimed ideological heirs in Russia a century later managed to beat their body count by a couple of orders of magnitude. But of course, neither gang of bloody-handed revolutionaries thought of themselves as emotionless, or desired an emotionless society.

Complicating matters is the fact that America was also founded by a pack of Enlightenment-era thinkers keen on Reason. They also wanted a rational society, but were pragmatic enough to realize it could not be imposed from above, as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks attempted. (Plus the geography and internal politics of America made it impossible for at least a century.) Still, it has left Americans with a decidedly split personality regarding rationalism. Across the entire modern political spectrum you will find people priding themselves on their rationality, untainted by superstition and unclouded by emotion ��� yet simultaneously deriding their opponents as being heartless and devoid of compassion.

The big secret that everyone keeps missing is that there is no opposition between reason and emotion. We are always motivated by emotion ��� even a desire to be ruled entirely by reason is an emotional motivation. Reason serves the emotions, and always has. An "emotionless" society is not just undesirable, it's impossible, and I hope we can come up with a better straw man to demolish in fiction.

 

More Bad Flags

This time it's not me griping about flags, it's a gentleman with the incredibly badass name Roman Mars. The scarlet-faced avenger gave a TED talk about flag design, highlighting some of America's best and worst city flags. 

He properly cited Chicago's flag as one of the best, and derided New York City's as lackluster. He missed New Orleans's excellent flag, but that might simply be provincial ignorance. It's interesting to see that at least two of the towns he cited for bad designs actually came up with better ones shortly after his talk.

However, the war god did make one inexcusable error: in a talk about awful city flags he somehow neglected to mention the gynecological hilarity of Toronto's city flag. Behold, and snicker.

Revolutionary Thoughts

As one does on July 4th, I was thinking about the American Revolution. Specifically, about the commander of the Continental Army, George Washington himself. From all accounts, Washington was not a quixotic man. He wasn't the sort to throw away his life and his fortune in a doomed cause. (Unlike his admirer and relative by marriage, Robert E. Lee, who consciously and deliberately did just that.)

What this means is that Washington must have thought he could win. Right from the start, when he accepted command of the rebel army in 1775, he evidently saw a path to victory. He knew the terrain, better than most people (he was a surveyor, after all). He had first-hand knowledge of how both British and Colonial troops performed in the field ��� and he had seen British commanders in action, both winning (Forbes) and losing (Braddock). He knew that by accepting command he was ensuring the British would hang him if they won. He must have seen a way to do it. 

But since he never seems to have written down a Master Plan to beat the British, we don't know what it was. Did the Revolution play out as Washington had foreseen? Or was he constantly improvising and rolling with the punches? Probably a little of both, I suspect. The scale of their response to the Revolution may have surprised him (the British threw almost twice as many men into fighting the Continentals as they had sent during the French and Indian War), but he adjusted.

It's a pity Washington never wrote his autobiography. I'd love to know more about his thoughts ��� and the existence of a self-portrait in his own words would have done a lot to damp down the endless cycle of building-up and tearing-down his reputation has undergone for two centuries and counting.

Anyway: thanks, Mr. Washington! 

A Scientific Hypothesis

Regular readers of this 'blog (you both know who you are) may have noticed that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Specifically: where is all the Life in the Universe, and why is Everything so silent? Yes, it's time for yet another look at our old friend the Fermi Paradox.

I've speculated that humans may be the first technological civilization in the Milky Way, or at least one of the first. And it occurs to me there's a fairly convincing logical proof. I'm proposing this idea seriously, so I'd appreciate it if anyone can find a logical hole in my argument.

Consider the principle of Mediocrity: the idea that we, as a species, are ordinary. That would seem to contradict the notion that humans are the first technological civilization. Being first isn't very mediocre, is it?

But look at it another way: if you were to be randomly plopped down in one of the Milky Way's technological civilizations, which would you be most likely to be in? In other words, which one would you have the highest probability of being born into? It seems to me that there would be a huge probability skew in favor of the firstborn and longest-lived civilizations.

If there's only one civilization, then your chance of being born into it are 100 percent. If there are two, then your chance is 50 percent for each. Since I, and both of you reading this 'blog, are humans, it seems to support the idea that maybe humans are a significant fraction of intelligent life in the Galaxy right now. By analogy, if there were no language barriers and everyone on Earth could read my 'blog, the odds would be good that you, my readers, are either Chinese, Indian, or American, as those are the most populous nations on Earth.

I realize there's a selection bias at work: the only people who can read this 'blog post are humans, therefore of course we're all humans. But I think my basic concept is sound: humans exist, which suggests that there's a high probability of humans existing, therefore humans make up a big percentage of technological civilizations.

One can also look at it across time. If there are multiple civilizations throughout the history of the Milky Way galaxy, which one are you most likely to be born into? Obviously the one which is longest-lived. Again, it has the biggest "target" in time for you to be born into. Humans exist, therefore humans existing is a common phenomenon, therefore humans will exist for a long time.

Is there something I'm missing here? Or are we alone in the Galaxy?

Humorous Interlude

Ever since I got rid of my gall bladder I've been thinking about the ancient medical doctrine of the Four Humors. A brief recap: until about 1830 or so, medical theory in Europe was based on the idea that the human body's processes are dominated by four "humors," and that illness is the result of an excess or deficiency in one of them. Each humor, in turn, is a combination of two of the four fundamental principles: hot, dry, moist, and cold.

So blood is a hot, moist humor. "Yellow bile" or choler is hot and dry (even though it's a liquid). "Black bile" (which doesn't actually exist, but is necessary for the theory) or melancholia is cold and dry. And phlegm is cold and moist.

We tend to scoff at pre-modern medicine, often with good reason, but it's actually kind of interesting to see that the humoral theory had a pretty decent track record.

Consider "Yellow bile" or choler. It's actually kind of a catch-all term for stomach acid, bile, and other digestive enzymes. A patient with an excess of yellow bile would be experiencing sharp or burning sensations in the upper abdomen ��� symptoms which could mean gallstones, ulcers, acid reflux, or (most likely) nausea caused by eating food which has gone bad. We still call that feeling "bilious." People with chronic digestive upset are inclined to be cranky, which is to say, choleric or bilious in temperament.

How do you treat an excess of choleric humors? Since bile is hot and dry, you have the patient consume cool, moist foods: vegetables, salads, cold water, maybe fish. That's actually about what my doctors made me eat after diagnosing my gallstones. It's a low-fat diet which probably would ease the symptoms of most gastric ailments. So, score one for humors.

"Black bile," also known as melancholia, is a little more tricky. It referred to what are now known as "bile pigments" in the feces, which are basically yellow bile after its has done its job in the digestive tract. In practice, an excess of melancholic humors referred to problems of the lower abdomen, in particular to constipation. If you know anything about the history of medicine, you know that much of it can be summed up neatly in one word: "laxatives." If you have a patient suffering from an excess of cold, dry humors, what do you give him? You give him hot, moist things: pepper, red wine, maybe some good hot soup. And, in general, those are not bad for constipation ��� especially after 1500 when the doctor could give the patient some good hot chili peppers to clean him out from stem to stern. Another hit for humors.

Aside: I'm not sure why melancholia and bowel complaints was associated with the sad, introverted personality traits of "melancholy." Certainly chronic constipation would make one somewhat unhappy, and I guess spending a lot of time on the pot could encourage introversion. Still seems like a stretch, though.

Phlegm means mucus in general, and refers mostly to respiratory ailments. You cough, you sneeze, and mucus comes out. Obviously your body has too much cold, moist humors. How to treat that? Keep the patient warm and dry, and give hot, dry things like onions and spices. As far as treatments for a cold (or anything else), keeping the patient warm and dry is always good advice. So I call that another victory for the humoral theory.

And now we come to . . . blood. An excess of hot, moist humors was the usual diagnosis for times when the patient was feverish, or had swelling (edema). Now, you could treat that by giving cool, dry things ��� except that there aren't many foods which fit the bill. Mint, maybe? Unfortunately, the other obvious treatment for a surfeit of sanguine humors was the direct approach: bleeding. Doctors loved bleeding patients. When someone was feverish or suffering from an infection they'd have a surgeon draw off a pint, sometimes more (they took three and a half liters out of George Washington during his final illness). It need not be said that bleeding is just about the last thing you want to do to someone who is fighting off an infection (especially if the surgeon isn't very picky about cleaning his lancet). Unsurprisingly, bleeding is the feature of humoral medicine we remember with derision today. Definitely a fail.

Now, I'm glad to be living in the era of science-based medicine. But it's foolish to dismiss the ideas of some of Europe's best minds over more than ten centuries simply because we have better tools than they did. The humoral theory was (kinda, sorta) scientific. It was based on observation and had some supporting evidence ��� especially since medical diagnosis with nothing but the doctor's five senses had a very high "noise to signal" ratio. And above all, sometimes it worked.

The Pessimistic View

In my last 'blog post I may have come across as a little over-pessimistic. My theme was the fundamental impossibility of telling "realistic" future stories. In particular, I mentioned that by the time humans venture to other star systems, they will no longer be human by our standards.

Is that true?

Well, consider. It's going to take a while for human civilization to expand into the Solar System. Probably longer than I would wish ��� I've pretty much given up on being able to afford a vacation in space before I'm too frail to go. But I do think expansion beyond Earth is inevitable. In time there will come a point when the bulk of human economic production is off Earth, and sometime later the bulk of human population will no longer be on Earth, either. The only question is when that will happen.

So how long will it take?

Depending on who you listen to, the space industry will be somewhere between one and three trillion dollars by 2040. Now the space industry is not the same as industry in space, but that's where most of the future growth has to come from. The more you can make in space, the less you have to launch on expensive rockets (and yes, even a reusable SpaceX BFR with costs to orbit approximating FedEx international overnight rates is still expensive).

Anyway, let's take the low end figure of 1 trillion dollars as our starting point, and the United Launch Alliance's estimate of 1000 people in space by roughly the same year of 2040. Even if the space economy grows at an anemic 1 percent annual average, that means it would nearly double by the end of the century. By 2200, it would be 5 trillion in constant dollars. If we assume the population scales with the value, that means 5000 people living in space a century and a half from now.

That's pathetic. Where's my interplanetary civilization?

Ah, but behold the magic of compound interest. A thousand years later, in A.D. 3200, those 5000 people have become 100 million. And a thousand years after that, the number of people in space is 2 trillion! So even with a low-ball estimate for growth, the number of people off Earth will surpass this planet some time in the middle of the Fourth Millennium. That may seem like a long time, but by the standards of everything except our mayfly lifespans, that's nothing. If the human species lasts only a million years ��� and the oldest known Homo Sapiens remains are about 300,000 years old ��� then for two-thirds of human history, we will be an interplanetary species, and probably an interstellar species for a significant fraction of that time.

Arthur C. Clarke put it better. I can't find the exact quotation, but to paraphrase, "If Mankind survives as long as the least successful of those creatures we deride as Nature's failures, the dinosaurs, for all but a vanishingly brief instant in the childhood of the race, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"

However, there are a couple of things which do advance faster than compound-interest economic and population growth: scientific knowledge and technology. Consider the famous Moore's Law: that computer processing power roughly doubles every 18 months. If computing power continues to double every couple of years for the next millennium, we're looking at a world with machines something like ten to the 150th power smarter than what we've got today. That's ten followed by 150 zeroes. A googol of Googles.

That is why I said the first humans to visit other star systems won't be human by our standards. Individuals will command millions of times more information and processing power than our entire civilization possesses right now. Even if we can capture only a millionth of the Sun's energy output, individuals will have megawatts of power at their disposal.

Those aren't humans. Those are gods.

There's a common trope in science fiction: the Elder Space Gods. Ancient alien civilizations with powers far beyond our comprehension, who've been around since before intelligent life arose on Earth. Well, here's a data point: so far all our searching hasn't uncovered any signs of technological civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy. We know that planets are common, we think that life should be common, so where is everybody? Well, someone's got to be first, and it looks like we're elected. Congratulations, humanity: you get to be the Elder Space Gods. Let's try to be the benevolent white-robes-and-glowy-crystals kind, okay?

One more thing to blow your mind: this picture of godlike humans as the Elder Race of the Galaxy is the pessimistic scenario.

Pure Fantasy

Most of science fiction is pure fantasy.

Seriously. Take my own story A Darkling Sea. It involves humans traveling to another star system and interacting with aliens. That's fantasy, right there. There's no way to actually travel faster than the speed of light, and we have no evidence of any other intelligent life in the Milky Way. I might as well have written about people sailing a magic crystal galleon to Elfland.

Sticking to "hard science" is no help. By the time humans can travel to other star systems, they won't be human, not in any way we would recognize. They probably won't even have permanent physical forms, for instance. It's much simpler to travel between stars as data. And a future human civilization which is willing and able to spare the energy to launch starships ��� even if it's a once-a-decade or once-a-century shoestring operation ��� must still have access to energy and resources on a scale we can barely imagine. A "realistic" story about interstellar travel would be a tale of gods, not men. 

So we're not going to fly off to Earthlike worlds beneath other suns and start homesteading. We've discovered plenty of extrasolar planets, but only a handful have even the potential to be habitable by something we would recognize as alive. Nor will we terraform planets into new Earths. The effort and time scales involved are simply staggering, and the justification for all that work simply doesn't exist. In another few decades the big problem for humans will be depopulation.

Don't even start about time travel.

Well, what if we retreat to a more sociological view of science fiction? Fiction about the impact of new technologies on society? But that's pure fantasy, too. To understand the impact of a new technology on a future society the author has to have a complete understanding of that future society and then of how the technology would affect it. Nobody really understands present-day society, let alone a hypothetical future. 

We're not really exploring taboo ideas and "dangerous visions," either. For the most part, science fiction writers are desperately conventional. Example: suppose it were possible to accurately determine a person's aptitudes and know in advance what job he or she is best suited for. That's extremely likely to occur as we learn more about the brain. Suppose someone were to write a story set in a future where being assigned to a career was the norm. What story would they write?

I can predict with 99 percent certainty that the story would be about someone defying the system, and overcoming adversity to do something the brain scans say they shouldn't be good at. In short, a story repeating the shibboleths that have defined Western liberal society for the past two centuries. A story so brave and transgressive that Washington Irving and Sir Walter Scott would nod approvingly at it.

You want edgy? You want "transgressive"? Let's see a story that doesn't reinforce the Western college-educated progressive conventional wisdom of the Current Year. Let's see a story defending intolerance, or fundamentalist religion, or inequality. The only really transgressive writer I can think of is John Norman, and guess what? He is reviled, because his fiction actually does violate contemporary norms. It's icky. We don't really like that when it happens.

So what are we science fiction writers doing, if we're not depicting the future or exploring new ideas? Well, we're telling tales of pure fantasy, but we live in a "scientific" era so we dress up our fairy tales in spacesuits.

And that's okay. Storytellers have to fit their stories to the audience's understanding. When Homer wrote of strange creatures and exotic islands, he had to send Odysseus off to the remote and mysterious western half of the Mediterranean (and even then he put the whole voyage into a tale-within-a-tale narrated by a character famous for his skill at lying). When an anonymous English monk translated Beowulf into Old English, he also changed it to suit a Christian audience.

G.K. Chesterton once said, "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed." Science fiction carries on that tradition. We tell our readers that the dragons of an uncaring cosmos can be overcome. The monstrous distances, the demon of entropy, the terror of discovering that we are nothing but animate matter. We show those dragons being beaten. It's worth doing.

Thoughts On The Dreaded Backstory

David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James Bond or Darth Vader or The Mad Hatter) is all the rage in current media, because it's a way to "monetize the franchise" or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is in Hollywood. The obvious current example is the forthcoming film about Young Han Solo, but we've also seen Young Sherlock Holmes and Young Indiana Jones and even multiple competing origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West.

The problem, of course, is that adding the backstory diminishes the very archetypical quality that makes the character popular in the first place. How many Star Wars fans would be just as happy not knowing young Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's opinions on the topic of sand?

Mr. McGrogan isn't the first to notice this. His 'blog post reminded me of something the legendary screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, about the lion-hunting film he wrote, The Ghost and the Darkness.* The movie was not a huge success, and Goldman identifies one reason as Michael Douglas's desire to explore the backstory of his enigmatic expert hunter character.

Douglas (and, after some arm-twisting, the director) thought about the hunter as a character rather than an archetype, which in Goldman's opinion weakened the role and the film, because instead of a super-cool lion hunter he turned into a guy with a string of failures in his past. In his book Goldman uses another example: would it really improve Casablanca if we found out exactly why Rick Blaine is an exile? Our vague imaginings are better than what the writers could ever come up with. "I like to think you killed a man," says Renault, and that's good enough for us.

Know when to stop explaining.

*About the real-life horror-movie killer lions of Tsavo. If it wasn't true nobody would believe it.

Why I Have Four New Holes

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . . " ��� Caesar

A week ago, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, my stomach hurt. The sensation was very precise: a single point, directly under my sternum. I had been out to lunch with my son, so I cleverly deduced the cause. Obviously I had a hard bit of potato "waffle fry" lodged in the bottom of my esophagus.

I drank some milk, I ate some bread, all with the aim of pushing the irritating foodstuff past the valve into my stomach. But nothing worked, and the pain got worse. Really worse. Clammy sweating worse.

Just to make things more complicated, my talented wife wasn't home, nor was she expected home for two or three days. So I left my responsible youngest child in charge of the house and the dog, got in my car, and drove up to Franklin Medical Center for a stop in the Emergency Room

They didn't waste any time. When a middle-aged man shows up experiencing severe pain anywhere in the torso, and doesn't have an obvious gunshot wound, the default assumption is "heart attack." They gave me nitroglycerine tablets to dissolve under my tongue, they gave me major-league painkillers, and ��� in response to my babble about waffle fries ��� they gave me some liquid Mylanta laced with lidocaine. Other than the painkillers, nothing helped.

So they did one of the two things which separate modern medicine from the desperate gropings of the era before 1900: they looked inside me. Until Roentgen, the only way to tell what was going on inside a sick person was to open him up (and before the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics, that was considerablymore risky than doing nothing). And before the development of CAT scans in the 1970s, even X-ray images took hours to develop.

But on Friday, in a rural hospital in western Massachusetts, they x-rayed my chest (no sign of heart attack), CAT-scanned most of my torso, and even did an ultrasound of my squishy bits.

Bingo. There was a stone about the size of a peanut lodged in the duct leading out of my gall bladder. As is traditional when an organ gets obstructed, it was infected and inflamed.

After that was rather an anticlimax. Sometime during the night the stone must have shifted, because by the time I was admitted to a room for an overnight stay, the pain began to ease. I never got to try the morphine they were going to give me.

Saturday was a nightmare, but only for the part of me above the neck. I hadn't brought a book or a notepad, I was a little too stressed to make stuff up, and I can't stand watching television. So I cycled among sleep, boredom, and getting poked with things. By invoking the tragedy of a 15-year-old left home alone with nobody to look after him I managed to wheedle my way into release Saturday evening, and drove home.

I spent Sunday at home drinking clear liquids until my talented wife arrived, and on Monday morning at the start of the business day did battle with the automated telephone menu system at my primary doctor's office. Eventually I decided it would be simpler to get in the car and drive there in order to explain to a human what had happened so that my insurance company wouldn't punish me for Not Following Procedures while sick.

I also phoned the office of the confidence-inspiring doctor who had diagnosed me at Franklin Medical Center, and we set up an appointment to get rid of the problem for good and all. I was hoping he might be able to just remove the stone itself, but apparently standard procedure is to take out the whole gall bladder. It's one of those organs that you can kinda get by without ��� invertebrates don't have them at all.

The past week I spent carefully following a low-fat diet and swallowing the biggest damned antibiotic pills I've ever seen. Seriously: large-animal veterinarians would look at these and say "Isn't that a little much?" My urine (not to get indelicate) looked and smelled like something coming out of a Soviet oil refinery's waste stream.

This morning, my talented wife drove me back up to Franklin Medical Center's spiffy new Surgical Wing, where I was deprived of my clothing, the hair on my abdomen, my glasses, and, ultimately, consciousness. When I woke up there were four little holes in my tummy: one at the navel, one more or less over my stomach, and two close together on the right-hand side just under the bottom of my rib cage. My troublesome gall bladder was nowhere to be seen.

The surgical technique is called laparascopy, and involves the use of a tiny camera to enable the surgeon to see what he's doing, and special low-profile instruments to poke in through the little holes and grab the gall bladder. They drain out the bile and then just remove the sad little empty balloon, then stitch up. My bandages are literally large-size Band-Aids(tm).

And with that, they kicked me out. No wheedling required. I'm home, and unless I manage to do myself an injury or get a galloping infection, that's all. I'm not even confined to my bed: the doctor even said the more activity the better (with the unspoken caveat that I should hold off on the luge racing and illegal bare-knuckle boxing for a while).

Sadly I did not get to take my stone(s) home with me. There are apparently some tiresome regulations about proper disposal of biomedical waste, so I won't be able to wear it on my watch-chain.

Until my innards adjust, I still have to follow a low-fat diet, and I have painkillers in case I need them. I did have to bail out of one writing-workshop meeting this weekend because my talented wife refuses to drive me to it. I think she's being over-protective. They're just little holes. She went down into a cave in France after passing a kidney stone.